there are political friends and enemies on any issue. — fdrake

Fdrake, enemies are people you look at through the sights of your assault rifle hoping to incapacitate them, even kill them, before they kill you. Those are enemies. Your fellow citizen who has a totally different political world-view, ideology and political agenda about everything is not at all your enemy, but an opponent with whom you make the best democracy you can.

Antifa super soldiers care a lot more about democracy and free speech than the lipservice most people pay to it. — fdrake

Lol! :lol:

Oh that's like an ardent breeze from the 1930's quite in tone with those delirious überlosers hallucinating in their dreams that they are now living in similar time as Weimar Germany and resisting rising Hitlerism and hence picking fights with similar losers with grandiose out of this World pipe dreams. I simply don't get those crowds who want to pick a fight with each other. It's like this perverse love relationship the antifa and the neonazis have: they desperately need each other.

Of course in the end it's pretty pathetic especially in the US which not only is very prosperous, but has a most effective huge security control system that has totally infiltrated all these radical groups.

We're creating schisms in societies by setting up every difference as irreconcilable, with us vs them, winner-takes-all, while we still need to live together. It's all pretty toxic. — Benkei

I wanted to go back on this.

It seems like this type of vitriolic politics is being copied from the US to Europe (among other things). I think it's a warning sign when political parties start simply rejecting any kind of cooperation with another parties and when consensus seeking is loathed so much. It's not the parties themselves who are an issue here (as it is partly a show), it's the gap that is built between the supporters of the parties.

Consider carefully rereading my original post. — Maw

Ok, so there (assuming I have the right one), you say:

Bret complained about this change on false premises, arguing via email that this was a "show of force", which it wasn't, since it was always optional. — Maw

And Bret Weinstein has explained this. He thought that it is quite different for a 'Day of Absence' being celebrated by African-Americans being absent (as a boycott mimicking past passive resistance) and to ask white people to stay away. I think that there is an obvious difference in the nuance. And I guess that in any way such a day would and should be optional anyway in either way 'celebrated', hopefully, so that this is a non-issue here. What is the false premiss or lying that refer to I don't know.

ssu, why did you remove my following sentence — Maw

Because I just wanted to note that what you described as only a few persons involved was obviously far more, simple as that.

I'm not interested to listen to Spencer, but I think I agree with this. And Shapiro as political commentator and a talk show host indeed wants people on the left to get provoked.

The simple problem here is to see nazis everywhere, just as for the right it is this quite odd fixation about there being these postmodernist cultural marxists undermining the society in the academia.

The trouble is that Spencer, Milo, and Bannon (and Shapiro) are great at positioning classically far right and Fascist ideas something else. To an average white seventeen year old, all they will see is someone claiming to represent their interests with some fancy sounding ideas about religion and government. The deeper they get into alt-right circles the more they're being exposed to mountains of misleading bull-shit that individually they have little hope of refuting (shit about "white genocide/death", shit about anti-semetic conspiracy theories, shit about "the muslim invasion", shit about "the evils of diversity", shit about "race and IQ" and more). Once the damage is done and they've accepted the basic alt-right program of bat-shit ideas, dissuading them is like talking to a flat-earther who cites nothing but obscure, convoluted, and misleading arguments to make their case. — VagabondSpectre

Yet one shouldn't go too far with this theory of a political gateway drug to nazism. Because it sounds like an argument like "if smoke marijuana, you'll end up as a heroin addict". Because there is the lure just to enlarge every conservative pundit having this kind of veiled agenda, which simply is false. Just to remind people that this thread was about Roger Scruton.

It is as condescending as thinking that every social democrat is actually for Marxism-Leninism and authoritarian communism. That they 'just disguise' themselves as believing in things like democracy.

this issue, which occurred two years ago at a college campus and really only affected a few people --- I don't mention Bret Weinstein because he was not, in actuality, a major component to the story. He inserted himself as a major figure during on-going protests for personal exposure. --- It wasn't until May that the incidents I mentioned regarding black students occurred and protests appeared throughout the campus. Weinstein confronted the protesters who shouted him down, in part because of his emails. Whether or not they were right to do so is frankly neither here nor there, as Weinstein later appeared on white nationalist Tucker Carlson's show on Fox and knowingly gave a false version of the events, which lead to alt-right targeting and harassment towards the school. — Maw

So Weinstein inserted himself to this (with apparently an outrageous and provocating email???) and then knowingly gave a false version of the events? So just what was he lying about?

About 80 students were sanctioned for breaking the student conduct code at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, where race-related protests broke out on campus during the spring, college officials say.

About 120 incident reports involving 180 students were filed during spring and summer quarters, college spokeswoman Sandra Kaiser told The Olympian.

“Of those 180 students, approximately 80 were found responsible for their actions,” she said. “They received sanctions ranging from formal warnings, community service and probation, to suspension.”

See the Olympian article Here’s how many students were sanctioned for breaking Evergreen’s conduct code last spring, summer

I wouldn't say that 80 students being sanctioned and suspended (after over 100 incident reports) is just a few people. And Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying receiving a $450,000 settlement and $50,000 in legal fees from the college tells something. Of course with your logic, this perhaps was Weinstein's plan all along to provoke the students and start a new career or something.

As I've said, this odd incident was picked up by the media basically for it's oddity and naturally was cherished and upheld by conservative media. The rarity of the incident and others like it is quite telling and actually show how the thousands of campuses and universities in the US aren't affected with similar issues. Simply put it, today's students aren't on a verge of starting a revolution. However your spin on the events is simply a bit biased.

What we probably don't want is hysteria on a crowded boat. — pomophobe

And this what we should really notice and stop here. There's no need for hysteria.

Students being hysterical asses in Ivy League universities is rather unimportant in the end. They are enjoying their time being woke and being so hip 'university students' and simply having fun before they start their top notch careers. And isn't it awesome for them if they get some professor fired? So they don't care about the wars the US, but do care if some provocative right-wing commentator is invited to their university campus to give a speech or are concerned of 'microagressions'. That's their thing to be so woke about. Let them have their egotrips I say.

Yet it really isn't that important. Just look at how radical university students, or the loudest leftist part of them, were in the 1960's and just how traditional that generation came out to be. The media has picked up these incidents mainly because of the absurdity factor, like the Yale Hollywood suit incident or the Evergreen incident and so on.

Right wing commentators like Scruton will be attacked. That's just the nature of the game.

Outsiders, though, see fanatics on both sides of them. The alt-right and the PC-left are perhaps equally eager to reduce their freedom. — pomophobe

Well, both like authoritarianism and actually aren't so excited about liberal tolerance. Radicals always hate the present that we have and want real change, something totally else.

but surely their are crazies in the red states who would vote for laws against blasphemy, etc. — pomophobe

Naturally. But for those it's quite easy to notice that the belief on liberties aren't actually so important.

By the measure of the content of their postion, that conservativism is a problem. They, in many respects, reject the valuing of particular groups. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Ah, like the class enemy is to the communist? Sounds like authoritarianism.

To be an ordinary conservative, for example, who thinks having a penis means your a man and a vagina means your a women, constitutes a devaluing and oppression of trans people. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Oppression, really?

Without going into the sex and gender issue, I'll take another example. So if I think that humans are omnivores because humans can eat meat, do I then oppress vegans? Am I really oppressing, devaluing or ridiculing them? You see you are making a similar kind of interpretation here.

This is the problem in thinking that having different thoughts means naturally that you then automatically oppress, hate, vilify, are against and surely will attack others that have different thoughts, ideas and feelings. Is it so hard to really respect others that have different thoughts and likes? Or different philosophy?

In the critical way, these positions are not different to the nazis, alt right or intentional monsters. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yep, there's the smoking gun. In the critical way. But what are the nazi like positions, really?

One doesn't need to demanding slavery for or attempting to genocide a group to have a culture which devalues or oppresses them. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yes, one can be a leftist SJW to do that too, to have that emotional hatred towards others.

Plenty of that happens in the values and expectations a lot of people consider "ordinary." — TheWillowOfDarkness

Or those with the values of being "progressive", "open to new ideas", "tolerant" and "woke".

Yes, I'd agree with this, that's why I think claims of being "anti-free-speech" are weaponised. Everyone is anti free speech. — Isaac

I don't think everyone is. And besides, anyone saying that people should have the right of free speech obviously do then logically give the opening for different viewpoints.

All I'm arguing is that continually deferring to the democratic decisions that have already been established, with regards to where these lines are, is pointlessly circular. Either Shapiro and the like do not influence the voting public (in which case shutting them down is of no consequence), or they do. If they do, then one cannot expect the democratic system to deal with the effect they have by restricting speech appropriately. — Isaac

I don't actually get your point here or perhaps I haven't read this part of the conversation. What's the fuss with this quick-speaking Jewish right-wing political commentator that resigned from Breitbart?

I don't know where you got that conclusion from in thread. — fdrake

From the comments after the OP, I guess.

Especially when many of the comments have been about the weaknesses of the liberal interpretation of freedom of speech to cooption by the far right. — fdrake

What is the far right here? Is Scruton really a spokesperson for the far right? It is about the Overton window in public discourse.

Sorry if I'm confusing people here, but I do make the difference between conservatism and the far right just as I do with social democracy and communism.

This presumes there is a binomial {with freedom of speech/without freedom of speech}. It's that framing which I dispute. — Isaac

In a society without free speach, which typically is a totalitarian society, this is a fact. People do behave differently. There is a genuine collective fear which stifles even ordinary debate.

In the US (or the West) this whole debate isn't about existence of free speech, but it is about the Overton window in public discourse. And that is totally different.

Hence the debate starting from Roger Scruton, but easily going to all the usual right-wing suspects, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson etc. An many go with the leftist line that anything beyond this or that and the people have to be white supremacist nazi bigots.

It seems like 'free-speech' is being presented as some kind of unique pre-requisite to social reform — Isaac

I'd say it's an inherent part of a functioning democracy and basically acts as a safety valve. People are very adaptable and do quite easily adapt to censorship and self-censorship. And it shows, really. Without freedom of speach, people are different and behave really differently.

You might avoid talking about politics with a total stranger (if he or she happens to be totally opposed to your ideas), yet there is no true fear about talking publicly your mind.

I remember how dramatically Russians changed once when Soviet Union collapsed. Politics and traumatic experiences of the past (and present) were something they didn't simply talk about. It didn't exist. The way to speak was called the lithurgy. Endless official jargon without any meaning, very hilarious when you actually think about it. Now they (the Russians) may be vary of publicly criticizing Putin, but are quite open to talk privately or with Russians about politics. Before not so.

Likely higher. And likely there would have been more povetry across the continent especially in the 19th and early 20th Century.

Just look at the place where there wasn't such mass emigration: India and China. They didn't have this kind of mass movement, at least back then. European emigration went to basically to (North and South) America, South Africa and Australia.

There's a simple answer to all of this: there actually is an US immigration policy, which both parties when in power adhere to.

Even if the rhetoric is naturally totally different and yes, there are small differences how the policy is nuanced. In the long run it has been quite similar. It's just like the War on Terror. Just look at how similar Obama and Bush were. Even Trump in the end is quite similar.

Corporations invest in both sides to subvert them as best they can, old and new media certainly aren't dominated by the right, and anecdotally it seems like there's a well funded pundit for every political niche. — VagabondSpectre

I've learnt here that this is toxic centrism.

You presume a position of political certainty where the battle lines are drawn--e.g., the Left vs white supremacist murderers--from which you can make an intervention to tell us all that we're wasting our time at best, paving the road to hell at worst.

But the political situation to me and others is different from that, hence the discussion. Hence the need for discussion. — jamalrob

Hear, hear

Yet too many actors gain from the vitriolic nature of modern (non)debate. Heated debate creates more posts, more activity (clicks) and makes you embrace your side more. Add the anonymity to the debate and that there is nothing that we have to do otherwise together, hence there is no need to be cordial and respectful. The opposing side isn't simply wrong, it's a sinister evil. Hence respecting opposing thoughts to your own is a sign of weakness or worse. Seeking a consensus is simply wrong.

Regarding “conservativism” it is clear enough to me that it’s suffering, and going to suffer more, simply because the world is changing fast. — I like sushi

Scruton and Murray do get to the point just why conservatism seems so feeble compared to the left (and I would also add compared to the extreme-right). Cherishing how things are, love of your country and your people is especially in a democratic justice state is quite lame and uninteresting. Conservatism is for those who at least are doing OK. Those that look for scapegoats in minorities and have more hate in their hearts than actual love for their people are made of a different mold and will look for radical changes. In political discourse and in the university traditional conservatism sounds extremely boring. However when it comes to real life and the choices people make in their own lives, conservative values are quite popular. In a leftist welfare state like mine I would say that many of those that vote for social democrats are otherwise quite conservative: they like how things are and don't object at all to what the free market can offer them, with the supervision of the government of course.

Conservatism a political movement for a silent majority which doesn't make a huge fuss about itself. Radical leftism is on the other hand quite hip for a loud extrovert minority who want to shake things up, especially when nobody here in the West has experienced the true nature of totalitarian Marxism-Leninism. It's very apt for Scruton to depict Murray as being 'harmless'. Of course the left wouldn't see Douglas Murray at all like that, yet there is a point about it when you talk about upholding free speach. You then have to respect that other people have different views about everything than you.

In my opinion we don't call mathematics what is patternless. — Mephist

That's the whole point! It's genuinely defining the limits of computable math. What here is important is to understand just how basic patterns are for ordinary mathematics.

I would argue that nobody would consider a mathematical paper that express patternless theorems. — Mephist

Think so?

When we don't have a pattern, we can't extrapolate, calculate or do the other usual mathematical stuff. Yet of course something not having a pattern is still logical and still part of mathematics. Same thing with immeasurability or non-measurability. Take for example the non-measurable sets like the Vitali set.

Maybe there are even parts of nature that don't follow any map, but the ones that follow the map are the ones that we may be able to understand. — Mephist

Isn't everything itself a perfect model of itself?

Following a map is somewhat difficult metaphor to understand. You see if there is a pattern, then we can extrapolate from the pattern. Yet something can be patternless, which still has a perfect model of itself and that is itself.

Back to the actual topic, here is the culprit talking among other things about this incident and conservatism in general to another wretched right-winger:

There is no school of philosophy about pessimism. Fate, yes. Suffering, yes. Depression, yes. Pessimism, no. — ernestm

There isn't?

Well, even a philosophical school has to sell itself. The teachings have to interest someone and give an answer.

Suffering fatalism that ends with an answer of overall pessimism would be cherished only by the person contemplating a suicide.

You're going to hate me for saying this; but, if it comes down to a decision between Biden or Trump, I would pick Trump. — Wallows

This is the new normal. This guy is so bad and lousy he actually cannot do much, but the other guys are going to be even worse.

Perhaps inability to do anything should be viewed as a positive trait?

Look at you go!

Your arrogance and ideological tribal fervor is so over the top that it's hilarious, yet so telling. Where did I say that the Koch's exclusively donate to politicians and campaigns? Donating to think tanks etc. can be a way to effect party policy and this can be done, in the end, for personal gains. Yet with the so popular tradition, just give an answer to things that have nothing to do with what I actually say. How this conversation reminds me of the debates with the old venerable LandruGuideUs chap.

The total inability to see that populists (by the traditional definition of populism, actually) both on the left and the right don't really like billionaires funding politics is obvious. At least those that fund the other sides favorite issues. Oh but this is what? Toxic centrism? That would be a new one. Even to refer that both sides would engage in basically similar demagoguery (even in their alternate universes, of course) is heresy for you as obviously one side is justifiably right, errr the left that is, and the other side just resorts to absurd lies that have absolutely nothing to do with reality.

Anyway, it was the Romans. — unenlightened

If I remember correctly reading the bible, it's just the gospel of Matthew that makes the astounding claim of Deicide of the Jews and the Jews taking willingly the responsibility on them and their children. Other Gospels don't tell it in this way:

So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, "I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves." And all the people answered, "His blood be on us and on our children!"

And that's how you end up with the formal reasoning based on the Bible on just why the Christ-killers should be punished by pogroms etc. (This actually shows that they were smart to have four gospels, four stories about the same event in the Bible.)

Of course it's totally logical that for a new religion that has to gain popularity among Romans in order to thrive the last thing would be: "Oh btw, your people killed the son of God."

↪Benkei Democrats could point out that tariffs are actually taxes and that what it really means is that Trump is raising taxes. There’s no greater poison for the GOP than that. — Wayfarer

Don't assume that people would be so logical. Trump was saying that 'Mexico will pay for the wall', yet when the reality is that 'The wall will be funded from the US Defence Budget, especially from fighting the war in Afghanistan and also counter-narcotics funding', nobody cares.

ssu consider actually reading the book on the Koch Brothers that I recommended instead of just blithely waving aside accusations on how they propagate their political and economic ideology. I will note that the author of the book Jane Mayer, wrote about how George Soros spent millions on the 2004 election. But I'm fairly tired of how you consider your clear ignorance on the subject matter as equivocal to my engagement with it. — Maw

When it comes to billionaires giving money to political movements, parties and outright individual politicians, one naturally has to make the difference between propagation of political and economic ideology and what is simply lobbying for personal gain. For some like the Koch brothers to hold power in the GOP it's more about the latter. Yet typically things are promoted as ideological choices.

Though I do it while pretending to be a leftist. — fdrake

Hannover will be disappointed. At least Maw and Bitter Crank among others are genuine leftists...hopefully!

I mean Jesus, what will be a Philosophy Forum without genuine differences in the political ideology of the active members?

Hell with those algorithm driven echo-chambers we have now!

I guess that was a compliment of some kind, fdrake.

Dude. I know that the popular right in the US aren't Nazis. What did I say that gave you the impression that I thought they were? — fdrake

Like um.... this is a thread about Roger Scruton? Why then bring up Richard Spencer?

Oh I know the answer, it's a topic you discussed with someone else that I didn't read more carefully. My bad. :yikes:

I think you're missing lots of nuance here, actually. — fdrake

Yet Richard Spencer isn't mainstream and he does not portray the conservatives in the US. It's as stupid as saying that the marxist economist Richard Wolff portrays every left leaning liberal in the US. A Jeremy Corbyn (or Bernie Sanders) aren't the extreme of the left wing. Just listen to them what they actually say. Sure, you can find something if go through all of their quotes that can be portrayed as them to be extreme, but in reality either Corbyn or Sanders aren't at all extremists. (Just as one Roger Scruton isn't a dedicated Islamophobist Anti-Semite)

Perhaps I'm exaggerating a bit about the Koch brothers — fdrake

Perhaps. I will repeat that they (the Koch Brothers) are exactly a similar trope for the left as Soros is for the right. Everybody hates billionaires that give money to political movements (that the people themselves oppose). It's simply a fact.

But try to understand just why the whole discourse has become in the US so vitriolic. The first reason is the political duopoly of a centrist and a right-wing party that totally dominate the whole political spectrum. It is essential for these two parties in order to dominate the whole spectrum of politics in the US to portray themselves in a bitter crucial struggle between each other. This creates a fundamentally different political environment than anywhere else.

This also makes very unique political strategies to be prevalent. One typical right wing strategy, most well seen in the strategy of the NRA, is simply to fight every inch of the way without any effort to seek a compromise. Yet this is logical in the current American political environment. It starts from the thought that there will be no compromise in the gun issue: the opposing side, the left, will not in under any circumstances be happy with any kind of consensus. Hence there will be no middle ground to be achieved in the gun control issue to be reached. The anti-gun lobby will not be pleased at some point and let it be. It is a total ban on privately owned firearms and nothing else. Hence the only logical strategy for the pro-gun lobby is fight all the way at anything all the time. So the thinking goes.

And in the end you end up with the vitriolic political environment you have today.

Look at any political campaign and the rhetoric used. Sure, the politician states facts, usually try to portray the positive events and trends that have happened as having been the outcome of their policies (if they have been in power). The politicians do in general give a historical viewpoint on just why they and their party should be voted in the next elections. Hence the use of facts, data and historical evidence.

But that's not all. There is also the part of simply making people feel that this is the correct party to support, that the ordinary reasonable people should vote for this party. And this is part of what Maw referred to a "comforting narrative" (if I understood Maw's point correctly that is). And naturally the other parties are vilified for being against the ordinary people and only working for special interest groups that are far from the 'ordinary people'.

Then again, never has any mass extinction event before happened with such an adaptable and dominant species around. If (and when) some species has by it's own actions inadvertently dug it's own hole for it's own extinction, no species has ever had such awareness of it's own actions than the species you boethius belong to. And I think you aren't alone with your thinking.

People in denial about these issues, which I expect a good part of this forum would be — boethius

Hmm. Saying that others are in denial means that you are saying that they are wrong. If I argue that the end the World isn't close at hand, am I in denial? If I argue that the obvious actual problems do pose a serious threat, but not an existential one, am I in denial?

Would it be fair to say that you are in denial of how adaptable and innovative the human race is? I wouldn't say that as I find you reasoning totally logical, yet to speak of people being in denial has that judging twist to it.

If the reasons for people turning right were evidence based we'd be in a lot more trouble. — fdrake

I think that political ideologies aren't based in the end on evidence. They surely want portray themselves as evidence based, that is for sure.

All successful political movements rely on a "comforting narrative". I'd say the movements are especially successful when they twist something that was considered a sin by the Christian Church into a rightful virtue, something good. Hence with capitalism greed comes to a good thing as you aren't greedy but simply hard working, which then produces the income for the work been done. In a similar way, in socialism envy isn't bad as the whole issue isn't envy, you are just wanting equality and fairness.

What better way for an ideology to get support than turn sin into a virtue.

uld be wrong for people who find it hard to spell their own name ruining democracy today. — thedeadidea

Democracy is above all a safety valve. It isn't perfect, but as a safety valve it works brilliantly. Yes, there are ignorant people and those who don't care at all about the actual politics, but it gives the society a peaceful way to change the political course if everything is going wrong. Democracy doesn't eradicate the problems of politics like corruption, but it tends to work better than a system without any trace of democracy.

Without democracy there is no safety valve. The machine either works or ends up breaking up totally usually rather violently. That's a bad thing.

But could there in his world still be "laws of mathematics" and mathematical theorems? I think the answer is yes! For example number theory is based only on the fact that natural numbers and logical rules are "constructible", and I that is based on a very minimal set of requirements that the "physical universe" must have. — Mephist

Perhaps it should be noted that any computer follows algorithms in a specific way (referred typically as the program it runs), which makes the whole thing quite mathematical.

So, I think that there is some set of "interesting" mathematical constructions that are different from pure logical combinatorial games in some concrete sense, and are not really related to our particular laws of physics. — Mephist

I would argue that a lot of things that we take as important yet problematic are indeed mathematical, but simply not computable. Even the patternless are still mathematical.

If you took five seconds to Google it, you would see that articles about the Yale Halloween costume controversy were published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Time Magazine, Slate, etc.. — Maw

???And the Washington Post, NPR, CBS... what on Earth is your point?

That a minor concern affecting no more than 6,000 students was discussed numerous times in a variety of well-respected publications demonstrates how absurdly perverted The Discourse is. — Maw

Well, absurd events simply do make it to the papers. Just as the Evergreen nonsense did. People do think that universities are important. Hence something happening at like Ivy League Yale does break the news barrier unlike some Mid-Western community college might not. And these kind of incidents people do find absurd. It's not the most important issue of course, but we're at page 14 in a thread about Sir Roger getting sacked from some committee.

And any sane person would understand that the issue doesn't affect the 6,000 of who the vast majority don't care much about these kinds of nonsensical issues, but focus on their studies that will be a big help in their promising future careers. The issue would effect more the professors involved.

you demonstrably have severe reading difficulties and prefer to resort to crass 'both siderism' in lieu of anything beyond a nine-year-old level of intelligence. Thanks to this enlightened centrism ideology your brain keeps churning out, like a rusting meat grinder, you seem to be utterly unable to comprehend that there is a big distinction between — Maw

seem to be utterly unable to comprehend that there is a big distinction between ...billionaires that give money to libertarian and conservative political causes and the ones that give their money to liberal and leftist political causes.

Yes, how dare I even mention in my naivety this kind of 'both siderism'.

The solution is just to never say it. The subjectivity of deciding when it can said and not and the severity of the consequences make it just too dangerous to say. — Hanover

And that we are anonymous on this site proves the fear of possible consequences quite well.

But not nearly as big a problem as black America has. — Bitter Crank

Well, the Jews had a problem with nazism too.

Yet in Western society we value self criticism. We want to be better, we want to improve things. We want to be good people. We have these ideals and we want to be just and tolerant, even permissive and so on, all the good things. Hence we look critically at our past and in many ways were other cultures might find just their glorious past and be proud of it, we think that in order to improve ourselves, we have to learn from our past mistakes. Nobody is for outright segregation or slavery as nobody is for taking away the vote and other rights from women.

This creates the present environment. Add to this that once the African Americans did have the obvious success with the civil rights movement, the intellectuals of this group use the same narrative that was so effective before, which btw is very typical to any movement that reaches it's basic primary objectives. Of course there is still racism as there are misogynists too, yet to understand the present discourse, our way of thinking about the history and culture has to be taken into account.

I've actually wondered where the racism and the bigotry comes from. I find it telling that white Americans use terms like white trash of their 'own' poor people. As if the last bastion for being a bigot is to be one at your own racial group. Such derogatory words for poor people were used in Finland only in the 19th Century or earlier, but not anymore. (I recall from history like the term loinen, parasite, for a person so poor that he or she was put to live by the authorities in someone else's home and typically got the salary in food.)

My question is whether this social convention of never uttering the N-word is a reasonable act of respect or whether it's simply a politically imposed rule that can be used to divide and destroy? — Hanover

I think it shows that Americans have a similar issues like Germans have with their past.

Not as traumatic as there of course, yet slavery, segregation and the hangings of blacks simply is an issue that white America has a problem with. And just to take it casually could be interpreted the wrong way as Americans take themselves very seriously. And just like with Hitler and nazism in Germany, the issue is used in current politics and casts it's long shadow to the present. In Germany showing the nazi flag can get you up to three years jail time, so they take it seriously.

I haven't been around lately, but is this forum afflicted bylow-number-of-posters syndrome? — Mongrel

There are about 100 members. We are about 3 months old. Rather than a syndrome, we're still in the pro dromo stage. We are past the beginning; we have gotten under way. We're doing fine - for a new group.

Can we stay this size and be a healthy internet group? Hmmm, probably not. We need to add new members as old members slink off into the shadows. And we need to add more members so that there are more, and more active, discussions.

Keep thinking about ways of making ourselves noticeable. (I have been thinking about it, but nothing has happened so far.) — Bitter Crank

So how is it now after nearly four years? Joined members here are over 4000 (many not active, of course). At least we are still up and the old wasted PF isn't. Nice to see that Paul has been still active here. (Next October this site will be four years old.)

What do the admins and the moderators and other old timers think?