ＲＥＶＯＬＵＴＩＯＮ ＩＳ ＯＶＥＲＲＡＴＥＤ
Crypto-Centrist Transhumanist Nationalist.
Type-19 Paramilitary Cyborg. Wanted time criminal. Class A-3 citizen of the North American Union. Opposed to the Chinese Hyper Mind-Union, the Ultra-Caliphate, Google Defense Network, and the People's Republic of Cascadia. National Separatist, enemy of the World Federation government and its unificationist allies.
Blogs Topics: Cyberpunk Nationalism. Futurist Shtposting. Timeline Vandalism. Harassing owls over the Internet.
Use whichever typical gender pronouns you like.
Not all content will have sufficient warning tags.
look I don’t want to live in a world where lots of people are roaming around looking to start fights with people who disagree on which batshit crazy political ideology they should implement, and I think you would too.
I’m annoyed at the liberals spamming “punch nazi” memes, but it’s reassuring to know that basically all of it is just posturing and signalling, and that most of them can’t be bothered to get off their asses to do the very things they advocate.
in? what? world? could? u? be? possibly? living? in? where? nazis? getting? attacked? isnt? something? to? cheer? for? ??? you act like this wasnt a known neo nazi that questions if jewish people are people and if black peoples “are neccessary” like lmao how about instead trying to act above violence you complain about the people calling for mass murder and genocide like??? messy messy messy
you complain about the people calling for mass murder and genocide like
Tankies call for mass murder and genocide literally non-stop and unironically, yet they are on the other side of the fist for some reason. But they should not be. ///
That’s right, comrade. Anyone our enemies salute is also our enemy. There is no danger in this, since despite being evil, manipulative, and duplicitous, our enemies would never salute someone in an attempt to control where our violence is directed, and none of our followers would ever do something like beat up a woman for wearing a spanish flag braclet. And if they did, well, she was a fascist, since good people like us only ever punch fascists, by definition.
There is totally a missing mood around Nazi punching. It’s not “I hate this, but punching them really seems to be the best option right now, so I’m gonna go punch a Nazi and then probably feel guilty even though I think it was right”. It’s “punching Nazis, fuck yeah. Nazis are bad, it’s great to punch them. While we’re at it, let’s punch people who support Nazi free speech rights. Surplus to human requirements! Nazis are bad! Punch punch punch!”
So yeah, it really doesn’t sound like you’ve done a cost-benefit analysis, and put “a person gets hurt” as a negative that gets outweighed by the positives. It certainly doesn’t sound like you’ve done that taking into account the possibility of motivated cognition and the dangers of normalizing violence. What it sounds like is you just want to punch Nazis.
That’s understandable, but you don’t get to punch people just because you want to.
look I don’t want to live in a world where lots of people are roaming around looking to start fights with people who disagree on which batshit crazy political ideology they should implement, and I think you would too.
I’m annoyed at the liberals spamming “punch nazi” memes, but it’s reassuring to know that basically all of it is just posturing and signalling, and that most of them can’t be bothered to get off their asses to do the very things they advocate.
in? what? world? could? u? be? possibly? living? in? where? nazis? getting? attacked? isnt? something? to? cheer? for? ??? you act like this wasnt a known neo nazi that questions if jewish people are people and if black peoples “are neccessary” like lmao how about instead trying to act above violence you complain about the people calling for mass murder and genocide like??? messy messy messy
you complain about the people calling for mass murder and genocide like
Tankies call for mass murder and genocide literally non-stop and unironically, yet they are on the other side of the fist for some reason. But they should not be. ///
i support them doing that tbh a fascist is a fascist, one should not and i mean never tolerate intolerance that bitch wants the government to control every aspect of peoples loves yeah she and anyone like her should be killed simple as that, theres no arguing their stupidity only crushing it
“you people” who people??? pretty easy to tell whos a bigot when they down talk someone else for race or talk up their own as some sort of master race like??? no, its not hard to see whos arrogant and punishment of who is arrogant is more than good, also any liberals who wanna defend bigots on the basis of free speech can feel free to join the pile of bigoted garbage
That is right, comrade. Anyone who questions our use of political violence is our enemy, and we must inflict political violence on them until the work camps swell with their numbers for the good of Communism. Only those who have already always ever agreed with us and those who are silent out of fear have virtue.
There is no possible way that expanding this sentiment of violence might have terrible consequences and get our regime labelled as one of history’s great monsters - after all, we are good Communists, and by definition, all monsters are counter-revolutionaries in disguise, right?
To be sure, but we have to decide whether we think those tactics are just strategically ineffective, or actually ethically wrong. If you try to say “both”, then you’re going to face some hard choices on the day it looks like a nasty tactic can get you a victory (and that day always comes.)
Well, there is not only a question of effectiveness and morality, but there is also a question of trust.
Brutal tactics can backfire, but they can also work. And there are times and places that even I might be willing to engage in those tactics.
But those tactics are costly, and there is far too much temptation to use them in situations where it is not warranted - in part because political ideologies thrive on a siege mentality and treating themselves as the underdog, even when they are actually quite popular or are even in the middle of going Full Overdog and bulldozing everything and everyone in their path.
A lot of actual, literal Nazis had to be shot during the second World War to put an end to the Nazi regime. Since the alternatives were worse, I would say it was correct - and perhaps even praiseworthy - to do so.
However, lots of people have been tricked into killing and dying for terrible political ideologies over the years, so my bar for when to use these sorts of tactics is a lot higher. And, here’s the trust part - I don’t trust the kinds of people who are hyped about this latest punching incident to keep that bar high. And ironically, exactly the sorts of people who are saying “hey, wait a minute” instead of cheering are the people I would trust more on when to initiate political violence.
If we could actually have a nice clear line at “it’s okay to punch people who openly call for genocide or certain genocide”, that might be okay. But let’s be realistic. That isn’t going to happen. Politicals will deliberately blur the boundaries in order to be allowed to punch people they want to punch. They already distort definitions of words like “violence” and “racism” for their own ends. There is no reason to believe they would stop. …and then the counter-punching would begin.
Thus I’m stuck opposing punching Nazis even though under other circumstances I might permit it.
I’m not the biggest anarchist either, but anarchism is really important for the same reason libertarianism is: you need people constantly questioning “do we really need this regulation?” and nitpicking everything you do or you just cede a bunch of power to the state for no reason and won’t get it back.
Oh, I came around to a view not so different from that one a few years ago. The vast majority of states are not so… let’s call it “technocratic” as to say “let us regularly prune regulations that are ineffective and put mandatory sunset provisions into all of our laws”. Nor, for that matter, is the typical government as careful as it should be about making laws in the first place. And quite frankly, the typical voter isn’t going to make them behave like that. So it’s useful to have Anarchists and Libertarians around.
I just still don’t like Anarchism, even if it’s useful. Of course, you won’t see me calling for punching, firing, doxxing, etc Anarchists. Sometimes you might see me argue with them on the Internet.
I said I’d talk about politics less, but I feel like I do need to get this out of my system.
There’s an idea going around both on my dash, and people I know in person, that the behavior of people on the left is what caused Trump to be elected. Different groups get the blame, whether it is rich white liberals in Silicon Valley, DC, and Hollywood, the campus left, black lives matter, internet SJWs and feminists, mainstream media journalists, late night comedians, or some combination of these, the theory goes that Trump was essentially a white working class middle finger to the condescension, radicalism, and disrespect toward traditional values of members of these various left-wing groups. People who put forward this theory say that to win back Trump voters, the left needs to be kinder, more compassionate, and less radical toward white working class (WWC) culture, values, and way of life. The claim is that if only the left were nicer to WWC people and respected their way of life more, Trump would have never even won a Republican primary, let alone an electoral college majority.
Now, leaving aside whether it would be personally moral and virtuous to be more compassionate and less radical toward the WWC (probably to at least some extent), I want to raise doubts about whether this perspective is actually useful for winning elections and defeating Trumpism.
No doubt many WWC people, and those sympathetic to them, feel condescended to, disrespected, and that their way of life is under attack by the left. There is also no doubt that there have been individuals and groups on the left that have been openly hostile to the WWC way of life, where “white male” is an insult, conservative Christians are publicly degraded and mocked, performative flag-waving nationalism is seen as not just gauche but stupid and hick-ish, and where white rural people are assumed to be personally racist and homophobic.
But, all political movements are going to have their assholes who degrade the other side and openly disrespect them. It’s easy to miss when you largely live in left-wing bubbles online and off, which I imagine is true of most people on my dash, and is certainly true of me, but the right has their own version of this, and it’s popular. There’s a post going around my dash about a condescending line in a Meryl Streep speech, and how this is an example of liberal condescension that created Trump, but I guarantee you that more people listen to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity on the radio every day than saw that Meryl Streep speech. And Limbaugh and Hannity on an almost daily basis disrespect, mock, and condescend to liberal constituencies, values, and ways of life. And guess what, Republicans still won.
People like Limbaugh and Hannity, not to mention Fox News and Breitbart, make their money by inflaming a sense of grievance and resentment of the left among the disproportionately rural, older, religious, and WWC Republican base. These outlets have far more political reach and power than random SJW blogs, the campus left, black lives matter, actors or tech billionaires giving speeches, or even late night comedians.
In the educated liberal bubbles that I and many people in my online and offline circles reside in, the reverse can seem true. It can seem like left-wing culture is omnipresent and the right is completely stifled by blacks lives matter, SJWs, and late night comedians. But in other circles, which comprise nearly half the country, the reverse is true.
In many ways, the left is already on net more compassionate to the WWC than the right is to left-wing constituencies. There were countless articles in left-wing outlets talking to Trump voters in order to understand and sympathize with Trump voters. I don’t think I’ve ever once seen an article in a right-wing outlet that went to Harlem, San Francisco, or Ann Arbor, trying to compassionately understand the motivations and lifestyle of people on the other side from their point of view.
So the idea that the left must hold itself to an even higher standard on compassion and than the right to win elections seems implausible to me (again, leaving aside whether holding ourselves to a higher standard would be more virtuous and moral).
Even if the left was nicer to the WWC, I don’t see that changing vote patterns, or making the WWC feel any less resentful and under attack. Suppose 90% of the left-wing people who are being blamed for the rise of Trumpism became nicer. The Limbaughs and Hannitys and Breitbarts of the world, and the millions who follow them, wouldn’t take a step back and say “you know, maybe the left doesn’t hate me or my way of life”. No. They would continue to cherry pick the worst examples, as they already do, from a smaller set of mean liberals in order to inflame cultural resentment and grievance among their followers, and they would also continue to see things that I think aren’t mean and are true that the left says, like that black people have a rougher relationship with the police than other groups, as offensive and attacking their dignity and way of life.
I’m not saying there’s no way to convince some of these people over to the left. But, pointing the finger at the meaner (and numerically smaller) strains of the left and thinking that if only for them being condescending and disrespectful we would be in a golden age of liberal dominance in politics doesn’t strike me as true or productive.
So I get your frustration, and a lot of what you say is correct. It’s far too tempting to say “Hey leftists-who-disagree-with-me, YOU’RE the reason our enemy won!” without sufficient proof. That’s just opportunism.
And we should treat the WWC (and all of the WC) in this country with compassion, and we should help their material needs, regardless of whether it wins us elections. Trying to come up with political justifications for basic human decency is a bit creepy.
(Plus, not to mention a Far Right resurgence is occurring across the entire developed world. It seems very petty to blame that on a few annoying American liberals. There are deeper trends here.)
I feel you here.
However, there is some countervailing evidence here.
1. If we’re not being condescending to them, we should listen to what our enemies are saying. And in between accusations of corruption and defending the free market, Republican voters seem really, really upset about Political Correctness. Obsessed with it, and explicitly saying they support idiots like Trump just to defy Political Correctness.
You can dismiss what they say and come up with other reasons they voted the way they did (they just want to be racist, or economic anxiety) but then that is being patronizing because you aren’t really listening anymore. If you listen, Political Correctness is a huge deal to them, and teasing out the source of that sounds like a worthwhile endeavor.
2. A lot of this is just projection from some left-of-center allies about the illiberal tactics used by establishment social justice, such as extreme arrogance, dismissiveness, shallow analysis, using institutional power to punish dissenters, and a bunch of other mindkilling, groupthink tactics. Said allies (or, former allies) really hated those tactics, and so rejoice in blaming them for the defeat of the mainstream SJ candidate.
Projection is not a good source of analysis of course, and so they might be wrong that this really caused Trump’s victory. But said establishment really should pay attention to how many enemies it has, even “on its own side.” Their tactics are really ticking off their friends, causing dissension every step away. SJ can try to ignore this dissent and pain as long as they wield the hammer, but don’t be surprised when their enemies leap at any weakness as a chance to earn some rhetorical points.
Social justice has enraged and alienated conservatives, libertarians, moderates, socialists, communists, and artsy anarchists. At some point it will have no friends left except the business-friendly / socially liberal wing of a city-based party.
3. Something happened between 2012 and 2016. There’s some reason Republicans started really getting into unbridled rudeness and race-baiting. You can’t even wholly blame Trump for finally opening the floodgates, he tried in 2012. What the hell happened to make voters so much more racist, or at least racist-tolerant? It’s not like there are a lot more immigrants around or other normal causes of racial strife (let alone to explain the tolerance of crude sexual behavior.)
And to the unaided eye, one of the real changes of the past 4 years was the political visibility of intolerant liberalism. So it’s at least worth considering “the thing that changed in the last 4 years, is somewhat responsible for the rather different outcome this time around.”
Regarding #1: If a 100% black company is okay, but a 100% white company “isn’t diverse enough”, this implies whites are inherently worth less than PoC. If women have equal beneficial capabilities to men, but men are uniquely violent and oppressive, this implies women are better than men.
I think people can feel this even if they don’t consciously realize it.
Also, as one of those alienated types, those tactics you mention make SJ a liability to me in many ways.
if you try to do both, don’t be surprised if everyone else is suddenly very interested in protecting even literal nazis from punchings, because you’ve shown an inability to distinguish the two
if you ask me, this is America
the country of Indiana Jones, Captain America, etc.
this is not the USSR
this is not the country where we label everyone we disagree with as fascists
if you want to do that, go back to Russia, comrade
There is actually a very consistent heuristic for punchings which would avoid the aforementioned issue. It should be perfectly possible to punch Spencer without justifying the punchings of people who aren’t like Spencer.
(This section used to contain information that seemed superficially true but has been corrected by insider knowledge; Spencer actually fired the guy who wrote the genocide posts in question but this information was not easily available on common sources. I apologize for the misinformation that happened. Spencer is a shithead who heils Trump but he did fire the guy who was even worse.)
So, if you do not entertain totalitarian notions of ethnic cleansing etc., you shouldn’t have to be worried that a heuristic that leads to Spencer being punched would be a threat to yourself. It is totally possible to have the rule that only people advocating ethnic cleansing (Spencer claims he wants “non-violent” ethnic cleansing which is a fucking joke; there is no non-violence in ethnic cleansing, the only question is how horrible the violence one will inflict in the process is), tyranny, democide etc. and actively politically working for it get punched.
So why the fuck are people afraid that punching Spencer means they too might get punched? I blame the tankies. No, really.
You see, if we had a consistent heuristic that (only) advocating tyranny and democide is what gets you the punchings, tankies would be on the wrong side of the fist as far as their preferences are concerned. Tankies don’t want this kind of consistency, so they will go to whatever lengths it takes to undermine the consistent attitude that democidal tyranny is the only thing that gets the punchings, and instead replace it with tribal bullshit.
And our broader culture and discourse are way more influenced by tankies than one would naively expect.
For example, Angela Davis, retired University of California professor and honorary co-chair of the Women’s March a couple of days ago, liked tankie-ism so much she got her doctorate in East Germany, and provided the guns people were killed with in the Marin County courthouse incident.
And here is Davis shaking hands with Erich Honecker, the leader of the tankie dictatorship of the GDR:
Apparently the principle of the progressive cultural elite no-platforming evil people only applies to right-wing evil people.
For comparison, let’s suppose some conservative professor were pals with B.J. Vorster, got his doctorate from the RSA because he liked apartheid so much, and was involved in supplying guns for a Klan shootout? What would it do to his career? The BDS people are adamant that anyone dealing with Israel is Bad, but how many people deal with Israel specifically because they like its treatment of Palestineans so much, and not just because it’s a first-world country with a lot of high-tech industry and good infrastructure etc.?
To say that I smell a bit of hypocrisy here would trivialize the traumas of those whose respiratory organs were devastated by chemical weapons.
And I don’t even mean to disparage prof. Davis’ work on the evils of the prison-industrial complex. Shocking as it might be, even people who have supported utterly evil things may be right sometimes. I’m not even trying to unfairly single her out because she’s only one example of the entrenched tankie corruption festering in the halls of left-wing power.
But it is clear that any sort of principled opposition to evil would require a massive purge in the progressive cultural elite, so naturally they will never support it. So instead the question of punching Richard Spencer gets turned into a tribal battle as the tankies try to justify punching anyone they don’t like and everyone else sees that and reacts in the only rational way.
On the other hand…
The super-structures that the marxist would typically speak entirely in terms of are ultimately simplistic macroscopic abstractions floating above a far more complicated and dynamic reality. The marxist loves to talk in terms of classes, the anarchist prioritizes talking in terms of interpersonal relationships and interactions.
Social justice has — on the whole — thus become in many regards a rather pragmatic attempt to hash out an etiquette or legal system (albeit a decentralized one largely enforced through reputation rather than state violence). This is an undertaking quite different from ethics. Indeed the biggest advantage and disadvantage of social justice is that it seeks to be as motivation-independent as it can be. It doesn’t attempt to establish why one should be for example opposed to misogyny. It either takes for granted that its audience already shares the same values (naturally causing some confusion from slight differences in these assumed values), or it seeks to arrange a sociocultural state of affairs independent of people’s underlying values. “Who cares what people actually believe, let’s find ways of browbeating them into at least acting decently.”
One can see why, as with marxism, most anarchists find the mainstream of social justice profoundly incomplete and insufficiently audacious. It often gives up before going deeper into challenging all power relations in and of themselves, settling instead for an incomplete intersectionality, and it shies away from the far more fractious problems of figuring out what we really value or should value, much less speaking explicitly of such values and their tensions. Of course the failure mode of some teens browbeating people over inane otherkin-style shit is a hell of a lot better than the marxist failure mode of The People’s Cops actually physically beating people.
Similarly there’s a temptation to see anarchist nuance and absolutism as frustratingly unpragmatic. There are big enemies doing a lot of damage that need to be knocked down and dithering trying to add complexities to our picture or speak in terms of distant and even more idealistic aspirations can understandably seem like a bunch of sabotague and backstabbing. When there’s a goal practically right in front of your nose you don’t want to hear some buzzkill well-actually anarchist telling you that’s not the ultimate goal and that the shortcut you want to take risks endangering their grander aspirations. Fuck their preposterously grand ambitions of a world without relations of control, you just want fucking bread. The picture you have, both of the world and your desires within it, are just common sense. Why dirty that up? Why undermine it?
Marxism and social justice largely look at the radicalism of anarchism with suspicion, seeing it as the kind of “reductionism” so accursed in the humanities. As something that either gets in the way of common sense or dissolves it entirely into useless and masturbatory intellectual rabbit holes. (“Oh so we’re supposed to care about individuals ultimately, I suppose that means ignoring systematic injustice and prioritizing every white dude with hurt feels cuz someone yelled at him.”) The proper notion of radicalism/reductionism — as something that compliments a realization of broad patterns and ultimately provides additional useful perspectives without undermining all capacity to prioritize — is alien to them.
Similarly the marxist (and the more vulgar social justice advocates) develop a kind of laser focus on some specific categories or forms of domination, often completely unequipped or unwilling to address more nuanced or complicated situations. Indeed just as marxist organizations have become particularly infamous among the activist left for tolerating and protecting abusers and rapists in their leadership, everyone is aware of circles of social justice where horrific interpersonal abuse is given a pass or becomes clouded and impossible to speak cleanly of because the perpetrators behavior isn’t easily definable along traditional dimensions of heteropatriarchal and white supremacist categories. The now quite old joke “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face while shouting ‘but this isn’t Formal Oppression!’ forever” reveals just how insufficient the “practical” lens can be. Aligning yourself against the currently most prominent expressions of power and domination does not equate preparing yourself to resist new or more local and particular instantiations of power, which can be all the more insidious or silencing for their relatively uniqueness or rarity.
While there’s no doubt often immense utility to the practical, the stakes in this world are too high to sit back and take things for granted. (…) [H]istory shows that oversimplifications into neat rhetorical frameworks have their own long-lasting momentum. People come to associate not with their original ethical motivations (if they even notice them) but merely in terms of the affiliations and strategies that once derived from such. The crude macroscopic patterns or tendencies that may well be correctly identified eventually get detached from their underlying roots. Those self-identified as underdogs remain stubbornly self-identified underdogs even when they come to rule regimes that slaughter millions, set up gulags, or occupy Palestine.
The radicalism of anarchism is what has left it fairly distinct among ideologies and mass movements, with no instances of mass murder in its name. It’s hard to stray too far, to ever let inertia and some “common sense” lead you down the road of slaughter and tyranny, when your philosophy grounds itself so directly in ethics, highlights it in every way and never lets you detach from your ultimate values. Many passingly claim to be champions of liberty, but anarchism demands of every action, every plan, does this liberate? Could this be more coherent with liberty? And if there are necessary tradeoffs how exactly do they work? Can they be improved? Are there better ways?
To reach a moment where we sit back, entirely satisfied, would be to abandon anarchism. To the radical there is no litmus for “due diligence”, no final finish line, no moment where we pat ourselves on the back. The vigilance of the radical is never satiated.
Anyone who claims anarchists are or should be friends with tankies is lying and has a gulag to sell you.
The Status451 article on the book ‘Days of Rage’ is extremely interesting and important. Read it. If you wonder what the right-wingers got from UR, read this one instead because it contains the good parts of Moldbug without the bad parts of Moldbug. If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about, read the article so you’ll know.
TL;DR: tankies are way more influential than most people ever realize.
It’s also not an accident that within the article itself, marxism is named 2 times, communism 8 times, maoism 3 times, and even stalinism once, but anarchism exactly zero times.
Tankies and nazis want political violence where the nuances of reality get collapsed into a simplistic “us vs. them” frontline. Fuck that noise.
Bring back the Iron Front. Show people that one can be against nazis and tankies simultaneously. Show people that they have options beyond the bullshit quagmire. Queer the “with us or against us” binary.
This is America. We don’t punch someone who voted for Trump because they are afraid that a college professor promoting “white genocide” is actually serious (a fear which, when considering the stuff rich progressive cryptotankies have been all too happy to write endless apologetics for, is far less unreasonable than rich well-educated C-tribers might realize). We don’t punch nonviolent people who have shitty opinions if they aren’t involved in actively trying to impose their opinions into violent reality. We don’t even punch people who indent with tabs instead of spaces. And if we are to punch Richard Spencer, consistency demands that we shall recognize that with the same logic it’s perfectly okay to punch the tankie leaders too.
Not a fan of Anarchism, but yeah, basically. And yeah, thr Anarchists get more standing to talk about this than the tankies, since they don’t have the same historical record.
It’s honestly so fucked up that I have to worry in leftist spaces that talking about rehabilitative justice will lose me friends.
In 2010 I took a class called Terrorism in the Modern World, which was one of the best classes I’ve ever taken. We learned all about the causes and cyclical effects of terrorism, about why people get seduced by dangerous worldviews, about how we cannot possibly offer more than palliative solutions until we reckon with the task of trying to understand them. About how futile America’s endless escalations have been. It was awesome.
The following year, when Osama bin Laden was killed, all my liberal friends joined me in reminding the world that he might have done terrible evil, but he was still a human being. We huddled together to grin smugly about how much more empathetic we were than those evil hawkish conservatives. Not that I endorse that, but we were 18. Point is, at the time we construed liberalism, and leftism more broadly, as an explicit rejection of the vengeful, punitive ethic that was blanketing our world. And I know we were not alone in that. Liberals around me talked about prison reform, about transitions from criminal dysfunction back to a productive life, about reaching out to the people who were hardest to reach. I was, at that time, proud to call myself a bleeding-heart liberal.
And now I’m seeing them, the very same leftists who joined me in calling for empathy with our enemies, posting endless diatribes against those they deem too far gone for any kind of understanding. The same people who stood up in a sea of patriotic zeal and reminded us that terrorists were real human beings with motivations beyond mustache-twirling villainy are the people I see calling Trump supporters garbage, calling them worthless, calling any attempt to understand them “collusion with the oppressor”. I’m over here advocating the same exact outreach I’ve advocated all my life, the same outreach you once praised me for, but now because it’s your pet enemy I’m evil and weak and awful for it.
These were once my people, and now I don’t recognize them. I’m horrified to see them acting exactly like post-9/11 nationalist zealots, dismissing any attempt at understanding or empathy as spineless, as cowardly, as oppressive. You think I haven’t heard this all before? I’ve heard it all my life. I was a child when 9/11 happened. I don’t remember a United States not at war in the Middle East. My whole life I’ve been a pacifist, raised by pacifist parents in a pacifist community, and my whole life I’ve heard that trying to understand and reach out to your enemy instead of fucking annihilating them was weak and cowardly and siding with the terrorists. The difference is that I once had the left on my side.
Your principles do not cease to apply when it’s your pet enemy on the chopping block. Believe it or not, people who got cruel and hawkish in the face of terrorism were exactly as scared and powerless-feeling as you are now. They weren’t spouting martial rhetoric out of pure evil - there was real fear there, but they let it make them into hateful people with no sense of empathy or common humanity. Like hell I’m going to let that happen to people I once called mine.
The thing is that the Left has always been like this. It was the Left who perpetrated Communism in its worst incarnations, after all.
…not that I want to rag on Communism too much, since I already criticize it often enough. It’s just that the sentiment of having a bloody revolution, crushing dissent, and purging all who don’t fit with the vision is something that has historical precedent on the Left just like it does on the Right.
I think most intellectual property is arguably good, in the sense that you could make a good argument for them being useful and I wouldn’t dismiss them out of hand.
The one kind that I think is definitely good and useful is trade marks, because brand recognition has huge economic efficiency boosts.
However, if you’re asking “Which type of intellectual property should the law definitely protect?”, this is probably the weakest area, because the law is already 100% unnecessary for it, because cryptography.
We can sign things with public keys now to prove beyond a doubt that they came from the right person. Verifying such signatures is now cheap. All you need now is to start cryptographically signing labels by having tiny QR codes you scan with your cellphone. And then, boom: No more counterfeiting at the consumer-level.
(Mimics of status goods will still exist, though, because it’ll be rude to scan your guest’s dress at a party to make sure it really cost them $2000. But, like, fuck status goods.)
Many if not most people would just pirate movies in that case, removing the money required to make the big ones or switching us back to a patronage system.
