#lightdancer comments on politics

[lightdancer1]

I'm just going to be impolite enough to say it:

To feel 'betrayed' that Muslims who take Islam seriously take it seriously in the bits that people deluded themselves didn't exist is to show that you project onto people and a culture things that they never said, never claimed to say, never will claim to say. They aren't betraying anyone any more than the Christians who hate queers and make this their spiritual 'if we deny this our souls burn in Hell' moment are betraying anything by those decisions.

Islam is not, in fact, an innately progressive force any more than it is an innately stagnant or regressive one. The resentment Islamists have of the modern era is that it went from an age of Muslim imperialism as the chief force in world affairs to them being hazard to the whims of others.

This is the reality of how other cultures actually work and it is not, in fact, sunshines and rainbows and Muslims that take power do not, in fact, have reciprocal obligations to people they consider anathema any more than a Christian would consider themselves obliged to a non-Christian who helped them out.

[lightdancer1]

I think that there are some very simple roots to the current crises in the United States:

Most of them have been pretty well discussed if oftentimes slanted in the direction of the US Right. One of them seldom truly tends to be acknowledged and it is simply that the United States is finally, belatedly, being forced to reckon in a way even its elites, political and cultural, cannot ignore with its limitations. The cheap empire expanded to the west at the expense of Indigenous peoples from Hawaii and Alaska to the initial 13 colonies and then the post-WWII boom when everyone else blew themselves up directly via the war or indirectly via colonial looting and pillaging allowed a great deal of illusions to thrive.

The United States has been accustomed to sweeping results for relatively cheap investments in a halfassed fashion and this pattern has worked amazingly well for a long time. It's worked well for long enough that the assumption was made, very dangerously, that the conditions that allow it to do so would themselves be eternal. As it proved these assumptions were based on very dubious foundations and are falling apart between the recovery of other parts of the world and the USA starting and losing not one but two idiotic wars.

As Mao well put it, all power comes from the barrel of a gun and the United States' idiotic wars dented its military credibility. One need only look at Russia's self-imposed clusterfuck in Ukraine to see that the association of political and military power is very much still intertwined in the age of drone warfare as it was in the days when the sword and the pike were the cutting edge innovations.

Centuries of being able to delude itself that its power was beyond these rules have created a crisis the United States is unsuited to match, in terms of its political, cultural, or military elites simply because it's never had to do things the other way and it doesn't know how. And creating the will is simpler than creating the means to exercise that will. And there are zero major political factions interested in creating the will.

[lightdancer1]

If you want one of the biggest reasons that originalism is a sham:

this is a good place to start. It will never make a dent to the people who profess to believe in it because their entire take on the Amendment is completely divorced from the writing in the Federalist Papers, in the actual deeds of the Founding Fathers, and in the entire intent behind the Militia Acts. It is true that under the old definition 'militia' as per this act meant the entirety of the freeborn white male population of the United States (notice just who's in and who isn't). It is also true that this was the way the Founders accommodated that uniquely Jeffersonian delusion that you could maintain an empire on amateur soldiers.

"A well-regulated militia" allowed the United States to have in theory an army that was very big on paper and in reality limited to the incestuous and infighting-ridden Regular Army in practice. 'Well regulated' meant people were allowed to arm themselves and to keep themselves at a fit level of military drill. In reality this almost never happened even in the slave states, where there was still a more militarized system by default because slaveowners never once forgot the reality that the people they claimed to own would gladly turn to murder them if they had the slightest hint of a chance.

We know also what the Founding Fathers thought of a standing army. They viewed them as innately dangerous threats to the very fabric of a democracy and that they were right on a few big things can be seen how how much the standing army and global empire of the modern USA has eroded fundamental elements of the vision they built, among them the fourth and fifth amendments.

So in short, this topic and the military-industrial complexes are the points that illustrate where 'originalist' conservatism shows itself to be a grift, worth contempt and scorn and not a single second of being taken seriously.

[lightdancer1]

Here is the actual Medicare for All Bill in its current form:

I know that none of the people who thirst for Bernie's plan to nationalize healthcare in a way literally no other society in the global north has done and which even Communist states did not do are going to read this thing, nor will they try to. For one thing it doesn't have pictures or smut so that leaves most of them right out. /snerk

But actually reading the bill makes it clear why the idea is poison and why it festers as a talking point for the 'so Leftist we vote for the germ theory denying Putin fellaters Williamson and Kennedy' crowd.

[lightdancer1]

While I'm at it, I also want to point out to the people who are all 'the President should just ignore the SCOTUS':

You know why Donald Trump loves Andrew Jackson so much? Because that's exactly what happened when the Cherokees sued and reached the SCOTUS and John Marshall ruled against Jackson. He said 'John Marshall has made his decision, and now let him enforce it' and orchestrated the Trail of Tears anyway. Andrew Jackson is not a good role model and the alternative to rule of ballot is rule of bullet.

And I don't think the 'revolution is a dank meme celebrating genocide of Eastern Europeans by a Red Tsar' crowd are up to launching a revolution. They would play the Tudeh to some American Cromwell/Khomeini wannabe.

[lightdancer1]

As far as the attitude to Standing Armies that reflects a blunt truth that is somewhat politically incorrect to note but is still true:

Namely that the United States was founded by English colonists who inherited a very English way of looking at things and thought of themselves as Englishmen. Other views existed, but they were not the ones that went into the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, or the people who went to fight and win the Revolutionary War itself. In many ways England, like Russia, was an outlier to a European norm. The Romanovs built a gigantic military machine with serfs taken in for 25 years that enabled them for a while to be one of the most invincible powers in Europe in the right circumstances. England learned one thing from the Civil Wars of the 1640s and that was that an army, given sufficient size, was not the servant of the state but its master.

And again one can look at the post-1945 history of the United States to see that however abysmally wrong they were on other things they called this one exactly right and that the growth of the huge military machine and the bulk of cases of its use validate this view. And yet, all the same, if one were adherent to the true 'original' vision of the Founders one would be literally mandated to oppose the MI Complex as much as anyone who uses Russian barbarism like cultural Viagra ever born.

This is the ultimate reality behind both the Militia and the 2nd Amendment, even its 1783 boundaries were far too enormous for a militia force to guarantee anything at all, but the Founders could not for a variety of cultural reasons take the logical approach of building your bog-standard 18th Century professional permanent military force. Like the Three-Fifths Clause, and in practical reality very much intertwined with how US culture actually evolved in its earliest days, the decisions made were very logical within the framework of the culture of the time and left a time bomb on the throat of the new country counting down to the explosion of 1860.

It is a slight overstatement that the Founders consciously built the Militia Act to preserve slavery, the people of the initial generation were quite sincere in their views that it would die out....conveniently when their own generation wouldn't have to make it so. But subconsciously, institutionally, and culturally the Second Amendment did very much evolve in the South in particular in a very consciously proto-totalitarian militarized fashion. And it did so because the military need in states like South Carolina and Georgia where well into the 19th Century the overwhelming majority of the population was Black the small number of white people could in fact do math and did everything in their power to prevent the people they terrorized from ALSO doing that math.

And that's the elephant in the room for 'Da Foundahs Intended' as an argument. Their intentions broke down amazingly swiftly, and the entire Constitution itself is a result of that breakdown. And unlike the cult that treats them as a geopolitical Hadith complete with chains of Isnad, they were smart enough to see that in real time and act on it and leave an Augean flaming mass for their grandchildren to fix to the tune of 720,000 dead.

[lightdancer1]

This article has a list of Black officials in the Reconstruction era:

Finally, two articles to put a set of faces on the gains Black people made during Reconstruction. Frederick Douglass's wife and Harriet Tubman are going to be mentioned in Women's History Month, and there are very specific reasons for noting his wife in particular. First, though, this article notes multiple people who held Federal office in the Reconstruction era. More than one of them were enslaved and legally property and then held Federal office, and state office, with the power to make and influence laws. One, P.B.S. Pinchback, remains the only Black governor of my state to this day.

This was and is rightly held as one of the greatest changes that Reconstruction produced for very good reasons.

[lightdancer1]

Next book on the list done and that means I get to beat one of my favorite dead horses

The ghost of Cannae, in particular, and the idea of military historians admiring the flamboyant loser of wars over the more successful and less flamboyant winners. Hannibal Barca, the greatest Carthaginian general in the history of the great Carthage, cast a very long shadow with his most famous victory, and the first double envelopment in military history. He also signally lost the war.

The reasons for this stem from much of the more flawed elements of prior military cultures and what they chose to focus on, or to not focus on, and why they did. I admit that, I can freely see it. Cannae, Chancellorsville, and Austerlitz make sterling narratives. The ability of the victors to negate all that by careful use of political-strategic and logistic abilities to raise and supply troop numbers too large to be broken do not.

Thus the Punic Wars are defined by the man who did much to ruin the great Carthage in pursuit of a vendetta where he did win some of the most spectacular victories over Rome, and not by the Soviet-style ability of the Roman Republic to go 'destroy three armies? Here's six more, all of them larger than the ones you beat at such staggering cost fuck your mother.'

And that ultimately is the reality of these wars, as Goldworthy lays out. The Republic raised colossal armies and fought wars for victory or 'Carthago Delenda Est.' The price for this was equally colossal, setting in motion the rise of professional private armies loyal to the military strongmen whose battles culminated at Actium and the rise of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty and the first phase of the Roman Empire ruled by the Emperors.

And this too is a lesson that could and should have been emphasized in the military histories and academies of times past and almost never really is. The price of victory can be as ruinous and transformative as the price of defeat. Wars are not things to be embarked on lightly, and they unleash forces that are not readily controlled even by the victors, while the price of defeat can be unaffordable.

10/10

[lightdancer1]

The next step began with the duo of Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla

Out of all the figures of the late Republic, if anyone can be blamed for its death and the collapse of the Republic as a society it is this man. He would face multiple wars of the late Republic where the institutions so murderously upheld by the Optimates were incapable of meeting the new challenges. Not just the insurgency of Jugurtha of Numidia, but the first clashes between Roman legions and the Germanic peoples of the far north. These peoples, the Cimbri and the Teutoni, dealt the Legions the most shattering defeat they faced since they encountered Hannibal. Not the last time for the Legions, but one of the first.

In response to this crisis, Marius created the Legions that would make the fame of the later Empire. Most dangerously he created a full-time professional army owing no obedience to any save the generals who sought to wield them in the field. These forces brought him triumph against the Cimbri and the Teutoni, but the very power he raised, which let him stomp over the laws of the Republic, would later consume him and it did so in the form of his great nemesis, Lucius Cornelius Sulla.

[lightdancer1]

The Sokoto Caliphate has its relevance not least in determining the endless endemic violence in Nigeria taking the shape it does:

The Sokoto Caliphate itself is the root of the civil war in modern Nigeria in one sense, as it was the largest unit in what's now Northern Nigeria that left the direct impact on that cultural gap between the Muslim north and the largely non-Muslim south. Forged in the Fulani Jihad, it remained one of the most warlike states in a region whose neighbors included the other mirror warlike state, the Kingdom of Dahomey.

It was able to hold itself together for a better part of a century and its fall will be returned to when this reaches the Scramble. That very legacy of a centralized Islamic state led by the Fula and the Hausa, who had an equally typical of the Islamic world merger of ruler and ruled across ethnic lines because ethnic groups are not essentialist, and they never are, and never will be, is why I also ungenerously but accurately define the endemic wars in Nigeria as a temper tantrum by Muslims who refuse to accept that the union of regions with distinct histories was not a blueprint for massed forced conversion and the efforts of non-Muslims to resist it.

[lightdancer1]

As yet another example of that bias:

It took until the 21st Century for Neanderthals, the oldest known and the best known archaic Homo species, to see anything written like this. We know the most about this species, about how it grew, about its genes, to a point that it's the most well-known species. And half of Neanderthals were so invisible that almost all the reconstructions you see of Neanderthals (as with other species) are based on males, and the questions of how these women lived was neither relevant nor interesting.

But as the article points out Neanderthals, the most humanlike in a lot of ways of our cousin species, still had one other fundamental difference besides the inability to throw and the lack of the precision grip. Their hips were such that childbirth would have been distinctly less fatal than among modern humans, while growth rates were predominantly accelerated.

Their lives were less dangerous in one way, but would have been just as dangerous in others.

[lightdancer1]

One thing also worth reinforcing is that the Solid South predated Jim Crow though it died with it:

Jim Crow was a product of the end of the Gilded Age. It formally codified itself after the Plessy vs Ferguson decision. Until that time the pattern was one of drawing the pale ghost of slavery over the South, and rule by the pale ghost of the Confederacy and a caste of Confederate veterans....but segregation was not a legally secured system until 1896. This was no small part of how the Black people of the 1880s and parts of the 1890s were able to secure things that their children would not be able to.

This world of the Solid South was also a part of a world where outside of Woodrow Wilson and Grover Cleveland the Republican Party enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the three branches of the Federal government from the 1870s to the 1930s. At times the Dems could win the House, or the Senate, but only at times. This was the real reason why the old Democratic Party was so avidly segregationist and racist, it was a sectional party that couldn't afford to alienate the racists or it'd disappear entirely.

[lightdancer1]

Next history book wrapped up, this one from my own collection:

As what it is, namely a survey of the past and of the person and reality of the idea of the Emperor or universal monarch and monarchies of times past, it's an excellent exemplar of a kind of survey that was once more typical of historical writing than it now is. When he tried to draw conclusions for the world of 2022 the effort cratered more than slightly for the precise reasons that it was a good look at the world that disintegrated with only indirect traces left in the 1940s.

7/10.

[lightdancer1]

Next book on the list done:

In retrospect it looks like a good idea of looking back at the actual foundations that built the system that the book I'm currently on details the blend of collapse and transformation thereof. In reality I misplaced it until I was well into the sequence of books on the Empire.

This book covers exactly what it says in 182 pages and it looks at how the Romans made the first version of Italy. The simple answer is 'imperialism is imperialism whether it relies on the Maxim gun or the Gladius.' Rome's civil wars and its foreign wars, in particular the Second Punic War (and the Social War is a blend of both depending on which particular side of which faction one looks at ) were the literal speartip of the transformation.

The tools of Empire are the same, and so are the evils that spawn them and shape their nature.

[lightdancer1]

And it would be Caesar's murder that set in motion the final fall

Caesar was the first Emperor of Rome, and was seeking to openly declare himself a monarch when the Senate expressed the pointed edge of disagreement with his plans. The result was the establishment of the Second Triumvirate, the eclipse of the most obscure of them, and the rise of the Roman Empire.

What Caesar had begun could not be undone, he was no Gracchus, and his killers were willfully blind to that fact.

[lightdancer1]

"I want to be Sultan instead of the Sultan" is the good summary of how this man came to power in 1492:

Askia Muhammad, it should be noted, took power at the age of 50 in the year 1492, a year notable for other various major events. In a good proof of how slippery history is and why if you're a Muslim Emir or Sultan you always scratch the backs of the Ulema before they put a dagger in yours and make it a justifiable act by ensuring history records it this way, this man, who was the greatest general of Sunni Ali, was opportunistic enough to work with the Ulema to murder his son and heir and declare that the son and the father were wicked savage infidels where he, the Pronunciamento man, was the true moral Muslim. When he did take power he ruled for a very long time into the 1530s, consolidating the power of the Songhai and building a regime that in his eyes and that of the Ulema was properly rooted in the Maliki Mahdab and solidly in Islamic norms.

In reality he claimed greatly exaggerated at best criminality on the part of the man he murdered and that man's father and the pattern here was the standard 'this is why in ancient times to medieval times smart rulers strangled the good generals after a while because sooner or later he decides he should be Sultan instead of the Sultan.'