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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
I think you specifically would've been around last time I had a similar discussion, but Hitler's stated goal was to make the world better for ethnic Germans at no expenses spared for other ethnicities (and with particular vengeance towards some specific ones that he considered their sworn enemies). For better or worse, most people consider such a goal already more evil than the same thing with people selected by socioeconomic status, but that's neglecting that the communists' stated goal as commonly understood does not mandate killing or even displacing any fixed set of people (that's why they ran reeducation camps).
Having to kill capitalists rather than being able to brainwash them all into becoming good workers was presumably seen by most communists (with the exception perhaps of outliers like Cambodia) as a failure and unfortunate compromise with reality. If you conflate "do terrible thing to everyone who doesn't fit in your world" and "do terrible thing to everyone who you can't reform to fit in your world no matter how much you try", then everyone supporting law and order in the US could also be said to want to make a better world by brutally robbing the liberty of everyone who doesn't fit into it, a number that is bounded below at ~0.5% of the US population.
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5mo ago
Yahweh creates a blood covenant with the Jews. It's a tribal god, Yahweh is a metaphor for the people he represents. Very straightforward reading of the mythos. If some Roman gold selected the Romans as his Chosen people and formed a heritable blood covenant with the Romans wouldn't it be very obvious to you that the god is a symbol for the people represented in the covenant?
No. I think you are stretching interpretations to force your hobby horse. There are plenty of examples of tutelary deities among pagan religions, including ones that were reused. Do any of the number of deities that the Aztecs believed they had a personal responsibility to keep fed with blood lest the universe get destroyed count as a representation of the Aztecs themselves, even though other Mesoamerican peoples were found to have the same gods with etymologically related names and the same attributes? Were Greeks worshipping Athena worshipping the city of Athens, even as they waged war against it? What about Apollo, who the Spartans considered their tutelary god with the lexical connection being less obvious?
It is universally acknowledged that the Roman pantheon was fluid and integrated the idols of foreigners that came under the hegemony of the Roman people. The Hebrew mythos demands sole worship of Yahweh above anything else and declares a holy mission to destroy all the idols of all foreigners. It's a major difference in the religious orders that is not acknowledged by OP and is going to undermine the direction he is trying to take this.
This is true of Romans (with respect to some foreigners), but not of all pagans; e.g. Atenism. Therefore intolerance of foreign gods is not a uniquely Hebrew feature, and can't be used to distinguish Hebrew(-lineage) religions from pagan ones.
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5mo ago
Define "caught". We're getting into territory where "how high on TDS do you have to be to believe that actually happened, rather than being an insane slander thought up by his enemies" would trump most sorts of evidence that could realistically be produced.
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5mo ago
Hebrew conception of God is simply a metaphorical and symbolic representation of themselves
This is not an interpretation I have heard before. What do you base it on?
Differentiation between pagan and Hebrew worship
The counterexample that immediately comes to mind is Atenism which during its brief life went full iconoclasm on the normal Egyptian religion and afterwards got eradicated in turn. Occasional Chinese persecution of Buddhists also comes to mind. The Romans also had little respect for Celtic religion.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
German elections
The German parliament snap election is coming up, and for the first time I actually managed to get my postal voting documents on time and am in a realistic position to send them in before the deadline. That being said, I am really at a loss regarding who to vote for, as I find the Wahl-o-Mat style matching to each party's stated views to be useless due to the gap between what they say and what they wind up doing. I would therefore like to take the opportunity to give a short account of the German party landscape as seen through my distant eyes, and solicit both corrections (especially from our German posters) to these perceptions and advice (from everyone) on how you think I should vote given my own values and weights. (It would probably be a waste of time to try to convince me to change those values and weights so that I vote for the party you would prefer in this setting.)
@mods, let me know if I should just hold it and repost it in the next Transnational Thursday instead.
In descending order of latest polling,
CDU (the Christian Democratic Union), around 30%. The right-wing side of the old "two-plus" party system. Famously the party of Merkel. Now running Friedrich Merz, an old fox who has been hovering around the candidacy since prehistoric times but was never allowed near it because of his negative levels of charisma. Their primary terminal value is the preservation of the post-war societal order of Germany, with the US representing the Lord God in his heaven, a CDU chancellor as the Pope, a college of cardinals consisting of assorted old-school industrial magnates, publishing house elites and wealthy widows, and the middle and lower classes staying quiet and attending catechism (TV and tabloids). They are pretty agnostic as to how to achieve this, but the chaos of the '00s (Pirate Parties, protests against transatlanticists ventures (Iraq, trade pacts...) that actually worked, people gluing themselves to tracks to sabotage nuclear waste transports...) scared them and so they are firmly convinced that they need to (1) control the lawless element that is internet culture and (2) break the back of grassroots leftist~anarchist civil society orgs.
(I think that half of the reason for Merkel's opening of the refugee tap is in this list: it was openly a hail-mary to improve the increasingly bad bargaining position of their industrial magnate base relative to their workers, and Merkel's political instincts told her that it would drive a wedge right into the contradictions of the civil-society orgs. The other half was EU political checkers downstream from the 2009 debt crisis.)
AfD (the Alternative for Germany), around 21%. Everyone's favourite alt-right populist boogeyman. Formed as a somewhat Frankensteinian merger of various groups, including a "dark enlightment"ish dissident intellectual wing that sublimated out of the old block parties, the rubble of various predominantly East German neonazi parties that had close brushes with being banned and grassroots identitarian anti-Islam movements like PEGIDA. Their terminal values are obtaining respect for a broad coalition of "deplorables" (blue-collar workers, the East German poor, low-openness rural dwellers), reducing the number of visible foreigners, and defending masculine-coded aspects of German culture (cars, engineering, firework, beer). Other parties, with the encouragement of the media, have agreed upon a "firewall" which says that the political system should produce outcomes as if they did not exist. Defecting e.g. by proposing laws that would not pass but for their votes is punished harshly.
SPD (the Social-Democratic Party of Germany), around 16%. The left-wing side of the old "two-plus" party system. Lost their status as a possible solo governing party irretrievably, after entering a coalition with Merkel's party in 2005. (Just imagine if, in Trump's first term, Bernie ran on an independent ticket, no single party wound up getting a majority, and the Democrats agreed to give their EC votes to Jeb in return for some cabinet positions.) The current chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is running again (he was carried by a coalition with the Greens and the FDP which fell apart), but barring some complete upheaval he is understood to stand no chance. Traditionally, they were the party of blue-collar workers and socialists, but by the early 2000s had become culturally alienated from their base and earned resentment for a severely pursestring-tightening reform of social programmes. It's hard to discern what their terminal values really are now - my sense is that they just pine for the old political arrangement, and think that if socialism must be wound down, it should be them doing it, since they will do with gentle sadness rather than hatred (think the Goebbels family poisoning its children).
Bündnis 90/die Grünen (the Greens), around 14%. A counterculture party that gradually worked itself into being the culture party as its members grew up and got white-collar jobs through the '90s. They are sort of like the medieval church, in that everyone within the mainstream must profess that they are the arbiters of morality, and just disagrees about the piety-practicality tradeoff. Accordingly, every major party can form a coalition with them, though their relationship with the FDP is strained. They had an interesting character development arc that started when the foreign minister who led Germany to join the American crusade in Afghanistan in 2002 was from their party, and resulted in them gradually turning from a virulently anti-American hippie party into the most pro-American party in the German landscape. They are the party of the young, well-educated, and urban women of all ages. Their terminal values are to destroy the masculine-coded aspects of German culture, US-style SJ, environmentalism, and to instantiate a decisive struggle of good against evil, with themselves as the vanguard of Good. The "grown-up" wing of the party believes that the principal battleground of this struggle will be the USA, and the proper role of the Greens and Europe more generally is to be the angelic mentor figure that guides the protagonist (US progressives) on his quest and orients his moral compass to save him from his human flaws (attachment to idiosyncrasies like free speech, unregulated business and self-sufficiency), but this sometimes creates tension with an unruly youth wing that takes America's performative self-loathing too literally (which results in clashes over Israel, Facebook etc.), as well as remnant elements from before they fell to American memes (e.g. anti-vaxxers, anti-globalists, pacifists).
Die Linke (The Left), >5%. A party that came to be as a merger of West German hard left, some SPD evaporates and the remnants of East Germany's communist uniparty. Actual communism is thoroughly discredited in Germany, which left them in an ideological vacuum that was filled by an incompatible combination of Greens-but-anti-bourgeois and East German cultural identity (\setminus the neonazis) plus more socialism. This resulted in the party finally fracturing into two a few years ago, with most of the sitting parliamentarians joining the BSW listed just below. This party got the "anti-bourgeois Green" component, and for a while it looked like they would just sink into irrelevance, but they are experiencing an eleventh-hour comeback. I can't get a good read of their terminal values, but I guess it is some patchwork of "more socialism" and instantiating the same decisive struggle of good against evil as above, but with the USA and Israel shoved into "Evil" coalition. It is conceivable that they could get into power as part of a coalition with SPD and Greens under certain circumstances.
BSW (the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance), <5%. The "East German identity" splinter of the above, and the newest party on the map. Uncharacteristically for Germany, they are completely centered around the eponymous founder, a rhetorical firebrand East German communist cadre with a microeconomics PhD. Their terminal values amount to "Sahra Wagenknecht should have a say in German politics", more socialism, and a "respect for masculine East German culture" package that is quite similar to that of the AfD; flowing from that, they advocate for keeping out refugees, reindustrialisation and rapprochement with Russia, but those details seem to be negotiable. They seem to vote and speak against the CDU's police state agenda, but this might just be because they expect to find themselves at the business end of it. They inherited many parliamentary seats from the Linke and initially looked to be pushing 10% as they absorbed anti-system sentiment from people that for one reason or another could not palate the AfD, but teething problems/drama (such as a whole state chapter going rogue against the federal party) and a deeply unsympathetic press has now driven them below their other half and the 5% threshold that generally needs to be cleared to enter parliament.
FDP (the Liberal Democratic Party), 4%. The third member of the shattered governing coalition. A party that has been part of the post-war German fabric from the very start and has been through some extreme highs and lows, being the "kingmaker" quite similar to the British Lib Dems for a while. They are ostensibly a civil rights/libertarian party, but in practice their national incarnation has been a "business bro" party for as long as I can remember. (The Europarl offshoot is a different story.) Their only terminal value is to lower taxes and hurdles for their upper-middle-class freelancer and independent white-collar business owner clientele, though they think that if this clientele could also have lower obstacles to do whatever pastimes they enjoy (sex, drugs, rock and roll, cars) this would be a nice plus. Because of this, for the longest time, their preferred partner was the authoritarian-leaning CDU, as they found that the CDU is not particularly opposed to business bros as long as they don't threaten the true elites (Bertelsmanns and Albrechts) and can be effectively nudged by the threat of remembering the civil rights component of the party platform. The media has been dragging them through the mud continuously since they were seen to have backstabbed the coalition (in a way that is particularly damaging to the cause of the Greens, who are unsurprisingly overwhelmingly supported by the newsrooms), with the result that they will almost certainly not make it past the 5% threshold. There is also a element of most everyone being fed up with their shit, since the 4% represent approximately all the people that actually care for tax breaks for freelancers/independents and they have time and time again proven to be a terrible political ally (as they don't care about anything else, but are willing to theatrically pretend to have other pieces of agenda just to have bargaining mass to trade for them).
Now, I am really unsure who I should vote for here. My own preferences are, in loosely descending order of weight,
- civil rights (I'm opposed to the CDU's onslaught of mass surveillance, encryption breaking, copyright enforcement, policing of dissidents, abortion restrictions; everyone-but-the-FDP's occupational licensing; the Greens' plastic bans, gender-inclusive language mandates, and the planned speed limits and firework bans that also seem to be pushed by the SPD)
- education (I'm opposed to the Greens' lowering of school standards, levelling of distinctions etc. in the name of diversity, also partially supported by the SPD; and to the AfD's likely Trump-like broad-spectrum reprisals against universities, as well as the Greens' ideological ban on certain areas of science and tech - nuclear, GMOs (especially!), some human genetics, partially shared by SPD and CDU for different reasons)
- opposing safetyism (related to "civil rights", but also including the whole aesthetics and philosophy that resulted in people over the last 10 years having started to wear helmets while skiing, raising mandatory child seat minimum ages, etc.)
- foreign-internal policy (I'm opposed to the USA bootlicking by everyone except for the Left, BSW and AfD, and the damage to the economy that results from it as instantiated in the Ukraine context. I'm also opposed to the Greens deindustrialising tendencies)
- internationalism (I'm opposed to the AfD's apparent goal of actually cancelling all foreigners rather than merely the refugees) and
- economic freedom (I have concluded it is unrealistic to operate as an independent software developer or tech entrepreneur in Germany, and I would even loathe to touch my stocks while resident in it).
As I see it,
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Voting FDP would weakly signal a theoretical vote for civil rights, but in reality it would only be a vote for economic freedom (far down on my list) and I'd have to watch my actual top preference being made a mockery of. They will also almost certainly not get in.
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Voting AfD might seem natural considering the dot product, but apart from a personal distaste for the neonazi component that lives on in them, I don't think it would actually be tactically correct. They also lean pro-surveillance/police state, being authoritarians. They are well outnumbered by people who categorically consider them to be the devil, and empowering them further has a pretty strong effect of also strengthening Green ideology by toxoplasmosis. It's needless to say that every subvariant of the Greens is my political nemesis, but the limit of letting the AfD-Green toxoplasma spread in Germany in my expectation looks like maybe 65% Green to 35% AfD, which would be much worse than the current situation. Alternatively the system could just ban them if they get too close to power, which would demoralise and create precedent for banning any out-of-window opposition.
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Voting BSW is my current teeth-gritting top choice, insofar as they are a neat non-toxoplasmic "against the system" option that actually has a chance to get in and I agree with them on a lot of points (Russia, industry, anti-Green, anti-refugees, anti-surveillance). However, they are now more likely to not get in, I find their focus on the person at the helm silly and politically a doomed meme in the German landscape, and I'm not actually on board with a lot of their tankie DNA.
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Voting the Linke might be an interesting "preemptive compromise" signal like "if it has to be something Green, this is the most palatable form of Green politics to me", and also signals opposition to the system as the CDU-SPD block tried and only recently failed to uphold an AfD-like "firewall" against them. However, my volume of object-level agreement with them is fairly low.
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The SPD, to the extent they have an identity of their own, are being something like a party of moderation (note e.g. Scholz's resistance to maximalist support for Ukraine). However, they are now weakened even further, which almost guarantees that if they get into power they will just be a canvas for whatever other parties are in the coalition to paint on. If they do not make it into government, a vote for them is at most a weak signal that Scholz's politics of moderation was not so bad, because they really don't stand for much.
I have taken to shocking my normie friends by saying that if they actually go through with the fireworks ban I will snap and vote AfD (since that is just going too far with the sadistic culture defacement, and I'm a card-carrying pyromaniac), but so far this is just meant as bluster.
I'm not considering the other two parties because for both of them negating every single vote they cast in parliament would have gotten closer to my preferences than what they did. Minor party voting in Germany is a non-starter at the moment (and the Pirate Party got converted into a Green Party Youth Wing without the lame adults watching). What should I do?
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5mo ago
I don't think the point about Hitler's identity politics is as surprising as you make it out to be, given that the deaths caused by Lenin and Mao are not exactly a secret. In fact, this is what the difference in their assessment often openly stems from - Hitler's stated goals (which really are those same identity politics you are talking about) are taken to be evil, but the goals of Lenin and Mao are generally actually perceived as a deontological or virtuous good even by many of those (common in the US) who consider them a utilitarian evil. If you wreak murder at an inconceivable scale in the service of evil goals, you are a particularly insidious (because effective) kind of evil; if you however wreak murder in your pursuit of good, you are seen as closer to something like a tragic or merely misguided, even antiheroic figure.
It's easy for resentful right-wingers to see this as a simple case of who/whom thinking being conveniently weaponised against them, but unless you specifically subscribe to (or want to no-enemies-on-the-right) Hitler's brand of identity politics, you are not actually the [antonym of beneficiary]. In the grand scheme of things, most murderous movements in history are actually tolerated, including ones that would unambiguously code conservative in the modern eye - nobody bats an eye at Genghis Khan branding, and even crusader chic is still on the menu (could you imagine a grand strategy game like Crusader Kings II, but modelling the political tug-of-war between Hitler's Gauleiters?) despite their portfolio including religiously motivated rape, murder and land grabs against people further down the progressive stack, use of child soldiers and much more.
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5mo ago
You can't just conflate a tendency in a direction with the endpoint that would be reached if no countervailing forces existed at all. Every law will be broken, but it still brings benefits to have and enforce laws; every system will ultimately devolve into disorder, but it still makes sense to tidy your room sometimes. We can, for now, push back against having a super upvote system and thereby eke out some more time in which the incentive is not just farming agreement, giving us more of a window to reap benefits in the form of posts that give new insights.
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5mo ago
I don't particularly want to dunk on jeroboam (whose post is really perfectly okay), but I don't really see that post as adding any particularly new insight or explaining the old insight that is in it from an unusually persuasive or interesting angle. Would you like it if the forum were made up of posts like that, but for views you don't care for or strongly disagree with?
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5mo ago
But all that misses the larger point, which is that it is possible to distinguish "paying thousands of dollars a month to gay men so they can have unprotected sex with a lower risk of an STD" and "refusing insurance to women who refuse abortions in principle".
Yes, it's possible to distinguish, which means that when the other team is back in power they will happily distinguish to enact the exact opposite of your preferred policy.
It's always easy to come up with just-so stories how the other side not having escalated in the past must have been due to contingencies that will be totally unaffected by your side escalating, and surely not because someone somewhere did not just want to stoke the fires of Moloch's furnace higher.
The vaccination stuff, probably because public sentiment was moving anti-Covidian.
I didn't get the sense that it was moving anti-mandatory-vaccinations, except in communities that the Democrats had largely written off as a voter base anyway. In an era where generating hype (stealing this expression from a pop culture engineer interview I read recently, which randomly put a good label on this propensity to just want to be betting on the winning team) is a crucial political strategy, punishing anti-vaxxers more would probably have actually energised the base.
Liability for "not aborting" is still outside the Overton window.
Would it stay there if normie Democrats found that the infrastructure supporting their own sexual lifestyle choices (as opposed to those of a loud but small utility monster minority) is being attacked? Your enemy, too, is capable of making sacrifices to punish and spite.
Christian sects that refuse various medical treatments have been targeted for many years (e.g. by taking their children away from them); the problem with trying to charge them more is that if they refuse blood transfusions they tend to cost less (being dead).
That doesn't apply to life insurance, where living longer means more profit.
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5mo ago
Well, they've for sure thought of it, but why didn't they go through with it? The simplest explanation could be that the other side does in fact have people who are concerned about principles or at least have other considerations than mashing the "defect" button as fast as they can.
If your reaction to that is to spy an opportunity and defect first, then this only makes my (and, I imagine, others') defector-punishing instincts tingle. I figure it would be a mistake for the Right to mistake the current situation for one in which they actually have a stable base of loyalists, as opposed to a temporary alliance that depends on people (such as myself) who got tentatively convinced that they are the lesser evil. Trying to defect first in any domain could flip that perception rapidly.
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5mo ago
That sounds like you are just treating AAQC as a super upvote for statements you really agree with. Upvotes based on agreement are already being a blight; taking even AAQC there would just complete the descent into circlejerking. Maybe Zorba should consider introducing MotteGold™️ awards to capture some of that energy instead.
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5mo ago
I'd be surprised if Trace was actually putting as much weight in his political value function on DEI at the FAA as you seem to make him out to be. Sometimes people just like making deep dives in some random direction, whether it is intrinsically interesting to them, they just enjoy the act of researching and arguing for its own sake, or they think they can make an impact or gain clout by spending effort on it. For starters, as people are quick to point out, he is a gay furry; it seems quite likely that those things take up a bigger share of his life than whatever research went into the FAA article, and along that dimension clearly Democrats are more of an ally of his than Republicans.
If you actually think that siding with Democrats on sexual tolerance and with Republicans on DEI is in itself a "tension or inconsistency", that's just being an agent of toxoplasma.
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5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
One way in which this would come back to bite right-wingers is that it would be taken as precedent to raise premiums or deny coverage for $disease-related costs and deaths to the unvaccinated. From what I can tell, this was already being bandied about around 2021-22, but seemingly not implemented.
Some other possible targets: anti-abortion women (liability from not aborting dangerous pregnancies and genetic defects where the parents' insurance may be on the hook), Christian sects that refuse blood transfusions (though you might not care if the interdenominational solidarity of the Waco era is gone).
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5mo ago
I really wish our resident loyal rightists at least used this opportunity to take a step back and examine their own reactions to him critically. It's human nature to hate tribal enemies, but in his particular case the apparent sense of betrayal that some felt over his attack on LibsOfTikTok seems to sit so deep that they are still having difficulties to even think straight enough to assemble a compelling argument against him, which can't be in their interest either in a forum full of autists whose response to social pressure is defiance. The degree of fuck-logic-and-charity indignation is something I otherwise don't see much here outside of some edge cases of sexual purity politics, such as abortion outrage or that one time when a card-carrying pedophile dropped by and ran a sort of AMA. (I'm still resentful of the mods for not cracking down harder on the hostile reactions at that time, since it was such a rare perspective to get. Probably the clearest sign that their problem is not so much a shared hatred of the left as it is an excess of sympathy for resident posters who lean right.)
Is this how loyal leftists in academia felt after the Boghossian affair, too?
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5mo ago
Surely you must understand that if there are non-aesthetic reasons for siding with the Republicans, the same things can also be non-aesthetic reasons for someone to side against the Republicans - you just have to disagree with the Republican stance on those propositions. Yes, Trace presumably happens to agree with the Republicans on the specific topic of DEI in the FAA, but last I checked they were not a single-issue "no DEI in the FAA" party.
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5mo ago
Where did he advocate for "full spectrum information manipulation"? He did, and advocated to, feed false information to a prominent social media sneering celebrity. Surely social media sneering celebrities do not represent the full spectrum of information; are you contending that they represent something like the pinnacle of purity and sacredness, so somebody who is willing to deceive a LibsOfTikTok should implicitly be willing to deceive anyone and everyone else?
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5mo ago
"I have no sympathy for people who are not fully on board with my team" is about the coldest take you can have in the culture war. I, for my part, hope Trace will still be at it in 10 years, showing that there is a way to survive without submitting to either of the two tyrannies of unreason.
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5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
Managed to do the questions thanks to @phailyoor's helpful copypasta below and the answer key someone posted still further. I got a 5/5 in the end, though the third one seemed quite ambiguous (insofar as none of the answers were a perfect fit, and several were almost the same level of imperfect).
Perhaps curiously, of all the tests I've encountered, I found the questions pretty similar to the reading comprehension section of the JLPT (obviously only useful for a small part of the audience here, but e.g. questions 8-12 of the N1 sample). They really seem to like doing a particular format where you are given a half-page essay by some cultural figure on some random topic (like crow intelligence, or whether historiography is too focussed on flashy happenings rather than the effort that went into preventing any such happenings) and then have to pick out one of four sentences that is most representative of the core premise or argument. Given that the JLPT seems to be required for foreigners to be employed by many Japanese companies, it seems notable that they would essentially sneak in a verbal intelligence filter on immigrants in this way.
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5mo ago
Thanks!
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
The "short test-prep site quiz" gates me with a "Press and hold to prove you are not a bot" landing page, which I can't pass (tried everything from holding inhumanely still to wiggling around a bit). Could you repost the questions here?
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5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
Statues are explicitly symbolic, and tearing down the Lee statue, melting it down, then recording the melting and publicizing it after the fact, is also explicitly symbolic. I don't think it's a stretch at all.
I'm not questioning that it is symbolic, but the question is what it is symbolic of. The Occam's-razor interpretation is that it's intended to be symbolic of removal, melting down, liquidation or whatever of what he is associated with by the vast majority of people: the Confederacy, and the Confederacy's cause of slavery.
Maybe if you're in $CURRENT_YEAR, sure. But the kinds of people (Nimarata Haley, anyone?) expunging American history aren't interested in the Civil War, they're interested in putting nons over Americans. The actual Americans reconciled from that war
Really? I don't think the South was ever rehabilitated or seen in a positive light by most people not associated with it. Is that reconciliation? To me, it looks like vanquishing an enemy, and absorbing his subjects.
and put up monuments to that reconciliation. Hyphenated Americans in $CURRENT_YEAR have a decided interest in tearing down the history of this country which doesn't include them. I think that's pretty obvious, and it certainly fits the facts well enough to be a working model.
Why would a "non-hyphenated" Northerner not be interested in tearing down the history of his ancestors' enemies?
It's unfortunately not easy to find a perfectly fitting parallel from other countries, but if for example the PRC started melting down statues of Chiang Kai-shek (wherever such statues may still be found on the Mainland, or after a future reconquest of Taiwan), would you take that to symbolise the "liquidation of Han China", given that at least nominally Chiang's nationalists were for Han supremacy while the communists in their propaganda claimed equality for the different ethnic groups?
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5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
Robert E Lee's face was literally liquidated, symbolizing the liquidation of white America.
Doesn't that seem like a bit of a stretch? Surely unless you are either an identitarian Southerner or a slavery advocate, you'd see Lee as a champion of an outgroup people who went to war for the right to keep slaves, not as a champion of your people. The war he fought probably was the single biggest act of deadly white-on-white violence in the history of the US, and given that the census just before it records about 400k slave owners in total, even the case that he fought for the interests of the significantly greater numbers of whites is a bit dubious. (There's room for some quip about temporarily embarrassed plantation magnates here.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
I think left-wing sadism is easily overlooked when making the comparison because it is comparatively less physical than right-wing sadism. Right-wingers (in their modern US incarnation) revel in seeing their outgroup and its avatars deported, imprisoned and beaten; left-wingers (in their modern US incarnation) instead want to see theirs humiliated, smeared, robbed of their culture and symbols and denied even the words to lament it. It is hard to see things like the famous "gamers are over" blitz in gaming media, or the myriad of remakes and sequels of beloved retro franchises with LGBT characters of color and subversions of the original message, or the actual outgroup avatar humiliation conga that was the Joker sequel, or all the teardowns of statues and removals of names, as being motivated by anything other than a sadistic impulse - confirmed then beyond any doubt by the volume of "lol incel tears" posts that the backlash inevitably attracts.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
A somewhat blunt way to put it, but I agree even as another person who would take 100% Left domination over 100% Right domination without blinking. It would take a lot more to balance the scales - when as many universities test right-wing credentials for applicants to student or faculty positions as do diversity statements and progressive stack scoring and 50% of illegal immigrants to the US have actually been removed, you could talk about the two parties being in a stalemate. The problem is that the US Left has really destroyed any objective sense of what balance looks like by tactical Overton window shifting, so even slight compromises to their preferences are depicted as huge norm-shattering transgressions, and in the end removing some 0.0?01% of illegal immigrants or firing that percentage of progressive federal government workers winds up feeling as if it may outweigh continued progressive domination of whole industries.
The problem in doing this for Leftists themselves, I think, is that in a world where so much power is built on kayfabe or rather the perception of invincibility, this might actually result in their downfall against all odds. You can keep a roomful of unarmed people in check with a machinegun, but if your strategy is to hide the gun and instead insist that you are a Sith lord who could force choke them at any moment, someone calling the bluff on your sad devotion to that ancient religion might just result in everyone laughing and bumrushing you before you can get enough bullets through your barrel.
I don't understand why gods have to be symbolic of anything beyond what their believers claim them to be symbolic of, whether that is "wisdom" or "a choleric narcissist father figure that created the universe and everything in it". The blood covenant also does not need any special interpretation: it's just the claim that the all-powerful figure has specially favoured a particular lineage. Can you not believe yourself to be the favourite son of a father with many children without claiming that the father is uniquely similar to yourself? If I think my boss or advisor likes me, does that imply I think he is the same as me? Every medieval European royal house claimed that their lineage was chosen to rule by the Christian god. Does that mean that each house saw the Christian god as a symbolic representation of themselves, in your understanding? Why did different royal houses then ever get along at all, if they apparently had a fundamental disagreement that amounted to "Jesus is symbolic of us! - No, Jesus is symbolic of us!"?
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