These people don’t make me butthurt. They do make me want to throw them into the sun though, so they make me something.
But not like raising my blood pressure. No, I mean if I had a button marked “remove all of the people who have liked that page from planet earth”, I would never stop pressing it. But with a happy-go-lucky smile on my face.
I just don’t understand why that kind of filth is given a voice by being shared here.
The same reason they let you know a killer is on the loose.
Some of these people are people you walk by every day. Better to know they exist.
Yeah, once upon a time posting things without comment was seen as an endorsement, but that’s obviously not what’s going on here. This stuff is gross, and I’m not sure why spreading it around is critically important at this time.
I also remain steadfast in my belief that trying to push nonviolence and tolerance as universal principals is going to go farther than advocating violence and trusting that your side will win a culture war that takes the form of actual war.
Following your example, isn’t this giving the killer a voice he doesn’t deserve?
Great.
The Americans are handing over all the evidence to NYT. Photos of crime scene, detailed maps, pictures of the bomb parts, the works. What the fucking fuck? This is Trumps America in action. The sooner we (temporarily) break off all relations with Washington the better.
I understand the frustration, but I imagine it would be even more damaging intel-wise to cut that pipe than the damage being done by these morons.
The entire country, cross-party, is livid. The UK is getting good at making irrational decisions too.
I think Julia Galef has a good starting point from a liberal/progressive point of view on how to address the sorts of issues raised by existential threats like terrorism. But I feel like this is just a basic starting point and not the end state. I think where her point of view suffers is not appreciating the gendered bias for direct confrontation by men (where the female desire is to avoid confrontation), but also that good faith engagement requires both sides to be willing to accept impasse or even contradiction, which in today’s political climate seems unlikely and also requires a certain level of intelligent emotional and rational detachment so lacking in most political agents today. Nevertheless, a good start.
The problem with actions like this is that progressives have already accepted the presence of low level terrorism as part and parcel of daily life and so are, to a large extent, unwilling to address it directly and/or have written it off as being purely random and a result of sociological factors that policy can easily address (if only the will to pass such policies were there), ignoring the existential threat these actions possess to conservatives and thus cedes the floor to the forces of pure reaction and revanchism. We have to find some middle ground to stay the growth of Trumpist/Brexitist tendencies.
Whoah: “The government does not believe the president is directly responsible for the potentially compromising leaks; but May will raise her concerns with him at the Nato summit where she will push for the military alliance to join the coalition against Islamic State.”
Theresa May will confront Donald Trump over the stream of leaks of crucial intelligence about the Manchester bomb attack when she meets the US president at a Nato summit in Brussels on Thursday.
British officials were infuriated on Wednesday when the New York Times published forensic photographs of sophisticated bomb parts that UK authorities fear could complicate the expanding investigation into the lethal blast in which six further arrests have been made in the UK and two more in Libya.
It was the latest of a series of leaks to US journalists that appeared to come from inside the US intelligence community, passing on data that had been shared between the two countries as part of a long-standing security cooperation.
I got a good laugh out of this. She seems to have the debating acumen of a lamp post.
You can see THE FEAR hit her just before she speaks. She’s terrified of public speaking.
Oh, now confirmed, UK police are no longer sharing with US intelligence.
I don’t think so, given that I don’t think the message is receiving any acceptance here, and instead is just highlighting how the person who posted it on facebook is a terrible person.
Two questions:
Are you saying that terrorist actions like Manchester are an existential threat, or merely that some conservatives believe that to be true?
If it’s the former, I would ask why you believe that. The odds of any westerner being killed by a terrorist are in “killed by bears” territory. Attacks like the one in Manchester are horrible, tragic and rage-inducing, but they’re not an asteroid headed towards earth.
Well, not until and unless terrorists get ready access to bio-weapons, or a stockpile of nukes they can use. That happily remains science fiction, for now.
Imagine a western government that randomly killed 100 people a year, deliberately and unambiguously, without due process and without rationale. Despite this number being extremely low compared to, say auto traffic accidents, this would constitute an intolerable existential threat to any community. Now imagine a western government that “allows” (hypothetically) an outside power to kill 100 people a year randomly; say Trump lets Russia arrest and execute 100 Americans a year, just because. Again, despite this being a very low number overall it would still represent an existential threat in a way that accidental mortality rates do not.
Now we get to the situation today, where people who have globalizing or progressive sympathies are essentially “willing” to accept causalities like Manchester as “the cost of doing business” in a globalized world. But clearly, people who do not share those sympathies are not going to be so sanguine about what is an acceptable rate of attrition. In other words it might not be an existentialist threat to you but it might well be an existential threat to Trumpist/Brexitist type voters; and the response seems to be ‘they’re wrong it’s just not an existential threat, deal with it’.
The moral hazard here - which i would personally see as right aside from how liberals or conservatives perceive acts of terrorism - seems to be in normalizing this sort of violence. Pierre Manent’s book more or less despairs of “preserving” universality of western values and accepts accommodationism as a necessary step in preserving the remaining status quo, though that sounds more dire than he puts it. In slightly more contemporary terms the closest thing the US/Britain has encountered is the Irish Troubles; the salient point in this analogy is the Troubles didn’t lead Britain to accepting roundly the arguments of the IRA as being merit worthy. However progressive voices often become so concerned with being “politically correct” (a term which feels outdated now, tbh) that there is often a strange counter-reaction to terrorism to over-embrace the other side in response. In that sort of environment drawing hard lines in the sand about what is or is not acceptable in a multicultural society becomes ever more controversial, and where I would argue the correct response to terrorist attacks is a re-enunciation and reinforcement of western values in the face of terror, this becomes seen as being nationalistic, anti-progressive or actually inflammatory. What ends up happening however is a growing sense of fearfulness and self-censorship. And this does give the forces of revauchism ammunition to complain - perhaps not entirely inaccurately - that globalist politics isn’t interested sparing their communities from terrorism. Even if, as far as it goes, many of these attacks are being done by self radicalizing individuals with dubious connection to external powers.
We’re using the same word, ‘existential,’ to mean different things, then. Because 100 deaths per year, regardless of the cause, are not a threat to the existence of the country. Those deaths would have political consequences, but the country would go on and the vast majority of its citizens would not be directly impact.
That doesn’t mean ‘progressives’ care about the deaths any less than you do, by the way. Stating that they’re willing to accept them is only accurate in the narrowest, most unfair sense.
Nobody is willing to accept terrorism in the sense that if it could be stopped they would not stop it.
You have to live with the risk while the fight against terrorism is ongoing. What is the alternative?
But the only reason it would be an existential threat in that case is that the government itself is comitting the crime.
Low level fatalities from crime is not an existential threat to society. We’ve been dealing with that for as long as society has existed.
We already do this. Far more than 100 people each year are killed by crime each year.