Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1d ago
I’m sorry, but I can’t help but think this is over-optimistic nonsense.
I don't think you can avoid plans happening, as people get radicalized, as someone who has even an inkling of what that could looks like, and very many good reasons to wish it wouldn't happen.
“Plans” will happen, sure. Lots of stupid, counterproductive “plans” by idiotic “lone-wolf” actors — a large fraction probably egged on and guided by undercover Feds into the least effective courses possible.
More seriously, there's a lot of options radicals have, many of which do not require vast planning or coordination, only common knowledge.
Not effective ones. This is an illusion created by the apparent effectiveness of left-wing supposed “lone-wolf” radicals. who are really just the visible end of a vast, less visible organized apparatus — read David Hines, or Curtis Yarvin.
Some of those options aren't bad. If, as a completely random example, the left will be murdering political enemies with impunity or the police and prosecutors will just look the other way when someone on the right gets his or her face punched in... well, I was on team Pink Pistols when gay guys getting bashed was a non-zero risk. I'm not abandoning that because some people insist it'd be better if I were beaten than their brownshits shot, and if they've never said the name "Paul Kessler", I'm not going to even care.
Sure, you can say “better to be judged by twelve that carried by six” or such, but when the choices are:
-
Take a beating from the “brownshirts,” and maybe get crippled or killed, or
-
Shoot one or more of them… and get tried in Federal court for murder and “hate crimes,” inevitably convicted and sent to Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for, if not life, then decades; where the guards, having been informed that you’re an evil racist homophobic transphobic white supremacist Nazi Klansman who should die behind bars, pass this on to every non-white gang in the prison, at which point you eventually end up getting shanked to death if you’re lucky, but more likely cornered, repeatedly violated, and then beaten to death (just like you were trying to avoid to begin with); all while the guards look the other way.
How many people do you think will really pick option 2?
But the majority of options are bad, and they're still going to happen.
Mostly when the state allows them to happen, because it’s convenient to let them happen as an excuse to crack down further.
There's some subtle stuff, like what happens when we it becomes common knowledge the Civil Rights Act doesn't and hasn't realled since its inception, and every jury the least competent lawyer in a red or purple state can manage will nullo your prosecutions, and any lawyer slightly above that Platkins out any attempt to Uno Reverso by getting jurisdiction in a blue state first.
This is unintelligible. Beyond the grammar errors — “when we it becomes”? — I have no idea what this means.
Today, there is basically nothing the nuBundies could say that would cost them political support
And that “political support” is useless.
they'd still have behaved better than anti-ICE groups. That includes literally dropping heavy rocks onto the front windshields of fast-moving cars and people, or running for a national office with a nazi tattoo.
It doesn’t matter how much right-wing radicals have “behaved better than” various leftist groups, because what decides punishment is not the level of “bad behavior,” but “who, whom?” Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi, as the Romans said.
Left-wingers can drop rocks. Red-tribers can’t and won’t, not because it’s “a fancy-boy edujumacated physics problem,” but because they’ll be destroyed if they try. They won’t get away with it like the other side does. Anyone on the right who so much as tries will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Their “associates” — their friends and family — could be prosecuted too; or failing that, cancelled, fired, blacklisted, debanked, attacked by “brownshirts,” burned out of their homes, etc.
If your “people doing work requiring hands-on expertise” try anything, they’ll be caught by the omnipresent surveillance we live under, and completely crushed by the invincible Leviathan of the state.
Remember some of the California trans sanctuary laws? What do you think happens when the mainstream news reports a father just now kidnapping his son, the federal marshals heroically rip a long-pregnant early teenager from their parent's arms the next week, and no one can talk about what the kid's current gender presentation or who assaulted him to start with?
I’m not clear on the scenario you’re vaguely gesturing toward here, but the answer to “what do you think happens?” is “nothing,” because nothing ever happens. Red tribes grumble, and mutter “somebody aught to…” and “next time, we’ll…” and then roll over and take it. I’ve watched my parents, my friends, my neighbors do exactly this my entire life.
Do you think there's anyone who can argue Loudon County a success case for gradual stepwise moderation? Do you think people need a medical doctorate to notice the difference between a week and twenty-one weeks? A historian's degree find every single person with their name on public record for those orders?
What difference does any of this make?
But think for five minutes, hard, about what thirty unrelated bad actors might individually want to do, just repeating the greatest hits of the last five years.
First, there’s what these bad actors might want to do, and then there’s the separate question of whether they’ll actually try to do it. Very unlikely, I say. Too comfortable, too much to lose — and smart enough to see that their odds of getting away with it are too low. Then, even if they try, there’s the odds they get away with it. Which, again, one can see are abysmally low.
It’s not “right-wingers are too stupid and lack the edujumacation and proper cred-en-tials to strike back” — it’s that we’re too weak and disorganized, and the enemy too strong and organized, for any of this sort of thing to ever work (that is, at anything but being counterproductive).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
I once got lectured by a Jewish person that "lizard people" (i.e., the myth about secret aliens controlling the world) is an antisemitic meme. And I'm like... do you really want to insist on that association?
Yeah, the tendency to reflexively react to criticism of "elites" — open, secret, or alien — controlling the world with "You mean the Jews, right? You're totally talking about us Jews!" isn't a good look. When you can watch someone put a standard lefty "eat the rich" rant on Tumblr, and immediately get piled on as a "Nazi" who wants to genocide all Jews because, between ranting about Musk, Bezos, and Klaus Schwab, they dared bring up George Soros; because the only reason anyone would ever mention Soros in a negative context is entirely because Soros is Jewish and they hate him because he's Jewish, because they must be an antisemite who hates all Jews — well, it's hard not to think this probably fuels at least a little antisemitism.
And back on the earlier point, it's not just goblins and reptilian aliens, either. How about the claim that the tengu of Japanese folklore are an antisemitic caricature? I mean, just look at those noses. I, mean, sure, the conventional explanation is as a more humanized form of their older depiction as bird-men:
The tengu in art appears in a variety of shapes. It usually falls somewhere in between a large, monstrous bird and a wholly anthropomorphized being, often with a red face or an unusually large or long nose. Early depictions of tengu show them as kite-like beings who can take a human-like form, often retaining avian wings, heads, or beaks. The tengu's long nose seems to have been conceived in the 14th century, likely as a humanization of the original bird's bill.
But, no, that doesn't stop people from claiming, like on Twitter here: https://nitter.poast.org/nerdtechgasm/status/1931926279106036079 that "it's not a theory" at all that the tengu are antisemitic depictions of a group of Jews who arrived in Japan in the 3rd Century and became the Hata clan.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
Or are you going to adopt the leftist frame that akshually, goblins were metaphors for Jews even in the Dark Ages?
I've seen someone unironically assert this on Tumblr, in the context of calling the anime Goblin Slayer antisemitic. Because goblins are always and everywhere an antisemitic caricature, a deliberate stand-in for Jews, and always have been, thus anyone who uses goblins as an antagonist element is a deliberate antisemite.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
disparaging misspellings of opponents' arguments
That's not the part I was calling uncharitable. I'm referring to @Amadan dragging @SecureSignals into this — without even having the decency to @ him — to put words into his mouth.
I mean, if in the middle of making some right-leaning argument, I were to drop a parenthetical about how "magicalkittycat will now come along to rant about how un-ironic literal Nazis are everywhere, the GOP will probably declare the Fourth Reich in 2028...", or something like that, I would not at all be surprised to get a mod warning at the least — and deservedly so.
I thought we're supposed to engage with the arguments people actually make, not the arguments we preemptively imagine them making.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8d ago
If I say "Hey, it looks pretty stormy out there - there's a very high chance of rain, so you should take an umbrella" I'm not actually saying "Rain is morally good and I support the rain falling on you and getting your clothes wet".
And when an Italian gentleman with a crooked nose says "nice business you've got here; it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it," he's just paying your shop a complement, and then making a true observation about an entirely hypothetical situation.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8d ago
The same norm preventing this is the norm that prevents, say, the father of someone screwed up (by the father's lights) by trans ideology and surgery from going and vigilante-ing intellectuals like Judith Butler who are, in some diffuse but obvious sense, clearly culpable for the ideology and thus its downstream material effects. Lode bearing norm etc - this gets fully general in a hurry in a society with meaningful liberal pluralism, because it means everyone is tolerating other people who are (by their lights) behaving like moral monsters.
Spending time on Tumblr as I do, the argument seems to be that we don't need "the norm" to prevent this father from "going and vigilante-ing," because the force of the state will do that. One side gets to attack the other for "behaving like moral monsters," and the state will mostly let them get away with it, and the other doesn't get to attack back, because the cops and courts will come down on them like a hammer.
To provide further example in a different context — the murder of Iryna Zarutska — someone made a comment about how, if our legal system keeps letting out people like Decarlos Brown Jr. to reoffend again and again, then eventually people will start resorting to vigilantism. The immediate reply was that, no, such people would be stopped immediately, because we've had laws put in place since the Civil Rights era to prevent such "vigilantism" — or, to call it by it's proper name, lynching — and the cops and courts all know how to properly deal with any such person, even if they decide this time to leave their pointy white hood at home.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
9d ago
SS will now come along to rant about how inserting a sympathetic Jewish character in a book is part of the Joo-spiracy, Anthony Trollope was probably ZOGed....)
C'mon, this is uncharitable, isn't it? Shouldn't you know better?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
9d ago
Why not? There's nothing pejorative about an asylum institution, unless you're trying to smuggle in the connotation of an insane asylum in particular.
I was riffing on the classic metaphorical statement "the inmates are running the asylum" where the context is indeed an insane asylum. Thus, I didn't think it needed said explicitly
But if you have to have insane inmates as analogous to the citizenry of a country for that analogy to hold as a pejorative, it can be trivially dismissed as a false analogy
And if I say, no it can't? If I say that just like children, the senile, and the insane, the common masses don't know what's good for them, and that they need wiser heads ruling over them, what then?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
10d ago
Hobbes talks about this, and it's one of the basic foundations of Enlightenment republican thought
Where does Rousseau, and his distinction between the "general will" and the "popular will" fit into "Enlightenment republican thought"? Because I generally see people class him as a major figure of the "Enlightenment" alongside Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu; and because I've read an argument about how that concept means that real democracy is when a self-selected vanguard party of intellectual elites take uncontested charge of the state, and that giving the voters what they vote for is instead "populism," which is the greatest threat to Our Democracy.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
10d ago
Government should be run by the people it governs
Should an asylum be run by its inmates?
As so many Boomer Republicans (still) like to say, "we don't live in a 'democracy,' we live in a representative republic." (Setting aside the quibble about how they here define "democracy…) Well, what does it mean to be a good "representative"?
How does a parent or guardian properly "represent" a small child?
How does someone with power of attorney "represent" a senile elder?
How does a relative "represent" a hospitalized schizophrenia patient who keeps trying to cut himself open to remove the chip the CIA implanted to control him?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
13d ago
Depending on how you define "conspiracy theory"… two come to mind:
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That Carolyn Bryant Donham was telling the truth about what happened to her, and that Timothy Tyson is lying when he claims she secretly, off the record, recanted to him.
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That the jury in Fulton County convicted the right guy for the murder of Mary Phagan.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
13d ago
I disagree with your scenario outlined here. First, because a "concerned parent" probably wouldn't just go in to the school. No, she'd probably go to the PTA first. So then, it's not one person going to the principal, it's a bunch of outraged soccer moms, threatening to raise a stink unless they Do Something.
Second, just a quick Google search returned a bunch of results. Like this case in California, albeit it was almost 13 years ago:
A middle school teacher who was fired after students learned she had appeared in pornography has lost her appeal to return to the classroom, her lawyer said Tuesday.
A three-judge panel unanimously decided Stacie Halas, 32, was unfit for the classroom. Halas was fired in April from her job as a science teacher at Haydock Intermediate School in Oxnard after online videos of her in porn were discovered by students and teachers.
"Although (Halas') pornography career has concluded, the ongoing availability of her pornographic materials on the Internet will continue to impede her from being an effective teacher and respected colleague," Judge Julie Cabos-Owen wrote in a 46-page decision issued Friday by the Commission on Professional Competence.
Halas was continually deceitful about her nine-month career in porn before she went to work at the school, the decision said.
Her lawyer Richard Schwab said Halas had tried to be honest but was embarrassed by her previous experience in the adult industry.
It's right there: fired for having done porn before she became a teacher, because the fact those videos are out there makes her "unfit for the classroom" in perpetuity.
And for a newer example, there's Texas in 2017, which also involves Libertarian politics:
A sixth-grade teacher at an all-girls school in Texas is out of a job and fighting to get her position back after district officials learned she worked in porn more than a decade ago.
Resa Woodward, 38, was removed from the classroom at the Young Women’s STEAM Academy in Dallas in November, after district officials received an anonymous tip regarding her work as an adult film actress, although a subsequent internal review cleared her of policy violations, the Dallas Morning News reported.
…
Woodward, who did not return messages seeking comment early Wednesday, told the paper that she was forced into pornography — saying “that involvement was not of my own choosing” — while living with an older man during a tough time financially. She eventually got herself out of the situation and finished school before becoming a teacher for the Dallas ISD, which serves roughly 160,000 students from pre-K through 12th grade.
But district officials got a tip in March claiming that Woodward worked in porn under the alias Robyn Foster, a name active in the business from 2001 and 2004, credited with 16 movies, according to a web-based adult film database cited by the Morning News.
…
Woodward, according to the internal report, told district officials she stopped working in the business in 2001 and thought a man she knew was retaliating against her by informing her employers of her past.
“I’ve been trying to live my life as far away as possible from this stuff for a long time,” Woodward told district officials, adding that no students, colleagues or supervisors knew of her sordid past.
Bauer then closed the district’s investigation in March, ruling that Woodward’s “past participation” in pornography did not constitute a policy violation.
Woodward’s work as a well-known activist for the Libertarian Party of Texas, however, would lead to her being outed, according to the Dallas Morning News.
…
Woodward told the Dallas Morning News that she wrote a post on Facebook last fall about a drunken driver that angered another man who claimed to be associated with the Libertarian Party in another state due to his beliefs about police. That man then detailed her past on social media websites, Woodward said.
Woodward then notified district officials of the post and she was placed on administrative leave on Nov. 29.
“They told me they were pursuing termination because it became public,” she said.
And it's not just women who get fired, either. From Florida in 2011:
A Miami-Dade teacher's past life in the adult entertainment industry has gotten him kicked out of the classroom.
The school district's investigation into Shawn Loftis, a substitute teacher assigned to Nautilus Middle, Miami Edison Middle, Fienberg-Fisher K-8 Center and Miami Beach Senior High, began last January.
…
But that time was cut short after administrators at Nautilus learned about Loftis' past. Under the alias Collin O'Neal, Loftis was a successful adult film star, even shooting movies on location in Miami Beach. After three to four years of success, Loftis went from in front of the camera to behind it and ran his own adult film company.
But then Loftis decided to change careers and get out of the business all together. Loftis said he wanted to sell his company and use his Master's Degree to teach. He qualified to be a substitute, taught for about a year until one day the past caught up to his present.
…
Loftis said he was terminated because it was determined that he broke a School Board rule which states:
"They are expected to conduct themselves both in their employment and in the community in a manner that will reflect credit upon themselves and the school system."
In addition to being fired, Loftis' teaching certificate is also in jeopardy. He said he may no longer be able to teach the lessons he wishes someone would have taught him years ago.
"I also want people to think before they dabble in that industry what they want to with their future," said Loftis.
Or then, moving over to Canada, there's Quebec in 2014 proving that time is no real remedy:
Pre-internet, you could likely move on from a career in pornography with only the occasional wondering glance your way. But now one Quebecois teacher, 73-year-old Jacqueline Laurent Auger, has had her past catch up with her after pupils went online and discovered softcore porn films she appeared in around 45 years previously.
She has now been dismissed from her position teaching drama workshops at the elite Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf in Montreal. “As educators, we had to ask what message is transmitted to all our students, boys and girls, from the first year of high school to the fifth, by the fact that the teacher of their drama workshops could now be seen on the Internet in the most suggestive of scenes,” the school wrote in an online statement, adding that they wanted to preserve “a calm setting free of allusions or discomfort that is unfavourable to our educational mission.”
Laurent Auger has called the move “completely absurd. I’m 73 years old. When I made those films I must have been 28 or 29. It was to make a living so that after[wards] I could work with great teachers and actors, in Paris and in Quebec. Come on.”
Sure, the culture has shifted in the past decade, but not that much, and not everywhere. So, again, I still don't see it playing out like in your scenario.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
16d ago
Frieren: "Why call out to a mother? Demons are monsters, and like all monsters, they don't raise their young. Once born, you are abandoned. You walk this world alone. That makes you ruthless, solitary creatures. Lone wolves with no concept of what family means. Explain."
Demon Child: "It's simple. That word stops humans. It keeps them from murdering us. Isn't that magical?"
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
19d ago
I’m beating around the bush, but I’m pretty much talking about scam culture, being the winner, getting one up on the people that are outsiders to ‘my group’, and getting status points for exploiting my outgroup.
I’d like to reiterate that this isn’t an Indian only issue, but it’s a culture clash between high and low trust cultures and is worthy of discussion.
I know that this is one of a half-Native Alaskan friend of mine's biggest complaints about his fully-Native cousins. He's a devout Christian who believes strongly in the Golden Rule, while they make no effort to hide the ways they exploit the system, based in solidly tribalist views of ethics.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
24d ago
The counterpoint is "the government is outnumbered and an armed populace doing guerilla warfare wins pretty much every time", which is also true.
No, it's not true. In * Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present*, Max Boot calculates that, of all the insurgencies since 1775, about 78% of them failed. Of the 22% who did win, one of the necessary (though not sufficient) preconditions is substantial material support from one or more foreign states. (Also, AIUI, practically every case of successful guerrilla warfare has been against a de facto foreign occupation.)
The left is way better at this.
Yes, and the right seems unwilling to try to remedy that.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
27d ago
Yes, and thank you for pointing this out. Given how obvious this is, I don't know why it's so hard to get people on the right (as well as a few on the moderate left) to understand it.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
27d ago
In most other contexts, it is considered absurd to try and impose treaty institutions on a state that is not part of the treaty, even when you think that treaty is a good idea or should supersede other principles of international law.
I remember one of the times someone brought up online (as a possible novel solution to some issue of the time) Congress's Constitutional power to issue letters of marque, adding that the US is not a signatory to the 1856 Declaration of Paris banning them. A few Europeans all responded with the same message: it doesn't matter what the US Constitution says. That the US claims to retain this power is face-saving cope, as are the excuses given for why the US hasn't issued such letters since. The actual reason Congress won't issue letters of marque is because they can't, because the rest of the world considers the Declaration of Paris a universal ban, binding on signatories and non-signatories alike. And were the US to try to defy this binding international law, then the rest of the world will enforce that ban on the Americans receiving those illegal, invalid letters of marque, lack of ratification be damned.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
27d ago
Currently reading The Balkan Languages by Victor A. Friedman and Brian D. Joseph, from the Cambridge Language Surveys series.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
30d ago
I think you missed that you responded to Arjin, when the quoted statement you're arguing against was made by Eupraxia one comment up.
So, why are you attacking Arjin for a comment he didn't make — and even argued against — instead of the person who said it?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
30d ago
No? I think it's both funny and clever, and in the traditional vein of "devilish contracts are foiled by word-play" stories. There's always a catch to the genie's gifts, and the gifts of Sauron are no exception. The Witch-king, by this view, may in part have surrendered to the lure of his ring through "I will be truly immortal and no-one will be able to kill me", and then the loophole smacks him in the face.
That he is taken down by a woman and a hobbit is completely in harmony with how the demons are foiled in Hindu mythology. They perform penances to gain boons from the Supreme Trinity, immortality is not possible, so they ask for elaborate conditions ("nobody can kill me except...") and think they have gained because this particular set will never come to pass.
It's also not unknown in European tales either, beyond just Macbeth. My favorite for "complex loophole" bit is Welsh, from the fourth branch of the Mabinogi. Specifically, that Lleu Llaw Gyffes cannot be killed "during the day or night, nor indoors or outdoors, neither riding nor walking, not clothed and not naked, nor by any weapon lawfully made."
So he gets struck down at dusk, wrapped in a net, with one foot on a cauldron and one on a goat, using a spear forged for a year during the hours when everyone is supposed to be at mass.
Because, like you note, there's always a loophole to these things.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Nobody at your apartment complex wants to go through the effort of filing a complaint for something that doesn’t bother them.
You obviously aren't familiar with a certain type of (almost always female) busybody who goes out of her way to find where people are Not Following The Rules, and then making a big deal of it to whomever she can, mostly because she enjoys the petty powertrip involved in pushing people around, and making them comply just because you can. The one who will call CFS every single day if she sees you're not parenting your kids the way she thinks you should. The kind who get out rulers to measure lawns so she can rat people out to the HOA.
(I'm thinking of my late grandmother — the one who was a "special ed" teacher because the crippled and cognitively-impaired kids were easier for her to bully.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Having to band together with locals to fight nature is an amazing social lubricant.
Don't forget fighting hostile Natives, too. That was also a notable factor.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Thanks. A quick Google turns up the original phrasing, which searched in turn gives Douthat's original 2016 tweet:
A thought sent back in time to the theocracy panic of 2005: If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
I'm looking forwards to Harris losing to Vance or Abbott or Rubio
But how would she do against DeSantis?
You can if you you have the tacit, hidden backing of a vast, powerful, organized apparatus behind you. If you don't have that, though…
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