Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
No bio...
User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
I didn't say that they were. It is merely that the South is where efforts to disenfranchise black voters have been most vigorously pursued. And in case it's not clear, I think the suggestion that persistent efforts to disenfranchise black voters have transitioned seamlessly from white supremacist to merely partisan motives should be viewed as totally laughable with extreme skepticism.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
The average Black Southerner cares very little for many Democratic-aligned social endeavors, for example, but not to an extent that they'll vote against them, either.
What is your point? Not agreeing with all of the political goals of candidates they support is not a distinctive feature of black voters (e.g. not all Republican voters are anti-LGBT, but they still support anti-LGBT politicians).
A question of interest might be why the GOP is so incredibly bad at capturing these socially conservative black voters. They're certainly capable of getting votes from extremely poor, socially conservative white voters, often despite openly promising policies detrimental to their welfare. I put it to you that there a significant faction in American politics that is hostile to black civil rights, that post-CRM these people concentrated in the Republican Party, and that black voters are acutely aware of this. The result is that even though there are a lot of socially conservative black voters and even though poor social conservatives may prioritize their social beliefs over economic interests, the GOP does extraordinarily poorly with black voters.
there's also been the parallel and ongoing project demonizing any creation of white shared interests as such.
If you are talking purely about progressive spaces, I find it hard to deny this, but I also find it hard to escape the conclusion that this is because basically every attempt to construct a shared white interest group has been unsubtle white supremacism/white nationalism. Black identity, by contrast, is largely an outside imposition, and by and large black political organization has been organized around civil rights issue; there is no comparable set of issues for white voters.
If you are talking about the full American political spectrum, no. Virtually every conservative space is extremely skeptical of the idea that racism against minorities is a live issue (unless they can find a way to blame the liberals, who are the real racists) while being very receptive to the idea that white people (and particularly white men) are being systematically disadvantaged.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
Did it?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
Why are France and Britain a problem? The transition from 4th to 5th Republic was not a violent revolution; discounting the period of foreign occupation during WW2, France has had a democratic government continuously since 1870. Britain's separatist rebellions came out of disenfranchised subject territories; as well say the US has a discontinuity because it no longer owns the Philippines.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
What does "overpowered" mean? Populous states explicitly punch below their weight relative to their actual proportion of the electorate in all federal elections. The US already has a number of countermajoritarian and outright minoritarian institutions, and the argument is that actually we need the federal government to be less representative?
Electorally I think it’s past time to allow each congressional and senatorial district to issue its own electors. State by state winner takes all overpowers the large states too much in national policy.
Why not just have a direct popular vote for President? Or abolish the Presidency and have Congress select the chief executive?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
That doesn't answer the question of why Southern black voters are so strongly aligned with the Democratic Party. Or why Southern white voters are so strongly aligned with the Republican Party - e.g. in 2023 Brandon Presely got 22% of the white vote in MS, which was an exceptionally good performance (Biden got 17% in 2020 and Obama got even less in 2012).
(It must also be noted that the Deep South has a large rural black population - appealing to rural/urban splits doesn't resolve the problem)
Anti-black racism is sui generis in the United States, especially in the South. Racism, xenophobia, and other forms of bigotry generally push minorities left, but this is, for the most part, garden variety discrimination that you find everywhere to some degree. It wasn't that long ago that ~1/3rd of the US was run by explicit white supremacists and rendered black Americans explicitly second-class citizens (on top of a raft of informal but no less severe forms of discrimination). One of the consequences of prolonged, intensive discrimination was to forge African-Americans into a much more cohesive, organized identity group than pretty much anyone else.
By contrast, "White", "Hispanic", or "Asian" are much more weakly operational groups containing subsets that do not see themselves as having shared interests, e.g. you could probably justify dividing white voters regionally and Hispanic/Asian voters by country of ancestral origin.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
Why are Southern black voters so uniformly aligned with the Democratic Party? Did something happen? I was led to understand that race relations in the South were actually great and reports of interracial discord were Yankee propaganda.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
America's "grand buildings" are skyscrapers. We crank out wonders with such regularity it has become pedestrian and people mostly complain that they're blocking the view.
These old world structures are mostly either religious monuments (of which there are plenty in the US, but lacking the inherent cachet of older construction) or the vanity projects of aristocrats. For the democracies, if you're going to spend 10% of the budget on a decades long project, there's mostly an expectation that it will serve the public (or at least national) interest rather than fluffing the king's ego.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5d ago
Sorry, we'll just keep calling them ICE, even (especially) when they're actually Bortac or something.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
The more important difference between J6 and the typical political assassination attempt is that Jan 6th was organised by the institutional GOP and various other organised right-wing groups
This is what I meant by "indicting yourself" - to try and pass of J6 as the act of crazy people entails conceding that Trumpism is institutionally deranged. Since Trump supporters don't generally believe that, the "I can't be held responsible for nominally affiliated lunatics whose ideas I definitely don't share" defense gets put aside in favor of a medley of "no big deal" + "provocateurs" + "actually justified" (which may not be particularly convincing from a logical perspective but provides supporters a variety of escape hatches).
By contrast, lone wolf terrorists may be following some piece of political rhetoric to its logical conclusion, but people can pretty easily justify disavowing them because rhetoric, however incendiary, usually stops short of saying "go forth and kill."
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
It did happen. I am contrasting it with a failed presidential assassination attempt, which aren't even all that uncommon.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
In the US, you're not white if you have any noticeable non-European ancestry. Like, Obama is technically biracial (white mother, black father), but basically everyone considers him to be black.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
Harming Patel is counterproductive if you're trying to undermine the Trump administration.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
He ran the first half of the marathon in 1:00:29, and the second half in 59:01
Obviously these guys are elite athletes and I am a pretty slow runner, but I find it hilarious and impressive that they can run a half twice as fast as me. And then, while I am out of commission for a day or two, they immediately do it again, but faster.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
I have a prediction: no one will care. The right tried and failed to do this with Charlie Kirk and there they had an actual body. It's just not that easy to rile people up over something that didn't happen.
I have a further prediction: the Trump scandal train has no breaks, so within a week this will be overtaken/displaced by some new headline about corruption or war with Iran heating up again or Border Patrol murdering some more people or one of a hundred other topics.
Why would you hand him a narrative victory?
Coordinating 70 million people is hard.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7d ago
because it can't simply be "oh that guy was nuts, but I'm not that guy so it doesn't impact me or my beliefs"
"That guy was nuts, doesn't count" is the pretty standard right-wing defense when confronted with right wing political violence. It only really becomes a problem when there's some reason you can't write off the perpetrator as crazy, e.g. J6 stands out because you can't argue thousands of Trump supporters are all crazy without indicting yourself.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7d ago
When the map is not the territory one should consider the ways in which the map and the territory differ and avoid drawing strong conclusions from information you know isn't representing the question of interest.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
Women in lesbian relationships report having experienced domestic/sexual violence at some point in their lives at a higher rate than heterosexual women, which is not the same thing as 'lesbian relationships have higher rates domestic abuse.'
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9d ago
It seems to me that if we take it as a given that we are now committed - that this war must continue being prosecuted as a matter of national honor and interest - then we should expect resignations from the senior leadership. Obviously we won't get them, but executive discretion and impunity grows with every year, and rewarding unilateral ineptitude with uncritical support is only going to further worsen it.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9d ago
I was writing up my own post, but this is basically a more articulate version of what I was going to say. The one thing I would add is that continuing the war against Iran degrades morale and readiness in the US military against dramatically more important threats (specifically, the China-Taiwan issue).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9d ago
I just want to point out, that international law you so fiercely defend is famously lacking legitimacy on all front
I'm not defending it; I'm observing that invoking and rejecting it simultaneously doesn't work. If the Trump admin. wants to say "we can do what we want because we are powerful", they can't also appeal to international principles like freedom of navigation to demand other help them out.
Or rather, they can do that in the sense that you can say whatever you want, but it's not going to go anywhere (as we can see).
So the critique is that they overestimated their strength and their inside and outside enemies are more powerful than them?
No. The critique is that they believe 'strength' obliges others to defer to them. This belief, in turn, is undergirded by a kind of brutish naivete about the nature of power. This leads them to make stupid decisions.
The higher principles themselves are only upheld by force
Any how do you gather the force to uphold the higher principles? Even the cruelest totalitarian relies upon their subjects accepting their rule. This is why I said that 'might makes right' (or however you care to formulate the idea that brute force trumps all) is a fatuous truism that obscures the substantive truth of the matter, which is that exercising power requires you to at the very least convince the people who do the actual exercising of your authority.
Why make the point and then immediately deny it, beyond reflexive ideological distaste?
Because the superficial resemblance amuses me.
The gentry's critique of the commercial class rests on the proposition that they were more virtuous as leaders (and as people), but I don't think that is in evidence. There's significant overlap of vices (likely just a broad pathology of moneyed elites), and they, of course, have their own sets of problems. I also think
a) some of their criticisms didn't land even at the time and are clearly just kicking down at a rising rival power center
b) modern business elites are qualitatively different from their pre-20th century counterparts (I don't mean that in a better or worse sense, just that you are talking about different kinds of people)
In general, conscious efforts to cultivate virtuous and effective elites seems very hit or miss, and is more often claimed than realized. Landed gentry, e.g. weren't really trained to be leaders. They were a mostly-hereditary leisure class that also leveraged their economic and legal power into political and military influence.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
A major element of Orban's perceived badness was his alignment with Russia. He has more recently attracted attention in the US because a number of conservatives put forward Orbanism as a template for Republican governance.
Hungary is basically playing the same role for postliberalism as Venezuela for socialism: the country is going to shit, opponents like to point that out, and proponents feel compelled to defend it and pretend everything is peachy because otherwise they'd have to admit that every single attempt to make postliberalism the governing ideology ended detrimentally.
A trait that Chavista Venezuela (pre-Maduro, who turned into an old-fashioned dictator) and Orbanist Hungary share is being illiberal democracies, a perennial favorite of people trying to challenge liberal globalism. You end up defending these illiberal governments because the alternative is to admit that your ideology is not fit for purpose (or you go mask-off authoritarian, but that's pretty unusual in developed countries).
All the conservative Chicagoland women are in the collar counties and don't use dating apps.
More options
Context Copy link