FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
So there's an official in ancient Japan, sharp as a tack, a real up-and-comer. He's rapidly making his way up the imperial bureaucracy, and his rivals decide they need to nip him in the bud. The capitol is overrun with pickpockets, has been forever; the crimes are too trivial for serious punishments, and yet no lesser punishments seem to dissuade the criminals. So they decide the thing to do is to give him the job of cleaning up the pickpocket problem, and then when he fails to do so, they can quash his career.
He accepts the job, thinks it over, and issues a new imperial statute: pickpocketing is now legal, provided the pickpockets obtain and carry an official license from the government while plying their vocation. This license is a large placard, five feet tall and two wide, with the word "pickpocket" written on it in large letters visible at a considerable distance. Pickpocketing without a license is now not just pickpocketing, but violation of the imperial law, a crime punishable by death.
The pickpockets examine their options, up-stakes and relocate elsewhere. The official's career proceeds unimpeded.
Because it's boring and cheap.
Calling for it is definitely boring and cheap. An actual collapse of civil order would be a lot of things, but "boring" and "cheap" are not among them. If you think that our current order would obviously have survived Trump catching the Butler bullet with his brainstem, you are much more of an optimist than I. I believe that a lot of Americans were genuinely disappointed that the bullets only killed and wounded his supporters and not Trump himself. Would you disagree?
The taboo on organized political violence has been steadily degrading for at least the last decade. We've had multiple presidential and federal assassination attempts within the last few years, numerous politically-motivated shootings, and at least one politically-motivated spree-killing of children. This would be catastrophic if the capacity for organized violence were a constant in the equation, and only the willingness were increasing. And in fact, the commenter above fervently believes this, as do most people, and so is actively working to maximize the willingness variable. And on the flipside, most people discounting the possibility of a serious collapse are likewise assuming capacity as a constant and reasoning from there.
He and all others who share this perspective are deceived. Not only is capacity a variable, it is a variable freighted by a massive overhang of untapped potential energy. The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for the best ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. The further the culture war escalates, the more motivated the search. If nothing changes, that search is very likely to, within the next few years, return results that are unsurvivable for our present society.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21d ago
I recall a discussion of "((( )))" use trigging and auto-admin response).
We had a Russian regular here by the name of Ilforte. Really interesting guy, quite prolific. The russian language apparently uses these weird double-parens-looking symbols rather than quotation marks, and some newbie mistook them for the triple-parens "echo marks" of infamy. Someone else responded explaining the difference, saying, "these:[wierd unicode double parens things] are russian quote marks, these: "((())) are triple parens, it's a different thing."
The reply explaining the difference got flagged for anti-semitic content by the reddit admins.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22d ago
Glad to help. But your claim was that Trump killed that movement, and as I pointed out above, it actually killed itself. Trump did not discredit foreign interventionism; his predecessors did that for him. Trump did not discredit fiscal responsibility; his predecessors did that for him. Trump did not establish that personal character is irrelevant in the presidency; his predecessors did that for him. He is the effect, not the cause, and it seems to me that you are speaking as though this all could have gone some other way, if only his supporters had possessed the necessary moral fortitude.
If you want to argue that foreign interventionism was a sound policy, by all means, take the floor. If you want to argue that the fiscally-responsible promised land was just over the next hilltop in 2016 or even right now, by all means make your case. But it seems to me that you are painting the GOP elite with virtues the historical record cannot remotely support. They lost, and they lost for concrete, obvious reasons. What benefit is derived from ignoring or papering-over their failures?
Foreign interventionism made a hell of a lot more sense when we were fighting the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is gone, and you think nothing should have changed? Why?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22d ago
It's easy to blame bullshit on your political opponents, but it's hard to offer any realistic alternatives.
Here's one off the top of my head: If the store catches you stealing, they can beat the shit out of you with a stick, and we collectively agree to, at most, tut-tut about it. I note that this solution arises organically without the need for any government intervention at all, and in fact significant government intervention is needed to stop it from instantiating itself.
It should go without saying that this is not the ideal way to do things. It seems pretty clear to me that it still, heh, beats the scenario you're offering where thieves are allowed to steal without consequence because it's just too much paperwork otherwise. If your message is that the law is so sclerotic that basic rules like "don't steal shit that doesn't belong to you" cannot be enforced, then my reply is that the law in its present form has outlived its usefulness.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22d ago
And yet, it seems to me that my conservative principles find better representation under the current environment than they did under the old arrangement. Why should I mourn this outcome?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22d ago
And my point is that we got the equivalent of the New Deal and the Warren Court even when we won.
It also elected Reagan, twice, took Congress back for the first time in 40 years and gave us probably the most conservative policy decade since the 1920s
This is true, and the 80s were a real success. They also ended 34 years ago. It's notable that in your summary, your detailing of concrete outcomes stops there, in favor of detailing process "wins".
It's not so clear that failing to beat Obama meant it was 'non-viable', although I know that's the self serving story MAGA likes to tell itself.
Because it allowed Blue Tribe political and cultural victories to snowball victories to the point that the term "Blue Tribe" became a necessary part of the lexicon. since the 80s, its wins were pyrrhic at best, to the point that the best option currently available to its constituents is to organize behind an analogue of 1990s-era Bill Clinton.
The movement you are eulogizing played a significant role in the destruction of America as a viable political entity. We will be paying for its mismanagement for decades to come.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22d ago
The old Movement Conservatism elected Presidents and won elections, too.
Yes. And what were the outcomes of those victories? Why are election victories valuable?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22d ago
I agree with you that a conservative movement is dead, certainly.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22d ago
To your understanding, how did the emails investigation get closed, and why did he have to re-open it?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22d ago
more an argument over definitions, in my view. Red Tribe's prospects look better to me under MAGA than they have at any point since W's first term. The MAGA movement is pretty clearly a national contender; and this despite what one might euphemistically refer to as "procedural headwinds". It's true that we're aligning into a direct fight with the entire formal establishment, but that sort of fight is exactly how this nation was founded, and I like our odds. Certainly the present situation seems preferable to one where we endlessly sacrifice value to support that establishment and receive nothing in return.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22d ago
W wasn't even a neocon. Although the Bushes like 'compassionate conservatism', they were really just the wild Northeastern Establishment reaching it's dead hand forward into the 21st century.
I voted for W, and one of the biggest reasons I voted for him was his firm stance against nation-building. 9/11 was shocking enough to change my mind for a year or two, but before his first term was out I had achieved escape velocity from the Conservative movement of my birth almost entirely because of the war and the whiplash-inducing abandonment of principles that went with it. Torture was fine. Fiscal responsibility was out the window, with the meme at the time being us dumping pallets of hundred dollar bills out the back of airplanes in Afghanistan. Two ruinous foreign wars leading to what were obviously going to be indefinite and doomed exercises in nation-building, based on deliberate lies to the public. Massive violations of civil liberties, "free speech zones", ubiquitous government surveillance. I had opposed Clinton and the Democrats explicitly because I didn't want any of that!
The neocons were a core part of Movement Conservatism, from the beginning. They had no special connection to foreign policy and the weight of anti-war sentiment coming down on them was more a creation of left wing anti-war media than something central to the neocons themselves.
I suppose I was fooled then, because what I remember is The Project for a New American Century and W's administration being notably staffed by neocon true believers in numerous prominent positions, and that they set policy in numerous ways from those positions. I remember those policies defining the era, and I remember the results.
the social conservatives have been thrown under the bus on abortion
The social conservatives have gotten Roe overturned, and are now one of the core nuclei for serious Red Tribe organization in the culture war. W's attempts to support the social conservatives as an integrated part of American society failed categorically. The current strategy seems like a better deal to me, given the present realities. We no longer have any illusions that public morality can be maintained, but that is probably for the best. Better for us to accept our role as the outsiders, to recognize that this nation and its social order are incompatible with our understanding of universal truth.
and the business conservatives/fiscal hawks have been shown the door both in rhetoric and actual practice.
As they should have been, because they have zero credibility with any part of the public any more. Offshoring manufacturing in favor of the "service economy" was supposed to provide broad prosperity. It did not. "Learn to code" is a cruel joke now, but I remember when that was the actual, inironic policy prescription. Fiscal responsibility is a joke after W and the Obama presidency; there will never be a balanced budget, and pretending otherwise is foolish; even if we could maintain it under Republican leadership, which we couldn't, there is no benefit to tightening Red Tribe belts to pay down Blue Tribe's credit card. We let the business conservatives lead, and they consistently led us to failure and to outright disaster. Then when we'd beggared ourselves supporting their defunct ideological prescriptions, they promptly dumped us and defected wholesale to the Blues.
You are describing outcomes, but you are not accounting for the process by which those outcomes arrived.
While the Social base of the MAGA movement allowed for this revival of Paleoconservatism, the base of the New Right in the suburbs is moving Left too rapidly for the New Right to ever revive, so Movement Conservatism is essentially dead. Evangelicals will continue their deal with the devil and Business Conservatives will dither over what to do: go to the Democrats and just pray their socialist wing can be kept under control or try to influence MAGA to be more friendly to them.
The social base of America is dead. The social cohesion you see right now, where cities are haunted by the specter of nation-wide race riots and federal politicians are dodging assassins' bullets, this is as good as it's ever going to be, and it's never going to be this good again. In less than a week we're going to vote in a national election, and no matter what the result may be, social cohesion is going to decrease significantly, yet again. Nor is it going to recover in the next ten years any more than it did in the last ten. The Culture war consumes all other concerns, and it continues to escalate. Red Tribe has a pressing need to mobilize to a war footing versus the Blues, and MAGA is the best option available for achieving that. There is no reason to compromise that mobilization to prop up a social order not only dead but visibly rotting off the bone.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22d ago
The Neocons killed the conservative movement by expending its credibility in support of ruinous Forever Wars. If the Republican candidate had been anyone but Trump in 2016, I was planning to vote Hillary.
I'm a trump voter. I grew up being taught that the abolitionists were the heroes of that particular story. I grew up cheering for the Union when reading about the history of that conflict, while also granting honor to the defeated southerners. I was born in the north, if that matters. I grew up thinking Lincoln was one of the best presidents the country ever had, a view I still hold even after learning of the greater complexities of his administration. I have a fair degree of borderer ancestry, but the Irish fought in large numbers on both sides.
In what way am I descended, ideologically or genealogically, from the Confederacy?
No, John Wilkes Booth would not be a Kamala Harris voter today.
Where do you believe he would have come down on the subject of eugenics?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
23d ago
Could you elaborate?
Are you familiar with the idea that "conservatives are liberals driving the speed limit"? This is just an instance of that. Trump's general policies are fairly similar to 1990s-Clinton policies. He makes no pretension of fiscal responsibility, which used to be a core Conservative concern and now has been completely abandoned. He has no interest in legislating morality. He is not a good example of moral character, he does not stand for public morality, and he has no interest on enforcing public morality through law or the bully pulpit. He's "tough on crime", though Clinton did a better job on actually following through. They've both been publicly accused of rape/sexual assault/sexual harassment, though it seems to me that the accusations against Clinton were far more substantial. He passes ineffectual gun control measures, though Clinton's were more lasting. They even both survived an impeachment.
If you want to see the tribes come together, Trump is as good as it's ever going to be, and it's never going to be this good again. This is the closest point of approach. When he fails, Red Tribe will inevitably turn to less conciliatory options.
it's a video of a prolonged and hideous torture murder committed by agents of a drug cartel, with the song "funkytown" playing in the background.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
24d ago
The GOP is the socially moderate party for social conservatives, which offers them protection for their way of life. The dems are the socially progressive party for people who want to make social conservatism illegal, which offers them realistically just harassment of social conservatives but it could be state discrimination occasionally, and of course both parties have other interest groups in their coalitions.
This seems like a system one would be well-advised to extricate oneself from with all possible haste.
African Americans, Latinos and Asians are all shifting right, and increasingly voting Republican.
Republicans are now running a 1990s-Bill-Clinton analogue for president. To remain even nominally competitive, the Republican party has had to abandon numerous priorities as simply untenable, to the point that the party itself has completely fractured from its base of supporters. It's certainly true that "old patterns break up and are replaced by new ones", and that there will be a viable "Republican Party" for the foreseeable future. They'll be running on democratic policies when they aren't outright endorsing democrats.
It seems to me that this is not, in fact, acceptable, and that it does, in fact, provide a pretty good argument for why the existing social structure should be done away with.
The thread you linked has people describing an inflection point where Red Tribe gets enough of a breach in the establishment firewall to actually have a go at producing good things outside the stranglehold of the present consensus. It's obviously quite optimistic; I think it's a reasonably open question whether optimism is inherently ridiculous at this late date.
The more probable outcome is that no matter who is declared the winner, trust declines precipitously, possibly to the point that credit cards stop working. I observe that there are multiple forms of doom converging rapidly on our present position, most of which even people here show no awareness of. Rockets and unrestrained Can-Do might thread the needle. It seems unlikely to me that your general prescriptions can. Or maybe I'm wrong; how does the future go in your view?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
25d ago
Here's Cenk Uyger's take, which seems pretty positive for someone who pretty clearly isn't suffering from pro-Trump derangement.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
25d ago
But by the same token, Portland is already blue, so why bother?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
28d ago
it's a reference to skibidi toilet, an absurdist source filmmaker meme animation popular with the youth.
How many examples of "average politicians" telling made-up stories would be required to shift your prior here? "Putin is blackmailing Trump with tapes of him being urinated on by Russian Prostitutes" and "Russia hacked election machines in 2016 to secure a Trump victory" and "The Hunter Biden laptop is a Russian disinformation campaign" are three obvious examples of made-up stories promulgated by those you seem to be classifying as "average politicians", and they were not even "directionally" correct. I am pretty sure that I could add dozens more examples from the last few years with minimal effort.
It seems to me that, moving beyond questions of aesthetics, this preference grounds out on quantifiable concrete outcomes. That is, we can actually look at population-level beliefs, and we can track those population-level beliefs to the statements of political actors that formed and broadcasted the message that gave rise to them.
This is one of my favorite graphs. It's a measure of population-level beliefs about an objective, factual question of immediate and undeniable salience to the political realities of our nation. It seems to me that the shape of this graph was directly created by the "normal politician" style of discourse which you are arguing for, and the consequences were likewise quite direct: a massive increase in violent crime nation-wide. More damningly, it seems trivial to me to demonstrate how obvious "made up stories" spun off and achieved virality directly from those "normal politician"-style claims.
What I see in that graph is an obvious example of a completely compromised epistemic environment, one where the center of gravity of the consensus narrative is completely detached from objective reality. And it seems to me that such epistemic compromise is hardly an isolated occurrence, and is in fact the norm across much of the policy space, from foreign affairs to educational policy to gun politics to abortion to the status of the federal bureaucracy and so on. If one accepts that broad epistemic corruption as a given, I'm at a loss to understand why you prefer the style that produces such woeful outcomes.
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