US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1617

We could have—and we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we’re gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That’s not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right.

The same lawyer also argued that there is “no contractual obligation” to prevent advantage or disadvantage between candidates,

On July 01 2019 05:15 CosmicSpiral wrote:


Hmmm, it's always a bit more complicated than mere utilitarianism.

The Romans saw the Greeks as distant relatives, or at least stemming from the same cultural traditions. Remember the founding myths popularized in order to build up the notion of Italy/Italians posited them as Trojan descendants, with the elites boasting bloodlines from Trojan royalty, so they inherited enlightened norms of antiquity that justified their conquests. The Greeks were also members of that same culture, inferior ones as a people but still members. It was largely the nobility that sought to learn Greek language, literature and philosophy. This indulgence by the upper class is a hallmark of cosmopolitan culture.

The primary reason Genghis Khan's main army and its auxiliaries engaged in mass genocide was pragmatic. Contra contemporary accounts he was a sadist, he simply lacked the tools to enact and secure control over conquered territories without dispersing his forces to the breaking point. His cavalry-based army required grasslands and flat terrain to operate efficiently (hence why he never conquered Southern China or India; meanwhile his descendants ran into severe problems in the Middle East and eastern Europe for several reasons). Nor was he keen on recruiting levies from the local population as they would have full knowledge of the local environment and weak loyalty to an absent conqueror. While Genghis occasionally left behind garrisons, it was more prudent. And he largely dealt the quietus to cities that recalcitrantly held out against prolonged sieges; his ambassadors usually offered terms of surrender prior to any real fighting in hopes capitulation would spare them the trouble.

For the same reason, he didn't slaughter everyone whom got in his way. Amassing such a gargantuan army from a hunter-gathered society left them ill-equipped to perform the basic functions of a sedentary civilization. They had little to no knowledge or interest in bureaucracy, administration, infrastructure, farming, engineering, so on and so forth. The Mongols didn't even have a unified language for communication until it was adapted from the Uighers. As they stormed through Asia and Central Asia, the Mongols usually employed the previous generation of aristocrats, government officials, artisans and other specialized classes to keep things running. And of course, most of them were awestruck by the great beauty and sophistication of these cities. It was often the case plundering a city entailed destroying basic housing and defenses while preserving everything else of value.



The simplest, most straightforward reason the Russian Empire never suppressed minority groups was that the inorodtsy comprised such a minuscule portion of the population that it was a waste of time to undertake such an endeavor. Not to mention the empire was prohibitively enormous. Instead, the idea was to placate them with certain privileges that both quelled dissent and excluded them from influence.

It's hard to distinguish between states and cultures within the annals of Imperial China. Court records rarely frame the internecine warfare in terms of ethnic groups, largely because they didn't consider such differences to be of importance. As for "striving towards a unified identity", well not even the Chinese bought into that except in relation to outsiders.

Which Persians are we specifically referring to? The Achaemenid Empire?



I've only read the last two pages. From what I've seen, all parties are in confusion as they are bouncing between different implications of the term, conflating it with cosmopolitanism in the social sense, or citing ancient cultures without being specific on what aspects were multicultural.

Multiculturalism in the sense of different cultures existing in proximity with each other in "harmony" has existed since antiquity, but the connotations are different from how we use it in the modern sense. The difference between a descriptive term and a laudatory one, so to speak.

On July 01 2019 15:10 Danglars wrote:
Andrew Yang's mic was off when he wanted to interject. Other candidates had their mics on for making accusations and contributing to the many free-for-alls. Now, Marianne Williamson is claiming the same thing happened to her.



This raises the specter of the NBC network deciding who gets to make a splash and who doesn't. The Harris-Biden exchange on civil rights was quite a moment for viewers. Forced busing programs were controversial back then, and Harris sought to make it another issue that Biden has to answer for in his long legislative record. Who knows how many other issues with health insurance, illegal immigration, or race that Andrew Yang could have made his mark upon?

This is a really dumb thing to be talking about after the 2016 Democratic Primary controversies with disfavoring the Sanders campaign.

On July 01 2019 08:00 xDaunt wrote:

Funny how a certain class of posters had no problem understanding exactly what I was getting at. And funny how you, as usual, are completely lost. Perhaps you should reconcile those facts.

On July 01 2019 21:28 iamthedave wrote:


On the Persians: probably. I really do have large gaps when it comes to the Persians and don't know the specific names for the different periods. This is second hand information from an archaeologist girlfriend who knows a lot more about them than I do and happened to see what we were discussing on here so piped in.

On the argument in general: My problem with the premise is that the idea is a) new and b) has no antecedent anywhere but in Western culture.

To me it's a very obvious wellspring out from the multiculturalism of multiple Empires from one end of the earth to the other, and of course you can characterise that multiculturalism very differently, but it doesn't need to be the same to be the parent-concept of modern multiculturalism. Cultural relativism, too, has antecedents. Several of the Greek thinkers wrote about it, and the idea pops up throughout antiquity before finding real purchase in the last couple of centuries.

On July 01 2019 23:35 Acrofales wrote:

Which is kinda the point of most concepts. You can find the progenitors of these ideas in antiquity around most of the world. Hell, the Inca were a multicultural empire and didn't even have writing (or at least, not as we understand writing. The quipus are apparently far more complex than initially thought).

I think what xDaunt is referring to is that these ideas were "rediscovered" and given more serious rigorous thought during the enlightenment. This gave rise to things like anthropology and archaeology: the study of other civilizations and the study of ancient civilizations for their own sake, rather than just to plunder whatever was valuable there (although obviously plunder was part of it). Multiculturalism as a way of understanding a nation as composed of various equally valuable cultures (rather than merely tolerating their presence, or taking advantage of other cultures' useful aspects) is really only something that came about post-WW2 anyway. And I'm not sure mass genocide giving rise to the idea that we should probably recognize that people of other cultures are firstly people is something that should be seen as a positive. Sure, the idea is positive, but the only reason we think that way is because we did the whole genocide thing first...

Of course, regardless of how the idea took hold, there are other issues with xDaunt's reasoning. Ryzel already pointed out one of the problems with xDaunt's argument: he is defining multiculturalism as valueing other cultures equally, and then using it to show how Western culture (whatever that is), is *better* than all those other cultures, because it is *only* in Western culture that this form of multiculturalism developed. xDaunt himself recognizes this flaw in his argument and says that this form of multiculturalism is a mistake (and thus a bad thing), but doesn't follow through on what this means for his argument: doesn't that make Western culture *worse* than all those other cultures that never incorporated this form of multiculturalism?

Secondly, it's a form of post hoc ergo propter hoc. Just because this form of multiculturalism was first adopted in western culture, doesn't mean that it is unique to western culture. To unravel this, we should probably start by deciding what exactly Western culture is. For instance, do South American nations have a western culture? If they don't, then why does the US (and Canada) count as Western culture? If they do, then most of the world is currently adhering to some form of Western culture (most of Africa and Asia are wearing your blue jeans and listening to local Beatles cover bands)...

But putting this aside, it still isn't clear that you can't have multiculturalism and discard all the bad parts of western culture. Nor is it clear that it is something that could never have arisen in other circumstances (e.g. somewhere we didn't have to murder 6million jews to come to the conclusion that murdering people for their culture/ethnicity is a horrific idea).

On July 02 2019 00:52 Nebuchad wrote:
I would offer that there is no valuable definition of culture where I have the same culture as xDaunt.

On July 02 2019 01:24 IgnE wrote:


Adorno and Horkheimer would like a word with you.

On July 02 2019 01:53 brian wrote:
well, no, then the worst case scenario is that it was entrapment.

On July 02 2019 01:40 Doodsmack wrote:
The story also fails to take account of this reporting by an Italian journalist:

https://twitter.com/lucianocapone/status/1118942338095755265

On July 02 2019 01:56 Gorsameth wrote:
That still relies on the Trump campaign being the first one (that we know of) that went 'fuck yes please' instead of calling the FBI.

On July 02 2019 01:59 brian wrote:

well the fine line for entrapment details specifically that that wouldn’t have been their first response. there’s a gulf between that and accepting illegal help on the third or fourth attempt for entrapment that helps to exonerate the campaign.

the illegality of receiving this assistance is then tempered by the illegal nature in which the accused is entrapped. you can’t illegally persuade people to break the law and then use it as a gotcha.

when all the evidence of a crime is obtained illegally it is not evidence at all. this applies here as well, except it also suggests trump’s campaign was not alone in (allegedly) breaking the law because entrapment is also a crime.