I miss the days when I had a lot of leftist followers who would send my own posts to me through the tumblr messaging system and demand I explain it to them
Just be me and be politically inscrutable to all of your readers at once, without explanation.
rocketverliden asked:
Nah, actually I was thinking that there are lots of other southerners we could choose from for replacement statues, specifically ones that weren’t all “rah rah slavery” and so on. Some of them could be a lot more modern, others from before the war, and so on. U.S. founding fathers from those states would be the ideal option for many of them - it reaffirms membership in the US, still has lots of historical weight, and so on.
They shouldn’t be more black than the proportional share of the population, though.
The goal here is to provide an alternative, positive regional identity for the white southerners that is not rooted in the racism inherent to the Confederacy. (And the racism was inherent - at least one governor or whatever went on about how yeah, this was about slavery, and yeah, this was about “the inferiority of the negro race” and so on.)
History is big. There is a lot that can be chosen from when we decide what to emphasize. There are many people, with many stories. With this, we could step sideways.
(The exception is generic confederate soldier statues, which should stay. After all, the side that wins the war usually thinks it’s the ethical side, since most factions fighting a war think they’re the ethical side, so removing them just means legitimizing the idea of removing monuments to soldiers of losing sides in general.)
However, I don’t think the capital-L Left, in broad strokes, wants the southern whites to have a positive southern identity. I think it wants to crush them in order to celebrate itself and its righteousness.
It doesn’t like the founding fathers, either. It doesn’t like the United States of America.
It could celebrate the power of the very ideals this nation’s founders espoused as the source of some of the very power that overturned the cruelty they allowed at this nation’s founding. But most of those people were white men, so they won’t.
Don’t worry, Progressives, Leftists, et al.
The Republicans will never actually take my advice on healthcare.
Therefore your eventual single-payer system is practically assured. In like 4-8 years.
Anonymous asked:
mutant-aesthetic answered:
no, they have suicidal utopian ideals, very different.
a bit less restraint than the Bush II White House is really not something you want to wake up to in January 2017 is it
If any president is going to be worse than W, it’ll be Donald. And yet, he hasn’t managed it yet, much though Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers would like to protest that he has, largely due to his aura of unclassiness. But I’m gonna use the Iraq war benchmark: If he can start a disaster that big, or accumulate that level of damage in total, then I’ll put him into consideration. And he may yet do so; I wouldn’t put it past him. But we’ll see. If he manages it, it will take some real effort on his part.
AL Gore also pushed for the Iraq war in the general election
He wouldn’t have been willing to pay the ideological price to transform Iraq into a Real Democracy, either.
This half-measures imperialism is really annoying and really deadly. I probably need to hire someone to go around and smack whoever still thinks it was a good idea.
It’s worth pointing out that we’re still occupying Germany and Japan, however technically.
The functional American system is basically “We don’t leave. Ever”.
The dysfunctional one is “We leave a decade after we ought to have”.
If Iraq turned out as well as Germany or Japan, would it really matter if we still had airbases there from which we could project power?
I mean, certainly in the sense of regional politics it would, but as something to complain about, I don’t think so, it’s easily a price worth paying.
a bit less restraint than the Bush II White House is really not something you want to wake up to in January 2017 is it
If any president is going to be worse than W, it’ll be Donald. And yet, he hasn’t managed it yet, much though Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers would like to protest that he has, largely due to his aura of unclassiness. But I’m gonna use the Iraq war benchmark: If he can start a disaster that big, or accumulate that level of damage in total, then I’ll put him into consideration. And he may yet do so; I wouldn’t put it past him. But we’ll see. If he manages it, it will take some real effort on his part.
AL Gore also pushed for the Iraq war in the general election
He wouldn’t have been willing to pay the ideological price to transform Iraq into a Real Democracy, either.
This half-measures imperialism is really annoying and really deadly. I probably need to hire someone to go around and smack whoever still thinks it was a good idea.
“money can’t buy happiness” is such a baby boomer concept like…. I don’t want excessive wealth to buy a golf plated toilet seat Karen, I just wish I wasn’t crying because I can’t afford both spaghetti and rent after working 40 hours a week
Now see, I reaaaally want to use this post to bitch about not building enough housing units keeping the rents high where the jobs are in the first place.
Unironically I sort of want to boycott Nestlé because of all the generally horrible things they’ve done (use child labor, slave labor, said water isn’t a human right, asking for payment for Ethiopia after they provided them with famine relief, etc) but at the same that’s near impossible considering all the industries they have their hands in. As hypocritical as it sorta sounds, I can’t afford to buy 100% fair trade stuff with no Nestlé logo whatsoever even if morally I see it as the optimal thing to do. Am I being overly scrupulous?
Exactly. Even if we’re to forget my moral and ethical concerns, it’s just generally bad for consumers. Companies like Nestlé, Mars, Procter & Gamble, hold onto alot of industries in what’s effectively monopolies. It doesn’t seem pronounced but it leaves us with solely expensive alternatives or else any semblance of competition will just die or be bought out. These effects are even more exasperated in smaller and/or more impoverished communities.
it’s called an oligopoly and while it’s not “technically” a monopoly its almost as bad.
oligopoly, the new board game where you team up with your friends to control the apparently irrelevant dog food market
The trick is to just stop caring because none of this actually affects you in any way shape or form
from there the only thing you have to worry about is being jealous that you can’t get away that that sort of thing yourself
Look brah, I know you have that doesn’t-care-about-others-except-your-boyfriend thing (although that you do care about your boyfriend is quite humanizing - a nice touch), but 1) major shifts in consumption habits really have been occurring, and 2) if not enough people care it’s actually really difficult to maintain civilization and have nice things. (Though I will admit that I suppose if too many people care too much it could also destroy civilization, we’re just dealing with like a ten cent increase in the price of chocolate or something here.)
One of the things I think about a lot is imagine asking an individual politician what value they provide to society: they can list work they’ve done, initiatives they’ve sponsored, speeches they’ve given, constituent interests they’ve represented, and so on.
Now imagine asking an entire party what value they provide to society: they can do something similar and talk about the good stuff they’ve done and the bad stuff from those other guys they’ve opposed.
Now imagine asking the entire representative body what value they provide to society and suddenly it gets much trickier, because they are inherently working at cross purposes to each other and most of their “work” is simply inhibition.
“As a group we’ve had endless debate, passed a bill, wrangled for a while, repealed the bill, wrangled a little more, then passed a similar but worse bill.”
There really isn’t any way to justify the existence of representative bodies as a group without saying look we’ve had five thousand years of power struggles that involved stabbings and this is a small step up from that, count your blessings.
But to say, as Sarah Champion did, that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls” is either saying that Pakistanis are more likely to rape and more likely to rape white girls, or that the rape of white girls is more of a problem than the rape of, for example, white boys or brown girls.
– Chi Onwurah
Worst take on Rotherham yet. Seriously.
Isn’t it… Literally true that British Pakistani immigrant men disproportionately rape white girls? Isn’t that a large part of the Rotherham scandal, that this is widespread and well above the base rate? So yeah, people are saying it is more likely. Because it literally is.
Now, if people are saying “therefore we should treat this subgroup with extra suspicion”, sure, you can object to that. Presumably a bunch of Rotherham-complainers are doing exactly that, and they shouldn’t.
But what makes the Rotherham scandal special is not that one subgroup committed a pile of crimes at a rate disproportionate to the population at large. The usual “treat people as individuals” liberal rhetoric is well-equipped to handle such cases and maintain social harmony while prosecuting offenders.
No, it’s that people didn’t treat them the same way. They literally discriminated, but the other way, letting minority groups get away with much more. It’s really hollow to try to dismiss the Rotherham scandal by saying “You can’t treat people differently based on their ethnicity/country of origin!” when the entire problem is that people did exactly that. If the relevant authorities had treated people the same regardless of ethnicity and national origin, Rotherham wouldn’t be nearly so big a scandal.
When I first heard about Rotherham, I was bracing for it to be yet another instance of conservatives claiming “PC culture means you can’t call out minorities who actually commit crimes!” without much basis. But then they had an actual example of just that, and a really grotesque one, too. Maybe all their other talking points and examples are shit, but this one isn’t. Haven’t seen anyone debunk it. People who support the culture that produced this trainwreck need to explain how this type of failure can be prevented under their frameworks. If parts of the progressive agenda are at fault for this, then we need to cut those parts out. I don’t believe that attacking racism has to involve letting rape gangs slide. If I thought that, I’d be a lot more conservative than I am.
And if I thought preventing these types of things required keeping out immigrants of certain nationalities, again, I would be a lot more conservative than I am. But as @mitigatedchaos says, you need the will to actually enforce your culture at times, if you want a liberal society that functions correctly. If there is a cultural cause of these rape gangs, then it must be stamped out. The left loves to fight the culture war; they should enjoy fighting this battle of it, too. “Respecting culture” has always been a lie; we have always judged and will always judge the merits of various cultural pieces, just as the left constantly attacks (often rightly!) the culture of conservative Christians. Feminists should be lining up to condemn the rape culture at work here. It seems in their wheelhouse.
Once more, if I believed that culture war tools were insufficient to fight this battle, I would be a lot more reactionary than I am. But I believe that we can change cultures, and yeah, you can call it “imposing our will on minorities” if you wanna make it sound ominous, but that’s kind of what society does. We can and should have broad, consensus standards for behavior. It doesn’t work if murder being okay is just a matter of opinion and cultural difference. If the “murder is okay” people are to coexist with me, they should be on the other side of the globe, in some other society where I don’t have to ever meet them.
Regarding the original quote: I wouldn’t put it as “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls”. I would say: “Britain has a problem with British authorities too chickenshit to go after rape gangs because they happen to be a minority ethnicity, and they fear being called racist more than they fear child sex trafficking.” Or perhaps it wasn’t fear of being called racist; perhaps they simply didn’t have the resolve to wield the iron hand of the state in communities not culturally similar to them. But that is their responsibility, to intervene fairly and consistently. (A third option is that they dismissed the allegations as racist, and so didn’t act. That also condemns them, albeit in a slightly different way.)
Whatever the answer, something’s wrong.
Much though it pains me to say it, the conservatives have a point, and it has to be addressed.
In the end, I did become more right wing, not because I think it’s mechanically impossible for the modern left of center to use the tools, but rather because I don’t believe they will have the will to do so unless they are forced to.
To unlock that capability, that willpower to acknowledge that there is actually a problem, which is so unwoke (they’ll defend Islam and Muslims even over other “religions of color”), they ultimately must be threatened with cultural displacement and made to compete.
