laxam
1yr ago
It has been quite the journey over the last decade seeing this general space, in its various homes, drift from being a place for a variety of dissenters, idle imaginers, original thinkers, and malcontents to being just another space for Trumpers to get together and gripe about everyone but themselves.
laxam
1yr ago
Hearts and minds of people who matter, not yours.
No shit. They need cash and weapons now, not the support of internet contrarians who will always hate them because they had the audacity to be invaded by the Russians.
laxam
8mo ago
I feel that the conservative movement has come to a healthier space where they differentiate the university and educational establishment that they hate from intellectualism in general. This worry did not materialize.
Trump essentially killed the conservative movement. It's not healthy, the old base now hates it and it's institutions have had to choose between sacrificing their souls or irrelevance. Just go to a MAGA space and say the word 'neocon' and see what happens.
MAGA doesn't even trust Conservative intellectual institutions. What progress is still being made (say, what's happening in Florida), is localized, not part of the national movement, which has shattered and died in most places.
I highly doubt Clint Eastwood was trying to hint at white replacement in Gran Turino. By reducing everything to white and not-white, I think you're missing some nuance in terms of dying urban white ethnic communities, romanticism for the glory days of blue collar Midwestern America, what the real meaning of American values is, etc etc.
It's honestly a very conservative movie and there's plenty in it that doesn't just skirt boundaries today, but outright leaps over them. For example, Clint gets out of his beat up old American truck to point a gun at a bunch of young black men -- acting like stereotypical hoods, of course -- then subsequently chastises a young white kid for acting black (although not in so many words). It's also the last movie I've seen to feature what used to be a super common phenomenon of blue collar American men calling each other very offensive slurs as a term of endearment/form of screwing around for fun. It actually is still decently common in the right circles, it would just never be portrayed positively or innocently in a movie anymore.
I guess it can be confused as a movie for Great Replacement messaging, but only because the replacement has already happened in a lot of American urban areas. Clint represents a relic of a piece of America that is already gone, it just happens to pattern match to modern fears.
Edit: To add on a bit more....
I think Gran Turino is ultimately about how the last generation of American immigrants has some important things to pass on to the current generation of American immigrants. It is absolutely positive on American values and, indeed, the thing that the movie portrays the Hmong as superior to Clint's own family at is exactly that: family. It doesn't really make Clint seem worse than the Hmong, just Clint's family, who have gotten selfish and stopped caring about their father (ignoring and dismissing him, to the degree of wanting to stick him in a home and forget about him).
It still portrays everything about those values in Clint as, if not superior to what the Hmong family has, at least having some important things to pass on to the Hmong children about being Americans. Clint's actual children have abandoned that aspect of their heritage and so he passes it on to someone who will have it, instead.
laxam
1yr ago
I do not understand the obsession with using precious metals as currency. Why is it better for the value of your currency to be at the whims of a commodity market as compared to managed by a central bank? Are the value of these coins (presumably) going to be pegged to some USD price? Free floating exchange rate? Why would anyone use these as opposed to USD?
Options are always nice. Central banks don't always do a great job managing their currencies and, while metallic standards aren't perfect, they're a workable alternative when your central bankers are having a live one.
laxam
10mo ago
I am annoyed by how weak the Republicans are. Increasingly, 2016 seems to be a flash in the pan.
2016 wasn't a flash in the pan, it was a brick wall that all the momentum the right had been building since 2010 smashed to pieces against.
laxam
10mo ago
There was no momentum in 2010.
The Republicans won the largest seat number in the House they had won since 1946 and the largest individual seat gain for either party since 1948. And, of course, the momentum didn't stop there: They won more seats total in the House in 2014 than they'd had in any year since 1928. The GOP went from controlling 10 state legislatures in 2010 to controlling 25 after the 2016 elections, they took enough individual chambers to drive the Democrats down to unified control of just 5 total state legislatures, and went from occupying 23 to occupying 34 gubernatorial seats. Obama apparently presided over the Democrats losing more than 1000 downballot offices in his two terms.
The Republican Party was at an apex of its power going into 2016 that it hadn't seen in a century. Trump barely squeezed out an EC victory from that and ran behind the rest of the party everywhere, then presided over a Democratic landslide in 2018.
This:
The Republicans didn't do anything wrong
is nonsense. They totally failed to live up to the expectations of a big portion of their base and so they got saddled with Donald Trump, who drives turnout for the Democrats at least as well as he does for Republicans, and dramatically better in midterm years. Had they done something to appease enough of the base that Trump's impact on the 2016 primary was as big as his impact on the 2012 primary and the Party went into the 2016 election with anyone more acceptable to the broader public, we'd be in a wildly different place.
laxam
1yr ago
This is a lot of words to write, "I don't understand why aggregate statistics don't apply to the individual".
Subsets of aggregate data can move in different directions from the summary statistics of the whole dataset. Trying to understand why people don't take selected macro statistics as gospel truth about their own lives is, to use a common phrase, extremely out of touch.
And stuff like this:
- Republicans think the economy is doing absolutely terribly, much worse than Democrats think, and 3) that most of this perception difference is because Biden, a Democrat, currently occupies the White House.
Is bordering on outright delusional. There are more Americans than just Democrats and Republicans and you don't get 55% fair/poor personal financial situation from just Republicans (no matter how much I'd love for 55% of Americans to be Republicans, alas).
What's actually going on here is that the chattering classes and the politicians and bureaucrats they support are finding, once again, that they can't actually tell people what to think about their personal lives. It's baldly obvious that this group doesn't actually know what they're talking about any functionally better than most people and that their ability to cite macro statistics is more an attempt to cast a magic spell than a real explanation of ground truth.
laxam
8mo ago
History is more contingent than that. And it's not clear that MAGA is particularly well equipped to perform better. The old Movement Conservatism elected Presidents and won elections, too. Outside of Trump himself, MAGA has mostly lost Republicans elections over the last eight years and I'd bet it'd lose this one, too, if the Democrats hadn't chosen an invalid and then an incompetent to be their standard bearers.
laxam
9mo ago
It may well be that a reasonable balance for ports vs port workers involves this thug and his hangers-on being sent off to prison for economic wrecking, mass sackings and prompt automation.
Good.
But similarly reasonable balances may be imposed on unruly, arrogant tech-bros by the rest of society.
Good.
Productivity is the source of wealth. Holding productivity back in pursuit of rents is how you get extended (ie. century long) periods of economic stagnation.
What happens when we automated the dock workers, automated the factory workers, automate the retail workers... who will be left to go on strike when they automate us? And then where is our leverage to negotiate anything in the future?
What does happen when they automate all the farm work? Where will we go?
-- Farm laborer, 1860, when 70% of the population worked in agriculture.
laxam
1yr ago
The really screwy thing about black representation in ads is that the 70% despite being only 13% elides that a huge number of these black people in ads are generic middle class black people (often, but blessedly less than in the past, light skinned). For a people who are disproportionately poor, it really seems like the TV ad execs want to ignore that most black people exist.
laxam
1yr ago
Israel was well on the way to coming to an understanding with its neighbors prior to 10/7.
The role of the global hegemon here, if we're really talking about 'just do whatever creates stability' would be take the population of Palestine, break it up into families, and scatter them around the globe, then decapitate the regime in Tehran and hand the reins over to a transitional government and leave. The Middle East would calm down very quickly.
laxam
8mo ago
W wasn't even a neocon. Although the Bushes like 'compassionate conservatism', they were really just the wild Northeastern Establishment reaching it's dead hand forward into the 21st century.
The neocons were a core part of Movement Conservatism, from the beginning. They had no special connection to foreign policy and the weight of anti-war sentiment coming down on them was more a creation of left wing anti-war media than something central to the neocons themselves. While Reagan's three legged stool makes clear the neocons weren't the only part of the conservative movement, Trumpism has also abandoned the other two legs: the social conservatives have been thrown under the bus on abortion and the business conservatives/fiscal hawks have been shown the door both in rhetoric and actual practice.
The Old Right/Paleos have essentially entirely won the battle and so the Conservative Movement is dead. The Conservative Movement in America was something that grew out of the collapse of the Old Right in the face of the Eisenhower Presidency as essentially another path for opposing the New Deal Consensus. While the. Social base of the MAGA movement allowed for this revival of Paleoconservatism, the base of the New Right in the suburbs is moving Left too rapidly for the New Right to ever revive, so Movement Conservatism is essentially dead. Evangelicals will continue their deal with the devil and Business Conservatives will dither over what to do: go to the Democrats and just pray their socialist wing can be kept under control or try to influence MAGA to be more friendly to them.
But the old Movement is 100% gone.
laxam
9mo ago
Ukraine... gets its independence and neutrality guaranteed by ... Russia
Ukraine already has that. What else you got?
laxam
10mo ago
External Gender: When people greet me, they say "ma'am" instead of "sir". There's a wealth of subtler behaviors, but the basic idea here is that people perceived as "female" get treated differently than people perceived as "male".
This is the 'gender role' terminology: The social role played by a particular gender.
Internal Gender: I prefer being called "ma'am", and am happier when my external gender is "female". In a lot of magical stories, a character has their sex transformed by some magic. "Internal Gender" is when a character wants to transform back, which is fairly common. "Internal Gender" is the idea that if you body-swapped with your mom, you'd still want to be called "him" despite the uterus.
And this is the 'gender identity' or 'gender performance', depending on the exact thing being discussed: Either that internal feeling of what 'gender' you are or the behaviors that feel natural to you on account of your felt 'gender'.
But here is the hard part: What is 'gender' separate from all of those individual nouns? What does the modifier 'gender' alone mean in front of all of these?
The truth is that it's an empty signifier unless you treat it as as synonym for 'sex'. But that has a whole lot of implications that aren't like by the kind of activist theorists who invented 'gender' as something different: Someone with a 'gender identity' discordant with their physical sex has a body dysmorphia, for example, and not something more deeply psychologically central. If that's true, the drive to 'affirming' care runs up on the rocks of evidence based medicine, where it's not entirely clear that that paradigm is actually the best. And it also means there are only really two genders, because sex and gender are the same thing and there are, in humans, only one big gamete and one little gamete and the machinery to produce each (which may or may not actually work in any particular implementation). That means that the 'nonbinary' clique is a philosophically incoherent trend, rather than anything more meaningful (not like there is anything wrong with that -- there's a reason punk ranges from anarcho-communist radicals to skinhead Nazis: there's something at a the heart of punk that doesn't make sense or, more likely, there's really nothing there but loud, angry music).
But these results are disturbing, so the desperate pretense must be continue.
laxam
2yr ago
This guy goes up in the lift with her and propositions her. I do understand why she'd feel at risk in a confined space with a possibly drunk guy where she has no idea how he'll react (and her being possibly drunk and tired as well didn't help with how she reacted or felt).
If this is a big enough worry for someone, it may be worth following a reverse-Pence rule and actively avoiding getting into confined spaces with young men.
laxam
10mo ago
Is not wearing a tie lazy?
Yes.
Should we be concerned about male modesty?
Yes.
Is this supposed to be that hard?
Land value taxes are good because they're extremely efficient and minimize deadweight loss in the tax system (intuition: Taxing something means you have less of it because you're causing a marginal decrease in the supply of that thing, whether it's labor, capital, or consumption goods. New land is not generally produced, so taxing land value minimizes the loss from that decrease in supply).
100% land value taxes are no more just than 100% taxation on anything else and are a form of paternalism at the end of the day.
The Trump era has been a historic disaster for the Republican Party downballot. After fighting and clawing it's way into centuriate power during the Tea Party era, reaching a peak of state and local power in 2016 unmatched since the 1920s, the anti-Trump backlash drove them out of power everywhere in 2018 and 2019.
They have the luck that the Democrats really suck at not just assuming they will hold power forever, so driving yet more backlash, but people in many places would rather have Democratic leftists over Trumpist conspiracy theorists (even if that is a near run thing).
The fact that the crazies have gained local party power in a lot of places is going to be a hobble on the party's performance for a long time. Arizona -- what is probably still a light red state in natural circumstances -- is probably going to be become blue just because the AZGOP is nuts.
My local party has stayed mostly sane, thankfully, so hopefully we can finish pushing the Democrats who won county control for the first time in half a century back into minority status. We'll see.
laxam
2yr ago
It's oppositional defiant disorder spreading to older whites. While ODD is something that is, from time to time, provided as a cause for black youth underperformance in schools, it's not something you've seen attributed to older whites. The perception of mistreatment by authority creates a permanent attitude of anger and defiance.
This can sometimes feel like just part and parcel of the way modern society seems to outright encourage mental illness in the general population. Attitudes and outlooks that, given time to fester, can develop into something almost clinical are celebrated and spread far and wide, coping mechanisms and other attempts to deal with mental health issues like this are denigrated and people are exhorted to reject them.
I don't really know what should be done about it. It has kind of metastasized into a pan-social malady that can't be addressed entirely because it's distributed and deeply entrenched.
I'm waiting for a non-self-referential definition of gender that doesn't just mean 'sex'.
So far, nobody has answered me.
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