The News Thread
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HamburgerBoy
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300 arrested, so whether or not they were "processed" (whatever that means) initially, they certainly didn't have permission to do what they did, and what they did was with the intent of delaying governmental processes. Unless the terrorism aspect you're referring to isn't so much the conscious political motive aspect as it is the physically destructive aspect, in which case black terrorism blatantly outnumbers right-wing terrorism when looking at the countless black riots in history (including recent history).
HamburgerBoy
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"Radical conservatism" is pretty much an oxymoron btw. Basically all right-wing terrorism, with the exception of abortion clinic bombers, falls into either libertarian or white-nationalist/supremacist categories. Most of the GOP, including its most right-wing members like Cruz, have described the Capitol riot as terrorism while simultaneously promoting the inflammatory myth that George Floyd was murdered. At most you'll see a rise in Qtard/MAGAtard radicalization, and many of those are less ideological than cult-followers. Most of the riot footage indicates that it was the dregs of the base, the trashiest of white trash plus assorted schizos, who participated. The facepaint barbarian guy was revealed to be a chronically unemployed 34 year old living with his mother, for example. The GOP has been engaged in a constant cultural left-ward shift for approximately a century and shows no sign of letting up, and most of its supporters are more than happy to continue supporting their party if it means keeping the DNC boogieman out of office.
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
The Patriot Act defines domestic terrorism pretty clearly I would say. Activities that (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the U.S. or of any state; (B) appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.
HamburgerBoy
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BLM riots definitely count by that definition. I'll admit that the Kavanaugh protests fail under section (A) however.
Allfader
Kvelding
HamburgerBoy
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Allfader
Kvelding
A bunch of people protesting due Cops killing black men because they actually admitted they have a racial bias against them is one thing, and trying to overthrow a government is another.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/racial-bias-training-de-escalation-training-policing-in-america/
You just can't be that dumb, sorry.
Einherjar86
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zabu of nΩd
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The Kavanaugh protesters didn't have a conscious political motive to kill Congressmen. Your comparison is absurd, and I'm guessing you're one of the people who was cheering on last week's attack given the general enthusiasm for conflict escalation (or just trolling the UM libs) you expressed during our last exchange. It figures you'd bring black riots into this discussion, with the implication that I condone them (I don't), because "he hit me first!" is about all you've got to work with in your sleazy attempt to downplay the attack on the Capitol.
HamburgerBoy
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I'd sooner see government overthrown than the lives of private citizens tbh. Not sure which cops you're referring to admitting their racial bias, but it was probably in the context of some mandatory training where saying the required words and checking the required boxes is the best way to move on. While Trump undoubtedly is lying when he talks about a stolen election, and his lies have undoubtedly provided the spark to set about the riots at the Capitol, so too are politicians and racial agitators when they talk disproportionately about the very small number of unarmed blacks killed by police. Black homicide is up massively post-Floyd in a spike not seen in decades.
Funny since you've already admitted that "left" has no meaning outside of trying to compare a small handful of white Western nations.
I acknowledge that among more traditional definitions of terrorism like the one CIG supplies, the Kavanaugh disruptions do not count. I've seen many claim that this riot is special specifically because it sought to disrupt electoral vote counting and therefore undermine constitutional democratic processes, which on that specific angle is comparable to the Kavanaugh case, but you're not making that argument so fair enough.
It's probable that some of the Capitol rioters had a conscious motive to kill Congressmen, though it seems like the majority (particularly those who the cops decided to give a brief unofficial tour of the place) were just angry venting tards. For example, I don't see "Hang Pence" and pushing around a guillotine as being any more a serious threat than a "Fry pigs like bacon" directed against cops at more left-leaning events. The armed participants and those with zip ties and whatnot, sure, and I'm sure as the feds investigate closer they'll find at least some engaged in coordinated efforts, but a dude entering Nancy Pelosi's office to have a selfie taken with his boots on her desk is not my idea of a hardened ideological killer.
fwiw I do remember your posts earlier well enough to know you're not Ein-tier, but in general people don't describe race riots as terrorism, and even though you're not a pro-burning-and-looting-shit guy I'm wondering if you would refer to them as terrorism. Certainly no influential terrorism-defining organizations do, and basically no political officials or mainstream news anchors would either. When the media went to check out CHAZ they tried to describe it as a festive rebellious street party. I'm not downplaying the riot; I've already acknowledged that it was violent, it killed people, and that the feds were right to shoot that woman and would have been right to shoot more. You're downplaying the many riots of the last several months if you think there was much separating them from the Capitol attack other than muh symbolism.
Einherjar86
Active Member
*sigh*
I've admitted no such thing. If you'd bother to follow up you'd know that I think it's tough to compare leftisms and rightisms between the U.S. and any other country. Any such comparison requires a lot of qualifications and caveats, and it struck me as an unproductive one in the moment.
Since you're making big assumptions, I'm going to make one too.
I'm guessing you were trying to suggest that the U.S. is more left than China because in the U.S. we have things like BLM, women's rights, LGBTQ justice, etc.--whereas China doesn't. You've made equivocations in the past between BLM and "the left" or "leftism," so I'm assuming that's your barometer.
The problem is that BLM, women's rights and gender equality have almost nothing to do with leftism, historically speaking. They have more to do--far more--with a liberal progressivism that is uniquely American. Hell, identity politics itself makes no sense without the ideology of possessive individualism (again, uniquely British and American). Idpol is all about an experience of individual selfhood, about the fullness of a person's identity--completely orthogonal to the selflessness and collectivist mentality of historical leftism.
This is why I cautioned against comparing the U.S. and China. In the U.S. today, "leftism" has come to mean anything from antifa, to postmodernism, to third-wave feminism, to deconstruction, to Marxism. It's a nearly useless term in its ubiquity, and this is primarily because of conservative fearmongers who throw around "the left" to arouse the passions of their unthinking audiences. You've clearly adopted this catch-all usage, and it allows you to imagine the U.S. as magically more leftist than countries like China or the Soviet Union.
If the U.S. were truly a leftist country, the tech giants wouldn't enjoy all the financial freedoms they do. The fossil fuel industry wouldn't have grown to the extent that it did. If the U.S. were leftist, private property would be routinely appropriated and redistributed to the commons.
In leftist countries, historically speaking, the state controls domestic capital. In the U.S., by contrast, domestic capital (and let's be honest, a lot of international capital) controls the state.
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Allfader
Kvelding
So, you're exactly like the traitors that went there. Exactly like them.
Funny, since those motherfuckers got killed 5 people there. So much for the care of the private citizens.
It would help you to get information from reliable sources instead breitbart/infowars shit.
This is probably downplayed by the government and it's still gross.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080222/
Recent analyses suggest that legal intervention deaths increased 45% (from 0.11 to 0.16/100,000) between 1999 and 2013, with higher rates among blacks (0.24); American Indian/Alaska Natives (0.20); and Hispanic whites (0.17) compared with non-Hispanic whites (0.09) and Asian/Pacific Islanders (0.05).17 An examination of data from 1960 to 2010 also indicated consistently higher rates among black men compared with white men, with rate ratios ranging from 2.6 to 10.1.3
Most victims were reported to be armed (83%); however, black victims were more likely to be unarmed (14.8%) than white (9.4%) or Hispanic (5.8%) victims.
Don't forget how this Trumpy piece of shit have instigated violence all along:
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zabu of nΩd
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Glad we could find common ground on some of this. There's a lot of violence on the left I'm not okay with, and as much as the general worldview of the right pisses me off, I know I have to keep this kind of dialogue open, not only to check my bias but to do my part to bridge the divide. I mainly just hope one day you'll move on from this cavalier attitude you've shown toward all the conflict in this country.
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HamburgerBoy
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No, I'm referring to economic and social freedom. In America a person can easily lose their entire livelihood for saying the wrong words and being bankrupted by a civil court. China has a somewhat similar system, but the punishment is restricted to crimes of criticizing the state, and transgressions are repressed rather than amplified, which attenuates the range of social penalties. America sells its youth into monetary debt in the pursuit of "social capital", an ersatz currency which demands ideological obedience and can be confiscated with less than law, merely through mores. China has a social score system, but at least that one is relatively transparent and is again primarily used for preservation of the state itself, not for dictating personal social values. America is basically a not-for-long-first-world Hoxhaist democracy in contrast to the PRC's soon-to-be-first-world state capitalism. I do agree that we're still to the right of the Soviet Union or the Khmer Rouge though.
I agree regarding the origin of our identity politics, which is why I mentioned Marx and his abandonment of communism in the USA following his conflicts with non-class identitarian groups. I disagree that it is all about "individual selfhood"; nothing is individual when mandated or enabled via the (inherently collective) state. That's precisely why American left-liberalism is so radical, because it seeks to make all matters traditionally of social and personal importance within the sphere of the state.
Tech giants have financial freedoms like serial rapists have bodily freedoms. They have the freedom to be sued into submission by governments (EEOC law), the freedom to perform unconstitutional (yet private and therefore "legal") acts on governments' behalfs (installing secret monitoring stations in AT&T buildings), the freedom to be rewarded with indefinite patent protections and protection from foreign competitors, and the freedom to be too big to fail. The very existence of corporate law is a left-wing construction that seeks to institutionalize trade by giving certain players special privileges, and FDR (America's true left-wing pioneer) recognized that as much as anyone by giving loyal companies like RCA power that the robber barons could have only dreamed of. The chicken-and-egg argument of whether it's corporations controlling states or vice versa doesn't matter much to me when each requires the other to maintain their power.
But in much more recent years, shooting of unarmed suspects has dropped significantly. All of this is only relevant if one accepts the premise that the role of government is substantially utilitarian in terms of reducing killings. Violent crime has plummeted since the start of the 90s, which corresponds fairly well to the rise of America's current police state and massive prison population. Escalation of police force will naturally carry with it an escalation of police shootings, and in higher crime areas where blacks tend to be, there will naturally be an observed racial component to police shootings. Your rates correspond quite well to the overall violent crime rates of each ethnic group, including Asians being half that of non-Hispanic whites. The number dead from BLM/antifa-inspired violence actually exceeds the number of those killed while unarmed by cops, last I checked.
Personally, I don't believe in utilitarian government except in limited cases like natural monopoly and negative economic externalities, so I don't really have a problem with the "defund the police" movement on the face of it. My only real problem is that in cities like Minneapolis and Portland, the individual right to self-defense (including defense of ones' business) is highly limited and when there's a riot, it leaves people at the mercy of the mob in black or the mob in blue. That's why I'd sooner see government overthrown than a private business.
I'm cavalier because it seems like everyone else is. A family-owned store gets burned down and the dominating response in the circles of power is "lol you had insurance right? It's just property bro build another". The US Mint can just print more money to pay for whatever damages were incurred at the US Capitol. I truly don't care about anything that happens to people causing the problems, and I'm not optimistic enough to think that telling the real world that I care more about property than political hysteria would result in anything other than a demerit on my social credit score.
Einherjar86
Active Member
I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around your perspective here. It strikes me as utterly perverse. It's precisely that the U.S. has hate crime laws that makes it less leftist than China. Hate crime laws and speech norms/mores are the product of liberal democracy, not an authoritarian leftist regime. Furthermore, practices of censorship are pushed, for the most part, by the public sphere. They aren't policies instituted by a central government.
Even in the case when we are discussing centrally instituted parameters, like hate crime laws, these aren't leftist. Hate crime laws are historically modern and arose from democratic processes. They have no basis in authoritarianism.
When Twitter deplatformed Trump, that wasn't an infringement on free speech. That was a private company making a business decision. When liberals boycotted Chick-fil-A because they don't like something the president said, or whoever, that's not the state interfering with business; it's private citizens voicing their dissent.
What you're claiming is state-run censorship and interference is just a democratic public sphere acting on its misgivings.
What is being mandated by the state? In the U.S., the central government might go along with currents that originate in the public sphere, but they aren't mandating what you seem to think they are. The state might pursue a case brought to them by individual plaintiffs, but that's why we have a state with branches of government. In many cases it's impossible for an individual to amass the capital and expertise needed to bring a suit.
Insofar as the state enables these discussions... that's the whole purpose of having a state. The alternative would be a lawless, stateless assemblage of warring clans. It seems to me that you'd characterize almost any manifestation of a state as leftist, simply to varying degrees; i.e. as soon as you have a state, you're leftist.
You're wrong that corporate law is a left-wing construction. I have a hard time finding where to begin here. It's a refutation and dismissal of actual economic and social history. The very fact that a corporation is treated in many respects as a person is key here; it's an individual that has the rights of an individual, except in certain respects. My guess is that you're lumping corporatism in with leftism; but corporatism in the liberal West is distinct from other brands of corporatism that have arisen since the nineteenth century.
States may have granted freedoms to companies in the early days of capitalism, i.e. the sixteenth/seventeenth century (e.g. charters for the Dutch East India Company, et al); but this was when feudal structures still held sway. Very shortly after this, state power in the West waned as capital grew. I'm not saying the state went away, but it increasingly functioned as a facilitator for the growth of capital--not the other way around.
Anyone has the "freedom" to be sued by anyone. You're not making a point. Tech giants serve a social purpose: they're communications media. They're not state sanctioned or sponsored; they're private companies, although some are publicly traded. That they're granted more exceptions by the government doesn't mean the government is leftist, but that it's deeply capitalist (or corporatist). In the U.S., government regulation and interference--even FDR--has always been for the ultimate purpose of maintaining economic growth and stability.
So again, all I see here is "government = leftism." That's not a productive claim, and it's also not historically accurate. You're redefining leftism to suit your interests. Ordinary speech and evolution of language are all well and good, but you're doing so in a rhetorically particular and pernicious way.
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challenge_everything
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I lol'ed at the idea of corporate law being a leftwing construction. Said no-one ever.
zabu of nΩd
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I mean you have a perfectly legit point about property destruction, but dude, have you listened to yourself? I still can't tell if you're legitimately angry or just trolling most of the time, especially when you praise Trump for trolling. When your style of argumentation involves responding to a single point with a sweeping litany of horrors about the Democrats, followed by a three cheers to Trump for making the snowflakes cry, it's hard to believe you really care about your "social credit score".
I get that PC/cancel culture is out of control, and UM is something of a refuge from that. I'm certainly more of an asshole here than anywhere else, online or offline. Is that what your style here is about, or are you anti-PC in a broader region of your social life? Maybe you're not willing to compartmentalize in that way, but your tone does go a long way in the persuasiveness of your arguments, and it's not exactly surrendering to PC culture if you can use tact as a means to bring people on the left more in agreement with you.
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
Einherjar86
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