pigeonburger
19d ago
I think at that point a big enough portion of the normie-right still believed that the hostages could be saved, that these hostile institutions had to be preserved even if sometimes you had to account for their biases. COVID certainly had an effect as to demonstrate how captured institutions could be weaponised against them. I think another aspect that pushed the normie-right towards preferring burning it all down rather than living with the captured institutions is the insistance from institutions, in and around the same years, on allowing kids to transition without their parents' approval; to a conservative parent, nothing could feel more like an existential threat.
pigeonburger
19d ago
Of course the right doesn't have any replacement, outside of "rogue" doctors and scientists who by being outside of the medical establishment will cluster around non-central views.
But you can hardly blame them; just telling the right to shut up and inject whatever people that have already clearly revealed themselves to be their ideological enemies tell them to is not going to go smoothly. Even if they cannot really tell whether what they're asked is harmful or not, the people telling them to do it are not trustworthy anymore.
It's the same with libraries; having a place funded by the community where kids can discover reading material for free is great, perhaps even important, and I think everyone in that community would agree with in general. But if the librarians insist they must host drag queen story hour, and that this is not a negociable part of its functions, despite it being considered unacceptable by a very large part of the community, then they shouldn't be surprised if the answer is to cut funding to the library, even if it affects the non-objectionable part of its functions.
Basically, the left is learning, a bit late, that they cannot hold important impartial societal functions hostage to get their way in politics. The right is willing (and increasingly able) to shoot the hostages to remove the threat.
pigeonburger
19d ago
be a fan of measures which promote public safety?
If they knew for sure that they did, they might. But when they see the medical establishment visibly torturing the science to fit the progressive agenda in subfields that are legible to laypeople (see again, transgenderism, or the immediate endorsement of BLM protests from the american medical establishment despite the pandemic), the result is distrust of the pronouncements in the subfields that are not as legible. If you're lying to my face about something that I can independantly observe, why would I just shut up and believe you when it comes to something I'm not able to observe?
pigeonburger
19d ago
It's simple, over the last decades, the left has succesfully taken over multiple fields through academia, including medicine, and there is a fear from conservatives that this political capture is tainting the quality of the science that comes out of it. In some fields of medicine, particularly those at the intersection of hard sciences and social sciences, for instance study of the transgender phenomena, it's hard to argue that the conservatives don't have a massive point. In more hard science aligned ones, such as which drugs are effective/dangerous, it's less legible, but the conservatives do have (IMO) a smaller point that the left relishes the power to force public policy and is not wielding it objectively. The gleefulness with which they they resorted to coercive methods to force people to vaccinate during COVID is a great example.
pigeonburger
22d ago
"loose bulk will shift during flight and create dangerous center-of-gravity,"
Actually, I saw something about how dangerous it is for ships, I imagine it's similar issues for planes.
pigeonburger
24d ago
Maybe they just want to grill Gaben as to when Half-Life 3 is finally coming.
pigeonburger
24d ago
I don't know, I think there's a demand for that kind of show, something that everyone could discuss together that isn't fiction, that reminds people that they are part of an actual nation with a shared culture, and not just participants in an economic opportunity zone.
Maybe it's just that I'm old enough to remember how it felt that TV was a shared experience rather than something everyone did separately and the younger generations have no interest in it.
pigeonburger
24d ago
I know, we are also building some new stuff sometimes, at enormous cost and effort. It's just that sometimes, when I snap out of the stupor of familiarity and actually look around at some of the infrastructure that we take for granted I'm appalled that we're okay with the state much of it is in, even for infrastructure that is clearly vital.
pigeonburger
24d ago
To add to that point about the ruins, I've had that feeling many times. I don't know about American infrastructure as much, but in my city, infrastructure is such a problem that just maintaining it becomes a bigger project (more expensive, more disruptive, longer, more divisive) than building it was in the first place. They've been renovating a bridge-tunnel built in the 60's. It cost 1 billion dollars ajusted to inflation to build and took 4 years. The renovation costs (so far) 2.7 billion and it's been 4 years already with no end in sight. There's a metro station that I remember when I was a teen looked alright, then when I started working as a young adult they had to temporarily take some wall panels out to deal with water infiltration. That was 20 years ago, the panels are still off and the walls keep looking worse and worse and you can see the precarious fixes they just kept applying, chicken wire holding pipes and gutters, funnels to move leaks and hastily bolted corrugated metal sheets patches over cracks. It's like we're children playing in the ruins of a more advanced civilisation.
pigeonburger
24d ago
The viewership has decreased, but many people still find these shows to be a comfy way to unwind at the end of the day.
Ultimately, though, that is pretty much the reason why these hosts are being cancelled. It's become clear to top execs since last november that Trump's supporters, even if they can't see them in their filter bubbles, are real people that exist and are not consuming their product. Late Night shows are supposed to be comfy, to everyone. Sure, the efforts they had done to be fairer since the election, on their own, wouldn't be enough to bring back Republicans, not for a few years at least. But when these media execs see one of their star hosts saying very un-comfy things about half the country, what's going through their mind is probably some variation on "No fucking wonder they want nothing to do with us!"
Third, progressives have to organize around a single morality, centered on empathy, both personal and social responsibility and excellence – being the best person you can be, not just for your own sake, but for the sake of you family, community and nation. All politics is moral; it is about the right things to do. Get your morality straight, learn to talk about it, then work on policy. It is patriotic to be progressive.
If this was published in 2011, it was a year away or less from being shattered by Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", which, among other things, explain very convincingly why western liberal morality fails to resonate with most people outside of western urban centers. Spoiler alert: it is the western liberals that are the moral mutants, with a narrower understanding of morality than pretty much every other human being on earth that ever lived. Doubling down on narrow morality is not going to help progressives communicate better to the masses, on the contrary.
But I guess if you define progressivism as that narrow morality, and everything else is conservatism then yeah, tautologically you can't really argue that expanding it is not letting in filthy conservative values into people's brains. But it's not driven by understanding the world, but by being blind to the idea that other concepts of morality exist and no, they're not all inherently conservative.
*EDIT: And I include myself very much in the western liberals here, even though I disgree with them more often than not, it's how I grew up, and having been made aware of and understand them intellectually, I still struggle to link the feeling of the violations of those moralities to intellectual condemnation of them.
I think the definition of cancel culture and censorship used commonly is too narrow to explain what this actually looks like to the right.
Cancelling could (and should, IMO, to capture the whole means and goals of it) be defined as attempting to impede someone's ability to live a normal life as punishment for speech considered beyond acceptability by the canceller. It's never been just the workplace that's a target, it's also pressuring friends and family to cut ties, pressuring the school the kids of the person go to, etc... By that definition, an assassination is the ultimate cancellation (and a normal cancellation is a limited "character assassination"). What the right sees right now is that a long term campaign of implying that the milquetoast right wing beliefs that Kirk had made him Turbo Hitler made enough people believe that he was Turbo Hitler that the always statistically possible but usually unlikely person with the mix of ability, opportunity, recklessness and belief necessary to succesfully carry out an assassination actually turned up, and then as a response a large contingent (and I'm happy to note it's not all of them) keeps it up, even while saying something they obviously don't really believe like "I didn't really want anyone to kill Kirk..." they keep the cancellation/dogwhistle going with "... but let's not forget he was Turbo Hitler". If you see it that way, then it's not so much that the right has full control of the cancellation apparatus and is using it unilaterally to punish the left, but more of a messy struggle.
pigeonburger
27d ago
Enough happenings in one week for Billy Joel to make a new "We Didn't Start The Fire"
pigeonburger
28d ago
I agree some of it should be counted (almost everything done by antifa/black blocs), but a lot should be counted as opportunistic violence committed under the cover of ideology.
I've known of it for a long time (and actually learned how to sing it in Italian, a language I don't speak) in my tankie/left-anarchist college days. It's significance would be very well known, way before the show, by leftie academic types I would think. But outside of them, I've also heard it sung in friends and family gathering, in random music shows, for decades, and I'm not italian. It's a very well known song in general. Maybe younger people have had more chances of being exposed to it through Casa de Papel, but it's been floating around in general culture for a long time.
pigeonburger
29d ago
It's not necessarily that unfair, because the "ambushed" side has the benefit of chosing whether or not to engage, whereas the professional looks bad if he refuses to debate someone, no one will know about the amateurs that don't show up. The amateur can research the specific point they want to make beforehand, has the benefit of researching the person they will debate beforehand... Knowing that you're going to go against someone who does that professionally, you would assume that they've already encountered every easy surface level arguments. But yeah, some people just look at "easy looking" carnival games and assume that there's nothing funny going on, just like I imagine some people look at a "debate me" event from a pro-gun person and think they never considered school shootings can and have happened. Still, they walked in it of their own accord; and it's a lot fairer than gotcha vox-pop you see on TV.
If you want to annoy a powertripping cop, giving him an excuse to do what he really wish he could do is not the way to go. Complying until he realises he's wasting his time and he's not going to get you to snap in a way that gives him licence to treat you as uncooperative and belligerent is a much smarter own.
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