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I've quoted the following passage repeatedly, and argued that I find it directly relevant to the current situation in America.
The above might be where the "Gulags" point comes from; I disagree with that usage, since I think the point generalizes well beyond literal gulags, but if this is the source, the interpretation seems at least somewhat understandable.
Reading this particular quote at a young age was a notably formative experience for me, and I think the idea it expresses is directly and immediately relevant to the current political situation in America, and to most places generally.
The lesson I draw from it isn't "camps are a legitimate threat"; I learn that lesson from the last two hundred years of human history. Rather, the lesson is that if you want to fight tyranny, the correct time to fight is when you see the tyranny coming, not when it has already arrived. This generalizes to all sorts of tyranny and oppression, not merely camps.
The other end of it, though, is that there's no objective definition of "oppression". Obviously camps and gas chambers and mass graves qualify, but does being forced to wear an armband count? Does krystalnacht? Or take it from the other end: does mandatory schooling and income taxes count? One could claim that Jim Crow didn't involve camps or gas chambers, so it wasn't oppressive. One can claim that taxation is theft and public schools are slave camps, so we each have a moral imperative to burn society down. Obviously, both allowing actual tyranny and destroying the peace over the normal friction of society must be avoided, and equally obviously, there's no objective way to tell which is which. it all comes down to a judgement call, based on limited information, with severe consequences resulting from a bad call and possibly even from a good one.
It seems to me that this discussion, the whole tangled network of conversations going back years now, is about how to make that judgement call. I've found the discussion deeply fascinating, and find considerable satisfaction in revisiting the previous points made in light of new evidence over the years. It saddens me when this conversation grows acrimonious, and it saddens me more when things I've written are the cause of that.
To me, the nature of the disagreement seems obvious. The tribes have different values, so they assess wrongs and the redress required for those wrongs differently. That variance means there's a fundamental disconnect in the moral calculus required to maintain peace and prosperity. Each tribe is willing to accept things the other tribe considers abhorrent or unjust, and each tribe is willing to condemn things the other tribe considers necessary. The examples are too numerous to require enumeration: COVID policy, Trump, insurrection, BLM riots, MeToo, Trans acceptance, gay rights, abortion, gun control, the entire culture war, in short: None of these problems are unresolvable if your society enjoys homogenous values, none of them are resolvable if it does not. In the same way that small vibrations can wear away steel, even small disagreements auger out our social structures and conflict resolution mechanisms.
On the other hand, society does have some forces pushing for reconciliation and togetherness. As I understand it, @Amadan's position is that the former forces are outweighed by the latter, where mine is that the latter are outweighed by the former. My question to you would be, why expect this to be a disagreement that can be resolved by evidence? Predictions seem more useful, and this seems to be a good time for them.
Yeah, I've been trying to avoid highlighting Joe Huffman's Jews in the Attic Test, since it's a little Godwinny in its name, and I have to keep emphasizing I don't think concentration camps are a near-term concern, but there's a reason he was highlighting it for LGBT causes in the late-90s and early-00s, and it wasn't because he believed that they'd be thrown into ovens anytime soon. Some of the (unfortunately, no-longer online) debates related to some of those matters were pretty persuasive to me even as someone who was skeptical of his redline around biometrics back then.
Part of my goal is to narrow down whether that is the point of disagreement. The one you hypothesize is not an unreasonable guess as a higher-level hinge, but it's hard to match with continued emphasis on disagreement about what's happening now.
Someone could also just reject this philosophy of preemptive resistance entirely, either out of moral disagreement, or by believing that any tactical benefits would be overwhelmed by the negative publicity. Those possibilities are part of why I keep highlighting the "Obviously if I'm wrong, you'll never be able to collect, but anyway" post. One of the solutions for your dilemma of distinguishing between acceptable levels of oppression is simply to set a threshold at so high a bar you never expect to see it in real life: it's possible to completely agree on the ground facts and expected social forces, and still fall here. That's why I tried and failed the Wittgenstein knockoff.
But even movement of forces is the disagreement, these estimations on these forces and their effects are observations of the world. There's nothing magical about predictions, and I dunno how useful they'll be, without an agreement on what we'd need to expect. Someone should be -- if not as persuaded -- still reconsider their positions when they find something unexpected in history or present-day news.
More deeply, I've highlighted some predictions I've made in the past, including where I thought I was wrong. And there's not been much engagement with that, or with either when they were first posted, either; I can't tell whether that's because those specific claims wouldn't matter even if true, or because no small-scale examples could be, or because anything without statistics is Chinese Cardiology.
Or see: "(hypothetical, hypothetical, vaguely related anecdote)".
((And then there's the problem of who and how you evaluate predictions. This would have been really prescient in January 2021, but it wasn't like we had a spat of politically-motivated homicides between Sept 2020 and Jan 2021; in mid-2022 one could claim it was just the racial nationalists modulo things like that cop city snafu; in a year I'm... not optimistic that it will be so easily debatable. Do the church arsons count? Do they have to be in the United States?))
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