whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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A fallacy of middle ground would go something like this. One person claims the sky is bright. Another person claims the sky is dark. I conclude the sky is gray. The fallacy involved here is false dichotomy. I'm telling you there's a day sky and a night sky. You're telling me sunny skies don't exist (because look at all that dark)! You accuse the left of doing the same thing, which of course they often do and which shouldn't be surprising. Everyone tends to see threats from the other side more clearly. I won't comment on the fact that the rest of your argument is mostly ad hominem (against blue bloods, academics, et al.). It should go without saying, and there are more interesting points to focus on.

So it doesn't seem that your real grievance is about logic or lack of "balance." In fact I've yet to see you respond to a balanced opinion without declaring it an example of repressive tolerance, woke projection, or some such evil. Your real grievance seems to be that the left dominates our media and cultural institutions. A lamentable state of affairs, to be sure. It also has one implication that you and Harrison are missing. You complain that the radical left has an outsized voice in our discourse. You forget that, by the same token, the radical right is under-represented. But you can't have it both ways. You can't claim the Bolsheviks are in control of the media and then claim the Nazis don't exist (or they're "100 people on some weird website") just because they don't have a show on prime time.

Your take on the WAPO article is also paradoxical because of its singular focus on power rather than truth. This is a typical mode of analysis for you. There's no real attention to the facts or logic of Ms. Walter's case, whether good or bad. Instead you're preoccupied with who she is, what class of person she represents, and what the power relationship is between her tribe and yours. This focus is of course the defining characteristic of critical theory and all its intellectual progeny. In that sense you are every bit the post-modern.

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actually, counselor, the defining feature of critical theories are race and gender identities. The Frankfurt School gave up class because it wasn't working, which was a bad idea because class is a real thing and the others are constructs. Indeed, the singular weakness of progressivism is that it's just a virtue posture which doesn't actually propose any meaningful solutions to any real problems (some of which were on that list you posted a while back.) Progressives studiously ignore all the things human beings actually DO have in common - the need for shelter, food, clothing, companionship, the means for achieving the aforementioned and a desire for a better life for themselves and their families - in favor of artificial, immutable constructs which prohibit common cause. That is what has cause the center to fail, not any dynamic latent or patent on the right.

Your middle ground fallacy was in juxtaposing the space laser person, who is clearly outside any conceivable notion of mainstream, with the 16 genders crowd, who now own major institutions to include teachers unions (link) and the DOJ. You are hardly alone in having a predilection for that fallacy. Indeed, such is the reflexive error of GOP moderates, who cannot shake the presumption that they must cede all social issue to the left because culture wars cannot be won by the right. Ergo, we have progressives not just owning most culture forming institutions, but purging them of all who lack enthusiasm for the cause.
https://www.christianpost.com/voices/preferred-pronouns-what-i-saw-at-teachers-union-convention.html

Patton read Rommel's book and used ideas in battle to defeat Nazis. That did not make him a Nazi. Understanding and describing how critical theories have achieved hegemony, for the purpose of fighting back, does not make one a progressive. Neither does using any number of Alinsky's Rules against the left, most particularly #4 but also #5-8 and #10, make one a commie community organizer. It means you intend to make the other guy play by his own rules (or beat him at his own), and will have the resolve to keep coming until you win to restore the Founders' Vision of self-government rather than the mob rule being proposed by the left.

Don't get me wrong. I wish I didn't have to play like this all, but I can see clearly I no longer have a partner in social contract and I'm not going to run off to Hungary & pout or change my vocabulary. I'm going to poke back. And I'll poke back harder on those of my own side who should know better than to be doing what they're doing. The progressives are not going to win this one. Post-modernism has hit the brick wall of reality and all the center-righties who insisted we had to go along with the nonsense are going to look pretty damned foolish when we look back upon this era, none moreso than the neverTrumpers.

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There are inklings of gender theory, for example in Adorno and Marcuse, but the Frankfurt School itself wasn't overly concerned with gender, much less race. The essence of critical theory as defined by Horkheimer is that it's practical and normative rather than "explanatory" in the traditional sense. It's about changing society (i.e. exercising power) rather than explaining it based on observation and reason. It has co-opted or tried to co-opt various identity groups for that purpose. Which one is trending at the moment hardly matters.

The problem with your strategy is that it doesn't restore the Founders' vision of self-government. The Founders based a government on rational, consistent laws and good faith political discourse in the hope that reason would prevail. You and the Marxists reject those principles because they stand in the way of power. No, it doesn't make you a commie community organizer. You're more like the Germans of the early last century who were so afraid of communists that they made a deal with the devil. Progressives are certainly in conflict with reality, but reality has nothing to do with QAnon or the Oath Keepers. The right deals in political rather than cultural power, and the radical right is gaining power in the GOP whether you want to admit it or not.

It's true that social issues need not and should not be conceded to the left. Your error is to assume that respect for political institutions, traditions, civility, and the rule of law are somehow a form of surrender. The opposite is true. It's your urge to burn down the opposition and violate every norm that is the surest sign of despair. I don't share it. I'll stick with the Founders' vision.

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Iron Law of Woke Projection there in bold, Chancellor Hindenberg, conjuring QA and oathkeeprs as material influences so dangerous as to require coalition with irritable radicals who now own the Democrat party to corrupt constitutional order to conduct political purges (J6 cmee). What you have in common with the intolerant forces you are allied with is post-modern worldview that all threats to liberty lie on the right.

Political institutions must serve a purpose. When they are seized to push purely partisan agendas, as has happened in academia, higher education, all forms of media, etc.....they destroy their legitimacy. QA and Oathkeepers are not destroying public schools. Progressives pushing queer theory on 3rd graders are doing that. QA and Oathkeepers are not causing the marginalization of legacy media nor driving the popularity of Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan. Cancel culture from the left is doing that..... Over and over and over again we see the very people virtue posturing as centrists supporting the dynamics that are destroying the center.

You are cheerleading a Reichstag Fire hoax playing out in Washington, in order to posture as a defender of democracy from dozens and dozens of people not terribly well connected to reality.

I hope you know how to make cream gravy. You'll need it to make the ashes go down easier.

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Straw man fallacy. I've made it clear again and again that the threats to liberty are on the right and the left.

Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

A fallacy of middle ground would go something like this. One person claims the sky is bright. Another person claims the sky is dark. I conclude the sky is gray. The fallacy involved here is false dichotomy. I'm telling you there's a day sky and a night sky. You're telling me sunny skies don't exist (because look at all that dark)! You accuse the left of doing the same thing, which of course they often do and which shouldn't be surprising. Everyone tends to see threats from the other side more clearly. I won't comment on the fact that the rest of your argument is mostly ad hominem (against blue bloods, academics, et al.). It should go without saying, and there are more interesting points to focus on.

So it doesn't seem that your real grievance is about logic or lack of "balance." In fact I've yet to see you respond to a balanced opinion without declaring it an example of repressive tolerance, woke projection, or some such evil. Your real grievance seems to be that the left dominates our media and cultural institutions. A lamentable state of affairs, to be sure. It also has one implication that you and Harrison are missing. You complain that the radical left has an outsized voice in our discourse. You forget that, by the same token, the radical right is under-represented. But you can't have it both ways. You can't claim the Bolsheviks are in control of the media and then claim the Nazis don't exist (or they're "100 people on some weird website") just because they don't have a show on prime time.

Your take on the WAPO article is also paradoxical because of its singular focus on power rather than truth. This is a typical mode of analysis for you. There's no real attention to the facts or logic of Ms. Walter's case, whether good or bad. Instead you're preoccupied with who she is, what class of person she represents, and what the power relationship is between her tribe and yours. This focus is of course the defining characteristic of critical theory and all its intellectual progeny. In that sense you are every bit the post-modern.

---

actually, counselor, the defining feature of critical theories are race and gender identities. The Frankfurt School gave up class because it wasn't working, which was a bad idea because class is a real thing and the others are constructs. Indeed, the singular weakness of progressivism is that it's just a virtue posture which doesn't actually propose any meaningful solutions to any real problems (some of which were on that list you posted a while back.) Progressives studiously ignore all the things human beings actually DO have in common - the need for shelter, food, clothing, companionship, the means for achieving the aforementioned and a desire for a better life for themselves and their families - in favor of artificial, immutable constructs which prohibit common cause. That is what has cause the center to fail, not any dynamic latent or patent on the right.

Your middle ground fallacy was in juxtaposing the space laser person, who is clearly outside any conceivable notion of mainstream, with the 16 genders crowd, who now own major institutions to include teachers unions (link) and the DOJ. You are hardly alone in having a predilection for that fallacy. Indeed, such is the reflexive error of GOP moderates, who cannot shake the presumption that they must cede all social issue to the left because culture wars cannot be won by the right. Ergo, we have progressives not just owning most culture forming institutions, but purging them of all who lack enthusiasm for the cause.
https://www.christianpost.com/voices/preferred-pronouns-what-i-saw-at-teachers-union-convention.html

Patton read Rommel's book and used ideas in battle to defeat Nazis. That did not make him a Nazi. Understanding and describing how critical theories have achieved hegemony, for the purpose of fighting back, does not make one a progressive. Neither does using any number of Alinsky's Rules against the left, most particularly #4 but also #5-8 and #10, make one a commie community organizer. It means you intend to make the other guy play by his own rules (or beat him at his own), and will have the resolve to keep coming until you win to restore the Founders' Vision of self-government rather than the mob rule being proposed by the left.

Don't get me wrong. I wish I didn't have to play like this all, but I can see clearly I no longer have a partner in social contract and I'm not going to run off to Hungary & pout or change my vocabulary. I'm going to poke back. And I'll poke back harder on those of my own side who should know better than to be doing what they're doing. The progressives are not going to win this one. Post-modernism has hit the brick wall of reality and all the center-righties who insisted we had to go along with the nonsense are going to look pretty damned foolish when we look back upon this era, none moreso than the neverTrumpers.

---

There are inklings of gender theory, for example in Adorno and Marcuse, but the Frankfurt School itself wasn't overly concerned with gender, much less race. The essence of critical theory as defined by Horkheimer is that it's practical and normative rather than "explanatory" in the traditional sense. It's about changing society (i.e. exercising power) rather than explaining it based on observation and reason. It has co-opted or tried to co-opt various identity groups for that purpose. Which one is trending at the moment hardly matters.

The problem with your strategy is that it doesn't restore the Founders' vision of self-government. The Founders based a government on rational, consistent laws and good faith political discourse in the hope that reason would prevail. You and the Marxists reject those principles because they stand in the way of power. No, it doesn't make you a commie community organizer. You're more like the Germans of the early last century who were so afraid of communists that they made a deal with the devil. Progressives are certainly in conflict with reality, but reality has nothing to do with QAnon or the Oath Keepers. The right deals in political rather than cultural power, and the radical right is gaining power in the GOP whether you want to admit it or not.

It's true that social issues need not and should not be conceded to the left. Your error is to assume that respect for political institutions, traditions, civility, and the rule of law are somehow a form of surrender. The opposite is true. It's your urge to burn down the opposition and violate every norm that is the surest sign of despair. I don't share it. I'll stick with the Founders' vision.

---

Iron Law of Woke Projection there in bold, Chancellor Hindenberg, conjuring QA and oathkeeprs as material influences so dangerous as to require coalition with irritable radicals who now own the Democrat party to corrupt constitutional order to conduct political purges (J6 cmee). What you have in common with the intolerant forces you are allied with is post-modern worldview that all threats to liberty lie on the right.

Political institutions must serve a purpose. When they are seized to push purely partisan agendas, as has happened in academia, higher education, all forms of media, etc.....they destroy their legitimacy. QA and Oathkeepers are not destroying public schools. Progressives pushing queer theory on 3rd graders are doing that. QA and Oathkeepers are not causing the marginalization of legacy media nor driving the popularity of Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan. Cancel culture from the left is doing that..... Over and over and over again we see the very people virtue posturing as centrists supporting the dynamics that are destroying the center.

You are cheerleading a Reichstag Fire hoax playing out in Washington, in order to posture as a defender of democracy from dozens and dozens of people not terribly well connected to reality.

I hope you know how to make cream gravy. You'll need it to make the ashes go down easier.

---

Straw man fallacy. I've made it clear again and again that the threats to liberty are on the right and the left.

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straw man fallacy of your ownb. I've made it clear again and again that threats to liberty exist on both right and left, while also identifying the bloody obvious: that the threats on the left have achieved control over major societal institutions, while the threats on the right are out in the trailer park trading meth and arguing about the space lasers. You equivocate the two over and over and over again in a way that patently denies reality.

They're doing more than arguing. They're organizing, equipping, and training. Knowing that you have some experience with insurgencies and have recognized the nature of Antifa, I find it hard to believe you're oblivious to the activity of right-wing militias. You know or should know that the WAPO analysis has validity, all ad hominems notwithstanding.

Sam Lowry said:

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They're doing more than arguing. They're organizing, equipping, and training. Knowing that you have some experience with insurgencies and have recognized the nature of Antifa, I find it hard to believe you're oblivious to the activity of right-wing militias. You know or should know that the WAPO analysis has validity, all ad hominems notwithstanding.

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Pro-abortion militias have made more attacks in the last three months on women's healthcare facilities than so-called militias have made since the Civil War.

Although it has been memory holed by the authoritarian media, some good accounts of previous domestic terrorism:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LFZ84PC/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_d_asin_title_o00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
"The Weathermen. The Symbionese Liberation Army. The FALN. The Black Liberation Army. The names seem quaint now, when not forgotten altogether. But there was a stretch of time in America, during the 1970s, when bombings by domestic underground groups were a daily occurrence. The FBI combated these groups and others as nodes in a single revolutionary underground, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government.

The FBI's response to the leftist revolutionary counterculture has not been treated kindly by history, and in hindsight many of its efforts seem almost comically ineffectual, if not criminal in themselves. But part of the extraordinary accomplishment of Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage is to temper those easy judgments with an understanding of just how deranged these times were, how charged with menace. Burrough re-creates an atmosphere that seems almost unbelievable just forty years later, conjuring a time of native-born radicals, most of them "nice middle-class kids," smuggling bombs into skyscrapers and detonating them inside the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, at a Boston courthouse and a Wall Street restaurant packed with lunchtime dinersradicals robbing dozens of banks and assassinating policemen in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta. The FBI, encouraged to do everything possible to undermine the radical underground, itself broke many laws in its attempts to bring the revolutionaries to justiceoften with disastrous consequences.

Benefiting from the extraordinary number of people from the underground and the FBI who speak about their experiences for the first time, Days of Rage is filled with revelations and fresh details about the major revolutionaries and their connections and about the FBI and its desperate efforts to make the bombings stop. The result is a mesmerizing book that takes us into the hearts and minds of homegrown terrorists and federal agents alike and weaves their stories into a spellbinding secret history of the 1970s."

Let's please keep barking at the mythical right wing militia bogeymen.

Here is a great way to support the new red tacos.

In the least surprising news of the day:

A Texas blogger who has levied a slew of "racist" attacks against Rep. Mayra Flores (R-TX) received a payment from Flores' general election opponent, far-left Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX), in June, per a report.

NBC News first reported on the ties between Gonzalez and the McHale Report blog on Friday, noting that the congressman's campaign provided $1,200 to the blog for "advertising services" on June 24. According to the outlet, no advertisements from Gonzalez run on the site. Derogatory attacks on Flores on the blog have been abundant dating back months as she has been labeled "Miss Frijoles," "Miss Enchiladas," "gringa hag," a "cotton-pickin' liar," and a myriad of other tasteless nicknames and race and sex-based insults.

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If she were a Democrat this would spark national outrage among the authoritarian media ... sure it got a lot of coverage by The View.

The FBI seems to have a strong bias toward investigating anti-government groups that are active today instead of groups that were active 50 years ago. Can't imagine why that would be.

Sam Lowry said:

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The FBI seems to have a strong bias toward investigating anti-government groups that are active today instead of groups that were active 50 years ago. Can't imagine why that would be.

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And apparently ones that don't actually do anything ... IIRC school parents are their #1 domestic terrorism group.