Recently, Argument Clinic received a formal request: “How do you argue against white supremacists?”
Is this the right room for an argument
Our work is cut out for us. In this particular episode, while we will retain our usual superior, snotty, didactic, tone, we encourage The Commentariat(tm) to help us out. A definitive treatment of the question “How to argue with white supremacists” probably involves winning a civil war – and decisively winning it, at that.
What is complete
The valley spirit never dies.
Call it the mystery, the woman.
The mystery,
the Door of the Woman,
is the root
of earth and heaven.
Forever this endures, forever.
And all its uses are easy.
A friend of mine just had some open heart surgery (isn’t modern medicine amazing!?) and is recovering nicely. His wife is a great and brilliant artist with a fantastic memory, and she recalled a discussion we’d once had about Fentanyl…
Theologians tell and repeat to us that man is free, while all their teachings conspire to destroy his liberty. Trying to justify Divinity, they accuse him really of the blackest injustice. They suppose that, without grace, man is compelled to do evil: and they maintain that God will punish him for not having been given the grace to do good!
Your host, Jean Meslier
Some political analysts have described the Badgerian political system as “passive aggressive,” though most would say that it relies on “fail soft” behaviors. While American Thomas Jefferson might say, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and martyrs” that sounds like a great deal of fuss to a Badgerian, who would probably re-phrase that as “neglect may kill tyranny as surely as revolution, it’s just slower.”
Imagine you’re a graduate student in American History and you write a thesis that’s so good, so striking, and so timely that it’s deservedly a best-seller: 200,000 copies. As Ray Wylie Hubbard says, “careers have been built on less.”
Religion is handed down from fathers to children as the property of a family with the burdens.
Your host, Jean Meslier
Political legitimacy is achieved by having a system of government in which the people agree to it, giving up a bit of their autonomy in order to gain the benefits of participating in the collective.
Walter Mosley could have been channeling the founding archons of Badgeria when he said:
This is a piece I stumbled across a few years ago; it’s interesting, especially considering when it was written: 1949. The author was looking back at Europe’s successive troubles and accurately saw the disturbance as an effect of the economics of the industrial revolution. The analysis seems pretty simple to me: imperialism was waning and the vast changes in the European powers’ economies brought on by new industrial processes (in particular, weaponry) created a perfect storm of events that – for a time – discredited capitalism. The Russian revolution was through the process of turning into Stalin’s dictatorship – discrediting communism in turn. Aristocracy, in the form of the family of elite pinheads who destroyed Europe, didn’t look particularly good, either.
When I close my eyes I usually see a brief, fading afterimage of whatever I was looking at, then blobby darkness. If I’m engaging in default behavior, I guess my eyes have rolled up and I’m looking at the inside of the back of my forehead.