Who Is IOZ?: And Fuck You Too, Pericles

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

And Fuck You Too, Pericles

Obviously the idea that 18,000 gaymarriages are not prohibited by California's state-constitutional prohibition on gaymarriage because they occurred during a brief window of legality is absurd. Can you imagine some post-bellum South Carolinian arguing that the 13th Amendment didn't apply retroactively? The CA supreme court tried to split the baby and ended up with blood and guts all over its hands. Now a new referendum seeking to repeal with prior referendum will go on the ballot and will probably succeed. This is all to say that no matter how it is constituted and exercised, democracy on a large scale is a sham.

52 comments:

Mr.Fundamental said...: and I friggin love it. dang, ain't it a good day to be an anarchist.; 10:35 AM
Agi said...: Is there a greater FAIL than California?

I think not.; 11:07 AM
NutellaonToast said...: Dude, I love your little pet belief that small scale democracy will work. Yeah, people get less stupid in small groups.

Is it a form of naivety or just narcissism? Do you think no one else has thought of it before?; 11:09 AM
Mr.Fundamental said...: dudetella I think she pulled the football on you again, chump.; 11:13 AM
IOZ said...: I am the walrus.; 11:20 AM
NutellaonToast said...: The walrus is a narcissist. I guess you're not one, though. Obviously, no narcissist would refuse to engage those who attempt to disagree with him.; 11:32 AM
Mr.Fundamental said...: key word there: attempt.; 11:34 AM
Mr.Fundamental said...: dudetella: first you must remove yourself from the self-imposed straight jacket that is your intellect. then maybe you can start articulating your disagreement here using simple hand gestures and such.

booyah.; 11:56 AM
Cüneyt said...: Nute, democracy on a small scale is just common sense, unless you've got no brains at all. And even then, there are few things that good old-fashioned tribal democracy can't deliver even to the wisest would-be philosopher-king. Perspectives are one of democracy's major imports.

In families, like-minded associations of every stripe, warbands, teams, democracy can be demonstrated to work. For empires, though, it's much more debatable and since coercion is inherent to almost all power, the larger the system the easier it is for that power to get out of control. I don't see what wisdom you possess that renders IOZ's observation absurd.; 12:46 PM
AlanSmithee said...: I think nutie's point is something along the lines of: "You dirty hippie libertardlian greenie anarchist purity pure pure purists are soooo dumb! Wooooo! Obama rules! Woooo!"; 12:58 PM
Cüneyt said...: Is Nute a partisan Dem? I must not be reading closely enough.; 1:15 PM
BrianM said...: Cuynet:

While definitely sympathetic to yoru views (and Ioz) I would also note that small states can be even more tyrranical, (c.f. tribal justice that involves stoning to death the younger sister of a young man convicted of being seen with a girl of "improper" caste). So...even though I still agree with you...; 1:46 PM
IOZ said...: Brian, lover, "caste" is not a function of tribal society. FAIL.; 1:51 PM
Cüneyt said...: Brian, a good point. Even families see murder, after all. But as IOZ notes, most of the pernicious and widespread systems of privilege have spread via those dubious engines--the state and its laws. Sure, we can split hairs--was tyranny in India imposed by the British state, per se, or simply one state's technical superiority over many others? (Will this attract a certain regressive fellow of ours, I wonder?)

But, in general, when you get into middlemen, you get arbitrary, and you get detached, and yes, I prefer a stoning to a bombing, because the stompers have, perhaps only infinitesimally more, a greater relationship with their victims. For that and many other reasons I praise the smaller states, though I am a fan of multiethnic empire in general. As far as violence in one or another, I'm not going to say. Violence is essentially human, I think, and only enhanced in flavor and motive by this or that system. But you see, the smaller system I control more, so that's a factor, too.; 2:19 PM
Cüneyt said...: Of course, come to think of it, nations are tribes too. And what are castes but tribes made into permanent classes? Perhaps less of a dichotomy than appears at first.; 2:20 PM
Justin said...: To recap - here is what we have learned.

Small scale democracy and de-centralized government is distinct and worse than democratic oligarchy and empire because...
1.) In small societies, when a member of the community violates taboo they may be punished violently up to death.

2.) Small societies sometimes grow large enough to develop class discrimination, castes, and governments that may be more oppressive and powerful, but less tyranical than smaller counterparts.

3.) People are just as stupid in small groups as large, therefore the small stupid groups are inferior.; 2:38 PM
Anonymous said...: I would also note that small states can be even more tyrranical, (c.f. tribal justice that involves stoning to death the younger sister of a young man convicted of being seen with a girl of "improper" caste). After reading this blog for awhile, I seem to remember part of the issue IOZ took was not one of sheer morality (i.e. stoning not entirely unlike carpet bombing civilians) but one of scale. I say that in so much as a small democracy of 200 may indeed come to some horribly unjust and incorrect views, but it would find it difficult to, say, shove 6 million people in ovens.; 3:28 PM
SteveB said...: Now a new referendum seeking to repeal with prior referendum will go on the ballot and will probably succeed. This is all to say that no matter how it is constituted and exercised, democracy on a large scale is a sham.I'm sure those two thoughts must be connected in some way, but I'll be damned if I can see what it is.; 3:41 PM
IOZ said...: One branch of the California government, the judiciary, saw in the work of another branch of the California government, the legislature, i.e. in the CA state constitution, an equal protection clause with which they extended marriage to same-sex couples. A few months later, a ballot referendum, through which the general population can circumvent the legislative and constitutional processes of the state, invalidated the court ruling and curtailed the meaning of equal protection in their own constitution, thereby rendering same-sex marriage null and void. Given voter turnout figures and such, one would be hard-pressed to say this expressed the will of a majority; it expressed, instead, a moderately more organized plurality of that percentage of citizens who voted in the general election. Previously married same-sexers sued. The result was a subsequent court decision that affirmed same-sex marriage within the brief window between the initial court ruling and the ballot referendum, while also finding that same-sex marriage is not only illegal but in fact unconstitutional, as the ballot measure in fact amended the state constitution. In the next election, a different plurality of voters will, using another ballot referendum, strip the amendment that bars same-sex marriage from their constitution, which will reset the jurisprudential clock and extend general equal-protection protection to same-sex marriages.

I don't know what else you'd call that, Steve, if not a sham. Whose "will" is served, expressed, and validated here, regardless of the ultimate outcome.; 4:02 PM
Anonymous said...: would it not be better if gays work to get govt out of marriage business altogether rather than get into this we are just like every one and marriage is so BIG thingie..
just wondering after seeing the usual chest thumping and over the top screaming and ritual CD etc etc here in san francisco last evening; 4:25 PM
SteveB said...: Public opinion is quickly shifting in favor of gay marriage, and if your prediction is correct California law will reflect that shift in opinion, sooner rather than later.

Compare that with the massive shift in public opinion against the Iraq war, and the complete non-response of our political system to that change.

In other words, it's not hard to find examples that suggest that we don't live in a democracy, but this doesn't seem to be one of them.

Given voter turnout figures and such, one would be hard-pressed to say this expressed the will of a majority; it expressed, instead, a moderately more organized plurality of that percentage of citizens who voted in the general election.

You mean more people voted for Prop 8 than voted against it?; 4:30 PM
IOZ said...: SteveB, you are officially the new NutellaOnToast, for taking a blawgpoaste about how horrible is the democracy we live in and turning it into a blawgpoaste about how we don't live in a democracy. Congratulations!

Additional hilarious note on the absurdity of democracy. Because Prop 8 passed in a Presidential election year, whereas the probably anti-prop-8 ballot measure will be in an off-year election, Prop 8 may yet be overturned by numerically fewer voters who will nonetheless compose a larger plurality of the voting population than those voters who passed it in the first place.; 4:41 PM
Pericles said...: You can lead a horse to water...; 6:00 PM
SteveB said...: OK, you got me. It's not that we don't live in a democracy, it's just that the democracy we live in is a sham.

And here's the evidence:

1) Elections are determined, not by the will of all of the people, but only by those people who actually turn out to vote.2) The results of one election can be overturned in a subsequent election. Bizarrely, the relative turnout of the two elections seems not to matter at all.Hmmm... I wonder what you'd say if the opposite of #2 was true? What if, for example, you had one election, say an election for president, which did not, in any substantial way, policy-wise, overturn the results of the previous presidential election? Would that also be evidence that our democracy is a sham?

Good work, I think you've got American Sham Democracy coming and going. Now that you've boxed it in, it's time to go in for the kill.; 6:48 PM
blue ox babe said...: SteveB > IOZ.

Hey, it's a mathematical fact.; 7:13 PM
Mr.Fundamental said...: I guess it just depends on what you're trying to accomplish.; 7:41 PM
Aaron said...: Okay, okay. But I was listening to a radio interview with this pastor who helped run the Prop 8 campaign. He says, and I quote, "For five thousand years marriage has been between one man and one woman." Then they had another guy on. And he says, "For thousands of years, the word 'marriage' has meant a man and a woman."

I conclude: the problem isn't necessarily the size of the demos. I mean, yahoos like that would be even MORE fucked up in a smaller scale system. Any form of government that doesn't systematically disenfranchise and possibly enslave people like that is going to be kind of a hassle.

Has the good pastor ever heard of a fella named Abraham?; 8:41 PM
lucid said...: Aaron - apparently also ignorant of the historical Catholic ceremonies for same sex partners during the first 1,000 years of Christianity...

One would think theologians would be aware of the history of theology... then again, perhaps not.; 11:29 PM
Anonymous said...: @Brian
A better example for you might be the European early modern witch-trials, which mostly got really, really bad in some of the minor statelets of the Holy Roman Empire, where there was no effective higher authority to appeal to when the local authorities went crazy.
But the price of having, say, the Parliament of Paris review every witch trial and squash most of the death sentences, was being the subject of a powerful state capable of getting into major wars and of persecuting heretics and so on. That tended to kill a lot more people.; 4:23 AM
The Promiscuous Reader said...: anon, "would it not be better if gays work to get govt out of marriage business altogether rather than get into this we are just like every one and marriage is so BIG thingie.."

This 'get the govt out of the marriage business' seems to be a popular line in some circles, just as '5000-year-definition of marriage' is in others. I'm all for it, because it would mean that married couples would no longer get any special rights from being married. That seems not to be what the people who use the line mean, though: they talk as though things like legal kinship, inheritance, and such just fall from the sky, and if the government would just get out of the way, they'd land on people who've exchanged vows.

About those alleged "historical Catholic ceremonies for same sex partners during the first 1,000 years of Christianity..." The famous ones are Orthodox, not Catholic, if I recall correctly, and they're not equivalent to marriage or there'd be no need for separate ceremonies. They're rites for sworn brotherhood, which of course predates Christianity by a long time and is found in many cultures. Whether they're much help to us contemporary fags, especially the non-religious ones, I don't know. At best their status and nature remain controversial, so you can't really rag on contemporary Protestant divines for being ignorant of them. Especially since today's gay Christians are just as ignorant about the history of their faith. Let "he" who is without sin, etc.

It's true that it would be hard for a hunter-gatherer society to kill 6 million people, but the rate of violence and murder in such societies seems to be high, even pre-European contact. Marvin Harris cited a study in Our Kind which found, working from the memories of older San, that they had a murder rate roughly equivalent to that of Washington DC or Detroit. You'll be killed just as daid by a stone-tipped arrow in your brain as by a gas chamber. Just sayin'.; 6:30 AM
Tyrant X said...: Now the IOZoids are falling back on metrics? "Uh, we should live in smaller, decentralized communities because less people will get murderized that way, even if there ain't a single god-damn one of us that would want to live in some kind of inbred Amish community or worse..."

Isn't that the logic they love to make fun of when it's applied to voting for lesser-of-two-evilism? "Sure, things will still be fucked, but they'll be less fucked, or at least fucked in a new way!"; 8:00 AM
Cüneyt said...: Some of us have consistently valued certain metrics.

Personally, I know that democracy can work individually, even if it's also routinely frustrating. Maybe that's because I'm slightly charming and slightly intelligent and I can get benefits out of some votes. Maybe if I was in another field, I'd be swept aside by democratic processes. I don't know. But I do believe there's function in it; as a system grows more complex and more arcane, however, authoritarianism and mechanization becomes inevitable. So it stands to my reason that, somewhere along the way, democracy loses function or, better yet, changes function, from governance to management of crowds.; 10:57 AM
Brian M said...: I vote for pre-Renaissance Tuscanny, myself. Plenty of peace, love, and understanding there. (I know...I know, the Popes and the Emperors and the outside powers stirred things up, but still.) Plus...I'll take Renaissance art over Dung Christ...

But...in our romanticism over smaller socieites and their abiliities to wage big war...I guess a lot of small wars kill just as many people??

"Brian, lover, "caste" is not a function of tribal society. FAIL."

I guess it depends on your definition of "tribal society." There is certainly not much of a true, modern State in the Northwest Frontier Provinces. And, the "elders" who laid down the law were working within a "tribal" or at a minimum a traditional village level cultural system. I'll grant you my use of the term "tribal" may be anthopologically incorrect, but the villages do operate on a traditional basis, no?; 10:57 AM
Dunc said...: I guess a lot of small wars kill just as many people?? I believe that, proportionally, the constant low-level inter-tribal warfare of Bronze Age Europe probably killed more people per annum than WWII. Modern wars kill vast amounts of people in large part simply because there are vast numbers of people to kill. Back in 500BC, a small group of determined men armed with pointed sticks could commit genocide in a couple of days (for certain values of "genocide"). And they frequently did.; 11:23 AM
Anonymous said...: How you gonna keep 'em on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?; 12:14 PM
mds said...: This is all to say that no matter how it is constituted and exercised, democracy on a large scale is a sham.I would at least temper that a bit by noting that the egregiousness of the sham does depend on how it is constituted and exercised. California has an especially dysfunctional democratic framework. Paying for state expenditures requires two-thirds of the legislature (as we have seen blow up yet again), but a plurality of the full electorate can strip previously-enumerated rights from their fellow citizens? Yeah, that's fucked up. Activist judges + a multistep amendment process worked in Massachusetts' favor, and now it's an electoral non-issue. So, clearly, the problem is, er... too much democracy. Is it too early in the day to start drinking?; 1:02 PM
Cüneyt said...: I'd rather a million murders than one choice to murder a million.

The former seems less inevitable. And the latter is certainly less polite.; 1:21 PM
Anonymous said...: Just shut up and bag my groceries, Cunteye. Nobody cares.; 3:03 PM
mds said...: Oh, snap! "Cunteye." Someone clearly brought their "A" game to the debate. (No, really, I suspect that is their "A" game.); 3:22 PM
Cüneyt said...: I can barely respond, for all the weeping. Of course, I fucking love cunt, so maybe I could take it as a compliment.; 9:06 PM
Anonymous said...: What are we "debating"? Whether it's better to stab a million angels with one pin or one angel a million times? Who gives a flatulent fuck about your moronic hypotheticals? Nobody's going back to live in tiny, xenophobic villages, and morality is not a matter of utilitarian metrics.

"The former seems less inevitable"? Yeah, I guess, if you don't count the godknowshowmany people who actually were stoned, burned or hanged because the rest of the inbred villagers thought they were a witch or some such thing. I mean, sure, it's already happened before, but that doesn't mean it would happen again! What's really important here is which scenario would make Cunteye feel better to contemplate!

Stupid fucking navel-gazing wankers.; 8:00 AM
Anonymous said...: Who gives a flatulent fuck about your moronic hypotheticals?Nobody! BLAWG.

"The former seems less inevitable"? Yeah, I guess, if you don't count the godknowshowmany people who actually were stoned, burned or hanged because the rest of the inbred villagers thought they were a witch or some such thing.You're right: No one typically kept track of those numbers. I'd venture to guess though that less people were stoned to death as witches in Europe over the period of, say, any given 300 years, than were killed in Burundi in the course of a single civil war about 15 years ago. Mind you, the scale of populations is smaller in the way back machine and all that, but as a betting man, I would gladly take you up on it at even odds. Even at 2-1!; 8:15 AM
Mr.Fundamental said...: calmer than you are.; 8:28 AM
Aaron said...: pre-Renaissance Tuscany peaceful? Ghibelines and Guelphs? Dante exiled? Hmm....; 9:40 AM
Brian M said...: I was joking, Aaron. Joking. :); 11:03 AM
Cüneyt said...: Jesus Christ, that was interesting. Yes, Anon, make fun of my name and castigate me for talking nonsense. After all, I'm sure you're out there changing things, constructing wonders, and generally being far more than your presence here would indicate.

Of course anarcho-primitivism (is that where we're going, right?) is a fool's dream. I can't recall who I saw speaking of it--may have been Chomsky--who rejected such "back to hunting-and-gathering, it'll be utopia" thought as plainly built on genocide. I heartily agree. The complexities and troubles of the modern world with billions and billions of people are here. I do not deny them.

But quite frankly, you'd only think that I deny them if you arrived here recently and read only two or three of my comments and deduced that I was the sort to lose myself in dreams of what was and ignore what really is. And the truth is, I do like to muse and consider this or that philosophical ideal. I also talk practicals, too, and fuck you for presuming that you know me based on one fucking conversation. What do you bring to any of this, you jackass? Are you elevating the debate one iota?

And, in any event, I was debating the organization of societies, not their population altogether. I continue to believe that direct democracy is better in effects than populist democracy taking in 300 million or more. In all majoritarian versions of democracy, you have the injustice of the minority spoken over, but I would say that, while any group can fall to authoritarianism and group think, larger ones commit, with more swiftness, actions that marginalize or harm a greater number at once. And if you cannot detect the principle in what I was saying, then how about you ask me next time, instead of throwing schoolboy-level insults at me and making me into some straw man of whatever demon you want to reject.; 2:06 PM
ts said...: I think we should all just go out to a big field and start humping each other. I'd like to see the police try and break up that pile.; 11:52 PM
Anonymous said...: I'm sorry, Cunteye, I wasn't listening.; 8:04 AM
Cüneyt said...: It shows.; 2:23 PM
Anonymous said...: Did I urinate on your rug?; 4:43 PM
mds said...: Did I urinate on your rug?Because you're unable to tell without feedback from others? This explains much.; 10:51 PM
Anonymous said...: Donny, you're out of your element.; 8:27 AM

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

And Fuck You Too, Pericles

52 comments:

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