The infighting needs to stop.
Hardly semantic. The way you fix a broken system is by working within the system to gradually shift it back to normal. The way you destroy a working corrupt system is by literally tearing it down French revolution style. Which path are we going to take? It’s only semantic if we ultimately decide to take no path at all, and simply lay down and die.
I’m not a revolutionary and I disagree that the semantic difference is unimportant.
“The system must be destroyed” implies, assuming we’re talking about national politics, at the very least a short period of very deep constitutional and institutional reform, but really refers to nothing less than civil war, violent revolution, and the systematic dismantlement of existing institutions from which proponents of such action generally assume that their preferred method of government will naturally emerge.
This is opposed to a belief that, flawed may they be, democratic institutions also act as safeguards against the tyranny of the majority as well as the tyranny of whoever has the most money/guns, and slow incremental change to these institutions is preferable to their dismantlement.
Of course everything in the world isn’t so black and white. Nonetheless the existence of gray doesn’t diminish the difference between black and white. “The system must be destroyed”, by virtue of the violence it implies, is an extremist statement and different in nature to “the system must be fixed”.
The trick, imo is if you call for chaos and violence to get from a to b.
If you do, you’re admitting to being ok with a gamble, and that “your brand” wins out, that the power vacuum is filled in an orderly manner, and that a greater level of peace and “quality” of society arrives after the dust settles.
Semantics is the field concerned with the meaning of words and sentences. Let’s take a look at two sentences.
The weather sure is nice out today
The bourgeois class must be destroyed in order to end the oppression of the proletariat
These two sentences have a semantic difference. And sure, they also have emotional and political differences, but those differences are a consequence of semantics.
The move to brand semantics as irrelevant is a conspiracy by people who don’t want words to have meanings. /hj
Look at the way monkeys communicate with each other. They hoot, screech, and throw poo. That’s communication without semantics. That communication is pure emotion, no meaning. The people who think semantics doesn’t matter are people who wish we all communicated more like monkeys.
