Category: 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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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. “
conservative universities
In the Islamic world, universities have, since the 1960s, been a strongly conservative influence. This wasn’t always true - there were thriving leftist, socialist and secular nationalist movements at them for much of the late 19th and early-mid 20th centuries - but beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, conservative religious intellectuals began to dominate. A lot of academic religious figures came to power, and student bodies became much more religiously conservative - customs like gender segregation, strict modest dress codes actually became common in Pakistani and Egyptian universities, among the middle classes, in the 1980s before they did so among many more common urban people. The universities of the Arab world played a key role in the increase in religious conservatism in the region since the siege of Mecca - particularly the most famous Muslim university, Al Azhar, which has been an intellectual center for Sunni Islam for over a thousand years. Similar things occurred in Shia Islam - is it not interesting how so many student revolutionaries in 1979 helped an austere religious conservative overthrow a secular government? Many didn’t know what they were doing, but many did - religious Islam offered many young people unsatisfied with secular nationalism a spiritual philosophy in the waning decades of the 20th century.
Across Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Morocco, Algeria and Syria, many of the most ardent and committed (and radical) Islamist figures were converted or radicalised at university. The common tale of some moderate or secular-ish, kind of hippie son who smokes and flirts with girls who goes to a university and comes out a thawb wearing Islamist is, well, common. As the failure of secular nationalism in the MENA region became clearer, the Islamist intellectuals were waiting in the wings.
So the idea that intellectual culture trends progressive is clearly false. It is possible to have a conservative or reactionary academy, even one much more right wing than the population as a whole. But it probably has to be religious in character.
Can’t find the link
vietnam POWs
How were South Vietnamese, in general, treated by North Vietnam ?
warrior society
The problem with all this is China’s reversal of fortune was not “sudden” at all: the country had been in a perpetual civil war for three decades before World War 2, and, though under-equipped, its armies had exceptional infantry and officers who consistently surprised the Japanese. It would not be an exaggeration to call interwar China the period’s only “warrior society”. As Jonathan Fenby points out, most of the men had been levied to fight for this or that warlord, usually several times in their lives, and often starting as child soldiers. This gave all Chinese warlords - Mao included - a massive reserve of military talent to tap into. Contra popular belief, the Chinese army that entered Korea received no extensive Communist training before entering the country and was made up mostly of new volunteers and Kuomintang defectors. “PLA tactics” were nothing unique, but simply standard operating procedure for Chinese armies, developed over decades of fighting and familiar to tens of millions of veterans. It is telling that once this “warrior generation” aged out of military eligibility, the PLA completely floundered in Vietnam.
Reminds me of the Taliban
why translate?
Just consider the huge amount of online and offline knowledge that’s simply unavailable to you for the silly reason that it’s written in a language you don’t understand. Should we encourage this status quo by promoting the learning of more languages so that people can generate more knowledge in more languages? Should we keep translating from the most common languages into a myriad of other languages?
How about instead we focus on one language, and better knowledge, for instance by making it as easy as possible to learn that language, and by translating knowledge into it?
- Dan Dascalescu
Definitely will translate this at some point.