Skibboleth
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
9mo ago
But the blue tribe's motivation is harder for me to explain to myself.
You've already got it:
They could just stop, but that would amount to a capitulation. Rightly or wrongly, the
redblue tribe won't accept that, so they continue they culture war.
Suffice to say that liberals do not share conservatives' assessment about the balance of power.
Is it naive to think that the red tribe hates the blue tribe defensively?
Yes. The red tribe's hate for the blue tribe (and vice versa) is fundamentally normative. The red and blue tribes hate each other because they have values that are not in alignment and which they are not willing to compromise on.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
if you fail to convey the things that actually made the gospel powerful
I am positing that this had little to do with the details of Christian theology, most of which weren't even settled until after a particular sect of Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire and resolved its disagreements in the traditional way. Conveying the good vibes is more important to attracting converts (or just avoiding deconversion) than being theologically sound. Is the ad in question theologically dubious? Yeah, probably. Is it any more theologically dubious than other modern (or ancient, for that matter) variants of Christianity? Probably not.
(Also, you're producing for an American audience. The Good News is not news for most of them them, so that's not a very strong angle of attack).
Skibboleth
9mo ago
the theological ground of these ads is spurious
Does this actually matter to anyone? Religion as practiced by most adherents is a loose collection of rituals and superstitions that serves chiefly as a tribal identifier; to the extent that such people follow their own religious doctrines, they tend to pick and choose what already fits their values while selectively ignoring anything that doesn't. This is why, for example, you can have an explicitly pacifist faith that decries the accumulation of wealth serve as the official religion for a bunch of bling-obsessed warrior aristocrats without everyone's head exploding or decamping to a better aligned belief system.
In the last iteration of the thread, someone articulated the point that right now Christianity is very heavily right-coded and enjoys a fairly poor reputation with young people (not unrelated). These commercials seem best understood as attempts to challenge both of those perceptions. It may not be true to some platonic ideal of Christian theology, but you can say that about most Actually Existing Christianity (it's only relatively recently that they mostly chileld.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
I'm not sure if you intended this question as a joke or some sort of "gotcha" but the obvious answer is Donald Trump.
I guess it was a "gotcha" insofar as it was extremely predictable that you'd say Trump despite the absurdity of that claim. "Tear the rotten edifice down" is not and cannot in any meaningful sense be a center-right ethos because the core principle of the center-right is that the status quo are basically fine. Trumpists are shouting that things are emphatically not fine - that the Federal government is hopelessly corrupt, the Democrats are stealing elections, the Mexicans are invading, the trans are corrupting the youth, globalists are stealing our jobs, etc... and that radical action is needed to fix it.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
I'm not complaining that conservatives are too conservative (at least not in this context); I'm offering a theory for why conservatives are really bad at playing the role of counterculture. Your garden-variety normiecon does not have the mindset to be an effective counterculture member. They're too uncomfortable with disorder and nonconformity. The types that do suffer from being intolerably crankish - the type of person who thinks a pop star dating a football player is a Pentagon (?) op.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
Who of actual political relevance would you describe as center right?
Skibboleth
9mo ago
better organized in terms of transportation, porta-poties, trash pick-up etc
See, this is the crux of it. Even if this was true (of which I am skeptical), none of this is relevant. The goal of a protest is not to stand around politely, then leave with your trash in an orderly fashion. It is either to be such a colossal nuisance that you can get concessions for stopping or to build sympathy for your political movement by baiting the police into kicking the shit out you. Conservative protestors occasionally try to cargo cult left-wing protest tactics, but tend to be either too docile (zero impact) or too aggressive (generate negative sentiment).
Skibboleth
9mo ago
Just, what the fuck guys? Can’t we just be the normal ones? It shouldn’t be hard by comparison. But instead we’re attacking normality. We’re doing goofball shit.
The world is turned upside down: conservatives and liberals are extremely confused because they are accustomed to and expect to be setting and rebelling against norms respectively. Obviously, this is far more discomforting for conservatives than liberals. They lack the mindset, the institutional capability, and the practical knowledge to be good counterculture rebels. (This, incidentally, is a major reason why conservative protests are usually incompetent). The coalition members with the most energy for this kind of politics are the people you least want to hand the microphone.
Normies are the natural constituency of the center-right - the sort of people who think "life's good, don't rock the boat too hard". Swifties are generally weapons-grade normies and the female equivalent of grillo-centrists. Yeah, they're "feminists", but it's an extremely anodyne feminism whose practical beliefs are probably mostly shared by a lot of conservative women (e.g. I have a hard time imagining what my mother or her sisters would say if their husbands suggested they shouldn't have careers). The problem for the American right is that the center-right is dead and the Republican party is (or is at least perceived to be) dominated by reactionary populists and religious conservatives. Not only does this coalition want to rock the boat, many of them are saying the boat is rotten and needs to burned down and replaced.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
That is a fully general argument for never letting anyone into the country, ever (also unfalsifiable, since when you don't turn up any foreign agents you can just say they're really sneaky) Far more people enter the country legally every year, and some of them are definitely spies. If Russia or China want to send an agent into the US, they can just... put them on a plane. Give them a bullshit job at the embassy (or just overstay a tourist visa). Being "undocumented" isn't a feature for a spy. It's a hindrance.
Imagining myself as an adversary of the United States, I could covertly send unarmed soldiers across the open border, have them obtain weapons on the other side, and then attack.
Teeth of the Tiger was not Clancy's finest work.
I mean, seriously, why? Going to stage an attack on a military base with a few dozen guys using civilian smalls arms? A terrorist attack to put yourself in the top spot on America's shitlist?
Skibboleth
9mo ago
Skibboleth
9mo ago
The Romans never would have let millions of migrants enter their territory and use their resources.
...they did.
In any event, it's not really clear why we should consider the Romans a model for behavior.
So often a debate does come down to the definition of a word.
"Invasion" rhetoric is classic Motte-and-Bailey equivocation. Nativists want to borrow the alarming connotations of the word to hype up support for radical measures, then, when their critics point out that there's a slight difference between people making dodgy asylum claims and an armed force sacking El Paso, fall back on "invasion has other meanings". If Latinos are "invading" like Japanese tourists, the claim becomes a lot less exciting.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
This is because most people don't understand formal reasoning. Proposition A being unproven doesn't mean Not A is assumed to be true. The "default" is agnosticism. This is a little more complicated in practice because most of the things people are arguing are not brand new subjects, so there's probably preexisting evidence which would skew our conclusions one way or the other if we could agree on what it means.
No scientifically relevant change has taken place
A considerable amount of research has taken place; however, that is mostly irrelevant to internet debates on immigration since those debates are overwhelmingly normative, with a couple of ablative empirical arguments for when you don't want to lead with your normative objection.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
if the federal doesn’t already have people in position to assassinate Abbott they are beyond a joke.
They almost certainly don't. I'm sure someone's gamed out the "rebellious governor", but not seriously. The plan, such as it would be, probably doesn't amount to much more than send in feds to arrest Abbott. Probably to cheers and applause.
But I want to emphasize: this whole quasi-secession scenario people are salivating over because they're bored and crave death is incredibly unlikely. The overwhelmingly probably outcome is that Abbott does, in fact, back down. His "win" is that he gets to say "I tried, but the tyrannical Biden administration stopped me."
Skibboleth
9mo ago
Push come to shove we'll bomb every oil pipe and free Europe from that addiction.
We can't even agree to aid the people who are currently in a hot war with Russia. Until that happens, the idea that we're going to comprehensively destroy European energy infrastructure is a touch laughable.
Even if true, it kind of runs counter to the Trump is NBD narrative.
Again, an economy about equal to Italy
If Italy could figure out a way to leverage boutique luxury goods into military and political power they could make a play for regional hegemon as well.
This seems like a willful misreading. Do you think "dominate" means "conquer by force of arms"? Because it's not as if the EU has been putting up vigorous opposition to Russian hegemony absent US spinal prosthetics.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
who predict or expect a foreign policy crisis if trump wins , but always fail to articulate what this entails
I can't ascribe this to anything other than not paying attention:
(for just one example I dug up in 20 seconds)
Maybe you agree with these prognostications, maybe you don't. Saying that Trump's critics can't or haven't articulated their positions is just confusing.
I guess they have to keep toeing the 'orange man bad' line even though he was not that bad
"'Orange Man Bad' is the 'Buy index funds' of political commentary.". If historically left-of-center political commentators who have spent the past 8 years criticizing Trump and his policies continue to do so, odds are pretty good that they actually believe it.
If anything, the sudden flurry of "Oh, Trump wasn't that bad"-type statements from figures who previously criticized him reeks of groveling and bet-hedging. Jamie Dimon doesn't have to worry that Biden is going to punish him for making critical statements. Likewise for his many critics within the party who have 'come around'.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
It's ridiculous, but it's also like 40 years old and has been litigated in the state supreme court already.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
Arguments for and against homeschooling resolve, I think, into fully general arguments about to what degree parents should be able to raise their own children as they see fit.
I don't really think that's true except in the vaguest sense. An argument about the effectiveness of homeschooling could theoretically be deflected by saying "it's my prerogative to not educated my children*", but very few homeschooling advocates are making that argument as opposed to arguing that homeschooling leads to superior outcomes. Arguments about outcomes in turn focus on the validity and interpretation of data.
*FWIW, existing laws on homeschooling suggest the existing consensus is "no, it isn't". Arguments about parental rights vs child's interests tend to turn on conclusions about outcomes rather than vice versa.
(I will also note that my point about unschooling was not whether or not it was good or bad relative to public schooling but that it was certainly not equivalent to handing a child a tablet with internet access and telling them to figure it out themselves; homeschooled children are usually more closely instructed than their traditional classroom peers)
Unless my memory fails me, unschooling is, despite the name, a form of homeschooling; the children have more control over subject matter, but it still assumes there's someone taking responsibility for teaching them (including necessarily ancillary skills).
Even though almost everyone in the West now has a machine capable of streaming much of the world's knowledge to them in an instant, they act as if it is the 19th century and public schooling is necessary to save masses of illiterate farm kids who live tens of miles away from the nearest library from ignorance.
How many kids do you think would teach themselves math via the internet? Or how to read?
If you want to argue that there's a more efficient and/or effective method of delivering universal education than the status quo, I'm quite willing to believe that. I do not find it plausible that internet-based autodidacticism is one of them.
Nobody wants to live in a world where the clownshow that is Congress has to deal with the technical detail of bank capital adequacy or aviation safety, and very few people want to live in a world where those things are not regulated at all.
Perhaps not, but many people think they do.
(Perhaps it would be better to say, that there aren't many people amongst the general population who want that, but there are probably a lot of local and business elites who would be happy to do away with federal oversight within their domain)
Skibboleth
9mo ago
Skibboleth
10mo ago
Edit: sorry, fat-fingered the submit button. Still working on this.
You can delete the post, finish composition, and then undelete it.
There is, but it's not that American conservatives love freedom more than American liberals. Trump was president at the start of Covid, which made his response a natural angle of attack for Democrats. Rather than defend his performance, Trump argued that Covid was actually not that big a deal. That more or less set the partisan alignment on the matter.
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