d4ky posted:

thanks tpaine, this post is pretty cool. it gives me a way to engage with ideas surrounding violence and socialism without having an encyclopedic knowledge of the esoteric ramblings of old, dead philosophers.

tpaine posted:

... but addressing the systemic problem demands that we focus on the rich and the politicians, and this requires us to organize, which I guess would be part two of the article: now we've admitted that violence is justified, but what do we do with it and how should we focus our efforts? This is all pretty theoretical because in contemporary America there isn't a damn thing anyone can do no matter how organized they become because the kidnappers have well and truly won. Happy 2013

correct me if i'm wrong, but aren't you basically asking how to be a good terrorist? that would be an interesting “theoretical” discussion to observe here, but it probably won't be as productive as you think. i'm sure you already know that anything too detailed will attract LEA like flies on shit. it puts germanjoey at great risk, and he will be compelled to give up server logs, and/or participate in a sting against y'all. like, i get that some of you want to rise above the pointless theorizing and mudslinging of groups like TNI and Jacobin Mag, but you can't do that here. when you've reached this point, you don't have much else to do besides secretly plot and scheme, no? and something like that is entirely different than posting cat pictures and talking about other historical radical groups who've done similar things and where they went wrong

neostraussian esotericism ftw

getfiscal posted:

g.a. cohen uses the kidnapper analogy in his later work, for example in "rescuing justice and equality". the problem with this sort of thing is that it isn't really a debate, like, it isn't a fair fight. you can dream about all sorts of different types of justice and so on but in reality you are up against people who will do anything - anything - to defend their inequalities and belief systems. argument doesn't really work in terms of convincing the right, small scale movements don't do much, the only thing that matters is mass movements that try to impose socialism on people who will kill you if they can to stop it.

Panopticon posted:

this is so great. posted it on paradox forums (makers of eurocentric nationalism sims), response is superb, from reactionaries gibbering about homeless people to milquetoast liberals wilting over the suggestion of breaking the law

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?655877-Two-Captives-The-Self-Defense-Case-for-Socialism

lmbo

gyrofry posted:

Issies: Laissez Faire

gyrofry posted:

that guy's dumb as hell

Goethestein posted:

like, even if you believe that the law today is fundamentally just, how do you not understand that its separate from morality. so many people do not get this, many of whom are enormous potheads with thousands of dollars of stolen media on their computers

good == legal is less mystifying to me (see kohlberg's stages of moral development) than the reification of "the system". don't attack individual people, they're all yelling, but it would be okay if you took your violence out on The System, because yeah, that's what the problem is. that system. over there

obvs sapir-whorf doesn't hold a lot of water but i wonder how long we've referred to business ventures as though they were grammatically equivalent to independent agents & if that is yet another thing that pushes people towards this projection of agency onto intangibles, so there is no one to actually blame neither syntactically nor psychologically

i'm going to go watch soylent green now

pls excuse me if this has all been beaten to death by 1000 writers already, whatever you're thinking of, i haven't read it (but pls let me know to add it to my to-read list).