And it's specifically demoralizing in the context of taking radical action.
This would imply that they took the sort of radical actions OP is describing in response to Trump's first term, where he didn't have this sort of delegitimizing gain amongst important demographics and Russia hysteria was at its peak.
I don't think they risked felonies even then.
Tanista
22hr ago
I thought it was very convenient: "race and IQ poaster concludes problem is race and IQ". But it is interesting to see the left-wing version from Cenk Uygur posted above. Both sides seem to think Democrats lost or alienated important human capital.
The 70 year-old politicos aren't going to give anyone a chance to arrest them. The middle class bureaucrats aren't going to risk jail either without some cover.
The actual play would be to stoke enough rage amongst the general public and underclass for them to do it or provide cover for people with more to lose, at which point people can come out with the excuses used during BLM/Luigi frenzy: obviously it isn't ideal but there's a legitimate reason behind all of this we need to talk about, "language of the unheard" and all of that.
The problem, I think, is that significant swathes of the public simply don't care that much about minutiae around government departments. What this election seems to have shaken is the notion that these sorts of people actually represent the groups in whose name they seize power . Apparently it's taking them a while to find the rhythm again.
Might vary by type of celebrity too. The tabloids seem to report that many WAGs just know that it's the cost of doing business, with maybe the expectation that the athlete is discreet. Does the same apply to relatively equal status actors ?
Tanista
1d ago
His girlfriend, Kayla, is an attractive woman (happy to cite my sources) who speaks Korean. Most men, in theory, would be happy to score even a 1st date with a woman like her.
I'm sorry but I find the idea of someone going "but I speak Korean" in response to being cheated on inordinately funny for some reason.
Maybe if she could read manga instead of manhwa she would have avoided this!
Tanista
4d ago
Most of those examples started as comics which have a much lower barrier to entry than AAA games or movies.
They became organically popular, at which point studios and corporations jumped on them for adaptations.
People did go out and make their own. And this is what they made and were rewarded for making.
I mean, sure. He has good political instincts for where the base is (not that it was unclear immigration was an issue voters cared about). So did Obama.
But, if we're going with that older definition of meme, then the mainstream media would arguably be more responsible for "memeing" him into existence. Both in terms of the free advertising/transmission and by condemning him so much.
Something they've never psychologically recovered from.
Tanista
5d ago
Copyright law is at fault for this. Letting individuals monopolize cultural icons neuters our ability to use them as shared myths...
"Cultural appropriation" is, strangely, an attempt to do this even to things that can't be copyrighted, by people who otherwise can't stop complaining about capitalism.
but only warner bros is formally allowed to use that shorthand to make money which in practice serves as a massive disincentive for artists to portray the same values in the same package and discuss them in a salient way.
On the flip side we have no end to Superman expies: Homelander, Omni-Man, The Plutonian, Brightburn. They're just deeply, deeply cynical and aimed at subverting the character. Which may say something about the audience.
Tanista
5d ago
Let's grant that it was radicalizing. I'm not sold that a certain sort of anti-woke radicalism matters.
It takes a long time to get people to some Rufo stage. A lot of the critics of Anita Sarkeesian were still fundamentally in agreement with progressives. It was just "mostly the same values, can you just leave our shit alone?". Around this time atheism was having a moment online and the GOP were the loser squares who talked about the body shutting down legitimate rape. Working with them to break wokies was unthinkable and the sheer unconstrained nature of woke demands and their who/whom mentality wasn't fully accepted. Some people are still in denial (until it impacts them)
A lot of people didn't care, and a lot of people were embarrassed by attempted strike backs against the heart of the problem or to rally people against that a la "they came for gamers, gamers".
I think pro- and anti-GamerGaters both tend to overestimate its impact. I tend to think GamerGate was just one instance of Toxoplasma of Rage that served as a political awakening for some people. I don't think it was more impactful than other Toxoplasma skirmishes, like New Atheism or BLM.
There was a period where people were claiming memes got Trump elected (or at least selected in the primary). This obviously wasn't the case except in the most trivial sense. It wasn't God Emperor Trump memes or the_donald, those were all riding on existing enthusiasm for the guy who broke with the learned helplessness strategy on a few issues central to the base.
It's just overly online people over-estimating the impact of the things they care about.
I'm probably above the 90th percentile of grass deficiency here. I was actually still reading IGN and other games sites for reviews and even I couldn't be fucked to drill through the tangle of claims that was Gamergate. It was just another populist vs journalist flashpoint AFAICT.
Tanista
5d ago
There is at least the cluster of things that amount to a rapid shredding of the previous arrangement where the US has a network of allied nations that enthusiastically follow it as a Big Good/moral leader
Was that why? Or was it because the US was the strong horse?
Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit.
If you set up any moral system that gives people prestige for conspicuously following it it'll attract bad actors who try to use it. These people can do outsized damage and are thus more salient and all movements that plan to survive must develop antibodies against it. Hence Jesus' warning and the feminist disdain and suspicion of people who constantly display their piety.
So The MFSP as a predator + The MFSP as salience bias. I think feminists overrate the salience of all sorts of things for ideological reasons (e.g. the risk of conservative domination, the risk from random incels vs normal men you know) but this one is probably a bit rational.
The real interesting question is where progressives have not only failed but stubbornly refused to develop antibodies and insisted on credulousness.
The problem here is that deportation is what Trump controls. He can't change state policies towards migrants or things like them having a "right" to schooling in the US. He can catch them at the border or send them back when he gets them but most anything else will be partly determined by lower governments.
To make sweeping changes would require Congress and, well, they've had years to do anything. If they could, Trump wouldn't exist.
Beyond that, nations like Germany don't have birthright citizenship. Plenty of people would eat shit indefinitely until their kids are born and have citizenship. That's just the incentive of all incentives (even if you stopped the sponsorship loophole). And there's no conceivable way Congress amends the Constitution any time soon. Let alone for that.
Tanista
9d ago
Consider that immigration under Biden 2 would have been something like +15 million and under Trump it will probably be negative.
It's unclear that Trump can even deport all of the people Biden let in.
Tanista
11d ago
Have any one of a half-dozen DR accounts tweet it and there's at least a 12% chance Elon Musk signal-boosts it within the week.
Tanista
11d ago
Okay, let's grant that nationalists are being overly charitable when they assume their enemies are driven purely by altruism towards foreigners (though some clearly are driven by that to a substantial degree). The obvious reason they feel this way is that their enemies continually attack them for their lack of altruism but whatever.
Let's say that what's actually happening is that altruism is one factor but some of these policies are seen as good for Americans overall and some are especially good for certain Americans who benefit disproportionately from the cheaper labour of migrants without concern for any externalities they impose on the rest of the populace.
What's Hanania's point then? "Well, ackshually, it's the nobles who benefit from all of the slave labour, not the slaves!" is technically accurate but so what?
You can argue that anti-globalist positions are stupid, but the fact that they're fighting globalists who happen to be fellow citizens doesn't change that they're nationalists.
Imagine a man who pays little attention to balancing his checkbook and doesn’t put much effort towards organizing his finances. At the same time, he lives in a state of absolute paranoia that his wife might occasionally give a dollar to a homeless person.
First of all: I've gained a lot of contempt for homeless people so I might actually feel this way. I've never felt more like a fool when I gave a former regular on our street money for "food" only to realize he was actively turning down free food from nearby restaurants. Even if I was making bad decisions with my money I'd still be annoyed at my wife for being a gull. I'd still be annoyed that said person gets to hang around stinking up the neighborhood even more, encouraged by our trusting folly.
But replace "homeless person" with "Christian or LGBT charity" and it becomes clear why someone might not want their money going to groups that may say nice things but are advancing causes they find troublesome.
Now replace voluntary donations with taxes.
Tanista
11d ago
Yes. This infamous discussion between Bernie and Ezra Klein gives away the game. Not everyone is a Kleinian, but you would be a fool to believe that people like that are driven by purely pragmatic calculus about the benefits to Americans.
It also doesn't help that one side maintains a final card they can play: false consciousness.
Feminists do this all of the time: feminism is good for you too and, where you disagree, it's because you simply haven't had enough feminism.
I simply don't believe some of these claims. I've heard a few economists blithely write off the downsides of immigration as "an allocation problem", as if that makes it a matter of a couple of dials for some bureaucrat to fiddle with. Let's grant that immigration has been great for Canada. That doesn't change that the fundamentally political Gordian knot of increasing housing supply still exists so everyone feels squeezed. It's not going to be dissolved by an efficient market because it's a matter of geography,regulations and the interests of some groups over others. Hanania is a libertarian so he does get this, until he doesn't want to.
And, even if I did believe them, I know no nationalist has ever won the debate by saying "I'll take the tradeoff". They just get written off as ignorant.
Empathy doesn't require reciprocity. Sympathy does. The word has gone the same way "tolerance" has: skinsuited for a rhetorical advantage.
If you're unempathetic you don't have a meaningful disagreement, you're just ignorant. That sort of knowledge isn't finite. Meaningful sympathy, the sort that imposes costs, is always a limited resource and generally parochial and isn't inherently increased by empathy . The question at the heart of politics is where that line is drawn.
I would rather have perfect empathy than have perfect sympathy and be Wolf's moral saint.
Tanista
13d ago
But they shouldn't do that. If morality means anything at all, you must stick to it even when it is personally inconvenient.
Even non-divine command deontological systems depend on the rule being a good thing overall. It's fine for a rule to be bad sometimes.
But if the rule you followed consistently brings you and all you value to defeat it is not a good rule.
The whole thing is already fraying. The fewer whites there are the weaker the ability of the progressive class to both maintain harmony despite the contradictions in their coalition and the fewer "racists" you can tax without accidentally harming a fellow coalition member.
And you can get sucked into so many loser positions that people who don't see their identity as being cheerleaders for some minority coalition can just opt out.
People like Jasmine Crockett writing off complaints about DEI and AA as just the complaints of mediocre white men (as if SFFA didnt involve Asian complaints) are just sad to me.
It's like watching an addled actor recite an outdated script and waiting for applause that'll never come.
How old-fashioned is tabula rasa liberalism really?
Nothing Cremieux and co. are saying would be a shock to liberals of many centuries (well, maybe their Oriental simping). Even when civil rights and egalitarianism became an issue a lot of people may have been for legal equality but not a pretense of blank slateism, especially if it's enforced at the cost of their own rights to sovereignty and freedom of association. They definitely considered gender blank slateism to be nonsense.
While tabula rasa liberalism has some roots in thought experiments about the state of nature that go back to early liberalism, most people didn't actually live by the sort of thorough-going refusal to accept innate group differences and the existence of an underlying human nature in practice until very, very recently.
And that "wokeness" follows that ideology because it cannot live up to its promises but has shown that that ideology is a useful way to erode certain liberal principles (like freedom of association) to create a more powerful state that theoretically could.
I don't think they could pay enough to get all the groups like Somalis out, and many of them won't want to leave regardless. At the very least, you will have to do the mean things that offering money is supposed to avoid first. And the consequences of that sort of thing is unclear.
I came from a safe poor country. We didn't live like kings but we were relatively well-off (middle class) by national standards. We still left.
Because if someone has a condition you can't get an MRI. You can't send your kids to a university worthy of the name (if you send them to the West as a non-citizen they'll squeeze you since it's the easiest way to raise tuition*, so there goes a chunk of that money). You can't always avoid the graft and corruption. You can't always avoid the shitty roads in the rainy season. You're constantly being taxed in a variety of ways: you have to organize your own electricity and water , have to dodge shitty cops, have to worry about family members on a small salary. There are very few good jobs and the economy is going nowhere.
And everyone knows that the West is better and no guarantee that you'll be first man in the village, for as long as European power maintains it, (and I'm being charitable in assuming that this is a thing that can be casually done and that Europeans have the will for pseudo-colonialism; the fact that you think it would be easy and would be done merely through diplomacy doesn't augur well) will be as good. It's inherently unstable and not a particularly bright future.
This shit might work on the Polish but I don't think there's any point in pretending there'll be anything genteel about ethnically cleansing people back to certain nations.
* At least in Canada. Much easier to raise fees on foreign students.
Tanista
15d ago
If they are not, then it’s a policy choice to deport. If they are citizens, it is better to encourage them leave through (1) monetary enticement and (2) permitting Swedes full freedom of choice in businesses and institutions to exclude them if so desired and (3) enhancing native birth rates (which Israel is doing right now in Israel proper, and I don’t criticize this).
This isn't going to make people go back to Somalia.
Either you break the citizenship contract (or admit some citizens are more equal than others) or they're staying.
A lot of these things were radical if viewed from the outside, but didn't put them directly at risk.
I would think the employed and well-off progressives were the ones providing cover in the NYT by shutting down things like Tom Cotton calling for a national response, not the actual people burning down cities (and even there there was more cover because some local authorities simply refused to use a strong hand).
OP is talking about them risking felony charges from a Trump-led government by trespassing on federal property or trying to bodily prevent Trump-appointed people from access. It's one thing to bully editors from your company discord for covering riots. But that is a different level of skin in the game.
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