The worldwide Statue War has begun..... - Page 8 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14838095
pugsville wrote:
So no you want a fictionalised version of history.

How is it a fictional version of history? Again, monuments should not be expected to depict historical events with complete accuracy. They tell us something about the worldview of the people at the time the monuments were erected.

We have writings of Roman historians that we know are inaccurate. By your logic we should change them. Statues and paintings often depict a person in a much more favourable light than their appearance was in reality. We even have statues of people that didn't exist at all. All of this obviously needs to change because it is not historically accurate.

What is it that you are worried about exactly? Do you believe people are confused about who was in Australia first? Are Australians not taught history in school?
#14838117
One Degree wrote:I will take your repeated refusal to answer my question to mean you do not think people should punch you, but okay to punch Nazis.


While I do think that, because I do not want to oppress other people while Nazis do, your refusal to tell me which question I supposedly ignored is not evidence for my position.
#14838192
Kaiserschmarrn wrote:How is it a fictional version of history? Again, monuments should not be expected to depict historical events with complete accuracy. They tell us something about the worldview of the people at the time the monuments were erected.

We have writings of Roman historians that we know are inaccurate. By your logic we should change them. Statues and paintings often depict a person in a much more favourable light than their appearance was in reality. We even have statues of people that didn't exist at all. All of this obviously needs to change because it is not historically accurate.

What is it that you are worried about exactly? Do you believe people are confused about who was in Australia first? Are Australians not taught history in school?



nope. It's not rewriting history. Monuments are in our public space. They should have some examination.

When we talk about history we should be constantly reviewing our knowledge and describing things as well as we can.

What I worried about , Respect. The statement is disrespectiveful it says only Europeans matter, their viewpoint is the only valid one. Which I don not accept.
#14838193
Finfinder wrote:Really is there a need to be so dramatic and to change my quote clearly I said tries to control. Are you saying the media reports the news fairly? Now if you really believe that, you are unhinged.


You also said "now dictates.

As I said if you bothered to rad they have a bunch of biases. But Far Left? That is unhinged. The Far Left have no influence in the Media. The Left had very little. They is some liberal bias in some outlets. But corporate interests in the basic factor in media coverage. Hype, Money.
#14838252
One Degree wrote:Hard to tell because so many who may not be tribal thinkers don't post much. I would guess 50% are consistently tribalists and the rest stretched out by how often their attempts at critical thinking is corrupted by tribal thinking.

Edit: what do you think @foxdemon ?


I'm not sure what percentage are tribal thinkers. It is hard to judge as just a few tribalists can polarise any discourse. You're either for them or against the them in their world. As RhetoricThug points out, this is death to introspection or reflection. If left unchecked, they turn the whole community into tribal thinking.

Tribalism fundamentally is about power. We are primates at heart and, like primates tend to do, we engage in dominance behaviours. As a very social species we tend to do a lot of collective dominance behaviours. This is the motive behind tribalism. We use the concept of power, in the political sense, to capture the idea of that collective dominance behaviour in it's practice.

What is at stake is access to resources. Politics is about who gets what, when and how (definition from H Lasswell). Tribalism is a means of convincing people to join in collective action to exclude other people from access to resources. It takes the form of a system of belief which identifies both those to be included or excluded and delegitimatise those to be excluded, which we experience as prejudice.

One example is white racism. But only a moral reductionist would believe this to be the full extent of tribalism. Tribalism is very common throughout the world and takes many forms. An objective look at most political discourse will reveil the ubiquitous nature of tribal thinking, even amongst those regarded as moral progressives in contemporary Western culture.

'Us' and 'Them'. It is so very human to think this way that most take it for granted. Yet it is inimical to cooperative outcomes due to the intolerance it produces. The result is a reduction of human interaction to a zero sum game where only the most ruthless benefit. 'Kill or be killed'.

This is why movements such as neo-nazis, religious extremists and the politically correct must be regarded as a clear and present danger to communal harmony. They represent lack of restraint in political power. It's their way or the highway. They are unable to compromise and thus they can never produce a peaceful outcome.

Tolerance = peace = trust = cooperation = prosperity.

The classic example was the European Wars of the Reformation. Religious tribalism laid waste to Central Europe. Everyone got to live in fear and poverty. Only after peace had been negotiated could economic life return due to restoration of trust and cooperation.

The positive state of affair, communal harmony, is dependant on responsible application of power. Accountability is of utmost importance in sustaining responsible governance.

Tribalism is intolerant and thus distructive of relations between communities and should be rejected for that reason. In Australia today, leaders of the major religions present a common front in rejecting religious tribalism. Here's an example of responsible governance. We need to take this philosophy further and apply it to other circumstances of national life.

The most powerful and influential tribal thinking in Australia today is Western moral political thought, ie: political correctness or social liberalism. This is the ideology of the white middle class which legitimates their privilege and identifies those to be excluded and justifies that exclusion. I think this is the form of tribalism that is now due to be challenged as it is most important to restrain and hold accountable those with the most power.

Quite possibly we could work toward a future where that system of belief is being identified as a decisive and destructive foriegn ideology. I think this approach would greatly aid the maintenance of communal harmony in the long term. Ideally other nations would be heading i this direction also. A broader community could be formed. There are trends in this direction and in the longer term this is where we are headed. The process will be much smoother when tribalists get called out for what they are.
#14838266
pugsville wrote:You also said "now dictates.

As I said if you bothered to rad they have a bunch of biases. But Far Left? That is unhinged. The Far Left have no influence in the Media. The Left had very little. They is some liberal bias in some outlets. But corporate interests in the basic factor in media coverage. Hype, Money.


I rad :lol:....... They have some liberal biases that's a joke.



Type into Youtube " liberal media bias" literally hundreds of examples. who's unhinged ? :lol: :lol:
#14838271
Someone had asked me if I could support the name of Sir John A MacDonald on highschools in Ontario, knowing that he did some shitty things to the natives of the land.
Why are white people now so fucked up about their heritage? The Euros founded NA and Australia.
They were "nation builders" and had to break some eggs in order to build our nations.
We don't have to "like" some of the "egg breaking", but why the hell should we topple statues and rename schools?
Are we supposed to deny history? Are we supposed to feel so guilty about having conquered the lands and built some really wonderful nations?
It seems like self-depreciation to me.

Perhaps these silly self-hating white people, should try getting laid more often?
#14838273
Corporate culture is going to have biases. These biases are not, as a rule, going to be, "far left," biases.

That video you posted tries to paint a picture of some light conspiracy where YouTube uses the ADL as a citation, and most people on the board of the ADL gave to he Democratic Party.

This a, "far left," ideology does not make. Saying the Democrats are, "far left," is like Saying Paul Ryan is Adolf Hitler. It's an absurd overreaction only a stupid child would make.

As someone who is far left, I'll tell you that you're reacting negatively to capitalism and then assigning the far left to be in charge of capitalism, no doubt because your masters have told you that they couldn't possibly be the cause of their own actions.

This broad concern the right has about their culture being modified by an outside source that they are alienated from is something Marx was explaining more than a century ago. In the most basic manifesto put out about it, it still makes an appearance:

Marx and Engels wrote:The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

...The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.


It is the nature of capitalism to take these things reactionaries and rightwingers hold dear and destroy them. You can be sad about it all you want, but this is the world we live in and have been living in. Your culture, your norms, your everything else have been substituted for that of the capitalist--in this case Google who has all the power.

To go a step further, the work that has been put into creating these videos is something that you have become alienated from because of the nature of private property, the foundation of the tyranny of the capitalist mode of production. What reactionaries are whining about so far as YouTube is concerned is true for every form of labour under capitalism. The work you put into it belongs to someone else now, and you become alienated from the videos you made:

Marx wrote:My work would be a free manifestation of life, hence an enjoyment of life. Presupposing private property, my work is an alienation of life, for I work in order to live, in order to obtain for myself the means of life. My work is not my life.

Secondly, the specific nature of my individuality, therefore, would be affirmed in my labour, since the latter would be an affirmation of my individual life. Labour therefore would be true, active property. Presupposing private property, my individuality is alienated to such a degree that this activity is instead hateful to me, a torment, and rather the semblance of an activity. Hence, too, it is only a forced activity and one imposed on me only through an external fortuitous need, not through an inner, essential one.

My labour can appear in my object only as what it is. It cannot appear as something which by its nature it is not. Hence it appears only as the expression of my loss of self and of my powerlessness that is objective, sensuously perceptible, obvious and therefore put beyond all doubt.[4]


For those of us on the far left, this is of course tragic. Though there is some satisfaction in watching the rightwing hacks that were so proud of their special snowflake feelings come to realize that they too are trapped within capitalism's net.

The result is so predictable as to as have happened before, even in Marx's time:

Marx wrote:As monosyllabic on the platform as in the press. Flat as a riddle whose answer is known in advance. Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: "Socialism!" Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.

This was not merely a figure of speech, fashion, or party tactics. The bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education it had produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods it had created had fallen away from it. It understood that all the so-called bourgeois liberties and organs of progress attacked and menaced its class rule at its social foundation and its political summit simultaneously, and had therefore become "socialistic." In this menace and this attack it rightly discerned the secret of socialism, whose import and tendency it judges more correctly than so-called socialism knows how to judge itself; the latter can, accordingly, not comprehend why the bourgeoisie callously hardens its heart against it, whether it sentimentally bewails the sufferings of mankind, or in Christian spirit prophesies the millennium and universal brotherly love, or in humanistic style twaddles about mind, education, and freedom, or in doctrinaire fashion invents a system for the conciliation and welfare of all classes. What the bourgeoisie did not grasp, however, was the logical conclusion that its own parliamentary regime, its political rule in general, was now also bound to meet with the general verdict of condemnation as being socialistic.


This is the far left solution: the violent and bloody overthrow of the capitalist order and establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

You're whining because capitalism didn't benefit you in every way, and looking for anybody to blame started flailing at any enemy you could think of, even if it didn't make any sense in your own propaganda.

Some threads going right now are condemning the Democrats as the far-right Ku Klux Klan. In the same breath, they're Illuminati in a conspiracy to help the Elders of Zion; and a page later they are closet communists opposed to both. IN reality, of course, they are none of these things. They are, like the Republicans, lumbering bourgeois interests seeking to perfect the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie--just based on free trade instead of protection at the moment.

In absolutely no way does this make them a "Far left," party. Nor does it make Google a, "far left," party.
#14838295
Buzz62 wrote:Someone had asked me if I could support the name of Sir John A MacDonald on highschools in Ontario, knowing that he did some shitty things to the natives of the land.


You are allowed to say it was me.

Why are white people now so fucked up about their heritage?


How is it f'ed up to recognise historical facts such as MacDonald's genocide? It seems more like you are just trying to insult anyone who wants to look at historical facts.

The Euros founded NA and Australia.


Not really. There were nations and laws and permanent settlements here before any Europeans showed up.

They were "nation builders" and had to break some eggs in order to build our nations.
We don't have to "like" some of the "egg breaking", but why the hell should we topple statues and rename schools?


You just dismissed genocide as "breaking a few eggs". This seems like a denial of history.

Are we supposed to deny history?


If we do as you ask and deny the genocides that occurred, then yes, we are denying history. If we do as the indigenous ask and recognise these atrocities, then we are not denying history.

Are we supposed to feel so guilty about having conquered the lands and built some really wonderful nations?


No one is asking anyone to feel guilty.
#14838337
Buzz62 wrote:Then why should anyone want to change the name of schools, named after Canada's first PM?
We CAN honor his name AND learn about his actions at the same time.


Because people do not want to honour the name of people who.commit genocide.
#14838358
Duck! Liberal throwing magic word. No argument can stand up to their magical power to be the sole determinant in any argument, at least in their minds.
#14838363
Buzz62 wrote:People?
You maybe and a few others?


So, you think most Canadians would support honouring someone who committed genocide. Okay. Whatever.

One Degree wrote:Duck! Liberal throwing magic word. No argument can stand up to their magical power to be the sole determinant in any argument, at least in their minds.


This thing where you do not look at the information already cited in the thread, and then pretend that the indormation does not exist so that you can act morally superior, is actually just an admission of ignorance.

You can just say that you had no idea that John A. MacDonald committed genocide. Most Canadians do not.
#14838368
I read the thread and other news articles about the subject. My distaste for the use of magic words has nothing to do with historical facts or being morally superior. I simply find it distasteful to rely upon such loaded words as an argument. This is why I have been doing the same occasionally in the hopes of getting people to see how it intentionally puts an end to an intelligent exchange of ideas.
If you insist upon using such overused emotional terms then at least add an actual argument to them instead of expecting them to stand alone.
#14838381
One Degree wrote:I read the thread and other news articles about the subject. My distaste for the use of magic words has nothing to do with historical facts or being morally superior.


I understand that your feelings about a word are not based on fact or on any actual moral superiority. That is abundantly clear.

I simply find it distasteful to rely upon such loaded words as an argument.


Then it is a good thing I am not doing that. I am pointing out histrocial facts to support why people want to change the name of a school.

This is why I have been doing the same occasionally in the hopes of getting people to see how it intentionally puts an end to an intelligent exchange of ideas.
If you insist upon using such overused emotional terms then at least add an actual argument to them instead of expecting them to stand alone.


Again, you ignoring the links I have put in the thread is just you admitting you do not read carefully and is not a valid criticism of my debating.
#14838453
Pants-of-dog wrote:So, you think most Canadians would support honouring someone who committed genocide. Okay. Whatever.

Yes! Most definitely!
I mean let's face it POD, your idea of "genocide" is a bit...all encompassing.
You know...it covers an extra-wide scope of matters. Most people would find MacDonald's ideas and treatment of the natives, a bit unsavory in today's culture, but we're talking about 150 years ago.
I'm actually trying to figure out how you don't see that. Or if maybe you do and just deny it. Either way...he was the first PM of the nation. Really now...we have to be at least a little realistic.

Pants-of-dog wrote:This thing where you do not look at the information already cited in the thread, and then pretend that the indormation does not exist so that you can act morally superior, is actually just an admission of ignorance.

You can just say that you had no idea that John A. MacDonald committed genocide. Most Canadians do not.

OK look...really this is stretching it soooo far.
Did MacDonald kill entire tribes of people? NO!
I see him being called "an architect of genocide against Indigenous peoples".
What utter horse kaka! He was NATION BUILDING! He, and us Canucks, managed to make our nation without the more aggressive tactics of the Americans. Allot o' Canucks are rather proud o' that POD. What the hell are you proud of with regards to your home and native land? All I ever see you do is piss on our flag. This "cultural genocide" crap is exactly that...crap. Every generation adapts to the society and its conditions. Even you and I. I'm nothing like my Dad, and even less like my Grandfather. Is that "cultural genocide" too? No, it is not. It is a perfect example of "assimilation" in order to "succeed".
#14838463
Buzz62 wrote:Yes! Most definitely!
I mean let's face it POD, your idea of "genocide" is a bit...all encompassing.
You know...it covers an extra-wide scope of matters. Most people would find MacDonald's ideas and treatment of the natives, a bit unsavory in today's culture, but we're talking about 150 years ago.
I'm actually trying to figure out how you don't see that. Or if maybe you do and just deny it. Either way...he was the first PM of the nation. Really now...we have to be at least a little realistic.


Your erroneous assumptions about what I don't see are not an argument.

Do you agree or disagree that he committed genocide?

OK look...really this is stretching it soooo far.
Did MacDonald kill entire tribes of people? NO!
I see him being called "an architect of genocide against Indigenous peoples".
What utter horse kaka! He was NATION BUILDING! He, and us Canucks, managed to make our nation without the more aggressive tactics of the Americans. Allot o' Canucks are rather proud o' that POD. What the hell are you proud of with regards to your home and native land? All I ever see you do is piss on our flag. This "cultural genocide" crap is exactly that...crap. Every generation adapts to the society and its conditions. Even you and I. I'm nothing like my Dad, and even less like my Grandfather. Is that "cultural genocide" too? No, it is not. It is a perfect example of "assimilation" in order to "succeed".


Please show how the cited evidence showing MacDonald's orders to kill indigenous communities is incorrect.
#14838500
Pants-of-dog wrote:Your erroneous assumptions about what I don't see are not an argument.
It's an observation.

Pants-of-dog wrote:Do you agree or disagree that he committed genocide?

I disagree...in the strongest of terms.
Perry Bellegarde, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, told the Star that he “totally” supports the call. He said he’s encouraged to see a group of teachers pushing for more awareness of Canada’s mistreatment of Indigenous peoples.
In Macdonald’s case, he said this includes the creation of residential schools and other policies of control and assimilation under the Indian Act — including restrictions on movement and voting rights that lasted until the 1950s and 1960s — that he considers “genocide of a people.”

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/0 ... union.html
HE considers “genocide of a people.”. Not me, not my Mom because I asked her, not allot o' people.
You can't just decide what is "genocide" and what isn't. To me, "genocide" means the killing of a people...PHYSICALLY! Not this...soft porn genocide you like to howl about.

Assimilation is not "genocide". It's actually the reasonable and rational thing to do...if you actually WANT to participate and be successful in a given society. You know...like you've done.
Last edited by Buzz62 on 29 Aug 2017 22:25, edited 1 time in total.
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