Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4d ago
You might notice that neither side in my example scenario had any political descriptors attached.
Which is exactly why your question cannot be answered. It's like asking if a blouse would pair better with a light-colored skirt, or a dark-colored skirt, without specifying the color of the blouse. Since the answer depends entirely on the blouse's color, it's impossible to answer either way without that answer.
Similarly, it's impossible to answer your original question of whether the board's actions against the CEO are "Fascist Authoritarian" or not — because the answer does not lie in the nature of the acts, but their political direction.
I can't recall which book by which historian it was, but I remember many years ago an author writing about the origins of "fascist tactics." He talked about Mussolini's early days with the Communists, and went on to detail about how the tactics used by the early Italian Fascists, the early Nazi party, the early Falangists, so on, had all been used by various Communist groups first, and that all the early 20th century "fascist" movements could be seen as starting with people on the right deciding to use the (far) left's own tactics against them. He did this not to excuse the fascists, or reduce any opprobrium against their methods, but only to argue that methods themselves are not inherently fascist. That there are no "fascist tactics," only tactics that are "fascist" when used by the right against the left (and never when used by the left against the right). That whether these tactics are good or evil depends entirely on whether they are used to "punch right" or "punch left."
Now, in the past, when I was more of a linguistic prescriptivist, I might have pushed back harder against this sort of thing. But at a certain point, one has to bow to common usage. And IME, the common usage of words (again, including by plenty of notable academics) like "fascist" and "authoritarian" defines them in this way.
In your scenario, the acts of the board against the CEO make them "Fascist Authoritarians" if and only if the board is to the right of the CEO and they are "punching left"; and they are not "Fascist Authoritarians" (and the CEO probably is) if they are to the left of the CEO and they are "punching right."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
Depends upon the relative political positions of the board and the CEO, of course.
It's something I see often. I recall once reading an online discussion of the political slant in Adorno's Authoritarian Personality and "F-scale," and more recent attempts to address left-wing authoritarianism. Specifically, I saw someone defend the political slant, and argue that there's no such thing as "left-wing authoritarianism." Not that the left can't do the things of hold the attitudes that are used to describe authoritarianism, but that these things are not inherently authoritarian, but only depending on who is doing them; and that under the "proper" definition, these things are only "authoritarian" when done by the Right, not the Left, so that "left-wing authoritarianism" is impossible by definition (because it's different when they do it).
It's the slogan of "no bad tactics, only bad targets" taken to it's conclusion, in the naked tribalism of Lenin's "who, whom?" When they, the bad guys, do it, it's fascism; when we, the good guys, do it, it's antifascism.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
Human sacrifice was mostly just a Mesoamerican thing, and usually just the big regional power players, not the small tribes living under their boot heel.
AIUI, the Tlingit of the Pacific Northwest would sometimes sacrifice slaves during a potlatch, as well as other ceremonial human sacrifices. See also here (pdf):
Similar to potlatches in neighboring coastal societies, the Tlingit potlatch involved several types of gifts, some of them reserved for the aristocracy (cf. Goldman 1975:136-137). Along the entire Northwest Coast, slaves and copper sheets ("coppers," Tlingit *tinna9) were the most valuable, their symbolism similar but not identical to that of other ritual prestations. Both slaves and coppers were brought from the “outside,” the former through warfare with the neighbors to the south, the latter through trade with the interior Athabascans and later with Europeans (Keithahn 1963b). Neither slaves nor coppers were used for utilitarian purposes, since the former were purchased just before the potlatch and did not do any work (Oberg 1973:116) and the latter were reserved exclusively for ceremonial exchanges. Slaves, like other gifts, were placed in physical contact with the hosts’ crests: they were killed with a special club depicting their master’s crest, or held a rope tied to a headdress owned by their master (Olson 1967:63). The freeing of slaves, which increased in the postcontact period due to European pressure, was equivalent to killing them, since both acts made them socially dead (freed slaves had to leave their owner’s community; cf. Goldman 1975:54). The slaves sacrificed in the potlatch became the servants of the hosts’ matrilineal ancestors, while those given away became the guests’ property. The spirits of the latter most likely became the property of the dead as well.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
As someone with a close relative who works at one of our libraries (here in Alaska), and has listened to her complain about both the workplace and her coworkers, as well as spent some time in said library, I'll second what @6tjk, @CrispyFriedBarnacles, and @ThenElection have said below.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6d ago
The problem for the Left is how to extract themselves from these bubbles, or maybe even reform them.
Is it? I mean, why should they bother? As I see it, their actual problem is more what you noted here:
In the Legacy Knowing, you got with the party line quick if you knew what was good for you, or you were banned or cancelled. It didn't matter if they said masks were dumb last week, now they believe masks are good, and so now you will believe that too, with exactly the same certainty as the previous contradictory belief.
That is to say, the problem is how to restore their hegemony, and force the rest of us to obey whatever they come up with within their epistemic bubble. "It's the children voters who are wrong."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6d ago
Algorithms have ruled everything the Gen Zers have done since they were young, from Video Games to Dating to School to Jobs.
Once again, I find myself quoting:
“The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," Leto said. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”
And this:
And I think the hard truth is just that everyone is TRYING to capture the top 20% performers across the board, so anyone not in the top 20% performance bracket for any given category is going to be left out, and very confused as to what their real options are.
reminds me of the gritty cyberpunk dystopia Tyler Cowen forecasts our civilization becoming in Average is Over.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6d ago
What does any of this have to do with the culture war? AIUI, this is the "culture war roundup" post, not a general "open thread" post; so this really belongs somewhere else.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6d ago
There were over 10M illegal immigrants under Biden, so that would need ~4k daily deportations for the entire presidency to undo. Seems unlikely/impossible to happen.
Why? When it comes to the capacity of modern states for mass deportations, I like to point to the example of the post-War "flight and expulsion" of Germans:
Between 1944 and 1948, millions of people, including ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) and German citizens (Reichsdeutsche), were permanently or temporarily moved from Central and Eastern Europe. By 1950, about 12 million[4] Germans had fled or been expelled from east-central Europe into Allied-occupied Germany and Austria. The West German government put the total at 14.6 million,[5] including a million ethnic Germans who had settled in territories conquered by Nazi Germany during World War II, ethnic German migrants to Germany after 1950, and the children born to expelled parents. The largest numbers came from former eastern territories of Germany ceded to the Polish People's Republic and Soviet Union (about seven million),[6][7] and from Czechoslovakia (about three million).
So it looks to me that the real question is one of will.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
18d ago
I think a lot depends on how likely it is that SF was causally responsible.
IME, that isn't how it works in environmental law, particularly when you get to what happens if an endangered species is found on your land (as was satirized by The Simpsons with the screamapillar.) I vaguely remember hearing about a case where a guy got caught in a Catch-22 because he had two endangered species on his land, one of which was preying upon the other (failure to protect the prey species was a punishable offense; any measures taken to protect the prey species were also a punishable offense, vis-à-vis the predator species).
that would be deeply unfair
What does fairness have to do with law?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
18d ago
Instead, civilization really detests murder, and is willing to spend extraordinary amounts to find murderers.
Then why is the clearance rate for murder cases in America around 50%?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
18d ago
Their duty is to try to convince the voters their ideas are right; and if the voters aren't convinced, they should vote for someone else who's selling a different set of ideals.
See, the thing is, I'm seeing people on the left actively rejecting this. As they see it, the party doesn't have a duty to convince voters, the voters have a duty to support them automatically — "Vote Blue no matter who" — and if the voters aren't convinced, then the voters are the problem, not them, and it's the voters who need to change, not them. Voters who "vote for someone else who's selling a different set of ideals" are failing in their duty to the Democratic party, and are either stupid — and thus need "educating" — or evil — and must be punished. (I recall one lefty YouTuber talking about the various demographics that moved rightward in 2024, noting that often the Democratic party has nothing to offer them… and then excoriating these groups, because it's their duty to vote Dem anyway, and voting for any other party is never okay…)
Again, all over Tumblr, the talk is of literal re-education camps for Trump voters — as the "humane" option — because they have to extend people the "charity" of assuming they're just not smart enough to understand Democratic party messaging, or have been led astray by the vast pipelines of far-right disinformation; and because the alternative is that they knowingly voted for "obvious Fascism," and thus must be either expelled from the country or simply killed.
They're all quite explicit about this: if an election doesn't go the way you want, don't blame the party, blame the voters.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
19d ago
Moving this here (rather late) on suggestion of the mods, with some added expansion:
Does anyone else see the way various people on the American left, particularly left leaning media, have been doubling down on "Trump is Hitler," "Harris ran a flawless campaign," "the voters are just sexist, racist, stupid, and evil," and so on, and that they shouldn't change policies to win over voters, except maybe by moving even further leftward (again, I'm on Tumblr, so I get plenty of this from ordinary D voters coming across my dash; there's also the Youtubers seen in this video for one) as part of an overall "strategy" by the left that strongly parallels the behaviors in recent years of "woke Hollywood" and game studios? That is, use identity politics as a tool to paint critics and opponents as bigots ('you don't hate our all-female reboot because it's a soulless cash grab with lousy writing and acting, you're just a sexist', 'you didn't vote for Kamala only because you hate blacks and/or women,' etc). "Schrödinger's critics": your opposition is just a few unimportant bigots who don't represent the audience/electorate and don't really matter; but when your movie/game/candidate flops, it's because of the immense power those same opponents have over the viewers/players/voters. The problem is that too many people are listening to fringe voices (whether that's YouTube movie critics, video game reviewers on Twitch, or 'purveyors of right wing misinformation' like Fox News and x.com), instead of professional, establishment movie critics/game journalists/political commentators; and we need to figure out how to mute those fringe voices. Taking your established fanbase/demographics for granted, and excoriate them if their support starts to wane ('how can you call yourself a Tolkien fan and not watch Rings of Power?' 'Sure, the Democrat party's policies do nothing for you, but you have to vote blue no matter who anyway' [a position I've seen left-wing YouTubers state in response to the election]).
Sure, the idea that "the customer is always right" — even if you append the qualifier "…in matters of taste" — is one that the "creative industries" have always struggled with. The purity of one's artistic vision versus "selling out" in order to make a living is a perennial tension. And similarly with electoral politics. Parties abandoning all principles in naked pursuit of the median voter turns electoral politics into a modern spectator sport, with the parties reduced to different colored jerseys with different mascots, and all that matters is that "your" team win the next game. ("Who will win the trophy this year, Team Elephant, or Team Donkey?") But, on the other hand, if a party wants to actually accomplish things in line with those principles, they have to win elections. Movie studios need to have people pay to watch their movies, so they can afford to make more, or else they'll go out of business.
In short, that you, the filmmaker/game studio/Democratic party, don't answer to your audience/voters, the audience/voters answer to you. You do not have to earn their dollars/votes, you are entitled to them, and if they aren't buying what you're selling, then they're wrong, and the strategy is to lecture them on what horrible bigots they are until they start watching your movie/playing your game/voting Democrat. And calling anyone who disagrees with you a fascist. (That "Unfortunately, this decision affects the wrong people" bit is wild coming from those making the decision in question — as if they have no agency over this decision, but it is instead somehow just a natural consequence somehow emerging automatically.) As Jim put it: "Doing an audit of federal government expenditures is the death of democracy, and doing a customer survey is openly fascist."
Even shorter: it's treating that Simpsons bit with Principal Skinner that's become a meme — "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong." — as a marketing/campaign strategy.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
19d ago
It seems to be a clash of different type of worldviews, one being the so called industrial policy, which is a policy where a nation creates favorable environment to grow domestic behemoths and grow their domestic economy. There are multiple examples of countries employing this type of policy such as South Korea, China or even Japan back in the day.
On the other side of the spectrum you have standard economic theory in favor of free trade. It has formidable range of theories for why this is ultimately the best policy, the most important one being the concept of comparative advantage.
On this debate, I recently read this lengthy 2017 American Affairs article, which I found pretty good for firming up and supporting a number of my views on this issue, particularly "free trade" as perhaps the archetypal example of economists succumbing to "the Ricardian Vice."
The bit that was particularly new for me, and thus stood out, was the bit about The Atlas of Economic Complexity and diversity beating specialization due to development spreading via "proximity":
Thus, although they claim to be experts on the effects of trade policy and argue almost unerringly for liberalization over protection, economists have not yet even asked the questions that are crucial to the real-world impact of trade liberalization: what does it do to the level and distribution of output, income, and employment?
Given that economists have not even considered these issues, it is not surprising that other researchers who have done so have reached conclusions that are diametrically opposed to the biases of economists. By analyzing the enormous Standard International Trade Classification database of international trade flows, data scientists at Harvard University, working on what they have christened The Atlas of Economic Complexity,19 have found that diversity, rather than specialization, leads to national success in international trade.
Their methodology was to classify products on the basis of their “ubiquity,” which they defined as how many countries exported the product, and countries on the basis of “diversity,” which they defined as how many products a given country exported.
…
The message that comes through loud and clear in this empirically grounded analysis is that, for countries to succeed at both growth and trade, specialization is essential at the individual level, and diversity matters at the level of the nation-state:
…
The researchers used the measures of ubiquity and diversity to develop a composite index they called “complexity,” which quantified “the amount of productive knowledge” products and economies contain.23 This complexity metric correlated well with living standards—with countries like Japan and Switzerland at the head of the 2015 index (at 2.47 and 2.18 respectively) and Papua New Guinea and Nigeria at its tail (–1.81 and –2.18 respectively). But movements up the complexity scale also correlated strongly with improved growth performance:
An increase of one standard deviation in complexity, which is something that Thailand achieved between 1970 and 1985, is associated with a subsequent acceleration of a country’s long-term growth rate of 1.6 percent per year. This is over and above the growth that would have been expected from mineral wealth and global trends.24
The success of this index in predicting which countries are likely to outperform growth expectations in the future was related to the role of product diversity within a country, which enable new products to be invented. The authors of The Atlas found that a country was more likely to develop a new product if the country had other industries which were close to that product in a third metric they called “proximity.” Technically this was measured as the likelihood that a country exported one product given that it exported another; practically, it indicated that invention of new products required knowledge of existing, closely related products. A country with a diversified export profile (and by implication a diversified industrial base),25 rather than one with a specialized portfolio, is more likely to have the product proximity that allows new products to be invented and the economy to grow.
…
These empirical findings also cast a very different light on the populist revolts that are currently disturbing the pro-globalization consensus, which has dominated economic policy for the last thirty years. These revolts are not unthinking reactions against rationality, as mainstream economists like to believe, but reactions to the failure of the real world to conform to the irrational thinking of economists, and the damaging policies that have been imposed by politicians following their advice.
Thirty years of trade policies pursuing the false promise of specialization have meant that residents of the Rust Belt states of the United States, and the economically depressed regions of the United Kingdom, can now compare the promise of globalization with the reality. They voted against globalisation, not because they were too intellectually limited to perceive its benefits, but because experience gave them the lens through which to reject the Ricardian Myth of the advantages of national specialization.
Policymakers should too. The empirical research that underpins The Atlas of Economic Complexity—as opposed to the armchair speculation that has characterized the development of economic theory—provides strong guidance on how to achieve economic development. It starts from an understanding of where the increased prosperity of the last two centuries has come from. It has not come from specialization in the allocation of existing resources, but from acquiring and developing new knowledge over time:
During the past two centuries, the amount of productive knowledge we hold expanded dramatically. This was not, however, an individual phenomenon. It was a collective phenomenon. As individuals we are not much more capable than our ancestors, but as societies we have developed the ability to make all that we have mentioned—and much, much more.26
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
23d ago
The same bizarre situation is going on in entire Western Europe. People talking about the need to decouple from the US, so we can defend Taiwan??
One of the British podcasters I listen to (I don't recall which off the top of my head — maybe Parvini?) characterized this as Starmer and European elites, in response to Trump trying to pull back the US from its global empire, trying to figure out how keep the GAE going without America.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
23d ago
So yeah, when I think of “sovereignty over my land”, I don’t think about Kolomoisky taking over the resources of a country through murder, illegally extracting all the money he can, spending that money on a lavish 100 million dollar “Menorah Center” and services for his foreign tribe members, funneling the rest of the money through his tribe members to help his co-ethnics 5000 miles away, and then using this media control to boost the popularity of yet another tribe member by depicting him as the president in expensive TV series. When I think of sovereignty, I do not think of “the largest money laundering operation in history”.
If I were Ukrainian I would not want to be controlled by these guys.
And here I'm reminded of a friend-of-a-friend who matches that. Specifically, an old friend of mine, when we were talking one time, told me about another friend of his, a Neo-Nazi Ukrainian expat. Said expat's opinion (as relayed to me second-hand) was that of course the primary enemy of the Ukrainian people is Putin and his half-Tatar mongrel hordes, but the second biggest enemy is Zelenskyy, who was installed by International Jewry to punish the Ukrainian people in vengeance for the Khmelnytsky pogroms almost four centuries ago.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Looking for beta readers?
Not presently, but thanks for offering. And if I do, I'll keep you in mind.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Is Germany "a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct genocide"?
Okay, more seriously (and less "bare link" phrased, Jeopardy-style, in the form of a question), does anyone else see things like this as part of an overall "strategy" by the left that strongly parallels the behaviors in recent years of "woke Hollywood" and game studios? That is, use identity politics as a tool to paint critics and opponents as bigots ('you don't hate our all-female reboot because it's a soulless cash grab with lousy writing and acting, you're just a sexist', 'you didn't vote for Kamala only because you hate blacks and/or women,' etc). "Schrödinger's critics": your opposition is just a few unimportant bigots who don't represent the audience/electorate and don't really matter; but when your movie/game/candidate flops, it's because of the immense power those same opponents have over the viewers/players/voters. The problem is that too many people are listening to fringe voices (whether that's YouTube movie critics, video game reviewers on Twitch, or 'purveyors of right wing misinformation' like Fox News and x.com), instead of professional, establishment movie critics/game journalists/political commentators; and we need to figure out how to mute those fringe voices. Taking your established fanbase/demographics for granted, and excoriate them if their support starts to wane ('how can you call yourself a Tolkien fan and not watch Rings of Power?' 'Sure, the Democrat party's policies do nothing for you, but you have to vote blue no matter who anyway' [a position I've seen left-wing YouTubers state in response to the election]).
In short, that you, the filmmaker/game studio/Democratic party, don't answer to your audience/voters, the audience/voters answer to you. You do not have to earn their dollars/votes, you are entitled to them, and if they aren't buying what you're selling, then they're wrong, and the strategy is to lecture them on what horrible bigots they are until they start watching your movie/playing your game/voting Democrat. And calling anyone who disagrees with you a fascist. (That "Unfortunately, this decision affects the wrong people" bit is wild coming from those making the decision in question — as if they have no agency over this decision, but it is instead somehow just a natural consequence somehow emerging automatically.) As Jim put it: "Doing an audit of federal government expenditures is the death of democracy, and doing a customer survey is openly fascist."
Even shorter: it's treating that Simpsons bit with Principal Skinner that's become a meme — "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong." — as a marketing/campaign strategy.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
I’m not much of a historian but still this doesn’t appear to hold water in my view. As far as I can tell, the era of European sectarian wars (mainly) between Catholics and Protestants wasn’t ended by classical liberalism but by monarchist absolutism i.e. a new order where sovereign authority is centralized and unrestrained, feudalism is gradually dismantled and the state supersedes the church in terms of power and influence. Local lords and religious leaders no longer had the means to start sectarian wars in the first place. There were no more peasant rebellions fueled by sectarian grievances (among other things).
The argument, AIUI, isn't that classical liberalism brought this about — as you note, that's ahistorical — but that it's the other way around: it was this that brought about classical liberalism later. Because, as you note, a new political order rose due to material, non-ideological reasons. Liberalism, the argument goes, was a later rationalization created post hoc to retroactively justify these, and other subsequent changes, ideologically.
Not to say I entirely buy that argument myself. But it's the one I see held forth most often. And if it's not post hoc rationalization of religious tolerance being argued as the source of liberalism, then the next most common position I see argued is that it was a post hoc rationalization for the rise of a mercantile/capitalist "bourgeoise" middle class ("middle" because they're somewhere between the traditional "noble" and "peasant" divisions) to increasing prominence.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Trying to finish several of my half-written (or less) political/philosophical essays (like "Society Is Not a Van Der Waals Gas," "You Are Not Avalokiteśvara," and "Darwinism Is Not a Creation Myth"), which are increasingly looking to turn into potential chapters in a hypothetical book.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
I'm wondering why it got off the ground then.
The argument I usually see, including from some defenders of liberalism, is that it's due to the Thirty Years' War. Specifically, that the Peace of Westphalia was a pragmatic decision, rather than a principled one, motivated by the massive bloodshed and destruction producing only stalemate. Further, cuius regio, eius religio only ended the religious wars as external, interstate conflicts. There was still plenty of religious conflict within many states — albeit less bloody, due to smaller scale; and much shorter, due to the (increasingly centralized) state being on one side. These conflicts, in turn, became a problem due to the economic changes Europe was undergoing, with mercantilism evolving toward capitalism (intolerance of Catholic or Protestant minorities is bad for business).
When it comes to choosing or building ideologies, people tend to find ways to justify and rationalize the things they're already doing. Thus, the need to find an ideology that justified not invading your heretic neighbors to impose the true faith, not oppressing minority denominations too hard; as well as all the changes in the structure of government (driven in turn by changes in military technology — the end of castles was the end of feudalism proper, and states with labor-intensive militaries are generally more democratic than those with more capital-intensive ones) and economics. Liberalism provided just that. (Limited) religious tolerance went from an unprincipled, pragmatic accommodation with the realities on the ground to a clear application of moral and political principles.
(Of course, it then turns out that the kind of religious pluralism envisioned has ultimately proved unworkable in more than one way.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
the more pressing problem with this attitude of simply wanting to return to "90s liberalism" which seems to be espoused by many figures is that they make no effort to explain that even if somehow liberalism defeats woke and we all become good liberals again, how will liberalism not immediately give rise to woke again. Woke, if not liberal itself, arose in the conditions of liberalism. Why wouldn't it do it again? Even if you're a 'classical liberal' rather than a '90s liberal' (social liberal) it's just delaying the problem slightly longer.
Well, one of the better-argued answers I see to this (even if I disagree with it) is that it is indeed about delaying the problem — turning the clock back thirty years buys you a few more decades — until tech comes to the rescue. There's the position that we just need to keep up 90s liberalism and fight the return of woke until AGI and the Singularity arrives and ends all human politics forever. Or then there's @mitigatedchaos's position that we need to return to "colorblind" 90s liberalism to contain racial conflict (and white identitarianism) another decade or so, at which point gene splicing technology will be safe and cheap enough to broadly use to fix all the HBD issues. (Personally, I find all these sorts overly-optimistic about the rates of technological progress.)
The next-best answer is the same one classical reactionaries often give: the second time around, we'll see the woke coming, and be better prepared to fight them off.
As an Alaskan, I have definite mixed feelings on this topic.
On the one hand, I like our wilderness, our "wild" character, the vast tracts of nature. My natural inclination is to say "no" and favor protection of undeveloped land.
On the other hand, the Feds own something like 2/3 of the land, and together with state parks it comes together to something like 90% of Alaska. And then, on top of that, you have further lands that are off-limits due to Federal regulations (like the Wetlands Act) written with the Lower 48's climate in mind, and which apply poorly to our very different climate.
Further, our economy has been in shambles for decades now, because the primary economic base* for our state has, historically, pretty much always been resource extraction (as is the case with the economies of the Scandinavian countries [I stand corrected]), which has been slowly strangled by environmental law and activism pretty much my entire life. So we really need some more mining and/or oil drilling opened up, or we're pretty screwed.
*note that "largest sector of the economy" ≠ "majority of the economy."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
Despite having the highest fertility rate in the world, women and men alike in Niger say they want more children than they actually have – women want an average of nine, while men say they want 11.
—Jill Filipovic, "Why have four children when you could have seven? Family planning in Niger," Guardian, March 2017
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1mo ago
I'm reminded of two things here. First is the discussions about the supposed "democratic backsliding" into "electoral authoritarianism" in Hungary. When I've asked people just what's so "authoritarian" about Orbán, beyond him just winning massive electoral majorities as an unacceptably right-wing candidate, and I get vague handwaving about the media and him having an "unfair" advantage. Whereupon I make comparison's to the Time magazine "election fortification" article and ask what the difference is, beyond that Orbán's actions aren't even so much that sort of "fortifying" as they are preventing left-leaning media from doing so in Hungary. Mostly, the answer ends up in angry sputtering that reduces to "it's different when we do it." The more coherent defenses end up being about how 2020 "fortification" was different because it was the media putting their thumbs on the metaphorical scale to influence election outcomes of their own accord, which is perfectly democratic, and thus it's interfering with their ability to do so that is "authoritarian." Because it's long been the media's job to determine a candidate's "electability" — to enforce the limits of which candidates and positions are "acceptable," and which are too far to the right. Because we've long ago accepted that "democracy" does not mean unfettered majority rule, therefore we can limit the voters' choices as much as we want, let an unelected bureaucracy decide the vast majority of political issues, put as many popular positions "off limits" as we want, so long as you have two candidates who aren't literal clones (a la Futurama), and you can vote between a corporate tax rate of 25% and 30%, it's still fully democratic. And we're a representative democracy… which means our politicians are supposed to "represent" us the way a parent or guardian represents a small child, or a person with power of attorney represents a demented elder or a schizophrenic mental patient: by doing what the expert consensus says is in the people's best interest, whether the people like it or not.
Second, there's what someone on Tumblr pointed out about recent media articles, about how the USAID freeze is threatening various "independent media" organizations, because they "rely on" said funding to remain viable. As the Tumblrite noted, quite early in the thesaurus entry for synonyms to "rely" is "depend." And if you depend on USAID funding to keep operating, how are you "independent"? Which, of course, undermines the whole bit above about how 'it's different when the "independent media" does it,' and makes it very much more 'it's "democracy" when the left does it and "authoritarianism" when the right does it.' While I wouldn't go as far as Neema Parvini does in declaring he was "90% right" and Yarvin "100% wrong" on their respective models of the system, recent events do make the media institutions look less like they're purely ideologically captured, and more like they're downstream from various deep pockets. (Much like how I've seen academics argue that much of academia's political slant is driven by pursuit of grant money.) That this is less the leaderless, incentive-driven emergent behavior "prospiracy" that some would have it, and more a matter of old-fashioned top-down political coordination via patronage networks; which is a lot harder to defend, except by "we're the good guys, it's good when we do it" tribalist appeals.
Not necessarily. I'm reminded here of my dad's last employer before he retired. Jake was a landlord who owned various properties — apartments, a commercial warehouse, houses — all either as rental properties or as investments to repair/improve and "flip." He was worth somewhere in the tens of millions at his peak. He'd take vacations down to Vegas at least once a year and blow five figures on poker.
Jake also disliked paying taxes. That's pretty much how he ended up going out of business, after he had to liquidate and sell off a bunch of assets when the IRS came after him for a bunch of back taxes and associated fines.
And yet, Jake was a solid Democrat, an avid NPR listener, and a frequent proponent of increasing taxes on "the rich" to pay for more socialist "gibs."
How did he square these things?
Simple. As far as Jake was concerned, he wasn't part of "the rich." He's just your ordinary, overtaxed middle-class millionaire. No, it's the billionaires and the hundred millionaires who need to be paying "their fair share" to fund all these programs he supports, not him. Because when he said to tax "the rich" more, he meant anyone richer than him.
Never underestimate the power of envy.
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