Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
#209, #StandUpLocust, #MurphysFerry, Surah Yunus 10:71
User ID: 2418
There is a huge and underserved audience of centrist and rationalist conservatism, who reject Fox News low-brow or populist conservatism.
I can't say how huge, but this is a point that I've tried expressing to others, only to get met with a fairly perplexed look. The conservative mainstream (i.e. Republican) is always desperately going to try and gatekeep the term to maintain as much of the political marketshare on the right-wing that they can. But I remarked to a friend back in 2016, that there were a lot of different conservative voting blocks that all thought they were going to get what they projected onto Trump. The racist Jared Taylor faction thought they were going to get their white nationalist into power. Libertarians thought they were going to get their free market utopia enacted. A disgruntled Democratic voting block wanted to thumb its nose at the party for sidelining Bernie. Everyone thought they were getting what they wanted with Trump.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2yr ago
People become politically active in the same way they watch the Olympic games, once every four years. I'm constantly torn and at odds with myself about what to think about voters. On one hand they're the collective ignorant, and on the other, they're smart enough not to bother wasting their time with the false display of a decision making process that they don't believe will benefit them, no matter who they elect.
Politicians are rational actors in the sense that politicians do whatever gets them elected. If they do stupid things that attract the support from voters, who's to blame? On the other hand, more informed people won't vote because their preferred candidate has no platform. It's a paradox of sorts.
If I was the Republican Party, I wouldn't want to draw media attention to a division between Trump and DeSantis that gets personal and dirty. It's precisely that kind of in-fighting that partly explains the chaos within the Democratic Party. I get that that's Trump's gig, but that's more of a general function of his personality than it was a desire to burn the Republican Party to the ground.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2yr ago
I think given how closely Trump's supporters have identified with his rhetoric, attacking Trump's legal cases would amount to alienating some sizable chuck of his constituency.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2yr ago
The media in no way was some innocent or indifferent spectator, or had any impartial interest in the case. 'Russiagate' was a media driven campaign that was false, and people on the inside, in particular those like Rachel Maddow knew they were peddling bullshit from the get-go.
That doesn't change his point. His point was that it's still eugenics. Regardless of whatever the reason may be. In a rudimentary sense, we're 'all' involved in some form of eugenic practice. People are always afraid of discussing it at a superficial level though, because they're afraid that you're going to trade on that basic agreement over terms, as a way to push for large-scale, sociopolitical policies that'll play into someone else's program of eugenics.
This is what I was going to say as well. It looks at only one side of a historical antagonism. The other side being the accusation that Jews have a covert interest securing their future, at the expense of the societies that hosted their population over time. Whatever you believe about that is beside the point.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2yr ago
This reminds me of Halsey English's (Jewish) debate with Nick Fuentes (Catholic) and they argue over this point. Halsey did make the correct observation that Jews were originally excluded from the Protestant banking practices during earlier American history. So as a result, they formed their own, out of which you got the large investment banks like Goldman Sachs. And then people came along later and complained that Goldman Sachs was overwhelmingly Jewish. Well that's why they originally founded Goldman Sachs, because nobody would give them jobs doing anything else.
The worry is about creating generalizations out of red-herrings and a pattern of circumstantial evidence. I think many Jews are becoming increasingly differentiated. The percentages you brought up are meaningful, but I think they're meaningful in the same sense that they're meaningful for most other populations you can find out there; namely of a very mundane and uninteresting kind. It's even inherent in the Reform tradition.
Trump was always going to be a self-absorbed individual before he would ever become an ideologue with a 'vision' to carry out. The people that ended up being the most disappointed with him were the ones that had the most unrealistic expectation of who he was. Even in retrospect, I think he was better than what I think it would've likely been the case with Hillary. And in 2020, I maintained that he would've still been better than Joe Biden. I'm not saying Biden hasn't done good things that I would agree with, because he definitely has. But people overwhelmingly focus on the wrong thing where it concerns Trump, and that's his outward personality instead of what he does in his capacity as President. If I want a sobering assessment of Donald Trump, I'll try and see what Noam Chomsky has to say about him. The irrational TikTok tirades of the left and disaffected right-wingers that feel he betrayed them, have nothing worthwhile to offer me as far as critique goes.
I think he realized at some point he had to deliver something to show for it, even if it wasn't much. Equally, people like AOC and Warren's "eat the rich" wealth tax or Green New Deal was just as populist and unrealistic as "build the wall" was.
Sometimes I'd wonder if I was the only person on an island who thought the impact he had on the media was brilliant. The desperation with which they wanted to paint him as someone who was completely insane, left me with the sinking feeling that it was all projection that was true of the MSM itself. I sometimes get asked by people why I don't trust the media and they look at me like I'm crazy because it isn't something that can be explained in a 15 second elevator pitch. I think anyone who's even slightly educated as a layman under the whole 'manufacturing consent' framework for instance can see the trappings of the American ideological system pulling the wool over the eyes of the American people. Especially when you look at something like western coverage of the Ukrainian conflict.
Personally, I 'loved' what Trump did to the media.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2yr ago
I read it, but I'm not sure how that's an adequate answer to what I've said, but I suppose it's a reply. Unless there's something I'm missing.
Tretiak
If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t.
2yr ago
Moral commitments are easy to make if all that's required of you is to make some false gesture or token of praise in favor of those like Christian, who are getting screwed pretty hard over this. So long as it involves no permanent or indefinite cost (e.g. 'deleting the subreddit'), I agree with you; it's ultimately meaningless.
I think Reddit's disintegration is long overdue, and this whole issue is just the watershed moment where it all comes to a head. I think it'd be a net benefit if the entire site disappeared tomorrow, as there's no room for nuanced discussion of virtually anything, it mostly just functions as an entertaining echo chamber of sorts; that occasionally pays lip service to 'open-mindedness' and 'free speech'.
I think his argument was a bit more nuanced than that, but it's been a long time since I read his manifesto. His issue as I understood it, was that modern technology acted as an artificial surrogate that distorted 'healthy' and normal human behavior. I think you could make a compelling argument for that, even today. Jaron Lanier's (who's basically a techie Ted Kaczynski without a life sentence) made a fairly strong case for the dangers of social media. I've increasingly come aboard to that same conclusion.
WRT leftism, I think he was striking at the ideological foundations that sit at the core of the philosophy. Some interesting studies in political psychology, also indicate that our sociopolitical and philosophical viewpoints are inextricably linked to our early childhood experience and psychology.
I think the long-view of history proves the contrary is true. At least your first sentence. Any 'perfectly consistent' and airtight legal system would have left all of us trapped in the dark ages. Because if I couldn't do 'anything' in life, without first consulting an FBI agent, or some government sponsored gatekeeper that had to vet and sign off on all of my actions, no matter how mundane, we wouldn't have ever overthrown practices like slavery. We'd have never progressed beyond "a black man can't marry a white woman." Gay marriage would've never become accepted.
The legal system is necessarily imperfect, because that's where the fights and progress happens and the changes take place. On the edges. That part may not be safe but the general level of civility it ushers in and adds to civilization as a matter of progress and practices is still a result of civil disobedience and leads to a better life overall.
It's not that it's okay if innocent people get locked up by the government but what other way is there govern, without the risk of that happening? People wouldn't accept the proposition in virtually any other domain of social life. Nobody would accept a system where a million people should starve in order to guarantee one person with a car that's completely safe, and has no risk of putting you in danger.
As a society, we make that rational calculation and tradeoff, because the cost-benefit calculations we run tend to justify it. We know that by legalizing alcohol for instance, that is 'guaranteed' to result in the death of thousands of people every year, who choose to drive drunk despite there being laws against it.
I don't know what this would do for the justice system as a whole, or how it would affect the rate of conviction. But what if you could insert a legal incentive, which says every wrongful conviction overturned within a category of some criminal tier (e.g. falsely convicted of murder, not petty crime for instance), would result in a $1 million dollar payout for every year they spent in prison? Or a substantial, life-long government pension?
Isn't the whole concern that they'd have to monetize the app? Seems like that would involve putting in advertisements, inserting massive telemetry, perhaps gutting the UI, etc.
Reddit lost it's catch as an organic community and later a free speech platform years ago. For at least a decade or thereabout, the site's been heavily botted, manipulated, and driven itself into self-referential echo chambers that cater to low-effort content. The things that made Reddit interesting in a strong sense of the word, are always destined to be things that don't scale up very well, but that you only find in smaller and decentralized communities. Those echo chambers are already floating by into places like Lemmy. I know, because I wasn't even there a week before a site admin banned me.
Glad someone else said it. If you went in sub's like AskReddit and sort by 'controversial' for instance you can see how lopsided the sociopolitical viewpoints get skewed based on the topics that get downvoted and upvoted. I'd wager half the userbase that post complaints about those who are lurkers don't realize they themselves don't handle contrary opinions very well and that's why people don't participate. At the end of the day you have to ask yourself why you're choosing to waste your time being the whack-a-mole target for wrong-think to a sea of idiots who can barely think for themselves; and worse yet, have no desire to.
This is what I'm casually keeping an eye out for. The Motte did it. CT did it. WPD did it. A few others have as well. I think the larger ones that are niche like as PCM, have a userbase large enough where they could get by on their own dedicated platform.
The right tends to look back to a lost golden age that never truly existed, while the left tends to look to a future that never ends up the way they expect it to.
I think every civilization exists at some point in a lifecycle. Ibn Khaldun and Oswald Spengler thought as much. Investors have become interested in the economic shifts that play a role in it. Peter Turchin is trying to synthesize something that he thinks may be able to extract patterns out of the mess of history. Toynbee likely would've disagreed.
History is replete with examples of societies who were on top of the world at some point representing economic and social and technological preeminence; only for the historical wrecking ball to come by and place them on the scrap heap of history. The same will happen in the US at some point inevitably just as it has all the others. I think we're playing a role in driving ourselves off that cliff. Climate change will ultimately reduce the US to a regional power at best, that will no longer be able to sustain its status as the world's sole superpower. When that date is going to come though is anyone's guess.
That view's now become common in our political parlance, as a result of democrats and leftists alike having their heads this deep in their own ass. I've never encountered any political opposition that can currently and coherently articulate a right-wing viewpoint, without satirizing or sneering at it. I'll admit I've got positions on things that could be found at home within fascist ideology as well as ideas on the far left, but to them, there isn't even a normal right-wing. There's only the 'sane and normal' leftism that claims to travel the middle of the road, and right-wing, neofascist extremism, the moment you even venture an inch to the right of that.
I used to get criticized and attacked all the time by people when I was very young, who claimed I was always trying to 'win' some argument in the conversation being had. What I actually was, was just enthusiastic, and I always tried to keep things on course and refusing to let the topic just irrationally jump from one unrelated point to another. I was never as concerned with 'truth-seeking' so much as I was determined to establish 'some' kind conclusion within the topic being had. I think people are getting 'far' too much mileage out of terms like 'strawmanning' or 'steelmanning' or 'weakmanning'.
I think there are few basic distinctions that on some level, are common to all terms used to capture this concept. Most people aren't very adept at precisely articulating their arguments. People always know more than they're capable of expressing through language. For most of them, they can only closely approximate at best what it is they're trying to say. And that's where all the haggling over the various -manning, takes place. There's what people are trying to say and there's what they're actually saying. I don't think any of those terms apply entirely, across the board as a general rule. You have to ask yourself what the purpose of your argument is.
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