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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33045 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Extraordinary.

I burst out laughing when I read this. We finally have AI that can make sense out of the longest and most incomprehensible Dasepost, so now you pivot to cryptic one-word replies that cannot be understood even in principle except by reference to the rest of your corpus. If not for your clarification to 2rafa below, I would have no idea what you actually meant by this comment.

It's not a reference to my own corpus. It's a typical response by Eigenrobot* (a pretty smart user 2rafa, like many dramanauts, most likely knows) on twitter. He usually writes it in response to… well, you be the judge. Oh, for convenience here they are.

*I'm not eigenrobot.

I read Eigenrobot's Twitter feed quite regularly and I didn't get it. The way he uses it you have to be familiar with his personal positions on issues to get that he's being sarcastic.

It's not just sarcasm. He says it sincerely, I think; and so do I. Some posts you disagree with really are extraordinary – extreme, audacious, wild, unusually unabashed. «A good leader hates his subjects» is in that category, for me.

Again, maybe there is a grain of truth to it – you need the ability to resist public pressure. But really, personal sentiment is orthogonal to the question of having the power to execute any vision you might have. I take it as a given that many leaders above vice-mayor level, certainly national leaders, are more or less non-human psychopathic reptiles who find notions like loving or even having contempt for the populace beneath their dignity; nevertheless, most opt for populism for pragmatic reasons.

And Biden is proving unexpectedly resistant to pressure; he 's ho senile grandpa. Case in point: Afghanistan.

I thought he was literally just saying that he found her comment to be extraordinarily good. Like a reddit-tier "This!" post.

Oh please don't backpedal now. It's pretty obvious that you are simply expressing your own sentiment and deep-seated philosophy here: all the bad comes from the unwashed masses, all the good from sometimes mistaken but ultimately competent and well-intentioned elites, whose loathing for villeins is in itself a decent guiding principle. It takes some boldness to spin a paranoid, corrupt autocrat's war of conquest informed by 19th century realpolitik and "geopolitics" into some romantic sentimentality; it stretches the notion of sentimentality well past the breaking point.

Russia also had conducted a wildly unpopular and protested pension reform, if you don't know. Colossal immigration from Central Asia is likewise unpopular and ruthlessly maintained, as is the suppression of popular nationalism. Putin has many faults, but being too soft-hearted isn't one.

I agree populism is poison and submitting to the whims of public opinion can well destroy a nation, but there's, well, at least I don't find much jupiterian in saying «geez the demography is busted, the budget is overextended, I don't know how to fix this shit so how about you scum work more and get paid less»; it's just about the most ancient and primitive tool at any ruler's disposal, on par with "hire more police" and debasing currency. If we're doing the high standards thing when judging plebs, it stands to reason to expect more of the powerful.

In America, angry people who care a lot about politics are 30% of the population, maybe more.

I think it's way less than that. I doubt that it's even 10%, actually. I rarely meet anyone who cares a lot about politics.

Angry people who care a lot about politics seem more numerous than they are because many of them spend a lot of time and effort on being visible, talking about politics, and making political content.

I don't think this notion requires quite so much cynicism about Macron's attitude towards the average Frenchman; I would suggest that his view comes closer to Burke's famous saying that "his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. ... Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."

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