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Interesting question of where to set the clock and what counts as grace, given how atrocious the original decision was.
Yeah, response was much more muted than I expected.
The malicious compliance/indeterminate regulation (choose your charity level) has probably killed a few high-risk people.
LOL. Moving on-
Probably, yes. Alternatives aren't fairing much better in my experience though.
70 years ago, yes: post-war optimism, being the main country that mattered and wasn't wrecked, fairly strong sense of national unity. 50 years ago it was already declining.
Distinct lack of alternatives. Information control works if you manage it; it's much, much harder to manage now. Harder to hide the sneering contempt and the high/low cultural differences.
Define "flawed." All models are imperfect; some are useful.
We should probably rewind to prehistory, when women risked infection to get back alley abortions with filthy stone age awls. we ought to retvrn to the old ways, where women would give birth and then drop the baby in the ocean or jungle.
Is the joke that the 10 million refugees is the defection, or the angry letters in the newspaper and on tumblr?
Just curious, what are you basing this on? Because I bet if I dug into the history books it wasn't as wonderful as you might imagine. The McCarthy trials and Korean war can't have been universally popular, the scars of Japanese internment, continuing racial segregation, miscegenation laws...even then, setting your norm as the high-water mark the decade after winning a world war and emerging as one of two superpowers does not seem like a solid foundation for a nation.
Besides, we won another global conflict within our lifetimes! The Berlin wall fell, the USSR dissolved and for my childhood the USA was the sole superpower. The budget was balanced and our biggest problem was that the president was getting BJs in the oval office. You really don't think the 90s were another high-water mark?
Had I the time, my thesis would be that the institutions of the 20th century were just as shitty as today. As you say, information control is simply much harder now.
Uniting behind a flawed leader is usually better than no leader at all. Or at least that's what I tell my employees.
Reminds me of a poem.
While I am morally pro-life, I am just enough of a squishy lib at heart to think that abortion shouldn't be banned entirely (at this stage of technology). But I find pro-abortion people viscerally disturbed and pro-choice wildly inconsistent. They really shouldn't have given up on "safe, legal, and rare."
Yes, the several million illegal immigrants was the original defection, and sending a couple dozen to self-proclaimed sanctuary cities that immediately shipped them back was the tiniest possible tat in reply.
MASH was! (Yes, I'm joking and aware the actual war was not nearly as popular, and also years shorter)
Talk about a failed opportunity.
Well yeah, that's kind of the point, and that it was already declining into the 70s (your 50 years ago mark). I think the post-war years were unusually good (though you're absolutely right, not perfect) times, and they set a cultural memory bar that's basically impossible to achieve without that set of circumstances.
We either have to redefine down what a good life and good country is, or we have to find a different route to get there.
Well, absolutely! I'd give my left nut to crank the clock back to late 90s cultural détente, colorblindness, warts and all. Hell, I'd be tempted just for Utopian Scholastic and Frutiger Aero to make a comeback.
But I also think it's cliché for a Millennial to say that the late 90s/early 00s minus the terrorism response were a golden age.
The funniest thing is that most of the increase in the illegal population occurred during our mutually agreed upon golden age, and evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. Although, I often forget that MAGA has retroactively decreed Bush to be a democrat, the same way that every politician elected between prior to 2016 (maybe with some exceptions carved out for Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jackson and Washington) was a democrat.
Even if you argue that there were an extra several million that came during Biden's presidency, this is more a return to a historical trend than 'an invading rapist horde' to paraphrase someone here.
Numbers of illegal immigrants almost seems to correlate with the relative prosperity of the USA to South American countries rather than ICE enforcement, which I'm told was a bipartisan issue in the 90s and early 2000s...
Have you considered that your main complaint with the contemporary US seems to be the culture war, yet your vitriolic hate for Fauci (and apparently Tim Walz?) is itself, culture warring? Even as you decry a lack of national unity, you're just as angry as everyone else.
...why?
No, I missed it. That's...an interesting choice.
I have two, and I'm confident they are growing up in a better world. They'll have significantly more opportunity than I ever had should they choose to pursue it.
You act like the people have no agency or responsibility for themselves. Fauci is still trusted by close to a majority of Americans; there's every possibility that regardless of what Fauci did, half the country would hate him. I worked at the same institute as Fauci and met him in passing, and I'm sure you've read enough of my writing in the past to know I think that the right's fixation on Fauci as a figurehead betrays a near-complete lack of understanding of his actual role/function and is largely a character assassination downstream of resentment about lockdowns.
If you do, it will look like this. The politicians you would like are not the politicians that would win elections.
Can you imagine the CCP cutting funding from Tsinghua or Peking university? The center of gravity around biotech and STEM are shifting towards China, and the only question (in biotech at least) is whether the equilibrium will be that of peers or whether we go the route of low/mid-value manufacturing, aka extinction. NIH is probably getting budget cuts next year too. Ten years from now neo-MAGA will be bitching about how they have to buy their new drugs from China because their elites sold them out, without realizing it was their own retarded policies that got them there.
You want justice? Justice would be the next democratic president coming in and cutting subsidies to farmers, trade schools and other red-coded industries who are trying to fuck over mine. Thankfully, I doubt that would ever happen contrary to what you and Iconochasm think about retaliation from the left.
If this is how culture war is defined, it's too broad to be a useful phrase. By this standard how would you have separated civil rights from culture war? Or would you consider them together?
The "white guy tacos/black pepper is too spicy" thing. The "code talking to white guys" thing. He was self-consciously a DEI pick because Harris or somebody advising her apparently thought she needed another generic old white guy for racist reasons, and they played it up too much. And, frankly and shallowly, I found his mannerisms deeply offputting. Awkward and unserious. Yes, tbf, Trump is also unserious.
I shouldn't hold his wife's comments against him, but the smell the burning tires thing was too weird. Riot fetishism.
I certainly am much more aware of how things work and can guide them better than my family could.
Do you really want me to start ranting about public health and certain populations? I think people have agency. I absolutely think people should take responsibility. What I'm asking is that "experts" also have to take responsibility.
People absolutely have agency. It is unfortunate that the people used that agency to reply to incredible hubris with incredible stupidity.
Either experts have consequences when they're wrong, or you're asking that the lowly public trust them, forever, no matter what, that trust can never be harmed by failures. That is not a reasonable request.
While I do blame him specifically for the mask thing and some degree for his role in GoF funding, I am aware that the singular focus is overblown by most people and that's why I try to consistently specific that I'm using him as a convenient synecdoche, not a sole scapegoat. Whatever I think of his failures during COVID, they were not his alone and he did do good work with PEPFAR; I'll avoid using him as a synecdoche going forward.
The attacks on me are attacks on science things was a self-own, though.
All our conversations and you think I'm on the EA side? It has been too long since we've chatted, hoss.
I'm pretty fond of the current NC AG and I have hopes for his future. He's won multiple elections so far!
Back to the conversation about information control, I can't imagine Tsinghua and Peking hosting significant anti-Xi demonstrations while denying other protests, or... well, I'm not aware of a group that occupies quite the same spot Jews do in American/Western society to draw a good parallel.
I can imagine the CCP cutting funding if they considered the university to be acting against the interests of the Party. Or maybe the specific professors would just disappear for a while and come back singing a different tune. Trump is not so competent.
Yeah definitely, kind of like people that refuse to understand why public transit it so unpopular outside of a tiny group of big cities in the US.
Vengeance is mine, thus saith the Raptr!
Yeah, they'll just reintroduce all the unconstitutional race and sex discrimination, restore the appropriately gerrymandered speech allowances for elite universities about who gets to assault whom, and go back to paying NGOs to bring people into the country illegally without ever normalizing their statuses.
I remember once upon a time we had happier conversations. Can we get back to those? If you've got the time and interest, I've got two questions I've wondered your input on.
One, how can scientific institutions regain the public trust? Do you think there's anything they could do to meaningfully communicate some degree of awareness?
Two, I'm pretty sure we disagree on the topic of affirmative action and how left-racism plays out in the public sphere (media bias, etc) but I wanted to ask anyways. Do you think the left (defined very loosely to include even sane liberals; the phrase used as a matter of convenience rather than strict party lines) will ever change regarding their at-best indifference and sometimes encouragement of anti-white racism, or is that just permanently baked in and people are supposed to take it on the chin?
Probably parts of it were, given that it happened many years before I was alive and history is not my forte. Undoubtedly FC could give you a detailed list of anti-segregationist terrorists who went on to have illustrious careers at Harvard.
Gay marriage may be a better example. Writ large, I'd consider that an example of Mostly Peaceful and Well Intentioned propaganda and PR campaigns which successfully won supermajority support among the American people. And even among those who don't support gay marriage, probably a significant portion have no problem with gay people and just hold some views about the church and sanctity of marriage and whatnot.
But it was largely a campaign won by sympathetic figures you knew in your community, not shitposting on twitter about the hordes of illegal immigrants coming to take your jobs and rape your families. It wasn't won by darkly hinting about how many guns you have, or congressional shenanigans or gerrymandering.
Undoubtedly there are those who'd claim that the left's takeover of Hollywood, the media and institutions etc. are just culture war by a different name. Realpolitik applied to culture war. But realpolitik invariably seems to be an excuse for defection.
Were those racist reasons them thinking that rustbelt/Pennsylvania/Georgian white working class Americans (aka where the election was won) were less likely to vote for a black/black or woman/woman ticket than woman/white man ticket? Because...yeah? Probably true? I'm sure they're not opposed to voting for either black or female candidates (Obama clearly won handily), but on the margin, I would 100% go with Walz or Shapiro or Newsom over Stacey Adams. Are you arguing that there were better-qualified non-white/non-cishet-male candidates that were passed over because Walz is white?
I can guarantee you that physicians in the 50s and 60s (your golden age!) believed much dumber things than they do now, and they nevertheless enjoyed much higher levels of trust. Thalidomide? Doctors selling out for smoking companies? Tuskegee syphilis experiments? Refrigerator mothers and autism, electroshock therapy, lobotomies? What, exactly, were the consequences for the profession for all that shit, and why was the public too stupid to know better? And I can guarantee you that whatever era of history people want to RETVRN to, the 'experts' believed even dumber shit than they do now.
Your argument should be that nobody ever should have trusted experts.
Don't overindex on the beliefs of the candidate, the point is that you're weird relative to the population norm. If you genuinely liked a politician that much, they're almost certainly unpalatable to the general population. I can't imagine you hold the combination of positions most electable in any given campaign year.
I've been here for 7 years, give or take. I'd estimate I've read >95% of the top-level posts in that time, although I rarely participate. Somewhere along the line I lost interest in people bashing Fauci and other causes I care about while nodding sympathetically, patting them on the back and censoring myself.
With the caveat as always that I don't really know what I'm talking about; they can't. They haven't lost the public trust, they've lost the trust of Republicans. Pandering to one would piss off the other. Probably best case scenario is that they fade into the background over the next 5-10 years and win bipartisan support in the senate (which is still holding, by the way).
In the meantime, people can stop vaccinating their kids and take supplements instead of chemo I guess. They're free to make their own choices.
I'm pretty far removed from anyone deep down those rabbit holes, but the chasm between the way you see things and the way they do is...significant.
I'm far from the first person to say this, but the left and, to a large extent, normies, support the underdog. So long as blacks and other minorities are the underdogs, there's going to be an urge to perpetrate what you call anti-white racism. I feel like this has been shifting for men vs. women given the way women outperform men in school and outnumber them in university. I wonder if the dam would have broken already were it not that 1) women still make less than men on average (debate the data/methodology of that all you will, it's a nice figure to quote to normies) and 2) women are much better organized and understand the game significantly better than most men.
I also think it's why I believe 2015-2020 were so damaging to the right (all the shootings and gun rhetoric and threats) and why the last few months have been so damaging to the left. If the right can position themselves as victims of leftist violence rather than threatening paramilitary men with all the guns, the mainstream will bail on the left pretty quickly. People don't like assassinations and domestic terrorism.
But what do I know, I've been largely wrong about every prediction I've made in my tenure here.
Communist Terrorists, actually.
Consider the term "homophobe", intentionally chosen to frame opposition to LGBT as mental illness. Consider the sheer amount of propaganda in media and film, where anyone opposed was a violent, low-class, slovenly bigot, probably a criminal, or perhaps at best an ignorant, withered old church lady. This went on for more than a decade, and grew so hackneyed that it spawned a second-order meme of "not that there's anything wrong with that", to encapsulate the pervasive moral obligation that permeated culture. The Westborough Baptist Church was framed as the modal opponent of Gay Rights in the culture. A murder over drug money was framed as a hate-killing and blown up into national news, followed by new federal laws to combat the danger of hate crimes against homosexuals.
And as @gattsuru often notes, it worked. You won. Those you did not persuade, you shamed and abused and harassed into silence. "Protected Class" law formalized this for employment, the media and the Academy handled it everywhere else. As several Blue Commenters have straightforwardly stated it over the years, we lost, so it's our turn in the closet for a couple decades.
How fortunate that this sort of political hardball had zero negative consequences of any kind.
Are you beetlejuice? Or do you, gattsuru and germ have some kind of discord group? I don't see how else you could find a 6 day old comment in a two week old thread, short of trolling my comment history or someone else doing so and reporting everything I write.
It's foolish to ignore the actual issue being discussed and chalk it all up to what you view as a propaganda apparatus, both because you're ignoring a half dozen other issues (gun control? trans people? climate change? Taxation and social welfare?) that failed to achieve anywhere near the same level of unity and because you're going to fail when you try to spin up your own propaganda apparatus.
...political hardball? Winning the hearts and minds of a significant majority of the population is not political hardball. You're so blinded by your obsession with realpolitik, so deeply steeped in the culture war and obsessed with small-minded zero sum games that you can't see anything beyond conflict and winning or losing. You can't even reflect on whether the change was a net benefit to the country, you're just bitter that 'your side lost.'
Is a more perfect union simply one where your side wins, and blue tribe is eradicated? And what comes after that? You'd just fracture into normiecons and groypers, neolibs and church fundamentalists and repeat the cycle. Your path is just one of endless conflict.
Tell me, then, your model of ethically influencing the electorate without playing 'political hardball.' Or are you so far gone as to think it's impossible?
I don't have anything to say about the actual topic at hand, but I'll note that I usually browse the site via the comments feed and thus am not usually aware of age of the "threads" the comments are in. I also frequently take days if not weeks or months (or years on occasion...) to finish writing non-trivial responses to comments. This combination naturally leads to exactly the behavior you're observing without the need of a discord group or trolling comment histories. Text forums are asynchronous; not everyone will or even can respond immediately. That doesn't mean they are stalking you.
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