Is a bigoted dystopia really feasible anymore?

[crazy canuck]

In any case, my point was to illustrate that a society that started two wars over something ultimately not very significant would be capable of going on a rampage if, say, someone detonated dirty bombs in two major cities. Not sure why this prompted Tamas to go on some erratic tangent.

I don't understand the proportionality thing at all. If you have to retaliate, you do it completely. The point is to make the attacker unable to strike again. The only question is whether or not to retaliate with force in the first place.

I dont get the proportionality thing either.  But I suppose a better/different point to make would be was there a need to attack.  I wouldnt characterize it as "retaliation" but rather a threat emerged in dramatic fashion and had to be dealt with in some way.  I would argue that the war in Afganistan was necessary to remove the Taliban's secure bases there.  People may forget that the initial war effort was very successful and it has been forcefully argued that it was through a series of blunders that the initial military success was not followed by a complete destruction of AQ in that region (eg letting taliban fighters back into Packistan etc).

Iraq was a different matter.  That war was started to remove weapons of mass destruction from Iraq.  It was only after it turned out there were no such things that the spin doctors went to work to try to link Iraq with AQ but that turned out to go no where either.  There are a lot of things to condemn regarding the war in Iraq but Marti's point misses the mark by a long way.

[Admiral Yi]

Pay back was at the very least part of the deal.  You fuck us up, we fuck you up.

[Agelastus]

I don't think the main motive was revenge (though if it was, more the pity to us as bloodlust isn't becoming for a supposedly enlightened state). I think acting against an organization that might have tried to make further attacks is sufficient reason alone.

I don't see how you can discount revenge completely as a motive though since previous smaller scale attacks had not resulted in such a massive response; moreover the purely precautionary argument for the War begs the question of why the USA let the Taliban etc. rule much of Afghanistan for several years prior to 9:11 given the previous attacks as well.

I'm not saying that it was the main motive, just that it should not be discounted as part of the motivation simply because we should be "too civilised to think that way".

[Ideologue]

But you do need a critical mass of people who are gung-ho, and probably a majority who don't give a shit.

No, you need a sense that the previously acceptable is wrong, failing, or no longer applies and willingness on the part of the extremes to take advantage of this.

Why do you need that?  Was there a sense in the American South in 1860 (or 1850, or 1800, or 1700) that the previously acceptable was wrong, or no longer applied?  Do you really think dystopic societies can emerge solely from extreme political breaks?  Just because that happened with the NSDAP or the Montagnards does not mean it provides the sole pattern upon which a horrorshow polity can exist.  They can emerge, also, completely organically, based upon the prevailing morality of the time and, for the simplest reason, because they can.  See also, China's stable periods, classical Greece, Republican or Imperial Rome, and Islamic countries--any.

You really misunderstand culture, how society normalizes behavior, and the need of people to belong to that society. As I said, the ugliness of the "normal people" point of view is not that they were moral cowards and that they knew better and were weak, but rather that the obscene acts became the norm, and the extreme thinking became the center.

So, given twelve years, or fewer, and most normal people can be converted into either active killers or passive enablers.  Is there any way that this is actually distinct from moral cowardice, which can be readily defined by willing to accept enormously negative consequences for others as long you're left alone?  I seriously refuse to believe that the German people, or American whites, were unable to grasp the complex moral questions involved in the Holocaust or slavery because their society taught them these things were okay.  I also know for a fact that some and many, respectively, were able to grasp these questions just fine, and they did stuff to oppose their evil governments, but in the former case there just weren't enough of them, who cared enough and were organized enough, to successfully defeat the Nazis from the inside.

Again the naivete helps this.  The "it can't happen here" mentality is the social self congratulations or an understood morality and self-awareness that will not let it happen is precisely what societies do - naturalize actions so they become the norm.  A disruption, for modern western culture I would say a series of economic disasters, could easily destroy the comfortable normal and make the extremes far more likely to happen.

And I think that's 100% wrong, because the pre-Holocaust West was perfectly capable of doling out holocaust-level horrors to outgroups even when they were "comfortably normal" by the standards of their time.  Something genuinely changed in our societies after the Holocaust; you could argue that it was a culmination of the process that probably started with the Thirty Years War, if not the Protestant Reformation, but World War II (granted, if you ignore the course of the war and its results in the East, which in fairness is what FDR, in his pragmatic wisdom, in fact did) was the most clear-cut contest of two competing visions of what the West's moral foundation should be, and it turned out that the vision founded upon inclusiveness and human rights and airpower won.  Subsequently, you get 60 years of enormous social progress where, despite some lingering bigotry in all our hearts, the overwhelming consensus is that people should be secure in their persons, effects, and beliefs, and not be enslaved or put in gas chambers or told what to do with their bodies or whatever.

Economic disasters, short of extinction events, really unlikely to change that, unless you think being really poor is going to suddenly mean that you want to road drag your black neighbor or make women you don't even know carry pregnancies to full term.  Also, p.s., we are in an economic disaster.  Where are the pogroms.  The modern-day NSDAP come to upset our terribly fragile liberal applecart?

[Ideologue]

I think we are being recklessly blind if we dont recognize that intolerance continues to exist in all Western democracies and if we kid ourselves into thinking that the sins of the past could never be repeated again.

I agree with this trite generalization. Who wouldn't?

Ide for one.  Thanks for coming out and playing

I never said that.  My point was that such vigilance is now highly integrated into our political and ideological systems, in such a way that it would be very difficult to remove it.

[dps]

Also, p.s., we are in an economic disaster.  Where are the pogroms.  The modern-day NSDAP come to upset our terribly fragile liberal applecart?

It's the worst economic condition the West has been in since the Great Depression, but compared to the Depression, or some of the economic collapses of the 19th century, we're living in an incredibly prospersous time.

EDIT:

I never said that.  My point was that such vigilance is now highly integrated into our political and ideological systems, in such a way that it would be very difficult to remove it.

OTOH, I agree with Ide on this point, at least as long as we assume that Western countries don't break apart into smaller political units.  If/when places like Detroit, eastern Kentucky, or the Vendee become independent states, those bets are off.

[Ideologue]

That explains the lack of any serious dissent, not the lack of bigotry.*

*Not to say that bigotry is lacking, but you know what I mean.

[Jacob]

I think we are being recklessly blind if we dont recognize that intolerance continues to exist in all Western democracies and if we kid ourselves into thinking that the sins of the past could never be repeated again.

I agree also, but unlike grumbler, I don't think it's trite

[Jacob]

So long as we have Tim around to keep a vigilant eye on the news and provide insightful commentary and Martinus around to start facebook groups and tackle people evil can never triumph again.

Why doesn't that make me feel any safer?

[Jacob]

...
Economic disasters, short of extinction events, really unlikely to change that, unless you think being really poor is going to suddenly mean that you want to road drag your black neighbor or make women you don't even know carry pregnancies to full term.  Also, p.s., we are in an economic disaster.  Where are the pogroms.  The modern-day NSDAP come to upset our terribly fragile liberal applecart?

I've gotten the impression that the bolded bit has been coming back fairly strongly if incrementally in the US.

[PDH]

Part of the problem, Ide, is not that those involved in the elements of the Holocaust could not grasp the moral wrongness of the acts, but rather the group morality and belonging became more important than the actions.  It was not that an internal morality was broken or that cowardice made the right course of action unpalatable, but more that the socialization of humans gives multiple levels or types of morality - and the weighing of actions within such a balance does not always come out clean and neat.

People have done things they know is wrong when the group says they are all right (at least given the circumstances) for as long as there have been people.  Often it is the action of people outside of this communal group that are able to record, stop, or attempt to alter the actions.  Inside the group the community can and does overwhelm.

I have to say that the present economic problems, while the greatest in 80 years, are not the type of thing to lead to such behavior.  Had the mechanisms to restart internal credit, etc not been in place and 2008/9 had seen a total credit and financial meltdown, then such a scenario would have been possible.  It takes time to enculturate, it takes time to exchange or add to their mores and possible actions.  The devil is in the increments, not the sudden takeover.

[crazy canuck]

I think we are being recklessly blind if we dont recognize that intolerance continues to exist in all Western democracies and if we kid ourselves into thinking that the sins of the past could never be repeated again.

I agree with this trite generalization. Who wouldn't?

Ide for one.  Thanks for coming out and playing

I never said that.  My point was that such vigilance is now highly integrated into our political and ideological systems, in such a way that it would be very difficult to remove it.

Whatever you point may have been, what you said was:

I cannot imagine any scenario where a country such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, basically any place you'd be likely to set a movie or book, would be very likely to be run by 40s-style throwback fascists that want to gas all the fags, coloreds, Jews (seriously?), or any discrete population group to death and all the women enslaved (e.g., Handmaid's Tale). 

[Razgovory]

Why does a bigoted dystopia have to be totalitarian?

[Ideologue]

And those two ideas are logically incompatible how?

[CountDeMoney]

Why does a bigoted dystopia have to be totalitarian?

No shit.  It could be utilitarian.