FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
You have not made any argument. You are making claims that are completely unsubstantiated presuming they are true, just because you said so: ipse dixit fallacy.
I disagree. Here is my argument:
When someone waves a rainbow flag or a hammer and sickle flag, Are they not specifically inviting everyone watching to infer their message? If not, why wave the flag?
I'm arguing that this is what flags mean to people. Implicit in the above statement is my evidence for it:
- This is what many people have told me flags are for in general, in both formal education and popular culture.
- This is what many people have told me that the flags they themselves are holding are for, in the specific moment they were holding them.
- This is why I have held and waved flags on all the occasions when I have held and waved them.
None of the above is Ipse Dixit, at least not beyond the tautological sense in which anything I might say is something I have said. I will grant that none of the above evidence is perfect, at least not to the standards of rigorous, committed solipsism. Given that I cannot read minds, I cannot actually be sure that the boringly-consistent data across a lifetime of observing social and political norms is not some elaborate prank being played on me by the rest of the world.
Further, despite the fact that contrary arguments seem facially absurd, I have invited you to offer contrary evidence, or even speculation, on what possible other purpose a flag might serve anyway, because you seem very certain and I'd like to know why.
Stating what people do has no bearing on what people ought to do.
What people do is at least legible. The problem with claims of what they ought to do is that such claims are not necessarily bounded by reality.
I can provide you with a completely different meaning of the rainbow flag that millions of people agree with, but you are going to claim their interpretation is wrong.
Will I? Why would I do that? Whatever meaning is ascribed, I'm going to argue that it needs to actually account for the common behaviors of those waving the flag. I think my definition above does a pretty good job of that, but I wrote it straight off the dome and would not be terribly surprised if a better encapsulation could be offered. By all means show me how it's done.
More generally, it's not clear to me that most people, or even any people, "know what they mean" themselves. Language is necessarily imprecise at the best of times, and often people speak carelessly, even about things they care deeply about. This is not a retreat to infinite subjectivity, just an acceptance that human minds are complicated, and introspection is difficult.
If you wish to argue by appealing to a general principle, what is the proper way to rebut such an argument if one disagrees that the principle is generally held?
I too am saddened when people are so solidified in their opinion that there is really no new argument or event that could change it. I am more saddened, however, when I see people who appear to believe that mountains of evidence they don't like and can't meaningfully respond to should spontaneously evaporate so that it can stop impeding the arguments they would prefer to present unchallenged.
On this subject in particular, a few others have offered the best insight available, and I'll reiterate it in my own words:
People who are upset by this appear to want the old sociopolitical system, wherein there was a strict division of labor between the people who cranked out images of shit being dumped on the hated outgroup by laughing cartoons of tribal champions, and the actual tribal champions who directly benefited from those images while standing solemnly before a podium in a very expensive suit extruding the blandest possible word-product into an array of very official microphones. If one is going to argue for this previous system, one should argue for it as it actually was, not as it might be imagined to be, particularly in the imagination of the side employing a large majority of the old shit-pouring cartoon experts.
In the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting, there was an article I read that offered an interesting nugget; the author, a professional journalist, had of course heard (and only heard!) about the shooting the day it happened. When her kids got home from school, she went to talk to them about it. By that point, of course, her kids had not only heard about it, but had already spent the day watching close-up slo-mo video of the moment of impact, the spattering fountain of blood, the crimson-soaked security detail struggling to load his body into a vehicle... she described a fundamental generation gap, where the experience of the event was sanitized on her end and far more visceral for her children, simply through their respective approaches to media technology, in a way that she probably should have seen coming, and maybe should have done something to prevent...
Food for thought.
No, it does not. You are stating "these sorts of assumptions" as if they are identical when in fact the sort of assumptions are completely different. Just because an apple assumption and an orange assumption are both assumptions, doesn't mean they are of the same sort. This is a false equivalence fallacy[.]
I agree that not all equivalences are created equal. Things can be similar in some ways and different in other ways, and whether their similarities or differences should be focused on is dependent on the situation.
That being said, while you've made it clear that you strongly disagree, you have given little explanation as to why, and you appear to have ignored the arguments I put forward.
You ask:
How do you propose a flag can defend an idea?
And the answer seems obvious to me: Flags defend ideas by their very existence, because the purpose of a flag is to serve as a physically-tangible token of loyalty to an abstract idea. Again I ask you, if a flag does not exist to support the ideas associated with its symbolic content, for what other purpose do humans make, carry and wave flags?
If I put up a flag, that is obviously a message. I'm putting the flag up because I want to send a message! I'm broadcasting that message because I want other people to receive it! If this were not so, what other purpose does putting the flag up serve?
It doesn't matter what "it seems to you". No one has ever argued in an open debate what a flag is intending to say, because all reasonable people understand that flags don't inherently say anything.
You do not speak for "all reasonable people". I think I am a reasonable person, and I will happily argue in an open debate what messages specific flags intend to say, because I perceive many flags to obviously hold such messages.
-
This flag means "Our willingness to live in peace with you is dependent on your respect for our personal liberties. If you cannot leave us in peace, we will defend ourselves from your encroachment."
-
This flag means "We support sexual minorities in their struggle for recognition and acceptance in society, and we oppose those who object."
Now, you could take the same rainbow flag, and say that to you it represents Christian Theocracy and the need to minimize and punish sin through the powers of the state, since the rainbow was God's symbol of peace with mankind after the flood. But the problem is that you would be the only person using the rainbow flag that way, and everyone else would still be using it to symbolize LGBT pride, and so the message people would actually receive is the pride one. In the same way, you could invent a novel definition for some common word, diametrically opposed to the common definition, and then insist that your definition takes precedence, but that would be stupid and counterproductive and most people would just assume you were trolling.
But even in the case when somebody is quoting a book verbatim, that doesn't mean they are saying anything about the quote. Sometimes they use the quote to criticize it, and argue precisely the opposite is true. Which means just repeating a quote from a book should not be assumed to be an endorsement of all the ideas contained in that book.
And yet, people make such inferences commonly, you will not be able to stop them from doing so, and communication requires accepting this reality and working around it.
What do you actually want here? I'm not even sure I want to argue that you're wrong, but what is your point? You seem to be objecting to the fact that humans in groups naturally coordinate together to create and maintain Overton windows, punishing those who fall outside them. Humans obviously do this, and there are obvious downsides to them doing this. It seems to me that humans generally perceive the upsides of such behavior to outweigh the downsides, and I do not think any meaningful number of them will ever agree to coordinate the opposite behavior in any consistent fashion. You can dislike this fact, but I'm exceedingly skeptical that you can change it, or that I'd even want you to succeed in doing so.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
the flair of the person he's asking is "Can Marx explain the used panties market?"
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Lenin and Mao did not do that while building up their movements. Both were always clear that their goals required a violent seizure of power, followed by a violent purge of society.
And yet, both existed and recruited from a far larger ecosystem that, in fact, mostly pretended that the ideology was all about peace and love, the brotherhood of man, and gradual, incremental, painless reform, while turning a blind eye to the radicals in their midst. The Russian Revolution was a coalition effort with numerous moderate voices, and then the small minority of Bolsheviks seized control.
In the same way, we currently have no shortage of Progressive voices arguing in the clearest possible terms that their goals require violent seizure of power and a violent purge of society. And Blue Tribe steadfastly refuses to police them, and has for decades, even as they've made serious attempts to make good on their theory.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
The distinguishing characteristic of communism is not that it critiques society. It's that it seizes state power and uses it to commit mass murder in order to radically reorder society, with the murderers being at the top of the new order.
True, but building up a cadre willing and able to implement that plan requires significant preparation, and during that preparation the naïve will claim the ideology is all about peace and love, the brotherhood of man, and gradual, incremental, painless reform.
Neither the Frankfurt School nor Social Justice activists, despite their faults, desire that.
This man saw a political opponent murdered in front of him, and his instinctive reaction was to begin dancing and cheering in exuberant celebration. Why do you think he did that?
We've already seen Social Justice lead directly to the celebration and implementation of large-scale, lawless, organized political violence, including cold-blooded murder. We've already seen Social Justice lead directly to both the attempted removal of policing, and also the draconian and illegitimate use of police powers against dissenters. The (surviving) previous generation of violent Marxist radicals got tenure, and are considered luminaries by their intellectual progeny.
Social Justice academia is overrun with arguments for the necessity and inevitability of Revolution. Social Justice culture, likewise, is typified by a totalizing model wherein the forces of oppression permeate every facet of society and only a complete leveling and reconstruction can deliver a truly just society. We've had a decade to observe how these cultural assumptions interact with our society's formal and informal power structures, and the answer seems clear to me: they aim to amass and wield absolute, unaccountable power without limit or restraint, and more "moderate" forms of Progressive culture are set up to pointedly ignore, cover for and enable the harms they cause.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
My understanding, roughly, is that classical Marxism, to the extent that it acknowledges patriarchy as a concept at all, holds that patriarchy and gender-based oppression are downstream of economic class.
If there's a difference between our understandings here, I'm not seeing it. So far, so good.
Today I don't think there is an ideologically coherent 'mainline Feminism'.
I would disagree quite strongly. The terms "Patriarchy", "Sexism", and "Misogyny" seem like stable, highly politicized tokens of a highly coherent ideological structure. Likewise "reproductive rights", "women's rights", "women's safety", etc, etc. There can be lots of disagreement over lots of things, even very important things, without an absence of a unifying foundation. As you say:
If I were to generalise, I would say that what makes a person or position 'feminist' today is 1) it is primarily interested in the position of women in society, and 2) it holds that women, as group or class, are in some way disadvantaged, and some sort of collective action is necessary to ameliorate those disadvantages.
..To which one might add additional precision: women as a class are seriously disadvantaged due to the nature and structure of society, and this sum of disadvantages can only be resolved by fundamentally deconstructing and rebuilding the nature of society. Patriarchy in Feminist ideology is isomorphic to Capitalism in Marxist ideology, in much the same way that the Greeks worshiped Ares and the Romans worshiped Mars.
Within that broad heading, there are both Marxist and non-Marxist feminists, and the line can be blurry. Moreover, because Marx is such a massively influential figure in the history of sociology, philosophy, etc., if you search for traces of Marxism in almost any school of social analysis, you're going to find some.
bell hooks is my go-to central example of modern Feminism as an ideological structure. Googling "bell hooks on Marx", first result:
The Black Marxist Feminism of Bell Hooks
This book explores bell hooks' trajectory of work and cohesiveness of thought about the meaning and meaningfulness of black womanhood in terms of a Black Marxist feminism, which uniquely confronts the dimensions of feminism and womanism; the relations between the secular and the religious; the problems of gender and sexism; and the structural and systemic issues of oppression, domination, white supremacy, and capitalism. In making sense of black womanhood in its philosophical, social, cultural, institutional, and historical complexities, hooks' Black Marxist feminism constructs an intersectional theory about what hooks describes as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. In this sense, hooks' Black Marxist feminism conceptualizes the ways and means by which white supremacist capitalist patriarchy imposes intersectional predicaments upon black womanhood, drawing foundationally on Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, working within the purview of a host of Marxisms in Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Karl Kautsky, Nikolai Bukharin, and Georgi Plekhanov, and speaking to the Marxist proclivities of Cedric Robinson, Cornel West, Charles W. Mills, James H. Cone, Stuart Hall, and Angela Y. Davis.
Okay, but this is commentary about bell hooks, not hooks herself. So let's skip several repeat results, and we find:
Challenging Capitalism and Patriarchy: An Interview with bell hooks (apparently republished from "Third World Viewpoint" via the Espresso Stalinist). Pertinent Excerpts:
...I think that what we see globally is that there have been incredible struggles to combat capitalism that haven’t resulted in an end to patriarchy at all. I also think that when we study ancient societies that were not capitalist we see hierarchical systems that privileged maleness in the way that modern patriarchy does. I think we will never destroy patriarchy without questioning, critiquing, and challenging capitalism, and I don’t think challenging capitalism alone will mean a better world for women...
...I think that strategically, we have to start on all fronts. For example, I’m very concerned that there are not more Black women deeply committed to anti-capitalist politics. But one would have to understand the role that gender oppression plays in encouraging young Black females to think that they don’t need to study about capitalism. That they don’t need to read men who were my teachers like Walter Rodney, and Nkrumah, and Amilcar Cabral.
I think that as a girl who grew up in a patriarchal, working-class, Black, southern household there was a convergence of those issues of class and gender. I was acutely aware of my class, and I was acutely aware of the limitations imposed on me by gender. I wouldn’t be the committed worker for freedom that I am today had I not begun to oppose that gendered notion of learning that suggests that politics is the realm of males and that political thinking about anti-racist struggle and colonialism is for men.
I’m very much in favor of the kind of education for critical consciousness that says: Let’s not look at these thing separately. Let’s look at how they converge so that when we begin to take a stand against them, we can take that kind of strategic stance that allows us to be self-determining as a people struggling in a revolutionary way on all fronts...
Absolutely. I think Marxist thought–the work of people like Gramsci–is very crucial to educating ourselves for political consciousness. That doesn’t mean we have to take the sexism or the racism that comes out of those thinkers and disregard it. It means that we extract the resources from their thought that can be useful to us in struggle. A class rooted analysis is where I begin in all my work. The fact is that it was bourgeois white feminism that I was reacting against when I stood in my first women’s studies classes and said, “Black women have always worked.” It was a class-biased challenge to the structure of feminism...
Absolutely. In my newest book, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, one of the big issues I deal with is the degree to which capitalism is being presented as the answer. When people focus on the white mass media’s obsession with Louis Farrakhan, they think the media hate Farrakhan so much. But they don’t hate Farrakhan. They love him. One of the reasons why they love him is that he’s totally pro-capitalist. There is a tremendous overlap in the values of a Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam and the values of the white, Christian right. Part of it is their pro-capitalism, their patriarchy, and their whole-hearted support of homophobia.
Farrakhan’s pro-capitalism encourages a kind of false consciousness in Black life. For example, you have a Rapper like Ice T in his new book, The Ice Opinions, making an astute class analysis when he says that “People live in the ghetto not because they’re Black, but because they’re poor.” But then he goes on to offer capitalism as a solution. This means that he has a total gap in his understanding if he imagines that becoming rich within this society–individual wealth–is somehow a way to redeem Black life. The only hope for us to redeem the material lives of Black people is a call for the redistribution of wealth and resources which is not only a critique of capitalism, but an incredible challenge to capitalism.
I would not generalize that modern, mainline feminists consider their critique to be a refinement of Marxism.
Would you say bell hooks considers her critique to be a refinement of Marxism? For the many, many feminists who draw on bell hooks as an inspiration, and who likewise employ formulations about Capitalist White Supremacist Patriarchy and Late-stage capitalism, would you say that they also appear to consider their critiques to be a refinement of Marxism?
...In any case, we apparently agree that there are Marxist feminists, and I hope I've demonstrated that these are often central examples of most workable definitions of "feminist". Can you provide some clear-cut, central examples of prominent Feminist theorists or intellectuals who are not Marxists?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
I'm saying that it's a mistake to identify the critical theory of wokism with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. The major figures of the Frankfurt School would reject wokism--ideologically and aesthetically, and in particular its focus on consumerist identity.
Would it also be a mistake to identify the socialist theory of Trotsky with the Socialist theory of Stalin? (Or that of Kamenev and Stalin, or Zinoviev and Stalin, or Bukharin and Stalin, or...)
...I submit that Marxism is best understood as a bundle of critiques of society emerging from a particular worldview. Beyond those worldview-clustered critiques, Marxism contains no actual, gears-level insight or plan for fixing society beyond "amass absolute power and use it tear down this society and build a much better one in its place". If you are tracking ideological descent, you should track it through the worldview, the critique cluster, and the prescription of amassing and wielding absolute power. These are the constants of Marxist thought.
The non-gears-level theoretical confections layered atop by Marx and his feuding successors are best understood as superstructure, epiphenomena. Lenin gutted much of Marx's own theoretical constructs to carry out the Russian Revolution, and no one cared because he maintained the constants of perspective, critique, and seizure of power, and he won. The Russian Revolutionaries who followed him themselves contained great diversity of thought and and many beautiful theoretical elaborations, until Stalin culled them all by hueing to the constants of Perspective, Critique, and seizure of power, and no one cared because he also won. Mao likewise diverged greatly from Marx, Lenin and Stalin, and yet he stuck to the basics, and he also won and so was recognized, at least initially, as a Real Marxist.
Consider the idea that Marxism does not actually contain actionable insight into the human condition or the proper ordering of a peaceful, prosperous society. Because of this lack, people attempting even minimally to engage with the human condition or build such a society in the real world quickly find themselves having to make shit up. Then if their improvisations work, they must have Really Understood Marx, and if they fail, clearly they were heterodox and benighted, at least by everyone within reach of the winner.
You may be correct that all the Frankfurt School and modern Social Justice share is a rhetorical commitment to communism, and you may be correct that in both cases, that commitment is fake. When in the history of the ideology has it been otherwise?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Yes, and that is why the people we are calling Cultural Marxists have engaged in a protracted and highly public campaign to, among many other things, put black people in charge of art, universities, and "etc". Surely you are aware of this campaign, the explicit arguments forwarded for its necessity and its many notable and expensive foibles?
What is your actual argument here? You appear to be quoting newspaper headlines as examples of ridiculous things that obviously haven't happened.
The motte is Marxists caring about culture, which obviously they have done throughout history. The Soviet Union is just one famous example.
The bailey is the much less defensible claim that "wokism is the bastard child of communism" - this kind of 'cultural Marxism' is a much larger, more complicated narrative about how intersectionality, modern progressive thought, etc., derive from a complex chain of descent from Marxism.
This claim comes around with some frequency, and has always left me quite confused as to where exactly such a view emerges from.
From your understanding, what is the doctrinaire Marxist view on, say, feminism as an ideological/philosophical system?
My understanding is that doctrinaire Marxism had no room for Feminism as such; class conflict was the problem and the solution, and the future classless society would provide seamless, perfectly egalitarian solutions for existing conflicts between the sexes with no need for further analysis or theoretical constructions. My impression of the attempts to implement Marxism likewise believed this, even as they often implemented, for example, what from a feminist perspective would be considered large-scale rape culture, exploitation and repression of women in their societies.
Likewise, from your understanding, what is the mainline Feminist view of Marxism as an ideological/philosophical system?
My understanding is that mainline Feminists consider Marx enormously influential to their critique of society and its discontents, but believe their ideological/theoretical model is an application and refinement of Marxist social critique, and that as a refinement, their movement's distinctive perspectives and prescriptions should be prioritized over the older, cruder, pure-class-conflict marxist view.
It seems to me that the above two descriptions are accurate for central examples of Doctrinaire Marxist and Feminist thinking respectively, and that both the fundamental relationship and fundamental conflict between them is undeniable. This old comment provides concrete examples of the phenomena both from popular appeals to academia, and from within academia itself; I'd be interested in whether you think I'm engaging with a Motte and Bailey there, and if so how. The dénouement to that post seems evergreen:
It seems obvious to me that the various branches of Social Justice theory are, to a first approximation, direct descendants of Marxism. It seems obvious to me that a supermajority of the people promulgating Social Justice theory believe that they are performing some combination of extending, expanding, or (for the truly arrogant) correcting Marxism, quite explicitly. I think the above position can be defended unassailably by looking at the academic output that constitutes the headwaters of the Social Justice movement. I think that those who argue that the obvious, inescapable ties between Social Justice theory and Marxism are some sort of hallucination or sloppy categorization are either woefully uninformed or actively dishonest. To those who have advanced such arguments in the thread on the subject below, I offer an invitation: assuming the above examples are insufficient, what level of evidence would satisfy you? How many papers from how many journals do you need to see? How many quotes from how many prominent figures within the modern social justice movement, and the people who taught them, and the people who taught them, and so on? How far back do we need to go to satisfy you? How deep do we need to dig to bring this question to a conclusion?
(And it's a genetic fallacy anyway, but that's a whole separate issue. Suffice to say that I think wokism is wrong, but it's wrong because it's wrong, not because of this or that historical antecedent.)
I would disagree. New Ranch Marxism goes wrong specifically because it retains many of the distinct errors of its progenitor.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
My point is that "it's okay to assassinate people, but they have to be evil" is a belief that's held by approximately nobody.
I disagree, but am intrigued. Huge amounts of entertainment hinge on this norm. lots of history hinges on this norm. Radicals openly advertise based on this norm.
All the people who celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk would never say that.
What would they say, in your view?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Could you elaborate your point?
I think most people are not actually aware of the sort of person John Brown was, and the sort of things he actually did. I think those who are aware of him generally regard him as a hero, and if informed of his actual actions, would consider them justified, because he was Fighting Evil. I think this prediction would hold increasingly true the more latent social pressure it's tested under.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
...are you on substack?
Not yet.
One could point out that one way to avoid worries of a slave revolt would be to simply not build your economy on the backs of forced labor from an imported underclass that continues to grow...
Are you under the impression that I disagree with John Brown's actions?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Neither. It is the peace where "they" get away with it for another day, for whatever definition of "they" we each prefer.
“For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”
-G.K. Chesterton
The concept is right up my alley, but the movie's ending really threw me off.
..what threw you off about the ending? It seemed relatively straightforward to me. Spoilers initiating:
|| The lighthouse was ground-zero for the Shimmer, due to it being where the alien landed. The shimmer operated by smearing things into other things, copying and mixing together and generating variants of anything within the zone. It began altering and copying all the team members as soon as they entered. Note that we see them enter the shimmer, and then we hard-cut to them waking at a campsite, with no confirmation of what happened in between; it's not clear we're actually watching the original team or a duplicate throughout.
The ending: the shimmer is playing with the humans, pretty clearly trying to understand them. The husband had been copied, with the original self-immolating while the copy walked back home. In the main character's case, she convinces the copy to self-immolate, and in the process sets off a chain reaction that spreads immolation through at least its core domain. The shimmer is destroyed. "She" walks out, fundamentally altered at the least, with bits of her comrades mixed into her, and reunites with "her" "husband". The open question in the end is whether they're still carrying the shimmer inside them, and whether it will simply spread again. ||
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Cool. Now imprint this feeling in your mind, so that you can recall it in detail when the shoe is on the other foot.
I think it is every red-blooded American's moral duty to do a lot of things you probably would not approve of. moral clarity is a rush but it does not keep the peace.
Yes there is???!
Then by all means, lay it out. When I want to list law enforcement travesties by federal law enforcement, I list people murdered, women and children burned alive en masse, obviously unnecessary use of lethal force, decades-long patterns of abuse of rights and murderous malfeasence, destruction of evidence, perjury and coverups, all without meaningful accountability through any process intended to supply it.
What are the clear misdeeds of the current ICE offensive?
This is happening, and the optics do suck. You can tell they suck because people hate and fear ICE officers in a way they didn't a year ago.
Blue tribe emotions are not a reasonable guide to material reality.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
I do not think that the South seceded because they thought that Lincoln would shoot them up a la John Brown.
My understanding is that southerners were very worried about large-scale slave revolts, having observed long-term the outcome of such a revolt with the Haitian Revolution in 1791. John Brown, a murderous terrorist, made a serious attempt to ignite the same sort of slave revolt in Virginia, and for this was lauded as a hero and martyr by northerners generally, and that contemporary southerners saw this as proof that the northerners held their lives and wellbeing in slight regard.
From the first result for "southerner reactions to john brown":
In John Ellis’ letter to John Floyd and John B. Todd’s letter to Governor Ellis, they both mentioned the need for a militia in the wake of John Brown’s raid and execution. Ellis wrote to Floyd, the United States Secretary of War, about the conditions of North Carolina after the John Brown raid, and why North Carolina needed weapons for its militias. “The Sense of insecurity prevailing among the people of this State, renders it necessary that I should apply to you for arms to place in the hands of the militia…
...It is important to realize that there are exceptions to this demand for a militia. One such exception appears in The Diary of Catherine Ann Devereux, where she and her father differed on the issue of being militarily prepared after Brown’s raid. “He does not conceal that he thinks it all folly, childs play, no need of preparation for war…. I do not see how in the present attitude of the North, sample they have given us in the John Brown raid, he can be so indifferent to our preparation for a future one.”[4] Catherine’s entry reflects the attitude of several newspapers suggesting Northern fanaticism, and well as a family division between her father, a man not convinced of the need for preparing for a war, and Catherine, a woman who was convinced that war would be inevitable.
...And plenty more where that came from. The AI summary:
Southern reactions to John Brown were overwhelmingly negative, viewing him as a dangerous lunatic who threatened their way of life and sovereignty. His raid on Harpers Ferry intensified fears of slave insurrections and was seen as a direct challenge to the institution of slavery, leading many Southerners to advocate for secession and increased vigilance against abolitionist movements.
...And of course, all of this should be obvious with any understanding of who John Brown was and what he actually did. Of course, we understand now that John Brown was in the right when he attempted to secure his moral values through direct, murderous violence against those who disagreed, and of course we understand that similar murderous violence is acceptable when confronted by evil, implacable tyranny backed by force of law. The only wrinkle is that we cannot agree on what constitutes "evil" or "tyranny".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
My own opinion is that they should openly state their position and attempt to modify the laws to fit it (or at least draft laws they would like).
We did that decades ago. We passed laws, and stopped laws we did not want from being passed. We won the legal argument fair and square. Only, it turns out that the legal argument doesn't matter because the other side, broadly speaking, is willing to ignore or actively subvert the law sufficiently to preclude all enforcement. There is no reason to believe that passing additional laws will force Blues to actually respect them.
So again, why are they attacking Christians first?
Did you miss this part?
Most effort is being directed toward South and Central American illegal immigrants because these are by far the most numerous cohort of illegal immigrants, also generally the poorest, and at least arguably the most criminal.
Considerable effort has been expended against Muslim and Hindu migration as well, but it is the southern border that represents the core of the problem. What part of this is confusing?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Trump brought this on himself. There's a million ways he could've implemented the ICE program, and he chose one with the greatest optics of cruelty.
There's a million ways he could have implemented the ICE program completely ineffectually. This way is delivering at least some level of results, and there is no reason to believe that any other plausible method would deliver better results.
"Cruelty is the point". I didn't believe it during Trump 1. For Trump 2, I believe it.
This has been a bipartisan pattern throughout the last decade, pretty clearly as a result of collapsing federal authority. Gun laws are routinely enforced this way, and have been for decades. COVID mandates were very clearly enforced this way. Trans ideology was enforced this way.
Here are the 'job requirements' for a deportation officer. Literally randos.
What job requirements would seem more appropriate to you? Can you point to some examples of how low recruiting standards have resulted in bad outcomes?
Democrats are justified in believing that this will select for bottom-feeder men with anger problems looking to get the high of having power over someone else.
As you say, "An accusation must be validated by a supposedly neutral arbiter." I disagree that Democrats are justified in such a belief. On the other hand, I can point to recent cases where federal agents promulgated official orders to violate their core mission to better discriminate against Reds.
As with all accusations in the US, until the supreme courts weighs in, it isn't formally treason.
I think you overestimate the sociopolitical "pull" maintained by the courts, including the Supreme Court. We are more than a decade into lesser courts, and local, state and federal officials operating in open defiance of rulings they disagree with.
The fact is that systems of law do not constrain human will, individually or collectively. "Treason" is a word invented by humans, applied by humans, and assessed by humans. If the argument here is that Democrat local and state officials probably won't be charged, convicted and sentenced for Treason for the things they're doing right now, I'll readily agree with you. But the fight that is happening right now is more likely to grow than to gutter out, and there does not appear to be an obvious point where it will stop. Blue Tribe has acted for decades as though it is above the law, and it turns out those actions have consequences.
Trump is consistently the first one to raise the temperature and to lower the bar for acceptable discourse. I don't want to sound like a kid. But, he started it. Only now, the democrats are responding.
It is certainly true that Trump started raising the temperature, if one carefully defines "raising the temperature" to exclude everything Democrats have done to raise the temperature over the last decade or more. Trump is essentially a copy of Bill Clinton. His cabinet and associates are full of former high-tier democrat figures. His policies used to be entirely normal within the democratic party as recently as a decade ago. Red Tribe has slaughtered numerous sacred cows to assemble their current coalition, essentially capitulating to broad swathes of the Democratic policy platform. The democrats have only moved further left in response, and have made both unconscionable government repression and large-scale, organized lawless violence core aspects of their political program.
The democratic party announced their intention to use mass immigration to secure a permanent majority Twenty years ago. It turns out that this was not quite the silver bullet they expected, but Reds are assessing future cooperation in terms of intentions, not results, and Blues have made it abundantly clear that further cooperation with them leads to no livable future for Reds.
Reds are not going to back down because there is no retreat available to us. We decline to be reduced to second-class citizens in our native country. We decline to be victimized by the full power of the Federal Government. We decline to uphold rules that are enforced only to our detriment and never to our benefit. We decline to maintain systems that exist only to oppress us.
No justice, no peace.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Is your claim that Reds generally are unconcerned about Muslim or Hindu illegal immigration? That would be a surprising take, given a number of past incidents.
Most effort is being directed toward South and Central American illegal immigrants because these are by far the most numerous cohort of illegal immigrants, also generally the poorest, and at least arguably the most criminal.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Why's Trump sending red state national guard units into blue cities?
Because that is a response on the table when state and local governments violate federal law and conspire to deny citizens their civil rights.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Come on. This is not true. First because treason is pretty well defined. But by this logic Texas was treasonous when they decided to enforce border control on their own.
IIRC, Texas explicitly defied federal control of a core federal concern. The federal government letting it go and refusing to push the issue was an admission of weakness, but... you can taboo the term "treason" if you want, but this was very clearly an inflection point in the collapse of our old system of government, a case where the rules very clearly went out the window. I supported it then and support it now because I think the rules are, at this point, a complete joke, but we should be clear-eyed about what is actually happening here: The federal government as an institution is dying.
But again, why are they not changing the laws to deal with this more thoroughly and why is all effort directed towards more pious coreligionists instead of Muslims or Hindus etc.?
Because it has been established that blues ignore laws they dislike or find inconvenient, and that this is one such law. There is no reason to believe that making illegal immigration double-illegal will result in Blues actually enforcing laws they don't want to enforce and perceive great advantage in not enforcing. This is an invitation to waste political capital on "process" that has already been subverted.
Actually, no, it wasn't. I raised a general point on the meta level, one that I think is reasonable to ask and really could do with some effort in answering:
Or to put it another way for you or @Amadan or @ThomasdelVasto or anyone else interested, if the sort of argument Amadan describes seems bad, what would a better form of argument look like, in your view?
...and then on the object level I raised a separate point about the division of labor model versus the current jack-of-all-trades model. I made no argument that jack-of-all-trades is better, only noted that if one is arguing against it, one should do so honestly.
In any case, if that's a discussion you'd like to have, I'm all for it, but the way it doesn't start is this:
That is not my argument, and I don't appreciate you implying that it is. I am fully capable of speaking for myself, and do not require your assistance in framing my sentences. We actually have a specific rule about this:
I think you can probably find at least one mottezan who would endorse each individual sentence you've offered there. I decline to answer for all of them in aggregate.
There is not, however, infinite value in norms, and many people, myself among them, believe the old system was worse for a variety of reasons quite apart from "dirty work" done by "Hollywood jews". The old system insulated our politicians from accountability on a scale that was appallingly unacceptable, because the formalized channels allowed a small set of elites massively disproportionate control over what the public at large knew, understood, and thought about. This had woeful consequences, such that enough of us rebelled to burn the old system down. You may disagree with that decision, but you would do well to engage with why we made it if you want to convince us that we've made a mistake.
But again, the argument is generally not that ritual and civic religion do not have serious value. The argument is that they do not have enough value to offset the abuses the old system enabled and continues to enable.
The "somewhere" that it has to stop is the grave. It can stop short of there, if enough people on each side recognize value in doing so. And yet: "give me liberty or give me death".
Many people on both sides believe that the principles at stake here are worth fighting and even killing over. Too many of them concluded this for the old system to survive, and so it has been gutted and is currently bleeding out in a ditch. I am not sorry for that, because I hated the old system with a passion words cannot adequately convey, and wish only that it would die faster.
This is a discussion forum. If you want to discuss why I believe what I believe, I'm happy to discuss that with you. You are certainly correct that many people here disagree with you on the value of the old norms. You are probably correct about the general shape of many of their arguments. But here's the thing: if their arguments don't persuade you, that doesn't mean they aren't persuasive. Maybe they're unreasonable. Alternatively, maybe you're unreasonable. If you want to discuss it, discuss it. If you want to take a "moral stand" and then complain when others object without substantively addressing their objections, it seems to me you've misunderstood what this forum is for.
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