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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   38807 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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Furthermore,

This is just functionally wrong. Whether dictators are net good is an interesting question.

But they do provide benefits.

No. Not only no, hell no. Not only no, a thousand times no.

Dictators are never good. Open calls for authoritarians are a sign of deeply misplaced idiocy and ignorance.

Our Founding Fathers did not create a bulwark against sheer hellish authoritarianism, they did not rebel against a king just so some shitbrained internet commentators who got hurt by a blue haired person once could lust after the inherently violent nature of a dictatorship.

I reject utterly this uncivilized madness.

All dictatorships are dysfunctional. Anyone who says otherwise is making a partisan and inflammatory claim.

The entire point of rejecting the authoritarian left is to avoid the hell that is a dictator in charge.

  • -24

Singapore would disagree.

I’m not convinced that every instance of Autocracy is pure unadulterated evil. There are great emperors in history. The emperor of Japan managed to turn a backward medieval civilization into a state able to go toe to toe with world powers. Peter the Great built Russia into a civilization. Augustus Caesar brought peace to Rome. There were great rulers in China as well.

The vast majority end up bad. But at the same time, democracy has done some bad things as well. Democracy nuked Hiroshima. Democracy installed Hitler. Democracy dumped metric tons of Napalm over Vietnam.

I don’t think, at the end of the day, the exact form of the government matters nearly as much as the character and intelligence of the people running the government. No society run by the kinds of people our current democracy is putting in power is going to do well simply because they’re not the kinds of people capable of leadership, integrity and intellectual agility. Do you honestly believe that Biden or Trump are capable of modernizing American systems to the needs of the 21st century and the challenges of AI? I’m not convinced either one can set up a router without help. I don’t think they’re that intellectually curious (even before Biden’s debate performance).

I think it's good to separate the principle from the instances. One can theorize or perhaps identify an absolute autocrat who is "good" by some standard. The principle of dictatorships, and therefore the act of ever advocating for any dictator to be installed in any nation, is 100% bad. This is one of the many issues I have with Yarvin and Yarvinism.

I think for example Pinochet was probably net good for Chile. Salazar may have been a net good for Portugal.

More to the point, the administrative state already exercises near dictatorial powers. Look at what they’ve done to Latin Mass Catholics. Look at what they’ve done with locking up some of their opponents while not locking up their own for the same transgression. Look at what they did to parents at school board meetings?

Look at what they’ve done to Latin Mass Catholics.

They’ve put some on a watch list. Have they done anything else?

No, they haven't even run a surveillance program.

I was shown the internal report from the SSPX. It broadly agrees with the FBI's story- there was a crazy person at a traditional Parish trying to recruit parishioners into a terror attack, the pastor reported him, and the FBI tried to recruit the latin mass community into running sting operations to catch domestic terrorists. "No, we want nothing to do with that" got escalated up to some senior leaderships and a few FBI agents showed up to recruit CI's, stood around awkwardly, and then either went native or left.

This program was stupid, but it was never directed against Latin mass Catholics- it was intended to convince us to use our streetcred with the actual literal far right to infiltrate white supremacist groups for the FBI. When we declined to do so and couldn't be convinced, the FBI gave up.

Interesting! And rather reassuring!

Is there anything published where I can read more about this?

Not in view of the public, although the report from the FBI that was broadly interpreted as an ass-covering exculpatory lying is more-or-less in agreement with what traditional Catholic leadership themselves thought was going on. I mean it cites things like the SPLC but the factual description of the program in the leaked internal memo was "we intend to recruit tradCath CI's who can infiltrate white supremacist groups using their existing street cred with the far right". This didn't happen and was always a dumb idea. But there don't seem to have been any pressure tactics other than requests from regional headquarters, which did the common sense thing and wanted nothing to do with such a program.

This was a convenient rhetorical cudgel for Josh Hawley, but an actual threat to the community- no, not really. TradCaths are too connected to conservatives with actual power to have their first amendment rights blown out of the water- freaking scientology gets theirs respected, and an eccentric sect of the largest religion in the country with two members on the supreme court is somewhat more protected.

That is enough. The whole point of putting someone on a watch list is designed to discourage the relevant group. There is zero reason to put LMC on a watchlist. It is evil.

All dictatorships are dysfunctional. Anyone who says otherwise is making a partisan and inflammatory claim.

Was Cincinnatus in the wrong when he briefly became dictator to solve a crisis in Rome? Are there really no scenarios where a dictator has done good?

When people use the word dictator they use it in the modern sense, which is a bunch of military generals subverting supposedly democratic revolutions for their own personal gain and power. This is also how Julius Caesar used it in the waning days of the Roman Republic.

Cincinnatus was a great dictator, just like George Washington was a great general and president. But, we don't call Washington a dictator, because he went out of his way not to become one. A feat not replicated by the various revolutionaries that have given us the modern definition of dictator.

Dictators have a long history of being great. It all depends on the world you find yourself in and the situation of those to be governed.

Now I think a Republic was correct for the people of the early United States this is not the situation most countries find themselves in. The most extreme form of Democracy probably won’t work in sub-Saharan Africa. War time Ukraine is likely better with less democracy.

Of course I can fairly obviously state that you yourself are not in favor of Democracy. I’ve yet to meet one person in favor of one world government where the votes of Africa, China, India would absolutely crush the votes from the people of western governments. The more you think about Democracy the more you realize it’s not the core American feature and never could be.

Agreed. The core American principle was respect for property rights and general freedom with a Republican government designed to protect those rights. See the eleventh amendment.

Dictators in the literal sense are a perfectly acceptable solution to pressing existential problems.

Temporary absolute monarchy to solve a specific crisis such as war is a political tradition so successful most republican regimes feature a clause for it.

Washington was essentially a dictator. Lincoln was unquestionably one. FDR was one in all but name.

Dictatorship isn't just a common tradition. It's a common American tradition.

What you are railing against is tyranny, not dictatorship.

And I can see that my comments have to be manually approved. Good God. The moderation here is simply bad.

  • -31

And if you can't accept that, fuck you.

The demand to be able to curse anyone who disagrees with you with nothing to throttle you isn't really supporting the pro- "classic 'law-and-order' conservative" and anti- "demonize rather than argue" stance you're claiming here. The moderation here is correctly identifying some of your posts as bad, even when agreeing with your conclusions, because it actually is pro-order and pro-argument and anti-demonization.

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