Republicans: continued

[Brian Peacock]

More terrorism probably.

Sorry to say I think you're probably right. Establishment republicans seem pathologically out of touch with modern society, and as their viewpoint continues its inevitable slide towards the sidelines only the hard-core will have the tenacity to cling to it as a moral imperative. People like that need everybody to know they're right, even when they're wrong. The incessant, self-pitying blather we hear about how 'right-thinking' people are discriminated against for being white, male, straight and/or Christian etc is not a sign that society is corrupt, or that political correctness is having a mental health crisis, but that the neo-conservative ideology that gave birth to the Alt-right is out of step and out of time. All it has now are complaints that nobody wants it in their house and that those who oppose it are traitors to Western Civilisation blah blah blah. 'Alt-right' is an identity as much as an ideology, and now that people have started killing in its name it has clearly also become religion.

[Animavore]

The ruling class.

[Animavore]

Good advise.

[Hermit]

Ambition and desire don't matter. His argument isn't that you want to live as you do, but that you can't help but live as you do because of conditioning.

Apparently his mum was the only exception. She accepted the food stamps and subsidised housing with great distaste, never once becoming subject to the conditioning everyone else on social welfare is a victim of.

The interview you excerpted this quote from is a fucking train wreck. There were no probing questions from Whoopi Goldberg or anyone else. Not a mention of logic fails. No suggestion of possible hypocrisy.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Link to tweet with video.

[JimC]

That just about nails it...

[pErvinalia]

And where are the Christians disavowals of said cleric and his ideology?

[Hermit]

Drones with hellfire missiles. How biblical.

[JimC]

Smite the unbeliever!

[Forty Two]

Many people are critical of me because they say, ‘Carson wants to get rid of all the safety nets and welfare programs even though he must have benefited from them. This is a blatant lie. I have no desire to get rid of safety nets for people who need them. I have a strong desire to get rid of programs that create dependency in able-bodied people.

--something he may have actually said

Able-bodied people depend on exactly the same kind of things as non-able-bodied people. The question is whether the able-bodied are deserving or not, and I guess the answer to that is that they're not.

Give every man according to his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?

The reason non-able bodied people are afforded help is that they aren't able to help themselves. Welfare isn't supposed to be about whether someone is morally deserving. It's about giving people a helping hand in order to reach a level in which they don't need that help anymore. IMO.

And as you've just implied, able-bodied people don't need welfare because they can help themselves. It's interesting, not to mention somewhat ironic, that the majority of those who promote the 'dependency culture' view of welfare automatically cast the sick and disabled in the role of passive recipients of state largess - particularly when qualifying for welfare is predicated on the ability to work rather than on immediate need. As an expression of the so-called Protestant work ethic the deserving/undeserving categorisation of the poor is entirely a moral distinction.

I didn't imply that, because circumstances other than disability can arise that would cause someone to need assistance.

People who receive state largess receive state largess. I can't see how anyone does it non-passively, absent some sort of "work for welfare" type provision where a person has to do some labor for the state to get welfare, which we don't have here in the US.

I don't see who is talking about "deserving/undeserving" in terms of a moral distinction. What are you suggesting the rule should be? Everyone gets the same welfare payments? I mean, if you say that some people ought not, then are they not "deserving" of welfare? Really it's not a question of who is a good enough person to get welfare, it's about whether a person needs it. One measure of need is whether someone is able to work, and if the only impediment is a lack of willingness, then the policy advanced is often that someone who is able to work, but unwilling to work, they probably ought not be paid for making what amounts to a choice not to earn. Then they will have to earn somehow, whether they like it or not, and they will generally get up and go earn.

It's also an economic policy - the presumption being that if you subsidize something, you get more of it. Let's just use a simple example - Assume that a person who is out of work and down on his luck can get $1000 per week in welfare money. That person gets offered a job making $1000 per week. Assume the job has no routes to advancement - it's just a menial job that is not reasonably expected to increase faster than the rate of increase in welfare payments. If government policy says that you can decline the job, and still collect the $1000 per week, what would you expect to happen?

[Forty Two]

Good advise.

In overall principle, I agree. I would also do that with Communists, Anarchists, Black Bloc-ers, red flat Socialists, ANTIFA, etc. -- I would be rather disconcerted if an event I scheduled attracted a lot of Nazis, and I'd probably cancel the event and say "I don't like Nazis."

I would add the caveat, that the writer of the above-pictured comment may, or may not, be a good judge of who is and who is not a Nazi, and therein often lies the rub. I've heard Ben Shapiro, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Avi Yemini called Nazis. Something tells me the writer of the tweet in the image has a strong likelihood of being of the ilk that would do so.

[pErvinalia]

Good advise.

In overall principle, I agree. I would also do that with Communists, Anarchists, Black Bloc-ers, red flat Socialists, ANTIFA, etc.

There's bad people on all sides?

None of those groups are looking to exterminate, or at least ethnically cleanse, a segment of the population. This is poor false equivalence.

[Forty Two]

Yes, there are bad people on many sides. Sure.

And, Communists can just as easily be said to ethnically cleanse and exterminate. Cultural Revolution - Gulag Archipelago - Antisemitic Pogroms. Etc.

And, the point of the meme is when assholes are attracted to your event, you should oppose the assholes and figure out why you're attracting assholes. If I had Progressive Leftist SJWs coming to my event en masse (other than to protest) I would want to think long and hard about what I'm doing wrong such that they are attracted to my viewpoints. Either I am expressing myself wrong, or the substance of my views are fucked up, if such people are attracted to my events or movement.

[pErvinalia]

Yes, there are bad people on many sides. Sure.

And, Communists can just as easily be said to ethnically cleanse and exterminate. Cultural Revolution - Gulag Archipelago - Antisemitic Pogroms. Etc.

How many times do we have to fucking point this out to you? Communists aren't Stalinist (well a small minority are, but the vast majority are essentially anarcho-communists). Communists aren't working to achieve a Stalinist state. They are working to achieve (an unrealistic) utopian society.

And, the point of the meme is when assholes are attracted to your event, you should oppose the assholes and figure out why you're attracting assholes.

No it's literally talking about Nazis (and probably white supremacists, since Nazi is a loose term these days). And sure, Nazis are arseholes, but not all arseholes are Nazis. Just look at Jordan Peterson. An arsehole who isn't a Nazi.

[Forty Two]

Yes, there are bad people on many sides. Sure.

And, Communists can just as easily be said to ethnically cleanse and exterminate. Cultural Revolution - Gulag Archipelago - Antisemitic Pogroms. Etc.

How many times do we have to fucking point this out to you? Communists aren't Stalinist (well a small minority are, but the vast majority are essentially anarcho-communists). Communists aren't working to achieve a Stalinist state. They are working to achieve (an unrealistic) utopian society.

Think slowly and carefully. What you just said is NOT CARVED IN STONE. You don't get to determine the definition of who is the One True Communist. Stalinists ARE in fact Communists. And, just as not all Communists would support gulags and pogroms - not all fascists or white supremacists support murdering people of other races. YOU DON"T OWN THE CONVERSATION and neither does anyone else.

You may be right - OR WRONG - about the "majority" or "vast majority" are "anarcho-communists" -- and you may be right or wrong that "anarcho-communists are benign. I don't think they are benign. And just as I don't get to determine which communists are the ones deserving of vigilante justice and which aren't, just because of the ideologies they express, other people don't get to do that either. Even if you think a viewpoint is repugnant, or even if you think a person holds a repugnant viewpoint, that does not make it "right" to go and beat people up because of their ideas.

I swear, it's like talking to a wall. Of course there are different kinds of communists. Everyone knows that. That's the whole fucking point. Just as not every right winger or alt right or white supremacists is a Nazi.

And YOU don't speak for what "communists seek." You have previously said you aren't even a communist. All you can do is express your opinion as to what "most" or a "vast majority" or "some" of them seek. Your view of it is not an established fact, nor can it be an established fact since the percentages of communists who adhere to some or other iteration of that ideology or set of ideologies changes over time.

SOME of them DO seek Stalinist communism. I've seen batches of them online supporting Kim Jong Un's Stalinist regime and lauding it. Under the vigilantes against despicable speech theory, I should be within my rights to go kick the shit out of them, I suppose. Wouldn't want that to take hold here, now would we?

And, the point of the meme is when assholes are attracted to your event, you should oppose the assholes and figure out why you're attracting assholes.

No it's literally talking about Nazis (and probably white supremacists, since Nazi is a loose term these days). And sure, Nazis are arseholes, but not all arseholes are Nazis. Just look at Jordan Peterson. An arsehole who isn't a Nazi.

Sure, that's one interpretation, that the only assholes that are attracted to one's movement that we need to worry about are Nazis. It's not mine, and memes and items such as the tweet above are not generally to be taken literally - they are making a larger point. Maybe not in this case, in your opinion. So what? There is certainly room to disagree about the import of the meme.