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Notes -
The following is an adress that delivered the upperclassmen of Harvard Universtity by Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr on Memorial Day 1894. Allegedly amongst the audience was a young up-and-coming politician by the name of Theodore Roosevelt and that the impression that this adress left upon him was a major factor in Roosevelt choosing to nominate Holmes to the US Supreme Court.
I have said before that one of the reason I enjoy reading old books and primary sources is that they lay bare just how little changes in a century or more. The old men have always been complaining about "kids these days" the devil has always been in the details. Some might find this percieved lack of progress frustrating or even frightening but I can't help but find it comforting. All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
In anycase, I feel that Holmes makes some observations here that are if anything even more relevant today than they were 130 years ago so on the occasion of Memorial Day...
Any day in Washington Street [in Boston], when the throng is greatest and busiest, you may see a blind man playing a flute. I suppose that some one hears him. Perhaps also my pipe may reach the heart of some passer in the crowd.
I once heard a man say, "Where Vanderbilt sits, there is the head of the table. I teach my son to be rich." He said what many think. For although the generation born about 1840, and now governing the world, has fought two at least of the greatest wars in history, and has witnessed others, war is out of fashion, and the man who commands attention of his fellows is the man of wealth. Commerce is the great power. The aspirations of the world are those of commerce. Moralists and philosophers, following its lead, declare that war is wicked, foolish, and soon to disappear.
The society for which many philanthropists, labor reformers, and men of fashion unite in longing is one in which they may be comfortable and may shine without much trouble or any danger. The unfortunately growing hatred of the poor for the rich seems to me to rest on the belief that money is the main thing (a belief in which the poor have been encouraged by the rich), more than on any other grievance. Most of my hearers would rather that their daughters or their sisters should marry a son of one of the great rich families than a regular army officer, were he as beautiful, brave, and gifted as Sir William Napier. I have heard the question asked whether our war was worth fighting, after all. There are many, poor and rich, who think that love of country is an old wife's tale, to be replaced by interest in a labor union, or, under the name of cosmopolitanism, by a rootless self-seeking search for a place where the most enjoyment may be had at the least cost.
Meantime we have learned the doctrine that evil means pain, and the revolt against pain in all its forms has grown more and more marked. From societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals up to socialism, we express in numberless ways the notion that suffering is a wrong which can be and ought to be prevented, and a whole literature of sympathy has sprung into being which points out in story and in verse how hard it is to be wounded in the battle of life, how terrible, how unjust it is that any one should fail.
Even science has had its part in the tendencies which we observe. It has shaken established religion in the minds of very many. It has pursued analysis until at last this thrilling world of colors and passions and sounds has seemed fatally to resolve itself into one vast network of vibrations endlessly weaving an aimless web, and the rainbow flush of cathedral windows, which once to enraptured eyes appeared the very smile of God, fades slowly out into the pale irony of the void.
And yet from vast orchestras still comes the music of mighty symphonies. Our painters even now are spreading along the walls of our Library glowing symbols of mysteries still real, and the hardly silenced cannon of the East proclaim once more that combat and pain still are the portion of man. For my own part, I believe that the struggle for life is the order of the world, at which it is vain to repine. I can imagine the burden changed in the way it is to be borne, but I cannot imagine that it ever will be lifted from men's backs. I can imagine a future in which science shall have passed from the combative to the dogmatic stage, and shall have gained such catholic acceptance that it shall take control of life, and condemn at once with instant execution what now is left for nature to destroy. But we are far from such a future, and we cannot stop to amuse or to terrify ourselves with dreams. Now, at least, and perhaps as long as man dwells upon the globe, his destiny is battle, and he has to take the chances of war. If it is our business to fight, the book for the army is a war-song, not a hospital-sketch. It is not well for soldiers to think much about wounds. Sooner or later we shall fall; but meantime it is for us to fix our eyes upon the point to be stormed, and to get there if we can.
Behind every scheme to make the world over, lies the question, What kind of world do you want? The ideals of the past for men have been drawn from war, as those for women have been drawn from motherhood. For all our prophecies, I doubt if we are ready to give up our inheritance. Who is there who would not like to be thought a gentleman? Yet what has that name been built on but the soldier's choice of honor rather than life? To be a soldier or descended from soldiers, in time of peace to be ready to give one's life rather than suffer disgrace, that is what the word has meant; and if we try to claim it at less cost than a splendid carelessness for life, we are trying to steal the good will without the responsibilities of the place. We will not dispute about tastes. The man of the future may want something different. But who of us could endure a world, although cut up into five-acre lots, and having no man upon it who was not well fed and well housed, without the divine folly of honor, without the senseless passion for knowledge outreaching the flaming bounds of the possible, without ideals the essence of which is that they can never be achieved? I do not know what is true. I do not know the meaning of the universe. But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt, that no man who lives in the same world with most of us can doubt, and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.
Most men who know battle know the cynic force with which the thoughts of common sense will assail them in times of stress; but they know that in their greatest moments faith has trampled those thoughts under foot. If you wait in line, suppose on Tremont Street Mall, ordered simply to wait and do nothing, and have watched the enemy bring their guns to bear upon you down a gentle slope like that of Beacon Street, have seen the puff of the firing, have felt the burst of the spherical case-shot as it came toward you, have heard and seen the shrieking fragments go tearing through your company, and have known that the next or the next shot carries your fate; if you have advanced in line and have seen ahead of you the spot you must pass where the rifle bullets are striking; if you have ridden at night at a walk toward the blue line of fire at the dead angle of Spottsylvania, where for twenty-four hours the soldiers were fighting on the two sides of an earthwork, and in the morning the dead and dying lay piled in a row six deep, and as you rode you heard the bullets splashing in the mud and earth about you; if you have been in the picket-line at night in a black and unknown wood, have heard the splat of the bullets upon the trees, and as you moved have felt your foot slip upon a dead man's body; if you have had a blind fierce gallop against the enemy, with your blood up and a pace that left no time for fear --if, in short, as some, I hope many, who hear me, have known, you have known the vicissitudes of terror and triumph in war; you know that there is such a thing as the faith I spoke of. You know your own weakness and are modest; but you know that man has in him that unspeakable somewhat which makes him capable of miracle, able to lift himself by the might of his own soul, unaided, able to face anniliation for a blind belief.
From the beginning, to us, children of the North, life has seemed a place hung about by dark mists, out of which comes the pale shine of dragon's scales and the cry of fighting men, and the sound of swords. Beowolf, Milton, Durer, Rembrandt, Schopenhauer, Turner, Tennyson, from the first war song of the race to the stall-fed poetry of modern English drawing rooms, all have had the same vision, and all have had a glimpse of a light to be followed. "The end of wordly life awaits us all. Let him who may, gain honor ere death. That is best for a warrior when he is dead." So spoke Beowolf a thousand years ago.
...continued in reply...
When I went to the war I thought that soldiers were old men. I remembered a picture of the revolutionary soldier which some of you may have seen, representing a white-haired man with his flint-lock slung across his back. I remembered one or two examples of revolutionary soldiers wom I have met, and I took no account of the lapse of time. It was not long after, in winter quarters, as I was listening to some of the sentimental songs in vogue, such as--
that it came over me that the army was made up of what I should now call very young men. I dare say that my illusion has been shared by some of those now present, as they have looked at us upon whose heads the white shadows have begun to fall. But the truth is that war is the business of youth and early middle age. You who called this assemblage together, not we, would be the soldiers of another war, if we should have one, and we speak to you as the dying Merlin did in the verse which I have just quoted. Would that the blind man's pipe might be transformed by Merlin's magic, to make you hear the bugles as once we heard them beneath the morning stars! For you it is that now is sung the Song of the Sword:--
War, when you are at it, is horrible and dull. It is only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine. I hope it may be long before we are called again to sit at that master's feet. But some teacher of the kind we all need. In this snug, over-safe corner of the world we need it, that we may realize that our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things, but merely a little space of calm in the midst of the tempestuous untamed streaming of the world, and in order that we may be ready for danger. We need it in this time of individualist negations, with its literature of French and American humor, revolting at discipline, loving flesh-pots, and denying that anything is worthy of reverence--in order that we may remember all that buffoons forget. We need it everywhere and at all times. For high and dangerous action teaches us to believe as right beyond dispute things for which our doubting minds are slow to find words of proof. Out of heroism grows faith in the worth of heroism. The proof comes later, and even may never come. Therefore I rejoice at every dangerous sport which I see pursued. The students at Heidelberg, with their sword-slashed faces, inspire me with sincere respect. I gaze with delight upon our polo players. If once in a while in our rough riding a neck is broken, I regard it, not as a waste, but as a price well paid for the breeding of a race fit for headship and command.
We do not save our traditions, in our country. The regiments whose battle-flags were not large enough to hold the names of the battles they had fought vanished with the surrender of Lee, although their memories inherited would have made heroes for a century. It is the more necessary to learn the lesson afresh from perils newly sought, and perhaps it is not vain for us to tell the new generation what we learned in our day, and what we still believe. That the joy of life is living, is to put out all one's powers as far as they will go; that the measure of power is obstacles overcome; to ride boldly at what is in front of you, be it fence or enemy; to pray, not for comfort, but for combat; to keep the soldier's faith against the doubts of civil life, more besetting and harder to overcome than all the misgivings of the battlefield, and to remember that duty is not to be proved in the evil day, but then to be obeyed unquestioning; to love glory more than the temptations of wallowing ease, but to know that one's final judge and only rival is oneself: with all our failures in act and thought, these things we learned from noble enemies in Virginia or Georgia or on the Mississippi, thirty years ago; these things we believe to be true.
"Life is not lost", said she,
"for which is bought Endless renown."
We learned also, and we still believe, that love of country is not yet an idle name.
As for us, our days of combat are over. Our swords are rust. Our guns will thunder no more. The vultures that once wheeled over our heads must be buried with their prey. Whatever of glory must be won in the council or the closet, never again in the field. I do not repine. We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.
Three years ago died the old colonel of my regiment, the Twentieth Massachusetts. [Web note: Col. William Raymond Lee] He gave the regiment its soul. No man could falter who heard his "Forward, Twentieth!" I went to his funeral. From a side door of the church a body of little choir- boys came in alike a flight of careless doves. At the same time the doors opened at the front, and up the main aisle advanced his coffin, followed by the few grey heads who stood for the men of the Twentieth, the rank and file whom he had loved, and whom he led for the last time. The church was empty. No one remembered the old man whom we were burying, no one save those next to him, and us. And I said to myself, The Twentieth has shrunk to a skeleton, a ghost, a memory, a forgotten name which we other old men alone keep in our hearts. And then I thought: It is right. It is as the colonel would have it. This also is part of the soldier's faith: Having known great things, to be content with silence. Just then there fell into my hands a little song sung by a warlike people on the Danube, which seemed to me fit for a soldier's last word, another song of the sword, but a song of the sword in its scabbard, a song of oblivion and peace.
A soldier has been buried on the battlefield.
Transcribed from my 2002 copy of The Essential Holmes: The Letters, Speeches, Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr edited by Richard Posner.
A stirring speech, but the paean to martial honour that it is built around has always been the minority view among those who fought and bled in industrial-age warfare. The politics of Reconstruction-era America, like the politics of inter-war Europe, was defined by never again. So, in a more uplifting way, was the politics of post-WW2 Europe. War is the price we pay to preserve peace, not something valuable in its own right. This view, too, is in the old books, because things change less than you think. I think it is most eloquently put by John Adams in a letter to his wife:
The virtues of American (and before it, British) commercial culture are deep and wide - and, incidentally, unmatched on the battlefield. They should be celebrated for what they are, not compared unfavourably to the martial virtues that we appear to have given up for them. And we remember those who died to preserve them for what they gave up, not what they represent.
If the dead of Gettysburg could talk, would they agree with OWH or John Adams? Mass literacy continued to advance over the intervening decades, and the dead of Flanders speak to us through their letters. Famously, they agree with the living of their generation - war is hell, and war on that scale should only be fought to end all wars.
We men of the factories and counting-houses are not without honour (serial bankrupt Donald Trump excepted). "Dictum Meum Pactum" - "My word is my bond" - the motto of the London Stock Exchange. "The full faith and credit of the United States Government". These mean something (although unfortunately less than they would have done to John Quincy Adams), and people sleep more soundly at night knowing that they will not be ruined because of them. What are Mensur scars or the broken necks of the polo ground which OWH so admires when compared to the skills and spills of modern football (Association or gridiron) - whether you compare the quality of the spectacle at the top of the sport or the ratio of characters built to bodies maimed at the grassroots. Mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture are advanced wonderously.
And perhaps we should be more gracious if our granddaughters want to waste some of their time on painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain. Rome, after all, is remembered as much for her achievements in those areas as for her battlefield victories.
I'm less concerned by the pean to martial honor than lines like...
...
...
I can't help but think he saw something of what was to come there
I found this bit to be particularly prescient. Much control over our lives has indeed been taken by those who proclaim a sort of scientific dogma, all while the combativeness that kept science honest and producing useful theories is fading. The future he dreamed about is here, right now.
I feel like ties into a conversation I had at work this morning, as well a s some of the responses to my most recent inferential distance post. I think you may be on to something here.
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I have always seen war as a very necessary evil. We shouldn’t seek it, but at the same time, there’s always barbarians at the gates, and peace is more often than not followed by those barbarians thirsting for the blood of a people who removed the cannons in favor of flower pots, who’d beaten their swords into plows and didn’t teach their kids to fight.
War is certainly hell, but I think the slavery bought by refusing to fight is just as bad. Watching your country ravaged and looted is bad, as is the hunger that follows. What concerns me hear is that Ukraine and (I suspect) Taiwan are the first of several wars that will result from the end of Pax Americana just as centuries of warfare followed the end of Pax Romana. Porcelain is great, but I think because we’re in the heart of the Atlanticist Empire, and don’t see the problems, that we assume we’re immune from nature’s law of tooth and fang. You cannot be weak.
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Civis Romanus Sum.
I'm also remind of this line from Patton's address to the 3rd Army.
Emphasis mine
...and I can't help but suspect that the real "beef" that a lot of users here have with traditional American civic religion boils down to this line here.
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Indeed, I can see how a martially inclined civilization would be less vulnerable to safetyism.
But when embarking upon a war, we need to be very sure that we're doing the right thing. Were there alternatives? Could George Bush have negotiated with the Taliban over handing over Bin Laden as they initially requested, or in 2003 (when they were the ones losing for a change) accepted their request for peace talks?
War without a worthy result is tragedy on a grand scale.
He did. They played stupid games, and everyone won stupid prizes.
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In fact vivisecting animals (one of the causes of the early SPCAs) is wrong and can be prevented. There's more to morality than "the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must".
Anything deviating from the obvious principle of
would do better to justify itself very well.
The point is that a banal statement about animal interaction doesn't necessarily allow you to deduce every human moral precept, many of which run directly contrary to the 'laws of nature'.
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That was a quote from (the dramatization of) Athens' treatment of the neutral Melos during the Peloponnesian War. The war ended with Athens' grand expedition destroyed, its fleets obliterated, its city sieged into starvation and disease, and its government replaced by the Thirty Tyrants.
One difficulty with acting like "the strong" is that it's easy to be wrong about that, and hard to learn you're wrong about it until too late.
Well, yes. I've read old Thuk, and I agree with the Athenians there and with your note regarding this stance. But it's my opinion that the quote requires no justification, being very obviously true, whereas anything running counter to it does require justification, since it contradicts something obviously true.
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Would you rather live in a world where people make some effort to avoid unnecessary suffering, or one in which they don't? Not going to complain if you disagree, but I find this is more than enough justification.
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Thanks for this great link. I'm often skeptical of arguments that people in previous generations were better orators and rhetoricians; many modern speechwriters would be capable of a Lincoln or a Churchill speech, their style is just considered 'cringe' now. Still, there is much good content here.
Very prescient. The entire American opioid epidemic exists not because of the Sacklers, or "muh Purdue", but because of a cult of pain-avoidance that spread through American society from the mid-20th century onwards. Certainly this was exploited by opioid manufacturers, but really 'pain is the fifth vital sign' was only the outcome of a broader societal shift toward the amelioration of pain at all costs. Older people (especially those who have done much manual labor) have suffered from back pain, joint pain etc. for millions of years (obviously). Only in late 20th century America did this necessitate 'treatment' with powerful narcotics.
Wherever painkillers have been available historically they seem to have been used, far before the late twentieth century:
Even in the context of modern painkillers (morphine and heroin invented about 200 years ago), opioid use globally seems quite a bit higher in the beginning of the twentieth century (1.5% of world population using) than the end of the century, or now (0.25% of world population using in 2008, though I assume its higher now).
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The opioid epidemic isn't about pain avoidance. It's about getting high. Yes, older people lived in pain all the time before the invention of opioids (and NSAIDS), but this pretty much sucked. Pain is not acting as a useful signal in many, many cases, because even if there is a known physical cause, there's often not a thing you can do about it.
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I see this sentiment all the time and while there is some truth in that as humans don't change our very human derived issues will continuously re-emerge I think this gives people more comfort than is warranted. People may not change but the environment we share surely does as novel technology is produced. The wars of the 20th century may be just modern examples of human treaties and human failures and human triumphs but surely the mechanization and scale has changed their character. Surely the Atom bomb and intercontinental missiles have raised the stakes beyond what was once conceivable. Surely social media has made the old natural human social tendencies show us a fresh new facet. And what horrors may yet hide in the yet unrevealed facets?
No, I am not comforted by the re-occurrence of old human foibles because they had old human solutions. I look back and I see some foibles ripe to return and fear for what tools we have sown for them to reap.
I'm not so sure, oblivion has always been in the cards, and instantaneous annihilation is arguably one of the better ways to go.
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Two? They were too young to fight Mexico. The Civil War and . . . the Franco-Prussian war??
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Ordinarily I wouldn't post personal Reddit drama here, but the thread is slow and I'm mad.
Here is a post that I saw on /r/baseball:
Anthony Bass promoting anti-LGBTQ propaganda on his Instagram
You probably noticed that the thread is locked with a moderator message: "The trolls are flooding in, and the conversation has run its course at this point. Friendly reminder to love your neighbor, and that it's not intolerant to oppose bigotry. Everyone have a nice holiday Monday!"
This message was posted only a few minutes after I was permanantly banned from /r/baseball for comments in that very thread! In fact, I believe they are referring to me as one of the "trolls flooding in". Lets take a look under the hood to see what counts as perma-ban and threadlock-worthy comments.
First, the actual article in question. Anthony Bass is a pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays. He posted an Instagram story saying Christians should boycott Target and Bud Light. That's it. That's the "anti-LGBTQ propaganda". I posted a top-level comment in the thread sarcastically making this point.
Is this a high-effort comment? No, but if you are familiar with the sports subs at all then you know that this type of low-effort sarcasm is all over the place. That's the posting culture there. I also got involved in another comment thread.
This was the extent of my participation in the thread. I did not expect my comments to be particularly well-received by the Reddit population, but I felt that I pointed out enough legitimate issues that I would be safe from accusations of trolling. I was wrong.
Here is the modmail message I received informing me of my permanent ban, along with the brief conversation we had before they muted me with their absolute power.1 For reference, here are the /r/baseball rules. Would an honest reading of these rules give you any reason at all to think that anything I posted would not be allowed, much less permaban worthy? You would have to be steeped in internet leftist culture to understand that, "Trolling, threatening, harassing, or inciting violence towards individuals or groups will not be tolerated. Racist, sexist, or otherwise intolerant language in both comments and submissions will be removed." means that pointed questions against the progressive consensus will get you tossed out.
I understand why so many subreddits are complete circlejerks now. It's not about echo-chambers and voting dynamics. They literally just banned everyone who disagreed.
1. Here is the source they cited for their "62%" figure. I'll let you decide for yourself whether this poll is applicable
Reddit's admins and mods have cultivated the culture they want and get, you can argue with them but it's only going to get you a ban and 99% of replies are either going to be people performatively responding for approval or others marking their account for more focus from the Eye of Sauron.
If you wish to fight them, take note of the Fox /r/antiwork piece and do likewise. Let their absurdity distance them from any audience of normies. Don't honestly post in a popular sub expecting to make a major influence.
I don't know if it's more damaging socially, but the single biggest argument against reddit usage I can come up with these days is to just post about their moderation team. The Challenor affair was the most visible and egregious (Reddit hiring a chief moderator who did not notice their father tying up a small child in the attic and raping/abusing them for several weeks, then banning people who reported on the story with no explanation) but when you look at people like BardFinn the idea that any conversation is improved by having people like them deciding the rules of polite discourse is just too funny not to laugh at.
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It's a shame because Reddit largely killed the standalone forum for non-ossified communities. For the passively apolitical majority, those who are okay with simply ignoring the politics or are used to hearing it as background noise and don't think there's anything weird with it, it's a Schelling point for conversations on any topic.
Yes it is practically impossible to find any other frequented forum for almost any topic at this point. It is easy to say just ignore reddit idiots but it is a real problem when reddit keeps luring in any online community and then causing its takeover by "those people"
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And was it your impression that reddit moderators were not "steeped in internet leftist culture"? This seems to me like jumping into a pool and wondering why it's wet.
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I'm trying to stay away from politics for now, but I feel a bit compelled to add to your comment.
As someone who's been involved in them before, Internet communities dedicated to the arts are probably the worst in this regard. There was a Discord server I was in a couple years back dedicated to a specific electronic band where the very same thing happened to me, except it was more farcical than this. So, some background - I was an early user of the server, I was casual friends with one of the mods there, and while little interesting conversation could be found from them they were at least pleasant to talk to. At first, the server was a fairly low-key place where one could talk about a certain artist's works, share their own music, etc. I came to be known as a regular there.
At some point, after an influx of new users, the server took on an explicitly political bent, despite (if I remember correctly) a rule stating no politics in the server. People would speak at length about politics and always from an incredibly progressive viewpoint, and when people would bring up concerns about the politicisation of the server the response was "Some people don't have the privilege of not thinking about politics". You had regular bashing of people like Jordan Peterson in there. You had users openly endorsing sentiments like "I hate men", stating that there was value in these open and unabashed statements of group hatred because it might enlighten people about their "privilege". The progressive conceptualisation of identity-based privilege and oppression, as well as the directionality of that oppression, were all taken as unchallengeable fact in that server and it never needed to be rigorously proved or demonstrated, just asserted.
Quite predictably, there was also talk about the underrepresentation of women in electronic music. The answer was always that some nebulous socialisation of sorts dissuaded them from trying their hand at it. Inherent or innate factors were not considered. As far as I know, no studies on the gender difference in empathising-systemising (E-S) or the impact of E-S on music preferences were ever linked there. It's also worth noting that the server at this point was also filled to the brim with purportedly gender-dysphoric people who identified as something or other. IIRC, one of the most political people on the server at the time I was there was a trans woman from Iran. I remember this person posting video of their "interpretive dance" which basically consisted of them uncoordinatedly jumping up and down on their bed while a song played in the background. I swear to God, I am not making this up.
I made quite a lot of attempts to argue that politics should be out of the server, that it didn't belong in a server dedicated to an electronic artist, and nobody really acted on it - instead, they continued having political discussion in complete contradiction to the rule. Eventually, I decided that if they didn't want to adhere to an ethic of "no politics", I would not be bound by that rule either. When they were having one of their many progressive-leaning discussions, I decided to outline some of my problems with that ideology in as polite and moderate a fashion as I knew how. I garnered responses, and before I could answer them a moderator came in and stated that things were "getting too political". The politics rule was conveniently invoked, and the entire conversation was shut down in a manner that allowed progressives to have the last word.
I left the server for a bit, and when I came back, things didn't seem to be that much better. I had only a bit of time to speak with some of the users there before I was abruptly banned from the server, and a longstanding friend of mine (who was still in there) posted me the text of conversations involving the mods - including the one who I was friends with for a good while - where they were shit-talking me. Stating that I had expressed "harmful things", and that I "creeped them out". My "harmful" take was stating that the relations between the sexes aren't characterised by oppression.
Apparently the topic of my banning still comes up with some regularity every now and then in that server.
Yeah, that matches my experiences as well. Deranged far left politics never fall afoul of a "no politics" rule. Arguing with them does. They are just socially normalizing their cult as "basic human decency" through raw exercises in power. You thought like a normal person, that politics are politics, and a no politics rule should apply to it. You need to think like a cultural marxist, where if there is a no politics rule, and long far left screeds aren't having the rule applied to them, then they don't count as politics. The rules and how they are enforced dictate reality, not the other way around. Because there is no reality. Only "social constructs", which you must constantly reshape so people have no choice but to perceive the world the way you want them to.
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As an aside, here's one thing I noticed about the Bud Light boycott: A lot of people here have pointed out that the similarities among major brands of light beer have made it a relatively easy thing to boycott since alternatives are readily available. I was already inclined to agree with this sentiment, precisely because it underscores why this boycott hasn't seemed to have much of an effect in my neck of the woods. A lot of products are popular by default, and they're usually the products that are marketed by major brands and have a ton of advertising. You don't need to know a lot about soft drinks to know that Coke is popular and that most people will find it an acceptable beverage; if you're having a party and serve Coke and someone doesn't like it, they'll at least understand why you chose it in a way they wouldn't if Cheerwine was the only option. In certain areas Bud Light is like this for beer; it's not so much a choice but the lack of a choice. Drinking Bud Light is staring into the void.
But where I live, in Western PA, it isn't. Among light beers, Miller Lite is clearly number one, followed by a tie between Coors Light and IC Light, the local option. Bud Light is a distant fourth, at least according to my own totally unscientific observations. Actually, fourth might be too generous as Busch Light is pretty common and Keystone and Natty are the go-tos for poor college students. What this means for Bud Light is that drinking it around here is a conscious choice. You don't select it by default, you select it because you've tried the other options and prefer Bud. This means three things. First, the boycott is more something that is on the news than something people are actively participating in, since they never drank Bud Light anyway. Hence, there seems to be little social pressure to jump on the boycott bandwagon, since there is none. Second, Bud Light drinking here is more of a personal thing than a cultural thing. Drinking Bud Light never signaled anything about you other than that you liked Bud Light, so there's no cultural associations with continuing to drink it despite the boycott. Finally, it's much harder to switch to a competitor because drinking Bud Light means having consciously rejected the competitors in the past; you're less inclined to switch if it's a beer you know you don't like.
So I still see people, even those I know or suspect to be conservative, drinking Bud Light in numbers roughly equivalent to what I saw before. As one conservative friend told me today: "I've drinking this beer since I was sixteen. I'm not going to stop just because some guy wants to wear a dress."
Which is why they think the brand is in decline. The older drinkers who've been drinking it for years are sticking with it, but they're not getting the new younger drinkers (for various reasons). That's why the influencer disaster. I've tried to find the demographics of Mulvaney's audience but that seems to be commercial information that isn't readily available. So I'm going to assume it's majorly women in the age range 18-30 (or so).
They want the 18 year girls to start drinking Bud Light, so by extension the association with "I'm a guy who has been drinking this since I was 16 and I'm 30/40/however old now" is unfavourable. Young drinkers are not going to be wooed by a dad beer, so this is why they tried to use Mulvaney to make it hip'n'happening.
Your friend may continue to drink it, but he's not the market they're trying to attract now. The (unfortunate) head of marketing for Bud Light in this interview, from around the 25th minute, about what she wanted to do. Evolve and Elevate. Representation. Inclusivity. The words that came back to haunt her:
"(And) we had this hangover. I mean Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humour and it was really important that we had another approach".
Good find on (at least one) of the original sources this and another interview are the ones I'd seen passed around in the early days of the controversy but most of the links/mirrors have since been scrubbed. Clearly the lady realized that she was giving proverbial ammunition to her opponents and sought to deny them the easy reload.
The problem is I have a tiny modicum of sympathy for her. Bud Light is (or was) the Number One brand, but it was in a slow, easy, steady decline: younger drinkers aren't drinking, or if they're drinking, they're not drinking beer, or if they are drinking beer, they're not drinking the old familiar "dad drinks that" brands.
So she was handed the job of "revitalise the brand and get young people drinking it" and being a modern woman who is in marketing she immediately went "we must be diverse and inclusive!" and then picked the single most terrible choice ever for the brand. The only way to make it worse would be a historical revamp about "hey, did you know that Bud was Adolf Hitler's favourite beer? and he should know because Germans love beer!" 🤦♀️
As others have pointed out, there's ways to do this that can pivot slowly away from the traditional market to bring in younger, more progressive drinkers. But not by some gay guy doing a performance-art drag act who, when he smiles, has a face that - in the words of an Irish saying - has a mouth like a hake.
Comparison photo of hake heads here.
I actually have a fair bit of sympathy but she was still monumentaly stupid and as the poster in the hallway outside my office reads...
"The penalty for stupidity is death"
If anything she got off lightly.
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What about Yuengling? I seem to recall that company having some sort of association with the right wing, though I can't remember the details.
They did. Dick Yuengling invited Trump to speak at the brewery during the 2016 campaign, which underscored his history of working to prevent his employees from unionizing. Several members of my own family said they were going to permanently boycott Yuengling for this. That boycott lasted only a few weeks, though Yuengling is a unique beer that isn't easily replaceable by competitors. I mean what exactly are its competitors anyway? The closest national brand I can think of is Michelob Amber Bock, and you don't really see that much anymore. Dos Equis Amber, maybe?
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You love to see it. I hope you're enjoying the beer, beyond drinking from America's oldest brewery still family owned, by Republicans who voted Trump at that. It's the ideal substitute.
And while yuengling lager and black and tan are quite different from a mass market light beer, they also produce Flight, which is a Michelob ultra competitor. 95 calories and easy drinking.
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Don't call it the progressive consensus. That implies that a majority of left-leaning people are onboard with it. Call it the progressive orthodoxy.
Not trying to sound condescending but I can't help but think of that one James Franco meme. Reddit in general and Reddit mods in particular have undergone such an intense purity spiral in the last seven years that you're best off just assuming any English-speaking sub which isn't loudly and conspicuously heretical (even ostensibly apolitical hobby and sports subs) has been taken over by woke mods. The site is a lost cause as far as meaningful discussion is concerned.
Hell, even subs that are loudly and conspicuously heretical appear to have been taken over by woke mods. I was permanently banned from /r/ActualPublicFreakouts - Reddit’s current go-to spot for videos of minorities behaving badly - (ostensibly) for making a few (fairly mild) off-color racial jokes. Certainly I would expect an instant ban for doing anything of the sort on a large public-facing sub, but on a sub that seems tailor-made for people who would be into that? It’s the sort of thing that fuels my suspicion that any remaining redoubts of non-progressivism are honeypots designed to corral all the heretics into one place for observation and eventual termination.
Increasingly convinced that I made the right decision uninstalling the Reddit app from my phone. Just about the only sub I still enjoy any more is /r/4chan.
Why wouldn’t you just browse 4chan?
I've tried once or twice but found the user interface impenetrable.
Try using the catalog view instead of the default view. And, in the settings, enable the "Inline quote links" option, so that you can follow a conversation without having to bounce up and down the page.
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Some would argue that's a feature. The medium is the message.
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Reddit subs dedicated to 4chan posts are much, much better than going to 4chan because they typically filter out the porn(which is the vast majority of 4chan) and in practice they mostly highlight the better posts(which is definitely not the majority of even the non-porn posts on 4chan).
I strongly disagree with this extremely overbroad assertion.
In the first place, /r/4chan is not a substitute for 4chan. 4chan is a discussion platform that happens to be humorous on occasion, while /r/4chan is focused exclusively on finding humor (not necessarily "the better posts") on 4chan. If you want to read a non-humorous discussion of electric cars or urban planning or Big Yud, you won't find it on /r/4chan—you've got to go to 4chan itself.
In the second place, it is not reasonable to say that pornography "is the vast majority of 4chan". Even assuming for the sake of argument that the statement is technically true—i. e., that, of all posts made on 4chan, "the vast majority" are pornographic (and I do not necessarily accept that premise)—it is not actually possible for a user to browse the entire category of "all posts made on 4chan". In practice, it is extremely easy for a person who uses the catalog view to ignore (1) the obviously-pornographic boards and (2) the few obviously-pornographic threads that are tolerated by the jannies on the non-pornographic boards, and to focus only on threads that actually contain discussion.
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Quitting Heroin for Fentanyl is a bold strategy Cotton, lets see how it works out. ;-)
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Case in point, I ate a permanent ban from Reddit for “hate speech” by posting copypasta which contained no hate speech whatsoever on an sub completely dedicated to shitposting. A copy pasta I had posted several times without so much as a warning.
After a few suspensions for essentially hurting people’s feelings I was clearly on the chopping block and all I had to do was annoy one person enough to have them report a comment and then it was over, no appeals.
I deleted the app shortly after my appeal was denied.
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Reddit is overwhelmingly woke, urban and (within the US at least) Democrat, to the degree "heretical" subreddits exist they are populated by woke democrat-voting heretics. As a general rule the mainstream right, IE the 3,000,000 people a night who were tuning in to Tucker Carlson, the 10,000,000 million people per show who listen to Rogan and the 74,000,000 who voted for Trump in 2020 are posting but they are not posting anywhere you as a member of opposing polity would be likely to encounter them and that is (at least in part) by design.
Status independence is a hell of a drug.
Emphasis mine. The mainstream right, which has so much influence it couldn't even keep Carlson on Fox News. That's not status independence, that's irrelevance.
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My friend, your words are wasted over there. Those are Motte-style arguments, and there’s a reason the Motte is no longer on reddit.
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@ace said it. You were in the wrong place, and what did you expect?
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reddit sucks. news at 11... it has been going downhill for a long time in terms of worsening censorship of anything outside of an increasingly narrow approved worldview. mods have too much power, no way to remove bad mods. it's ridiculously easy to get banned on subs on reddit for even dumbest of reasons or no reason at all.
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Banning all harmful voices is in line with their ethos. Has been for quite some time.
Popper suggested how to abolish freedom of speech all the way back in 1945.
Why wouldn't they ?
If you ban everyone who transgresses your holy values from an important online space, you are strenghtening your religion's position, no ?
They see this as good and laudable. "It prevents violence".
They've mostly dispensed with even the pretense of being interested in a debate.
Better learn to turn every criticism into a fifty Stalins type criticism. Maybe that'd work.
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For one, that comment of yours was blatantly false. There's no such thing as "just" telling people to not drink Bud Light, the context of doing so is common knowledge. I would expect more awareness of that on the forum where leftist causes are routinely delved into for any sort of covert allegiance with communism/leninism/pedophilia and whatnot.
Were I a mod there I'd ban you not even because you're a "heretic", but for feigning ignorance.
It seems a bit melodramatic to describe telling people not to drink Bud Light using the scary word "propaganda", though.
Pretty much what Scott calls "the worst argument in the world". When I hear the phrase "anti-LGBTQ propaganda", I think of people who want to make sodomy illegal, or gay men being thrown off rooftops, or the promotion of conversion therapy etc. I do not think "public figure urges people not to drink a particular brand of beer".
It doesn't seem melodramatic to me. I mean, everyone knows what the current culture war is, it's clear which actions are enemy action. Propaganda is just the memes the enemy is spreading to further their cause and people are pointing at them.
Regardless of whether you think people should be censoring each other over the direction of their activism to begin with, I think it's perfectly sensible to say "This is clear enemy action" and use the word "Propaganda" for that once you are committed to this sort of combat.
I know this is probably the wrong place to get into a quibble over definitions, but I really don't think "one guy using his personal social media account to back a boycott and encouraging his fans to do likewise" can reasonably be described as "propaganda". I'm aware that the moderators of this subreddit consider it (reasonably) as clear enemy action, but that doesn't answer my question: not everything which is clear enemy action is propaganda. If Anthony Bass had been arrested for beating up a trans person because they were trans, that would also be "clear enemy action" in the "current culture war", but it wouldn't be propaganda. From context it doesn't even seem like Bass was using any memes to further his cause, it sounds like he was just saying "I endorse this cause and you should too". For reference, a pro-LGBTQ meme would be something like "#lovewins" or "born this way" or "trans women are women", while an anti-LGBTQ meme is the "groomer" accusation: it doesn't sound like Bass was saying "if you drink Bud Light you're a groomer", which absolutely would be a meme.
I think /u/QuantumFreakonomics's contention that it was a bit hysterical to frame "a private citizen endorsing a boycott which is contrary to woke orthodoxy" as "propaganda" was fair. The fact that I know what the mods were doing from a game-theoretic perspective doesn't change my assessment that it's hysterical and melodramatic to frame it as such.
The shared message in question isn't just saying not to drink bud light or shop at Target. It never says the g-word, but the phrase "shoving it in children's faces" has pretty unambiguous implications.
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I don't think that means there isn't "just" telling people not to drink Bud Light or shop at Target or whatever. It just means that when you "just" tell people to do that, you also necessarily include the context of the common knowledge. That doesn't make a message to Christians to boycott Bud Light not "just" telling people not to drink Bud Light; that's still literally "just" what it is.
This seems like quibbling over the definition of "Just". Physically what you're doing is "Just saying words" but this isn't a defense because cognitively, your brain is assigning meaning to those words and wielding them with intent. There is no such thing as Just doing without meaning. Sure. Literally all you're doing observably is Just saying words, sure.
When someone says
I think it's clear enough which of these they mean that we don't have to quibble about their usage of language.
I mean, yes. That's what the whole subthread is about, starting with the claim that the statement was "blatantly false" in the comment to which I was responding. I don't think it's blatantly false. You could say that it's arguably misleading, especially in the context of a Christian boycott of Bud Light and Target being clear "enemy action" from the perspective of partisan Reddit mods, but if there's room to quibble over the words - and there is such room - then it's not the case that it's blatantly false.
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There's often a point to feigning ignorance: if the censor refuses to state what is banned because doing so would be embarrassing or expose hypocrisy, he's already feigning ignorance. You can then honestly say "by your openly expressed standards, there's nothing wrong with this", because he shouldn't be hiding his standards in the first place.
I think this is such a case. Yes, QF knows what supporting the boycott actually means, but likewise, the moderators know why they're not letting people support the boycott, and they're refusing to say it.
As a complete aside, that feigning ignorance of the true standards is the part of the whole affirmative action debate I find most infuriating. If organizations were required to just say something like, "We, Harvard/Yale/whatever consider you, an Asian, as having lesser worth to our organization on the basis of your intrinsic Asian-ness and as such we'll dock you points compared to individuals of other races that we have judged to provide greater value to our organization when you try to join us," it would, perhaps be not nice, but at least it would be honest. The judgments of the people making these decisions would be laid bare for the rest of society to judge and make decisions based on. There could be honest discussions on whether or not such judgments by such organizations are moral and policy discussions on how much they should be allowed. Yet they insist on continuing to (attempt to) hide the ball. All part of the game, I suppose.
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This just explains why I’ve radicalized. The conversation is over. It’s why I love Desantis attacking Disney though I think Disney falls within the spirit of free speech. The point of the game now is finding wedges of power and taking them when you got them. Use your power, use lawfare, break all norms. When you can take a win take a win. Any courtesies won’t be extended to you from the other side.
And by breaking thing I associate with civil society that’s where I think the right is winning. Texas lawsuit oriented abortion law pre-roe overturned was working. Lawfare works. Desantis Disney assault is working. Bud lights boycott led to the target change of corporate behavior. Busing migrants to blue cities worked. All of these are combinations of activision, lawfare, using government authority outside of the spirit of the constitution. Things the right wouldn’t do before. They need to keep doing these things and probably 10-50x the amount of them. And it’s why I’m a big Desantis backer because I think he’s the best the right has for working outside their comfort zone.
Same here, in my case I go as far back as gamergate.
It was a harrowing experience to have all my lefty heroes seemingly turn into irrational monsters overnight who simply refused to listen and circled the wagons around a handful of clearly corrupt people.
That's when I got intimately familiar with the typical lefty 1-2 punch: first they silence you, and then they lie about what you said.
The couple years after gamergate was an experience of getting repeatedly caught off-guard and surprised by the sheer pettiness and malice of people I had respected and admired. We used to have a saying back in those days: you don't join GG, you get thrown in the pit with the rest of us; and, boy, was that the case for me.
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Keep in mind, though, that Reddit does not represent the entire left. Especially when it comes to politics, and especially on the big subs, it highly over-represents constantly online, politically angry, mostly young wokes who are convinced that they are on the right side of history. It is like deciding that having a conversation with the right is pointless because 4chan exists.
Where the analogy fails is that the views of the modal 4chan right-winger are very far removed from those of any right-wing Anglophone who wields any power or influence (Holocaust denial is a meme on 4chan, but you'll never catch Trump, DeSantis, Johnson or Sunak saying anything which could be even uncharitably misconstrued as antisemitic).
By contrast, the typical opinions of Reddit mods may be unrepresentative of the left as a whole, but they are very representative of the views held by leftists and liberals who wield power and influence in Anglophone society. Pro-lockdown, pro-vaccination cert, pro-censorship, pro-hate speech legislation, pro-arming Ukraine, pro-trans, pro-BLM and so on. These stances may not be popular among the Anglophone left as a whole, but they are absolutely popular among our left-liberal ruling classes.
You make a good point. Maybe a bit exaggerated, because most leftists who wield power and influence in Anglophone society do not favor open borders, very high minimum wage and/or UBI, massively cutting the number of police, or other common Reddit causes. But still, a good point.
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Fair. It’s always a bit difficult to seperate online discourse from facts on the ground. Though it seems to me a lot of the online stuff bleeds into real stuff.
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That’s fucking stupid.
What good is owning the libs if you have to dismantle civil society to do it?
Abandoning all courtesy doesn’t look like DeSantis. It looks like free helicopter rides. This isn’t some novel theory, but the oldest excuse in the book. Oddly enough, it doesn’t tend to work out in the long run.
DeSantis is most effective when he uses the rules in his favor. You’re getting way more actual value out of his educational reforms than from any grandstanding over Disney. The latter is intra-party maneuvering, not an external strategy.
Civil society is already dismantled; instead we have a progressive orthodoxy wearing its skin. Case in point above, the conviction on felony charges of two tiki-torch carriers at the Unite the Right rally. If those in charge don't care to allow the right the benefit of "civil society" (including the right to protest), they should not be surprised when the right decides that what the left is calling "civil society" is of no value to them.
Civil society is partly dismantled but the current situation is nothing what it would be like if civil society were utterly dismantled. Our society is still vastly more similar to pre-wokism America than it is similar to anarchy or to a totalitarian dictatorship. Plus to me it seems that wokism reached a high-water mark sometime around two years ago and has actually been receding since then.
None of which to say that one should not be concerned, but to me it seems that saying civil society is dismantled and we have a progressive orthodoxy wearing its skin is almost as hyperbolic as saying that the Republicans are planning to put all transgender people in camps. It is, at best, directionally correct.
Yes, if it were utterly dismantled progressives might receive harm from the right.
No, what happened is Trump was defeated and as a result wokism is proceeding more efficiently and quietly because there's less opposition to it able to even be heard. At least until the Bud Light thing.
In the last few years, Musk bought Twitter and, encouraged by this, anti-wokists and race realists ran wild all over it. Substack became very popular and is now host to all kinds of respected independent journalism. Joe Rogan still has one of the world's most popular podcasts despite cancellation attempts. Conservatives managed to launch a successful wide-scale boycott. Non-wokes actually to large extent (not at the infrastructure level, but at almost every other level) managed to build their own Internet. Affirmative action policies were defeated in multiple California elections. Despite censorship, a bunch of city subreddits are full of people complaining about crime and saying that wokism has gone too far.
Musk is turning Twitter back over to mainstream media figure Linda Yaccarino. Substack is irrelevant. Meanwhile DEI initiatives continue to advance, prompted by Biden-administration regulations and by existing DEI supporters in industry, government, primary and secondary education, and universities. Left-wing cancelation continues unabated.
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If that were truly the case, you wouldn't be worried about the Cops catching you carrying a concealed firearm because at least one of the following statements would be true. A) what laws there may be on the books are simply left unenforced, B) the consequences of being caught are so trivial that the law may as well have gone unenforced, C) that things have devolved to the point where in both the citizenry and police both exist in a state of nature and thus all you have to do to avoid consequences is to ensure that attempting to bring said consequences is more expensive than letting you walk.
You are forgetting the concept of anarcho-tyranny. The cops can arrest otherwise law abiding citizens for carrying concealed firearms while simultaneously ignoring people who commit actual property destruction and violence.
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What good is overgrazing if it destroys the commons?
Well, if overgrazing secures you benefits, and the commons are going to be gone very soon regardless, then the choice is between securing some benefits by overgrazing, or securing little to no meaningful benefit as the commons disperse too many ways to be of value. This presumes the commons can't be meaningfully preserved, and that overgrazing is net-benefit at least for you personally, but neither seem unreasonable assumptions in a variety of real-world scenarios.
Getting back to the discussion over the weekend, your use of "civil society" is shorthand for a whole lot of points that can't, in fact, reasonably be assumed. The day before the Rwandan genocide, did Rwanda have "civil society"? The month before? The year before? Unless we're assuming spontaneous mass possession by demons, there has to be some sort of runup to the fabric of society abruptly failing, right? What does that runup look like?
The intra-party maneuvering is vital, in the same way a rudder is vital. It's the small things that determine where a much larger thing is going to go, and where the thing is going to go is the whole of the question. Without that, there's nothing of value in the exercise at all.
If you have a principled view that government enforcement of ideology against or through business interests is a bad idea, I invite you to climb into your time machine and deliver an impassioned plea to some point at least twenty years ago, probably more like fifty. It is far, far, far too late now.
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The goal isn’t to “own the libs”. It’s to win and make society how you want it.
The Disney strategy is part of getting the PMC back in the fold. Right now they have to be woke because that’s the activist class that will hurt them. Punishing corporates for being woke and having a right activist class is part of a strategy to make corporates more neutral again.
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Talking about some baseball player's Instagram post, reactions to it, and the Bud Light boycott is a valid Culture War topic, but this post is exactly why we say to leave the rest of the Internet at the door. You are literally just coming here to complain about being banned on reddit, with complete repostings of your entire personal thread just so you can bring your drama to what you presume will be more sympathetic ears.
Don't do this. Two-day ban to deny you the satisfaction of participating in this thread, because this is such an obvious and deliberate flaunting of the spirit and letter of the rules.
I can see how technically his post violates the rule, but "Two-day ban to deny you the satisfaction of participating in this thread" seems rather savage to me given that I am not convinced he broke the rule deliberately.
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I think the rule is good. And that this discussion could have happened without the OP violating the rules.
You can do this here. What you can't do is bring up a bunch of specific subreddits, specific people, and specific details of the situation. Leave the specifics out and talk in generalities.
I really thought we had another rule to use specific groups instead of general. I suppose the closest is the CW prompt's "[Avoid] making sweeping generalizations" or perhaps "be as precise and charitable as you can." Yeah, those are in theory compatible with generalities.
It still rubs me the wrong way.
All reddit mods are terrible
some reddit mods are terrible
[these specific] reddit mods are terrible.
The rule you pointed out covers 1, the op did 3 which isn't allowed cuz no drama. 2 is allowable and what the op could have said.
How could you argue 2 without 3?
"I had an experience in an unnamed subreddit..."
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The rule does not forbid bringing up specific communities, people, or details. It just says:
So you can be specific, you just have to contextualize.
If you want an easy way to avoid drama leave out the details.
No amount of details or contextualizing will save a post if it's bring drama down upon us.
Personal vendettas are unlikely to pass muster.
So this post brought drama down upon us? From /r/baseball?
Yes, only one person (the original poster) but that's enough.
There is a different spinoff site for this sort of thing.
What? Are you saying that the op itself is the drama which the op brought down upon us? What does "drama" mean?
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I agree with the other comments.
It's an interesting thread and a straight up ban on first offense with that hostile wording seems very excessive.
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*flouting
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I strongly disagree with this characterization of OP's post. The rule states in relevant part that, "we ask that you refrain from posting bare links to culture-war-related discussions held outside of this sub. If you are going to link to another platform we ask that you please put in the work to contextualize the post and explain why it is relevant to readers of this community."
This is not a "bare link" to a culture war discussion from an outside website. The OP provided plenty of context, and it's obvious why this is relevant to the culture war--it's an example of progressive/woke discussion norms and of what is considered "out of bounds" in woke spaces.
The fact that OP is directly involved in this culture war drama should be irrelevant. If this interaction had happened on a college campus between students, with some of the students trying to "cancel" another student for saying what OP said, and someone had given this description of the events along with light commentary describing their thoughts on the matter, no one would have batted an eye. This is classic Culture War Thread content and OP shouldn't be punished for posting it.
The OP came here to bitch about being banned on reddit, complete with repostings of their arguments with the mods.
That's not what this place is for and you will absolutely be discouraged from doing that.
It isn't.
Then it would be a substantially different situation from this.
He has a good point. The rule's title is "leave the rest of the Internet at the door", but the rule's text doesn't actually say not to post about anything involving yourself and the rest of the Internet. It's an inaccurate title that doesn't really describe what the rule refers to. The rule itself only says that you shouldn't be posting bare links to such discussions without context that explains why it is relevant, not that you shouldn't be posting such things at all.
The OP clearly didn't post a bare link without context.
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I'm kind of surprised you are surprised. I was permanently ip and device banned from reddit for using the /r/place thing the way it was intended to be used because an admin had a personal bone to pick with the community associated with the logo, a community that really is less objectionable than other allowed logos like 4chan. The whole phenomenon is why it was important for us to get off of reddit, they want an echo chamber and will have one. Only controlled opposition, complete with admin politically aligned moderators in control, is allowed and it's been that way for years.
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Don't speak in venues where you don't want to be heard. If you're banned, leave. The same goes, especially so, for reddit - you can stay outside and watch the little fishes flit about, but joining them for a swim is forbidden. Nonetheless, it's still possible to cast stones in from outside of the community and observe how the ripples propagate through it. After all, it is a "hive-mind."
The message of reddit is no longer the actual thoughts of its users: it's the message of reddit as medium - that is, a highly restrictive diet of information curated by those wanting to impose a particular reality tunnel on its users. By banning cogent rebuttals to its own view of the world, and elevating vigorous affirmations of the same, it creates the semblance of public discourse where there truly is none - only distorted, exaggerated angles and highlight reels that present a particular perspective, an optical illusion of sorts. A warped, fish-eye lens of discussion.
Participating in such media only lends credence to the illusion that "everyone is there" and that these "discussion forums" actually represent a healthy and diverse range of views. Surely, our stance must be correct, because otherwise someone would have upvoted "the real answer" in the comments? Much better to leave the system to its own designs to make more apparent what it truly is - a false representation, a simulacrum of discourse.
However, I get the feeling that there are many who fear silence and solitude and the inevitable gaps in the (externally visible) narratization of their selves this creates (though, watching others attempt to fill in the gaps can be quite illuminating). You have to say something, after all - otherwise, do you even exist, unless you have an active presence, take a stance and a position, on reddit, Twitter, & other fora (it's also interesting to consider this in light of what happens when you have that speech taken from you)?
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Quoting an AAQC from someone else who commented here and then subsequently chose to delete it:
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Biden-Harris Administration Releases First-Ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism
Last week the Biden administration published the anticipated national strategy to counter antisemitism.
The Full Report starts with a legal disclaimer that it does not supersede any existing regulation or law- it should be viewed as a blueprint and aspirational. However, the 100+ "calls to action" touch every corner of government, even the USDA and and Department of Forest Services. One of the main architects of the initiative is Kamala Harris's Jewish husband, Dough Emhoff.
The first question you may have is "what's antisemitism?" I have discussed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism in the past, and it is acknowledged in the report as the most prominent definition which has been adopted by the US:
The IHRA working definition of antisemitism includes:
The Biden administration's strategy to counter antisemitism includes censoring criticism of "the power of Jews as a collective", even while there exists a whole-of-society effort to engage in mendacious criticism of the power of white men as a collective.
There are indeed well over 100 calls to action, which includes things like:
The most tangible impacts of this strategy in the short term are the mandated propaganda initiatives described here and in many more "calls to action" in the document. By my view, the most alarming dimension of the strategy is in combatting online antisemitism (emphasis in original):
In today's day in age, where something like Twitter is unambiguously the public square, this call to action is clearly intended to abridge the freedom of speech even though it wouldn't run afoul of constitutional checks in the court system. In particular, the call for permanent bans from the public square in the face of a "zero-tolerance" policy is chilling. If you rob a Walmart, or assault someone, even if you are a repeat offender, you will go to jail but then eventually be released. A permanent ban from the public square is tantamount to a worse punishment than faced by many criminal offenders.
The Call to Congress is even more alarming:
The Right Wing has naively supported changes to Section 230 that would prohibit politically-motivated content censorship, on the logic that if they aren't publishers they shouldn't be censoring political speech. The more likely changes to Section 230 would be that social media companies will be required to have strict content policies and moderation against antisemitism and other forms of hate speech in order for social media companies to have legal protection.
This call to action doesn't seem unrealistic, I noted last month that Ron DeSantis travelled to Jerusalem to sign a hate-speech law which was described as "the strongest antisemitism bill in the United States". Likewise, this all-encompassing initiative by the Biden Administration has sparked absolutely no opposition of any note, indicating it's one of the rare areas of bipartisan consensus among "our" representatives.
Generative AI is only mentioned in one part of the fact sheet:
No doubt AI will be more prominent in the Second-Ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.
One of the most tired memes is "replace 'Jew' with 'white' in this article and look how 1488 it looks loool", but I have to say if this document were a whole-of-society effort to combat anti-white hatred online, among our society, and institutions, it would be unambiguously identified as fascist, white supremacy.
I’m not sure this changes anything except for costing money.
Does anyone believe the Biden admin wasn’t already ‘encouraging online platforms to combat antisemitic misinformation’ or whatever?
The propaganda stuff literally just looks like excuses to spread money around to left wing NGO’s.
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I do agree that there are a couple of ringers thrown in here that may be concerning (particularly the hate speech one, which is a clear end run around the Constitution), but I don't believe for a moment that it's just those parts that SecureSignals is objecting to.
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Obligatory reminder that one of the first actions Biden took upon taking office was rescinding Trump's executive order banning executive-branch training that makes these sorts of claims about white people.
Edit: It wasn't limited to white people, but it was widely understood that nobody with any real power in the executive branch wanted to run trainings that made similar claims about people of any other race.
Do you have further information for that?
My first thought is that it was performative deTrumpification—he did something, so it’s got to go. If it was clearing the path for anti-white training, I haven’t really seen the follow through.
What do you mean? There's been reports of CRT training in the military since then.
I don’t honestly have a great handle on what constitutes CRT. I guess I’d believe that the military has picked it up; if they did, it was probably down to the executive.
In the defense industry, diversity training has remained fairly anodyne. The closest we got to Internet-activist talking points was “race-blind isn’t good enough.” I wanted to see Trump’s EO so I could tell whether that would have made it past.
It never ceases to amaze me how precise people's confusion on critical theory is. But if anyone's curious, a one sentence summary would be: dividing society into oppressor races and oppressed races, and analyzing social problems through that lens.
Or if you want something more in-depth and from the horses mouth, you can read something like Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement.
Is this going to be like that time you asked someone for an example of segregation, I gave you a link to segregated housing, you went "holy shit, how is this legal", and promptly refused to change your mind about anything? I wouldn't call this anodyne but YMMV.
You've convinced me. I won't try to pretend that's anodyne. So yeah, I'm seriously unsettled, and I'm reevaluating whether I've been misreading the messaging at my company.
I really didn't believe we were getting stuff like that. Given the level of cross-pollination in defense, it's unlikely that we are much less woke than LockMart. I could believe that the messaging is very stratified, and that expensive, controversial workshops are only spent on the upper management. Or it's possible that I've just had my head in the sand.
For what it's worth, you convinced me that people are successfully bringing back segregated housing, too. I stood by my belief that Pynewacket was being hyperbolic, but I was naïve to assume that sort of project would be banned.
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You keep saying this as if you don't want to admit what's happening. https://reason.com/2020/08/13/sandia-laboratory-nuclear-white-male-privilege-training/
And then when you're given evidence you forget all about it by next week. Is this deliberate?
I keep saying this because it matches my experience. No one was giving me this evidence last time I raised the subject. Or the other time which got a little sidetracked by some guy ranting about socialism. So no, it's not deliberate. I'm just clueless.
arjin's example was better, anyway. Coincidentally, it's the same workshop, same year, and the same smug journalist blowing the whistle.
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My reply is simply, "which do you expect me to trust? Some guy on the internet, or my lying eyes?"
ETA: it is amusingly on brand to though see LockMart chase [latest thing] off a fucking cliff but I also suppose that I am in no position to cast stones.
Wait, why did I get notified here? Was there a ping?
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By "off a fucking cliff" do you mean "they will continue receiving lucrative government contracts until the collapse of the American Empire"?
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Here's Biden's 2023 follow-on 'whole of government' "Equity" EO: https://www.whitehouse.gov/equity/
It's chock-a-block with the government's plans to:
stuff every agency full of DEI commissars ("requir[ing] agencies to designate senior leaders accountable for implementing the equity mandate")
giving those commissars increased control and oversight over the agency's policymaking and enforcement decisions ("instruct[ing] agencies to consider bolstering the capacity of their civil rights offices");
directing the agencies to slant everything they do through DEI analysis ("direct[ing] agencies to produce Equity Action Plans annually and report to the public on their progress");
ensuring that resources will be allocated to the DEI commissars to carry out this new institutionalized and systemic racism/sexism/heterophobia ("direct[ing] the White House Office of Management and Budget to support agencies’ Equity Action Plans");
increasing the amount of racial, sexual, and gendered discrimination and graft in federal contracting ("formaliz[ing] the President’s goal of increasing the share of federal contracting dollars awarded to small disadvantaged business by 50 percent by 2025"); and
carefully pruning the collection and dissemination of federally-collected data and statistics so that these progressive DEI shibboleths can't be challenged ("focusing [agency OCR] efforts on emerging threats like algorithmic discrimination in automated technology" and "further promot[ing] data equity and transparency").
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It was this executive order, repealed on Biden's first day in office.
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Looks good to me.
The most invasive part is potentially deplatforming some people on Twitter. Anything which discourages treating that cesspit as a “public square” is a net good in my book.
All the rest looks like boring cultural initiatives. Business as usual for the NEA and friends! Hardly worth being a Concerned Citizen over, no?
Why would these actions discourage the treatment of those platforms as a "public square"? They will continue to fulfill that function while they deplatform content that criticizes Jewish power or anything else deemed antisemitic by the IHR definition. Their purpose is to set the boundaries of acceptable speech within the public square, and the boundaries of acceptable speech will entail incessant criticism of white people with a zero-tolerance ban on criticizing Jews.
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Sometimes, if a thing is "needed" and violates the constitution, that means you still shouldn't get to have it. What's the point of principles if you only hold to them on matters that are agreeable anyways?
I would say that there is no point, that you should abandon paying lip service to principles you clearly don't believe in and live a life more authentic to the principles that actually govern your actions.
This is nice in theory, but giving yourself licence to break your own oaths on the altar of honest practicality is not a coherent ethic.
Oathbreaking needs to be punished with dire consequences, otherwise nobody can believe anybody's word and all conflict is total war.
In this case it means the only reasonable form of dissidence is armed terrorism since the State will always be able to justify any means to any ends and is bound by no chains of law.
Defection is the only rational behavior against defect-bot.
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I'd worry less about antisemites and more about the government cracking down on wrongthink.
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Does everyone in America really need to be right about something that happened on another continent 80 years ago?
I'm not saying the Holocaust didn't happen, I'm saying we shouldn't care whether it did or not; certainly not to the extent of making laws about it.
The Holocaust ended up a quite reliable proxy for whether one has something against Da Joos or not.
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Doesn't this cut both ways? "Who cares if the Holocaust even happened - there's a known history of anti-Semitic hate and violence across Europe and America in their pasts, so we're better off just banning it legally to avoid further violence."
How about, "Who cares if the Holocaust even happened" leading into "all of those ethnonationalist things left-inc doesn't like are fine and dandy".
Yes, that is also an option. The point I'm getting at is that if you decide the truth is irrelevant, then you can justify things that people don't want. I assume that Butlerian is probably not in favor of European laws that ban Holocaust Denial.
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Any relationship between this initiative and existing Noahide laws on the books?
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I don't think they are "unambiguously the public square" at all. For the obvious difference the historical public square was, well, public in that it was operated by a government and open to all. Twitter, Facebook, and similar online platforms are very much private. They have a big long list of things you have to agree to in order to use them and are definitely not operated by the government. Maybe they are the best way to disseminate a message to a mass audience, but that was true of television and radio in their time without them becoming the "public square."
Not so, the public airwaves doctrine put requirements and restrictions on broadcasters to require them to be used in the public interest, and the First Amendment applied to those.
The first amendment applied to the restrictions the government put on broadcasters, yes. Not to the restrictions broadcasters put on what they aired. Symmetrically the first amendment would apply to any government regulation of social media, but not a social media companies policies that users must follow.
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If you want to know why Dems will never get the working white class vote this is it
A lot of antisemitism as defined is very close to just telling facts. Jews really do have a disproportionate amount of power in key institutions. Things like criticizing George Soros gets lumped in with a world wide Jewish conspiracy. And his play on DA’s was outside of prior political norms. Of course Koch plays too. I back Israel as part of the religious right but many of their actions are against enemies are more Old Testament vengeance than what grew out of the neoliberalchristianglobalhomo norm of exerting power.
There is explicit mention of athletes in the documents. I guess in the identity politics games we see it confirmed blacks aren’t at the top of the totem pole. Sorry Kyrie.
I wish a prominent Jew would trash the ADL or atleast this document. Like a formerly libertarian type who donates a ton like Zuck. I think this document only inflames racial tension.
Agree this is an end-run around the constitution. They can’t themselves censor people. But they can strongly encourage those who are allowed to censor because they are technically “private”. It’s as I’ve pointed out in a prior comment in another convo I’ve radicalized on the use of power. I never would have supported Desantis versus Disney 5 years ago. It violates my understanding of US civic norms. Power should be used by the right when they can.
Jewish criticism of the ADL is hardly uncommon. In any case, I highly doubt that a lack of antisemitism is why the Democrats aren’t doing well with the white working class.
The majority of his complaints in that article are that the ADL isn't pro-Israel enough. Technically that is a criticism of the ADL, but I don't think it's what the OP had in mind.
In this case, "not being pro-Israel enough" means "only being pro-Israel when it can be used to attack the right, but ignoring it when the left would be the target". That's a substantial objection, not just a twenty Stalins criticism.
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Ah, Critical race theory!
I'm glad to find another adherent on this sub, most people are super against it here.
Less snarkily, your points are all valid only through the racialized, critical framing that produced the document you are arguing against.
If you are a white nationalist or black hebrew isrialite or some other flavor of such you are acting 100% consistent, otherwise I think you should do some intellectual hygiene regarding prevailing theories accepted without critical analysis.
I believe in hbd. I don’t think Jews win more because of societal advantages. I think genetically they have a much higher average IQ than other groups. Which I don’t believe is critical theory.
In that case, carry on and thank you very much.
If it's not too personal, may I ask which you are? White nationalist or Black Israelite or some other flavour of such?
No, I'm jewish.
I'm just taking the compliment.
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What? Yeah, I'm sure non-binding anti-Semitism plans are absolutely top salience issues for Bud from Scranton.
This misses the point. No-one denies that Jews are over-represented in important areas, what is anti-semitic is suggesting that this is either the product of some nefarious process or that it will have deleterious consequences because of some imagined Jewish agenda. One can criticise Soros individually, even if I think the criticisms are mostly dumb, but bringing up his Jewishness in a negative light certainly implies anti-Semitism.
The above point that if you replace Jew with white and you basically have crt and all the anti-white woke ideology of the left. Buds not that dumb be realizes he’s being point at the bottom of identity politics.
On the second point perhaps if the document is read that tightly. I’ve seen plenty of people make antisemitism accusations for even mentioning Soros/DA. Same thing for Jewish over representation. But like I said in what you quoted “this comes pretty close to just telling facts” - let’s say this was law and I go to jail if I violate it. If I’m talking about Soros/DA manipulation then one wrong word or one judge who thinks I’m dog whistling/implying something puts me in jail. It’s very very close to the line of banning facts.
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what better way to deflect criticism of a group than to give said group protected status against criticism
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Great write up.
Is there any major group in America that is more of a collective than religious Zionist Jews? It’s a combination of nationality, bloodline religion, singing odes to their ancestors in the Temple, praying for their bloodline, remembering historical slights… So, any criticism against white people as a collective applies some 60 fold to “collectivist” Jews, IMO (namely those who are deeply self-identifying, religious, and Zionist).
There exists a kind of Victimhood-Oppressor dynamic which is the lifeblood of Judaism since antiquity. You can read it in the stories of the Israelites against the Canaanites, and you can hear it in psalm 137: “for there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth […] Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!”. This psalm is 3000 years old, and yet you can see in it how the Jews depict themselves as a collective. In a way, it reads like a scene from Schindler’s List. The threat of, let’s say, Jewish extremism is not something to be laughed at. Consider what happened in the 2nd century, when the Jews waged an insurrection and massacres hundreds of thousands of innocents:
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Only if you're a white-collar PMC. The underclass is not governed in the same way as the overclass. Do you think that being banned from Twitter would do anything to the people stealing random shit from Sephora? Most people are not on Twitter, or, if they are, use it to communicate shit-takes with their friends or as a mechanism to view various types of entertainments. Those latter functions are not part of "being in the public square" and can be done in any number of other ways, including passively consuming TikToks, Instagram Reels, YouTube shorts, etc.
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I wonder if this push will have any effect at all on the increasing hostility towards Jews in Blue-team institutions, particularly towards those who wholeheartedly support Israel?
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-vanishing
https://www.thecollegefix.com/conservative-israeli-scholar-at-princeton-target-of-cancel-culture-campaign/
https://www.thecollegefix.com/harvard-hosts-fiery-palestinian-activist-well-known-for-antisemitic-rhetoric/
Or will they address the anti-semitism coming from Democrat darlings like Linda Sarsour, or from black activists? Or is this just another attempt to attack any conservatives they can paint as anti-semitic while ignoring any signs of it from their own side?
Yes, in fact a cynic might suspect that this is the intent. The grievance mongers are going to pedal racial grievances as is their wont, and guys like SS, @coffee_enjoyer, and others here are going to boost that signal like the good little Id-Pol stooges that they are because anything that increases the likelihood of ethnic strife is seen as a win in their book.
Do you see a difference between defensive and offensive id pol? Or active versus passive? In your book, id pol is bad even if others have been waging it for a decade?
Not really. It's all a load of psuedo-marxist bullshit, all of it.
Bruh. Ethnic, religious and racial identities have been a thing for far longer than marxism even existed. Get a grip. Not playing the game doesn't absolve you of the consequences for the enemy team owning you.
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Historical injustice depends a lot on where you start the clock.
I'll try to keep this mostly general, because much of history is under debate, especially about culture war issues, and litigating ancient history for current politics is a fool's game (if potentially entertaining). This phenomenon is not relegated to any particular side, it is rather the method by which fact and fiction become myth. It is how partially-understood history becomes dogma, and drives our current politics and society.
The history of humanity is a history of injustice, conflict and strife. When we look to history to explain our modern world and inform our modern politics, much of the divide between us can be discerned by where we start our "clocks". One notices that, for instance, in the Jewish/Palestinian arguments, one side likes to start the clock in the 1970s and one starts it in the 1930s. Real history, of course, is not divided artificially. Every conflict leads to the next, every injustice to the next. Progress happens on a long enough timeline, but there are enough reverses along the way to outlive any of us.
This is something to watch in ourselves, as much as in others. To think about where we're starting the clock, and whether something important might have happened before that to produce that situation.
To take a silly hobby-horse theory/hot take of mine as example, I think the british fought on the right side of WW2, but the wrong side of WW1. I think the historical context WW2 is completely dependent on WW1, and that of WW1 is inextricable from the Franco-Prussian war, the countries, borders and alliances it produced, and thus the clock should start in 1870 rather than 1913. Anyone who starts the clock in 1913 is a Francophile.
One thing I've contemplated about the approach to estimating historical grievances that must be repaid later on by the nominal 'victor' at the time is that it would seemingly create some unfortunate game-theoretic implications when engaging in a particular conflict.
If you wage a successful campaign of complete annihilation/genocide, leaving behind no survivors to later complain about your past misdeeds, then you have less risk of ever being made to acknowledge or have to compensate for said annihilation. So any time you engage in conflict, you should probably go for broke and try to completely eliminate the opponent from the gene pool, assuming you can define them tightly enough to do so.
If you seize the land out from under someone, and kill any and every person who might claim to be the rightful beneficiary of the land, you're effectively shoring up your own claim to the land such that nobody can really claim to have a morally superior right to it than you do, if only because nobody alive can trace their lineage to someone who used to own the land. Granted you may have to kill thousands upon thousands of people, but if the alternative is you end up being forced to return the land or pay massive compensation decades down the line...
Or try to reduce it to an absurd hypothetical: let us say that there is particular [minority group] that experienced hundreds of years of oppression and suffering inflicted by others, and then a systematic campaign to exterminate them down to the last man. This campaign failed about 100 years back, but it came so close to succeeding that in the present there is only one (1) surviving descendant traceable to that group. Rough estimates for the rightful compensation for the pain and suffering inflicted on these peoples is 1 trillion dollars. Is it somehow appropriate to award that full amount to this one surviving descendant, thereby rendering them the richest person on the planet, by far?
Would it be bad to just wait another 50 years until that person dies with no heirs and consider the debt 'extinguished?'
If nobody survives who could seemingly make a claim for reparations, then what possible method could you use to impose accountability in the present?
Practically speaking your odds of success in going the full genocide route are likely low enough that this 'strategy' becomes VERY high risk/high reward, at best. But man, ethics seem to get spotty in these "all or nothing" scenarios, where you carry the full moral blame and consequences for your act if anyone survives, whereas if your evil plan succeeds in full you're home free.
The other thing to contemplate is the question of why misdeeds/debts should be carried forward to be paid back later by one's descendants, whilst positive achievements/credits aren't?
I think these are good points, but we run into a similar issue of incentives if there are not long term repercussions either. If we have a statute of limitations that nobody ever pays for their misdeeds, or any misdeeds that are done don't have to be paid if more than 50 years have passed, then there are incentives to destroy your rivals, steal their stuff, pass it on to your descendants, and then maintain control and prevent more sympathetic and guilt-feeling people from gaining power until the clock runs out.
I think the optimal incentive aligning solution might be something like a global penalty pool. Most of the damage done by terrible atrocities is done to people who die and thus cannot be compensated. And the most terrible damage will be when entire families are wiped out together, meaning the only people who could be compensated are more distant relatives, and the more complete the genocide the fewer legitimate surviving victims. So... make them pay anyway, it doesn't matter who they pay. We have a central pool, wrong-doers are forced to pay penalties into it proportional to the actual damages (including what is owed to dead people), and whatever portion of the money is damages to actually surviving people or their recent descendants can go to them, while money for dead people or people from long long ago can be used for humanitarian aid or something.
Obviously there are still incentive issues with whoever is in control of assigning penalties and determining how the money gets spent, but it solves the issue of rewarding victims proportional to how few of them remain. I am very very strongly opposed to being forced to pay reparations to people of certain races because multiple centuries ago people who shared their skin color were oppressed by people who share my skin color (but neither were our direct ancestors). But I don't think I would mind having some of my tax money go into a global pool for humanitarian aid, if it was spent effectively on people who actually needed it. I'll consider that charity.
Yes, and this gets into why belief in an all-seeing, all knowing, eternal God might in fact be an adaptive and helpful thing from a very broad civilizational standpoint. If you believe that some higher power is keeping a ledger of every deed and is capable of inflicting punishment upon you in this world or, possibly, eternally in the next world and WILL DO SO, then you suddenly DO have fear of long-term repercussions even if you manage to destroy every single earthly enemy you have.
Granted, you can have religions that are ambivalent to or even encourage the slaying of rivals, but the point here is that having a belief in a higher power is potentially a force for mediating the tendency to abuse your own power.
It's kind of the whole issue of human nature: what WON'T we do if we believed we could get away with it?
I would argue that, absent the all-seeing, vengeful god posited above, this is ALREADY the incentive. Under current circumstances, if you ever find yourself with the power to utterly crush any rivals to your control of [resource], you should do so without hesitation.
It's just very hard to get to such a position given the current balance of power in the world.
I'm somewhat of two minds about the whole thing, but I think my belief really comes down to:
A. You can't punish OR reimburse the dead.
B. You CAN try to prevent future harms from occurring.
C. If you can't return things to the status quo ante or close to it, then setting some number which the survivors agree is acceptable to settle the matter for all time is the only real way forward.
D. But calculating this number should account for the both negative AND positive events experienced by the survivors.
You're hitting on something close to the idea of 'genocide insurance' (isomorphic to life insurance, only instead of for one person, for an entire identifiable ethnic group.) which basically takes action on behalf of the genocided group to wreak some kind of vengeance so as to ensure there are repercussions to the attacker if there can't be compensation to the victims.
But the issue as it stands is once you have some massive fund or stockpile of wealth as part of this penalty pool there's now a meta-game about seeking control of or access to the wealth and determine under what conditions is it distributed.
This is known as creating future harms.
Example: everything that was done in the years 2020-2022, ostensibly to protect public health
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I don't think many people are meaningfully able to notice a benefit that won't exist for 50 years, nor are willing to put up with repercussions (severe ones) that will last for 49, so I think 50 is a good line there.
I definitely believe in adverse possession for lands held that long.
Not everyone has to care, just enough people to make an impact, and people in power. People care about passing on wealth to their grandchildren, people care about the honor and fame that their name will carry in future generations. Their legacy. Not everyone cares, but some do.
Having something like "if you conquer this land you and your children and your grandchildren will be wealthy for generations to come, and your grandchildren will venerate you as heroes they are proud of" appeals to a lot of people. Having something like "if you conquer this land then you and your children will be wealthy for a few decades and the international community will watch your country like a hawk until they eventually find a weakness and then reconquer the land, bankrupt your grandchildren, and then indoctrinate all of your great grandchildren into cursing your name in schools" seems like a disincentive. It's a weird game theory thing, like mutually assured destruction, because obviously it's a terrible thing to actually do to someone, and the grandchildren did nothing wrong and don't deserve to be punished, but theoretically if the threat is credible (I'm not sure how it could be if it's happening more than 50 years in the future) then it would act as a deterrent that rarely needs to be actually used.
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That's an interesting hypothetical. I doubt Jews would consider them true Amalekites--having the right DNA seems much less relevant, from both a scriptural and common-sense standpoint, than actually being descended from them. Still, say we discovered some long-lost Amalekites who were unambiguously descended from them. I can't imagine they would do anything but define the problem away somehow.
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i dont want to hear about the holocaust again when stuff like this is part of their religion. holocaust might have been the most justified genocide in history. compared to a typical genocide, the people killed were foreign to the lands that they were killed in, had refused to assimilate for 2000 years into the society's that they were making money off of, and would have done the same thing a long time ago had the roles been reversed.
Wishing death on your outgroup seems to be your routine, for which you've been banned repeatedly and you keep coming back to do it.
You also keep changing the groups you think deserve to die. First it's Catholics, then it's white nationalists, then it's Jews.
Maybe you're just an equal-opportunity hater, but I think you're a troll. Banned. Duration TBD, but probably permanent.
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Machiavelli noticed this some time ago.
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Because the misdeeds and debts are carried forward to allow deconstruction of the culture of your target, so you can destroy their narratives, make them uncertain of how to act, deprive them of confidence and ideas.
Reminding people of praiseworthy past achievements wouldn't help.
Critical theory was created by people who wanted to change society in accordance with their ideas.
That's all there is to it. (added later: They were not even making any secrets about it either - they openly said as much)
If certain intellectuals are to be believed, of whom most prominent one is now James Lindsay, people using 'critical theory' do not even have a normative vision - they believe that by criticizing that what exists endlessly, a more just synthesis just somehow happens to arise.
EDIT:
added a clarification
Right, I've asked this question quite a few times of the grievance studies/critical theory types and there's no satisfying answer to date.
"Why is it that people living now can be held accountable for negative actions taken by their relatively distant ancestors... but also cannot be permitted to take pride or credit for positive achievements of those same ancestors?"
It is a strange theory that allows blame to propagate forward through time and across generational gaps to currently-living descendants and yet considers the preservation of familial wealth and status across generational gaps to be unjustified.
Seems like any grounds you use to discard the one can likely be used to discard the other as well.
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You don't need to kill all of them, you just need to thoroughly assimilate them (although this usually involves killing a lot of them). This could be thought of as removing them from the meme pool, I suppose. Modern French people are mostly descended from Gauls who were massacred and enslaved by the Romans, yet Napoleon's armies proudly fought beneath the Roman eagle and he adopted the titles of Consul and Emperor for himself. The same goes for Arab nationalists from Egypt, or Italian and German nationalists from any of the dozens of formerly independent states that once occupied the modern territory of those countries.
And of course if the progressive dream of "browning America" were to succeed and we became a completely ethnically and racially homogenous society (a surprisingly trad vision of the future if you think about it), then it would be impossible for any one group to pay reparations to another because we would all be descended from both the perpetrators and the victims of whatever historical atrocity was being adjudicated. Not that I expect us to get much farther than Latin America along the path of race-mixing, and they still have distinguishable groups with lingering grievances.
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Positive achievements usually benefit the achiever's group primarily, and other groups only incidentally. Do we all still owe the British for sparking off the industrial revolution? Maybe we do, but then again history's largest empire is a fairly decent reward too. Misdeeds on the other hand are felt directly, they motivate people to demand redress far more than an Italian would be motivated to ask for compensation for his people's contributions to architecture.
There are cases where the credits of one group are carried over across generations, the memory of the Choctaw Indians donating money to Irish famine relief in the 1847 was the basis for a GoFundMe campaign to solicit a fairly successful fundraising campaign for COVID relief in 2020.
On the other hand, the benefits to the other groups might be outsized in proportion to the conditions they'd have found themselves in otherwise.
Being more direct, if you were the descendant of an extremely primitive tribe living on an isolated island where previously the only technology was sharpened sticks/rocks, fire, and MAYBE mud huts, and a colonial power arrived on the island, murdered half of your village, enslaved the other half for one hundred years, eventually released them from slavery and built a 'proper' society with modern technology for you to live in...
Well how does it balance out? If they had never arrived you, as a descendant, would be living in the same primitive conditions as before. Now you've got modern conveniences and a developed economy and you, personally, were never enslaved in the process.
So the benefit conferred on YOU, personally, is like a 100x increase in the standard of living than what you would have likely experienced otherwise, in exchange for a few generations of ancestors suffering greatly. So from the perspective of you, as an individual, do you inherit both the benefits of an advanced civilization AND the penalties of a history of oppression? How does that balance out in terms of what you're 'owed' in the present?
Thinking more on this it's clear that evaluating how things 'balance out' has a utilitarian presumption behind it, whereas I think the most plausible case for treating historical grievances with importance takes a more traditional view of specific 'crimes' commited which demand redress (greivances based on systemic inequalities where there's no obvious unjust act are a more recent innovation). So, as would be the case with any crime, you demand redress for the specific wrongs done and ignore the question of whether you'd be better or worse off in the counterfactual. Breaking into someone's house is still breaking into someone's house even if you leave a bag of money in their living room.
The most straightforward cases of this in history are the demanding of an official apology, the return of titles, legal rights, or land. The discourse of monetary reparations already veers too far into the murky waters of utilitarian calculations to be workable in my opinion.
Hence why I think there is a valid case to be made for agreeing to some specific number that will suffice to settle the issue once and for all.
Something that is more than a mere symbolic amount but also acknowledges that the outcome wasn't solely a harm or detriment in the long run.
But these are the sort of discussions that would need to take place in the process. Because returning you to the status quo ante would be to tear down all the trappings of advanced society from your island and leaving you behind with your village and sharpened rocks and sticks and fire.
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Is there really no historical grievance if the victims are extinct?
I don't think that's enough. Historical grievances aren't just raised by the aggrieved party. They are raised by any party that benefits from saying "what we did in the past was vile".
Furthermore, there's a reason the full genocide route doesn't happen, and that's because the counterforce already exists in the past. The memetic counterforce that loses the war also sees itself as an aggrieved party, and continues its resistance, regardless to whether a genocide of the most central victims is successful.
A pure and complete genocide needs to be a pure and complete genocide not of the aggrieved party per se, but of the memetic counterforce.
This is similar to ResoluteRaven saying "You don't need to kill all of them, you just need to thoroughly assimilate them"
To put it in logical terms, ResoluteRaven is saying "Genocide is not necessary to prevent historical grievence, Assimilation is sufficient." And I am making the stronger claim, "Genocide is neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent historical grievence. Assimilation is both necessary and sufficient."
Though my definition of Assimilation here is something like 'memetic genocide' of which actual genocide may be a component. Assimilation doesn't have to be nice to be game theoretically functional.
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I think building on your WW1 and WW2 takes, whenever someone is discussing what you should do with a hostile third party everyone preaching “not my business” is routinely reminded of “peace in our time.” But that is once again starting the clock in the 1930s. Maybe if for example the US had stayed out of WWI it would not have been quite the decisive victory for the allies and thus the terms might have been not as bad for Germany. With less bad terms, maybe Hitler never rises to power and thus we never encounter “peace in our time” rhetoric.
It is a counter factual but it isn’t obviously wrong and depends on as you put it when you start the clock.
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It's a fairly persistent narrative that it was the harsh terms of the treaty of versailles that lead to the second world war, but it's always struck me as a load of rubbish. If your enemy is still strong enough to make another serious go of invading you a generation after you have decisively defeated them, it's an argument that you were not thorough enough in their hobbling, not the reverse. You don't hear many people saying that the Romans were in danger of the hurt feelings of the Carthaginians causing another great war when they made their desert and called it peace.
The problem with the post-WW1 peace was that it did not change the fundemental conditions that lead to the outbreak of WW1. It left a Germany that was humiliated and embittered, but still in pretty much the same place it was before the war. If your aim is to prevent the rise of Hitler and WW2, you need to disarm its military at the end of the war, rather than letting them go home under arms, occupy the country and then dissolve Germany as a nation. Of course I'm referring to the nation as a political entity and not advocating for some sort of mass disintegration of all Germans, but I think having Germany forcibly broken up into a series of smaller nations is a fair price to pay for starting the greatest war in history and then making the rather inadvisable decision of losing it.
I would say that WW2 was a consequence of firstly, that special brand of German pig-headedness that convinces them that everything must be done the German way. And secondly, a dangerous cocktail of American softness mixed with the bitterness of two empires that had just spent the lives of a generation of their men (and a whole lot of money) with very little to show for it.
Somewhat tangential to this point, I'm not typically given to writing great long essays for the internet, but I do feel that one day I will be compelled to research and write a great screed about the US and it's approach to international relations and diplomacy. I'm thinking of opening it with "American diplomats and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race".
Agreed, it certainly compares well with the treaty the same Germans inflicted on their defeated enemies. The impact of Versailles is often overstated imo, the reparations requirements were downgraded several times in the Dawes Plan and Young Plan, Germany frequently just didn't pay, and ultimately only ever delivered about 12% of what it owed. Reparations certainly weren't an impediment to rearmament, on which much many times more money was spent, and broadly the German economy had been improving in the decade before Hitler's rise, especially in inflation. Things got much worse right before he came to power, but this was due to the Great Depresion, not Versailles.
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Well, it seems you probably want one or the other. But the Romans didn’t negotiate an end with Carthage; they utterly destroyed them because they beat their armies in toto.
But yes, it would’ve been better if there was less financial penalties on Germany and more military punishments.
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I can see the claim that, say, Russia or Serbia bears the blame for WWI, that Austria was in the right, and even that Germany’s actions are understandable(although not praiseworthy) given the context. I can see assigning some blame to France.
What I can’t wrap my mind around is the idea that Britain was in the wrong- whether you have central powers sentiment or not, responding to an ally in time of need is almost definitionally a just war. It seems like Britain was the only major belligerent that didn’t do anything wrong.
If you are referring to the claim that Britain only got involved to defend Belgium, that is literally just British propaganda. They wanted to get involved from the very start and the Belgium thing was a convenient excuse.
I think you've chosen a very interesting place to stop your chain of logic here, not examining why Britain "wanted to get involved from the very start". Given that Britains war aims were essentially to keep the continent pretty much as it was before the war and preserve the balance of power in Europe, it is in fact accurate to say that Britain chose to use the excuse of maintaining Belgian independence in order to join the war in support of Britains true goal of supporting Belgian independence.
"We want Austria-Hungary to keep oppressing everyone because the status quo is profitable to our top-hat class" is not exactly my definition of Just War.
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Yes, Britain probably had anti-Germany as more of a motive for intervention than genuine support for Belgium. But reacting to the invasion was grounds for war according to anyone who isn’t a pacifist.
To put it another way, US aid for Ukraine is predicated more on the fact that it’s being shot at Russia than on concern for Ukrainian sovereignty, but it’s certainly justified morally because defending Ukrainian sovereignty is a good moral ground for war, even if it doesn’t happen to be one we care very much about.
Agreed.
In the rare situations where realpolitik/strategic practicality actually align with moral imperative and long-standing norms it strikes me particularly stupid and short-sighted to not at least plan for the contingency in which the opposing party follows through on those imperatives/norms.
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The public and political mood was ambivalent until the invasion of Belgium. The British were horrified by the Sarajevo assassination and inclined to see AH's actions as justified.
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I'm not really a fan of the argument, but it's Niall Ferguson's. The claim is that Germany had already stopped its naval buildup and didn't have an army big enough to really conquer Europe, so they probably just wanted to neutralize France and Belgium to stave off a two-front war, then withdraw under some kind of settlement. The precedent is the 1871 Franco-Prussian War where Britain stayed out (other than diplomatically) and this basically happened, with Germany withdrawing and only taking Alsace-Lorraine. Supposedly internal British documents show they didn't really take the Belgium Treaty seriously so their main motivation was crushing the eternal Kraut, and thus turned a small conflict into a huge one.
You can kinda squint and see it, but I'm not really a fan of counterfactual arguments that are just 90% conjecture, nor of blaming fights on anyone other than the guy who started them. (I haven't read the full book so the argument may be stronger than I'm portraying).
For not having an army big enough to 'really' conquer Europe, they sure did come pretty close more than once during WWI.
That was 1871. Wilhelmine Germany was not embarrassed about their ambition to dominate Europe, and they deliberately worked to that end.
Germany’s army at the start was smaller than France or Russia’s, so sustaining occupation across Europe probably would have been a stretch. The original German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg seemingly tried to avoid escalation, held off initiating German mobilization until after Russia had started first, and tried to trade leaving France and Belgium’s borders unchanged if Britain stayed out.
Like I said though, I’m not really a fan of the argument.
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And that's why the war started smack in the middle of Bava...................Kosovo.
1: Serbian-organized terrorists kill Austrian heir
2: Austrians demand massive concessions, on threat of invasion, which I think is understandable enough (in realpolitik terms). This is essentially what the US did with Afghanistan.
3: The Russians jump in with zero stake or justification other than Pan-slav ideology.
4: Germany tells Austria to go ahead, they got their back
5: France jumps in, although their treaty with Russia doesn't require it, as Russia is not defending itself.
6: Now facing a two-front war, Germany loses the game of chicken and starts fighting.
7: Britain looks at all that and goes with France and the Russians.
The result of the war will be a communist dictatorship in Russia, a fascist one in Germany, another world war, and a seventy-year cold war between the victors. Counterfactuals are impossible, but Nicky 2 is a strong contender for dumbest world power leader of all time.
Of course Germany wants to dominate Europe, so does France and everyone else. They do it with banks rather than armies now, which is better for everyone, but still resented.
Id-Pol truly is the mind (and apparently everything else) killer.
It's a bit more complicated, of course, but was trying to be short.
Russia had sold the Balkan slavs out the last several rounds of great-power reorganization of the area. They were under a lot of pressure to make good that time. Bad time for Nicky to find his balls.
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Sure, it's understandable why the Austrians demanded those concessions - they anticipated that the Serbians would be unwilling to comply or unable to within the very small timeframe offered, which would justify a military invasion. As you say, it's very understandable realpolitik - which is to say, lies and disregard for the weak.
(I don't think this is really that similar to Afghanistan. The AH interest in Serbia and the Balkans was long-running, part of a grander expansionist policy. But Afghanistan did not fit all that well into American foreign policy. If anything, it has interfered with and muddled long-term State Department strategy.)
The Russians had just as much stake in the Balkans as the Austro-Hungarians did - it was there, and they wanted it for themselves.
I don't see how Germany having Austria's back is defensible and France having Russia's back is not. Fact is it's just moronic not to help your allies. Was France supposed to just twiddle their thumbs while the Germans defeated their ally, knowing that they would soon be next? This is always a problem with alliances and commitments - those that you commit yourself to alliance with might take advantage of your reliance on them to do what they wish. Of course, this was not a problem for Germany and Austria.
Germany wanted a general war in 1914. Germany's guarantee to Austria was intended to increase the likelihood of war. They were ready for war and confident of victory. France and Russia were not. In addition, many in Germany feared that Russia would become an unbeatable foe if their army was successfully modernized. German strategy sought to knock the French out of the war quickly in a repeat of 1870, and then settle in for a longer and more grueling conflict against the Russians.
All of which can be laid at the feet of the German militarists who sought in 1914 to dominate Europe through force of arms. The fact is that it was they who loosed Lenin on Russia. The fascists who arose in Germany were no aberration, for they were cut from the same cloth as the Prussian militarists who were the driving force in 1914. Had the Germans simply accepted the status quo in 1914, all these things and more could have been averted. Instead, they chose escalation. They chose to believe that war was inevitable, and made it thus. All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.
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I didn't mean that Britain was exclusively at fault at all. It's great-power realpolitik for everyone. I just meant that the state of play in 1913 was far more ambiguous than the way in which we see it after WW2.
My reading of the immediate run up in 1913 was that of the great powers it was Russia who precipitated the expansion of the war with less justification than anyone else. Without Russia backing the Serbs without any formal alliance or responsibility, Germany doesn't enter into it, France doesn't enter into it, and neither does anyone else. Of course, Serbia is really the culprit, but no one cares enough about the Balkans to hate them for it.
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One of my favorite hobby horses: Start the "Colonialism" clock in 1492 to claim European colonization of the Americas was wrong, but start it in 1452 and Istanbul should be part of Greece (or rather Greece should be ruled from Constantinople).
Quite so. Who was colonizing who was pretty different only fifty years before, there was still a muslim caliphate in Spain then, and the Ottomans were invading Hungary, and had colonized most of the Balkans.
Honestly with Asian history there's a ton of hilarity if you expand the 'who's colonizing who' slightly further.
Most of Vietnam as we know it was carved out less than 500 years ago from a bunch of locals who were subjugated, eradicated and generally mollywhopped but ask them and they've been in charge since time immemorial.
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Sounds fair and reasonable
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