Oceans Yet to Burn

collapsedsquid

ranma-official

Socialist countries have a really bad track record of human rights abuses and a strange set of failings that are either specific to them or unusually prominent compared to the general zeitgeist, so you can draw decent conclusions like “don’t break systems a lot of people depend on, just cuz” and “freedom of press is actually really important” and “science shouldn’t be controlled by the state’s ideology ever”

instead people realize that Marx was wrong about something and the Soviet Union killed people and then go become tankies but for capitalism

isaacsapphire

I guess the real question is, “is it possible to avoid these known horrible bugs in Communism/socialism, or is it time to go look for something else and try to make that work?”

The vast majority of Communists I’ve encountered in person or online don’t seem to be trying to avoid the known problems. They either ignore/don’t know/pretend to not know about the historical issues, or they consider eg. genocide a feature rather than a bug.

discoursedrome

Yeah the communists I know mostly just roll their eyes at this sort of objection, and, like, okay, I get that they’re tired of fielding criticisms of that sort, but it’s not like they have really solid retorts that anyone who cares to know can easily look up. If their goal is just to wait for widespread revolutionary class consciousness to develop naturally and then assume it will all work out, I dunno guys.

Even on a maximally optimistic timeline we’re something like 30 years out from the kind of mass socialist movement that existed at the fin de siècle, so if they’re serious about this then proselytism is crucial, and they’re not going to get very far with that unless they can convince people that the widespread suspicions toward communism aren’t likely to apply to their movement. Unless they’re just trying to use the threat of communist revolution as a bludgeon to extract short-term incremental concessions from the ruling class, in which case more power to them I guess.

bambamramfan

Far leftists often get made fun of for obsessing about arcane details of ideology, having schisms over potential policy long before they ever conceivably might get actual power.

Far leftists also have to contend with a history of bad institutional and policy decisions leading to the death of millions and autocratic government.

I like to think the first is a result of the second.

collapsedsquid

I think that problem with that idea is that the schisming came before the gaining of power. There’s a good case to make that the causality is (partially) reversed there.

mitigatedchaos

Agree. Far Leftist/Communist arguments, from what I see of them, don’t appear to be about technocratic differences, but more about moral ones.

It would be interesting to see them argue like economists over specific detailed alternative societal models, and probably more beneficial since they might run more tests of them.

Political factions in general also appear to lack the idea of running competing tests in order to assess their effectiveness. Sadly that might be an artifact of gaining power.

Source: ranma-official politics

nuclearspaceheater

bloodandhedonism:
“ concentrated-sunshine:
“ reperspectivity:
“ alaija:
“ reperspectivity:
“ celticpyro:
“ equestrianrepublican:
“ pietycrane:
“ the stupid burns pls help
”
Where to begin.
>sweden
>calling something racist against a...

politics

argumate

morecrows.wordpress.com

Unnecessariat

I remember AIDS. I’m older than you probably think I am, and I remember what AIDS in America meant in the eighties, when William F. Buckley suggested all “carriers” be tattooed, a…

argumate

If I still don’t have your attention, consider this: county by county, where life expectancy is dropping survivors are voting for Trump.

very relevant

gattsuru

(cw: suicide, drug overdose, Trump, comparisons of things that aren’t like the AIDS crisis to the AIDS crisis.)

This is interesting, but it shies away from a lot of overt revelations.

The author had to lump together various types of death to make the comparison to the AIDS crisis work, but it kinda occludes a serious issue. There is a surprising increase in white (and Native American/Alaskan) suicide rates, but it’s not the cause of that terrifying map atop this post. A 40% increase in suicide rates makes up 6.4 deaths per 100,000 people, but at most that’d drop the red areas to a mere yellow. Suicide’s always been a rural issue, and we’ve had jumps in recessions before. By contrast, the increase in drug-related overdoses looks like this. Some of the more vulnerable populations had 30 death per 100,000 capita increases in drug and alcohol-related deaths (Case-Deaton 2016).

The other is the definition of “unnecessariat”. Scott Alexander tries to discuss this in terms of the (low) unemployment rate, but between SSDI and the nature of the term, that metric’s essential been consumed by Goodhart’s law. Labour force participation is the central focus, and it’s down significantly in these states. West Virginia notably under 50% of adults, and worse in some counties! But that’s been a long, slow decline for quite some time, and indeed if you look both the total employment count and total population hasn’t changed much since the 1990s. They’re not completely jobless – but they’re increasingly fractured between those with short-term jobs and those on the disability rolls who can’t take any above-the-table work without losing money in toto. There’s not so clear a delimination between the unnecessariat and precariat, or even the secretariat, as implied here.

This also leads to the awkward issue of mobility. Population growth for West Virginia has been incredibly low for over two decades, sometimes even dipping negative. That’s not because West Virginians have lost appetite for underprotected hetero sex, but because those who can, leave for greener pastures. You get a sort of evaporative cooling, with the remaining population too old or ill to work, with too much capital sunk into houses you couldn’t even get fire insurance on, or tied to those who do. Divorce plays a heavy role, not just because of broken relationships, but also from lawyer and court fees.

((It’s worth pointing out, here, that there’s not a single Great White Ghetto, but multiple, just as Baltimore’s problems are different from Detroit’s are different from Oakland’s. The Rust Belt’s issues have overlap with the Appalachia, and the Appalachia’s with the Plains, but they’ve significant differences that adding all the groups together obscure. Indeed, not all of the Great White Ghetto is even white! The suicide and drug epidemic has struck Native Americans first, and some enclaves through the southern Appalacians are majority-black. Not all of these matters with generalize.))

It’s also worth pointing out the sense of decay that’s universal throughout these areas, like something out of a post-apocalyptic film. That’s most obvious in Detroit, of course, where one driving up i-75 gets a scenic view of a crumbling concrete parking garage, of the sort most Coastals would normally only see when visiting other countries after cautions not to drink the water. But between the amateur eschatology on signboards and Grandpa’s Cheese Barn there’s countless barns falling apart, and an even greater number of houses with ill-patched roofs or long-past-expiration siding. Where things are brand new, it’s often because no one owns them – tractors either date back to the seventies or are controlled by a far-off computer, motels are either rusted and closed or ‘safe’ franchises. Skyscrapers in the midwest won’t even publish their capacity (never high to start with), and remain maintained as much by embarrassment as by popular support.

There’s folk who try to undo this – anyone who’s done their taxes through TurboTax has, unknowingly, contributed to an attempt to revive downtown Detroit – but it just ends up being fancy storefront with no actually homes or businesses inside. Literally: there is a class of construction made to look used without occupants.

((This decay combined with deep-but-few-roots end up with bad economic structural differences: you see alcohol, pepsi, firearms, and trucks used as mediums of exchange and stores of value pretty heavily, and then exchanged for labour or cash during hard times. The lure of the tipped employee comes, at least in part, from having their pay today rather than in a week and a half. But increasing commodity value and decreasing land value and manpower value and even utility of extra manpower makes for a weird barter-environment version of deflation.))

The political aspect is… more complex. There’s a whole lot more to the unnecessariat’s dislike of Sanders than just that he can’t win the primary – a good many of them see promises of free or low-cost as just more ineffective job training, hear ‘clean energy’ as another nail in the coal industry coffin and another business in California, and think of infrastructure investment as another highway overpass on the other side of the state. No one’s going to turn road trips into an American past-time again – the closest we’ve seen are folk that want to replace aircraft with trains – and certainly not enough to make the motel industry viable again.

That article also misses the sense of randomness, of assault under the pressure of unpredictable and maybe unpredictable outsiders. The speeding ticket is definitely part of it – you’ve not seen midwest decay til you see someone break down over a fifty dollar speeding ticket – but it’s really just the shadow. West Virginia’s coal mines didn’t lose production because they tapped out, but because of an intentional domestic coal phaseout and increasing political protest preventing even international shipment. For the midwest plains, the Bundy group started because a single wildlife determination put his business under, and even if most people don’t take it as far as he did, most know or know of someone who’s had to fight outsiders over similar stupid problems. ((And linking to the SLPC as a summary of LaVoy Fininicum is… tasteless, especially given the current investigation in FBI misbehavior.)) It doesn’t help that ‘outsider’ can be someone who married and moved into the county a decade ago, but if you want to understand the distrust, you have to examine that.

argumate

interesting, and sad.

politics

ranma-official

instead people realize that Marx was wrong about something and the Soviet Union killed people and then go become tankies but for capitalism

isaacsapphire

I guess the real question is, “is it possible to avoid these known horrible bugs in Communism/socialism, or is it time to go look for something else and try to make that work?”

ranma-official

It’s certainly possible to try avoiding these bugs, or dramatically improve the current social order, or to try and build some other system entirely, but then/instead you get people like @redbloodedamerica openly celebrating fucked up shit because capitalism is good and cool and therefore bonded labor is good and cool also, hence, tankies but for capitalism.

mitigatedchaos

Anarchists say they’re against it, but I’ve never seen them lay out how they would prevent it from happening except to claim they wouldn’t have a state - but Catalonia had death squads, perhaps not Stalin-tier death squads, but apparently it did have them. I think the way to socialism now, the way to actually convince people, is to stop telling people to embrace a Communist revolution and instead buy up a huge tract of land in a country with a weak central government and demonstrate a real, working, unoppressive, prosperous model.

I don’t actually think they have that model, so I don’t see myself supporting Communism over Boring Welfare Capitalism any time soon.

politics the invisible fist the red hammer the iron hand

manicgothicoctopi-deactivated20

angel-ani

To all y'all liberal kids that are getting icky feelings about punching Nazis and other forms of violent protest:

Voldemort was taken down by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.

Darth Vader was taken down by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.

Jeanine Matthews and the Eurydice faction were taken down by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.

President Snow and the government of Panem were taken down by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.

The Homeworld Gems were stopped from destroying Earth by a left wing anti-fascist group of radicals that used militant violence against the government.

I mean damn. One Piece, Bleach, Ghost in the Shell, we can stretch it and say The Silmarillion, Eragon, The Chronicles of Narnia, Animorphs, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Voltron, I could probably name more if I had time, all this has in common is that the bad dudes with power WILL NOT GIVE THEIR POWER UP. EVER. It had to be TAKEN from them.

If y'all can understand this and relate to fictional characters, why can’t you do this to your fellow humans in real life?? Y'all are supporting the Death Eaters, the Empire, the bad guys you say you hate. Get your priorities in order. Get over that “Non-violence” bullshit.

I never saw Princess Leia shake hands with the Sith.

silvershewolf247

Where’s the picture, one of my followers has to have it. @klubbhead @jetpack-jenny

klubbhead

I’m on mobile dammit

mister-christmas

The difference was all those baddies INITIATED the violence. Here, you’re the one initiating violence which makes you the baddies.

angel-ani

Hi yes umm the presence of a Nazi/fascist is an inherently violent act. Someone saying stuff like “I want a white enthnostate!” Or “[insert type of person] aren’t really human!” IS AN ACT OF VIOLENCE.

The existence of Nazis is violence
The existence of white nationalists is violence

The antifa or any other group protesting the Nazis are a reactionary force. They would not exist if the Nazis didn’t exist, but they do so here we are.

The violence has already been initiated. These Nazis and fascists are killing people, are taking away rights, they’ve infiltrated police and government, they want people DEAD.

The violence is already here, and if you cannot/will not see that, you are complicit.

mister-christmas

Words are not violence. Opinions are not violence. Nazis existing is not violence. The fact that you believe those qualify as violence tells me you’re either a troll or delusional and in either case having any kind of rational discussion will be a fruitless endeavor. Though I am curious what you’ll try to pass off as examples of Nazis and fascists killing people or taking away rights in the U.S. and what bullshit CNN article you’ll try to use as evidence.

angel-ani

Words lead to physical violence. Also, these people don’t stop at words, they stab people, they take away peoples rights, they murder and destroy lives. That’s violence. If we tolerate the existence of fascism, we allow it to grow and infect others. We are complicit in the violence to come. Also, I’m at work and on mobile, so I can’t hunt for sources right now, but give me a few hours, I’ll post some later tonight.

hannah-ananas

Jesus christ how do people think these fictional facist powers rose? With ‘charm’, guile, with WORDS. Theyre posion-tongued bastards that are trying to weasel their way into power. They know that if they start with all their views than they’ll be shunned right off the bat. So they sugarcoat it, they say its just their opinion, that theyre just exercising their right to free speech. It starts small and it depends on people like you @mister-christmas saying that theyre not doing anything wrong. Excusing their behaviour and, in the process condoning it, until its too late. Until theyve seized power and they can start to do what you qualify as violent acts. Get over yourself you milquetoast motherfucker.

neeetsocks

WHY ARE WHITES LIKE THIS OH GOD

death-drive-128

Don’t you have drugs to sell and police officers to bribe, neetsocks?

neeetsocks

*white person voice* omg thats something only voldemort would say

manicgothicoctopi

@angel-ani

“Ghost in the Shell” a series based around an elite police unit stopping terrorist and dealing with political/intelligence conspiracies is somehow “radical antifa story” doesn’t this go against the whole ACAB shit antifa spews out? Or let me guess you only saw the live action film.

mitigatedchaos

Yes, must’ve been the live-action one, “left-wing anti-fascist radicals“ is not how I would describe a group of paramilitary counter-terrorist cyborgs that report only to the Prime Minister.

Of course, that isn’t the real problem here.

The real problem is the citing of fictional evidence by which liberal society feeds its own mythology about democracy, justice, tolerance, acceptance, and so on back to itself.

Yes, mythology, dear readers. The way Hitler is treated, the way World War 2 is treated, is not as a historical study but as the founding mythology for the post-war order. That doesn’t mean that Hitler was a good man - he wasn’t - but he’s essentially treated as a borderline supernatural adversary figure with an inverse halo effect.

As for the OP and some of the others, true White Nationalists are not anywhere close to obtaining real political power in the United States, unless you do definitional game-playing that essentially amounts to lying. However, every AntiFa dumbass out there hitting people with bike locks, pepper-spraying bitcoin hat wearers, and so on, is contributing to an increase in White Nationalism.

Normally, the White Nationalists don’t have much to offer. Normally, of course, when you don’t brand every single voter for a rival presidential candidate as “Fascist” and then say “we need to kill all Fascists” and a few people are stupid enough to take both seriously.

Source: angel-ani politics

mutant-aesthetic

Source: klezmer-un-anarkhizm politics

mutant-aesthetic

sneering-imperial-brit:
“ These people actually think that Harry Potter pioneered themes of virtues and morality.
They truly have never read any books that came before it.
”
This has to be some kind of twitter shitpost. Right?
…right?

Source: punished-cel probably politics

argumate

blackblocberniebros

While I’m all for “self-criticism” of antifascists who go too far and use excessive violence or attack innocent people, that’s necessary and too often ignored, it’s worth noting no leftists have killed anyone in the US in decades, while the far right are killing people every couple of weeks now.

argumate

this kind of accusation, while tempting, gets awkward because it sort of relies on pushing all the violent people out of the category “leftist” and all the non-violent people out of the category “far right”, resulting in what is basically a tautology.

but at least we can all agree that killing is bad

blackblocberniebros

I mean if you wanna include reactionary black nationalists under the category of leftist, that’s understandable even if I wouldn’t include them. They’re monstrous and have killed innocent people.

But if you ask me, and no one did, it’s the very logic of nationalism that leads to aimless murder, the viewing of entire ethnic groups as The Enemy and therefore legitimate targets, and it’s why actual anarchists and socialists in the US, who are internationalists, rarely if ever kill innocent people.

argumate

entire classes as the enemy and therefore legitimate targets is a thing too, even if ethnic hatred certainly does suck.

blackblocberniebros

To be honest I don’t think anyone believes that, the entire class as a literal enemy in the military sense. No ones out there shooting landlords and business owners at random. No one but the fringest of tankies imagines that any revolution consists of literally murdering the entire former ruling class.

Me thinking it wouldn’t be so bad if someone iced an oil company CEO or war criminal US official is not at all the same as thinking every human being in the entire capitalist class and state apparatus is a “legitimate target”.

argumate

right, but we’re kind of haggling over price, now.

blackblocberniebros

On the contrary, I think your acceptance of a “minimal” level of state violence that’s just allowed to go on unpunished and that doesn’t reasonably give credibility and justification to retaliation by victimized nonstate actors, is an unacceptable moral imposition on my conscience, a price too high for me to pay.

I’m not willing to take the position of a black-hearted school principal who just tolerates a certain level of abusive victimization by bullies as acceptable but would never allow for a victim to hit back and “start a fight”.

argumate

I think the problem in the scenario you describe is tolerating state violence, and the solution doesn’t involve molotov cocktails.

The unprincipled principal may punish both sides equally while the principled principal assesses the situation and delivers justice, but they still have to stop the fight!

blackblocberniebros

No! The fight IS justice. Justice consists of the victim delivering a well-deserved fist to their assailant. Some investigation and punishment afterward will only ever be a second-best outcome, unless in those (admittedly quite common) situations where there’s confusion about who actually did what and who’s responsible.

The partisans shooting Mussolini and the liberated Jews who picked up a cane and beat up their former SS captors were better deliverers of justice than the war crimes tribunals as far as I’m concerned.

argumate

Extreme cases make bad principles; concentration camp guards directly committing heinous crimes are clearly asking for it, yes. But that’s hardly the typical case of political violence, is it.

And ideally we would have both more and better war crimes tribunals; Saddam Hussein may have deserved the noose, but it should have been for a clear accounting of his crimes, not because he was overthrown by a different gang of thugs.

mitigatedchaos

“The fight IS justice!” says political Tumblr user, “but any unpunished incorrect state violence is too much.”

Yeah, that’s just acceptance of a minimal level of violence by another name. Confusion of who intiated what violence and/or manipulation by social adepts is the dominant case, not the edge case.

Source: blackblocberniebros politics

funereal-disease

You can’t fight evil with bullshit

realsocialskills

Donald Trump has spent years telling outrageous lies. He’s continued to do so since assuming office, even lying about obviously verifiable things like what he’s tweeted about or the size of his inauguration crowd.

He is attacking the idea that truth matters, and trying to make people give up on telling the difference between the truth and a lie. This is dangerously disoriented.

In order to stay oriented, we need to care what’s true. This is easier said than done. In the short term, bullshit is often much more politically convenient than the truth. In the long term, if we create a world in which the truth doesn’t matter, we will end up defenseless.

We need to keep in mind that being on the right side doesn’t make everything someone might say true. Good people can tell lies. Good people can get things wrong. Their goodness doesn’t make the lie true.

Being marginalized doesn’t mean that someone always knows what they’re talking about. Being oppressed doesn’t make people infallible; being wrong doesn’t make someone privileged.

Similarly, not every rumor about a bad person is accurate. Lies told about a bad person are still lies. (And not everyone who has a bad reputation is actually a bad person.)

Be careful about spreading rumors. Learn to recognize fake news, and avoid spreading it. If something doesn’t sound true to you, ask for citations or investigate. Everyone can be wrong, and you don’t have to believe anyone without being persuaded that they are right. Evidence matters, arguments matter. (And being a good person isn’t a substitute for either.)

You can’t fight evil with bullshit. In order to fight evil, we have to care what’s true.

mitigatedchaos

The rivals have been lying/bullshitting/misrepresenting/omitting a lot in their attacks on Trump. Every time I go and investigate one of the claims, I come back less trusting of the media and less trusting of the left and liberals, instead of more.

But it’s growing less surprising every day, since why was I ever foolish enough to think the Left and Liberals weren’t every bit the truth-apathetic political operatives as their rivals, when correct only correct by coincidence and not by process?

And I don’t mean to say that Trump is great, because he isn’t, but one can’t beat him on his level. He lives there.

Source: realsocialskills politics

blackblocberniebros

I mean if we’re even going to entertain the idea of minimum ages for shit like voting and serving office we should have to consider maximum ages too.

ranma-official

Disagree. Children can’t vote because 1) biologically incapable of making good decisions yet 2) parents are legally allowed to punish them for voting incorrectly.

Voting because of old age can only be a problem because of stuff like dementia, and then you’d have to disenfranchise all people who are not mentally capable of voting.

what’s currently being done if is a person is mentally incapable of voting, a handler votes for them, which is okay because handlers will probably trend towards voting for candidates that help people who are mentally incapable

we need to encourage more people to vote not disenfranchise them

blackblocberniebros

I’m saying the opposite. Since we won’t consider maximum ages, why are we considering minimum ones? Just let children vote. “Biologically incapable of making good choices” is exactly the same argument for taking away the vote from old people with dementia or the mentally ill.

mitigatedchaos

So what you’re saying here is just a roundabout way of suggesting we should disenfranchise the literally demented and the mentally ill.

And of course, taking your other reply into account, I, too, value the power of soft authoritarian technocratic dictatorship.

Unless, of course, you are suggesting that because some limits are not present due to the dangers in imposing them, other limits which already exist and aren’t particularly dangerous to enforce should not exist?

Might I suggest that the lack of wide support for this policy by a group which consists entirely of people who were once teenagers might not be quite the same thing as the other two examples?

blackblocberniebros

I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why are rationalists so impenetrable?

I’m saying let children vote.

classmeoutsidehowbowdah

This person seems anything but rational. I’d say start with giving working minors the right to vote because they pay an income tax

mitigatedchaos

“Rationalists” is more of an anthropological label, and one I don’t claim for myself, in part because most of them believe in Open Borders or something similar, but I’m an unironic Nationalist.

Anyhow, I give a more direct/accessible and serious reply later in the thread.

Although the irony that what I said is less impenetrable than certain philosophers or schools is not lost on me. I can provide a close reading if you’d like.

Oh, and I’m not actually a time-travelling supervillain. My blog description does convey real information about my positions, but it isn’t literal.

Source: blackblocberniebros politics the rationalists

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Unnecessariat

You can’t fight evil with bullshit