http://genius.it/10674070/theweek.co...ng-peter-thiel

This is a great takedown of a garbage defense of Peter Thiel

the chinese media is practically giddy with Dutertes visit to China. I cant turn on the news for five minutes without them showing him talking about seperating from the US.

It was probably me. Unfortunately the blog author took it offline so I'd have to find my original post. But the point was that you will often find just so much inhumanity expressed in political thoughts and then those same people will turn around and demand civility in discourse.

So it's like Person A is like, yeah we should really just nuke the Middle East, make their sand glow, take their oil and Person B is like "holy **** you're a ****ing terrible douche monster, that is heinous" and then Person A will get their hackles up and dismiss Person B as horribly uncivil while they spout advocacy for war crimes, torture, terrible treatment of people and other crimes against nature.

Then you take it the next step further and note it's not just that these people are sensitive babies and all that irony of saying horrible things and advocating miserable treatment of people while demanding you be treated with respect -- that's all good to note. But it's that the insistence on civility is the point. The demand to treat their horrible **** civilly is to further normalize their ideas, to put it within the bounds of respectable discourse. Sure, they don't want you to embarrass them, but the polite conversation itself is part of the scheme. They're trying to suppress the natural instinct to revulsion. Talk about it in respectful ways is to allow it to be part of an acceptable mosaic of ideas and options.

You frankly see it in a limited sense in the whole "calling someone racist is worse than being a racist" pearl clutching. Sure, of course, most of those people are just whiny babies who want you to sit in respectful silence but they also intuitively get that their ideas can get over and be normalized so long as we entertain them in polite conversation. They get that you might not agree but allowing them to join the normal discourse is so critical. You see it with FoldNDark who wants to talk about differential IQs between different races and religions and people are like "what's the point of this, you don't really agree with the conclusions drawn?" and he's like oh no no, of course not, but why do you hate science and study?! Most of the practitioners of this **** get that people aren't going to suddenly embrace their pseudoscience mumbo jumbo, the entire point of The Bell Curve esque discussions is to let "are blacks just naturally stupid?" back into the respectable dialog, not to actually get you to conclude blacks are naturally stupid. Let "studying race and inherited intelligence" into norms of academic stuff and they know that opens up a whole host of **** you can now normalize and insert into the popular conscience.

tl;dr: insisting on civility isn't so much superficially about civility and the value of formal politeness, but about what we accept as a norm for what is acceptable to debate

How many articles have been written about the poor, poor whites who are voting for Trump and how it's our obligation to come to them? I see them all the time. But I have seen very few articles exploring what might actually happen to colored people under a Trump Presidency. It's like that side of the equation doesn't even exist.

And these guys will quiz you for hours on "how is Trump racist?" and try to pick apart any answer and somehow make Trump not racist. And calling him that is just slander and mean and awful and horrible. But then they call Democrats racist the first chance they get because obviously, Democrats hate white people to them (I guess?), so that's just calling it like it is. It's an endless sad cycle.

This the one?

I mean Thiel seems to basically be a wealthy version of ikes no?

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...date-rape-book

Women regret being drugged and raped? That's on them!

GUYS WE'VE BEEN OVER THIS

I was taught along the way that a prominent reason for American success during our nation's formitive years was what amounts to the protestant work ethic. Is this conservative spin or an accurate reflection of history?

Having a huge tract of largely arable land with tons of resources and navigable waterways that was largely emptied of natives due to disease and separated from potential hostile enemies by two huge oceans helped some I think, although sure maybe some credit belongs to the protestant work ethic which taught whites and their hired overseers to really try to get the most out of their slaves.

Probably a healthy amount of spin involved but The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is an interesting theory nonetheless.

The Protestant Ethic is the sort of thing Malcolm Gladwell or Richard Florida might have written if they were born 100 years earlier.

Read it in college and Weber is a smart guy, but I wasn't at all convinced.

Open arable land, extremely defensible territory with little or no local competition, slave and indentured labor, protectionist policies that allowed Northern industry to flourish despite European competition, centuries of expansion into undeveloped new territory, massive amounts of gold, then massive amounts of oil, then massive industrial benefit with little destruction from wars while the rest of the world gets pulverized....it's not too surprising to end up on top.

Well, I don't think it's the sort of thing one ought to be entirely convinced by

Guys like Weber and Marx and Durkheim were trying to build these cathedral-like theoretical constructions. The one true theory of social life. And as far as that was the goal, it's clearly a failure in all cases. But as perspectives that highlight certain ideas and phenomena I think they provide some useful insights. I doubt that Weber's story of the rise of capitalism is at all complete, but it is interesting and there's probably some validity to it.

I can't speak for other regions of the country, but for the South slavery was absolutely the main driver of the economy during that time. It's hard to describe how powerful a tool it was for creating economic growth and profit. It's a dynamic engine and an incredibly powerful resource when exerted in the proper ways. Add to that the nutrient-rich soil, and it was almost too easy to make boatloads of money, provided you had enough initial capital to get a proper plantation running.

After the brief Reconstruction period, these people wouldn't even have the right to freely vote in their own state until the late 1960s.


Map of Alabama's Black Belt region. Counties highlighted in red are historically considered part of the Black Belt region. Counties highlighted in pink are sometimes considered part of the region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_...ion_of_Alabama)

Edit: A couple of things to add. Most of the white people didn't own slaves and they just worked for the plantations or the other industries that served the plantation. But the few white people who did own the plantations got the vast majority of the benefit of all of the economic growth of the area. They used that as leverage to keep poor white and blacks against each other and of course laws which were basically apartheid (Jim Crow) were put into place as well.
Here's some more info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planta...American_South

Love this forum, thanks all.

And then what? What's step 2? (Try to take over the world, I assume.) Or is it just "I like racism. Lets get other people to talk the way I think because it makes me feel good."?

lousy dns ddos. the only page that loads quickly now is the forum index pages

Using my case, I think the idea that we critically study racial differences in IQ or discuss preemptively striking ISIS with nuclear weapons and insist that we engage those ideas civilly is to put them within the bounds of acceptable solutions or debate. Not necessarily that we agree with them, just that they are accepted as part of everday political discourse.

What that does -- the next steps -- is allow for things that might be have formally considered extreme or unacceptable into the political discourse: think of all the things we can study as having hereditary racial differences, *******s say. Maybe we instead of nuclear weapons, can just dream up preemptive invasion forces or carpet bombing with conventional artillery instead of nuclear bombs, people with terrible ideas might say.

The key word is normalize: to take things that might be intuitively unacceptable or revolting, or violate our social norms, and insert them into the discourse, and recognizing you might not be able to win the argument or compel anyone immediately, by at least demanding a concession you be treated civilly, the ideas seem equivalent to other things within the acceptable sphere of debate.

I think you probably get how social norms work: if I were like yah, I'm gonna go walk the neighborhood and kick every dog I see or take a **** on my neighbors patio furniture, and you were like "lol what a ****ing clown you are, that's terrible" -- I don't think anyone would demand you remain civil with me, we all get how it's OK to be revolted and have strong even impolite reactions to people who propose doing awful things. Insisting on civility is trying to engage in the argument by proxy: OK, sure, dropping nuclear weapons on ISIS might cause incredible amounts of damage and murder tons of innocent people, but don't you dare call me a mean name or discuss my ideas in impolite terms is functionally a demand your ideas deserve respect and belong alongside reasonable options and thoughts.

Problem there is that "uncivil discourse" turns to violence fairly quickly.

I don't know seriously to take this objection but I'll assume sincerely, and I agree to an extent of course that the norm of civility is meant to reduce violence and promote a lot of good things. Conceded.

But other things that lead to violence, chaos and turmoil include like advocating genocide and inviting casual racism. It's not like "turn the Middle East into a radioactive lake" is consequence free but "**** off" is some clear invitation for imminent violence.

What I would argue is that incivility actually has a place; it gives civility its utility. The whole argument here is that people use the norm of civility as a kludge to insert unacceptable arguments into an acceptable framework. Implicit in the whole thing is that humans usually reserve incivility for serious violations of norms and that we should be pluralists and engage in arguments we disagree on with civility.

So I suppose what I'm arguing here is that treating someone impolitely and with a lack of civility is actually an incredibly valuable tool in humanity's 'norm enforcement' toolbox and I agree -- if I can restate your argument -- that it should be used sparingly. What I disagree with is that there's like precisely zero utility in treating someone with incivility. And that corollary to that, often people argue just truly heinous **** that ought to be dismissed with just pure invective and anger, and they insist on civility as a means to circumvent orthodox social norms. I mean if this is a hard concept to grasp, use my analogy above and imagine I showed up advocating severe animal abuse as a stress reliever or entertainment or just some really horribly stuff like that. We correctly and rightfully use incivility to do a lot of heavy lifting and keep a collective lid on that kind of stuff (e.g., "get the flying **** outta here you despicable POS")

Fair enough, only thing I would add is not only sparingly, but by very few people.

I think this is a real concern, and since I might be poster-child on 2+2 for participating in conversations that could be said to normalize certain perspectives on race, I feel like I ought to respond. Although that said, I'm not sure I have a strong defense. It troubles me.

But, while I think it's clear that many issues involving race are entirely resolved intellectually, or scientifically, it also seems clear to me that they aren't really resolved socially to the point where relying on strong norms is actually possible.

Obviously, the demands for civility are 99% nonsense. And I'm sort of painfully aware that engaging in conversations about racial differences in IQ (I use this example because I have) can to some extent normalize those conversations and that there is a downside to that. But it isn't just the worst PU posters who hold these beliefs in some form or other. I think there is a lot of data to support the conclusion that racist beliefs are widespread. Consciousness raising is a pretty standard tactic in civil rights movements, and I think a successful one, and it would seem to involve trying to correct those beliefs in some fashion.

How do you draw the line between reasonable attempts at consciousness raising that involve engaging the existing culture (which does require at least some minimal level of civility to be effective, one imagines) and attempts which are unreasonable? How do you gauge whether the potential upside justifies the potential costs of normalization. I mean obviously even I draw it somewhere. I don't get in internet arguments on Stormfront, and I don't bother with every racist troll that drops by here either. But while I've seen the argument in favor of incivility as an expression of strong social norms a few times, I'm not really convinced that we've made enough progress for that to be a viable tactic if the goal is to reduce racism. I'm also not entirely convinced the argument is wrong either, and since I'm guilty of engaging in the normalizing conversations, this bothers me. I'm curious what you would say about it.

Ya, nipping that in the bud would be preferable. These moral imbeciles then call foul, and are told to stfu in return (which annoyingly gives them a sense of righteousness, or strength)....damn, those ****ers are just waiting for us to sleep on them, aren't they? The orcs, always ready to rise.