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zoux posted:My opinion is no in itt is ever in their lives going to punch a Nazi Are you willing to bet on that?
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Jun 18, 2019 17:33
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P-Mack posted:Democracy is good IMO. Not a huge amount considering the massive naval drawdown that happened soon after, they probably had a reasonable quantity of scrap value. However one real benefit was that it meant there was no diplomatic wrangling over the fate of the ships among the allied powers, which if i recall made a lot of people in the RN fairly happy, because it meant that they didnt have to hand over german ships and their associated technical secrets to people who mayt very quickly become rivals again, particularly France and Italy who could have potentially contested the hold on the mediterannean.
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Jun 18, 2019 17:35
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zoux posted:Also ffs stop jacking yourselves off like your John Brown for thinking it's cool to vandalize statues (it is, but also no one here is a Lost Causer) I'm not accusing anyone of being a Lost Causer, I am pointing out that scrupulous adherence to the law may well lad you on the wrong side of history.
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Jun 18, 2019 17:35
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GotLag posted:Gentlemen, you can't discuss politics in here, this is the extension of politics by other means thread! this thread isn't much use if people are just yelling and posturing. There's plenty of other places to do that on the forum. I find the intersection of violence and politics fascinating. In many conflicts the legality of actions is determined retroactively. It's also interesting to see instances in which political violence is deemed acceptable.  This is a picture from May Day in Paris. Anthropologically, I find this to be an extremely interested custom, although it is confusing. See every year the state squares up against the radicals and together they have a nice little riot. Everything is amazingly well organized and disciplined. Scheduled Everyone comes on schedule and participants fall into one of three teams: police, protester, and media. Each has an easily identifiable uniform and a well defined role in the performance. Protestors can use molotovs, fireworks and clubs but not guns or bladed weapons. Police use tear gas, rubber bullets and batons but not guns either. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoxsDkB-rWU It's so formalistic, its almost more like a sport than a protest. Before clashes start journalists are carefully herded out of the way. Press can mingle somewhat freely with either side so long as they are correctly marked, after all you wouldn't want to look bad in the papers. And yet despite the organization every year people suffer disfiguring burns, or a rubber bullet to the eye, or are even killed. And then they do it again the next year. It is political violence, but it violence that is highly normalized, if not entirely accepted. I'm not sure what exactly is accomplished, but it seems like at the end of the day most people go home satisfied. Varying levels of extra-legal force and violence are an accepted part of political activism in essentially every country, the United States included. For example, many people within the African-American community see riots as to some extent justified as a form of political protest, following what they see as expressions of injustice, as after the Rodney King trial. It is an extremely expensive and wasteful form of expression, but common nevertheless. When violence reaches the level of civil war or insurgency, the legality of actions will typically be determined retroactively. In the most extreme cases where the state realizes it has lost the monopoly of force and has no hope of imposing its will by force, it must negotiate. Almost all civil wars end with general amnesties. That inevitably means killers and murderers get to go home like nothing happened, and will never face any kind of justice. Often they even get to keep that which they took by force. In this world power is never absolute, there is always a negotiation. In the case of Confederate statues, I think many of their defenders have made some serious missteps. The southern state houses have assumed that they don't have to negotiate, and that they can impose these statues on cities, universities, and other communities by force of law, regardless of local opposition. This I believe is a mistake. What will they do if the city police refuse to investigate, the local district attorney refuses to prosecute, and the city council refuses to remediate damage? It puts them in a hard place politically.
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Jun 18, 2019 17:36
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zoux posted:My opinion is no in itt is ever in their lives going to punch a Nazi An member of the National Socialist Party of Germany that was abolished in 1945? No, I'm not that old. Racist skinheads in SoCal who wore swastikas? You'd be wrong to take that bet.
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Jun 18, 2019 17:37
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Cessna posted:I'm not accusing anyone of being a Lost Causer, I am pointing out that scrupulous adherence to the law may well lad you on the wrong side of history. That's a fine argument to have but some people are getting awful personal
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Jun 18, 2019 17:39
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Local vandalism news: apparently someone decided that the Liberty Memorial was the right place to discuss the Peruvian prison massacres of 1986. They may very well have something interesting to say and I admittedly know nothing about the Peruvian prison massacres of 1986 but I find their choice of medium distasteful.
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Jun 18, 2019 17:45
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chitoryu12 posted:Vandalism is a protest. If you are interested in the safety and position of the least privileged, I think you should be less blase about the use of extralegal force in politics. Even if it is justified, you must be prepared for force to be met with force. In such circumstances it is the marginalized who inevitably suffer the brunt of the violence. Don't make the mistake of confusing a just cause with good tactics. I'm sure the members of Tulsa's African American community who mobilized to protect Dick Rowland from being lynched in 1921 felt very righteous in their actions. Too bad about everything that happened after. Don't make the mistake of thinking you can win every battle.
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Jun 18, 2019 17:51
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zoux posted:This didn’t become law in Texas but it did pass one chamber: a law that would require that the alteration, relocation or removal of any Confederate monument require a supermajority of both chambers of the Legislature. As someone who knows a fair amount about Texas politics, I can tell you that this is a threshold that wouldn’t be possible for at least 50 years. It was in direct response to cities like Dallas and Houston voting to move or raze CSA monuments. So here you could’ve had a situation where there was no feasible legal recourse to removal. Georgia actually passed something similar. https://legislativenavigator.myajc.com/#bills/54724
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Jun 18, 2019 18:02
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Considering how the national guard helped burn Tulsa I'd rethink what extralegal really means in the context of lynchings
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Jun 18, 2019 18:02
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ulmont posted:Georgia actually passed something similar. Yeah these things typically come from the hellbrains at ALEC, they're blatantly partisan.
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Jun 18, 2019 18:04
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Squalid posted:If you are interested in the safety and position of the least privileged, I think you should be less blase about the use of extralegal force in politics. Even if it is justified, you must be prepared for force to be met with force. In such circumstances it is the marginalized who inevitably suffer the brunt of the violence. Don't make the mistake of confusing a just cause with good tactics. I'm sure the members of Tulsa's African American community who mobilized to protect Dick Rowland from being lynched in 1921 felt very righteous in their actions. Too bad about everything that happened after. Don't make the mistake of thinking you can win every battle. Translation: "Don't get uppity."
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Jun 18, 2019 18:04
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I don't get why they painted all over the monument. Like, just make some thermite and just take the legs of the statue that way - much easier means of toppling it and takes as much effort as painting in the darkness.
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Jun 18, 2019 18:08
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They can have their graveyards imo. Anything else belongs to non shitheads.
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Jun 18, 2019 18:10
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Cessna posted:Translation: "Don't get uppity." Not at all. It's just that because politics is so often about projecting the image of strength, it can be easy to forget that actually, you're going to lose a lot of fights. When people forget that and think they really are going to get tired of winning so much, they tend to make mistakes. For example, consider watching that video of Cyprus's independence struggle I posted a few days ago. They really believed they were going to get enosis if they just fought hard enough. They didn't, and they also lost half the island forever to Turkey and Britain. But hey, at least they didn't have to compromise their principles am I right?
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Jun 18, 2019 18:17
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The French Revolutionaries had deeply legitimate grievances and suggesting they should have played within the rules would be risible. And they destroyed a lot of things that were definitely tools of social control, including a lot of religious art. But today, the dominant body of historical thought is not "We're better off without those icons, historiography has no use for them, good for those iconoclasts who destroyed that stuff." I completely agree that at least most Confederate monuments were erected as tools of social control. And I also agree that the grievances against them are deeply legitimate and that they should be removed. And I personally wouldn't object to vandalism of them any more than I objected to vandalism of statues of Stalin when the Soviet Union collapsed. But why is the embrace of iconoclasm in this case so near-universal?
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Jun 18, 2019 18:21
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Squalid posted:In the most extreme cases where the state realizes it has lost the monopoly of force and has no hope of imposing its will by force, it must negotiate. I think what's most fascinating is that at almost no point does the state actually lose its monopoly of force. Technically they always have an option of escalating one step further, and these governments always will have access to tools that could very quickly just end it all in a massacre. But there are a panopoly of reasons why they hold off. Governments can sometimes be more intimidated by protestors threatening their own lives than they are of threats to the police or their rule, and I'm not fully aware of all the reasons for that. China famously killed a couple thousand people to quell a protest, but instead of trying to double down on that iron-fisted rule and letting that stand as a warning, they've been trying to suppress all knowledge of the protests. It's an interesting dynamic that involves a lot of bluffing. Riot control forces develop all kinds of ways to push people around without getting out more traditional warfare. The whole concept of how much to push a protest or how much to push back against a protest has been developing over centuries. The Revolutions podcast has a lot of it, a couple french kings got intimidated into leaving office, and the Hapsburgs got intimidated into various concessions, before they decided to turn around and actually use that monopoly of force. Austrians were more willing to kill their citizens (although what citizenship even means was part of what was under debate at the time) than the French, and they got 50 years more rule out of it. But I also try to look at things from alternate angles, and the way that I can imagine the development of protests like this being a bad thing (aside from the "oh no! Property damage!" angle) is with the dueling protests that have been happening lately. If you can't stop protestors who start to riot, you can't stop a fight between two groups. I dunno, maybe that's too much devil's advocate. I do know that genuine fascist takeovers often involve non-governmental organizations creating for themselves a monopoly of force where the legitimate government is either unwilling or unable. It's certainly a thing to watch out for.
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Jun 18, 2019 18:23
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Phanatic posted:The French Revolutionaries had deeply legitimate grievances and suggesting they should have played within the rules would be risible. And they destroyed a lot of things that were definitely tools of social control, including a lot of religious art. But today, the dominant body of historical thought is not "We're better off without those icons, historiography has no use for them, good for those iconoclasts who destroyed that stuff." We've had this argument in this thread before and people are tired of it.
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Jun 18, 2019 18:29
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Phanatic posted:The French Revolutionaries had deeply legitimate grievances and suggesting they should have played within the rules would be risible. And they destroyed a lot of things that were definitely tools of social control, including a lot of religious art. But today, the dominant body of historical thought is not "We're better off without those icons, historiography has no use for them, good for those iconoclasts who destroyed that stuff." A thing to consider would be how the French revolutionaries had a habit of not playing within the rules even after they had gotten rid of their old government and the king. That was part of the horror of the reign of terror, it was France's own little version of lynch mobs. It feels weird to me to still call them "revolutionaries" after a point. At what point does the interchange happen between fighting the power and fighting the people? Surely the Republican Baptisms don't count as fighting for freedom?
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Jun 18, 2019 18:32
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Phanatic posted:I completely agree that at least most Confederate monuments were erected as tools of social control. And I also agree that the grievances against them are deeply legitimate and that they should be removed. And I personally wouldn't object to vandalism of them any more than I objected to vandalism of statues of Stalin when the Soviet Union collapsed. But why is the embrace of iconoclasm in this case so near-universal?
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Jun 18, 2019 18:41
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Cessna posted:An member of the National Socialist Party of Germany that was abolished in 1945? No, I'm not that old. Technically only THEY need to be that old ofc
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Jun 18, 2019 18:43
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think what's most fascinating is that at almost no point does the state actually lose its monopoly of force. Technically they always have an option of escalating one step further, and these governments always will have access to tools that could very quickly just end it all in a massacre. That's basically true during a lot of civil protests. However looking at the big picture I would go more in the opposite direction: the state never truly has a monopoly on force, its just good at pretending it does. This can be hard to see in wealthy western nations where the state seems so very powerful and we are constantly told it is true. However in much of the world the limitations of the state is much more obvious. In places like Colombia groups like the FARC operated their own little mini-state for like 50 years. In this thread where the emphasis tends to be on total war, with large battles and decisive campaigns that burn up the entire nation's manpower in only four years, it's hard to imagine what a 50 year war even looks like. It's really not even that unusual a conflict though, and societies with parallel conflicting institutions are common. In such situations powers that won't even acknowledge one another's legitimacy often have no choice but to negotiate.
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Jun 18, 2019 18:45
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Fangz posted:We've had this argument in this thread before and people are tired of it. Apparently not tired enough.
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Jun 18, 2019 18:50
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chitoryu12 posted:Likewise, I'd be totally fine taking down some memorials to fallen WW2 soldiers in Germany. The Memorial to the Murdered Members of the Reichstag and the concentration camps turned into museums is one thing, but honoring those who fell in service of keeping Germany from facing consequences for genocide and trying to conquer most of Europe is not a good look almost 100 years after it happened. The big official monuments I am familiar with are Russian, and it's in the treaty that you can't take them down; they must be preserved "forever."
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Jun 18, 2019 18:55
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Stairmaster posted:property is the most important thing actually That's literally what the south believed
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Jun 18, 2019 19:03
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The idea behind the state having a monopoly of force as it's often used is sort of Weber. The ide isnt that the state has superior firepower, it's that only their use of violence is seen as legitimate. It's about the question of whether society recognizes the right of non state actors to act as vigilantes.
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Jun 18, 2019 19:03
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I'm trans as hell and there's no way I'm abandoning a commitment to liberal democracy. That doesn't make me "non uppity" or whatever you want to say, it means that if my enemies get the right to a peaceful and well ordered state I demand that right for myself as well, because I am nobody's subordinate. God made me equal to every human being.
HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Jun 18, 2019 |
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Jun 18, 2019 19:09
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Nothingtoseehere posted:I don't get why they painted all over the monument. Or prefabricate a properly sized big wooden box with small holes cut in the sides so you can thread rebar through it. Show up, put the box around the statue, enmesh it with rebar, seal the holes with spray foam and and then use a concrete pump to fill the box with quickset and entomb the statue.
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Jun 18, 2019 19:09
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Squalid posted:That's basically true during a lot of civil protests. However looking at the big picture I would go more in the opposite direction: the state never truly has a monopoly on force, its just good at pretending it does.
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Jun 18, 2019 19:10
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SlothfulCobra posted:A thing to consider would be how the French revolutionaries had a habit of not playing within the rules even after they had gotten rid of their old government and the king. That was part of the horror of the reign of terror, it was France's own little version of lynch mobs.
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Jun 18, 2019 19:12
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SlothfulCobra posted:I do know that genuine fascist takeovers often involve non-governmental organizations creating for themselves a monopoly of force where the legitimate government is either unwilling or unable. It's certainly a thing to watch out for.
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Jun 18, 2019 19:15
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Phanatic posted:The French Revolutionaries had deeply legitimate grievances and suggesting they should have played within the rules would be risible. And they destroyed a lot of things that were definitely tools of social control, including a lot of religious art. But today, the dominant body of historical thought is not "We're better off without those icons, historiography has no use for them, good for those iconoclasts who destroyed that stuff." Probably because those Confederate statues have the build quality of an office tchotchke.
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Jun 18, 2019 19:15
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Jobbo_Fett posted:WW2 Data I have been reading these from the very beginning. How many bloody bombs do you need? Seriously? Is this some German fetish to have a bomb for every possible use, (probably) from mosquito repellent to shaving your boyfriend? Do the modern militaries have such a huge selection of different kinds of stuff to drop on their battle buddies from above?
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Jun 18, 2019 19:16
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zoux posted:My opinion is no in itt is ever in their lives going to punch a Nazi
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Jun 18, 2019 19:16
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Letmebefrank posted:...shaving your boyfriend? 
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Jun 18, 2019 19:17
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HEY GUNS posted:I would rather have him arrested. I have terrible news about the people who would do the arresting
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Jun 18, 2019 19:17
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HEY GUNS posted:This is one of the reasons I don't trust revolutionaries. Sure it's the people you hate today and liberals tomorrow, but it might be me the day after. Effete bourgeois decadence after all. There’s a reason why the first people up against the wall when the revolution comes are frequently the revolutionaries.
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Jun 18, 2019 19:21
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HEY GUNS posted:I'm trans as hell and there's no way I'm abandoning a commitment to liberal democracy. That doesn't make me "non uppity" or whatever you want to say, it means that if my enemies get the right to a peaceful and well ordered state I demand that right for myself as well, because I am nobody's subordinate. God made me equal to every human being. i'm sorry, didn't you say you were a monarchist?
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Jun 18, 2019 19:22
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HEY GUNS posted:Is there something I should know about you, Letmebefrank? When the first "shave all body hair" bomb arrives, I am first at the ground zero. "Slowly turning into an orangutan"
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Jun 18, 2019 19:24
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Phanatic posted:There’s a reason why the first people up against the wall when the revolution comes are frequently the revolutionaries. This is also why I hate the idea of communes or "deliberate communities" or whatever you want to call it, too. Historically, tight-knit emotional groups based on a gift economy have been very bad for outsiders. If my life depends on the feelings of the majority, I just don't trust that. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Jun 18, 2019 |
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Jun 18, 2019 19:26
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