Skibboleth
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
25d ago
I don't know what to tell you, man. If your political beliefs really crystallized in the 90s, you're going to find the valence of many of your beliefs sliding right (or being reduced to rhetoric rather than policy, or just losing salience). It doesn't necessarily make you right wing relative to the general population, but it probably makes you more right wing than you used to be. That's not some semantic sleight of hand on the part of the modern progressive movement; that's a normal aspect of how politics change. I'm more left-wing/less conservative than I used to be, partly because my views changed, but in large part because things I still believe became less conservative.
And that is apart from how certain phrases can serve as political euphemisms that convey a meaning quite distinct from their literal one.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
Other nations have far more recent and far worse histories of this sorts of behavior, and yet manage to pass reform just fine.
Can you give examples?
because there are absolutely shennanigans going on
You'll forgive me if I don't take this seriously - "shenanigans are happening, I just know it" is not credible. Not only is this sort of belief more often an expression of fatuous cynicism than actual knowledge, it's also just a frequent loser's cope. "Those establishment politicians with their organizations and social networks and actual funding are doing something shifty, I'm certain of it." (To be fair, they often are, but it's far more likely to be in the category of ethically dubious transactional politics with interests groups than buying ballots from bums).
Skibboleth
1mo ago
The electoral reality in the US is that many states have a history of very overtly disenfranchising certain kinds of voter. This colors basically everything about electoral reform in the US.
voter ID is a ridiculously low bar that the GOP should be able to hammer home, but the fact that they cant speaks volumes to their weakness/idiocy.
Anyone who deeply cares about mandatory voter ID and is really worried about vote fraud is already a die-hard conservative.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Why are so many Americans committed to sneering at and impugning the traditions of their warrior class?
White Southerners are not the American warrior class. Enlisting at a somewhat higher rate doesn't overcome the weight of demographics.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
This is very different from "a major party is not allowed to contest X position, opponent wins by default".
That's not what is on the table. It perhaps feels that way to Trumpists, because Trumpism is populist movement and thus first and foremost a cult of personality.
Most of the time, even senior party figures are largely replaceable. If a couple of senior senators got disqualified from either party, people would care infinitely more about the replacement process than the people ejected (they're not even necessarily unpopular - as has often been noted, Congress has terrible approval but people like their guys - but their supporters just aren't attached enough to stand by them if they got into real hot water). In the case of Trump, his followers regard him as irreplaceable and are hostile to even considering alternatives. As such, the possibility that he performed some disqualifying act feels like total disenfranchisement even though the GOP still gets a nominee (who probably fares better) (plus the Supreme Court, ~half of Congress, half the state governments, etc...).
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Stole from whom, exactly?
The president gets to nominate SC justices. Customarily (see @guesswho's remark about trust), the Senate almost always accepts them, even when the president is from an opposing party. It has rejected them on occasion (or nominees have been withdrawn when it was clear they were headed for rejection). Garland was neither rejected nor withdraw. McConnell simply refused to hold a hearing or consider the nomination.
Yes, in theory, the Senate can do whatever it wants. In reality, what McConnell did was extremely unusual, compounded by the handling of ACB's nomination making it clear that his arguments with respect to Garland were unambiguously in bad faith. If you keep mashing the defect button, don't be surprised when your opposition starts Noticing.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
So like I thought, all of it are examples of recent backlash against transing kids
How, exactly, is 30% of the population openly supporting a ban on gay marriage a recent backlash against trans kinds? And, again, why should we expect that all the homophobes stopped being homophobic after a supreme court case they were livid about?
after years of tolerance
What tolerance? You talk like there was some sort of settlement where homophobes agreed to tolerate gay people rather fighting it every step of the way.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
When your cities are packed with low-agency wards of the state who can vote themselves unlimited quantities of free grain
This seems at odds with the reality that in the US urban poverty is lower than rural poverty and that in developed countries cities are economic engines that subsidize infrastructure and welfare for rural areas.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
The "suddenly very concerned" part comes from how 98% of the time American conservatives have somewhere between zero and negative interest in treating mental health as a public policy concern and bring it up only when taking a defensive position after a mass shooting (and generally without any actual policy proposals)
Skibboleth
1yr ago
And the sneering that the Puppies were all racist sexist bigots? That didn't happen either and didn't matter?
Oh, it definitely did. Because a quite a lot of the Puppies were racist, sexist bigots, most prominently Vox Day and his followers. Especially considering that Vox Day was more successful than Correia or Torgersen. If the shoe fits, wear it.
It wasn't the about the not-liking, it was about the vicious backlash to, essentially, two short story nominations.
The 'public emergency' releases funds to take care of arrivals. That's the extent of emergency here. Most people in DC have no idea this is going on and the people who do know don't care. There are no 'freak outs' - there's public officials annoyed that it was done with zero attempts to coordinate with local authorities. Which goes back to my point: Abbott/Desantis are not making a good faith effort to redistribute immigrants. Being as disruptive and disorganized as possible is the point, so they can talk about how owned the hypocritcal libs are.
Skibboleth
24d ago
a few core concepts to liberalism that are very old and very consistent and the disconnect here is that most modern progressives don't realize that they have almost totally abandoned the ideological framework that they were raised in
I don't think this right. It is true that progressivism contains illiberal beliefs and values, but that is generally true - virtually every political movement in the US synthesizes liberal and illiberal beliefs. Very few people can be said to have abandoned liberalism, but everyone accepts compromises on liberal values. Sometimes this is directly ideological (something which applies to progressives, populists, religious conservatives, leftists, etc...) and sometimes it is the consequence of disagreements about what liberal values mean in practice or an attempt to reconcile internal ambiguities within liberalism. (Or ideology making contact with reality).
The suggestion that all the principled liberals are on the right is belied by the reality that the modern American right is a coalition of religious conservatives and right-wing populists. These people are not totally illiberal, but their policy preferences center on illiberal goals. The center right, which one would expect to be the standard bearer for conservative liberalism, is functionally dead.
Tellingly, while there is a lot of policy conflict between left and right on culture war issues, the intellectual side of the culture war is almost entirely center left vs far left. The right doesn't have much intellectual firepower to bring to bear, and what it does have tends to be either too spicy for public consumption or too lacking in clout due to misalignment with the broader conservative movement. The latter functionally operate at the right tail of the center left (e.g. people like Lyman Stone or Tanner Greer, who are smart and interesting and also totally untethered from operational conservatism). This is a major reason why conservative illiberalism doesn't get much discussion.
It seems sort of amusingly illiberal, to rewrite history so that liberal is just the word that the left uses to describe itself and so liberals who are no longer in-line with the modern left, despite being totally in-line with liberalism, must be conservatives.
This linguistic shift is decades old (older than me, certainly) and conservatives were enthusiastic participants. The modern progressive movement didn't even exist at the time.
Beyond that, I stand by my initial point: self-described classical liberals are very likely to be people with right-wing views who do not want to describe themselves as conservatives. Not always, certainly (sometimes they are embarassed liberals instead), but someone with conventionally center-left views will probably describe themself as a liberal without adjectives (or maybe a neoliberal if they're terminally online) rather than a classical liberal. The consequence is that professing seemingly anodyne, cross-spectrum beliefs becomes right coded (and 'professing' is the key word here).
Skibboleth
1mo ago
His Excellency Joe Biden
I believe you mean Generalissimo Biden.
Thoughts?
I'm not a theologist, but I'm pretty sure this means that until next Easter only trans people get into heaven.
No, seriously. You yourself note that this is a coincidence. I do find it to be a humorous example of how Republicans will complain about grievance politics while being its most prominent practitioners.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
Trump was genuinely pro-oil and gas, thus US oil production reached record highs under Biden due to delayed-action investment.
That's not at all evident in the data. It looks like we need to thank Obama for the upward trend in US oil production. That or people are overcrediting their favorite president for trends that are mostly driven by things other than US executive policy.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
It doesn't decrease violent crime any (as it is obvious from the fact the places with the strictest gun laws still feature a ton of violent crime)
Is that obvious? The states with the most violent crime also have very loose gun laws (the top 5 states for murder rate are MS, LA, AL, MO, and AK, for example), while states with strict gun laws tend to have lower murder rates (IL is an obvious counterpoint, but, e.g. contrary to popular perception NY's murder rate is fairly low by American standards). Now, correlation is not causation and it's very probable that some of this is really due to an endemic culture of violence in the South that drives both homicide and weapon ownership (and, perhaps more importantly, weapon carrying), but I don't think you can at all conclude that efforts to curtail violence via gun regulations have failed. People may kill people, but firearms are a lubricant to violence.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
If conservatives are merely concerned about sexualized performances near/involving children, one might wonder why they don't have similar issues with, e.g. child beauty pageants, dance recitals, or cheerleading?
with the silent removal of existing research is dishonest and suspicious.
It is? It certainly could be, but it's also pretty easily justifiable if you have a wide range of results and have good reason to think the extrema are low quality or otherwise unreliable. Notably, they didn't just jettison the 2.5M study for being low quality (despite that being fairly defensible on its merits) and report a narrower range that included the lowest estimate but not the highest. All in all, this smacks more of ducking controversy by removing an offending phrase than trying to hide the truth or sabotage gun rights activism.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Did you pay any attention to the details of the case? Because this response makes me think you didn't and are just resorting to pattern matching against a strawman. The NC state government did not pass some facially neutral policy which had disparate impact:
the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices. Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans.
All this right after having a consent decree originally imposed for racist electoral policy lifted. The "golly gee, how did that happen" doesn't fly. If you ask for racial data and then immediately use it to enact policies which are de facto racially discriminatory, the most likely explanation is that it was deliberately discriminatory.
I find your suggestion that they get the same treatment as common criminals to be rather ludicrous, and I do not believe that you are making it in a good faith.
I think you vastly overestimate how well criminals and suspected criminals are treated.
The criminal justice system did not treat the George Floyd rioters in the same manner, that is, by attempting to catch every single last one of them and keeping them in pretrial detention for months or years.
The vast majority of people present at the Jan 6 riot were not arrested or charged with anything. Justifiably, since all they did was mill around outside. (Many participated in attacks on the USCP, but not in a way where they could be credibly identified).
The 2020 protests led to ~13.6k arrests by early June (FBI). Much like Jan 6, most people weren't arresting and many were slapped with minor charges (e.g. violating curfew), but many were subject to more serious charges.
The problem here is that you are asking me to play along the rules of the game, while your side of the "criminal justice reform" argument is rigging the game to punish my side and benefit theirs. I reject that.
This is a common claim here, but allow me to offer an alternative thesis: right-wingers are really bad at protesting. They don't get that protests - the interesting, effective ones, that are more than just rallies - are as much about the police response as they are about the protests themselves. That means walking the line of riotous behavior, because fundamentally you're trying to garner sympathy by provoking a police overreaction. Too riotous and you alienate potentially sympathetic members of the public, too docile and you just get ignored. The point is to be able to gesture to the riot cop kicking the shit out of you and say "come and see the violence inherent in the system".
Where this becomes a problem for would-be right wing protestors is a) many view anything more disorderly than a Flyers' victory celebration as a riot, so the nuance of this is lost on them b) they don't do much protesting themselves. So they never develop the metis that left wing activist communities do about how to walk the line, how to self-police people who make a little too much trouble, how not to get arrested (e.g. don't film yourself doing crime and post it to social media with a public statement admitting you're doing the crime). They don't even understand that walking the line is something you're supposed to do. Nor do they have the social infrastructure set up to assist when their people do get arrested.
The result is that for the most part, right wing protests are cringe and a bit pathetic, and when it does get rowdy they blunder across the line and get in a lot of trouble. This seems unfair to them because they don't perceive the distinction between their cargo-cult protest tactics and what more experienced left wing activists do. The game isn't rigged, they're just new to it.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
A united front of Republicans arguing that the combination of the weirdness of the election and the narrowness of the Dem majority meant that it was inappropriate for Democrats to attempt major legislative actions or fundamentally change the country would have been highly appealing.
To who? Even if we assume Trump is induced to keep his mouth shut and the election conspiracy theories never take off, the ACB/Garland jutxaposition is going to make any suggestion that the Democrats ought to refrain from wielding power seem utterly laughable to both Democratic office holders and Democratic voters.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Why should Texas have to absorb all those people illegally coming into the country?
It doesn't. Many pass through Texas and many remain, but the vast majority wind up elsewhere (and many enter elsewhere, notably California).
Skibboleth
24d ago
You claimed you do take them on their word
No, I said I don't:
"I do [see a reason not to take them at their word]. The issues of the late 18th century..."
Why does it matter?
Because you seem to think it does and are making inferences based off that. Otherwise why bring up the idea that I'm a progressive?
Perhaps it would help if you could clarify what you mean when you say "progressive".
So that means what Amadan, and people like him, are saying is correct
Could be. Could be a story they tell themselves to feel better about swinging right. Could be they were always kind of right-wing but didn't like to think of themselves that way and the low salience of their views meant that self-perception never got challenged. Contra Moldbug, political currents move in all directions.
And how do you decide those specific beliefs are conservative?
Context and judgment.
Well, in that case progressives need to stop pretending they have any principles other than change itself.
I'm not sure how you get from here to there.
you can't honestly guarantee that at some point everything that was old won't become new again, and the divine right of kings won't be declared progressive.
This is true but has nothing to do with the contemporary progressive movement as opposed to just human nature. Look no further than the libertarian -> nrx pipeline if you need an example of old ideas being revived. There is no magic wand that will perpetually banish an idea to the dustbin of history.
It's a lot more useful than pretending that things that are moving are standing still, and vice-versa.
On the contrary. Understanding that motion is relative is extremely useful, whereas collapsing the distinction between hundreds of years of political philosophy is obfuscatory.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
How is that winning the issue?
Any Federal voter ID law actually able to make it through Congress is likely to also impose restrictions on election administration that red states don't want. Avoiding Federal standards for voter qualification and election administration gives more leeway to put their thumb on the scale.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
It seems like an incredibly pedantic distinction to say that Donald Trump expanding US involvement in Middle Eastern and African conflicts doesn't count because the US was technically already involved. It doesn't support the notion of Trump the peacemonger.
Why? As I said, the normie libs continues to exist and, indeed, to dominate. (Though tbh I'd be hard pressed to describe early 2010s gaming communities as socially liberal as opposed to merely disdainful of religious conservatives for being critical of gaming)
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