Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
May I ask what it is you do for a living?
As I've said repeatedly here on this very board, I'm a worthless welfare parasite leaching off of hardworking American taxpayers — in other words, I'm on SSI and state public assistance for disability. (My state's Division of Vocational Rehabilitation also ruled me effectively unemployable.)
I'm wondering where you were trying to go with that question; I can picture several possibilities.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
30d ago
From Emile DeWeaver at the Brennan Center for Justice: "Crime, the Myth":
Crime is not real. This assertion flies in the face of common sense and consensus. Of course crime is real, one would be justified in thinking — we see “crime” every day on the news. Charles Manson was, in fact, responsible for nine murders. Dylann Roof did, in fact, enter the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and kill nine people. Crime rates are, in fact, either up or down or stable on a given day in every city in the United States.
So how could crime be a fiction? The reader and I likely agree that people hurt others and transgress moral boundaries. We may also agree that communities have the job of figuring out how to prevent and remedy such transgressions because a basic precondition for happiness is safety. If, however, we are actually to create a society that is safe for everyone, we’ll profit from challenging our belief in the “reality” of crime.
Begin this challenge by considering race. For hundreds of years, race’s realness was a “fact,” but today, scientists understand that race is not real. What “real” means is well described by journalist Jenée Desmond-Harris. “By ‘real,’ I mean based on facts that people can even begin to agree on. Permanent. Scientific. Objective. Logical. Consistent. Able to stand up to scrutiny.” Racism is real, as real as Dylann Roof. Race, however, is a fiction, and the creation of this fiction was a political project aimed at a political end.
…
The national conversation about crime engages a similar mythology: prevailing narratives routinely deny us the ability to make the distinction between myth and reality. These narratives are, like racial narratives, political projects aimed at political ends. Given the conflation between myth and reality, it makes as much sense to call crime real as it does to call the legend of King Arthur real. If we want to call crime real, we have to locate the truth of what it is and what it isn’t. We have to dispel the mythologies of crime.
One myth is that we punish people for committing crimes. The truth is we punish people less because of what they do and more because of who they are. If I kill a stranger on the street for disobeying my orders, I’m a murderer. Police officers routinely kill unarmed people for, according to police claims, resisting arrest — arrests, as in the case of George Floyd, where no meaningful “crime” has been committed — but we don’t treat police forces like criminal institutions.
…
Then there’s a second myth, that crime is an act committed by an individual. Calling an act a crime is instead a choice we make as a society about how we respond to harms committed in our community. I recently experienced how this myth operates while standing in line at a local Walgreens.
I was about to check out at the cash register when I looked up from my phone and noticed a security guard becoming excited, even agitated. He alternated between whispering to a store clerk and positioning himself to track someone in the surveillance mirrors on the store’s ceiling.
The scene awakened trauma in my body. I remembered all the times I’d been caught shoplifting as a child, how quickly and easily our criminal legal system could destroy a young life, family, and community in the name of justice. I began to scan the security mirrors too, thinking please don’t let this be some kid. The security guard ducked into an aisle. I tracked him in the mirrors to determine his target. The person stealing wasn’t a kid.
…
“Hey, man,” I tried to sound as casually authoritative as I could. “Go back, get whatever you want, and I’ll pay for it.”
Something quite phenomenal happened.
The store’s tense, fearful atmosphere evaporated. A look of deep relief washed over the security guard, and he stepped back without protest. The people standing in line relaxed. A woman working in the photo department left her post to open a third checkout stand specifically to get this homeless man checked out. She smiled and treated him like a human being. It’s true that I had to buy this treatment for him ($30 for toilet paper, food, and a razor), but that did not make the decisions everyone made in that store any less real or less important. All it would have taken is for one person to insist on police involvement, and that homeless man would have been arrested. It took the entire community waiting in that store to save this man.
The homeless man had in one second gone from a criminal whom people feared and even reviled to a member of a community who needed support. Not only did this community — the people in the store — choose to support him, they seemed hungry to do it. They’d just needed to be shown a path and given the opportunity to be the community that the man deserved. The difference between crime and not-crime wasn’t the homeless man’s actions or his intent. It was his community’s response.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
I don't think anyone would conflate the Department of Education with Erectile Dysfunction as you imply.
One is an irritating and frustrating affliction most men would love to eradicate for good. The other is erectile dysfunction.
Just an aside, but is there a name or term for this particular variety of joke?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
but this isn't something we can just eliminate overnight.
Why not? It seems rather simple to me to just declare that the offices will be closing and programs will all be ending on such-and-such date.
I've seen statistics that suggest Federal student loan and tuition assistance accounts for about 18% of revenue for 4-year public universities. At first glance, no institution can afford to lose 18% of revenue overnight.
So what? If anything, this 18% isn't big enough.
Doing that, Federal support now accounts for up to 25% of revenue. As I said earlier, I'm all in favor of forcing costs down, but a 25% across the board cut will likely result in the kind of emergency cost-cutting measures that are likely to throw the entire higher education system into crisis.
And what's so bad about that? Besides, that is, that it doesn't go far enough. The "entire higher education system" doesn't need "thrown into crisis"… it needs to be burned down — somewhere between Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and Qin Shi Huang's burning of books and burying of scholars (including the executions).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
then the obvious answer is ‘credit card debt’.
That only nets me ~$500 (the credit limit of my credit card). It also removes most of my meager safety net for sudden expenses — like if medicaid decides not to cover part of my recent ER visit.
Edit: Once again, it seems like most people here don't understand how poor — and not just "poor" — someone can get.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
the pollsters have to keep the polls showing the possibility of a Harris victory to give the Democrats cover when they "find" enough ballots to put her over the top
This has been the theory put forth by some commenters over at the Dreaded Jim's blog.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Why do you feel it's inevitable?
To quote Curtis Yarvin, "Moore's Law of election 'fortification.'"
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Buy a bunch of "Yes" shares for a Kamala victory at a discount, enjoy your windfall.
With what money? Broke, disabled welfare parasite here.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
For those watching the Presidential election, things have been looking very bad for Kamala lately, with national polls tightening, and Trump ahead in several key states. Although it remains too close to call, Trump's odds have shot up to 57% according to Polymarket.
And I still don't see how people can take any of that seriously. Meanwhile, I'm just trying to prepare myself for how much worse things are going to get under the inevitable eight years of Harris.
But most importantly, it's explicit racial discrimination against the 86% of the country who isn't black.
What's new about that? If you were the sort to care (negatively) about that, weren't you already highly likely to vote Trump? What's one more such thing on top of the many that already exist. And for liberal whites, you've got their whole pro-outgroup feeling thing.
Personally, I think this appeal is likely to backfire as most swing voters are sick of handouts to people who aren't them.
Aren't most "swing voters," particularly these days, the politically "checked out," who don't pay attention to any of this, and thus are unlikely to hear about this particular proposal?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Reestablishment of the Church and a social policy of traditionalism instead of the revolutionary element classic to fascism
So you dispute the idea of "clerical fascism"? How would you classify Father Coughlin, then? How about the Ustaše? South Africa's Ossewabrandwag? To quote the latter's B. J. Vorster in 1942: "We stand for Christian Nationalism which is an ally of National Socialism. You can call this anti-democratic principle dictatorship if you wish. In Italy it is called Fascism, in Germany National Socialism and in South Africa, Christian Nationalism."
No mass political movement such as the blackshirts/browshirts.
Did the "Emperor-system fascism" of Imperial Japan — which "advocated for ultranationalism, traditionalist conservatism, militarist imperialism and a dirigisme-based economy" — have such a movement? Would you count the Kempeitai or not? Did they "believe in the metaphysical state as an idealist concept which is the protagonist of history" — or was it more about the divinity of the emperor?
He had no aims to remake his polity into new men who could contenance a total revolutionary future.
Again, did the Japanese?
The difference is important.
According to who? Certainly not the Boomer conservatives of my acquaintance, let alone the libertarians or the progressives. People like the woman (apparently some personage in the video game industry) who say things like this tweet
Don’t let bigots try to convince you that civility is the moral / ethical high ground and that it makes you more credible. If folks are spitting western preservation/traditionalism throw rocks at them - they’re Neo Nazis babe. Don’t tolerate intolerance.
Are they going to listen to your defenses about how big a difference "belief in themetaphysical state as an idealist concept which is the protagonist of history" makes before they start throwing figurative — or literal — rocks your way? Is it going to convince a sixty-something "fiscal conservative" GOP voter raised on WWII movies?
This relates to my effortpost (my second highest-voted post) on the competing definitions of "racism" and why convincing people of HBD won't fix our "disparate impact" regime. You can try to argue that an entire academic field — fields, really — is using the "wrong" definitions for the field's core terms, and that the definition preferred by many uneducated laymen is the "right" one, but like that guy who argued that physicists need to stop using the word "flavor" because "you can't taste quarks," I don't expect it to go anywhere. DR3 hasn't exactly been working. All it does is allow the strategic equivocation through which the moral opprobrium attached to "racism" defined as meaning "invidious racial discrimination against individuals" gets applied to elite usages where "racism" is used to mean "disparate impact in statistical outcomes between groups."
Or you can simply concede to the academic definitions, and then note that under such definitions, the opprobrium no longer attaches to the word, and focus on the questions that fight obscured — do we care about 'judging individuals not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character,' or do we care about whether statistical outcomes are proportionate to population fractions? Is the goal “colorblindness” or is it “racial equity”? Does fighting over labels clarify this, or confuse it?
Take a metaphorical page from judo or aikido. Don’t try to strike against the force of your enemy’s blow, go with it. Lean into it. Don’t try to fight the enemy’s labeling; own it. “Agree and amplify.”
Let the Kendi types have their desired definitions… and thereby empty them of their moral and political weight. If the official definition of “racism” means that “colorblind racism” is a thing… then let us be all for “colorblind racism.” If “anti-racism” means affirmative action and quotas and double standards and otherwise treating similar individuals differently on account of their skin color to equalize group outcomes? Then most people are probably fine with not being “anti-racist.”
While the left draws power from their radicals — you'll find plenty of people who will argue that there's no such thing as "too far left" — and sharply police their rightward edge ("no friends to the right, no enemies to the left"), what does the right do? Constantly police their rightward edge — and cancel anyone who even defends someone "too far right" (see how many people on the Right are denouncing Tucker Carlson for "platforming" Cooper) — while welcoming in every "I didn't leave the left, the left left me" person to be exiled from the left for failing to keep up with the latest phase of the revolution, even while they haven't re-examined any of their leftist priors and still fear and loathe those to their right more than they do those further left that gave them the boot. It's what I've seen called the neocon cycle:
Oh, I got pushed out of the Left, because the Left got slightly too crazy. Well, now I have to be on the Right, but I hate the Right, so actually I’m just going to gatekeep the Right, I’m going to transform the Right, I’m going to turn the Right into the kind of Left I wanted and that got away from me.
You know, how you get right-wing pastors’ conferences inviting and looking to guidance from someone who wrote multiple books about how God doesn’t exist and Christianity needs to be destroyed (who thinks Alex Kaschuta is beyond the pale, and is now ranting about how the right is being taken over by a vast Theosophist conspiracy that seeks to summon the Archangel Michael). How you get right-wingers falling all over themselves to welcome and bestow leadership on exiled Leftists who do nothing to hide how they hate those to their right more than they do those to their left. Taking direction from broken scholars who still respect, and are desperate to get back into, the academic institutions they were banished from.
Is there a left-wing counterpart to Buckley purging the Birchers? You can put up a poster of Che in your office and still be a respected professor, but put up a poster of Pinochet, and see how quickly even conservatives will call for your ouster. You can talk about how Mao, despite the body count in the millions, had some good ideas, like… but try saying something about how William Luther Pierce made some good points, like… and see if you still have anyone willing to be seen in public with you.
There is no political “tent” big enough to hold both the likes of Pat Buchanan and the likes of James Lindsay — if only because when you invite in the latter, they end up “policing” the bounds of the tent to expel the former. We pander to those to our left, and purge those to the right, while the left… panders to those to their left, and purge those to their right. And what has doing that, decade after decade, far longer than I’ve been alive, gotten the right? Can we just stop letting new arrivals from the left decide who gets to be “acceptable” on the right? Instead of trying to make a "big tent" by trying to bring in every Jordan Peterson and Bret Weinstein, why not try bringing back in the Buchananite paleoconservatives? The Birchers?
All this trying to bring in definitional nuance — "I'm not a fascist, really, you've gotta believe me, because [something nobody outside the non-establishment Right cares about]" — will not defend you from the "nazi punchers"; from a modern order that takes WWII as its founding myth, and seeks to perpetually refight said war. (Which is why, when they cast you into that enemy role, you better be prepared to win that war.) It only fuels the above dynamic.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Social conservatism is a bottom-up phenomenon which grows by community functioning and institution building.
Yes, but this requires certain favorable conditions. Like a sane, functional official religion (every society has an official religion, even if it's unofficially official, like the insane one we have now).
In fact, I think Jim Donald sums up the basic conditions pretty well: "throne, altar, and freehold."
Instead a reactionary government needs to prune society so that organic socially conservative community building fills the vacuum in society.
Given the decayed state things are in, that's gotta be a lot of pruning. And certainly a lot of pushing back against globalism and immigration despite their benefits for "line go up" economic metrics. Plus, most of the churches aren't exactly maintaining their congregations all that well. AIUI, the Mormons are barely holding steady because, despite being one of the few with significantly above-replacement birth rates, said excess is only just countering their losses from people leaving. And these don't just come down to things the government is doing, such that merely clearing government away will fix the problem.
And how do you propose to pull off all the pruning? It seems to me to be the sort of thing you need an Augustus for.
(And now I'm reminded of some fellows of my acquaintance who, despite denouncing democracy as "fake and gay," and wanting a government headed by a single man with supreme executive authority who serves for life, insist that this cannot be compared to "monarchism" in any way, because their support for such a leader derives purely from the Führerprinzip, and "Moldbug is a Jew." When pushed on just what exactly the difference is, when you set aside "CEO-king appointed by shadowy cabal of cryptographically-anonymous "shareholders" who direct him to maximize the gold he extracts from the masses to line their pockets" scenarios, between their desired "Führer" and historical monarchies, particularly the non-hereditary ones… and the answer is basically "it'll be more explicitly racist." Bringing up the contrast between Rex Anglorum and Rex Anglie just resulted in more antisemitic ranting about Curtis Yarvin.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
It actually might make sense for someone to not own a car and instead simply rent one on a weekly basis from a fleet of vehicles maintained by a larger company that are mostly standardized and will suit whatever their needs are at the time. Or a system like Citibike for cars. Or maybe later on, just call a robotaxi as needed.
An immediate example of an answer (beyond the others given) that comes to my mind comes from a recent discussion about the need to own movies and video games on physical media. "Why bother taking up shelf space with DVDs of the original Indiana Jones Trilogy, when I can watch them anytime on my Disney+ streaming service?" Well, how about when said streaming service suddenly takes them down? Same with "games as a service."
"Services" can be taken away with far less difficulty than possessions. It's a lot easier for your "Citibike for cars" or robotaxi to say that they won't rent you a car because (thanks to your tweet on x.com last night) your social credit score just dropped too low, than it is for someone to come tow away the car you own.
Or what if the computers go down at your "Citibike for cars," and suddenly they can't rent anything out? Sure, there may be competitors, but they're now all suddenly swamped by all those customers. Centralization makes failures so much bigger — see supply chains under COVID.
In short, in increases your dependency on others, and on large centralized systems, and thus your vulnerability. Ownership grants resilience.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
“Which means that obviously you can’t support it.” Wait, why not? “Because it’s fascism!”
This is where you misunderstand me, because you seem to have mistaken me for a leftist, rather than a far-right extremist who thinks the American Revolution was a mistake.
It's not me, but our elites who say you can't support it. And you won't be allowed to until they're removed.
In short, it’s just a rhetorical trick to prevent his ideological opponents from supporting social conservatism.
Again, you have me placed wrong.
the only acceptable conservatism in a modern Western country is one that doesn’t actually conserve anything, just drifts leftward more slowly.
Again, this is the position promulgated and, more importantly, enforced by our elites, and which has been absorbed by too many on the right in our country. We on the right need to stop conforming to what's "acceptable" in favor of unacceptable right-wing positions.
Of course, voters are finally wising up to this and voting MAGA, AfD, FPÖ, etc.,
Which shows an improvement in attitude… but not strategy. As the saying goes, if voting could change anything, it would be illegal. That's why Trump Derangement Syndrome — as far as the people who rule us are concerned, MAGA must be crushed, no matter what it takes. AfD is going to end up being banned in the name of "defensive democracy" and "never again."
The problem is that the people who rule us are not going to allow us on the right to do anything that might actually work, not so long as they're alive. Our first priority should be figuring out how we're going to deal with them.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
The whole point of having a leader is that this is the person who makes the calls, the final arbitrator, the one who decides on exceptions, makes quick decisions.
And what I keep seeing people argue, in various contexts, is that for many people, you can't give a human being — any human being — this sort of power, not because they can abuse it to do evil things, but because they will abuse it to do evil things. Any authority not carefully laundered through procedures, algorithms, consensus-building, and all the rest of Weberian bureaucratization is, in this view, automatically tyrannical. (Hence why many in this set seem to hold machine rule by AI as their ideal government.)
Suppose the Pentagon wants to dump Zelensky and the Department of State wants to prop him up - who resolves this? Do they just go and do their own thing?
Looking at the many past conflicts between "the red empire of the bases" and "the blue empire of the consulates" — as the dreaded Jim calls it — nobody resolves it, and, yes, they each do their thing. (Usually, the State Department ends up winning. Because for the Pentagon, the outgroup is whatever enemy we're fighting; while for the folks at the State Department, those guys are the fargroup, and the outgroup is the Pentagon.)
The Department of Energy and big tech want more nuclear plants, the green faction wants more solar - what happens?
Lawfare, bureaucratic infighting, gridlock.
The chaotic, aimless situation under Biden will keep entrenching and metastatizing as the govt runs away with itself.
Yes, it will. It's only going to keep getting worse; that's the nature of government under Weberian rationalization.
If your model of the world can not contenance that Francisco Franco was not a fascist
How was he not a fascist? I ask as someone who thinks Franco was one of the good guys.
then you are better off refraining from using the word fascism altogether.
I'd prefer it indeed if people refrained from it's use, but they won't. Hence, better to just embrace the label, recognize that the "punch fascists" crowd are serious and deadly enemies, and deal with them accordingly (supposing that we have the capacity to, which remains doubtful).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
What hiring process are you referring to?
However hiring for the million-plus civilian Federal bureaucracy is done, particularly regarding hiring rules and degree qualifications.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
The question then becomes whether the power to convert positions in this way exists in reality, or only "on paper." Will they allow him to do this, or will they block all such attempts?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
If your right acts apoplectic towards the idea of right + using power, but tolerates much more the left using power, or it self even engages in using power for left wing or foreign nationalist causes, then they aren't really much of a right wing conservative party and at least in part made by people who are a false opposition and identify more with the other side.
You've summed up my view of the GOP, and why they're useless, pretty well.
But by these standards a lot of countries majority populations, including in Europe are made of fascists.
Which is why elites of the post-Nuremberg regime fear and hate so much of their own subject populations. Why — as well-detailed by Curtis Yarvin — they reduced electoral politics to a sham, use Jacobin arguments to redefine "democracy" as meaning rule by left-wing technocrats, and denounce any actual democracy as "populism," "demagoguery," and, yes, "fascism."
It simply is true that much of the hysteria about fascism is not about opposing evil things but about opposing right wingers, hated ethnic outgroup, and not having far left oikophobic politics. In fact it is about opposing things that a reasonable person who is moderate would support, in favor of a hysteric far left paranoid anti-intellectual overreacting fanaticism.
And that hysteria will continue until the elites that promote it are removed. And, no, there's no voting them out. As Brandon Walsh put it on Twitter, "All of our solutions are fedposts."
Well, moderate nationalists have existed aplenty, but they have been failing because they let people like Satre and the decolonize and destroy our society and brand everyone opposing this as supremacist, fascist. They have in part accepted too much of the framing of the far left.
I'd say less "let people like…" as were "forced to by people like…" But yes, we need to ditch the framing of the far left… particularly the "fascism bad" framing.
Anyone on the right who isn't a useless GOP establishment-style "conservative," who doesn't actually conserve anything, is eventually going to get tarred with the "fascist" brush; so you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
Using this definition of fascist, I’m forced to ask, what’s so bad about fascism?
Nothing… except that our ruling elites will do anything in their power to stamp it out.
If “fascism” is just a neutral descriptor of one quadrant of the political graph, then supporting fascism should be no more controversial or upsetting than supporting libertarianism or neoliberalism or socialism, and it certainly shouldn’t result in people losing their minds TDS-style.
I agree that it shouldn't be that way, but it is that way.
Why be so upset about fascism?
Don't ask me; I'm not. After all, I'm a far-right monarchist with friends who are literal neo-Nazis.
But I think that there’s a bait and switch going on here, that labeling the socially-conservative-yet-fiscally-progressive quadrant “fascism” is a deliberate choice to poison the public discourse by tarring your political opponents as Hitler wannabes.
The people in that quadrant aren't my political opponents, they're my allies. And it's our ruling elites who are tarring us as "Hitler wannabes."
I'm saying anyone on the right not content with being the "outer party" branch of the uniparty is going to end up so tarred, so we might as well own it. And recognize that the elites doing said tarring, and making with the "Nazi-punching" and "by any means necessary" rhetoric, are our enemies and must be removed. And thanks to their control of the institutions and to our "democracy" being a sham, there's no lawful, non-violent means to do so.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
I've posted on this before here.
Set up a two-axis "political compass." Let the horizontal axis be the social/cultural axis: "socially conservative"/"right wing" vs. "socially liberal"/"left wing." Let the vertical be the economic axis, with upwards being increasing government intervention in the economy, and downwards being towards laissez faire — "fiscally liberal"/"socialist" vs. "fiscally conservative"/"capitalist" (and with the actual space of interest being confined to a much smaller window somewhere in the middle between those far extremes).
In the lower left, we have the Libertarian Quadrant: "fiscally conservative but socially liberal." Low taxes, low redistribution, low regulation, but left-wing social politics. Above that, we have the Progressive Quadrant: high taxes, high redistribution, high regulation of markets, and left-wing social politics. (The trend of the past decade has been for the Democratic party electorate to actually move closer to the Libertarian/Progressive border on economic issues as they move left on social issues.) Over on the bottom right, we have the Conservative Quadrant of the GOP establishment — the people who think the best way to promote traditional values is to lower taxes, reduce regulations, unleash the free market, and "shrink government until you can drown it in the bathtub." (I could go on about this group, and how they respond to tensions between market forces and right-wing social values — but the tl;dr summary is that "low taxes, small government" must always come before "social conservatism" because having it the other way around is fascism.)
Now, what about the fourth quadrant, above the Conservative Quadrant? People who are socially conservative, but also in favor of wealth redistribution and business regulation? Who want to use the government, particularly over the market, as the Progressives, only for right-wing social ends instead of left-wing ones?
Again, I've had people in all four quadrants label that corner the Fascist Quadrant.
To reiterate from that post I linked:
I have a real-life acquaintance who, about half a year or so ago, made a short argument — I don't remember the precise phrasing, only that it was more succinct and pithy than I can manage — that the average post-Trump Republican voter "wants fascism." To try to lay it out here, first, the average GOP voter has become ever-less wedded to worship of free markets and absolute opposition to redistribution over the course of the 21st century. I remember when people made fun of the old lady at a TEA Party protest with a sign reading "Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare" for the incoherence of that statement when taken at face value. But I also remember someone arguing that it makes sense if you understand it as a person trying to express support for a portion of the welfare state via a political language limited to anti-government Reaganism. There were plenty of socially-conservative people who were unhappy about the role of "too big to fail" firms in the financial crisis and sympathetic to the economic goals of Occupy Wall Street (and according to one left-wing person I knew, the driving away of such people by the "progressive stack" and embrace of all the usual lefty social causes was not a bug but a feature, because any socially conservative person who would agree with OWS's economic positions is a fascist, and better that OWS fail than let fascists into their movement). Economic protectionism and opposition to globalization — left-wing positions back in the late 90s — are now more popular on the right. You see increasing support for anti-trust laws, particularly with the rise of "woke capitalism," DEI, and ESG scores. Even George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was a step away from the "drown government in the bathtub" position (which is why classmates at Caltech denounced it as fascist). More and more, younger right-wingers are moving toward the sort of things people of my parents' generation used to denounce as "socialism" — and even that set is coming around to the bits like Social Security and Medicare that they're increasingly depending on.
But they're not exactly becoming truly socialist, are they? They don't want a command economy. As my acquaintance put it, they want a government that intervenes enough against Big Business to let the little guy compete, without outright picking winners and losers. They're looking for something in between unfettered capitalism and Soviet communism — a third position, you might say.
And:
So our straight working class Trump voter wants policies, both economic and social, that improve his or her ability, and the ability of people like him or her, to find a spouse, settle down, and raise a family in conditions that allow them to pass on their values to the next generation. You might say that this group of people — mostly and implicitly white (or "white-adjacent") — want to secure the continued existence of their group and a future for their children.
Or, to succinctly sum up these two points, they want fascism.
More than once, I've seen Democrat voters argue that a key reason not to elect Republicans is that the GOP is so solidly anti-government, so determined to "shrink it until it can be drowned in the bathtub," that when placed in charge of the government, they're incapable of running it competently. Well, once in my college days, I responded by asking what would happen if the Republican party stopped trying to cut government, and focused instead on how to run it when in charge. Would that, therefore, be less objectionable?
The answer was not just no, but hell no. That would be the worst-case scenario. Because no matter how bad the "cut taxes, cut regulation, kill the government" GOP was, any socially-conservative right wing party that didn't embrace this, which actually wanted to run the government, and use it toward right-wing ends, would be a fascist party.
I don't remember the context, but in an argument at SSC, I remember someone replying to me that Imperial China, across the millennia from Qin to Qing, was "basically fascist," for similar reasons.
There's the GOP establishment, particularly the never-Trumpers. Dedicated first and foremost to cutting taxes, cutting regulations, cutting spending that doesn't go to big politically-connected firms, cutting anything that gets in the way of corporate profits. Whose support of social conservatism is limited to fighting attempts by the left to use the government against it. Who are in favor of Burkean incrementalism, moving things in the same direction as the left, just much more slowly.
Why was the party elite this way? Because it's the only acceptable form the "right wing" can take, particularly in a modern, Western country. Because any socially-conservative right-wing that isn't this way (particularly when its supporters are mostly white and/or Christian) is definitionally fascist.
Again, you can find people both left and right, with a variety of economic views, who agree with this definition. Again, I know people who fall into this quadrant who agree with this definition, and thus accept the "fascist" label.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
They've tried everything from jeering them in the media to inventing novel legal theories to imprison advocates of such theories for long periods, as well as disbarring and otherwise cancelling some of them
But have they tried them hard enough. If the current level is silencing "a few," then why wouldn't doing more of this silence more people? And thus, intensify the jeering, the cancelling, the jailing as necessary until the problem goes away.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
an abandoned constituency in the native proletariat victimized by globalization and the SJ conflicts boiling over into larger culture created a broad class of young energetic reactionary activists that were also looking for a champion.
Or to sum it up in a word, fascists.
populism and anti-SJ sentiment.
In other words, the "socially conservative but fiscally liberal" quadrant opposite the sparsely-populated "fiscally conservative but socially liberal" libertarian quadrant on the "social axis vs. economic axis" political plane, which — as people I've encountered from all four quadrants of that plane argue — is best labelled the fascist quadrant.
The coalitions had already been drawn out with the failure of Occupy I would argue.
As a left-winger once argued to me, Occupy had to fail like it did, no matter how lamentable that outcome, because the alternative was platforming fascists.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Democracy, in the sense you mean, died with Kennedy of an agony that started under FDR. The oligarchy of bureaucrats that make up permanent government or the "deep state" was all too happy to maintain the illusion of a government by consent so long at the governed consented to the rule of experts.
Because Weimar Germany showed us the alternative. "Democracy" is either this sort of illusion draped over expert technocracy, or it's fascism.
But American (and Western in general) elites have grown to believe that the plebs are too ignorant to have a point and that this accountability mechanism is antiquated, because they know best anyways.
Plus, do they really need it? Because who cares if they trample the plebs, changes in the nature of military force, law enforcement, surveillance, financial control, etc. means they no longer have to worry about the masses rising up against them; they're free to trample the plebs at will.
It is therefore no surprise that the fix advocated for is essentially to destroy those remnants of democracy by clamping down on free speech as "misinformation", to fix elections and to arrest dissidents if necessary.
Yes, and what's wrong with that?
There are only really two ways out of this.
Sure, but there's a third option: we don't get out of this. We fully transition to "hard managerialism," and it maintains a hold on power (until civilization collapses). After all, the Soviet Union lasted for decades after it was already clear that the promised socialist utopia wasn't coming. They also had a clear rival system in the west, which matters for a number of reasons. First, it meant that there was a clear alternative model one could point to for comparison. Secondly, it's easier to get people to admit the current system isn't working and let it end when you have a clear answer for what to do instead. Third, while the military build-up of the Cold War arms race with the west was part of what defeated them, it also prolonged their survival in some ways, because it put limits on how far from contact with reality they could get. It also placed geographic limits on the resources available, and on how much they could damage in their fall.
The GAE, as global hegemon, however, will not die so easily. There's no obvious answer to the question "if not this, then what?" Where on Earth can you point to that's doing better than the "hard managerial" current-year American regime? After all, as N.S. Lyons's "The China Convergence" notes, the whole world, including America's top geopolitical rivals (such as they are, given their various issues), are either converging upon or have already reached this same hard managerial system. The plebs might have a lot of complaints, but so long as the Cathedral can keep them convinced that it's the best humanity can do, or least prevent the serious complainers from coalescing around any single alternative — and crushing by state force those who try — nothing is changing.
Further, we don't have a Cold War to limit our detachment from reality — despite the Ukraine and Israel conflicts and fears around Taiwan, the "competency crisis" rolls on unabated. Because which is easier, fixing problems like crumbling infrastructure, immigrant crime, falling planes, and so on; or convincing people that these are no big deal, or at least not problems to be blamed on the state. 'Islamic terror attacks are just part of living in a big modern city' and all that. They say that to someone with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Well, to a regime with a vast system of narrative manufacture and control like the Cathedral (and steeped in postmodernism), every problem looks like a public relations problem.
Suppose you're a shady used car salesman with "the gift of gab", and you've got this lemon of a vehicle, a real clunker, on your hands that you need to sell off. Well, you could spend a whole lot of time and effort trying to figure out what all is wrong with it and attempting to address them with your meager mechanical skills… or you can spend a lot of money hiring a mechanic to so that for you… or you can try to cheaply cover over the most visible issues, slap on a coat of paint, and then use all your skills of persuasion to con some poor schmuck into buying the thing.
Since the GAE is global, the resources it can potentially call upon to prop itself up are far less limited than those the USSR had. Sure, it can't stave off collapse forever, but like a dying star, it will expand and engulf as it dies. Expect the crushing of any attempt by a true rival system to emerge. Expect also "looting" to keep the plates spinning — both domestically of civilizational "seed corn," and of resources more broadly abroad. (We're already doing it to a significant degree population-wise, no?)
So, yes, the Soviet Union collapsed. And if we follow them into maintaining a "hard managerial" regime, so will we. But it will take far longer, be far more catastrophic, and will almost certainly take the entirety of global civilization with it when it goes. Long after our current (mostly childless) elites are gone, so, even if they recognize this, why should they care? Why sacrifice their personal power, in the here and now, for a distant future that won't affect them or anyone they care about?
But we could also get brutal Stalinism too, that too works if you're willing to go far enough.
See above.
The alternative of course is being replaced by another ascendant elite who will "restore democracy" inasmuch as they will fix the system in favor of new patrons who actually listen to the native proletariat.
In other words, a fascist takeover. I can't see our current elites doing anything other than using every tool and bit of power at their disposal to prevent this.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
they are absolutely going to find rosters of people who are loyalists first and foremost to install into the bureaucracy.
Where are they going to find enough of these, particularly given their general lack of the academic credentials necessary to get through the government hiring process? Plus, for that matter, how are you going to get rid of the masses of old, unfirable bureaucrats to make space for these "loyalists"?
Not in this timeframe. Even if the applications were processed in time, the cards likely wouldn't make it here (Alaska) in the mail before the election.
Some further points, after having given this more thought:
More options
Context Copy link