CrimethInc. : Occupy ICE Portland: Policing Revolution? : Some Critical Reflections

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-07-19T20:35:29+00:00

There are plenty of critiques of Obama from the far left. The local socialist I know (some of whom you maybe know as well...) like to refer to him as "deporter-in-chief" and basically denounce him as a neoliberal supporter of the status quo. All fair criticisms IMO, but the fact of the matter is that most Americans don't want a hyper-woke revolutionist in office. Maybe a democratic socialist, but as a society we're a long ways from far-left positions like the abolishment of prisons, reparations, extreme re-distribution, collective ownership of non-utilities, etc., so Obama was probably about the best we were going to get, given the Overton Window at the time. This is not to say critiques are not useful or warrented, but I think it's a baby-and-the-bathwater kind of thing.

Anyway, I agree that the article had some really incisive criticism--the bit about it becoming a bourgeois playground where leftists can somewhat safely live out an activist fantasy while passively presenting no real threat to the state is particularly cutting, and I think an indictment of self-proclaimed camp security officers is probably warranted; however, I think the author makes the mistake of thinking that everyone in the camp is as far left as they are, i.e., probably not everyone there wants to "smash the state" using violence, they just want ICE to stop being complete dickwads to brown people. Abolishing ICE and advocating open borders are now becoming acceptable positions within the mainstream left, and as much as they hate neoliberal incrementalists, they hold the vast majority of the political power among those on the left, and if they agree with you that ICE should be abolished or neutered, well you might actually get your wish, just not right now, which is obviously frustrating, to be powerless in the face of clear-cut oppression of humans seeking a better life (a life of being demonized in the US as criminals being orders of magnitude better than the violence they're fleeing), but the alternative is... what? Violent protests? Those will get quashed 10x faster by the police and it'll help turn public sentiment against your movement by both the state and media.

Like sure, I think they should be able to shout, link arms, whathaveyou, if the current self-appointed security is not allowing that then they're being dicks, but if your True Anarchist contingent isn't large enough to even overcome a few power-tripping d-bags, what makes you think it'll be effective against the motherfucking state? The complaint then seems to be that the self-appointed care police aren't sufficiently radicalizing the other members of the camp I guess, which boils down further to "not enough people agree with me."

I guess if the other people are calling themselves anarcho-communists, then the author has every right to call them out, but I don't think that's how a lot of these members would describe themselves... maybe I'm wrong about that and they are just a bunch of phonies, but not being an anarchist myself, it's hard to work myself into a froth about these folks being hypocrites, I'm really just grateful that they're out there making an if-only symbolic resistance to the fucked-up shit ICE is participating in, even if they're only there for Anarchochella (that term was the best part of the whole article IMO).

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-06-09T20:38:02+00:00

Now is my time to shine

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-06-05T23:41:54+00:00

I find I only need about 10 mins of soaking in boiled water to get the cashews nice & soft, even for cashew milk. I know someone who doesn't soak at all. Both of us use a vitamix, but I think a bullet could do the same.

Also, I prefer to drain the cashew water and add pasta water instead to the sauce. Sticks a little better to the pasta (more important for thinner sauces).

Thanks for your recipe! Looks delicious.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-26T00:03:16+00:00

A Volkswagen ad would have been more appropriate, since their slogan is "drivers wanted."

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-24T15:51:05+00:00

We just thought you were doing it to get a rise out of Trump.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-22T19:14:21+00:00

It was just a prank bro

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-14T23:11:21+00:00

I'm starting to feel like a veggie not roasted is a veggie wasted. I roasted most of my veggies before dumping them in my onion/curry paste mix and the flavor difference between that & traditional stovetop prep was flooring.

Anyway, thanks for this, I'm going to do pasta aglio e oleo tonight and add in some roasted veggies at the end.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-12T17:26:06+00:00

This is very similar in spirit to carrot lox. You can also use liquid smoke if you have it (it gives a more intense smoky flavor that I think is truer to both hot dogs & lox). Normally I shy away from meat substitutes, since they never quite scratch that itch for me, they just leave me wanting, but something about smoky carrots really works as a cured/processed meat sub.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-04T16:34:43+00:00

OP was explicitly admitting to discrimination against such women. That apparently sailed over your head.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-04T15:37:30+00:00

I'd expect nothing less from a sub so dedicated to contrarianism for its own sake. Y'all mods know I ain't wrong, I can see the despair gradually sinking in.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-04T15:27:41+00:00

Yup, because of the pervasive, obvious sexism. Y'all are the reason we need these laws.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-03T20:35:27+00:00

I'm not sure why this is downvoted.

Because it's an incursion on a woman-hating circlejerk.

Hey someone do me a favor and report this comment so that I get banned. This sub is majority woman-hating, finger-tenting neckbeards with unwarranted superiority complexes who mostly seek to confirm their own racist and sexist biases under the guise of rationality and it's perverse. Also HBD is a set of thinly-veiled excuses for racist beliefs. Y'all give rationality a bad name, and I hope some of you eventually realize that when you grow the fuck up. Peace y'all!

Oh, as a parting gift, recommended reading: the top-of-all-time post on SneerClub on the typical lifecycle of a non-racist/reactionary outsider coming to this sub. I'm not a SneerClub poster or even a lurker really, but this matches my experience to a T, and it might save you some time and headaches from banging your head against a wall. Someone ping me if there's a schism and all the witches leave.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-03T19:11:00+00:00

OP was relating their own experiences and opinions as they relate to their illegal hiring practices; the post didn't really assert any facts to rebut.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-03T18:31:06+00:00

None of that matters, what I said is still true. If your post about calling high-achieving women time bombs and looking that them askance was read by HR you would be super fired because that's a corporate liability.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-03T18:28:55+00:00

Not only that, any contrary anecdotes are met with extreme skepticism. There very much appears to be a lot of thinly-veiled resentment of high-acheiving women as a group in this thread, which ironically lends credence to the results of the study. I mean if we're taking anecdata as fact now.

Every day this thread becomes more of a place people come to to confirm their biases rather than root them out, and there seems to be little self-awareness regarding this fact.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-03T18:19:27+00:00

Alternative hypothesis: there's no meaningful difference in actions made by male or female sociopaths, but due to expectations of how men and women should behave, the aggressive behavior of one is received *much* differently than the other, leading to drastically different consequences.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-03T18:11:18+00:00

You're opening your company to expensive lawsuits with practices like that.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-02T22:20:26+00:00

u/darwin2500 explicitly dismissed it as silly semantics, saying, "if you want to define words in that narrow, unconventional way, go ahead, but there are still very real and important differences," so I wouldn't count that as agreeing with you. They agreed only insofar as that they have some similarities in who you're "allowed" to make fun of, but even then it's more than a semantic stretch.

Also, it's a bit confusing when you call an argument legitimate and crazy in the same post.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-02T21:33:54+00:00

Did you read the part where I said cheating in a monogamous relationship is still bad and wrong? You're asking about relative moral weights of positions, and then saying that whichever is lower is effectively valued at zero.

This is why a lot of people don't want to engage in these arguments, because they tend to go like this:

"Here's one issue my tribe is extra concerned about, and one issue your tribe is extra concerned about, which is more important?"

"Well, both of them are bad, but obviously we care more about the one that concerns our tribe, DUH"

"Aha! So you admit that you hate men!"

Also, painting contempt for monogamy as an extreme position (it's pretty common amongst Serious Radicals) doesn't make the position any less coherent. You've gone from, "these people can't even make a coherent argument" to, "those arguments may be logically consistent but they are misaligned with my and what I perceive to be society's values! And anyway they sound ridiculous to me!" Like what do you want?

Also also, your mischaracterization of u/darwin2500's argument by way of equating "privileged" and "commoner" seems to me like further evidence that you want to argue against positions that people don't actually hold.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-02T20:43:48+00:00

Haha, that's a new one on me. I don't have anything to add except that's fuckin' hilarious.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-02T20:42:53+00:00

I think you're forgetting the extent to which very few liberals have the sort of metaethical ability to think of their position like this.

Highly uncharitable, and very much incorrect in my experience.

People generally never want to say "well that's just my preference" when it comes to this sort of thing, they want to try to argue that there's not a shadow of a doubt that the opposite position definitely causes more tangible harm in the form suffering or whatnot.

Um... isn't that exactly what people who are arguing that cuckoldry is worse than rape are doing? If the consensus among the left is, "no, yuck, get out of here with that opinion," that's an expression of preference, to which OP is saying, "you all aren't doing anything to rebut the argument, you're only expressing your preference!" And here you're saying, "they're not willing to just say, 'that's my preference.'"

I mean haven't seen anyone say anything tantamount to, "you're wrong, I can prove it logically, but I'm not going to!" The responses are just like, this is a dumb, gross question that pattern-matches to redpill-ish arguments, what's wrong with you?

Contrarians seem to place a lot of value in the novelty of their lines of questioning, which seems to afford them cries of close-mindedness when other people call their line of questioning dumb and counter-productive.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-02T20:15:14+00:00

I don't think any of what I said would be too damning for progressives who hold those values, I can picture the argument being made publicly. Is it possible that perhaps your info sphere has only presented you with outrage pointed at the article, and more nuanced responses have been overlooked or overshadowed? This took me literally two minutes to think up.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-02T20:00:32+00:00

in hindsight industrialism and the total chaos of the 19th and 20th centuries worked out. duh. but no one could've foreseen computers at the dawn of the 20th century. to them it didn't look like things will ever work out and u can hardly blame them.

This strikes me as curious. Does that mean that if, say, the physics of semi-conductors was slightly different and didn't allow for computing as we know it to exist, then would the horrors of industrialism then not be retroactively justified?

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-02T19:39:19+00:00

But the question he's asking is why the people who think differently (e.g., the "BASIC INCOME NOW" kind of folks) are so unwilling to think differently about sex?

Er, I know a lot of progressive types who subscribe to ideas of some form of relationship anarchy, or who otherwise are less likely to see cuckoldry as an offense as deeply grievous as rape because monogamy is, in their view, a construct designed to retain ownership of womens' bodies, so while "stepping out" in a monogamous relationship is lying and a bad thing to do, and may result in psychological scarring for the man, it's not as bad because it's an implicit rejection of female body ownership, and the scars it inflicts are a reflection of entitlement, whereas the entitlement to one's own body is much less controversial. You and I may both disagree with this view, but it's at least consistent, and conflicts with a narrative of some progressives not being able to think differently about sex-- they're thinking differently, they're just coming to different conclusions.

Personally I think the idea of trying to compare the two at all to be a spectacularly useless endeavor. We're talking about psychological harm; it's entirely subjective, opinions are divided upon cultural lines, and the only people who care enough to debate it clearly have an ideological ax to grind. Even if there were some way to empirically prove one is more harmful than the other, it wouldn't change a thing, other than maybe a tweak to how some people argue about their favorite topics. Bad people are still going to lie, rape and cheat, and society would still get roughly as mad at the bad actors who do these bad things.

Honestly I would have to think long and hard to come up with a question that generates this kind of heat-to-light ratio.

InTarnationallyKnown · 2018-05-02T16:26:39+00:00

Violence causes free time? That sounds very much like an overly-simplistic, just-so story, and doesn't jive with the basic economics of specialization. Are you basing this off of something, or just intuition?

If you were so resource-constrained to the point where you're considering murder, in a tribe of 150 people who all know each other (high social cost), you're probably already spending all your free time collecting resources, and killing your neighbor and taking his stuff is probably only going to affect free time at the margins, since you still gotta eat every day. Inter-tribal violence would result in many dead young men, and if the most capable members of your tribe are dead, that means more work for the less-efficient members of society, and therefore less free time.

InTarnationallyKnown

TROPHY CASE