Yes, domestic terrorism, you’re right.
Doesn’t terrorism have to have a political aim?
It’s the surgical strike capability of the oppressed, that’s all. You could be anything from a disgruntled incel who just lost his job at the arcade to a radical jihadist who’s fixin to get himself an island paradise hosted by a bunch of virgins.
But whatever you are, you’re basically saying ‘enough is enough. Let’s fuckin do this’.
Yes. As prom mentioned, it’s a socio aim, and socio is political. It’s not about nation states, but ultimately it’s about social politics.
For them, it’s also a matter of self defense, or a James would say… the hope to threat ratio.
They are not inaccurately perceiving the threat, they just gave up.
I don’t condone such behavior. But I do know a lot about just giving up because of society.
So terrorism as defined currently no longer has the same meaning to you, but that is not how it is defined online.
Well, um. What did he fuck up? There are no economic catastrophes besides those began in Obama and Bush’s era, in fact from a purely economic perspective, things have objectively improved in the last couple years. Anyway, to address your more- problematic comments. You are essentially valorizing the existence of a highly stratified and layered system of government intentionally conceived to obscure its machinations from its own population, because we haven’t had a major terror attack in some time. We’ve had no terrorist attacks. However, we are now a populace that has basically accepted that we are being monitored twenty four hours a day, that our leaders freely indulge in what they have gleaned from our taxes to conduct massive global projects that most people not only have no interest in but do not even understand; a populace that has accepted that it is in fact good that we don’t understand what is happening on the scale of global politics and that this is a sign of merely national security, and we might as well put our faith in it, again without understanding; a populace that is happy for our own nation to concern itself primarily with the interests, not of us, but of other countries, and that our resources should be diverted to them, that this ‘deep state’ might further its true vision, not of the US,- but of the World. We’ve had no terror attacks, yet the results of this paradigm are innumerable: the accelerating metastasis of globalization, spearheaded by our synarchic shadow government, has further entangled our nation in global politics that have essentially nothing to do with the common man or our interests as a people, even to the extent that, for an example, the offloading of US Industry to foreign countries without any intention on the part of our leaders of conducting the necessary preparations to safeguard its population from the potential negative effects of too rapidly following through on that eventuality has gutted what they call the ‘rust belt’, (where he gained a lot of his voting base) leading to a total melt down of the economy which has produced an opiate crisis as a beautiful scapegoat for the true problem, ie. the fact that the rapid loss of jobs (to some extent the processes of globalization are inevitable, but the corporatist push toward it with increasing fervor, and without having made any plans concerning easing the transition for the people involved, has lead to the catastrophe) has left so many people with nowhere to go and so little hope that pills and heroin is all they have to turn to now. (The opiate crisis is, not coincidentally, at its peak in precisely this area of the country.) The fact that you would blame capitalism for this, is very uninformed. I really just want to say that you should maybe think a little more about, well. Stuff.
And to address your anti-America sentiment. America is the only nation born out of agency, out of a Will: every other nation was born out of a long evolutionary process and it is only America that offered the possibility of a new reality, a self-directing government. A New Order.
You seem to believe that geopolitics is just a game of physics as you put it, and whoever has the resources ‘wins’ the game. It really isn’t that simple. You should read Steigler, I summarized his critique of geopolitics and globalization in another thread:
[size=85]Steiglerian critique of globalization: techne [technology] has always evolved; but in the past, culture could evolve to catch up to it before the next big innovation came; so it was a co-evolution of human culture and human possibility, ethos and techne. But at a certain point, technology began evolving far faster than culture, to the point that culture cannot simply ever catch up: this means that globalism emerges as a deterministic event, as a total extinction of the individual, which is the basis of culture and its capacity to change. Then not only does techne evolve faster than ethos/culture, but it replaces culture as the human program, as the thing that guides us in life. Steigler says that since this globalization is extinguishing the individual which is the basis of culture, and thus eradicating individual distinct cultures while pursuing an inclusive multicultural global state, what we need to do to combat it is withdraw and form “microcultures”, like microgenres in music: small, ephemeral island-societies that come together to achieve a specific goal and then voluntarily dissolve.
[/size]
America is the only country where you know, you are allowed to say whatever you want. In Europe you can get jailed for making a Nazi joke. I don’t know, that seems pretty “great” to me, and has nothing to do with our resources.
“Our country was conceived on killing 70,000,000 people who already lived here, then eventually freeing slaves and women to earn more tax dollars for corporate welfare.” Well women were never enslaved, and about 98 percent of the native population died from unintended diseases we transmitted to them.
Parodites,
Please read all of this very short thread (less than one page) before you reply like this.
Okay, well; I did before I replied. Did you have a point? I addressed your comments on the way in which the US came to be; I addressed your statement that people should be sacrificing themselves for the world, not the country; I read your valorization of the “swamp” or “deep state” due to a lack of terrorist attacks; I addressed your assertion about the nature of geopolitics. What did I miss? Or was it because I chose to focus on your original post? In my second reply I addressed the rest of them. So genuinely, did you have a point?
Well, you mention the “Rust Belt” as President Trump’s constituency and even justification. This is true, partly, but it is also what bothers me about politics as seen from inside the mind of US citizens. I mean, it all seems to boil down to a communist dialectic, n’est pas? You are either with the poor or with the fat pigs.
Whereas, during the Obama years, a bunch of us that maybe became increasingly poor out of terror-stricken paralysis but where by no means the “Rust Belt,” you know, type, were like “this is extremely fucked up. We hired this faggot to do the opposite of this.”
The president’s constituency is at least equally the very same crowd that kept bringing up the Obama airstrikes and massive surveillance, the crazy de-Americazation of America which, as much enmity as any proud non-American will have with her, America is still pretty goddamn cool and the rest of the world should die before we let her perish, and generally everything that dictated more top-down control, more fat fucks telling you what to do and how to be, how to think, how to feel.
People make fun of. But Freedom is really what it’s all about.
That also brings geopolitics into focus. All of these things that this same crowd was terrified by, the seeming helplesness of the free world to do anything about a fucking fascist regime, and expantionist at that, like Iran fascisting and expantioning at will, of China with their creepy fucking empty smiles hostile take-overing the world, of a lotta shit I won’t go into necessarily right at this very moment but along that vein, Trump addressed with the fucking precision and elegance of a coked-up late-1800’s surgeon.
Listen, it’s more than that. It’s not that we realized that it’s suddenly all about the red necks. It’s just that we discovered long-lost and alienated brothers.
Don’t let them fool ya. Communist dialectic is bullshit.
Pzr out, thank you for the good post.
The risk is dropping “the government is fucking up too much” for “the government is not doing enough.”
Watching the president surf this line is like… Like watching one of the early seasons of Master Chef.
I don’t mean to deify the industrial sector or Rust Belt, I only mean to draw attention to the fact that the rapidity with which jobs have been exported to other nations indicates that very little concern has been paid to the population, as these transitions, with some care and planning, not only could have been carried out without so harming people that live there, but actually benefiting them in the process. And also I wanted to point out how the moral hysteria involved in the opiate crisis is a piece of propaganda intended as a scapegoat (it is at its fever in the area of the country I indicated, and among that class of people, “rednecks”: that is the cradle of death as far as opiates go, now.) to distract everyone from the fact that the actual problem is on our leaders and their economic and geopolitical decisions and it’s honestly gross listening to it, as is listening to someone valorize these obfuscatory tactics by the ‘swamp’ because we haven’t had a major terror attack in some time.
" the rest of the world should die before we let her perish"
Parisian streets are so laden in piss from the pedestrians that it’s eating at the doors to places and the most common name in Britain is Mohammed, so indeed the rest of the world- is perishing, before America.
And I’m still waiting for the OP to tell me why I needed to re-read the thread; was there a secret code he embedded in his posts that I missed?
Psh.
Trust me, there is more way down than there is way that has been travelled down.
That is true. About the propaganda and the swamp. But I just feel there is something more basic at play here.
I will return to this, have to go for now.
“Trust me, there is more way down than there is way that has been travelled down.”
Yes; that may be true.
I am aware that this might go over the original poster’s head, [if he wants to tell me why he dismissively implored me to re-read the thread after I took the time to write to him, like there was something I missed in the Bible Code of his posts, I’d be happy to resume my more respectful demeanor toward him. I tend to find difficulty in letting things go, regardless of how slight an offense I perceive to have been ventured toward me.] so I am choosing to address you instead of him for this, Pedro.
I want to further clarify that I do not believe that America rose to the status of world-leader just because of our resources in the first place. It was our destiny to reach that height, for our nation was born out of will, intellect, out of intention, whereas every other nation is the product of blind evolutionary processes. We are young compared to them; yet our youth is the youth of intellect- and our age is the age of intellect.
Like I write here:
Finally, Greek political science and metaphysics was incorporated into Christianity by the Gnostics and Alexandrians
who, in turn incorporating the Platonic philosophy grounded upon- but not limited to this essential teaching of Socrates, [Plato’s
Republic, while not reaching a political idea that codified the absolute primacy of the individual, should be read as a kind of
miniaturization of his understanding of anamnesis and reincarnation that succeeds in approximating the ethical value of the
Individual: he identifies the Philosopher-soul as the true and only Individual, and his Republic is set up to essentially shepherd souls
from the lowest position in society up to the heights of Philosophy.] finally laid the groundwork for- the US, essentially,- whose
constitution, at least at present, is the only one to canonize these ethical realizations of the Individual as primary, even at the level of
the super-ethical, ie. metaphysics. [The so called “rights” in European states are merely privileges afforded by the State that can be
modified at any time and to whatever extent the State pleases, whereas the rights of the US are explicitly stated to be “self-evident”,
echoing Euclid’s phrase and indicating that they are not granted to us by the State but by God and Nature, as furthermore grounded
upon true abstractions, that is, metaphysical principles that cannot be modified in anything but their historical presentation, never in
their essence; in fact, the Constitution goes further by stating that man’s rights are infinite in potential and a right need not be
EXPLICITLY stated in the constitution in order to be granted the same protection as rights that are, for these rights are not given to us
by the piece of paper- by the constitution, but by either God or Nature, (the Constitution- in fact Law itself, as understood in the US,-
does not grant us our rights- it PROTECTS them from the tyranny of other men and from the State itself by codifying a system of
checks and balances, a mathematically rigorous coordination and dispensation of political power, in which to further organize their
exceedingly complex interplay and ‘historical presentation’) grounded as they are on principles based on the idea of Natural Law and
the Sphere of Nature in relation to the INDIVIDUAL and of that of the individual in relation to his fellows, ie. all that I can do of my
own power without overstepping the sphere of nature which I occupy and encroaching upon another individual’ sphere, belongs to
me.] If Socrates did not die for the sake of the individual, Christ would have never emerged out of the necessary historical
preconditions, to die also- for the sake of the individual. The power of that Idea- that the individual man and his needs, his desires,
the safeguarding of his potential and “pursuit of happiness”, not the perfection of the polis or demos, must be the core of any ethical
system, (because only an individual can take responcibility for his actions- you cannot make a group of people take responsibility for
the acts of one or a few members in it) is what allowed the Christians to overtake and dispel Rome. If that did not happen, Greek
political theory would have simply been more and more highly refined, toward Aristotle’s goal of the perfection of the polis. We might
have developed computers 500 years earlier, Hypatia might have not been stoned to death and thus had developed calculus hundreds
of years before Leibniz, and the Romans, in refining Greek nautical science, might have found the New World hundreds of
years before Columbus, but the category of the Individual as an ethical primacy would not have survived all the many attempts in
history to destroy and suppress it, since it was obviously the greatest threat to every center of earthly power, from Athens murdering
Socrates out of fear of his influences on the youth to Rome crucifying Christ for the same reasons, etc.
And geopolitics. Take the EU.
I consider the EU to be a kind of Crypto-German empire with a line of descent tracing all the way back to the Nazi high command and the plans formalized amidst the death wails of the Reich, centered around mobilizing the plundered wealth accumulated by the Germans during their various occupations in the form of shell companies set up all around the world, as a kind of safe-keeping so that it could be re-imported at a later date. That last part of the plan was eventually modified and what we call the EU appeared, fulfilling the ambition of a unified Europe without any need for military conquest-as it failed twice for the Germans, namely by re-positioning Germany as a kind of harmless mercantile state in happy allegiance with its neighbors. Yes, happy allegiance, as it barks out orders at them from Brussels, from out of the mouths of soulless bureaucrats who nobody voted for.
The multi-lateral, multi-national institutions in which the US has been forced to participate at its own expense for the sake of preserving the world-order, (we endured them for the sake of curtailing the expansion of communism- ie. to suppress the rising Soviets) among which the EU is now the largest cog in the machine, are all failing. Out of them there has arisen a massive corporatocracy whose trespasses have created a situation in which we, meaning my country, no longer have anything to gain. We spend hundreds of billions preserving a world order that benefits nobody but this secretive elite class. How do we do that? By paying the military expenses of every member of Nato for one. My country does spend 10 times more than every other country combined on its military: because we have to fucking loan our military out to the rest of the world, because we have 100 thousand soldiers protecting the South Koreans from the North Koreans, because we supply enough aid to Japan that they don’t have to spend a single dollar, or even maintain a military of their own. My country is abandoning this whole project and leaving you people to your own devices because your German high command is fucked, corporate influences have hijacked every multinational institution that’s been created since WW2, nobody treats us fairly and we get nothing in return for footing the bill for the rest of the god damn planet. That’s why Trump was elected. And it is why Britain left the EU. After my country has completely checked out so it can attend to its own people and interests, a massive power vacuum will appear and you know what happens every time one does in Europe. You see, my country is separated from the rest of the world by oceans- nobody’s invading us from outside. And it is the only country in which the Public and the Government exist in a very finely coordinated dance, between fear and respect. Our government is the only one which actively fears its own people, its own governed, and our founders designed it to be that way. No usurpatious dictator can arise here because even if he got through the legal barriers, the government knows that there are about 150 million people here armed with military grade assault rifles.
Now, a different subject.
I am indeed anti-Marxist (I am anti-Capitalist as well, if only because I am creating my own economic theory) not because I hate poor people or the oppressed, but because my first-principles contradict Marx’s, and Hegel’s, ie. Marx’s “teacher”. Marxism- specifically, what Marxists call dialectical-historical materialism, is… well, a very materialist world-view. And I am an anti-Materialist.
Marxists believe that the mind is simply an arbitrary, mutable pattern- one carved out by the evolutionary process that has no intrinsic property, let alone an intrinsic bent for the transcendent, or God: it is organized solely by the direction-less process of dialectical materialism unfolding over time, imprinted and manipulated by the “material conditions” of the given era and society, specifically by the class-struggles constituting the given era and society. In other words, there is no soul. What there is, is an internalization of that class-struggle, which Marx calls false-consciousness, and that is the blind force driving us all under the “great delusion of Western civilization” which has somehow caused us to enjoy our own oppression at the hands of our Capitalist overlords. That is not an adequate replacement for the idea of the human soul for me. It is a first-principle I cannot go along with, so everything Marx based on it- I cannot go along with that either, no matter how seemingly just or virtuous some part of the exterior Marxist doctrine might sound- this empty, to me, this empty core of materialist philosophy underlying it, simply stands in complete contradiction to my own philosophic foundation and everything I hold dear about the Life of the Mind. But this all brings me to a more general observation, though before I get to that I’d also like to remark that Hegel was the complete opposite- Marx developed his theory by inverting the Hegelian system; for Hegel, the mind is a perfect, timeless Spirt- geist, that, through the course of history, is slowly ascending toward the Absolute by purging all negation from the dialectical process, and the final revelation of the Absolute to Geist (the German term for the human mind, that has somewhat religious connotations, it can also be translated as Spirit) is an inevitable end of the historical process. There is nothing of the tragedy of man’s longing for God in Hegel, of the loss of Being to (b)eing: I am equally at odds with Hegel, and stand opposed to him as well, but this is getting too complicated for the much simpler point I wanted to get across here.
The reality is that nobody knows what they’re talking about, but Socrates discovered that for us a long time ago. So it is not arrogant for me to say so, this is only the good old, long-standing premise of Socratic ignorance, though I am reinterpreting it and expanding the concept so as to better address modern academia and all the various forms of modern academic bullshit, it is as rampant as the Sophists were back in the day. Nobody knows what they’re talking about for the simple reason that human beings do not tend to think in terms of first-principles, that is, they do not build up a self-consistent world-view from some common foundation, from a grounding insight, from a kind of intuition about the structure of reality itself (The stoics called this kosmos, the mirror of the world within the human soul) that imparts to our body of thought and work a kind of aesthetic unity, something beyond merely logical coherence. No. Human beings instead pick and choose little pieces from this and that, from completely disparate bodies of knowledge that have no relationship to one another, without any mind for the underlying principles of these little pieces they are gathering and the fact that maybe they contradict each other, all based on what feels right to them at the moment or satisfies their peculiar sense of justice- and out of these, they create a big Jenga tower that immediately falls apart the second you start to pull pieces out of it to more closely examine them. The former mode of thought, thought based on a Ground to use the German word, on a foundation of first-principles, ie. philosophy- this mode of thought is not natural for human beings, and it is hard to teach. If you read the Platonic dialogues, the takeaway is that it might be impossible to teach: though we can hope to inspire it in others- that intuition about the structure of reality that starts the whole process of building up this aesthetic unity of coherent ideas, so as to capture something about that reality. To inspire that intuition is likely the most a philosopher can “teach” to others.
How to inspire this un-natural mode of thought in others, ie. how to teach philosophy, is one of the great problems of philosophy- maybe the central one. I have been writing a lot about it recently actually.
At bottom, I just don’t understand how an American can look at the rest of the world and the intellectual climate and then turn his gaze back to this nation with contempt.
Who decides what ideas are dangerous enough to classify as thought-crimes? It starts with: any ideas which promote retaliation by marginalized groups, because we want to protect their feelings for the sake of social cohesion and do not want to encourage the disintegration of the polis into fragmentary tribal groups at war with one another. Hence laws regarding what terms to use when referring to transgender people, laws regarding racist ideology, etc. It seems noble on the surface- and, to be sure, the desire to stamp out racism is noble. But it is the State who will be deciding. And the state is not a Platonic symposium of artists, philosophers, historians, and scientists: it’s a committee of government officials with clubs and guns, who force mankind to behave a certain way under threat of violence or imprisonment. Not that it would matter if the State even was such a virtuous symposium of gifted rulers. Once you allow the state the power to decide this, to decide what is or is not dangerous thought and therefor a thought-crime, or to demarcate the nebulous and difficult territory of social marginalization, the next step is the State expanding the definition of thought-crime for its own benefit, propagandizing and redefining every system of thought that is challenging to the State’'s status quo as itself a danger to social cohesion and progress and therefor a thought crime. The State will just turn around and label anything that challenges it as dangerous, it would never leave it at, ah yes, only racism is dangerous, that and holocaust denial. This pattern has been observed over and over again and not once have you ever been able to take that first step without taking the next 3 or 4, which all end with Dostoevsky being rounded up and shot in the back of head. That is why we absolutely cannot give the state the power to decide this, what is or is not dangerous in terms of thought and speech, what is or is not true history, what is or is not scientific fact. Europe already has, well parts of it, and that is why certain ideas cannot be legally published, why saying certain combinations of words can get you actually imprisoned. I mean, you have literal thought-crimes there, in some places anyway. Such a thing is unimaginable here. You’re allowed to not believe in the holocaust here, in the US, or think that certain races are subhuman as long as you do not act violently on such thoughts, and, unfortunately, to guarantee the freedom to express future ideas that might be deemed dangerous when they are really just new and not understood yet- in order to maintain the freedom to speak new truths into being, we must also guarantee the freedom to speak old retardations into being, for again- the power to decide this matter, what is or isn’t dangerous thought… that power can never belong to the State, to the government. You just can’t give the State the power to define… legitimate or illegitimate thought/philosophy. That’s a horrible, horrible idea. To me.
Romanticizing individuality is a form of ‘divide and conquer’ practiced in systems that use seduction and manipulation instead of coercion, to control and dominate.
There is no individual without the group, and no group without the individual.
Nature resolves this tension with vicious callousness and costs.
Shared blood substitutes for personal ambitions and desires.
This, being absent in cosmopolitan multi-racial, multi-cultural systems, must be substituted with a shared abstraction - an ideology, such as that of individualism.
The “individual” having been ‘liberated’ from past and its own genes - in theory - is offered alternative forms of self-identification. converting him to the ideal consumer of goods and services - primarily of any ideology proposing fantastic powers and incredible pleasures.
With no group to fall back to, and draw sustenance from, he becomes easy prey to charlatans promising and offering occult fantasies.
The U.S. is an example of the insanity individualism leads to. Insanity of loss of identity - the meaning crisis, as it has been called.
A population no longer aware of its own identity, seeking substitutes and compensations in ideologies, presented to it in the form of a product.
Detachment from group reaches an apex as detachment from body - the physical.
Identity built no ideas, marketed through language.
The individual is conveniently convinced that it is what it claims to be - salvation mythology.
Symbol, in the form of money, becomes its new messiah, promising to create any identity it desires - purchasing the agreement of others, from which it draws - having given up its past and its genes.
Identity as a reflection in and through otherness.
An empty husk, seeking for self in otherness. Primed to be manipulated and exploited by wannabe Messiahs and salesmen.
Quantities substituting for physical and mental qualities. Popularity identifying ‘truth’ in an inter-subjective Desert of the Real.
This ‘culture of no culture’ is part of the Judeo-Puritan Dominion - leveling all down to the lowest-common-denominator to then sell it a life-raft.
But what theory is imperfect?
It is in practice where it reveals itself. It is when applied in the real world where ti shows its motives.
Alright, well I didn’t romanticize it; I very cogently articulated the thesis that elevating the category of the individual as the ethical primacy (not dismissing the group) was one of the chief advancements in the evolution of human ethics and government. I am not dismissing the value of the group, I stated that all other governments had placed the group above individual, and it is doing the opposite which was quite necessary in advancing the political sciences. Why is it necessary to found a system of law on the Individual instead of the Group? Because an individual… can take responsibility for their actions, and a group cannot. And if responsibility- punishing the actual people who have tresspassed against the law, is an aim you have- then I see little for you to disagree with me on. If a single individual does something, he can be called to give an account for it before the Law; if a person in a group of say 10,000 people does something criminal- you can’t take the entire group and make them legally account for it. (There is a word for that; fascism, totalitarianism; class-warfare; communism- you pick.) Well you can- in fact, that is how government worked until relatively recently- until the realization was properly formulated, that the Individual, for the reasons I just outlined, must be used as a primary category in establishing an ethical legal system.
So you have no resolution to the individual versus group dynamics?
I just told you how nature evolved to deal with it. Is nature fascistic? How do you propose to ‘soften’ it to humanist standards? What are you willing to sacrifice?
Denying the body, for the sake of the mind’s salvation - via language based ideologies - leads to insanity.
As the current state of the U.S. shows.
The world does not ‘envy’ the U.S…it denies the insanity it proposes as a new world sanity.
It offers an Orwellian post-truth ‘reality’.
I find it difficult to regulate my temper due to this tendency toward reductionist philosophy- which is basically, ideology. Yes aegean, hyper-individualism has something to do with the crisis of meaning; you’re not the first to point that out, and I am not arguing against it. But guess what? So do 10,000 other things.
" This, being absent in cosmopolitan multi-racial, multi-cultural systems, must be substituted with a shared abstraction - an ideology, such as that of individualism."
Do you not realize you’re being reductionist when you say something like that? It can be regulated by using an abstracted and ethereal ideology to satisfy the natural instinct to form groups. And you can also get into Magic the Gathering and go play on the weekends at your local card shop to get your dopamine hit of community and belonging.
My post about the Individual was from a strictly legal perspective, that is, the value of the Individual as an ethical and legal category- (which you have not taken one step toward rebutting) having nothing to do with the cultural individualism you are talking about, so perhaps I will write to you about it in another thread sometime. It just doesn’t have anything to do with what I said.
Nothing reductionist bout my views.
I seek the grounding, knowing there is no absolute. I build complexity from the simplest upward, and do not pretend to be an all-knowing intellectual because I can name-drop a few thinkers, alluding to a complexity that fails to manifest in cogent arguments.
Claiming complexity and showing it, are not the same. I can claim to be anything.
I can claim to have 160 IQ…and fail to perform in a way that exposes it.
Complexity is where pretence makes a last stand.
If a complicated idea cannot be explained using simple language, then it is not an idea, it is a dogma. An ideology, with its own jargon and cult following.
If all you argue is legalities, then we can agree that society needs pretences and lies to remain cohesive.
Take medication for your temper.
A complex mind simplifies.
A simple mind, complicates.
Prose and allusions do nothing but seduce men-children and little girls pretending to be women.