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I want to identify and discuss a stealth-CW trick that I find particularly irritating: the use of (predominately left-leaning) CW positions used as examples in some other piece of work. I mostly notice this in technical articles: you might be reading an article about writing a program that prints to the console, and the example code will say something like:
I find this quite insidious: it normalizes left viewpoints in a way that's hard to argue against. If you try to say anything, you risk being accused of derailing the discussion with irrelevant politics or otherwise being a Bad Person who violates the norms of a forum. Has anyone seen any examples of this and/or successful arguments deployed against it?
Somewhat tangentially, I don't really understand how "eat the rich" isn't read as a really, really extreme position. Yes, I know that literally eating people is tongue in cheek and it isn't earnest advocacy of cannibalism, but the underlying sentiment really is that people that have too much money should have their wealth expropriated by force. This seems at least as ideologically extreme as the sentiments implied by 14 words styling, but one is read as being a literal Nazi and the other one is just a cute hippy slogan. It's really quite remarkable how communist-adjacent positions are inside the Overton Window.
Yes, it is one of the injustices of our culture. The movement of Lenin/Stalin murdered arguably more people than the movement of Hitler, and yet if you parade in a T-Shirt with the portrait of Hitler or swastika, you will never be accepted in the polite society again (rightfully), but if you wear Lenin or hammer and sickle you're at worst an eccentric, and usually just an interesting rebellious soul. I think it's a completely unacceptable situation, but American culture thinks it's ok.
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for the same reason racism against whites is tolerated
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I mean, the steelman of the position is "high progressive tax levels" which were a (leaky) reality within living memory.
You can always wear "tax the rich" - as AOC demonstrated us with her expensive designer dress. This message is pretty safe to show to $30k-per-ticket gala crowd. I wonder if they would accept the original one too - I mean, they are in power, if somebody would have to be designated to be eaten, it won't be them, it would probably be some high-middle-class Republican lawyer or dentist.
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It may be worth noting that it was leaky to the point that effective tax rates were virtually the same as today.
True, but the vast majority of people who say "eat the rich" don't know that.
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What it wasn’t was communist.
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Because people saying nazi slogans mean it, while people saying communist slogans are LARPers in clown costumes.
No one is afraid of contemporary communists, everyone, and especially the rich, knows no world worker revolution is coming, no one is going to seize means of production, no one is going to expropriate the expropriators.
The class war is over (ending on the right). Deal with it.
I think you underestimate ironic Nazi slogan larping.
I'm afraid of contemporary communists not because they'll otherthrow the government, but because it's a clique of smug hypocrites that pull out Marxist slogans to excuse them doing what they want to do anyways, and imagine problems that they can pretend to fix. Infesting and hollowing out subcultures, scenes, and organizations that were created and nurtured by people who have better things to do than jockey for clout.
That's like 90% of 4chan.
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But realistically everyone knows that David Duke or Nick Fuentes would also not leave mass graves behind them, they’d implement outside Overton window policies that are either popular or barely underwater(like immigration restriction, or hard bans on affirmative action).
No one on the left is really worried about David Duke or Nick Fuentes because they are the controlled opposition. The woke correctly identify them as woke-leftists in all but name. The enemy will always tell you who he is afraid and in this case who the woke left is afraid of is obvious. It's people like Rogan, Gabbard, DeSantis, and of course the unholiest of the unholy Trump.
Trump was president, what did he do to help conservatives/reactionaries?
Nick Fuentes literally went to tell him he has to stop whatever he's been doing since being elected and stick to what he was saying in 2016 but harder, as the situation has already considerably worsened.
What does controlled opposition even mean?
Is Ye (Kanye West) controlled opposition when his products get removed from the shelves and his media appearances cancelled?
Trumps efforts to disperse growth unquestionably helped conservatives and arguably bought the Republic a few years. Reactionaries like Fuentes opposed this because they didn't want to see the Republic maintained or restored. On this topic "Conservatives" and "Reactionaries" are not allies as much as they are blood enemies.
"Controlled" in this context refers to existing within and furthering the goals of the left-wing academic memeplex/GloboHomo Agenda/Davos Crowd/Cathedral or whatever you want to call them.
Kanye West is being attacked, and his media blacklisted because he is not controlled.
'disperse growth'? Economic growth?
If Fuentes is controlled then West is as well, since Fuentes works for him.
Fuentes would be his handler.
Fuentes' media is also blacklisted. He was reinstated on twitter 2 or 3 weeks ago and banned again the next day.
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Fuentes in particular seems to have been spun up to foil Turning Point USA, though I suspect that one is controlled opposition also.
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Realistically no one thinks they're going to leave mass grave either.
Because they are the controlled opposition.
Trump is very definitely not controlled, not by the DNC, not by some NWO thing, not even by himself.
My bad, I thought you were talking about Duke and Fuentes.
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What? Duke and Fuentes? The ADL describes fuentes as a "white supremacist leader, organizer and podcaster who seeks to forge a white nationalist alternative to the mainstream GOP". Wikipedia describes duke as "an American white supremacist, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, far-right politician, and former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan". What are you talking about? Who on the 'woke left' identifies them as woke leftists in all but name? How?
Yes. Duke and Fuentes.
A pair of "far right" political figures who just happen to always seem to come down on the side of woke democrats when push comes to shove. The guys that Ryan long was making fun of in his infamous bit
Nick Fuentes believes in a genetic basis of IQ/intelligence that contributes to most of the racial IQ gap, and a total ban on immigration.
Wikipedia claims he has said "Who runs the media? Globalists. Time to kill the globalists" and "I want people that run CNN to be arrested and deported or hanged because this is deliberate.". He opposes feminism and LGBT, is a Christian who opposes atheism, believes in the importance of the "white demographic core" of the US, thinks jews have too much power in the US, and is a "holocaust denier". 'He has stated "You're either a Catholic or you're with the Jews"'.
He also opposes COVID vaccines. He often jokes about hitler.
How does he "happen to come down on the side of woke democrats when push comes to shove"?
The joke in your video is that the 'woke' and the 'racist' come to dumb conclusions on similar issues. Wokes want to hires more blacks, racists want to hire fewer blacks, so they're "both opposed to discrimation laws". A woke thinks 'white privilege' is bad (i.e. white people fundamentally hurt black people), a racist thinks it's a 'privilege to be white' (i.e. white people are better than black people). These aren't at all the same!
How does one come to believe this?
The difference is that while within the context of northern protestant Christianity the difference between a Lutheran and a Episcopalian might seem really important, from without it really isn't. From the perspective of a Catholic, Muslim, or Jew, Protestantism is Protestantism. Or in this case, a democrat who espouses id-pol infused socialism with a post modernist framing is a democrat who espouses id-pol infused socialism with a post modernist framing. I would contend that whatever animosity the people of hair-color might hold towards weirdly neotenous white nationalists largely comes down to the narcissism of small differences.
Like I said, the enemy will always show you who they are afraid of and they are very clearly not afraid of Fuentes.
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Hlynka is a true believer - East German Christian Democrat. He thinks the Socialist Unity Party has corrupted the pure communism found in the writing of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (Martin Luther King), and that if they only stopped being so corrupt, exaggerating the capitalist threat to mask it's own corruption, and shooting people; we would suddenly live in a happy classless society. That violent repression, and permanent revolutionary rhetoric is necessary to avoid the collapse of the inherently dysfunctional communist (colour-blind) regime, escapes him. He will go to his grave claiming that the rare capitalists he stumbles accross are actually Stasi.
Do I get it right.. ... are you accusing Hlynka of being a right winger of the 'democrats are the real racists' school that is quite prevalent among right of center Americans ?
People who think racial disparities in achievement or criminality would disappear if blacks had the right culture / were properly motivated etc ? I don't think he is - he's far too online and clever for that, but it's a type that exist, and I've no idea what to do about them.
He is an anti-racist (not the Kendi type), anti-white identitarian conservative, basically the meme of a “based black man” civic nationalist
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See this prior exchange.
https://www.themotte.org/post/328/smallscale-question-sunday-for-january-22/56816?context=8#context
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The "extreme" way to read this slogan is that the extremely rich should be killed, in which case your indignation would be justified.
The reading that extremely rich people should have their wealth "forcefully expropriated" (AKA taxed) is a position I would consider moderate, and perfectly reasonable in societies with a high enough level of economic inequality.
When I said eat unbaptised babies what I meant was tax unbaptised babies! Yes it's me baphomet, baby tax collector!
I don't think so either, I was responding to the poster claiming that "the forceful expropriation of wealth" is an extreme position when that's the expected behavior of every state since the dawn of civilization.
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Post WW2 jews are in the most prominent positions in media and academia in the country that dictates the 'Overton Window' of the western world.
The 14 words for the state of Israel are not a problem. And so long as the worker revolution is communist and so long as the communism is jewish there are no issues with it. There might be some grassroots opposition to both Israel as a white supremacist ethnonationalist colonialist state and communism as a satanic force of godless mass murderers who don't understand Austrian economics. But that resistance gets mowed if it ever grows to far in an antisemitic direction. Even if it's just Glenn Beck accidentally rattling off all the jewish founders of the Frankfurt School live on air, or an innocent hippy on a Facebook group wondering why Israel isn't taking in more refugees. There are control elements in place to shut those things down. Both Glenn Beck and the hippy will get a talking to about what acceptable opposition to these things looks like and they will either fall in line with the astroturf or get ripped by the root.
That's, for me at least, a theory that neatly explains why things are how they are today with regards to these things.
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I don’t think it is ideologically extreme for billionaires’ wealth to be forcefully taken from them. They violate the spirit of society (as well as capitalism) by lobbying Congress to bring in millions of laborers to strip Americans from high wages. Then they waste this money on whores and yachts, like Bezos, and a few pet progressive projects. They are vermin and I believe it would be better if they were eaten than allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains. They are the single class most responsible for the destruction of the West because the artificial deflation of white collar wages reduces entrepreneurialism (risk-taking and business creation increases with wages/employment to fall back on), and thus they are responsible for reduced development of technology, in addition to reduced fertility and lowered happiness. You violate no ethical principle by wanting to take their wealth forcefully, but violate many by submitting to what they do.
Who is hiring those people to begin with? Or creating those jobs? Yeah, maybe the CEO is google is overpaid relative to the value he produces, but Google has created thousands of high paying jobs. $300k a year is still pretty good even if there is still wealth inequality. White collar wages, like in tech, have exceeded inflation...the opposite of deflation.
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Meanwhile Jeff Bezos:
Of course we could redistribute the wealth Bezos wastes on this frivolous nonsense to ehh... Education (more money and power to cruel and/or inept single women lording over children), Healthcare (but only non-disruptive sort, we need more obese elderly adults in agony, for longer, for many decades!) and of course National Security (alien balloons ain't gonna shoot themselves). Also splurging on financial stimulus for those same corporations we have just looted.
I realize this is an uncharitable reading of public spending. Hopefully you realize that so is your critique of billionaires.
But with the understanding that they must do obesiance in the right ways and to the right people.
The idea is not just robbing Peter to pay Paul, but robbing Peter to pay Peter or Paul, depending on which maximises the probability of re-election.
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Yep, A dollar in the hand of a modern tech billionaire does a lot more good for the world than that dollar in the hand of a government.
Yup..up to a point, coordination problems, blah blah . Tech CEOs cannot create a military to defend themselves.
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This is a ridiculous sentiment in multiple ways. first and most obviously the 'eat the rich' types are definitely more in favor of things like open borders and increased immigrations. Just the lines you're drawing are hopelessly confused. Secondly there is a much easier way to target people pushing harmful policies than using wealth as a proxy, you know, just pick the people actively pushing those policies most are not billionaires, most are the type of people to unironically post 'Eat the rich'. Thirdly, and probably most importantly,
The problem with the economy is not that too much money is being spent on yachts, yacht spending isn't even worth mentioning on economic analysis. These Billionaires by and large are not using their billions to meaningfully distort the market, their wealth is stored inertly in companies that do pie growing business with everyone else. A dollar in Amazon and thus some fraction of a dollar propping up Bezos' net worth is not a dollar out of the pocket of an American, that's a child's understanding of economics. When you "expropriate", which frankly can only be interpreted as nationalizing companies like Amazon, this wealth you'll watch amazed as it evaporates into thin air. This deep resentment people feel towards the wealthy is just ugly crab in a bucket mentality. Punish people who cheat and abuse to become billionaires for cheating and abusing, if you're right that this is the only way to become a billionaire then no sweat off your back, but I think you're dead wrong.
Most billionaires are just regular folk who simply made a lot of money from a successful biz or investment. The vast majority are people you never heard of and are not that involved in politics , except maybe donating to certain causes. They are not globalist types or benefit from crony capitalism.
In fairness to the other side, there is a subset of right-wing eat the rich types. They are popular on 4chan
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The reason the eat the rich left are pro immigration is because they are controlled by billionaire and corporate driven ideologies. False consciousness.
Why all this indirection? Can you not just cut the Gordian knot and go straight to opposing the people who push policies you dislike? What exactly is the conspiracy theory that all billionaires are united against you, despite their apparent total lack of unity, buying you? When you assert that the Koch brothers, Bezos and Soros are all conspiring all this does is make people who have any idea how economics work think you're a delusional crank and it's totally unnecessary to push your policy positions.
I didnt really mention any conspiracy. Capitalists run capitalism in much the same way that feudalists ran feudalism. They don’t get into a room to conspire.
Do you think the Koch brothers, Musk, Bezos' and Soros are pushing in the same direction on policy? How about Oprah?
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You and kulakrevolt ought to get together and discuss your ideas.
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