6 ms·

I don’t think he/she is wrong in saying they all employ the same strategy, where the last two being the only ones with a noble goal. It’s a powerful weapon, an

I don’t think he/she is wrong in saying they all employ the same strategy, where the last two being the only ones with a noble goal. It’s a powerful weapon, and can be dangerous if not used carefully.

Kinrany 6y ago
Which of the first 12 did not have a noble goal?
- kstenerud 6y ago
  Only prohibition, the war on drugs, #metoo, and BLM had noble goals. The rest were "the enemy is among us" fear based. I suspect that the fallout from virtue signaling and bad actors taking advantage of #metoo and BLM probably won't be too bad; certainly not on the same level as the rest.
  - rurban 6y ago
    A war on drugs is never noble. It wasn't the Opium war (England wanting to keep cheap Opium supply from China), and it wasn't Nixon. Criminalization of drugs and declaring war on the cartels, whilst secretly supporting the cartels for their help in their fascist putsches. Civilized countries can fight the drug problem fine without declaring war, even if state actors are involved. (Eg Kosovo, ...)
    - kstenerud 6y ago
      Eliminating the scourge of drugs in America was Nancy Reagan's brainchild, and it was a very laudable goal. The fact that it was so ham-fistedly and wrongly implemented, and co-opted for repressive purposes doesn't diminish the nobility of the original goal that gave birth to such a monster.
      - fuzzfactor 6y ago
        Back in the 1970's it was plain to see that a Nixon initiative such as a drug war was not congruous with a free country in the same way that an absolute prohibition on alcohol was not. The first Nixon election was actually the birth of the monster which enabled such a multi-generation debacle. Regardless of how toxic and harmful alcohol and drugs have been for millennia. Turns out Nixon was not only misinformed, he also had a crooked streak. History shows that the Reagan mishandling of a free country occurred afterward. I not only witnessed all of this first hand, it has been a painful experience. You should have seen what a free country was like beforehand.
  - thundergolfer 6y ago
    The war on drugs certainly did not have noble goals. It’s a matter of public record that the government used the drug war to target “free love” political radicals, and far worse happened than that.
    - zajio1am 6y ago
      What public record? AFAIK, the association between war on drugs and targeting radicals and black is mostly based on hearsay.
      - knightofmars 6y ago
        https://www.jazziz.com/the-hunting-of-billie-holiday/ https://www.jazziz.com/the-hunting-of-billie-holiday/
      - thundergolfer 6y ago
        "At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. "You want to know what this was really all about?" he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." - Dan Baum, talking about John Ehrlichman, who served as domestic policy chief for President Richard Nixon
        zajio1am 6y ago
        Yes, this is exactly that hearsay. Not public record, but unauthorized quote published years after Ehrlichman's death. The authenticity of the quote is often disputed.
  - commander_k33n 6y ago
    >Only prohibition, the war on drugs, #metoo, and BLM had noble goals. That distinction is entirely in the eye of the beholder. Some say McCarthy was vindicated with the release of the Venona papers and the declassification of documents from the Soviet Archives. Many of the accused were in fact spies for the Soviet. Also the stolen secrets for making the Atomic bomb almost brought the world to an end. >I suspect that the fallout from virtue signaling and bad actors taking advantage of #metoo and BLM probably won't be too bad; certainly not on the same level as the rest. It's sad to see how you have to walk on egg-shells to placate the BLM zealots and still get downvoted and somebody is probably already combing through your post-history.
    - alexilliamson 6y ago
      You don't have to placate the BLM zealots. You can say whatever you want. If people disagree, your comment gets a gray tinge. I don't understand the downvote animosity here.
ogurechny 6y ago
I should remind you that a lot of revolutions had a noble goal. Russian Revolution was made by people with an enormous noble goal of freeing the whole world from oppression (and Soviet state has never disavowed World Revolution, future Communism, people's dictatorship, etc.). How it was twisted from the very beginning — even long before revolution itself, see Dostoevsky's “Demons” — is a different story. I think that “we had a noble goal, and accidentally ended up with a dead body” is an explanation only suitable for children. It is better to pay attention to the process, not its stated goals (even more so for broad and lofty causes), and judge whether it is fishy. In fact, nothing that happens in America today comes as a surprise to people familiar with Soviet society: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-soviet-mentality https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-so... It's a recent article, but I remember people commonly expressing similar sorrows years and even decades ago. If you want to look deeper into the possible future of US, see “The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices” (University of California Press, 1999).
- dennis_jeeves 6y ago
  The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
- agapon 6y ago
  99% agree with you. But as far as World Revolution, it's educational to see what the Stalin's USSR did to Comintern. Especially, German communists.
pjc50 6y ago
BLM and #metoo are driven by impunity: a crime is committed by people in a powerful position, and the normal justice process completely fails to deal with it until an overwhelming number of people come forward. They are also driven by real incidents: No sane person alleges that George Floyd isn't dead, for example. Whereas with witchcraft and many of the others the alleged "harm" was vague, nonexistent, or impossible to link. BLM and metoo are also bottom-up movements, whereas most of the others were either initiated from the authorities or were authoritarian responses to popular demands (Prohibition is probably the latter). The paedophile scare is complicated. There do appear to be fantasists and "recovered memory" incidents, but there is also a lot of historic child abuse that was institutionalised. Magdalene laundries, for example. Mob justice is the weapon of last resort. The best answer to mob justice is an official justice system where justice is seen to be done. This requires tackling prejudice about whose crimes are investigated, whose are exonerated, and whose evidence is taken more seriously. How many women's testimony equals one man's testimony, for example?
- marcoperaza 6y ago
  Plenty of people are throwing around inflated or manufactured accusations of racism. Or trying to publicly ruin private citizens for sharing forbidden thoughts among friends and even family. There have been a string a highly dubious rape accusations in the press. In many cases, gross exaggeration or outright fabrication of the claims has been proven. The climate we live in now is very similar to these previous purges. That you find yourself politically sympathetic to their cause only makes it easier for unscrupulous elites to use the mob to do their bidding. You might think you're safe today, but you'd better hope that your moments of candor stay off camera, because no one lives life carefully enough to be immune to this angry mob.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    > Plenty of people are throwing around inflated or manufactured accusations of racism Such as? > There have been a string a highly dubious rape accusations in the press. In many cases, gross exaggeration or outright fabrication of the claims has been proven Such as? Are we back to finding the worst possible examples of a cause on twitter and using it to discredit the whole cause, just like McCarthyism used one or two actual pro-Stalinists to demonise everyone asking for more equality?

Kinrany 6y ago

Which of the first 12 did not have a noble goal?

kstenerud 6y ago
Only prohibition, the war on drugs, #metoo, and BLM had noble goals. The rest were "the enemy is among us" fear based. I suspect that the fallout from virtue signaling and bad actors taking advantage of #metoo and BLM probably won't be too bad; certainly not on the same level as the rest.
- rurban 6y ago
  A war on drugs is never noble. It wasn't the Opium war (England wanting to keep cheap Opium supply from China), and it wasn't Nixon. Criminalization of drugs and declaring war on the cartels, whilst secretly supporting the cartels for their help in their fascist putsches. Civilized countries can fight the drug problem fine without declaring war, even if state actors are involved. (Eg Kosovo, ...)
  - kstenerud 6y ago
    Eliminating the scourge of drugs in America was Nancy Reagan's brainchild, and it was a very laudable goal. The fact that it was so ham-fistedly and wrongly implemented, and co-opted for repressive purposes doesn't diminish the nobility of the original goal that gave birth to such a monster.
    - fuzzfactor 6y ago
      Back in the 1970's it was plain to see that a Nixon initiative such as a drug war was not congruous with a free country in the same way that an absolute prohibition on alcohol was not. The first Nixon election was actually the birth of the monster which enabled such a multi-generation debacle. Regardless of how toxic and harmful alcohol and drugs have been for millennia. Turns out Nixon was not only misinformed, he also had a crooked streak. History shows that the Reagan mishandling of a free country occurred afterward. I not only witnessed all of this first hand, it has been a painful experience. You should have seen what a free country was like beforehand.
- thundergolfer 6y ago
  The war on drugs certainly did not have noble goals. It’s a matter of public record that the government used the drug war to target “free love” political radicals, and far worse happened than that.
  - zajio1am 6y ago
    What public record? AFAIK, the association between war on drugs and targeting radicals and black is mostly based on hearsay.
    - knightofmars 6y ago
      https://www.jazziz.com/the-hunting-of-billie-holiday/ https://www.jazziz.com/the-hunting-of-billie-holiday/
    - thundergolfer 6y ago
      "At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. "You want to know what this was really all about?" he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." - Dan Baum, talking about John Ehrlichman, who served as domestic policy chief for President Richard Nixon
      - zajio1am 6y ago
        Yes, this is exactly that hearsay. Not public record, but unauthorized quote published years after Ehrlichman's death. The authenticity of the quote is often disputed.
- commander_k33n 6y ago
  >Only prohibition, the war on drugs, #metoo, and BLM had noble goals. That distinction is entirely in the eye of the beholder. Some say McCarthy was vindicated with the release of the Venona papers and the declassification of documents from the Soviet Archives. Many of the accused were in fact spies for the Soviet. Also the stolen secrets for making the Atomic bomb almost brought the world to an end. >I suspect that the fallout from virtue signaling and bad actors taking advantage of #metoo and BLM probably won't be too bad; certainly not on the same level as the rest. It's sad to see how you have to walk on egg-shells to placate the BLM zealots and still get downvoted and somebody is probably already combing through your post-history.
  - alexilliamson 6y ago
    You don't have to placate the BLM zealots. You can say whatever you want. If people disagree, your comment gets a gray tinge. I don't understand the downvote animosity here.

ogurechny 6y ago

I should remind you that a lot of revolutions had a noble goal. Russian Revolution was made by people with an enormous noble goal of freeing the whole world from oppression (and Soviet state has never disavowed World Revolution, future Communism, people's dictatorship, etc.). How it was twisted from the very beginning — even long before revolution itself, see Dostoevsky's “Demons” — is a different story. I think that “we had a noble goal, and accidentally ended up with a dead body” is an explanation only suitable for children. It is better to pay attention to the process, not its stated goals (even more so for broad and lofty causes), and judge whether it is fishy. In fact, nothing that happens in America today comes as a surprise to people familiar with Soviet society: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-soviet-mentality https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-so... It's a recent article, but I remember people commonly expressing similar sorrows years and even decades ago. If you want to look deeper into the possible future of US, see “The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices” (University of California Press, 1999).

dennis_jeeves 6y ago
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
agapon 6y ago
99% agree with you. But as far as World Revolution, it's educational to see what the Stalin's USSR did to Comintern. Especially, German communists.

pjc50 6y ago

BLM and #metoo are driven by impunity: a crime is committed by people in a powerful position, and the normal justice process completely fails to deal with it until an overwhelming number of people come forward. They are also driven by real incidents: No sane person alleges that George Floyd isn't dead, for example. Whereas with witchcraft and many of the others the alleged "harm" was vague, nonexistent, or impossible to link. BLM and metoo are also bottom-up movements, whereas most of the others were either initiated from the authorities or were authoritarian responses to popular demands (Prohibition is probably the latter). The paedophile scare is complicated. There do appear to be fantasists and "recovered memory" incidents, but there is also a lot of historic child abuse that was institutionalised. Magdalene laundries, for example. Mob justice is the weapon of last resort. The best answer to mob justice is an official justice system where justice is seen to be done. This requires tackling prejudice about whose crimes are investigated, whose are exonerated, and whose evidence is taken more seriously. How many women's testimony equals one man's testimony, for example?

marcoperaza 6y ago
Plenty of people are throwing around inflated or manufactured accusations of racism. Or trying to publicly ruin private citizens for sharing forbidden thoughts among friends and even family. There have been a string a highly dubious rape accusations in the press. In many cases, gross exaggeration or outright fabrication of the claims has been proven. The climate we live in now is very similar to these previous purges. That you find yourself politically sympathetic to their cause only makes it easier for unscrupulous elites to use the mob to do their bidding. You might think you're safe today, but you'd better hope that your moments of candor stay off camera, because no one lives life carefully enough to be immune to this angry mob.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > Plenty of people are throwing around inflated or manufactured accusations of racism Such as? > There have been a string a highly dubious rape accusations in the press. In many cases, gross exaggeration or outright fabrication of the claims has been proven Such as? Are we back to finding the worst possible examples of a cause on twitter and using it to discredit the whole cause, just like McCarthyism used one or two actual pro-Stalinists to demonise everyone asking for more equality?