Banks, please do give those questions thought as I am. I prefer kicking around salient and thorny issues with interesting and intelligent minds, adjectives I’ve long applied to you. When I catch an opportunity to actually explore an issue, I try to treat it as sincere and jump in.
Many posters here both fling and wear amounts of shit that many would find excessive. I definitely fling my share, but I’d debate whether any flung at me have actually stuck. I sometimes think you may view shit flung your way in a similar light. So we go about making our cases. I think it provides some weird form of growth and sustenance, or in this age where options so far outstrip time why would anyone still bother to read or post here?
I also play ping pong with and launch probes at arguments that aren’t very salient and thorny at all for fun and practice with minimal shitting. It’s done in hope and in my world as an act of faith that occasionally a thought provoking run will somehow unexpectedly unfold in this space. I get rewarded enough not yet to have lost faith.
My sublime and elegant shitting will of course continue (until morale improves). I can still be reasonable and conversational on topics big and small, serious or not. While I don’t multitask, I multithread like a mo fo and the shitting follows two distinct purposes.
Also as a community member, but not a community official, I’m obliged to follow community standards but not to adjudicate them. I also feel no obligation to try to be comprehensive or impartial in my presence. That’s on josh a bit. Bless him. He does an impressive job, and for what but our infrequent thanks or acknowledgment and whatever he gleans from our weird collective essence? It seems like quite a headache he bears for what seems like by conventional standards a meager return.
The big two reasons I fling poo are first poo flinging at fascists and proto-fascists so they drown in shit before they can grow friends and teeth. Less work for the Vickers at the end of the day if these drownings are attended to early and often. Perhaps not much less, but every villian fewer counts. Second I fling shit to break the rythym of growing flame feuds between people who are interesting and intelligent when the jet is turned down or the heat better distributed to try and shave some duration of the inevitable molten stalemate these things lead to. Also, some times the flame sparks themselves reveal problematic misconceptions I judge more pertinent to address than the conflict that sparks them. Also zinging is fun sometimes and while there are limits here (Ham is too dense to figure them out), it feels far more open and richly textured here than in most venues where any vestige of true zings still remain.
The difficulties you bring up about addressing the perpetrator side of crimes against humanity aren’t ones I have ever found good answers for. They are at the heart of the issue so they can’t be avoided, and probably contribute a great deal to the staggering impunity of most of the world’s bad actors.
This leads me to suspect that victimhood and the extent of victimhood in crimes against humanity might be more graspable and measurable and therefore be a preferable starting point to understanding and acting in response to those crimes. Corpses, ruined houses, shuttered schools, bombed hospitals and factories, crops burnt in the field, etc.
In our legal system you have to show harm to establish standing to bring a suit.
Poll
