[HN Gopher] Thought Examinations, Indoctrination Meetings and St...
___________________________________________________________________
Thought Examinations, Indoctrination Meetings and Struggle Sessions
Author : chrysostom
Score : 104 points
Date : 2023-04-17 15:37 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.falltide.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.falltide.com)
| Animats wrote:
| All that indoctrination and control kills productivity. Maoist
| China and East Germany fell into that trap.
|
| China may be headed that way again, with Xi's one man rule and
| personality cult.
| lasermike026 wrote:
| You can see flavors of this in the anti-abortion bands where
| people turn in doctors for providing health care and patients for
| receiving care. You see this in Florida where they define drag as
| grooming, grooming as a sex crime, sex crime as punishable by
| death, and a death penalty by 8 jurors. You also see this in
| education where student turning in their teachers for history and
| lesson that don't meet the GOP political standards.
|
| So now we see. Now what? Make a buddy. Everything starts with the
| buddy system. Make a friend and ally in a state under
| authoritarian control, provide them with the support personally,
| monetarily, and help them evacuate when necessary.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| I wouldn't equate the obvious overstep of drag policing with
| the rather more complex issue of abortion. It's not at all
| clear that "viability" is anything more than a hacky
| placeholder definition for when human life begins. I personally
| do agree that abortion should be legal. I can't however help
| but reach the conclusion that it's still the willful
| termination of a human life (read: murder). Justifiable murder,
| but murder nonetheless. I can therefore sympathize with those
| who hold the view that it should be illegal.
|
| Also, re: drag policing, obviously wrong-headed as it is, there
| seems to be a lot of popular backlash against cultural
| indoctrination by schools. Schools should endeavour to soberly,
| objectively teach children about the world, and leave defining
| right and wrong to parents as much as possible. As much as we
| may disagree, you should be entitled to raise your child with a
| racist or homophobic worldview. Trying to correct for this is
| _not the government 's job_. It's that pesky American
| individualism again.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| "when human life begins" is easy.
|
| Biology, the science, makes it clear that such cells are
| alive. That definition of alive is the only one that can
| matter to thinking, non-superstitious people. There are no
| souls or spirits.
|
| Furthermore, the science of genetics makes it quite clear
| that we won't do a DNA test and discover that the fetus is a
| wombat, or a giraffe, or a sea urchin. It would test as Homo
| sapiens, which is the definition of human.
|
| It's objectively the truth.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| So would a puddle of fresh blood. Should we ban cleaning
| that up now?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Red blood cells don't even have nuclei if what I've been
| taught is true. Just what do you think you'd be testing?
|
| Are you saying that some random leukocyte that wandered
| into the wrong capillary is a living human?
|
| The fetus is physiologically whole and complete. Two
| arms, two legs, a brain. Two eyes, every major organ.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| No, you are. Are you adding criteria to your previous
| facile entry that "it is obvious that human cells are
| human life duh"? Are you saying that a fetus is the
| beginning of a human life when it is physiologically
| whole and complete? When does that happen, do you know?
| It's certainly not at conception. What if it doesn't
| happen - is a missing eye relevant to whether there's a
| human life?
| akvadrako wrote:
| We kill living human cells all the time without issue.
|
| Besides, science cannot provide definitions. There is no
| hypothesis to test that disproves "an organism is alive
| when it can X and Y".
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| How many of those cells have you killed that were
| physiologically whole, were arranged in a shape of having
| two arms, two legs, two eyes, and every major organ but
| especially a brain? How many were complete organisms?
|
| > There is no hypothesis to test that disproves "an
| organism is alive when it can X and Y".
|
| 1. Metabolize 2. Homeostasis 3. Responds to stimuli 4.
| Growth 5. Reproduction
|
| Never learned the list in school? It often includes
| "composed of cells", but that one might not make sense
| for xenobiology.
|
| There are people who only believe in science, I guess,
| when it gives them the answers they were hoping for
| anyway.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > Schools should endeavour to soberly, objectively teach
| children about the world, and leave defining right and wrong
| to parents as much as possible.
|
| They are certainly trying, but the sober, objective reality
| is "Some people dress using gender signifiers counter to the
| traditional ones for myriad reasons, and almost all of those
| reasons are harmless."
|
| The political friction is coming from the people who think
| that lesson is, somehow, already too politically charged to
| share.
|
| > you should be entitled to raise your child with a racist or
| homophobic worldview. Trying to correct for this is not the
| government's job.
|
| That's very thorny "we live in a society" territory because
| in point of fact, the entire underpinning of public education
| as an institution is that a democratic society requires a
| populace educated in the practice of citizenry because they
| have the collective responsibility / burden / obligation to
| _be_ citizens. "I have indeed two great measures at heart,
| without which no republic can maintain itself in strength. 1.
| that of general education to enable every man to judge for
| himself what will secure or endanger his freedom..." [Thomas
| Jefferson]. That obligation ties into the relatively-new
| concept of "nations" (as opposed to previous structures of
| clan / tribe / subject of a king / etc.). And in that
| context: no, it would not be okay for the public education
| system to just teach racism, because racism is caustic to the
| national constitution.
|
| When this became apparent during the mid-20th century, the
| racists in some states temporarily suspended public
| education. As a useful rule of thumb: always be deeply
| suspect of those who would claim that topic X is not
| appropriate to teach at all or, when faced with choosing
| conservation of what they know vs. allowing public education,
| would torch the education.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| I'm perfectly fine with an objective take on identity and
| subculture formation, but it seems like pretty advanced
| material inappropriate to elementary school students.
| Deconstructing societal norms is just too advanced for
| young children. It also directly undermines parents who are
| trying to _instill these very norms_.
|
| The lessons that are too politically charged are
| unsurprisingly those that have the least evidential support
| - namely those rooted in social constructionism. Even the
| concept of "gender" isn't well-defined enough to teach a
| child, given that even experts can't ELI5 "what is a
| woman?". Gender itself is not a plain fact about objective
| reality (like sex is).
|
| > _...judge for himself what will secure or endanger his
| freedom_
|
| > _...is caustic to the national constitution_
|
| These two things are actually not contradictory. Being
| racist doesn't stop you from judging what will secure or
| endanger your freedom, you may just reach different
| conclusions than other people. This should be OK in a free
| and pluralistic society.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > Deconstructing societal norms is just too advanced
| material for young children. It also directly undermines
| parents who are trying to instill these very norms.
|
| Kids crossdress in kindergarten; I don't know at what age
| discussion of why one does or does not do that is
| appropriate, but I can tell you that absent some rules
| it's just yet another fun game they play.
|
| > Gender itself is not a plain fact about objective
| reality (like sex is).
|
| That implies that when a boy picks up the feather boa in
| kindergarten the appropriate response from public
| education is to do nothing, right?
|
| > Being racist doesn't stop you from judging what will
| secure or endanger your freedom, you may just reach
| different conclusions than other people.
|
| Ah, but here's the rub: we had a whole fight about that
| topic specifically and decided to kick it out because of
| the damage we observed it doing. Separate but equal and
| its ilk didn't work; we have a cultural narrative of "all
| men created equal" (for temporally-expanding definitions
| of 'men') that is incompatible with racism.
|
| On that issue, the nation (as a cultural construct) is
| pretty decided.
|
| There are plenty who would love to reopen the question.
| The public education system is not obligated to give them
| a line-item on the SOLs. They can and will try to seize
| one, of course, via the democratic process (as is their
| right, and those who disagree with them must be aware
| that this is their intended design).
| thegrimmest wrote:
| Yes, kids cross-dress in kindergarten. Just like all
| harmless childhood play behaviours, they should mostly be
| ignored by educators.
|
| > _That implies that when a boy picks up the feather boa
| in kindergarten the appropriate response from public
| education is to do nothing, right?_
|
| Yes, exactly that - nothing. Just like when a kid colours
| their face with marker, or puts their clothes on
| backwards, or any other strange thing that kids do when
| they are developing. The thing not to do is call special
| attention to this particular play behaviour because it's
| related to "gender". And if other kids tease or socially
| reject said boy for picking up the feather boa, then the
| appropriate thing to do is _also nothing_. This is how
| social norms _are formed_. Interfering with this process
| is not for educators to do.
|
| > _we had a whole fight about that topic_
|
| > _" all men created equal" (for temporally-expanding
| definitions of 'men')_
|
| > _they are endowed by their Creator with certain
| unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
| and the pursuit of Happiness_
|
| But importantly, continually diminishing definitions of
| "liberty". All we've done for the last century+ is expand
| the obligations of the private person/business owner to
| the public and the state. Segregation is certainly
| abhorrent for the government to practice, but a private
| person should be able to choose whom they serve by
| whatever criteria they see fit. This is the definition of
| liberty that the nation (as a cultural construct) was
| founded on.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > but a private person should be able to choose whom he
| serves by whatever criteria they see fit
|
| I don't know what to tell you on this topic other than
| "You missed the lessons of the 1960s." The soul of the
| racist was bared in the fight and it was found to contain
| nothing but fear and traditional power-lust. Their
| privilege of calling the shots on this topic was stripped
| with cause... Not by power-mongers or politicians, but by
| the people, by a generation coming to feel nauseated at
| the kind of naked belief in racial superiority that
| enabled the sins of the past.
|
| The ERA and related Acts were fairly unprecedented, but
| passed for a very good reason.
|
| And you're right; they are a curtailment of liberty. Most
| laws are, but we're a country of 330 million people;
| nobody expects the same laissez-faire approach that
| worked for a country of 100,000 to work today, right? Do
| you also rail against the right denied to pilots to buzz
| a plane twenty feet over your house, or the right denied
| to motorists to drive on the left side of a divided
| public road? From whence, then, the umbrage at the notion
| that a person cannot be fired based on some made-up drop-
| of-blood rules, or tossed out of a restaurant for having
| skin darker than the table they're sitting at?
|
| I don't disagree the country was founded on the notion
| that racism was acceptable. I'd hope it'd be self-evident
| why we are doing the work to jettison that cornerstone.
| For what liberty can a man truly have when even the
| provision of water and bathrooms are arrayed against him
| for something as irrelevant as the color of his skin?
| thegrimmest wrote:
| The country was founded on the notion that _individual
| liberty_ was the most important concern. It 's right
| there in the text. You can have equality of rights under
| law (yes please!) without infringing on other's rights to
| live as they please. Expand the _scope_ of liberty, but
| leave the _definition_ alone.
|
| > _nobody expects the same laissez-faire approach that
| worked for a country of 100,000 to work today, right?_
|
| This argument supposes that the only factor in liberty is
| scale. It seems to be far more complicated than that -
| there are far smaller and far more collectivist nations.
|
| The point is that you can jettison racism (or any other
| kind of inequality) while leaving the racists alone. All
| people need to be is equal under law.
|
| > _For what liberty can a man truly have_
|
| Being free doesn't mean you're entitled to relationships
| (personal or professional) with others. It means you're
| free to navigate these without interference. Just like
| every other free person, you are born with nothing.
| Everything that you obtain you do so by negotiating with
| people.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > You can have equality of rights under law (yes please!)
| without infringing on other's rights to live as they
| please
|
| I think I may need firmer definitions of terms to accept
| this assertion. Because unless I've misunderstood your
| meaning, it sounds like this is unworkable. Every law is
| a curtailment of an otherwise-existant naturally
| occurring right to do something; the law says, in the
| universe of all _possible_ things you could do, here is
| something you _must_ do or _must not_ do, yes?
|
| But for the law, I could keep all my money, but we pay
| taxes.
|
| But for the law, I could steal all my neighbor's stuff,
| but we have property rights.
|
| Etc.
|
| Social contract theory (a false story of how we got to
| governments and civilization, but a useful fairy-tale for
| thought-framing purposes) tells the story of the rights /
| protections tradeoff, but the first step of the tradeoff
| is _we give up some liberties._ So clearly, individual
| liberty isn 't the most important concern; if it were,
| we'd have solved the problem by never forming a
| government.
|
| Rather, the Constitution appears to lay out several
| overlapping goals alongside "secur[ing] the blessings of
| liberty." "We the People of the United States, in Order
| to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure
| domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense,
| promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of
| Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." The blessings of
| liberty are important, but so is the general welfare,
| domestic tranquility, common defense, and a more perfect
| Union, etc.
|
| > The point is that you can jettison racism (or any other
| kind of inequality) while leaving the racists alone. All
| people need to be is equal under law.
|
| Again, we may be talking past each other if we're
| operating from different definitions, but how do you do
| that? The racist wants to operate a business where black
| people need not apply, nor may they sit at the table. How
| on Earth do we respect their liberty while preserving the
| right of every citizen to operate as a citizen? If I
| understand your meaning correctly, I predict your answer
| is "one cannot," in which case I direct us back to the
| Constitution and the note that there are other sometimes-
| competing objectives alongside the preservation of
| liberty (it's hard, we discovered, to preserve
| tranquility or have a more perfect union if a huge chunk
| of our population just gets to pretend some of our
| citizens aren't equally citizens in private affairs, not
| only before the eyes of the law. Hard to the point of
| unworkable. Violence-in-the-streets unworkable).
|
| > Being free doesn't mean you're entitled to
| relationships (personal or professional) with others
|
| Quite true. But it is entirely possible that being a
| citizen obligates such relationships, in specific
| contexts, at specific times, and there's a compelling
| reason to force such relationships (under the very
| narrowly-tailored privilege of "Owning one's own
| business," for example).
|
| > Just like every other free person, you are born with
| nothing
|
| Goodness is _that_ ever untrue. For example, you 're born
| with your skin, whether or not it will provide you some
| net advantages or disadvantages because of the complex
| sociopolitics that already existed before you came into
| the world. You don't get to choose it; it's just your
| birthright.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| I tend to use the definition of liberty from the
| Declaration of the Rights of Man[1], which was
| contemporary to the Declaration of Independence:
|
| > _4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything
| which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the
| natural rights of each man has no limits except those
| which assure to the other members of the society the
| enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be
| determined by law._
|
| From here it follows that the only legitimate
| infringement of liberty is in direct defence of
| existential threats to liberty itself. Therefore taxing
| people to pay for police, courts, rights of way, etc. is
| fine. Even drafting people into the military to defend
| from an attack is acceptable despite the enormous
| infringement of liberty that being conscripted
| represents. Liberty is a right to be free from outside
| interference, not entitled to public services.
|
| The only clause you listed that may be interpreted more
| broadly is "the general Welfare". The re-interpretation
| of this clause in 1936 gave the government much more
| broad authority to tax and spend. It was previously
| interpreted very narrowly by the supreme court. This is
| the exact ruling (US v. Butler) that opened the door to
| the erosion of fundamental liberty, and it's one I would
| like to see reversed. The vagueness of "general welfare"
| has been the subject of debate since the 1800s.
|
| > _How on Earth do we respect their liberty while
| preserving the right of every citizen to operate as a
| citizen?_
|
| Simply by acknowledging that your rights to "operate as a
| citizen" are nowhere enumerated, and don't generally
| include dining in private establishments anymore than
| they do dining in private homes. People should be allowed
| to choose who goes into their business on their property
| just like they choose who goes into their house. The
| civil rights movement had legitimate grievances that
| needed to be addressed. Segregation in publicly funded
| institutions (so far as these are themselves legitimate)
| is unacceptable. We actually have never seen a world with
| fully integrated public schools, universities, police
| forces, military, etc, but no opinion on private
| business. I'm not nearly as sure as you are that it would
| be a markedly more violent one.
|
| > _But it is entirely possible that being a citizen
| obligates such relationships_
|
| It is exactly implicit obligation that I'm against.
| Obligation should as much as possible be explicit. You're
| no more entitled to get laid than to eat or work at a
| restaurant, but in only one of these cases do we
| recognize the importance of explicit consent.
|
| > _Goodness is that ever untrue_
|
| It's quite true. Mothers don't (usually) abandon newborns
| because they have a strong instinct to care for them.
| Newborns are very endearing. This is the very first
| relationship negotiation you do - you convince your
| parent(s) to love you. Everything our parents give us
| follows from that. We are born with no possessions.
|
| > _your skin, whether or not it will provide you some net
| advantages_
|
| Right, but these advantages and disadvantages are your
| own to exploit/bear just as much as your skin is.
|
| 1. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rightsof.asp
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > Right, but these advantages and disadvantages are your
| own to exploit/bear just as much as your skin is.
|
| Wait... So your attitude on being born with dark skin
| carrying (entirely socially-crafted) disadvantages is
| "sucks to your luck?"
|
| ... Wow.
|
| I hate to be blunt, but that's crap. I think I want no
| part of your concept of equality or of liberty, and I'm
| glad wise people in the past saw better than what you're
| putting on the table.
|
| The liberty of the dice roll and the equality of a seat
| at the craps table.
|
| What a limiting worldview.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| heh, I think it's your worldview that's limiting, in that
| it presumes that your perspective is the right one, and
| seeks to impose it on other people. It's much less
| limiting to consider the vast plurality of perspectives
| out there in regards to how society should be structured,
| and who is entitled to what. In this spirit, what leads
| you to conclude that people's inherent genetic/biological
| traits are anything but fundamentally _theirs_?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > don't generally include dining in private
| establishments anymore than they do dining in private
| homes
|
| That's an interesting hypothesis but it doesn't stand up
| to scrutiny. A private establishment isn't a home
| (indeed, there are often zoning laws against conflating
| the two, lest business interfere with neighbors' domestic
| tranquility).
|
| Owning a business, including the protections under the
| law and the separation of the fate of the business from
| the fate of its owner, are protections granted under the
| law that are privileges, not rights. They are contingent
| and revokable. The same governing authority that lets
| government demand you not dump toxic waste in the river
| behind your factory lets it demand you serve every
| citizen who can afford your fees and has not transgressed
| in a non-protected way against you.
|
| I agree that in the '30s we reinterpreted the general
| welfare. I like to tell people we're basically on US
| version 3 now. To our credit, we pulled this one off
| without the bloody civil war it took to hammer out
| version 2. But like the change to version 2, it was also
| quite necessary; we'd tried ad-hoc'ing a functional
| nation of millions together using massive individual
| liberty and we got ourselves a Great Depression for our
| troubles.
|
| > Segregation in publicly funded institutions (so far as
| these are themselves legitimate) is unacceptable
|
| The bus boycott wasn't about that. Nor were the lunch-
| table sit-ins. These were all parts of the civil rights
| movement.
|
| > I'm not nearly as sure as you are that it would be a
| markedly more violent one.
|
| As I said, you have more to learn from a closer study of
| the history of the civil rights movement. It was never
| about mere government equality; this is a government of
| the people, and those who fought for equality rightly
| recognized they would never get it without the hearts and
| minds of the people changing (something that, history has
| since shown, is a slow process but one that can be
| accomplished modulo outliers).
|
| > Any obligation or consent should always be explicit.
|
| Oh, it's quite explicit. Form a corporation, and here's
| the whole set of federal, state, and local laws you're
| now obligated to comply with. It's quite a bit more than
| the private citizen complies with.
|
| ... and you've completely dodged the fact that though we
| are born naked, _the skin we 're born into matters in
| this society,_ still. While that is still true, we impose
| obligations on our citizenry to make it less so
| specifically _because_ we believe people should have the
| freedom to do that which injures no-one else... Such as
| share a lunch counter with a stranger in a restaurant
| that serves the public.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| > _A private establishment isn 't a home_
|
| A private unincorporated business isn't meaningfully
| separated from its owner, financially or otherwise.
|
| > _The same governing authority that lets government
| demand you not dump toxic waste in the river_
|
| But they derive this authority from the defence of the
| commons, which is fundamental to liberty. The whole point
| is that "we the people" agree to be governed _within
| these constraints_. From where does government derive the
| authority to make demands on whom you serve?
|
| > _hearts and minds of the people changing_
|
| _Forcing_ people to change their hearts and minds is
| _abhorrent and divisive_. I wouldn 't say it has been all
| positive so far as outcomes are concerned either.
|
| > _Form a corporation, and here 's the whole set of
| federal, state, and local laws you're now obligated to
| comply with_
|
| And these laws are enabled by the very same overreaching
| interpretation of "the general Welfare" that I addressed
| in my previous comment.
|
| > _and you 've completely dodged the fact_
|
| Sorry, I've included it in an edit to the parent.
|
| > _share a lunch counter with a stranger in a restaurant
| that serves the public._
|
| The person being injured is the owner of the restaurant
| that can no longer exercise their liberty to choose whom
| they serve. The exercise of this liberty harms no one
| else.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > From where does government derive the authority to make
| demands on whom you serve?
|
| ... from we the people. Same legal process that passed
| the other laws those years and nothing in the
| Constitution countermanding it.
|
| For what it's worth, you will find that most of the
| equality laws you're concerned about don't apply to
| private unincorporated businesses. They do, generally,
| scale with the impact of corporation has on the society
| around it.
|
| > The exercise of this liberty harms no one else.
|
| I assume the "else" here is necessary because it clearly
| harms the person who is being denied the ability to buy a
| meal purely because they have the wrong skin tone for
| this town.
|
| Would you agree that is a harm and if so, by what right
| do we stand by and let that harm perpetuate?
|
| (Note: "they could just go somewhere else" is a non-
| starter because we lived through that, and a separate but
| equal was not good enough).
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| > This is the definition of liberty that the nation (as a
| cultural construct) was founded on.
|
| It is dishonest to claim that the definition of liberty
| has changed without acknowledging that the largest and
| most important change is the expansion of who the
| definition applies to.
| johngladtj wrote:
| It's not thorny at all, it's the bare minimum required in
| order for you to have any shred of legitimacy when you
| argue against fascist states enforcing their own moral
| rules via publica education.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Can you clarify your meaning? I'm not sure what the
| pronouns in this sentence are referring to ("it's not
| thorny", "it's the bare minimum": what's not thorny or
| the bare minimum?)
| zo1 wrote:
| If I as a parent object to a drag show at my kids primary
| school, I am certainly not doing so to be mean to a trans
| person or want to deny them from being who they are.
|
| Instead, I am denying them a platform to influence my innocent
| and impressionable child to become that, which in a free
| society they are welcome to do when they're of age and
| understand what they want. But I won't allow the possibility
| that this thing is steering them into an unattural direction.
| This is indistinguishable from targeted brainwashing and I
| won't know if it's because they are actually like that, or if
| it was because they got brainwashed during their early years.
| nverno wrote:
| You can see flavors of in just about any society. That's why
| Orwell's 1984 is a timeless masterpiece. People on the 'other
| side' of the political spectrum can list of their own examples.
| I think the best way to avoid it is to do as the article says
| and try to avoid ideological thinking.
| lasermike026 wrote:
| Maybe and don't be atomized. Make a buddy. Build communities
| to protect themselves.
| tomohawk wrote:
| Example from Canada. A civil servant did not go along with the
| struggle session and was fired.
|
| https://quillette.com/2023/04/13/a-public-servant-stood-up-f...
| motohagiography wrote:
| I was excluded from these specific sessions in more than one
| government office (who were clients), I assume because my
| natural wit, presence, and basic personal integrity would
| have made it impossible for the struggle leader to fully
| break down the audience.
|
| They exploit the agreeableness of the people in the sessions,
| and whenever I hear about them, I am reminded of the "blue
| eyes / brown eyes" experiment I studied at an alternative
| high school, where we were all oddly innoculated to this
| nonsense because it was effectively tested on us.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I guess it is kind of obvious but the 21C is a fight between
| totalitarianism and individual rights.
|
| It's weird that the side I want to be on tries very hard to stop
| being a single unified "side".
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > It's weird that the side I want to be on tries very hard to
| stop being a single unified "side".
|
| I'm not exactly sure I catch your meaning, but assuming I do:
| the self-defeating aspect of many supporters of individual
| liberty is that they don't recognize how to wield collective
| action because the psychological tools effective movements
| employ smell to them of coercion.
|
| It's a similar problem to how democracies and anarchies
| historically get steamrolled by dictatorships and autocracies
| because those systems are simpler to use for organization and
| deployment of vast amounts of violent power.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _democracies and anarchies historically get steamrolled by
| dictatorships and autocracies_
|
| Is that actually true? Probably not in the 20th century.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| No longer in the 20th and 21st, due to a lot of effects.
| Probably the most significant are communication technology
| and transportation technology; democratic organization is a
| lot easier across vast territory when something like the
| telegraph has come along. The crazy accident of an
| (eventually) continent-spanning empire setting up a
| representative democratic structure of government and then
| going militarily unchallenged long enough (mostly due to
| geography and technological distribution) to build up into
| a formidable military power unchallenged should also not be
| overlooked.
|
| But earlier than that, European history in particular is
| rife with small communities and larger republics or
| representative democracies eventually getting devoured by
| the military ambitions of the few and the many who follow
| them as divine leaders or power-mongers.
| inawarminister wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, Plato's political cycle is monarchy
| replaced by oligarchy replaced by plutocracy replaced by
| democracy, which in turn is replaced with mob rule /
| anarchy then tyranny and return back to monarchy.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| That's a cute over-simplification by Plato, but we have
| thousands of years of human history since then that shows
| that's not true.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Plato probably had a different conception of what a
| democracy is than we do now.
|
| My suspicion is that the more open and egalitarian and a
| democracy is, the more resistant it is to corruption, and
| the more faith the people have in it. The US was denying
| like half of our population (women) voting rights until
| like 1920, so it is hard spot trends in such a short time
| scale. I mean it is probably just a coincidence of
| history and geography that we've been absurdly successful
| since then.
|
| Nowadays I'd be more worried about the trajectory:
|
| Democracy->Oligarchy->Populist backlash/Mob
| rule->Tyranny.
|
| Although I guess that's really tied to concerns about the
| long term trajectory for the US (hey at least it isn't
| tied to ancient concerns about the trajectory of Athens
| or whatever).
| chrisco255 wrote:
| The first half of the 20th century was a pretty dire time
| for democracy, I'd say. This is when communism and fascism
| took off. To be fair, some of that was a response to
| monarchy/oligarchy and imperialism, but as an example the
| Weimar Republic in Germany was democratic and it got
| steamrolled by the Nazis.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The Weimar Republic didn't get steamrolled by Nazis, it
| failed politically, right? It turns out fascist
| propaganda is unfortunately attractive to some folks. The
| real steamrolling happened a couple years later, and it
| went the other way--it turns out fascist propaganda does
| not magic up a factory that can produce a bomber an hour.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Would you have accepted "the Weimar Republic was burned
| down by the Nazis" as a more literal metaphor?
|
| By the way, as a natural born quibbler, I upvoted your
| post.
| bee_rider wrote:
| How about usurped?
|
| If we want to involve fire, I'm not sure... freer, more
| open societies seem to result in better productivity.
| Maybe there's some analogy about burning a workshop to
| have a big bonfire.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| A steamroller is a large machine that flattens everything
| in its path. The republic was steamrolled by Hitler. But
| he's hardly the first authoritarian in history to
| steamroll an elected body.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The Weimar republic had a pretty hefty Achilles Heel
| built into its democracy: because Bismarck didn't
| necessarily trust the will of the people completely, the
| government he structured ended up giving Chancellor far
| more power than, in hindsight, was correct to preserve a
| democratic system.
|
| The system basically had an "In case of populism, break
| glass" feature built in and the nazis figured out how to
| pick up the hammer. Not to imply they didn't enjoy some
| popular support from the German people prior, but once
| they had Hitler clicked in and able to dissolve the
| Reichstag, that support was irrelevant.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Traditionally speaking though, this "in case of populism,
| enshrine an emperor/king/caesar/dictator" has always been
| true. The Romans experienced this with Julius. The French
| relapsed several times after their 1789 Revolution and
| dawdled between democracy and Napoleonic imperialism and
| dynastic monarchy. The British, too, have a colorful
| history of monarchs vs Parliament. And to this day refuse
| to sweep away the institution altogether for some
| indescribable reason, perhaps as a fallback in case this
| whole democracy thing doesn't work out.
|
| The U.S. isn't an old nation, but it's the oldest
| continuous democracy. It was meticulously designed to
| avoid such issues, but I wouldn't say it's immune either.
| corbulo wrote:
| It is. See Philip II of Macedon vs Athens.
|
| It's not true today because of how OP the US is in
| geography+natural resources, but also from alliances like
| NATO. Without NATO European states would be getting flipped
| one by one (as seen by what happens to states not in it).
| Rome also benefitted from her geography immensely. Same for
| the Swiss.
|
| Isolated democracies are really vulnerable to outside
| manipulation. Philip II was famous for buying off all the
| Athenian actors+politicians who love to hang out with his
| courtiers. The story of Demosthenes is a Cassandra-style
| tragedy.
|
| Federalism was a giant patch that massively increased the
| robustness of democracies/republics.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| That's because the side that supports individual rights has a
| wide diversity of opinions. Including those who would like a
| more totalitarian state!
| lannisterstark wrote:
| As should be. Even shitty opinions have a right to be
| expressed - I don't have to agree with them.
| pphysch wrote:
| [flagged]
| shadowgovt wrote:
| There is functionally no comparison.
| prohobo wrote:
| It's soft, but it's the same practice.
| [deleted]
| whatshisface wrote:
| Could we get some facts and examples? This is heading in
| the direction of a "no it isn't, yes it is" type
| discussion.
| prohobo wrote:
| Sorry, I'm just not interested in really arguing about it
| anymore except to disagree whenever I see someone act
| like it's not happening.
|
| There are direct parallels in modern Wokeness to Maoist
| history. There's a great podcast about it which is worth
| listening to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqD5RF2Kwjs
| and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaw72Wxz9EY
|
| Some examples:
|
| - They are both offshoots of Marxism. This is an easy
| target, but it serves as the foundation for the rest of
| the parallels.
|
| - Struggle sessions: occur on social media in modern
| times as mob freakouts and "cancellation" of
| people/organizations.
|
| - Us vs. them: to be an ally of the cause you have to
| always agree with it. Any deviation from the current
| narrative makes you vulnerable to being painted an enemy
| - regardless of your rational arguments or personal
| support for the cause. The narrative is dictated by
| elites. "Not to have a correct political orientation is
| like not having a soul." - Mao
|
| This is the concept of "the people" and "the enemy", as
| per Mao, and it informs why often progressive allies get
| suddenly railroaded and become the same as right wingers
| in the eyes of the indoctrinated.
|
| - Totalism: the ideology must intertwine in every aspect
| of daily life. It has to be in everything. At school, on
| TV, in the news, in advertisements, in food, whatever.
| Wherever totalism exists, institutions become closed
| groups akin to a cult. I'm sure everyone has noticed
| Wokeness in basically everything now, gradually
| introduced over the past 7-8 years.
|
| - "The Great Leap Forward": this isn't so much a direct
| parallel, but probably coincidental that The Great Reset
| is essentially the same idea that Mao had, and has such a
| similar name.
|
| - Maoist freedom and democracy in society guided by
| ideological elites: the modern parallel is stakeholder
| capitalism. The point is that ideologues dictate what is
| or isn't allowed, while supposedly maintaining a free and
| open market. This is different from democratically
| established oversight and regulations because the
| stakeholders are not elected or accountable to anyone.
|
| There's too much to go into as it's a really really deep
| topic, but hopefully I at least gave some idea of how
| these political movements are comparable.
| scythe wrote:
| >They are both offshoots of Marxism.
|
| As long as YouTube is making our arguments, here's Zizek
| trolling Peterson about this canard:
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wsz6ijXWS3A
| prohobo wrote:
| I don't get it, you don't know anything about critical
| theory?
|
| "Who are these postmodern neo-Marxists?"
|
| Herbert Marcuse, Paulo Freiri, Erich Fromm, Max
| Horkheimer, Robin DiAngelo, Patrisse Cullors, etc. I'm
| not so interested in the origins of critical theory
| though, but in its implementation, like the last two
| people I listed.
|
| And what do they have to do with Marxism? They believe
| that applying Marxist economic theory to cultural issues
| provides a more effective means of hijacking political
| discourse and enforcing their moralistic ideologies.
| They're using Soviet and Maoist strategies to do it, not
| because they're Marxists, but because they're cultists
| and ideologues and those strategies work.
|
| Where are they? In nearly every institution. In every
| organization that has a Diversity and Inclusion officer,
| and most universities. Everywhere you see the rainbow
| flag, basically.
|
| I know old school Marxists hate being associated with
| these people, but that's not really my problem... Zizek
| is cool, but he hasn't said anything interesting in like
| 10 years.
| pphysch wrote:
| The only relevant Marxists have been the Marxist-
| Leninists so it is bizarre that Trots and anti-Leninists
| (like those you listed) get to own the label.
|
| Whatever, it's all superfluous labels anyways.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I think the source for these two YouTube videos is highly
| suspect. Isn't this the same guy who got called out by
| Claire Lehmann for promoting white genocide theory?
|
| Source aside, I think this is another example of
| confusing common elements in any cultural shift with the
| totalitarian violence-oriented method employed by the
| Maoists. "Stakeholder capitalism," for example, is a
| fancy term for "Corporations bow to their stakeholders."
| But who are the stakeholders? They're mostly customers.
| So if the customers are rewarding companies for (at least
| paying lip-service to) being open-minded about diverse
| ways of being, then who we blame for capitalism-backed-
| democracy being "subverted" is... The people?
|
| Can the people subvert their own democratic system?
| prohobo wrote:
| Actually the stakeholders are the investment firms
| implementing ESG programs. What you're referring to is a
| different kind of capitalism from what we currently have.
| I think it was in the late 19th century that someone
| first figured out that you can give out a newspaper for
| free and make tons of money by selling ad placements and
| creating eye-catching headlines. That's the current model
| of capitalism, where the "customer" is not a stakeholder
| at all but is instead the product. Investors are the real
| stakeholders.
|
| As for the YouTube videos being suspect, half of the
| content is direct quoting from Maoist literature, and I
| think a discerning intelligent person can figure it out
| for themselves.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| What investment firms are those, and what benefits to
| they gain from ESG programs?
| prohobo wrote:
| https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/best-esg-funds/
|
| The biggest ones are of course Vanguard and Blackrock.
|
| I don't really know what they gain from it. I don't think
| it's anything directly, but maybe it's part of the
| intertwining of state and corporation, where they scratch
| each others' backs and compensate for each others'
| weaknesses.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I believe what they gain from it is investors.
|
| ... which ties back to the "It appears to be what the
| people want" problem. Granted, money may be a bad proxy
| for what the people want (and we could have an entire
| conversation on the caustic effect of financial
| inequality of the stability of a functioning democracy).
| But to the extent that capitalism _likes to imagine_ we
| can conflate the two... If it pulls in the dollars, it 's
| the thing that's wanted, right?
| pphysch wrote:
| There absolutely is. While the kinetic and political
| situation in USA is much less severe than civil war China,
| initiatives like ESG, DEI _are_ about changing the culture
| and thought patterns of individuals. They are forms of
| reeducation. And I do support some of these "new" ideas, but
| we should be clear-eyed about what's going on and how it
| could escalate if there is further political breakdown.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| By that metric, you can place organized religion, self-help
| programs, and the public education system in the same bag.
|
| It's true, but it's as uselessly true as weighing the pros
| and cons of having two arms given how many of Hitler's
| footsoldiers were observed historically to also have two
| arms.
| muyuu wrote:
| Where they are mandated, surely they also belong in the
| same bag.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| So down with public education then? Because truancy law
| definitely exists.
| muyuu wrote:
| public education when compulsory definitely has all the
| ingredients to spiral into authoritarianism
| whatshisface wrote:
| Organized religion can be very cruel and totalitarian.
| pphysch wrote:
| It's not "uselessly true" to identify recent historical
| analogues. Quite the opposite.
|
| And yes, thought control is as old as civilization. It
| was not invented by the WW2 bad guys.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| But the point is when the bag is that big, "thought
| control" is also not apriori bad, and implying it is so
| by comparing corporate education and policy programs to
| China's liquidation program is, at best, incredibly
| disjoint.
| pphysch wrote:
| It's not disjoint, it's on the same spectrum. USG had
| pretty serious liquidation programs of their own during
| that era, from Japanese internment to COINTELPRO and all
| the deaths that resulted. And in 2023, far beyond ESG and
| DEI, we are looking at rising Red & Yellow Scare 2.0.
| (the persecution of Gang Chen for instance).
| shadowgovt wrote:
| What does the Japanese internment program (which has been
| roundly criticized as a massive mistake) have to do with
| ESG or DEI? This is what I mean; it seems like you are
| throwing concepts into the same bag with only irrelevant
| connection to each other.
|
| I suspect there's an underlying philosophical position
| that is connecting these in a relevant way for you that I
| don't necessarily share.
| pphysch wrote:
| > What does the Japanese internment program (which has
| been roundly criticized as a massive mistake)
|
| You do realize that the CPC also considers the GPCR a
| mistake in many ways?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| What does any of that have to do with ESG or DEI?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > organized religion, self-help programs
|
| Those are voluntary.
|
| > the public education system
|
| Yes and I do. That _ought_ to be voluntary, but isn 't.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It kinda goes hand-in-glove with the whole "democracy of
| the citizens" thing, is the underlying philosophy
| underpinning things like truancy law.
|
| If you're going to force the responsibility / obligation
| on everyone of being citizens in a democracy, you've
| kinda obligated yourself to make sure they aren't too
| plug-ignorant to self-govern successfully.
| hn_throawlles wrote:
| [flagged]
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Go to your profile and turn on 'showdead'.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > There is functionally no comparison
|
| Yet. That is the goal, though.
| hn_throawlles wrote:
| the collective (i.e. the figurative global city understood as
| itself) fighting the individual persons which built the city and
| live in it.
|
| it's like an allergic reaction,
|
| it's as if I went to war against my cells for being 'legacy' and
| 'old culture'
| pphysch wrote:
| What would a cancerous tumor represent in this analogy?
| hn_throawlles wrote:
| I don't think this analogy is sufficient to answer that.
|
| we may need to delve deep into types and causes of cancer
| whatshisface wrote:
| Well, cancer is caused by a series of inopportune
| mutations, and prevented when the immune system clears out
| cells it recognizes are different. I don't like where this
| analogy is heading!
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hum... In principle, we can require that a police force
| must exhibit more intelligence than our immune system.
|
| We are talking over a pile of evidence pointing that this
| doesn't always happen. But it's quite a jump to conclude
| that it can't ever happen.
| pphysch wrote:
| Cancerous tumors represent corrupted cells or
| "hyperindividualists" that enrich themselves at the
| absolute expense of the host, and may end up killing it and
| themselves in the process.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| This requires a view that "society" is some sort of
| organism. Not everyone holds this view. Some of us think
| that we're a collection of individuals agreeing only to
| resolve disputes nonviolently (read: coexist not
| cooperate). It's also immediately problematic. Who gets
| to steer this organism?
| pixl97 wrote:
| It is very weird that we think of ourselves as
| individuals, and not at minimum a part of some small
| collective. Those people ignore all evolutionary history
| that we didn't develop as individuals at all.
| pphysch wrote:
| By that reasoning, _you_ are a collection of cells
| individually agreeing to coexist.
|
| If you are an organism/individual/ensouled being, then a
| society can be as well.
|
| > Who gets to steer this organism?
|
| It suggests the importance of a central nervous system
| (e.g. government).
| hn_throawlles wrote:
| this is a way to gloss over how it all works while still
| pointing to a "sharp" conclusion
| scythe wrote:
| Organized crime, e.g. the Sinaloa Cartel.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| I haven't thought too long about the article, but to me one
| perspective seems missing:
|
| Psychologist Robert Jay Lifton wrote an extremely impressive and
| surprisingly sober book "Thought Reform and the Psychology of
| Totalism" on the torture methods used in mainland China. He
| interviewed victims that had just escaped to Hong Kong (then
| still a safe harbor for civic freedom).
|
| This book has much more detailed, personal impressions of what
| "struggle" means. Struggle in torture prisons is a sequence of
| absolute physical and psychological destruction, followed by the
| attempt of the tortured to break and destroy their old selves, to
| denounce what they identified with, loved and fought for, to try
| and re-model themselves into model citizens. Only, what exactly
| the party demands model citizens to be is often left vague.
|
| I was left with the impression that the extreme violence exerted
| on individuals cannot be left out of any high-level analysis of
| what totalitarianism does.
| jmole wrote:
| This video came to mind:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPrnZAUi0l0
|
| The reaction of the correctional officers to finding a feather
| in the inmate's cell is particularly poignant. The TV can stay,
| but any means of creative expression has to go.
| im3w1l wrote:
| What makes it all the weirder is the impracticality of the
| whole enterprise. Like you could just lock troublemakers away
| and call it a day. Thus I think we must conclude that it is
| motivated by ideology rather than the realpolitik of
| maintaining the system.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Locked-up troublemakers still make trouble though, don't
| they? Their very existence signals to those not locked up yet
| that there is something wrong. That you can be punished for
| having ideas and behaving in ways they don't want.
|
| They are many things at that point. A source of inspiration,
| a lesson in how to maybe not be locked up yourself. A target
| for rebels to rescue (that would be embarrassing).
|
| Getting more extreme doesn't fix it... if you simply execute
| them, then they're martyrs. It can't be fixed later (like
| with prisoners, potentially). You don't get to un-martyr
| them.
|
| The question is how you erase them from existence itself. And
| the totalitarians have started to figure out the solution to
| that problem in the 21st century, I fear.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Imprisoned people (especially political prisoners) are apt to
| cooperate, either breaking out or radicalizing everyone who
| comes into contact with them. There's abundant examples of
| this, both from history and in gang recruitment/membership
| patterns in contemporary prisons.
|
| The totalitarian brainwashing definitely serves ideology, but
| the technique is not unique to any particular ideology, any
| more than the concept of a loop is unique to any programming
| language. Pre-communist imperial Chinese society was pretty
| totalitarian in its own right. Over a longer historical scale
| Chinese history abounds with examples of hyper-
| authoritarianism, eg printing the emperor's full name in a
| dictionary was grounds for the execution of your entire
| family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_taboo
| retrac wrote:
| Exactly. After all, the PRC doesn't do it today. Nor did the
| later USSR. Not quite like they did back in the day. There
| was/is the whole thought control and censorship apparatus,
| and perceived enemies and threats were/are dispatched,
| secretly and sometimes not so secretly, but millions of
| random innocent citizens were/are not systematically tortured
| in the later USSR or China. Because it's not /necessary/. The
| ruling clique does not really expect mass, loving-terrified
| worship, just compliance.
|
| One analogy that keeps coming to mind is the religious
| rapture of a medieval or early modern crowd as a witch is
| burned, an act they sincerely believe is good and necessary
| to save the soul of the person they're burning.
|
| > "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the
| good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be
| better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent
| moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes
| sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those
| who torment us for our own good will torment us without end
| for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
|
| - C. S. Lewis
| muyuu wrote:
| I'm not sure why are you being downvoted, what you said is
| largely correct and appropriate.
|
| The tyrannies going on right now are more insidious,
| because people can be more insidiously cajoled into
| compliance and more surgically atomised from each other,
| and out of their moral frameworks.
|
| It's when a hot revolution happens that these highly visual
| acts of repression happen, as it's a feature not a bug to
| signal who's boss now. But if everyone already perceived
| and agreed to who's boss and rendered all their power to
| the service of the new regime, and there was no need to
| appease the new ruler's revenge thirst, then all of these
| struggle sessions would have been wasteful.
|
| Performative struggle sessions are to be expected if
| there's an active resistance.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Probably disagreement with the facts asserted - e.g
| "millions of random innocent citizens were/are not
| systematically tortured in the later USSR or China", and
| the claim that the crowd burning witches were actually
| motivated by the goal of saving the witches soul.
| gessha wrote:
| Peasants: We have found a witch! (A witch! a witch!) Burn
| her burn her!
| lisasays wrote:
| _After all, the PRC doesn 't do it today._
|
| Except for what's going on in the Uyghur internment camps.
| Which does look a lot more like what went on back in the
| day. And (in the CPC's view) it's for their own good, no
| less.
| muyuu wrote:
| It's proportionate to the perceived need and perceived
| resistance. This is nowadays basically just Uyghur and
| Hong Kong, where the civil religion of the areas refuse
| to be completely assimilate. If Taiwan were to be
| successfully invaded, there would be massive repression
| until they would be broken.
| pookha wrote:
| I don't see any resemblance to the witch-scare. The most
| popular books back then were about finding witches:
| https://theontarion.com/2020/02/28/witchcraft-and-the-
| magic-...
|
| Which means it was mostly unplanned mass hysteria...
|
| Classic Maoism is NOT unplanned. It's is all about taking
| advantage of the dumbest members of society to enforce
| arbitrary dogma that is pushed by the state.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Locking troublemakers away just means you have a tiger that's
| locked in a cage and that will eat you when it escapes.
|
| No, instead they torture the tiger until it becomes a
| zookeeper itself.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| This is precisely what happened: "reformed" inmates (after
| a year or so) would be matched with newcomers and
| instructed to "help" them in their own path, i.e. to beat,
| humiliate and criticize them.
| robocat wrote:
| The article and your comment reminds me of Joe in Elan
| School: https://elan.school/18-back-in-the-day/
| none_to_remain wrote:
| You think "why go through the trouble of inflicting all this
| suffering" but to this mindset inflicting suffering is not a
| trouble, it's a pleasure
| pookha wrote:
| How do you know who the troublemakers are? What happens when
| there's blowback or your socialist bureaucracies aren't
| playing nice? The CCP has to then start enforcing their will
| across a giant area...You can't expect a central clearing
| house to handle that. What it looks like they did is create
| two classes of people. One that published out nonsensical
| dogma and one that was expected to worship it. They then (Mao
| and his hynchmen) found the dumbest, most impressionable
| members of this consumer class (typically the only ones that
| would buy the bullshit wholesale) and set them loose at the
| ground level to wage guerilla warfare on (perceived) non-
| believers. After the smoke cleared and the bodies were piled
| up Mao had a strangle hold on the bulk of the population and
| most of the country without having to do that much. That's
| how I view Maoism. Bullshit dogma and giving the dumbest
| elements of society power versus just a place to vent in
| hate-sessions.
| akomtu wrote:
| > Mao explicitly forbid the army and the police from trying to
| stop the violence, ordering that they must "absolutely not
| intervene." Names and addresses of writers and artists were given
| to the Red Guards, who proceeded to ransack their homes,
| destroying books, paintings and musical instruments, and beating
| up their owners in the process.
|
| That's what 2A is for.
|
| The article doesn't explain what these regimes really do. The
| end-goal is inverting the flow of "life-force". Normally it flows
| upwards when people express any high or selfless aspirations. In
| demonic religions, this flow goes downward, mostly via two
| channels: hatred and sexual passion. The two are destructive and
| creative forces inverted. Wars, concentration camps and prisons
| create a reliable source of hatred and fear. The cult of unhinged
| sexuality inverts the creative force of the people.
|
| The author is wrong to think that tyranny wants to break down
| your will and turn people into veggies. It's an intermediate
| step. The demonic force behind a tyrant wants its subjects to
| apply all their knowledge and creativity to demonic ends. This is
| why creative cruelty was encouraged in Red Guard and other
| similar cults. Dumb veggies with weak will are of no use to them,
| but they may serve as the fuel by producing hatred and sexual
| passion.
| tempodox wrote:
| > "revolution is no crime, to rebel is justified."
|
| Sarcasm of history. Try to survive with that motto in today's
| China.
| gnarbarian wrote:
| "When you strike at a king, you must kill him." Ralph Waldo
| Emerson
| wwarner wrote:
| Makes good points and supports them with historical data, but the
| repeated references to a work of fiction (Orwell's 1984) weaken
| the argument.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| How so?
|
| I think it's clear that the references to 1984 are being used
| as explanation, not evidence.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Besides, Orwell put a lot of his actual knowledge into that
| book.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| It seems to be rarely mentioned that Orwell worked as a
| propagandist for the UK government. 1984, in particular the
| goal of the Ministry of Truth, was a description of his job
| more than it was some prediction of the future.
| Animats wrote:
| I've mentioned this before. Find "Orwell, the Lost
| Writings", for his own descriptions of his years at the
| British Ministry of Information. One of his jobs was
| translating news broadcasts into Basic English, the 1000
| word vocabulary. Simplified news was broadcast to the
| colonies (India, Hong Kong) for non-native English
| speakers. Orwell discovered translating into Basic
| English was a political act. Ambiguity had to be hammered
| out, which involved decisions about what was meant.
|
| Hence Newspeak.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| For what it's worth, I learned that he was a propagandist
| from a comment on this site so it's rather likely it was
| yours; it was even this specific story about his
| translation work. This is a very strong point. I'm well
| convinced this is exactly where Newspeak came from. (I
| should probably have mentioned Newspeak specifically over
| the Ministry of Truth in my comment; oh well, I can
| remember for the future.)
| Animats wrote:
| He was trying not to be too much of a propagandist.
|
| Orwell, 1941: "One could not have a better example of the
| moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the
| fact that we are now all more or less pro Stalin. This
| disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so
| the purges, etc., are suddenly forgotten."
|
| Hence the scene in "1984" where the orator, upon being
| handed an update notice, switches mid-speech from
| supporting Eastasia to Westasia. (Or was it the other way
| round?)
|
| Orwell is worth reading beyond "1984" because he
| punctures the delusions of all the sides without
| descending into nihilism. We need more of that today.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > trying not to be too much of a propagandist
|
| Thanks for the correction. I do get that impression from
| his writings. In this case I was using the word
| descriptively and any accusation is not intended. He was
| a "propagandist" as much as anyone who "propagates"
| messages.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Orwell fought on the Communist side in the Spanish Civil
| War. His "Ministry of Truth" comes out of that experience
| far more than it does his working for the UK government.
| robocat wrote:
| You have made a disgustingly political statement - given
| the wide variety of reactions people have to the word
| communist.
|
| In Homage to Catalonia, Eric (George Orwell) writes about
| how the Communists supported Franco: "The general swing
| to the Right [occurred] when the USSR began to supply
| arms to the [fascist] Government and power began to pass
| from the Anarchists to the Communists." (He was fighting
| with the Anarchists, and the Communists were another
| separate group). He wrote that the Russian terms were
| 'prevent revolution or you [the Fascists] get no arms'.
|
| You could say he fought against Franco and Fascism. You
| might say he was fighting for the individual freedom of
| working class people - he was fighting with 100%
| volunteers as equals, so top-down control hardly existed.
| "the bullying and abuse that go on in a normal army would
| never have been tolerated for a moment", "you often had
| to argue for 5 minutes before you could get an order
| obeyed, [which] appalled and infuriated me. I had British
| Army ideas". "As a militiaman one was a soldier against
| Franco, but one was also a pawn in an enourmous struggle
| that was being fought between two political theories".
|
| Personally I identify with his fight against
| authoritarianism, and I don't identify with the left, nor
| the right. In New Zealand [I suspect] we have a bit more
| political nuance because we don't have a two party
| system.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _he was fighting with 100% volunteers as equals, so
| top-down control hardly existed._
|
| That didn't last for that long. You might want to read
| his memoirs on the subject.
|
| https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/george-orwell-
| homage...
| robocat wrote:
| Huh: that link points to the same book that I referenced
| in my comment!
|
| He wrote about the front: "Up here in Aragon one was
| among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not
| entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same
| level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was
| perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far
| from it."
|
| Are you talking about the rise of the Popular Army?
| For the time being, however, the militias were holding
| the line while the Popular Army was training in the rear,
| and this fact had to be advertised as little as possible.
| Drafts of militia returning to the front were no longer
| marched through the streets with drums beating and flags
| flying. [] The fact that the militia troops were also, on
| paper, Popular Army troops, was skilfully used in the
| Press propaganda. Any credit that happened to be going
| was automatically handed to the Popular Army, while all
| blame was reserved for the militias. [] When I
| first reached Barcelona I had thought it a town where
| class distinctions and great differences of wealth hardly
| existed. [] 'Smart' clothes were an abnormality, nobody
| cringed or took tips, waiters and flower-women and
| bootblacks looked you in the eye and called you
| 'comrade'. I had not grasped that this was mainly a
| mixture of hope and camouflage. [] Now things were
| returning to normal. The smart restaurants and hotels
| were full of rich people wolfing expensive meals, while
| for the working-class population food-prices had jumped
| enormously without any corresponding rise in wages. Apart
| from the expensiveness of everything, there were
| recurrent shortages of this and that, which, of course,
| always hit the poor rather than the rich. The restaurants
| and hotels seemed to have little difficulty in getting
| whatever they wanted, but in the working-class quarters
| the queues for bread, olive oil, and other necessaries
| were hundreds of yards long. Previously in Barcelona I
| had been struck by the absence of beggars; now there were
| quantities of them. [] The workers' patrols had been
| ordered to dissolve and the pre-war police forces were
| back on the streets. One result of this was that the
| cabaret show and high-class brothels, many of which had
| been closed by the workers' patrols, had promptly
| reopened.
|
| More about his political views being formed from being on
| the front: One had been in a community
| where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where
| the word 'comrade' stood for comradeship and not, as in
| most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of
| equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion to
| deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In
| every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks
| and sleek little professors are busy 'proving' that
| Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism
| with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there
| also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from
| this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism
| and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the
| 'mystique' of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the
| vast majority of people Socialism means a classless
| society, or it means nothing at all. And it was here that
| those few months in the militia were valuable to me. For
| the Spanish militias, while they lasted, were a sort of
| microcosm of a classless society. In that community where
| no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of
| everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got,
| perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of
| Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of
| disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. The effect was
| to make my desire to see Socialism established much more
| actual than it had been before. Partly, perhaps, this was
| due to the good luck of being among Spaniards, who, with
| their innate decency and their ever-present Anarchist
| tinge, would make even the opening stages of Socialism
| tolerable if they had the chance.
|
| You might want to read his memoirs on the subject.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| He did fight for the communist side in the Spanish Civil
| War, but he was doing so because of primarily social
| (anarchist) ideals, rather than economic views. It's more
| accurate to say he fought against fascism than to say he
| fought for communism. He directly states that much of his
| views on language come from his work for the UK
| government (although I'm not aware of him directly saying
| that about Newspeak, it's fairly clear where the idea
| comes from in his work as a propagandist).
|
| It's popular among people who want to co-opt _1984_ as an
| anti-communist work, to represent Orwell as having been a
| communist who later saw the light of capitalism, but the
| truth is that Orwell was a communist until the day he
| died. _1984_ was a criticism of _totalitarianism_ , not
| communism, and while _1984_ focused primarily on how
| Stalinism had perverted the communist movement, Orwell
| was very conscious of the fact that many of the symptoms
| of the disease of totalitarianism under communism, could
| equally occur under the totalitarian capitalism. But
| again, I think it 's more relevant to see Orwell as an
| anarchist than as a communist.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| If you read Orwell's _Such Such Were The Joys_ it seems
| 1984 may channel UK public schools (in particular, being
| a scholarship student and not a full-fare client) more
| than any of his adult experiences.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| The article is largely free of evidence. I'm interested in
| how authoritarian tyrannies work, but this article hasn't
| made it any clearer for me.
|
| It presents a lot of accounts of how Mao's followers behaved;
| but those accounts aren't linked to Mao's thoughts or
| motivations, or really to anyone's motivations.
|
| So why? I'm not illuminated.
| hn_throawlles wrote:
| sometimes fiction provides the best way to pass on complex
| meanings
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