Corvos
18d ago
I think you're right, it is regular politics. The overton window has become narrower and more harshly enforced since 2010, as the political and media class grows more uniform, and simultaneously the size of groups outside that window has been steadily enlarging. I think this is explains the feelings of persecution on both sides.
What's more relevant to me is the question: if a movement never becomes popular, how do we distinguish between "we were discredited" from "our ideas were never palatable to more than 10% of voters"? Because I feel that many losing movements declare that, and it can't be universally the case.
I'm not sure, sorry. In theory, you could be maximally encouraging of fringe groups (e.g. fawning newspaper coverage) and see whether they turn out to have legs, but I'd be very surprised if that ever happened.
Perhaps you could use volatility of support as a metric? If support for your ideology has strong peaks and troughs in response to events and scandals, that suggests that more people might be willing to support it depending on the circumstances. And, therefore, that the media can manipulate support with bad coverage or that politicians can manipulate support by crushing the insurgent new politician everyone is interested in. If support for your ideology chugs along at 5% for decades that suggests it's just unpopular. But this is very tenuous.
Corvos
18d ago
Sticking with left wing examples for now, let's say there's a movement advocating for a wealth tax.
Saying, "no, only 10% of people want that," is appropriate.
Saying, "no, only 10% of people want that," and then going through that movement to find the one member who said something stupid ten years ago and bringing it up incessantly whenever people talk about wealth taxes is what I would call "active methods". An active attempt to damage and (further) discredit movements that are not popular in order to prevent that movement from ever becoming more popular.
Trump is moderating so hard that he’s repudiating even the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025
The impression I'd got from this article in Unherd was that Trump doesn't like Project 2025 because:
a) He's the big boss and nobody tells him what to do (in his self-conception). He's not interested in being some pencil-neck's sockpuppet.
b) He thinks that small-state conservatism is stupid and electorally unpopular.
How accurate is that? I don't really know much about the Heritage Foundation.
Corvos
18d ago
I mean, I get not liking it, but a coalition that gets 50% of the seats and around ~50% of the votes is not anti-democratic.
I don't know. On the one hand that's true, on the other... there's something off about having people whose ideologies and needs are utterly incompatible linking hands to make sure Those Awful People never get anything they want. It's naked warfare, and I think it's also damaging because you get governments that can't run the country because they don't agree on anything. Basically you get FPTP back again but more impenetrable.
If the people who voted for those parties don't like the fact they made a grand coalition, they can vote for other parties who won't do that, until the far-right gains enough support a grand coalition isn't possible.
Only if you assume that politics under proportional representation is a perfect market with no market failures. But imagine a situation where, for example, the professional classes treat anyone associated with a populist party like a leper. (Oh, how I wish this were a hypothetical...) That means that anyone with experience of government doesn't join the populist party but stays with a centrist party which is enforcing the cordon sanitaire. A hypothetical voter might want to vote for a party that is competent and has a populist manifesto, but they can't because circumstances prevent such a party from forming.
If the country is roughly representational, and someone is requesting unpopular actions, then not necessarily giving them what they want is natural and appropriate. The charge - increasingly true, I think - is that active methods are being taken to discredit and weaken those broadcasting non-majority views along the lines I described in reply to OP.
Which I can understand but it's somewhat distasteful at best and causing the very problem it's meant to prevent at worst.
I'm saying that the uniparty is keeping them down. Combine that with the fact that radical wings are growing rapidly in America and Europe for the structural reasons I give and it's no surprise that the amount of paranoia is also growing.
Corvos
19d ago
I was trying to make a version of this using LLama v3 (70bn) and a predictive algorithm which learns to predict the user's replies (and therefore implicitly actions, thought processes and needs). It's a work in progress: I turned it on, it told me to get up out of my chair and do something useful, and I turned it off.
But a 'programmable superego' is exactly what I want out of AI.
I do find it interesting that whenever I venture into left-wing spaces, they have a very similar mindset to the right-wing ones re:
- the uniparty is neutering politics, pretending to hold our ideology whilst throwing us under the bus at every opportunity (citing e.g. the lack of long-lasting legal change despite the Floyd riots)
- even when our guys are popular the moderates in our party close ranks to keep them out (Bernie Sanders, attempted with Jeremy Corbyn)
- mainstream media lies to build complacency and takes every opportunity to identify us with the worst of our movement (e.g. the /r/antiwork interview, the UK media's treatment of Corbyn)
- the opposition wants us gone permanently, and any election risks them finally getting enough power to manage it
I think that conservatives have a much stronger leg to stand on here: the illiberal centre is left-wing and actively persecutes right-wingers; the fact that it's not quite left-wing enough for the radicals doesn't fill me with sympathy.
But I think that the paranoia on both sides is basically driven by structural problems:
- An oligarchic form of government that is unaffected by election results (the Deep State, the Civil Service)
- The professionalisation of politics (almost all politicians come from a very similar and unusual background and are beholden to the Overton window amongst people of that background).
- An increasingly weighty cruft of legal systems and regulations that have got ever more tangled and impenetrable over time and prevents movement. This (and the production of 'clients') produces a 'ratchet' model of politics where losses like Brexit are often permanent.
- Genuine ethnic and moral tribalism vastly reducing the space of beliefs that are shared by a supermajority of people.
The result is that
"My ingroup is relentlessly oppressed by the supposedly neutral authorities, who are actually in the pockets of my enemies. The outgroup is highly organized and relentlessly hateful of people like me. If my side loses a battle, that's just further proof that I'm right and the whole thing is rigged. If my side wins a battle, it's also evidence of how right I am because the only way we'd win against such odds is by being twice as correct as the enemies. My side is the victim. It's all a conspiracy rigged against us."
is essentially true for anyone except the most anodyne of the centre-Left. It hasn't escaped my notice that much of recent right-wing thought (conflict theory, the long march through the institutions, the Cathedral, who/whom) is very much from a left-wing critical tradition, because they are used to being political outcasts and have more mental tools for dealing with that. Often it literally comes from (former) communists - people like Brendan O'Neill, Peter Hitchens, Freddie de Boer.
I think horseshoe theory is overrated, but dissident/complacent is often a useful axis to go alongside left/right and authoritarian/liberal when you want to model how groups will behave.
Corvos
20d ago
because women often won't be publicly honest about what they actually find attractive and actually want from males when interacting with them.
But if that's true, and our hypothetical feminist knows it's true, then he has to choose between being honest and being a black-and-white, 'if she doesn't say yes, she's saying no' feminist. If you believe that women sometimes want men to be a little pushy, you cannot reasonably call for men to be punished for trying it on with a girl they legitimately think is into them. In practice, these people are hypocrites. They act as if the world is one way in public, they act entirely differently in private, and they profit.
a famous man who is preaching the female-preferred social standards AND engaging in the female-preferred behaviors when dealing with a romantic partner is still being consistent as to the female perspective.
If you're intending this as an explanation for why a woman being pursued by a feminist celebrity doesn't smell a rat, fair enough. You may well be right. But the man is still a lying hypocrite.
Corvos
20d ago
I agree completely. But as I say, proportional voting doesn't seem to be sufficient for producing a democratic system (look at the Cordon Sanitaire in France, or the way that the AfD are treated) and I'm also aware that we've had our current parliamentary system for 300 years give or take and changing it based on a twenty-year crisis is a drastic step.
(Imagine a Lib Dem, Labour, Muslim Independents, Green and Conservative Wets coalition and shudder).
Corvos
20d ago
In theory, I agree. The conservatives tried it with the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission but like so much else they failed to follow through. The head of the Commission (Sir Roger Scruton, the UK's equivalent of Thomas Sowell) was monstered on twitter using misrepresented quotes and the 'moderate' wing of the Conservatives instantly fired him (within five hours of the first tweet). I remain flabbergasted by the sheer wasted potential of the last 5 years of Tory government.
If Labour picked up the program, I would still argue for getting the population under control before doing lots of building, but I would be much happier with a proposed building spree.
Corvos
21d ago
I always thought there must be some instinct at work, telling the child that they need to know what kind of big, scary things are around. Same thing that makes young children - especially boys? - obsessed with diggers and other large machinery.
Corvos
21d ago
I voted Reform, and I'm very annoyed about the vote : seat ratio, but I'd still be hesitant to rush headlong into changing our voting system on the basis of one freaky election. European countries with proportional voting don't seem to have significantly happier and more representative politics, and FPTP has mostly worked for 200 years. I think our problem boils down to the professionalisation of politics more than to our voting system. Having 4 parties of PPE graduates doing backdoor deals doesn't necessarily seem like an improvement.
I'd love to see him crush the NIMBY malaise, bulldoze the greenbelt and get infrastructure and housing being built once again.
Apologies if I'm misrepresenting your preferred policies, but the constant insistence that we need to build more annoys me. I grew up in quite a nice part of the countryside. How about we leave that the way it is, and we don't import 600,000 people every year? The population of native British people is shrinking - we don't have a housing crisis, we have an immigration crisis and an economy that encourages treating shelter as an asset.
Infrastructure and nuclear, granted, we need.
100%. I'd rather replay a short-ish game many times than get bored half-way through a long one. My most-played is still CoD Modern Warfare 2: about ten/fifteen hours of pretty good gunplay and exciting story, nicely divided up into forty minute missions. I miss levels, and level select screens.
If you like that length, have you played Doom 2016? It's neither too short, nor too long, and it's the first time for years that I honestly had so much fun that I had to sit down and play until I was finished.
Do you have some recent AAA recommendations?
Corvos
21d ago
Oh, sure. But one of the things that made Pratchett so readable (until he started losing his touch near the end, around or just after 'Going Postal') was that he didn't usually feel the need to indulge in those fantasies. I'm sure he had them - he had a lot of pent up rage against the world - but he was self-aware enough not to let them come out in print. Even Lord Rust, who is usually treated as an absolute buffoon, has a way of dealing with problems that makes Vimes "darkly impressed". He's not humiliated, or cast out from society, or eaten alive.
Corvos
21d ago
I've tried this with my parents, it doesn't work. They just think I'm making excuses for Brexit (in a well-meaning way). I think this strategy would also run the risk of activating the 'Blitz Spirit' gene. There's nothing Brits are more proud of than suffering for the sake of a good cause.
‘Preaches virtue in public but realises they can get away with vice privately’ is pretty much the classic definition of hypocrisy though.
I do question how much of this is 'intentional' predatory behavior where they disguise their intent in order to lure young women in by appearing 'safe' to be around and able to offer sexual mentorship, vs. just an incidental outcome of modern social mores contradicting more basic instinctual drives.
From an external perspective those are pretty much the same thing. I think you’re right in at least some cases, but that sounds awfully like those men are deluding themselves into believing what’s convenient to believe at any given moment.
If they do it once and are horrified that they fell to temptation, okay. But otherwise they implicitly know that what they say about how men and women interact is a lie, and they are choosing not to think about it too hard, all the while coming down heavily on other men.
Corvos
22d ago
Britain is going to the polls today. All signs point to Labour's Keir Starmer getting Britain's largest ever landslide on one of the smallest vote shares. I'm hesitant to change the system of voting we've had for centuries on the basis of one election but it's very awkward that Labour is likely to get approx. 450 seats on 40% of the vote while Reform UK is expected to get approx. 10 seats on slightly under half that.
Poll of polls is here: https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/
A couple of interesting phenomena:
- Reform UK suddenly doubled its vote share in the last month, drawing even more strongly from (the left-wing) Labour party than from the right wing Conservatives. This can be pretty much purely attributed to Nigel Farage entering the race and shows how important a single charismatic figure can be IMHO. The great forces theory of history has much to recommend it, but it's also true that Right Man in the Right Place historical contingencies have more effect than I think is commonly credited to them.
- Reform UK suddenly dropped in the last week, and all the freed voters go to the Conservatives. I would be good money that this resulting directly from him saying* that eastward expansion of Nato had provoked Putin and given him an excuse to invade Ukraine - something he had predicted ten years ago. Not sure whether he would have done better to lie like Marine Le Pen, but he seems to have paid a price for honesty.
*Quote:
"It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man a reason to his Russian people to say, 'They're coming for us again' and to go to war,"
Corvos
22d ago
I would be more than happy to slot him in with Joss Whedon as examples for the rule: "The more a male celebrity is feted for his feminism, the more likely he is to have done skeevy things with young women."
Corvos
22d ago
To take just one example, I used to work next to a small woman with a high-pitched voice who decided one day that 'she' was now 'he'. I had to interact with her on a daily basis, lying literally every time I referred to her with a pronoun, knowing that if I ever slipped up once and accidentally used 'her' in the office then my impeccably liberal employer was almost certainly going to fire me. It was stressful and humiliating, and I don't think she even meant to put me in that position. But that's the reality when you're surrounded by HR machinery that is willing to enforce liberal social mores at any cost.
Corvos
22d ago
Those are the same thing seen through different eyes, right? If I took a video every time my mother forgot the name of something or why she came into a room, I could absolutely make her look demented. If all you have is a set of videos curated by interest group A, and another set of videos curated by B, your final conclusion is going to have to rely on your pre-existing opinions or some other set of evidence (frequency of videos, or lack of unscripted public appearances). A lot of Ds should have known better, but I can see why people like Scott weren't convinced.
Corvos
22d ago
I felt that you could usually tell whether you were reading a Pratchett section or a Gaiman section by the tone of the writing.
Pratchett is essentially a satirist and a humourist, and nothing really terrible ever happens to the people in the Discworld books. Even when people do suffer (like the murdered dwarves in Thud!) it happens offscreen or is skimmed over.
Whereas Gaiman is a dark fantasy / horror writer. When something really grim happens, like
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