Skip to content

controversial

US Capitol attacks

Honorable Mentions:

Various duels and fights conducted in the Capitol or by Senators and Congressmen. Special plaudits go to: the duel in which Representative William J. Graves of Kentucky killed Representative Jonathan Cilley of Maine; the incident on February 6th 1858 in which a debate over the Kansas Territory grew into a fistfight that included over 30 Representatives; "The Battle of the Reed Rules," in which newly-elected Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed attempted to count Democrats in the chamber who were present but remaining silent to defy a quorum, after which Democrats attempted to flee before Reed had the doors ordered locked; the infamous Brooks-Sumner affair, when Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Charles Sumner with a cane on the Senate Floor over a heated debate on slavery (which only ended when several Senators pulled pistols to restore order); and, less-famously, the caning in 1866, when Lovell Rousseau of Kentucky (a Union general during the war) caned Josiah Grinnell of Iowa, after which Rousseau was censured, resigned, and then re-elected handily in the same seat.

Honorable Mention: The Weather Underground

On March 1st, 1971, radical militant group "Weather Underground" successfully planted and detonated a bomb in one of the men's bathrooms. No one was injured, and no one was ever arrested or changed. Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were later, famously, at the center of a controversy over how close they were to then-candidate Barack Obama.

Later, in 1983, the "May 19th Communist Organization," a feminist spin-off of the Weather Underground, would plant bombs twice in Capitol restrooms, failing to detonate one on November 6th but succeeding to detonate one on November 7th. Nobody was hurt, 7 people were charged, 2 were sentenced, and one would eventually have her sentence commuted by President Clinton.

...

At first, it looked as if neighboring Virginia would remain in the Union. When it unexpectedly voted for secession, there was a serious danger that the divided state of Maryland would do the same, which would totally surround the capital with enemy states. President Abraham Lincoln’s act in jailing Maryland's pro-slavery leaders without trial saved the capital from that fate.

Faced with an open rebellion that had turned hostile, Lincoln began organizing a military force to protect Washington. The Confederates desired to occupy Washington and massed to take it. On April 10 forces began to trickle into the city. On April 19, the Baltimore riot threatened the arrival of further reinforcements. Andrew Carnegie led the building of a railroad that circumvented Baltimore, allowing soldiers to arrive on April 25, thereby saving the capital.

Wikipedia rather understates the danger. After the incident at Fort Sumter, when the seceded state of South Carolina bombarded the federal garrison there, Virginia voted to secede from the Union, and DC found itself at risk of being totally isolated and captured without any defenses. Lincoln passed a very sleepless week wondering if the capitol was about to be occupied any moment, and was only relieved when the first troops of his 75,000-man militia arrived from Massachusetts.

The 1954 United States Capitol shooting was an attack on March 1, 1954, by four Puerto Rican nationalists who sought to promote the cause of Puerto Rico's independence from US rule. They fired 30 rounds from semi-automatic pistols onto the legislative floor from the Ladies' Gallery (a balcony for visitors) of the House of Representatives chamber within the United States Capitol.

The nationalists, identified as Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero, and Irvin Flores Rodríguez, unfurled a Puerto Rican flag and began shooting at Representatives in the 83rd Congress, who were debating an immigration bill. Five Representatives were wounded, one seriously, but all recovered. The assailants were arrested, tried and convicted in federal court, and given long sentences, amounting to life imprisonment. In 1978 and 1979, their sentences were commuted by President Jimmy Carter.[2] All four returned to Puerto Rico.

Five congressmen were injured in the attack but none too seriously

Some commentary:

I think part of this is the dichotomy of politicians as symbols and as people. Politicians have power, they are privileged. But they (in theory) have that power because they have been invested with decision making powers by the people.

Like 9/11 wasn't targeting as many killings as possible, they targeted symbols of America, symbols of capitalism and power. This is because arguably barring nukes or similar, no matter how many people you kill in the US, it won't really affect anything. You could kill a hundred thousand people and not much actually happens. The nation will go on.

Bring down the World Trade Centre? Destroy the Pentagon? The White House or Capitol? That has an outsized impact on the nation, because they have an outsized meaning to the nation. Politicians are invested with having a meaning beyond their own life.

So politicians are at once representations of privilege and symbolic concentrations of the common man. So when you attack a politician are you punching up at their power? Or down at the thousands of standard Americans they are the symbolic representation of? Sideways if you are one of said standard Americans?

Other commentary:

B) the intent or the "what if" versus what happened. B) is kind of a complicated one, because I'm expecting responses of "THEY RANSACKED THE CAPITOL!," which is... kind of true, but also they could have done so much worse. I find it hard to get past that: they had every opportunity to do real damage, and yet for the most part, they acted like drunken frat boys. Like all of Trump's presidency, for all the bluster and barking, there was (virtually) no bite. I can even quote Chuck Schumer on that: "all this mob did was delay our vote a few hours." Like Heath Ledger's Joker, they were the dog that caught the car and didn't know what to do with it. I just- that tension bothers me, that so many attitudes seem based in what they could have done instead.

Do we judge people for what they could have done, or for what they did? Judging a mob for failed intent is... dangerous ground to stand on, in my opinion. "Hang Pence" is a clear threat, but a serious one? A whole lot of people make clear yet (supposedly) unserious threats; shall we round them up too?

More radical takes:

Neither the government nor it's public servants are sacred.

I've been hearing a lot of public officials describing capitol hill as "sacred" and the democratic process as "sanctified". Even Joe Biden (a "catholic" no less) described it as such during his speech yesterday.

In no uncertain terms do I reject this framing. Government is transient by definition. Rights are endowed to the individual, not by the state, so there is no real significance in the means by which we govern other than "we like it." If we fail to like it any longer, then we the people have every right to restructure our government in whatever way we please. There is nothing holy or sacred about it.

Private citizens, however, are "sanctified" if you will by "the will of god," endowed "with inalienable rights" by which they "shall not be infringed." Several of the founders questioned whether it was wise to even have a bill of rights, so as to make it appear that we don't have certain, unlisted rights (I think it was the right call, tbh).

So no, I have a pretty particular opinion on the January 6th riots: they were dumb, potentially malicious (but mostly dumb) people who were frustrated by the means of governance. They exercised this frustration by going to the seat of power and expressing it to their leaders with force. This is infinitely more palatable to me since I believe sanctity lies with the private citizen, not the public servant. With this modality, I see the capitol riot as rather benign compared to the 2020 summer riots, pillaging, looting, burning, and destroying my own community because they are acting on private citizens, not public servants.

30 people died during 2020 due to the riots. The same cannot be said of the capitol riots. If the whole government of the United States were overturned that day, I would be more concerned with how they planned on drafting a new constitution than I would be with the public servants caught in a dangerous situation. Public leaders of the country are a lower priority to me than the retention of my rights as a private citizen, and this should be, frankly, how everyone sees it.

It sounds pretty radical now that I type it out, but I stand by it.

More commentary:

If the described plan existed, and was only foiled by Pence not playing along, he would have found out, kept receipts and gone on Oprah as a hero, rather than retiring to a life of obscurity. He may not be a shining intellectual star, but you don't get to be vice president by being blind enough to get played like that.

Also, I'll believe that some kind of plan existed in Trumps delusional inner circle, but a plan that required the direct complicity of the Secret Service and the Capitol Police? With no leaks a year later? Hatched by a president who couldn't conspire to hold on to even his own chief of staff? Helped by Four Seasons-guy?

The biggest argument against most conspiracy theories is that they require a level of competence on part of the perpetrators that very clearly does not exist (and, if it did exist, the conspiracy often wouldn't be necessary -- I mean, 9/11, all that to get to go to war in Iraq, instead of just fabricating and planting convincing evidence of a WMD-program?).

/u/mseebach

engineered Omicron

"I nonseriously wondered if some mad scientist engineered Omicron and released it to inoculate the world. Because, it is so mild, so much less severe on the lower respiratory system, so much more infectious, and seems to out compete all other variants of Covid while granting immunity to them as well. By everything I hear and read, yeah, it's Covid. But it's not the Covid we were taught to fear, where overnight your lungs get shredded and you drown in your own diseased fluids.

Of course, actually doing that on purpose were be insanely unethical. But I can also imagine a mad scientist so fed up with feckless bureaucrats and greedy pharma execs that he or she does it anyways, because it's what they can do and it beats leaving it to the idiots or the assholes. "

bullshit jobs

If a man calls a girl 3-5 times who doesn’t want to hear from him an tells him to fuck off everytime, its harassment and he can be charged... if a man calls 100 people a day who all tell him to fuck off and continues that everyday for 20 years... we call that a [sales] career.

...

the fact that expertise in a particular field of compliance and expertise in the government bureaucracy mandating the compliance is the exact same skillset and a common career path is jumping back and forth between the two “Sure i can help you comply with these rules! I was the one enforcing them!” “Sure i can help you write and enforce the rules! I’ve spent the past 4 years complying with them!” Does very little in my confidence for this field. - /u/KulakRevolt

a reply:

I proposed once on this forum that some value is "derivative" of other value, so that none of the people doing sales at an oil company could exist without someone manning the well. I remember being mostly told that economics isn't measured that way. (I consider that economics' problem.)

teenagers lost rights

I think it’s important to recognize that, whether his argument is sound or not, teenagers do occupy a rather historically unique position in the present. People between the ages of 12 and 18, or even 12 and 21, are probably the only group who have steadily lost rights over the last century and a half (maybe dating from 1880 in the US?) as a result of their membership in an immutable group, rather than gaining equal rights with others, as has been the trend for other such groups. Obviously age is more mutable than e.g. race in the absolute sense, but certainly it’s immutable in the sense that it’s not alterable by any human power, only by time itself.

This does seem a bit strange, considered from the perspective of an alien observer: 250 years ago, Alexander Hamilton was selling cargo at 15, publishing influential political writings while attending Columbia University in New York City at the age of 17 and serving as Washington’s aide-de-camp at 19. Now, at those ages respectively, he couldn’t work, instead being forced to be in school, he wouldn’t even be able to drive in NYC, and he couldn’t knock back eggnog with old Georgey either. And why is this? I don’t really know. - some user on /r/TheMotte

latch

the right has latched onto a boogeyman of election fraud, while the left has latched onto the idea of internal coups. Both are dangerous in the sense that they create an atmosphere of paranoia about the acts and intentions of the other side. That’s where the violence will come from. When people see the other side as untrustworthy enemies, there’s no good will. Whoever is president after Biden will be president of his own voters, not the country. And the rest, for reasons of their side’s choosing will not accept him as president. And with each claiming the republic is at stake, the risk of nut jobs getting a gun or planting a bomb or whatever else starts making sense. - /u/maiqthetrue

Looks like it was deleted. Can't find link.

discussion on HackerNews about census 2020

I'm in favor of removing the race question from the census. It proliferates collectivist thinking (my people/kin vs others, based on bloodlines or appearance) over individualism. It is also used as a justification for implementing discriminatory policies, ironically in the name of fighting discrimination. - cherrycherry98

and other replies:

The census exists to inform policy. If there is discrimination based on race, then we're better off measuring it so we can address it than burying our heads in the sand. Of course, this may lead to targeted policies, just as insulin is applied to people with a diabetes diagnosis, and not to the general population. - karpierz

The comparison to diabetes has one major flaw. You either have or don't have diabetes and the fact that you are tested for it does not change your diabetes status. You can only measure it, but your measurement won't alter the situation. But by constantly reminding people of their racial category, a feedback loop is created. The more are people defined by their race, the more important will they consider their racial category. They will also start viewing more interactions through the race angle, especially the negative ones. Not "the policeman was rude because he is an asshole", but "the policeman was rude because I am of a different race from him".

I cannot imagine a scenario where constant race consciousness leads to people being less concerned about anything that can be construed as racially charged. - inglor_cz

As pointed out elsewhere in the comments on this thread, the census may have accidentally ended up enforcing white hegemony in America. See the anecdotes of people suppressing the reporting of partial indigenous or African heritage in order to pass as white. The data made America look far more white than it ever was. And despite the recent trend I doubt the effect has vanished. Are we so sure we want to be using that data for policy? - retrac

Anyway, colorblindness is inherently a pro status quo approach

If the data is bad then improve data collection - Trung Tran

Rebuttal on HBD

It's better if you read the thread.

The hard statement, on the other hand, is that where you have two populations that can be reliably distinguished by their gene pools, any phenotypic gap is likely to be essentially genetic in origin. - /u/JuliusBranson

and the rebuttal:

This is a fatal error, and anything which flows from it can be immediately discarded as unsupported.

Let's consider chimps and humans, two species separated by ~5 million years of evolution, and which everyone would agree are genetically distinct in many, many ways. They are immediately distinguishable on both genetic and phenotypic examination, and on would be hard pressed to mistake one for the other.

One of the crucial distinctions is bicondylar angle, the angle of the femoral condyles at the knee relative to the femoral shaft. In chimps, this is near-zero because, as predominantly quadrupedal animals, the femur is held parallel to the tibia and both are vertical. As a result, the feet are widely spaced which gives the stability when quadrupedal, but makes them unstable when they walk bipedally, causing them to sway from side to side. In humans, the femur angles inwards while the tibia remains vertical, bringing the feet together under the body and reducing the sideways sway during locomotion. Correspondingly, the offset angle between the femur midshaft and knee articulation is ~0 degrees in chimps but about 12 degrees (give or take) in humans.

I would like to pause to note that I'm not just pulling up some obscure bit of anatomy here. The biggest reason Lucy the Australopithecus (and the partial knee remains discovered nearby a few years earlier) shook the entire physical anthropology world was because the fossils show a human-like bicondylar angle, and therefore evidence of upright walking. Lucy's knees are up their with Ostrom's re-descriptions of Deinonychus as an active, endothermic predator and Walcott's discovery of the Burgess Shale fauna as the greatest paleontological discoveries of all time.

Surely such a massively important anatomical difference, that's been in place for millions of years and underlies upright walking, one of the defining events of our evolution, is genetic, right?

Nope.

In fact, it's mostly the product of "phenotypic plasticity", the ability of organisms to modify their anatomy, biochemistry, and, yes, nervous system to suit their environments. Habitual bipedalism in chimps and other primates leads to non-heritable, phenotypically plastic modifications of the femur towards human and australopith values (1, 2) (whether natural or due to human training). Conversely, humans who have never walked due to paralysis since infancy show no bicondylar angle at all, and very "chimp-like" femurs (1, 2).

This represents merely a very visually striking and emotionally resonant example, as it deals with a major morphological difference in the most studied (or over-studied) evolutionary transition ever, but is FAR from exceptional. Dramatic plasticity occurs in mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects, and crustaceans. This can include mechanical and biochemical responses to the environment as well as social and behavioral changes. It interacts with genetic evolution in bizarre and sometimes counter-intuitive ways. In some cases, information does seem to be transmitted generationally, but also seems to "evaporate" after a few generations.

The problem I see in most HDB arguments is not that IQ isn't highly heritable or that humans don't have geographical genetic variation, it's wanting to jump straight from one to another and skip all the steps in between. In fairness, some of these steps are impossible or insanely difficult without transgressing major ethical barriers. We already know IQ is highly plastic at least in the downwards direction due to factors such as malnutrition and heavy metal contamination, yet these factors are never, IMHO, given adequate consideration.

You might cry "gene denialism", but I'd be on equally strong footing calling "plasticity denialism". - /u/GeriatricZergling

irony as a mode of political action

Edit: included rebuttal

IRONY AS A MODE OF POLITICAL ACTION

We are generally used to the assumption that the motivation driving political action is sincere. All past political movements fit that criteria. Progressives were, and still are sincere about curing racism from the world. Nazis were sincere about doing Nazi things. And so were Protestants, Catholics. Augustus Caesar and his army were sincere in wanting to rule an empire.

There is a growing current now, present particularly in forms of youth culture like 4chan and now TikTok, that everything cool and memetically attractive should be deeply layered in irony. The most striking example to me was a series of TikToks about Holocaust themed pornography, that were lambasted by mainstream media - but the culture that produced them continues to go on unabated.

This sort of phenomenon wouldn't be news to Baudrillard or Nietschze - the lack of sincerity of belief would just be an obvious symptom of modern life. Normally, these insincere people are cast as politically helpless, last men and slaves to a few rules who control their lives effortlessly. But suppose that the way to move them into taking action was through the opposite of sincere ideology, instead only through the insincere.

The most clear, and perhaps only example of this - was the debacle involving the Gamestop stock. A bunch of normal people were willing to throw their money at something for reasons that were mostly insincere: memes and shitposting at the man. Mocking the man with graffiti is nothing new, but usually there is a framework held in opposition to what the man believes. The 60s radicals had their communism to hold against the pseudocapitalism of 60s America. Antifa today still does, and still is sincere, even if their ideas are pathetic and wrongheaded. But what does r/wsb believe in?

The radical right does have tenuous ties to Nazi or Randian ideology, but not conclusively. It's hard to be a Nazi outside of Germany, or to rescue the capitalists from themselves. So all that's left is to believe in nothing. Some 'neo-Leninists' want to resuscitate the old ideals of Marx to give them an ideology, but I haven't been that impressed with what they've accomplished so far.

A friend mentioned to me that they believed a second Holocaust was possible from today's youth, not from any sincere hatred of Jews, but from how they would do it ironically, laughing about how those crotchety old boomers couldn't stand joking about it. I don't think that result is particularly likely, but it seems more plausible to me than any claim that a sincere genocide will happen, from the left or the right.

and the reply:

I'm going to go out on a limb here and potentially draw the wrath of the mods and admins by stating that I do not view irony as much of a defense.

My default attitude is that Nazi's should be shot and thier homes burned to the ground as Patton, Harris, and Le May intended. Ironic Nazis should be shot and thier homes burned to the ground ironically.

  • /u/HlynkaCG

societal confidence

I'm sure having every mistake catalogued doesn't help. But I see a lot of this coming from the culture. In part by removing the literature of the past. We spend a lot of time worried that our reading lists are too European. We worry that our history courses celebrate our achievements too much or without being sure to tell students that the people doing this were bad in some way. We can't talk about industrialization -- a process that ultimately raised humanity to wealth, health and endless luxury on a scale unimaginable beforehand -- without being sure to mention the environmental devastation, or the wealth inequality, or something else.

China has the same Internet we have, and do a lot less self flag elation over their past misdeeds. They don't remove Chinese literature in favor of French or Indian literature. They don't talk about whatever Confucius did wrong. And it seems to give them the self confidence to do amazing things. The Chinese absolutely believe in progress, and that they can and should go for it. They could build a fully functional hospital in a week. They're building highways in Africa.

is there a paradox of tolerance

The solution to intolerant ideologies is to speak up, debate, make them look foolish, exhort people to stand up for what they believe is right.. This is done all the time, the far-right British National Party, which had built up some momentum througout the 2000s crashed and burned when their leader Nick Griffin was given a platform on the BBC's Question Time which he used to make a fool of himself. A healthy liberal society should be able to rebuff attacks without giving up on its own principles to do so, if a society is healthy there should be no shortage of enthusiastic, charismatic and intelligent supporters ready to be called to its defence.

The reality behind the paradox of intolerance is this: that if you are at the point where you think an open debate will lead to the loss of the liberal side to the openly intolerant, then your society is no longer a liberal one and nothing you can do, no law you can pass, is going to change that. The Nazis didn't take power because the liberals were too hesitant to clamp down on them, they took power because faith in liberalism had already collapsed. "