Economic democracy? That's what you call vigilantism and beating up people you disagree with?
Jeez, the left and newspeak. Never changes does it.
[RD] Why y'all always trying to defend Nazis?
- Thread starter inthesomeday
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Jeez, the left and newspeak. Never changes does it.
I guess we're already starting to go in circles here. But like I said, if fascism were a real threat which is destroying democracy, then of course I would consider violence. But it isn't. In Charlottesville, there was what, a couple of hundred people marching? In a country like the US, that is only an extremely small drop in the bucket, is it not?
In Finland, neo-nazis sometimes have their rallies, and they are protected by the police to prevent violence. Their membership is less than 200 people overall, or less than 0,00377 % of the population. Do you really think those guys are taking over? Because I sure don't
If the police is still participating in KKK lynchings, then you certainly do have a point. But I daresay that that is rare, almost to the point of being practically non-existent, and if it does happen then law enforcers will get crucified for it. As for the mass incarceration, the police are only following drug laws passed by the democratic system. I think that drug offenders shouldn't be incarcerated, but that's another discussion entirely.
I believe that you have a right to free speech, just as the fascists. If you use that free speech to promote communism, then I will argue against you, just like I would argue against the fascists. If you try to overthrow the state, then I guess I will take up arms against you, just as I would if the fascists were taking over.
I mean if you want to have a communist rally then sure, by all means, go ahead. I will argue in favor of your right to march
I've often wondered, which is more evil, fascism or communism? Communism killed more civilians, but I guess one could argue that most of those civilians died due to massive incompetence, rather than pure malice. Although then again a lot of them also died because of pure malice. And even if all those death were due to incompetence (they aren't, commies also had mass executions) it doesn't make those people any less dead, does it?
Have you heard about communism in Cambodia? When the communists gained power, they had a lot of enemies, and you can't have enemies in glorious "economic democracy". They stared shooting massive amounts of people (1-3 million people died). Since they were communists, they had a shortage of everything, including bullets. So in order to save bullets, they decided not to shoot babies. Instead, they grabbed them by the legs and swung them, smashing their heads into trees. I don't know what those babies did to deserve that, maybe they were evil counter-revolutionaries. Or maybe they were fascist babies, who knows
(spoiler alert: Another post by me turned into an essay. Read it anyway, because I can't find places to cut it without losing real content. Attention spans are good for you. Builds character. By which I mean the depth of your thinking. Feel free to respond only to little chunks of it though, and I'll split it into two parts for better readability. Responding is the actually time-consuming part.)
---------
Part 1: A contradiction within liberal democracy
Liberal democracy contains within itself a contradiction that can occasionally lead to its own destruction.
Namely, free speech and association are sacrosanct. That's fine when applied to all people who agree with the core tenets of liberal democracy, but have other disagreements. But what about people who don't?
If fascists, neo-Stalinists or Maoists, white supremacists, radical Islamists, other religious fundamentalists, neo-monarchists who practice Moldbuggery, and so on and so forth make up a small fraction of the population with no chance of their ideas really catching on, then it's totally fine to let them do their thing without interfering.
But what if one or more of those ideas really catches on? if you have a society that is at least somewhat democratic, then there is a possibility for the people to replace the liberal democrats in charge with authoritarians of some stripe or another. Once that happens, the liberal democracy dies.
Often this happens in insidious ways, where someone with authoritarian tendencies takes power through democratic elections and then slowly chips away at the foundations of liberal democracy (however sturdy they used to be). After the 2016 election, I took quite a while to read about Putin, Chavez, Erdogan, and Orban to see how this happens in the modern world. What I found is that all of these people had clear plans to undermine the liberal democratic nature of their states and were good at political maneuvering, which made me breathe a huge sigh of relief: there was no chance of Trump pulling anything like this off. He's way too incompetent to effect an authoritarian transition, and his party isn't really behind him.
Further, he shows no sign of learning the game. Even if he tries some sort of Shock Doctrine stuff - trying to take advantage of a war, terrorist attack, or economic catastrophe to push through unpopular legislation - it would still probably backfire, in a way it never did when W. Bush had his approval ratings hit the stratosphere after 9/11 and he could do whatever he wanted for about 2 years, including invading an irrelevant country because the PNAC neocons had wanted it invaded since they were founded, years before 9/11.
But we were at a vulnerable moment, and had Trump known what he is doing, he could easily have pushed us into frank electoral authoritarianism. He was the wrong man for the job, and while most liberals seem to act like the country has been shot in the gut, what I heard was a bullet whizzing by.
So anyway, how do you suppress anti-liberal democratic movements within a liberal democracy? Probably just ad hoc and in no particularly principled way, which could include getting counter-demonstrators to shut down speeches. But when we start doing illiberal things ad hoc in order to defend liberal democracy, then you have to consider the unintended consequences of this: when you shut down a speech by threatening violence, do you boost or weaken the appeal of white nationalism?
-----------------------
Part 2: On white identity politics and why it appeals to people nowadays
There's also the uncomfortable fact that white nationalists are appropriating identity politics and using it for white people. Putting aside the fact that "white people" basically didn't come into existence in their current form as "all those with [mostly] ethnic European ancestors* " until sometime after WW2, the fact of the matter is that humans like to form tribes. And many people are inadvertently working to strengthen white nationalism, even though they think they oppose it.
What's happening is that certain (mostly well-intentioned) leftists, along with cynical centrist Democrats who see this as a way to use divide-and-conquer techniques to their advantage, have been loudly boosting minority racial identity politics, while talking about "white privilege" in ways that reach non-privileged white people (via Fox News, Breitbart, et al.), while also pointing out that white people as currently construed are declining demographically and will eventually be a minority as well, and doing all this after the collapse of the labor movement and the rise of high levels of inequality - abetted in large part by the centrist Democrats. So there are a bunch of not-very-privileged white people with no identity to speak of besides whiteness, and the non-college-educated fraction are literally killing themselves in despair, either outright or through drug and alcohol overdoses. The obvious effect? Boosting the appeal of identifying as white, especially for those underprivileged enough not to have college educations.
Which is why I'm a fan of boosting the intersectional approach among leftists - namely, that privilege is a function of many variables, of which race, gender, and sexuality coexist with social class, income, education level, innate ways your brain happens to work**, disability, and so on in determining who is privileged and who is not, and that we should work to lessen the differences in privilege. We need to push aside the divide-and-conquer tactics that are being incompetently used with predictable side effects, such as a heretofore unprecedented collapse in support for the Democratic Party among its former core in the working class, bringing Obama's blue wall crashing down as the last places where working-class white people voted majority Democratic swung dramatically towards a demagogue with a weird hairdo. Laugh at them for obviously voting against their economic interests all you want, the fact is that people care about more than just economics. Keep laughing, and the Dems will find they have still further to fall.
Sounds complicated, but I've seen a couple of encouraging signs. The less important one is that the word "intersectionality" really is gaining rapidly in leftist circles. I was recently at a camp - originally started as a Quaker thing but now consisting almost entirely of secular liberals - and the young adults all knew what that term meant or caught on immediately once it started being discussed. Even more encouragingly, the term isn't really necessary. Many of the Baby Boomers there glommed onto me and my explanations of what was happening. I started out by pointing out that Minnesota is Ground Zero for this phenomenon, with the whole state outside the Twin Cities metro swinging dramatically in Trump's favor. Then I showed them the maps of Wisconsin and Iowa, where the same thing happened enough to flip those states. Then I started moving east from there. They got the picture real fast. As The Boss eloquently put it:
From the Monongahela valley, to the Mesabi Iron Range –
To the coal mines of Appalachia, the story's always the same
(edit: included asterisk statements in spoiler, split into two parts)
---------
Part 1: A contradiction within liberal democracy
Liberal democracy contains within itself a contradiction that can occasionally lead to its own destruction.
Namely, free speech and association are sacrosanct. That's fine when applied to all people who agree with the core tenets of liberal democracy, but have other disagreements. But what about people who don't?
If fascists, neo-Stalinists or Maoists, white supremacists, radical Islamists, other religious fundamentalists, neo-monarchists who practice Moldbuggery, and so on and so forth make up a small fraction of the population with no chance of their ideas really catching on, then it's totally fine to let them do their thing without interfering.
But what if one or more of those ideas really catches on? if you have a society that is at least somewhat democratic, then there is a possibility for the people to replace the liberal democrats in charge with authoritarians of some stripe or another. Once that happens, the liberal democracy dies.
Often this happens in insidious ways, where someone with authoritarian tendencies takes power through democratic elections and then slowly chips away at the foundations of liberal democracy (however sturdy they used to be). After the 2016 election, I took quite a while to read about Putin, Chavez, Erdogan, and Orban to see how this happens in the modern world. What I found is that all of these people had clear plans to undermine the liberal democratic nature of their states and were good at political maneuvering, which made me breathe a huge sigh of relief: there was no chance of Trump pulling anything like this off. He's way too incompetent to effect an authoritarian transition, and his party isn't really behind him.
Further, he shows no sign of learning the game. Even if he tries some sort of Shock Doctrine stuff - trying to take advantage of a war, terrorist attack, or economic catastrophe to push through unpopular legislation - it would still probably backfire, in a way it never did when W. Bush had his approval ratings hit the stratosphere after 9/11 and he could do whatever he wanted for about 2 years, including invading an irrelevant country because the PNAC neocons had wanted it invaded since they were founded, years before 9/11.
But we were at a vulnerable moment, and had Trump known what he is doing, he could easily have pushed us into frank electoral authoritarianism. He was the wrong man for the job, and while most liberals seem to act like the country has been shot in the gut, what I heard was a bullet whizzing by.
So anyway, how do you suppress anti-liberal democratic movements within a liberal democracy? Probably just ad hoc and in no particularly principled way, which could include getting counter-demonstrators to shut down speeches. But when we start doing illiberal things ad hoc in order to defend liberal democracy, then you have to consider the unintended consequences of this: when you shut down a speech by threatening violence, do you boost or weaken the appeal of white nationalism?
-----------------------
Part 2: On white identity politics and why it appeals to people nowadays
There's also the uncomfortable fact that white nationalists are appropriating identity politics and using it for white people. Putting aside the fact that "white people" basically didn't come into existence in their current form as "all those with [mostly] ethnic European ancestors* " until sometime after WW2, the fact of the matter is that humans like to form tribes. And many people are inadvertently working to strengthen white nationalism, even though they think they oppose it.
What's happening is that certain (mostly well-intentioned) leftists, along with cynical centrist Democrats who see this as a way to use divide-and-conquer techniques to their advantage, have been loudly boosting minority racial identity politics, while talking about "white privilege" in ways that reach non-privileged white people (via Fox News, Breitbart, et al.), while also pointing out that white people as currently construed are declining demographically and will eventually be a minority as well, and doing all this after the collapse of the labor movement and the rise of high levels of inequality - abetted in large part by the centrist Democrats. So there are a bunch of not-very-privileged white people with no identity to speak of besides whiteness, and the non-college-educated fraction are literally killing themselves in despair, either outright or through drug and alcohol overdoses. The obvious effect? Boosting the appeal of identifying as white, especially for those underprivileged enough not to have college educations.
Which is why I'm a fan of boosting the intersectional approach among leftists - namely, that privilege is a function of many variables, of which race, gender, and sexuality coexist with social class, income, education level, innate ways your brain happens to work**, disability, and so on in determining who is privileged and who is not, and that we should work to lessen the differences in privilege. We need to push aside the divide-and-conquer tactics that are being incompetently used with predictable side effects, such as a heretofore unprecedented collapse in support for the Democratic Party among its former core in the working class, bringing Obama's blue wall crashing down as the last places where working-class white people voted majority Democratic swung dramatically towards a demagogue with a weird hairdo. Laugh at them for obviously voting against their economic interests all you want, the fact is that people care about more than just economics. Keep laughing, and the Dems will find they have still further to fall.
Sounds complicated, but I've seen a couple of encouraging signs. The less important one is that the word "intersectionality" really is gaining rapidly in leftist circles. I was recently at a camp - originally started as a Quaker thing but now consisting almost entirely of secular liberals - and the young adults all knew what that term meant or caught on immediately once it started being discussed. Even more encouragingly, the term isn't really necessary. Many of the Baby Boomers there glommed onto me and my explanations of what was happening. I started out by pointing out that Minnesota is Ground Zero for this phenomenon, with the whole state outside the Twin Cities metro swinging dramatically in Trump's favor. Then I showed them the maps of Wisconsin and Iowa, where the same thing happened enough to flip those states. Then I started moving east from there. They got the picture real fast. As The Boss eloquently put it:
From the Monongahela valley, to the Mesabi Iron Range –
To the coal mines of Appalachia, the story's always the same
Spoiler asterisks :
(edit: included asterisk statements in spoiler, split into two parts)
Last edited:
"A political system where government is elected in free and fair elections where all citizens can vote"? "Free and fair" requires rule of law, maintaining of which normally requires some sort of separation of powers. We also need to avoid undue manipulation with the "all citizens" part, so human rights need to be respected.
I'd say it was as good an "economic democracy" as can be expected without there being a political one.
Of course, I consider "economic democracy" to be a buzzword that to my knowledge lacks any proper definition... not to mention good real-life examples.
I (think) I understand the problems it tries to address and I acknowledge those are real, but I'm afraid the cure becoming worse than the illness here.
A good post. I won't splice it up, and I spoilered it for scrolling convenience. But a few thoughts if I may.
First of all, I daresay that first world democracies were built on a much more solid foundation than 3rd world or post-communist democracies. I guess the counter-argument to this is that it could happen here since it did happen in Weimar Germany, but I think that was in large part due to historical circumstances (world war one, the humiliation the Germans felt, and the massive reparations which destroyed the economy).
But I guess it is still worth considering. What should I do if far-right, centrists and far-left would all be roughly 1/3 of the electorate? I guess that situation would be a nightmare, and I definitely wouldn't want to fight alongside either of the extremes. If it got to that point, wouldn't it spell doom either way, regardless of actions taken? I wish that society would never get there, but I'm not at all sure that violence is the right way to go to avoid such a situation. Perhaps there is some kind of coalition that could be reached? Give both sides some of the stuff that isn't completely insane? Perhaps implement some non-crazy social democrat economic policies and some non-crazy conservative social policies?
Should liberal democracy tolerate illiberal ideas? If it does, could those ideas end up destroying liberal democracy? If liberal democracy doesn't tolerate illiberal ideas, then can it be considered liberal? (I'll also throw the slippery slope argument here)
Last, but not least. I don't know much about the white identity stuff, but as for the privilege. The problem is that if you normalize for IQ, then pretty much all of the race differences disappear, making the concept of privilege and systematic racism completely useless (unless you define it as IQ privilege). Accounting for IQ would destroy the reasons as to why the privilege theory was invented in the first place
EDIT: I put the original post in spoilers for scrolling convenience, but it seems like it didn't add the whole post, I don't know why (in the edit screen it's all there, the full text). Anyway if you guys want to read the original post then it's right there 2 posts above this one, so I figured I'll leave this as is
Well, have some sympathy. I mean, the guy does come from a country that just did elect Donald Trump.
Who wouldn't feel tempted?
Traitorfish is from ScotlandWell, have some sympathy. I mean, the guy does come from a country that just did elect Donald Trump.
Who wouldn't feel tempted?
But yeah, I do have some sympathy. We all feel like punching people every now and then. People can be a-holes. I mean, I live in Paris. I feel tempted to punch about ten people per day. People who throw trash on the streets, people who take the metro on a summer day without using any deodorant... So sure, people chanting Nazi crap would also make me feel like punching them (though I never saw anyone chanting a Nazi song in my entire life, and I've been around). But I don't think we should be allowed to punch people like that. We can't live in society if every person gets to decide who is worthy of being punched and who isn't.
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Oops. I somehow thought this was a reply to inthesomeday.Traitorfish is from Scotland
Timsup2nothin
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Come back to the US. It's happening with great regularity, at announced events. That's actually the subject of the thread at hand. Whether such events should be allowed, or broken up.
aelf
Ashen One
Funny, but the Allies didn't seem to think they were fighting fascism with fascism or undermining liberal democracy.
Berzerker
Deity
allies were defending themselves, these 'antifa' people attack others
Timsup2nothin
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Yeah. Others who are "innocently" marching into other people's cities in terror columns.
aelf
Ashen One
Hmm yeah, because Nazi Germany was on American beaches and in the American hinterland, so tit-for-tat, right?
Timsup2nothin
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Bottom line description of events in Charlottesville.
A local crank spoke out about how the statues built during the civil rights era to "keep the negros in their place" should be respected. No one infringed on his right to speak, but they did dismiss him as a crank.
Since speaking wasn't getting him his way, he organized a "rally" by getting a permit and inviting hate groups from across the country to come to his city. This "rally" was promoted on hate sites frequented by the alt-right, where it was clearly stated that showing up in numbers, and heavily armed, would be needed for the locals to be cowed...else the locals would freely drown out their little hatefest.
Unsurprisingly, the locals resisted and violence ensued.
A local crank spoke out about how the statues built during the civil rights era to "keep the negros in their place" should be respected. No one infringed on his right to speak, but they did dismiss him as a crank.
Since speaking wasn't getting him his way, he organized a "rally" by getting a permit and inviting hate groups from across the country to come to his city. This "rally" was promoted on hate sites frequented by the alt-right, where it was clearly stated that showing up in numbers, and heavily armed, would be needed for the locals to be cowed...else the locals would freely drown out their little hatefest.
Unsurprisingly, the locals resisted and violence ensued.
Akka
Moody old mage.
What I wonder is, doesn't the USA have hate speech laws which could have been used to prevent this rally ?
Berzerker
Deity
They didn't get here, the allies ended their ambitions - are you saying the allies weren't defending themselves?
Of course, when people I like protest, the counter protesters are fascists...and when people I dont like protest, they're fascists.
I doubt many locals were involved
Timsup2nothin
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The body count is one dead local, the murderer count is one imported terrorist. But don't let facts get in your way when you are trying to defend Nazis.
Have you read anything I've posted so far? I can't tell if you're being serious here. Do you willingly misunderstand stuff or does it come naturally?
I thought about writing a serious reply but I don't know if this comment requires one
caketastydelish
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Germany made the declaration of war against the United States first, + Pearl Harbor counts.
Still, I agree that we should have attacked the Nazis regardless.
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