Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Well, what now? Apparently the left has pushed too hard and too fast and it’s turning the GOP away. Being LGBT isn’t seen as some harmless thing anymore, especially when it seems being “tolerant” means accepting gay drag nuns on crucifixes. The parodies are no longer a parody, and grooming children to accept gender ideology seems rife in schools even in deep red states.
As another American politician said during another of the country's great culture wars: "We are now far into the [eighth] year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to [queer] agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed - 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half-[queer] and half [traditional/heteronormative]. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other."
No polity can long retain serious moral divisions within itself for long.
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
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
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
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
6mo ago
Be careful with historical documents - those were political documents written for public consumption. You're not entirely wrong - the seceding states clearly thought slavery was a central pillar of their unique civilization (though they were not unconflicted about it). However, they also had every incentive to try and bring the northern abolitionists, who were a small minority widely-viewed as radical, humorless, and radical (not in the good sense), front and center. When you're reading those, take the same attitude you'd take towards Lindsey Graham talking about the invasion of Iraq in 2003, or AOC talking about the Floyd riots - it's basically the same thing.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
I'm not saying that the differences between AMAAC and AWAAC are not significant. I'm saying that if you're asking me about my life-chances from behind a veil of ignorance, the differences imposed on me by being AMAAC or AWAAC would be swamped by (and in many ways significantly dependent on) other traits about me - inherited wealth, inherent intelligence, inherent beauty, sketchy family, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
I agree that FBI opposition can harm an administration they don't like. However, I don't think that a more competent and audacious administration would have been nearly as harmed as Trump was by Russiagate. The FBI is nominally under executive branch control, and the President has the pardon power - an administration that doesn't concede to opposition pressure has ways of pushing back against rogue enforcement.
Supah_Schmendrick
20d ago
Many thanks!
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
The culture war is as much a commentary on whose righteousness can be expressed as much as it is a contest over the definition of righteousness.
Maybe I'm dumb, but I don't see a large distinction between "a definition of righteousness which can be expressed without significant social pushback" and "a definition of righteousness which has triumphed and been accepted by society." Can you elaborate?
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
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
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
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
11d ago
White Colonization could not have happened in the first place without a much smaller number of White Men subjugating a much larger population of indigenous peoples in all cases. India, relative to its population size, was controlled by the British with an extremely small elite pool.
This is very bad history. Colonization in India occurred not because a few god-like white people showed up and crushed all before them, but instead because very clever and ruthless opportunists, through a combination of skill and luck, managed to co-opt local power structures by backing challengers to weak overlords. The British didn't rule India in their own name; they slowly accumulated alliances and legal rights and privileges through local intermediaries.
There's a myth that the Aztecs interpreted the arrival of Spanish Conquistadores as fulfilling a prophecy of the return of the Aztec's gods.
This is also very bad history. The Aztecs didn't think Cortez was a god - they in fact whipped his men out of Tenochtitlan in La Noche Triste, after killing the collaborator Moctezuma. Instead, Cortez proved himself a diplomat of no small skill, and put together a coalition of the Aztec's subject peoples which ultimately strangled Tenochtitlan, and then entered into negotiated political relationships with the Spanish crown. The influx of more and more Spaniards into the region, coupled with the massive disruption to Mexica society caused by the plagues of the Columbian exchange, was what finalized the ultimate subjugation of the locals.
Supah_Schmendrick
20d ago
I mean, the narrative I was taught in school was that there were a lot of different ways that Nazis killed jews - rounded up and shot in the wake of Wehrmacht conquests, beaten/burned to death in pogroms, worked/starved to death in slave labor camps, and yes, gassed in extermination camps. All of which was tied together by the Nazi's fairly-consistent rhetoric that Jews were the ethnic enemy of Germans and should be killed. The idea that it's "6 million gassed" or complete denial/revision seems like a really bad strawman to me.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Except your example also demonstrates that "let them do it on their own" is BS. The Azeris had Iranian, Turkish, and Israeli backing...the Armenians "fought on their own" and got stomped. Little countries will always cozy up to big countries, and whoever doesn't have a patron had best find one quick or risk domination by their mobbed-up neighbors.
You are taking insufficient account of interpersonal variance. I am unconvinced that the differences between the life-experiences of American-Men-As-A-Class ("AMAAC") and American-Women-As-A-Class ("AWAAC") are significant compared to the differences between the rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, normal and disabled/crippled, smart and dumb, low-time-preference and high-time-preference, etc.
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