We are prepared to accept surrender in the "culture war"

[pecksniff]

The Left is going to lose the culture war. You losers don't have the character, will, ingenuity, or the energy, to found a new nation.

Nobody is founding a new nation. The existing one is evolving. And you can't stop it.

 

[pecksniff]

The evil of totalitarianism

has nothing to do with any of this.

 

[pecksniff]

Our constitutional order is the light of the future

Not even you believe that nonsense.

 

[Chobham]

Even that is an 18th Century thing and as such should never be accepted uncritically.

There is nothing new under the Sun with regard to man's relationship to his fellow man, or man's relationship to his government. It's all been tried before in one form or another. So saying it's so 18th century is to say nothing at all.

The Founders gave us a Federal Republic and drawing from the past they put in place certain guardrails to ensure we didn't go the way of the Greeks, Romans, or so many other civilizations of the past.

They made sure the government could not infringe on the freedoms of speech, religion, or the press. They also insured that the citizen would be armed as a bulwark against Tyranny. Other guard rails were put in place to act as a wall against other government excess's. They understood, as so many today seem not to, that the government is the ultimate source or tyranny and oppression. They fully understood that liberty can be messy, even bloody, from time to time. Just not quite so much as all the other forms of government.

Politicians of all stripes have already talked the people into abandoning some of the safe guards and principals contained in the Constitution as written. But they did go about it in the proper manner by proposing amendments.

 

[pecksniff]

There is nothing new under the Sun with regard to man's relationship to his fellow man, or man's relationship to his government. It's all been tried before in one form or another. So saying it's so 18th century is to say nothing at all.

"Looking through Chesterton's Introduction to Hard Times in the Everyman Edition (incidentally, Chesterton's Introductions to Dickens are about the best thing he ever wrote) , I note the typically sweeping statement: ‘There are no new ideas.’ Chesterton is here claiming that the ideas which animated the French Revolution were not new ones but simply a revival of doctrines which had flourished earlier and then had been abandoned. But the claim that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ is one of the stock arguments of intelligent reactionaries. Catholic apologists, in particular, use it almost automatically. Everything that you can say or think has been said or thought before. Every political theory from Liberalism to Trotskyism can be shown to be a development of some heresy in the early Church. Every system of philosophy springs ultimately from the Greeks. Every scientific theory (if we are to believe the popular Catholic press) was anticipated by Roger Bacon and others in the thirteenth century. Some Hindu thinkers go even further and claim that not merely the scientific theories, but the products of applied science as well, aeroplanes, radio and the whole bag of tricks, were known to the ancient Hindus, who afterward dropped them as being unworthy of their attention.

It is not very difficult to see that this idea is rooted in the fear of progress. If there is nothing new under the sun, if the past in some shape or another always returns, then the future when it comes will be something familiar. At any rate what will never come — since it has never come before — is that hated, dreaded thing, a world of free and equal human beings. Particularly comforting to reactionary thinkers is the idea of a cyclical universe, in which the same chain of events happens over and over again. In such a universe every seeming advance towards democracy simply means that the coming age of tyranny and privilege is a little bit nearer. This belief, obviously superstitious though it is, is widely held nowadays, and is common among Fascists and near-Fascists.

In fact, there are new ideas. The idea that an advanced civilization need not rest on slavery is a relatively new idea, for instance; it is a good deal younger than the Christian religion. But even if Chesterton's dictum were true, it would only be true in the sense that a statue is contained in every block of stone. Ideas may not change, but emphasis shifts constantly. It could be claimed, for example, that the most important part of Marx's theory is contained in the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any attention to it? Who had inferred from it — what it certainly implies — that laws, religions and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate him so much."

-- George Orwell, As I Please, 1944

 

[Sean Renaud]

All Negroes are not inferior by heredity. And what do you mean by "inferior?" They look good on the basketball court and the dance floor. They are rarely impressive in the class room, however. That is what matters. It will matter more in the future as intelligence becomes more important in our economy and society.

I have already pointed out that gene alleles that determine intelligence are being discovered, despite the taboos and sanctions against looking for them. As time goes on more will be discovered. It has long been known that intelligence runs in families.

Lets start here. Oh the blacks are good at shooting hoops and dancing, that means they are not inferior! Where do you get these nutball ideas anyway?

We've covered inferior in the classroom to death and you just don't want to believe in how basic economics plays out nor segregation. You have not pointed out genes that determine intelligence, you've shown some extremely narrow things that anybody could correlate. Of course if you wanted to test your evil idea you could always convince whatever a perfect couple would be having a child and then it being addopted by a family that lives in a ghetto with more liquor stores than grocery stores and see what happens.

The Left is going to lose the culture war. You losers don't have the character, will, ingenuity, or the energy, to found a new nation. All your movement will be is a monument, a warning to future generations, not to follow the piper of the left into poverty and the darkness of tyranny. The Left is a blood sucking scourge on the progress of mankind. Our constitutional order is the light of the future and the only real light along the dark chronology from whence we came. The evil of totalitarianism needs to be returned to the darkness of the past where it belongs. Americans are going to do that.

The Left almost never loses a culture war. You could make a handful of times when it has happened most of those turned into wins it just took a while.

The Right is far more tyrannical than the Left. This isn't even a contest and we didn't get the Light of the Constitution to escape some grimdark past. Its crazy how brainwashed you are.

If you don't like Totalitarians you should vote Democrat up and down the ballot at all times.

There is nothing new under the Sun with regard to man's relationship to his fellow man, or man's relationship to his government. It's all been tried before in one form or another. So saying it's so 18th century is to say nothing at all.

The Founders gave us a Federal Republic and drawing from the past they put in place certain guardrails to ensure we didn't go the way of the Greeks, Romans, or so many other civilizations of the past.

They made sure the government could not infringe on the freedoms of speech, religion, or the press. They also insured that the citizen would be armed as a bulwark against Tyranny.

Politicians of all stripes have already talked the people into abandoning some of the safe guards and principals contained in the Constitution as written. But they did go about it in the proper manner by proposing amendments.

There is so much new under the sun as it regardes to the relationships of humans. To claim otherwise is to ignore basically all of living history. It has not 'All' been tried before save whatever "one way or another" is defined. I mean does that mean that Alexander and the various European nations tried a one world government and it just didn't work out? IS that the story we are aiming to spin?

I would love a history lesson on where these great civilizations went wrong exactly. They did not insure that the citizens would be armed as a bulwark against tyranny. That's just revisionist history. And that's being kinda polite about it since there was more to it than just that even if you believe that was AN issue it certainly wasn't THE issue.

There is no correct way to "anandon the safe guards" whatever works, works and that is what you should do. Up to and including breaking laws.

 

[pecksniff]

All Negroes are not inferior by heredity. And what do you mean by "inferior?" They look good on the basketball court and the dance floor.

But what you are always saying is that they are mentally and morally inferior by heredity. That is what most Americans -- probably including most black Americans -- believed for most of American history, but it is not true.

 

[pecksniff]

You don't get it. In cultural terms, every inch our society moves leftward is an irreversible inch.

This is what matters more than anything else here.

 

[pecksniff]

Whatever gains transgenders make in the present period will be permanent.

I'm sure everyone here understands this is true.

 

[Chobham]

"Looking through Chesterton's Introduction to Hard Times in the Everyman Edition (incidentally, Chesterton's Introductions to Dickens are about the best thing he ever wrote) , I note the typically sweeping statement: ‘There are no new ideas.’ Chesterton is here claiming that the ideas which animated the French Revolution were not new ones but simply a revival of doctrines which had flourished earlier and then had been abandoned. But the claim that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ is one of the stock arguments of intelligent reactionaries. Catholic apologists, in particular, use it almost automatically. Everything that you can say or think has been said or thought before. Every political theory from Liberalism to Trotskyism can be shown to be a development of some heresy in the early Church. Every system of philosophy springs ultimately from the Greeks. Every scientific theory (if we are to believe the popular Catholic press) was anticipated by Roger Bacon and others in the thirteenth century. Some Hindu thinkers go even further and claim that not merely the scientific theories, but the products of applied science as well, aeroplanes, radio and the whole bag of tricks, were known to the ancient Hindus, who afterward dropped them as being unworthy of their attention.

~snip for brevity~

In fact, there are new ideas. The idea that an advanced civilization need not rest on slavery is a relatively new idea, for instance; it is a good deal younger than the Christian religion. But even if Chesterton's dictum were true, it would only be true in the sense that a statue is contained in every block of stone. Ideas may not change, but emphasis shifts constantly. It could be claimed, for example, that the most important part of Marx's theory is contained in the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any attention to it? Who had inferred from it — what it certainly implies — that laws, religions and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate him so much."

-- George Orwell, As I Please, 1944

Ah yes, poor ole Orwell. The disillusioned, hard core, Socialist. I often wonder what he might have written if he'd lived to learn exactly what had happened in the Soviet Union? He certainly was quite aware of what was going on with the elite fellow Socialists of his day and did a good job documenting it in "The Road to Wigan Pier."

In a sense you make my point for me by introducing science and technology. Of course those are evolving fields. Fields that bring with them great risk. The first being that they are easily lost. One 5 megaton burst 300 miles above central Kansas and the United States will be back in the hunter-gatherer stage in a heart beat. Then there is the fact that far too many see these advances as 'proof' that mankind has evolved and nothing could be further from the truth. Biological evolution just doesn't work that way.

My statement was, "Man's relationship to his fellow man and man's relationship to his government." You bring up slavery. That has only disappeared from view due to agreed convention. The dirty little truth is that it still exists in the darker regions of our planet. And in the event of a collapse of the social systems, as I mentioned in the previous paragraph, it can reappear in no time flat.

Returning to the biological theme. I look at the animal world and observe their behavior and then I wonder about those that seem to think that man is somehow divorced from that world. I can understand the hard core religionists that believe that man was a separate creation. What baffles me are those that deny the religionist theories, accept that man IS an animal, and then act as if he's somehow immune to those laws of nature. I observe governments, ALL governments, attempt to apply Pavlovian techniques to mold human nature to their particular will. And in that observation I can't help but wonder, "Who is the master and who is the dog?"

 

[pecksniff]

Ah yes, poor ole Orwell. The disillusioned, hard core, Socialist. I often wonder what he might have written if he'd lived to learn exactly what had happened in the Soviet Union?

It would have made no difference. It is clear from Orwell's writings that he had no illusions whatsoever about the Soviet Union, and he had a lot of harsh words for contemporary British intellectuals who admired it. OTOH, he saw clearly that even those self-deluded intellectuals were mentally superior to the conservatives, and they were. And socialists are superior to conservatives even now.

Otherwise, regarding no new thing under the sun, see post #59.

Everything politically relevant about today's world is new. It all would have been utterly incomprehensible to Aristotle and even to Machiavelli. Even to Jefferson. Even to Marx.

 

[YDB95]

The Left is going to lose the culture war.

That's what people like you said about abolition of slavery, women's rights, civil rights, gay rights...I could go on, but you get the point (although I'm sure you'll make a point of pretending not to).

 

[pecksniff]

The Left is a blood sucking scourge on the progress of mankind.

Actually, that is exactly what the Right is.

 

[Chobham]

You sure unloaded a trailer full of horse shit there. It is NOT clear that Orwell was aware of the facts within the Soviet Union. Neither was Satre' or any of the other Socialist intellectuals of the day.

Socialists are superior to conservatives? What's your empirical evidence? That they believe that men can have babies and women have penii?

Politics is situational real time and the term 'political science' is an oxymoron. Machiavelli's treatise is as true today as the day he wrote it. The same can be said regarding Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" which in and of itself is a political treatise. Again you mistake the complexities of technological developments with an some profound change in the basic principles. If that were true those individuals would have been in the dust bin of history long ago. The fact that you even refer to them is a testament to their relevance today.

Go grab yourself a modern translation of the Bible, the old testament. Read it, read it carefully. Forget about any reference to God doing anything. Read it as if you were reading a history text. Within it you will find every triumph and failure of mankind. The only other text that comes close is the complete works of Shakespeare. Take for example the 'great flood.' That really did happen, science has verified that. Noah and his kin? Totally subject to question, but the racial memory survived and so did the human race. Did Noah (Gilgamesh, etc.) have some foresight? Who's to know? From my perspective it only shows that there were some wackadoodle survivalists 12,500 years ago.

 

[pecksniff]

You sure unloaded a trailer full of horse shit there. It is NOT clear that Orwell was aware of the facts within the Soviet Union. Neither was Satre' or any of the other Socialist intellectuals of the day.

The full facts did not come out until de-Stalinization. But Orwell knew all about the Holodomor, he mentioned it in an essay on Gandhi; also about the show trials of Old Bolsheviks. See his review of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon:

Naturally the whole book centres round one question: Why did Rubashov confess? He is not guilty — that is, not guilty of anything except the essential crime of disliking the Stalin régime. The concrete acts of treason in which he is supposed to have engaged are all imaginary. He has not even been tortured, or not very severely. He is worn down by solitude, toothache, lack of tobacco, bright lights glaring in his eyes, and continuous questioning, but these in themselves would not be enough to overcome a hardened revolutionary. The Nazis have previously done worse to him without breaking his spirit. The confessions obtained in the Russian state trials are capable of three explanations:

1. That the accused were guilty.
2. That they were tortured, and perhaps blackmailed by threats to relatives and friends.
3. That they were actuated by despair, mental bankruptcy and the habit of loyalty to the Party.

For Koestler's purpose in Darkness at Noon 1 is ruled out, and though this is not the place to discuss the Russian purges, I must add that what little verifiable evidence there is suggests that the trials of the Bolsheviks were frame-ups. If one assumes that the accused were not guilty — at any rate, not guilty of the particular things they confessed to — then 2 is the common-sense explanation. Koestler, however, plumps for 3, which is also accepted by the Trotskyist Boris Souvarine, in his pamphlet Cauchemar en U.R.S.S. Rubashov ultimately confesses because he cannot find in his own mind any reason for not doing so. Justice and objective truth have long ceased to have any meaning for him. For decades he has been simply the creature of the Party, and what the Party now demands is that he shall confess to non-existent crimes. In the end, though he had to be bullied and weakened first, he is somewhat proud of his decision to confess. He feels superior to the poor Czarist officer who inhabits the next cell and who talks to Rubashov by tapping on the wall. The Czarist officer is shocked when he learns that Rubashov intends to capitulate. As he sees it from his ‘bourgeois’ angle, everyone ought to stick to his guns, even a Bolshevik. Honour, he says, consists in doing what you think right. ‘Honour is to be useful without fuss,’ Rubashov taps back; and he reflects with a certain satisfaction that he is tapping with his pince-nez while the other, the relic of the past, is tapping with a monocle. Like Burkharin, Rubashov is ‘looking out upon black darkness’. What is there, what code, what loyalty, what notion of good and evil, for the sake of which he can defy the Party and endure further torment? He is not only alone, he is also hollow. He has himself committed worse crimes than the one that is now being perpetrated against him. For example, as a secret envoy of the Party in Nazi Germany, he has got rid of disobedient followers by betraying them to the Gestapo. Curiously enough, if he has any inner strength to draw upon, it is the memories of this boyhood when he was the son of a landowner. The last thing he remembers, when he is shot from behind, is the leaves of poplar trees on his father's estate. Rubashov belongs to the older generation of Bolsheviks that was largely wiped out in the purges. He is aware of art and literature, and of the world outside Russia. He contrasts sharply with Gletkin, the young G.P.U. man who conducts his interrogation, and who is the typical ‘good party man’, completely without scruples or curiosity, a thinking gramophone. Rubashov, unlike Gletkin, does not have the Revolution as his starting-point. His mind was not a blank sheet when the Party got hold of it. His superiority to the other is finally traceable to his bourgeois origin.

Socialists are superior to conservatives? What's your empirical evidence? That they believe that men can have babies and women have penii?

No, that's not socialists. Such matters are completely irrelevant to socialism. (BTW, the plural of "penis" is "penes.") I judge socialists mentally (and morally) superior because all those I have met were, and conservatives inferior for the same reason -- that includes those met virtually on this board.

And there was a time, you know, before WWII, when a great many of the Communists outside the USSR were better, mentally and morally, than anyone else seriously engaged in politics at the time. Of course, I'm thinking here of what you might call Hemingway Communists. And if I had lived in Germany in the interwar period, I would always have voted Social Democrat, not Communist. The Communists who called the SDs "social fascists" were either too stupid or too stubborn to see that joining them in a Popular Front could have stopped Hitler.

Politics is situational real time and the term 'political science' is an oxymoron. Machiavelli's treatise is as true today as the day he wrote it. The same can be said regarding Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" which in and of itself is a political treatise. Again you mistake the complexities of technological developments with an some profound change in the basic principles.

That is exactly what they are. They change the game.

Take for example the 'great flood.' That really did happen, science has verified that.

Nonsense. There were floods in Mesopotamia that must have looked worldwide to the inhabitants, but there never was a worldwide flood, not in the past four billion years.

 

[phrodeau]

There is no evidence of a worldwide flood, or even a continent-wide one, nor is there any evidence that the Ararat volcanic chain was ever submerged.

 

[Chobham]

The game doesn't change, the tactics do.

Look up "Fresh Water Pulse Event(s). It was world wide.

 

[pecksniff]

Look up "Fresh Water Pulse Event(s). It was world wide.

I got two results for that, neither a worldwide flood, and both predating civilization. There was only coastal flooding caused by glacial melt and sea level rise. No, it is not plausible that Noah's Flood was a "racial memory" of either.

 

[pecksniff]

The game doesn't change, the tactics do.

The content changes. Never before the 20th Century could there have been any political controversy over universal health care or Internet access. Never before the Industrial Revolution would any nation have gone to war to secure a "coaling station." Marx was entirely right in observing that industry had changed everything, including not only class relations but what the classes were, and that the industrial proletariat was a completely new and completely different thing, not only in function but in mentality, from both the peasantry and the old urban tradesmen.

 

[phrodeau]

The game doesn't change, the tactics do.

Look up "Fresh Water Pulse Event(s). It was world wide.

The pulse events raised sea levels about 60 feet. Eurasia and the Americas have populations living above 6,000 feet.

 

[Chobham]

The pulse events raised sea levels about 60 feet. Eurasia and the Americas have populations living above 6,000

Here's a little map to play with. 60 feet is approx. 20 meters.

Sea Level Map

 

[phrodeau]

Here's a little map to play with. 60 feet is approx. 20 meters.

Sea Level Map

Whatever floats your boat.

 

[SgtSpiderMan]

Here's a little map to play with. 60 feet is approx. 20 meters.

Sea Level Map

It’s actually 18.3 meters. Good try though.

 

[Chobham]

The event of interest is the event at the onset of the Younger-Dryas. The theory is that a fragmented comet struck the earth with a major impact on the Hiawatha Ice Sheet somewhere in the vicinity of Saginaw Bay, MI. with smaller fragments striking throughout the Americas and in portions of Europe. Look up Younger-Dryas Comet Strike.

This theory is still being debated among scientists but the evidence for such a strike is growing year by year.

Such an event would have had a profound impact on the racial memory of the survivors.

 

[Chobham]

It’s actually 18.3 meters. Good try though.

Fuck off. Approx 20 is close enough.