Not a counterargument, but an argument that using individual cases to make a point against a group is a weak tactic; as well as it is weasely to post articles without comment in an attempt to… what were you doing?
After all, most Marines don’t rape 12 yo children, right?
I guess there isn’t any point, but those articles addressed the idea of Black Bloc people referring to themselves as Antifa Anarchists. So at least some of the participants fail to see a contradiction in that term. I sort of thought that this was a discussion of who the groups engaging in violence are, as well as their motivations and tactics.
But I guess the point is not whether the people participating in the violence properly follow the orthodox tenets of Anarchism, Communism, Fascism or whatever. The issue is not what they believe, but rather what they do.
And when listing former Marines who have done bad things, Don’t forget Charles Whitman.
Fair enough. I think the term “anarchist” is, rightly or wrongly, readily associated with violence (the Anarchist Cookbook presumably took care of that). Personally if I thought humanity was better off without any formal power structures to enforce laws, I would probably choose a different term for myself.
I presumed nothing about what you do or don’t know. Growing up, my neighbor’s father, who was quite fond of pg-13 life advice, would admonish us often with the line “Never assume shit. It makes an ass of you and me.” If I live by any single piece of advice, that’s it.
That said, statements like
[Anarchists] hold silly ideas
anarchism and various other dumb shit they tend to believe is good
[Anarchists are] violent jerks
don’t give me much to work with in terms of sussing out whatever prior knowledge of anarchist philosophy you might possess (also, kinda hilarious that you’re all wadded up over whatever assumptions I’ve made of your knowledge, considering the heights of condescension you began with…) In fact, I asked for further explanation so that I could get a better sense of what you might know. All I really got from you was opposition to undefined means, and again, I asked you what comprises those means.
[quote=“caze, post:102, topic:99192”]
and probably some definitional differences as well (e.g. what exactly constitutes ‘equitable’).
[/quote] (emphasis mine)
Yes, “from each according to ability, to each according to need” is Marxist (or really, socialist in general, Marx was not the first to utter it.) But it does not imply equality of outcome, and it’s not a definition of anything, it’s an idiom. For Marx this was specifically a statement of economics in a post-scarcity communist society. Personally, I use the phrase like a story pole or guide wire, hence my prefacing by “to give you a start.”
No one is seeking a total equality of outcomes, that seems fairly impossible without a strictly controlled environment. However, equitable distribution of necessities/essentials is not so difficult, save for the fact that a few insist on the capacity to hoard massively at the expense of the many. As long as the latter condition exists, noble goals like “ending world hunger” will remain unmet. One person can not have more with another having less. A handful of individuals (as per OXFAM) can’t possess half the world’s wealth without, well… Get the picture?
If you were playing a sim game which tasked you with collecting food and you wasted 1/3 of it while 1/6 of your sims went hungry, you would not likely be doing well in that game, and either start over or take a longer look at the FAQ.
For me, outcomes are beside the point, and often incorrectly correlated to input at any rate. (I.E., is Herr Donald a billionaire because of any particular tactical decisions made over time? Or is he a billionaire because his starting point was ridiculously higher than that of the average schlub?)
As for me living in a fantasy-land? At the end of the day this may well be the truth of it, but I’d vastly prefer to work towards that fantasy-land than remain consigned outside the gates of the current one, a relatively small island where only a select few may reside while the teeming masses careen through a life of some admixture of purgatory and hell (our consolation prize for non-admittance to the club being that our minds are very good at tricking us into believing that things are much better than they appear. Amen to dissonance, our true Christ and Saviour!)
There is an operative difference between being a pacifist with a lowercase ‘p’ and Pacifism with an uppercase ‘P’. Pacifism as a moral code is in itself totalitarian, and therefore not really anarchist at all. Being a pacifist, as in a personal choice to avoid violence, is fairly normal to all humans, and likewise anarchists. However, the personal choice to avoid violence does not preclude the right to self and community defense, unlike Pacifism, which views all violence as morally wrong. If you were to ask black bloc participants, they would very likely indeed claim they are acting in a defensive manner (if they were to respond to you at all, rather than stare blankly at you for a moment before moving on…)
Whether you personally disagree or not is immaterial, only the facts as they pertain to whether they have a legitimate claim to feel so threatened.
First, most of us do not consider property destruction to be inherently violent, or more specifically that violence is interpersonal harm.
Well, considering that language is a social construct that evolves to suit the needs of those who use it…
Look, I’m not on an individual quest to redefine the term. That said, by levelling violence between persons with that against objects, the emotional component of violence (which is implied in its original Latin definition) against people is debased, and objects are anthropomorphized, now possessing qualities of emotion they do not inherently possess. To put it simply, a shattered BoA window is not capable of PTSD.
It is only in the interest of property fetishizers to claim that violence against property is equivalent to that against humans, which is the net result of using the same qualifier to describe both actions. A person who has nothing, or relatively little, has little to gain from such claims. Truth is that we have other, more apt words to describe ‘violence’ against inanimate things- destruction, damage, etc. which do not carry the same emotional component as violence and allow us at least a little to see with greater clarity that human lives have more value than objects.
No, I disagree with the violent hate-speech espoused by people like Coulter and Milo, not right-wing/conservative/whatever speech/ideas I happen to disagree with (FWIW, I don’t disagree with every right-wing/conservative/whatever P.O.V.) and for that matter, if I was a conservative I’d be downright offended by any connotation with shameless hucksters like them. Unfortunately, it seems as though the population of principled conservatives is rapidly dwindling…
Here’s some Coulter gems-
“We just want Jews to be perfected, as they say.”
“I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo.”
“We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now.
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”
“When we were fighting communism, OK, they had mass murderers and gulags, but they were white men and they were sane. Now we’re up against absolutely insane savages.”
If it looks like an ugly duckling and quacks like a goose-stepper…
And again, the anti-fascists who show up to these ‘speeches’ are claiming self-defense. That is not the same as saying they weren’t violent. As for the property destruction, this is almost never coincidental. Banks, large corporations, and police property are almost exclusively the target, or in the case of Berkeley, the structures that stood as the barrier which allowed Milo to spew hate (where, based on every account I have seen, he was planning on doxing immigrant students.) It is worth noting that once the lobby was breached, Milo’s speech was cancelled.
If it’s something else that went smashy smashy, it was not likely that an actual anarchist did the smashing. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen- collateral damage is extremely difficult to avoid, is it not? Of course too, anarchists do not police other anarchists, because, ya know…
What they don’t show you amidst the stirring clips of burning trash cans, busted windows, and tear-gas clouds is us showing up the next day and cleaning up. If I only followed national media, I would not be far off base in assuming that downtown Portland must look like a warzone, what with all the consistent ‘rioting’ and chaos. Suffice to say, that is not the case. We certainly can’t say "Whose streets? Our streets! without some measure of accountability towards them.
Real economic terrorism (/s * 10^nth) is how corporations treat the communities they exploit- GM and Detroit is a perfect example of the extreme, but can occur through something seemingly innocuous like pitting different communities against each other in a zero-sum tax giveaway fiesta. The mortgage industry foisting foreclosure on millions is another. I remember a stop back in Indianapolis, a year after the crisis broke. My band was playing a basement show in some non-descript suburban part of town. When we got to the house, we were informed that we didn’t need to worry about the cops showing up to bust the show, because they had no neighbors to call the cops on them. Literally every other house on their street was foreclosed and abandoned. That, to me is a much greater ‘violence’ against property than anything an anarchist has ever destroyed.
And to reiterate, personally I’m not comfortable with how these events unfold. It is not what I would do, nor do I think there is much if anything to be gained from it. However, if I am to take a stand (and I do, obv) it will be with the oppressed, not the oppressor.
We’re talking about genocidal provocation here
Hyperbole? So when Coulter says she wants to bomb Muslims back into the stone age, or someone with the supposedly dignified position of ‘Senator’ says they want to see if “sand can glow in the dark,” I should grant them full faith that they are being solely metaphoric, and do not actually wish to see their words become reality? Pardon my French, but that seems to me to be naïve to the maximum. As for non-fascist/racist Trump supporters, if they don’t want to be associated with fascists and racists, well, there’s an easy solution to that- stop attending rallies organized by fascists and their fellow travelers, and quit trying to justify the bile they spew as somehow legitimate. If someone is defending a fascist, odds are pretty good they at a minimum harbor fascist sympathies.
@SenorSchaffer, who started this topic, has asked us to close it. Given that the linked events took place a few weeks ago, I’m going to go our the request.
Anyone is welcome to spin off the conversation into a new topic if they so desire (use the link icon under whatever comment you wish to use to start the new topic, or start fresh.
Thanks.
