USA Politics

Started by Que, June 09, 2020, 10:18:46 AM

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greg

https://www.breitbart.com/border/2020/06/14/texas-prepares-for-rioters-dont-mess-with-the-alamo/

Rumors of rioters trying to destroy the Alamo (~20-30 min away from where I live). Hopefully this is just a big nothing. If stuff like this gets out of hand, though, that won't be good since they will just be asking for a pushback. You don't just destroy all of the cultural monuments in a country and get away with it.
Wagie wagie get back in the cagie

Karl Henning

A Breitbart piece about "rumors"; can't get much farther from hard news than that.
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

drogulus

Quote from: JBS on June 13, 2020, 12:17:37 PM
And the intelligence agencies shared their conclusions with you?

And how do you know that "we know enough"? You are just assuming things are true because you want them to be true.

      There's no need to personally inform GMGers that inaccuracies in Chinese numbers are not a matter of orders of magnitude. The extraordinary hypothesis is the one that requires extraordinary evidence, and that is everyone in China with a smartphone and a VPN is suddenly "in on it" for something we really know nothing about, because it's not there.
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SimonNZ

Quote from: Dowder on June 15, 2020, 04:47:33 PM

If you want to see how confused the younger generation is about communism check out this tweet:

https://twitter.com/titaniamcgrath/status/1272478090061664257?s=21

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titania_McGrath

"Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) is a parody Twitter account created and run by comedian and Spiked columnist Andrew Doyle. Doyle describes her as "a militant vegan who thinks she is a better poet than William Shakespeare".


If I have to add further comment, rather than just post that as a corrective, then I'll ask: how did that appear in your twitter feed? From whom? Did the source also accept it as a serious illustration of the beliefs of the young and/or left? Will you now reconsider the reliability of that source, or perhaps even go back and question other "information" they've passed on?

Todd

The universe is change; life is opinion. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

People would rather believe than know - E.O. Wilson

Propaganda death ensemble - Tom Araya

SimonNZ

Quote from: Dowder on June 15, 2020, 06:13:45 PM
I know that is parody account, mocking the ignorance of the tweet of someone who is real, ie Ben Norton—who would rather have a Stalin statue than one of Churchill. If you had taken the time to research further, you would have understood this.

No, that's not how your post read at all. And I have no idea who this Ben Norton is or what he's arguing or why its important to you or why I should "research" this, and neither of your two posts have thrown any light on that.


SimonNZ


amw

Quote from: Dowder on June 15, 2020, 04:47:33 PMHistory repeats itself, leftists had to eat crow and realize Stalin, Trotsky, Mao and the other host of commie leaders were pretty much butchers with disregard for human life; it'll be the same for this generation, too.
These days I think most of us think the purges by Stalin and Mao didn't go far enough. If Khrushchev had been sent to Lubyanka or Deng Xiaoping had met the appropriate fate in the Cultural Revolution, etc, maybe we'd have a different (and better) world, one in which the permanent destruction of the United States of America would be within reach. (Though I personally doubt it.)

This is not to say we idealise Stalin or Mao or the gulags or the armed struggle etc, but anyone who genuinely thinks Stalin or Mao were "butchers with no regard for human life" is not a socialist/leftist of any kind, but rather some variety of liberal or conservative or whatever.

(Ben Norton is viewed by many people on the left as an opportunist who simply adopts socialist rhetoric to appeal to a certain demographic, probably mostly because he spent the first few years of the Syrian War propagandising against the Assad government before abruptly switching sides upon realising that most socialists were not buying the whole YPG/Free Syrian Army/Rojava/Syrian Revolution narrative. But that's more of a topic for a "Syria Politics" thread. And he's not wrong in this particular case although it would probably be even more appropriate to have a statue of Zhukov.)

Todd

Quote from: Dowder on June 15, 2020, 06:32:10 PMA Jefferson statue came down in Oregon yesterday, too.


Yeah, that made it on the local news last night.  That was uninspired hooliganism - it's very small statue on a short pedestal at a high school.  Of all serial rapist presidents, Tommy J is my fave.  The Boston mayor supports futzing with the Lincoln statue, which ups the stupid ante.


Quote from: amw on June 15, 2020, 06:33:35 PMone in which the permanent destruction of the United States of America would be within reach. (Though I personally doubt it.)


It is good to have goals.
The universe is change; life is opinion. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

People would rather believe than know - E.O. Wilson

Propaganda death ensemble - Tom Araya

amw

Quote from: Todd on June 15, 2020, 06:44:36 PM
It is good to have goals.
There seem to be two different schools of thought on the modern left about how to achieve this: either People's War (i.e. spray-painting "Fuck 12" on the wall of a Wendy's, etc) or leaving the country and hoping it collapses on its own (what I did). One kinda misses the Black Panthers these days.

Todd

Quote from: amw on June 15, 2020, 06:52:35 PM
There seem to be two different schools of thought on the modern left about how to achieve this: either People's War (i.e. spray-painting "Fuck 12" on the wall of a Wendy's, etc) or leaving the country and hoping it collapses on its own (what I did). One kinda misses the Black Panthers these days.


I question the efficacy of either approach, at least if the desired timeframe is one or two human lifetimes.  Since the US cannot be militarily defeated (meaning conquered) by any combination of powers, that basically leaves violent, organized revolution as the only way.  Well, that, or a constitutional convention like the one advocated by various sorts on the left and right.  I guess the world will just sort of limp along for a few more decades until China achieves unipolar status and dictates financial and political terms on the world. 
The universe is change; life is opinion. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

People would rather believe than know - E.O. Wilson

Propaganda death ensemble - Tom Araya

Daverz

#111
Quote from: SimonNZ on June 15, 2020, 06:30:47 PM
I'll wager that imagery has been considered highly problematic long before now.

What!?  Those crazy SJWs have finally gone too far this time.  Imagine objecting to a statue of good ol' Abe Lincoln!  <clicks thru>  Oh.

I wonder who put that up originally. 



EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Memorial

"According to the National Park Service, the monument was paid for solely by former slaves:

The campaign for the Freedmen's Memorial Monument to Abraham Lincoln, as it was to be known, was not the only effort of the time to build a monument to Lincoln; however, as the only one soliciting contributions exclusively from those who had most directly benefited from Lincoln's act of emancipation it had a special appeal ... The funds were collected solely from freed slaves (primarily from African American Union veterans) ...

The turbulent politics of the reconstruction era affected the fundraising campaign on many levels. The Colored People's Educational Monument Association headed by Henry Highland Garnet wanted the monument to serve a didactic purpose as a school where freedmen could elevate themselves through learning. Frederick Douglass disagreed and thought the goal of education was incommensurate with that of remembering Lincoln."

The "incommensurate" comment is a bit opaque to me.

EDIT: a bit later in the article we have

  Douglass said the statue "showed the Negro on his knees when a more manly attitude would have been indicative of freedom."

Todd

Quote from: Dowder on June 15, 2020, 07:35:37 PMWe have time to stop the Chinese 100 year marathon.


You misinterpreted what I wrote.  China will not assume the same type of global reach and power that the US has enjoyed since the collapse of the USSR.  The US is an historical anomaly, and the post-war order it maintains is dependent on its anomalous status.  The world is moving back toward a true multi-polar international order, one where the US has near-peer rivals.  As such, clinging to the now outdated post-war order is fundamentally mistaken and strategically foolish.  We need to embrace demographic, economic, and political reality and adjust behavior.  No more foolish wars with no real strategic merit.  No more defending strategically irrelevant nation states (eg, the Baltics), far less reliance on limiting alliances that don't address current strategic challenges (eg, NATO), that sort of thing.
The universe is change; life is opinion. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

People would rather believe than know - E.O. Wilson

Propaganda death ensemble - Tom Araya

arpeggio

#113
Of course liberals have their share of nut jobs.  The actions of these individuals do not invalidate the Black Life Matters Movement.

Todd

From the Amazon Post:

Armed 'militia' members arrested, gunman identified after man is shot at Albuquerque protest


Quote from: Katie Shepherd and Katie MettlerThe gunshots, which left one man in critical but stable condition, have set off a cascade of public outcry denouncing the unregulated 'militia''s presence and the shooting.

It always makes sense to pay close attention to the specific and deliberate language used by 'journalists'.  (I am not at all surprised that Ms Shepherd worked at Willamette Week.)

The universe is change; life is opinion. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

People would rather believe than know - E.O. Wilson

Propaganda death ensemble - Tom Araya

Archaic Torso of Apollo

Quote from: Todd on June 15, 2020, 06:59:33 PM
  Since the US cannot be militarily defeated (meaning conquered) by any combination of powers, that basically leaves violent, organized revolution as the only way.  Well, that, or a constitutional convention like the one advocated by various sorts on the left and right. 

In his 1969 Playboy interview, Marshall McLuhan predicted the breakup of the USA into a set of regional and ethnic states (the relevant part starts a little more than halfway down):

https://nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan

Worth reading, if you're the sort of person who "only reads Playboy for the articles."
formerly VELIMIR (before that, Spitvalve)

"Who knows not strict counterpoint, lives and dies an ignoramus" - CPE Bach

Todd

#116
Quote from: Archaic Torso of Apollo on June 16, 2020, 08:32:05 AM
In his 1969 Playboy interview, Marshall McLuhan predicted the breakup of the USA into a set of regional and ethnic states (the relevant part starts a little more than halfway down):

https://nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan

Worth reading, if you're the sort of person who "only reads Playboy for the articles."


The timing of the interview is useful to note.  It was a fairly chaotic time in US history.  One can draw parallels to today, of course.  Balkanization - a somewhat lazy intellectual construction - and the inevitable disintegration of the USA has had its adherents at various times.  When I was in college, I had to read Ecotopia, from the 70s (I think) which was premised on a similar construct.  (I live in the author's ecotopia!)  While there is no reason to believe that the US will exist forever, it seems unlikely that disintegration will occur any time soon.  The federal government possesses overwhelming practical power, military and otherwise, that can enforce political unity, and both the Constitution and subsequent case law give the federal government basically unlimited legal authority to ensure unity.  Only if large enough political groupings demand secession, with widespread political support across the country, could it come to fruition.  Given the historically peripatetic nature of the US population, that seems unlikely, though internal migration has been slowing over the last couple decades, so it is not inconceivable that at some point in the distant-ish future regional differences could become severe enough, and political cohesion in the country strained enough, that such an outcome could occur.  I think there is a higher probability of an ill-informed and ill-advised Constitutional Convention dissolving the existing national system and replacing it with something different. 

(The reference to Linus Pauling's works in the interview seems a bit out of place.)
The universe is change; life is opinion. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

People would rather believe than know - E.O. Wilson

Propaganda death ensemble - Tom Araya

Karl Henning

How nice to hear this message from a non-"libtard"

And that has caused so many of my fellow conservatives to abandon the requirement of the humbling and life-enriching commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.

https://www.youtube.com/v/HXFlyjNQbvY
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

Gurn Blanston

Quote from: k a rl h e nn i ng on June 16, 2020, 09:31:21 AM
How nice to hear this message from a non-"libtard"

And that has caused so many of my fellow conservatives to abandon the requirement of the humbling and life-enriching commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.

https://www.youtube.com/v/HXFlyjNQbvY

As a one-time, long-time conservative, I totally agree with this guy. I was never (ever) a religious believer, but there was a time (before Reagan?) when one didn't need to be one in order to be a political conservative. Didn't need to be any of those repellent things that are taken for granted today either.  :-\

8)
Visit my Haydn blog: HaydnSeek

Haydn: that genius of vulgar music who induces an inordinate thirst for beer - Mily Balakirev (1860)

Karl Henning

Quote from: Gurn Blanston on June 16, 2020, 10:14:22 AM
As a one-time, long-time conservative, I totally agree with this guy. I was never (ever) a religious believer, but there was a time (before Reagan?) when one didn't need to be one in order to be a political conservative. Didn't need to be any of those repellent things that are taken for granted today either.  :-\

8)

Indeed.
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot