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Notes -
It refutes the main far right talking points.
Voting doesn’t matter : Trump’s election has loosened the tongues of intellectuals who can finally express “what the man on the street is really thinking”.
Discussion is pointless/conflict theory: The Truth triumphs yet again against all attempts to censure it (including a brief attempt by our own mods) ; kept alive by the tireless arguing of myself and others, transferred to the public, voted in, correcting course, guiding & guarding us on our way to a better future.
...through conflict, and not through discussion. This is derived directly from the previous point.
Is voting conflict now? According to SS and his ridiculous euphemism "memetic political conflict", even discussion is conflict.
Of course.
Another way to look at it is the vote that happens after a debate to determine the winner.
But even from a perspective of the vote as representing force, the vote is less an instrument of conflict than a sublimation of it.
It's a proxy for "how many divisions can you field" and the further it is removed from that the less useful it is as a consensus mechanism. Because then, you "win" an "election" and the people with more divisions topple your illegitimate regime.
You can't escape violence, you can only add abstractions on top of it. Liberals used to understand this before they fell for their own propaganda.
I understand one-man-one-gun-one-vote fine, I don't see why it should undermine debate or democracy.
If you want; then I am pro-abstraction. One man goes around shooting people - another talks to them, then counts their vote, and then, only if he has won, uses limited force. Do you think they are the same?
It's not the same. We've long known of the distinction between abstraction heavy and light regimes, i.e. Machiavelli's Foxes and Lions. But I'm not sure you are fully aware of the tradeoffs.
For instance, a common criticism of fox regimes is that they, by nature, have to be totalitarian. The legitimacy they rest on relies on the illusion of public support, which means they have to control and shape public opinion as much as possible. This is how it is paradoxically democracies that have brought forth general conscription, total war and the most sophisticated forms of psychological warfare.
This isn't all to say that debate is useless or pointless. Nor even that Fox regimes are strictly worse that Lion ones. Merely that it is foolish to think oneself secure from the forces of power, however many pieces of paper one hides behind.
Debate only really is possible in the areas of life that do not concern power, and this isn't something that can be changed. To the dismay of any and all anarchists.
I think a reality check is enough to disabuse people of that theory, if ‘totalitarian’ is to keep any meaning.
I take it you categorize the ur-totalitarian communist, and nazi regimes, as ‘light’, ‘fox regimes’? Even though they were opposed to debate, to voting, and made direct unrestrained force the order of the day?
There’s a contradiction here. If the people are truly powerless, their support a mere ‘illusion’, why do the rulers need it, shape it? Your answer ‘Legitimacy’ is tautological. Why do the people in power need this ‘legitimacy’, what is legitimacy but the people’s acceptance of a ruler’s authority?
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