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To quote a long-eared muppet. "That is why you fail".
This is why leftism always devolves into purity-spirals and circular firing squads, this is why utopians are incapable of building anything other than mountains of skulls. The first step to building any lasting legacy is to care about something (usually a principle, but possibly an institution or other person) more than you care about yourself.
-Thomas B. Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome
And yet the those same leftists control nearly every institution with influence or power in the US today. That's not what failure looks like.
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Seems like you want principles but also some pragmatism.
Utopians often have principles but it is in those non flexible principles that leads them to creating hell on earth.
I don't believe this is the case. More pointedly I don't think that the modal Utopian has any real principals other than "Achieve Utopia", and that is why they have a tendency not just to tolerate but embrace "evil" in the name of achieving their "greater good". After all, it becomes trivially easy to justify GULAGs, Guillotines, and Gas Chambers when your only limiting principal is "first we have to win".
What I mean by pragmatism is perhaps better worded as tolerance. I know not everyone is going to agree with me or my principles. I should be happy getting 85-90% of the way. Trying to get that final 10-15% is where he’ll is often created.
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That's funny you mention that quote, I just watched Oblivion yesterday with Tom Cruise and it was a plot point of the film. What are the chances. It's funny how two people can read the same writing and both think it supports their perspectives even though they are opposed.
But I don't think that quote lends support to the "be quietly devoured" side of Nietzsche's dilemma. Do you really think you are facing fearful odds for the ashes of your fathers with a milquetoast non-resistance to an opposition that is tearing down the temples of your gods? You really think "Democrats are the real racists" is you standing against fearful odds when it's the safest (non-)opposition that progressives allow you to have? You will be able to live peacefully with that opposition, that's true, because "Democrats are the real racists" is ultimately paying homage to their gods. You are still adopting their moral compass.
Horatius describing "Standing against fearful odds" obviously honors the bold and the brave opposition- in the context of ancestor worship for that matter, and not the personal salvation of one's own soul. The ancient Romans made mountains of skulls in honor of the ashes of their fathers and the temples of their gods. And so did any great civilization.
Caring more about the salvation of one's own soul than fighting and winning against a monstrous opposition would be total lunacy to Horatius.
I also object to the implication I am a utopian. I am certainly not. I believe in the deep, inherent conflict of the political and don't believe there's one neat trick that solves it and saves everyone's soul. That's why I care about winning, and think it's a vice for people who should know better, but they stay within the walled garden of their feckless opposition while they make the conscious decision to gracefully lose.
It's not brave at all and it's certainly not the posture that Horatius is honoring in this writing.
What do you know of "resistance"? What makes you think mine is "milquetoast"?
I'm not the one here who's ensconced themselves in a progressive bubble only to go anonymously bitch about it on the internet while still parroting their leftist sociology professor's talking points. Nor am I the one trying to delude themselves into thinking that Kolmogorov Complicity is somehow not complicity.
I know what I am and where I stand, and that is in defense of the old ways against the nihilistic post-modernism that seems to have eaten academia and much of the mainstream media from within.
No, I think it is a statement of a simple historical fact. But we are also at a point where statements of historical fact can be a form of resistance. The opening to the US Declaration of Independance does not read "after careful examination of the available sociological data and best academic arguments we have concluded..." it reads "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." what you've never seemed to grasp throughout our interactions is that I don't just reject the woke democratic narrative, I reject the whole psuedo-Marxist framework upon which it is built. That is why I hold both the woke left and the alt right in contempt and why my first impulse in any conflict between the two is to root for casualties. Identity Politics Delenda Est.
As for Brave Horatius, I think that he and Franz Jagerstatter would find common ground in the belief that it is better to be killed by the enemy, and die with your chin up, than to compromise with sin.
Quaker-style? Do you believe it is better to be conquered than for your soldiers to kill enemy soldiers?
Define "conquered", because I feel that that might actually be one of the fundamental disconnects here.
First, in the literal, Ukrainian sense. Second, in the cultural, Uyghur sense.
...and I would reply by questioning whether either of those groups have actually been "conquered" in a meaningful sense.
I get that the Motte skews heavily pro-Russia and pro-CCP relative to the wider population but given that we're now in the 11th month of a special operation that was only supposed to last 3 weeks perhaps a reevaluation is in order.
Do you seriously question that, but for its soldiers committing acts such as killing, Ukraine would be conquered? Surely it's not moral superiority and unwillingness to meet evil with evil on the part of the Ukrainian Army that is holding the Russians at bay, right?
Yes I seriously question it.
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I don't have nothing to add other that I loved the passion of your comment: it's making me introspect on how I want to live my life.
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