I’m well aware that the government can invent crimes and violate its charter of rights and freedoms. I’m just saying it’s wrong and tyrannical to do so.

If BLM blockaded the US capital NOS would be singing a different tune.*

Just more ingroup-outgroup posturing.

I love when you foam at the mouth.

Good point, but that obviously is not the only motivation behind cancel culture. Isn’t it really more about something like tribal loyalty? Or maybe you mean that being loyal to a tribe is to be bigoted?

There probably is a tribal element to it. What do you think? By bigoted I mean that one is intolerant of another because of his views, which do not manifest beyond the victimless expressions of thought and speech. There are actions we should not tolerate, however, and censorship is one of them.

The difference, my hyperbolic friend, is that the Salem witch trial executions, for instance, were state-sanctioned. If a private sector employer fires someone because they did something that reduced the businesses profit margin, that’s just good business practice, right?

The motivation of bigotry and resultant actions of censorship and ostracism are wrong no matter who does it, is the point.

I don’t know who to believe.

The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said she would like to “request to the mass disinformation outlets of the USA and Britain – Bloomberg, the New York Times, the Sun etc – announce the schedule of our ‘invasions’ for the coming year. I’d like to plan my vacation”. And these predictions have so far been worthy of such mockery. No doubt some incident will occur before anything happens, but it is unclear who will do it first.

War is certainly immanent, though I hope I eat these words. If so, it will no doubt be a self-fulfilling prophecy premised on projection.

Do you mean those GoFundMe accounts?

No, I mean bank accounts. Bank accounts are being frozen for the crime of donating to a protest.

It’s funny that many of those who whine the loudest about cancel culture believe that a capitalist society should be self-regulating. Isn’t cancel culture the ideal of this philosophy? Probably only when it works in their favor, I imagine.

There is nothing self-regulating about this kind of ostracism and bigotry, even if they have found less violent means of doing it than in the past. Wherever heretical speech and thoughts are censored, it is nonetheless premised on the base motives found in inquisitions and witch-burning.

Cancel culture was regnant in McCarthyism and Anti-communism, I would say.

Polarization was effectively suppressed during those times, though. But in “Eichmann in Jerusalem” she notes of Denmark, which resisted the Nazi program, and even the Gestapo there were destroying orders from Berlin. The “bureaucracy of murder” is only possible in conditions of abject conformity.

I remember a quote from the libertarian radical Albert Jay Nock that was along the lines of the quote you just shared, but from far earlier in the 20th century.

Once, I remember, I ran across the case of a boy who had been sentenced to prison, a poor, scared little brat, who had intended something no worse than mischief, and it turned out to be a crime. The judge said he disliked to sentence the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but the law left him no option. I was struck by this. The judge, then, was doing something as an official that he would not dream of doing as a man; and he could do it without any sense of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because he was acting as an official and not as a man. On this principle of action, it seemed to me that one could commit almost any kind of crime without getting into trouble with one's conscience.

https://mises.org/library/anarchists-progress-0

It’s a combination of herd mentality, or collectivism, allied with statism.

Polarization and division are important. Think of all the one-party or no party states, as uniform as could possibly be. Look at regimes that are unable to suffer dissent. We need more polarization, more division, especially when it comes to power and control. And we should avoid it; we should engage in it.

It’s bigotry, it’s censorship, and it’s cruel. The punishment is disproportionate to the supposed crime, which is often no crime at all, not even an act that warrants much attention.

Those who try to gather a mob and go after another’s job and livelihood because they do not like what was said are a far greater threat to the public than anyone who may say something inappropriate.

That's an expected reply, which sums the attitude very well: 'money is more important than a healthy body'. Obviously the proclaimed "freedom" is not even relevant, it's a money issue. And having money in the bank account is prioritized over having a healthy body. Thanks for the demonstration, NOS.

That’s the expected reply. It suits perfectly well a pampered culture. A bruise is worse than poverty. Getting a spanking is worse than the government stealing your property.

Right, you'd categorize a bunch of 120db air horns and train sirens blowing 24/7, right outside your front door as "peaceful". I'd classify that as torture. You know, one of those horns can be heard miles away (literal truth), imagine a bunch of them right outside your door. Now torture is illegal, but those who engage in it always find new ways of doing it, and claim what they're doing does not qualify, in the attempt to avoid reciprocal punishment.

They are torturers now. I guess the protesters are much stronger than the rest of the population because they are right next to the horns instead of miles away. So they are torturing themselves, and they still look as happy as clams.

I've walked through three different freedom convoy protests where I live and it is nothing like what you describe, so I can reject your characterization out of hand. All walks of life and background were in attendance. I suppose I can understand your position, though, because perhaps you've never had to use a bank account, which is used to store something called "money", the prevailing means by which many of us buy food and pay bills. A little bruise is nothing in comparison.

The protests have been so peaceful that the Ottawa had to make honking illegal in order to impose any punishment. Now anyone who donates to it will be subject to investigation and the seizure of money without due process or court order, and all for donating some money to a bunch of truckers parking their trucks and honking their horns.

Watch MSNBC shill for Ukraine’s Azov Battalion.



Suspiciously enough, Congress removed a ban on funding them back in 2015. It looks like it's paying off.

Nothing new there. Ever been audited by the revenue department?

Have you ever had your bank account frozen for participating in a protest?

If Biden’s pick is given advantage by eliminating an entire gender and other races from the process, it doesn’t follow that members of the another gender and other races should be given the same advantage.

It would be fair.

Well, yes.

Canada’s panty-waisted despot just invoked the Emergencies Act to quell the so-called Freedom Convoy protests. The act gives the federal government sweeping powers, such as to regulate and freeze an individual’s bank account or call in the military. Whatever piddling rights Canada offers its citizens are effectively gone, for now.

The protesters have blocked some important border-crossings, impeding the government’s bottom dollar, and stewing more fear in the ruling class than any Molotov-throwing rioter ever could. All they demand was an end to public health mandates, but Canada’s state-run television likens them to insurrectionists, as is fashionable these days. The worrying part is that none of this is surprising.

No, that’s fair. I don’t understand what you mean when you say I have a superstition that I don’t value fairness.

You’ve lost me.

I don't understand the contention. A murderer has killed someone. How can others of the same taxonomy be perpetrators of murder if they did not kill anyone? A victim of murder is deceased. How can others of the same taxonomy be victims of murder if they are still alive? To confer guilt or victimhood to others beyond perpetrator and victim is a false conclusion and leads to unjust actions, in any case, but to confer them to one race or another is an absurdity.

The superstition as it has been used leads one to false conclusions and unjust actions, such as the assumption that any member of such taxonomies are either victim or perpetrator in some all-purveying race struggle.

I speak of race as pseudoscience and superstition. The history of how this superstition was used to malign, exclude, and murder human beings is well documented. The assumption that any member of such taxonomies are either victim or perpetrator in some all-purveying race struggle are the direct result of the same thinking, and immediately falsified upon evidence to the contrary.

It cannot be confirmed from the mere sight of someone that he is disadvantaged or advantaged by virtue of these taxonomies. Your guesswork, premised on pseudoscience and superstition, sets you right on track to make the very unethical activities you claim to oppose.

But you never mentioned the motivations of those who appointed them nor any other circumstance. If you do not want to know what I would infer from such facts, how about you argue what I ought to infer.

I could infer nothing from such facts. What would you infer?

The arguments as to why this is a good thing are still lost on me. Far from being any concrete progression towards a better state of affairs for anyone besides Joe Biden's political career, every argument in favor of a race-based nomination to the supreme court seeks to satisfy problems that are purely symbolic in nature. Therefor, in utilitarian terms, every good thing that may come of it is unable to manifest beyond anyone's brain matter. In ethical terms, it is morally bankrupt.

“Representation”—a single judge, by virtue of her skin-color alone, will represent all who happen to fall within these racialist distinctions—fits perfectly well in the Western tradition of superficiality versus depth, but serves as little more than a fig leaf in practice. To put to the side for now the argument that these distinctions were created and enforced by the enemy in the first place, to further enforce them on the implication that someone can only represent another so long as her pigment is similar (and as a corollary, that one is unable to represent another if her pigment is different) is as sinister as it is false. It is not true, in any case, but is also bound to set up everyone who believes in it for failure and disappointment.

The notion that race-based nominations can be used to "redress past wrongs" is of the same symbolic character. It redresses nothing. It neither brings to justice those who perpetrate such wrongs or seeks retribution for those who were wronged by them. And because it utilizes exactly what was wrong about these past wrongs—the prohibition of other races in favor of one—it is itself a wrong.

The irony of entrenching vast swaths of individuals under the false taxonomies and superstitions of white supremacy shouldn't be lost on us, but this is where collectivism allied with racism necessarily leads, as it always has. For my own tastes, wherever it is unethical to lobby against someone on the grounds of race, it is unethical to lobby in favor of someone on the grounds of race, and for the same reason. It seems to me that violating this principle is the problem to begin with.

You look at the disproportionate representation of certain skin colors in prison, and then someone comes along and shows the same disproportionate representation in violent criminal activity such as murder. Any implications derived from these proportions are sinister, but false, because both use the specious race variable in order to make predictions about individuals. The fact remains that not all people you call Black or White have the same experiences as everyone else who occupies their position in the color spectrum. The fact remains that individuals, not races, are found in prison, commit crimes, are victims of crime, etcetera.

One of the potential nominees has a father who was cop, which falls outside your assumptions that, by virtue of her skin color alone, her experience is somehow “closer to those who have been incarcerated”. Not only is the assumption wrong, it’s odious; it assumes that her, her family, or her friends have been on the wrong side of the justice system by virtue of her skin color, when exactly the opposite is the case. False assumptions such as these are the direct result of methodological racism, just like every racist act, policy, or system throughout history.

No, it is not obvious to me that someone who has been convicted and sentenced to prison, or who is similar in skin-tone to others who may have had such experiences (which is everyone), are better suited to the highest court in the land—nor is it obvious that someone’s epidermis can afford him some ability, or otherwise prohibit him, from taking such experiences into consideration.

Instead, it’s obvious to me that these insidious generalizations are born of race-thinking and other assumptions, all of it premised on bogus taxonomies. You want her skin color to matter, is the problem, like everyone else who tries to divide the species into such tenuous and superficial categories. There is some symbolic self-interest in it for you, perhaps even in most of us. But at the same time this grandstanding can only serve to maintain a division where there isn’t one. This division, at every step, is born of pseudoscience and hatred, and reified by activities such as this.

You are unable to explain why the racial makeup of the court is relevant to law or the court’s function.

It was certainly relevant wherever the law was unjust and the court racist, sure. But that’s no argument that it is now or ought to be.

Right, being black is irrelevant to qualifications. But not irrelevant to the makeup of the court.The woman he nominates will be black and qualified and will have a judicial philosophy that is not at odds with his own.

The racial makeup of a court is irrelevant to law and the function of a court. Not to mention, historically speaking, the only ones concerned with the racial makeup of the court were of the racist variety. This is reason enough to avoid race-based hiring or nominations, to say nothing of the ethics.

But now we have this quandary of “representation”, as if justice will be accessible so long as millions of people can point to a similar pigment in the epidermis of nine judges. Racism has enough narcissism built into it, why add more?

There is a yawning gap in your understanding. Biden opposed Brown's nomination because of her human rights record as detailed above. Being a black woman is not sufficient grounds for supporting a judicial nominee. To think otherwise is tokenism. To nominate a candidate who is a qualified black woman whose judicial philosophy and record he approves of is not.

I completely agree. Biden explicitly stated his nominee will be a black woman, all of which is irrelevant to qualifications.

Well, you have grouped people and have made assumptions about them according to their racial characteristics. But all I’m trying to say is these assumptions are the prerequisite to any social practice that groups them any further, to any racism, to any racial discrimination.

I’m not sure how one can redress past wrongs and make starting points equal through racial discrimination. This is because one is neither victim or perpetrator by the fact of her complexion or any other phenotype alone. In fact, assigning guilt and victimhood to people according to their racial features is a past wrong, also a present and future wrong, as is racial discrimination in hiring. It seems silly to me redress these past wrongs by applying them in practice.

Again, I bow before your expertise in law, and if I’m ever in the market for Dutch legal advice I’ll be sure to let you know.

No I fully agree. That’s why I said Biden, nor anyone, cannot claim he is excluding other races for matters of racial justice. His past actions falsify this theory.

I still do not understand why you are accusing me of tokenism out of one side of the mouth, and then defending Biden’s tokenism outside of the other.

Why is that? Because I think people with a white skin get hired easier, are less often deemed suspects in criminal cases, get shot by police less often, I somehow place people with a darker complexion on a lower rung? No I simply think there is a lot of prejudice against people with a darker skin and that that means they have fewer chances in life and are required to prove themselves more than people with a light complexion. Those are cultural traits.

I see it like this: you've grouped people under superficial racial categories of which there is no scientific basis, look for the disparities between them, and use the results to position them, one on top of the other, in a hierarchy of superficial racial categories of which there is no scientific basis. That right there is the methodology that has unleashed racism upon the world. It results in assumptions about people on the basis of their complexion, in injustice, and finally, in racial supremacy and inferiority.

Assuming prejudice, both against and for, is the result of this methodology, I oppose it on the same grounds. We cannot in fact infer how much prejudice, discrimination, hostility, someone has faced by the mere fact of their complexion alone, for the same reason we cannot know what position they occupy in the economy, in ability, in intelligence, and so on. The assumptions we make about someone’s status based on which racial categories they happen to occupy are neither right or wrong, they’re “not even wrong”, to use the phrase. The fact of someone’s status becomes apparent only in other forms of inquiry, such as conversation, cooperation, mutual enterprise, etc.

You are not a lawyer eh? Best leave it at that. I am not going into that because I am used to being paid to give legal education. What you can do is read a few pages back in the thread, read the article Atheist provided and my comments and you may have an inkling what lawyers can and cannot do. This remark is just intellectual laziness.

While your ability to train students to give legal advice and draft documents are far superior to mine, I see no reason to abide by your authority in other aspects of law and Justice.

I could care less what a judge looks like, what feigned group they “represent”. It is Biden, not me, who is making the symbolic effort of choosing a black woman for the court. Of course, you wouldn’t dare make such an accusation against Biden, would you?

Very true. It probably is about tokenism for Biden in particular, and the democrats in general.

No I only need to assume that there is a privilege to being white. All in research I know of confirms that privilege.

Just another racial hierarchy upon which you place people with darker complexions on a lower rung.

Of course not, they are based on cultural hierarchies reiterated in discourse and practice.

What does the spectrum of complexion have to do with culture?

And you are again wrong. Read my discussion with mr Atheist. The law does not speak. Judges do, they interpret the law.

The law does not speak, sure, but it is spoken. A judge cannot interpret her way out of it.

Positive iscrimination is a way to redress past wrongs and an attempt at creating equal starting positions. It has nothing to do with inferiority or superiority.

You’d have to assume she’s been wronged, and base it on nothing other than the color of her skin. So already you place her on a lower rung in a racial hierarchy.

Not different ways of thinking but different perspectives. Having different perspectives represented might lead to better in the sense of better informed legal judgments. In the US there is also the matter of judgment before ones peers to be kept in mind. That does deal with equal representation. Considered in the long term would it not also be representationally fair if a woman of color gets a chance to shape the law of the land? Law is, as I have tried to show a hermeneutic enterprise in which the presence of a plethora of background assumptions is beneficial. Now it is not by necessity that a woman or a or a black person brings a different perspective to the table, but it is more likely than that a white man does.

Upon what assumption do you assume she has a different perspective? I figure these assumptions are based on nothing other than pseudoscientific racial distinctions and nothing besides, but perhaps I’m wrong. I’m not lawyer, but I assume that the only perspective that matters in a court is the word of the law.