Thread by @shengokai

I don't even know what the democrats (or really any "progressive," even your faves) hope to accomplish by doing anything remotely conciliatory towards their opponents.

Why negotiate with motherfuckers who have demonstrated they'll burn everything down just to fuck you over?

I'm being completely serious here. And, to be philosophical, in Ch.11 of The Art of War, Sun Tzu says the following:

"In difficult ground, press on; On encircled ground, use subterfuge; In death ground, fight."

Something not clear here is that a good commander has to be able to read the ground. This is similar to a broader cultural concept of "reading the air," where one takes stock of the affective (and tactical) energy of a space and responds accordingly with the resources at hand.

Kongzi and Mengzi appeal to this kind of logic as one of the capacities of the cultivated xin of the junzi, the idealized leader whose ability to be aware of the qi, the energy of the country, the people, and the world they're in allowed them to shape policy in response to tien.

So, what does some old ass Chinese Philosophy have to do with our situation? EVERYTHING.

The left, broadly, has failed to cultivate a sensitiveity to the air, the affective quality of the situation, of the nation, and of the world. Instead, they cling to their rigid structures.

Even your faves lack this sensitivity to the people and the world, as indicated by how and what they've advocated for. More specifically, who they've tried to court and how they've tried to organize the political landscape to enable the passage of their policies.

Which gets me to something rather important about Sun Tzu, Kongzi, and Mengzi's thesis: the folks we've placed in power really don't know what the fuck kind of ground they're standing on. Obama, as an example, was on encircled ground. He could maneuver to an extent.

On encircled ground, whole new strategems had to be devised to get shit done. While successful, they were still extensions of the rigid neo-liberal structure that got us into this mess. So Obama demonstrated a partial awareness of the ground and limited adaptability.

Post-Obama, their inability to read the changing political ground and reliance on old structure, kept them from adapting their structures of thought and political action, of fucking VALUE, to the new situation. And so they ended up in death ground, ass bare to the world.

Here's the fucking problem: because the left wasn't sensitive to the changing ground, they mistakenly thought they were on difficult or encircled ground. They couldn't see that they were on death ground until it was too fucking late to do anything but fight holding actions.

In contrast, the right treats every engagement as death ground and, against Sun Tzu, they're literally willing to fight to hold that ground without regard for the cost, social, political, or in human fucking lives. Those are the terms that the right uses to organize its fight.

And the left? Well, to quote a certain shitty movie "you can't even break a rule, how do you expect to break bone?"

This is important because at this point, the moral high-ground that the left clings to needs to be built atop the corpses of fascists.

All of this is to say that even with the dems in power, for all the good that will do, we're still on fucking death ground. Our planet is dying, our social structures are in tatters, and there's a concerted effort to make the mere though of democratic education a crime.

And yet, the folks in power want to dither about trying to win people over from the other side.

Like, the terms of the battle have been decided and you want to try fucking DIPLOMACY? Are you kidding me with this shit? Did you learn NOTHING from the past four years?

That said, I don't have any upshot to this except to once again provide a quote from from Mass Effect:

"You wish to finish this war with honor intact? Stand among the ashes of a trillion dead souls and ask the ghosts if honor matters. The silence will be your answer."

And that's really all there is to it. If we want to win, we can't assume the other side will play by the rules of polite discourse, of rational debate. They don't care about any of that: all they care about is power and retaining that power at any cost.

And if you want to have any hope of beating them, you're going to have to accept that the first casualty of the culture war is going to be whatever notion you have that this will be a clean, "honorable" fight.

This is fucking death ground: it is past time y'all acted like it.