WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
8hr ago
Governing institutions in a democracy cannot survive by being only trusted by one political party.
I mean, if that's your thesis, surely the current MAGA strategy won't help even if it succeeds at its stated aims. Institutions reshaped by Trump in his image won't be trusted by the Left. Best scenario, you'll just flip the problem.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
While this wasn't exactly the language used at the time, it doesn't seem incoherent to say that the Civil War amounted to "well done, you've exercised your right to self-determination to become a nation of your own. unfortunately, judged as a neighboring foreign nation, we find you guilty of crimes so intolerable that we have no choice but to declare war on you and annex you".
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
They are so vapid and myopically self centred that they couldn't even save democracy from the proles with the most advanced propaganda machine in history. A centralised bureaucracy supported by media, education and intelligence, and how did they explain the perils of populism to the people? (…)
This is the difference between a conspiracy and organic ideological affiliation. The bureaucracy, the media, and the educational system are in lockstep under the mainstream-woke banner, yes; but they don't think of themselves as following centralized directives. Every individual in the chain is acting according to his own conscience. Such a system is capable of coordinating like an astonishingly huge conspiracy so long as everyone's goals are aligned, but it cannot switch gears just because some clever people somewhere in the blob have realized it would be in their long-term interest. Nobody regards themself as taking marching orders, and if someone tries to give them orders that go against their own judgment they'll be ignored.
It feels like there is a never ending game of (…)
I agree, but this sort of disingenuous behavior seems to me like another manifestation of the same lack of trust. It's game theory all the way down. You don't feel you can ask for what you really want up-front without triggering all-out war, so you go for salami tactics and artificially shifting the Overton window. There are other dynamics and incentives at play, like the unrealistic but alluring hope of total victory which means the respective sides pursue dangerous gambits which they dream might give them the edge once and for all, instead of working towards a stable compromise as the expected end-state.
Related still, but distinct, is the endless fool's-quest for the appearance of a total consensus. We as a nation and indeed as a civilization need to be more comfortable with overt compromise. We need politicians who openly say things like "I know 45% of you really want [A] and aren't going to budge. And personally I'm with you, but another 45% desperately want [B], and they aren't gonna change anytime soon, either. Here's what my administration and I are proposing to do to try and keep the peace", instead of pretending they've invented a magic solution that will make everybody happy except for a few meanies on the fringes. I truly think, to an unbiased observer, it would look nuts that so few political issues are phrased in those terms in speeches and think-pieces. Even when they don't actually believe in it, let alone advocate it, almost everyone writes as though the 170 million guys on the other side of the fence are just a temporary inconvenience who can be safely ignored, perhaps reeducated. And yet, this. Never. Works.
If it were easier for opposing sides to negotiate with all cards on the table, we could skip all that tedious, damaging business and skip to the begrudging compromise.
I think if you want to see this sort of thing simmer down, you’ll need to appease the red tribe - not just give them empty promises that’ll be rolled back the moment they aren’t watching, but actually give something up.
Oh, I agree with that, too. The dynamic I outlined was symmetrical for a reason. Alas, I'm not in charge of the Blue Tribe. FWIW, if I somehow was the Blue Tribe Czar, and had a Red counterpart at the negotiating table, there are a number of guarantees I would be prepared to give that differ from my ideal world-state (up to and including "it's the parent's choice whether their child gets to transition before their legal majority, and we will codify into federal law that refusing to aid transition will not, in and of itself, be considered parental abuse").
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
Far be it from me to defend WhiningCoil, whose demeanor and positions I find deeply objectionable, but if you will tolerate my nitpicking - I think that in "(Drooling Retard Edition with words, words, words for the slow kids in the back who have hammers they can't be trusted with)", the opening slur refers to the kind of guy who would post a lengthy verbose message instead of a snappy call to violence, i.e. to the persona reluctantly adopted by WhiningCoil himself - not to the people who asked for the verbose version. Note that, although you quoted it as a plural, it's singular in his post.
Of course, this still leaves "the slow kids in the back..." as being obviously directed at the mod team. As I said, not seeking to help his case, merely indulging my inner pedant.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
While I disapprove of him generally, and don't trust his Constitutional analysis as far as I could throw it, I do have to sympathize with his bemused "this is what I talked about doing" refrain. It was, and if I was in his shoes I would probably feel equally bemused and annoyed that the media flips its lid every time I implemented another point of the program I'd been very loudly advocating for years, as if I'd gotten elected under false pretenses and revealed hidden true colors. I'd wager he's less concerned with the exact wording of the law than with a sense of… fair play? "Well I said I'd do all this, and the American people elected me anyway in full knowledge of that, so it can't be as outrageous and anti-democratic as my enemies are now claiming."
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
I repeat, there is no viable political or legal solution
Not if you treat "politics" as a zero-sum popularity contest to determine whose side will get to steamroll over the other one in all cases and in all respects. There is an obvious solution if we introduce such concepts as negotiation and compromise.
The way I see it, the school boards are stubbornly refusing to give an inch on "stop showing sexually explicit LGBT material" because they think that giving in would lead to a slippery slope. In short order they'd face a general ban on LGBT materials in schools, and, down the line, a federal ban on homosexuality in general. While a few zealots and a few perverts might specifically want the pornography, it is not the primary concern of the school boards or the general-purpose LGBT activists.
The obvious solution here is meeting in the middle, with credible enforcement mechanisms to enforce the compromise in the long term. The Left pledges to have a zero-tolerance policy for pornographic materials in school; the Right pledges not to play any games like redefining non-explicit LGBT material as "pornography" to artificially extend that ban. Write both of these policies into law, and enforce those laws. Solved. Equilibrium.
It is the civilized solution, and the only reason it couldn't work - the very reason the school boards are refusing to be the ones who take the first step in that direction - is the very existence of rhetoric like yours on both sides. If the loudest voices on the opposite side are always ranting about how there's no point in trying to compromise and they should just exterminate the enemy, you're not going to want to play the mug's game of negotiating with these people. You'll conclude that you should just exterminate the enemy. In fact, if anyone on your side looks like they're thinking about negotiation, you might start ranting very loudly about how pointless that would be… And there you have it, vicious cycle. But I believe that vicious cycle of mutual paranoia can be broken; if it couldn't, we wouldn't have civilization in the first place. Someone's just got to be the bigger person eventually.
The typical retort is that what there is, is a chance of survival for the human race in the event of total catastrophe befalling the Earth, albeit in reduced circumstances. Now sure, this is such a remote concern that it would be unlikely to motivate nations to make the expense. But that may say more about nations than about the soundness of the idea (depending on how much you value the survival of the human race).
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