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What do you want from me, to go through your list item by item and say whether I agree or disagree with it? There seem to be two claims here:
I was always very clear that I was arguing against #2, while you seem to be accusing me of arguing against #1.
To most of your bullet points, I'd nod and say "I agree, that's bad." I feel like I'm saying "Yes, I agree, leftist/DEI/woke censorship is bad" and you're screaming at me "But you said they're not literally herding us into concentration camps, therefore you don't really think it's bad!" (And no, I do not think it would have to reach herding-into-concentration-camps levels for me to come around to right wingers being institutionally oppressed.)
The thread I was responding to, three years ago, was an argument about whether or not accelerationism and a second US Civil War is desirable and/or inevitable. If you just wanted me to say "It really sucks that leftists control so much of the culture war front," well, I'm here, aren't I? If you think I am too mushy and moderate and failing to see the existential threat to human liberty represented by DEI departments, okay, fine. Yes, I do indeed still cynically see your hysteria as essentially the same as the people who confidently assert that Trump is Literally Hitler, now threatening to become Zombie Hitler Returning From Hell. You all have legitimate cause for concern wrapped in hyperbole, and this leads to this kind of attack on the unconvinced (like me) as Refusing To See The Problem.
You are very good at collecting links and building legal cases. I can't write a brief like you can. But nothing happening today looks to me wildly different from previous eras in US history; the factions change, the dominant groups in the culture war and those being "oppressed" have different labels, and there have been people deprived of their livelihoods, jailed, even killed, before. I don't say this is good or there is "nothing to see here." I only observe that I don't think it's unique or particularly bad relative to the rest of our history (or the world). You will also notice I have not repeated the "You are not oppressed" rebuttal in years, so give it a fucking rest. If you have such a burning need to come at me at any opportunity, at least address things I have said in a current thread.
No, my point is that you've consistently and commonly argued #2, against people who clearly aren't bringing that position. I can provide past examples, either ones I've already linked to here and more generally, but if you want me to focus on current threads :
I have not, at any point, compared what conservatives today are encountering with concentration camps, even in the figurative sense. At no point in this thread have I gotten anywhere near that. Neither has the_nybbler nor fcfromssc since the move. Nor did anyone in that three-year-old subthread. Maybe TopHattington on a COVID rant? But that's somewhat complicated by Lyman Stone et all advocating the Korematsu solution to COVID (and not discriminating politically in doing so). Like, I won't swear no one ever did, because there are some amazingly dim-witted weakmen out there. There was probably some on the motte subreddit, and maybe even one that wasn't a SneerClub troll.
And I'm absolutely sure I haven't 'screamed' at someone for refusing to agree with that hyperbole.
(Nor have I been comparing anyone to "Zombie Hitler Returning From Hell".)
You do realize that anyone watching can notice that you're endlessly retreating from specific ground points presented by the people you're talking with, to this? Which is probably why you consistently mix "defection and civil war" in response to defection, or to come back to 'current threads', you follow up the earlier quote in this post with :
Nevermind the awkward question of what those levels are, or why your word games should matter to anyone else, and whether those new levels will stay set or be permissible to reference for another three years. Whatever that point is, it's something vastly different from the excluded third claim that:
Nevermind that each of those times, we built entire new rules under the express pretense of making sure it 'never happened again', with the best you can say is that some cases didn't involve that much gunpowder or blood. The objection today is not that Bad Things Happen To
ConservativeGoodPeople. The objection is that specific things are happening, and the response is thisI mean, I can show people opposed to FCFromSSC's position swinging back to how "the ability to push for this kind of visible social conformity" is novel and only been available for anyone to exploit for such a short time we can't tell how the Red Tribe might have done so. I can point to the OP of this very subthread claiming that conservatives no longer exist as a group in federal administrative infrastructure, in a way that will prevent them from achieving their goals (or, implicitly, seriously slowing the goals of their opponents), in a way that lacks parallels since the end of the South as a racial institution (coincidentally, a time where this meant far less). I can provide a dozen significant tactical or strategic differences, some wildly different, in powers that the progressive movement is actively using today, if they matter.
Do they?
No, it is not clear to me that people are not bringing that position. You just (re)quoted FCfromSSC and yourself providing a long list of how conservatives are being persecuted and deprived of their rights. If all you're claiming is #1, then what are we disagreeing about?
You may not literally have invoked concentration camps, but the whole point of @FCfromSSC's accelerationism has been, as I understand it, that he sees peaceful coexistence becoming impossible in the near future. Actual concentration camps? Maybe not, but if we can't even share a country and accord each other civil rights, that seems pretty damn concentration camp-adjacent to me. And the @The_Nybbler's entire schtick is whining that the Left has won, laws and democracy are fake and gay, and the boot is already stomping on his face forever and ever.
No, I do not realize this. I think this is a claim you keep repeating because you're playing to the crowd. What specific ground points do you think I am retreating from?
I honestly can't tell if you genuinely believe you're scoring gotchas, or if you've just (correctly) deduced that accusing me of lying annoys me, so you keep doing it for the lulz. I can entertain the possibility that I am misunderstanding you, that I missed the point, hell, maybe even that I'm just too dim to understand your argument. But I don't lie or argue in bad faith or play "word games."
I don't know, it depends on what you want me to do with these examples. Agree that they happened? Agree that they are bad? Or agree that they constitute the Right being oppressed? To what level do you want me to agree that the Right is being oppressed? Apparently invoking Orwell and disenfranchisement is too far, but just agreeing that the Right is losing the Culture War at the moment is not enough. What do you want? (Besides to goad me, so, mission accomplished I guess.)
I am not claiming #2 or #1, and I just spelled out that's my point. A good deal of my frustration is because of this division where the only settings are either "woke censorship is bad" or "literally herding us into concentration camps".
You did catch that there were a couple shootings that never went to trial in there, right? The ATF and EPA are not typically considered as censorship issues,. The executive branch repeatedly ignoring court orders are not "laws I don't like sometimes get passed".
And more broadly:
"[L]iterally herding us into concentration camps", "can't even share a country and accord each other civil rights", "peaceful coexistence becoming impossible in the near future", and "whining that the Left has won, laws and democracy are fake and gay, and the boot is already stomping on his face forever and ever" are all drastically different things (as are "invoking Orwell" or "disenfranchisement"), and they're not even the full scope of positions you've brought this set of claims against! Some of them aren't even the same tense!
I don't agree with FCfromSSC or TheNybbler — I’d rather their position be false, though the Litany of Tarski still reigns — so I'm not going to debate whether this is a particularly good interpretations of their posts. I'm not going to argue that you could or should try to steelman either's position.
In this thread, we have "being deprived of civil rights" or "the level of a fringe political or religious minority in previous eras in US history"], before you jump to "literally herding us into concentration camps". That entire giant list of examples is here because you set it as predictive ground points, even if you were targeting twenty years rather than three.
Do you want (and am I allowed to) point to past examples from old threads, now? There's a smorgasbord of options, but I don't want to bloat the post if it's not your point or if it's going to come across as a gish gallop.
To be as explicit as possible (and borrow formatting from Wittgenstein):
Which of the following are you actually claiming :
A. Things I'm citing are "specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies"? either that:
Dolloff really faced a trial, Garner wasn't hounded to suicide by a prosecutor who celebrated his death, few if any violent acts by leftists escaped trial or received laughable punishments, conservative public speech never encounters legal threats or state-mandated discrimination or tolerated physical violence, people don't get fired (from a government job!) for donating to legal defense funds of innocent men, the federal government does not defy court orders, there haven't been prolonged and successful efforts to restrict some conservative meetings while tolerating or even permitting progressive protestriots, so on. I'm not gonna ask you to name every false claim, but I'd like more than one.
or They happened, but they aren't common enough to 'count', and there's no reason for Red Tribers to worry about or plan around an increase in rate.
or They happened, but they aren't novel enough to count, compared to past cultural loggerheads that Americans resolved calmly.
or They happened, but they aren't novel enough to count, compared to past cultural loggerheads that included the Literal Civil War.
B. The things I'm citing real and meaningful, but not justification for retaliation:
past some threshold of behavior, or
even where those retaliations are non-violent? (or at least as non-violent as any state power can be)
C. These things real, and meaningful, and justification for retaliation, but not cause for escalation? either
as a matter of slope, eg, where it's better for someone to get beaten to hell by an angry mob than shoot his attackers or
as matter of thresholds, eg, until people get thrown in gulags/concentration camps?
D. These things are real, and meaningful, and people can retaliation and escalate in response where necessary to stop an attack/whatever, but such behaviors will not keep escalating.
Any of these are potentially interesting discussions (although, uh, I've not found discussions on the normative side of self-defense particularly illustrative in the past with other people), but I've been hammering pretty hard on A1 so we've at least got some factual foundation in agreement, and it’s very far from clear we have that.
I'd say my position is somewhere between A (3) and A (4).
I did use to be closer to 3.
... I've tried to draft a post touching on the specific examples I think break those settings, a couple times, but I keep coming up with lists that are different from past ones only in size and count, or seeing comments about 'concentration camps' or 'deprived of civil rights' or this post and having trouble keeping my temper or thinking such a discussion would be helpful.
Available if you'd think they'd help, but I think the genuine disagreement is deeper than that.
First, I think the delineations of 'novel' are vulnerable to salami-slicing and the garden of forking paths. Are politicians putting the names and employers of donors to their political opponents kinda like McCarthyism, or are they new? Offering cash rewards for the names of non-violent protesters like the Pinkerton's, or unprecedented? That dilemma is more obvious when technology comes to play: domain name services cutting off random web fora with no notice wasn't even on people's threat model five years ago (and wasn't even possible before the invention of DNS), but it's kinda like 1930s era postal regulations, kinda. And some objections would be reasonable: there's lots of novelty to the extent modern social justice has begun destroying symbols of past ('enemy') leadership and reconciliation... that almost certainly would not have been on my top ten list of concerns, and which are hard to separate from past iconoclasm in intent even if the process and impact was different now.
That's especially true if there are other implied constraints -- if the problems on social media are excluded, or if COVID-specific rules can't count, or if it doesn't count when someone tries to do something unprecedented and fails, or if the complaints are First World Problems.
Secondly, I don't think these (and especially A(4)) are that great as arguments against a Great Divorce or, more morbidly, worries that interparty politics has devolved into a "massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble" where attempting to avoid playing the game maybe -- only maybe! -- means you get eaten later.
Trivially, the literal American Civil War came at tremendous cost of blood, tears, lives, and livelihoods. That could be a justifiable and reasonable response to literally millions of people being in some of the worst forms of slavery that have existed. There's a lot of arguments that none of the current snafus are on that level, and you'd have to put effort in to get one that wasn't right! But that's a lot more persuasive as an argument that we shouldn't keep escalating to maintain federal power over whatever minor culture war of the day is getting people frothing over, or that if we absolutely had to pay a ton of blood and treasure to maintain federal power we have done so once in the past. Less so about whether we can avoid it.
Ok, the literal Civil War is just the extreme end of problems that could not be "resolved calmly". So, for that matter, is the mass internment of large populations, where we 'just' had to bomb and then militarily control entire island chains. We're not at those levels, and in the case of Korematsu you quite accurately (and repeatedly) pointed out that concentration camps aren't on the menu right now.
Why should that matter? I've been trying not to hammer too hard on the "Here's a wager. Obviously if I'm wrong, you'll never be able to collect, but anyway." comment, since it was(? might have been?) joking, and you've apologized to someone else for tone in a kinda related way, but it's kinda relevant if your claim actually is that we can't highlight this problem until and unless there are people literally getting marched into concentration camps. (Or worse than concentration camps, since again, Korematsu). I don't want to go full Godwin with The Attic Test, but I'm absolutely not waiting until resistance is completely doomed just for the moral high ground.
What's the comparison we should be using? You don't like FCFromSSC's point about charcoal briquettes, and there's a good number of reasons to not like it. I don't like it! But that post was about a couple major oversteps -- one on the right and one on the left -- that 'only' were solved after small lakes of blood, and the best you can say is that they didn't involve oceans. Yes, we 'solved', at least for a short time, and for a low definition of solved, the policy disagreements in question. Even if we suppose that matters will never go worse than that, it's still pretty bad, and I don't really trust that will. What, if anything, is this supposed to tell us about policy disagreements that seem to be barrelling down that slope while maniacs are spreading grease on the brakes?
((Yes, there are possibilities that escalating violence won't lead to such extremely high fatality rates, in that we aren't as likely to have cholera epidemics in our prisons, or that the FBI is a little more careful with pyrogenic tools. But there's a lot of possibilities going the other direction, and there are reasons that discussion is one I'm not going to describe in all but the vaguest detail in public spaces without good cause. And as far as I can tell, you've not been making those arguments, and they'd mostly fall under B and C above.))
Worse than that, it's not clear that the deescalation is anywhere people want to go, especially the sort of people who get political power. An early question of political representation leading to a rebellion and attacks on prominent federal officials, which in turn was called treason and men sentenced to hang... and which they were pardoned.
Is that anywhere on the table today? Forget J6 or literal rebellion, is there any serious group on the left calling Obama or Biden to provide clemency for someone on the level of the Bundys? When Trump pardoned the sympathetic guys that the Bundys were protesting for, that turned into a fishing expedition for bribery, and their grazing permit was revoked. Forget major political victories, or even the Constitution just applying in California (last update) or New Mexico. Is there any chance someone in New Jersey is going to stop harassing some schmuck in Texas if he posts a CAD file?
It's not like this is going to only go one way, or even that it only goes one way on each topics, as the wide array of CRT/DEI or credit card processing or trans books or a thousand other types of bullshit demonstrate. Do you think any set of activists here think of each other as anything but moral mutants?
... and... separately, I made a bunch of predictions, here and here.
I didn't get all of them correct -- Rittenhouse hasn't faced federal prosecution (yet), and Dominick Black ended up with a suspended sentence for the Kenosha gun stuff and only ended up in jail for unrelated reasons (cocaine motorcycle chase was not on my bingo card). Demokovich was overturned, if on limited grounds, and Gustafson is in a weird place that I didn't even know was possible when I wrote it.
Others, it hasn't been long enough to check: the NRA's New York DFS lawsuit isn't likely to be resolved for months at best, and we don't know that the next Republican President is one who's had tactical leaks against him yet.
But I don't look back at that and think "well, we're on a lot better a trajectory now" or "well, I need to toss a ton of disclaimers and caveats for each of these". In many cases, the extent these attacks have reduced conservative access to the public sphere has remained constant or accelerated. Given the news from today, if anything, I am feeling a little like I was insufficiently pessimistic.
Well, this is where I tend to walk away (though I am trying not to do that here, even though I also find these conversations very frustrating and circular, but when I give up in exasperation, you later come back and accuse me of ducking the argument, so). I just reread all those posts of mine you linked to. I can see how you might disagree with some of the things I said. I can see how I might have worded some things better, or might even walk back a line or two if I were re-editing myself now. I cannot see where you get (what I perceive to be) an accusation that I am lying or arguing in bad faith or ignoring your counteraguments. For the most part, I stand by what I said and have not changed my opinions. You think invoking concentration camps and literal Civil War is hyperbolic or something? Fine, duly noted, I will take that into account when trying to get my point across (to you) in a way I hope will be received in the way I intended, but I used those examples for a reason (and often because other people invoked them first!)
I also admit at this point I am honestly not sure whether you think my problem with FCfromSSC's position is that I disagree with his conclusions or that I dislike what he is forecasting. In fact I do disagree with a lot of what he has said (regarding how oppressed Red Tribers are), and of course I dislike the idea that we might fracture into a bloody civil war. But those are not the same issue!
It seems to me like we often come to a point where I don't really disagree with most of your specific examples ("Yes, that's bad" ... "Yes, I agree, that's bad too") but then you still rail at me because I don't agree that all those bad things mean Blue Tribe is already where nybbler says it is, stomping on your face forever. I am not sure you believe that, but clearly you believe the situation is worse than I do. Or perhaps unlike me, you don't see this as a historical pendulum, but some sort of irreversible state change. That's fine, we can disagree about the severity of the problem. Is that your problem, that I just don't agree with you about the severity of the problem? Or are you convinced that I'm lying about how bad I actually think it is, or lying about whether I actually think it's a bad thing for the Red Tribe to be oppressed? If the actual problem is that you just think I'm wrong and too stupid to see how obviously correct you are, well, you are only going to continue to be frustrated (and frustrating me) with this pettiness.
Because none of these things would break from the standards you demand, now!
Time, after time, after time, after time, you propose horribles or parades of horribles of things that are Worse that are your evidence that conservatives need sit down and take it, not just in response to civil war rhetoric but even to matters as simple as turnabout being fair play.
And then I provide examples that those parades of horribles are happening, or being attempted, or in rare cases have been room temperature for a decade or been applied to me personally. In some cases, you explicitly say that "mostly, it's not happening" and a "gish gallop", even after I provide explicit evidence, without even the slightest effort to point to a single one that I'm actually wrong on. Other times, you just ipse dixit, or simply duck out because my claims "doesn't impress", none of the examples I bring were persuasive enough for you to even bother responding to.
And now it turns out it doesn't matter! It wouldn't change the conversation even if conservatives were being literally marched into concentration camps -- which, to be extremely explicit so you don't deflect down that rabbit hole again, I'm not claiming is the current state. If A(3) or A(4) are what we're trying to talk about, we've had concentration camps before! Why the hell were you asking me about shit like voicing conservative opinions in public or struggle sessions? You, in this thread, brought up "(Or even, say, the level of a fringe political or religious minority in previous eras in US history.)" as what you were arguing against, and by definition even if I could have demonstrated this to your requirements, it'd still not have been novel at all!
Well, okay, maybe the conversation topic just drifted in the last handful of posts. You've said our real disagreement was about whether the severity and novelty of the
gish gallopsexamples I provided weren't serious enough to justify defection. That's something we could discuss seriously, and I spent a thousand words doing it: why evaluations of novelty are vulnerable to giving you whatever answer you came in wanting, and why defection is both necessary and laudable before the more extreme degrees of marginalization and exclusion from the public sphere hit.Did your response here engage with any of that, either? You literally can't see how you're ignoring my counterarguments or arguing in bad faith, with all that?
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