“banning Muslim immigration will only increase terrorism!”
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such an outburst.
it’s literally “the terrorism will continue until immigration improves”
Consider what it says about Muslims. It isn’t good. It only reinforces the Conservative viewpoint, much like some of the reaction to Charlie Hebdo did.
What neither side of US politics wants to admit: the promotion of identity politics combined with the declining white super majority has led to turbo charged white identity politics. Since Dems catered for non-white identity politics, Trump and the GOP took hold of white identity politics.
Most countries that do not have a 70%+ super majority ethnic group have ethnicized
electoral politics.
Yes, my fear is that Lee Kuan Yew is right.
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.
Anonymous asked:
sinesalvatorem answered:
Leukemia is not actually a good thing, anon. If your blood is over-saturated with white cells then please seek medical assistance.
I just saw an article last week suggesting that using identity politics in the US was a bad plan because the majority can practice identity politics, too, and the definition of “white” has expanded in the past.
I’m pretty hyped. What exciting new races or ethnic groups will be considered “white” in the future? Could Asian-Latin fusion cuisine become the next official white people food? When will they be issued their official White Man™ polo shirts?
I actually suspect that the switch to identity politics over class politics may have been based on a growing ineffectiveness of class politics.
“BUT THE POOR!” lost ground as more cached arguments were built up against it, even if it wasn’t entirely justified.
“BUT RACISM!” still had a lot of bite and could circumvent some of those cached arguments. So, it’s natural to shift to it and build the platform around it.
It had a lot of bite, anyway.
There was always the focus on what was morally right, even in the minds of people who claimed they didn’t believe in morality, over what was effective policy, so now we get a lot of talk about guilt, or about pie in the sky ideas of “dismantling the systems of X oppression requires dismantling capitalism” (and people remember how “we need to dismantle capitalism” went last time), and not so much about “we should distribute multivitamins to the poor.”
I mean, that does sometimes get through, but the zeitgeist doesn’t seem to care about it as much as it cares about language policing and thinks that beneficial policies will just naturally unfold once everyone acknowledges their sin.
“banning Muslim immigration will only increase terrorism!”
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such an outburst.
it’s literally “the terrorism will continue until immigration improves”
Consider what it says about Muslims. It isn’t good. It only reinforces the Conservative viewpoint, much like some of the reaction to Charlie Hebdo did.
I’m not convinced that it says something about Muslims that similar circumstances wouldn’t say about other groups. (Having conveniently used the term “similar circumstances” in such a way that I’m not sure that similar circumstances exist for any other group, rendering my claim suspiciously difficult to disprove). It seems to just say that this course of action will have the effect of non-negligibly increasing the very small proportion of Muslims who think that All Americans Deserve to Die, on account of this being a course of action that will likely (and not with maximal inaccuracy) paint us as Bad People who Must Be Destroyed.
What I mean is what it says about left-wing opinion of them. “Oh those poor Muslims, they’re so easy to rouse to violence. They can’t help it, so be nice to them!” It’s a form of special treatment that would not have been given to other religions, and it isn’t a form of respect.
But of course, the Left already doesn’t want real cultural diversity on this matter. They don’t want, for example, the Jizya. They want a watered-down version of the religion that is compatible with Western Secularism.
the politics of any country would be vastly improved if politicians were forced to commit seppuku in shame when they fuck up
The politics of any country would be greatly improved if the politicians had such a sense of shame when they fucked up that they committed seppuku on their own.
But if they had shame, would they still be politicians?
Seriously, try and imagine what Freud would say while reading your politics blog
Kinda makes you wanna take a shower
Me, watching as Freud grinds up and snorts my politics blog: Uh, dude, are you sure you want to do that?
Freud: *experiences seizure* the future is already here the future is already here the future is already here
Hell, why don’t we re-enact Sherman’s march and raze the US south, the southern US is full of shitty people with shitty politics. Maybe burn down all Mormon churches and compounds, they got both nasty shit going on and nasty politics.
I get you wanna piss your fuckin pants because it’s those dirty furriners doing those dirty furriner crimes, but horrible shit didn’t start with immigration and it won’t end when it’s cut off.
Things being bad is not a reason to make them worse. (This part of the problem with arguments about alcohol/drugs, too.)
We have no obligation to import these people. We do not have an obligation to import people that will make the country worse. We don’t have an obligation to tolerate criminal acts favored by their cultures, or tear our national social cohesion to shreds to tolerate those acts.
So some fringe groups of Mormons are still polygamists and practice shady things with young brides and that sort of thing. Oh look, Westerners doing a bad thing. Better import enough people that have similar practices so that it becomes normalized and gains political power! That’ll sure improve things! Yay justice!
but horrible shit didn’t start with immigration and it won’t end when it’s cut off.
How much FGM was happening in the US before it was imported? It won’t stop now if immigration is shut off only because we won’t literally kick all those who practice it out of the country.
Kicking out only individuals who are actually convicted of it is the individualist approach. And it makes sense. The preconditions for citizenship included not bringing foreign criminal/terrorist activity to this country. Those preconditions were violated.
In light of that, how does removing citizenship not make sense?
And I don’t really think the problem we have is “We don’t execute criminals grotesquely enough.“ I think there’s a reason why we don’t do that sort of thing anymore. If you wanted to heighten investigation, that could make sense, but public executions don’t really help anyone.
It apparently cost $500,000 to prosecute three guys, and the number of crimes committed is far worse.
However, “diversity” ideology covered up that the crimes were even happening in the first place. Admitting that some cultures practice this bullsht more than others was “racist”. I mean it’s just economics, right? Cultural differences beyond food aren’t real, right?
What is your plan to force assimilation on this issue?
Maybe we don’t have to publicly execute them. Maybe we can just ordinarily execute them and make sure it gets in the news where their buddies we read it.
Maybe I don’t even want to go that far. Maybe I just want to throw the Overton Window far enough to the right that Cultural Antirealism will die and Left/Libs will at least start admitting that there is a problem and we can get a gentler solution that actually works.
Jon Stewart, John Oliver…mostly enact the pure arrogance of the liberal intellectual elite: “Parodying Trump is at best a distraction from his real politics; at worst it converts the whole of politics into a gag. The process has nothing to do with the performers or the writers or their choices. Trump built his candidacy on performing as a comic heel—that has been his pop culture persona for decades. It is simply not possible to parody effectively a man who is a conscious self-parody, and who has become president of the United States on the basis of that performance.”
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.
