/r/ - miscellaneous

にぱー

You nailed it. It seems like the only candidates that rise to the top in recent world elections are those that are willing to embrace the polarization and radicalization of their parties, and the public at large.

It's a bummer, lain. France needs a good president right now to help cool things off; I had hopes for a more moderate candidate (as one usually does).

So do you want to go with the fascists or the corporatists?

>>79
there is a third option.

>>84

Amen to that.

It's a shame that Robespierre&co. get such flak for la Terreur. The only reason they're villified more than the fucking aristocracy or clergymen they had to kill was because, for once in history, the ones getting killed were the literate classes who documented the deaths of their friends. The French aristocracts and churchmen who lost their heads had it coming.

>>88
>The only reason they're villified more than the fucking aristocracy or clergymen they had to kill was because, for once in history, the ones getting killed were the literate classes who documented the deaths of their friends.
wow, I hadn't thought if it that way. good insight!

>>70
>>79
The notion of democratic elections changing nothing is so obvious, fact-of-life-ish, that I'm actually bewildered every time people are compelled to point it out.
In a world without dynastic monarchies, where kings would derive their powers from God, given to them in a ritual of coronation; without a national identity or other type of unifying political myth, a more universal, secular justification for power is adopted. The election is just a mysterium through which an official "gains" his powers - a justification for him holding power over others, which in and of itself cannot exactly be justified by anything more than the law of the jungle, the survival of the fittest.
Like with the animals fighting over the role of the pack leader, the crown still rests on the head of the only one to have enough power to seize it (usually, just a representative of said power).
What makes him legitimate is not a tradition or a divine power, but the perceived will of the people, or rather, an expressed will of majority of the individuals, since modern democracies do not attempt to be nation-states anymore.
With mass media, legal and bureaucratic intricacies, obviously, it is not about the will of the masses, but about who is most able to sway them. A competition, a sports discipline of sorts.

Needless to say, any ethical argument for democracy, or any other coercive hierarchical system, for that matter, is deemed to fail.
It is a seemingly wasteful ritual, with a ton of mythology surrounding it, but, for whatever reason, every such mean of reaching non-violent consensus over who is the biggest fish in the pond is wasteful (and so are the deer's antlers).
Democracy also tends to be "conservative", that is, hard to change, and favor the option that causes less turmoil - the very purpose of it is the reduction of turmoil to minimum.
Which is why I find expectations of change through democratic elections bewildering.

>>84
Seems like this third option is just a prelude for the first option.
Obviously, not that one can call Napoleon a fascist, even though the term does seem to mean nothing to many people nowadays.
What I'm hinting at is that bloody revolutions are just bloody births of bloody regimes. Nothing good ever comes out of them; in fact, every one of the genocidal regimes that I can think of originates from a violent revolution.

>>88
And here I thought the reason they were vilified was, you know, mass murder

>>96

>And here I thought the reason they were vilified was, you know, mass murder

Do you think the years before the revolution were all sunshine and roses for the peasant classes? Do you think that the peasants were just generally angry and prone to murder for no valid reason?

No, there's a damn good reason the revolution happened. The French aristocracy and their allies in the Catholic Church were absolutely brutal towards the peasant masses. I have zero issues with what happened after the revolution. If I had access to a time machine, I'd go back to January 20, 1793, just so I could camp out to get a front-row seat for the decapitation of that motherfucker Citoyen Louis Capet on the following day.

The Reign of Terror was like chemotherapy for France. It was awful, but it was also necessary for the survival of the new republic. The Ancien Regime cancer needed to be purged.

>>97
I do not see any reason, besides emotions and bias, that you would see anything beneficial coming from the revolution. I understand that the thought of brutal executions of people that you oppose politically and ideologically might be pleasing for some; the outcomes, however, are an entirely separate matter.
If you count not only the reign of terror, but also, say, the slaughter of Vendee, you end up with a death toll of hundreds of thousands. Needless to say, you can hardly let the mob rule murder hundreds of thousands of people and end up with anything resembling justice.
To add insult to injury, it was immediately followed up by a tyranny that has practically introduced conscription in Europe (which, I think, is even more vile than the old-fashioned slavery) and bled another hundreds of thousands of men in pursuit of its imperial dreams, and another hundreds of thousands of other nations defending from their aggression.
The reign of terror was indeed like a chemotherapy, a chemotherapy that didn't take. It was not even tailored to the receptors expressed on the tumor in the first place, had no chance of a positive result. More like, a mixture of random chemotherapeutics, all in too high of a dose, and shoved in the patient's rectum in a singular incident.

>>98

>To add insult to injury, it was immediately followed up by a tyranny that has practically introduced conscription in Europe (which, I think, is even more vile than the old-fashioned slavery) and bled another hundreds of thousands of men in pursuit of its imperial dreams, and another hundreds of thousands of other nations defending from their aggression.

Even this was still better than theocratic feudalism under an absolute monarchy. The founding principles of the republic may not have led immediately to a happy democracy, but at least modern France is far more democratic than - for example - the United Kingdom. The UK still doesn't have any sort of true constitution to guarantee rights to citizens. The French would almost certainly suffer under the same "no rights, just privileges" constitutional-monarchy bullsoykaf that the British currently suffer under, if the revolution had failed and Louis Capet had clung to power.

If it weren't for his "genocide the catholics" thing, I'd put Cromwell in the same personal-hero category as Robespierre. Cromwell had some damn good ideas. If he'd limited his killing to artistocrats and clergymen, I'd be happy to raise a glass in his honour on Victoria Day.

>>99
>Even this was still better than theocratic feudalism under an absolute monarchy.
pretty sure the Bourbons were a much slower meat grinder. If casualties per annum is a positive measurement of worse/better, then all right; other than that, you've just stated that something is "better". You have every right to find something better or worse, but you've provided no objective, or even subjective, measure of "better" along with this claim.

>but at least modern France is far more democratic than - for example - the United Kingdom.
How so?
And, if so, it results in what, exactly?
How are things being more or less "democratic" of any concern to the people? Do you disagree that democracy is simply another myth legitimizing the government? Do you believe that being forced into the military by an elected leader is somehow better than being forced by an unelected leader?
That might be an entirely different discussion that you do not wish to take part in in this context, but you seem to be operating on an assumption that there is some sort of consensus that things being democratic is a value in and of itself. I see no value in being coerced in the name of collective over being coerced in the name of the individual. Actually, to me, the collective historically seems even more merciless, blood-thirsty and trigger-happy due to its impunity in lack of personal responsibility, but that is hard to assess one way or the other, so I will leave that as an unbacked, personal opinion.

>The UK still doesn't have any sort of true constitution to guarantee rights to citizens
which results in what, exactly?
I know that the difference between that and what we're doing is only in degrees, but isn't attributing the state of modern France and Britain, which is arguably any different, directly to the existence of a monarchy in deep atrophy, or lack thereof, a bit of a stretch?
How does Sweden or the Netherlands compare to France?

Occasional reminder that Catholic Kingdom France was best France.

Nothing else will ever compare to the big blue blob.