Skibboleth
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
14hr ago
the powers-that-be
There should be a requirement that if you're going to use vague and allusive terms that you define those terms so people can know who you're talking about. Don't just say 'elites' or 'the powers-that-be'. What specific people/organizations/institutions do you mean?
Skibboleth
15hr ago
Why not say that instead of using a needlessly vague and conspiratorial sounding term?
I mean, it is clearly is appropriate for many as well, but off the top of my head Booth, McKinley's assassin, the Puerto Ricans, and that one Georgian dude who threw a grenade at Dubya had fairly clear ideological motives. It may not necessarily have involved a good plan, but it wasn't like the ghost of Elvis told them to do it.
Skibboleth
1d ago
The Powers-That-Be
Can you be more specific?
I'm beginning to suspect that Powers That Be may not Be all they're cracked up to be. Current track record on presidential assassinations is leaning really heavily in favor of deranged highly motivated individuals and against the Illuminati.
edit: deranged is not really an appropriate descriptor for many presidential assassins, but even the ones with clear political motives were acting alone or in a small group, not as agents of a significant institution.
Skibboleth
2d ago
I mean for the politicians to only see a percentage on each line item.
This mostly seems like a way to waste staffer time preparing reports which convert percentages in actual relevant cost information. You can't actually make the legislature decide budget priorities in purely percentage terms and then decide how much revenue to raise. Whatever the nominal procedural requirements, it's going to be negotiated holistically.
Skibboleth
3d ago
I'm being a little glib. As a pejorative it's tended to have pro-free market connotations, though when right-wingers adopt the term they tend to emphasize the globalist aspect of that rather than the anti-regulation/anti-public sector implication of left-wing usage. In either case, it tends to suffer from lumping together a wide range of people who may not be part of the same political coalition as each other or hold the views imputed to them.
Skibboleth
3d ago
Catch-all pejorative for political opponents is actually the standard usage.
Skibboleth
7d ago
Free Market Conservatism strikes again. This is primarily about protecting the economic interests of agrarian elites, secondarily about visceral disgust, and little bit about aesthetic anti-environmentalism. Other reasons offered are not necessarily insincere, but they are... noncentral? Which is to say, having them conclusively disproven wouldn't change many minds.
“Although the FDA has said that this type of product is safe, that doesn’t mean it’s healthy,” Black said. “In Florida, we don’t want our citizens used as guinea pigs.”
Far be it from Florida to allow its citizens to pursue unhealthy habits.
Justin Tupper, president of the United States Cattlemen’s Association, called the bill a “win” for similar reasons. Although he said he doesn’t fear competition, he is concerned about chemicals in the new product.
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But Rossmeissl and Shapiro said there’s little merit to health concerns, because cultivated meat has near identical nutritional value to real meat. Furthermore, conventional meat often has fecal and intestinal pathogens, and antibiotic residues, that need to be cooked out for safe consumption, Shapiro said.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
Why? As I said, the normie libs continues to exist and, indeed, to dominate. (Though tbh I'd be hard pressed to describe early 2010s gaming communities as socially liberal as opposed to merely disdainful of religious conservatives for being critical of gaming)
Skibboleth
1mo ago
a few core concepts to liberalism that are very old and very consistent and the disconnect here is that most modern progressives don't realize that they have almost totally abandoned the ideological framework that they were raised in
I don't think this right. It is true that progressivism contains illiberal beliefs and values, but that is generally true - virtually every political movement in the US synthesizes liberal and illiberal beliefs. Very few people can be said to have abandoned liberalism, but everyone accepts compromises on liberal values. Sometimes this is directly ideological (something which applies to progressives, populists, religious conservatives, leftists, etc...) and sometimes it is the consequence of disagreements about what liberal values mean in practice or an attempt to reconcile internal ambiguities within liberalism. (Or ideology making contact with reality).
The suggestion that all the principled liberals are on the right is belied by the reality that the modern American right is a coalition of religious conservatives and right-wing populists. These people are not totally illiberal, but their policy preferences center on illiberal goals. The center right, which one would expect to be the standard bearer for conservative liberalism, is functionally dead.
Tellingly, while there is a lot of policy conflict between left and right on culture war issues, the intellectual side of the culture war is almost entirely center left vs far left. The right doesn't have much intellectual firepower to bring to bear, and what it does have tends to be either too spicy for public consumption or too lacking in clout due to misalignment with the broader conservative movement. The latter functionally operate at the right tail of the center left (e.g. people like Lyman Stone or Tanner Greer, who are smart and interesting and also totally untethered from operational conservatism). This is a major reason why conservative illiberalism doesn't get much discussion.
It seems sort of amusingly illiberal, to rewrite history so that liberal is just the word that the left uses to describe itself and so liberals who are no longer in-line with the modern left, despite being totally in-line with liberalism, must be conservatives.
This linguistic shift is decades old (older than me, certainly) and conservatives were enthusiastic participants. The modern progressive movement didn't even exist at the time.
Beyond that, I stand by my initial point: self-described classical liberals are very likely to be people with right-wing views who do not want to describe themselves as conservatives. Not always, certainly (sometimes they are embarassed liberals instead), but someone with conventionally center-left views will probably describe themself as a liberal without adjectives (or maybe a neoliberal if they're terminally online) rather than a classical liberal. The consequence is that professing seemingly anodyne, cross-spectrum beliefs becomes right coded (and 'professing' is the key word here).
Skibboleth
1mo ago
You claimed you do take them on their word
No, I said I don't:
"I do [see a reason not to take them at their word]. The issues of the late 18th century..."
Why does it matter?
Because you seem to think it does and are making inferences based off that. Otherwise why bring up the idea that I'm a progressive?
Perhaps it would help if you could clarify what you mean when you say "progressive".
So that means what Amadan, and people like him, are saying is correct
Could be. Could be a story they tell themselves to feel better about swinging right. Could be they were always kind of right-wing but didn't like to think of themselves that way and the low salience of their views meant that self-perception never got challenged. Contra Moldbug, political currents move in all directions.
And how do you decide those specific beliefs are conservative?
Context and judgment.
Well, in that case progressives need to stop pretending they have any principles other than change itself.
I'm not sure how you get from here to there.
you can't honestly guarantee that at some point everything that was old won't become new again, and the divine right of kings won't be declared progressive.
This is true but has nothing to do with the contemporary progressive movement as opposed to just human nature. Look no further than the libertarian -> nrx pipeline if you need an example of old ideas being revived. There is no magic wand that will perpetually banish an idea to the dustbin of history.
It's a lot more useful than pretending that things that are moving are standing still, and vice-versa.
On the contrary. Understanding that motion is relative is extremely useful, whereas collapsing the distinction between hundreds of years of political philosophy is obfuscatory.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
Where?
I've already stated my reasons. If you don't find them compelling you're free to ignore me.
And I don't suppose it crossed your mind that you see it this way because you, and the progressive movement generally, has changed it's views
What do you think my views are?
And is this based on anything other than "trust me, bro"?
Nope. But that's the normal standard of evidence on this forum.
Is there any way we can determine whether someone like Amadan is an actual liberal (classical or otherwise) or full shit?
Sure. Rigorously interviewing them about the specifics of their beliefs.
"My friends jumped on a bus and drove away" is not just another way of saying "I jumped on a bus and drove away".
The Overton Window is not a bus. Politics is not oriented around a set of immovable poles. People may fix their own beliefs, but the context for those beliefs is always changing.
Once upon a time, thinking that the electorate should be all men, regardless of property, made you a liberal who wanted to massively expand the franchise. Now it would make you a radical reactionary who wants to massively reduce it.
personally I don't think that not keeping up with the eternal revolution makes you conservative.
As near as I can tell, that is exactly what makes you conservative. What should? Are we all liberals because we all reject divine right of kings? That hardly seems useful.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
I don't know what to tell you, man. If your political beliefs really crystallized in the 90s, you're going to find the valence of many of your beliefs sliding right (or being reduced to rhetoric rather than policy, or just losing salience). It doesn't necessarily make you right wing relative to the general population, but it probably makes you more right wing than you used to be. That's not some semantic sleight of hand on the part of the modern progressive movement; that's a normal aspect of how politics change. I'm more left-wing/less conservative than I used to be, partly because my views changed, but in large part because things I still believe became less conservative.
And that is apart from how certain phrases can serve as political euphemisms that convey a meaning quite distinct from their literal one.
people who feel forced out of their own movement.
People who feel forced out of their own movement are struggling with the dissonance between their self identification, their beliefs, and the direction of the movement they used to be a part of. This is as true of ex-conservatives who stayed put or moved left while the party moved right as it is for ex-liberals who did the converse.
Me making up my own definition for a particular label has no bearing on that.
Ok, so even going by that definition I see no grounds to say classical liberals shouldn't be taken seriously on their word
I do. The issues of the late 18th century are overwhelmingly different and the label itself was largely dead until it was functionally revived by people who wanted to avoid associating their ideas with conservatism.
But the bigger factor is just that the vast majority of self-ID'd classical liberals I know have garden variety soccon views + weed while exhibiting very little interest in (or outright hostility to) the personal freedoms or civil liberties aspect of their claimed ideology. (There is also the occasional embarassed liberal and even a few sincere libertarians, but they are less common).
It's not that I think they are lying. It's that I think they're full of shit.
the claim that everyone around them moved left is plausible
It is plausible. It's also another way of saying "I got more conservative". The views that would make you socially liberal in 1954 would make you pretty reactionary in 2024, and having your views crystallize while the world continues to change is pretty much the standard form conversion story.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
I apologize; I misinterpreted the question.
I don't think it's a very useful question (or at least not one I have a useful answer for), because I don't use the term except in reference to people who self-describe as such. You can look back to late 18th/early 19th century liberals, but that's a political context that's almost unrecognizable to today. I guess if you want my short answer: classical liberalism properly refers to a historical political tradition which has been succeeded by various offspring.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
Except that's manifestly untrue. The center left and far left squabble incessantly without the former being forced out. Some gamers have a meltdown because some gaming journalists called them sexist isn't being thrown in a pit, but it is sort of telling.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
That would depend on the actual content of their beliefs, since someone calling themselves that could be almost anything from a center left neoliberal to a blue tribe conservative to white supremacist who isn't quite ready to take off the mask.
Statistically, my money is still on conservative in denial.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
People usually call themselves "classical liberals" because they pointedly want to distinguish themselves from social conservatives. What I am saying is that many/most (though not all) such people are just garden variety conservatives who are embarassed by their own socially conservative views and/or the association with other conservatives, so they come up with stories to tell themselves (and others) how the party left them behind or the SJWs forced their hand or something similar, the point of which is say "I am not really a conservative."
Skibboleth
1mo ago
You are wrong if you are accusing me of actually being an "embarrassed conservative
I am not trying to accuse you of anything. I am telling you why this political narrative is not taken seriously.
the white nationalists or white nationalist-adjacent don't claim liberalism
The people I am describing are not white nationalists (they are frequently racist, but not ideologically so). They are embarassed conservatives. I use that turn of phrase for a reason - they are people who like to think of themselves as liberal even though their political priorities and sensibilities are overwhelmingly right-wing. I know no shortage of people like this in real life by dint of the fact that I used to be one, and the almost universal pattern was that when push came to shove they'd come down on the conservative side of an issue. Sometimes this was just lack of perspective - they couldn't conceive of how a gay man or a black woman might have a different experience with - but often it was just disregard.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
But really, it just enrages me, when I can still muster such feelings, that believing in colorblind meritocracy, free speech, presumption of innocence, biological reality, "my rules, applied fairly," etc., is now coded as "right-wing."
Because no one believes you. Whatever you, personally, believe, it all stinks of embarassed conservatism. People make fun of self-identified "classical liberals" because the label has been spoiled by bigots hiding behind a mask of libertarianism (libertarianism that for some reason only seems to extend as far as their own preferences). I like meritocracy too, but I've met too many people for whom 'meritocracy' means never having to think about how society allocates opportunities.
I could go on, but I'm on my phone and that makes composition awkward, so I'll leave it at this: I find this comment darkly hilarious because the kind of people who populate the Motte are exactly the reason you are treated to a presumption of bad faith.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
where the liberals at? Or alternatively, why has the proportion of racists increased dramatically since moving off Reddit?
Lack of external pressure + Evaporative cooling + community sentiment
On Reddit, there was some degree of pressure on both the mods and the users to avoid the attention of the admins. Leaving Reddit meant that they were no longer bound by those restraints and the least motivated posters were left behind. That in turn drives more people away who don't want to spend all their time debating HBD, etc...
Community sentiment has an effect of its own. To quote someone from the post-mortem on the SSC sub:
Of course, it goes beyond the general sense of hostility that drives people off and into the problem of moderation. Even if they're not biased by nature, internet moderators are unpaid humans and they're going to tend to look at users generating a lot of reports and angry responses as troublemakers, even if the quality of their posting is well within acceptable parameters.
Skibboleth
1mo ago
I do think that Allen gets some extra flack compared to Tyson because Allen is white whereas Tyson is black.
An obvious possibility here (and IMO the biggest reason) is that people who care about cinema think sexual violence is a really big deal and people who care about boxing don't. Like, both will say rape is bad if you ask them "is rape bad?", but the former are much more likely believe an allegation even if the evidence is weak and act on that belief, whereas the latter are more likely to dismiss allegations (or just not care) even if the evidence is strong.
The difficulty with this question, taken more broadly, is that there's a very long list of celebrities with at least semi-credible accusations against them who beat the rap, and looking at their race is not likely to be very enlightening.
I think the most relevant factors here are a) do you give a shit b) does your audience give a shit? If the answer to both of those is no, you can get away with pretty much anything that doesn't actually land you in jail.
Voting Republican gives some people the "ick".
That, or they don't trust Republicans.
Or polling doesn't capture their priorities (or the polls are just bad).
Or they are tribal and they intuit that Republicans won't accept them.
You could just be specific. I'm not suggesting you need a comprehensive list of every single person involved, but you should be able to provide some key identifiable institutions or people. It is extremely relevant who they are because you cannot possibly draw useful conclusions about them otherwise. A nebulous "they" has no interests.
All rhetoric serves an interest. Vagueness makes it impossible to interrogate claims or simply obfuscate their absurdity. The motives of the "powers that be" to assassinate Trump are not something anyone can examine because there is no clear reference.
Of course, the real answer to all this is that the "ruling class" is a fiction - the people and organizations that wield power are fragmented and frequently at odds.
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