Arctic Dementor

wow i wonder what the video shows

... yeah i can see why the cops don't want that getting around, holy shit

Skulldrinker: Is there an element of convenience here? It's much easier to arrest the one guy (who's, let's be real, more likely to respect police authority) than the three guys who'll go all tribal. It still has the effect of ending the altercation. The three guys will process cop and guy= white, two us = black, three, therefore, attack I think that's behind a lot of two-tier policing; not hating white people, but enforcing the laws that are easy to enforce on the people who will capitulate. nomenym: This may offer a less malicious explanation for the behavior, but it doesn't really deny the problem. In fact, it makes the problem more intractable, since they will never admit to this explanation. It also incentivizes even more tribalistic behavior to dissuade law enforcement actions. If the purpose of the police is to manage relations between ethnic groups to prevent large scale public disorder and inter-ethnic conflict, then they cannot also treat people as individuals before the law. Every law enforcement action must be first evaluated by the likelihood of it undermining "community relations", and so the ethnicities of the people involved should be at the forefront when deciding when and how to enforce the law. Because whites have lower levels of ethnic solidarity, the trade-off will almost always be to target the whites. This makes a lot of good sense given the new priority to manage ethnic conflicts. The question is how stable this strategy is longer term. Presumably, these concerns are also driving the abolishment of juries. It allows judges to concern themselves not with individual actions but rather balancing competing ethnic resentments to maintain public order. Quietly, the entire tradition of British law is being repealed and replaced by merely changing "guidance" documents.

So for the past ten years or so in Iowa there's been this song and dance ever since the governor put his foot down and told the school districts that they were not allowed to have the start of school until after the end of the state fair. Like most school districts, they had been moving the start of school up by a week every year or two for a long time, and it had, for a long time, started during and even sometimes before the state fair.

Now Iowa is obviously made up mostly of farming communities, and the state fair is The annual event, especially for kids on small, family run farms, who are learning how to run the farm, and things like livestock handling and the like. These things are not taught in school. There are some college courses you can take about it, but the vast majority of the next generation to own small farms are learning how to run them on farms belonging to their parents or friends. And for these kids, the state fair is like graduation. It's essential for them to be there, to show their proficiency in different fields, make connections with their peers and in the various industries they will need to work with, and to take advantage of workshops and resources that are only available once a year during the state fair. (Also, the state fair is just a massive part of the culture here and kids should be allowed to attend and be a part of it, even if they don't plan on going into farming.)

With school starting during or before the state fair, this was obviously a problem. Kids were forced to choose between the first weeks of school and the state fair. If they chose school, they lost out on essential education and name-taking that would pave the road for them further down the line if they chose to go into farming. If they picked the state fair, it put their general education at risk, and there's not a lot of forgiveness going around for kids who miss the first week of school.

The governor told the school districts that they weren't allowed to force kids to choose anymore. The state fair has been at the same time every year for a hundred years, that's their cutoff point for how early school can start. This means school can start on the last week of August, which is more than reasonable IMO. (Edit: I went back and googled it and the exact cutoff date is the 23rd of August. This was signed into law last year -- I'm not sure if there was a specific date prior to that or if the actual law is new.)

This worked for a couple of years, and then the school district tried to move the first week of school up again and were firmly told no. And ever since that's happened every few years.

Now I believe this is happening in more places than just Iowa, but it was called out and stopped in Iowa because of the strong cultural weight of farming here. It goes unnoticed in most other places because it's just not as important culturally.

And it's important because pushing school back to before these essential farming events is pushing future generations out of small farming. I.E. when the people who currently own small farms die or become too old to run the farm anymore, they won't be able to pass it on to younger relatives or friends, because those people won't have the skillset to actually operate the farm. They'll end up having to sell their land to -- mostly Google and Facebook, who loooooove to buy up farmland around here to build datacenters, but also to larger corporate farms, who are going to do everything more shittily and less ethically.

The post was years old at this point. It was a relic from a bygone era, like that post from 2015 about our favourite science girlboss Elizabeth Holmes that people keep reblogging as a joke.

Except it wasn't a joke, and nobody in the notes had corrected anything. OP was still actively policing the notes, and some comments had been hidden/deleted.

The post wasn't only about something that had already been debunked. It was also about something that people still care deeply about. Let's take the famous "A Rape on Campus" hoax. The reporter who wrote the article wasn't in on it. She also got hoaxed. At the time, people felt really strongly about it, and even if it wasn't literally true, many said, it hints at a deeper truth about college campuses, which are especially dangerous.

Now I don't want to get bogged down in the object-level of the issue, but claims like "women who go to college are more at risk of sexual assault that woman of the same age who start working right after high school" are often thrown into the conversation, and if you tried to interrogate such claims, or the "A Rape on Campus" story, people would often find it distasteful. At the time, Jezebel wrote: 'Is the UVA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax?' Asks Idiot.

Similarly, you can find a surprising number of people who remember the name "Kyle Rittenhouse", and when you ask them what he was notable for, the answer is often "Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a loaded gun to defend a used car dealership and shot three people" or "Kyle Rittenhouse killed three unarmed black protesters". The falsehoods are this time not something repeated by the media, like in the "A Rape on Campus" story, but something repeated over and over on social media, where many users insist that correcting the falsehoods is nit-picking irrelevant details. These same people will often continue to repeat these irrelevant details on social media – the incorrect version.

These two stories aren't all that similar. In the first story, journalists circled the wagons and doubled down. Some journalists implied (and some feminist activists stated outright) that the truth of this story should have been suppressed for the greater good. In the second story, the source of the distortions is much more nebulous. In both cases, it was about much more than a single incident, it was supposed to be emblematic of a bigger problem.

Often when there is an identity-politics element to a debunked story, the people who continue perpetuate the story will see the attempts to set the record straight as attacks, or they will try to protect themselves and attack the debunkers by opportunistically painting the debunking as politically motivated. A lot of pseudohistory that claims Native Americans came from Africa or that Cleopatra was black fits into this pattern. Even if they know that the story has been debunked already, many people somehow would find posting a link with the receipts distasteful. If you post receipts, you sound like you don't get the "emblematic of a bigger problem" part, or like you are on the other side of that bigger problem.

All this is a long-winded way to say I know why – if I reblog that post and add a correction – I will likely be blocked. I understand that this story is supposed to be emblematic of a bigger problem, and even if it didn't happen, it still says a lot about society, and if you debunk this story, you make our side look bad and give ammo to the wrong people.

But I also know that OP had posted that thing years ago, and is still policing the notes.

The thing that makes me write this vent post goes beyond that. OP had carefully screenshotted and cropped news articles. Somebody added screenshots of tweets, and links to "sources", but the sources were more tumblr posts. The main content of the post was a tumblr text post early in the reblog chain, with some screenshots of tweets. And then everybody in the reblog chain completely misrepresents the accusation and mixes it up with a different story. It was a mix of circling the wagons because this is a Very Important Topic right now on the side of OP and vaguely misremembered version of the story in the notes. It's both, in sequence! And it's still happening. People are still reblogging this post.

Well, that and I think a lot of it is more primal than that: for these people voting for centrist and liberal politicians feels like complicity, it feels dirty, it feels morally injurious, and they perceive “vote blue no matter who” type exhortations as simultaneously a kind of forced teaming and a kind of humiliation ritual. Also, I think a lot of them see centrist and left-liberal parties as in a way the bigger force blocking leftism, insidiously draining leftist energy into electing functionally center-right politicians, and on a more primal level a lot of them have a deep well of resentment toward centrists and moderate left-liberals.

Of course this assertion sounds repugnant. But it is a repugnant conclusion which follows from common libdem premises: a democratic state is run by The People, so when a democratic state declares war then The People are co-aggressors. Aggressive war is the supreme crime and aggressors may justifiably be executed, (assuming the defender prevails well enough to put the aggressor on trial, and so forth,) thus The People may justifiably be executed.

Trying to haggle the punishment down from “executed” doesn’t win you much here, the weaker form of the argument still justifies national-scale severe mass punishment of civilians. For example, punishing the aggressors with life in prison - still a kind of genocide, considering what it’ll do to their dating prospects.

To avoid the repugnant conclusion, I think you have to sever The People and their votes from the decisions of the state, acknowledging that the ship of state isn’t in the control of the population at large, and then we’re back to “legitimization ritual” by another route - voting isn’t picking leaders or commanding the state in any meaningful fashion, voting is expressing approval for the state that already exists, the state which might replace maybe 0.01% of its personnel in response to a vote.

Well, that and I think a lot of it is more primal than that: for these people voting for centrist and liberal politicians feels like complicity, it feels dirty, it feels morally injurious, and they perceive “vote blue no matter who” type exhortations as simultaneously a kind of forced teaming and a kind of humiliation ritual. Also, I think a lot of them see centrist and left-liberal parties as in a way the bigger force blocking leftism, insidiously draining leftist energy into electing functionally center-right politicians, and on a more primal level a lot of them have a deep well of resentment toward centrists and moderate left-liberals.

You will note that the far leftists who don’t vote also don’t actually do fuck-all to actually have a revolution either. They know they don’t have enough popular support, and they also do absolutely fuck-all to change that fact.

Meanwhile the far right… Is not ideologically not voting, and goes to the range.

This new world might mean the death of the "revolution" as envisioned by Maoists, Leninists, and other card-carrying party members. This is not1917. Nations are an old idea that is quickly becoming outdated. Fight against chaos and you'll be torn to pieces like a cheap-ass trailer in Ft. Pierce during a category 5 hurricane.

But in an Egoist sense, a claimed zone of territory made lawless and effectively ungovernable, too chaotic for any one force to hold the upper hand... much promise in that. Disrupt. Discredit. Militias and communes defining themselves town by town, street by street, aligning and breaking apart as they see fit. No one person to corrupt, arrest, or even kill.

Put that on a generational track. Such zones could become infection points, cancerous bulbs on the body politic spreading "no-go" zones and destabilization. Bring Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya home. Read shit like this and start putting it to use where you live. Carve out new lives, new dreams, from the rotting carcass of a continent-spanning "society" and never look back. As long as insurrectionists remain popular and willing to continue the fight until the last breathas the Seminoles did they're guaranteed a chunk of territory.

But are we prepared for that?

Is the Left willing to sacrifice the United States for a free but chaotic territory across a few states? Could we study sniper tactics, small arms maintenance, and urban/rural survivalism right alongside economic and gender theory? Are we willing to selfishly demand our right to live as we see fit? Are we willing to struggle, fight, and even commit violence...for a decade? Two? How bad do we really want this?

Do we really, really want to win...and are we prepared to pivot towards what that might mean?

Difficult questions, ones I don't have the answer for.

We have nowhere near the training, or the infrastructure, or even the popular support we'd need anyway.

But we could. And that's why we need to start thinking about it.

Needless to say “a group with completely different underlying ideology, completely different culture, and a completely different terrain, far from the Imperial Core pulled it off, so it’s totally possible for us to pull it off” is stupid, especially when paired with a worse outreach practice than The Taliban and less organization and competence.

And then of course, another leftist chimes in how you totally gotta pair it with an anticolonial perspective. The thing is, the local population that the whole insurgency plan would be based on is almost entirely the descendants of colonists, so this just shoots the whole idea in the head right out of the gate.