DocWatts

You realize that 'white' is not a race (ie, an ethnicity), right? 'German' or 'Polish' are ethnicities. Whiteness is a ad-hoc social class for who gets preferential treatment within Western societies. To see how silly the whole notion is, as recently as the 19th century the Irish weren't considered 'white'. Neither were Italians, Poles, or Jews during that same period.

Greetings! It's been a hot minute since I've posted on the Intellectual Stuff forums, but I thought I might share some of what I've been working on for the philosophy book I'm writing, 7 Provisional Truths. The section below is an introduction to a chapter on perspective-taking - what perspectives are, their limitations, and how to use them as tools for meaning-making. The aim in this chapter is to develop a form of perspectival pluralism which manages to thread a pragmatic 'middle way' between rigid absolutism and paralyzing relativism, without being a lukewarm attempt to split the difference between two played-out extremes. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Perspectives are like sketches of a house, drawn from different angles and for different purposes. Just as a dreamy watercolor painting and an architectural blueprint reveal different aspects of the same building, perspectives derive their value from what you're trying to accomplish. Perspectives And Purposes At this juncture in our journey, we ascend from the corridors of context and into the panorama of perspective. The insights we've been gathering so far form a coherent methodology with a name: Enactivism. Its purpose is to help us navigate ambiguity without getting lost in it, by charting a flexible 'middle way' between rigid certainty and paralyzing skepticism. No lukewarm compromise between extremes, Enactivism forges a third path where meaning is enacted through our lived interactions with the world - yet no less 'real' in its lived significance. A guiding meridian of this framework is that our situated position within Reality isn't an obstacle to overcome, but a condition to be embraced. It's these situated positions, also known as perspectives, that will be our focus here - along with the assessments we attach to them. The pivotal insight: these assessments are never neutral or purpose-free. They have everything to do with where we stand in relation to the world. Purpose directs perception, but not all purposes are created equal. And critically, this doesn't mean that a perspective is worthwhile just because it helps us achieve some instrumental aim. The purposes that underlie our perspectives are themselves subject to ethical scrutiny (a subject we’ll be returning to when we discuss Malicious Perspectives later-on). Which brings us to our thesis: all perspectives are partial. 'Partial' means localized, limited, and incomplete - inevitable consequences of having a perspective at all, rather than a God's-eye view. Any vantage point we occupy is necessarily a 'view from somewhere', not a view of 'everything, everywhere, across all time'. A trite point? Perhaps - until we find ourselves in an argument over something that matters to us, and our vantage point morphs into an all-seeing eye with a 360-degree view of Reality. While the lenses we view the world through both reveal and distort, that doesn't mean they're all created equal. Some are serviceable enough for general use, some excel only for highly specialized tasks, and some are so distorted that we're better off discarding them entirely. But how do we separate the functional from the defective if these lenses can be swapped out, but not left behind entirely? If the only way to evaluate a perspective is from within another perspective, does that doom us to a hall of mirrors with no way out? Not at all. While a sweeping view of the full mosaic has been a holy grail for philosophers, the everyday mug that we actually drink from need not be so grandiose. Our lenses don't need to be flawless to provide a reliable view - they just need to be 'good enough' for the task they're applied to. In a messy Reality where control is an illusion and complete information is a pipe dream, it's practicality rather than perfection that's sublime. The House of Perspectives Envision a group of professionals from different fields descending upon a house to represent it through their specialized lenses: The artists set up their easels from different vantage points, and get to work in their chosen mediums The photographer searches for angles that showcase elegant landscaping while avoiding unsightly power lines The architect updates schematics for the addition of an enclosed patio The historian writes about how the house fits into the neighborhood's shifting cultural landscape The city inspector notes code violations that are invisible to the untrained eye, but compromise the building's safety Each of these perspectives reveals something vital about the house, but none are exhaustive. A dreamy watercolor painting doesn’t reveal the house’s structural flaws. Detailed schematics tell us nothing of what it’s like to live in the house. Photographs for a real estate website don’t convey its cultural significance within the neighborhood. The mistake comes from thinking of partiality as a 'flaw' to be overcome by painting on a bigger canvas or drafting more detailed schematics. Even if we archived this collection of viewpoints into an oversized scrapbook, the composite would still reflect our particular interests and priorities. No matter how meticulous our curation, how diverse our contributions, the house will always be more exhaustive than our attempts to catalogue it. The takeaway? Partiality isn't a failure to be rectified but a condition to be understood. It's the inevitable consequence of having a perspective at all - a viewpoint rather than an everything-point. Breaking Free from False Dichotomies Human psychology being the engine for meaning-making that it is, we feel an almost gravitational pull toward certainty and closure. When this quintessential desire collides with the messy complexity of the real world, however, our sensemaking can get trapped between a rock and hard place. On one end, we may mistake our partial sketch for the complete picture, insisting that we occupy a privileged vantage point rather than a situated position with unavoidable blind spots. On the other, we may retreat into a cynical relativism where the sketches blur into a murky blot of subjective opinions, none more reliable than another. Or, with no means of escape in sight, we might attempt to split the difference - settling into an indecisive middle ground that offers neither the conviction of the former nor the humility of the latter. The solution to this dilemma is as deceptively profound as it is frustratingly straightforward. When we pause to consider how we got ourselves into this situation in the first place, it becomes unmistakably clear that we’ve been wedged within a false dichotomy. The rock and the hard place that once seemed immutable begin to reveal themselves as constructed facades, assembled upon a foundation of emotionally intuitive assumptions that feels solid enough - if you don’t probe it for cracks. And lest you mistake this epistemic hygiene for some dramatic revelation about a hidden Reality behind appearances - there’s no red or blue pills to be found here, and your tour guide is no Morpheus. Instead, it’s just the mundane mechanics of social learning, combined with the everyday discomfort that accompanies ambiguity. The sensemaking trap we'll be stepping out of is twofold. The first misconception is an either/or fallacy. Either our viewpoints are valid insofar as they correspond to an inferred mind-independent Reality, or else they’re merely subjective constructions with no truth beyond our individual preferences and social agreements. The second misconception follows from the first: the assumption that there's an 'out there' and an 'in here' - as though the knowing subject and the world they inhabit can be cleanly separated. The takeaway isn't some New-Age pseudo-profundity that 'you are the whole universe'. It's that the relationship between 'mind and world' is highly porous - less like a brick wall, and more like a permeable membrane where the boundaries are fluid and constant exchange is the norm. The alternative we'll be exploring is that perspectives can be better or worse than one another, but not in the way that a yardstick measures against a fixed standard. Instead, perspectives are purpose-bound - useful or inhibitory to the degree that they shed light on whatever it is that we're trying to understand. Not a God's-eye view, and not just a matter of whim, but a situated disclosure that reveals aspects of the world in relation to our concerns. This path leads not to a flattening relativism where all lenses are equally valid, but toward a rigorous pluralism where multiple viewpoints overlap to reveal complementary truths.

Bernie Sanders is a great example of how to do this well - while he's clearly very progressive on social issues, pretty much all of his messaging is laser focused on how ordinary Americans are getting screwed over by a system that favors billionaires and corporations at thier expense. When he's asked about social issues, he's very adept at framing his response around economic populism in a way that ordinary people can understand. There's a reason that Bernie has the highest favorability rating of any US Senator.

Less intellectualizing and more instrumental action in the real world, for one. Find a way to integrate civic engagement into your life. The way we get through this is by organizing into a network of resilient communities with a solid political strategy behind it. Find a group that shares your values and attend an in-person gathering. If you live in the States, Indivisible is a great place to start - it's a broad-tent pro-democracy movement which has local chapters in most major metropolitan areas. Bernie Sander's Fighting Oligarchy Tour is a class act on how to do this well - regularly drawing in crowds of tens of thousands of people in a year when there's not an election. No one is coming to save us - the public rising up through a sustained nonviolent civil resistance to make it through to the next election is how we perseverance against fascism in a modern context.

About 4 million people, over %1 of the entire US population, took to the streets to protest the Trump regime on Saturday April 19, many in small towns and deep red counties. The April 5 Hands Off protests drew out 5.2 million, and that had weeks of planning behind it. While yesterday's protest drew out the numbers it did on less than a week's notice in many or most cases. https://bsky.app/profile/mskohut.bsky.social/post/3ln7u74v73s2t https://www.reddit.com/r/50501/s/Wnj2W4M3nH

Not really sure what you mean by this.

Realistically, we're not going to get far fighting this as isolated individuals. This is a collective action problem - that means organizing into resilient communities that can come together to form a Popular Front against fascism. A nonviolent resistance movement that involves active and sustained participation by at least 3.5% of a country's population has proven to be the most successful strategy for resisting authoritarian regimes in the 20th and 21st century. Indivisible and 50501 are good places to start. There's a good chance that there's a local Indivisible chapter for whatever metropolitan area that you lived in when you were in the 'States. Groups like these help channel individuals into forms of civic participation with a coordinated strategy behind it. As an individual living abroad, you can still attend demonstrations and participate in sustained boycotts against companies like Amazon, but honestly your best bet is finding a pro-democracy group to work with. Remember - apes together strong.

Thank you for this - talking the talk isn't enough, you also need to walk the walk. We need less intellectualizing on 'what this moment means', and more instrumental engagement. You don't have it figured-all-out to make a positive impact in the pro-democracy movement - unsexy stuff like attending demonstrations, providing mutual aid, and having difficult conversations with friends and family who are tuned out to what is going on right now. Find a way to integrate in-person civic engagement into your life (posting on an internet forum does not count as civic engagement, fyi). If you live in the States, one easy way to get your toes wet is to find your local Indivisible chapter and attend the next meeting. Another is to grab the 5calls app and flood your state representatives with voicemails to uphold the Rule Of Law and the US Constitution. Yet another is to withhold your wallet from companies like Amazon and Target that have bent the knee to Trump. If you ever wondered what you would have done in 1930s Germany or during the Civil Rights movement, you're doing it now.

As someone who's involved in the broad-tent pro-democracy movement, believe me we're well aware that this is the intent. Maintaining nonviolent discipline and cultivating positive optics with the American public are at the top of the priorities list. If you look at these demonstrations you'll see the American flag, and that's very much intentional - the intent is to make these demonstrations impossible to dismiss as a fringe-Left movement. You'll also see lots of white faces and grandmas with American flags at these events - there's a reason these don't look like the BLM protests, since there's an understanding that the mere presence of large numbers of young black and brown men will itself be used as an excuse for bad actors to instigate violence. As much as I dislike it, it would be foolish to ignore that being white gives you FAR more protection against violence from law enforcement. 5.2 million people took to the streets for the Hands Off protests across 1400 events nationwide, and not a single violent incident took place. And believe me, if there was anything that Fox News could be using against us we'd be hearing about it nonstop. The best the propaganda machine has been able to come up with so far is that that we're supposedly 'paid protestors'.

Greenland's citizens aren't treating Trump's annexation threats as a joke - they're treating it as a threat to their national sovereignty. Same goes for Canada - within just 100 days he's managed to torch a two century old military, economic, and cultural alliance between our two countries. And he's almost singlehandedly tipped Canada's national elections from being a slam dunk for the Conservatives to a likely Liberal victory. Do you know how much you have to f*ck up to get Canadian hockey fans to boo America's national anthem? What you have to understand this isn't the Trump of 2017. All of the adults who reigned him in during his first administration are GONE. The institutional guardrails that could have prevented him from doing something crazy have been eroded down to symbolic speedbumps with no real enforcement mechanisms behind them. In short, there's no one left to tell the Mad King 'NO'. Millions of Americans taking to the streets and withholding their cooperation with the regime, while demanding that our elected officials do their damned jobs and uphold the US Constitution, is one of the last checks on Trump's power that we have left.

Thank you, Leo.

It was never 'just' rhetoric - Trump's intentions were never hidden, they were stated openly and proudly. Just as Hitler's contempt for the Jews was never an 'open secret' but loudly declared from the very beginning, Trump is doing exactly what he campaigned on. Even after a decade of creeping fascism, it seems that people still have trouble believing bad actors when they're straightforwardly telling us what their plans are.

Robert Evans certainly has the chops to know what he's talking about. He's a journalist who's written extensively about online extremism and global conflict, and knows how to present these topics in an approachable way.

The atrocities that Trump's regime wants to commit requires the complicity or indifference of ordinary people. If sending American citizens to literal concentration camps isn't worth having difficult conversations with friends and family who are tuned out of politics, then nothing is. Call a spade a spade - MAGA is our version of the Nazis, and Trump is intentionally destroying our country from within for the benefit of billionaire oligarchs and Vladimir Putin. But fortunately, America isn't 1939 Germany - Trump's regime is weak and unpopular, and if you have any amount of social privilege the costs of resisting are quite low compared to what it could become if we throw in the towel just a few months in out of apathy and exhaustion 'Not being interested in politics' isn't an excuse anymore - if you ever wondered what you might have done in 1930s Germany or the Civil Rights Movement, you're doing it now. Fortunately, there are plenty of different avenues to join the pro-democracy movement. Attend a protest or a town hall. Call your reps using the 5calls app. Find your local Indivisible group and attend a meeting. In short - less souls searching, more instrumental engagement. Find a way to be integrate civic engagement into your life. Find a group to work with, and make good trouble. Behind The Bastards - How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible

It's important to be direct when we're discussing this. If there was ever a time to ditch sanitized language, it's now. Plain and simple, this is state repression - dictator shit that's meant to get us to obey in advance. (Not saying that you're doing this OP, but some are going to try and sanitize this - don't let them). Trump isn't deporting these people - they aren't being sent back to their country of origin. They're being abducted by ICE and sent to a concentration camp in El Salvador. This isn't immigration policy, it's state repression meant to terrify dissenters into silence. ICE isn't protecting our borders, they're being used as Trump's gestapo to disappear people.

If you live in the States, call your Senators and demand that they vote NO on the SAVE Act and the No Rogue Rulings Act. Both passed the House by razor thin margins and will be signed into law if they're not killed in the Senate, where they're due for a vote soon. The former is a expansive voter suppression bill that would disenfranchise tens of millions of voters by requiring rarely-used and expensive citizenship documents in order to vote, under the guise of the the GOP's Big Lie that millions of undocumented immigrants are supposedly voting in US elections. The latter is a blatant attempt to strip courts of their independence, so that Trump can rule by decree like a King, by stripping the courts of their ability to order national injunctions against Trump's unconstitutional behavior. The Courts are one of the few Constitutional checks on Trump's power that's largely working as intended, which is why MAGA is so fixated on destroying their independence.

Meanwhile in MAGA-Land, the Red Hats are going to be very confused when their sweet treats from China - their clothing and electronics and toys - more than double in price.

Those of us with our heads on straight are certainly trying - 5.2 million people took to the streets over the weekend for the nationwide 'Hands Off' protests, which is about %1.5 of the entire population of the United States (the largest single day of protest in American history). These will only continue to snowball as the weather gets nicer and Americans are crushed beneath the Trump Tariffs. Bernie Sanders is drawing crowds of tens of thousands of people to town halls all across the country in a year that's NOT an election. You don't revitalize a democracy that's been rotting from within over a weekend, but I can tell you as someone who's lived here for 37 years I've seen much more civic participation in the past 2 months than I have in the past two decades.

The FBI is compromised - Trump is replacing career agents with loyalist cronies whose only qualifications are a willingness to help Trump break the law and weaponize federal agencies.

@Rafael Thundercat Believe me, those of us who are participating in these protests are well aware that Trump is looking to manufacture an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act - Project 2025 clearly lays this out (with the upcoming deadline on Hitler's birthday, no less). Declaring martial law is one thing, and actually enforcing it is another. The US contains 340 million people, while the US military has 1.3 million active service members across all branches. The national guard which would be tasked with actually carrying out these orders numbers around 400k. The US military, when it was led by far more competent people, was barely able to keep a lid on Afghanistan - enforcing martial law across the US would be 1000 times more difficult. Moreover, Trump and Hegseth would be banking on the assumption that US service members are going to be okay with turning their weapons on crowds of peaceful protestors that contain moms and grandmas waving American flags. The intent of invoking the Insurrection Act is much like that of ICE abducting people off the streets - it's to intimidate dissenters into obeying in advance. Of course, this all hinges on the protests remaining nonviolent and having positive optics with the American public. 5.2 million people poured into the streets on April 5, and I've yet to hear of a single instance of violence or property damage. Believe me, if there was anything that could be weaponized against us, Fox News be blasting it from a megaphone like they did with the BLM protests - the best they've been able to come up with so far is that we're supposedly 'paid protesters'. Trump's regime is resorting to threats and intimidation because it's unpopular and weak. Rule #1 of resisting authoritarianism is DO NOT OBEY IN ADVANCE. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. - Timothy Snyder, On Liberty

For the periphery of swing voters who pushed Trump over the finish line because they thought he was going to lower the price of groceries, I'd say so. Ultimately, these folks are going to end up blaming the economic miseries they're experiencing on whoever's currently in charge. And Trump's insane lies can't fully pave over people's day to day experience as their grocery bill is skyrocketing from what it was six months ago. I wouldn't hold out much hope for any type of mass exodus from the Cult though - the buyers remorse that they were being conned this entire time is too high. And a sizeable proportion of these voters genuinely want the US to become (or more accurately, return to being) a white, Christian ethnostate.

By that metric, are you going to lump in Abolitionists with the slaveowners just because they're within the same borders? Or the French resistance with the Vichy government? For the record, I do agree that we need to be doing much more to take ownership of collective problems. Civic participation has been declining for a long time in the US, and American democracy has been rotting from within as a result. Moreover, it's been generations since we've had to fight for our freedoms. But the flip side of this partial truth - that Trump himself is a particularly acute symptom of a larger sickness within America - is that countries are not monoliths, and the US isn't just one culture. Treating America as a monolith just reinforces Trump's Big Lie that he has a mandate from the American people. When in actuality %32 of the country voted for this - the rest voted for other candidates or stayed home. 5 million people, or about %1.5 of the entire US population, took to the streets to protest Trump over the weekend - the biggest nationwide day of protest in American history. This is in spite of the fact that dissenting could get you abducted and thrown into a gulag in El Salvador.

Yup - anyone trying to spin this as economic policy is either dangerously naive or intentionally dishonest.

It's not 'the US', it's Trump. And they're not economic policy, they're extorsion. Trump wants to rule America like a mafia boss, not a president. The Liberation Day Tariffs are a political weapon intentionally designed to create economic hardship - to establish a patronage system where Trump can offer selective relief from the tariffs to companies and individuals who are willing to kiss the ring. Trump isn't playing twelve dimensional chess here - he's a grifter and a bully who's using tariffs to feel like a big man who can make people grovel at his feet. ________________________________________________ BlueSky post from Senator Chris Murphy on the Tariffs: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:y77n77kdqzhbg647blkfypyr/post/3lluxkmx7wc2m Those trying to understand the tariffs as economic policy are dangerously naive. No, the tariffs are a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief. This week you will read many confused economists and political pundits who won’t understand how the tariffs make economic sense. That’s because they don’t. They aren’t designed as economic policy. The tariffs are simply a new, super dangerous political tool. You see, our founders created a President with limited and checked powers. They specifically put the power of spending and taxation in the hands of the legislature. Why? Because they watched how kings and despots used spending and taxes to control their subjects. British kings used taxation to reward loyalty and punish dissent. Our own revolution was spurred by the King’s use of heavy taxation of the colonies to punish our push for self governance. The King’s message was simple: stop protesting and I’ll stop taxing. Trump knows that he can weaken (and maybe destroy) democracy by using spending and taxation in the same way. He is using access to government funds to bully universities, law firms and state and local governments into loyalty pledges. Healthy democracies rely on an independent legal profession to maintain the rule of law, independent universities to guard objective truth and provide forums for dissent to authority, and independent state/local government to counterbalance a powerful federal government. But the private sector also plays a rule to protect democracy. Independent industry has power. The tariffs are Trump’s tool to erode that independence. Now, one by one, every industry or company will need to pledge loyalty to Trump in order to get sanctions relief. What could Trump demand as part of a quiet loyalty pledge? Public shows of support from executives for all his economic policy. Contributions to his political efforts. Promises to police employees’ support for his political opposition. The tariffs are DESIGNED to create economic hardship. Why? So that Trump has a straight face rationale for releasing them, business by business or industry by industry. As he adjusts or grants relief, it’s a win-win: the economy improves and dissent disappears. And once Trump has the lawyers, colleges and industry under his thumb, it becomes very hard for the opposition to have any viable space to maneuver. Trump didn’t invent this strategy. It’s the playbook for democratically elected leaders who want to stay in power forever. The tariffs aren’t economic policy. They are political weapons. But as long as we see this clearly, we can stop him. Public mobilization is working. Today, a few Republicans joined Democrats to vote against one set of tariffs. The people still have the power.