You have to put Tocqueville in the context of his era.
Europe was still in the era of monarchies. In fact, even though France had just beheaded their monarchs they tried to recreate various flavors of monarchies for decades. They even installed an "emperor" in Mexico.
Tocqueville was trying to figure out if other forms of governance could exist.
I find it comforting that the same flaws we see in democracy today also existed in the time of Tocqueville. That does not mean that I think other forms of government are better. I agree with Churchill that “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”
Can you please stop it with the ideological flamewar? I'm bending over backwards not to ban you, and you keep posting things that are not the curious conversation we're looking for.
If you want to have curious conversation, you're welcome here, along with all of your opinions and views. If you just want to smite enemies, please go do that somewhere else.
We don't need you to tow any ideological line (trust me, we really couldn't care less, besides which I'm all in favor of having well-read communists in the conversation) but we do need you to stop it with the generic flamewar tangents. They're predictable and uninteresting.
Also, you've been crossing into personal attack regularly and that sucks and is not ok. It's also beneath you, or at least I would have thought so.
It would be helpful if you would take to heart that we want HN to be a web forum where people don't make habits of such things.
This is like a cop saying they're trying to be fair in mediating between the dozen people mobbing me and unjustifiably downvoting all my posts, and me for simply saying well-founded, well-cited things that disagree with the liberal ethos of this place.
Why so much self-delusion? Just let it be, ban if it makes you happy, you know just as well as I do that this place is crawling with fascists.
If possible, though, I'd like for you to point out where I attacked anyone. My MO is always the same: keep cool, cite quotes that upset people because they tarnish the images of their idols. You keep saying I'm breaking the rules and attacking people, and I don't see where?
I'm trying to help you here. If you can't agree that you've been posting flamewar comments, past the point of trolling in many cases, and just keep blaming others (including the mods) for the entire problem, it's hard to see how this is going to work. Ironically, it's your right-wing counterparts that I most often have to tell this to.
You're not just "simply saying well-founded things" and "keeping [your] cool" - you're inundating the threads with provocation and snark. The effect of this is predictable and we have no choice but to moderate it. HN's survival depends on not burning to a crisp, and you're starting and feeding flames all over the place. I'm not saying it's arson, but it's negligence, and the flames are just as damaging either way. The fact that other people lose their shit in response is not only not an excuse, it's an effect you're co-producing and are therefore co-responsible for. That doesn't make what they're doing ok, and we'll moderate it whenever we see it, as usual.
There's an extra burden on people arguing for minority or contrarian views. You can't just drop them like bombs in the threads without deranging people and destroying the environment. No doubt the majority is wrong, but it's your job to know who you're dealing with and to persuade them, not troll them. Otherwise you end up discrediting your own views and re-entrenching others in their errors (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
If you want to keep posting on HN, you have a responsibility to protect it for its intended purpose. It's only because most of the community does so, and moderators work hard to mitigate the rest, that HN has any value at all. You're benefiting from that, since you find it valuable enough to spend your time here. Trashing the place in return is a poor way to give back—and I'm sure you wouldn't do the equivalent in other cases (such as littering in a city park, or starting fires and leaving them to others to put out).
> I'd like for you to point out where I attacked anyone.
You needn't look far; you did it two sentences before your question ("self-delusion"). Here are some other places where you crossed the line:
1) Calling someone a bad writer isn't an insult, it's an honest appraisal of their literary talents.
2) Where's the insult? They themselves said they're the child of a CIA agent and that they think Russian culture is stagnant and worthless. I simply repeated exactly what they said but emphasizing how vile it was.
3) Again, where's the insult? They accused me of delusion, I said that they can choose theirs.
4) I told someone that they have a wrong theory of statecraft. Again, are you saying that telling someone they're wrong crosses a line? Is this a safe space for... being wrong?
5) Again, I fail to see the insult.
From my perspective, you seem to be arguing that all my engagement should take on the superficial form of "civilized engagement", even when people are saying rancid or provably incorrect things, attacking me, and mass downvoting me. I don't swear, I don't insult. This place has a problem with ad-hominem, as shown by the funny reactions to this post:
>There's an extra burden on people arguing for minority or contrarian views.
I think this is very much what's at stake, but I have the opposite view: contrarian views deserve a little support from neutral parties and authorities if they are valid and the prevailing challenge to them is subpar, not additional responsibilities to coddle those who dismiss the unfamiliar from a position of smugness. Other than simply kowtowing to "might makes right", why should the members of the numerous and overpowering status quo have less responsibilities than challengers to it? You can say that them's the breaks, that's how things are, but it's a construct just like everything else on here.
You probably think that I "generate work" for you with my posting, but what you'll find is that in the absence of communist types (ideally many and more belligerent ones than me), this place will continue to descend more and more into people talking about the need to exterminate the Chinese, the importance of appreciating the fundamental IQ differences between races, the need to eliminate homelessness in San Francisco at the human level, the celebration of war as a cult of death. You'll find that, as a mod aspiring for "neutrality", you'll have banished anyone who might care to "organically" oppose those views, and that suddenly upholding "neutral" law and order will mean enforcing fascist takes.
But this is just HN, so it will be a farcical and goofy version of what you'll be witnessing happening everywhere else in society. I don't expect you to do anything differently, but at the very least you should stop blaming me for people finding Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin quotes scandlously upsetting to their own poor understanding of history.
Marx and Engels weren’t writing on American slavery and race relations.
But they seem pretty racist to me based on their frequent dropping of n-bombs in their writings [0].
I think the reason we don’t have 19th century racist essays by Marx and Engels is that they wrote almost always about Europeans and European culture.
Agree on Churchill. But does that surprise anyone? England was still literally colonizing India and South Africa during Churchhill’s time. It would be weird to find a non-racist world leader from that time period. Even LBJ, decades later, held pretty racist beliefs even while passing the civil rights act.
It's pretty easy to find non-racist leaders, actually, but not if you restrict yourself to ghouls like LBJ.
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A point to be noted is that in this respect Mr. Churchill and his friends bear a striking resemblance to Hitler and his friends. Hitler began his work of unleashing war by proclaiming a race theory, declaring that only German-speaking people constituted a superior nation. Mr. Churchill sets out to unleash war with a race theory, asserting that only English-speaking nations are superior nations, who are called upon to decide the destinies of the entire world. The German race theory led Hitler and his friends to the conclusion that the Germans, as the only superior nation, should rule over other nations. The English race theory leads Mr. Churchill and his friends to the conclusion that the English-speaking nations, as the only superior nations, should rule over the rest of the nations of the world.
Actually, Mr. Churchill, and his friends in Britain and the United States, present to the non-English speaking nations something in the nature of an ultimatum: “Accept our rule voluntarily, and then all will be well; otherwise war is inevitable.”
But the nations shed their blood in the course of five years’ fierce war for the sake of the liberty and independence of their countries, and not in order to exchange the domination of the Hitlers for the domination of the Churchills. It is quite probable, accordingly, that the non-English-speaking nations, which constitute the vast majority of the population of the world, will not agree to submit to a new slavery.
It is Mr. Churchill’s tragedy that, inveterate Tory that he is, he does not understand this simple and obvious truth.
So you agree that Marx and Engels were racist and rescind your point “I read a lot of Marx and Engels, who wrote at a similar time, and they don't sound racist?”
So you don’t think Marx and Engels are racist? That’s interesting, would you expand on why?
I can’t think of a reason why people would write n-word used in a diminutive and insulting manner and not be racist. And it’s really common too. Not just a single instance but many times and seems like it was in their regular vernacular.
Think whatever you want, but know that the idea that "everyone was racist", or that any Westerners were at the humble vanguard of anti-racism, is utter bunk.
I really don't know if trying to tease this out is worth it, but is there an eastern power you would hold out as an exemplar of "anti-racism" or whatever?
Europe was still in the era of monarchies. In fact, even though France had just beheaded their monarchs they tried to recreate various flavors of monarchies for decades. They even installed an "emperor" in Mexico.
Tocqueville was trying to figure out if other forms of governance could exist.
I find it comforting that the same flaws we see in democracy today also existed in the time of Tocqueville. That does not mean that I think other forms of government are better. I agree with Churchill that “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”