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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   31790 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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Recently @RandomRanger accused me of strawmanning the Right:

Turok was being banned for being overtly aggressive and obnoxiously creating imaginary narratives like "The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain."

That's not what the 'woke right' thinks and he surely knows it. He need only check the MAGA rhetoric from Trump about good factory jobs, or the rhetoric from the right about the need to mechanize dull fruitpicking jobs and raise productivity. Why, they say, should millions of people be brought into the country if AI is going to destroy everyone's jobs? Or the need to have American wealth kept in America rather than sent off in remittances. Or them hating H1Bs as cost-cutting that interferes with developing talent. Or them not seeing the country as purely an economic zone but having responsibility to native citizens. It's an insanely uncharitable and aggressive butchering of other people's ideology.

Did I strawman the Right? Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:

FOX: I think American citizens are willing to do the jobs that illegal immigrants are willing to do.

LORI CHAVEZ-DeREMER: Americans are willing to do the job. What we have to give them is the opportunity to have those jobs.

DeRemer refers to "Americans," the online racialist Right is talks about whites, but in both cases the vision is the same, uplifting the ingroup means getting them the opportunity to do the jobs currently done by the guy standing in the Home Depot parking lot. Is there any wonder high-income whites are moving away from the Republican Party? Working-class whites, too, don't want their sons working casual labor, which is why in the video DeRemer goes on to talk about how Americans will be given opportunity through being "skilled, upskilled, re-skilled" and how the Trump administration is increasing apprenticeships. Of course, few illegals do those high-skilled jobs, so upskilling Americans won't replace many illegals, but it's not like the Fox News host is going to point out the apparent contradiction.

Given that I've given an example from a cabinet-level Trump administration official, (not "nutpicked" from some rando on Twitter) I expect that @RandomRanger will withdraw his claim that I "obnoxiously created imaginary narratives" in the interests of truth and courtesy.

  • -38

Let me demonstrate how irritating you're being.

"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask Sam Brinton."

"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask Anthony Weiner."

"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask Jasmine Crockett."

"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask AOC."

You are not strawmanning. You are weakmanning. You are not giving your political opposition the benefit of the doubt. I have a whole list of leftist politicians, intellectuals, and academics that have said embarrassing and stupid things I'd like you to defend, if you'd care to play at this particular joust.

If AOC says something and isn't broadly getting a lot of pushback from her party, that would be quite indicative that at least a major fraction of the left believed something, or at least doesn't disagree with her. This is not weakmanning.

It is still weakmanning to insist that [someone] else speaks for [group X] because arbitrary-subjective sections of [group X] weren't sufficiently vocal in denouncing [someone].

I just don't think that's true. If AOC says something like "abolish ICE" and a decent chunk of the Democratic party waffles as to whether they agree, then it's reasonable to say that a decent chunk of the party is at least sympathetic to the idea, even if they don't explicitly endorse the literal statement.

I think this is broadly true, but also requires notation of exceptions. the Democrat Party (and the Blue Tribe more broadly) is pathologically incapable of policing its' own members, because it's a very loosely-bound coalition of a bunch of different more-tightly-bound groups and the old intra-system methods of policing dissent have broken down in the last decade. So when someone like Kamala Harris or AOC or even Will Stancil says something nuts, there isn't a pathway for dissent to show itself that can't be dismissed as "right wing trolling".

You may not think it's true, but you certainly act as if it's true.

We can all look at your posting history and note that you are not spending your time denouncing or distancing yourself from any given stupid comment by any given political figure. Despite your constant failure to distance yourself from the infinite stupidity of the universe, it would, in fact, be unreasonable to claim that said stupidity represents you to any relevant degree.

There's a difference between "an individual doesn't reject stupid comments by their party" and "the broad mass of believers doesn't reject stupid comments by their party". The latter is much better evidence for the stupid comment being believed.

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