domain:rifters.com
kky
16hr ago
If we follow your logic at its word, the natural conclusion would be the total collapse of the Democratic Party.
Right now, the fringe elements of both parties are wildly unpopular. The question for most elections is who comes across as the most repulsive and who successfully tamps down on their extremists in public messaging. Since Democrats are better educated and hooked into their politicians, this has turned into a real advantage for the Republicans. The Democrat extremists are able to effectively pressure and primary politicians into following their worst ideas, which have a lot of salience right now.
So we have a civil war right now, between the Democrats from the Reagan days who want to relive that heady sense of resistance like they were young again and the young progressives who have been educated into mind-meltingly unpopular ideas. Out on the distant fringes are the swing-state Democrats like Fetterman who are effectively untouchable by the party mechanism but equally have no sway over it. Whoever wins is going to win based on their ability to signal #resistance to the equally extreme base, as voters on the edge increasingly disengage with the party. But the party does not compromise on its least popular tenets, and in fact broadcasts them as a matter of principle, and the way things are going, will stand absolutely no chance in upcoming elections (only exception being the presidency if Trump does something dumb like defy the law to run for term 3 and scare the normies way too much).
So we should expect to see evaporative cooling concentrating the heart of the overeducated party, keeping seats where urban Millennials and Xers dominate and hemorrhaging the rest. And then, probably, the Blue Dogs try to create their own party and recapture the many voters who really don’t like Trump but can’t find it in themselves to vote D.
There was a moment, after this election, where I wondered to myself: is this when the Dems will figure out what’s happening? Is this where they Sister Souljah the woke out and start trying to win elections again? But that moment passed in a heartbeat, and the old party mechanisms reasserted their dominance. I think this is a general pattern, not just for democracy but for every kind of human organization, where the mechanisms of power become too cleanly rationalized, too stable, and the possibility of an internal coup vanishes. The existing order loses the possibility of making mistakes and being replaced from within, as they control all the needed feedback mechanisms and are not vulnerable to it. It’s at this moment that the levers of power cease to be representations or formalizations of the real sources of power, and become sources of power in themselves. When that happens, the power structure itself is in dire jeopardy, as it’s lost all connection to reality and has become a sort of ouroborus, swallowing its own tail and growing smaller and smaller.
I suspect that part of this self-consuming behavior is related to class divides like the educational alignment of the parties, but that’s probably enough on this for now.
Tree
16hr ago
Do you disagree with the theory that Elon Musk buying Twitter was a pivotal moment for Trump's second run?
Can't have hurt him. The point is, 'mind control theory' in its strong form, is contradicted by dissenters buying a piece of media to fight back against the mind control. There's the sarcastic quip about 'build your own banking system'- well, him, and through him, people who agree with him, did buy their own media system.
Sure, they can't control the entirety of society at will, 100% of the time, but engineering does not require 100% accuracy, just predictability.
Are we just haggling about the price? I could just as easily say "Sure, you can fool some people some time, but you can't fool all the people all the time....".
gattsuru
16hr ago
No.
The problem is that there are enforcement of laws that people disagree with, which have very overt parallels to matters where the other tribe received broad victories, which any reasonable reading of the text of the law would not permit, and where defendants either lose in court or never have a fair day to start with. It's a problem when the Constitution seems a scam, and where the BATNA looks like a direct improvement on the very measures that negotiated agreement is advertising itself on.
phosphorus2
16hr ago
Here is the Imperial War Museum's purpose, in its own words:
IWM was founded in 1917 to document the First World War in real time, and to preserve for future generations a record of everyone’s service and sacrifice, military and civilian, across the UK and the British Empire. IWM’s remit was later extended to cover the Second World War and conflicts involving British and Commonwealth service personnel, up to the present day.
The next, and final day, had been organized at my behest. At some point, I'd evinced interest in visiting the Royal Armories Museum (to meet the ever-entertaining Johnathan Ferguson), but was enthusiastically informed by my cousin that we had the Imperial War Museum in town. With a name like that, how could I not go?
It was a bit of a drive, and the exterior was uninspiring. Very 1990s, all angular slopes and little decoration to break them up.
The insides were rather interesting. I was a bit confused by the currently running exhibition, organized by a Punjabi lady and celebrating her experience of growing up in the UK as an immigrant. A lot of East meets West, leaning towards the East. Not particularly exciting to me, I'd grown up there.
Of course there is an exhibit exploring the family, marriage, religion, and the role of women within Punjabi culture in an English war museum. Its like they picked an exhibit as conceptually distant as possible from what they tell the public their purpose is. Its so quintessentially English, of their all encompassing self debasement. Just a little snapshot, a microcosm, of the degradation of their own culture and people perpetuated by their own elites.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16hr ago
Rulers rule by codifying their rules into written laws out of a pragmatism that allows them to rule more effectively.
Some rulers do that. Other rulers claim they're doing that and then rely on manipulation of procedural outcomes instead. And likewise, some critics are pointing to actual abuses, and some are simply mad because they got caught breaking black-letter law.
I believe I and others here are pointing to actual abuses. Between formal complexity, subjective interpretation, selective enforcement and corruption, Rule of Law is not a sustainable assumption in the United States. We cannot passively trust the legal system to fulfill its promises to us; pressure must be constantly applied, and some of that pressure must be illegible and outside the formal bounds of the law.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
16hr ago
@ZorbaTHut, I've made two pull requests in the repository.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
16hr ago
Is the right to marriage written into the constitution?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
16hr ago
But what they ultimately wanted to achieve, more than anything else they ever wanted before, was preventing Trump from getting elected, twice, and they failed at that. In that light, mind control does not work at all. I
Do you disagree with the theory that Elon Musk buying Twitter was a pivotal moment for Trump's second run?
I don't think HBD or lab leak theory or grooming gangs or trans scepticism or any other dangerous idea has been successfully suppressed by information control
I'll refer you to one of my previous comments:
Sure, they can't control the entirety of society at will, 100% of the time, but engineering does not require 100% accuracy, just predictability.
There’s this contradiction at the heart of anti-establishment movements – according to their own central myth, they are doomed rebels against the all-powerful, entrenched evil forces of the establishment, the cathedral, the megaphone, the elites, and so on.
I don't believe that, but I also think that the art of sausage-making involves a lot more than most people (including me) have stomach for.
Trump is acting as though he expects the ceasefire to be respected. Notably, he's acting like he expects both sides to respect it, and is willing to criticize Israel for shooting back. It seems pretty clear that Trump is, in fact, imposing a ceasefire on people who have a strong preference to continue shooting; if this is the case, then both sides are going to want to goad the other side into accepting blame and consequences for breaking the ceasefire, so that they can continue shooting with their opponent in a worse position. If that's the situation, then getting the ceasefire to stick means convincing both sides that they will not succeed in this and that brinksmanship games are an unacceptable risk, which is what Trump and his administration appear to be doing.
I maintain that Trump at least appears to be doing the right thing: pursuing obvious American interests as efficiently as possible, while actively avoiding entanglement in the problem. Trump declaring a ceasefire and blasting both Iran and Israel for limited violations makes it significantly more likely that the fighting will stop, and indeed both Israel, Iran, and the media are acting as though the ceasefire is a real thing that there are consequences for violating. But also, it seems to me that Trump's general approach vastly reduces the chances of America getting dragged into the war, because our stance now is that there is no war to get dragged into, and contradiction of that narrative by Iran or Israel is being framed as wrongdoing.
This seems like a pretty significant change from the status quo, and I am happy to see it.
[EDIT] - ...And skepticism and resistance to the contrary, it does in fact appear to be working. Per CNN headlines:
Iran is ready to resolve issues with the United States, [Iranian] president says on call with Saudi crown prince
Israel lifts country’s restrictions, and airports will resume full operations
And of course:
Rep. Al Green introduces articles of impeachment against Trump over Iran strikes
...some things never change.
Tree
17hr ago
But what they ultimately wanted to achieve, more than anything else they ever wanted before, was preventing Trump from getting elected, twice, and they failed at that. In that light, mind control does not work at all. I don't think HBD or lab leak theory or grooming gangs or trans scepticism or any other dangerous idea has been successfully suppressed by information control.
There’s this contradiction at the heart of anti-establishment movements – according to their own central myth, they are doomed rebels against the all-powerful, entrenched evil forces of the establishment, the cathedral, the megaphone, the elites, and so on. So when they win, as they often do because it’s a popular message/beloved fiction trope, they have a dog caught the car moment. In reality they were always more powerful than they thought they were.
Holocaust denial is not about maintaining the moral righteousness of nazism, but its essential myth of the all-powerful jew. 'it didn't happen, but it should have'. Or 'according to my ideology: it should have, and it couldn't have.'
SSCReader
17hr ago
I think that the Thirty Years War is the appropriate comparison because it too was about which value system, Protestant or Catholic, was to be the sole value system, regardless of parental wishes.
Absolutely, which is why the time to do that would have been at the founding. Trying to do it now would be a huge mess to say the least.
The only thing I would disagree with is that power honey pots are inherently bad, they do attract wasps, but to do anything requires power, so wasps must be planned for and tolerated. The optimum amount of government power is more than you think, because otherwise the honey pot will still exist and will be exploited by wasps anyway. At least if the hive is in charge you might get something useful done while the wasps are grifting.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17hr ago
How can you hate that guy?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
17hr ago
Obergefell is correct. The right to marriage does not distinguish between same-sex and opposite-sex couples just as it doesn’t distinguish between same- or mixed-race ones.
5434a
17hr ago
Rulers rule by codifying their rules into written laws out of a pragmatism that allows them to rule more effectively.
This thread smells of "there's a law I disagree with, therefore all law is illegitimate".
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
17hr ago
I think Putin's stated goals of destroying the idea (the meme as it were) of a distinct Ukrainian identity is, under the more expensive definitions, considered "genocide", but I will concede that it's a much less central example than "industrially kill them all" or just "evict them from their lands and ignore the obvious implications" that people would typically point to in WWII.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
17hr ago
It’s no hair off my chin.
Seriously. On the long list of questionable bits of jurisprudence, intervening in an interfaith beard dispute is incredibly niche. There’s plenty of things more threatening than the government overstepping its prosecution authority.
Magusoflight
17hr ago
More likely they didn’t want a ceasefire to begin with, but Trump made it a pre condition of their using the B2s. So now they are taking any excuse to renew the conflict.
TIRM
17hr ago
No_one
17hr ago
Iran's victory condition is avoiding civil war, preserving their strategic forces and forcing Israel to accept that Iran also has nukes.
Israel isn't Russia or US, it has limited resources. Iranian victory is possible.
No_one
17hr ago
My interpretation is that Israel is short on interceptors, Iranians are short on missiles bc Israelis almost certainly bombed exits of tunnel storages and possibly generally short. Rumor is Iranian air defenses rallied and made striking Tehran harder.
Both sides have refrained from truly damaging strikes so far. E.g. Israel didn't hit oil terminals at Kharg island, Iranians didn't hit turbine halls of the five Israeli power plants.
American bombing effort, if it wasn't fake (smaller yield bombs dropped) almost certainly failed to destroy Fordow enrichment facility which was engineered to absorb such damage.
Iranians want to withdraw from the NPT and are reportedly more avid than ever for a nuclear program. So, if Israelis are truly dead set on dismantling that, they're going to have to continue bombing until Iran turns into a failed state.
Can they? Do they have the munitions, spare parts etc?
No_one
18hr ago
Good, interesting write up.
However:
It was an explicit break from the premise of the DNC as a neutral leadership institution for democrats anywhere.
Were the claims by Sanders supporters that DNC essentially sabotaged his chances to win primaries in '16 plain lies?
I have a hard time believing in 'neutral' institutions in the first place.
No_one
18hr ago
It's sometimes used but I have doubts about the 'a lot's. SpaceX disables access for the ones in Russia. They're easily capable of preventing Russians from using them.
No_one
18hr ago
How is the ease with which a modern military could impose a police state 'assuming the conclusion ' ?
You're going to need to explain that because it seems erroneous.
will take a substantial period of time
You sure? Simply grabbing the cell phone operator's admins by the throat, sending in your own experts and the network disconnecting devices whose IMEIs aren't registered as using the app would get most everyone who uses the phones to do so.
Alternative is not having any comms.
They failed, twice, to exercise control at the point where exercise of control is the absolute weakest and most difficult to execute: control over highly protected and highly legible choices made by dozens of millions of Americans in secret, all at the same time. And of their numerous attempts to forestall these choices, many failed by very thin margins or in very temporary ways.
Anti-establishment movements do not have a central myth that they are doomed. Their central myth is that entrenched evil forces are a clear and present danger that must be fought with maximum effort, right now. "Winning" means removing that threat and preventing it from re-emerging, and electoral victory is not the end of that effort, but rather the beginning. You have to actually wield power to un-entrench the elites from their positions and entrench yourselves or your allies therein, or you'll be right back where you started when the electoral winds inevitably shift.
"Don't be ruled by people who hate you" is the proper foundation of political thought.
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