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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   26195 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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Federal authority is a norm, not an immutable law of the universe, and norms can go away over time.

Except it's a norm backed by a lot of guns.

Here, defiance by Red Tribe provides the other half of the back-and-forth wrenching that will tear this norm out of its cultural foundations.

And what is left after the norm of Federal authority is "torn out," if not the raw "obey or die" assertion of power through raw force?

If Abbott and DeSantis continue on their current trajectory, then we'll see more Broad spectrum resistance from Reds as well.

Only until Abbott, DeSantis, and their supporters end up in prison or dead.

Keep that up, and it's entirely possible that Federal authority loses all credibility

They don't need credibility, they just need to send armed FBI agents to do pre-dawn no-knock raids on enough of those who oppose them to deter the rest.

...A quote from a recent conversation seems relevant.

I am pretty confident that people can't do much better with a torture regime than we've seen them do in the past. That is to say, I think the problem is pretty well bounded by irreducible limits on human agency and capacity, and I do not expect this to change in the forseeable future.

The core of our disagreement comes down to whether there are practical limits to the exercise of power. You don't seem to believe that such limits exist, or are so distant that they cover all plausibly survivable spaces. I disagree. I don't think the Enlightenment revolutions of the 1800s - 1900s are repeatable, and I think the social systems that produce similar regimes are observably dying. That does not mean we are heading for utopia; there is no utopia. It does mean that humans are moving away from centralized control as the default organizational principle of society. Attempting to assert control through the naked exercise of force is less practical now than it was previously, and it grows less practical over time.

For a long time, castles were the defining paradigm of force. When gunpowder arrived, one might argue that it should benefit castles, since it allowed faster mining and quarrying of stone with which to build them. One would be wrong.

That does not mean we are heading for utopia; there is no utopia.

Agreed.

It does mean that humans are moving away from centralized control as the default organizational principle of society.

Disagree. Where's your evidence of this? The internet and computers are only making centralization of control more effective than ever.

Attempting to assert control through the naked exercise of force is less practical now than it was previously, and it grows less practical over time.

Also wrong. You cite the invention of guns removing the power of castles. Yes, there was a trend, for centuries after the invention of gunpowder, that made "the naked exercise of force less practical," gave power to "the people" and drove the rise of democracies. Such trends of labor-over-capital in military effectiveness peaked over a century ago, and the trend has been back toward high-capital "knightly" military elites, leading "government versus masses" conflict to look less like the French Revolution, and more like the German Peasants' War.

We're seeing in Ukraine the failure of "war of movement" and "hordes of expendable replaceable meat" of the past century, and to elite battlefield drone operators as the new knights:

Hordes of expendable replaceable meat just are not working very well. One very good drone operator is responsible for a significant proportion of all recent Ukrainian casualties — we are drifting towards early iron age warfare where a single very good warrior with very good and very expensive equipment can make the difference between winning and losing, and tenth century warfare where men fought largely as individual heroes.

We are moving towards aristocratic warfare, with the likely result that we will return to aristocratic governance.

You've already called me a liar and and stated that I should not be listened to. Why are you still trying to talk to me?

The purpose of debate is not to convince the other side, it's to convince the audience. It is to their benefit that I address the claims you make, rather than allowing those claims to sit un-rebutted.

You're wrong, and I'm not going to stop pointing out when you're wrong.

Do what you need to do, sir.

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