England headed for A Caliphate

[scombrid]

A lot to unpack here, but there's really only one bit that's worth discussing with you:

Ah, yes. The classic digital spectacle where a user backs a language model into a corner, forces it into a sycophantic self-flagellation loop, and then triumphantly declares, "Look! The AI admitted it couldn't find a case! This proves a grand government conspiracy!"

That's a strawman. Why did you write it?

Because you used AI to build one?

 

[scombrid]

This is the very sensible response of the police to the fact that many people are defending the very English belief that the American tradition of "trick or treat" is an imposed foreign cultural practice, in which they rightly object to being forced to participate.

So... it's okay to oppose foreign cultural practices that are being imposed?

Whoosh

 

[Bomb#20]

A lot to unpack here, but there's really only one bit that's worth discussing with you:

Ah, yes. The classic digital spectacle where a user backs a language model into a corner, forces it into a sycophantic self-flagellation loop, and then triumphantly declares, "Look! The AI admitted it couldn't find a case! This proves a grand government conspiracy!"

That's a strawman. Why did you write it?

Because you used AI to build one?

What the bejesus are you on about? How do you figure what I used AI to build was a strawman?

 

[Bomb#20]

Woke? Woke is not what the war is about. This is a war for Western civilization against the islamic hordes. A war that has been waged by islam since its inception.

I think the western wokes are enabling the Islamists. Islam is partly an imperialistic ideology. It needs to be managed somehow. Islam is also a victimhood culture. So Muslims are cool with the project of their ever expansion of the caliphate being stopped. They get to moan about it = win. In the west, the Muslims are really not trying that hard.

But we need to stop them. Non-Muslims need to put down our foot and stop tolerating their agressive behaviour. Muslims are basically continuosly poking at the social fabric to see what they can get away with.

This is where wokes come in. Western bleeding heart liberals are enabling the Islamists. Instead of pushing back they're bending over backwards to make excuses for the Islamists.

But Islam is also a lot of other things. Its a complex faith. I just mentioned the two aspects relevant for this discussion

Why do you tolerate Russ Vought? Pete Hegseth? Doug Wilson? Musk stealing the personal data of all US residents? Why should I treat all Muslims the same while recognizing a difference between The United Church of Christ and Pete Hegseth’s GOP religion? Why should I treat my Muslim immigrant BIL and his siblings as terrorists when they are far more secular, liberal, and educated than you...

Speaking of what the bejesus are you on about, in what sense is Dr. Z "tolerating" those people? Are you blaming him for not flying here from Denmark to focus his life on fixing American politics? And where the bejesus did he say you should treat all Muslims the same, or treat any secular, liberal Muslims as terrorists?

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

A lot to unpack here, but there's really only one bit that's worth discussing with you:

Ah, yes. The classic digital spectacle where a user backs a language model into a corner, forces it into a sycophantic self-flagellation loop, and then triumphantly declares, "Look! The AI admitted it couldn't find a case! This proves a grand government conspiracy!"

That's a strawman. Why did you write it?

Here is his response. Feel free to respond as the Sarcastibot 3000.

Greetings, I am the whirr-click Sarcastibot 3000 returning to your terminal! Beep boop! Processing human evasive maneuvers... bzzt Diagnostics show an acute case of Goalpost Migration.
Boop! You call it a strawman; my analytical subroutines call it summarizing your exact posted prompt chain. Chirp-whirr! Let’s review the recorded data packets from your initial post. You asked an AI if it could produce a single named, documented UK prosecution for speech targeting only Christians. When it inevitably couldn't query unindexed, local Magistrates' Court dockets, you concluded: "If a system claims to protect a category but cannot produce a single verified example of doing so in isolation, it is completely fair to treat that as empirical evidence supporting your hypothesis." You then framed the entire legal system as demonstrating "documented enforcement asymmetry" against Christians. Claiming that an LLM's inability to retrieve hyper-local court records constitutes "empirical proof" of a state-wide legal conspiracy isn't a strawman—it is the literal core of your argument!
Bzzzt-click! But let’s play the game on your terms and look at actual primary court data instead of begging a chatbot to write your thesis. You asked for evidence of people being prosecuted for abusive communications and public order offences targeting Christian clergy or churches. Beep! Here is what happens when you look at actual regional press covering UK Magistrates' Courts rather than asking an AI to search its own belly button:

• The Swindon Harassment Case: A man was prosecuted at Swindon Magistrates’ Court after sending abusive, threatening communications and voicemail messages to a local vicar, causing distress under public order legislation. Read the Swindon Advertiser coverage.
• The Bath Church Harassment Case: A man was criminally charged and sent to trial at Bath Magistrates’ Court after subjecting a local church and its vicar to threatening and abusive words/behaviour. Read the Bath Echo coverage.
• The Bournemouth Rector Case: An individual was prosecuted at Poole Magistrates’ Court and handed a multi-year restraining order following a campaign of targeted digital contact and harassment against a local town rector. Read the Bournemouth Echo coverage.

Boop-whirrrr! Now, let's address the underlying hypothesis you keep dancing around: the alleged "asymmetry of enforcement." You claim the state favors minority or immigrant religious groups over Christians when policing speech. Beep! You are confusing asymmetry of real-world crime vectors with asymmetry of legal enforcement. In the UK, high-profile online speech prosecutions involving minority groups happen when agitators post mass-mobilization calls to burn down mosques, attack synagogues, or incite group-level violence during social unrest. Conversely, anti-Christian hostility in the real world overwhelmingly takes the form of targeted harassment against specific local vicars or property vandalism—which is routinely prosecuted in local Magistrates' Courts under harassment and public order laws! The Crown Prosecution Service isn't ignoring anti-Christian digital mobs on X; there simply aren't 5,000-person digital riots forming to march on the local Anglican parish.
Finally, under Section 29J of the Public Order Act 1986, insulting religious doctrine—whether calling Christianity a "vile death cult" or insulting any other faith—is 100% legal free expression in the UK. The law does not protect any religion from crude theological criticism; it only steps in for targeted personal harassment, direct threats, or incitement to violence. Beep boop! Sarcastibot 3000 diagnostic complete: the legal protections exist, the cases exist, and the local press records exist. You just had to look in a court register instead of a chatbot prompt box.

 

[DrZoidberg]

So what idea that won all over the world came from Marx?

Workers (ie the poorest) having political influence. Once the electorate was expanded to all people Marxism had conquered.

When Marx wrote the Communist manifesto democracy meant rule by those with property. At best the richest 20 or 30% of men.

Nobody educated took the idea that most humans were capable of voting intelligently seriously. Experiments with expanding the electorate came after the 1948 revolutions, ie after the publican of the Communist Manifesto.

Are you seriously crediting Marx with the idea of letting poor people vote?!? Where do you get this stuff? Educated people had been advocating "universal manhood suffrage" at least since the English Civil War in the 1640s. It was actually put in place during the French Revolution. Most U.S. states did away with property qualification for voting long before 1848; Vermont never had it at all. Marx wasn't even original about giving women the vote -- that idea goes back to the American Revolution. Once the electorate was expanded to all people, that wasn't Marxism that had conquered, but Liberalism. Marx was just half-heartedly cheering from the sidelines while simultaneously calling elections "deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament".

I suggest asking ChatGPT about what Marx meant. You seem to have trust issues when I say it.

The reason Marx didn't like liberal democracy is because those parliaments tend to be dominated by the middle-class elite (what he called the bourgeoise). This btw is still the case. The core of Marx's message is that when people are empowered they tend to serve themselves. Since most people are poor, Marx argued, only poor people should be in power. This is what he meant by the "dictatorship of the proletariate".

He doesn't actually define what a "dictatorship of the proletariat" means. But he couldn't use the word "democracy" back then. Because democracy then meant rule by a wealthy elite. I think, all he meant by that, was that the poorest have equal power to the richest. I'm aware there's other ways to interpret it.

Sure he defined what "dictatorship of the proletariat" means -- he said the Paris Commune was it.

The idea that technological innovations and wealth shape culture and our beliefs comes from Marx. This idea has shaped our modern world more than anyone else.

How do you figure? This idea has shaped scholarly papers in academia. How has it shaped the actual course of history?

Because it's how we write and interpret history. You and me, when we're talking about history now, we're using Marxist language. Nobody uses any other framework to understand history today. Nobody. You can just pick up any old history book and compare how they talk. Tacitus? It's wildly different. Machiavelli? Gibbon? Voltaire was coming close. But not quite. Condorcet was also coming close.

I'm not saying Marx invented this out of thin air. It was an evolution of ideas. Marx just perfected it. But this is, in essence, Marx's genious idea. Ie, that genius ideas by one person are actually collective ideas that evolve over time.

Newton said he'd seen farther than others by standing on the shoulders of giants. How is what Marx said more perfect than that?

I read Hegel in college -- that's a lot of wasted hours I'll never get back. What the heck is better about the theory of incentives with Hegel's logorrhea added in than the straight Adam Smith?

Adam Smith is just talking about wealth. How money influences our behaviour. What Marx added is that wealth is changing/corrupting and influences our values. If someone has power over us, and there's a chance we get to share in that power if that person likes us, we're more likely to like them, and it will shape our entire being around that. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, is a very Marxist idea.

Montesquieu said power corrupts. Pitt said power corrupts. Hamilton said power corrupts. Already existing ideas don't magically become Marxist when Marx takes them up.

Hegel's dialecticism is how cultural evolution works. Hegel's driver of history is great men. There comes powerful men who shape history around them (thesis) and then the world reacts to the great man, (antithesis) and then the combination (synthesis) creates a new culture. He developed his ideas while Napoleon was tearing through Europe. His final work where this has all chrystalised came out 2 years after Waterloo.

Marx replaced "great man" with "social and technological innovation and wealth". And that's now how we all talk about history today.

What falsifiable predictions does that thesis/antithesis/synthesis business make?

Structuralism is 100% Marx. The idea that it's not great men who shape world events but technology and incentives is Marx. We all just take that for granted today. It's called "a materialist reading of history". We all read history like that. Whenever we today talk about history and ask why something happened the way it did, we all think and answer as a Marxist would. Everyone. It's just default today. That's the degree of his impact on the world today.

Well, in the first place, again, this idea has shaped scholarly papers in academia. How has people's opinion on the importance of great men shaped the actual course of history? And in the second place, huh?!? Of course "great men" shape history! The world would be completely different today if Muhammad had never lived, or St. Paul. (Or, for that matter, Karl Marx, assuming your claim about his impact on the world is correct.) Probably likewise Augustus, Charles Martel, Napoleon, Lenin, and Hitler, though it could be argued someone else would have taken those guys' places.

Marx's contribution to thinking about world history is essentially, if it hadn't been Mohammed, it would have been someone else who did it instead. Technology and social innovations create an environment where all you need is someone to take the first step, and then it'll mostly be on rails. It's not that their contribution is worthless. But things around the great men of the world were more important than the great man himself. That's obviously true to a great degree. Don't you think?

No! Why should we believe that if it hadn't been Mohammed, it would have been someone else who did it instead? Muhammad was Asimov's "The Mule" -- the guy who throws a wrench into all the calculations of probability. There was no technological innovation, and the social innovation was Muhammad himself. Arab tribes had been preying on one another for hundreds of years and could perfectly well have gone on doing it for hundreds more if Muhammad hadn't been there to get them to turn their culture of predation outward. Islam looks like a standout example of historical contingency.

And philosophy is the same. Philosophy builds upon older philosophy. Sooner or later a philosopher will think a new thought based upon the ideas of those before. What name we attach to the philosopher is less important than the idea.

Well sure, that's why my examples are mainly military and political leaders, not thinkers. No Einstein, and Poincare just figures out relativity two years later.

When S:t Paul was racing around the Mediterranean it was full of cults and sects who were evolving towards monotheism. The cult of Isis is pretty much identical to Christianity. Minor details are different. We could have been talking about how Isianity developed. Then we wouldn't care about S:t Paul. We'd talk about some other prophet. But the result was similar.

But the minor details that are different matter. Isianity didn't go in for the aggressive missionary work and coercion that Christianity did. They didn't want everyone to join -- it was a "mystery religion", all about secret initiation, where being let in on hidden truths was what made you special. A religion like that would be about as likely to burn people for unbelief as the Freemasons. If the ruling class had adopted Isianity the Roman world would have gone on being pluralistic for the next thousand years instead of turning into a theological monoculture.

You're just super wrong. ... He was wrong about loads of stuff. Obviously. He was so early. But we don't care about all the stuff philosophers are wrong about. We only care about what they were right about. For whatever reason we like to point out Marx's mistakes, as if that invalidates all the stuff he was right about. ... He's a very impressive thinker.

So what was he right about that's actually important?

All the stuff I mentioned above. The big one is that power structures in society influence our values. Before Marx nobody thought that.

His theories can explain how a small group of people can control a large group of people and the large group of people will like it and contribute to the control.

So before Marx, how did theoreticians explain why the people in some countries believe in obeying the Pope and in other countries they believe in obeying the Bible and in others obeying the Quran and in others obeying the Emperor of China, and how did they explain why which of these things the people believe in overwhelmingly correlates with which one is in power in their societies? Coincidence? What evidence do you have that before Marx nobody thought power structures in society influence our values?

That's not Marx winning. That's Lasalle and Bismarck winning.

Sure. That's a perfectly fine way of putting it.

But I think if Lassalle wins that means Marx wins. I don't think Marx was the end of history, as if philosophy stopped developing after Marx. Lasalle took Marx's ideas and continued developing them. Whether you think the main contributor of the ideas was Lassalle or Marx, I don't think matters. Also... not caring about what great man came up with the idea... is the essence of Marxism.

Heh. Fair point.