Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
We see litters of articles and papers from liberal media that democracy is globally dying. While I don't believe this is happening right away, could most democracies become less so in the future?
I hate this kind of talk because it's incredibly indefinite. What is meant by "democracy," and what social goods are alleged to attach to it? Is it just national popular elections for head of government and/or legislature? Because that can be everything from Purtian totalitarianism to Peronist mob-anarchy.
Direct popular involvement by laypersons in political affairs? Well, localisms are getting steamrolled by digital global monoculture, including involvement or participation in politics of purely local or regional scope (at least in the U.S.) The turnout numbers for local and state-wide elections that don't coincide with Presidential elections are abysmal; it's why AOC was able to win her seat with only like 25,000 votes.
Popular input into government policy? Well by some measure we're more democratic than ever, because polls and online "discourse" drive political news cycles and individual politicians' success or failure in very serious ways. But on the other hand who knows and/or cares about the members of the commissions overseeing the various U.S. power grids that are on the brink of overloading from age, lack of maintenance/upgrades, and irregular power generation?
"Democracy" needs to be fnorded.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Consider that the limited inaccuracy and moral freightedness - particularly the idea of trans people as being under imminent external threat from evil - is in fact the point and the objective.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
There's nothing inherently "activist" about critical theory, but the activism its theories enable are particularly destructive and quasi-nihilistic, so it gets a particularly bum rap.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Was he? It's his vaccine, as he proudly claimed.
Hot take - the existence of the vaccine is good, as was the rushed development process. The mandatory dosing of everyone, regardless of risk analysis for various cohorts, was bad.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Overt cultural pressure is less important now that banks, universities, bureaucracies, and schools are, in large part, captured by wokist moral reasoning.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Galadriel is the feminine archetype, or at least one of the feminine archetypes. She is the embodiment of ethereal beauty, not just in the sense of physical attractiveness, but also in the philosophical sense. She represents purity.
Not really. Galadriel, in Tolkein's telling, is a failure as an elf, full of mortal fires and furies and ambitions. Instead of retreating to the west and eternal communion with Eru and the Maiar, she clung on to dominion in Middle Earth, willingly accepting the corrupting power of her ring (which, remember, draws its power from Sauron and The Ring just the same as the Nazgul's rings did) in order to keep Loth Lorien in a state of protected stasis. Her journey in the LotR is the story of finally learning to let go of earthly loves and trust in the underlying goodness of powerlessness and subsumption into communion with God.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
More than a bit. He once resolved to speak in nothing but old Mercian as a protest for the conversion of the midlands from woods and villages to industry, and the intrusion of radio, television, and other mass-media
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
If ISIS were doing the same thing, would you or would you not be upset about it?
Not the OP, but that description could also apply to the Amish, and FWIW I don't think that many "English" have a big beef with them...
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
You might have read me as asserting that pressure was the goal in and of itself, but that is not what I wrote. Clearly, influence in policy is more important to most activists than just getting culturally-popular institutions to signal fealty to their cause. This is apparent from listening to woke/leftist media products, which in my experience spend a lot more time thinking about how to actually pass Medicare-for-all, or gun bans, or abortion guarantees, or fossil fuel restrictions than they do about getting instagram influencers or sports stars to parrot the latest slogans. Further, it's a sort of obvious assumption to make if one assumes that the activists are operating in good faith and believe their own statements; to assume otherwise would be to assume cynical grifting. While there's a lot of grift in politics, assuming it's universal - particularly on the left - strikes me as a mistake.
Furthermore, there's no reason to think that policy success requires uniform cultural pressure. There is limited activist money and time, which isn't always focusing on the same institutions and causes. Moreover, as an idea becomes successful, former activists "graduate" into institutional positions, and now have the opportunity to influence policy directly rather than being forced to form rabble-rousing pressure groups spearheaded by popular cultural influencers. Illinois just put second-degree murder on a "no-cash-bail" list. Congratulations, I guess?
Still, the slogans were extremely important in that they shifted the overton window of permissible behavior. How many corporations were divesting from oil and gas exploration due to ESG in 2018? How many new """diversity""" racial set-asides and sinecures have been created since 2020? How much money was funneled to activist NGO groups? How many people will get fired today for saying things about differential crime rates? How many melanated workers and students can demand that their pale comrades get punished for verbal lese majeste of being insufficiently deferential to the aggrieved? Would opposition to affirmative action get you called fascist in 2018? I could go on but I don't want to belabor the point too much.
Moreover, the slogans continue to be important because they spread a large number of actively false and pernicious ideas through the population, and tied those ideas to one's moral standing in the community (after all, only Nazis don't support BLM, right?). Without BLM and these slogans permeating every aspect of life in 2020, there's no way that the general public comes to believe that 1,000 unarmed black people are shot by cops every year (it's actually more like ten) (cite: https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf), or white liberals come to believe that white people are more violent than black people (13/52, etc.) (https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1101118880154611713). So their effect is going to be long-lived (or at least continue until something else actively drums them out of the public's heads).
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Honestly it's probably both. Capitalism is adaptable to a wide range of aesthetics and policies; the activists provide the substance of the aesthetic and, ironically, serve as market-leaders and promoters for those corporations which are on board with the slogans.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
As I like to point out, the fertility rate of the US was higher during the Great Depression, the worst economic period in modern history, than it is today. So the social factors must be playing a greater role, something that has been discussed quite extensively on theMotte in the past so I won't go into detail here.
This doesn't explain what you want it to, because during the Great Depression the U.S. was 56% urban (1930 Census data), and modern "suburbs" did not exist. Nowadays, north of 80% of the populace lives in an urbanized area. Cities have been fertility shredders for centuries, so just moving people to the cities explains a sizeable chunk of the fertility decline.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
It could be social roles, it could be physical environment, it could be personal choices/views about when is "proper" to have kids, it could be other things, I don't know. All I know is picking rural people up and plopping them in the City lowers their fertility for some reason.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Or Jutes
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Also, the Thor comic books only have a passing familiarity with the actual fables/myths. If someone was actually trying to dramatize the Poetic Edda, transracial casting would be a bigger deal.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Whatever Amazon is doing, they're doing something right.
Money. Money is what they are doing right.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
That's fucking hysterical, since almost the entirety of the Dahomeyan Royal Court's food came from slave-worked plantations. And this movie's posters (which are extremely common in LA) have the damn temerity to say "based on a true story"
It's literal "we wuz kangz" historical inversion.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
He's also from Buenos Aires, which is insanely pale for a "latin american" place...
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
It has nothing to do with pandering to Africans, who are disproportionately poor and, frankly, have a variety of cultures very different from Americans.
Actual African culture can be pretty incredible. For example, there's a huge country and bluegrass scene in anglophone Subsaharan Africa (sorry about the paywall: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/whats-behind-africas-love-affair-with-country-music). Other western musical genres have caught on too in odd places; there's a death metal scene in Angola, for example.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I mean, that is what Iraq and Iran and Saudi Arabia tried to do but with oil during the last 50 years, and they don't have forcefields or whatever the hell Black Panther's annoying little sister was supposed to be.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
The first half of the first movie was good, as was the first bits in the planky-town with scenery-chewing villainous Stephen Fry, because they correctly adapted the source material's fundamental silliness. The Hobbit series should have been wholly pitched to the sensibilities of 7-year-olds, because that's what the book originally was - a bedtime story for little kids
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Assuming they're organized and aiming in the same direction. We already have a quite violent, quite sizeable criminal fraction, who aren't anywhere close to bringing down the government.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Core tenets like “diversity is a good thing” are hard to disprove.
That all hinges on the meaning of "good" being used. If diversity is axiomatically accepted as virtuous in itself, then obviously its benefit can't be "disproved." But otherwise it's not so hard to provide historical and current examples of comparatively more and less diverse places and societies and make a choice.
Others like “women ought not be restricted to the home” are outside the realm of proof and into that of values.
Hardly; the expanded economic role of women can also be observed in different historical settings, and the results judged (according to the viewer's criteria, of course). For example, there is a powerful argument put forward by Liz Warren of all people that the economic and social liberation of women in the 60s doomed the middle class by creating dual-income rat races and driving up the costs of family-formation essentials like housing and childcare.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
The migrants have as much or as little right to be in Martha's Vineyard as they do in McAllen, TX; restrictions on interstate travel in the U.S. are prima facie unconstitutional. They will suffer less privation in shady Martha's Vineyard than they would in outdoor detention facilities in the dusty Texas desert, so this is actually an improvement. Moreover, they're being shipped to one of the least violent places in the country; far away from the human traffickers and cartels. What, can undocumented people not cut the grass, caddy the golf courses, cater the garden parties, and nanny the fur-babies of the Vineyard? Is there not a massive New England employment crisis for lack of workers? Surely there are some "jobs Americans just won't do" there! I've heard that this kind of enriching diversity is a positive gift!
This is one of the best political stunts of my lifetime, because it is finally an example of chickens coming home to roost for the sanctimonious rich NIMBYs who are always so eager to be so charitable and hospitable with other people's neighborhoods and lives, but then insulate themselves and their own from the predictable consequences of their ideals. The migrants are already being used as chattel by the smugglers and the wealthy progressives who prioritize not having to see awkward and uncomfortable images that would result from enforcing the actual law and having an off-the-books workforce to abuse. This is just a teeny tiny step towards actually evening the burdens. You know, having the rich and privileged do "their fair share." Like a prominent Martha's Vineyard denizen said, "The defining issue of our time" is working "to apply the same rules from top to bottom" and not "settl[ing] for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by."The ruling class who refuse to preach what they practice must be made to put skin in the game, otherwise they have no reason not to continue to disassociate from the rest of the country and let it go to ruin.
He was widely seen as being responsible for the rise of Ron DeSantis in Florida, which counts for something. Moreover, Trump was a brick through the Overton window.
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