Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
Is liberalism dying? If it is, is that a good thing or a bad thing to you?
Yes, and it's a good thing, because the entire "Enlightenment" political project was a mistake from the beginning.
This is a bad thing to me and a cause of some hopelessness, since America produced a great deal of good things during its heyday, and even still is doing awesome things.
This looks like cum hoc ergo propter hoc to me. I've never really bought the case for "technological determinism" whereby a society's political forms are determined entirely by its technology base, and I especially haven't seen any good arguments for the reverse, that scientific and technological progress are entirely "downstream" of particular political forms.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
In constitutional law, it is very clear--the executive branch does not have the authority to stop payments.
And who enforces that?
Plus, I think you've completely misread me. I'm not talking about Trump and/or Musk committing "impoundment," I'm talking about left-wing Treasury employees doing so in order to defy and sabotage Trump.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
The treasury cannot block payments unilaterally
Why not? Who has the ability to stop them if they do?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
HN is a pretty good proxy for a left-aligned highly-online space and it is remarkable how uniform opinion is there. There's a single top-level comment pointing out that revealing individual's names like this is out of the ordinary but the rest of the opinions seem to range from (paraphrasing) "these people are idiots for listening to Elon" to "these people are traitors" (and need to be hanged?).
Related: this Hindustan Times piece talks about the responses at /r/WhitePeopleTwitter, which are just the sort of thing one might expect:
The description on the page reads, ‘Muskrat’s DOGE Henchmen have been identified.’ One comment on the page says, ‘Their names?! Drag their fuc*** bodies, cuz. Time to drop the mitts.” Another reads, “I’ll say it. This nazi stooge needs to be shot.” “It’s time to do more than dragging names, let’s drag their necks up by a large coil of rope,” reads one comment. Many other similar remarks have been posted on the page.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
On multiple occasions, I've had conversations with older "small government conservative" types talking about how we need to "loosen up" on the social axis to try to ally with people in the "small government social progressive" left-libertarian types. I then pointed out, each time, that that "quadrant" in the four-way economic axis vs. social axis space is the least populated, and we'd have much better results appealing to the opposite quadrant of "big government social conservative", which is rather underserved (including pointing to polling data on Hispanic voters and why, despite being Catholic "natural conservatives," they vote Democrat), by letting up on the anti-government, anti-regulation dogmatism in exchange for wins on social issues.
Every time, the response has been horror at the suggestion, and replies about how it would be better for the "communists" in the Progressive ("big government social progressive") quadrant to win, and for us to lose on both social and economic issues, than for us to win on just the social issues. Most the time, they've not been able to give a concrete answer as to why they'd prefer to lose on both axes than win on just the social axis. Just a lot of vague handwaving about how social conservatism without the whole "drowning government in the bathtub," deregulated free market über alles, would somehow be the worst possible outcome, in ways they can't articulate.
(The one time I did get a clear answer, it was that the people in the Progressive quadrant are Communists; but since the alternative to the whole "small government, free markets" side of the economic debate is socialism, the proper term for the combination of social conservatism with socialism is National Socialism, and just as we allied with Stalin to defeat Hitler, Communists are always preferable to Nazis.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
Personally I think this speaks to the larger conceit among liberals when it comes to their Message: Liberals are automatically right, and everyone who does not heed the wisdom of our words is just too stupid to understand what we are saying so we need to say it louder.
I recently did a long post on my Tumblr about this, making an analogy to a classroom:
Consider a school teacher. Suppose she’s teaching, say, math. Or American history. Or whatever. And the kids keep failing tests, because they keep giving similar wrong answers. Like, say, when asked to do 2x2, they give “22.” Or put down as the year of Columbus’s first voyage as “1942.” Or whatever. There are a few possibilities as to the issue.
First, maybe the teacher isn’t teaching it well. Perhaps she needs to change how she’s presenting the information; find a method that communicates it to the children in a way and at a level they can comprehend. Maybe she’s using too many big words, and the kid’s aren’t smart enough to grasp what she’s saying. Or she’s giving it too quickly, and hasn’t repeated it enough, particularly for those kids in the back of the classroom who might not have heard it the first few times.
Second, maybe the lessons are fine, but the kids are paying more attention to something else. After all, even if you try to “make learning fun,” class is still going to be a bit more boring than the alternatives, and the kids would likely rather watch TikTok videos on their smartphones instead. Maybe the kids in the back of the class have their phones carefully placed and hidden to do just that. And maybe that’s where they’re getting their wrong answers. Perhaps some YouTuber has started a troll campaign to convince young people that 2x2=22. Or maybe a popular rap song that drops bars about how “Columbus sailed the ocean blue/in nineteen hundred and forty-two,” and it’s an earworm getting stuck in the kids’ heads.
The problem then is to figure out how to keep the kids off their phones in class; and if the problem is watching these videos out of class, then get the PTA on board and contact their parents to try to get enough of them to control their children’s time online better.
Third, if it’s not how the teacher is teaching, or bad information environment, then the only thing left is the children themselves. Maybe a whole lot of them have undiagnosed dyscalculia. Maybe they’re answering “1942” instead of “1492” because dyslexia is causing them to swap the digits. Maybe a bunch of them belong in a Special Needs classroom.
Or maybe they’re a bunch of troublemaking little shits who’ve coordinated this to mess with their teacher. They’re trying to drive her to her wits’ end, or maybe even sabotaging their own grades to mess with class outcome metrics to make her look bad and sabotage her continued employment. In which case the answer is to discipline them — particularly the masterminds instigating and coordinating it — until they stop.
What you don’t do, in any case, is change the curriculum. You don’t start accepting “2x2=22” as a “correct” answer no matter how many students put it down on their math quiz.
I've seen a lot of Youtube video on this, too. That they didn't do enough to point out how Trump is an evil, racist fascist campaigning on pure hate and desire to hurt people, and how the Democratic party stands for joy, hope, and everything that is good in the world. The metaphorical teacher just isn't giving the lesson properly for the dummies in the back of the class. Or they're being drowned out by lies and disinformation pouring from far-right pipelines like x.com, and we need more censorship and fact-checking.
At no point in all this political discussion have I seen liberals consider that maybe their words have been heard and understood and have been found wanting.
I have seen people, on Tumblr, Reddit, and Youtube, who do indeed consider that. They do hold that a lot of voters did understand what the Democratic party was selling, and rejected it in favor of Trump. That their words have been found wanting… which is why Trump voters aren't stupid, but evil. Because if you knowingly, with full understanding, choose the "indisputably fascist" Trump and his party of pure hate over Harris's "flawless campaign of joy and unity" with all the objectively correct policies, knowingly choose lies over truth, knowingly choose fascism over democracy, then you're a Nazi. It's not that everyone on the other side is "just too stupid" — it's that they're either stupid or evil. The former just need to hear the message louder and more often, until they finally get it. The latter need to get what they deserve, just like Corey Comperatore.
If the voters don't like what the Democratic party is selling… then the voters are wrong, and it's the voters who are the problem needing fixed.
Another example of contradictory narratives on USAID that I've seen people pointing out is between it being a "relatively small agency mostly known for saving starving kids and such"… and it having "played a significant role" in overthrowing foreign governments.
Edit: it looks like this is another example of how USAID was instrumental in "regime change."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
Probably some of it. But when we add in, say, Dave, who is the opposite of Carol, and agrees with Alice on DEF and disagrees with her on ABC, and Alice thinks Dave is indeed preferable to Bob — rather than a heretic/traitor/outgroup — this can't be the whole story.
Let's see if I can make a table for this:
| ￢ABC | ABC | |
|---|---|---|
| ￢DEF | Bob | Carol |
| DEF | Dave | Alice |
Where Alice's order of preference for the other parties is Dave > Bob > Carol, rather than something like Dave > Carol > Bob (that makes more sense in terms of preferring agreement), or even Bob > Dave > Carol (that prizes the heathen/enemy/fargroup Bob over the heretics/traitors/outgroups Dave and Carol).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
I'm surprised once again to see myself on this list, and even more surprised at which comment of mine ended up here.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
"Carol" and "Bob" are meant to be stand-ins for groups more than specific individuals — and you got them reversed — but that does kind of fit what I've observed, in that part of disapproving of "Carol" despite her being less in opposition than "Bob" is that "Carol" has a bad reputation, while "Bob" has a lot of PR on his side (see my reply to Walterodim above).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
In the case I'm thinking of, yes. Here, "ABC" stand for social issues, "DEF" for economic/government size issues. Specifically, I'm referring to certain "small government conservatives" who express a preference for "big government social progressives" — whom these same conservatives regularly call "socialists" or even "communists" — over "big government social conservatives."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
On the power of the purse and control of the Treasury.
I’ve seen a few articles and videos going around, referencing and linking or exerpting the various left-wing people (mostly women) on “short video” social media filming themselves crying about how they can’t sleep because they’re up all night with the thoughts of how their children are about to starve because Trump is taking their EBT and Social Security away; followed by a debunking of this — complete with links to/excerpts of the press conference addressing this mistaken view, and how these sorts of domestic benefits are unaffected by any funding halts President Trump has ordered so far — and how these people have worked themselves up due to believing scaremongering from voices on the left. But I’ve come to wonder whether this is just about riling up these sort of easily-misled people… or if it’s about laying groundwork for a fight over the Treasury Department.
I’ve repeatedly held (here and elsewhere), whenever someone has talked about “defunding the left,” that it would actually be very hard to do, because for all that the constitution gives Congress “the power of the purse,” in reality all the checks are actually written and issued by the unelected bureaucrats at Treasury, as seen in every “government shutdown.” So what if Congress orders some left-wing institution defunded… and Treasury just keeps writing the checks anyway? I’ve argued that they can, and maybe even will, just defy Congress, because who can stop them?
Well, on the one hand, we’re seeing that permanent bureaucrats are less “unfireable” than I thought. On the other, we have this tweet from Musk on how independent people at the Treasury act:
The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups.
They literally never denied a payment in their entire career.
Not even once.
So, again, what if Treasury officers keep issuing checks after being told to stop? Or, in an alternate scenario that brings things back around to my first paragraph, they start engaging in the sort of malicious compliance we’ve already seen elsewhere (like the “No DEI? Guess we have to stop teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen!” bit)? If they talk about how, since they can’t tell who’s been really fired by Trump and who hasn’t, and thus who they should or shouldn’t issue paychecks to, they’re going to err on the side of caution and halt all federal employees’ paychecks (are ICE agents going to be deporting people for free?). Or how if Trump’s talking about abolishing the IRS, that means they need to put an immediate stop to issuing anyone’s income tax refunds. Or how they’re so confused trying to figure out what is and isn’t funded by Trump’s rushed, poorly-written executive orders, they’re just going to halt all Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, EBT, etc. until things get “straightened out.”
Because what are Trump, Musk, and company going to do, fire them all? Because this is where Scott’s “Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats” really comes into play. The more people at Treasury you fire, the fewer are left to process and issue all the funds that need issued, the more everyone’s paychecks and Social Security and Medicare and EBT and tax refunds get delayed.
So, will the Treasury #Resist? Can they be reined in, or does their control over the cash spigot so many depend upon give them too much power?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
Not entirely sure yet, given my naturally pessimistic and "wait-and-see" attitude, but probably more positively-inclined toward them than most here, despite my "super precarious place financially."
As some alternative viewpoints most here probably aren't exposed to, I'll first link this from Conservative Treehouse, "The Secret Tariff Code is Buried in ‘Section 2, Item (h)’ of the Executive Order":
So, Canada and Mexico get 25% tariffs, but China only 10%. Why? The secret is in that subsection “(h)” when it talks about de minimis treatment. Essentially, what President Trump is doing is levying a much more massive import tax, and possible confiscation impact on the core source of fentanyl (and other illegal) substances.
Approximately a billion packages are estimated to enter the USA under the cover of the de minimis exemption. This is where the enforcement mechanism of the “External Revenue Service” combines with the tariff approach and the “state of emergency.” President Trump imposed the tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a nearly 50-year law that gives the president sweeping power to impose sanctions after declaring an emergency.
Now the billion packages, mostly from China, Mexico and Canada are going to be subjected to review and interception.
The de minimis loophole comes from back in the 1930s. The idea back then was, say you went on a vacation to Paris, you shouldn’t have to file customs paperwork or pay taxes if you decided to ship some little Eiffel Tower statues to your friends back home.
Congress in 2015 then raised the de minimis threshold from $200 to $800. However, the e-commerce world exploded, and Chinese companies began using the de minimis loophole to ship cheap goods (ex. Temu and Shein) into the USA direct to consumers without paying any customs duty.
It was reported last year that the U.S. was on track to receive a billion packages through the de minimis loophole that aren’t taxed and don’t have customs slips saying what they are. Making matters worse, illegal items are slipping through the cracks, including, knockoffs, unsafe items and even chemicals used to make fentanyl. The worst abuser that exploits this de minimis loophole is, by far, China.
President Trump can require a customs and duty declaration stating what is in every package and subsequently collect tariffs and duties.
Put it all together and President Trump is executing an Emergency Act executive order, plus the imposition of a tariff review, and simultaneous interception of de minimis packages previously unchecked as the enforcement mechanism. All executed by the External Revenue Service.
(Emphasis in original)
And for something a bit more out there (even for me), there's Vox Day's "Testing the Free Trade Hypothesis"
It has long been a mantra of the free trade crowd that both sides lose from a trade war. President Trump has called that mantra into question by launching a trade war with Canada, and likely Mexico and China as well:
…
Conclusion: the USA will handily win a trade war with all three countries, which is presumably why President Trump singled them out. The US economy will observably benefit from removing foreign competitors taking sales away from domestic businesses; the GDP cost to the foreign countries is an order of magnitude greater to them because their interaction with the USA is more parasitical than symbiotic.
…
Remember, the theoretical justifications for free trade have always been false and incorrect, as first demonstrated by Ian Fletcher and then conclusively disproved by me. Free trade is absolutely and inherently detrimental to a nation, because its logic of efficiency and optimally pairing labor with capital absolutely requires the complete destruction of families, local communities, and the demographics of the nation itself.
The fact that decades of even partially free trade within and without the US borders has significantly fostered these three negative societal trends isn’t an accident, it is specifically predicted by my theoretical observations and argument in my 2016 book ON THE QUESTION OF FREE TRADE.
Here is the relevant Presidential order. It’s informative to see that instead of cracking down on its illegal fentanyl production and exports, the Canadian government has elected to embrace trade war. The irony here is that the USA is simply attempting to do what China tried, and failed, to do in the Opium Wars.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
Why is it that a person can prefer someone who disagrees with them politically on more items than someone who disagrees on fewer items that are a strict subset of the other person's disagreements, so that it cannot be explained by priority of items?
Let me give a toy diagram to clarify. Suppose we have six areas where the people in question can disagree: ABCDEF. Now, if Alice cares mostly about A, I can see her preferring Bob, who agrees with her on A, but disagrees on B-F, over Carol, who agrees on B-F but disagrees on A. But what I'm talking about is when Bob disagrees with Alice on all of A-F, while Carol agrees with Alice on ABC and disagrees on DEF. Carol's disagreements with Alice are a strict subset of Bob's disagreements with Alice, so there's no way of prioritizing items that should make Alice prefer Bob over Carol…
…and yet, I've found people who express exactly this sort of preference. What is this?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
Wouldn't a more realistic scenario be various Red States snatching up military assets within their border
How? Except for the National Guard, American servicemen are loyal to the chain of command, not local state governments. And the National Guard can be federalized.
I've been assured by multiple veterans that the sort of thing you describe, much like military coups, are something that only ever happens in other countries, and could never happen in America, because literally no one who serves in the US Armed Forces would ever betray their oath and the principles of the US military as strictly apolitical by putting either personal political affiliation or loyalty to a particular state over obedience to the chain of command.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
Same reason America lost in Vietnam and to the Taliban.
I wish I could find again the essay I read a couple years ago by a retired general, talking about the risk of civil war in America, and why it needs avoided at all costs because neither side could win, and would thus grind on forever.
The key part I would reference was the part where he reasons that whichever side the US military goes with cannot lose, because the US armed forces cannot be defeated. He specifically mentions Vietnam and Afghanistan, arguing that the US military did not lose, was not defeated, in either of those cases, they were forced to quit and go home by politicians more sympathetic to the commies/Taliban. He then notes that in a civil war, you can't "pack up and go home" because home is where you're fighting; any politicians more sympathetic to the other side are on the other side, are part of the enemy you're fighting and not people who can give you order; and no one's just "calling it quits" while not losing militarily, because while nobody in the upper levels suffered any consequences for the Afghanistan withdrawal, giving up in a civil war has much more dire personal consequences.
Of course, he then went on to argue that the US military could not win a civil war either, taking a position much like yours, except that the reason he gave for the US's failures in counter-insurgency operations was…
…that counter-insurgency is and has always been completely impossible. Indeed, he went on to make arguments about the inevitability of the populace perpetually rising up to throw off any occupier, such as to imply that military conquest is impossible. Do I need to point out how ahistorical that is? Per his view, we should expect present-day England to be wracked with violence from Anglo-Saxon insurgents still fighting to throw off the Norman yoke. It was reading this essay that led me down a rabbit hole of looking up and reading works on Roman methods of suppressing rebellion, as well as a few discussions of why Anglo-Saxon peasants didn't rise up against the Norman conquest, and some of the "fourth-generation warfare" experts on why American counter-insurgency strategies are so terrible (basically, that there are two effective strategies, but since we lack the patience for one and the stomach for the other, we try to do something half-assed in between that ends up the worst of both worlds; and also over-focusing on technological superiority and "precision" strikes as the go-to "solution").
Most of the material I've read on the history of guerrilla warfare points out that guerrillas usually lose. Further, that the image of their effectiveness in the popular imagination is mostly a holdover of Communist (and particularly Maoist) propaganda of the "invincible Marxist guerrilla." Also, they "work" best as an adjunct to a professional military force — for example, despite the over-inflated reputation of the Viet Cong, they were mostly gone before the war was over, and pretty much all the real damage and progress against the US was accomplished by the North Vietnamese Army.
I can't remember if it was Max Boot, or someone else's work citing his, but I recall reading a work on guerrilla warfare that laid out three preconditions, which are necessary but not sufficient, for a successful insurgency.
-
At least one foreign ally providing material and financial support to the guerrillas
-
At least passive cooperation from the general population
-
and to be fighting against a foreign occupier.
That last one is the most important. No "guerrilla" or "terrorist" insurgency has ever won a civil war against a domestic enemy.
And beyond all this discussion of insurgencies and military matters, why would crushing "American Nazis" ever even rise to that level? Why couldn't it just be done by civilian law enforcement, with each "cell" of "real American homegrown fascists" getting Waco'd the moment the state learns about them?
After all, AIUI, the reason there "hasn't been any more Wacos" isn't that, as some would have it, that the government was soundly deterred from ever trying again by what happened there, and by Oklahoma City. No, my understanding is that local law enforcement wanted to arrest Koresh and a bunch of other leading Branch Davidians, and had various opportunities to do so, but were held back from doing so by the Feds, because Janet Reno wanted to make a big show of rolling the whole group up all at once. And thus, what the FBI, ATF, etc. learned from the resulting debacle was to let local law enforcement break them up.
The reason we don't "see more Wacos" isn't that the government has stopped trying to shut down groups like the Branch Davidians, it's that its become so effective at shutting down such groups, with arrests by local cops, long before they ever reach the "armed compound" stage, that it never makes the news.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
I cannot think of a better way to actually facilitate the birth of a real American homegrown fascism than killing or jailing Trump and successfully using extralegal methods to suppress the maga movement and stifle their (very popular) core political agenda.
Yes, but so what? Why can't they then just crush said "American homegrown fascism" like Hitler was crushed?
And I remember a comment on Tumblr from someone arguing that "fascism" is hard to pin down. First, because many fellow leftists use it as a boo word meaning "anything I don't like." But more, that to the extent that it has a narrower, more concrete definition than that, but a broader definition than "the specific Italian ideology of Mussolini and co." (such that even Hitler and the Nazis "aren't really Fascist), then it refers to a sort of cluster with overlapping traits (what, per here, was called a "family resemblance" by Wittgenstein), where no specimen has all the associated traits, and no trait is shared by all members — Hitler and Franco had different positions on religion, Mussolini and Pinochet on economics, Imperial Japan lacked a clear "strongman" figure, Orban uses electoral democracy differently, and so on. But it is a cluster, which includes (but is not limited to) Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Salazar, Hussein, Pinochet, and Orban (and, according to some people, China from Qin to Qing); and thus, Trump — particularly as he is now — fits into that cluster; into what, if you reject the label of "fascist" for the whole thing, is still a space containing fascism, and other unacceptable right-wing regimes adjacent to it.
This is again, a position I encounter from people all over the multi-dimensional political spectrum, from old school conservatives to libertarians to progressives to self-described "fascists," that it's acceptable (or at least tolerable) to be socially right-wing, as long as you're also in favor of "free markets" and "small government" — to the point you prioritize those over social issues — and categorically opposed to actually ever trying to use government power (as opposed to the classic libertarian bits about "seizing power and ruthlessly leaving people alone" and "drowning government in the bathtub"), but the moment right-winger actually try to wield power — rather than just block the left from using power and "standing athwart history yelling 'stop'" — they've gone in to forbidden territory, too close to Hitler to ever be allowed.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
Of course they use "saving democracy" type rhetoric.
I'm reminded of so much of the rhetoric, often out of Europe, about Hungary and its "democratic backsliding," its "hybrid regime of electoral autocracy," how it maintains a "quasi-dictatorship" by winning elections (by giving the majority what they vote for); and the invocation of various "democracy indices" whose inner workings reveal a definition of "democracy" in which elections and the will of the voters play a relatively tiny part, and it becomes "undemocratic" to respect the outcomes of elections when the electorate 'votes wrong.'
And I don't think they get that democracy would not be restored post-coup.
Sure it will, given — per my previous paragraph — the way they define "democracy." After all, as I once saw some wag online put it (in a snowclone) "'Democracy' is when Democrats are in charge; the more Democrats are in charge, the more democratic it is."
I mean, I've exposed to a lot of melting-down lefties over on Tumblr, and there's quite a few coalescing around the position that if "democracy" means giving the voters a say, but a majority of American voters are either so stupid or so evil to support racist rapist Fascist felon Trump and his pure evil Nazi Party 2.0 over Kamala Harris's "flawless campaign" of "joy, hope and unity" and a Democratic Party that stands for all that is good and right in the world, then "democracy" has got to go — proposed solutions start with massively rolling back the franchise (such as requiring a bachelor's degree to vote), through "reeducation camps," to "kill all Trump supporters."
They explicitly talk about Kamala being made President.
Well, who do you think "a cabal of CIA and military leaders," deathly opposed to Trump, Vance et al, and seeking to save the Left's hold on the permanent bureaucracy, would choose to install as their puppet in the White House? Newsom? Hillary? Liz Cheney?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
Maybe this should go to the pardon thread, or even get it's own top level post, but I'm not summarizing the entirety of the drama.
In any case Ross Ulbricht is free and Trump is now the greatest president who has ever lived*.
This might also belong in a similar location, but I'm replying here.
Sure, Ulbricht may have been pardoned… but has he actually been physically released from jail yet? Even more, have any of the J6 pardonees?
Because, AIUI, getting released from Federal incarceration is not a simple or quick process. There's a bunch of paperwork, and protocols, and procedures, all of which determined bureaucrats can slow-walk to great effect. Sure, keeping someone locked up after they've been pardoned probably falls under "false imprisonment," but that's something you have to take to court — which takes time, and can be dragged out — and even if the court finds in favor, compliance with the resulting court order can also be dragged out.
I mean, maybe if Trump were to send agents to physically see to the pardonees' release — they'd have to be US Marshals, I'd figure — even then, I'd imagine the warden and guards and such would protest that this is against procedure, and that the Marshals have to leave and not come back until all the paperwork is in order…
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
However what's driving me insane about the deployment of the label is either it's laziness, or if you want to be more cynical, it's deliberate use to obscure the nature of the conflict. "Woke Right" implies something like "these right-wingers are substantially the same as the left-wingers we've just finished fighting", and so there's no need to investigate what they want and where are they coming from.
Per Josh Neal, this is an old tactic going back at least to Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics:
Lindsay’s ‘Woke Right’ polemic is a high-stakes confidence game, premised on the style of regime polemic authored over sixty years ago by arch-architect of the consensus view of history, Richard Hofstadter. Allow me to expand on this.
…
Published in 1964, Hofstadter’s essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ detailed the problems posed by the John Birch Society, Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy, McCarthyism and the various Red Scares, as well as the broader development of populistic ‘pseudo-conservatism’. Deliberately employing psychoanalytic language in a pejorative manner, Hofstadter reduced the legitimate political and existential concerns held by large swaths of the American electorate (a demographic Sam Francis would later term ‘Middle American radicals’) as nothing more than neurotic and provincial irrationality. By accomplishing this, Hofstadter provided hegemonic progressive liberalism with the rationale it needed to guiltlessly dispossess White America.
Just as Lindsay would later do, Hofstadter rooted his theory of the paranoid style in Janus-faced descriptive analyses, superficial comparisons and false equivocations, technical inaccuracies, pejorative language, and outright mockery. I shall begin with the first charge before moving swiftly into each subsequent one – demonstrating along the way precisely how James Lindsay fits into this intellectual tradition of ‘regime polemics’.
…
The very real clash of civilizations between Protestantism and Catholicism, for instance, is treated as a tit-for-tat exchange of paranoid delusions. McCarthyite anti-communism is similarly held up as a fiction of the mind despite the well documented history of socialist and communist maneuverings inside the American government. Hofstadter’s passing reference to the biopolitical use of fluoride is pathologized as well; he argued that even if fluoridization of the water supply was performed to achieve certain political aims, that middle Americans ought still to be considered paranoid and delusional for conceiving of such a thing before evidence came to pass. Hofstadter cited the People’s Party’s belief that bankers used bribes to influence 19th-century monetary policy as proof of a long-running paranoid style in American politics. Unfortunately for Richard Hofstadter, this paranoid delusion was proven to be a matter of factual occurrence (we may credit the 2011 article entitled ‘Populism, Paranoia, and the Politics of Free Silver’ written by Samuel DeCanio for providing the receipts necessary to disprove Hofstadter’s fallacious argument). Throughout the essay, Hofstadter detailed the nature of competition between groups, sometimes getting deep into the details of a given rivalry, before declaring the entire debacle to be a fanciful and irrational artifact of the mind. His ‘artful appropriation’ of psychiatric language, which is – inexplicably – not intended to be understood in conventional terms, allows him to psychologize away the legitimate political concerns of the American population, effectively reducing such insights to mere spooks in the mind of an unsophisticated rabble.
When Lindsay describes the cultivation of a postwar liberal consensus, or how Buckley’s National Review overtook the conservative movement, and so on, he similarly puts together a factual narrative of history only to declare the facts invalid by labeling such an intellectual exercise as ‘woke’ (and therefore illegitimate). A coherent (and accurate) narrative is laid out only to be discredited using appropriated, pejorative language (for Hofstadter, ‘paranoia’ and ‘anxiety’ being appropriated from psychiatry and psychoanalysis; for Lindsay, ‘woke’ being appropriated from popular culture).
Hofstadter attempted as well to delegitimize the inductive conclusions of folk Americans (to be understood synonymously with White America and middle America) by superficially comparing their cognitive and behavioral habits to those of their rivals, thereby ‘eliminating’ any difference between the two, thus reducing a very real political conflict to the level of petty envy and feelings of inferiority (or insufficiency). The Ku Klux Klan donned ornate uniforms and organized hierarchically just like the Catholics. Members of the John Birch Society operated clandestinely and fought a zero-sum ideological war just like the communists. Christian anti-communists were as psychically and intellectually vigorous as their communist foes – wow, what profound insight! Such trifling arguments are only given weight and credibility by the fact that they are supported by a dominant regime.
There's more from Neal on this in his appearance on the J. Burden show. And I'm also reminded of a bit from this decades-old blog post about Gandhi:
World War Two exposed one major flaw in Gandhi's strategy: Gandhi never opposed Britain's defense of India during the war, but he never really supported it either. He seemed to think that because Nazis and Brits both had guns and fought wars, they were pretty much the same.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
Today only the nordics and Japan still eat whale meat
And Alaskan Inuit.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
What frequently stands out to me in these sorts of discussions is how everyone seems to be utterly unfamiliar with the Mexican Expedition, AKA originally the "Punitive Expedition, U.S. Army":
The expedition was launched in retaliation for Villa's attack on the town of Columbus, New Mexico, an incident of the larger Mexican Border War. The declared objective of the expedition by the administration of US President Woodrow Wilson was the capture of Villa.[7] Despite locating and defeating the main body of Villa's command who were responsible for the Columbus raid, U.S. forces were unable to achieve Wilson's stated main objective of preventing Villa's escape.
The active search for Villa ended after a month in the field when troops sent by Venustiano Carranza, the head of the Constitutionalist faction of the revolution and then head of the Mexican government, resisted the U.S. incursion. The Constitutionalist forces used arms at the town of Parral to resist passage of a U.S. Army column. The U.S. mission was changed to prevent further attacks on it by Mexican troops and to plan for the possibility of war.[8] When war was averted diplomatically, the expedition remained in Mexico until February 1917 to encourage Carranza's government to pursue Villa and prevent further raids across the border.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
Isn’t Alaskan independence relatively mainstream and normal?
Depends on what you mean by "relatively mainstream." In that the AIP exists, has about 2% of the state's population as memebers, and is one of the few third parties to have ever (briefly) controlled a state governor's seat, sure (though it hasn't really been the same since Vogler was murdered).
But there's still quite a lot of opposition; Mrs. Johnson's was on the basis that "secession is secession," that any and all attempts to leave the US are, morally speaking, the same thing, and thus support for Alaskan Independence is also necessarily equal support for the Confederacy, and thus slavery, and therefore an unacceptable opinion for anyone to hold in her classroom.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
With no one.
And then you get sued, and the EEOC going after you, until you're forced out of business. Like Jim says, HR departments are a tentacle of the state inserted into every corporation, via threat of lawfare.
This is the key point I find myself harping upon, again and again. It probably makes up a substantial part of my current political views. "Process and procedure" can never fully substitute for virtue; there is no perfect system to make even a society of "rational devils" good; and what the focus on procedure does is either empower people skilled in "manipulation of procedural outcomes" to exercise power without responsibility, or build toward Machine Rule. I'm not sure which is worse, the Dolores Umbridges, or the "distributed non-human intelligences" (as IIRC Benjamin Boyce put it).
Either way:
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