TheAntipopulist

TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

I'm not a lawyer so my description probably isn't perfectly accurate; The_Nybbler gave a more precise definition. The important bit was that it threw gasoline on the fire in terms of money in politics.

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TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

Wish I could have read what you replied before you deleted it.

But it seems like you blocked me instead =(

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TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago · Edited 3yr ago

Sure, I trust your explanation is more correct than my simplification.

But the important bit was that it threw gasoline on the fire in terms of money in politics. That said, I still don't think it matters all that much since people overrate the power of money in politics.

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TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

I'm not sure what you're getting at, but the effects are an extension of money = speech, thus allowing for the formation of superPACs and a greater emphasis on money in political campaigns.

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TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

Any state, democratic or not, becomes pretty untenable when there's a significant, politically empowered portion of people with a different culture. For most countries that line is drawn at ethnicities, e.g. unrest that perennially rises in the Balkans. The US is weird in that its cultural ingroup is a strange amalgamation of mutable racialism and civic nationalism. The intricacies of how that works for the US are certainly interesting, but the pertinent point is that there's certainly still a cultural ingroup. An assimilated, 3rd+ generation Chinese living in Philadelphia is very different from a Chinese living in Beijing.

Sliders' post implies that democracy means we should let Chinese living in Beijing run American politics. But that's obviously wrong. It's pure strawman.

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TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

Why use a goofy, excessively stringent definition of democracy like this? It doesn't conform to common usage nor to the dictionary definition.

Then following this up with a very lax definition of oligarchy reeks of noncentral fallacy.

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TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

Tell me how far apart you would measure an early American democracy and a democracy in which a ruling party controls all media exposure.

Various levels of control over the media and political writers has been going since the nation's founding.

In a modern context, the left does not control the media. Many employees of the mainstream media are left-leaning and that certainly tilts coverage in a lot of ways, but anyone is free to start their own news organization, and there are several ones in existence right now like Fox and Breitbart that cater to right wing views.

Early American democracy had a vigorous debate

The internet has made debating easier than ever, and presidential candidates have several debates while they're running.

once corporations and wealthy donors are able to “persuade” anyone they want without regard for facts, we don’t have a democracy anymore

I'm not sure what the quote marks around "persuade" are supposed to imply. Rich people can hurl tons of money towards basically whatever political cause they want thanks to the SCOTUS's asinine decision in Citizens United, but thankfully money doesn't have that much of an impact outside the margins. Bloomberg's campaign in 2020 was an example of this.

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TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

America doesn’t have a democracy

The only way anyone comes to this conclusion is by playing games with definitions. Communists like doing this by retorting "real Communism has never been tried" whenever someone points out the faults in their ideology. This post is doing something similar, except instead of defending a system, it sets out an unrealistically high bar for being defined as a "democracy", then using any faults to say "hey the US isn't a real democracy!!!"

democracy presupposes rational actors, informed voters, and an absence of psychological manipulation

The first two would be nice, but are not necessary. See Bryan Caplan's rational irrationality for example. The last one, "psychological manipulation" is just "persuasion" written in inflammatory language.

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TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

Democracy in a single nation is very different from a single democratic world country that encompasses the entire planet. Pointing at some hypothetical superpower UN and claiming its potential sins proves anything about democracy is an absurd strawman.

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TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

It's kind of weird for Brazilian leftists to criticize Bolsonaro so harshly for being authoritarian, then have their guy Lula turn around and start feting the leaders of the most autocratic countries like Russia, Venezuela, and China.

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TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

One important historical factor here is that perceived national security interests almost always trump short-term economic concerns. A lot of people loved to trumpet something akin to "global trade is too important, major wars will never happen" or that Europe would be forced to capitulate. In the end, though, Russia's King Gas had as much staying power as the South's King Cotton.

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TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

I'd say it's not particularly fair to give no evidence yourself, ignore the evidence I gave, and then claim "assertion without evidence". But fine, a book is indeed pretty long.

If you look at the corruptions perceptions index, apart from a few exceptions (that Why Nations Fail goes into), the least corrupt countries are overwhelmingly democratic, and the most corrupt countries are overwhelmingly authoritarian, or at the very least anocratic. This includes nonwhite countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Most Latin American countries have very flawed democracies that tend to slide in and out of despotism, but the more consolidated and well-functioning ones like Uruguay also have less corruption.

I don't know what you're saying with the Polish example. Communism was bad due to inefficient markets, but also because it engendered a secretive and authoritarian society, which is where corruption flourishes. The move to democracy slowly started fixing that.

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TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

Corruption definitely happens in the US armed forces, but comparing what goes on to the Russians is at a whole different level.

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TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

Democratic Russia was indeed very corrupt, but the attempt at democracy only lasted for ~10 years. Democracy isn't a magic panacea that fixes everything instantly; rather, it's a way to change institutional incentives to slowly guide countries to better outcomes. The book I listed above goes into this more. It would have taken decades to root out the centuries of corruption that had been caked into East Slavic society through the Tsars and Bolsheviks. Even before the war Ukraine was still very corrupt, but its democratic path gave it a far better chance than Russia to actually fix its problems, which we're seeing now. Most other Warsaw Pact states like Poland saw massive reductions in corruption after they switched to democracy.

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TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

If you want a more rigorous answer to this question, I recommend this book.

For a shorter answer, being democratic makes us massively less corrupt than Russia, even though, yes, corruption is still an issue in the US (and everywhere) but comparing the US to Russia is just worlds apart.

We're also far richer and have much better public services like education and healthcare. It's possible for some rich countries to be authoritarian, but it's the exception rather than the rule. Though there is some debate on which way the causality goes here, although I would personally say it's more a case of democracy --> stability --> rich.

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TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

These are flaws in the implementation of democracy, not indicators that we should abandon democracy altogether. There's a huge difference between European or American governance systems and those of a real dictatorship like Russia.

Immigration issues typically have a huge amount of fraudulent "compromise" because corporations like cheap labor, so they bribe (through political "donations" and other kickbacks) politicians to "compromise" on the issue, effectively relegating countries to open borders in some cases. Support to Israel is also held up above and beyond popular approval due to AIPAC corrupting the US political system.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

hard men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times, bad times create hard men

I think this phrase is mostly BS, but here it seems appropriate, at least insofar as "hard men" = "tough on crime" and vice versa. This issue seems alarmingly cyclical.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

The black population is estimated to remain stable at 11 to 13% of the US population out to 2100 last time I checked. I haven't heard about Jews but I imagine they're not declining precipitously.

So the US is moving from whites to more Hispanics, which aren't as pro-SJW as blacks are but certainly are sympathetic in many ways.

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TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

This is happening in video games as well. Of the top 10 video games that have been released this year, 8 are ports, remakes, or remasters, while one is a DLC and the last one is a sequel.

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TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

That being said, I do think many components of wokeness did originate in the US rather than Europe.

This is a classic Motte and Bailey. In the original post, wokeness was described as an "American cultural export", or that it was "imported wholesale". Now it's drawn down to "many components of wokeness originated in the US", which I wouldn't disagree with. Looking at the wiki pages for many woke topics like radical feminism will indeed show many Americans, but it will also show people like Julie Bindel, Monique Wittig, and Germaine Greer. Again, almost all of critical theory traces its roots to the Frankfurt School and people like Foucalt. I'm not countering by saying that wokeness is uniquely European, rather I'm saying its a joint venture between both sides of the Atlantic. For a more nuanced take, I'd say that the general groundwork skews German, while the modern implementation of wokeness skews to the Anglosphere. Fundamentally, it's just wrong to describe wokeness as uniquely American, or even disproportionately American when accounting for population levels and scholarly output.

While Spotify was founded in Sweden, it's not like they started off exclusively hosting Swedish artists

I wasn't using Spotify as a genuine example, I was using it to show "correlation doesn't imply causation", specific to examples you used like Pfizer somehow being a critical component of wokeness advancing in Europe.

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TheAntipopulist Voltaire's Viceroy 3yr ago

This seems like an anti-American take dressed up in anti-woke trenchcoat. "Don't like modern wokism? Well guess what! It's all America's fault!!!"

This piece does a lot of finger-pointing showing how European leftists occasionally say stuff that only makes sense in America, but a lot less thorough of an examination of how wokism is a uniquely American product... because it isn't. The source theory of modern identity politics is European. A lot of the left-leaning economic critiques of the US come directly from Europe as well, comparing the country unfavorably to places like Denmark.

America takes up a huge amount of the mindshare of the collective West since it has the biggest population of any Western country by a significant amount. Americans mix their opinions with Europeans over the Internet constantly so there's going to be a ton of cross-contamination no matter what topic is looked at. American might be the first place you notice particular trends manifesting since America is inherently signal-boosted, but calling those trends themselves "American cultural exports" is disingenuous. Only BLM stuff is uniquely American since no European countries have >10% of their populations being black like the US does, but other things like idpol feminism (which crested before BLM happened, mind you) was sourced from both sides of the Atlantic, as was LGBT stuff, and stuff like Islamophobia has more of a European tint to it.

I have a simple question: before Facebook was introduced to Ireland (December 11, 2005), did you ever hear of an Irish teenager describing themselves as “non-binary”?

Counterargument: Before Spotify was introduced to the USA, did you ever hear of an American teenager describe themselves as "non-binary"?

You could make some objections to this comparison, but I would contend that both arguments are nonsense. Europe has fewer multinational companies (especially tech ones) because Europe is a free-rider continent that has lower rates of business innovation than America. But in any case, companies don't take on left-leaning culture out of nowhere; it happens as a bottom-up process as motivated employees push their agenda with nobody willing enough to stop them for fear of reprisal. Those employees got their opinions from broader society, forged from both American and European arguments interchangeably.

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