[Max Goodman]

Originally Posted by Andrew Mandelbaum

Max,
Is this a serious theory, that Charlie's deep clinging to, for example, the preposterous definitions of the Left, Patriotism, Trump, and Believers in his last post is created by sharp confrontation?

Not created. The theory, as I understand it, is that confrontation won't help Charlie to a better understanding of these issues, and is likely, in fact, to make it harder for him to understand them.

Originally Posted by Andrew Mandelbaum

Or are you saying...

If you want to better understand what the Dartmouth researchers are saying, asking me is the wrong approach. Above, I've provided a link to an article about the study. Here's one to the actual study.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

My response is a disagreement with the conclusions being drawn from the article. I think the "backfire" is just a higher reading of an already existing commitment to defend an underlying certainty. I doubt there is any way to actually engage those certainties without that backfire unless it is through other human avenues that have nothing to do with public debate. So, I am not here to do anything like "help" Charlie.

Without the courage to place the certainty, and security that comes with it , on the blocks I have never seen this sort of argument make any conversions so I never even imagine that that is what I am about. I say this from experience. I am not, contrary to Charlie's schtick here, educated in the academy or with any stake in it. Until recently I was a high school quitter of the working class. I have been in demolition, roofing, even ditch digging as an honest choice for decades until settling into old house carpentry. I just read stuff for my own interest. Every day I try to put any recognized intellectual safe hiding place out into fresh air and open to ravages of what's-really-out-there. Whatever is still there at the end of the day, I take back inside for the night. I admit i don't have alot of grace for folks who refuse to do the same and white wash the violences their certainties need to survive.

In the there are implications in what Charlie and others say on here that seem to ugly to not pick a fight with. So I pick a fight.

I think that might make me a jerk some days. I can live with that.

[William A. Baurle]

I wonder how many in this thread have gone in private with Charlie, because I see accusations of him which I know for a fact are utterly false.

What bothers me tremendously is this word "trolling." I can't say it's directly aimed at Charlie, but if it is, it's just plain false. For those of you who've mentioned trolling, all I can say is you must not have had any interaction with a real Internet troll. I saw one belligerent soul shut down at least two newsgroups in a relatively short amount of time, with nothing but vicious and multitudinous posts that eventually no-one had any time for. This site is moderated, and it's almost impossible to troll for very long on a moderated website without being called out and banned. The days of the anarchic newsgroups are old hat, and the term troll has lost a lot of its punch. From what I can see when things get heated, the term is like any other ad-hom: applied when it's convenient, and getting no-one anywhere but stuck in useless anger and frustration.

So let's stop with the accusation, since it is entirely without basis. And ya know it, that's the frustrating thing! If you want someone to respect your argument, why not refrain from accusations that are clearly and demonstrably false? (That goes for all of us, of course.)

As for the danger of ideological thinking, it works both ways. The far Left can be just as lethal as the far Right. I brought up Russia, 1918, in a recent argument wherein someone asked why I said just that. His only real answer was, "well, that was a century ago," as if that meant anything. We are already seeing so-called peaceful protests erupt into violence. If the mob gets whipped up enough, they will stop at nothing. History has proven this, and whether the mob chant for the Left or the Right makes precious little difference. Extremists on both sides will eventually run dangerously short of restraint once their collective wrath builds to a breaking point.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

William,
If you will show me something in my case against Charlie's ideas that you know as a fact to not be present in his ideas, either willfully or implicitly, I would be interested in hearing it.

If the information expressed on this thread in support Trump or his policies is gathered from a peer based review of either history or science or what have you, again I would be interested to hear it.

If you have a way that ideas like inerrant notes form exclusive and violent Deities can be put forward as the last word in the polis without them becoming ideologies of force, again I would be interested in how that might work.

The left you bring up, I assume, is the Bolsheviks and later Stalin. Personally I don't recognize most of that business with the anything but another Statist ideology gone bad. So if that is the Left, then I am not. I think the State and its techniques are what most threatens life on this globe and that only ideas more kin to anarchism, mutual aid, and what-have-you have any real promise. Not the place for a long rant on this but I am all Fanya Baron and very little Trotsky I guess. I don't think socialism is innately tied to that sort of business. I think the idea that the autonomous movements for environmental, gender, and economic justice have murderous counterparts today to the destruction of capitalism, consolidation, and religious fundamentalism is total bull%$#t. Any evidence that I am wrong here, again I would be interested in seeing.

The last person to use the word trolling was me. I used it about my own behaviour of late, responding aggressively to each of CS's posts. I also said why that was so. If my writing is unclear on those points, I apologize.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

nevermind.

[Andrew Szilvasy]

Well, this isn't good:

http://observer.com/2017/02/donald-t...ssian-embassy/

[Julie Steiner]

Neither is the combination of this (North Korea has taken its saber-rattling up a notch, with a provocative ballistic missile test) and this (Trump nixed the experienced deputy that our neophyte Secretary of State was begging for; apparently the need for a U.S. State Department that knows its ass from its elbow is less important than the fact that the guy had criticized Trump during the presidential campaign).

And in other news, the Trump Administration's attacks on the judiciary leg of the three-legged stool known as the Constitution's separation of powers continue, too. That can't be good, either.

[William A. Baurle]

Originally Posted by Andrew Mandelbaum

The left you bring up, I assume, is the Bolsheviks and later Stalin. Personally I don't recognize most of that business with the anything but another Statist ideology gone bad.

Andrew,

I wrote: 'Russia, 1918'. There is nothing to assume.

Anyone who hasn't lived under a rock will know exactly what I referred to, to be blunt. That revolution had repercussions that affected the world, and, more heinously, flattened and demoralized the Russian populace.

Statist ideology doesn't have to go bad, it's bad to begin with. When you believe that the state is more important than the individual, and that any number of individuals can and often must be sacrificed to maintain the well-being of something that is not a flesh and blood entity but a nebulous abstraction— and essentially an unattainable dream in the heads of a few privileged intellectuals—then something is terribly wrong.

The October Revolution was not just an ideology gone wrong. It was a bloody massacre of innocents.

And let's not forget the French Revolution. Yet another festival of blood and carnage.

When the Mob rules, all bets are off. The Mob can be right or left, it doesn't matter. A mob will behave the way a mob behaves. And it's never pretty, and it's never good.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

William,
I don't think you are understanding my point.
During 1918 in Russia there wasn't just one desire, one vision, or one Left. 1918 was when the Cheka turned on the anarchist who had for the most part already saw that "All Power to the Soviets" was just a short lived joke of the new State. Bakunin called their s*&t decades earlier.
July 1918 was the time of the crushed Third Russian Revolt, thus my Fanya Baron comment, so sorry bud but to me it is way more complicated than that. It appears you can crawl out from one rock and still be under another. As is true of my own post I am sure.

Real threats to the State are always turned on from all sides. Kronstadt always has to be eliminated. Like in Spain. Look at Rojava now. Not without mistakes or violent crimes on every particular but the experiment there is what I think of when I think of comrades. Or Chiapas. Or actually some of ideas in the Permaculture/Resilience hub here to lesser degree of break. I "root" for Sanders/Warren types not because I settle for the silly binary that makes this thread so tedious. I think they are more likely to create an environment less hostile to something genuine. I think the monopolization of the means of violence by the State makes the idea of some violent seizure of power a nonsensical idea so guillotine jokes aside, I don't know what 1789 has to do with anything in my posts or ideas.

I am assuming you are including the State you live beneath in your explanation. The fact that the utopic dream it offers came on a spoon just after birth and that the individuals it sacrifices are often out of sight and sound hardly changes anything.

In Neither Victims Nor Executioners, Camus writing against both these States said something he could have wrote today in defense of all those who say f*&k your binary, a another world is possible and it isn't Capitalist. Marxist or anything that plays nice with the species-ist grind we call civilization. Unfortunately the Plague that trying to get its Juggernaut on in the changing room on the Hill needs seeing to in the immediate.

"To reply once more and finally to the accusation of Utopia: for us, the choice is simple - Utopia or the war now being prepared by antiquated modes of thought.... Skeptical though we are (and as I am), realism forces us to this Utopian alternative. When our Utopia has become part of history, as with many others of like kind, humanity will find themselves unable to conceive reality without it. For History is simply humanity's desperate effort to give body to its most clairvoyant dreams." Camus

[Andrew Frisardi]

Tying in with something Andrew M. said earlier in this thread: "These Conservative Christians Are Opposed to Trump—and Suffering the Consequences.