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Absolutely, and this still happens today in much of the world. I think it's bad, and I think one of the most important efforts of each person is to move away from this sort of world.
Do you think people didn't have burning rage during the Civil Rights movement? After the Great Depression? During the fight of the sufragettes? Hell, I'd say the rage back then compared to the limp, satiated populace we have today is barely comparable. I'm frankly shocked you just look at history, supposedly, then say the rage in the modern West is at a boiling point. People have endured far, far worse situations than we have without rebelling. We don't even have it that badly, and even if we did we have ample distraction. Bread and circuses orders of magnitude better than the romans.
You really see the modern world as irreparable without violence? I don't buy it.
I don't trust your reading of history. I think that as you admitted above, the miracle of modern liberal democracy is that we can make changes like this without bloodshed. I'd argue that we try and let those mechanisms work, and actively push for that sort of non violent revolution.
Yes I disagree with your assessment if it means violence is inevitable. Sure I think targeted persecution is a historical norm, but I also think that we've miraculously managed to move past that historical norm, as we've moved past other historical norms. Did we all the sudden go back to oral history after writing was invented? No. Permanent step changes in human history can happen when we find a vastly superior cultural technology. Liberal democracy is a step change.
Whether or not violent political purges are extreme, they are foolish, sub-optimal, and most importantly wrong. Whatever justification you try and make for them regarding our current state of the world is foolish. Perhaps in circumstances orders of magnitude worse than the West's current situation I could see the justification for violence, but even then I'd prefer we find our way without it.
What happens is not out of our control. Which path we go down depends on the actions individual people make, day to day. Creating a just-so story of inevitable political violence is you trying to justify your worldview by making up a narrative that makes it impossible to avoid. Again, I don't buy it.
Yes, they did. And they expressed that rage, often through violence, and got their way.
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The rage is less important than whether a practical path forward exists. In the times you mention, there was a path forward. Wind the clock back a little more to the late 1850s, and there was no path forward, so it came to serious violence.
If you see a path forward now, your eyes are better than mine.
Sure. And a couple years ago, the actions individual people chose was to tell lies to foment mass violence nation-wide, then fanned that violence continually and dropped the hammer on anyone who tried to resist. A massive amount of damage was done, and now everything is worse, and none of the people responsible suffered meaningful consequences. They did that because they thought it was in their interest. They'll do it again, because they still think it's in their interest. Sooner or later, they'll force the issue to the point where your options are surrender and be crushed, or fight. They'll push it that far because it's the only option they have other than giving up. Their values demand it.
Thanks! Maybe you should invest in Lasik or something, friend. Alternatively...
As for this part:
I absolutely agree. It was awful, immoral, and absolutely destructive. The recent response to the Covid pandemic and the George Floyd situation were bungled unimaginably bad. Unfortunately for Covid at least, both parties were more or less complicit in fucking things up, at least on the national stage. On the local level conservatives made much better choices.
In my mind the obvious solution is to keep blasting the truth from the rooftops in places like this, and not let the people who pushed for these awful policies and disregarded our liberties get off scott free. It will take some doing and persistence to push through the government propaganda, it always does. But I'm encouraged by the fact that the Covid response has seen things like Musk taking over Twitter, and generally a much larger signal-boost of the wrongs committed.
If all goes well, this blatant corruption and evidence of outright lies by the elites during a time of serious upheaval will serve as a renewed beacon of the importance of free speech. If we do our jobs right in learning from the disaster, we can teach a whole new generation of people to keep the flame of liberty alive, and warn them away from the dangers of authoritarian governments, policies, and ideologies.
Again it won't be easy, but this is the path forward that I see, which it seems like you are too blind to even admit it's a possibility. I'm not saying it's the only path forward, or even the most likely. But for you to effectively say it's impossible is utterly foolish, and as @Amadan says in his other response, this type of rhetoric is exactly what will lead us to unnecessary bloodshed and war.
I like your thoughts elsewhere and you've helped me to become a more moral person with some of your other perspectives, so I hope I can convince you to lay down your sword and work for a peaceful resolution.
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I think I have mentioned before that I have been chugging chronologically through presidential biographies. I'm up to Franklin Pierce (not exactly a page-turner).
A common theme from about Andrew Jackson on is "He set in motion / failed to prevent events that would lead to the Civil War."
And while I haven't actually gotten to Lincoln and the Civil War yet, I have already concluded that this is basically wrong - that the Civil War was inevitable, due to irreconcilable differences (arguably baked in from the start), and no president could have prevented it. Individual decisions or different policies enacted by some of them might have shifted the timeline a bit, maybe even made the whole thing shorter and less bloody (or longer and much bloodier), but slavery was just not something we could compromise on forever. Half the country wanted slavery to end, half the country didn't want slavery to end, and all the various attempts at "Okay, we'll only have some slavery" were of course doomed.
(Yes, I am reducing the irreconcilable differences to slavery. Of course there were other issues as well, but really, it boiled down to slavery. But that's an argument for another time.)
There was no practical path forward in 1861. At most the can could have been kicked down the road some more.
So, as for where we are today: until recently I would have said we don't really have literally irreconcilable differences. Yes, red state vs. blue state (and all the cultural and economic differences that entails) will always be a thing. Abortion and gay rights and racial tensions and transing kids - they are very heated topics, but compromises do (and did) exist.
Individually, I don't think any issues we face today are truly things people would go to war over. The escalation of race issues, worse than I ever imagined it would be in the optimistic, "colorblind society" nineties, may come close.
But I do think there are enough people who are so angry that they want to "break the system," light the fire, set off the war, that there is a danger this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Okay, well, to be honest I’m not really interested in getting you to buy it. I’m comfortable with the fact that a great many people on this sub, and obviously a far vaster number of people not on this sub, are fully committed to seeing this liberal democracy experiment through to the end. Maybe I’ll crack the code at some point and figure out the best method to dissuading these people, but I am humble enough to recognize that right now I’m simply not going to be able to make an effective enough case to persuade dyed-in-the-wool liberal democrats. Obviously I used to be a liberal democrat myself, so one would naïvely think it’d be as simple as reverse-engineering what arguments led me to change my mind and then deploying those to try and change your mind; however, it seems not to really work that way.
Much of my writing here is targeted toward people who are already at least part of the way along the journey away from liberal democracy the same way I am. The goal of at least trying to get people such as yourself to see people like me as somewhat palatable, or at least not obviously crazy and requiring immediate censorship and destruction, is a secondary goal.
I can't say I wish you the best, but at least you're honest about your intentions.
I hope for all of our sakes you and people like you never gain a significant amount of power. I don't think you understand the scope of the horror you will bring back into the world if you achieve your goal of widespread political violence.
It's always the naive ones that want it bloody, and ruin things for the rest of us, unfortunately.
Who’s asking for “widespread” anything? I very explicitly said that I’m advocating targeted consequences for a relatively small number of specific public officials. The premise here is that this will be basically welcomed by such a large majority of people that it will not require a civil war or anything like that. It’ll be more like a “truth and reconciliation commission” with the power to hand down criminal punishments.
Now, I also advocate widespread violence against criminals and profoundly mentally ill, but my fervent hope is that this is all done through formal criminal justice channels and does not mean widespread vigilantism. The only way this happens, though, is a massive clearing-out of precisely the public officials who are making this impossible at this time. They’re not going down without being taken out. Those are the sorts of people I want persecuted. Not you, not random people who disagree with me, not “everyone from a particular ethnic group”, etc. Does this help clarify things a bit for you?
Does there have to be violence? What if we just jail them for their callous disregard of virtue and the will of the people, would that satisfy you?
I'm... generally fine with this, as long as we aren't talking about brutal beatings and murder. I think criminals and the profoundly mentally ill do need to have far more consequences than they get today in the West.
This does help clarify, thanks for sticking with the conversation long enough to get here. I'm used to seeing wignats, depressingly more and more often on this very site, unironically call for another civil war on racial lines. I appreciate that you have a bit more nuance.
Again, I'd argue that it's likely that we can manage this political turnaround without resorting to extra-judicial violence. I also firmly believe that even if it takes 10-20 years longer, it's worth doing the purging the right way in order to prevent a spiral of political violence, like the one that took down the Roman empire. But I do understand your points and have found more areas of agreement than I thought there were.
I'm glad we resolved this - I generally like your perspective and really enjoyed your post about increased pushes towards monastic orders, so I was sad to (mistakenly) see you devolving into a full-throated violent revolutionary wignat.
Well, I do think that the establishment of something resembling a black ethnostate - my hope is that it will be a formally sovereign separate nation, but it’s possible that it’ll just be a de facto black part of the United States with special carve-outs and autonomy - will be key in preventing widespread racial violence. Since I do not want widespread racial violence, I believe that separation between whites and blacks will be necessary. It doesn’t have to involve every black person in the country, although as I’ve explained before, I want it to actually succeed as a functioning nation, and that will mean it’s going to need the best and brightest people - the ones who are a “credit to their race” like some of the black people I know - to run things and to do everything they can to make it thrive.
I’m not really interested in having that larger discussion right now; I would say “you can peruse my back catalogue of posts to see more about my views on that issue”, but I post a lot, and this site has no search function to help you find what you’d be looking for! In any case, I’m not a “white nationalist”, in the sense that I don’t think white people cannot peacefully coexist with any non-white people, but I am a “black nationalist”, in that I believe that on the whole black people cannot coexist with non-black people. (Again, I’m talking in society-scale terms, and not about specific individuals, many of whom do not fit this pattern.)
Do you think this is an immovable problem due to genetics or some inherent 'nature', or a cultural one that can be solved over time?
Culture has a genetic substrate. “Cultures” didn’t just fall from the sky and pick different peoples at random. Certain cultural “technologies” can be spread in a coordinated way, and thus produce changes in the way that certain peoples live, and this can even sometimes produce changes that get people to reliably work against their own genetic proclivities, but this is a messy process that fails more often than it succeeds.
The best we can usually hope for is some sort of “synthesis”, where a people commits to adopting as many parts of a foreign culture as they can and then they morph the incompatible parts of that culture into something that works for who they are as a people. This is the story of Christianity in northwestern Europe. I could point to East Asian countries’ adoption of a syncretic, non-individualist and non-“liberty”-oriented form of liberal democracy as well.
I’m not ready to say that ADOS blacks are totally incapable of adopting any sort of syncretic, attenuated form of first-world civilization. That’s the way it looks to me right now, but maybe “in the fullness of time” that prediction won’t bear out.
What matters to me is how things are right now and the manifestly evident failure of the massive society-wide attempt - AKA the “Civil Rights Movement” that you seem to love so much, which was actually just a Trojan Horse for race communism - to bring blacks up to our level. If blacks are going to make it, they’re just going to have to make it on their own. Non-blacks simply cannot be held responsible for making that happen anymore.
Hah, I just used it as an example of how change can happen without political violence. Of course there were some pretty serious race riots, but to me that's very different than violence specifically against political figures. I find the latter far worse, even though it may be more fair in some sense.
I mean I don't think we're that far off in terms of how we view this situation. The Civil Rights Movement was a great and understandable idea at the time. I think that most clear-thinking folks at this moment have realized the problem is much more complicated than we thought at first, and we need to go back to the chalkboard and rethink some of our basic assumptions around racial equity.
That being said, I'm optimistic there are gentler, more cultural solutions as opposed to just creating racial ethnostates. We've seen where that path leads, and it's not a good one.
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