A comment popped up for approval on an older post, Immanetize the Eschaton, and I thought it worthy of a post of its own, since the author was so impassioned about it. Perhaps it will start a new debate here on TSM. Without further ado, Chris R’s response to my post:
I only came across your blog bc I’m reading the ILLUMINATIS! Trilogy and wanted to know more about the phrase used to open the book: “It was the year they immanentized the Eschaton.” And i would have kept reading past the first half until I realized how fond you are of vage, sweeping generalizations. What particularly offended me was your assertion or implication that defunding the police is a wholly anti-racist move. I am bipolar and as a result have gone to jail because the right seems to think that anything illegal is a moral failure on the part of the “guilty”. If police departments would realize that less than a sixth of their calls are actually in response to violent crime, they could then be justified in spending less on armored transports and tanks and more money on training police to take potentially dangerous individuals or people just at their whits ends to hospitals instead of jails. if we decriminalized certain unpopular behaviors and re-invested in hospitals not jails, then we’d (I’d) have no criminal record bc i would have been treated faaaaaar earlier for my medical condition. And it’s also embarrassing that you think jist bc you won’t date a trans you’d be marked as anti-trans. This simply isn’t true. I’m hetero-normative and don’t particularly enjoy the idea of d* in my mouth. But I’m pro trans and I’ve never been accused of the opposite. You speak good words and can write sophisticatedly, so why is it so hard for you to think with equal sophistication. It’s Sunday, a day off from work bc of all the hard work put in by Anarchists, Commies and Wobblies, tyvm, and I have better sh* to do than write an essay i never intended to write, but if you’re interested in hearing more from me, bc -idk- maybe you’re interested in actually. discussing sophisticated, cosmopolitan ideas that are never black and white (gray, gray, gray -yes, I’m also a moral relativist *whooooooo*-) then I’ve left an actual email for us to begin discussion. Not that I expect to ever hear from you.
Three more thoughts: you say, “The 2016 election was stolen by Trump with the aid of Putin, but the 2020 election was unquestionably fair and even-handed, and there’s something wrong with you if you do not accept that.” Which, given the fact that only registered Republicans have been found to have committed voter fraud, Trump should never have been president. I wish it had been Bernie not Hillary: the Progressive Left are the democratic socialists like him and me who don’t stand the centrism of the current DNC. And you’re mostaken in thinking that Progessive Liberalism is the new religion: that falls to Humanism of the type touted by Vonnegut, a Christian. Many atheists need something to believe in, and that has fallen to believing in the innate goodness of our brothers and sisters, humanity. The DNC needs to die, the SDS was right in ’68, and the GOP has shown it has no problem using violence to get what it wants so they are obviously as morally relative as myself.
Again, it’s Sunday and I never planned a speech, must got disgusted by your Randian misinterpreting of 1984. 2+2=4 and the facts showed that Trump should have been impeached. They did not add up to 5 as what I presume to be your party would have the American Public believe.
Hope to hear from you soon, ;-).
Oh my! Respond to that? Where to begin?
I guess there could be places set aside in the world where you can believe whatever you want, and free passage to move as you please.
Personally, I’ll take the one named Reality. It’s got troubles, struggles, and issues. But at least 2 and 2 does come out to 4 every time.
I went back and read your prior post “Immanetize the Eschaton” after reading the screed above. My reaction was much as Ed Skinner … “where to begin” when an authors’ logic and irony processor is so impaired.
I reflect upon your comment in the original post:
“You don’t debate with evil. You don’t negotiate with evil. You don’t compromise with evil. You don’t tolerate evil. You DESTROY evil. You pat it on the head until you can find a rock big enough to bash its skull in.”
… “Chris R” sounds like someone in need of a great big rock.
Oh my goodness.
“Only registered Republicans have been found to have committed voter fraud”. Really? That’s on a par with the fellow who told me the other day that hundreds of firearms were seized during the 1/6 fracas in the Capitol. You can’t really have a debate with someone whose version of Spock always had a beard. And he’s right about anarchists and communists and days off, just think of all the business owners and their employees who got extra days off when Antifa and BLM torched their workplaces.
Kevin, I’m going to predict that when he can’t confuse you by making up his own history, he’s just going to fall back on namecalling. Folks like this I just tell to choose their lamppost in case they ever make a serious attempt to enact their program on the rest of us.
He did have one salient point. State mental hospitals HAVE pretty much been shut down, thanks to the ACLU, dumping all those folks on the populace after a 72 hour hold, time after time. And I’m betting he’s a violent bipolar, acting out and ‘that’ didn’t go well with the responding officers. Re the rest… sigh… I’ve got books to write, not the time to respond point by point, to his many errors.
I lived in NYC when they did this and not only did we have them sleeping on subways but also on heating grates in the freezing cold. The cops use to take them into shelters or even a cell but even that was limited because of the reaction to the lawsuit filed by the ACLU. I seem to recall someone summing it up by saying: those actions were stifling their right to be crazy. I also seem to recall that a number died from the cold every year because they refused to go into the shelters and such.
A critical skill in today’s world is appreciating who is worthy of engagement and who is not. It’s not your job to pointlessly attempt to improve someone’s ability to analyse their own culture. More important things in this world.
“…pointlessly attempt to improve someone’s ability to analyse their own culture.”
That’s not what I do here. I want each side of the discussion to air their beliefs (and supporting data) in public so third parties can decide who has a better grasp on reality. I suffer no illusions that I’m going to “improve” anyone’s anything.
Untreated mental illness can be so sad…. And so incredibly stupid.
The problem was these people needed to be institutionalized as they would not take their meds or eat, etc. They were a danger to themselves. Some, not a large percentage became violent without their meds. Much of this stems from families not being able to cope with the person’s problems so they would put them into an institution, many public. At some point the climate changed and mental illness professions started saying it would be better if they were not shut away, thinking that the families would take them in and care for them. Wrong! They ended up on the street.
It’s not even necessarily the family’s fault: if someone is violently mentally ill, they can’t be kept at home.
For that matter, there are plenty of examples of mentally ill people who are financially fine — they get their social security disability checks monthly, and it even pays their rent — but they are still on the street, because their paranoia keeps them from staying in their own apartments.
After having read “My Brother Ron” by Clayton Cramer, I have concluded that we really need to include things like “an inability to hold a job due to mental outbursts”, “an unwillingness to stay in homeless shelters”, and “frequent arrests for harassing strangers on the street” as factors for “a danger to self and others”.
No it is not necessarily the families fault, because they had the same problem they could not make sure the person stayed on their meds. In some cases there was a stigma about someone in the family having metal issues but that was more common in those classes that could afford to put someone away.
Far be it from me to contend with such a paragon of “sophisticated, cosmopolitan ideas”.
I bet I know how this went down.
He went off his meds, went into a full violent wig-out episode, and got sat on by Officer Friendly. And then the judge asked him why the hell he hadn’t taken his meds, like he was supposed to, and he didn’t have a good answer for it.
Indeed.
And when he says “Only one sixth of crimes police respond to are violent crimes”, I wonder if he’s counting things like theft and trespassing as “non-violent” crimes. Well, places like California and New York City are now considering those things as non-violent, and thus have no need of police intervention — and we have seen the fruits of that approach — in increases in both non-violent and violent crime.
The truth is, property crime is violent crime, because we pay for things by the hours we give to others.
I wonder how much of the left cannot understand the concept that theft takes the hours of your life that you spent earning your stuff, because they never earned _their_ stuff.
At any rate, the difference between “no-violent” (but not victimless) crime as held by the left is meaningless in the long run, because if the police do not do something about theft and fraud, eventually the victims will – and it will be violent, because there’s nothing else they can do. A police force that is only allowed to act against violent crime will become a police force that protects criminals against their victims.
Finally, fraudsters may be “non-violent”, but they are vicious sociopaths, worse than most murderers. A Bernie Madoff ruins more lives than all but the worst of the psychopathic serial or mass murderers and rapists, and the fraudsters outnumber the violent psychopaths 100 to 1.
OTOH, the difference between victimless crimes and crimes with victims is stark – and most of what is wrong with our police force in the present day stems from them spending so much of their time on victimless crimes. If a cop is trying to find crimes where there are neither complainants nor dead bodies, he will be either conducting entrapment schemes or sticking his nose into others’ private business. And a cop who does these things to free people should not be surprised that he is attacked. Which is why so many cops are panicky and trigger-happy.
Indeed, stealing nullifies the minutes and hours of life that someone spent to earn his stuff. It’s a fractional sort of homicide.
One does not debate a mad dog. The proper and effective response is well known.