nomenym
9d ago
This is a good example of how the cultural left is led by its fringe. It's the extemists who set the course and steer the ship, and everyone else is eventually brought along for the ride, even perhaps unwittingly. At first it's a small cadre of extremely online culture warriors who start excommunicating Rogan for heresy, but it sort of trickles down until everyone understands, almost by cultural osmosis, that he has become untouchable and nobody should go on his show. Eventually, mainstream political pundits just take it for granted, because it's just common knowledge, that Rogan is some kind of far-right grifter and wonder why he doesn't have a left-wing counterpart.
While this dynamic can occur on the right, it's far less pronounced or successful, in my experience. It also seems most restricted to cultural issues on the left, because they've had far less success steering the economic ship.
nomenym
9d ago
One pundit I saw was asking why the left did not have its own counterpart to Joe Rogan. I wanted to shout at the screen, "You did, and his name was Joe Rogan! You ostracized him because he was friendly with some people on the right."
nomenym
12d ago
Is the problem a lack of trust or a lack of trustworthiness? Are they more trustworthy than we think? Or is it good for us to believe they're more trustworthy than they are?
nomenym
14d ago
Who said I expected anyone to find proof? I don't. What I do expect is that IF people want to make a positive claim, they SHOULD be expected to provide proof for that claim.
No you shouldn't, but that goes beyond the scope of this thread to address.
nomenym
14d ago
But why should we expect to find any proof? The nature of the act tends to leave little evidence, and that evidence is likely not on public display and is probably circumstantial and inconclusive. The people who are in the best position to find any evidence also have very little incentive to do so. Besides, I also believe Haitian immigrants in Ohio are continuing to practice other culinary traditions and habits they have brought with them, but I also have no proof they are not subsisting entirely on Big Macs. So there's that.
nomenym
15d ago
Don't worry, it will soon be over. If Elon is right, then we won't have to worry about competitive elections again. In Soviet America, the people do not choose the government, the government chooses the people.
nomenym
16d ago
It's curious how eager some people are to deny that the Southport killer as an off-the-boat refugee. Surely, that he was a second generation immigrant makes the whole situation worse! What it means is that even when you're not importing terrorists, you're importing people with with a high propensity to become terrorists. There could hardly be anything more damning of British immigration policy, and yet somehow that he was not "off-the-boat" is seen as pro-immigrant.
nomenym
17d ago
If women can't figure out how to have an absolute right to control their bodies and a replacement fertility rate, then Stein's law applies.
nomenym
19d ago
I would rather a politician tell me something true but incomplete/misleading, rather than tell me something false but directionally correct.
Yes, and I am saying that for a lot of Trump supporters it's the other way around. They feel like the former too often ends up going in the wrong direction altogether.
You are correct, but it doesn't really change my point very much (ironically).
nomenym
19d ago
Absolutely, but there are also failure modes to other ways of communicating. Almost all Western politicians are comfortable speaking in lawyerly abstractions, but do you trust them? No, you don't, but you're used to reverse-engineering their words, because you know the word game they're playing. If you're smart, then you can even beat them at this game by twisting their words back on them or holding them to an unintended meaning (e.g. malicious compliance). There is no doubt that Trump's communication style can be exploited to mislead people, but that does not make it unique. I think most ordinary people find Trump's style easier to "reverse-engineer", and so they perceive him as being less misleading than the politician who speaks in technically true abstractions.
One of the things that alienates educated Westerners from Trump is the way that he talks. He hardly ever talks in abstract terms. He doesn't qualify or hedge; everything is direct and concrete. Rather than say that he was on one of the later episodes of Oprah's show when they were coming to an end, he will say he was on the last episode. He won't just say that one of Lincoln's sons died, but instead he will name that son Tad. He's always including specific details that he misremembers or aren't all that important. He can't just say that people like Liz Cheney send people into warzones but will never face any real danger themselves, but rather he makes that idea concrete by describing [EDITED] her being pushed onto the frontlines to face death against an overwhelming force. One of the worst parts of his interview with Rogan was when he forgot the name of a boxer in his story. Usually, he would just throw in some name that sounded about right and run with it. However, this time, he didn't, and he tried to talk about "the guy" and the whole story fell to pieces in a mess of vague referents.
I think this is why Trump actually has a lot of cross-cultural appeal, because it's the educated Westerners who are strange. Most people aren't very good at thinking and talking in lawyerly abstractions, studiously avoiding any implication that might not hold up in court. For most of human history, people have used stories about specific people, in specific places, and about specific events to communicate general ideas about society, politics, morality, and even science. Most people aren't good at remembering abstract statements about general categories. However, give them a story fleshed out with questionable details, and they'll remember the gist even after they've forgotten most everything else. Educated Westerners are very good at communicating in abstractions, and they expect their audience to infer details from context. For many people, this kind of speaking might as well be in some kind of secret code language.
One of the most charismatic storytellers I know is an old Christian missionary women who would abhor the thought of voting for Trump, but she is very much like him in personality. She has made her entire life out of convincing people to fund her charitable missionary work. She has an incredible capacity to reach across national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries and communicate with so many different types of people, and she talks just like Trump. Her stories are all too good to be true, and that's because they're not, at least not literally. She didn't really escape from a country descending into civil war on the very last flight out of the airport. The miracles and coincidences in her stories were not really quite so serendipitous or unexpected as she makes them sound. She always embellishes with details that are often lazily misremembered or merged from other events. I don't think for a moment she is trying to be manipulative or deceitful, because she implicitly expects her audience to extract the general meaning from the particulars. The specific names, times, and places are used as placeholders, either approximately true or for illustrative purposes. She does not seem to know how to communicate in any other way.
What's interesting about Trump is that he can't turn this off either. He can't code switch between the two different ways of communicating, and it continually suprises him when he is misinterpreted. This is, I think, one of the reasons he comes across as stupid to educated Westerners, because to them this kind of communication is associated with stupid people. And they're not wrong--this is how stupid people communicate abstract ideas. However, not everyone who commicates like this is stupid, and perhaps most people in the world prefer this way.
nomenym
22d ago
That just means they need to step up the pace.
Modern progressive globalism burns human beings like fuel. If it's running out of fuel, or some of the existing fuel is going bad, then it needs to import more fuel. This will go on until it can't, but that might be well after any of us are alive to see it.
Culture becomes parasitic when its fate is no longer aligned with of its host body. Old successful cultures were symbionts, because, like mitochondria, their ability to reproduce and spread was mostly or entirely tied to the body's ability to reproduce and spread. The culture had to make sure its hosts completed their biological lifecycle, because cultures that didn't tended to be selected against.
Modern information technology, with relative peace and prosperity, has allowed culture to become more parasitic. The culture that spreads most successfully today has started interrupting or stalling the lifecycles of its host bodies, because that is time and energy being wasted from the culture's perspective. The culture is able to jump from host to host very rapidly. It has infected the nodes cultural transmission like media and academia and no longer needs old slow biological reproduction.
Intelligent people are the most malleable, the least biologically instinctive. They have the most modifiable behavior and in some respects are the most susceptible to these cultural pathogens, or at least become the most useful hosts. The selection pressure for immunity is no doubt intense, but it moves at the speed of biological reproduction so will take a while. I think something like this cycle has played out several times in history, but never before has it been so rapid and intense because of more limited technology.
nomenym
26d ago
Maybe the owners have been looking for a way to shake up their newsrooms, maybe reduce bias or introduce more AI content.
You can't really win. Once your side starts winning, the people interested in only power and status switch sides. They then morph and corrupt your "principles" into excuses to pursue their power and status. They may fly the same flag and use the same phrases and words to justify their actions, but none of the symbols or words mean the same thing for them. But this process of curruption takes time, and for a while it can seem like your winning. Eventually, you're going to have to switch to another team and begin the whole thing over again, but once your new side starts winning, well ...
nomenym
1mo ago
I think the money-men are basically being held hostage at this point. There are too many damning and obvious failures that can only be interpreted as striving to alienate the core audience (but marketed as attempts to expand the audience). It's just all too much at this point. They doubledown every time. There are people behind the scenes decrying this, but they don't feel as though they can say anything publicly.
Capitalism creates its own complex ecosystem. Perhaps we should not be suprised that pathogens have evolved to exploit this niche. These entertainment companies have contracted a disease, and it is repurporsing its host's resources to support and spread the pathogen. The host may survive, but its immune system has never encountered this pathogen before.
nomenym
1mo ago
There was probably some thing that happened that one time and there was an accident and then a rule for made.
nomenym
1mo ago
I see it as more a prospiracy, and it's mostly small actions on the margin by many individuals. There are almost certainly some more bold cheaters, but I just think they must have gotten away with it. It's not like it's easy to prove, and it has recently gotten even harder. The people who are most able to investigate are uninterested in doing so, because they don't want to discover cheating for various reasons. Easier to leave the "investigation" to a bunch of wingnuts who can easily be discredited and ignored. So long as the Democrats aren't cheating too much, and they are doing it to hurt Trump, I think most of our institutions are quite happy to turn a blind eye (including a lot of Republicans). This kind of cheating is itself less dangerous than people beleiving it is happening, so it's tolerated so long as it is simultaneously denied. There are limits to this, but I think activists have gotten quite savvy about how to game these election systems.
Assassination attempts are kind of a proxy here. For every one person who is willing to try and assassinate Trump, how many are willing to cheat if a good opportunity presents itself? Probably a lot, and a lot of those people will get themselves involved in the electoral process.
Of course, much of what I said could be flipped around and also said about Republicans. The difference is that I think Republicans are far less often in a position to do actually do anything, and also much less likely to get away with it if they did. I believe Democrats cheated because, from my perspective, they all but said they would (and will). They had motive, means, and opportunity, meanwhile laws were and are being actively changed to make any kind of foul play harder to prove. It also helped that many of their most outspoken accusers, while correctly intuiting the dishonesty and shenanigans, cast around crude and ridiculous theories about how this kind of thing happens. Trump must be stopped by any means necessary. Democrats are already openly bending and buckling norms and laws of election integrity, often defying the spirit if not the words themselves, so stepping over the line into outright cheating is not a big leap. After all, Democrats are the party of outcomes, not procedure. Democrats frequently target traditional procedures and processes to be dismantled because they do not have the outcomes that Democrats support. I do not expect the side that is most in favor of completely reorganizing how elections are conducted (e.g. abolishing the electoral college) to regard the particulars of the current electoral system to be especially sacrosanct or inviolable.
The idea that the 2020 election is beyond reasonable doubt is absurd, but they have been very effective at tabooing the notion. Somehow, the 2020 election, perhaps the most obviously questionable election in recent history, is the one election that is also uniquely unquestionable. This does not inspire trust. I fully expect Democrats to cheat harder and more successfully than Republicans this coming election, but I don't know whether it will be enough.
nomenym
1mo ago
If Trump represents an existential danger to American democracy and an imminent threat of fascist tyranny, then it would be irresponsible for patriotic Democrats and all upstanding citizens to not to cheat or bend the rules in any manner they could get away with. Democrats should not hold election integrity and fairness as a terminal value--not when the stakes are this high. Besides, the amount of lies, disinformation, and election interference coming from Trump, and malefactors like Russia, is artificially boosting Trump's popularity among low information voters. If Democrats have an opportunity to put their thumb on the scales without completely invalidating the election, then it should be their duty to do so. One or two somewhat shady elections is a small price to pay for stopping Trump. The remaining question is just whether it will be enough to make a difference.
nomenym
1mo ago
I associate it with post-2000s prolifieration of predominantly lefty critical theory type work, though it has clearly been adopted more broadly. I don't think it carries the aggressive connotations in those intellectual communities today, but I suspect outsiders would still make those associations. I also see it frequently used in a struggle-session way.
nomenym
1mo ago
Complete aside, but I've always been curious about the word "interrogate" when used in this way. It's such an aggressive and presumptuous substitute for "investigate" that until more recently was most associated with criminal interrogation--an inherently manipulative, unfair, and coercive type of investigation. I can't say these connotations are inappropriate given the people who tend to use the term "interrogate" in this context, but usually they're better at picking their euphamisms to sound nice and cuddly.
The opposite direction thing you describe is rationalized on essentially the accelerationist idea of hastening the revolution. Basically, once the cultural Marxist project of destroying Western civilization and capitalism has been achieved, then we can move past the "whites suck" and "women should be in charge" stuff. It's kind of like the idea that violent revolution is necessary to eventually abolish all violence.
The whole ideology implicitly endorses the idea that beliefs are only instrumental towards goals, so whatever beliefs hasten the revolution are what you should believe, and that can change depending on circumstance. Truth is kind of besides the point, since it's a distraction from winning. This is why it can be practically impossible to have a good faith dialogue with some of these people.
That said, I agree with you more broadly. In an anthropological, perhaps even ecological, sense these are just a rationalizations of runaway virtue signaling. What the participants in this culture believe they are doing is somewhat immaterial. However, the rationalizations do somewhat orient the direction of the virtue signaling spirals even if they do not provide the fuel, so they are not entirely irrelevant. It is meme cancer.
The way they often jump to "eradicating my existence" always makes me feel like "woke mind virus" is more than just a metaphor. I always want to say "but I don't want to kill anyone", and then I realize that it's not the host speaking but the virus. Of course the virus is scared of herd immunity.
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