I Re—sign

I’ve said and read rude 1 too many times in the last 2 minutes

the word has achieved that weird foreign-state to it

Wow. Its the taking past each other world championships. Lot of strong competition this year. I think if cuse were being brutally honest he’d say this forum is a bit of a lark and I don’t want to be called into a partners meeting (or whatever) over some nonsense about setting fire to Tucker Carlsons house. So stay in the lane of ‘would my supervisor be concerned if they read this?’ ie supporting the Iraq war, fine (if slightly misguided), supporting squatters using violence to defend against bailiffs not fine. We all know instinctively which side of that line our posts are gonna fall.

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the squatters?

Well keep it on the down low buddy. Or at least give cuse some plausible deniability if Dewey, Cheatem or Howe happen to read your posts. You support squatter rights (acceptable) you don’t say whether that means smacking a baliff with a 2X4 if they try to drag you out.

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Well, that’s where I was at yesterday. I figured I’d read the threads in one fell swoop, see where people started talking past each other, and try to help hash it out. But I think pandora’s box was all the way opened today, what with the replies to zikzak’s post and Sabo’s posts.

I haven’t made a guillotine joke once on these new forums but it’s never been about guillotine jokes, or edgelording, or measured discussions of revolutionary direct action, or even whatever NBZ’s whole thing is. Apparently, disappointingly, it’s been about a sizable part of this forum not wanting to grasp that any time a law is made, even a good law like, say, I don’t know, against rape or enslaving black people, that law only means anything because of the implicit unrelenting violence baked in.

And, like, I get it. It’s depressing as fuck to engage in quasi- Friedmanian cost-benefit analysis and especially to entertain what that pessimistically implies about humanity and I empathize, truly, but it’s reality.

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Yeah, obviously the earned income tax credit is an order of magnitude more violent than punching richard spencer in his dumb face. But unless you’re going to define your terms in every post the previous sentence just seems farcical to a moron in a hurry and those morons hold significant sway over our social and financial lives.

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lol me then. I figured he was one of the lawbros. If he doesn’t even have a boss then my posts above are all wrong. There’s no rational objective reason (in the logic > all sense) to be against discussions of guillotines but not against discussions of taxation, both are violent. The argument “I don’t want to hear shit from people” is completely valid and imo carries the day but to frame it as a purely moral argument brings these definitional arguments to bear. As usual mircobet is the hero any thread needs.

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We might be talking past each too now, lol, but I’m not saying I need to fight the power by making guillotine jokes. I’ve been swayed by and sold on the arguments against. I’m talking about the absurdist realm of pretending like all politics isn’t violence.

I quoted this already but to quote it again:

Like, amen brother, but we don’t own a jail or the implements to arrest somebody, not directly, so let’s call on the righteous state/collective/society/etc to do violence to these wicked men.

But it doesn’t play like:

“Sir, we humbly insist you go to jail.”

“No, I don’t want to.”

“Sir, you don’t understand. We humbly yet stridently insist you go to jail.”

“No.”

I never really got the fuss over Orwell’s novels, finding the prose arid and unenjoyable, but his journalistic books are wonderful.

No worries. We’re in total agreement it seems. I just had the wrong context about cuses employment status.

So if the guillotine thread preambled with “This takes place in a future where the government has changed and legalized guillotining those found to be traitors of the United States during the Trump Wars” this entire thread would not exist?

But you make a fair point about other people’s employment status, right? Or no?

At least, that’s what swayed me (with the border agent issue folded in). All this other stuff that’s been unpacked is probably a separate topic.

Yeah, I’m swayed by the argument “having a guillotine thread isn’t a hill worth dying on if there’s even a 1% chance my boss will see it and I’ll get some shit off the back of it”. But that argument was won 300 posts ago so I’m hardly adding to the thread by agreeing.

I think we’re in agreement that the above is a subjective argument and that it’s a category error to frame this as a moral question unless you are also challenging the inherent violence of the everyday. In that moralising frame I would argue that posting in favour of the iraq war is far far worse than posting “my legitimate targets of violence list”.

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I think this thread is a pretty good view on why America is where it is vs the actions we are seeing in Hong Kong or France now.

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Nobody has done this.

Nobody said that either. The most extreme position taken in this thread recently has been by me, where I advocated using the tactics of Gandi and MLK.

It’d be kinda cool if ya’ll could take a moment to read what’s actually being written before you respond to the imaginary things you invented in your head.

I mean they were hypothetical positions to demonstrate the idea that “legitimate violence” is far more complex than the moral arguments being laid out by cuse. That said I totally support squatters defending their homes against people trying to evict them. With violence if necessary. If a 2x4 is the only thing to hand then have at it. I just understand that people are gonna be uncomfortable with that support and would rather it be deleted than have to talk about it in their weekly 1-1.

That standard is 1,000x more strict than anything 2+2 ever imposed and would have precluded at least half the ACist discussions from years back. How the christ can we have a political discussion forum under those terms?

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Obviously I’m not adding any clarity to this thread so I’ll bow out. FYI I’d have zero restrictions, I’d happily take part in a “which of trumps testicles would you most like to drive a rusty spike into” thread (#Left ball 4 life)

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You’re English?

Thread: non-Americans talk about stuff that could get Americans in trouble

Jk -no more threads!

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