Serious Political Correctness and Race

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no i correctly point out that this violence consisted in a civil war and factional infighting, not a war between 'Arab states' against israeli. i didnt ignore any violence i actually put a descriptor on it.
Uhhh.. I'm gonna ignore "in-fighting". What's your point. All dunk said was that the situation was fucked up and he was right. Definitions doesn't really have anything to do with it.
 

Myzozoa

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my point from last page, nothing to do with a 'definition' (idk what ur whining about), but a historical event that actually took place in a context:

"when israel expels palestinians by making conditions unlivable for them or economically impossible, then they become refugees, 'destabilizing' all the states around israel."

hence why they go to war against israel when the expel 100000's of the palestinians on may 15, 1948...

before that it was a more 'internal' conflict to the territory

go read du posts too, thats not all he said lol
 
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Myzozoa

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Like I said, the folks lobbying the bill want to curb the BDS. The article runs with that and describes some big mouth shutting phenomenon that may or may not exist... That's like if the govt wanted to fine mcdonalds for its health practices and some dude went up and said "fast food joints everywhere are getting shut down". As someone who has seen plenty of televised boycott rallies in us universities, well, if they really are punishing students for rallying, it sure isn't working.

Btw, it's really daft of you to say israel not existing before '48 ignores all the violence that was leading up to the war.....

wat?

so the headline
'J STREET, A RELIABLE FOE OF BDS, URGES CONGRESS TO OPPOSE ISRAEL ANTI-BOYCOTT ACT FOR NOW"
is misleading, according to you, because the article goes into the events and things that have happened to lead people to conclude that this law is attempting to impede bds movements?

like lol if this law is passed you won't see anymore bds rallies because theyll be illegal and your thought is 'well it hasn't worked yet so how bad can this law be'

i suggest a simple google search if you want to know what students organizing bds deal with as far as being punished

whos a bad troll??
 
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wat?

so the headline
'J STREET, A RELIABLE FOE OF BDS, URGES CONGRESS TO OPPOSE ISRAEL ANTI-BOYCOTT ACT FOR NOW"
is misleading, according to you, because the article goes into the events and things that have happened to lead people to conclude that this law is attempting to impede bds movements?

like lol if this law is passed you won't see anymore bds rallies because theyll be illegal and your thought is 'well it hasn't worked yet so how bad can this law be'

i suggest a simple google search if you want to know what students organizing bds deal with as far as being punished

whos a bad troll??
I'm not defending the bill (just read my first post), I'm saying the article blows things up from the other end. You don't have to make me look up why the freaking bds needs pity, no one is forcing these kids to get involved with a toxic group that doesn't even do any good to the conflict in the first place

If you wanna tell me more about the poor bds organizers you can take it up with me in pm because I'm 70% sure we're off topic
 

Myzozoa

to find better ways to say what nobody says
is a Top Tiering Contributor Alumnusis a Past WCoP Champion
I'm not defending the bill (just read my first post), I'm saying the article blows things up from the other end. You don't have to make me look up why the freaking bds needs pity, no one is forcing these kids to get involved with a toxic group that doesn't even do any good to the conflict in the first place

If you wanna tell me more about the poor bds organizers you can take it up with me in pm because I'm 70% sure we're off topic
slide into my dms if you must

some of 'those kids' involved in bds are palestinian refugees, but yeah they shouldn't get involved right? not like they have family there or anything.
 

destinyunknown

Banned deucer.
During the civil war, the Jewish and Arab communities of Palestine clashed (the latter supported by the Arab Liberation Army) while the British, who had the obligation to maintain order,[6][7] organized their withdrawal and intervened only on an occasional basis."

so uh what arab countries were fighting a war against israel when Palestine was under the British Mandate and Israel didnt exist?? I missed it

(the latter supported by the Arab Liberation Army)

Dude, do you even read what you are posting? You answered your own question literally 1 line above it. Now if you could be so nice to click the link that you yourself posted, the arab countries that you're asking about are in that link. It's really hard to discuss anything if you're just copypasting random lines and not even reading them yourself, because if you don't even know what you have written in your posts it probably means you're not reading what everyone else is writing either.

Besides, even in the context of the 1947 Civil War, it was started by Palestinian Arabs, so what I was saying in my posts still stands. And now please either read, or improve your reading comprehension. This is from your link too, btw:

According to the Arab League general Safwat:

Despite the fact that skirmishes and battles have begun, the Jews at this stage are still trying to contain the fighting to as narrow a sphere as possible in the hope that partition will be implemented and a Jewish government formed; they hope that if the fighting remains limited, the Arabs will acquiesce in the fait accompli. This can be seen from the fact that the Jews have not so far attacked Arab villages unless the inhabitants of those villages attacked them or provoked them first.
 
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Shrug

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questioning why we have 14 pages on dudes heartfelt feelings / bitching about the tyranny of overzealous college sophomores and biased forum mods when the movement the latter two censure is ascendant, getting up to all sorts of hijinks like such as for example terrorism and armed marches in the defense of white supremacy. seems, uhhh, incommensurate with the relative threats
 
Watching Trump and his supporters be so wishy-washy about white nationalists and neo-nazis is not suprising but still incredibly frustrating.

These aren't just people who want to yell obscenities at me that'll hurt my fragile libtard feelings. These people want to see me and my whole family dead. This is not a game.
 

Chou Toshio

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@ Charlottesville episode-- All we can do at this point is hope that bad ideas do die in the forum of public thought. If what I and other free speech hard liners believe is true, than this episode should be part of Trump's undoing.

Logically, I really want to say it will be. Many factors look favorable-- many things looking bad for Trump!

Emotionally, it's hard to deny the real fear generated by this turn of events-- the crazy voices are not disappearing no matter how much I look through comments on Fox/Breitbart content.

It's all about how much faith you have in humanity to disavow hate and idiocy, and Trump's base is giving us every reason to lose more of that faith by the minute.
 
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Myzozoa

to find better ways to say what nobody says
is a Top Tiering Contributor Alumnusis a Past WCoP Champion
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/opinion/rich-getting-richer-taxes.html

the most basic:


"
A half-century ago, a top automobile executive named George Romney — yes, Mitt’s father — turned down several big annual bonuses. He did so, he told his company’s board, because he believed that no executive should make more than $225,000 a year (which translates into almost $2 million today).

He worried that “the temptations of success” could distract people from more important matters, as he said to a biographer, T. George Harris. This belief seems to have stemmed from both Romney’s Mormon faith and a culture of financial restraint that was once commonplace in this country.


Romney didn’t try to make every dollar he could, or anywhere close to it. The same was true among many of his corporate peers. In the early 1960s, the typical chief executive at a large American company made only 20 times as much as the average worker, rather than the current 271-to-1 ratio. Today, some C.E.O.s make $2 million in a single month.

The old culture of restraint had multiple causes, but one of them was the tax code. When Romney was saying no to bonuses, the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent. Even if he had accepted the bonuses, he would have kept only a sliver of them.

The high tax rates, in other words, didn’t affect only the post-tax incomes of the wealthy. The tax code also affected pretax incomes. As the economist Gabriel Zucman says, “It’s not worth it to try to earn $50 million in income when 90 cents out of an extra dollar goes to the I.R.S."

A few years after Romney turned down his bonuses from the American Motors Corporation, Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation that lowered the top marginal tax rate to 70 percent. Under Ronald Reagan, it dropped to 50 percent and kept falling. Since 1987, the top rate has hovered between 30 percent and 40 percent.

For more than 30 years now, the United States has lived with a top tax rate less than half as high as in George Romney’s day. And during those same three-plus decades, the pay of affluent Americans has soared. That’s not a coincidence. Corporate executives and others now have much more reason to fight for every last dollar.

The theory behind all those high-end tax cuts — a theory that I once found persuasive, I admit — was that it would unleash entrepreneurial energy: The lure of great wealth would inspire business leaders to work harder and smarter, and the economy would flourish.

The first half of that theory may well have come true. Many of the world’s most successful companies are American — not only Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, but also Exxon Mobil, Walmart, Johnson & Johnson and JPMorgan Chase. The second half of the theory, however, has been a bust. Most Americans have not flourished in the era of a reduced top-end tax rate.

Incomes for the middle class and poor have grown sluggishly since 1980, while the upper middle class has done modestly better. Only the wealthy have enjoyed the sort of healthy pay increases that had been the norm in the 1950s and ’60s. (Last month, I published a chart that showed these trends better than any paragraph can, and I encourage you to take a look if you haven’t already.)

The decline in high-end tax rates has helped change the culture of money. George Romney, a highly successful and personally decent man who thought that making even a couple million dollars a year was unseemly, begot Mitt Romney, a highly successful and personally decent man who has made a couple hundred million dollars.

Across society, the most powerful members of organizations have fought to keep more money for themselves. They have usually won that fight, which has left less money for everyone else.

What would be the right top tax rate today? I don’t know the precise answer. A top rate of 90 percent clearly has the potential to drive away entrepreneurs. But I am convinced that the current top tax rate, 39.6 percent, is too low.

It has contributed to soaring inequality, with the affluent having received both the biggest pretax raises and the biggest tax cuts. Plus, there is no evidence that a modestly higher rate would hurt the economy. The recent president with the strongest economic record, Bill Clinton, increased the rate, while the one with the weakest economic record, George W. Bush, cut it.

This week, President Trump and Congress will turn their attention to tax policy. After the failure of their health care bill, they are desperate for a legislative win and hope to pass a bill by year’s end. Of course, they are not considering a higher top tax rate.

The question is whether their plan will further cut taxes on the wealthy. The early evidence is that it will — enormously — while Trump pretends otherwise. If so, the tax bill will deserve the same fate as the health care plan: energetic and organized opposition, followed by defeat."
 

Chou Toshio

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I don't get what Myzozoa's post has to do with the topic, but I absolutely agree with the NY times article.

My thought would be to yes, increase taxes greatly on the top bracket-- that order of 70% seems about right-- while decreasing corporate taxes. At the end of the day, it's people who pay for taxes-- whether it be in consumers paying higher prices, workers with lower wages, or investors with lower returns. People pay for taxes, so we might as well tax the richest people. So them, and also as Bernie said-- speculating on Wallstreet.
(For a better financial industry, I would support policies that free up capital to move around, but slow down the speed of transactions to make people actually have to think about what they're doing)

Lower corporate taxes (especially against mid-small enterprises) to keep America competitive as an attractive market for businesses and entrepreneurship (besides having such a massive consumer base and consumer culture), but tax against absurd incomes (we will not be short on game-changing leadership talent by paying execs in the 10's of millions instead of the 100's of millions), and more importantly on absurd wealth (stockpiled absurd wealth, inheritance).
 

Myzozoa

to find better ways to say what nobody says
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"
III. The Promise of Exchange Value
In Charles Johnson’s “Exchange Value” a situation that might also have turned out that way does not. The way the story plays out what happens when a certain kind of person is defeated by being between one habituated life and another yet to be invented because something good turns out to be unbearable, says something about why the phrase “political economy” must thread throughout our analysis of cruel and usual optimism.Why do some people have the chops for improvising the state of being unknowing while others run out of breath, not humming but hoarding?

As with Ashbery’s lyric, this story begins with a meditation on neighbors and neighborhoods. “Exchange Value” takes place during the 1970s on the South Side of Chicago, around 49th Street. The protagonists, eighteen year-old Cooter and his older brother, Loftis, are poor and African American. They do not drive downtown regularly to see their friends, or frequent other neighborhoods regularly: they do not have cars.

Home and the ’hood are spaces of localized, personalized practices of encountering, wandering, and scrounging. But here, the intimacy of proximity has nothing to do with anyone’s lyric intersubjectivity, even though the story takes place in the meditative rhythms of Cooter’s way of parsing a new situation.
The subjects of “Exchange Value” are expressive and opaque, but with quite different valences than in our previous example.

The story opens onto a plot: two brothers concoct a plan to rob their possibly dead neighbor, Miss Bailey. Who is Miss Bailey? Nobody knows: she is a neighbor, so one does not need to know her; her job is to be around, to be a “character,” which is what you call someone who performs a familiar set of actions around you but is not intimate with you. Miss Bailey dresses in cast- off men’s clothes; like Cooter and Loftis, she eats free meals that she begs off of a local Creole restaurant; when Cooter gives her pocket change, she doesn’t spend it, she puts it in her mouth and eats it. This is what Cooter knows about her, deducing nothing more about her from her actions. The story takes place because she’s always around and then she isn’t. Cooter and Loftis think that perhaps she’s died and determine to get the first pickings.

This kind of behavior, this scavenging in other people’s stuff, is not characteristic of Cooter, but it doesn’t violate his fundamental relation to the world either. Compared to his brother, he’s always been branded a loser. “Mama used to say it was Loftis, not me, who’d go places . . . . Loftis, he graduated fifth at DuSable High School, had two gigs and, like Papa, he be always wanting the things white people had out in Hyde Park, where Mama did daywork sometimes.”

The children’s parents are both dead by this point in their lives: Papa from overwork and Mama because she was “big as a Frigidaire.” Having watched this, Cooter refuses to ride the wave of the American dream: remembering his parents “killing theyselves for chump change— a pitiful li’l bowl of porridge—I get to thinking that even if I ain’t had all I wanted, maybe I’ve had, you know, all I’m ever gonna get” and so organizes his life through the lateral enjoyments of fantasy “I can’t keep no job and sorta stay close to home, watching TV, or reading World’s Finest comic books, or maybe just laying dead, listening to music, imagining I see faces or foreign places in water stains on the wallpaper”.

But Cooter’s fantasies aren’t mimetic— they’re aleatory and passive ways of inhabiting and making an environment in which attachments are not optimistically pointing toward a cluster of transcendent promises but toward something else, something bearable that holds off not just the imminence of loss but the loss that, inevitably, just happened.

For Cooter fantasy isn’t a plan. It calibrates nothing about how to live. It is the action of living for him, his way of passing time not trying to make something of himself in a system of exploitation and exchange. In the political economy of his world, that system does not produce rest or waste but slow death, the attrition of subjects by the situation in which capital determines value. In this story, that scene dedicates the worker’s body to a deferred enjoyment that, if they’re on the bottom of the class structure, they are not likely to be around to take pleasure in, as his parents’ fate demonstrates. In contrast, Loftis’s relation to fantasy is realist. He inherited his parents’ optimism toward his life by being ambitious. But his strategies are strictly formal. He takes classes from Black Nationalists at the “Black People’s Topographical Library,” reads Esquire and The Black Scholar, and sews upscale labels onto his downscale clothes:28 to him getting ahead is what counts, whether it is via power, labor, or the “hustle”. His opinion of Cooter is quite low, because the younger brother is dreamy and has no drive. Nonetheless, they decide to do the job together.


Miss Bailey’s apartment is pitch dark and reeks of shit: a newspaper clipping from the Chicago Defender among the garbage reveals that her former employer, Henry Conners, had left her his entire estate, and that all of the years of scavenging and weirdness masked her possession of enormous wealth. It all makes sense in the dark. But when the light turns on, Cooter notes, “shapes come forward in the light and I thought for an instant like I’d slipped in space” (30). In this moment Cooter enters an impasse: his talent at making out foreign shapes becomes applied to his own life, which he can no longer occupy"

'Her living room, webbed in dust, be filled to the max with dollars of all denominations, stacks of stock in General Motors, Gulf Oil, and 3M company in old White Owl cigar boxes, battered purses, or bound in pink rubber bands. . . . [E]verything, like a world inside the world, you take it from me, so like picturebook scenes of plentifulness you could seal yourself off in here and settle forever. Loftis and me both drew breath suddenly. There be unopened cases of Jack Daniel’s, three safes cemented to the floor, hundreds of matchbooks, unworn clothes, a fuel- burning stove, dozens of wedding rings, rubbish, World War II magazines, a carton of a hundred canned sardines, mink stoles, old rags, a birdcage, a bucket of silver dollars, thousands of books, paintings, quarters in tobacco cans, two pianos, glass jars of pennies, a set of bagpipes, an almost complete Model A Ford dappled with rust, and I swear, three sections of a dead tree.'

How do we understand this collection not only of things but of details? Cooter’s verbal response is not to be a historian but a moralist: “A tree ain’t normal” (31). But to my eye the story’s main event, the scene of potential change, is somatic. Change is an impact lived on the body before anything is understood, and as such is simultaneously meaningful and ineloquent, engendering an atmosphere that they spend the rest of the story and their lives catching up to. It’s like winning the lottery, getting a wash of money they haven’t earned; being possessed by coming into possession of possessions, they are shocked into something impassive. This crack in the necessities of history makes Cooter’s head get light—“My knees failed; then I did a Hollywood faint” (32); Loftis “pant a little” and “for the first time . . . looked like he didn’t know his next move” (31).

Their bodies become suspended. But if riches change history, they also make it possible for history to be something other than a zone of barely or badly imagined possibility. Loftis returns to crazy reason and puts the break on their adrenalin. He forces Cooter to catalogue everything:

"Eventually, that cranky old ninnyhammer’s hoard adds up to $879,543 in cash, thirtytwo bank books (some deposits be only $5), and me, I wasn’t sure I was dreaming or what, but I suddenly flashed on this feeling, once we left her flat, that all the fears Loftis and me had about the future be gone, ’cause Miss Bailey’s property was the past—the power of that fellah Henry Conners trapped like a bottle spirit—which we could live off, so it was the future too, pure potential: can do. Loftis got to talking on about how that piano we pushed home be equal to a thousand bills, jim, which equals, say, a bad TEAC A- 3340 tape deck, or a down payment on a deuce- and- aquarter. Its value be (Loftis say) that of a universal standard of measure, relational, unreal as number, so that tape deck could turn, magically, into two gold lamé suits, a trip to Tijuana, or twenty- five blow jobs from a ho—we had $879,543 worth of wishes, if you can deal with that. Be like Miss Bailey’s stuff is raw energy, and Loftis and me, like wizards, could transform her stuff into anything else at will. All we had to do, it seemed to me, was decide exactly what to exchange it for. (34–35)

Cooter’s senses, awakened to the promises clustered around things, have truly become theoreticians. Exchange value is not identical to the price of things, but marks a determination of what else a thing can get exchanged for, as though money were not involved, exactly, in the mediations. Your coat for a piano. Your money for your life.

The scene of shocking wealth changes the terms of the meaning of life, of the reproduction of life, and of exchange itself. Loftis gets very quiet. Cooter grabs a bunch of money and goes downtown to spend it. But though downtown Chicago is just a few miles away, it is like a foreign country to Cooter: he does not speak its economic language. Theory aside, in practice Cooter doesn’t have a clue what to do with the money and realizes sickeningly, right away, that money cannot make you feel like you belong if you are not already privileged to feel that way. He buys ugly, badly made, expensive clothes that shame him right away. He eats meat until he gets sick. He takes cabs everywhere. When he gets home, his brother’s gone psychotic. Loftis has built an elaborate trap, a vault to protect the money. He yells at Cooter for spending, because the only power is in hoarding. Loftis says, “As soon as you buy something you lose the power to buy something” (36). He cannot protect himself from Miss Bailey’s fate: “suffering that special Negro fear of using up what little we get in this life” (37); inheritance “put her through changes, she be spellbound, possessed by the promise of life, panicky about depletion, and locked now in the past because every purchase, you know, has to be a poor buy: a loss of life”
(37–38).

Notice how frequently Johnson reverts to the word “life.” Can a person on the bottom survive living “life” stripped of the illusion of indefinite endurance via whatever kinds of fantasmatic practices he’s been able to cobble together? How quickly can one dispense with the old bargains between defense and desire, adapting to a regime whose rules provide no felt comfort?

“Exchange Value” demonstrates the proximity of two kinds of cruel optimism: with little cultural or economic capital and bearing the history of a racial disinheritance from the norms of white supremacist power, you work yourself to death, or coast to nonexistence; or, with the ballast of capital, you hoard against death, deferring life, until you die. Cooter is the realist; he can see that there’s no way out, now, no living as if not in a relation to death, which is figured in all of the potential loss that precedes it. This story is exquisitely tender toward the surrealism of survival in the context of poverty so extreme that riches can only confirm insecurity.


On either side of the capital divide, human creativity, energy, and agency are all bound up in bargaining, strategizing: it only begins with the mother at the sink predicting which of her sons has the sense to ride the rhythms of remuneration in the system; the parents dying before the kids are of age because of having had to scavenge for what Cooter scathingly calls “chump change”; Cooter choosing to live to feed his passivity and capacity for fantasy; and Loftis living amorally among a variety of styles for gaining upward mobility. Before the windfall they all manifest the improvisatory opportunism of people on the bottom who, having little to lose, and living in an economy of pleading, sharing, and hiding, will go for something if the occasion permits .

But the inheritance the sons engineer produces a sensorial break for them, and whereas the earlier modes of optimism included a community and a meanwhile that meant being somewhere and knowing people no matter what style of living- on one chose, the later modes almost force privacy, hoarding, becoming pure potential itself. The inheritance becomes the promise of the promise, of a technical optimism; it sutures them both to life lived without risk, in proximity to plenitude without enjoyment. For Loftis it destroys the pleasure of the stress of getting through the day because the scale of potential loss is too huge. Cooter is more passive: he’ll fold himself in to his brother’s crypt because that’s who he is, a person who does not make spaces but navigates the available ones.

At the same time, the withdrawal of the brothers from even vague participation in a life made from scheming mimes another aspect of the logic of capital. We have seen that they have always been the subjects of cruel optimism and its modes of slow death, having inherited their parents’ future- directed, life- building, do- it- so- your- kids- won’t- have- to discipline of the respectable body and soul. Now, in this relation of life- building to life- expending, they induce new generational orientations toward exhaustion. From coasting to the activity of the hustle they embody styles of being that can seem anything from subcivilized and extralegal to entrepreneurial and ambitious, in the good sense. In this final logic, though, capitalist sensibility in “Exchange Value” manifests as crazy in the way that reason is crazy—not only crazy- dogged, crazy- compulsive, crazy- formalist, and crazy- habituated, but crazy from the activity of maintaining structural contradictions.

In this world the subject’s confrontation with singularity is the most horrifying thing of all. Singularity is the part of one’s sovereignty that cannot be handed off to a concept, object, or property. Under capitalism, money is power and if one has only surplus amounts of it, sovereignty is infinite and yet a weight that cannot be borne. Exchange value was supposed to leaven the subject through the handoff of value to another, who would return something in kind. The space of exchange would make breathing space, and breathing space is what the capitalist subject, in all of her ambition, is trying to attain—the good life, as in Ashbery’s poem. But what usually gets returned in the exchange of desire embedded in things is merely, disappointingly, a brief episode, often with a thing as memento of the memory and not the actualization of desire.

In “Exchange Value” the money form in particular reveals in- kind reciprocity as a mirage, the revelation of which destroys for the brothers, and Miss Bailey before them, the whole infrastructure of trust in the world that merges the credit with the affectional economy and keeps people attached to optimism of a particular kind. If consumption promises satisfaction in substitution and then denies it because all objects are rest stops amid the process of remaining unsatisfied that counts for being alive under capitalism, in the impasse of desire, then hoarding seems like a solution to something. Hoarding controls the promise of value against expenditure, as it performs the enjoyment of an infinite present of holding pure potential. The end, then, is the story’s tableau of the structural contradiction that shakes, stuns, and paralyzes its protagonists. Under capitalism, being in circulation denotes being in life, while an inexhaustible hoard denotes being in fantasy, which is itself a hoarding station against a threatening real, and therefore seems like a better aspirational realism. But in fantasy one is stuck with one’s singular sovereignty in an inex haustable nonrelationality. Therefore, an unquantifiable surplus of money— what any capitalist subject thought anyone would want—turns each brother into a walking contradiction, a being who has what everyone wants and yet who reveals that the want that had saturated the fantasy of the whole imaginable world is wanting, because sovereignty, while ideal, is a nightmarish burden, a psychotic loneliness, and just tainted. This means that the object of cruel optimism here appears as the thing within any object to which one passes one’s fantasy of sovereignty for safekeeping. In cruel optimism the subject or community turns its treasured attachments into safety- deposit objects that make it possible to bear sovereignty through its distribution, the energy of feeling relational, general, reciprocal, and accumulative. In circulation one becomes happy in an ordinary, often lovely, way, because the weight of being in the world is being distributed into space, time, noise, and other beings. When one’s sovereignty is delivered back into one’s hands, though, its formerly distributed weight becomes apparent, and the subject becomes stilled in a perverse mimesis of its enormity. In a relation of cruel optimism our activity is revealed as a vehicle for attaining a kind of passivity, as evidence of the desire to find forms in relation to which we can sustain a coasting sentience, in response to being too alive.
 
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EV

Banned deucer.
Might as well just bold the whole article next time.

Srsly tho can we not c+p articles wholesale without any context? I don't know what it's in response to or what argument you're trying to make and I'm certainly not going to read the entire thing just to ferret out the point for you.
 

Soul Fly

IMMA TEACH YOU WHAT SPLASHIN' MEANS
is a Contributor Alumnus
Watch fox news break down while trying to process a mass shooter who is cis-white-male-millionaire-from-florida.

"we don't know enough about him to hate him yet."

damn.


really tells you all about race, privilege and broad institutional-level propaganda in the US.
 

TheValkyries

proudly reppin' 2 superbowl wins since DEFLATEGATE
Yep. Uh huh, unlike Adam Lanza who had a great reason to shoot children in an elementary school.
 

Myzozoa

to find better ways to say what nobody says
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lol so apparently there is a new rule on these forums specifically for deleting my posts because the mods think posts that require reading are more dangerous to this forum than actual mass shooters of which there have been plots in the pokemon community, so lol reposting my last post:

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles...ally-so-were-not-really-seeing-a-pattern-here

"First off, our thoughts and prayers go out to the latest hiker who was mauled by a lone wolf in our national park. The rabid wolf in question acted completely on its own. This foaming-at-the-mouth wolf was part of a one-wolf cell of resistance. We have no reason to believe the attack perpetrated by this specific bloodthirsty wolf can in any way be linked to the hundreds of other wolf-related and rabies-related incidents reported in our national park over the past few years."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/oct/02/america-mass-shootings-gun-violence

"The attack at a country music festival in Las Vegas that left at least 58 people dead is the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history – but there were six other mass shootings in America this past week alone."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/05/las-vegas-mass-shooting-rightwing-pundits

"And at libertarian site Reason, Jacob Sullum got to the emotional core of this form of rightwing bargaining with reality in the title of his article, ‘A massacre is not an argument’."
 
lol so apparently there is a new rule on these forums specifically for deleting my posts because the mods think posts that require reading are more dangerous to this forum than actual mass shooters of which there have been plots in the pokemon community, so lol reposting my last post:

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles...ally-so-were-not-really-seeing-a-pattern-here

"First off, our thoughts and prayers go out to the latest hiker who was mauled by a lone wolf in our national park. The rabid wolf in question acted completely on its own. This foaming-at-the-mouth wolf was part of a one-wolf cell of resistance. We have no reason to believe the attack perpetrated by this specific bloodthirsty wolf can in any way be linked to the hundreds of other wolf-related and rabies-related incidents reported in our national park over the past few years."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/oct/02/america-mass-shootings-gun-violence

"The attack at a country music festival in Las Vegas that left at least 58 people dead is the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history – but there were six other mass shootings in America this past week alone."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/05/las-vegas-mass-shooting-rightwing-pundits

"And at libertarian site Reason, Jacob Sullum got to the emotional core of this form of rightwing bargaining with reality in the title of his article, ‘A massacre is not an argument’."
Alright I'm gonna step in here and explain a couple things for future reference.

I agree with the new rule as it stands, and did when it was brought up in the mod circle. Cong shouldn't be just giving people a bunch of homework and telling them it speaks for itself. You should at least take the effort to spell out what points they're responding to and how their articles fit into their arguments. This is so that discussion can flow better in the future.

I like the articles myzo posts on a regular basis. I read these articles. There is nothing wrong with bringing literature to the table and it should be encouraged.

I also do think that in the spirit of the rule, a small number of articles with a small number of quotes which clearly explain the purpose of posting the article should be fine, if the quotes make up a clean argument. The issue has been brought up in the past where gigantic posts of full walls of text with no original content can be a conversation stopper. You should bring whatever problems you have with the enforcement of a rule to the attention of the person who deleted the post and/or the other mods privately.

Since you brought this out publicly, I'm offering a public explanation. What we're working to achieve is a proper code of conduct which ultimately creates a productive and comfortable discussion environment. With few exceptions, I will not be policing anyone on the quality or content of their ideas so long as that content exists and follows decent standards of conduct and site rules.
 

OLD GREGG (im back baby)

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Myzozoa


After looking through these articles...the journalism seems a bit yellow idk...
The first article draws a false equivalency by comparing a disturbed human individual to an animal...not at all the same.
The second article is misleading because modern history goes farther back than ten years. I suggest you look up the Wounded Knee Massacre and Black Wall Street where the number of deaths tallied into triple digits.
The third article opens up with the gun debate which is funny. The real question here isn't why civilians would need semi-auto's but instead it is why police officers need them. If we are going to ban something we shouldn't half-ass ban it. If semi-autos go then they should be all the way gone imo.
 

GatoDelFuego

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This guy really was a black swan and there is no good explanation for why he did what he did
Are you replying to soul fly's post w/ this? Because the guy being a nut or lone wolf or bad apple or not doesn't "excuse" fox news's M.O. following the shooting. It's revealing of their agenda. (Which all news stations have, no denying that)
 
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Myzozoa

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Myzozoa


After looking through these articles...the journalism seems a bit yellow idk...
The first article draws a false equivalency by comparing a disturbed human individual to an animal...not at all the same.
The second article is misleading because modern history goes farther back than ten years. I suggest you look up the Wounded Knee Massacre and Black Wall Street where the number of deaths tallied into triple digits.
The third article opens up with the gun debate which is funny. The real question here isn't why civilians would need semi-auto's but instead it is why police officers need them. If we are going to ban something we shouldn't half-ass ban it. If semi-autos go then they should be all the way gone imo.
1. lol, don't be so sure.
2. youre right, but whats your point? "American history is full of mass killings'? I think we agree, but as the article says we've had over 1500 mass shootings in the last 1700 days. Should we just accept that we're one day gonna get downed on our way to work? These incidents are just gonna happen more and more often. Or is your point that maybe America should (go back to a time where) have the government target black people and native americans for mass killings instead of letting mentally ill white men open up on crowds of country music fans? Either way, your idea in 2 seems to be that mass shootings are not that big of a problem historically, or that they are an inevitable part of life in America. Now whether you're right or wrong here, the main release granted by such conclusions is they allow anyone to accept that they can't actually do anything to address mass shootings. This emotional release is desirable because it rationalizes individuals perception that they cannot take action to stop mass shootings in present moment America. When they actually don't do anything, then they feel they're being reasonable.

But I do not accept this, there are steps we could take: expanding mental health services, new gun regulations, and actual opportunities for people to make their lives meaningfully better.

3. very good, if only everyone had so much foresight as dear old_gregg. while i agree that it is correct to be consistent about applying a semi-auto ban to police officers, obv not many supporters of guns rights would be keen on a semi-auto ban.

Blazade I'm sure my posts are precisely what the mods had in mind when they made that rule, that rule on its own is ridiculous, unreflective, and came about with no transparent discussion, i.e the type of discussion that takes place when people actually care about making rules to make a forum better, and aren't just targeting one user that posts every two weeks.
 
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tcr

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Old_Gregg are you seriously stupid enough to think 1890 and 1921 are "modern" with respect to mass shootings? Despite one being considered an official wartime battle?

The first article Myzozoa linked was making fun of the "lone wolf" aspect attributed to white shooters. This labeling is a huge double standard compared to other shootings, such as the Orlando Pulse shooting. If someone is white conservative media downplays the severity of the attack, saying it was nothing but a fluke commited by a mentally ill person, while if they're brown they're automatically a terrorist. The fox news bit that Soul Fly linked shows this extremely well, with Brian Kilmeade doing his best to find a motive and saying "we don't know enough to hate him yet" when failing to find one. Conservative news sites do their best to protray an "us vs them" mentality, dehumanizing every single shooter and in effect sidelining the issue by explaining away the shooting. "Oh ofc Adam Lanza shot up children, he was a basement dweller still living with his mom." Instead they should be focusing on the commonality between these shootings, that is inadequate mental health care and and inordinate access to firearms.

As to your third point, officers should certainly have limited access to firearms. Many countries do just fine without a militarized police. Unfortunately the "justice" culture of America actively prevents this. Drug dealers and minorities are executed in the street for very small non violent crimes in order to fill some maligned quota because the police are incompetent at dealing with real active threats (serial killers point to this incompetence, Zodiac Killer, Ted Bundy, the amount of unsolved murders and rapes is ridiculous). If the police do nothing because no violent crimes have been committed, the people revolt. Ofc there's crime out there so if the police aren't catching the bad guys then obviously they're not doing their job right? However demilitarization of law enforcement will probably never happen due to gun culture in America. There are too many unhealthy people out there that believe they should "prepare" for some imaginary government take over, all the while ignoring that they could never be able to go toe to toe with a military coup. It's all a dogwhistle for "i just like having some small amount of power as compensation." There is zero legitimate reason for people to own anything except a pistol and maybe a hunting rifle to defend themselves in their own home. Anything more is overtly excessive and disguised behind the flimsy reason of "oh I use my AR-15 in order to hunt deer!!"
 
As to your third point, officers should certainly have limited access to firearms. Many countries do just fine without a militarized police. Unfortunately the "justice" culture of America actively prevents this. Drug dealers and minorities are executed in the street for very small non violent crimes in order to fill some maligned quota because the police are incompetent at dealing with real active threats (serial killers point to this incompetence, Zodiac Killer, Ted Bundy, the amount of unsolved murders and rapes is ridiculous). If the police do nothing because no violent crimes have been committed, the people revolt. Ofc there's crime out there so if the police aren't catching the bad guys then obviously they're not doing their job right?
Can you elaborate on this? I'm not quite sure I understand. Are you claiming that the police murder drug dealers and minorities (who commit non-violent crimes) because they have a quota of people to kill? And that this quota exists because presumably they can't be bothered to solve real crimes? Crimes I take it you think are solvable but just aren't because of this quota or something ??? So basically the police aren't solving crimes that they could be because they are busy murdering non-violent drug-dealers/minorities?

I also don't really see how the new rule is "ridiculous" although I do agree a public discussion about it probably would've been for the best.
 
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