Skibboleth
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
1mo ago
I don't know why US figures survived this kind of stuff.
Many American politicians have figured out that you can just ignore this stuff and people will probably forget about it. If you're sufficiently shameless you're basically scandal-proof. Also, the structure of US politics makes it harder to get rid of someone. A minister can be sacked, a PM can suffer a leadership challenge, an MP can be kicked off the party list. In the US, an elected official is only really accountable to their voters, and that goes double for state officials. Re: Covid specifically, it helped that basically everyone was ignoring the substance of Covid restrictions anyway.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
does this new evidence change your view
Not even a little.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
I think my point is reasonably clear and plain: people are signal boosting rumors with a reckless disregard for the truth because they don't care about whether the particulars are true. Given the context of the rest of the not-very-long post, I'm not sure how someone would read some other meaning into that sentence.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
None of this seems to make sense.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. It seems perfectly sensible: anti-immigration activists are repeating a rumor that supports their preferences. It might be true, it might be exaggerated, it might be a complete lie. Why bother checking? After all, even if it's not true, the fact that I could believe it really says something about society.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
She and her staff may not share my belief. Also, they may believe (possibly correctly) that not debating is worse than the likely outcome of an unimpactful debate.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
Harris will deliver a mediocre performance that will look positively masterly next to Trump's old man ravings. It will have minimal impact because every aspect of Trump's incapacity is priced in. Practically speaking, Harris can't win, she can only lose.
what do you think the policy strengths/weaknesses will be?
Trump's biggest policy strength is simply that he is the challenger and can thus run on vague promises instead of his actual record. Whenever he talks about specifics, it's embarrassing (but again, priced in - no one expects Trump to know what he's talking about). His biggest vulnerability on that front is that he's surrounded himself with extremist weirdos who have fairly radical ambitions and Trump has a history of being pretty milquetoast with respect to his advisors, so he may suffer if those attacks stick to him. "JD Vance pals around with mask-off authoritarian billionaires" is probably a more fruitful line of attack than "your proposed economic policies are positively Argentinian", even though the latter is more substantive.
Harris' biggest policy strength is that she's not Trump and can thus talk about policy in a way that doesn't threaten to have your brain self-deport through your ear canal. Her biggest policy weakness is that her policy proposals are still very bad and she's not going to get graded on a curve like Trump will be.
5% chance Trump refers to Harris with a racial slur. 50% chance Trump makes some implausibly deniable misogynistic remark.
What am I missing?
Trump is the Republican nominee for president
a) Trump appointed the SC majority that overturned existing precedent on abortion. b) Democratic voters believe (correctly) that many Republicans want to ban abortion nationwide and many more Republicans are happy to go along with that.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
It's a bit weird how late the Republican party was to discover wokeness
The allegations that the Republican party is anti-intellectual are essentially correct, and one of the consequences of this is that they have a very limited perspective of expert institutions. Namely, an exterior view which tends to write off the whole edifice as a wretched hive of degenerate commies. The result is that the right is virtually always late to the party intellectually and their efforts to participate in the discourse are often pretty unimpressive (in this case, their constant efforts to equate the post-liberal bent of 'wokeness' with any sort of social liberalism mostly just delegitimized center-left left critics of the far left).
Skibboleth
2mo ago
The biggest negative element on most social media platforms (not just twitter) is recommendation algorithms that optimize for engagement by stoking outrage and other negative emotions. I think there's a decent change we see significant regulation of algorithmic content recommendation in the near future, and that the present state of social media is looked back upon in much the same way we view the pre-60s state of affairs with respect to smoking.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
Why on earth would you jeopardise these favourable battlefields to tilt at ideological windmills that the large majority of Americans and Westerners consider sacrosanct? Bad and stupid ideas, but also bad and stupid strategy.
As a poster here (actually back on reddit, but same diff) once trenchantly observed, bigots can't help themselves. The reason people from the New Right keep getting caught out doing Nazi apologia is that the New Right is shot through with Nazi sympathizers. Maybe they're not champing at the bit for an expansionist totalitarian dictatorship, but they often think Mr. Hitler had some interesting ideas about the use of state violence to enforce racial/cultural purity and fight degeneracy.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
Housewives aren't unicorns, but women's prime-age LFPR is 75-80% (cf. ~90% for men). This isn't just professional women having outsized presence; the vast majority of adult women have jobs. And it's not just liberal women - the vast majority of working-age conservative women are employed as well.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
Change the structure of working environments. The dominant mode of employment in developed countries is calibrated around the assumption of either a childless worker or a parent (i.e. husband) who has no obligations that might interfere with working hours and a parent who stays home to take care of the kids and do domestic labor. Needless to say, while single-income households with children still exist (and were somewhat less universal in the past than is commonly supposed), it is no longer typical, especially as you move up the socio-economic ladder. This is problematic for TFR because a dual income household has to either pay for childcare for any young children (often cost prohibitive, eating up most of one partner's salary) or have a partner (almost always the wife) drop out of the workforce (highly non-normative for people in developed countries, especially middle class and up). Throw in some extremely high standards for what constitutes an acceptable minimum level of parental attention and you have a recipe for even fairly affluent couples deciding they can't afford more than one child.
If you're right-wing, you may favor more women leaving the workforce. If you're left-wing you may favor childcare subsidies. I think the former fails for normative reasons. It's going to be very hard to persuade women to go back to being housewives, even with big pro-natal propaganda efforts, and most people will find the proposal unacceptable in any event. The latter struggles on economic terms - the same people who advocate for childcare subsidies want childcare workers to be paid more and tend to push for a lower ratio of children-to-worker (basically, childcare is already very expensive for your average family and they want to make it even more expensive). In a world where we expect most people to have several children, you can't have everyone pay someone else to raise their kids.
This brings us to option 3: Retvrn, but not like that. For a very long time, it was normal to work out of the home for both men and women, so the question of who was going to watch your kids was straightforward. We can modernize the concept via a mix of encouraging permissiveness with respect to WFH and encouraging/requiring workplaces to be more accommodating to parents with young children. It should be entirely acceptable for a parent to bring their very young children to work with them and reasonable accommodations made for them. This reduces financial and attention pressures on parents. (If you don't like poor people, this has the added benefit of disproportionately favoring middle class+ families).
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(Aside: a lot of pro-natal policies can be helped along by avoiding reactionary framing. Child tax credits are popular, taxing childlessness is not. This despite the fact that they're functionally the same thing).
Skibboleth
3mo ago
I can assure you the English Tories I worked with 10-25 years ago did not fit the blue tribe stereotypes you are mentioning here.
This should not be surprising, since the Blue/Red tribe paradigm is attempting to explain subcultural divisions amongst White Americans. Applying it to the British seems wrong-headed.
I don't think that it is - at least not in a political sense. Conceptually it's an easy distinction to make, but in practice it's just arguing over whose subsidies and legal privileges don't count.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Your mistake is thinking these are different groups of people instead of the same people at different times of day.
Listicles are still clickbait filler even if they're published by notionally-respectable outlets. The purpose is not actually to come up with a comprehensive list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. It's to get people to click on the article so they can either feel outraged at the writer's tastelessness or validated by the writer sharing their opinion. They will then ideally start a fight and share the article with their friends, saying "so true/can you believe this bullshit".
As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.
It's literally just a popularity contest. They asked a bunch of writers their favorite books and tabulated the results.
What’s the big actual object level disagreement between the reds and the blues here?
The proper way to live and the ordering of society.
(More practically, most Americans are way too comfortable (and in many cases, literally too fat) for anything like an actual civil war. Something like the Troubles is more likely, though even that I find doubtful, if for no other reason than the most dedicated Reds and Blues live in different places)
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Mary Todd double-tapped Abe while Booth was distracting everyone by jumping on stage.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
You're the first person I've encountered who claimed that the economic problems his base have been talking about just don't exist.
I am saying the problems afflicting the rural working class and poor (as distinct from the suburban conservatives who make up much/most of Trump's base and who are generally doing more than fine) are not the product of the urban professional class, immigration, or free trade as Greer hints. These people have, by and large, chosen to side with political leaders who favor economic and labor policy disfavorable to them for social/values reasons. Insofar as this represents their priorities, fair play, but to turn and blame low standards of living in the rural midwest or deep south on the urban professional class is nonsensical.
I don't know if you are accurately representing the body of Greer's argumentation, but if the way you characterize it is accurate, it's sort of giving away the game. US manufacturing dominance in the mid 20th century was a bubble of anomalous circumstances that was never going to be sustained. Europe was always going to rebuild, East Asia was always going to industrialize, economic growth was always going to make American manufacturing less competitive internationally, automation was always going to make manufacturing less labor intensive, etc... Even a maximally protectionist policy regime wouldn't fix this (ignoring the harm inflicted on the rest of the economy in the name of manufacturing fetishism), because it wouldn't fix the fundamental issue of a world that had grown beyond US manufacturing. Japanese and later Chinese industry frequently ended up beating US industry on both price and quality.
I'm not going to say that nothing can be done about the US' relative position in global manufacturing, but it isn't what Trump is promising and it isn't what a bunch of 60 year old ex-factory workers from Ohio want. It probably means more immigration, not less, more international partnerships and less protectionism, more capital/automation-intensive facilities, and more federally directed industrially policy. It also requires acknowledging that no, the US is not going to go back to manufacturing most of the world's steel or cars.
I feel like this is extremely uncharitable - this is the mirror image of the argument that Trump haters are simply immature people who hate their fathers, and that sense of childhood grievance is what actually informs their opposition to him.
A major distinction is that Trump haters don't say this, whereas many Trump supporters cite the arrogance, condescension, and judgment of 'coastal elites' as a reason for supporting him. They frame it more sympathetically than I do, but it's coming from their own mouths.
He actually spent quite a while living in the areas he's talking about, and he's old enough that he actually has childhood memories of the 60s. He was actually there!
He was literally four in 1966. If he has any expertise on the socio-economic conditions of the 60s, it is purely incidental to his personal life. (TBF, it wouldn't be appreciably more credible if he was ~20 instead, though he could at least cite a singular adult perspective).
As I said, I don't think he's lying. I think he's bullshitting.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
It's very hard to tell on this forum.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
...Reagan was severely wounded and Kennedy was literally dead.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
How many have been fired for not hewing to CEL social mores?
Extremely few. Especially once you factor out instances of nonconformity that boil down to things like "don't sexually harass your coworkers so badly that even HR can't ignore it".
the primary ways these classes interact are power relationships, and the power almost always goes the same way
Does it, though?
Alternative theory: the asymmetry of "resentment" vs "contempt" is because the mean things liberals say about conservatives cut significantly deeper than vice versa. When conservatives call liberals godless degens, liberals' response is generally something to the effect of "hell yeah we are 😎". This is because they fundamentally don't care about the accusations. There's also a degree of reactance, especially for LGBT individuals, but there's no sense of shame or humiliation. Its like accusing a Christian of being a bad Muslim. On the other hand, almost everyone in the US thinks bigotry is bad and education is good. So when liberals call conservatives ignorant bigots, that actually lands. Notably, conservatives tend to get way more riled up about being accused of racism than homophobia (and don't care at all about being called things like gun nuts).
The actual power asymmetry is that educated liberals can make uneducated conservatives feel bad about themselves, whereas uneducated conservatives can merely scare educated liberals.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
TheMotte has confidently assured me it's no big deal.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
I actually agree with this, but I think that this is true of any large political movement.
What is very distinctive about Trumpism is that the loyalty is to Trump, specifically. Non-personalist political movements can and do regularly replace leadership figures when they become a liability, while their duller supporters are usually the least motivated and exert minimal influence over leadership selection.
you don't seem to have grasped the point actually being made, which is that Trump has been using this tendency on the part of the left to ingratiate himself with his base
I was never disputing it it. It was central to my claim: "they are attracted to Trump because he promises to vicariously remediate their sense of humiliation." My point there is that the "grievance" is hollow. There's no material injury. Trump supporters have an inferiority complex and feel humiliated when college-educated liberals look down on them. (They, of course, have never been shy in their own hatred for CELs, but nobody seems to regard this as a reciprocal grievance. Nobody is visiting yoga studios to do pop-anthropology of Hillary voters or hand-wringing about how they might start a civil war if we prosecute her.) To the extent that these people have been abused (referring primarily to rural conservatives, rather than affluent exurbanites), it has generally been by their own leaders who they continue to support. The reason the town's factory closed down wasn't because of snooty Democrat journalists from NYC. Though in fairness to the Republicans, even a maximally protectionist industrial policy isn't going to fix competition on the international market.
Do you have any kind of argument against the claims he makes?
The socio-economic composition of Trump's voters and the economic (and political for that matter) history of the United States. Like,
In 1966 an American family with one breadwinner working full time at an hourly wage could count on having a home, a car, three square meals a day, and the other ordinary necessities of life, with some left over for the occasional luxury. In 2016, an American family with one breadwinner working full time at an hourly wage is as likely as not to end up living on the street
is prime bullshit - a politically expedient claim made with no regard for the truth. I won't go so far as to call it a lie, because while I think Greer probably knew it wasn't true he wasn't so much willfully misrepresenting facts as making an... emotionally satisfying statement. Nevertheless, the fact that he says this with a straight face makes it hard to take him seriously. It is both an overly rosy portrait of life in 1966 America and a comically pessimistic one of life in 2016 America. Single income couples with children are still common in the US and are overwhelmingly not homeless, as I'm sure he knows. They're not as proportionally common as they used to be, but that's mostly due shifting social norms around women working, not because modern America is such a wasteland that there's no other option. And let's say nothing about the legal status quo in 1966.
You don't have to think the US is a utopia with no economic issues to doubt the claim that Americans are worse off now than they were in 1966. At least on grounds of material abundance like Greer appears to be making. If you want to make a normative argument about the desirability of segregation and women's labor force participation, I'm going to have to pass on that discussion.
But to pretend that's the only motivating factor strikes me as absurd.
For Trump's die hards? It's the sine qua non. They have other concerns, but they are either standard Republican things (tax cuts, abortion, nativism) that most Republican candidates would deliver on (and thus don't really explain Trump's particular appeal) or at odds with the reality of policy under the Trump administration (e.g. the Republican Party continues to be anti-labor).
I sure hope it doesn't take as long to deliver aid to North Carolina as Ukraine. Hopefully fewer fights over it in Congress as well. Maybe there should have been more funding for FEMA in the continuing resolution?
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