Tiber727
1mo ago
Ah. Though from the sound of it that sounds more like Biden making a stupid remark, and alluding more to the sort of Cyberpunk-style "Megacorps make the rules" than literally sending people back to the plantations.
Tiber727
1mo ago
I don't remember the "reintroduce slavery" argument. I remember the much-to-do about him traveling with his dog in a crate strapped to the roof (which I can't say I like but doesn't really have anything to do with Presidential qualifications).
But yes, on the left much was made of his job being to buy up a company to saddle it with another company's debt.
That said, Romney's social awkwardness specifically was of the the "What could a banana cost, like $10?" variety. To the left, he was like an out-of-touch manager who couldn't empathize with the working class at all.
Tiber727
1mo ago
Here we go again. Going to generalities and completely omitting the specifics. Yes, protesting in general is not criminal. "Protesting" like the Hamas mobs did definitely is - property destruction, attacking other students, shutting down campus, preventing other students from learning, etc. It should have been criminally prosecuted, if the campus management did their jobs - but they do not intend to, because of their ideology. That does not make criminal actions less criminal.
You are the one omitting the specifics. If Trump wants to cancel the visa of John Smith, then the argument should be that "John Smith committed property destruction" and bring the evidence, not "the mob committed property destruction and John Smith shares ideological views with the mob." Sorry, when it comes to government, guilt is not communal.
Seriously, you are choosing a MS-13 member, a human trafficker, a domestic abuser and an illegal migrant who has an active removal order from a judge, to be your best example of how Trump is deporting people just because he's racist and no other reason but thinking there's too many foreign people in America. I guess that does close the case, just not the way you think it does.
No, I think the combination of Trump's views on travel bans from Muslim countries, birthright citizenship, asylum claims, ICE tactics, student visas, etc. and the way he goes about doing them almost exclusively through poorly thought out executive orders, combined with his belligerence to any pushback from the judicial branch on virtually every issue, represent an attitude of "I am going to take every nativist stance (I don't care whether this is genuine or political), and I don't give an actual fuck about the people this will affect or how this policy will actually work."
Not controlled, but coordinated. And not by CNN alone, of course, as I explained numerous times, it's a network. Propagandist outlets like CNN serve the coordination function in it, disseminating the Currently Correct THinking, so that the faithful would know what they must think. I'm not sure what this has to do with "profit" - their point is not to make a profit, and they are doing piss-poor job as a business, but they are not traditional businesses anymore. They don't need to be, it's not their function.
Big CNN was a joke by the way, not that I thought you meant CNN alone. If CNN is simply "disseminating" information, who is the shadowy figure giving CNN and MSNBC and so on their next propaganda to deliver? Because if it's just "people share information when they agree with it" that's just how society works. They need to make a profit because they can't disseminate propaganda if they close. More money means more propaganda.
So what? Stalin murdered Trotsky, and they both were Communists (and Stalin murdered many, many more communists too). Of course inside the left there would be some tensions and clashes. I am not saying the leftists always and in everything are in lockstep. I am saying in the question of suppressing the political opposition they are able to deploy vast number of resources, and the banking system is one of those resources that they were successfully able to use for that. Of course it doesn't mean some on the left never had any conflicts with any banks (ignoring now Visa/MC aren't even banks) for any reasons.
I am saying that you act as if they are coordinated when it's convenient. I am asking you to elaborate on where the actual coercive power lies. What group fills the Stalin role of the current left, and can make everyone bend the knee? Sure, maybe the Visa example was too small potatoes. But progressives really want to put pressure on Israel right now. How much actual coercion are they deploying, and how much effect is it having? How much coercion power are they using on the left to coerce them to put more pressure on Israel?
In other words, did they put pressure on the banks to stop gun sales or did the bank do it themselves? If they put pressure, why are they not successfully doing it in other leftist causes?
Why? Because if was set up this way. Why it was setup this way? Because this way it's much easier to control and manage. Who controls and manages all this system? Deep state bureaucracy. Which side of political spectrum the deep state bureacracy leans to? Bingo! The dependency on the government is a feature that was carefully implemented and entrenched. That's why the left is so infuriated that the right is trying to use it against them - how dare they to use the weapon that was designed and implemented by the Left to fight back against the Left?! It's not fair!
LOL no. Business wants people who are already trained. You can learn programming on your own, but when it comes to job hunting that paper makes it so much easier. Government wants to be more prosperous, so funding college increases the net wealth of America. Colleges know their value and price accordingly. It's not "deep state," it's three portions of society interacting with other to fulfill their own goals.
That's what the govenrment had been saying for many years, only the X beliefs were the correct beliefs, that the Left and the deep state condoned, so everything was well. Now that the right is trying to use same tools, the left is screaming "what happened to the small government?!" You killed it, you bastards, that's what happened to it.
The left was never really crying for small government, the right was. Now they are not, but what they stand for now I genuinely only have vague ideas. You want to say I wasn't paying attention to all the left's transgressions, you are probably to some degree right. And by the same token you aren't really paying attention to the right's transgressions. That's how information bubbles work, and the right is not immune to it either.
Yes they did. BLM riots were widely endorsed and supported - including absolutely mind-blowing declaration in the middle of pandemic that mass gatherings against racism are exempt from any medical concerns - and the premise of US being deeply racist country, solely based on oppression of non-whites by whites, and various race hate hoaxes, from "hands up don't shoot" to finding various nooses in random places etc. has been very actively propagandized.
You are missing the nuance of what I am saying. I am not saying BLM wasn't supported. It absolutely was. I am saying that the elements of the left that specifically call for violence are not endorsed, they are denied. Denied in the sense that most of the left doesn't even want to think about the fact that some of their members commit violence. That's not a good thing, but it's a thing you wouldn't really do if you were on board with the violence.
I do. Well, the label is different, but recording things that pissed me off about US politics had been a little hobby of mine for over a decade. Call me crazy but that helps me being less pissed off about them, kind of therapy if you will. I don't often re-read them but sometimes I do. [...] And when you repeatedly say that you haven't seen or noticed things that I witnessed to happen - either in person or by reading contemporary reports about them as they were happening, and I know that they happened, then I know whatever you read it's not enough to keep you informed.
But do you keep a record of everything that pissed off other people? And second of all, you're missing a big thing here. I did not say I had never read those stories. I said that I do not know which stories you are referencing, which can also mean that I have read those stories but I am not remembering or not making the connection of what you are referring to.
People with guns tell protestors to stop all the time, and protestors ignore them all the time. If that led to killings each time, all Portland antifa would be dead already, and most of other leftist militants were too. It's not how it works though - except in one single case. In the case where this person posed absolutely no immediate danger to the people with guns or anybody else - and was actually surrounded by people with guns, and people much stronger than her (5'2" woman) who were able to subdue her in seconds without any danger to themselves.
During your average protest, the police's goal is to prevent violence towards other people, and if they can arrest someone causing property damage without triggering the mob or leaving a formation that needs to hold, do so. During this particular protest, the goal was to protect a specific group of people that the mob was moving towards. The police had to back off before, and now the mob is getting close. They don't know what Babbitt will do, and they don't know what the group of people behind her will do. But if she goes through, more will follow.
It was easy to prosecute, especially because all the FBI and all the surveillance network (including financial companies, cell companies, etc.) have been mobilized to hunt those horrible criminals - old women that walked in "restricted area". But it wasn't the right thing to prosecute, and it was absolutely horrible injustice in the way it was done. And it was done on purpose - they were prosecuted with maximal effort and maximal cruelty specifically because this was to send the message - the left can do such things any time they want, but the right is not allowed it. There is no symmetry, there is no equality, and the right must be put in their place.
Even if a prosecutor wanted to, it's very difficult to make a case out of someone being on the street in Kenosha when a protest happened. It's easy to prove that they didn't have the right to be in the Capitol building. It absolutely was the right thing to prosecute. First of all you argue that the left should be punished. Sorry, but the government does not operate on "you can't prosecute a murderer unless you prosecute all murderers equally." Either you did it or you didn't. Unsurprisingly the government looks down on actions taken directly aimed at the heads of government.
You know btw who FBI didn't find easy to prosecute, despite lots of cameras? Somebody who placed the pipe bombs at DNC and RNC HQs. Somehow nobody cares about that, and the FBI is absolutely content to let it slide while zealously prosecuting every last grandma and grandpa who walked anywhere near the Capitol. Is this normal?
Don't know enough about that case, but a politically motivated prosecutor certainly would try to find someone who tried to bomb their own HQ, even if said person also attempted to bomb the opposition.
He would say the bank refused to open his account because he was gay? Or the college kicked him out? Or he was attacked by a mob in a restaurant? Or blacklisted by all employers? Which town is that?
Debanked, no. Christian colleges absolutely have kicked out gay people. Attacked by a mob, no, but absolutely hazed at times, sometimes physically, and without facing any consequences. Blacklisted? Can't say but fired, absolutely.
Tiber727
1mo ago
Trump is not just going after "people", Trump specifically is going after people who are involved in criminal mischief, and not just any mischief, but in violent support of foreign terrorist organizations and publicly calling for a violent uprising on US soil.
The tiny, tiny flaw in this argument is that it's not true. Protesting is not criminal in and of itself no matter the reason they are protesting, and Trump has not signaled in any way that he's only going after those who commit crimes during the protest. "To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests," he said, "we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses.". Even putting aside the "Is having sympathy for Palestinian citizens the same as supporting Hamas," I see two possibilities here: either they are being punished for a crime or they're being punished for their speech. And I don't see the bar being met for the first. There are legal definitions of what counts as "supporting" a terrorist organization to a criminal degree.
That's a completely false and libelous statement, and you should be ashamed of proclaiming it, contrary to all known facts, but I don't expect you to be.
I didn't say Trump hates literally every immigrant. I think that Trump sees the number of people deported as a high score list, and doesn't actually give a shit what the details are. Stopped for marijuana in the 90's? Leave the country. DUI in 2009 that you already served? You guessed it, leave. I will be fair and say that events like these happen under other presidents and maybe the media is less apt to report them, but based on Garcia I don't think Trump is capable of much besides doubling down.
Congratulations, you found the coordinating node! What you generously called "the news" is the propaganda organization whose sole purpose is to instruct the woke CEO and the woke professor what they are supposed to be outraged about now.
That's it? It's all controlled by big CNN? Most news outlets can barely make a fucking profit nowadays, and you're telling me they're the head of the Illuminati? Sure, the news can spin a story to some extent before being able to be sued, but reporting on things is not control, else I'd argue LibsOfTikTok is in fact organized harassment. Either you control how people react or you don't. Even if it's not editorialized, it's still selected to show only the arguments that invite ridicule.
That's really weak. Banks have been scared of porn for decades, and it's not some kind of political anti-gay move you are trying to present it. If that's all you got, you are really scrapping the bottom.
I didn't claim they were doing it to target the left. My argument is you claim they are part of the leftist network, and the predominantly left media is criticizing them for it. They are obviously not in lockstep with the left on this and the left has absolutely no power to make Visa/Mastercard change course.
If you want another example, how many groups have actually divested from Israel? I decided to take a look. Many universities have refused, or given vague promises to consider. This link shows 56, most I haven't really heard of. Oh, and the city of Portland, of course.
Most of them are very dependant of govenrment funds and government loans, even those who are formally private. The amount of woke pushed by the governemnt through the colleges, either directly, or by just dangling money in front of their noses, is gigantic.
Well yes, welcome to America where barely anyone can afford to go to college without going into debt. But now we get to the leftist argument that giving money to someone is endorsing their beliefs. To say that "I won't give you money if you espouse X beliefs" is to say that government can control speech if there's money changing hands, and I very much don't like that. Whatever happened to small government anyway?
Are you new to this whole thing? We had whole huge scandal where IRS was doing this - it was deciding which organizations to allow tax-exempt status and which not, by political beliefs, and then somehow all the evidence for this turned out to be on some hard disk
You mean the one where they also doing it to progressive groups?
When the whole movement endorses the outbreak of violence, and fuels it, and incites it,
They don't endorse it, from what I've seen. They excuse it or deflect from it. That's where you get the "93% of BLM protests were peaceful" or "Fiery but mostly peaceful protests" from. Which is still bad, but different from "Hell yeah we did it!" The part about scientists weighing in to excuse breaking covid was completely dumb, I agree.
You know, willful ignorance is not as strong argument as you may believe it to be. Maybe watching "the news" does not make you as informed as you may think? Maybe "the news" are not telling you something that they don't want you to know, and you should lookup up beyond them if you want to be informed? Provided that you indeed want to be informed, and not just reassured your side is good and all is good, of course.
Done with the little rant? I may or may not have even read some of these at some point, but I don't keep a folder on my computer labeled "Things that pissed off other people that happened 10+ years ago." You don't actually have a clue what I read and what I don't, thank you very much.
Babbit was definitely a victim, especially if you apply the same criteria as the left had been applying to other cases. But even by any sane criteria, there was absolutely no need to kill her.
She was in the front of a mob of people trying to get past a barricade leading to multiple VIPs, and people with guns were telling everyone to stop. Sometimes it'd be nice to live in a world where teens do stupid things and live to realize how dumb they were too, but, well, oftentimes the predictable happens. And as for the rest of the group, well it turns out if your protest happens to involve going into a large restricted area and there are lots of cameras, it makes it easy to prosecute.
THe right never did even a tenth of what the left has been doing recently. However, when the right did have the power, when they did bad things - like censorship - they were wrong. They don't hold that power anymore, and haven't been holding it for a couple of generations at least. If they ever hold it again, and try to use it again for evil - like, I don't know, ban porn or something - then it would be righteous to oppose them. It's not the problem that is currently has any real importance.
It's easy to say that when the right hasn't targeted you. The gay kid who grew up in a conservative town would say otherwise. I like how your example of them hypothetically abusing the left is porn. Porn is not the right's battlefield anymore. This is Trump's party now, and everything is about owning the libs.
Tiber727
1mo ago
Dems have always (well, if we talk about recent times, not ancient) made the difference between legal, limited and controlled immigration and no holds barred open borders. This was a long time union position too (no need to expand on where the unions political affiliations go).
Agree but with a quibble. Dems do very clearly favor a path to citizenship because, whether you believe anything else or not, it would be a much different story if Trump were kicking out people who had completed becoming American citizens. That said, I was contrasting with Trump who seems to be going after people on student visas, people with green cards, people who claimed asylum. They are people whom the government is essentially already tracking, and putting aside the current crazy progressive Dems, the 90's Dems probably aren't too concerned with them being here. I extrapolate from that that Trump is acting on vibes of "there are too many non-Americans staying in America, get them out."
My point is not that everything Trump is doing now is part of Democratic agenda - of course not, he's on the opposite side of the war so he'd do stuff to wrestle control from them. My point is that Trump's political positions before he became the leader of the MAGA had been very close to Democrats' positions before the Great Awokening.
My point is that I don't actually care about the distinction here. I know he does a lot of things for the votes, but the only thing that's relevant to me at the end of the day is "Did he do X? Yes or No." And a moderate Democrat from the 90's would not have done these things.
Those mobs are surprisingly well financed, supplied and coordinated. Often, if you bother to dig, with taxpayer money. And covered for and protected by government officials. It's not random, it's a system which is distributed enough that people fail to make connection between different aspects of it, but there's one. Woke professors, woke AGs, woke NGOs, woke antifa soldiers, woke CEOs, woke actors, woke judges, woke journalists, woke bureaucrats - they all part of the network.
They are financed and supplied, but they are not that coordinated. The woke professor has no control over or in with the woke CEO or vice versa. All they do is see on the news that the other did something and approve (sometimes monetarily) or turn around and shame him. You mention the banks, but right now there's a protest over Visa/Mastercard cutting off porn video games. That notably includes LGBT games. Currently the leftist network is accomplishing jack shit. And I point out social media for a different reason. Social media thrives on forming echo chambers and showing you the opposing side's outrage. That helps form personalities that think the world is nothing but people who agree with them and crazy people/people who willingly align with the crazy.
That's not correct, the right has the ground game too, and finally is pushing back on the culture war. But given the amount of capture of the governmental and government adjacent institutions, some governmental action is required.
Non-state colleges are not government-adjacent institutions. And even then, K-12 and state colleges are managed mostly at the state level. NGOs are also private organizations. I did not claim the right is not fighting back culturally. I am claiming that the federal government is what they expect the use to achieve their biggest aims. And I think they're taking a lot of creative liberties to get around the question of "Can the federal government even do this, particularly by Presidential fiat?" And Trump is treating every interaction point with the government as a stick (such as cutting off international students from a university), as if the government could one day decide that your tax return is based on your political beliefs and this would be totally acceptable if the correct side was behind it.
Some property is billions dollars of loss, multiple businesses and governmental buildings destroyed, full city blocks made unlivable, etc. The problem is not even that per se - though it is extremely bad - but the complete acceptance and normalization of it from the leftist elite.
That's a more precise definition of the damage. I was objecting to "cities destroyed" which is quite obviously false. I did see that damage estimates from BLM are estimated at $1-2 billion. For some context, a quick search suggests somewhere between 15 and 26 million participated in BLM nationwide protests. Brave AI thinks that a basic grocery store would cost $1-2 million to build, stock, and staff. A relatively small number of idiots out of a huge pool can make numbers add up fast on that scale. If 15 million people really want to cause destruction, they can easily make $2 billion look like chump change. I'm not trying to excuse away $2 billion. I'm trying to show you the scale of fuckery that even a subset of 15 million people can get up to.
As for the minimizing it, nobody likes to admit the bad. I see the same thing when the right says Jan 6th was just some people walking around and Babbitt was a victim. Though yes I know you are going to claim the scale of these are way different and I agree. It's just an example.
Yes, of course, people are harassed on both sides sometimes. But there's a difference between getting a bunch of hateful tweets and being declared domestic terrorist by the FBI.
Hold on, this is a different argument. The argument was not over which side is worse, the argument was over "wanting to be left alone." Harassment is definitionally not about wanting to be left alone. Here you are doing similar minimizing the bad.
Even getting to this new argument, it's a bit of a gish-gallop. I don't even remember most of the things you're referring to except the one where organizations were accused of engaging in political activities despite claiming to be a nonprofit that does not engage in politics.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
A, the distinction still matters because the way you stop a tyrant and a zealot differs. B, what I am talking about is the tendency of the right to turn around and say they are righteous in whatever they do to oppose the left.
Tiber727
1mo ago
That is the sane-washed story they tell themselves. In practice, Democrats only hold to norms to the extent that they are winning. Consider the Supreme Court. When the SC was delivering progressive wins, it was an unimpeachable source of restraint and goodness and laws and norms. And then when Trump gave us a conservative majority, they immediately switched to "This SC is illegitimate and it's rulings are illegitimate. We should pack the court when we get back in power."
Everyone follows this behavior where they say to do X then do Y, they will always have a reason why the situation demands doing Y vs X. It's just a question of if that exception was reasonable or an excuse. One can respond to a perceived violation by either taking the high road or going tit-for-tat. Honestly what frustrates me the most is when someone says they're going tit-for-tat but tries to act like they still have the moral high ground, or when they act outraged says they are going tit-for-tat towards you (since the other side likely didn't see their original action as a violation).
With the Supreme Court specifically, the norm violation the left was responding to was McConnell arguing to Obama that Supreme Courts should be filled after elections to ensure that it aligns with the will of the people, then very pointedly rushing to fill the seat before elections when Trump was almost out of office.
Tiber727
1mo ago
He's not even "the right", for Heaven's sake - he's pretty much bog standard moderate Democrat, by the standards of times before Democrats went bonkers.
I disagree with your assessment, much as I disagree with your assessment about Fox News. Democrats certainly wouldn't work to get Roe v. Wade overturned. Sure, the left has gotten way too "open borders" recently, but have been historically consistent about believing immigration is a net good. I don't think working with another government to imprison them without trial is a Democratic position. I don't think threatening colleges with cutting their foreign studies is a Democratic position. I don't think "piss away our international relations to strongarm trade deficits" is a Democratic position, even if Democrats are sometimes protectionist.
Remember the case of Gina Carano?
Yes, I covered this with my point that firing people for any reason was always available and not as uncommonly used historically as you might think.
But that does not cancel the existance of the evil empire, and it always has enough troopers to maintain the required level of terror.
In the Soviet Union, the terror originates from the government. They effectively set the background level of terror and the punishment for not complying. Here, the terror has no defined point of origin. There is no evil empire. There's a mob that forms whenever some story pops up and gets embellished enough. The dynamics are very different. One is a group with a goal. The other is a culture of social media frying everyone's brains. And how they must be cured is very different. The latter I think can be accomplished by getting everyone to chill the fuck out, which I think will happen when the left cries wolf too many times and people stop caring, and I think the Democrat's unpopularity and Gen Z shifting right is a sign that it may be happening.
Destroying the death grip of the left in virtually every institution of the country is a prerequisite to restoring the equal footing, this is the minimal necessary condition.
My problem with this is the right is going about it almost exclusively via government, and in order to fulfill that goal it requires giving the government power it does not and should not have.
The right doesn't want to burn the institutions and salt the Earth. The right wants the institutions that do what they are supposed to do. They want the politics be normal again, and so do a lot of normies.
Multiple people in this thread are saying almost verbatim what I just said.
Now it's about whether it's ok to introduce por[n] to kids in kindergarten, whether we need to let somebody to talk them into cutting of their genitals without even notifying their partent, we hear arguments that putting criminals in jail is racist and that deporting a violent gang member with dozen-page rap sheet including murders is fascism, we hear that mass rape and kidnapping is legitimate political tool, and that this kind of politics must be brought to the US, we see cities burned down and any semblance of rule of law eliminated, and we are told that if you are against any of that, you are nobody but a literal Nazi.
There's a mix of things I agree with and things I think are mischaracterizations.
- introduce porn to kids in kindergarten
I think the left is going too far with this, but I don't think all sex ed is porn.
- whether we need to let somebody to talk them into cutting of their genitals without even notifying their partent, we hear arguments that putting criminals in jail is racist
Agree with you on this, even though you did frame it in a way to sound more malicious than a warped idea of helping
- that deporting a violent gang member with dozen-page rap sheet including murders is fascism
"That alleging someone is a violent gang member and knowingly sending them somewhere they will be imprisoned without trial is bad"
- that mass rape and kidnapping is legitimate political tool
Missing context on this one.
- we see cities burned down and any semblance of rule of law eliminated
"cities burned down" is more like "some property destroyed during a mass protest." Which is bad but it's like calling the death of 5 people a genocide.
This is very different for the right and for the left. For the right, not dealing with other people means ignoring them.
This is the classic "I sanewash my allies and nutpick my enemies" framing. Yes, there are absolutely people for whom this is true. There are people for whom this is not. For instance, the left plays it up but are you going to confidently tell me that people highlighted by LibsOfTikTok don't sometimes get harassed? I browse /r/legaladvice and you do get threads like "my landlord is trying to make me take down my pride flag" or a woman at a Christian school fired for being pregnant out of wedlock (with a man who works there and is not being punished).
Tiber727
1mo ago
Oh no, "encroachments" stage was decades before. The last 20 years was "the walls are breached, time to burn and pillage!" stage.
Must everything be so over-dramatic? Berlin is not burning. Hirohoto has not announced surrender. Trump is not the last hurrah of the right. Trump is one of the least popular presidents in history, but the Democrats are even less popular. Gen Z is shifting right. The pendulum swung too far, and is now swinging back. It will swing again and again, as it has the entirety of history.
Like what? Let's take the inventory. The mass culture is about 90%, it's not that right-coded entertainment doesn't come out, but it comes out maybe once a year or less, and is always a huge controversy...
Mass culture is 90% left? Sure, agreed. Right-coded entertainment causes controversy? Eh. Your usual leftists on Reddit and some websites, mostly many small ones, complain about it, but does that really amount to anything?
I work for a woke company you've heard of. What's it like day-to-day? The once a year HR training has some eye-rolling sections. I get some emails about whatever group's day or month it is that I delete. I don't talk politics at work, which is good advice always. That's about it. Completely anecdotal, but I've heard one guy say he reviews applications at a university, and the only attention he pays to the mandatory "what have you done to promote diversity?" question is judging their writing ability. Whether he was lying or all professors do, I can't tell you. I'm making the argument that life is often pretty banal. Supposedly the students are more woke than many of the professors.
With regards to big business, to some degree yes. A decent number of them are scaling it back. Disney is realizing that young men have stopped watching and that's a massive amount of money being left on the table. Billionaires tend towards the woke when it doesn't notably affect their bottom line. They aren't rushing to implement socialism or raise the minimum wage.
If we can't find any, or can't find a list as comprehensive and powerful, then demanding the right stops fighting back - without any history of prior consistent and prolonged demand to do the same from the left, at least - can not be read as anything but telling the right "why can't you just lose quietly so we all can stop this unpleasantness?". It is not hard to see why the right wouldn't look favorably on such approach.
I'm not asking the right to lose, or to stop fighting. I'm saying the left lost themselves to BLM and became a parody of themselves because everything was so awful they had to do this and that. I think the right is becoming the party of nothing but political grievances and emotional overreactions in much the same way. Political parties always fight. The fight over slavery would probably make today's fight over "wokeness" a joke even aside from the literal civil war era.
What I am saying is maybe get off the internet and step back a bit. Things aren't great but America isn't collapsing either. "Burn the institutions and salt the Earth!" is cringe and could possibly cost you the normie vote in future elections. A lot of wokeness is nothing more than people being sanctimonious on the internet and then individual actors being blown up on the national stage. In a country of 350 million, you can find no shortage of idiots even if they don't matter at the end of the day. You should fight it, but that doesn't mean you need to shape your personality to "REACT" to it.
And that's true. They were, when the right had institutional power and tried to shut down all kinds of leftist speech. And lost (mostly)...
Not everything is national. "Fire in a crowded theater" was a government decision and we're mostly talking about private organizations. As for private organizations, welcome to At-Will hiring. It's always been the case that you have no real job safety in America. You can be fired or refused a job because your boss woke up one morning and decided he didn't like you. And there are plenty of times this happens to left leaning people and you don't hear about it. Lots of America is red-coded rural areas.
Free Speech can mean both the willingness to tolerate opposing ideas and the freedom to choose not to deal with other people. The left was cheering for banks cutting off the right from oil pipeline funding, now they're complaining about Valve removing LGBT games because Visa went on a porn crusade. It's the same power in both cases, both sides just cheer when it gets the outcome they want and jeer when it cuts them. But unless you want government czars deciding how individuals relate to each other, what are you going to do about it?
Tiber727
1mo ago
What's interesting to me is the latter argument. Putting political advantage aside, an ideal district would be not competitive in the slightest. The reason being that districts exist to serve the needs of the local, and a politician with 100% of the vote is perfectly representing everyone in the district rather than half.
Tiber727
1mo ago
That does not compute. Protesting is by definition controversial - if it weren't, it's not a protest, it's at most solidarity march.
Oh, I know. I was deliberately stating it in a way to show the absurdity. My impression of progressives is that if you asked them what the median person believes on X, Y, and Z issues, they would describe a progressive. They think their belief system is so normal that they see themselves less as attempting to move the needle and more trying to keep the needle from moving away from them. Or at least they think that the culture is aligned with them and they only need to get the government to recognize it. That doesn't mean it's true. It's just an observation about many members of a group that I believe I'm seeing.
From there I am saying that there's a sort of discrepancy - the right frames the last 20 years as if the left sat in a war room and planned out a list of slow, coordinated encroachments meant to erode the status of any right-leaning beliefs. The left acts as if they were going about their normal daily routine, dealing with the occasional asshole as one does, and then the assholes came back with a mob.
My model is that the left is an uncoordinated mob that isn't even really paying attention to all those other encroachments because journalism, left or right, mostly focuses on whatever bad thing the other side did. Everyone has a point where they will try to completely shun someone else. Finding out that someone supports pedophilia is an easy example. The progressive left has calibrated their "cut all contact with someone" threshold to be extremely low.
Only now, finally, the right starts to wake up and wonder "oh, they are trying to crush us, maybe we should push back?" And then we hear the complaints "how undignified, you are fighting back, people would think you are the same! They will reject you for stooping so low as to fight back! You should just roll over and take it, then you'd have all our sympathies - everybody loves losers!"
That's one way to frame it.
The left and the right have fought for public support since the beginning of democracy. I might disagree with the rules of war the left plays by, but the right, collectively speaking, were not passive bystanders minding their own business either. "We didn't start the fire" after all. The problem is, in real life there are laws that allow anyone to use the public square. When it comes to both businesses and the internet, every part of it belongs to somebody, and with that comes the ability to remove someone for any reason. They're nowhere near as culturally dominant, but there are certainly places that ban left-leaning opinions. If you'd like to change that, well that's certainly an opinion but it's one at odds with the libertarian beliefs many on this forum claim to possess.
Let me ask you this - how can an outside observer tell the difference between someone "pushed to their limit" and someone who never had principles in the first place? Surely the left would tell a similar story about how they were all for free expression until the mean old right wouldn't leave them alone. I'm obviously biased, but many on the right seem positively giddy about all the things they want to accomplish. And they only clues I have on what they would consider "too far" are the things they've already done and now tell me are completely reasonable.
Tiber727
1mo ago
I think the biggest problem for me is the difference in framing and tactics. The people here frame it as a war, but I don't think it was ever that. To me, I think that the real problem with cancel culture is not a sort of "factional left vs. right" conflict. I think that the left has adopted the framework of the internet. What I mean by that is, you can pick a forum and cultivate your own echo chamber. If you don't agree with someone block them. There's a range of disagreement between "I disagree with you but that's okay" to "It's disgusting that you believe that and I don't think we can share the same space." I think that the left has developed a neurotic personality leading to the range of acceptable disagreement being tiny. I don't think they "took over" institutions so much as many individuals gravitated to similar locations based on their personality, and pushed out the right due to that tendency and the fact that they gravitated there in greater numbers.
They don't even think they're waging the culture war. They think they're going about their day doing boring and uncontroversial things like protesting for trans rights and then some asshole came along and they kicked him out like any normal human being would do. That's why the left claims the right invented the culture war or that "cancel culture doesn't exist."
I think the real problem is the neurotic personality more so than their ideas. Bad ideas are fine. I don't have much hope for the current generation, because attitudes are hard to change. I see articles like this that start to get it, but of course even here she can't shake the "the message wasn't bad, only the delivery" trap. That said, the real barometer is the next generation. Younger folks are rejecting the Democratic party even though politically speaking they're arguably more left than right.
The right is in full "We're aiming to crush you" mode. The left might learn something from the independents turning away, but I guarantee you they won't "learn" anything from the right's current tactics. They'll simply see it that the right is completely okay with using the full force of government to try to control culture, and think they need to play dirtier. The independents are the real decider here, and they may reject the right for their tactics.
Tiber727
1mo ago
Interesting. I do think Rasmussen is biased, but biased doesn't necessarily mean wrong. So I am genuinely trying to see if my mental model needs to be updated. I expect my mental model for the number of people who think that is too low but probably for many here theirs is too high.
I was having trouble finding other sources about wanting to ban AC. Thoughts on banning cars yielded far more results. Based on this thread, the steelman version of this argument is that many of the anti-car people don't want to ban cars so much as they want to prop up alternatives to the point that others don't feel the need to buy them. Which Noah Smith pointed out that Japan has both great public transit and a lot of car ownership. Though I think they'd still count it as a win if cars are driven less.
Those number are just bonkers, and makes reasonable people want to just write off environmentalists (if true).
I was personally just making up high numbers, but over the long term (meaning I make no prediction about if it will be 5 years from now or 500), I do believe these things to be true.
But despite the failure of environmentalists to implement their preferred policies, capitalism has brought down carbon emissions in the US quite a bit. So this part is just them screaming that reality is wrong. And actually, its easy to use the market to monetize reducing carbon usage. You put a carbon tax at a per ton basis and then you cut taxes elsewhere to make sure that the carbon tax doesn't cripple the economy. Notably when such a proposal was made in Washington State, environmentalists were part of the coalition that killed the proposal. The fact that they have this specific bundle of beliefs appears problematic for your thesis. The central planning thesis is actually strengthened here.
That's easy to square. Capitalism created the pollution, particularly during the industrial revolution when pollution was largely ignored, then government (not capitalism) intervened to force companies to change. Having government push companies to reduce pollution is their preferred policy and was enacted, if not to the extent that they want.
Reading your link, it sounds to me like they believed that if they killed this bill they could get a new, more aggressive version pushed. Progressives letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is nothing new.
Valid to an extent. But, what if this is just another irrational part of their bundle of beliefs. That being that being an environmentalist and anti-capitalist is also highly correlated with being...anti-white/western? Perhaps all these beliefs are in conflict for achieving each seperate stated goal, except as to the part where all the policies trend toward...more central planning.
The reason I'm a Democrat but not a progressive is because I think that progressives are somewhat good at identifying problems (if oversensitive) but bad at solving them. It's the same personality trait that lead to becoming an environmentalist that lead to every other cause du jour.
I don't think brainstorming solutions to problems is bad, I just think they tend to weight real-life problems high and problems with their hypothetical alternatives low. They aren't central planning for the sake of central planning, they're central planning because it is the most obvious instrument that could potentially do all the things they feel must be done.
Lots? There are a bunch of large subreddits dedicated to these beliefs like /r/fuckcars, and the mods of those are typically powermods that also control super large subs like /r/politics and /r/askreddit.
True, I was not thinking of fuckcars. I think I'd only really heard the name once. A quick scan seems to me that their primary issue with cars is the number of people who die in car accidents. I disagree, but that does sound like a motivation that cars are harmful rather than a motivation that because they don't like cars that nobody should have them. Though to be fair I am also seeing some who do hate cars, mostly due to hating parking lots.
Oh, I absolutely agree that their actions are often superficial and having unreasonable expectations of others. That was part of my backhand comment about college kids with iPhones. It's much like wanting to lose weight but not dieting (outside of switching to diet soda) or exercising.
My point of disagreement was anti-dan's framing was that they're not actually motivated by a desire to reduce pollution, instead they want people to live worse lives for the hell of it I guess? Because they derive enjoyment out of decreasing the total happiness in the world or something?
My model is that lots of people want to have their cake and eat it too. That they end up eating the cake is because obviously they can't have both and base desires won out. I'm more objecting to what I see as someone going:
I keep seeing people saying you should save your cake but they end up eating it. The logical conclusion is they hate the sight of cake and want to destroy it.
Tiber727
1mo ago
I live in a college town. I honestly can't think of a single person right now in real life that I would describe as a hairshirt environmentalist. Online, I can only think of Greta herself and her refusal to take an airplane, and she's a massive outlier because she pretty much uses her influence to bum rides around the world on an eco-friendly yacht. A quick check of Just Stop Oil shows that most of their antics result in 50-ish arrests, which seems like peanuts to me.
Your average environmentalist is a middle class college kid with an iPhone. They aren't giving up much of anything except maybe biking more and eating less meat.
I would say that your assumptions are way off with regards to your opponents.
The environmentalist would say that:
A) Global Warming is true and humans contribute: 99%
B) That is bad: 95% (addendum to B) How bad? Coastal areas become flooded. Increased deaths due to heat. Increased frequency of natural disasters. Risk to food production due to unstable weather. We're talking potentially millions of deaths.
C) That due to the severity estimates of B, if proposed policies won't work, increased attention must be given to come up with policies that will.
And yet, environmentalists act as if they have 100% confidence, and they commonly reject market solutions in favor of central planning. The logical deduction from this pattern of behavior is that the central planning is the goal, and the global warming is the excuse.
Alternatively, their confidence levels of capitalism solving societal problems are low as a general rule, and in this particular instance capitalism literally has negative incentives to solving this problem. How does one monetize the ability to bring the global temperature of Earth down? How do you monetize clean air? The only thing I can think of are carbon credits, and Republicans oppose implementing such a system in the first place. Conversely, you make money by producing things which pollute the air as a byproduct, and putting in effort to mitigate pollution costs money for no monetary benefit.
a principled environmentalist would never bother raising a finger in America. They'd go to India and chain themselves to a river barge dumping plastic or go to Africa and spay and neuter humans over there.
This strikes me as comparable to saying that pro-life people should be shooting up abortion clinics. Your average environmentalist believes they have 0 influence on India's policies because they are not Indian, and India's government gives every impression they don't care. People believe lots of things they don't follow through fully on, even assuming the assertions that if they believe X they should do Y are reasonable. Do all the people complaining about western fertility have 10 kids?
If you are trying to mess with American's cars, heat, and AC, its because you dont like that Americans have those things, because other concerns regarding the environment have been much more pressing for several decades at this point, and that isn't likely to change.
That's incredibly boo outgroup. How many people out there actually hate that people have things, as a primary motivation?
I'm sure there are places on the Internet where (say) criticism of Donald Trump will get you banned--but they are explicitly "right wing" spaces. Whereas places you might naturally suspect to be politically neutral--hobby websites, for example!--are routinely very much not.
That's partly a consequence of the people who make up the groups. Board games nowadays are primarily played by younger, indoorsy people. That's generally going to be left-leaning people. If you started a club for gun enthusiasts, I doubt progressives are going to invade the space and push out the people who refuse to use someone's preferred pronouns. And your gun club is probably going to have the occasional comment about Democrats that would start a fight should any Democrat be around to hear it.
But there tends to be a certain creeping nature to it. You're making a wargame forum and someone wants to show off their mechs in pride colors. You either ban it or leave it. Then if you ban it you're a political space but according to the left not a political space if you allow it. If you allow it someone is going to give a negative response that probably leads to an argument. The next time someone shows off their mechs and adds "trans rights are human rights" and we repeat.
To my understanding the Battletech forum rejected pride mechs. And one of the novel authors made some gay characters and that got rejected. Eventually Reddit intervened to replace the mods and the left quite literally took over the space.
Having Trump in office hasn't really changed this
No one can without trampling on the First Amendment. And they certainly aren't going to choose to stop being angry that Trump managed to win again.
Tiber727
2mo ago
GamerGate: Leaderless movement where some Republican strategist came along after it started and made some remarks suggesting he wanted to capitalize on it for political gain, which the left ran with to claim him as a mastermind of a Twitter mob. Side note: I like to compare this to claiming Putin controlled BLM because he supposedly had some trolls online try to fan it to increase fragmentation in America.
Tea Party: Fair that I don't remember how much central planning, but to my recollection there was no leader, more comparable to current Trump protests where they say they're protesting on X date, please come.
BLM: My point in this was that said group that co-opted it was irrelevant to it being a movement.
The will of the electorate is what I'm talking about. If you can define a "will" and a group that possesses that will, you have a group that you can discuss. Leaders are irrelevant for this purpose. BLM is a group with demands, and I can support or rebut its ideas because they are definable enough to discuss. If BLM came along and said, "We're not a group because we came here independently and we're not trying to do anything (this claim is only made when trying to dodge criticism)" then people are free to call bullshit. If they don't want to be named that doesn't stop anyone from coming up with a name for them. If that name sticks then the lesson here is to get better at PR rather than whining that you should be uniquely immune to needing PR. Control the message or you will be controlled by it.
Is the implication here that anyone with a college education is woke?
No, the implication is that it's disproportionate. The consultants and the marketers believed that their view was correct (primarily morally and secondarily financially, and the former biases to believe the latter) and BLM in particular gave them the opportunity to sell it to their bosses as profitable. Again, conspiracy and coordination are not required, merely enough people doing a similar thing at a similar time.
Tiber727
2mo ago
I guess maybe I'm being uncharitable by interpreting this as "Please associate with each other as a cohesive, organized political movement so I can attack the principles of your group rather than deal with the 17-headed hydra that is contemporary social liberalism". Maybe I shouldn't have use the term "single theory".
If we must say that there's 17 heads and name each of them, that's at least in the direction of what Freddie and I are saying. The complaint is that first they deny that there's anything there, then that it's a hydra, then that the hydra is good. And of course once the conversation is over they will return to acting like the people who cried hydra are responding to literally nothing. If people see sky blue and cyan and aquamarine together, they're going to call it blue. Ain't nobody got time to go one-by-one with 100,000 ever-so-slight variations on a theme, and if you demand they must they will simply refuse. Republicans have been successful in painting the progressive left as obnoxious, and young men are swinging right despite having many left-wing views.
You and Freddie both are painting contemporary social liberalism as a monolith, with the implication that it's a coordinated effort with offices and political committees. Maybe there's a reason that it's so hard to wrangle these disparate movements together (and why they seem to cannibalize through debates on intersectionality):
No, the issue is that you think these are requirements. Central coordination is not required; the only thing that's required is reasonably definable goal that a noteworthy amount of people would agree with and are or would cooperate towards. Many movements don't have leaders, or if they do most of their own members probably couldn't identify them. Was GamerGate a movement? Tea Party? 99%ers? BLM? Are all of those words useless and should be dispensed with?
I've actually seen the pendulum swing way harder in the past couple of years, with many more complaints of too many non-white male characters.
Well yes, the artists (generally left leaning) started doing it, and people noticed. Said artists will happily admit in a friendly environment that it was a conscious decision to increase representation - the idea that people empathize more with their in-group and this is a good thing (except for white men).
It seems to be the consultants, focus groups, and corporate America that are guiding these decisions - not some National Wokism political action committee.
In other words, college-educated people.
Tiber727
2mo ago
Who said it had to be a single theory? Freddie gave an example of teachers in California who want to make school anti-racist. What do we call that group? If you say CRT they will say it's an obscure legal theory not taught in high school, even when you read the supporting material and they straight-out say they are making policy decisions inspired by CRT.
There are several people out there who say there are not enough [insert non-white-male group here] in [industry, fictional story or type of art, etc.] and flat-out state that they are selecting for or wanting to select for said group. What is this group or idea called? Well it's certainly not "woke" because that word means nothing (yet somehow they know the meaning enough to parody it).
Whether all of these people have ever-so slightly different beliefs is irrelevant. The terms "Democrat" and "Republican" manage to lump enough concepts together to be useful as terms even if almost everyone in the set will disagree with at least one of the ideas/policies in the set.
Freddie is saying that it doesn't matter if they deny that they have a banner. If you're all standing really close to each other doing very similar things, you will be treated as a group even if you didn't come as a group. The exasperation is people are tired of the game where if you critique the idea they say, "What idea? I'm not suggesting anything other than being a decent person and teaching history!"
Tiber727
2mo ago
why is labor so expensive?
Because in a prosperous society people want a lot of money for their labor, because they have a lot of opportunities and everything costs more in a prosperous society.
Why is there the need to exploit interns?
Begging the question. You assume they did it because they needed to, yet somehow most other companies don't do this. Why did those other companies not need to?
The only body who can actually change laws in Congress.
Yes, and said body uses agencies and interns to provide them information, because they are old men whose major skill is campaigning. Hell, Republicans actively campaign on there being too many laws. An agency designed to find laws that are obsolete and clean up spaghetti laws sounds exactly in line with what they claim to want.
Tiber727
2mo ago
My whole point is that we should be talking about fewer laws.
I could tell by context that that's what you believe, and I am contesting that.
When you use legislation and regulation on a case-by-case basis as you described, you're playing whack-a-mole without ever looking up at the bigger picture.
My thesis is that sometimes moles should be whacked, otherwise your yard turns to shit. You state that bad case of having too many laws, and I state the bad case that the rules are being created to attempt to stop a bad thing, so without them you have the bad thing. An example that was brought up was rotating interns baited by promises of full-time work. You might claim that it is a symptom of overcomplicated hiring laws, and I might claim what I see as a simpler explanation - they wanted cheap labor but felt bad about it.
Complexity is the enemy, especially when refactoring of the system is slow or difficult. Congress likes to pass laws, but it very, very rarely retracts previous legislation.
I have a suggestion on that that I think should be followed regardless of my feeling of being more big government. The government should have an agency or committee dedicated periodic review of laws to see which laws can be retired, or if multiple overlapping laws can be combined for clarity and brevity.
Tiber727
2mo ago
I'm someone who subscribes to the capitalism but nice theory. I read your linked previous comment. I think some mandatory training is stupid, but I think you're picking some low-handing fruit. Capitalism but nice can just as easily be EU telling phone manufacturers to stop making proprietary phone chargers when USB exists, or that John Deere needs to stop making their tractors unrepairable by third-parties for arbitrary reasons. Good or bad depend entirely on which law we're talking about.
Tiber727
2mo ago
Ukraine is already too weak to attack Russia by choice, and that's not going to change no matter what the outcome of this is. I don't believe this is actually Russia's condition.
As far as I can see, the problem with this option is strictly that neither the current Ukrainian government (which surely would collapse in such a situation) nor the West (for whom a neutral Ukraine with present borders is of little value, and they would have to credibly signal that they would defend it, vs. the option to have it cheaply continue killing Russians and gamble on the absolute bonanza that a surprise Russian collapse would be) would actually want it.
I would contend that Russia would also not accept this proposition, but even without that contention you already make it sound like a nonstarter.
If another country were actually willing to face Russia, they could do so right now. At this point, I think that if almost anyone but the U.S. said that they were sending troops and kept those troops in Ukraine, Russia wouldn't actually use nukes.
I remember that. Though I think it was less about sexism and more going back to the sounding like an out-of-touch manager. "How do I talk about women? Talk about binders of resumes!"
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