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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29551 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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The fact that RFK is the counter enthusiasm on the R side is sad and desperate. We’re not building enthusiasm anymore to build the wall or drain the swamp or even fight inflation. It’s a crackpot lefty further watering down any sense of conservatism.

The ability to incorporate old-style moonbats in the GOP at least indicates a credible commitment to giving moonbats some of what they want, and for a conspiracy-leaning base tired of adventurism that’s definitely a benefit.

I'm not sure if you've been paying attention or not, but conspiracism and crackpot theories has become mainstream for years, if not decades at this point. Old, genteel conservatism that is happy to be a principled loser voters are tired of. There is nothing more American than winning, because Americans love winners. Even returning to 2000s liberalism is a conservative direction to Western culture's current trajectory.

It's a big tent.

RFK's strongest takes have always been about health. Americans are getting fat and sick on seed oils and other ultra-processed foods. For some reason, Democrats are celebrating this?

Whatever his quack views, Kennedy at least believes that "good things are good". I think that's the core position that defines the difference between the right and the left. He fits in the tent.

I think most Americans have no idea what an actually good apple or tomato tastes like, because virtually all produce grown here is terrible crap selected for its looks on a supermarket shelf, its easiness to grow, and its ability to withstand sitting in a truck for a few days.

I think that many Democrats think that they are being smart by eating so-called organic food or local farm food. I've eaten that organic food and local farm food, to me it mostly tastes more or less the same as supermarket stuff. Maybe like 10% better at best, and more frequently indistinguishable. It's really bad compared to actually good produce.

America does have a food problem, and it's unfortunate that most Americans do not realize it. The quality of American produce is despicably bad, it's basically trash. The meat seems okay though. And Americans are famous for not eating fruits and vegetables much anyway, maybe this is why people have not rebelled yet against the fact that their fruits and vegetables are terrible. The meat is laced with chemicals that are put in animals for various reasons, but that does not automatically make it bad of course, it depends on what exactly the chemicals do.

I have to wonder what exactly your mental model is here. When you bite into an apple you're tasting sugar, and though I have a pretty awful sense of taste, I really don't believe that others can taste vitamins. So I don't really know if when I bite into a tasteless, watery carrot, I'm actually missing out on nutrition.

A good apple has rich, complex overtones of flavor, like an entire symphony of flavor... even to the point of different aspects of the flavor manifesting themselves over time as you bite in, first one and then a second later another one becomes more prominent. And after you bite, the smell of the freshly bitten apple is heavenly, you don't even have to touch it with your mouth, the very scent manifests its complex beauty. If this seems erotic, that is because it kind of is related to eroticism, it is a deeply sensual experience to eat genuinely good food. A bad apple just tastes like sweet water, with no complexity.

Peaches and melons right from the supermarket taste as good as homegrown. Tomatoes, you have a point.

I had some plums from a Kroger store this week which were almost completely free of taste despite being the perfect softness to eat. Very offputting.

In fairness fruit is really sensitive to growing conditions. I've had figs from a tree that overproduced that were watery and tasteless.
Abandoning fairness, growers are basically incentivized to optimize for weight and transportability over flavor.

I've occasionally experienced this with various foods but eventually determined that it was usually because I was in an (often minor) illness phase accompanied by reduction in odor sensitivity. Remember that almost all of what we consider flavor is not taste but smell.

You can buy honeycrisp apples in stores that taste almost as good as the ones from my tree. Tomatoes, yeah, a lot of the best varieties just aren't fit for mass shipping.

While I wish public health was actually a large issue, for either party, I don’t see any evidence that Kamala or democrats broadly are celebrating people getting fat.

While ‘body positivity’ is generally supported, ‘Fat acceptance’ is still extremely online. At least, I’m assuming, couldn’t find polling at a glance.

If we are talking trim, fit bodies, prominent Democrats (the men, at least) probably better represent the healthy norm than Republicans. Compare Trump, Christie, Huckabee to Obama, Bernie, Newsom, even Biden. (Women there isn't as much a disparity, and might even cut the other way. Few of either party qualify as actually obese.)

That said, I see Republicans as more willing to explicitly say that fat is bad, fit is good. They just lack any meaningful follow-through.

You're just summarizing Murray in Coming Apart (2011) on EVERYTHING.

RFK built the largest independent political campaign since Ross Perot. He has a big political organization made up of volunteers from the broad political middle of the country. He is, besides, like Trump, much smarter than consevatives.

He is, besides, like Trump, much smarter than consevatives.

I don't understand this at all. You're saying that two people are, individually, more intelligence or cognitively capable than an intellectual movement?

Political apparatchiks have an insular and provincial view of the American electorate based mostly on hearsay and things they learned from their political science courses. They aren’t necessarily reading the room as it actually is, but seeing it through lenses that are decades out of date and thus either don’t work anymore (seriously, who’s watching political ads on TV, let alone basing their votes on them? Hence Trump was able to get around the media gatekeepers because he understood that people are much more engaged with social media and online platforms and online news). RFK understands that most of the concerns of the working classes below the PMC are much more rubber meets the road kinds of problems than the high minded “let’s build the future” vibes that the major parties are putting out. The political class is baffled by the fact that most people think the economy is bad and that inflation is a major problem. They keep jabbing at random graphs and saying “look the numbers are going in the right direction!” And the people look up from their kitchen tables where they’re trying to squeeze their budget even tighter because rent, groceries, and gasoline went up again unimpressed with those graphs. Trump and RFK get that. They also get that people want things like safer streets, schools focused on the basics, etc.

The political class is baffled by the fact that most people think the economy is bad and that inflation is a major problem.

The political class isn't baffled. Maybe journalists are baffled because they're high on their own supply, but this isn't a case where the numbers say one thing but the feeling on the ground is different. The numbers are in fact mediocre. Unemployment is increasing. Job growth numbers were recently revised downward big-time -- and this was pretty much expected. Inflation was obviously terrible over the past few years and is still above that 2% benchmark. Yes, various flacks have been pushing the idea that the economy is doing just fine, but they're mostly not honestly wrong; they're lying. For the Democrats, this is their best strategy because they're stuck with responsibility for the economy.

Even this analysis has a problem in the fact that the numbers aren’t telling the full story here. The cost of necessary household goods, groceries and gasoline have gone up much more than that 2.9% and because you feel the effects of this very strongly because it’s directly impacting QOL even more than the 2.9% number would suggest. Eggs were $2.02 in 2019 and $2.86 in 2022. The graph doesn’t go to 2024, but going from $2 to nearly $3 is a big hit to the budget. (https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/egg-prices-adjusted-for-inflation/). If you’re seeing those kinds of new prices, especially if rent and other bills are increasing faster than your paycheck, it’s not good.

And I just don’t see the party in power especially taking it seriously. Trump and RFK get it because they’re talking to ordinary people who struggle to afford things. I know lots of people who are constantly taking formerly normal things off the table. No more name brand stuff, staycation instead of vacation. No more meals out. Make clothes and shoes last longer. And as this continues, the appeal of candidates and media outlets that at least get it will be more popular. And unless the ruling elites start to get it, vibes don’t work as a bandaid. Kamala has a weakness hear because she doesn’t seem to actually get how the cost of living has changed since the Trump days.

Food at home stands at 21.1% higher than the start of the Biden administration, compared to 19.1% higher for the overall average; they've been converging lately, with food having been much higher. Gasoline is indeed much higher, 35.4% higher over Biden's term.

2.92% inflation in the last 12 months. If you measure inflation as "absolute distance from 2% target" this is 54th percentile for all years since 1990 (a hair worse than average)

I'm usually on team "the economy isn't really hat bad actually" but I'm baffled how people can misread the sentiment like this. It's obvious that what people who think inflation was too high want is for prices to go back down. the inflation number is a second order leading indicator. The previous years were 3.4%, 6.5% and 7.0% so around 17% over 3 years. And spread unevenly among the indexes so there were items in the basket that stayed relatively flat and other items that saw much higher price hikes, human cognition is such that those price hikes are the main thing people notice and do feel like the kind of thing that ought to be able to be put back in the bottle.

The leading indicators of how the economy is going to feel in the future have done decently over the last 6 months is just not really a compelling argument.

2.92% inflation in the last 12 months. If you measure inflation as "absolute distance from 2% target" this is 54th percentile for all years since 1990 (a hair worse than average)

So, as usual I'm somewhat limited in what I can back up with my own to eyes from where I sit, but what do you make of gimmicks like this?

CPI has fudge factors. Larry Summers reconstructed the CPI used in the late 70s and found inflation was twice as much as reported.

Now maybe those fudge factors are right or maybe they are wrong. But it isn’t like CPI is the gospel truth. And the government has an incentive to understate inflation.

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Well, I'll just say that if people see their bills go 3x you're going to have a hard time convincing them inflation is fine even if by some statistical vodoo you can get the numbers to show 3%.

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Nobody's comparing to all years since 1990. They're comparing either to the Trump years, or at least to the post-GFC years. Unemployment was declining from the end of the GFC to Covid. Now it's rising. Inflation remains higher than any pre-Covid time later than 2011. Real wages are roughly flat.

Picking longer timeframes to make things look better doesn't fool anyone who doesn't want to be fooled.

You didn't say "the economy is worse than under Trump".

We're talking about an election campaign here; the comparison is obvious.

Average Overall Unemployment:

  • 2017Jan to 2019Dec = 3.975%
  • 2023Jul to 2024Jul = 3.875%

The averages obscure the fact that the trend was downward then and upward now.

Average 12-month Inflation

  • 2017Jan to 2019Dec = 2.07%
  • 2023Jul to 2024Jul = 2.92%

2.92% is considerably worse than 2.07%, particularly considering what immediately preceded that 2.92%.

Now, again, explain how the only way someone can think "the economy is doing just fine" is because they're lying.

I've presented my case.

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Wait for the downward revision…

The point was there were a lot of people predicting the downward revisions because there was a lot of other data suggesting the official numbers were garbage.

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Many here were dumbfounded. I argued the job numbers were obviously phony looking at 1) the divergence between establishment survey and household and 2) the unlikely amount of one sided downward revisions.

The response was “sometimes shit moves funny.”

You'll notice the market didn't react, so at least the people with money weren't surprised. And the job numbers (which are based on a model) weren't matching the unemployment numbers (based on a survey). Anyone fooled was either not paying enough attention or was fooling themselves.

If some/all of the movement's core assumptions are incorrect, that would poison the entire edifice - e.g. Marxist thought might be the largest published corpus of philosophy or economics ever amassed, but it wouldn't be hard for one person to be more correct because the Marxist edifice is chained to fatally-flawed premises.

I think his support for free speech is something every conservative can get behind. Also there has always been a strain of “no foreign entanglements” amongst conservative thought for a long time.

Doesn’t mean RFK agrees with all or even most of conservative thought but there are some key overlaps there and it shows that the Republican Party can appeal to disaffected democrats. It also could be big for the election. Assume RFK was polling 5% in battleground states. Assume 60% of his voters vote and they break 2-1 for Trump. That’s a net 1% bump for Trump.

"Support for free speech." Isn't this the guy who was calling for the imprisonment of "climate deniers" like two minutes ago?

Converts are welcomed!

Specifically think tanks and organizations. Now I still think it's wacko, as are of course a lot of things about the man, but on paper the idea that individuals have free speech, not organizations, is perfectly coherent.

Having one's rights end where those of a legal fiction begin is one of the more insane accepted beliefs of our time.

There's definitely a bi-partisan contingent of people who think corporations should shut the fuck up about politics, that their involvement amounts to bribery and that Citizens United was a bad decision.

It's of course a longstanding gripe in US lefty circles, "take the money out of politics" and so on, but individualistic libertarians on the right and even MAGA people don't hold woke corporations in their hearts. So RFK codes as a friend more than he does as an enemy.

on paper the idea that individuals have free speech, not organizations, is perfectly coherent

I don't see how it can be coherent at all when organizations are simply groups of people. If a person expresses a belief, that's fine. But if a person brings 5 of his friends who all believe the same things together to form an organization and express those beliefs together, that's not allowed?

I don't see how it can be coherent at all when organizations are simply groups of people.

Isn't it weird then how their legal status is not that of simply a group of people? You could, if you wanted, replace every single person in an organization,, and the government would treat it as the same entity.

This is Ship of Theseus paradox and I don't see how it relates.

It's not, even if replacing everyone is instantaneous, it doesn't change anything I'm the example.

It relates to the question by demonstrating that organizations aren't just groups of people composing them, at least legally.

It's not, even if replacing everyone is instantaneous, it doesn't change anything I'm the example.

Fair enough.

It relates to the question by demonstrating that organizations aren't just groups of people composing them, at least legally.

If I'm understanding your point correctly, the same can be said of people themselves. You are not the same person (probably) as you were 10 years ago, but legally you are considered the same person. The legal status of a group is simply a shorthand because it's not feasible to continually update the listing of members in a group.

Novel behaviors emerge out of collections of components. Locusts are harmless and even helpful when in their solitary phase, but subjecting them to enough density induces a far more destructive gregarious phase by a cascade of social and physiological changes.

To take a human example, I don't really care if someone does fentanyl alone in the confines of their own home. I guess it's sad if they die, but that's their life. But allowing large groups of fentanyl addicts to congregate and use together has damaging consequences far larger than the damage they inflict on themselves.

Unless you're a hyper-individualist, it's perfectly coherent to say it's reasonable for the government to regulate destructive collective behaviors while otherwise taking a hands off approach to individuals.

To take a human example, I don't really care if someone does fentanyl alone in the confines of their own home. I guess it's sad if they die, but that's their life. But allowing large groups of fentanyl addicts to congregate and use together has damaging consequences far larger than the damage they inflict on themselves.

I would say that the obvious solution to preventing groups of fentanyl addicts from congregating is to stop individuals from using fentanyl in the first place. Further, I'm not sure that groups of people using fentanyl in and of itself is the problem, but the results of that such as homelessness and destitution. Suppose a group of otherwise functioning fentanyl addicts congregate to one of their homes and does fentanyl, then leaves afterwards and goes back to work and later goes back to their families. Is that a problem in your eyes? Conversely, if a single fentanyl addict is shitting in the street and yelling at passers by, is that not a problem simply because it's an individual?

They're both problems, but a large, concentrated group is worse. It drives the formation of consistent, predictable markets and behavioral norms. Concretely, 100 addicts spread out around the city are a much better problem to have than 100 addicts congregated on a single block. Once you have 100 on a single block, you make the market much more efficient, and political structures develop around those 100 addicts to defend them, advertise for them, and make it much harder to actually address the issue.

Devil’s advocate, but it’s almost never just their life. Sooner or later someone has to pay the bill. So long as it’s possible to go outside and make a mess, the warped incentives of drugs will lead people to do so. And we’re a long way from the level of totalitarianism you’d need to make it impossible.

You can still say it's better for them to individually go outside and make a mess, then to allow groups of drug-zombies to collectively make a mess.

I suppose so.

I’m unhappy about individual drug use in the same way that I’m unhappy about individual suicides. You probably ought to have the right, but that won’t make the janitors feel much better.

on paper the idea that individuals have free speech, not organizations, is perfectly coherent.

No it's not, it's completely bonkers. An organization - especially something like a think-tank - is just a group of people gathered for a common purpose. Anything that a member of the organization says can trivially be rebranded as the speech of one or more of the organization's component members.

it's completely bonkers

My individual natural rights come from Gnon. And are therefore inalienable.

Where do organizations, fictitious entities that don't exist in nature, derive their rights from?

The only coherent theory of rights that provides for organizations to have rights is one where those are privileges granted by the State, which are as revocable for corporations as they are for individuals.

I assume that by Gnon you mean god. But these are extremely bold assertions to make. The idea that there is a god, and that there is such a thing as rights in any sense other than that of a social contract, and that god gives you these rights... all these ideas should be justified by some kind of argument, I think, not just stated blankly. Because certainly not all of us here agree with any of these assertions. I personally agree with you about qualia. I think that in some sense of the word "god", there may be a god. The hard problem of consciousness is real. But I do not believe in a god who grants natural rights, unless by natural rights you mean something more like a striving for those rights that is inherent to being human.

My own opinion is that "rights" are a legal fiction. They are extremely important, but they have no existence outside the context of a society with its particular laws, habits, narratives, and power dynamics.

by Gnon you mean god

It's "Nature Or Nature's God" reversed, the Jeffersonian part of his attributes that doesn't require providence or miracles. I use that because the Liberal argument for rights ties itself specifically to that part of the idea and only requires an extremely limited form of Deism that's tantamount to Kantianism.

This I think defuses the rest of your argument. The existence of Nature and its game theoretic reality explicitly do not require belief in the supernatural. We are a certain way, which means that there is a category of rules that are good for us to follow to be good whatever-it-is-we-are, and that category is natural law, from which rights spring. God is a reification of this.

There are certainly patterns of behavior that are more adaptive for living in reality than other patterns of behavior are, but then to say that your individual natural rights come from those patterns is either extremely metaphorical or just inaccurate, depending on what you mean by "rights".

To have a "right" implies having a claim. And nature, from what I can tell, gives no-one any claims on itself. Why would any rights spring from a set of behavioral patterns that are adaptive for humans to follow?

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Where do organizations, fictitious entities that don't exist in nature, derive their rights from?

From the rights of the natural persons they are made up of.

Let's assume that rights are transferable or transitive, which they are not.

What then of organizations that only exist on paper as objects of ownership, that contain no people or people that have no rights? Are these rights revocable by the participants?

This is evidently not the source of such rights, corporations are treated as facsimile persons, and the rights they are granted are legal fictions that only exist by analogy and have no serious philosophical backing.

They may be agents of people who have rights, but they themselves possess no such thing.

What then of organizations that only exist on paper as objects of ownership, that contain no people or people that have no rights? Are these rights revocable by the participants?

Such an organization cannot do anything without a person being involved somehow. That includes corporations. If it does not do anything, the question of rights is moot.

The idea that if I make a film about how bad Hillary Clinton is, it's my right, but if I get together with a bunch of other people and make a better film about how bad Hillary Clinton is, that can be censored, makes no sense. And the no-rights frame makes it absolutely pernicious, because it means there's no reason the law cannot be such that organizations are forbidden from denigrating Hillary Clinton, but not from praising her.

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My individual natural rights come from Gnon. And are therefore inalienable.

Of course individual rights are alienable. What "right" to life does a murder victim or conscripted soldier have? What "right" to free speech does a nativist Britbong have? Etc. etc. Even the founders admitted that rights only exist where people demand them and are willing to back up those demands with force if someone tries to take them away.

Where do organizations, fictitious entities that don't exist in nature, derive their rights from?

Hypercooperation and the formation of organizations is hard-coded into us.

At the very least, the organization would have the same rights as its constituent individuals, no?

Well there's two ways you can take the line of objection you're pointing at to Liberal theory.

One is Fascism and related radical syndicalist ideas whereby individuals are actually not real and the true protagonists of history and real persons are groups and nations and corporations, etc. I think this is more sound than most people like to admit. O'Brien makes a good point. But I still believe it's ultimately disproven by qualia and individual consciousness. If God wanted us to be ants, he'd make us ants.

The other is a less radical but no less incompatible with Liberalism form of Traditionalism. Either of the perrennial or integralist variety. This I think is less clearly invalidated, but it still as incomplete an account of the human condition as the Liberal one.

The Liberal concept of rights isn't quite as revocable as you're making it out to be because it's not pointing at something that always is instantiated and can't be violated. But at natural law and the game theory thereof. It's trying to build a metaphysical understanding of the individual experience of the world and then points at it to justify a morality that would have us be good whatever-it-is-that-we-are because to not do that is tyranny and bad government, which is the same thing.

(In this sense at least, Objectivists are a a truer continuation of Liberal philosophy than a lot of other things, despite Rand's animosity towards Kant.)

The modernist puts man as a cog in a machine. The traditionalist puts him as the organ of a living thing. But both deny something real about the individual experience this coercion begets. "Everywhere he is in chains" did not come out of nowhere. And yet, we live in the ruins of the radical liberation trying to destroy his bonds with others.

I don't have a neat post-liberal answer, but completely abandoning the liberal conception of rights doesn't seem wise to me, because the things that Hobbes and Locke gesture at true in some sense. They're just not a complete account.

Well there's two ways you can take the line of objection you're pointing at to Liberal theory.

I should hope there's a lot more than just two! Humanity is very adaptable!

One is Fascism and related radical syndicalist ideas whereby individuals are actually not real and the true protagonists of history and real persons are groups and nations and corporations, etc.

Individuals are absolutely real. Group dynamics are also real. It's not an either-or proposition - humans are social individuals. As I originally said, trying to regulate groups but not individuals is ridiculous because the group is the individuals.

But I still believe it's ultimately disproven by qualia and individual consciousness. If God wanted us to be ants, he'd make us ants.

I don't know what you mean by "disproven" here, but this also just goes to show how trying to distinguish between "groups" or "organizations" and "individuals" is a lot harder than you'd think. Founder-effects and path-dependency are very real forces that impact individuals and their development and outlook! So is heritability, which gives rise to the subtle, yet substantial differences between populations that we observe all over the world! So is the Overton Window! Group dynamics affect everybody, even if they're not formally affiliated in an "organization," and likeminded people are going to find ways to cooperate and work together no matter how you try to prevent them.

The other is a less radical but no less incompatible with Liberalism form of Traditionalism. Either of the perrennial or integralist variety.

What? Which and whose traditionalism? I'm confused what this has to do with restricting organizational behavior but not individuals.

The Liberal concept of rights isn't quite as revocable as you're making it out to be because it's not pointing at something that always is instantiated and can't be violated.

Then they shouldn't have used the word "inalienable," which means "can't be taken or given away."

I don't have a neat post-liberal answer, but completely abandoning the liberal conception of rights doesn't seem wise to me

Who's abandoning rights? I'm not. I very much like the rights I have as an American, and am frequently rather obnoxiously patriotic about it with my friends. I just don't think that those "rights" are anything other than fragile current social consensuses that need to be handled with care - like beautiful Faberge eggs - in order to keep them around and pass them along, more-or-less-intact, to future generations.

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Organizations often have privileges beyond those granted to individual members. Why should we be able to grant such privileges to organizations but not set restrictions on them?

Organizations often have privileges beyond those granted to individual members.

Could you elaborate on what these privileges are? Because the obvious ones that come to mind are limited liability, which has some limitations and regulation regarding group formation, and tax advantages for nonprofits, which come with restrictions on governance, actions, and even speech -- 501(c)(3) organizations are largely prohibited from political action in favor of candidates.

Because "the combined group has more resources" is true, but seems pro-egalitarian: pooling resources allows larger expenditures (TV ads! Blimps!) that would only otherwise be accessible to the Musks and Bezoses of the world.

They don't have to serve in the military or importantly, to pay the same kind of taxes. Those seem pretty big.

The taxes, are different, although the people that make up corporations are still responsible for their own taxes and serving in the military. The Defense Production Act allows the President to require businesses to accept and prioritize contracts for "critical and strategic" goods, which is at least related.

Practicality, for one. If your restrictions can be trivially circumvented by a constituent member of the organization publishing "in their own name" instead of in the name of the organization, you haven't meaningfully impaired or restricted anything, and have just incentivized the organization to go underground.

You say that like we don't do this on the regular for terrorist and criminal organizations. In a lot of countries it's a crime to re-form a banned organization.

Yes, because committing terrorism (or, more relevantly, conspiracy to commit terrorism or attempted terrorism) is equally illegal whether one or many people do it. The organization isn't restricted because it's an organization; it's restricted because of the illegal purpose.

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Money out of politics? Is this what you think this is about?

New York, for example, prescribes corporate death whenever a company fails to "serve the common good" and "to cause no harm."…

No. It's about shaking down any company that does things that New York thinks is bad, or is associated with a persona non grata. Such as being funded by the Kochs.

Thinking that this is about getting corporations out of politics is among the more naive takes I've seen on this forum.

You think you're a cynic, but you're not nearly cynical enough. Politics isn't about policy or the effects of policy for the most part.

It's about signalling the right things to the right people. Politicians routinely support insane policies that would never actually be implemented or even do anything that furthers their goals on the sole motivation that those policies send the right signals.

"Build the wall", they say, and then don't literally build a literal wall, because what the people heard and care about is "I want to lower immigration", not the thing in itself.

What I'm trying to get at here is what tendency RFK is coming from and whether that tendency is reconcilable with that of Trump's electorate. That his actual policy positions are contradictory with those of Trump, or even with themselves, is immaterial.

RFK is the standard bearer of old school hippie leftists who are skeptical of the government, corporations and buy into every conspiracy theory under the sun, his alliance with Trump is a ritual that consecrates the alliance of that tradition with the generally syncretic MAGA movement. Or at least it's what the Trump campaign is trying to make it into.

"Build the wall", they say, and then don't literally build a literal wall, because what the people heard and care about is "I want to lower immigration", not the thing in itself.

The wall was synechdoche, not metaphor. There is indeed a literal wall involved, but it's also part of lowering immigration.

Well more of a fence. But you get my point.

You think you're a cynic, but you're not nearly cynical enough.

This isn't even cynicism, it's just taking him at his word.

RFK is the standard bearer of old school hippie leftists who are skeptical of the government, corporations and buy into every conspiracy theory under the sun, his alliance with Trump is a ritual that consecrates the alliance of that tradition with the generally syncretic MAGA movement. Or at least it's what the Trump campaign is trying to make it into.

Noted businessman Trump is not exactly the kind of guy who I would say is skeptical of corporations. The argument you are making here seems incoherent - RFK is against corporations, we must imagine Trump is too, therefore they go together. Then you confusingly heap the campaign finance angle on it for some reason even though nobody is talking about that.

Noted businessman Trump is not exactly the kind of guy who I would say is skeptical of corporations

And yet Caesar is no less the ally of the plebs because he is himself a patrician.

The distinction you are not seeing is the one delineated further down in the thread, between public companies as oligarchies and private companies as monarchies. Trump is a champion of the latter, of personal power and individualism.

This is compatible with old hippie individualism to some degree. It's also contradictory of course, but that doesn't and has never prevented syncretism. All that needs to happen is a depersonalization of the robber barons. Which is effectively what comes out of RFK's mouth when he wishes death on abstractions instead of specific names.

nobody is talking about that

Everybody is talking about that.

There is a specter haunting the Western world. And his name is Managerialism.

All political conversations are ultimately about the ruling class and its enemies. Or they're not political conversations.

What are the conservatives even conserving anymore? We don't really have a way of life to conserve that actually has principles and promotes belief in God. Churches have been hollowed out, the lifestyle of most 'conservatives' in America is nothing but rural poor people indulging in thoughtless moment to moment hedonism.

Conservatism as a project has clearly failed, as far as I'm concerned. The right needs to move away from this idea of conserving a past which is gone, and move towards building virtues and morals in culture that don't exist anymore.

Some combination of patriotism, protecting the rights of the socially conservative quintile to their trad lifestyle, and sanity in certain regulatory and tax policies.

I want to argue with you, but it's hard to. I've also been profoundly distressed that Trump is the best our nation can muster in defense of it's founding principles, before they are abolished entirely and written out of history. He's like a fucking child, pretending to be Thomas Jefferson. He can gesture at ideas he doesn't understand, but knows the adults in the room talk about with reverence. He governs like my four year old pretends to woodwork in the shop with me. Which is to say, he sits at his desk, mimes some actions he thinks he's seen politicians do, but has no understanding of how to work the levers of power. He's also not allowed to use any of the real tools actual politicians use to govern.

And yet, he's it. He's all that's left. Americanism has been extirpated from all the institutions that train up future leaders. Nobody with experience working the levers of power will ever believe in our founding principles ever again. That's how thoroughly our nation has been attacked and conquered. I'm waiting for three letter agencies to start quartering troops in our homes just to teabag the bill of rights completely. It's going to be an increasingly centralized command economy, increasingly looting the country to give party members in good standing the spoils, and fewer and fewer rights and standards of living for everyone else. And probably flooding the country with people who will rape, maim and murder the founding stock of the nation.

The conservative movement does have people who are extremely smart and capable: Vance, DeSantis, Thiel, and Musk for example.

But they can't speak to the people because, as you mention, the people just want government handouts, legal marijuana, and Doordash.

Trump can speak to the rubes, and he is willing to work with the smart people in the room. Choosing Vance is evidence of that. It might not be much, but it's the best we've got. The alternative is just more socialism forever.

I'll put DeSantis down as a maybe, but Vance, Thiel and Musk are radical libertarian opportunist. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have their help, god knows we need it. They might even put off the abolition of free speech 5 or 10 extra years. But their entire temperament is wrong to "conserve" anything. Their have that typical silicon valley mantra of "move fast and break things". Works great when you are building an unmanned reusable rocket. Less great when you are attempting to restore the republic.

Unless you are using the Romans as your template. But that only buys a generation or so of time, at most. Though it would be satisfying.

their entire temperament is wrong to "conserve" anything. Their have that typical silicon valley mantra of "move fast and break things".

I disagree. Actually much of the libertarian right, via a ton of really weird reverse-engineering of religion through game theory and such a la @coffee_enjoyer, have come to genuinely respect religious institutions and social coordination mechanisms.

In fact, a few of them have even genuinely converted to religious beliefs privately, I have heard through the grapevine. (Not the figures I mentioned, but some in that space)

We're going through a massive religious revival at the moment, it just hasn't gotten the public's attention yet due to censorship of anything right-coded and the tight grip of the media. I don't think it will be long before you start to see more and more of these figures publicly coming out as religious.

There may be a religious revival among a very certain set of previously agnostic to atheist right-leaning people in specific industries who spend a lot of time on Twitter, I see no evidence in church attendance numbers or other factors of any actual shift in religiosity among the larger population.

The religious revival is notable for only really happening among heterosexual white men. I believe this is because it’s become clear to everyone that the ruling belief system has no place for heterosexuals or white men, and they’re searching for an alternative belief system and community that values and valorizes heterosexuality instead of rejecting and demonizing it. The young straight men I know are either depressed and demoralized, or they’re religious.

Old religions have the social proof and track record to do this. They’re also attracted to personal development and ideological purity, which is why traditional Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and to a lesser extent confessional Protestantism, are the religions of choice. Evangelicals bend too far to try and appeal to the world with laser shows and electric guitars, and mainlines try too hard to appeal to the world with ideological indifference.

But the problem is it takes two to tango, and straight women are the movers and shakers of the ruling belief system. So you’re ending up with straight men crowding into Latin masses and Divine Liturgies, with the women there so crowded with male attention that it might as well be Tinder or so obsessed with a rigid sense of gender roles that no spiritually-sensitive man could ever be masculine enough for them. The one exception I’ve found is the genuinely rad-trad Catholics who are comfortable attending mass at SSPX chapels, where there do seem to be a lot of women. This certainly has a lot to do with having 7 children to a family, approximately half of which will statistically be women.

I don’t actually know if this current wave of religious revival will last, if it can’t reproduce it can’t persist. Rad trad Catholics will, but I don’t have much optimism for the future of Eastern Orthodoxy in America as I think the orthobro converts will burn themselves out, and the evangelistic and phyletistic contradictions at the heart of Orthodox ecclesiology will eventually show their ugly face.

Maybe this is just local conditions but in my (heavily convert) Orthodox parish a supermajority of people have converted as couples or families, and I've not noticed anything like the conditions you are describing among those who are/were single. If anything it's been the single young women who have been most desperate to get married -- which they are succeeding at. (Though I wouldn't read as much into that part, the sample size is pretty small.)

and to a lesser extent confessional Protestantism

Thanks for the mention!

Yeah, I have no idea how the coming years are going to shake out. Looking to political data (since that's what I know has been tracked), there's clearly a large gap between young men and women between conservatives and liberals. I know South Korea's had the same problem. People don't exactly like marrying across partisan lines, so I imagine that'll be a source of some dissatisfaction? Presumably this presidential election will have one of the largest gender splits in a while.

I wish we had better religious stats, I'd find that quite interesting.

Presumably this presidential election will have one of the largest gender splits in a while.

In a lot of ways this election does seem to be the men vs. women election -- abortion, childless cat ladies, blowjob Kamala, Republicans are weird, couch fucking, horse semen. Everything's just so... sexual.

I realize we've had discussions about politicians' sex lives before, but this election is simply NSFW. Genuinely. I've heard way too much about candidates' sex organs than I would have liked to hear in a lifetime. It's like the story of our election is being written by a horny teenager. Is this just what happens when you throw off all sexual restraint and couple it with mass sexlessness?

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Rad trad Catholics will

Rad trad Catholics have a TFR of 3.6 based off of shitty internal data. This is almost certainly being dragged down a bit by a lower than desired marriage rate. No idea if that’ll get fixed. 3.6 sounds like it should be above replacement when you account for generational apostasy, and most outside observers seem to agree that it is, but the apostasy rate isn’t really known- other than higher for men than women.

Proportionally, there are more rad trad Catholics in France- much more hostile to religious minorities- than in the USA, so there’s almost certainly some level of ability to weather hostility in place. Rad trad institution building is, however, strongly hampered by things like internal divisions.

This is almost certainly being dragged down a bit by a lower than desired marriage rate. No idea if that’ll get fixed.

This is news to me. What do you think is causing this?

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The religious revival is, if anything, a reactionary retreat in response to the disgusting progressive ideology. I will use such a negatively loaded term because the actual visceral response most normies have to Drag Kids, or Black Crime Is Just Unfair Noticing, or Public Junkie Defecation Is Part And Parcel Of Living In A Big City is disgust.

Secular humanism and urban social dynamics have turned out to be bitter tinctures because progressive shibboleths have not been filtered for failure. With the continual rot of safety and education failings being unable to address due to the moral sanctity of the poisoners, religion is a steady bulwark standing against the continual social degradation. It is no surprise that some would find genuine comfort in religion as a result.

I honestly don't think Musk Thiel Vance are especially intelligent and capable. Certainly their public profile allows for such generous assessments to be feted, but thats just a best-fit for the Smartsuit, not that the suit actually fits. Too many normies don't think especially highly of Musk or Vance, and Thiel is not on the public radar. Also, Trump kicked out the last smartdicks he had (Tillerson, Mattis, Bolton - I accept the controversy about this dude, pls no bully), so there is a risk that being smart isn't actually good enough to stay in the cabinet.

I honestly don't think Musk Thiel Vance are especially intelligent and capable.

I’m honestly curious, this isn’t a gotcha — if they’re not, could you name some public figures who are?

I'm not American so any specific figure hidden in the deep woods is likely to escape my current notice. I will state that I do pay attention to track records as evidence for total success, and mere participation in one successful project doesn't make up for historical failures. Musk powered through to get Space X and Tesla working despite immense (and to my mind still extant) disadvantages, and X is a flailing shitpile (along with Optimus, Hyperloop, The Boring Company, Neuralink and other stupid ass ideas). Thiel and Vance are SV VC who have culture war trappings drawing eyeballs to them and their decent-but-not-especially-outsize performance. @SlowBoy is right in saying that Musk beat Boeing and NASA with SpaceX, but that highlights the incapability of Boeing more than anything else, and Thiel is... like, he founded PayPal. Great investor/manager maybe, not exactly genius planetbrain.

My gut is basically 'when this man speaks does his rambling pass the smell test'. I'm too old and lazy to hyperoptimize and backtrace, so just based on gut for recent supposed smartdicks I've seen interviewed on whatever shitty clip floats to my attention. The following logarithmic scale is my assessment of smartdickiness, with 0/10 being College Educated Corporate Professional With 10 Years Of Experience And Steady Career Profession With No Fuckups. The modal mottizen is probably a 3-5/10 on this smartdick scale. A 10/10 galaxybrain is I dunno, a combination of Nikola Tesla, the Black Scholes dudes, Grace Hopper, and lets throw in Billy Beane and Michael Jackson (americentric references due to availability and common reference pools).

If forced to choose the closest I'd rank as a modern singular smartdick I'll demurr and give the following options (weighted for visibility and common knowledge osmosis),

Chase CEO Jamie Dimon 7/10

Berkshire chancellor Charlie Munger: soft 7.5 (or 8)/10

Stephen Cohen (the one I think actually has the sauce instead of Thiel) firm 8/10

(sigh) Steve Jobs: 8.5/10. The man had the product design and pivoting flexibility to drive the change we see in modern microcomputing. Theres a reason every SV blowhard wants to copy his style.

For reference I'd rank the 3 i cited as follows: Vance 5-6.5/10 Musk 6.5-7.5/10 Thiel 7-7.5/10

I do not think Musk Vance and Thiel are stupid at all, they clearly are smart enough to avoid crippling fuckups and have pushed appropriately for given opportunities. However I do think that current conservative fluffing of these particular smartdicks is to contrast them against the cucked college educated cowards abasing themselves to performative wokeness. The motivated reasoning to claim that these men are Truly Intelligent comports their actual achievements into parody. We fete these men as kings among sheep because they dare to stand against the intelligensia, even if their crown ill fits.

I honestly don't think Musk Thiel Vance are especially intelligent and capable.

Musk and Thiel both invented some of the most important companies of the century. Just one of Musk's companies, SpaceX, now outperforms NASA and Boeing. Thiel is one of thr godfathers of Silicon Valley, one of the most competitive and important corporate battlegrounds in the world. They are probably two of the most capable men in the world.

I think conservatism as a popular movement is quite minimized, yes. But as an intellectual movement with real political force, it endures.

Say what you will about Project 2025, but The Heritage Foundation isn't going anywhere. And, besides AEI, it is the most influential think tank on the right. Furthermore, thinkers like Deneen are on the up in conservative intellectual circles currently. Now, are "conservative intellectual circles" going to amount to much more than bespectacled dudes smoking cigars and mentally masturbating about a benevolent dictatorship? Probably not, but they will continue to exist. The whole point of conservatism is that it functions even as a small minority. It's a movement based around not doing much and doing that slowly.

The popular right wing movement is going to be the Techno-Libertarianism of Peter Thiel and his greater orbit. I mean, that's why JD Vance got the VP pick. It's a seductive movement because it attracts big money and top human capital, but I worry that it lacks any appeal to women and, more broadly, families. Thiel himself is a gay transhumanist. Nothing wrong with the gay part and nothing currently wrong with the transhuman part, but, taken together, this is hard for the Nebraska insurance salesman and his 2nd grade teacher wife to really get behind they did with Reagan.

The competing popular movement is Club For Growth et al. While pro-growth is a very broad and appealing economic argument, it comes with some thorny social baggage. Close to open boarders, offshoring. It offers nothing in the way of "community cohesion" or "social order" which, while highly vibes based, are important for a conservative inspired movement.

While they're are certainly fights to be fought on the right, I have more (vibes based) confidence they'll figure it out. This is because the left is trying to decide between actual statist communist and explicit racism as its number one priority.

I agree, but I'd go one step further: the best would be to stop worrying not only about conserving vs changing things, but about what counts as "right" vs "left". Align yourself with What Is Good and work for that, regardless of whether it is present or absent in your culture, ancient or new, "left" or "right", progressive or reactionary. The moment you take your eyes off The Good and start choosing your values based on political alignments is the moment you lose your way. Politics ought to never be anything more than merely instrumental.

Beautifully said. I absolutely agree with this.

We have an incredible opportunity with the current political realignment to reintegrate Goodness with politics. I say we take it.

How so?

Well basically, there's a bunch of chaos and things are up in the air. That means opportunity to form something new.

the lifestyle of most 'conservatives' in America is nothing but rural poor people indulging in thoughtless moment to moment hedonism

In whatever shape England emerges from the war it will be deeply tinged with the characteristics that I have spoken of earlier. The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children's holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same. (George Orwell, 1941)

I've been curious since reading it a few years ago... how are those suet puddings doing?

Remember that he was deliberately writing propaganda because he believed that the war would create conditions for a communist revolution in the UK.

The essay series was literally crafted to sell Ingsoc to tories worried about the war. It's as exploitive as any other communist propaganda.
It's the same basic thing as a Democrat telling you "vote Biden to cool down the culture war," barely hiding his utter contempt for the rube he's manipulating. Or "if you like your health care plan, you can keep it"

Lying to people that nothing they love is going to change is the first step in destroying every they love.

It does, however, characterize 'rural poor people indulging in thoughtless behavior' as essentially conservative behavior, without sneer, as early as 1941.

Tangential, but either George Orwell is a believer in the magic soil hypothesis or didn't realize that mass immigration could ever be a thing.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, foreign conquest doesn't necessarily change a country. But wholesale replacement of its population does. The Norman invasion didn't change the fundamental character of England. It merely replaced the ruling class. But the Saxon invasion did change England and made it what it is today. It did so by extirpating the prior residents and replacing them.

What emerges after 100 more years of mass immigration will be far less English than if the Germans had conquered it in WWII.

either George Orwell is a believer in the magic soil hypothesis or didn't realize that mass immigration could ever be a thing.

Orwell died in 1950, a full 18 years before Enoch Powell’s much-maligned “Rivers of Blood” speech. So my money is on the latter.

That's my view as well.

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