Archive for May, 2014

Ever faster movement left

Sunday, May 4th, 2014

Weasel zippers reports some tweets:

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Now, not only can free speech get you fired, supporting, people’s right to free speech behind closed doors with the blinds drawn, while piously deploring what they say, can get you fired.

Observe that Josh Olin did not take the horribly extreme ultra ultra far right neo nazi position that people have a right to free speech in public.

Can anyone remember a time when anyone was so ultra extreme far right as to support free speech in public?  I am sure that not only did I never support such a horrible thing, but my parents and grandparents and great grandparents never supported it either.

Everyone who was born before 1956 remembers a time when there was no such thing as marital rape, when the idea that there was something wrong with a husband compelling his wife to perform her marital duties was so strange that there was no easy way to say such a thing and be understood.  And yet, no one remembers ever thinking such a thing, nor the people of the time thinking such a thing.  The past is always changing, only the future is certain.

For a long time, esr has entirely forgotten that once upon a time, he, his entire family, and everyone he knew, took a husband’s right to compel his wife to perform her marital duties entirely for granted.  Now, it seems, he has entirely forgotten that once upon a time he supported not only the right to freedom of speech behind closed doors with the curtains drawn, but, gasp, horror, free speech in public, a position so extreme right wing that no one has words to express how horribly right wing it is.  Freedom of speech is now bullying, just as the marital contract is now rape.  All right thinking people agree on this, and they always have.

 

 

ESR moves ever leftwards

Friday, May 2nd, 2014

Esr has to move ever leftwards, or else suffer persecution, and to prove himself sufficiently left, has to enthusiastically support the ever greater persecution of his fellow leftists. Thus each leftist has to move further left, and has to support the persecution of his fellow leftists even more than he did last year.

This is the left singularity, which results in ever leftwards movement, ever faster.

It is always cut short internally by dictatorship, a Stalin or a Cromwell who, finding himself outflanked on the left, makes it as illegal to be to the left of him as it has long been illegal to be to the right of him, or else cut short by foreign conquest, the foreign conqueror is drawn in by weakness, and by the extermination of people he cares about.

If not cut short, the final outcome would be infinite leftism in finite time, where everyone tortures each other to death, and the last torturer commits suicide for his inability to inflict infinite torments.

The closest approach to an actual left singularity was Chang Hsien-chong, who reduced the population of Szechwan from three million to seven thousand, largely by torturing people to death.

Had his career not been cut short by imperial reconquest, would have doubtless reduced the population to zero, either outflanked on the left and killed by someone even lefter than himself, or killing himself after torturing to death the last of his generals. Recall how the political followers of Aristide continued in zombie like loyalty even after he personally gouged out the eyes of one of his loyal minions with his own thumbs. Recall generals in Siberia, surrounded by armed and loyal troops, going to Moscow when summoned for torture and death

As Trotsky said:

The party in the last analysis is always right … I know that one must not be right against the party. One can be right only with the party, and through the party …

Chang Hsien-chong distributed the wealth of the landlords to the poor, then ate the landlords for oppressing the poor, then exterminated the intellectuals for infecting the poor with insufficiently progressive ideas, then flayed the poor alive for being insufficiently grateful for having the wealth of their oppressors redistributed to them.

Of all those who write in English, the historian Donnithorde  was in the best position to know the truth about Chang Hsien-chong. Leftists, which is to say all modern historians, either rewrite Chang as a mild mannered agrarian reformer or else a horrible reactionary installed in power by the CIA. (I am just making up the part about the CIA) – modern historians, which is to say modern leftists, go completely incoherent and make no sense whatsoever when reporting these events. To get a report that is evidence based and intelligible, you have to go back to books and articles written in a safer time when the left was less terrified of itself.