Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard is about the unofficial prime minister of the world going on vacation with his boss and coworkers while trying to explain his job to his relatives.
The Human Division by John Scalzi is about, essentially, a second rate team of diplomats (well, they're billed as second rate; in the actual story they appear to be pretty good at their job).
Artifact Space/Deep Black by Miles Cameron is about the crew of a Space Indiaman, and while the main character has some personal issues, the crew overall is a pretty well-oiled machine.
A weirdo leftist failing to get you banned for sharing a conservative opinion seems like evidence in favor of my point.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
More or less what what @hydroacetylene said. I'll admit that there's an element of "I know it when I see it", but I think it's important to note that it's not just (or even primarily) a proxy for rural - most Red Tribers live in suburbs/exurbs, not rural areas.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
It's not a unified subset. It's a disparate collection of individuals with discriminatory beliefs which they nevertheless consider to be an integral part of their political identity, though you can point to specific groups in some cases. Religious conservatives are a big standout on the gender and sexuality front, but they're hardly exclusive. Insofar as there's a real unifying theme, it's the "facts don't care about your feelings" aesthetic that many conservatives (especially younger ones) adopt, which IME mostly ends up glossing prejudice as "realism".
To put it as plainly as I can: whenever you find right-wingers saying "I don't think I can be open about my political beliefs because I'll be ostracized", it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice. You can think we should slash welfare or defend aggressive foreign policy or declare that Christianity is the one true religion and your left-wing peers at college may think you're an asshole (or a rube), but you're not going to be a pariah (nor is the TA going to mark you down on your essay). The sticking point is basically always about either gender/sexuality or race, and often beliefs that would be considered boundary-pushing even in conservative milieus. For example.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
I strongly suspect that in the arts/humanities side of things, expressing conservative views/tastes in assessments will literally often get you marked down
I don't find this to be true except in one very particular sense: there are a subset of bigots who are also conservatives who define conservatism in terms of their own prejudices, who arrive in a space that is extremely hostile to those prejudices and find that expressing them gets them in trouble. You're not going to get marked down for saying we should lower taxes or be tougher on crime, for using nationalistic iconography, taking a pro-American stance in history class etc... If you study philosophy, there's a good chance there will be literal fascists on the curriculum. You may find yourself as a distinct minority opinion and arguing with your peers a lot, which is undeniably an unpleasant experience, but the actual landmines tend to be homophobia and racism.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
I'm just going to refer back to what I wrote when this came up a few years ago, since nothing has really emerged that had changed my views on the subject (tl;dr Correia and Torgersen mostly precipitated the situation they claimed to be fighting because they were upset pulp wasn't winning awards, pre-2015 Hugo winners were totally fine):
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
it's the most hard sciences that trend most conservative to my knowledge.
Looking at donations amongst professors, if there's an effect, it's very small.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
Red Tribers have a great deal of use for knowledge. It's just usually directly applicable knowledge.
This is my point. I want to reiterate: I am not saying that Red Tribers are stupid or have no skills. I am saying they have a general disdain for knowledge production. Which, bluntly, the rest of your comment and my own personal experience does not dispute. Knowledge is either inherited or received from trusted community members, and updated only slowly. It's not just that they don't want to personally do academic research, they don't trust the entire process because it's not part of their epistemological paradigm.
I lived in a small Red town in the US for a number of years
So did I. I've lived in Red America in one form or another (it's important to note that "red tribe" != rural) for most of my life. I went to private evangelical schools until I left for college (to my original point, my high school's college counselor advised against going to any but a select list of private Evangelical colleges). Most of my extended family is from the rural Midwest. My perspective on this is personal, not sociological.
(Something I find deeply frustrating about this forum is that it is taken as a given that criticism of the Red Tribe or Red Tribe-adjacent things are coming from a distance)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
That depends on what you mean by "Red Tribe" (everyone seems to have a slightly different definition).
The Red and Blue Tribes may have rough analogs in other countries, but IMO they are strictly American (and primarily White American, though there peripheral non-white members) phenomena. As I've said before, the artistic and intellectual bankruptcy of the Red Tribe is not some universal attribute of conservatives. It's not even some atemporal quality of the Red Tribe. It seems to be something that's emerged in the past few decades.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
Do you ever wonder what they don't say to you, you seemingly being clearly hostile to their entire worldview
Considering that several of them are openly sexist or homophobic and routinely make outrageously bigoted comments about blacks and latinos to my face, with seemingly no expectation that I might find any of that objectionable, I can only imagine the true opinions they're hiding are that George Wallace was right.
(to be fair, at least one of them seems to grasp that it's not appropriate to openly say all our black coworkers are incompetent, but he either thinks I privately agree with him or at least trusts that since he outranks me I just have to put up with it (he's correct on that last point)).
I think you will understand this position better when you are made to bow.
What makes you think I haven't? I don't think conservatives understand that the reason their ideological adversaries are unsympathetic is not because they don't understand what it's like to have to bite your tongue, it's because many of them have had a boot up their ass their entire lives.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
Sorry for the heat, but it's probably more honest than what you usually get.
No, I actually hear stuff like this on the regular from gainfully employed relatives and acquaintances, loudly telling anyone who will listen how they're not allowed to speak their mind for fear of dire consequences.
For reasons that I don't understand, a lot of right-wingers simultaneously openly, viciously loathe liberals but also seem to crave their respect and approval.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
The red tribe produces plenty of petroleum geologists, clergy are generally quite intelligent, has successfully engineered affirmative action for themselves in the legal profession despite the legal profession trying to do the exact opposite.
All of this just seems to me to be implicitly conceding the point. My contention, contra Hanania, is not that Red Tribers are literally stupid. It is that Red Tribers are somewhere between uninterested in and actively hostile to intellectual/cultural production (by which I mean things like scholarship or art). But they are still very much interested in those products, hence my remark that they want liberals to think conservative thoughts for them. They want (liberal) artists to create conservative-inflected art, (liberal) historians to write conservative historical narratives, etc...
I think it's correct to say that conservatives don't care about academic status and prioritize income/general social status - that's my point. Nothing wrong with that on an individual scale (I'm certainly not one to talk), but a side effect of this taken across a whole society is an extraordinarily vulgar* culture that produces little thought, little art, and can't handle critical perspectives.
*for lack of a better term. I do not mean that it is rude/inappropriate.
I find it pretty distasteful to give up anthropology to positive feedback loops, and let our history become a mockery when it is within one's power to just raze it.
The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance. They can't or won't produce knowledge and they distrust anyone who does. They don't want to become librarians or museum curators or anthropologists. The best they can manage is the occasional court historian or renegade economist, chosen more for partisan loyalty than academic achievement and quite likely to be a defector. The effect is this bizarre arrangement where rather than produce conservative thought, they are demanding liberals think conservative thoughts for them.
Occasionally rightists will plead weakness to rationalize their lack of intellectual productivity, but this is nonsense. They have had plenty of money, plenty of political power, and a broad base of support. Unless we accept the Trace-Hanania thesis that they literally just lack human capital, we're left with the conclusion that the right-wing withdrawal from intellectual spaces is a sort of distributed choice. Razing institutions because you can't be bothered to make your case is just barbarism.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
Still, this is really blowing up in ways I didn't expect.
Is it blowing up with anyone whose opinion might sway the administration or their supporters? In a normal administration, Hegseth and/or Walz would be going under the bus for this (in a normal administration, Hegseth wouldn't be SecDef), but that sort of thing is mostly driven by intra-elite norms and the only norm Trumpist elites care about is in-group loyalty. The general American electorate (and especially Trump's base of support) is too disengaged and too prone to facile cynicism to care about something as niche as bad opsec or the implications of senior political leaders working through Signal.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
We've been bombing the Houthis to Make a Point; it would seem charitable to assume that these strikes were intended to inflict material losses, not simply remind them that we still have airplanes.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
To be fair to Vance, the historical track record of Operation Bomb Dirt is quite poor. Seeking divine intervention in the hopes that the next round of desultory air strikes will be more productive than in the past is not so unreasonable.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
Leading with "COFAs for all who want it" would have been an interesting policy move, but I rather strongly suspect that Trump has poisoned the well on that front.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
Canadians do not even exist
Every Canadian I know and seemingly a very large share of their population disagrees.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
The right that Schmitz critiques is right-wing in the sense that it tends to be hostile to various elements of social liberalism, e.g. feminism, anti-racism, or LGBT rights. But it is not especially socially conservative in the sense of favoring traditional social arrangements. Thus people like Musk or Trump, who pretty much categorically fail at the traditional role of Father and a more general reject traditional masculine duties in favor of what amounts to perpetual boyhood. Frat boy conservatism is nothing new, of course, but it was generally something one was expected to outgrow, not a dominant aspect.
Hereditarianism isn't a necessary element for this value set, but it helps in that it provides a general purpose rationale for writing off any duties one might have to others. Help the poor? No point, bad genes. Raise your kids? You already donated your genes, parenting doesn't matter that much and besides taking care of children is for women. But this is fundamentally an ablative belief - if it were incontrovertibly proven false, few of its adherents would change their behavior much (which is not to say they're insincere, just that the belief is non-essential).
Actual hard hereditarians are pretty scarce on the ground, if for no other reason than it's a sufficiently intellectualized position as to escape mass appeal. People like Hanania exist, but they are largely gadflies without much influence.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11d ago
We kind of do. As others noted, Social Security covers more than just citizens. It's also not actually an ID system. Your SSN is a unique identifier, but there's nothing about it that verifies your identity. It's just a number.
I should clarify that I misspoke in my prior comment - I'm talking more about a national identification system rather than merely a list of people with citizenship. A list that tells you John Smith, Fictional Nation ID# 123-456-789, is a citizen isn't much use for identification purposes (immigration enforcement or otherwise) unless it also tells you how to identify John Smith.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11d ago
The problem, in the US at least, is that the people most interested in mass deportations are also the people most hostile to any kind of centralized database/identification system for citizens.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
TDS in real life
Yes, that's my point. Trump sycophants constantly dismissed his critics as hysterical, but they keep being right.
They are arguing they did by dint of completing the removal prior to the judge issuing the order which therefore would not apply.
I am saying that that is comical bullshit, they know it's bullshit, and their actual argument is "who is going to stop us?"
Trump Derangement Syndrome Utterly Vindicated, Season 10, Episode 19.
Trump promised to act in a lawless, corrupt, and abusive manner. Lo and behold. I don't know if the cruelty is the point, but it certainly seems like a KPI.
The trouble is, of course, that admitting the TDSers were right either requires openly admitting that you're evil
that order may have been issued after the gang members had already left US soil.
Even assuming this is true, crime does not become legal because you do it really fast. The Alien Enemies Act doesn't apply, and the administration claiming they can nullify due process is textbook tyranny.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
14d ago
I actually have a different issue to raise than my earlier remark: very little of this is new. American business elites have been trying to roll back regulatory oversight, labor laws, and the welfare state since the minute they were created. Certainly the proposition that Musk et al are reacting to being 'ruined' is laughable. Even before he managed to make himself un-elected shadow president, he was one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. Sorry bud, libs hating billionaires isn't new either. All you have to do to get away from them is uninstall twitter.
The only thing new is that the conservative movement has become more reactionary and overtly illiberal.
The Revolutionary War was a separatist rebellion. It could also have been a revolution within the American colonies, but by and large wasn't - the major social/political developments in the colonies had already occurred and to a significant degree the cause of the rebellion was attempts by the British government to roll them back/redefine the relationship. The post-war social order wasn't identical to pre-independence, but it was pretty similar.
Contra your follow up remark, I would say that the Haitian Revolution was a real revolution, in that it totally upended the Haitian social order, in addition to being a separatist revolt against France.
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