Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Okay, so now you've just displaced the object level arguments one meta-level higher; now it's a battle over whatever historical evidence you can turn up or torture to support your position. Originalist arguments can be made on both sides of most constitutional questions if you work hard enough at it, and there are may very smart, well-paid, and/or motivated people who work full-time at doing just that.
But this whole debate is pointless; you can't make people conform to an interpretational theory. There's just no processing or proceduring your way over serious substantive conflicts in society, or stopping the inevitable drift in culture, language, economic relations, technological circumstances, morality, and language that occurs across the generations.
Supah_Schmendrick
14d ago
Many thanks!
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Evidence? As a Californian (albeit not a particularly vigilant one) I have seen zero incidents of the GOP being dinged for ballot harvesting.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I don't see the gambling. Card X now costs $4, and Card Y now costs $5, and Card Z now costs $10. No need to gamble for them at all; you pick the ones you want and buy them in the quantity you want for set prices.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Oh psh, we get blackmailed all the time. Its why we haven't reunited the Korean Peninsula, and energy blackmail is a decent explanation for half the horrifying shit we do in the middle east, like arming and funding the Saudi's quasi-genocidal conflict with the Iranians. Which, btw, is just as revanchist as anything Putin is doing, with an added soupcon of ethnic and religious bigotry tossed on top for fun. We also generally support Israel annexing other people's land too, so that's clearly not an American ethical red line either.
Also, while I don't doubt that we could achieve rapud significant conventional superiority over the Russian forces in a direct engagement, I do not trust that we could neutralize their nuclear forces immediately. Given that direct US armed involvement is likely to trigger general hostilities with Russia up to and potentially including a "fuck you" countervalue strikes, your "home by Christmas" glibness is, frankly, horrifying.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
There's nothing inherently "activist" about critical theory, but the activism its theories enable are particularly destructive and quasi-nihilistic, so it gets a particularly bum rap.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
You are correct, thank you.
Supah_Schmendrick
5mo ago
What else but armed insurrection (i.e. war as waged by the stateless) do you call the 1st and 2nd Intifada?
Supah_Schmendrick
5mo ago
I'm not sure. I'm pulling from Darryl Cooper's account, but he doesn't give names. Apparently a German Neo-Nazi was also involved (Willi Pohl/Voss).
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "an afterthought or a footnote" but 19th and early 20th century U.S. politics are all about brass-tacks, "jobs-for-the-boys" style patronage. As the high point, I'd point to maybe the various landgrant laws from the mid-1800's on, just because of the massive scale of the uplift caused thereby.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
the invention of the (practical, iron) stirrup and (more advanced) saddle doesn't seem too significant to us because we don't care about horses, but it ushered in an era of political dominance by feudal lords and their knights.
The stirrup and saddle were important, yes, but the idea that the rich rode horses while the poor fought on foot is at least as old as Alexander's companion cavalry (who had neither stirrups nor advanced saddles). Similarly, political organization revolving around personal relationships between kings and subordinate networks of landholders who also owed military service doesn't arise with medieval "feudalism" (which itself isn't a unitary concept, because e.g. the French, English, and Polish models are so radically different) but was much, much older - the huscarl/fyrd system is similar, not reliant on mounted troops, and has antecedents back to classical Germanic tribes. Heck, even classical greco-roman hoplite/legionary systems are similar (though the Roman system diverged with the consolidation of agricultural land and then the marian reforms).
Developments in every day life did occur, and are interesting. But let's not lose the forest for the trees - it wasn't until first the Columbian exchange, and then the modern era, that there were true civilization-rocking material sea-changes.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
Yes! But my point was that it could become a hunting dog with less effort than you'd think (though it would take directed effort or a long-ass time and a lot of random luck) to get it there.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
Dachshunds are also tiny, and yet the name means "badger hound" and they were explicitly bred that way in order to get down in badger warrens and drag those ferocious pests out by the entrails.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
Will you also argue that culture can make a chihuahua into a hunting dog?
It takes culture to even determine that there should be "hunting dogs" at all, and to start the project of breeding them. We are the product of the cultures of yesterday - who they decided to reward, what traits they regarded as high-status, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
Thank you for the insight!
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
Was that supposed to be a summary of what I commented? If so, I'm confused - I didn't say that at all. What I said was:
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STEM disciplines' truth-seeking functions are often undermined by human nonsense. E.g., "The Vaccine Prevents The Spread of COVID, and anything else is misinformation."
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STEM methods are currently ill-suited to describing and analyzing the human nonsense undermining their truth-seeking functions. E.g. the Replication Crisis.
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Even where STEM disciplines do produce truth, that is no guarantee that power will not suppress those truths. E.g., "Comrade Lysenko is correct; the so-called 'genetics' are reactionary bourgeois fallacies!"
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
No, it makes it a "momento mori"-type reminder of fallibility. But I suspect we'll have to agree to disagree here.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
It should, because if you don't respect someone you're likely to underestimate them, or otherwise misunderstand them, and so be more likely to fail when combatting them (or when trying to reach a peaceful modus vivendi).
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Instead, I thought it was about the lack of clear evil intentions.
Slightly more complicatedly, it's about the way that things which would be wildly extraordinary in normal life (the uprooting and shifting of large populations, and the commitment of mass violence) and which would be shocking to bourgeois morality if committed on an interpersonal basis (shooting someone, or stealing their possessions while they scream) are normalized in the thoughts and discourse of policymakers by taking refuge in rhetorical generality and bureaucratic jargon, and then how everyone just gets on with normal things like office politics and lives completely boring lives even as the ultimate subject is the death and dispossession of millions. It's about how, notwithstanding all the hifalutin' things that the philosophers of liberalism wrote about citizens' exercise of reason and morality in public affairs, the quotidian swallows all of that even when it's the lives of millions on the line.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Eppur si muove - whatever the rhetoric, the result speaks for itself in this case.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
why use a proxy at all? Why not just focus resettlement offers on criminals and dumb people generally?
Because crime isn't tearing apart the (mostly-white) elite and wrecking our culture; the progressive religion which has as one of its chief tenets the evil of whiteness (always with the lower-case) and the corresponding martyrdom of Blackness (with the capital-b, of course), is.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
For reference, the amount of alcohol intake I find pleasurable in an evening is [two fingers of whisky / a glass of wine / a beer] consumed slowly over a 2- to 4-hour period. Anything more turns unpleasant quickly.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Fair enough
This doesn't actually work; it just displaces the substantive questions to various interpretational meta-questions like: "what does 'Necessary and Proper' mean?" and "Is the 'militia clause' prefatory or limiting?" and "what does 'Due Process of Law' mean?"
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