more thoughts: when you are the dominating political group, you either ban or control the others depending on the perceived environment.

For example in the cold war the communist party in the UK was completely owned and operated by intelligence agents, so there is this aspect of controlling both sides of the debate while appearing democratic for a democratic environment. (However they themselves were very thoroughly compromised by the russians agent Kim philby. This pattern can also be seen in corporations - everyone knows that complaining to HR about the CEO may not always be in your best interest... because HR works in the interest of the company, not you.

When the bolsheviks took power they violently suppressed all opposition, so this is the other example in a more autocratic environment. Prior to their taking power though, they themselves were violently suppressed and illegal by order of the Tsar, indeed prior to the revolution they were all in exile outside Russia.

To add to this I think that these tactics are universal, not just conservatives do this, but any group might do this eg corporations use these against each other, or leftist parties.

• This popped up a while ago here: undercover british cop has kid and 19 yea 'fake' marriage (not sure what they were investigating).

• fictional but in the (pretty average) tv series about uber ('pumped up') an investor plants an 'advisor' who eventually falls prey to the charisma of travis kalanick character and betrays his boss - this could be seen as the ideal way to beat it - just have such good proposals/persuasion that even the agents turn.

• the 10 ds

  • deflect
  • delay
  • deny
  • discount
  • deceive
  • divide
  • dulcify
  • discredit
  • destroy
  • deal

http://web.archive.org/web/20210918160006/https://sdc.ahslabs.uic.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2014/04/Public_Health_web_4.pdf

• Lee Staples, in his book Roots to Power (1984)

Just do dumpster diving or busking and like squat somewhere owned by blackrock. If you start making problems people will respond in kind. Try to solve problems capitalism has created in a constructive worker-owned way. Most communities have a lot of lonely highly skilled people, for example - all they really need is hope and connection - that's what cults/yoga bullshit/therapists target.

If you have the risk-appetite and wherewithall to plan a robbery including logistics, getaway, disguises/surveillance evasion, money laundering then you definitely can coordinate a team to provide a meaningful and engaging experience. Why use a gun to convince people to pay when you could get them to pay willingly just by talking to them for a bit.

Use chatgpt to generate convincing marketing scripts if you are really down.

I dont know what to do about the debt, maybe call a rich friend to maintain it.

Hmm, then pretty much every political philosophy is not valid.

No, some other philosophies contain more information less dependent on context - if you say you are socialist you are a socialist in a socialist utopia or a capitalist structure, but if you are "conservative" that tells me nothing without the context. So in some sense it is a silly thing to say.

It is a detail but it is important, but I suppose there is so much rebranding and analogy in politics it's kind of useless to fight.

but then they should openly state whatever the current system is, like neoliberal or some christianity thing.

Like if we live in a socialist utopia the conservative party position would be to uphold that utopia. If we live in Nazi Germany, the conservatives uphold that. Therefore the word conservative, and the statement "I am a conservative" is essentially meaningless and not a useful party to have absorbing votes.

It's a term I made up to try get at something. I would define it as a consistent set of ideas, principles and models of human behaviour that govern policy and law.

For example egalitarianism or the harm principle kind of tell you how to make a decision (make everything as equal as possible), (do the least harm), but the statement "do the same thing as before" doesn't even try to do that. It is a cop-out.

On the news and in governmental parties you have "the conservatives" "the liberals" "the social democrats" "the greens" etc. My point is that each should in theory have some kind of consistent logic that determines how they argue things should work. But to have a whole party based on "doing whatever was already done" is silly.

For example I feel like anarchism has a kind of set of values that would inform members of the society how to behave - valuing liberty, rejection of domination etc. Even religions do this.

But conservatism is kind of worse than religion, because it doesn't try to define anything.

I think the point is they are part of a company, not the state, and the state has the monopoly on making things legitimate, but not violence because there are at least two entities doing violence - private contracting companies and state actors.

Well yeah, I guess we have a lot of private military contractors now, even fighting in wars, so definitely no monopoly there.

I suppose the assumption is that if they have that capacity they are a "state" in the sense that they have enough unification of political views and enough collaboration to use violence to exert their will in a dominant way eg they have the monopoly on legitimate violence therefore they are a form of state.

Even in fascist states they aren't continuously beating people up, but there are forces that can do it legitimately as needed.

I agree it's a bit oversimplified. I agree with your point.

Yeah Hobbes and weber were in the discussion, my memory is pretty vague, I have seen this "but what about the violence vacuum" argument leveled at anarchism before though.

There is even a vaguely related simpson's episode where they get rid of all the guns then sideshow bob (i think) takes over the whole town with a stick.

thats a nice point.

yeah and then eventually one sort of wins and you get a state like in a chaotic revolution situation. The point is there is a 'violence vacuum' without a state.

:/ sadly true.

I lived with a wannabe cop who did the same thing. Also read that some cops get psychological problems where they can't turn off the paranoia and it creates problems for their partners.

I saw a few pretty bad reviews on their glassdoor, so this also kind of tracks... well, at least I learned something.

good to know, thankyou.

Haha yeah good point to think on. Some thoughts. Firstly, stating an effect of training on later behavioural patterns is not chauvinism because it doesn't reference a personal trait, it references a changeable thinking pattern.

Secondly, I suppose this joke references "emotivism" or the "boo-hurrah" theory of morality - if one was to draw your conclusion from what I said - "get rid of the military people" which is apparently also a form of chauvinism one has to justify why this is "better": In the Boo-hurrah theory moral statements don't have truth value, they are just expressions of how we feel about something, so my chauvinism based on military thinking is no different to racism and it's just how different people feel.

I personally think there are empirical and obvious mechanistic justifications for why "getting rid of the military people (possibly through retraining)" is good chauvinism, but "kill all the enemies" is bad. Such as the measurable complexity and value of the human mind.

Pretty limited understanding of ethics here, but that's my two cents.

Do they have a bad reputation? I hadn't heard of them before.

did they talk about enemy/us and civilian/solider categories?