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So best I can tell security at the recent dinner was somehow even worse than at the campaign event that nearly cost Trump his life. This sounds incredibly stupid but mainstream media reports of the security indicate it is so. And this is in a...storied location no less.
This is also not a situation where things have been calm for a while, we are at war and several attempts have been made, and people have died (ex: Kirk).
Some of this is probably due to security theater elements - security was never good, so it remains not good. You'd think we could make a bit of a change though?
Are all of our institutions really so rotten?
And perhaps more importantly - how many times can we get lucky and how will our civic norms survive when that luck runs out?
Presidents have been assassinated several times before and it has been fine; but Trump is singular (derogatory).
It's hard to know what his , lets call them fans would do, or what they could do; but at least some of his haters have been listening to what he was saying and interpreting it literally, so who knows what THEY would do.
In brief: Yo maybe those were load bearing norms, maybe we shouldn't have started removing struts to save weight, maybe the civility and political correctness and all those cancelations on tumblr I'm told were happening to prevent some real ass Sullian cancelations in the street, type of thing.
Yeah. Because clearly tumblr was a long standing fence in the middle of nowhere that reformers wanted to tear down without understanding why tumblr cancellations were there in the first place.
You joke but that is a true fact. People confused getting yelled at with actually getting prescribed out of existence; they seem to think that nobody should be allowed to make them feel bad and the power of the state should be deployed to that effect.
Yes, I think this is a perfectly valid characterization of their actions.
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It's the other way around. Cancel culture was about a lot more than private citizens / liberals "making people feel bad". Among other incidents:
Chicago citizens were fired from their jobs for making the OK hand signal, because progressives hallucinated that this was a White Supremacist hand signal because of 4chan
Mass censorship campaigns on social media platforms which included government officials emailing i.e. twitter and asking for accounts to be throttled / banned. (In the case of the pandemic specifically, many of the things that would get one censored turned out to be true.)
Academics and university speakers protested for having opinions unacceptable to liberals: this created a really perverse political culture on universities which culminated in e.g. corporations imposing mass DEI policies in the wake of George Floyd because nobody could say out loud that it's illegal to not hire white people because of their race.
Google broke a wonderful search engine that materially contributed to the benefit of all humanity because sometimes when you search the news you can find things that liberals think aren't true.
The host of The Bachelor was fired because he posted comments in defense of a contestant who attended an event at a plantation. The Dr. Seuss company stopped printing several of his books because they contain language progressives now consider unacceptable. James Watson was canceled and dishonored to the point that he had to sell his Nobel because he believes that race and IQ are real.
Cancel culture was real and progressives would have prescribed people out of existence if they had the power to. They clearly tried to many times. Instead of letting them we created a parallel society where they can't do that, which is now mainstream. You are choosing to participate in a forum that abides by these norms, and not by the cancel culture norms progressives tried to ensconce.
To make a little joke, None of those things happened, and if they did happen they didn't happen like that, and if they did happen like that then it was good.
You are gonna need to source me the first claim, it doesn't seem to have happened according to google.
Mass censorship is when fact checked, got it. Crazy that I was actually there during that time and I would have paid money to get away from those types; it's the "I was Canceled!" from the front shelf in the bookstore meme in real life.
Got it, free speech is when you can say whatever you want and if people get mad about it they should restrict their tone and only complain in the free speech zone on designated protest days. The knife cuts both ways, if you get to say what you want as a public figure, the public gets to call you a fascist/marxist depending on which direction the yelling is coming from.
4 and 5: so, the government should step in and force corporations to do things that the public at the time didn't like? Is that your solution? What do you actually want to do about this? When the republicans get washed this year and then again in 2028, should the Dem congress get to kick down the door to twitter and install sensitivity cops on every corner?
Cancel culture was fake, it was conservatives getting a taste of their own bullshit for the first time after 600 years of being on top and instead of realizing "Hey, free speech is great actually" doubling down on "No, only we should be allowed to cancel, now lets gut every US anything that has trans in the title. Transgenic? Transnational? Transorbital? Sounds woke to me."
Fact checking is fine. However, like many other terms, this term got subverted to mean something that does not follow from its naive meaning. What "fact checking" is now is an industry that delivers plausible deniability to governmental and quasi-governmental bodies to exercise censorship by producing third-party "objective" opinions (always aligning with the Party's needs, miraculously) which are used to censor disfavored opinions for being "misinformation". This has very little to do with facts or checking them, about as much as Democratic People's Republic of Korea has to do with democracy. It's a censorship laundering. And the perpetrators did not hide and do not hide right now that the goal is to deny their political opponents the "platform" - i.e. the ability to express and publicize their political speech. The goal is not having better facts, it's having less opposition.
Sure thing. The public figure does not get to use the government suppression apparatus to get me to stop saying those things though. And the public figures in the US did a lot of that recently. In fact, they had massive governmental and taxpayer-paid programs to get people to stop saying things that the government does not approve of saying.
The public figure also does not get to apply the laws differently depending on whether or not you say what the public figure wants. That's also what public figures had been doing a lot - like, saying "X is bad" and then some unknown people dressed in black show up and beat up X and destroy their business or set fire to a place where he was supposed to speak, and the public figure just shrugs and says "unfortunately, we do not know who those people are and have no way to find out, but if X says those things again, they have only themselves to blame for what happens".
It should not, but it had been doing it a lot lately. The corporations had been pressed, either overtly - by government contracting rules, EEOC regulations and such, or more covertly - like prioritizing corporations that actively play in ESG and DEI, into doing what the government likes.
They shouldn't, but they would like to, very much. In fact, in Europe they are openly demanding exactly this. In the US, some pesky and little known legal loopholes, like 1st Amendment, make this harder, thus they need to resort to indirect ways like ones described above. Not that they are too proud to strong-arm too - see all the angry letters the government sent to social media companies under Biden, and the following censorship fast-lanes that were implemented as a result of that. If they take power in 2028, there is absolutely no doubt they would try to do it again.
That is a lie. Cancel culture was real, and is still real in many places.
So was it fake, or was it righteous revenge? You can't claim both in the same sentence without having a red nose and a rainbow wig on.
And yes, the conservatives did a lot of censoring and cancelling themselves, when they were in power. That's bad. A lot of people said that it was bad at the time, and they were right. Now the left is doing it. It's still bad. Shame on the people that changed their opinion on freedom when it became their team that is in power and suppressing freedom. Shame on fair-weather freedom lovers.
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You can get arrested in Britain for "hate speech" and hundreds of people do every year and the position of mainstream liberals was that we should have laws just like that. Look, just admit you're in favor of cancel culture, that's a much more consistent position to hold. Just admit that you're fine with the government monitoring twitter so they can throttle accounts they don't like. You can't actually coherently claim that "mass censorship is when fact checked" so it's no big deal and then also claim to somehow be against it.
This is what actually happened. Dems on the Hill held hearings excoriating tech CEOs for not censoring more. Officials in the State Department had working relationships with social media companies to censor content they didn't like. The files were all released by Elon when he bought twitter. The case went up to SCOTUS and John Roberts ruled that it isn't illegal because the State Department has a 1st Amendment right to tell twitter to ban things.
You can be for it or against it. It's real and it happened.
See, you're not even against cancel culture, you're essentially arguing in favor of it. I don't actually need to provide a citation for every instance of cancel culture in the world: You are arguing on a forum that was created because reddit would no longer allow us to have these conversations on their platform. You are literally participating on a platform that exists as a consequence of the forces you deny exist. Your position is inherently ridiculous.
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Ah yes, the load bearing norms, the same ones Obama used in operation Chokepoint, the same ones the SPLC and the JDL have been using to strangle the discourse. You know if Elon didn't buy Twitter we would still be back in the age where rabid groups of feminists and dangerhair unperson people and get them fired for not eating the communion wafer with enough gusto.
Agree on all counts, But it takes two to tango, speak up if you think the right has been perfectly christ-like and has not escalated to destroyed any of their own load bearing norms.
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If Trump is assassinated nothing will happen. Rather, his successor — so JD in this timeline — gets extraordinary political capital to do all sorts of things. Crackdown on antifa, economic free hand, maybe an immigration bill. It all depends on the mix of JD’s temperament (stronger than most suppose) and the GOP’s temperament (weaker than you’re thinking).
But most of what a Trump successor could do is priced in. There would be an extraordinary moment followed by a return to politics as usual. That’s all.
Trump is not politics as usual. Trump is unusual. When he’s dead that tendency will go away. Whatever state he leaves us in is the trajectory we’re likely to follow for some time. An assassination would just give JD Vance a last gasp put some finishing touches on the hot iron shape before it cools into place.
There won’t be civil war. If there are riots they will fizzle out. If MAGA rises to the occasion it will be within the political process. If libs rise up they will playact as revolutionaries and then fizzle out into the political process. That’s all
I've never agreed with you more!
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I feel like with all four of those we kind of “got lucky” that nothing particularly important was happening at the time. Even with Lincoln, the Civil War was basically over when he died. We aren’t guaranteed that it will always be like that. If equally obscure President Rutherford Hayes had been shot instead of Garfield, we may very well have had a second civil war.
Despite the heat of 1876 Hayes was ultimately accepted because the memory of the Civil War was too near for everybody to go to war. I guess it’s an open question. But I would take the other side of that bet
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Be specific. What norms, dismantled by who and when?
One example: social media has dismantled social norms.
Even when phones and TV existed, people used to communicate face-to-face more often, especially to strangers. Privacy used to be expected. News used to be centralized.
How does this affect politics? Perhaps since people have less random face-to-face interactions, they have tighter echo chambers and less respect for those outside. Perhaps since we have dirt on everyone (no privacy), especially dirty politicians are seen no differently. Perhaps since social media promotes strong emotions (especially negative ones; weaker centralized moderation), emotive (especially negative) politicians benefit.
Unfortunately in practice, we can’t ban social media and revert to the past (although that doesn’t stop politicians from trying). I think we need more local groups, in-person events with encouragement to attend, trusted curators who present “unbiased” news (specifically biased towards positivity and important details such that the people receiving the news benefit from hearing it). Most of all, we need to explicitly teach people how to behave socially, how to spot those who deserve sympathy vs. who’d exploit you, how to think critically; and this teaching should be through experience (trial and error, positive and negative reinforcement…). Because I believe those lessons used to be taught implicitly by face-to-face interactions which (para)social media has replaced.
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The norms that politics was as usual, the system can be reformed, and we all play act like we are doin' shit while the technocrats get on with getting on, and that your messaging needed to be connected to reality to be effective.
As to who to blame: Newt Gingrich, IMO. He's the dude that realized that movement was more important than improvement; that he could make more hay out of breaking shit than maintaining shit; and that you could create the problem then sell the solution. With one hand you can sign NAFTA, with the other you can rail against mexicans taking your jerbs. With one hand you can wave china into the WTO while the other is in fist configuration, shaking away at those dirty chinks. It's been wildly effective since Reagan, and the democrats are too limp dicked and liberal to do anything about it.
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Most of them
The rich and powerful
The last ~50 years
Edit: I wrote slightly more coherent version here
Then I got baited and wrote an even longer response here
So no specifics. Thanks.
I'm not that guy, just exercising my god given right to butt into random conversations with my thoughts
I did write a slightly more coherent response here
EDIT: I got baited and wrote an even long response here
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Man, that might be even more vague than the original framing.
In some ways yes, in others I actually find it quite accurate.
I've seen enough of the
"Republicans destroyed the norms"
"Erm actually, it was Democrats who started destroying the norms with X"
"Erm actually, the Dems who did X were simply responding to the Republican norm destroyal of Y"
And so on and so on. Lost in all the finger pointing litigation is the core truth that the norms have been fucking obliterated and our society is worse off overall.
Thus, I'd like step back and acknowledge that
the leadership/elite of the Republican and Democratic have way more in common with each other than they do with us
their en bloc interests very very clearly do not align with ours
the rich and powerful people of Western civilization have been absolutely strip mining this civilization in their relentless pursuit of accruing more power and money to themselves, regardless of the detrimental effects to the society that created that wealth in the first place.
I agree with your general framing but would expand point 1. to the managerial/laptop class more generally, and suggest that much of derangement and consternation surrounding the Aesthetics of Trump and MAGA is driven by status anxiety stemming from the appearance of the working class pushing their own interests.
To borrow a word from this forum's favorite (as measured by number of times I see his name) political philosopher, I think we can happily call them the "petit bourgeois". Although the laptop-class is a larger group than the original concept of the petit bourgeois so I am personally partial to the term "Professional Managerial Class" and even that is almost too narrow.
But the occupy a similar niche for sure.
100% agree but I'd go even further and say that much of the appeal of MAGA itself is also status anxiety. Its status anxiety all the way down! It's almost like people are really worried that things are being enshittified in every direction by a bunch of elites who no longer feel any obligation to their society...
The petit bourgeois (as defined by Marx) in modern society consists mostly of self-employed tradesmen and microbusiness owners. These are the most right-wing occupational group and largely define themselves in opposition to the PMC, which by stereotype consists of employees of large (public and private sector) organisations with large salaries.
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I don't think this is a good explanation. On really any level.
Have norms really eroded in the last 50 years? 50 years ago it was the 70s, this was a huge period of political and social unrest. Political violence was at least an order of magnitude more then. Very widespread protests on the Vietnam war. There were daily bombings by an entire mish mash of groups - the Weathermen, Puerto Ricans, black power type groups. What do you mean the norms have eroded in the last 50 years, they're way better than in the 70s! Especially on political violence!
And your 3 points are lazy. They don't really explain much.
Like on 1 - of course the leadership/elite of the parties have more in common with each other than with us. They work the same job! They talk to each other a lot! They live part time in the same city! Of course you have more in common with the people you work with than with 330 million people you have never met! How could it be any other way?
Your point 2 is also very vague, it is not clear at all. What en bloc interests are unaligned? How has that unalignment increased in the last 50 years? What are some examples? Like they have an interest to stay elected? And raise money? That's always been the case. What changed? What eroded?
Your point 3 - there have always been unscrupulous rich people. They have always been willing to obtain money and power at the expense of others. They've always been there, so how could a supposed erosion of norms be due to them? What has actually changed? There are much better and much more interesting explanations out there. Like if anything changed I would say it is the technology, particularly the internet, that is driving changes. The internet is what allowed the rise of social media, and online echo chambers, and doom scrolling algos, and mean nasty people having a voice. DJT is the twitter president. Technological changes allowed his rise, he could bypass the traditional media gatekeepers. Zuck can't build facebook in 1970 when there are no smartphones and no internet.
Sorry but its just a lazy explanation when there are much more interesting ones to chew on. "Rich people bad. Politicians bad." Ok but there are a lot of people, there are a lot of rich people, a lot of them will do bad things. This has always been the case. A lot of them did bad things in 1976. So what changed? You offer platitudes that aren't even true and don't make any sense.
I ass-pulled 50 years, I could have said 75 and I don't think it changes my point. 50 years = "directionally over the last century post WW2"
Clearly the answer to this is yes. Many norms across society have changed in 50 years. Some of these changes are good, some bad. The norms around political violence have clearly gotten better, so that is nice.
What I’m talking about is, on net, norms of: institutional restraint, civic obligation, elite shame, truthfulness, long-term stewardship, and basic seriousness about governing. Some norms have improved. Others, like these, have decayed badly.
It mattered when politicians felt they had to at least pretend to respect institutional boundaries. It mattered when business leaders felt they had to at least pretend they owed something back to the society that made them rich. It mattered when public lying carried more shame. It mattered when leaders were expected to speak like adults, not like engagement-optimized influencers.
Trump is the obvious example, although clearly not the whole argument. A president(al candidate) being caught on tape saying "grab em by the pussy" or lying constantly and blatantly, or saying any number of things that would have been politically fatal in an earlier media environment, and large parts of the country just shrugging, is obviously a norm shift.
Similarly, on a procedural side: I don't really want to get into a debate about American constitutionalism and procedural philosophy, but it is very clear the Trump2 admin is doing many things outside the bounds of previously thought to be accepted norms and processes. Maybe it's good they're bending/breaking these processes because they were shit, maybe it's bad, maybe the Dems did it first in some way, I don't really care here. The point is that it's happening, and the boundaries are constantly being pushed and tested.
Also fun stuff like Citizens United.
This is obvious to you, as it is obvious to me. However, I have seen enough partisan back-and-forth on this forum to know that many members either do not find this obvious, or choose to ignore it while trying to dunk on their opponents.
The perpetual "the Republicans ruined it" "no the Dems ruined it" is a stupid argument in my opinion. I don't care who ruined it, I want my government to work again. Us all fighting each other about who's fault it is serves the Democratic/Republican elite, who get to continue ruining everything as we fight over the Titanic's deck chair arrangement.
Red vs Blue arguments trap us inside a frame that benefits them and not us.
The incentives of the political, economic, and media elite are growing increasingly detached from the long-term health of the society they govern.
Sure, politicians always wanted to be elected, businesses have always wanted to make money/secure power to ensure they can continue to make money, media has always wanted eyeballs. None of those incentives are new. What changed is the strength of the counterweights.
There used to be more pressure: social, institutional, geopolitical, and reputational. The elites had more pressure to justify their status by maintaining buy-in. Call it noblesse oblige, fear of communism, postwar civic nationalism, stronger unions, higher institutional trust, whatever. That system wasn't 100% fair or wonderful either. But there was at least pressure on elites to build public goods, maintain legitimacy, and make ordinary people feel like they had a stake in the system.
That pressure seems much weaker these days, does it even exist?
Now we get to enjoy things like: financialization, regulatory capture, monopolistic/oligopolistic concentration everywhere, cartoonish short-termism, asset inflation, institutional decay, and attention-economy slop. The pie is not being expanded in the way it could be. A lot of elite behavior now looks more like fighting over pie slices on a stagnating pie. We seem to be Moloch-maxxing a lot more these days.
Yes. Greed was not invented in 1976. My point is that the restraints around elite self-interest have borderline evaporated.
There have always been selfish rich people/corrupt politicians/those willing to trade the public good for personal advantage. But societies differ in how much they constrain that behavior, how much shame attaches to it, how much counter-power exists, and how much elites feel obligated to reinvest in the system that enabled their wealth.
Previously, the rich often felt some need to build public goods with their names on them. Libraries, universities, museums, civic institutions, hospitals, parks, whatever. Obviously there was ego and such involved, but the output was still often a durable public good.
Plus, I think they used to fear "the masses" a hell of a lot more than they do now. A big reason homeownership was pushed in the 1930s-??? (definitely not these days lol) was as a way to support/entrench/create buy-in to "the system" by making millions of households materially invested in private property, consumer credit, and rising asset values. To be clear, I think that this is a good thing. I want my government to be worried about my opinion towards the system, and to take action to make me like the system by having the system work for me. Do Americans feel like the system is working for them right now?
Now the dominant model feels blatantly extractive. Regulatory capture, monopoly/oligopoly power, tax avoidance, asset hoarding, platform rent-seeking, union avoidance, and political influence operations. The goal increasingly seems to be to take as much as possible out of the system while giving as little back as possible. All of this was happening in 1975 or 1950 too, but it seems a lot more successful and a lot more aggressive now.
Technology matters enormously. I agree. But I don’t think "the internet did it" is a full explanation either. The internet amplified incentives and trends that were already there.
TL;DR: Over the last ~X decades, the "elite" / "the institutions" have become increasingly optimized for extraction, self-preservation, and short-term advantage rather than long-term civilizational health. The informal norms that once partially restrained that behavior have weakened. We are worse off as a result. Parisian "no you're team is the one truly at fault" is useless at best, and actively against our own interests as citizens at worst.
This isn't a social norm, it's a political norm based on leftist assumptions. And not a common one in the past; it's most associated with Andrew Carnegie, though he based it on different assumptions. Further, Carnegie's beliefs did not cash out to "I should pay shitloads of taxes" (though he supported a high estate tax), but to "I, and other wealthy people, should use our wealth to directly help society".
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