Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
5mo ago
Letting Enrique Tarrio out of a 22 year sentence is reprehensible imo. Kinda increases the incentives for doing political crimes now.
The BLM lawyers who firebombed a cop car got 12-15 months.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
I wanted the woke to be defeated by classical liberals
The problem is that "classical liberalism" has very little positive substance to it in most formulations; it's usually articulated as something of a meta-philosophy about open competition between ideological groups (free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, equality before the law, etc.). It has very little to say about what the actual positive vision society should be working towards is. Hence its fundamental discomfort with the actual exercise of power necessary to rip out the institutional kudzu the woke has implanted into the liberal's precious "impartial institutions."
My biggest mistake, I think, was to extremely overestimate libs and the left. I really thought they would manage to blunt Trumpism's worst impulses and there would be a sort of stalemate like there was during Trump's first term.
The problem is that there is no institutional check on the left when it gets into power (eg all the nonsense the Biden Administration got up to, as documented ably by Rufo and many others) so the only actual check there can be is the one originally contemplated by the Founders - the full exercise of political power by a successive administration elected to reverse the initiatives of the last.
In fact, the checking of one aggressive force (wokism) by an equally and oppositely-aggressive one (Trumpism) is precisely the balancing of powers and passions contemplated by Madison and the federalists. It's just been so long since we had anything even resembling an equal fight between progressive and conservative forces in the country's institutions that actual open conflict looks like a radical coup.
Supah_Schmendrick
5mo ago
People renaming stuff for ideological reasons is bad actually.
Right. This community knows this progression. neutral rules are best, but once someone defects then trying to uphold the neutral rule is basically the same thing as unilateral disarmament.
Supah_Schmendrick
5mo ago
Fox News recently broadcast a "helicopter ride-along" to the southern border, where they accompanied border agents at night as they scanned the riverbanks for intruders. The searchlights trained on a man who was attempting to lay low in the brush; he made a run for it, but was inevitably captured. The camera lingered as he was handcuffed and put in the patrol truck, to ensure that the viewers at home got a good look at their hard-won trophy. Even for an amoral Nietzschean overman such as myself, there was something slightly nauseating about how brazenly exploitative the whole ordeal was. Your moments of desperation, packaged and commodified by a foreign mega-conglomerate and sold as entertainment.
Or, perhaps, this is attractive to voters as a concrete example of a policy which they have consistently demanded for decades, frequently gotten lip-service toward from multiple politicians in both major parties, but have never actually seen consistently and seriously enacted. It's not packaged and commodified desperation; it's visual evidence that they are finally, for once, getting what they have been promised.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
Because this leads to photos of children being separated from their parents by law enforcement, which makes a majority of voters sufficiently sad/uncomfortable to vote against it.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
This is extremely inaccurate. Lebanon is famously split between feuding Sunni, Shia, and Maronite christian groups to the degree that their constitution sets ethnic quotas for power-sharing. Afghan is also split between many warring tribal-ethnic groups as well, including Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazara, and Uzbeks.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
What the hell are you talking about?
Our idiot mayor (promoted far above her competence because of her race and gender) decided to be in Ghana even after she was warned that conditions were going to be particularly dangerous for fires.
The deputy mayor - also a part of the same ethnic political machine - was out of the picture because he is being raided by the FBI for allegedly calling bomb threats in to City Hall.
The third in line - the City Council President who only got the gig after the previous President went down for allegedly racist comments about the same ethnic mafia - was too busy cutting off public comment and oversight over City Council meetings and didn't do anything either.
In previous fire seasons, fire-engines were forward-positioned in the hilly areas to respond quickly to reports of small brushfires before they could spread and get out of control. Efforts were made to clear fire access roads up into the hills and cut away excess brush. DBS inspections were made of properties with notably overgrown brush and fines assessed if the landlords did not engage in required clearance. Etc. Etc. None of this was done, and the fire department itself dedicated to issues of gender and sexual diversity rather than actual fire-fighting effectiveness.
To say nothing of how decades of one-party liberal rule have led to a situation where our municipal water infrastructure is ancient and creaky - unable to deliver the volume of water needed in a true crisis - the DWP has become a byword for corruption instead of competence, and we still have the same number of fire stations as we did when the city had half the residents.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
I disagree with you. This editorial is very bad, and Chuck Todd should feel bad for writing it.
The problem with political discourse in America right now is that we are all stuck in a social media funhouse mirror booth. What we see isn’t what is, and how we’re seen isn’t who we are. And yet, here we are.
This isn't new. Herbert Hoover's magisterially-dyspeptic magnum opus goes into microscopic detail about all the ways various FDR-administration officials and allied journalists lied and slanted the truth to manage and manipulate public opinion during the depression, New Deal period, and WWII, and the number of people who remember or care today round to zero. Heck, even the "really famous" examples like the NYT lying about the Holodomor in Ukraine, or rabidly defending the Lindsay administration in NYC at the time, then excoriating it in Lindsay's obituary, are just cocktail-party trivia and not seriously internalized lessons.
Come Jan. 21, we all are going to be living in the same country and sharing the same group of people as our elected representatives. We need leaders who accept that there are major political differences between us and that governing needs to be incremental and not radical.
How do you get "incrementalism" from "the country is politically-divided"? It really smacks of "we just need to make sure we boil the frog slowly so it doesn't jump out." No instinct towards actual compromise or even honest open conflict; just dishonest slow-rolling and gaslighting about ultimate endgames until it's too late and the fait accompli can be imposed on a prostrate foe. Of course, this strategy also has the side-effect of not being at all concerned with actual quality of governance in the mean-time...if you're suffering from a gushing stab wound, incremental care, one bandaid at a time, won't stop you from bleeding out even if stitches or cauterization would really hurt in the short-term.
Right now, our political information ecosystem doesn’t reward incrementalism or nuance, instead punishing both and, more to the point, rewarding those who make up the best stories.
Our political information ecosystem is primarily geared towards rationalizing already-extant beliefs. That's how you get in people's customized algorithms - feeding them plausible-sounding affirmation of things they already believe. It's not a question of "nuance" or "incrementalism" - what do those even mean in the context of journalism? That you shouldn't report facts if it looks like they lead to an "unnuanced" conclusion or one that is a radical departure from current consensus? And why do we think that our information delivery system should be characterized by the same qualities as policymaking in the first place? To even ask the question betrays the degree to which unbiased investigation has been subordinated to ideological preference.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
AA is gone.
The Harvard admission statistics for 2024-5 strongly suggest otherwise.
DEI is declining.
- The Democratic nominee for president brags about tripling federal government loans specifically to non-whites.
- Her Vice Presidential nominee, as Governor of Minnesota, signed into law mandatory racial quotas for bodies disbursing state health and community welfare grants. (e.g. MN Statutes secs. 145.9285, Subd. 3; 145.987, Subd. 1). Of course, this already builds on existing "Ethnic Councils" established in 2017, explicitly charged to "work for the implementation of economic, social, legal, and political equality for its constituency" by lobbying the governor and legislature for set-asides, exercising oversight over proposed legislative and administrative changes, promoting racially-affiliated interest groups, and disbursing contracts. (MN Statutes sec. 15.0145)
- Approximately one in five academic jobs requires an ideological litmus test of allegiance to DEI.
- The Department of Education (pdf warning) spends a significant amount of effort on collecting detailed statistics on the racial and gendered breakdown of suspensions, expulsions, and law-enforcement referrals in schools, heavily-hinting that this is racial discrimination...but then tucks the tables with student offenses at the very end, and doesn't provide any details on who's actually doing the offending. In that report, by the way, the Department cites a 2014 "Dear Colleague" letter that threatened loss of federal funding if schools didn't punish black and brown kids less, regardless of their actual behavior, which is apparently still active.
- The Department of Agriculture just doled out over a billion dollars in reparations-style payments to black farmers specifically.
Yeah, I'm going to say DEI is doing problematically fine.
Trump is openly calling for a blood-soaked deportation campaign
As opposed to the blood-soaked results of the fetishization of open immigration?
Even leftists like Matt Yglesias are calling for more immigration restrictions.
Ah yes, Matt "I think fighting dishonesty with dishonesty is sometimes the right thing to do" Yglesias. Clearly he is being fully open and honest about his views, which have changed based on evidence which has convinced him to foreswear his most recent book, "One Billion Americans." (I am being sarcastic; I do not believe for a second that Matt is being honest).
Harris is sprinting away from woke as fast as she can. Ctrl+f for "trans" on her campaign platform brings up only 2 results, both of which deal with "transnational criminal organizations".
Ahhh, but remember - "her values have not changed."
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
Both republican and democratic defense secretaries are speaking out about Trump firing senior military leaders in an unprecedented fashion.
Even if we grant everything else in your comment, what does this have to do with "democracy?" Is it undemocratic for a civilian head of state to exercise control over the leadership of the professional military?
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
So, in conclusion, I have come into belief that you should judge people for being obese. Not to say that all fat people are ignorant, entitled, and stupid. But they definitely have at least one of these traits, and should be avoided at all costs.
Consider that the people who get selected to be controversial and entertaining enough to be cast on reality TV, and the interactions which are edited by the producers into the final cut, are not representative of the general population.
Signed, a fatty who knows exactly why he is fat (depression, gluttony, and laziness), and does not expect anyone to do anything for him.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
why the distinction?
Madison in Federalist No. 45 wrote that "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite."
The Tenth Amendment explicitly states: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Of course, all this assumes that people will be most involved in their localities and states, with only sporadic contact with national-level politics. That theory didn't really survive contact with modern communication and transportation technologies.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
You're neglecting the other dynamic among high-participation GOP voters (the ones most likely to turn out for the primary, as well as to volunteer, donate, etc.) - that of the "former partisan who took his institutional role and oath of office seriously" once installed, i.e. discovered a strange new respect for the status quo once he actually faced the prospect of having to implement his prior policies on a disapproving department he now ran. The formerly rock-ribbed conservative jurist who suddenly is desperate to find any way to avoid actually implementing the positions he enunciated before being put on the bench. The bright firebrand Jim Hacker getting sabotaged by suave Sir Humphrey Appleby and immediately caving.
There was, and remains, a desperate hunger for conservatives who can credibly signal they will actually do the things they campaign on instead of just getting absorbed into the DC liberal borg.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
Your anger at health insurance companies is misplaced.
The insurance companies, the AMA, and the feds are locked together in a perverse cycle that produces a system that somehow spends even more on healthcare than socialized medicine countries...but the lion's share of the extra money goes to doctor's salaries (artificial scarcity driven by the AMA, med schools, and residency limitations) and ever-increasing administrative costs (additional regulations and insurance bureaucracy).
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Given the finding that second-generation immigrant populations commit more crime than their first-gen parents did, shouldn't this actually be a warning sign - "if the current number of stabbings is bad based on 2000-level immigrant populations of [x], how bad is it going to be in 2044, when the current migrant populations of [5x-10x] turns over to a feisty second generation?"
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
The Dems didn't come close to invoking "White Identity Politics" here. What part of the "white dudes for Harris" program said "white people have distinct interests which will be advanced by a Harris administration"? Because if there was one, I missed it.
First up was Jeff Bridges, who joined the stream from a computer chair locked to a deep recline. (“I’m white, I’m the Dude, and I’m for Harris,” he said. “A woman president. How exciting!”)
"You white guys should vote for Harris because she isn't one of you, and thus deserves honors and offices. And besides, we all know that your actual policy wants and needs are never going to be addressed, so why not vote for novelty?"
Then into the rotation went the perpetually nerdy Pete Buttigieg, who did a decent job eschewing his typical didactic, policy-only instincts to match the giddy energy of the moment. (“Men are more free when the leader of the free world supports access to birth control,” said Buttigieg, a sentiment I read as extending the olive branch toward Barstool listeners.)
"You white guys have to vote for Harris because if you don't, other, more important interest groups will screech at you about not getting their way."
Josh Groban followed, helming a contingency of pleasantly washed-up entertainment industry veterans: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mark Hamill, Josh Gad, and Sean Astin, the latter of whom shared a charming story about the power of nontoxic men’s groups.
"You white guys are completely outmoded and obsolete, but there's a modern program to make you less like your icky selves, and part of that is voting for Harris."
Threaded between them were the likes of J.B. Pritzker and Tim Walz—two progressive, vanilla-pale Midwestern governors—who saluted men who look exactly like them. “When I’m invited to an event called White Dudes for Harris … it doesn’t sound like something I’d usually join, but this is a great cause,” said Pritzker, in one of the more honest moments of the evening.
"I wouldn't normally be caught dead with the likes of you asshats; I actually have to hold on to power and influence. But if you're willing to support me and my causes I guess I won't actively turn you away!"
One of the more interesting aspects about the White Dudes for Harris stream was how all the speakers resisted the desire to scold or lecture the assembled Caucasians about the many, many world-historic crimes they have unleashed upon the face of the earth. The tone was positive and empathetic, confident that white men are capable of goodness—a departure, I think, from the hectoring morality that would go on to doom the momentum of Clinton’s 2016 campaign. The opportunity to extinguish MAGAdom is so enticing that it has purged one of the most self-sabotaging inclinations in the American liberal’s coalition: the fractious adjudication of identity that can too often become a priority over winning elections. The White Dudes for Harris cause grows stronger every day. We are cringe, but we are free.
"You white guys are the forever accursed and attainted children of Cain, a plague of locusts upon all you see! However, if you repent of your heinous sin, abase yourself before the holy Other, and give the proper obeisance and indulgences, then for the moment we will refrain from actively condemning you!"
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
If at any point he had stated that he was opposed to gay marriage, his base would have fallen out of love with him and turned on him in an instant.
Again the amnesia strikes - he did this! Repeatedly, during the 2008 election!
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Republicans have a failure mode of cult of personality;
How quickly we forget the "Is Obama Enlightened" discourse, and even the "Cocaine Joe" and Bernie memes of the late Obama era. Not for nothing did Bill Clinton quip that that when it comes to picking Presidential nominees, "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.".
Supah_Schmendrick
5mo ago
Actually, in the real world, when you ethnically cleanse undesirable populations for having the wrong religion you engender disgust and hatred in the majority of the rest of the world.
Ah yes, this is why Azerbaijan is having so much trouble selling their oil, considering their behavior towards Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh.
And why the world NGO-cracy condemned any attempts to help the Hutu genocidaire refugees in Congo, considering how they kept going after any Tutsis they could get their hands on.
It also explains why Turkey's continued repression of the Kurds got them kicked out of NATO, and why there's massive protests on every college campus about the genocidal atrocities being committed by the Sudanese Arabs towards the Christian and animist black Africans of South Sudan.
/sarcasm.
The part I want to focus on is this kind of blend of mistake and conflict theory -- there's conflict, yes, but it has a cause which can be addressed and then we'll all be on the same side.
The bolded part is, I think, a mistake.
My model of the western queer islamist-supporter isn't that they think muslim societies would be pro-LGBT but for the interference of the west, and that after the removal of the oppressive outsider everyone will be chill and copacetic; it's that they identify first and foremost as opponents of what they believe is the hegemonic moral, political, economic, and ethnic power of the west. They then see the islamists as also opposed to the same forces and, since the enemy of my enemy is my friend, automatically support them as fellow-travellers. All oppressive struggles everywhere are linked and intersectional. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere".
I'd say that a major component is not having to deal with the contradictions of living cheek-by-cheek with large fundamentalist muslim populations, but I'm not sure even that would shake the trend. Plenty of prominent queer and secular-socialist leftists have been seduced by the thrill of exotic, primal, other Islamic revolution as an alternative to dreaded western capitalist modernity.
I can't even really blame them for it; there's plenty of historical basis for westerners using outsiders as a political cudgel or hedge against local enemies.
You're not wrong that the left-progressive memeplex draws a lot from Marx. However, as someone with some training in intellectual history, I would insist that really modern progressives have a pretty-attenuated relationship with Marx. They tend to directly interface more with more recent thinkers who have fairly radically-expanded the Marxian canon from its original roots: e.g. the Critical Theorists and Fanon incorporated Freud, Friere incorporated both Fanon and Rousseau/Dewey, all incorporated their own original insights, and so on. So yes, its "Marxist"...but there's an awful lot of elaboration in there, to the point that it's really unclear what Marx himself would think of it, or whether he would even recognize it if you could unearth and revive him. One analogy might be that modern progressivism is Marxist in the sense the orthodox Marxists were Hegelian. Like, where's the Marxism in the proliferation of radically-divergent sexual mores among the professional classes and capital-owning bourgeois classes? I could buy it if you were talking about the broader left-socialist tradition, referencing important contemporaries of Marx who time has rendered more obscure like Fourier and Robert Owen, but not Marx. In a lot of ways, modern leftists insist they are in a Marxian tradition as much to gain the cachet associated with asserting a famous genealogy than they do because they really care about and have deeply drawn from Kapital etc.
But all this wrangling over the intellectual history (which is incredibly rich and complicated and admittedly fun to wrangle over) aside, if you're seeking to understand and grok modern leftism you're not going to do it just by looking at Marx. And if you want to combat modern leftism you're not going to get very far just by calling it "Marxist." I don't think modern progressivism is an intellectual movement; not really. It, at least as it manifests in its politically-relevant common outbreaks is a morality, a teleology, an zeitgeist; a system of unfalsifiable, unquestioned assumptions about virtue and value that people feel more as vibes, aesthetics, and a priori interpretive lenses than they do as rational arguments for any particular falsifiable theory. It's not any rational system of thought that turns a completely normal list of basic life tasks...and turns it into icky ragebait with the addition of "...for a husband and family" to the end of each of them. Marx is a lot of things, but he's not that, and to the extent his thought has been absorbed into it, it's part of a lot richer inheritance including deracinated, desacralized protestantism, and the same leveller impulse that even appears in some of the wilder parts of the Christian tradition (such as, famously, Christ's admonition to forsake family and wealth to follow Him, the Diggers, Waldensians, early-church communes described in parts of the Book of Acts, and a lot of the religious movements Engels was banging on about in "The Peasant's War in Germany"). And if you want to address it, you need to do so on its own level - catechism of the young, and evangelization (or de-conversion) of adults where possible.
Supah_Schmendrick
9d ago
I don't think it was done to the Nazis qua being a Nazi, it was done because they materially lied about it during naturalization.
These are not materially different things. GK Chesterton actually remarked on this:
When I went to the American consulate to regularise my passports . . . [t]he officials I interviewed were very American, especially in being very polite; for whatever may have been the mood or meaning of Martin Chuzzlewit, I have always found Americans by far the politest people in the world. They put in my hands a form to be filled up, to all appearance like other forms I had filled up in other passport offices. But in reality, it was very different from any form I had ever filled up in my life. At least it was a little like a freer form of the game called "Confessions" which my friends and I invented in our youth; an examination paper containing questions like, "if you saw a rhinoceros in the front garden, what would you do?" . . .
One of the questions on the paper was, "Are you an anarchist?" To which a detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to answer, "What the devil has that to do with you? Are you an atheist?" along with some playful efforts to cross-examine the official about what constitutes an αρχη. Then there was the quesiton, "Are you in favor of subverting the government of the United States by force?" Agaisnt this I should write, "I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour, not the beginning." The inquisitor, in his more than morbid curiosity, had then written down, "Are you a polygamist?" The answer to this is "No such luck" or "Not such a fool," according to our experience of the other sex. But perhaps a better answer would be that given to W.T. Stead when he circulated the rhetorical question "Shall I slay my brother Boer?" - the answer that ran, "Never interfere in family matters." But among many things that amused me almost to the point of treating the form thus disrespectfully, the most amusing was the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it respectfully. I like to think of the foreign desperado, seeking to slip into America with official papers under official protection, and sitting down to write with beautiful gravity, "I am an anarchist. I hate you all and wish to destroy you." Or, "I intend to subvert by force the government of the United States as soon as possible, sticking the long sheath-knife in my left trouser-pocket into Mr. Harding at the earliest opportunity." Or again, "Yes I am a polygamist all right and my forty-seven wives are accompanying me on the voyage disguised as secretaries." There seems to be a certain simplicity of mind about these answers; and it is reassuring to know that anarchists and polygamists are so pure and good that the police have only to ask them questions and they are certain to tell no lies.
...
Superficially this is rather a queer business. It would be easy enough to suggest that in this America has introduced a quite abnormal spirit of inquisition; an interference with liberty unknown among all the ancient despotisms and aristocracies. About that there will be something to be said later; but superficially it is true that this degree of officialism is comparatively unique. In a journey which I took only the year before I had occasion to have my papers passed by governments which many worthy people in the West would vaguely identify with corsairs and assassins; I have stood on the other side of Jordan, in the land ruled by a rude Arab chief, where the police looked so like brigands that one wondered what the brigands looked like. But they did not ask whether I had come to subvert the power of the Shereef; and they did not exhibit the faintest curiosity about my personal views on the ethical basis of civil authority. These ministers of ancient Moslem despotism did not care about whether I was an anarchist; and naturally would not have minded if I had been a polygamist. The Arab chief was probably a polygamist himself. These slaves of Asiatic autocracy were content, in the old liberal fashion, to judge me by my actions; they did not inquire into my thoughts. They held their power as limited to the limitation of practice; they did not forbid me to hold a theory. It would be easy to argue here that Western democracy persecutes where even Eastern despotism tolerates or emancipates. It would be easy to develop the fancy that, as compared to the sultans of Turkey or Egypt, the American Constitution is a thing like the Spanish Inquisition.
...
It may have seemed something less than a compliment to compare the American Constitution to the Spanish Inquisition. But oddly enough, it does involve a truth; and still more oddly perhaps, it does involve a compliment. The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the manner of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things.
Now a creed is at once the broadest and the narrowest thing in the world. In its nature it is as broad as its scheme for a brotherhood of all men. In its nature it is limited by its definition of the nature of all men. This was true of the Christian Church, which was truly said to exclude neither Jew nor Greek, but which did definitely substitute something else for Jewish religion or Greek Philosophy. It was truly said to be a net drawing in of all kinds; but a net of a certain pattern, the pattern of Peter the Fisherman. And this is true even of the most disastrous distortions or degradations of that creed; and true among other of the Spanish Inquisition. It may have been narrow touching theology, it could not confess to being narrow about nationality or ethnology. The Spanish Inquisition may have been admittedly Inquisitorial; but the Spanish Inquisition could not be merely Spanish. Such a Spaniard, even when he was narrower than his own creed, had to be broader than his own empire. He might burn a philosopher because he was heterodox; but he must accept a barbarian because he was orthodox. And we see, even in modern times, that the same Church which is blamed for making sages heretics is also blamed for making savages priests. Now, in a much vaguer and more evolutionary fashion, there is something of the same idea at the back of the great American experiment; the expierment of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a melting-pot. But even that metaphor implies that the pot itself is of a certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The melting-pot must not melt. The original shape was trace on the lines of Jeffersonian democracy; and it will remain in that shape until it becomes shapeless. America invites all men to become citizens; but it implies the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship. Only, so far as its primary ideal is concerned, its exclusiveness is religious because it is not racial. The missionary can condemn a cannibal, precisely because he cannot condemn a Sandwich Islander. And in something of the same spirit the American may exclude a polygamist, precisely because he cannot exclude a Turk.
"What I saw in America" 1912, pgs. 3-9
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
Isn’t boring and dull bureaucratic number crunching the opposite of “made up”?
No, it means that they are "made up" out of the distortions and idiosyncracies of a horribly-kludged procedure on its 44th revision from an original 1987 typewritten spiral-bound handbook, which has been subject to a constant distortionary tug-of-war to drag it closer to the political expediency of the day, or the latest appointee's personal policy judgment.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
nAd now watching these videos of pagers exploding reminds me of the videos I've seen of Islamic terrorism: Life going on as normal in a marketplace or something, then an explosion with women and children around.
One is an explosion coming from a suicide belt or backpack which is designed to harm and kill everyone in the immediate vicinity, particularly those women and children.
The other is sabotaging a pager handed out by a terrorist organization to its members with a small enough amount of explosives that even the person wearing the pager or keeping it in their pocket isn't reliably killed.
These are not the same.
I just don't understand the point of an operation like this except to provoke fear and a regional conflict. It's not going to cause Hezbollah to surrender or significantly disrupt their wartime capabilities at the northern front.
Are you sure? Knocking out a major communication system sure seems disruptive to me, to say nothing of putting a couple thousand officers, cell leaders, logistics people, etc. in the hospital all at the same time.
It's just a terrorist attack.
I know words are just vibes now, man, but come on. This is an attack on the participating personnel of a combatant organization during ongoing hostilities. That's not terrorism.
Politics has replaced religion as a foundational cornerstone of personal morality and identity, and people really don't like having those questioned. Seriously; just look at the polling about whether you'd be comfortable dating someone with different politics/religion and the two concepts have flipped over the last half century.
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