Naturally, the common people don’t want war. . . but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Fucking bootlicker.

When he was a serf, they said to him, "Let me find you in this field: I will hang you if I find you in anyone else's field." But now he is a tramp they say to him, "You shall be jailed if I find you in anyone else's field: but I will not give you a field." They say, "You shall be punished if you are caught sleeping outside your shed: but there is no shed." If you say that modern magistracies could never say such mad contradictions, I answer with entire certainty that they do say them. A little while ago two tramps were summoned before a magistrate, charged with sleeping in the open air when they had nowhere else to sleep. But this is not the full fun of the incident. The real fun is that each of them eagerly produced about twopence, to prove that they could have got a bed, but deliberately didn't. To which the policeman replied that twopence would not have got them a bed: that they could not possibly have got a bed: and therefore (argued that thoughtful officer) they ought to be punished for not getting one. The intelligent magistrate was much struck with the argument: and proceeded to imprison these two men for not doing a thing they could not do. But he was careful to explain that if they had sinned needlessly and in wanton lawlessness, they would have left the court without a stain on their characters; but as they could not avoid it, they were very much to blame.

The desperate man to-day can do nothing. For you cannot agree with a maniac who sits on the bench with the straws sticking out of his hair and says, "Procure threepence from nowhere and I will give you leave to do without it."

(GK Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils)

Impossible! Why, only three days ago, the lovely Germans over on feddit.org informed me there's no real censorship in Germany and that the only things you can't say are "calls for the deaths of entire population groups!"

Trust these people no further than you can throw them.

We should try giving the measles virus a MS-13 tattoo.

A man rubs a lamp and a genie comes out and says, "I will grant you one wish, anything you ask for, whatever you can imagine, your wish is my command."

The man shouts, "I want a dragon!"

The genie responds, "I'm sorry, but a dragon is just too much, it's just not possible for that to exist. Can you think of something else?"

The man thinks for a minute and says, "Well, in that case, I guess I wish for the rich and powerful to face significant legal consequences within the existing system for the harm they do to regular people."

The genie sighs and says, "What color did you want that dragon?"

Yeah if you think Bush was an acceptable choice and not a fascist then you don't really have a leg to stand on with this "commies love gulags" nonsense. You think this El Salvador shit is new? Those of us who were paying attention know that Bush did the same shit, while they did their fair share of torturing alleged "terrorists" with no due process in our own black sites, the worst abuses were conducted in foreign countries like Egypt, when we sent prisoners there knowing full well how they'd be treated. Some of us have been fighting this battle for over 20 years, nice of you to finally wake up and notice now that someone you hate is doing it, but it would be nice if you'd notice when the people you like are doing it too.

It's so stupid when liberals, defending a system with the largest prison population per capita in the world, with indefinite detention without trial, mass surveillance, etc, still try to take the moral high ground on that issue just because the word "gulag" sounds scary and foreign.

1. Electric Slide-stepping of Tariffs

2. Harlem Shake off the Chains of Capitalist Oppression

3. Swing (at a fascist)

4. Cap Vance

I was going to tell you to fuck off because I can't stand talking to people who agree with me and just want to scream at outsiders, but I think this counts as "circle-jerking over how much 'theory' we've read" so that means we're cool 😜

Yeah, when they teach about book burnings they never mention that fact. It also serves as a reminder that trans people are not just a modern phenomenon. The Nazis' reasons for targeting trans people then are the same as right-wingers today, they look for a small, marginalized group and seize on existing prejudice to sow division and divide and conquer. The Nazis claimed trans people were a Jewish plot to weaken and destroy the Ayran race, and you can still see echos of that in some right-wing rhetoric today.

Honestly, I wonder how much of our disagreements do ultimately come down to moral philosophy. I see a lot of people making this comparison and I'd be happy to put aside the present political situation and step back to discuss a higher level of disagreement.

I am a consequentialist, and I would agree, in principle, that the correct decision in the trolley problem is to pull the lever. But that should always come with an extreme amount of disclaimers. There are no shortage of people throughout history who have made justifications for their actions on the basis of "the ends justify the means," but often, they turned out to be wrong. To use an example, torture under the Bush administration was claimed to be justified on the basis of getting useful intelligence in order to save lives. But no such intelligence was ever extracted. Really, it was more motivated by revenge, or a desire to be the sort of cool antihero who does the stuff nobody else will that needs to be done, but "the ends justify the means" served as a rationalization. Another example like that (though perhaps more controversial) is the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The problem with applying the trolley problem to real life is that we are mere human beings of flesh and blood. We have a whole host of cognitive biases that mislead us even when we have the best of intentions. If we give our minds a way to justify things that we know are bad, it gives it an out that allows us to rationalize the irrational and justify the unjustifiable.

There are two practices that are necessary to apply in order to counteract these biases. First, it is necessary to adopt a set of strong moral guidelines based on past experience and historical evidence. Second, it is necessary to regularly practice some form of introspection or meditation in order to better understand where your thoughts and feelings arise from, and how they flow through your mind. Said guidelines do not have to be rigorously adhered to 100% of the time, but they should be respected, and only deviated from after clear, careful consideration, understanding why the guideline exists and why deviation from them is almost always bad.

"Base" consequentialism, where you recognize that pulling the lever in the trolley problem is the correct decision, but simply accept that as a guiding principle, is a terrible moral philosophy, worse than deontology and possibly worse than having completely unexamined moral views. Some of the worst atrocities in history are the result of that sort of "ends justify the means" approach, detached from a set of moral guidelines and detached from humility and self-reflection. I would even say, speaking as a communist, that many of the bad things communists have done in history are a result of that kind of mentality. Following moral rules blindly is preferable to breaking moral rules without first doing the necessary work to be trusted with breaking them.

There's plenty more I could say on the topic but people always complain about my long posts so I'd better cut myself off there.

War profiteers. If you work for a company like Raytheon or Lockheed Martin then you are doing an incredible amount of harm to the world and I have even less respect than I have for people in the military. These companies are constantly looking to fuel conflicts, destabilize, and pump all sorts of weapons into every corner of the globe. These people are the true scum of the earth, they are among the worst people who have ever lived.

Hey now, don't forget about draft dodgers