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Recently @RandomRanger accused me of strawmanning the Right:
Did I strawman the Right? Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:
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.
Alex is definitely here reading all the comments, yet the only time he ever responds is a 1 sentence dig at what he believes is a mistake a commenter made.
To the dozens of high effort well researched posts, it's radio silence for every single one. Alex has not made a single substantiative response downthread in this thread or any other thread he started.
I'm not sure whether only responding to the very weakest of your opponents counts as a strawman, but it's certainly infuriating.
Ehhh.. there's a ton of sophistry on the internet, The Motte is no exception. Let's not pretend this is the Library of Alexandria or the old salons of Europe. There is an occasional interesting and well-thought out post, but those are mostly an exception. This is why I mostly lurk and now just skim top level posts for an interesting topic. It's probably best to view this site as a place where somewhat rightwing malcontents talk amongst themselves with an occasionally centrist or somewhat liberal poster chiming in.
Look, I used to be quite liberal, but back in the "age of woke" I got turned against progressive idiocy. I read SSC, Less Wrong, Steve Sailer, etc. and that helped me see the overreach and sometimes straight out wrongness of the mid 00-10's progressive and liberal ideologies. However, I never dug that deep beyond some rightwing/centrist thinkers. Now that a lot of the right is either in power or in the spotlight (see X), I see how stupid much of it is. Politicians talking about banning chemtrails, TACO Don who doesn't understand trade beyond a general love of tariffs and wants to continue scamming his supporters (e.g. formerly Trump University, now Trump Coin, Trump scent, etc.), and to quote SSC, the spineless toady JD Vance. It's just all so stupid! Well, stupid and malicious. It reminds me of an older meme about Pakistan; that they'd be 100% ok with the world blowing up as long as India was destroyed first.
There are strong arguments to be made about some right wing positions, e.g. reducing the deficit, decoupling from China, demanding NATO allies pay more, on-shoring, etc. but these clowns are just bad at this. The BBB adds to the deficit, tariff schizophrenia doesn't allow for a stable and long term industrial policy, etc.
The left might be wrong a lot of times, but that doesn't make the current right correct.
Dunking on maga is great but you should be expected to explain and defend your position. Not drop a cryptic reply like "I'm anti third-worldism." several times and never explain what that means.
As far as I know the "official" definition, as an obsolete cold-war political movement, has nothing to do with the current right at all.
Your posy by itself does a better job dunking on maga than any of Alex's sneering walls of text.
Here he is with a related take though still not a coherent or contextually-appropriate one.
Am I understanding this correctly?
Alex believes that the first world is better than the third world. And actually the racists who want to deport all the immigrants from the third world are somehow actually the ones making the first world into the third world? Meanwhile unlimited immigration from the third world is no big deal?
I don't know what he thinks because I've never seen him try to articulate it instead of making snippy comments at people who are trying to understand. At this point I don't really care what he thinks and frankly I interpret any apparent effort on his part as likely to be a trolling operation.
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