Biden Thread

[Viking]

See, disregarding the logical flaws in your polemic by escaping to the level of meta-abstraction - defending the mere availability of abstraction - does not increase the credibility of your initial attempt here, which was to insinuate jeopardy in the public discourse on subjects like race and gender.

Notwithstanding one's opinion of the Vietnam War, someone urging that American forces ought to be recalled to the mainland in order to stave off Native American genocide of the White majority, in connection with the emergence of the American Indian Movement, could be dismissed without further thought.

You should expect to do a lot of heavy lifting to explain why unsubstantiated potentials from an unsubstantiated harm (that is more often part of an affirmative good) have some kind of precedence over an ongoing national crisis.

Designating left-wing radicalization a point of anticipation is dubious when we've had generations of right-wing radicalization outpacing it by an order of magnitude. We already know what's going on here.

So in summary, statue violence has an unclear connection to cultural leftism in general or the development of the Democratic Party, the indicia of radicalization are responsive to conditions outside the activities of the Left, and it is uninformative to analyze current events without actually setting them in current events.

The idea is not that the Democratic party is likely to be taken over by authoritarians within the next few years, but your point seems to be that authoritarian or totalitarian movements no longer will spawn on the 'left' today - which raises the question, what are Jughashvili, Mao, and Saloth Sar doing today? Playing Civilization or staying involved with the 'alt-right'? Even if that were the case, you can be confident there are new names to replace them.

The point is that people are dangerous, not the 'right', not the 'left', not 'fascists', not 'communists' - but people. All dictators, murderers etc. were and are people. When (sub-)movements with clear anti-intellectual and anti-democratic inclinations appear, they are worthy of attention, and many of them are found on the 'left'. That is a fact.

Is your point that this terminology or the concepts they denote are bad and dangerous, that it is as bad as you think toppling a statue is, that the two are somehow related, or that they represent a path of objectionable extremism for the Democratic Party? You will, as before, have a very hard time actually supporting any of the above with more than appeal to infinite possible worlds.

But as a matter of fact "trigger" and "survivor" have been mainstream terminology since the Obama era. Hope that doesn't undo you.

The point is of course how fringes can make their way closer to the Democratic mainstream over the years.

I don't think use of the word 'triggered' this way was particularly common in mainstream usage 10+ years ago, particularly not in combination with a phrase like 'femme-led'.

Now your turn on why talking about sex crime and nonstandard genders and orientations manifests danger from the left.

But spare me the 'ZOMGbbq teh statues SJdubz gone mad' crap that you clearly can't justify up front.

I brought up statues because it is much more relevant than talking; and now you bring up talking again. Politics is of course never just about talking. Implying so is disingenuous.

Here's the problem again. You're wounded when I recount the specific actions of what is certainly a well-defined group of people, primarily in the context of modern American politics no less, yet you see no breach of etiquette in implicitly condemning the broad left on the basis of almost literally nothing but vague discomfort.

Reasonable debate is what is wounded. Yes, you bring up specific actions by specific people to condemn a very large and very heterogeneous group of people that has nothing to with said actions. I have not addressed the 'left' in general, but specific individuals and subgroups, in particular one group that has defined itself through its actions (toppling statues).

If you mean US conservatism, then state so. Even then, tarring aside, implying that people like Trump and Milton Friedman are basically the same is not very useful, to put it mildly.

That is of course not what happened.

"If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions.”


I am not always going to be present to call you out when you engage in this dishonest tactic of motte-and-bailey abstractions. The issue at hand in the Damore controversy was never whether there are non-zero differences between men and women as groups.

Except it is exactly what happened. The memo presented an alternative science-based hypothesis for the hiring pattern in technology (coupled with criticism of related corporate practices), and this argument was perverted, either intentionally or out prejudice, by people such as the CEO to justify Damore's firing (quote: "To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK."")

As long as you cannot substantiate your claims, you have no credibility on this topic, so this is pointless.

Liberals and leftists the world over continue to get less religious by the year, but freedom of religion has always been a liberal plank. For example, most Evangelical Christians are scum, but that's not an excuse to discriminate on a group level. Evangelical Christianity was originally the birthplace of progressivism in the United States, so maybe that's what you're thinking of, but those days are very long gone.

This plank seems to occasionally provide a cover for Islamists (i.e. 'fascists').

Veering slightly from the original topic here, but freedom of religion is nothing but special treatment of religions. There is nothing here that should not already covered by concepts like freedom of speech, assembly, association, and so forth - unless special treatment for religions actually is the goal.

My sense is that you disagree with the cultural Left on values, perceive them as more of a threat to your worldview than fascism and by that pretext launder some of your own unpopular views on race and gender and civics by inflating criticism of an unpopular impulse among part of the cultural Left. Hence why you don't rely on the old standby of an imminent Communist uprising coming to ban private property, because that particular fish doesn't get at which of your oxes is presently being gored.

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It would be something else entirely if you sought out perspectives on how societies should go about memorializing figures as such in public spaces over time. There's at least scope for a grounded discussion; I've read multiple non-worthless thinkpieces in that vein. Or if you just wished to register displeasure at vigilante iconoclasm, I wouldn't pressure it.

The problem is that you keep practising as a hobby psychoanalyst, looking personal reasons instead of sticking to the sentences that are actually written down and not rely on more context than what is logically necessary to interpret the sentences.