Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Sure.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Funny how the ADL and AIPAC have been pushing hard for the polar opposite of nationalism for us. Mass migration and open borders to Europe, an ethnostate for Israel.
Why, it's almost like diaspora populations have strange relationships with the host nation and the metropole. Of course, if you actually look at the people who are doing the on-the-ground work of the mass-migration you get a lot of Catholic groups, not Jews.
Yes, we need to get rid of the AIPAC and ADL influence
Ah yes, the gentiles who actually hold office are just helpless little mice before the terrifying might of...completely ordinary lobbying groups. And it just so happens to aaaaaaallllll be the Jews...couldn't be the Turkish lobby, or the UAE, or the Saudis, or the Iranians.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Israel is a state fundamentally opposed to western values that causes constant headache for the west.
I mean, yeah; a state organized around blood-and-soil nationalism premised on a mythic past and present-day military conquest is pretty opposed to the modern deracinated, pacifistic, cosmopolitan western ideal. A bit surprised that you're in favor of the latter over the former, but wonders never cease!
What about European women's right not to be raped by the migrants IsraAID is bringing into Europe?
Clearly the gentile governments of European nations don't care about protecting that right. Sounds like a problem with the Gentiles.
What about the christians in the middle east that are being destroyed by the hostile nation of Israel?
Sounds like another failing of world christendom. You should probably get on that.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
This is all in response to the recovery of six dead hostages which were shot, presumably before they could be rescued.
Based on some other hostages' testimony it seems likely that these 6 hostages were shot because the IDF was about to rescue them.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
It seems that the main difference between bikes and motorized vehicles is speed,
I am a novice to this debate, but why wouldn't two other relevant differences be stability (cars don't fall over or spill their driver/occupants onto the pavement nearly as easily as two-wheeled vehicles) and occupant safety features (seat belts, air bags, crumple zones, etc.)?
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I strongly suspect the goal is to portray her dominance by both interrupting Trump and throw him off balance and theteby goading him into a nasty retort, and also to contemptuously scold him if he interrupts her. I'm sure the idea is to exploit female sympathy to the maximum extent possible. It didn't work that great for Clinton though, so I doubt it's worth the bad PR of reneging a fair agreement.
I'm not so sure - when some researchers put on a genderflipped 2016 presidential debate, female!Trump, with all Trump's mannerisms and lines ("WRONG!") turned out to be incredibly popular, and male!Hillary was reported as “'really punchable' because of all the smiling." If Hilarie had acted more like Kamala proposes to ("I'm Speaking!") it may well have gone much better for her.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Honestly that says more about the extraordinary weakness of the 2016 Republican field than it does about Trump's strength.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Well there's two ways you can take the line of objection you're pointing at to Liberal theory.
I should hope there's a lot more than just two! Humanity is very adaptable!
One is Fascism and related radical syndicalist ideas whereby individuals are actually not real and the true protagonists of history and real persons are groups and nations and corporations, etc.
Individuals are absolutely real. Group dynamics are also real. It's not an either-or proposition - humans are social individuals. As I originally said, trying to regulate groups but not individuals is ridiculous because the group is the individuals.
But I still believe it's ultimately disproven by qualia and individual consciousness. If God wanted us to be ants, he'd make us ants.
I don't know what you mean by "disproven" here, but this also just goes to show how trying to distinguish between "groups" or "organizations" and "individuals" is a lot harder than you'd think. Founder-effects and path-dependency are very real forces that impact individuals and their development and outlook! So is heritability, which gives rise to the subtle, yet substantial differences between populations that we observe all over the world! So is the Overton Window! Group dynamics affect everybody, even if they're not formally affiliated in an "organization," and likeminded people are going to find ways to cooperate and work together no matter how you try to prevent them.
The other is a less radical but no less incompatible with Liberalism form of Traditionalism. Either of the perrennial or integralist variety.
What? Which and whose traditionalism? I'm confused what this has to do with restricting organizational behavior but not individuals.
The Liberal concept of rights isn't quite as revocable as you're making it out to be because it's not pointing at something that always is instantiated and can't be violated.
Then they shouldn't have used the word "inalienable," which means "can't be taken or given away."
I don't have a neat post-liberal answer, but completely abandoning the liberal conception of rights doesn't seem wise to me
Who's abandoning rights? I'm not. I very much like the rights I have as an American, and am frequently rather obnoxiously patriotic about it with my friends. I just don't think that those "rights" are anything other than fragile current social consensuses that need to be handled with care - like beautiful Faberge eggs - in order to keep them around and pass them along, more-or-less-intact, to future generations.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Yes, because committing terrorism (or, more relevantly, conspiracy to commit terrorism or attempted terrorism) is equally illegal whether one or many people do it. The organization isn't restricted because it's an organization; it's restricted because of the illegal purpose.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Practicality, for one. If your restrictions can be trivially circumvented by a constituent member of the organization publishing "in their own name" instead of in the name of the organization, you haven't meaningfully impaired or restricted anything, and have just incentivized the organization to go underground.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
My individual natural rights come from Gnon. And are therefore inalienable.
Of course individual rights are alienable. What "right" to life does a murder victim or conscripted soldier have? What "right" to free speech does a nativist Britbong have? Etc. etc. Even the founders admitted that rights only exist where people demand them and are willing to back up those demands with force if someone tries to take them away.
Where do organizations, fictitious entities that don't exist in nature, derive their rights from?
Hypercooperation and the formation of organizations is hard-coded into us.
At the very least, the organization would have the same rights as its constituent individuals, no?
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
on paper the idea that individuals have free speech, not organizations, is perfectly coherent.
No it's not, it's completely bonkers. An organization - especially something like a think-tank - is just a group of people gathered for a common purpose. Anything that a member of the organization says can trivially be rebranded as the speech of one or more of the organization's component members.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
If some/all of the movement's core assumptions are incorrect, that would poison the entire edifice - e.g. Marxist thought might be the largest published corpus of philosophy or economics ever amassed, but it wouldn't be hard for one person to be more correct because the Marxist edifice is chained to fatally-flawed premises.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
the PREMIER weapon in modern warfare (for cost-effectiveness, anyway) is not tanks, fighter aircraft, or cruise missiles, but a $25 Chinese Amazon drone with a $2 explosive warhead.
Or a $300 thermal camera.
I think that the face of warfare has changed a lot since the framing of the US constitution. In the days of the war of independence, men using small arms, i.e. guns similar to the ones privately owned for hunting or self-defense, made up the bulk of land military capability.
Yes, but those men had to be organized and equipped, and the expensive stuff - heavy cavalry and artillery - were what won most wars.
While today military small arms still play an important role in combat, especially in in urban areas, they no longer rule supreme. Artillery, armored vehicles, air and drone strikes are force multipliers for ground operations.
Each side had well over 200 cannon at the 1759 battle of Kunersdorf, or approximately one cannon for each 250 combatants.
As best as I can tell, as of January 2023 Ukraine had approximately 1,600 artillery pieces and roughly 700,000 men under arms, or approximately one cannon for each ~440 combatants. Even if that 700,000 number sweeps in a lot of non-combat personnel, the ratio of guns to combatants in major open warfare hasn't changed all that much.
And although there really is no civilian counter to organized air power, per press accounts (fwiw) imaginative civilians are dunking on established defence establishments these days in drone tech, development, and deployment.
A war where one side has such assets (such as a tyrannic federal government) and the other side (such as freedom-loving Americans) does not have them will likely be very asymmetrical. The US military has proven capable of mostly suppressing insurgents in the Middle East even if they are armed with RPGs, which are crucial to counter armored vehicles.
The U.S. war of independence was also a massively-asymmetrical conflict against a highly-capable enemy with experience in such conflicts - the rebels never developed a military establishment that was as disciplined, organized, equipped, and motivated as the Brits, who had significant experience putting down colonial risings in North America, Ireland, and India. Things don't change as much as you think.
Compared to patriotic Americans the insurgents in the Middle East had a few key advantages:
- Birth rates above replenishment, where life is cheap
Both Russia and Ukraine have had absolutely atrocious birth rates for ages, and they're going at each other hammer and tongs just fine.
- A religious ideology which emphasizes the importance of violent self-sacrifice
Not present in Ukraine either, or indeed in colonial America. People motivated themselves with secular causes just fine.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Oh, so when we make Felons a class of people who can't own guns, are we doing something unfair?
Insofar as "felons" means "people the democrats like, feel sorry for, and/or totemize," then yes.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Why wouldn't they accept a compromise that gets them PART of what they want? Surely they're capable of adapting their position to make such a thing 'fair'.
Because getting the policy enacted on the object level is only part of the motivation for partisan political affiliation and advocacy; there's another whole part rooted in the will to power, the desire to impose one's moral and aesthetic will over others, or just the desire to see opposing moral and aesthetic views stamped down/out.
To steal an old New Yorker cartoon - "it is not enough that dogs succeed, cats must also fail."
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
What is the dividing line between the 1954 attack on the United States capitol by Puerto Rican nationalists and the January 6th riots?
The nationalists' fellow travelers eventually took power and pardoned them. At least, so far that's the political difference.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Or not, and force a reckoning.
People can stay inconsistent longer than you can berate them over their hypocrisy.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
That depends almost entirely on how close the relationship is between group membership and criminal activity. MS-13 gang members? Good case! Right-handed people? No case at all.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Why wouldn't this work?
Because there is still no no willingness in the U.S. to take the steps necessary to prevent smugglers from bringing millions of people either outright illegally or on various asylum claims of various (though mostly extremely dubious) merit.
And because one party has realized that pumping the number of immigrants of all stripes made citizens is beneficial for their electoral outlook.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
As a California attorney who went to school with, and now professionally deals with, prosecutors, they are definitely not all smart. They generally have craptons of sitzfleisch and are workaholics. But raw brainpower is not necessarily a pre-req.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Interestingly, plantation owners tried to keep poor landless whites away from their slaves because they believed the "white trash" would be a poor influence on their slaves.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I think it's more complicated than that. A lot of ex-indentured servants mingled with black servants and slaves in the early colonial period, and a supermajority of slave owners (~70%) owned less than 40 slaves, most significantly less than that. Plus, slaves near urban areas or major transportation routes were frequently rented out as industrial (for men) or domestic (for women) labor, remitting most of their wages to their owner. Those slaves obviously were much freer to develop relationships in the general population than agricultural workers bound to a single plantation or homestead.
There's no guarantee that a German-dominated Europe would have been hostile to Britain. German relations with Britain were actually significantly improving prior to the outbreak of war in 1914 - Germany had conclusively lost the battleship race and stopped even trying to keep up with the British by 1910. The Chancellor even offered to gift the entire German High Seas Fleet to the Brits in order to secure neutrality.
The Liberal government was fairly unified in favor of staying out if it could be reasonably done...except that particular Teutophobes (e.g. Eyre Crowe) and Francophiles (e.g. Edward Grey) at the Foreign Ministry had been running a private French policy with minimal supervision, and during the July Crisis advised the PM and cabinet that they had already committed the honor of Britain to keeping the Kriegsmarine out of the Channel without bothering to consult the Royal Navy (or really anyone else).
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