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I said something along the lines of:
"Wow, I haven't had a reason to smile ear to ear in a while."
Along with
"Nah, the more dead ~~corpos~~ dragons, the better."
In response to some liberal going off about how violence is never the solution, not mentioning how this murdered dipshit has personally overseen a system that perpetuates harm, suffering and death (violence) in the name of profit.
...
Good ole' civility clause.
Whats the paradox of tolerance?
.world mods have never heard of it I guess.
Yes.
As an anarchist, I am keenly aware that rules are merely suggestions, and are utterly meaningless when no system exists to actually enforce them.
The whole thing is all just made up. There are no "rules" written down like there are for software systems. There are just shared habits and models of the world, and traditions for how to react. In general, people agree and keep it all consistent enough from day to day that the rules in their heads translate into behavior and dependable systems in the real world. But it's all just made up. It's just people deciding what to do, every minute, in every society, based on what they decide in their brain, no matter how strict the "rules" that supposedly exist are.
Like how we could 'make up' having a healthcare system that provides universal affordable care to all citizens, but instead ... we ...
(not actually all of us, actually the extremely wealthy and influential people who control government policy and all the media that tells us what to think about government policy)
... 'we' make up a horrible, unjust system that perpetuates suffering, violence and death, so that a tiny minority of people can profit!
What I'm saying is that there is no mechanical system that puts those particular people in charge.
We had the gilded age, we had the labor battles that laid the foundation for the working economy of the 20th century, we had the New Deal and prosperity for a lot of people, then we let it get away from us and the crooks took charge again. But it all can change. We can make it different. People have fought their way back to good government from places a million times worse than modern-day America.
I'm not sure what you mean by mechanical.
Obviously there is not a physical machine like a 3d printer that produces a sociopoliticaleconomic system.
But there are absolutely empirically verified theories within sociology, political science, and economics which describe why historical events happened with a pretty good degree of accuracy, and a lot of them do function pretty mechanistically to predict likely future outcomes, though with a wider margin of possibility than physics predicting a physical machine.
I'm saying that nothing enforces these particular people being in charge, other than everyone agreeing that these are the people in charge, and that can change.
It has, in huge ways, for better and worse depending, all throughout history.
Is this a joke?
You're saying there's no military, no police, no jobs that take all our time just to stay alive, no media that reinforces the desired narrative, no corruption, no broken electoral system, no economic stratification, no relgion and bigotry used to convince people to support their own materially worsening lives, no intentionally broken education system... none of that enforces who is in charge?
I could go on for actual hours about ludicrous this statement is, you have to almost entirely ignorant of history, poli sci, sociology, econ, a whole number of other fields, to be able to say something like this.
I'm saying that the military only reacts to each set of orders they get because they decide to. In the recent past in the US, it's always been deciding to follow every order to the letter, which is the usual way, but that's not set in stone. People in the military switching their allegiance or having conflict between one or multiple "systems" which are trying to tell them what to do, and their own conscience, is a key feature of times of upheaval like the one we're about to enter into. Same for the police. More than once, the final stage of the revolution has been the commanders ordering the military to fire on the revolutionaries and the military simply saying, "No." I don't expect that particular detail to come into play, but it might, and I definitely think there will be conflicting "systems" telling various military people what to do, and how they'll decide to act is not obvious in advance.
Hugh Thompson landed his helicopter between US troops and Vietnamese civilians, at My Lai, and told his men to shoot the Americans if they tried to advance. They apparently were ready to, and he ended the massacre, and although it's a little bit complicated they did give him a medal for it when he got home.
Jobs that take all our time is a real thing. It was far, far worse back in the late 1800s. At least today you get paid in money and live in housing not provided by your job. People worked it out, though, although it was harder than anything I've ever done and probably anything that you've ever done. We can do it, though. They did.
Media is the same. People decide what media to follow. A huge amount of it is corrupted by propaganda, but again, at least the oppostion media is legal. For now. It may be different a year from now.
And so on. I'm saying that all the systems you describe are things that other people are deciding to take part in. I'm not saying they're optional from your perspective when you're interacting with people who are obeying their systems and ready to enforce them with violence. I'm saying that their obedience to that system is a thing that can change, too. It's happened before, many many times.
Ok, so there is actually more enforcing the inescapable systems that govern the vast majority of people's lives than just 'we all collectively agree that how things are going is how they should continue to go.'
Great. Glad you agree?
This all started with you just saying oh just all of society is made up so we can all just make it up into something different if enough people agree.
You say there are no rules that are written down (what are laws?) but there are traditions and habits and models (which can and mostly have all been described as informal rulesets).
This is infantile, incoherent nonsense, which I mock by using the same language to basically just say ah ok, let's all just 'make up' something better than, oh wait no thats not how anything works.
Then you say there is no inescapable (literal?) machine that forces society to be one way forever, and that change is possible.
Sure great. Change is possible. Uh huh.
Then you say that actually yeah it really is just that everyone agrees on one way society should work and then they all agree to change it and it just happens. You consistently use the term 'we' as if people are all just an undifferentiated blob that collectively 'decides', somehow, to do different things.
No, societal change requires specific targeted actions directed by almost always an intially small but like minded people with specific goals and methods of achieving them, who figure out some means of obtaining enough power and enough additional people to force the currently powerful groups to either disband or acquiesce to their specific demands.
You are just taking a functional, representative democracy as a given, as an inviolable state of nature, where all that matters is the aggregate of what most people think.
This is demonstrably false, history is replete with examples of small groups of people either manipulating or overtly forcing others to act in certain ways, often for very long periods of time, and/or with extreme violence, deprivation and suffering, where the opinion of the common person has almost 0 sway on the course of history.
Anyway, now we arrive at this post where you do seem to now be saying that actually there are power dynamics and group dynamics and that actions actually do matter, and that things can change because they did before.
Wonderful.
You are full of empty headed optimism, bite sized high school history lessons, where everyone just makes decisions for no apparent reason, you discuss no motivations or material conditions or other factors that influence why things happen, why people decide, singly, as a small group, as a nation, whatever, to make certain choices, just, sometimes people do different things you do not expect.
I guess I am the idiot for engaging with you this far.
I am impressed that you've managed to bamboozle me thus far, I made the mistake of thinking you had something meaningful or interesting to say.
Yes. That is literally what society is. That "if enough people agree" is doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting, but yes, that is exactly right, if that condition can be met.
Usually, it lasts at best until that small group of people dies, and then the whole thing changes. Sometimes them dying has little bits of assistance from the common people, Democracies are more stable, in general, because people have something to believe in that can span multiple generations.
Actually, I would say tyranny of small groups is the more normal state of human history, and democracies are more unusual and fragile modern beasts. They last a while, with the right maintenance, but they can be surprisingly delicate in some ways, and they're difficult to put together again once they're lost.
Yeah, probably. I did give some specific examples, like the late-1800s labor movement and the My Lai massacre. I alluded to the fall of East Germany, with the military being ordered to fire on protestors and refusing.
I didn't mean to sound like I was saying it was easy to change these agreements people all have with each other that make it all operate, or anything like that. It sounds to me like thinking I was saying that is what got you so upset, and you're now claiming that I'm changing my story. But my point wasn't that it's easy. My point was that it's possible. That's why I kept bringing up specific examples like the labor movement or the New Deal, where the whole fabric of society changed from one thing to another with sustained action over time. It's happened. You can't say it's "empty headed optimism" if it has literally already happened, many, many times over the course of history.
Police procedures are not set in stone. They can change depending on who's in government. Governmental structures are not fixed. Sometimes the whole thing comes crashing down, and people set up a new thing. Sometimes what comes after is better, and sometimes it's much much worse.
You seem oddly hostile in response to a fairly mild comment.
Some people view the point of online discussion as to "win." If what I'm saying makes sense, it's a problem, because I might "win," and so he has to go on the attack to prevent that, and regain the position of being the one explaining things, instead of the one being explained to, which is "losing."
Great cherry picking. They did continue that statement. And these other people still have agency. Nobody says there are no reasons why the people agree who is in charge but in the end it is still the people from whom all power originates.
Nobody can rule alone.
Yeah. I don’t think it’s any kind of malicious misunderstanding or anything, he’s just set in his thinking, as are a lot of people on the internet. But yes it’s pretty funny to cut off the “nothing” statement right before the “other than” part, and then bring up as the first two examples stuff that was included in my “other than.”
Maybe the root cause is that he doesn’t think of the military or police as being made of people, which is an understandable but critical error. He thinks of him and his friends as “people,” but people in other walks of life as some type of robot or different species entirely maybe, which if so, isn’t a good way to look at it.
No, my problem is that your analysis/prescription is entirely vibes, entirely thought-form based.
Oh and thanks for pathologizing me like an object while claiming that that's actually what I do, very charismatic and reasonable approach to try to sway another person's opinion.
I spent a while trying to explain to you what I was saying. It seems like you're not into it. That's okay.
Now I'm talking to someone else, who also noticed you being resistant to picking up what I'm saying, about why that might be. I get that the presentation is kind of insulting to you. But I don't know, that's how I see it. I'm not trying to sway your opinion in any respect. I'm presenting what I think, and spent a decent amount of time on it, and what you do with it from here on out is completely up to you.
The rest of the statement doesn't matter as it is even more absurd.
Everyone who works every position in all those systems agree, like, affirmatively consent and endorse that the people in charge deserve to be in charge, and all they need to do is change their minds, not actually do anything, and then the people in charge, the system itself changes?
This isn't even true, tons of people often work jobs they hate, do things in those jobs they regret, things they wish they did not have to.
They are coerced by their situation in society into doing so, these people do not 'agree' with the structures they are forced to be a part of to survive.
And saying that all thats needed is for wvwryone to magically agree in their minds on some other societal structure is just manifesting, power of positive thinking, mind over matter nonsense.
Its like saying politics would be wonderful if everyone agreed.
I think you two are talking past each other. I interpret what they’re saying as basically: we made this system, we can unmake it. Military members, police officers, people working in the media- they’re all just people and if they all changed their minds tomorrow, things would be different. Obviously getting them to change their minds is basically impossible for one person, but the point is that solidarity is the only (incredibly painstaking) solution to this kind of mess.