Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
the political environment was rather different from the current one in both cases, wasn't it? There was no sense of vibecession/stagnation, disillusionment in the party leadership, general anomie etc.
This is very wrong; both presidents were elected as countermeasures to perceived (and actual) vibecessions.
Especially in Kennedy's case, his cult of youth and personal example were so powerful precisely because they provided an outlet for this broad but unfocused and aimless search for an alternative to what was thought to be a depersonalized, cog-in-a-machine, stagnant society. The late 50's had spawned an intense critique of percieved conformism and rigidity in culture and economy. "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" came out in 1956, the same year Mills published "The Power Elite" and Whyte (who had coined the term "groupthink" in 1952) published "The Organization Man." The Beatniks reached their apex in the 50's, and were clearly reacting to a vibecession avant la lettre: "much of Beat culture represented a negative stance rather than a positive one. It was animated more by a vague feeling of cultural and emotional displacement, dissatisfaction, and yearning, than by a specific purpose or program ... It was many different, conflicting, shifting states of mind." Ginsburg's "Howl" (most famous in this community as the inspiration for the True Caliph's "Meditations on Moloch") was written in 1954-5 and published in 1956 (what was in the water that year?!?).
I don't have my sources at hand to fully dive into the eighteen nineties at the moment, but the fin-de-siecle decades were also stuffy and conformist, which spurred cultural backlash. TR's progressives were just as much a reaction against corruption in government and established political machines as TR himself was an icon in the cultural charge against perceived Victorian over-domesticity...not for nothing were TR's progressives smeared as "goo-goos" (short for "good government").
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I'm not anything resembling an expert on late-soviet history, but I do remember being impressed by Zubok's Collapse which argued that Gorbachev failed primarily because (1) he was really unlucky, (2) he didn't build himself a personal constituency within the state, (3) he was a true believer who underestimated the degree of cynicism and suppressed opposition present in the soviet body politic, and (4) lacked the economic chops to understand the uniquely-complex soviet economy, which was full of odd kludges, hacks, and workarounds accumulated over the years to square necessary interface with the rest of the world with Marxian ideological dogma, and so blundered into speeding up the implosion of the system in the guise of reform.
I can kinda pattern match Kamala to some of these, but I gotta be honest, the comparison isn't exactly leaping off the page...
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
While consuming a succulent chinese meal last night
A succulent chinese meal? Hopefully you go through it without experiencing any manifest democracy!!
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
since the foundation of the NLRB.
As we discussed below, the 5th Circuit is working on that problem.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
This is extremely inaccurate. Lebanon is famously split between feuding Sunni, Shia, and Maronite christian groups to the degree that their constitution sets ethnic quotas for power-sharing. Afghan is also split between many warring tribal-ethnic groups as well, including Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazara, and Uzbeks.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Soldiers routinely commit atrocities worse than your average executed murderer, and yet people have been enslaving prisoners of war for literal milllenia.
The behavior appropriate in group-conflict is radically different from that which is appropriate within the in-group, and as such the comparison is inapt.
Also, the standard practice for millennia was to execute the soldiers, and to enslave the women and children. We don't do that anymore.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Respectfully, there's nothing "obviously fantastic" to me about any of those. "De gustibus nil disputandum" and all, but frankly my (probably typical-minded) prior is that the number of people who would describe those works "obviously fantastic" are a small minority.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Now, more generally I agree that fat people (even "normal" fat people) have a strong tendency to be in denial about how much they eat and how little exercise they do, or about the health effects of obesity.
No, I know exactly how much I eat and how little I exercise. I'm lazy and depressive; exercise sucks compared to eating delicious food and reading a good book or playing a wargame in a comfy chair.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
So, in conclusion, I have come into belief that you should judge people for being obese. Not to say that all fat people are ignorant, entitled, and stupid. But they definitely have at least one of these traits, and should be avoided at all costs.
Consider that the people who get selected to be controversial and entertaining enough to be cast on reality TV, and the interactions which are edited by the producers into the final cut, are not representative of the general population.
Signed, a fatty who knows exactly why he is fat (depression, gluttony, and laziness), and does not expect anyone to do anything for him.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Gorsuch might bite.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Based upon what?
Based upon the fact that the majority of the rank and file GOP activists, lawyers, think-tank fellows, and other people likely to fill the thousands upon thousands of presidential appointment slots in a second Trump term come from institutions that are fairly sympatico with many of the assertions in Project 2025.
It seems uncharitable to tells someone what they believe (or what they will do) after they denounce it.
Yes, and neither candidate this cycle has earned much charity from me. However, I do take Trump at his word that he really does not like being bound by Project 2025, and he certainly wasn't part of dreaming it up (though many people who worked in his first administration and who remain his supporters were). Thus my conclusion that his appointees are likely to be friendly to many of the goals in Project 2025, but that Trump is likely to throw overboard any aspect of it which he believes has become a political liability.
Doesn't this lead to believing whatever you want about your political opponents?
I am trying to draw educated guesses about the most likely outcomes, based upon what I understand the facts to be. I would be happy to be corrected if anything I've said is factually incorrect, or if I'm missing something. My posting history should clearly indicate that I am open and transparent about owning up to error.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I would expect many trump underlings in a 2nd Trump administration to generally act in accordance with the overall thrust of the recommendations there, though the more radical the proposal and the more it diverges from the interests of major interest groups the less likely there are to be serious attempts to implement it. I also expect Trump to loudly denounce any effort which gets sufficient media attention to make him look/feel bad, and possibly fire any bureaucrat responsible for the attempt.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
aka deep spiritual connections to household pets.
This one seems to be a pretty common one, historically. I don't think of myself as very witchy, but I admit getting touched when I read ancient epitaphs for pets: "I am in tears, while carrying you to your last resting place as much as I rejoiced when bringing you home in my own hands fifteen years ago." Or reading about one of Muhammad's companions who was so devoted to his cats that he got nicknamed "father of kittens."
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
In that case, why am I (and I’d imagine, your average American citizen) not familiar with these terrible slave trades and exploitations of labor while I’m reminded of American black slavery nearly every day?
In part because we have a substantial black population that conceives of itself as needing to guilt benefits and sinecures from the hands of whites, while the hispanic and chinese populations do not do so, and the native americans were functionally destroyed aside from a few remnants. Thus, black slavery is politically useful in a way the rest is not, and most politics is whig history in service of contemporary political ends. And the rest is because we have terrible memories of our high school history curricula (or grew up in states without a significant history as part of spanish america. In California we learned all about the encomienda system as part of the Colombian exchange, and conditions in railroad gangs and early-industrial factories as part of early-20th century labor history. For the more advanced stuff you'd actually have to read some college-level scholarship (or just Scott's review of Albion's Seed), but it's not exactly hidden. This is all bog-standard 20th century progressive historiography that the elite are happy to teach to kids; it's hardly forbidden, red-pilled secrets.
If this was football, and your weak team had a miracle one year and beat the strong team in the next county, I imagine you’d be happier to recount the glories of beating the strong team while ignoring the glories of beating all the weaker teams.
Yes, but this is not football, and even if you were right and the metaphor holds, this rationale wouldn't have anything to do with why the actual slavery-supporting Americans imported black slaves because they were convinced that the black people, specifically, were physically superior. You've given a just-so reason for why such mythologies of physical dominance might spring up after the fact - i.e., for your own assumption.
Similarly white Americans have had a history of making their enemies out to be strong, portraying the native Americans they conquered as powerful because if they portrayed them as weak it would make them look unchristian and evil and sadistic.
A lot of the natives were very strong and impressive, for nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes. The white generals who fought them (Sherman, Sheridan, etc.) were quite open about the fact that yes, these impressive people were going to get steamrollered by industrial modernity, and that was sad, but such was the march of civilization. Not all christians believed that power = evil.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Besides that I think white men were fine with the enslavement of black men because they perceived black men as physically dominant/superior in some way. They didn't enslave Asians or natives to any significant degree because enslaving someone smaller than you makes you look bad and doesn't jive as well with Christian theology (see David and Goliath, Nietzschean slave morality etc)
Yeah, no. The nascent latifundia used unfree labor from white people (usually called "serfs" or, in the U.S., "indentured servants", or later "sharecroppers" or company-town folk), native americans (in latin america just look up the "encomienda" system and shudder in horror), and, when they started coming over, chinese immigrants (check out labor conditions on railway gangs in the 19th century) as long as they could; black people were just evolutionarily less likely to keel over dead of malaria (thanks to the sickle-cell mutation) and other tropical diseases than white people in the caribbean and/or US south, couldn't run away back to their tribes like indians, and in the 17th and 18th centuries were flooding the market thanks to very rich and aggressive slave-trading kingdoms on the west African coast. Notably, the places where there were a lot of native americans to enslave, like Mexico and points south in Spanish (as opposed to Portuguese) Central and South America tended to not see a big importation of black slaves and tend not to have large african-descended populations today; there was no need to go to the expense of shipping them in when other unfree labor sources were right there.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I don't disagree with anything specific you said, but I don't think most of the "queers-for-Palestine" leftists are deriving their positions from rational analysis of facts; I think they have a vibe, an aesthetic, a friend-enemy instinct, and tack on rationalizations after that. TBH, I increasingly think most politics (very much including my own) draws from this tendency, and clear-eyed rationality is both extremely-hard to maintain and prone to error itself (legibility problems and incomplete data being the root of most of them).
The part I want to focus on is this kind of blend of mistake and conflict theory -- there's conflict, yes, but it has a cause which can be addressed and then we'll all be on the same side.
The bolded part is, I think, a mistake.
My model of the western queer islamist-supporter isn't that they think muslim societies would be pro-LGBT but for the interference of the west, and that after the removal of the oppressive outsider everyone will be chill and copacetic; it's that they identify first and foremost as opponents of what they believe is the hegemonic moral, political, economic, and ethnic power of the west. They then see the islamists as also opposed to the same forces and, since the enemy of my enemy is my friend, automatically support them as fellow-travellers. All oppressive struggles everywhere are linked and intersectional. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere".
I'd say that a major component is not having to deal with the contradictions of living cheek-by-cheek with large fundamentalist muslim populations, but I'm not sure even that would shake the trend. Plenty of prominent queer and secular-socialist leftists have been seduced by the thrill of exotic, primal, other Islamic revolution as an alternative to dreaded western capitalist modernity.
I can't even really blame them for it; there's plenty of historical basis for westerners using outsiders as a political cudgel or hedge against local enemies.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Cultural Marxism, on the other hand, seeks supporters by appealing to the cultural grievances of marginalized groups in predominantly right-wing hierarchical social environments.
You don't find most critical theorists in 90% baptist towns in Alabama; you mostly find them in NY, SF, LA, and college towns - i.e. places where the social order is overwhelmingly dominated by the progressive left. And yet, they're just as, if not more mad than the gay kid with orthodox christian parents. I would edit your formulation to:
"Cultural Marxism...seeks supporters by appealing to the cultural grievances of groups opposed to the existence of low-status social environments they call 'right wing'"
You're not wrong that the left-progressive memeplex draws a lot from Marx. However, as someone with some training in intellectual history, I would insist that really modern progressives have a pretty-attenuated relationship with Marx. They tend to directly interface more with more recent thinkers who have fairly radically-expanded the Marxian canon from its original roots: e.g. the Critical Theorists and Fanon incorporated Freud, Friere incorporated both Fanon and Rousseau/Dewey, all incorporated their own original insights, and so on. So yes, its "Marxist"...but there's an awful lot of elaboration in there, to the point that it's really unclear what Marx himself would think of it, or whether he would even recognize it if you could unearth and revive him. One analogy might be that modern progressivism is Marxist in the sense the orthodox Marxists were Hegelian. Like, where's the Marxism in the proliferation of radically-divergent sexual mores among the professional classes and capital-owning bourgeois classes? I could buy it if you were talking about the broader left-socialist tradition, referencing important contemporaries of Marx who time has rendered more obscure like Fourier and Robert Owen, but not Marx. In a lot of ways, modern leftists insist they are in a Marxian tradition as much to gain the cachet associated with asserting a famous genealogy than they do because they really care about and have deeply drawn from Kapital etc.
But all this wrangling over the intellectual history (which is incredibly rich and complicated and admittedly fun to wrangle over) aside, if you're seeking to understand and grok modern leftism you're not going to do it just by looking at Marx. And if you want to combat modern leftism you're not going to get very far just by calling it "Marxist." I don't think modern progressivism is an intellectual movement; not really. It, at least as it manifests in its politically-relevant common outbreaks is a morality, a teleology, an zeitgeist; a system of unfalsifiable, unquestioned assumptions about virtue and value that people feel more as vibes, aesthetics, and a priori interpretive lenses than they do as rational arguments for any particular falsifiable theory. It's not any rational system of thought that turns a completely normal list of basic life tasks...and turns it into icky ragebait with the addition of "...for a husband and family" to the end of each of them. Marx is a lot of things, but he's not that, and to the extent his thought has been absorbed into it, it's part of a lot richer inheritance including deracinated, desacralized protestantism, and the same leveller impulse that even appears in some of the wilder parts of the Christian tradition (such as, famously, Christ's admonition to forsake family and wealth to follow Him, the Diggers, Waldensians, early-church communes described in parts of the Book of Acts, and a lot of the religious movements Engels was banging on about in "The Peasant's War in Germany"). And if you want to address it, you need to do so on its own level - catechism of the young, and evangelization (or de-conversion) of adults where possible.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Not in the vernacular.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
One might even say the dogma lives loudly in them.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
One of the early motives / aspirations of the printing press, for example, was framed not in terms of 'think of what it could do for newspapers' but 'think of how many more Bibles the world could had.'
This thought had extremely different valences depending on your opinion of the commonfolk; the Church hierarchy was corrupt, yes. But they were also right that proliferation of the sacred text in the vernacular would cause an absolute riot of absolutely uncontrollable radicalism, with not-infrequently horrifying consequences.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Yo I forgot Lou and he did that!!! Thank you for reminding me; one more reason the Hoovers are among my personal heroes.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Can you imagine being a Springfielder with a third of your town suddenly replaced by foreigners - your schools swamped with ESL kids, your car insurance tripling - because your mayor wants to bilk the feds out of craptons of money on his shitty apartments?
Well...that and mob ties (allegedly). Daggett got out from under prosecution for that when his co-defendant who was testifying against him turned up dead in the trunk of a car in New Jersey, a murder which has mysteriously never been solved! He has even pulled out the old "anti-mafia measures are anti-Italian bigotry!" card
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