White #Resistance at it yet again.
The first couple of minutes will do to get the gist of this:
Chem/bio warfare, deliberately targeted at civilians, with China as the main target.
Agreed. Thanks for the reply.
My attitude towards the death penalty is a bit complicated.
I do not support the death penalty in any modern judicial system. However, this is not due to any consideration of “the sanctity of life”.
My objection is based on two main factors:
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There is no such thing as a perfect, incorruptible error-free judicial system. Any such system will inevitably execute innocent people. You can’t appeal a wrongful conviction when you’re dead.
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The psychological impact on the executioners, and the sociological impact on the society. There is no way to make that harmless.
OTOH, if we’re talking about a pre-modern society where the resources for prolonged humane detention are not available, things may be different, and none of the choices are good. In some ways, slavery was invented as an alternative to execution and genocide, and we know where that goes.
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I also probably wouldn’t have hung the slavers, for fear of the cultural impact of mass execution.
I phrased that “would not object” bit carefully; it’s not the decision I would make if I were in charge, but I can see reasons why people might reasonably consider it defensible in those particular, extreme circumstances.
But I certainly would have dispossessed them, and I might’ve given serious consideration to exile (although that raises the issue of: “what right do we have to inflict these bastards on the rest of the world?”).
I don’t know. Denazification is never an easy task.
Yup.
Again, I don’t endorse the Haitians’ killing of the French. I wouldn’t have chosen to do it myself.
But, again, OTOH…I can easily imagine that there weren’t a lot of good options at the time.
A residual French population would have virtually guaranteed continued insurrection and eventual reinvasion by France. I doubt the Haitians had the resources to organise a “peaceful” expulsion. And, if we remove the euphemisms, that would itself have been an ethnic cleansing.
I don’t think peaceful coexistence and integration of the French was a realistic possibility at the time, and I don’t think it would be reasonable to demand that the newly emancipated Haitians try it. Haiti made the American cotton plantations look relatively civilised; centuries of merciless, murderous terrorism on a massive scale.
The massacre was dreadful, but I think it is important to remember that most of the responsibility for that event lies with the Europeans who were the first to turn Haiti into hell on Earth.
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Related to this is a factor that comes up both here and on BB: how to judge the ethics of revolutions?
Approach A: did the revolutionaries do bad things, or did the revolution cause bad things to happen?
Approach B: if the revolution caused bad things to happen, are those things better or worse than what would have happened without the revolution?
I’m obviously in the “Approach B” camp.
Revolution is dangerous, even if peaceful. Violence is dangerous, even if justified. But when reading history and politics, we need to “imagine it complexly”, as John Green likes to say. Context is crucial.
IMO, anyway.
Ye olde context:
Post-revolutionary troubles predate socialism by a long time.
Freeze peach
Emma Goldman was illegally stripped of her citizenship and deported to the Soviet Federation because she became an anarchist after immigrating and becoming a citizen. Not that it would have been right if it were legal, but it shows how little the law-and-order factions care about law.
the republicans like to play these sorts of games.
Good Intercepted podcast this week.
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Yeah, I know.
You could make some good ads out of that if you did them as table-thumping rants about the GOP stealing democracy. The linked ad was not that.
When you have a political faction pulling that sort of bastardry, lack of voter education is not the key problem.
Same take I had when I read Brazille’s excerpt. Posted the YT link since videos on twitter are always borked for me.
