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News from Australia: we're probably not going to have a Constitutionally-enshrined "Voice" for Aboriginals.
Background: there was a statement by a bunch of Aboriginal groups a while back that they wanted a constitutionally-enshrined advocate in the governmental system*, along with a couple of other things. Opposition leader Anthony Albanese, of the Australian Labor Party, included this in his platform for the 2022 election, which he won**, and we're a bit under a month from a referendum***.
New information: support started high, and certainly the Usual Suspects want a Yes vote. But support has now crashed to the point that it's considered highly unlikely to pass.
Up until now I'd been thinking "well, maybe the US people are right about SJ having peaked in the USA, but that's cold comfort to me", but this has given me some real hope that it's peaking here as well.
*NB: Aboriginals can vote and run for office, and are slightly overrepresented in Parliament compared to the general population.
**Labor is our centre-left party; the other major parties are the Liberals (city-based centre-right), the Nationals (small-town conservatives, in a semi-permanent coalition with the Liberals), the Greens (historically a "hippie" party, and they still do hold basically all the stereotypical "hippie" positions, though they've gone majorly SJ of late), One Nation (alt-rightists since before it was cool) and the United Australia Party (alt-rightists since after it was cool, because an alt-right billionaire had too big an ego to support the existing alt-right party). I actually wound up voting Labor; the Liberals had gotten too comfortable in government to the point that they refused to discuss a bunch of what they were doing, which I consider a threat to democracy, the Greens want to ban One Nation and the UAP, which I consider a much larger threat to democracy, I live in a city so the Nationals weren't on my HoR ballot, the UAP is a bad joke, and while I preferred One Nation's stance on this particular policy (i.e. "get the fuck out of here with your reverse racism") I preferred the rest of Labor's platform to the rest of One Nation's by more.
***Our constitutional amendment procedure - a majority of citizens and a majority of citizens in at least four of the six states must agree to the amendment. Like most other Australian votes, it's mandatory.
In Sweden woke peaked 9 years ago and has been in steady decline since then. It has been strange to see the anglosphere go woke while watching social media and society in general lurch to the right at home. A leading antifa member in Sweden once said the difference between a green voting liberal feminist and a neo nazi race warrior is a non white mob threatening their condo. The liberal middle class is only liberal and woke until it has consequences. Threaten their property values, and they will often demand whatever it takes to defend their lifestyle.
What happened in Sweden was that middle class areas experienced an increase in crime. Schools in good areas experienced diversity, and the dysfunction caused by hundreds of thousands of migrants entering the medical system started to impact the life of people who used to be woke. Unlike the US that much more urban sprawl, richer people in Sweden often life in downtown areas. When their daughters had to go home at night while Afghan gangs sold heroin in their neighbourhood, the interest for BLM narratives was replaced with enthusiastic support for law and order. Surging electrical prices limited enthusiasm for the anti nuclear left and has caused real economic damage to the Swedish middle class living in large homes that have to be heated in the winter.
Australia probably has gone woke because woke hasn't had a major negative impact on people's lives. You haven't had gun crime increase 1000% in 17 years, you haven't seen your electrical grid become unreliable, posh schools don't have 15 year olds pretending to be twelve causing mayhem in class.
The online right thinks the masses can be inspired by ideas and ideology. Rightwingers tend to have little interest in ideology and are content as long as they can barbecue. Australia will stop going woke when woke has an impact on people's lives.
It's kind of funny, we're seeing this in sanctuary cities in the US (looking at you NY). It's easy to be generous with someone else's resources...
The US primary system largely prevents wealthy urbanites going full GOP though, you can just elect a “tough on crime Democrat” who will say all the right things while also having the right broader ideology.
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I don’t get the impression that’s what’s going on in NY. The city is big enough that 50 or 500 or even 5000 bussed immigrants won’t tip any balances. It’s not Martha’s Vineyard, where they were a significant and unusual fraction of the off-season population.
The sticking point is that the Red Tribe is scoring points off of Blue Tribers. Can’t have that.
NYC is to all appearances actually having trouble dealing with them(and 5000 is an extremely low number- the Texas government claims to have shipped more than twice that many to New York and the real number is undoubtedly higher because of randos buying bus tickets for migrants), although that’s at least partly because NYC decided to shock them into a social service system designed for a smaller number of short term homeless.
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To quote a Swedish white nationalist from the old subreddit who made the same argument 3 years ago:
The big problem in the long term for the alt right is that America is so suburban. Suburbs are very blue pilling. When whites left cities in the 60s after being forced out by race riots they moved to suburbs and their views on race did a 180. We see similar trends in Europe where suburbia is the one place where nationalist groups can't make progress at all. In Sweden the weakest results for the Sweden democrats in every election has been suburban areas around Stockholm. Those areas are solidly neoliberal. Unfortunately for American nationalists urban areas are small, rural areas are too spread out and the suburban population dominates white people. The suburban demographic is naturally materialistic, rootless, individualist and globalist.
This really doesn't match my experience in the US: the average suburban dweller I know has a mortgage "rooting" them to their dwelling and presenting nontrivial costs -- real estate sales, movers, etc -- to up and move elsewhere. There may be some individualism, but the average suburban school has an active parent organization donating time and funds to local education. And there's no shortage of other groups meshing the community together: churches, youth/adult sports leagues, and so forth.
I wouldn't expect support for the alt-right to take off in suburbs -- whose inhabitants seem generally happy and content to just grill in their backyards -- but I think "solidly neoliberal" reflects what is actually a general conservatism in the sense of being change-averse: suburbanites don't want major political changes (locally or nationally: these might, gasp, impact property values), and garden-variety neoliberalism seems to be one of the least change-seeking platforms currently. In general, I think they want to keep things as they are, with an eye toward modest, gradual improvements and at least a stated preference for "be nice" policies with modest price tags. These folks aren't pushing to (re-)overhaul American health-care because they're largely employed and prefer the devil they know in their existing insurance plan. They aren't pushing to defund their police departments. But they might agree on increasing Medicaid spending or buying body cameras for police.
But perhaps Sweden's idea of a "suburb" is very different from what I experience day-to-day.
I suppose if you're a dissident rightist observing your outgroup from, well, the outside, it's easy to conflate a) the leftist urban laptop class / PMC who are mostly renters or at least live in inner-city flats and who are relatively eager to wage the culture war and are indeed "naturally materialistic, rootless, individualist and globalist" a) neoliberal/centrist suburbanites who are recognizable by occasionally publicly spewing the same liberal/woke snark as group 'a'.
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I would say that this is probably a factor, but what little I've seen of suburbs in Europe (example: the suburbs in Cry of Fear, a Swedish-made game set in a Swedish town, which I presume is all modeled fairly faithfully to real life) suggests that they aren't fundamentally different from American suburbs in terms of layout, construction, and even appearance.
And yes, I would also say that suburbs, in terms of their neo-liberalism, probably can be thought of in the leftist-sneering-sense of neo-liberalism in that they are foundationally conservative with some helpings of Blue Tribe-ness.
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Maybe Sweden is different. Here in the states, we are tolerating problems far worse than Sweden ever had. Wokeness hasn't diminished much if any.
The major blue cities have a murder rate that is more than 10x what Sweden has. And the public schools in our major blue cities have been terrible forever. San Francisco public schools are less than 10% white now as everyone either sends their kids to private school or moves to the suburbs.
Yet these American blue cities are not "lurching" (a mild slur by the way) to the right, far from it. In the past decades they have become woker and woker. If anything, it is the suburbs and rural areas that are becoming more conservative, despite having many fewer of the problems created by lack of rules enforcement.
Edit: I think I might have caused some confusion. By "slur" I mean that lurch is being used as a slur here. "My outgroup moves like a drunk or a zombie". I do not mean that there is anything wrong with the word lurch.
I think a big reason is that those who aren’t “woke” and haven’t drunk that koolaid generally find it much easier to simply leave and move to someplace safer and less woke.
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No, it is not. It is simply a descriptor that can be applied to any group of things or persons with equal effect. Drunken revelers walking the street after last call lurch in the same way I do getting out of bed in the morning, and we are not diminished for such a description.
I agree this is the start of a totally unnecessary hyperstitous slur cascade, and NO! DOWN! BAD! STOP!
Ah... I get it the objection. Yes, there is no problem with using the word lurch. Lurch, lurch, lurch. It's fine. Use it all you want.
But when you refer to the arguments of your political opponents in the same way that you are refer to the movements of a drunkard, then you are slurring them. "Swedish voters are drunkenly stumbling to the right" is just as bad. Lurch itself is not a bad word.
You rang?
Give this man a medal.
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I recognize that this is purely anecdotal, but my overall sense of "blue spaces" (and I live in one) is that in the last 12-18 months there's been an increase in the number of, as the kids say, "based" takes. Especially since the moderator revolt a few months back, a number of previously-radical local subreddits seem to have pivoted towards the center a bit, even if it's IMO quite-modest statements like "local property crime is bad for the community, and actually I want the police to do something" or "letting homeless folks shoot up drugs and openly defecate in the street across from the local elementary school is hardly 'compassionate' to anyone involved" get upvotes and positive engagement.
I'm jealous of New York City and LA. Various "based" events are taking place there that have no chance of occurring in the Bay Area.
e.g. a Yarvin and Peachy Keenan thing in LA in May, now some Katherine Brodsky and Anna K thing there too...
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Agreed. I wouldn't say I'm hopeful yet, but I just visited with some very historically progressive friends in CA, and all were sort of hinting at things having gone too far, which I don't think they ever would have dared to do a year ago.
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Among average liberal suburban normies in the US, one generally accepted narrative regarding political history is that Republican administrations between 1968-92 have committed a horrific, unspeakable, terribly evil etc. crime against BIPOC by enacting a policy of mass incarceration of African-American (and, to a much lesser extent, Latino) young men in the name of the 'war on drugs' and 'law and order' in order to pander to the racist sentiments of hwhite garbage humans. (As far as I know, nothing of this sort has ever happened in Sweden.) Therefore there's no chance at all of any politician making the kamikaze decision of trying to drum up support for law and order.
I do think that the spectre of Donald Trump allows people to tolerate a higher level of crime and dysfunction than they otherwise would.
People weigh their own safety vs. the social undesirability of voting Republican. In our current epoch, the surge in murders and crime hasn't been enough to overcome the very strong social undesirability of Donald Trump. So they continue to vote for progressives despite a worry that things aren't going that well. Because the alternative of a "literal fascist dictatorship" is worse.
As far as I know, the abnormally high violent crime rate of the '70s and '80s in the US reached its zenith around 1991 and then started declining around 1994, with increasing speed, but this trend later reversed around 2012, and if not then, then surely by 2014. Around the same period, marked by the scandals around Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray etc., this trend was paralleled by increasing rethoric focused on police brutality, essentially laying the groundwork for the abolish-the-police tendency.
None of this had anything to do with Trump.
In normal times, voters could be expected to respond to the post-2014 crime surge with more law and order policiies. Not immediately, mind you. The crime surge didn't happen overnight and only really started to take off post-2020.
However, Trump has antagonized the left to the point that they started to play zero sum team politics above all else. Here in Seattle, politicians are always deflecting from our drug and crime wave by waving at national politics. Voters seem happy to play along, and continue to elect far left politicians even though concern for crime is rising significantly. Anything else is support for the evil Republicans, which is simply not done.
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I don't think it's social undesirability at this point. The main issue a lot of people (myself included) have with Trump is the fact that he is likely to bring about huge systemic instability. Most people who have some vested interest in the current amalgamation of systems and institutions in the US are very reluctant to support the sentiment of "it's all rotten, tear it all down" coming out of the populist right these days. Conservatism used to be about avoiding rapid change due to the possibility of unforeseen consequences. Now it seems to embrace it.
If you interpret that sentiment as reactionary, then I think there's little contradiction. When Reagan campaigned with the slogan of making America great again in 1980, I suppose it resonated with Boomers who basically felt that "America used to be pretty great when I was younger but now it has all gone to shit, can't we like just go back to being normal?!", and when Trump campaigned with the same slogan in 2016 it resonated with many voters for the same reason. It's not about promoting rapid change, at least in their minds, but about radically undoing rapid change.
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It would be nice if critics of "huge systemic instability" had a general theory of what "huge systemic instability" actually consisted of. For an example, weaponizing the federal security services against political opponents seems like something that should be pretty damn destabilizing, but somehow it's never accounted such. Likewise, a coordinated campaign to foment serious racial conflict, culminating in massive outbreaks of organized political violence should probably give one pause. One of the most thoroughly black-pilling moments I can remember is when, during the BLM riots, one of the moderate blue regulars here opined how they just wanted Trump gone so things could calm down.
You changed too much, and now our trajectory is both blind and ballistic. We repeatedly warned you not to do that, and you either ignored or mocked us. You burned the stability, and now you complain that we're not sacrificing our values to replace what you willfully destroyed. Conservatives are realists; they aren't going to pretend that things aren't as they plainly are. Rapid change has been happening for years now, and further rapid change is inevitable. The only question is what the nature of that change is to be, whether some new stable system can be salvaged from the rapidly-disintegrating wreck of our previous construction.
Okay: WWIII is plausible soon, and SJ is able and willing to form a fifth column. So, avoid people that will especially inspire SJ to do this.
Yes, this is spineless pragmatism that rewards their treasonousness. I know. I'm past caring. Hold on for now, root-and-branch later.
The most plausible path I see to WWIII is internal strife boiling over inside America, fatally compromising its ability to enforce the Pax Americana, resulting in a lot of countries lunging for the cheese while the cat's busy dying of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Granting unlimited social and political license to an irrational, irresponsible, and highly aggressive faction of ideological zealots seems like one of the best ways possible to cause internal strife to boil over inside America. Those of us taking the beating can see that you are compromising our values, interests and welfare in a vain effort to secure your own. Why should we not return the favor?
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At the risk of sounding a little preachy, I don't think your us vs them mentality is doing you any favors here. I'm not sure what you think my views are, but I'm pretty sure the "you" described above doesn't encapsulate them particularly well. I'm not if favor of moving in the current direction and haven't been in a long time.
I am, however in favor of moving slowly. Despite what you may think, we did not end up in this situation overnight. Institutions have moved away from their traditional roles bit by bit over the last several decades. If we want to reverse any of this with any semblance of our current society intact, the progress is going to be equally slow. Thinking that we can quickly fix anything by tearing institutions apart is just going to make the situation far worse. We'll loose what we still have.
Seems like a big "if". There is nothing left of the law, the constitution or our civil society. Nothing to save, nothing to conserve. Nothing to lose but our chains, as the kids say. We are fast approaching truly epic and colossally dangerous amounts of freedom.
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I've seen video broadcasts of organized, uniformed thugs publicly celebrating the political murder of someone very much like me, with the tacit support of a national political party, and the contented acquiescence of "moderates" everywhere. Some situations really are us vs. them. This is one of them.
Seven years ago, the previous iterations of this community were worrying over the insane levels of runaway polarization spreading through every corner of society, and how this needed to be corrected or there would be hell to pay. The problem was not corrected, and now there is hell to pay. An "us vs them" mentality continues to deliver superior predictive power. What benefit is derived from pretending otherwise?
Well, it's a shot in the dark, but my guess is that you are a fairly average moderate light-blue Blue Triber, with some serious doubts about the excesses of the Social Justice movement and considerable nostalgia for the 90s-2000s era. I could be wrong, but it seems a reasonable guess. In any case, it is at such "moderates" that the above critique is aimed.
And other people are in favor of moving quickly, and moreover have done so. Results matter. Facts on the ground matter. You have to actually engage with what has happened, and what is likely to happen next. I see no way that "moving slowly" is going to be able to do that.
Sinkholes form over years or decades, but the part where the ground opens up and swallows your house with your entire family inside can happen in seconds. Something building up slowly does not mean it remains slow once it starts rolling.
In any case, I argue frequently that it all goes back to the Enlightenment, so that's three centuries back, give or take. The best estimate I've seen for the tipping point past which the situation became acute is 2014, but one can make arguments for the 90s or the 60s. The historical question is entirely separate from the question of what is happening now, though. And what is happening now is a runaway culture war death spiral, driven by mutually incompatible values. It took a long time for those values to become mutually incompatible, but now that they are, things proceed much more quickly.
It seems unlikely to me that you can unscramble an egg, but it would certainly be amusing to see someone try. What's the nature of the problem, and what would a solution look like, roughly speaking?
If I am forced to choose between all the institutions being captured by my tribal enemies and used to crush my tribe and its values without mercy or recourse on the one hand, and destroying those institutions and probably a lot of other things besides on the other hand, I am going to be heavily in favor of destroying those institutions. Sure, there's value in stalling and hoping for a miracle. Barring that miracle, it is not hard to figure out where things are going. We, Red and Blue collectively, continue to search for better ways to hurt the outgroup without individually getting in too much trouble. Soon or sooner, one will be found and used that our institutions cannot survive, and those institutions consequently won't survive.
Trump is a symptom of this process, not a cause. It doesn't matter whether he loses or wins this next election; the process will continue either way. Nothing he has done or might plausibly do is going to cause "huge systemic instability" outside the bounds of the huge systemic instabilities that are already growing at breakneck pace. If the system were not already completely fucked, people would not be lining up to vote for a geriatric con man.
So it goes.
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Also, the corruption. Putting in so many completely inexperienced family members, and extracting money (e.g. via forced use of your hotels) is banana republic stuff that weakens all kinds of good things.
I think Trump is an order of magnitude less corrupt than the alternatives on offer from the Democrats or even the other republicans. He's done nothing that even gets close to the ouster of Shokin, let alone the rest.
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This leaves conservatives with few useful tools to counteract rapid change which has already produced its consequences. I need to reread Burke, but I don't think there's anything about conservatism that would preclude modern day versions of an invasion of France to restore the monarchy.
I think there are quite a few tools that are there, but that are not being used. The problem is that for the last several decades, a lot of political attempts have been made to fix cultural problems. Culture, while maybe upstream of politics, is still downstream of economics. If there were ever any real economic efforts made to change culture, I think we'd see some interesting results. Such efforts would have to be sustained and coordinated though. So far that has proved elusive.
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I wouldn't call that a slur. It can sometimes have the connotation of drunkenness, but it can also merely connote suddenness.
The pejorative meaning crowds out other meanings. If your movements were described as "lurching" you would not feel this as a neutral descriptor.
No one says, "the goalie lurched to his left, making an amazing save". They say "the goalie lurched to his left, tripping on his face". It is only used in a negative context.
In fact, I'll go further. A negative connotation matters more than the actual definition. There are tons of words that average people can't define but they know are "bad". Using these words to describe your outgroup reveals a bias.
"The ship lurched to the port side."
"The ship of state lurched to the right."
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I wouldn't necessarily think that the describer had a negative opinion of me, though. If someone described me as lurching around sick, well, he's probably got a negative opinion of being sick, but not one of me. And when used in the abstract the "drunk" connotation is less relevant and I wouldn't take a negative connotation from someone describing a group including me as "lurching" in an abstract sense.
Also, you are participating or attempting to participate in what appears to be the early stages of a hyperstitious slur cascade and this is bad.
Funny enough, I stated earlier on this week's thread that I only participate in hyperstitious slur cascades once 90% of people have joined. (versus Scott's 70%).
I stand by that here, and believe that lurch is used negatively nearly 100% of the time. We'll have to agree to disagree.
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