@transmorpher

you seem a smart sort.
so i am curious how you reconcile your own biases and prejudices that the rest of us struggle with on a constant basis?

humans,taken as a whole,are pretty fucking dumb and tend to adhere to social constructs that appeals to our inherent tribalism.this is why we are so easily manipulated by:nationalistic pride,religion and yes..racism.

this is why i found this video so delicious.
overt racism is something that is so transparent that we can all recognize and despise its deplorable and divisive nature.

but we all struggle with our own biases,and prejudices,and this video reveals that ugly truth in such a glorious fashion,because it exposes our hypocrisy and reveals and uncomfortable truth about our own prejudices.

it is funny,because it is true.
uncomfortably true.

so your comment came across as sanctimonious moralizing to me,but i want to give you the benefit of the doubt and ask how YOU reconciled your own,very human... prejudices.

because i struggle with mine on a daily basis.

@bcglorf

interesting how you classify the protesters as angry mob and rioters.

see,
this all on tribal land,owned by native americans,who welcomed this "angry mob" and "rioters" and the police are there NOT at the behest of the tribal elders,but DAPL,a private corporation attempting to push a private pipeline,for private profit,through privately owned land.

DAPL had even hired private mercenaries to keep the landowners off their construction site,who used attack dogs,mace,rubber bullets and worked alongside the police.it got so bad at one point that they had pulled police officers from FIVE states to keep those pesky landowner rabble down!

on a good note,those ancillary officer teams bowed out after a few days,saying that it was immoral and they were unwilling to participate.so the "police" you are referring to are most likely private security.

Funny how the perspective you tell the story from changes it entirely even while keeping to the overall same facts.....and then add some context.

democracynow has been doing excellent work on this situation,as has countercurrentnews:

https://www.democracynow.org/topics/dakota_access

http://countercurrentnews.com/2016/11/north-dakota-becomes-first-u-s-state-legalize-use-armed-drones-police-defend-illegal-pipeline/

http://countercurrentnews.com/2016/10/ohio-swat-state-police-deployed-north-dakota-crack-dapl-pipeline-protesters/

http://countercurrentnews.com/2016/11/sheriffs-leave-standing-rock-saying-completely-unethical/

and if you wanna berate those hiring the private thugs:

http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/dial-a-cop-20161031

I would say that Stalin, the Kin Jong's, Various African Tribal Genocides, and Pol Pot might disagree with your account of wholesale slaughter being reserved for the 'white' Europeans and their descendants. That is just to name a few. Also, what is a 'white' European? I mean the southern Europeans have quite a bit of Moorish blood in them, do they still count as 'white'?

All sarcasm aside, your argument is extremely flawed. Conquerors tend to lay waste to the societies they conquer, not always in terms of total lives lost, but in terms of cultural death. The reason why 'white' people are vilified for this lately is because for the past several hundred years they have been the ones expanding and taking over the regions you speak of. This is not exclusive to a skin color or originating locale, it is absolutely a core of our human nature.

I gave some examples earlier of non-European conquerors, but they are fairly recent. If we look in history at other groups, we find the same meme. The Steppe Horse Tribes were BRUTAL to cities and countries that did not capitulate. Look up "Measuring against the linchpin". That saying came from the fact that if you resisted Mongol rule, they would slaughter every male taller than the linchpin of a wagon wheel. The Aztecs and Mayans ruled southern American empires through great brutality, including human sacrifice for 'religious' purposes. Recent discoveries even indicate that it was considered a good omen if the sacrifices were crying in pain before they were to die. Remains recently found showed "All shared one feature: serious cavities, abscesses or bone infections painful enough to make them cry."

Slavery originated as early as human recorded history, if not sooner. Slavery can be traced back to the earliest records, such as the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1760 BC), which refers to it as an established institution. Slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations. Mass slavery requires economic surpluses and a high population density to be viable. Although slavery in some form or another existed in most European countries, it wasn't until after contact with the Arabic African slave traders that it soared in the 15th and 16th centuries.

tl;dr

You are referring to recent history to make an example while completely ignoring THOUSANDS of years of similar history. All humanity is flawed, narrowing it down to a singular group with cherry picked data is not going to persuade anyone with a brain.

We live in a world populated in the enormous majority by mindless tribals. Of course their rituals are idiotic.

Educational videos are fine, but what we need is a cull.

Natives on reservations can kill you and only deal with tribal prosecution. In some instances it's the right thing to do.
Shoot those motherfuckers then scalp them all.

And another note, a tribal burial site was bulldozed before people could get there to determine if it had historical value which would have stopped the pipe line.

They should simply murder anyone trying to build it on their land, and insist on using tribal courts in the prosecution of the 'crime'. No tribal jury will convict them....problem solved. Can we please get Palin to attend the ground breaking ceremony?

Cute rant but I really think it's because he can't dance.

Dancing and Music are tribal.....they have been around since there were people.

I would actually say that's what makes a personally successful politician, but not a professionally successful one, and as far from a perfect one as it's possible to be.
I think we need both election reform and finance reform to make a difference. Election reform to be able to actually hold politicians accountable to their voters at least once every few years, and finance reform to make them want to work for the voters rather than the donors.

A perfect politician would be fair minded, not greedy, not ego driven, not 'tribal', honest, willing to sacrifice for the greater good, thoughtful, consistent but willing to change in the face of new information, moral (not the kind of morality where you force your specific morals on others, but the kind of morality where you can be a role model for them), and still influential and successful at not only finding solutions to problems that are at least palatable to all, but also successful at getting them implemented. I'm not sure I've ever seen one of those...but as I see it, Sanders checks more boxes than most, far more than any other candidate.

Right wingers have a lower IQ and want a simplified world. They get frustrated when the simpleton they elected, surrounded by Nixons CIA team (including the simpleton's daddy) treat them like the fools they are.
Then they make an even dumber decision. Eventually they will elect a Hitler or such. If that doesn't make them idiots I don't know what would.

As an entertaining sidenote, when Bush lost to Obama, right wing voters (those that were being monitored and expresseed political preference) had a DROP IN TESTOSTERONE.
For them politics is an emotional, tribal event like a pack of apes fighting over power. Idiot is too kind.

another lovely racist video from bobknight. the "tribal drums" was a nice touch.

No. Not even a little.
They are being stored BY THE TRIBE at this locked, until now secure location. These morons have no right to rifle through their private tribal papers and artifacts because they don't know the tribe is involved and they assume the evil government must be doing it wrong. The tribe is outraged, their opinion is the only one that counts...after all, this is THEIR ancestral land, not the ranchers, and it's THEIR history and PRIVATE papers being pawed through and likely stolen. The terrorists have already been caught stealing things from the park, it's no stretch at all to assume they'll be stealing many artifacts they find 'interesting' or 'improperly stored'....if the natives want them back, they can go ask Bundy for them, right?

Hahaha... seriously, what kind of passive aggressive bullshit is that? "Ignoring the theoretical underpinnings of socialism, because I've decided that that's waffling, I say Jesus was a socialist." Next time, maybe just write TL;DR and make a farting noise while rolling your eyes.

You can't dismiss the actual meaning of the word Socialist as 'semantics', if you're talking about whether or not something is socialist. That doesn't help the discussion.

In order to use socialism as you appear to be doing, you would have to first:
- ignore the history of socialism and its political development,
- ignore the entire body of academic work, current and past, on socialism, and
- ignore how the word socialism "IS used now, like it or not" in actual socialist or semi-socialist countries

By doing that you end up at your definition of the word, yes. But you had to take a pretty long detour to get to that point

Marx's quote on religion is pretty straightforward - it can be, as you say, open to interpretation, but it's generally agreed that he didn't say that your Jesus was a stand-up socialist. He is more commonly taken to mean that religion is a false response to the real suffering of the oppressed; religion provides a fiction of suffering and a fiction of redemption/happiness, that will never translate into real change. It makes the oppressed feel like they are bettering their lives, while actually keeping them passive and preventing them from changing anything.

The slightly larger context of the quote is this: "Das religiöse Elend ist in einem der Ausdruck des wirklichen Elendes und in einem die Protestation gegen das wirkliche Elend. Die Religion ist der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, das Gemüth einer herzlosen Welt, wie sie der Geist geistloser Zustände ist. Sie ist das Opium des Volks."

I don't know how to make that more plain, but I can try. Religious suffering is on one hand a response to real suffering (wirkliche Elend, by which one would mean a materialistically determined actual lack of freedom, resources, physical wellbeing, etc), but it is also a false reaction against that real suffering. Real oppression creates suffering to which there could be a real respones, but religion instead substitutes in false suffering and false responses - it tries to tackle real suffering with metaphysical solutions. He goes on to say:

"Die Aufhebung der Religion als des illusorischen Glücks des Volkes ist die Forderung seines wirklichen Glücks."

This, too, seems pretty straightforward to me, but you might see 4 or 5 different things there. Religion teaches the people an illusory form of happiness, which doesn't actually change or even challenge the conditions of suffering, and must therefore be tossed out, for the people to ever achieve real happiness.

A fundamental difference here is that religious goodness is internally, individually, and fundamentally motivated. 'Good' is 'Good', and you as a Christian individual should choose to do Good. A goal of Marxism is to abolish that kind of fundamentalism and replace it with continuous criticism; creating a society that always questions, together, what good is, through the lens of dialectical materialism.

You might recognize this line of thinking* from what modern Europeans call the autonomous left wing, or what Marx and Trotsky called the Permanent Revolution, which Wikipedia helpfully comments on as "Marx outlines his proposal that the proletariat 'make the revolution permanent'. In essence, it consists of the working class maintaining a militant and independent approach to politics both before, during and after the 'struggle' which will bring the 'petty-bourgeois democrats' to power." Which sounds great, except it can also lead to purges, paranoia, and informant societies.

My entire point is that socialism and Christianity are entirely different beasts. One is a rich, layered mythology with an extremely deep academic and political history, but no modern critical or explanatory components.** The other is an academic theory of economics and politics, with all the tools of discourse of modern academia in its toolbelt, and a completely different critical and analytical goal.

TL;DR? Well, Jesus (in a lenient interpretation) taught that we should help the weak. Marx explained that the people should organize to eradicate the conditions that force weakness onto the people. Jesus
taught that greed would keep a man from heaven, Marx explained that religion, nationalism, tribalism and commodity fetishism blinded the people to its common materialist interests. Jesus taught that the meek will be rewarded for their meekness, and while on earth we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar's; Marx explained that meekness as a virtue is a way of preventing actual revolutionary change, and that dividing the world into the spiritual and the materialistic helped keep the people sedate and passive, which plays right into the hands of the Caesars.

*I'm just kidding, I know you don't recognize any of this


**There probably are modern scholars of Christianity who adapt and adopt some of the tools of modern academic discourse; I know too little about academic Christianity.

Yes it is important the field you work in. You are going to spend something like 40% of your waking hours doing it. If you think doubleshifting manual labour under scorching sun and whips is somehow equivalent to 8 hours in an office environment where you answer phones or w/e, you've lost the thread.

You're right that not everyone can change jobs. You grossly exaggerate what is required to do so, however. Yes, changing between highly skilled careers that required a significant amount of specialized knowledge isn't available to all that many people. But you can't even see the miseries of slave labour from the desk of your first career, they're so far away.

You haven't thought too much about infrastructure and what it would mean to have it removed, have you? Of course infrastructure is a benefit to employers, but that's not relevant to how beneficial it is to the 'slaves'. I expect casual access to electricity, water, and world wide communication would have done a lot for slaves, to name just a few of the elements of infrastructure. I'm honestly starting to doubt your sincerity now.

Slaves had good healthcare? Holy shit. I never expected to hear something like that. I don't need to make a counter point here, as you've ridiculed yourself. American healthcare is shitty -- COMPARED with other developed countries. It is light years ahead of anything that has existed outside the jurisdiction of a government.

Yes, the influential have an advantage. Nobody is disputing that. It doesn't utterly negate your rights across the board. You can still travel. You can still educate yourself. You can still own property. You can still address many grievances by wielding your rights. This list goes on and on. ALL things a slave couldn't ever hope to do. I think the rest of your paragraph should have been moved to the protection from hostility section so I'll address it there.

I was addressing hostility from other slaves. You are probably right in that the tribalism it fosters can be very dangerous where countries clash. In a system without government, spats would result in undending blood feuds, all across the territory ruled by the anarchy, whereas under a state, if they happen across borders they can erupt into something far worse.

I don't agree with the way the US has handled the extremist muslim situation that they mid-wifed in the middle east. But are you going to tell me that you're less safe, now, even after all the alluded too transgressions, than some rural farmer in South Sudan, who is effectively living without any guaranteed rights?

I'm definitely for more compassion and socialism than seen in modern US policy, so I'm not sure what your point is. Are you trying to claim that policies on slave plantations were more generous towards the slaves than our current policies are towards us?

Let's just say that I'm loathe to accept an unsourced opinion than medieval peasantry lead better lives than the average government-laden citizen nowadays. I'm sure there are some points on which they did better. Superstition, sickness, famine, war, flooding. We honestly don't have anything that even compares to these in the modern world. If you could link it or something though, I'd love to read it. It sounds interesting.

These posts are getting too long.