Agreed. Even in modern context without sympathetic media nonviolent protests are absolutely ineffective. Just a few examples, two from conservative and two from leftist side:
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March for life/abortion clinics vigils. These were largely ineffective, in fact they led to oppressive laws where praying in a buffer zone around abortion clinics is punishable offense which in fact got some people arrested.
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Antiglobalist protests in early 2000s in Seattle and other places. They did not achieve their goals, all the trade deals went as planned and in fact globalist agendas went through just fine. If anything meeting in places like Davos to embark upon Global regulations is even more popular than in the past.
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Occupy Wallstreet was complete fiasco, a lot of ink was spent if it was sabotaged possibly by introducing woke as a new topic or what. Nevertheless this movement is dead in the water.
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Tea Party and wave of protests for their policy died similarly to Occupy.
Secondly, a decent number of progressives have in fact even fully moved on from claiming to want meritocracy, and outright use entirely different justifications, such as representativeness of a community, racial/social justice or equity over equality of chance. In many circles, meritocracy has become negatively connotated.
I think that they still have a point. The liberal ethos was all about equal access to opportunity to achieve American dream of happiness and success. Except that we have a problem - if you believe in liberal tabula rasa, then there is no other way to measure equal access to opportunity other than outcome. Unequal outcome means unequal opportunity and thus DEI is good. The only liberal defense was that we did not achieve true socialism meritocracy. We need more education or welfare etc. and we will see the meritocratic utopia maybe next generation. In a sense DEI people claim the same - except that they want to accelerate these gains by redistribution now on grounds that we will achieve true meritocracy maybe even sooner by magic of representation and other DEI effects.
Or you do not believe in tabula rasa and you believe that some differences in opportunity are inevitable or ingrained etc. But then you are no longer believing in the same meaning of the word "merit", which than catches too medieval of a flavor of having certain classes or people who are inherently more meritorious as opposed to common uneducated plebeian caste. This is too right coded and in fact plays toward lefties sensibilities as they see this obviously as hated ancien régime which needs to be fought at every step for true progress.
Seems reasonable. I understand the complaints, but sorry, if you're signing up to carry out the violence of the state your face is on the line. That's the deal.
You skipped quite a lot here. How adamant are you about this principle? Should this be a federal law: no facemasks for SWAT teams, Delta Force members or any police officers making high profile arrests of dangerous gangs, cartel members or other members of organized crime who routinely come after families of police officers? How do you feel abut undercover agents getting the ultimate mask in form of whole new identities during their operations, so they can escape any accountability from public including those that sympathize with criminals they targeted?
Where is the boundary and how does it apply for ICE agents in year 2026?
georgioz
12d ago
One of the main effects of body cameras is for defense to use discriminatory policing angle. Lawyers can sift through months of bodycam footage of any given policeman and prove that he let some other offender on the same charge thus proving racial profiling etc.
I think this is one of the more insidious aspects that bodycams have. In a sense they turn policemen into modern robocops, they know that they are constantly surveilled and that the smallest mistake can be used against them. So their policing may turn into a procedural nightmare - you are not talking to a police officer, you are talking to a Moloch that now controls policeman's actions. You rob policemen of their agency, they will no longer rely on their intuition, experience or hunches. They will be less likely to utilize their judgment when it comes to leniency or more strict policing if needed.
I think it completely changes the meaning of many laws, which were designed on assumption that some things will be fuzzy and that they will rely on personal judgement. It is similar effect to may other laws. Your anti-jaywalking or littering or loud noise laws may be fine if they require some action on part of offended party and randomness of police officers being around. The same laws will look differently in some future city full of cameras and drones with capacity to be personally assigned to every citizen on the streets.
This is an interesting analogy. The Scottish clan was a weird kind of mannerbund-family hybrid. There was a lot of fictive kinship involved - the clan included all male-line descendants of the founding chief plus their wives and daughters, but it also included a bunch of people living under the chief's protection who accepted him as a symbolic father-figure.
It is similar with Roman system. Unsurprisingly it really was something like Italian mafia family. The core of the clan was based on blood relation, with some space made for adoption - but even adoption was mostly family related e.g. when Augustus was Caesar's great-nephew (grandson of Caesars sister Julia). Augustus did not even carry the Julia family name, as his father was just plebeian.
Nevertheless Roman society was based on complicated structure of patronage and master/client relationship of various plebeians and freemen around the clan with family at its core. Many of these positions were hereditary, these clients were part of the clan structure for generations and their service was rewarded. They were something like extended family and in many cases they actually were, given the power of exponential growth just in a few generations. I believe that Scottish clans had similar structure and they provided patronage when it came to valuable people with necessary human capital such as blacksmiths, or people who distinguished themselves in some other way.
Roman society revolved around fraternal organizations
As others said, this is absolute ignorance of historical realities. Power structure of ancient Rome was more akin to power struggle between huge mafia clans Godfather style. Roman social life revolved around atrium which contained literal altars to ancestors, with portraits and masks of the most important family members who attained some high position or success. Your relation to your clan (gens) was paramount to your identity even as a client of such a powerful clan. Again, if you want some parallel it would be that of huge Scottish clans.
ll striving was done by men, with men, and for men, negotiated among men outside the family fold. I’m not really sure where this idea originates that the “family” is the bedrock of the West.
They were not just random men. They were true patriarchs - father figures to extended clans and their clients and vassals, with membership in thousands or even tens of thousands. The most powerful clans such as gens Cornelia which produced numerous consuls and dictators including Sulla were so powerful, that they even had powerful offshoot clans such as Cornelii Scipiones. You have it exactly the other way around. The relationship between strangers mimicked that of the family, with all the subtle status games and structure given. You literally talk about brotherhood and fraternity - which is family related concept. Brotherhoods have older brothers and fathers. If you were accepted into such a fraternity, you had to accept family obligations including being a bitch to your more senior brothers.
This is not just about one anecdote. The gameplay loop of radical activists doing bad shit, getting arrested by police - only for sympathetic government to order some outrageous settlement is a known tactics of how to make government finance their own political organizations. Just look at the aftermath of 2020 summer of love where local government "settled" with BLM and other "peaceful protesters" for alleged police brutality: Cincinnati $8.1 million settlement, Austin $27 million. There are whole money mills - apparently Chicago settled for $107 million in 2024 alone for supposed misconduct, which is around 5% of whole Chicago police budget.
You have to understand that this is now a bona fide industrial complex. People talk about homeless industrial complex but the same goes for daycare, hospices, government lawsuits, environmental issues etc. This is industry on the level of whole percentage points of GDP at this point, think of how literal Italian mafia took over government waste disposal services raking billions a year in the process.
Welcome to Banana republic tactics, where the only thing that matters is tribe loyalty and where the state is just out there as a resource to be plundered. I remember a case from my country where a judge was assigned a lot of cases outside of his area of expertise. He was then slammed by disciplinary action for too many cases not being decided on time, and was impeached on those grounds. Of course lazy judges who had similar infractions got a free pass.
As I said, prepare for more of for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law. Just look at all the insane fraud that was discovered recently. The thing is that for many people - especially those hailing from corrupt environments - this is not a fraud. It is rightful spoils which need to be claimed and directed, so money flows to proper coffers aligned with a correct tribe, thus protecting the spoils from enemies claiming them. Exactly as with old eastern bloc "socialist" saying: he who does not steal from the state steals from his family.
It is obvious if you think about it - you have large swaths of population that think that USA is an illegitimate fascist state. Stealing and defrauding such a state so that it can be destroyed and abolished more quickly is a good thing. It is similar mentality of how many people saw the illegitimate socialist states, the state capacity fell as people not only lost trust but started to actively hate it or at least saw it as an opportunity if stealing was normalized.
The nervousness and tribal defensiveness (which i suspect you feel) also exacerbates the spiral; in a vacuum, these news would be condemned just 5 years ago by all but the most psychotic Red Tribers, now it's being normalized.
If you said 7 years ago, then maybe yes. After the summer of love following killing of George Floyd, I think a lot of people saw how their empathy can be weaponized against them. So yeah, people are much more cynical and tribal and less principled on all sides, especially given that there were several attempts to create new martyrs since 2020 - including pushes to create some sort of trans Floyd and others. Trying to create immigration related Floyd is probably the best bet activists have now, although white liberal Karen and now a white guy does not cut it. They will probably need something more juicy.
Anyways, my take on this specific situation is that both sides are assholes - both protestors and ICE. If ICE are brownshirts, then "protestors" are Roter Frontkämpferbund. The hardcore of democrat "activists" literally call themselves Antifa, which was founded by KPD Communist Party of Germany in 1932 as their equivalent of brownshirts. I am not exactly sure what to think. What do you think did German Christian or social democrats thought when they saw how communists and fascists beat and maim each other on the streets in 1932?
Then there can never be a true UBI. In the end it will always be subject to political whim and so it can be cancelled overnight. UBI is not a natural law, so it can never truly be universal. Right?
What is prized in global politics is consistency and predictability. China is extremely predictable. The outlines of its foreign policy have been the same at least since the end of Cold War.
I am not sure what you mean. I can say that you have two sides: democrats want a globohomo foreign policy, trumpians want America first policy. These two sides changed who is in charge last 20 years. It is relatively predictable.
I do not buy this supposed dichotomy. Putin's foreign policy was supposedly predictable to the extent that Germans leveled their nuclear power, invested into multibillion dollar gas pipeline and schmoozed with him up until 2022 when everything went to shit. Xi Jinping shows similar trajectory as Putin, however he is in charge only since 2013 so Putin has 13 years on him. Xi is much more jingoistic, nationalistic, he revived the old Maoism and he axed many aspects of collective leadership that was in place since late 70s and Deng Xiaoping. Xi triggered massive capital flight and elite exodus including capital flight from many western companies. Foreign investment is the worst since 2008.
I'd argue that some realignment of Cold War era foreign policy is needed. Ascendancy of China and India and concurrent decline of EU on global scale from 30% to to 15% of global GDP is definitely going to rebalance things, especially given also technological and innovation decline. Especially paired with some stupid ambition of EU to regulate world economy - that definitely was not there after Cold War.
georgioz
26d ago
Then there can never be a test or a pilot for an UBI, because it was only tested in this small city or during this timeframe so no true UBI. This is just nitpicking. The OP is right, the situation he describes is at least on par with pilot version of UBI when it comes to actual results.
Maybe, maybe not. Nevertheless the nonviolent nature of these protest did not win anybody some moral high ground or anything like that, it won them maybe mockery. Even for popular issues like those related to Occupy, it just fizzled out like a fart in outer space.
It also works the other way around such as when violent protests are made successful thanks to media shielding. Prime example are BLM protests/riots, which were turned by establishment into massive success with wave of capitulation from government to corporations to the agenda. Similar example is violent outbursts after some high profile Quran burnings which led to laws banning such burnings under hate speech and other laws. If you want something maybe right-coded, then I'd say that violent yellow vests protests in France were much more successful compared to let's say trucker freedom convoys, which were safely ignored with some of the organizers personally attacked and unpersoned.
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