Likewise. I understand deleting the deluge of substance-less posts that came after Finch's, mine included, but we were also having a substantive argument in there.
-
Welcome to Smogon! Take a moment to read the Introduction to Smogon for a run-down on everything Smogon, and make sure you take some time to read the global rules.
Serious The Politics Thread
- Thread starter Oglemi
- Start date
- Status
most of the posts after Joycap’s rant were substance-less, it was probably mod-wiped as a whole (although not sure why some posts in specificity was deleted)
shifting gears
i imagine it probably has something to do with the active smear campaign that's framing haitans as animal abusers & murderers. it's really fucked up how much traction that story has gained despite it being completely fabricated
i imagine it probably has something to do with the active smear campaign that's framing haitans as animal abusers & murderers. it's really fucked up how much traction that story has gained despite it being completely fabricated
wdym "some of my constituents call me about it" is totally acceptable plausible deniability for fanning the flames of ethnic and race based violence based on stories proven to be fabricated at the personal (facebook woman at the start rescinding the claims and apologizing about them), local (city staff), and state (Republican governor stating these incidents are false) levels and means that really, what punishment can be done :^^^^^
Is there no legal framework that can take Donald Trump to task for outright lying in this way?
In the UK we have the Race Relations Act which if he had made those comments here, he would have been charged with an offence under it (frustratingly few politicians in the UK despite racist dogwhistles have been charged, however, but a lot of rioters have been charged under that act recently). https://www.parliament.uk/about/liv...e-relations-act-1965/race-relations-act-1965/
Bro is catching civil and criminal challenges left and right. What's one more?
The base of politics is for minimal damage to happen to any politician that sits on the status quo or shifts right to it. Even far-right nutjobs are given protection and very few punishments comparatively to, frankly, bare-bones left-wing action. Trump is more likely to be pardoned than put in jail, if anything.
Also mods you should give a 5 minute warning before deleting posts I want to screenshot the funny messages :(
Also mods you should give a 5 minute warning before deleting posts I want to screenshot the funny messages :(
One guy said a thing, therefore it must be the "standard leftist position". Get fucking real, please.
Why does your theory suppose there's a desire for 'crazy authoritarian laws with insane punishments' to begin with? My theory is that corporate, conservative, and fascist elements love to create broad, poorly defined expansions to their power, and have realized if they ostensibly frame it as being intended to combat hate speech or whatever they can get politically unsavvy liberals and even progressives on board as most people don't think about the implications of something beyond the immediate stated intent. It's a problem with perverse incentives and power structures.
Not to be glib, because I also think the state (all of them) sucks and loves to exert authoritarian control and violence on everyone, but given the state of this thread for the last few days, the idea that the UK government is leftist (lol), and the reference to the Soviet Union, I'm giving it 50/50 odds of this person asking why they can't say slurs or making some classic free speech absolutist argument within 24 hours
Anyway I'm curious what your definition of authoritarianism is and if you believe a non-authoritarian state can exist, and if so what does a good, non-authoritarian state do
Anyway I'm curious what your definition of authoritarianism is and if you believe a non-authoritarian state can exist, and if so what does a good, non-authoritarian state do
That doesn't answer my question. Why is the British population extremely authoritarian?
this thread topic interests me enough to suck me into this thread
i find it very entertaining how the internet has progressed international discussion from a eurocentric perspective to an american one. in years gone past, political conflicts and shifts/global trends were viewed through a european lens - where the vast majority of the developed/wealthy/influential world was. speaking around 18-1900s, victorian era/world wars type beat. even in centuries prior. countries were compared to being versions of a european one(think New Zealand or New Guinea being the coloniser branding for various non-western european countries)
and yet, there are so very many examples, this thread being exemplar, of the states being used as a microcosm of global conflict - by extension, used as a model through which various different countries are perceived to be. hence "The british population is extremely authoritarian". I mean, there's only the american lens that ever makes this take make sense, right? Just the various ways through which conflicts and discussion of those who have power versus those who haven't, how hierarchies are structured, what makes privilege/what makes one privileged, it just all smacks of americanism. just something to chew on.
I feel like answering "why is there a desire for authoritarian laws" with "because they're authoritarian" is so obviously circular and meaningless that it should have been obvious that I was asking for an explanation how that came to be. And you're right that it's not an easy question to answer. I didn't expect to get a complete and comprehensive answer from esteemed political thinktank Smogon.com, but I feel like the answer you did give somewhat contradicts the framing of your original post, especially the part about how the "standard leftist position" is to either deny or support authoritarian overreaches of the state.
There are plenty of leftists who quite literally want to abolish the state as a centralized power structure. Libertarian socialism, social anarchism, and other similar movements predate the roots of modern Laissez-Faire capitalist movements by decades, and yet it's depressingly common to see people frame leftism as 'pro government doing stuff' and right-wing ideologies as 'anti government doing stuff'. There's a pretty common meme that 'socialism is when the government does stuff, and when the government does all the stuff, that's called communism', but that quite literally seems to be a lot of people's understanding of leftist ideologies, and your original post definitely smacks of that.
I'm just logging in and catching up to what's transpired since this morning but ya it looks like they were deleted en masse to deal with the problematic elements of...whatever it was the op was trying to get at.
Not speaking for awyp but I'm not a fan of editing posts in general; it can feel icky/sneaky (and it's possible to do so sliently) so I personally tend to avoid doing so. If it were possible to delete and edit en masse at the same time, (and give unique edit messages), you'd probably see it more, but that's a limitation of XF. So we tend to prioritize removing the problem asap, at the cost of hitting otherwise innocuous or good portions of posts.
If this kind of thing happens where you want the good portions preserved, you're welcome to DM us and see if you can just repost or have us go back through your specific post and re-edit/undelete, especially if you notice it's part of a mass delete wave.
This is one of the strangest takes I’ve ever seen in response to “racist man says something racist, why can’t we take action against his racism”
Like my dude
We don’t have freedom of speech in the UK. You have the freedom of expression but you also have the responsibility for your own words. There are various laws and acts that are specifically written to curtail “hate speech” which Trump by any measure absolutely indulged in.
“Free speech” is not a get out of jail free card in the UK.
Side note: how is it I am having to defend the idea that to be a racist piece of shit and get comeuppance for it under existing laws is actually preferable to letting the racist piece of shit say what he wants with impunity and then watch entirely innocent people get targeted by dumb people dumb enough to believe what the racist piece of shit says.
Like seriously? That’s where we’re at? It’s more important to protect a rich man’s right to lie in public than to protect the people directly affected by his horrendous lies?
What a disgusting take.
I mean we sort of are at the minute, but not enough of them, and definitely not the worst of them (See: Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch, Richard Tice, etc etc)
(Side note: Kemi Badenoch should definitely be charged under a couple of existing laws)
Maybe this is a controversial opinion, but I don't feel that freedom of speech should extend to blood libeling thousands of ethnic minorities on national television.
You know you can just have an argument With Me, who has those opinions, instead of waving them at someone who probably doesn't right lol. I think leftist violence is necessary and important, and the defanged western leftist movement is at best very slow and at worst useless beyond making you Feel Good about taking the #correct stance. I'm not a democrat politician who wants a "strong republican party" and then cries that they lost to the strong republican party, I believe in a one party communist state through and through.
Meanwhile I want the complete abolition of all states - just throwing that out there because it’s funny how much the neolibs who post here like to act like all “the lefties” have the same exact echo chamber opinions and the exact same ideas of how we get there
Re: leftist governments if the government is not actively working toward dismantling capitalism in some way I firmly disagree with calling it “leftist,” so very few state-level governments now or in the past can really be said to be leftist
Re: leftist governments if the government is not actively working toward dismantling capitalism in some way I firmly disagree with calling it “leftist,” so very few state-level governments now or in the past can really be said to be leftist
This is a really interesting take. (And I don’t mean that in a bad way). Do you mind expanding on it?
I mean thats the most basic take/declaration of a anarchist and is usually coupled with complete dismantling of capitalist economy and replacing it with a collectivist economy. The workers are exploited by capitalism and their capital/labor is essential to keep the whole machinery going that encompasses all of moderns societies. The workers are supposed to have a interest to end this exploitation and end all classes altogether.
Now the main difference compared to majority of marxists is that the latter want to replace the current state with a "temporary" workers state that would wither away into a stateless and classless society while Anarchists are more radical in the demand to dismantle any kind of state, even more so since history examples of "Marxist-Leninist" states such as USSR, Mao China or Castro brothers Cuba. Besides that, Anarchists are also against any kinds of domination & oppression (and what is the state in the first place if not a body that be it as a monarchy, fascist dictatorship or democracy enforces domination and be it through democratic elections?), be it men ruling over women, European-Americans over African-Americans, able-bodied over disabled people, cis Heterosexuals over LGBTIQ+ (regardless of what they use as "justification" to oppress them) and so on.
This website is even if you're not inclined to become a devout Anarchist a good place to at least understand Anarchism as a ideology better while schools etc. are absolutely failing of doing so. I basically copied this standard 101 explanation from there and Sablette can add more things/details and her own views if she so wants:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/index
Not the person you're replying to, but I also believe in abolition of the state as a concept. This isn't even an uncommon idea on the left; both communist and anarchist schools of thought seek to establish a classless, stateless society. Have you ever actually talked to leftists? I don't mean this in a pejorative way, but I feel like if you had ever tried to have a good-faith conversation with an actual leftist then abolition of the state is a topic that probably would have eventually come up. Not all leftists believe in it of course; there's kind of a spectrum, from hardline anarchists who believe in the immediate dissolution of centralized power as soon as possible, to Marxist-Leninists who generally see the state as a vehicle that should be seized to steer society in the direction of an ideal communist state and ideally make itself obsolete eventually, to many different stripes of socialist and social democrat who desire to establish socialism within the framework of existing states.
Anarchist and communist schools of thought have decades of history and mountains of literature, theory, and analysis to sift through if you really want to learn about them. I get that leftists telling people to read theory and educate themselves is kind of a tired meme at this point and nobody actually does it, but if you really want detailed explanations of these theories, why people believe them, how society would be structured under them, etc., there's really no substitute. I would personally recommend the works of Peter Kropotkin, especially Mutual Aid and the Conquest of Bread, although if you're really unfamiliar with leftist philosophies in general, Marx's Capital is kind of the best introduction, and the criticisms made therein form the foundation of most leftist critiques against capitalism even to this day. Asking for an expansion on the statement "I want to abolish all states" is approaching such a broad topic that answering it is about as easy as fitting an ocean into a bucket, but I can give you a condensed and oversimplified version of my perspective.
Personally, I would describe myself as an anarcho-syndicalist. I believe social hierarchies are fundamentally oppressive and anti-human and the only way for a truly just and equitable society to exist is to find a way to excise them from society as much as is possible. In simple terms, this means the abolition of all forms of centralized power in favor of a society run by mutual cooperation at a much more granular level. I believe the most peaceful and plausible way to accomplish this is a gradual abolition of centralized state power and reallocation of social responsibilities currently held by the state to a network of directly democratically-run unions. I believe collective bargaining is the only tool the working class has to effectuate societal change on a structural level, and you only need to look at the efforts corporate power goes to to suppress unionization to see this. The owning class doesn't fear violent revolution; they know who has all the guns, the bombs, the planes, and the nukes, and they know who pays for them. At least in most western countries, an attempted violent revolution would be nothing more than an easy excuse for a brutal crackdown on leftists. They fear a united working class, because at the end of the day, nobody working means they don't make any money. Despite having warped society in such a way to mitigate this as much as possible, the fundamental fact is the owning class needs laborers more than the laborers need the owning class.
If you're engaging in good faith, you no doubt have a lot of questions about that. How would an anarchist society even function in terms of manufacturing and distributing goods? Would an anarchist society have rules or laws, and how would they be enforced? Why haven't there been any successful anarchist societies yet? Doesn't the competition that exists under capitalism result in technical innovation and better, cheaper products? I asked a lot of these questions myself when I first began delving into anarchist schools of thought. I'm not even going to pretend like I can answer every single question in as much detail as you'd like; at the end of the day I'm a dude posting this on a Pokemon website, not some kind of anarchist philosopher/social scientist. That said, you're free to ask any specific questions you want and I'll do my best to answer them or find sources and literature that discusses them.
I'm also not under the delusion that I'll ever live to see some kind of utopian anarchist society either. I just have a goal I think we should move society towards and I advocate for taking the steps that bring us closer to that goal. It's going to be a long journey.
Last edited:
- Status