Remember when the term “Orwellian” was often treated as somewhat ridiculous, because western governments, censorious and propagandistic as they might be, still didn’t rise to anything close to that extreme a level?

Meanwhile, the President of the United States is trying to convert the White House into an American Versailles and yacht sales are at an all-time high.

These things are all connected.

US military spending isn’t meant to benefit the US or its military. It’s meant to benefit defense contractors and the politicians they finance.

So will they stop calling them “independent” or will they legally enshrine a lie?

A “physical property”, in this context, may be a metaphysical or logical combination of properties which are not physical in the ordinary sense.

lol

I’ve been watching as ontology has gone sideways since the new generation of blinkered STEMites decided they were qualified to weigh in on it, but this goes even beyond what I cynically expected.

Sorry, but no. Yours is the misunderstanding.

You’re conflating physicalism and materialism.

That’s the current version of a power fantasy he’s had ever since he was the nerdy kid getting picked on by the mean kids on the playground.

For context:

Libre is a third party that was formed in 2011. They’re a coalition of leftist groups, and are democratic socialists.

In 2012 and 2013, at least 18 of their pre-candidates, candidates and staff were murdered.

In 2013, they lost the almost certainly fraudulent presidential election to the right-wing National Party candidate - Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado, the narcotics trafficker who was just pardoned by Trump.

Those are conceptual terms.

What is doubt’s shape? Its size? Its mass? Of what elements is it composed?

If physicalism is true, then either those questions have answers or doubt does not exist.

He’s an unqualified, paychopathic piece of shit and a fucking war criminal and the best the US media can do is speculate that maybe the deranged toddler-in-chief might maybe not support him quite as much as he used to because maybe a few of the brazenly traitorous Republican scumbags in Congress might actually take issue with him.

2025 is going to go down in history as the year that the US dropped all pretense of being rational or legitimate and went full bug-eyed insane.

Any reason to doubt physicalism?

Describe “doubt” in purely physical terms.

Of course.

None of this is or ever has been about crime, or even really about immigrants, undocumented or otherwise.

It is and always has been about establishing precedents by which to expand governmental authority.

What they’re building is a system in which anonymous federal agents will be seen to have the right to black-bag anyone, regardless of whether they can be charged with a crime or not, and disappear them.

They started with undocumented immigrants justifiably accused of other crimes because that was the easiest case to be made both legally and popularly, but they never had any intention of stopping there. They’re going to keep expanding until they reach the point that they can do it to anyone, any time, for any reason.

Right, but it’s also Trump’s personal philosophy.

I don’t think Trump is even capable of considering a coherent ideology - his mind is just too scattershot and too self-absorbed for that.

Rather, I think that what happened is that after his first term. actual fascists like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought and Elon Musk saw Trump as a tool through which they could get what they wanted. They feed his ego-driven tantrums and he demands things because he’s a giant overgrown toddler, and not coincidentally his demands and tantrums align with the fascist agenda that Miller, Vought et al are pursuing.

Weird though it is I sometimes suspect just that.

The sinplest explanation is simply that he’s oblivious to hypocrisy because he’s so narcissistic and so sociopathic that he can’t conceive of any conflicts between his desires since they are all his desires and thus inherently perfect and beautiful, and he conceive of any interpretation of events other than his own.

But there are times, and this is one of them, in which his hypocrisy os so obvious and so brazen that it does feelbaomost deliberately.

And I can actually see it from a warped paychological perspective - basically, he’s demonstrating that niceties like integrity and principles are for the small folk, but as an inherently superior member of the legitimate ruling class, he’s above such things, and entirely free to be just as capricious and self-serving as he pleases. It’s basically an ego flex.

Harmful either way.

Never seen it.

Off to see why I apparently should…

…Ah. I see.

That’s a specific approach I’ve never seen before, though the broad strategy is tediously familiar.

Thereby neatly proving that his war-mongering in Venezuela and his hatred for Maduro have nothing at all to do with narcotics.

I’m amazed and pleased. I almost never encounter anyone who shares my views, even among self-described 'anarchists."

Most of them carry around lists (figuratively at least) of all of the things that will be required and all of the things that will be prohibited in their “anarchism,” antagonistically immune to the fact that by doing so, they’ve already stipulated institutionalized, hierarchical authority and thus proactively eliminated anarchism.

I don’t think of it as a political philosophy but more just as a description of how I believe the world actually is when stripped of the systems we’ve laid on top of everything.

Very much yes.

My anarchism is rooted in my view that authority is a contrivance, and an ultimately unjustifiable one.

Tom lives alone on a desert island. That means that Tom, within the constraints necessarily imposed by simple reality (he can’t, for instance, flap his arms and fly) enjoys complete freedom of choice.

The only way that that freedom can be constrained is if another person is introduced and that other person acts to constrain Tom’s freedom.

So as you note, the state of affairs in which Tom’s freedom is constrained beyond anything determined by simple reality is some additional element that’s laid on top of the base state.

And as such, it’s the thing that must be justified. Tom doesn’t have to justify being free from constraint imposed by another - he already was so free, and would have remained so were it not for the fact that the other has chosen to try to introduce constraint.

Therefore, the introduction of constraint is the thing that must be justified

And there’s no possible justification for it that doesn’t ultimately establish a hierarchy by which the other person is seen to effectively be a superior being, such that their determination of what Tom may, may not, must or must not do is superior even to Tom’s

If the tacit presumption of innate superiority isn’t made, then any and all noninal justifications for authority over Tom’s decisions fail, since any argument by which any other party might justify imposing their will on Tom is also an argument by which Tom might justify imposing his will on them, and any argument by which they might claim to be rightly free of the imposition of Tom’s will is also an argument by which Tom might claim to be rightfully free of the imposition of their will upon him.

This is where and why institutionalized authority inevitably goes wrong, which in turn is why I’m an anarchist.

Without first hand knowledge, I couldn’t say in any detail, but I expect that ambitious, greedy, power-hungry psychopaths are already angling for Council positions, from which they’ll exercise tacit authority until such time as their positions and their authority can be institutionalized, at which point they’ll become the new generation of corrupt officials.

That’s not to say or imply I oppose the effort - if nothing else, they’ve gotten some breathing room. And hopefully the next time they throw off their tyrants, they’ll remember how they got their start and reject authority in and of itself and entirely, rather than deluding themselves that it can be constrained.

My anarchism.

Anarchism in general makes me the other when dealing with most people, but the specifics of my views on it also generally make me the other when dealing with most “anarchists.” (I oppose any and all attempts to institute anarchism - I believe it will arise organically or not at all - and I similarly reject any and all stipulations regarding what sort of standards, norms or systems may, may not, must or must not be a part of an anarchistic society),

So here’s how I see it:

Someone is goading/bribing Trump into acting so that they can take control of the Central and North American narcotics trade.

That’s why he pushed for invading Mexico to fight the cartels, and when that didn’t work out, he shifted to starting a war with Venezuela.

It’s obviously not a sincere effort to stop narcotics traffic, or he wouldn’t be pardoning Hernández. It’s much more likely that he’s pardoning Hernández because he either already is or is intended to be a well-connected and experienced ally to Trump and whoever it is that he’s working for/with.