Mass sexual assaults in Cologne

[FourthBase]

When the civil war ends and we emerge from our ruined houses (state-subsidized or otherwise), perhaps we can come together, squinting at the sun, and consider the agency of forces beyond the current culture war factions.

No, sigh, probably not. Despite it being a no-win lose-lose proposition -- because, gasp, even the "underdog" worldwide leftward contingents that most here would identify as the "good guys" in any conflict are also and no less merely/mostly a movement of conniving alpha psychos rallying chronically/temporarily deluded/indoctrinated mass movements (probably including you, too, lol!) to wage total cultural, then physical, warfare -- there'll still be a main loser, and that loser will invariably refuse to accept the loss, and will seethe about losing for years, all while trying to prod the winner into a rematch it thinks it can win the next time, or doing everything possible to frustrate and reverse the winner's mandate. Now, had the first Civil War (dreading the day that "f" is officially capitalized) turned out different, then folks of lit/woke/good/unpoisoned conscience would have rooted for that Lost Cause as passionately as the retarded ex-Confederates did theirs, would have (one presumes, one hopes) righteously sabotaged a victorious South's perverse idea of Reconstruction from the start, rather than still be mourning the North's failure to ruthlessly enforce it, 150 years later. There was a "good guy" back then, clearly, no matter how some leftists want to withhold moral credit from either side because, duh, capitalism, Amerikkka, etc. The next civil war, though, will have no good guys, not even relatively speaking, not as main combatants, anyway. No victims, just perpetrators...perpetrators everywhere. /buzzlightyear The only real victims will be The Unaffiliated. But some side is going to lose and then steam, bubble, and rage over the injustice of it. And some side is going to win and then get high off their own supply of justice-recalibrating propaganda and lord their dominance over the other like deserving, holier-than-thou monsters. And neither side will have deserved to win, and both winner and loser will fucking suck as society-molding and society-destabilizing forces, for ages thereafter. And that's what the next world war will be like, a shitload of concurrent civil wars tearing civilization apart everywhere, until we slide into a prolonged dark age. And several of them will be labeled "revolutions" on one side, and no shortage of "anti-war" RI-ers will be cheering those ones the fuck on, no less chauvinistically than your average NFL diehard, and putting hardcore blinders on to block certain inconvenient atrocities out of mind, thick filters through which to see only tortured apologetics. Totally plausible near-future timeline, right? I think so. Probably because it doesn't take much extrapolating, at all.

[norton ash]

Not sure what you're after here, 4th Base. I think it's kick all the Muslims out of Europe to protect the womenfolk.. and stand up for brave little Israel, right? This is me lacking nuance almost as badly as you, btw.

[Nordic]

A non-response like that, speaks volumes.

Haters gonna hate.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Nah, read more closely, I said you are not really an anti-misogynist, i.e., you can live with excusing one especially heinous and aggressive brand of misogyny if it means guarding the reputation of a identity-demo positioned as premier victims of capitalism and potential revolutionary allies. I wouldn't equate that with being a misogynist, they are two distinct sins, you don't strike me as a misogynist at all. Whereas I do think you are both not an anti-racist and also are an outright racist as far as generally being a hater of most Jewish interests goes. You are not an anti-fascist, but I think it'd be unfair to describe you as a fascist. You're just a fascism-excuser and imperialism-enabler, selectively, whenever you think it serves the interests of foregrounding the "larger truth" about the supposedly ultimate and therefore the only true forms of fascism and imperialism. But hey, you're not alone. Definitely not here on this board.

That's a whole lot of "You" pathologizing, right there. None of it means a fucking thing in terms of the OP, either.

As ever, perhaps our time here is better spent examining the subject at hand instead of diagnosing one another.

[FourthBase]

Not sure what you're after here, 4th Base. I think it's kick all the Muslims out of Europe to protect the womenfolk.. and stand up for brave little Israel, right? This is me lacking nuance almost as badly as you, btw.

Kick out however many particular Muslims morally fucking suck because they're hopelessly, tragically encaged in an especially shitty version of what is already a totalizing meme system invented by a militaristic medieval cult and nearly unchanged since? The particular ones demonstrably on a neo-imperialist mission to conquer and re-conquer host cultures through an alternating combo of violence and legal/social/demographic pressure? Sure. I would wish the same fate for the equivalent particular Christians if it were them instead, if it were over a billion Westboro Baptists in the world and a frighteningly sizable minority of which were possessed by active theocratic visions of forceful world conquest, female slavery, homosexual extermination, persecution and execution of unbelievers, etc. If there were as many terror bombings and mass shootings from a multitude of reactionary wings representing an especially bold fraction of that brand of fanatical Christian, and if there were an ideological egregore pressuring everyone to just STFU about it for the sake of an abstract ideal of multicultural harmony or, worse, for the cynical sake of long-term geo-ideological chess, then, I would probably get so desperate as to find myself hoping for a general moratorium on Christian migration until an approach is worked out that didn't let that pants-shitting asymmetrical Christian existential menace run a multifaceted civilizational crusade game on the rest of us. I mean, in that case, wouldn't most of you, too?

But at the same time I would also want to cling unmovably to the sanctity of the individual to choose to live as whatever if no harm no foul, and so, no, I would in the end absolutely oppose blanket expulsions based on religion. I would not, though, have as my default setting the assumption that, whenever militant Westboro-ers were caught trying to murder an assload of random people, to protest grievances or make a dent in The Enemy According to Them, they were always/usually/often merely innocent patsies. Fuck that. Is what most of you would also be certainly saying if the theocratic sandal were on the other foot, in the same proportion to over one billion feet. I'd entertain no illusions that Westboro-ness is just as benign or malignant as any other religious-themed culture-machine. If there were the same kind of undiluted, elder-approved religio-cultural streak of aggressive rape-entitlement machismo amongst a generation of Westboro lads, then I would abso-fucking-lutely expect an instant and unstoppable avalanche of mass demonstrations, boycotts, and work stoppages until that shit were somehow minimized to a "normal" fraction of psychopathy, through some set of remedies within the bounds of individual human rights and overall human decency. I would not -- if wire reports were at first collectively suppressed by a diversely-untrustworthy media, in order to preempt a feared rise in anti-Westboro prejudice, but then gradually leaked, predictably at first by low-information-capitalizing over-the-top Westboro-phobes, about hundreds of Westboro-lad rapes and assaults in one night, in any public or private setting, against any type of women whatso-fucking-ever, anywhere in the whole goddamned world -- I would probably not be stubbornly playing the "pics or it didnt happen" bluff card in order to give myself an excuse to not have to start dwelling too much about the grim, ugly implications of a scenario where, you know, maybe it did happen, in all the worst ways you wish it didn't happen, but nope, oops, sorry to disappoint, Big Brother isn't quite fully-operational yet or susceptible to insta-leaks, so without pics for now. I mean, what then? Has that kind of ethics-clarifying, hypocrisy-exorcizing inverted scenario crossed your mind? Does it ever? Why the fuck not? Because of rigid indoctrin...errr, rigorous intuition?

I'm not distorting your perspective. I'm showing it to you in the round, namely the shit-stained backside of it where all your hypocrisy likes to hide from view, even from your own. Not my fault you're a stranger to your own dissonance.

[FourthBase]

Nah, read more closely, I said you are not really an anti-misogynist, i.e., you can live with excusing one especially heinous and aggressive brand of misogyny if it means guarding the reputation of a identity-demo positioned as premier victims of capitalism and potential revolutionary allies. I wouldn't equate that with being a misogynist, they are two distinct sins, you don't strike me as a misogynist at all. Whereas I do think you are both not an anti-racist and also are an outright racist as far as generally being a hater of most Jewish interests goes. You are not an anti-fascist, but I think it'd be unfair to describe you as a fascist. You're just a fascism-excuser and imperialism-enabler, selectively, whenever you think it serves the interests of foregrounding the "larger truth" about the supposedly ultimate and therefore the only true forms of fascism and imperialism. But hey, you're not alone. Definitely not here on this board.

That's a whole lot of "You" pathologizing, right there. None of it means a fucking thing in terms of the OP, either.

As ever, perhaps our time here is better spent examining the subject at hand instead of diagnosing one another.

1. The you kind of rotates from being individual to plural to generalized. It's supposed to be indeterminate, so that basically everyone is addressed and implicated, not just one person singled out. Is that better, or worse?

2. I strrrrrrrenuously object to the notion that my last several posts have been off-topic. Quite the contrary, imo. And if you still disagree, fine, but then I would kindly request a forum quorum or something so that any people paying attention the last couple pages, outspoken or merely lurking, can chime in either here or via PM to you about whether they agree or not with whom.

[Wombaticus Rex]

1. It sure as shit looks like you're just you're just addressing Nordic. Unless you really think of RI membership in general as "generally being a hater of most Jewish interests." Either way, my point stands.

2. I do Democracy once every two years, tops.

[Pele'sDaughter]

1. It sure as shit looks like you're just you're just addressing Nordic. Unless you really think of RI membership in general as "generally being a hater of most Jewish interests." Either way, my point stands.

2. I do Democracy once every two years, tops.

Hey, he did say "among others" even if they weren't included by name like Nordic was. .

[FourthBase]

I did respond to more than one person, too.
Next time I'll write, "Dear Usual Clique of RI Lefties," cool?

You folks do realize you are a type, right?
Or is it impossible to smell your own homogeneity?
Do you mistake internecine squabbles for independence?

[Nordic]

No, I totally understand how women getting groped in Koln is all about Israel.

[FourthBase]

No, I totally understand how women getting groped in Koln is all about Israel.

You understand that always conforming to whatever the most anti-capitalist, anti-Zionist RI Strong Take possible is, will predictably lead to you (among others) bending over backwards into self-betraying knots to handwave away mass rape as a hoax or inside job operation or media non-event because god forbid you took it seriously and then, oh shit, wound up genuinely worried about some of the same deep civilizational shit the populist right wing is plumbing for political currency and, the horror, you might wind up for once genuinely critical toward and rightfully fearful of millions of comrades who co-despise America and Israel as much as you do?

[FourthBase]

Anyone curious what the reaction would be like if the most progressive locales in America were chosen to be the exclusive providers of refugee sanctuary? Imagine the celebrations on Commercial Street if several thousand needy, judgmental Muslims stepped off ferries one summer morning for resettlement in Provincetown. I wonder how differently the media, professional activists, and armchair analysts around here would be responding to reports of mass sexual assault there. Or would there still be the same give-the-benefit-of-the-doubt, take-one-for-the-team, deflect-with-anticapitalist-theorizing spirit of solidarity?

[kool maudit]

It would be the same. There is nothing that can make your average Western progressive cast any sort of collective aspersion against a group of people whose religion, race or both renders them a minority in any European-majority country. It's a matter of existential principle. They absolutely will not do it.

[norton ash]

Wow, you guys are going full-on FOX now, aren't you? We Western progressives just aren't capable of reason.

So here's hoping your Provincetown scenario takes place and we can slam the door on refugees forever. That's really what you're after, right? Meanwhile, I'll continue to extend the benefit of the doubt to those who've been starved and terrorized and have no homes, and you can continue to bitch about the scary, rapey Muslims and the sucker progressives.

[kool maudit]

FOX? Seems to me that a shill network for the Republican Party has a lot of "untouchable areas" as well, many of them far more convoluted, at their moral heart, than progressives' hardheadedness here, which is after all motivated by fears of majority-on-minority violence of the type we famously saw in the 1930s and during Jim Crow.

I get the doctrinal wall, but it IS a doctrinal wall.

As for what I REALLY want and what kind of person your allocation of doubt-benefits makes you, you are incorrect in your assumption about where I am coming from and I am glad you feel good about yourself and your moral choices, respectively.