Zdzisław Beksiński. Untitled, 1973
Certain strains of accelerationist anarchism, particularly those you find online, are just celebrating the oppression and death of minorities with a tacky veneer of “for the greater good” smeared over, change my mind.
People assume that human rights are in the natural order. Human rights are fictional and can be revoked. There is no such thing as an inalienable right. It’s so funny how many of the people who have this foundational belief aren’t religious.
Edit: since I’m no good with words: Fascism bad. Human rights not guaranteed. You’ve gotta fight for your right to party.
Wait I’m confused can you explain how this relates to the post
I’m commenting that this attitude is borne from the fatal misunderstanding of human rights. These people probably assume that from the ashes, a better world will rise.
“Killing innocent people is chill sometimes because human rights are fictional and can be revoked”
That’s what I’m getting from you here, feel free to correct me but this is prettyyyyyy despicable sounding lol.
Yeah I’m apparently not communicating well. I’m saying the attitude that is willing to open the gates to fascism arises from a belief that human rights are assured. In the natural order, human rights are not guaranteed and must be maintained by people and civilization
okay yeah you might want to rewrite your comment lol I think I get what you’re saying but it was not at all clear from your first messages.
“passivity leads to fascism; human rights must be fought for in order to be maintained” might be closer to your intent.
Ehh I have COVID and the brain fog is real. Who knows what I’m even saying at this point. I read this interesting anthropology book that traced humanity from pre-homo sapien to present. It introduced me to the notion that human rights are a fiction. They only have any effect when we give them effect. Who knows if that’s even the right effect/affect?
I hear you :( wishing you a significant and speedy recovery!
And affect is the verb, so you used the correct one here :)
Coming back to this. This piece of art real stoked some great debate. Nice post.
Affect is also a noun. And effect is also a verb.
You have a flat affect.
You can effect change.
If you’re trapped in a slaughterhouse, the best you can hope for is that the giant death machine breaks before it gets to you. Even then, you don’t have any more control over the situation than your fellow cows who consider getting turned into hamburger some kind of necessary evil.
At some point, maybe a country that exists as a colossal intercontinental war machine would be better off in ashes. Certainly, the US exodus from Vietnam and the end of Apartheid in South Africa and the collapse of fascism in Europe was better for the world than the alternatives, even if the immediate aftermath was ugly.
But getting mad at someone for hoping these industrial scale death machines fall apart is absurd. What the hell is someone’s fucking wishful thinking doing to change actual policy or social function? Are you going to kick in Anne Frank’s door and wag your finger at her because she doesn’t realize how bad Dresden is going to be for the Germans? Are you going to shake your fist at Ayn Rand for daring to think the end of the USSR would make the world a better place?
Maybe my view is obscured by my own privileges, but I don’t think we’re in the slaughterhouse. The fact that you can write this long post calling for the potential end of America proves it. Do you think this type of rhetoric would be acceptable in Russia, the Soviet Union, or the Nazi Reich?
We talk as though we live in an outright fascist dictatorship. We live in a Republic in decline.
I’m not mad at anyone. I’m just posing a cautionary warning to not throw out the baby with the bath water.
Lemmy exists because of the large scale capture and bulk censorship of social media. Hell, just ask what happened to Aaron Swartz.
Republicanism does not preclude fascist policy. Just ask the Russians or the Indians or the Columbians or the Israelis.
What we’re doing domestically, and on an international scale, is fascist in all but name.
But you can make these statements on Facebook, X, and Reddit too. You also don’t need a VPN to access this information.
Also, I can openly discuss US massacres against indigenous populations. Can Chinese citizens openly discuss the Chinese genocide of the Uyghurs? Can Russians post pictures making fun of Putin? Russians can’t even be gay.
My point is that, while America isn’t great, it’s not as bad as some of the fire eaters make it sound.
Maybe. Unless a LibsOfTikTok account comes by, flags it, and unleashes a legion of flying monkeys to report hysterically until it’s taken down.
What you’re describing isn’t free speech… It’s security through obscurity.
Firstly, no you can’t. “Woke” academics, teachers, and journalists routinely lose their jobs and platforms for openly discussing US genocide. From Donahue to Katy Halper, we’ve got a decades long history of people getting sacked for questioning our police state at home and wars abroad.
Secondly, yes they do. Unfortunately, it is very hard to get Chinese national news and social media via American search tools because it is routinely censored. The best I can give you on short notice is Al Jazeera coverage of Chinese coverage.. But the idea that people in China just don’t know anything is happening in Xinjiang is about as absurd as claiming Americans don’t know what’s happening in Palestine.
Same with Russia. They get round the clock news coverage of Ukraine, both through domestic and international press. They are well aware what Americans accuse them of, in the same way we’re aware of what Iran and Syria accuse us of.
It’s not so bad, because we’re not the ones getting the business end of a military crusade.
All valid points. I’ll admit, I just don’t have the bandwidth to stay up to date on Chinese media, so no doubt some of my view is colored by US propaganda.
Regardless, you should know that I really like your username.
I assume that when the civilization will collapse, it’s free for all with a little bit of Mad Max.
The idea that there’s rights you’re entitled to just because you’re a human being who deserves a basic standard of decency from your fellow humans is not actually just made up nonsense.
Some bastard with a stick can pretend they’re revokable, but when the revolution comes for them, it’ll be their head on display in the public square as the people celebrate the triumph of their liberties over some warlord with a deficiency of moral character.
Yes even if they’re some faux intellectual who justified it with ass backwards “theory.”
Where do those rights stem from? If people suddenly accepted they didn’t exist would they still exist? Rights must be vigorously maintained.
They exist the same way hydrogen does. They are an inherent part of the universe, and all trying to break that does for you is blow up in your face.
You, just like the rest of us, are an infinitesimal speck of dust on a surface of an unremarkable ball of rock orbiting a star just like trillions of others, whose existence as a thinking entity will likely span less than 100 years out of the 100 trillion years that the universe will exist in a meaningful sense before the stars die and the last black holes evaporate.
The universe owes you nothing; human rights are nothing more than the common decency we owe one another in the face of an uncaring universe, and the idea that anybody other than the ruling class should even have them in any meaningful sense has a surprisingly short history. In contrast, the idea that might makes right is as old as the first predatory microbes. If a society believes in the value of human rights, it needs to be ready and able to vigorously defend them against would-be strongmen who don’t feel constrained by rules and norms of behavior, who will happily banish those rights back to the philosophical ether from which they came if it means they can secure more power and comfort for themselves.
Cold uncaring universe MFers when they realized they just outed themselves as a sociopath since as a part of the universe the only way they could actually believe it’s cold and uncaring is if they themselves don’t care about anything or anyone and are projecting.
You are not an observer looking in, you are a part of, and as a part of, what you see is nothing more than a reflection of yourself.
Understanding of calculus is a shockingly recent development too, does that mean that planets shouldn’t have been able to stay in orbit until Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz figured out how it could be possible?
The idea that as a living breathing thinking person you are entitled to a bare minimum standard doesn’t stop being true or any less a natural law just because you’re a pathetic worm who chooses to believe the person beating you with a stick has a right to because something something might makes right.
Cruelty is unnatural, authoritarianism is unnatural, the estrangement from our rights is unnatural, and your nihilism is nothing but to spit in the face of the universe and act shocked when all you’ve done is get spit in your eye and decided to bitch philosophical about it.
So by this logic, things were great by default?
It’s a fundamental law of nature. Okay. God given?
God Irrelevant.
I mean this sincerely. You are naive if you believe human rights appeared out of thin air. No offense intended.
The “pretending” is fully real, but perhaps temporary.
There will be no deus ex machina to protect rights