Posting smug bullshit that claims to be superior to both sides while making no difficult judgement is a Christmas tradition?
How does that indicate disliking the general idea of nonpartisan criticism of the establishment (or however else you want to phrase this strain of thought)? It's pretty expressly directed at, as you put it, reckless and lazy rants.
Maybe you don't parse that rant as equating things which are completely out of proportion with each other, but that's how it read to me: the guy brought up petty bullshit in the same metaphorical breath as serious issues. It could be intentional bias, it could be lazy and imprecise rhetoric, but in either case the issue being underlined is clearly with that blog post in particular rather than anarchist or nonpartisan sentiment as a whole.
The eagles thing is taken from this.
The older I get, the more I see, the more I read, the more clear it becomes to me that the entire game is rigged. The leftists and the rightists each see half of the fraud. The lefties correctly note that a poor kid caught with cocaine goes to jail, while a Bush can write it off as a youthful mistake (they somehow overlook the fact that their man Barrack hasn't granted clemency to any one of the people doing federal time for the same felonies he committed). The righties note that government subsidized windmills kill protected eagles with impunity while Joe Sixpack would be deep in the crap if he even picked up a dead eagle from the side of the road. The lefties note that no one was prosecuted over the financial meltdown. The righties note that the Obama administration rewrote bankruptcy law on the fly to loot value from GM stockholders and hand it to the unions. The lefties note that Republicans tweak export rules to give big corporations subsidies. Every now and then both sides join together to note that, hey! the government is spying on every one of us…or that, hey! the government stole a bunch of people's houses and gave them to Pfizer, because a privately owned for-profit corporation is apparently what the Constitution means by "public use".
What neither side seems to realize is that the system is not reformable. There are multiple classes of people, but it boils down to the connected, and the not connected. Just as in pre-Revolutionary France, there is a very strict class hierarchy, and the very idea that we are equal before the law is a laughable nonsequitr.
Maybe you guys are taking his meaning where he says "half of the fraud" way too literally. But it doesn't even matter, because this isn't even his core point. His core point is that the nature of the thing is unfairness and that unfairness is intentional. The above paragraphs are only building up to it, pointing out examples where the right and left sides of politics focus on specific things that they find unfair, instead of accepting that the whole thing is founded on intentional unfairness. Yeah, a couple of his examples are rather shitty, and I'm not defending them.
There's a drug war that has imprisoned millions but a windmill killed an eagle somewhere so those things are basically a wash.
Picking on a single petty detail to establish a surface appearance of superior informedness and validity.
Posting smug bullshit that claims to be superior to both sides while making no difficult judgement
People will repeat bitching and moaning like it's some amazing wisdom and then when you apply a little skepticism to the bitching and moaning they act like you are cheating.
Coupled with sweeping statements of belittling character judgement about anyone who says anything of this general nature without any substantiation beyond picking on that detail.
It's the same routine anytime anyone says something like this. That's how it's read to me in the past when it was directed at me for expressing anarchist sentiments, and that's how I'm reading it now. Claiming separation from right/left party politics just means you're being smug, and bringing up issues to reinforce your point of view is bitching and moaning, regardless of whether it's trying to make a point or not. Instead of accusing me of strawman, tell me how I should read it.
It was essentially an anarchist rant. An immature one, yes, but a general sentiment I am sympathetic to. My beef is that you accuse that sentiment as nothing more than a need to feel smugly superior by pretending to be different from mainstream politics with empty bitching, and I'm bringing it up because that's far from the first time I have interpreted your posts in precisely this way.
I would say that's because empty or misdirected bitching masquerading as independence or neutrality or libertarianism or anarchism comes up a lot. If you have problems with me labeling specific arguments that way then I would be interested in knowing the specific arguments you feel I have unfairly condemned.
We haven't had that sort of confrontation much for a long time. I haven't been as active on the forum the last couple years as I used to be, and have specifically avoided that kind of thing when I have been, because I haven't had the time to dedicate to it. I'm not going to spend my night going digging now. So what I'll do instead is bookmark this post and quote it whenever it happens again.
Author
Topic: Murrican Politics Megathread 2016: There Will Be Hell Toupée (Read 1583894 times)