anon_
6d ago
I agree but I also endorse /u/maiqthetrue below that there is some kind of equivocation here.
There is also something else here -- the leftist version doesn't always actually explain quotidian things like how the food is grown when no one choses to be a farmer than wakes up at 5AM and works for 12H a day.
anon_
6d ago
Sure. I think the question there is about whether the vision for where the individual tradcon fits into their hypothetical future lines up with reality.
anon_
6d ago
I mean, the left and the right are huge spaces. I think some of the right wants to greatly change society, especially along gender lines. Some doesn't and just wants a nicer economy, less crime and fair college admissions.
anon_
6d ago
The would-be commune dweller is funny because leading discussion groups and making clothes out of scraps is no more plausible as a career after the revolution than it is before. If it's not profitable to do under a capitalist system them it's not practical to do under a communist system.
Sadly this is not true. The profitability of making clothes out of scraps depends the opportunity cost of that labor to do something else useful. If Communism destroys all other productive activity, it will render that profitable. Of course, the other way to say that is "your labor will be so worthless that mending socks will be net positive".
Being a warlord is a real job, it's just that you chose for some reason to compare a regular person making clothes out of scraps with a highly-exclusive job reserved for social elites.
I think the mockery of the leftists is that "person that doesn't have to do hard labor but can futz about in the garden, sew embroidery and teach the children for an hour in the afternoon" is an aristocratic/elite position.
"Under an authoritarian system I would be one of the dictator's goons enforcing his will on the people and exploiting his power to enrich myself," may not be a very moral stance, but no one can say that it's not a tried-and-true strategy for getting ahead.
That can't work for everyone. And there is quite a bit of intra-goon competition there too. It's a very slippery post.
anon_
6d ago
If you actually look at the ideas, the reactionary thesis is that most people do not desire to participate in politics and that the job of a respectable aristocracy is to fulfill this demand.
Right, and to the extent that Communists believe they will be governed by enlightened and benevolent socialist rulers, reactionaries believe they will be governed by respectable and benevolent aristocrats. Neither has a desire to participate in politics assuming that those with power will simply do it correctly.
The reality for the poor reactionary is that he's more likely to get a venal, greedy or scheming lord as he is to get a benevolent one, and he'll quickly remember why everyone got so sick of it and overthrew them.
A common flavor of mockery is to find leftist posts about "what I'll do after the socialist revolution" and ridicule them. We were discussing the genre and the general amusement at folks that think they will have a quasi-aristocratic life: oh I'll work on the commune garden and teach embroidery and prepare meals for everyone. Weirdly, many of the posts by women ended up being weirdly trad too -- but that's a bit of a sidetrack.
My friend had an important insight: there is probably a rightist/reactionary equivalent to this. That's a good observation. We came up with a few of these
- He believes society has prevented him from being a warlord, it more likely prevented him from being a slave
- He believes society could police sexual & religious morality, it would more likely have had him flogged for drinking or disrespect or dirty jokes
- He believes he'd be the head of a respected family, more likely he'd chafe under his grandfather/uncle's authority
anon_
7d ago
Indeed, I think it does depend on the siege. But also (with notable exceptions) it rarely happened when the besieged surrendered in good order.
Realistically anyway, the only hope anyway is that the attacker's forces are drawn away, starves or that a friendly army comes to relieve them. No defenders ever actively won a seiege, although many skills played for time and got one of the above 3 relief.
anon_
7d ago
The question is how much Israel can torture the civilians before there is sufficient moral pressure to make them stop.
Hence the framing. If one believes that the torture is being inflicted by Hamas' refusal to surrender then there ought to be moral pressure on them to do so.
anon_
10d ago
They fought way harder than was reasonable to expect when this first started.
And, for many purposes, they established a very credible lesson about it for the future.
That is to say, even if they end up losing some eastern territory, they will have demonstrated that the cost to get it was extremely high -- both in absolute terms and relative to expectation.
anon_
10d ago
Because it wasn't my position that we need to accept 'full scale ethnic replacement' or anything of the sort. Or that the solution is just "be more lenient". Neither of those was actually what I wrote.
anon_
10d ago
I expect legal procedure is gonna converge on "you need to give meaningful notice to deportees unless they already have a final order of removal".
anon_
10d ago
Not that I disagree. But the Biden policy was ridiculous even though their leader/figurehead (whichever, dgaf) tried to maintain that he was a serious person.
IOW, ridiculous figure or not, we get ridiculous policy.
anon_
10d ago
Could probably start with a single appeal, in front of an Art II appointed official (not an Art III judge) scheduled for a reasonable time in the future (say 10 business days).
anon_
10d ago
I'd rather have a system that occasionally unjustly deports a tiny number of people to one which deports almost nobody.
If those are the choices, maybe it's the right one. But we should probably demand better.
anon_
10d ago
I don't at all (look at my post history) think we need to treat every migrant kindly -- especially those with facially bogus asylum claims. But I think we should have treated this individual migrant better.
Of course, there is no actual political movement for "be fucking reasonable, don't let a million Venezuelans and Hondurans in but also don't deport a guy that runs a legit business".
anon_
10d ago
5. The boss wants to appear to be against it and is generally happy to let underlings do it with plausible deniability so that he doesn't personally take political heat for an unpopular choice.
Every governing body has to figure out how to make those kind of choices. A system that allows them to made while protecting the boss from the blowback is part of the design.
anon_
11d ago
I don't think one should change one's opinion on the object level based on popular sentiment.
anon_
13d ago
but acktually the media and journalists are spreading it, not witches on twitter ad 4chan
Or it could be both? It could be that the media, journalists and a large swath of the rest of society torched the integrity and trust in reliable institutions and now in their absence cranks have taken over.
Those two kind of are complementary theories.
anon_
13d ago
The WSJ wanting to help the democrats? The party trying to chase them out of NYC?
anon_
15d ago
Actually no.
My very earnest belief is that homosexuality is significantly hereditary and hence gay children have at least a few people in their family history that were predisposed to homosexuality but who were never gay because that wasn't actually a noun.
Consider being a man with homosexual tendencies in any of the time between 1200-1900 (roughly, not trying to litigate the specific endpoint here). You might perhaps become a priest or a sailor, but odds are reasonable (to the extent that anything pre-industrial revolution is) that you end up with a wife who you successfully impregnate (perhaps while closing your eyes and imagining the pastor). That gene continues on.
It's even more stark as a woman. Sure some end up as nuns or spinsters, but a sizable fraction end up married and no one cares about their level of arousal at all. Again, the gene continues on.
The experiment we're running in the West since 1965 now is not even half done. And perhaps I'm wrong. But it will be a fascinating thing if the acceptance of LGB leads to a significant decrease in their population come 2065. This will be especially poignant if there's far more gay folks outside the tolerant west -- a world with gay Muslims but no gay Swedes.
It's not meant to be a contradiction, it's meant to underscore that one's assessment of a system has to take into account what one believes that one's role in that system would be.
That is -- we agree that this is the same system. But the people daydreaming about destroying capitalism and replacing it with (whatever) are imagining a small slice of it. They imagine the commune but not the forced labor. They imagine the social order but don't imagine that they would ever see the sharp end of the stick.
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