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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   33695 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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I wrote last week about how my circle was reacting poorly to the Trump win, but also how their reaction wasn't as bad as 2016. My latest update is, it's still pretty bad, probably worse than it was last week, but still not quite as bad as 2016. But I'm starting to get that feeling again like I'm the crazy one, simply on the basis that everyone I know in meatspace seems to think a complete disaster has befallen us. Furthermore, I think I need to retract my previous statement that my exposure to this strong sentiment is because I went to a very leftist college. I'm now seeing a lot more of this from people who I know outside of that school.

I have a number of people posting multiple times per day about some kind of issue du jour, ranging from high school boys chanting the Nick Fuentes thing, to screeds about how people will (literally) die due to Trump being in charge, for whatever reasons. And I spent the weekend with family and friends who wouldn't stop talking about it, also. It was a lot of signaling and complaining and without any real acknowledgement that over half of the country voted for Trump, including huge gains in lots of minority groups, and that maybe that means something.

So far, from a personal standpoint, this is not off to a good start, and I worry this next four years will be as personally trying as the previous four, with regards to my ability to keep my cool and not feel like a crazy person when surrounded by those in my life and their insistent attitude about Trump. Personally this is starting to make me want future Democrat wins, but not because I believe in the Democrats. If the dems win, my life mostly stays the same. If the Republicans win, my life gets worse just because people around me can't deal with it. But I also can't bring myself to really take these people's fears seriously, since I do feel like this chicken little routine happens every time a Republican gets elected (from my limited experience), without the Republicans even doing anything that bad.

Are other people also seeing an escalating level of this sentiment? It seems maybe like the anti Trump machine had some rusty gears and a slow start, but it's starting to get going again.

I think there’s some subset of people who at least unconsciously want these bizarre nightmare 1984 and literally Hitler and handmaid fantasies to be real. I say that because most of the people doing this seem to have similar profiles: almost invariably white, upper middle class, professional, college educated, and highly likely to be female as well. Which if you’re keeping track, is the one demographic, that even if the absolute worst nightmare scenario happens is going to be affected the least. It just doesn’t make sense that the people worried about an illegals roundup are the richest, whitest, best educated people in the country and who live in a bright blue state to boot.

Further, the “resistance” thus far, is the opposite of serious. The protesters in Hong Kong were seriously trying to protest the Chinese government crackdown. They weren’t doing things to make themselves easily identifiable, they weren’t posting about it on social media, they weren’t making videos of themselves #protesting. They did things like wear masks, carry cash and leave phones at home so as not to be tracked. They did things like black bloc does. Our #resistance is doing things like shaving their heads and wearing cute little blue bracelets they bought for $25 on Etsy. These actions as well as the constant posts, videos, selfies, etc., are absolutely not the actions of a people actually afraid that the government is going to go after them. I say that because if you’re afraid of being singled out, you’re probably going to try to blend in, and while they might protest, they’re not going to do so in ways they know can identify them.

I think there’s some subset of people who at least unconsciously want these bizarre nightmare 1984 and literally Hitler and handmaid fantasies to be real. I say that because most of the people doing this seem to have similar profiles: almost invariably white, upper middle class, professional, college educated, and highly likely to be female as well. Which if you’re keeping track, is the one demographic, that even if the absolute worst nightmare scenario happens is going to be affected the least.

This would be pretty parallel to the (extremely) male fantasy of the zombie apocalypse, Red Dawn, preppers, etc. Disproportionately fantasies held by men who are wealthy and/or secure.

The fantasy in both cases being the suspension of ordinary life and moral responsibilities. I have friends who are panicking about Trump and "how can I bring a child into a world like this?" This neatly solves all the doubts or fears one might have about having or not having children. Similarly, "I have to kill everyone else before they kill me" solves the problem of one's inability to get along with others, and the sudden disappearance of existing hierarchies solves the problem of why one finds oneself at the bottom of them.

This would be pretty parallel to the (extremely) male fantasy of the zombie apocalypse, Red Dawn, preppers, etc. Disproportionately fantasies held by men who are wealthy and/or secure.

This comparison is appealing on the face of it but, I think totally different under the covers. The male disaster action hero fantasy is characterized by the main character specifically having a chance to massively increase their relative social standing and personal control over their life. If you're in white-collar management you're in charge of maybe 12 people and at the same time extremely aware of all the levels of management above you that decide your fate and interfere with your attempts to exert authority. Or even if you're a billionaire-- you're still in a social environment where you're in close competition with a number of near-peers and constrained by the actions of various governments and laws. Meanwhile, If you're a prepper in a zombie apocalypse you have a reasonable shot at being the undisputed leader of a gang of 20-30 people with total control over whether you all live or die.

The female equivalent are fantasies about being reborn as a villainess and in general being put in situations where they face ludicrously outsized social threats-- but from peers who oppose them personally and openly, rather than faceless social media egregores. It's the same sort of fantasy about having the tools and relationships to take a high degree of agency in solving their romantic and economic problems.

Meanwhile, the people obsessing about extreme political outcomes and oppression* are engaging in a more typical form of catharsis-- they already feel anxious and terrified and stressed out and uneasy. Imagining that they're under imminent threat from shadowy fascists puts that all into context and gives their negatives emotions justification and meaning. It's the same mechanism that leads schizophrenics to conclude they're being gangstalked.

* mandatory note: these people exist on both sides of the aisle

The male disaster action hero fantasy is characterized by the main character specifically having a chance to massively increase their relative social standing and personal control over their life.

The female equivalent is the increase of one's social status massively, by way of her sexual value being threatened/desired for control by multiple parties. If you're a pink collar woman in HR, you have maybe an inattentive leaf-eating boyfriend or husband who doesn't really get that worked up over you or value control over you. In Handmaid's Tale type fantasy/dystopia the entirety of society is built around controlling and possessing you and your sexuality.

A partial explanation that is boring and, therefore, higher in explanatory value;

Some of these PMC white women simply enjoying politicizing their sexual fetishes. Remember when Fifty Shades of Grey was crowned the king of "Mommy Porn?" The oft cited statistic (maybe internet levels of quality, however) is that 80% of women have entertained some sort of submissive sexual fantasy. If you get to transform this into a publicly acceptable display of political "outrage" it's like getting to partially entertain your fantasy every day and get positive feedback for it.

I know this is flows to/from the deeper waters of The Last Psychiatrist, but I am earnest in my belief that it explains some of the hyperbolic emotional broadcasting. I'll emphasize, however, that it's partial at best. Not everything derives from our naughty thoughts and childhood experience (fuck you, Freud).

I’m not sure it’s naughty thoughts so much as a deep need for a cause to fight for. For most people the dominant issue is boredom in some sense. There’s no greater thing in most people’s lives than going to work and coming home. It’s a bit empty and quite boring. At the same time our culture has been heavily promoting the idea of heroes saving the world. We’re part of the culture of the spectacle and our dominant way of interacting with the outside world is screens. We’re seeing a movie and want to be the heroes of the movie.

I think there is a rather large dose of narcissism involved here. They’re hoping for disaster so they can be a hero or heroine. I just don’t under the need to put yourself in the center of historic events. I’m hoping for a nice quiet, boring life. I can’t imagine that it’s going to even be helpful to anyone caught in the crosshairs to have the fight taken up by people doing it out of boredom.

Especially, it's trans people, or people with lots of trans relatives/friends, who are severely decompensating online and losing contact with reality (i.e., acting as if Trump's first act upon being inaugurated will be to round up all trans people and herd them into the gas chambers).

Does Trump even care about trans people as long as they (or more likely their allies) don't make a huge amount of noise?

During his 2016 campaign he explicitly stated that Caitlyn Jenner can use any bathroom in the Trump Tower that she pleases.

No, but he depends on people who do and he’s smart enough to realize that.

Trans people I’d kinda get, there’s a plausible explanation n the fact that the far right wants to delay transition until adulthood, as well as remove trans people from opposite sex changing areas, restrooms and women’s sports. That’s at least a cause. The women crying in their cars are none of that. Even if abortion were illegal, most women making cry TikTok’s could afford to fly to Toronto to get an abortion as needed.

the far right wants to delay transition until adulthood

Isn't it ironic how Democrats are constantly singing the praises of the European (specifically Scandinavian) ways of doing things? But when progressive European countries across the board are hitting pause on youth gender transition, Democrats stick their fingers in the ear and say that only the far-right wants to do that?

Isn't it ironic how Democrats are constantly singing the praises of the European (specifically Scandinavian) ways of doing things?

In my experience, that's often because they don't actually know that much about Europe, they just have a vague impression of it being more "enlightened" and left-wing than us. I've actually had fun bursting their bubbles on occasion by introducing them to things like European abortion laws, or how many still have established churches (or only just separated their "national church" from the government in the past couple of decades), or corporate tax rates, or how their unions differ from ours, or any number of cases where Europe differs from their idealized picture.

(The fallback position as to Europe's superiority over America usually ends up being socialized medicine, and fewer cars and guns — and don't bring up San Marino or Switzerland.)

No, the far right wants to ban transgenderism in adults. Centrists want to go delay transition to adulthood and remove trannies from women’s sports.

wants to ban transgenderism in adults

Not just adults, kids too. I'd also like to ban cancer in adults, or treat transgenderism as we do cancer.

Um. I think I might be misunderstanding your last clause there.

We treat cancer by cutting the diseased organ out, or killing it with radiation/toxins. This certainly describes the gender-transition model of dealing with gender dysphoria (with their conception of the diseased organ being the unwanted reproductive organs), but you appear to hold the other conception of the diseased organ (i.e. the brain), which would seem to suggest lobotomies or neurotoxins.

As noted, this seems kind of absurd, so if I'm misconstruing something please tell me what it is. I'd prefer not to bark up the wrong tree and unnecessarily accuse anyone of moral turpitude.

I would think that applying the gender-transition model to cancer would be for cancer patients to identify as a Cancer-person and advocating for Cancer-person pride.

In my mind applying the cancer model to gender dysphoria would be targeted treatment to realign the misperception of their gender with their anatomy. Restoring their natural anatomy to health.

Well, okay then. Sorry for the confusion.

the fact that the far right wants to delay transition until adulthood

I don't think that's specific to the far right.

These can both be explained by the same thing: the vocal anti-Trump "resistance" folks are part of a social group where people who fight oppressors on behalf of the little guy have a ton of status. Everyone loves a David vs Goliath story, but for this subculture that tendency is way stronger than it is for other groups. That means that these people are more likely to be overzealous in identifying tyranny (because they subconsciously want the chance to fight for freedom like the stories they were raised on), and more likely to be very conspicuous in their efforts (so that they can get the approval of their peers). If they were fighting an actual tyrant they would need to be more circumspect (as you point out), but anyone who has grown up in America is so far removed from actual tyranny that they don't even recognize how good they have it.

If we create a negative reaction Doom Scale that accounts for impact and prevalence I'll grade the 2016 reaction as something like a 7. Negative reactions were maxxed out without trudging into the upper end of the scale. If the scale only includes reactions to elections I've seen in my own lifetime as a reference, as it probably should, then 2016 earns an easy 10.

I attended a gay, queer-lesbian wedding post-election. Maybe a 40/60 normie to gay queer-lesbian ratio in terms of attendance. The attendees included lots of people that I know to talk about Trump's evils, genocides, and so on. I only ran into one person that couldn't not talk about Trump.

"Hi, good to meet ya I'm wemptronics, this is yadda yadda"

"I'm Incredibly Gay and Queer-Lesbian Wedding Guest"

"This is great isn't it?"

"Yeah. Well. If only, you know, something bad hadn't happened."

"..."

"Oooooh I don't know, might there have been something that happened? Something huge and terrible?"

"Yeah, I get it"

[Speaking to Gay and Queer-Lesbian Partner] "I know, I know, I said I wasn't gonna talk politics but you know it effects all of us the most and..."

Whatever stern look Gay and Queer-Lesbian Partner gave must have partially worked, because the mourning and diatribe only went on for a minute or so. Afterwards, politeness, drinks, and good cheer won the day.

In 2016, I recall making a "it'll be ok" post in response to the wave of the doomposts by blue friends, colleagues, and family. Doesn't feel necessary this time around, but I'm also less online. Gay and Queer-Lesbians will talk plenty of Trump, but the threshold for imposing their politics on me at a wedding has been raised it seems. I might rate 2024 as a 5-6/10 compared to 2016's 10/10. I do expect the #resistance gears to get turning as we approach inauguration day, but it'll be less of an oppressive cultural zeitgeist and more of a bog standard party-out-of-power deal.* Hopefully.

I do expect every culture war issue to make a return to the limelight. All the fan favorites: police misconduct, every school shooting, rape allegations. It's living, I guess.

Surely you can see why an electoral victory for the anti-gay-marriage party might put a damper on the celebration of a gay wedding? Even if the Trump administration and/or Supreme Court doesn't revoke the federal recognition of gay marriage (as was suggested as a possibility in the Dobbs decision) or pass any federal level legislation to make it more difficult to exist as openly queer, they still live in a world where the majority vote didn't think those policies were a deal breaker. And "yeah, their policies are bad, but they're probably not going to manage to pass them, so it's fine" is not exactly reassuring anyway.

In addition to a Supreme Court decision overturning Obergfell, revoking federal recognition of gay marriage would also require either overturning in court or revoking at Congress the Respect for Marriage Act, with no credible extant theory for the former, and the latter dependent on either 60 Senators going against gay marriage or 50 Senators willing to nuke the filibuster over it. And neither the Trump admin or any of its affiliates ran against gay marriage, with even the often-nutty Project 2025 avoiding the topic entirely.

as was suggested as a possibility in the Dobbs decision

Drop the passive voice. Who suggested it?

Go search "Obergefell" in the text of the decision and you'll see multiple instances of asserting that sure the same arguments work just as well against contraception and gay marriage, but they pinky swear to only use them against abortion.

And if that's not strong enough evidence that the Dobbs decision threatens gay marriage, here's David French arguing it doesn't. But, more seriously, searching Dobbs and Obergefell found a news article on a recent dissent by Sotomayor on the topic in addition to multiple analysis articles pointing out that the Dobbs decision threatens those other rights.

I think I'm familiar with many of the grievances and worries, yes. Of those that I consider real friends I even have shared some opinions of my own.

Anyway, it didn't put a damper on it for most near as I could tell. Gay marriage didn't even come up. That's why I rated 2024 as a 5-6/10.

federal level legislation to make it more difficult to exist as openly queer

There's a lot wrapped up in this that doesn't start or end with gay marriage. General trans issues is a more common topic within this group. If a make-or-break gay marriage case makes it up to SCOTUS it'll definitely be at the forefront. I understand, yeah.

Trump is pro-gay marriage, although he probably won’t die on that hill, and it seems like he understands that he depends on people who wouldn’t like it if he did. Even if the Supreme Court overturns obergefell(I don’t think this is likely) gay marriage will stay the law of the land in most states, and more likely than not Missouri will be required to recognize gay marriages performed in Illinois, even if both participants were Missouri residents at the time.

Trump is pro-gay marriage

Citation needed. Trump says all sorts of contradictory things - what actual concrete actions did he take as president to protect/benefit LGBTQ people?

Trump’s state department made a push for decriminalizing homosexuality in other countries, for one example.

Trump is less pro-gay than democrats, and he’s not pro-trans. This does not make him anti-gay.

I mean, the original claim from token_progressive was "anti-gay-marriage party", which seems true?

But your claim was that Trump is pro-gay, not merely an absence of anti-gay.

Trump is supposedly pro-choice as well. It's not really relevant if the Republican majority and think tanks that select the legislation and judicial appointments for him aren't and he just goes along with whatever they want. It may very well be the case that gay marriage is in less danger from Trump than it would be from a different Republican president, but it seems unlikely to make a big difference.

If people truly believe Trump is an existential threat to democracy and is literally Hitler reborn and going to put them all into camps, then they should stop squawking on their social media and friend groups and buy weapons to assassinate him.

I'm not kidding, either.

That is the logical end point of this rhetoric, if its assumptions and principles are genuinely held. If he is a tyrant, then that is what the Second Amendment is for. If he is not, then what has been perpetuated upon Trump is the most pernicious and cowardly slander campaign in American history.

Put up or shut up.

Trump just spent four years claiming the Dems are an existential threat to democracy and stole an election, why didn't Trump supporters stop squawking on social media and buy weapons to assassinate them?

Considering the election results, most Trump supporters shut up and voted. :shrug:

I'm not going to play the whataboutism game.

Did some people call Biden Hitler? (given reducto ad Hitlerlum, probably.) But Trump didn't call Biden Hitler. He didn't tell his followers that they were going to be put into camps and there was going to be a genocide. That's crossing-the-rubicon rhetoric.

You could say that 'stolen election' is that kind of rhetoric, too... but unlike so many, I have memories of the year two thousand of our lord when the Democrats thought Bush stole the election. Nothing happened to the American Republic. Life continued as normal.

If he is actually Hitler - and a minority of people seem to believe this with all their heart - then peacefully transferring power to him is what a cuck would do. Either that, or they never really meant it. That's all what I mean.

This isn’t some kind of video game where once Trump gets his brains splattered by a pink haired trans twenty-something from Brooklyn all the MAGAs shrug and go home. What you're suggesting is extremely counterproductive; it would just make a martyr of Trump and make the ascendance of turbo-Trump even more likely. The only people stupid and determined enough to do what you're describing tried already.

I apologize, I wasn't making an argument of 'the most effective thing to do.' I agree, making a martyr of him would be grossly unproductive for the people on the left. But you can't peacefully transfer power to Hitler. You can't peacefully protest a Hitler. Leftist rhetoric is begging for armed resistance that can never happen. They made such a big deal out of it. Now they look like so very weak and shrill.

Their self-perceived Hitler arose, and they are unable to stop him. What a pathetic display.

If people truly believe Trump is an existential threat to democracy and is literally Hitler reborn and going to put them all into camps, then they should stop squawking on their social media and friend groups and buy weapons to assassinate him.

I've already seen a counterargument to this, which is that assassinating Trump — and Vance; you'd need to get him too — would buy a little time, it doesn't deal with the 70+ million unreasoning, murderous, hateful fascist Americans who voted for him. (One noted that Hitler only got about a third of voters, max, but this time it was a majority.) It took the Allies, and especially America, to defeat the pro-Nazi Germans last time, but now that it's America that has chosen Fascism — "wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross" as predicted — who is going to save us now?

Well, certainly not the liberals.

There's a popular conservative cliche: the ballot box or the bullet box. It's chest-puffy masculine bravado, but something completely lacking in their enemies.

Right now, the political left is awakening to the fact that their leaders are not only gaslighting liars, but spineless collaborators to a man they see as Hitler. There are no riots in the cities, no drama or fervor. Exhaustion.

At least the January 6th people showed up. I doubt this time around the left will muster any sort of response. There's no stomach to oppose him anymore. It ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Apparently NYC is pretty chill, there were very large Trump gains in all demographics likely due to the crime / homeless psycho issue. Nobody really seems to care either way, the vibe feels way different among my friends to how it did in 2016 or 2020.

San Francisco seems surprisingly chill as well; I've only gotten a single unsolicited political text from a friend, and it was from an Asian, SF native tradesman, ecstatic about the results.

The group chat of my high school friends from $FLYOVER_STATE, on the other hand, is sounding pretty similar to 2016.

Interesting divergence.

It makes sense when you think about it. The elites in the capital have already made it; they have nothing to prove.

The plebians in the provences, however, must express sufficient zeal to be above suspicion.

No, the mood around me has been jubilant. Much hay about the large gains with Hispanics. Granted, I went from a rad trad election watching party to deer camp.

But, of course, that’s precisely the point. Opposite filter bubbles exist. The anti-trump machine is, I would suggest, now confined entirely to one of them. It needs to expand or die. And it is upon this machine that lies the fate of the democrats, barring fraud. Democrats have two possible economic platforms- quasi socialist economic illiteracy and unpopular Goldman Sachs technocracy. Fully embracing one of them on a national level means losing key voters they need to win. Their social policy is far left extremism that, at best, is slightly less unpopular than republicans’ far right extremism(and that’s only for abortion, on other social issues the GOP wins). And of course there’s the trust issue with big swaths of the electorate.

The dems’ best hope in ‘28 is for a rape victim to die from an ectopic pregnancy right before the election during an oil price spike. Structurally it’s difficult for democrats to make credible signals of moderating.

And of course there’s the trust issue with big swaths of the electorate.

I can't find it again in a cursory search of my browser history, but I know I saw a piece in a "legacy media" outlet asking how they deal with our situation wherein so much of the American public have turned against facts and truth and willfully chosen to be ignorant. To support this description of our current landscape, the author cited the well-surveyed decline of trust in the establishment media and increasing turn to alternate outlets; then immediately wondered how you fix people who have stopped trusting in Truth and have willfully turned to listening to liars instead.

It was pure Principal Skinner "Am I so out of touch? No. It's the children who are wrong" attitude. There's quite a lot of that these days. There's nothing wrong with the legacy media and its trustworthiness, it's the people who've stopped listening that need to change. There's nothing wrong with Democrat policies (except maybe compromising too much with the right), it's just that so many voters are driven by racial grievances and hate, and are beyond reasoning with. The Party and the Media did not fail the people, the people have failed the Party and Media. "[T]here aren’t people worth “winning over,” there’s just a country overwhelmingly clogged with trash to eliminate."

To add to this, I can confirm that this is not just an opinion they're projecting outwards, I've heard high ranking industry professionals despair to a room of colleagues as to what they should do about the "misinformation" problem. They truly believe that the public is turning away from their trustworthy news because they're not as comforting as misinformation.

And those in that industry I've personally interacted with, yes, probably do take their ethics and integrity seriously. The reason they don't get a pass is something I've touched a couple of times here.

Even if one journalist, multiple journalists or even a majority of them, are hardworking and try hard to report the truth, my observation is that as a group they are unwilling to push back against the large contingent of liars and frauds in their profession. And I don't mean "the evil and bad right wing journalists that write misinformation", I mean their own in-group. When outsiders push against them the wagons circle and end up pointing in a predictable direction, leading me to believe there is a tacit endorsement of the bad aspects. Journalists cannot afford in-group loyalty with their peers. As Scott wrote, yes, genuinely criticizing the in-group is excruciatingly painful, but that is precisely what the public expects journalism school to train journalists to be able to do.

As long as the profession as those serious journalists don't start publically cleaning up their profession, the public has no reason to trust them.

Even if one journalist, multiple journalists or even a majority of them, are hardworking and try hard to report the truth, my observation is that as a group they are unwilling to push back against the large contingent of liars and frauds in their profession. And I don't mean "the evil and bad right wing journalists that write misinformation", I mean their own in-group.

I'd agree with this, but I'd also extend slightly more charity, in noting that part of journalism is taking a large amount of information and reducing it down to the most important parts, trimming out more irrelevant bits. And human beings being what we are, it's not unexpected to have some bias creep in — even if unconsciously, and even if one is trying to be even-handed — toward omitting "unflattering" elements for your side. Now, consider what happens when this is repeated as a story passes through multiple layers (see also the usual complaints about science journalism and what the nuanced conclusions of journal papers end up reduced to at the end of the journalistic "game of telephone"). You get something like the top portion of this infographic from our own @mitigatedchaos.

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."

I've been thinking about this as well, Joe Rogan has had a number of left-wing guests over the years and he's sympathetic to many left-wing ideas but he's "part of the right-wing misinformation machine" because he'll listen to right-wingers too. So a "liberal Joe Rogan" would have to: (1) never speak with a known right-winger, (2) immediately push back on any guest that happened to express a right-wing idea, (3) never utter or express sympathy for any right-wing idea himself, and (4) pay close attention to the ever-evolving liberal orthodoxy so he never accidentally violates rules 1-3.

There are guys with podcasts right now who follow all of these rules, but I seriously doubt anyone of that ilk could build a mass following among apolitical men the way Rogan has.

If Joe Rogan followed all those rules his listenership would probably be a tenth of what it is now.

Which indeed is the crux of the problem with the left in America these days: they refuse to acknowledge that yes, you have to actually engage with people that you want to convince. You can't just preach at people and demand they convert. You need to do the hard work of talking to people, understanding where they're coming from, and trying to appeal to them in terms that they can appreciate.

A lot of times the left can get away with this, for example in Hollywood and stuff where they have a stranglehold on the culture. But when it comes to elections, you can't berate people into voting for you. And unless they learn that lesson, they're going to have more Trump-style "how could America vote for these awful people" losses.

You can't just preach at people and demand they convert.

Why not? Consider parts of the spread of Christianity into "Pagan" Medieval Europe, or much of the early expansion of Islam. All you need is a sufficiently persuasive "or else"

But when it comes to elections, you can't berate people into voting for you.

But you can make electoral outcomes less relevant. If the people are going to vote wrong, then their votes don't get to matter anymore.

And unless they learn that lesson, they're going to have more Trump-style "how could America vote for these awful people" losses.

Or they can take a page from Bogleech about how …there aren’t people worth “winning over,” there’s just a country overwhelmingly clogged with trash to eliminate… They chose to be fash like the supporters of every other fash machine in history. Name a single time that problem was solved by kindly talking them out of it please. At minimum they have to be driven to leave."

Or from one "pizzmoe" on Twitter:

I am not going to blame the candidates. You can't get much better than Hillary or Kamala. They were not the problem, Dems are not the problem, the voters are the problem.

Or jbrillig on Threads:

You can not appeal to fascist voters, period. If they can't vote for a woman THAT IS THEIR BIGOTRY. YOU DO NOT APPEAL TO IT. THINKING THAT WAY WE WOULD NEVER HAVE NOMINATED OBAMA.

Or, for someone more notable, The View's Sunny Hostin:

I’d like to reframe the conversation…I think the more relevant question actually is: What is wrong with America?!

What is wrong with this country that they would choose a message of divisiveness of xenophobia, of racism, of misogyny over a message of inclusiveness, a message for the people, by the people, of the people?! That’s what the problem is!

If "the majority has spoken and they said they don’t care that much about democracy," as Stephen Colbert has claimed, then democracy has to be defended from the majority.

If the voters are going to make "the wholesale decision to go full in with electing as their leader a convicted felon, a rapist, a child molester and a treasonous insurrectionist," then it's incumbent on the "kind hearted, generous and moral people who love democracy and their liberty" to stop them from using Our Democracy against itself. If the Constitution is not a suicide pact, then neither are election outcomes.

Why compromise your possession of truth, facts, and high morals, on the Right Side of History, by playing Chamberlain and trying to appease a bunch of fascists? Why should the party change, when it is not them, but the voters who are wrong? Is not the better course to make the electorate change for the better, whatever it takes?

Why not?

Is not the better course to make the electorate change for the better, whatever it takes?

Simply put, because you can't. All you can do, and all they have done, is cause people to not speak their true thoughts under threat. But that doesn't change them, that simply makes them quietly resent you and bide their time. And since we live in a democratic society, you really do need to change them.

I'm aware of all the various rhetoric you quoted saying "we shouldn't waste time trying to appeal to them". But that rhetoric is exactly why they lost this election, and why they will continue to lose elections (not every election to be sure, but enough) until they realize that politics is not a game of who is the most self righteous and preachy.

And since we live in a democratic society

That's fixable.

But that rhetoric is exactly why they lost this election, and why they will continue to lose elections (not every election to be sure, but enough) until they realize that politics is not a game of who is the most self righteous and preachy.

Or until they stop holding elections. If letting the American people vote means Orange Hitler, then you obviously can't let them vote anymore.

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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.

We know that "just be nice" with the treasury doesn't work in the long run. Our economists are less susceptible to flim flam than our social scientists and culture warriors.

I think it'll be a continuation of the polarization arc, guided by the incentives of profitable content. Obama was a Marxist Kenyan and we got the Tea Party. Trump was Hitler and we got Wokeist nonsense. Election conspiracies and QAnon notwithstanding, I think Jan 6th was peak derangement. Biden was more honestly criticized than either Trump or Obama because it simply wasn't profitable to publish election conspiracies for 4 years. Bidens brain really was mush. He really was hiding. The border really did get worse. Crime really was being minimized. Trotting out ye olde "this president controls gas prices" chestnut was practically quaint.

Conservatives are dominating media. The MAGA narrative and style really are popular. Liberals will have to find or wait for a narrative and delivery that actually resonates. People are sick of race and trans obsession and a style of condescension. Harping on these issues isn't nearly as profitable as it was in 2016. For the last four years it was hard to get rich running ads on dem narratives. It was much easier to get rich harping on US foreign expenditures, inflation, the plight of the working man, the plight of men, crime, and just straight up duking on dem talking points. The anti-Trump machine is comparatively weak right now. It'll have to pivot or die as the well that pays the bills is running dry. Orange man bad will still work to a degree, but nothing like in 2016.

Conservatives are dominating media. The MAGA narrative and style really are popular. Liberals will have to find or wait for a narrative and delivery that actually resonates

I think it's way too soon to say this. This forum just spent the last however many months lamenting that it would be impossible for Trump to get elected since leftists control all institutions. The election was a victory for conservatives, sure, but can we really say that they're dominating media? Maybe they're dominating media that works outside of traditional media formats, and paywalled media, but I don't even know if that's true.

Trump was Hitler and we got Wokeist nonsense.

Wokist nonsense was plenty present before Trump. I suppose it was juuuuuuust sub-normie, but anyone at least moderately online was either a participant in it or deeply hated it.

I think that is kind of what they are saying - that Trump emboldened Wokeism and caused it to break free into normie spaces.

It was already permeating normie spaces, though. Trump was part of the inflammation response to the infection of Woke ideology. Fevers are necessary; it's the infection that's the problem.

I (as a very liberal person who detests Trump but sometimes also find the reaction to him unhelpfully hysterical, or at least unfocused in how it's hysterical) found this post from George Saunders to be quite helpful: https://georgesaunders.substack.com/p/a-slightly-altered-course

Quote:

I am, above all else, an artist. As an artist, I am trying to be interested in what has just happened. I am trying to maintain two ideas at once: 1) Most people who voted for Trump are nice people. (I know this because many close friends and family members voted for him and, well, more than half of voters did), and 2) Our democracy really may be in peril. Trump has repeatedly said things to indicate this and people who worked closely with him the first time have said this.

So, what I’m trying to figure out is: how do the people who voted for Trump, some of whom I love, not see what I see in him? And, also, importantly: what am I not seeing, about the way the world looks to them? I'm not saying that the way they see it is right – I feel very strongly otherwise - but I am saying, or accepting that, yes, it really does look that way to them.

This mirrors my reactions to the election and in its curiosity seems more constructive than just hysteria posting. Would it help to share it with your circle??

No one cares about democracy.

When I am Weaker Thn You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom Because that is according to my principles.

Except no one is actually the principled party. Democrats will shit all over democracy if democracy goes against their ends just as fast as Republicans except as Republicans make abundantly clear and get mocked for WE DON'T LIVE IN A DEMOCRACY!

Democrats will shit all over democracy if democracy goes against their ends just as fast as Republicans except as Republicans

Well, the Democrats have a far better recent track record than the Republicans when it comes to accepting election results.

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There were prominent calls for faithless in 2016. And 66% of polled Democrats thought Russia changed votes in the 2016 election

Trump is an election denier. He's in good company with many Democrats.

If your time horizon is 7 years or less, yes.

I don't think the response of the Democrats to 2016 is equivalent to the Republican one of 2020.

What @ArjinFerman and @NewCharlesInCharge said -- Trump whined a lot, but there were more riots from the Democrats AND they interfered with the Trump Administration.

Yeah, me too. I'd much prefer it if the Democrats' response to 2016 was equal to that of Republicans' to 2020.

Me as well. One riot with one death, and on the rioting side. And then the winning side ultimately gets to govern without bureacratic hamstringing.

Compared to years of rhetoric and investigation into "Russian collusion" that turn out to have been sourced to a document paid for by the opponent's political campaign. And then a whole summer of riots all around the country with billions in property damage and many more than one death.

That is cynicism gone too far. People care about living in a democracy because democracy appears to work better than the alternatives. I'd rather live in a democracy than a dictatorship whose policies match my beliefs, because in the latter case, if the government changes, I'll have no recourse. Do you think that is so unusual as a position?

You also have no recourse in a democracy -- if Trump does in fact enact Gay-O-Caust in the next four years, there won't be anything you personally can do about it. If this turns out to be a popular policy, there won't be anything anyone can do about it.

You also have no recourse in a democracy

There's a huge difference between tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of an actual tyrant. For one thing, the tyranny of the majority requires the majority of people to actually want these things. For another thing, it's a lot easier to change public opinion than it is to change one person's mind.

There's also, you know, a large number of legal systems that do ostensibly prevent Trump from just killing everyone who is gay - if he gave that order on his first day of office, I think people would just laugh nervously. Conversely, when Hitler said it, the Germans built concentration camps.

Even if people are pro Gay-o-Caust, a lot of them are going to be less enthusiastic about "dismantle our entire system of legal protections and install a dictator."

But supposing that we do get to the point that all of that happens... then I'm not living in a democracy. The worst possible failure state of a democracy is simply that we vote to stop having one. Maybe it's not quite so formal, but realistically the Gay-o-Caust can't happen until we're already living in a dictatorship.

You are confusing 'liberalist state with robust rule of law' with 'democracy' -- the two are pretty orthogonal, although in practice they are often seen together these days due to accidents of history.

To some degree - but the ability to sway popular opinion and thus affect the outcome of a vote is pure Democracy.

Yes, and those options are equally available to good and bad people alike -- indeed I suspect that Bad People are usually a little better at them.

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What do you mean? I can vote against him and campaign against him. Maybe I'll stand for office, I think my 'Stop the Gay-o-Caust' messaging would be quite popular. That is all the recourse I am entitled to.

For real? If a plurality of Americans vote for a guy who is literally putting gay people in camps and gassing them, you wouldn't think that you were entitled to any further recourse than at the ballot box?

Fascinating.

Legally, yeah.

So since you have approximately no recourse either way, wouldn't a dictatorship that matches your beliefs be better for you? (probably other people too -- you seem compassionate and normal enough)

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Interesting because most people in my filter bubble would take- well not the gay-o-caust, but maybe door to door gun confiscations or serious infringements on the 1a or something like that- to mean the constitution has lost the mandate of heaven(they wouldn’t use those words) and therefore it becomes legal to open fire on government officials acting under orders because there’s no social contract anymore.

Would they actually do it? I dunno. Probably most wouldn’t. But equally, if the government actually did enact robust hate speech laws or something, they wouldn’t inform on people who did.

Can you steelman the "democracy in peril" argument? As far as I can tell, it's really the core scissor statement of the mainstream-left-versus-alt-right divide in Western countries. People on the left side seem to hold it to be so self-evidently true that you cannot disagree with it in good faith, while it is in equal measures self-evidently false to the point that good-faith agreement is inconceivable to those on the right. I personally always have figured myself broadly closer to the left than the right (if perhaps coping that the race/gender collectivism social justice movement is a temporary aberration), but with one's position on this statement now being treated as a shahada by both sides I find myself driven into the arms of the right wing simply because the left-wing position strikes me as too insane to accept. Unless "democracy" really is code for "whatever my allies want", how can you justify iterated statements that amount to "giving the majority what it keeps voting for is a threat to our democracy"?

If anything, it seems to me that the opposite sounds plausible: democracy as I understand it is threatened by political insiders collectively pulling all stops to prevent giving the majority what it wants, even if this requires wrecking a considerable amount of systems and societal machinery as collateral damage. What is actually the notion of democracy that is imperiled by the right, rather than the left?

(To forestall a possible line of argument, I do find it plausible at this point that, say, the German AfD, if it got into power, would engage in some sketchy reprisals against left-wing institutions, such as pulling funding from nonprofits. Even if on its own this would be a concerning move, I find it hard to put causal blame on them for this, given that the other parties were openly saying since day one that they would sooner ban the AfD than let them get into a position where they could implement their voters' preferences. Something like pointing a gun at someone and then saying that you were right about them being violent all along when they try to wrestle it from you.)

Can you steelman the "democracy in peril" argument?

The argument is pretty straightforward: Any democratic system of government relies upon the ruling party being willing to cede power when it loses an election, otherwise the elections would be meaningless (lemma: if any power existed that could force the ruling party to cede power, that entity would be the de facto ruling party). Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Donald Trump did not conced the election until after his schemes to change state vote counts, appoint fraudulent electors, and pressure Mike Pence to not count the electoral votes failed. Donald Trump's schemes failed because his underlings in the government were not willing to go along with his plans. Given the level of influence that Donald Trump has over the Republican Party, in his second term, he could appoint only underlings who he is sure will go along with his schemes next time.

Hm. This line of argument does not seem persuasive to me because (1) I see the same "threat to democracy" rhetoric, at the same level of intensity, being levelled against candidates and parties running on an anti-establishment line in other countries (Germany, Italy), where there has so far been no indication of them refusing to acknowledge official election outcomes, and started in 2016, not 2020; (2) given that Trump did in fact cede power, I find discussion of counterfactuals to be unproductive since it's not like there is a trusted neutral party that can provide us with particularly likely ones; (3) between the "faithless elector appeals" in the US of 2016 and cases such as the recent elections in Georgia (the country) where the same suspects are actually backing an opposition's refusal to accept election results and currently trying to instigate a violent overthrow in the name of "democracy", the idea that "democracy" and not contesting election results is correlated seems ill-supported.

I do recognize, though, that if you do not accept context from other countries, an argument about Trump on this basis seems more compelling - I guess you would only have to accept that the 2016 rhetoric about him being a threat was properly prophetic, as opposed to self-inflictedly so in the "claim someone is violent to coordinate provoking them into proving you right" way.

I don't know if I can do justice to this request right now but I'll try briefly to at least copperman the 'democracy in peril' argument. I think we have plenty of evidence that Trump admires dictators and wants to become one and will work towards becoming one. Will he do this systematically and openly? Well no, both for characterological reasons and because it would be self-undermining for him to be seen to be doing this. But if opportunities to take more power come along or can be engineered he won't hesitate to seize them, and he is in a position where he is likely to get these opportunities, especially as he has built a following who trust him above anyone or any organisation. I find it likely that – in the event he's still alive and energetic – he'll be the real power behind the throne of the next Republican candidate to an extent we've never seen before (Putin/Medvedev style). Most of his voters will actively want this arrangement.

I don't really want to get into evidencing all of this – I would be supplying tonnes of quotes of his, that you're likely familiar with already and that Trump's admirers can just choose to say are meant non-literally. To people like me and I suspect George Saunders, Trump comes across as a creature who is transparently knowable. There is no mystery. You can follow his thought processes and drives exactly and see where they'll take him, and you can observe that he's not subject to political norms that do hold other politicians back. (Now it's very interesting that at least lots of his voters appear to either not mind this, or to see something else in him, and does this fact give me pause? Sometimes, but ultimately 99% of people I esteem and respect in the field of ideas/politics/philosophy oppose Trump so this makes it pretty easy for me to conclude that his supporters are the ones with faulty judgement.)

An additional dimension is that 'democracy is in peril' is not only about elections. It's also about the ability of ideas to face off against one another in a somewhat mutually comprehended arena. Trump and/or his followers endanger this because they have special abilities to believe in lies (and I do see this as a collective and advantageous 'ability' rather than simply a failing). Of course people in this forum just think Dems lie more cunningly, whereas Trump's birtherism or election-denying is to them more honest, because less legalistic and more bald-faced. So again, I am not going to try to provide evidence, but this is the gist of my case.

I think we have plenty of evidence that Trump admires dictators and wants to become one and will work towards becoming one.

So why didn't he become a dictator during the first four years he was president? I've never heard a good response to this one. He was already president for four years, and yet we still have democracy. He's a known quantity.

Now it's very interesting that at least lots of his voters appear to either not mind this, or to see something else in him, and does this fact give me pause? Sometimes, but ultimately 99% of people I esteem and respect in the field of ideas/politics/philosophy oppose Trump so this makes it pretty easy for me to conclude that his supporters are the ones with faulty judgement.

Consider the following: I am a Trump supporter. Based on the above, I presume that you would thereby see my judgement as faulty. But the feeling is not mutual. I don't see your judgement to oppose Trump as incorrect; I just think you're a different type of person than me and you have different values, so of course you would think differently. You see me as faulty, whereas I just see you as different; and difference is not in itself a bad thing. Does this fact give you any pause?

An additional dimension is that 'democracy is in peril' is not only about elections. It's also about the ability of ideas to face off against one another in a somewhat mutually comprehended arena.

I think the left has had a profoundly more deleterious effect on intellectual discourse over the past 10+ years than anything Trump has ever done.

Of course people in this forum just think Dems lie more cunningly

I don't think the left is bad because they lie. In fact I don't think of them as being particularly untruthful at all, not anymore than the right is anyway. If I had to enumerate all my complaints with them, "lying" would not make the list. Rather, I think they're bad first and foremost because they can't tolerate dissent.

So why didn't he become a dictator during the first four years he was president? I've never heard a good response to this one.

Because his plot to overturn the 2020 election failed? Since the DoJ slow-walked the investigations, he's had four years to consolidate power and will have another four years before another presidential election. I don't see why the Republicans (probably not Trump, given his age, but who knows?) wouldn't try again or why anyone would be sure they'd fail.

Because his plot to overturn the 2020 election failed?

I feel like that just goes one level deeper (insert Inception fog horn here), because not everyone agrees that such a plot existed to begin with.

The DOJ did not slow-walk their investigation into 2020 voter fraud; Bill Barr actually moved sufficiently faster than normal that it was, at the time, reasonable to consider this evidence of political pressure campaigns on the DOJ which called their impartiality into question.

I still think that the circumstance the investigations appear to have found nothing is only strong evidence of the investigation not having been conducted properly - based on my understanding of US election and vote-counting procedures I would estimate the probability of there being no voter fraud in any national election at a single-digit percentage (3%, maybe, with the probability mass dominated by scenarios in which I systematically underestimate the checks and balances?). It's just that I would expect fraud to exist benefitting either side (P(fraud only for one party|fraud) is low), and don't have a strong prior as to which side benefits from it more in a given election. My expectation is that the "investigating bodies" know that any truthful answer takes the form "we found abundant evidence of fraud, but no evidence that the number of fraudulent votes each party got isn't basically roughly the same", but they do not believe that making this common knowledge is something that the American electoral system could survive.

So why didn't he become a dictator during the first four years he was president? I've never heard a good response to this one. He was already president for four years, and yet we still have democracy. He's a known quantity.

A couple of things to this:

(1) It's hard to become a dictator in the US, would be one huge reason. When people are worried he's going to 'become a dictator' there are a lot of steps that would need to happen, only some of which he has any control over. The right war, the right resistance, the right economic resentments etc. He's not likely to declare himself dictator against the popular will, it's far more likely he'd subvert normal democratic norms and processes by consent. (2) When people find Trump's dictator-forward attitudes alarming, it's not only because they think there is a practical danger of him subverting democracy. It's that it feels like an offence against the office, akin to having a new vicar appointed who is loudly atheist. (Which actually I would like, but you get the analogy.)

Based on the above, I presume that you would thereby see my judgement as faulty. But the feeling is not mutual. I don't see your judgement to oppose Trump as incorrect; I just think you're a different type of person than me and you have different values, so of course you would think differently. You see me as faulty, whereas I just see you as different; and difference is not in itself a bad thing. Does this fact give you any pause?

I mean, yeah, correct, this is one difference between right and left. A huge part of the pain of this election is (a) feeling a degree of judgement towards the electorate, but then also (b) feeling terrible about this because it seems to confirm the right's stereotypes of the left as being judgemental.

I think the right's self image of being very tolerant of different opinions is massively exaggerated though: there are tonnes of people on the right who absolutely revel in liberal tears and obviously loathe their political opponents. You say you just see me as different but in the end our ideas are probably incommensurate so if you are going to impose your beliefs on mine (as is the right of those who win elections), how do you feel okay about it if you don't think your ideas are superior but just different? Do you just see it as a valid exercise of your tastes?

It's hard to become a dictator in the US, would be one huge reason. When people are worried he's going to 'become a dictator' there are a lot of steps that would need to happen, only some of which he has any control over.

Sure. But it seems like this is just bolstering my case. Yes, it is hard to turn the US into a dictatorship. That's why he wasn't able to do it in his first four years. We can extrapolate that he probably won't do it in his second four years either.

I think the right's self image of being very tolerant of different opinions is massively exaggerated though

I don't disagree. Especially if we take a broad historical view. Going back not only through the religious right of the 80s and 90s, but going all the way back, through the centuries of western political thought; if we polled most people who could at all be classified as "rightist" throughout history, "tolerance of dissent" would probably not rank highly as a political virtue for most of them. And the right is no stranger to moral judgement and condemnation, certainly. I don't deny any of that.

Ultimately the only person I can speak for is myself. The views I have expressed here are not universal among "my side", although they are not wholly unique to me either.

The terms "left" and "right", although convenient, may not be the most accurate terms for our current political context. Perhaps "woke" and "anti-woke" might be better?

there are tonnes of people on the right who absolutely revel in liberal tears and obviously loathe their political opponents.

Oh sure. Some amount of animus towards your political opponents is natural and unavoidable. I get angry at people, I find myself wondering why they have to be such NPCs. But I think all of that is still importantly different from thinking that your opponents are evil. Evil is harder to come back from; there's less chance of redemption. It seems unclear how one could sincerely wish for there to be any space for "evil" to flourish in the world. If possible, I'd like for my opponents to have a space in the world where they can be happy and live their lives according to the principles they believe in. I just want them to do it away from me.

You say you just see me as different but in the end our ideas are probably incommensurate so if you are going to impose your beliefs on mine (as is the right of those who win elections), how do you feel okay about it if you don't think your ideas are superior but just different?

I don't think there's much that can be said in the abstract here without a concrete example to work through (what am I imposing on you, by what mechanism, etc).

The right war, the right resistance, the right economic resentments etc

The right pandemic that resulted in people's rights being infringed upon all across the world?
I think if Trump didn't use covid to significantly expand his personal powers, he's pretty harmless.

I don't see how covid presented much of an opportunity for Trump to cement his power. It was a hot potato he had to handle and made life more difficult for him.

Why not? It was an emergency that people were willing to give up their individual liberties for. It'd be easy for a dictator to pull a Palpatine and grant himself emergency powers to do all types of mischief.

But if opportunities to take more power come along or can be engineered he won't hesitate to seize them

Is Covid not dispositive here?

I agree that Trump is uniquely brazen (because that is the only kind of opponent that is immune to the "every Republican candidate is a racist misogynist" gambit, at least at the moment) and uniquely dismissive of the rules of decorum (because they have been weaponised against him and his platform). He may be in the 80th percentile for narcissism among top politicians but there are certainly others who surpass him. Is he uniquely powerhungry? I do not actually think so. And if we are taking all of these flaws into account, we also have to look at others: he is rather lazy and disorganized and doesn't actually like governing. And his narcissism also means he has a lot of turnover and has trouble keeping competent people around him. That makes the Orange Reich rather less likely.

And then we are in the sad position that the question we face is "is Trump a threat to democracy?" but rather "of the available options, is Trump the greatest threat to democracy?". The latter question is much, much harder to decide, given the mask-slip Trump induced in his political enemies.

As I’ve said before- ‘mos maiorum oppugnatus est ait Sulla et veritatem Dixit.’

In other words, democracy really is crumbling, but the people screeching about it do not have clean hands. Trying to jail Trump on pissant charges with legal theories that haven’t been used before after what should have been counted as a hung jury is just transparently a political operation, the sort of thing we see in second world hybrid regimes. Etc, etc.

Trump’s not a saint either, but democrats have actually declared their intent to do the things which hybrid regimes do, just the same. I back the potential illiberal democracy which stands up for the interests of social conservatives(no, not socially conservative interests, the interests of social conservatives), and not the one which announces its intent to persecute us. C’est la vie.

In other words, democracy really is crumbling, but the people screeching about it do not have clean hands

Worse, they are the primary perpetrators.

My policy right now is I'm giving EVERYONE a week-long pass/reprieve where they can grieve and/or celebrate. So one more day.

After that, anyone still acting unhinged OR still spiking the football rather than working on their goals for the future is getting muted. If they antagonize me directly, they're getting blocked, at least for a while.

I did learn from the past 8 years that my own personal mental health is better preserved when I'm not exposed too much to the screeching insanity from either side. Hence why I spend my time here rather than Reddit.

I've already started the process of muting all the most intolerable of the pundits and influencers. They will keep doing their shtick regardless, and its no longer amusing to have to hear the same doomsday prognostications, or useless chest-thumping. These are not serious people.

My goal for the next four years: Just fucking build stuff. The uncertainty of the election is gone, the Red Tribe is ascendant, the left is going to act in a very predictable way going forward. No reason to let them alter my plans and actions one iota.

What your take on Richard Hanania I can't tell if he's useful signal or bloated hot air. Mostly I'm not a fan, I find him pompous, aggressive and mostly without anything interesting to say....but maybe I'm missing something? Smart people seem to respect him. EDIT: I ask because I think he might be in that intolerable pundit's and influencers class but don't want to miss signal if it's there.

Hmmm...

I think that there's a group of 'public intellectuals' that includes Hanania, Matt Yglesias, Noah Smith, Jesse Singal, and a few others, who have crammed themselves into a microniche of the influencer ecosystem where they play the same ragebait game as everyone else, but have the wherewithal to couch it in enough rhetorical flourish and data that they can maintain reputation as 'serious' intellectuals who are worth listening to even among the more respectable circles of discourse. They're basically squeezed in right beneath The Atlantic but above, say, Vice covering angles that are a bit too speculative for real news but never so lowbrow that they can't be discussed in polite company.

Their persona is basically "haha I agree with 95% of what [ideology] says, but on these specific issues I vehemently disagree and will vigorously bang the drum of dissent, bet you never expected that!" (Being FAIR, Ben Shapiro was also like this, but he's made the big time so he doesn't have to rely on this any more)

Hanania is very much a right-leaning mirror of Yglesias. He has high verbal IQ and is versed in the esoteric and counterintuitive arguments that were born from the neoreactionary movement, but makes himself out to be the moderate and rational alternative to said neoreactionaries.

I also think he doesn't have much interesting to say. His shtick seems to be "here's some piece of data or a study result that seems to contradict a particular right wing narrative, I hereby declare that narrative debunked!" Here's an example. "Haha, I found some data that vaguely disagrees with your point! How's it feel to be WRONG?" Then he gets dunked on but he achieved his goal of gaining attention.

And he isolates that data from almost any and all surrounding context so that the interlocutor is forced to introduce the necessary informational context which he can either ignore, or attack narrowly "that doesn't refute MY data!" even though the whole issue is HIS data, in context, doesn't really refute anything. Or, if he wishes, put on a layer of irony and claim he wasn't making his claim seriously anyway, you rube.

In short, they all like to pull 'micro' motte-baileys where they never make any serious claim that can be pinned down and destroyed, they stick their toe in the Bailey enough to garner some outrage but no so far that they can't defend the claim with some artful rhetoric.

I think their grift mode is to state some superficially fallacious contrarian argument, then claim that they'll address all critiques and counterarguments in their longer substack essay, which once you pay to access it and read it, you realize it is just a wordier version of the same arguments but then they have your money.

So they're just selling newsletters via particularly skilled trolling, if you will.

Side note, just to add to my earlier gripes about Noah Smith, here's him botching another prediction/analysis about topics he really doesn't grasp.

Interesting...I agree with your assessment of all the people you mention with the possible exception of Jesse Singal, who seems like he may actually have some journalist chops. Just today Yglesias was had a post "something something media loves Trump" and I knew exactly what it was going to say before I read it. I read a third of it and shrugged. At least he's not offensive and rude? Hannananinana seems to delight in being a scoundrel to some extent and that turns me off. I watched some live video with him and Michael Tracy and jsut got too bored to keep watching. (I think Tracy is interesting FWIW).

Anyway, it's nice to test my perceptions against others, so thanks!

Jesse Singal is a little more... earnest than the others but you begin to notice that he critiques the left but never actually takes the obvious implications of all those critiques.

My personal social circle is unhappy and distressed and posting lots of doomer posts, but mostly sane. They think the world is going to suck with Trump in charge, but they aren't threatening to leave the country or start underground railroads or join the 4B movement.

Online, it's hard to tell to what degree all the cataclysmic tweets and videos from leftists melting down hysterically and screaming that we're going to enter an era of plantation slavery and the Handmaid's Tale are nutpicking (the reason LibsOfTikTok is so popular is that Millenials and Zoomers so freely provide so much content) and to what degree they reflect a genuine widespread sentiment.

Online, it's hard to tell to what degree all the cataclysmic tweets and videos from leftists melting down hysterically and screaming that we're going to enter an era of plantation slavery and the Handmaid's Tale are nutpicking (the reason LibsOfTikTok is so popular is that Millenials and Zoomers so freely provide so much content) and to what degree they reflect a genuine widespread sentiment.

I know that Tumblr is very far from a representative sample, but the histrionic posts coming across my dash thanks to the #politics tag have been plentiful enough to exceed mere "nutpicking."

Well, "very far from a representative sample" indeed. If there is anywhere that I would expect 90% of the posts to be hysterical meltdowns, it's Tumblr.

Incidentally I'm kind of amazed that the word 'hysterical' hasn't gotten y'alled yet.

Likewise to @Amadan, I don't concretely know what "y'alled" means, but I'm assuming that you mean to express surprise that it's still acceptable to say "hysterical" given its origin.

I'll say, you're not allowed to say "hysterical" in the circles I run in without getting at least a remark about how we shouldn't use gendered and/or historically sexist/misogynistic language.

The thing is, 'hysterical' first and foremost described a gendered pattern of behavior. It's called what it is because women are much more prone to it than men, and always have been. So its 'origin' isn't even the problem, I think. And I think it's funny that people (not necessarily you) would have become so blinded to the realities of psychological and behavioral differences between the sexes that they'd parse 'hysterical' as not having anything to do with women except incidentally in its origin.

It's called what it is because women are much more prone to it than men, and always have been.

Citation? You're making a factual claim that it's significantly more common in one sex here, not about how masculine/feminine the behavior is

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/its-catching/201703/why-are-females-prone-to-mass-hysteria

But honestly I'm at a loss as to how anyone could be so, uh, sheltered from the realities of differences between men and women that they'd ask for a citation. It's like asking whether boys or girls are more likely to throw knives at stuff for fun, and then demanding a citation when someone gives the obvious answer. There's a screamingly-loud pattern here that I'd think one has to be either extremely autistic or intensively propagandized in order to miss.

You're making a factual claim that it's significantly more common in one sex here, not about how masculine/feminine the behavior is

What a baffling statement.

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I'm certainly aware of the word's origins and why feminists object to it.

Whether or not hysteria is something women are more naturally susceptible to, though, I have seen enough hysterical men not to consider it to be a female-specific thing.

Yes; men can also behave in feminine ways. This doesn't make those behaviors masculine.

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I'm not sure what "y'alled" means. Is this a reference to some feminists saying it's a "gendered" insult?

Reddit mods locking threads and deleting posts of wrongthink because "y'all can't control yourselves".

TitaniumButterfly wonders why 'hysterical' is not being treated like 'retarded'.

It's /r/drama slang. Reddit mods saying "ya'll can't behave" before locking a thread/banning users turned discussion being shutdown into "getting yall'ed".

I'm not sure what "y'alled" means.

It's a reference to such sentiments as "Instead of saying 'you guys', which is etc., try something like 'y'all!'" A typical example of a larger pattern.

I'm pretty sure it's a reference to Reddit moderators locking a thread with a stock phrase like "y'all can't behave".

"Instead of saying 'you guys', which is etc., try something like 'y'all!'"

Oy. I do that at work all the time. I'm actually afraid to say "you guys" anymore.

This change is really weird to me, as someone from the heart of “you guys” territory. I had a lot of progressive friends in school who always said “you guys.” They didn’t think of it, it was just what people said, not something anyone needed to police.

They also weren’t the wokest of the woke I knew, so maybe the others were into it.

But if we’re going to pick a gender-neutral plural you, I nominate “you’uns”.

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My Dad said y'all. My Grandpa said y'all. His father probably said y'all.

I hope one day you may be find the courage and fortitude to return to "you guys", but in the mean time I'm giving you your y'all pass. No longer should you feel like a y'all carpet bagger. Y'all away. Y'all freely. Y'all without any shame, consideration, or fear.

Progressives want to claim it for themselves. Edgelords want to re-re-code it into oblivion. They can come and take it.

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Personally this is starting to make me want future Democrat wins, but not because I believe in the Democrats. If the dems win, my life mostly stays the same. If the Republicans win, my life gets worse just because people around me can't deal with it.

See also: Danegeld, negotiating with terrorists

I'm not seeing it personally. I even logged onto Facebook for the first time in ages and people seem to be posting about normal people stuff not politics.

I've encountered no wailing or gnashing or teeth or insane behavior.

But it's likely that TikTok is deliberately pushing that angle.

Facebook

TikTok

Try spending some time on Tumblr. Given the stereotype of your average Tumblrina, the responses have been exactly what you'd expect. Hundreds of thousands of women are going to die of miscarriages each year, and hundreds of thousands more are going to kill themselves to avoid being forced to give birth after being raped by their uncles. Latinx are going to be rounded up into death camps and mass-murdered. The "fascist Supreme court" is going to "overturn Brown v. Board and the entire 14th amendment" (Yes, those are literally from a post I saw.) Some claim the 13th amendment is getting repealed.

I didn’t even know that Tumblr still exists! I thought it died after Yahoo bought it and they banned porn.

Imagine the sort of Tumblr's who would stay on Tumblr without porn.

Well, just on current Tumblr-ites that also frequent this forum, there's at least me and@mitigatedchaos.

And I approve! It was meant to be a joke, but I realize now it might have seemed a bit mean-spirited, which I apologize for.

It's actually as short as it is because I cut off a bit of a nerd spiel. One of my favored commentators for analyzing video games (specifically Elden Ring) was- for some unfathomable reason- only posting on Tumblr. It was just that level of 'niche access' and 'you have to really be dedicated to this topic' that I now associated with Tumblr, for its highs and its lows.

Could you provide a link/direction to said Tumblr? You posted an in-depth examination of the Ring Cycle/Elden Ring relation a while ago and I have been fascinated by the level of thought hidden away ever since, given that I almost entirely missed your interpretation of Ranni's storyline. I've been wanting to know more ever since.

The Tumblr person for EldenRing is @yournextflame.

I don't remember if they had anything about the Ring Cycle in their pieces- that was me just being more familiar with the director and the material- but they have some great cross-cultural insight into the Japanese language/connotation/cultural context that doesn't always translate to the English fandom.

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And me. I enjoy pretty pictures, birds, and occasional completely unhinged fandom takes. Compared to Twitter, I find it quite peaceful, and there's far less obnoxious political posts to scroll back, either supporting or in opposition to my views.

But I also can't bring myself to really take these people's fears seriously, since I do feel like this chicken little routine happens every time a Republican gets elected (from my limited experience), without the Republicans even doing anything that bad.

Ask them what tangible thing they predict and what concrete plans they have to mitigate it. Worked wonders the last time around when the "Trump (2016) is going to put the gays in camps!" hysteria was all the rage. You can even feign ignorance if that's more up your alley.

To be fair, I did a gentler version of this with my now-ex and she said he was going to repeal Roe and the ACA. I told her there was no way they'd get Roe past the supreme court, and, well, we had insurance through work so the ACA wouldn't hit us. She ended up being fairly accurate...

I mostly just brag about how much money my portfolio is making. Oh? You believed all those economist that said the economy would be devastated if Trump won? Again?!

I'm already up $100,000 on my fairly modest holdings, and it's been less than a week. At the rate we're going I might retire early in 4 years.

Instead of gloating and waging the culture war, please be better and have some empathy for those who have been facing mental health struggles with the outcome of an election that impacts the lives of millions of Americans, especially women and minorities.

For example, I’ve been in a real dark place since Wednesday.

The aftermath of the election exacerbated the situation I was already facing due to this market bull run since 2023, where my leveraged equity ETF allocation has grown far too quickly. My effective leverage ratio is far higher than I would like.

I’ve already exhausted my rebalancing options in tax-advantaged accounts. Selling to further rebalance in non-tax-advantaged accounts would result in substantial realized capital gains that would reduce my accumulated capital losses from 2022 and prior. My net worth to income ratio is such that I’d be unable to make a material dent in this with future income for at least several months. Why don’t I just make more money; am I stupid?

I’ve been buying short-term US treasury ETFs with newly earned income to try and reduce my leverage ratio (buying vanilla unleveraged equity ETFs reduces my leverage ratio too slowly). However, this feelsbadman: I’m earning the risk-free on the treasuries, while paying risk-free plus a presumed spread and a management fee on the leveraged ETFs (which tends to be hefty for leveraged ETFs).

How could Trump-voters do this to me?

I thought the stock market would go down if Trump won, so I was holding my money to buy stock after the election. Now the market is at an all-time high, so I'd feel dumb to buy now. Serves me right for listening to the media, I guess.

My existing portfolio is doing great, though.

I'm KICKING myself that I didn't think to slide more money into $TSLA in the leadup to the election.

It was obvious that a Trump win would benefit Elon directly and bounce Tesla higher. It's up over 40% since the election.

I didn't even do anything different, because I'm not a reactionary investor. I just let everything I normally do ride. Granted, I have significant holdings of BTC, COIN and NVDA, and BTC and COIN seem to be directly benefiting from Trump optimism. But even my safer index funds and blue chip stocks have done fantastic this week.

I had money on Ted Cruz winning, and I otherwise decided to let things ride, which has paid off too thus far.

But I'm also selling off the last of my Crypto holdings for the time being because I STRONGLY suspect the current leap is overoptimistic, and it'll correct by or before January. For reference, I originally bought a (small) position in Bitcoin in 2014.

Ultimately yeah. I avoid reacting to any one event. But there are still times when I wish I had been bolder on certain moves.

It's hard to imagine an administration as hostile to Crypto as the Biden admin with Gary Gensler. Trump could follow through on zero of his promises, and shit canning Gary would still be an enormous boon for crypto.

It still suffers from the problem of not having much you can do with it aside store it for the long term.

And ultimately that's why I'm pulling out, I got other things I want to do with the money.

These are the biggest things I've seen them be afraid about:

  1. women's reproductive health
  2. immigrants getting deported
  3. tariffs messing with the economy, and in some cases their actual jobs
  4. losing health insurance and getting stuck with large bills

"Women's reproductive health" paired with "threat to our democracy" were the core planks of the Harris campaign and she lost on them because they didn't hold up to reality.

Anyone who ranks those two "issues" as their top two is not seriously engaged with reality. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that. They probably function well in a day-to-day sense (hygiene, going to work, performing chores etc.) but their comprehension of American Federal and Constitutional Law, geopolitical realities, cultural currents, and a theory-of-mind for about 70m other Americans is zero.

I see a lot of political campaigning - "messaging" - as starting with a true but boring premise and then stacking a lot of vibes on top of it. Harris' true messaging core was "I am not Trump." This is plainly and obviously correct. But "I'm not the other candidate" isn't actually a campaign strategy, so you have to build something more substantial on top of it - or do you?

The Harris campaign decided to layer vibes-on-vibes. Abortion is now a loser of a topic because American's are (1) Very self-contradictory on how they feel about it and (2) As exit polls showed, American's are able to separate candidate-from-issue in regards to abortion. Trump won Missouri, and Missouri based state abortion protections.

The "threat to our democracy" narrative is a different loser. For those on the fence, it comes across as histrionic, overwrought, and hyperbolic. You can play doom-edited videos of January 6th all you want but the fact of the matter is it's old hat. It also begs the question - if Trump is such a threat to democracy are you, Kamala Harris, advocating for vigilante justice should you lose? Will you actually organize an armed resistance of some sort. No no, of course not. Peaceful transition of power and all that. For your own supports, it creates a sense of mission where the stakes are too high. If I'm a Harris support (haha, it's fun to laugh) and I truly believe the "threat to democracy" line ... how can I even have a conversation with a Trump supporter or someone still deciding?

So, if these are loser issues, why make them platform planks? Because a lot of politics comes down to ingroup / outgroup and it's easy to default to ingroup sloganeering and vibes. Much like the Hillary campaign, 50% of the Harris defeat is on the fact that she ran a dogshit campaign and made the worst VP pick in history (Sarah Palin no longer GOAT'ed). I'm starting to see some stories that Shapiro said no to Harris and not the other way around ("We didn't break up, I dumped you!") but I consider this to be ex post facto spinning.

But then again, I'm probably wrong. Trump's across the board win - Electoral, Popular, house, senate - paired with 95% (approx) of American counties drifting right compared to 2020 really does mean this is a realignment.

It also begs the question - if Trump is such a threat to democracy are you, Kamala Harris, advocating for vigilante justice should you lose? Will you actually organize an armed resistance of some sort. No no, of course not. Peaceful transition of power and all that.

I'm not sure why this begs that question. Thinking that Trump is a threat to democracy as well as that responding to his victory via armed resistance would be an even bigger threat to democracy are both compatible positions to hold.

women's reproductive health

I never understood what people think the mechanism is that connects the re-election of Trump with worse access to abortion than is present in the status quo. These are the only things I can think of:

  • Going after interstate abortion tourism (unlikely that the agencies play ball, but at least that's a realistic fear)
  • Preventing the SCOTUS from being flipped back which ices any plans to conjure a new legal theory of why there is a constitutional right to abortion, actually
  • In the same vein, installing pro-life judges further up the pipeline
  • A federal abortion ban (not going to happen)
  • Blocking efforts to introduce a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion (Dems had decades to try this, they didn't)

To steelman:

  • There's a Biden-era regulation holding EMTALA to cover abortion in emergency room case involving life or health of the mother, and under the supremacy clause, override states that ban abortion under those circumstances. A Trump administration is extremely likely to reduce this in scope to life or serious physical harm of the mother, if not rescind it wholesale.
  • While surgical interventions are almost entirely regulated at the state level, drugs are near-completely dominated by federal law. The Biden-era FDA took an unusually expansive approach toward availability of prescription abortificants (and some contraceptives), allowing levels of telemedicine and other issuance that was previously not accepted. I don't think a Trump admin cares about OTC birth control pills, but I think it both at least attempts to claw back things like the reading that states may not ban a drug that the FDA has permitted or the guidance that refusing to fill a reproductive health prescription is a violation of civil rights law.
  • The Comstock Act is still technically on the books, and while I don't think expansive interpretations focused on speech are likely to be used (and extremely unlikely to survive court scrutiny if used), there are a pretty wide variety of unenforced bits that would be highly sympathetic to bring to bear, and would make a lot of stuff that's illegal-but-you-can-do-it-anyway into hope you like federal prison if you attract the eye of sauron stuff.
  • Medi* funding is an absolute clusterfuck: by law, it's not supposed to support it, excepting a few cases where the spending is instead mandatory, but cash is fungible and there's a lot of places that aren't exactly great about paperwork. That's historically been papered over (largely because then-unsettled Constitutional law was a third rail), but if the Trump DoJ drops the Haim indictment and starts aggressively auditing or courting whistleblowers, even short of actual enforcement it will likely reduce availability as hospitals check their six consistently.
  • Direct defunding of groups like Planned Parenthood isn't possible without a law (and shouldn't be even with one, except the protections of the writs of attainder clause are pretty lackluster), but something like the ACORN path is possible, and there's questions about the extent regulation could create rules that had the same effect without needing a law. Even if new orgs grow in response, they will be disrupted in the meantime.
  • There's a lot of politics that's about building terrain for latter politics. There's a paranoid conspiracy theory about Project 2025 wanting a registry of every woman's pregnancy, but the actual policy proposal is :

Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion. In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion

And this is something that's not that objectionable, but it's also extremely likely to have a number of very unpleasant numbers reported by a government agency.

Great steelman, thanks! I am updating towards some of the panic being less unfounded than I previously thought.

Most people don’t know Jack about constitutional law. Many of them thought Roe was the only thing keeping abortion legal and that it would automatically become illegal everywhere the second it was overturned. They probably think Trump can and will ban abortion with an executive order.

A federal abortion ban (not going to happen)

I agree this almost certainly won't happen now because the margins in the Senate and House probably don't allow for it, but in the world in which Republicans made a more convincing sweep of both chambers it wasn't off the table, surely. Certainly, had a ban reached Trump's desk I doubt he'd have had the guts to defy most of the Republican party by vetoing it.

It really depends on whether Trump or the rest of the GOP is more willing to call the other’s bluff.

When I put it that way, you already know the answer. I suspect Trump would sign a 15 week abortion ban(he opposes late term abortions), but the Republican Party doesn’t defy trump well at all.

You can even feign ignorance if that's more up your alley.

Who's this Donald Trump guy? Wasn't he on the Apprentice or something?

As much as I hate remakes in most cases, I keep imagining a modern take on Back to the Future featuring a Cybertruck and an oblique reference like this to the "Who is the president in 1985?" "Ronald Reagan." "Ronald Reagan? The actor?" gag.

I've often dreaded the inevitable Back to the Future remake/reboot that Hollywood will jump on once the stubborn owners of the franchise die off. I just wonder how they'll manage the whole central plot line involving near-incest and a boy punching out another boy in order to protect a girl and win her heart.

Marty McFly will have to be a woman, likely black and gay/bi. Martina's equivalent-age father from the 90s being sexually aggressive towards her just isn't going to be as funny as the actual male Marty getting sexually assaulted by his equivalent-age mother from the 50s. Changing it to her mother could work for laughs and for the spectacle, but then the central plot being around getting her lesbian/bi/bi-curious mother to pair up with her father would probably not be acceptable to Hollywood.

a modern take on Back to the Future featuring a Cybertruck

"The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with a complete lack of style?"

You know, that actor who played the bad guy in Two Weeks Notice

I thought he was in "Home Alone 2"?

A civil war you say? In Spain?

I unironically think probably the best way to get people to drop the histrionics and making politics their primary identity is to just lead a happy life and flamboyantly feign ignorance of anything political. Oh, I didn't vote. Or, I voted Trump, because Biden banned abortion.

You can't reason people out of something they didn't reason themselves into.

My in laws are out of their damned minds. I saw a support thread for the subreddit in the region I moved away from. There was a thread where ladies were trying to find places to get their tubes tied.

I moved to a much more culturally tolerable area almost 4 years ago now. It's improved my quality of life by magnitudes. I highly recommend it. The private school we send our daughter to still has a lot of far lefties, because private school. But most people we run into, or other parents we meet at the park, are very culturally aligned with us.

I don't know how to deprogram people who uncritically believe every Democrat hoax from the last 8 years. They're in too deep at this point. My FIL was compulsively going off about how all the corporatist and oligarchs won, totally ignorant to the fact that Harris was the big money candidate with the most corporations and oligarchs behind her.

Ditto on the 'moved out of a blue bubble' to a mixed area. It's remarkable how much chiller and more functional everything seems to be. I was just at my kid's Veteran's day pageant. Never once in my older child's school career (in Oak Park, IL) did they ever do anything Veteran related I ever knew about.

Anyway...that's the way Amerca works best: conservatives and liberals in neighborly competition trying to make difficult things work. I couldn't see it from within the Blue Bubble of Chicago.

My in laws are out of their damned minds. I saw a support thread for the subreddit in the region I moved away from. There was a thread where ladies were trying to find places to get their tubes tied.

There is this infamous evolutionary just-so story from the manosphere days of yore titled War Brides. It is almost a 100% conjecture and goes like this:

Women possessing a more pronounced empathic capacity undoubtedly served our species in nurturing young and understanding tribal social dynamics, however it was also a liability with regards to a hostile change in her environment. Stockholm Syndrome is far more pronounced in female captives (the story of Jaycee Duguard comes to mind), why should that be? Because women’s peripheral environment dictated the need to develop psychological mechanisms to help them survive. It was the women who could make that emotional disconnect when the circumstances necessitated it who survived and lived to breed when their tribe was decimated by a superior force. This is also known as the War Bride dynamic; women develop an empathy with their conquerors by necessity.

Preposterous, right? And yet I cannot prevent me from thinking about this whenever I read another hysterical article about female Western journalists trying to make the 4b movement (essentially a Lysistrata-style boycott on sex and child bearing) happen in the West. Add to that a couple of social media posts about "not even my very progressive husband getting any for a long time" and a haphazard conclusion presents itself:

In the face of defeat, which woman in her right mind would mate with a member of the losing tribe?

From that NPR link on 4b:

It calls for the refusal of dating men (biyeonae), sexual relationships with men (bisekseu), heterosexual marriage (bihon) and childbirth (bichulsan).

Koreans didn't have a word for sex until the West brought them one?!

I think it just doesn't sound right otherwise. To match with the other terms, they need something that is short and not ambiguous. The standard term for the act of sex (sexual relations) is three syllables. They could shorten it to two, but then it would just mean "relationship".

There are also taboos about talking about sex, where even the common euphemisms and clinical terms are not uttered much in public. I guess using the English loanword is the most socially acceptable way to specify "act of sex" in print.

Also radfems seem to get their craziest ideas from their academic connections to the anglosphere, so they use loanwords more than the general public.

Don't know how it happened in Korea, but a lot European countries ended up borrowing it too. The native word for sex often feels (extremely) vulgar, and the non-vulgar alternatives are either vague euphemisms, clinical multi-word phrases or compound words in languages like German. "Sex" by comparison is pretty handy - short and neutral.

Also seems to be a thing in Japan, if some media is to be taken as representative.

Interestingly (to me) another euphemism for sex is etchi or エッチ　which is itself the pronunciation of the letter H, which in turn is a representation of the romanization of the word 変態 (hentai or perversion).

The term's arduous journey softens the tone from the original hentai meaning--エッチ really just is a noun for sexual intercourse --but it's one of those weird words in Japanese.

There is a term 性行為 or sēkoi which means sex, but it's a clinical term (think "intercourse"). Sēi means sex or gender, koi means "deed" or "behavior."

In the face of defeat, which woman in her right mind would mate with a member of the losing tribe?

Given that, which man in his right mind would remain a member of the losing tribe, if he had the option of converting? The bulk of the Afghan National Army could figure out the answer to that one, why not Western men?

If Trump keeps on winning so much that his fans become tired of winning AND if men living in larger cities can keep prestige employment while not swearing fealty to Woke Inc., it's reasonable to assume that we will see an even larger shift in the political realignment of men than the one we observe now.

If Trump keeps on winning so much

What has Trump actually won, really? What makes people — on both sides — think he's going to be any more "in charge" of the executive branch than Biden currently is?

I don't think he has. He has the track record of an unusually ineffective administrator.

But this is about perception and status. It's about who won the popularity contest, not about who's in charge of the bureau of boringness.

if men living in larger cities can keep prestige employment while not swearing fealty to Woke Inc.

They can borrow a page from Islam, and engage in taqiyya.

taqiyya

You say that as if it isn't already widespread practice.

(lays finger alongside nose)

Thanks for the reminder to rewatch The Sting.

There was a thread where ladies were trying to find places to get their tubes tied

Take that, conservatives?

I do not know why there’s a progressive idea that pro-life laws exist to boost the white fertility rate by controlling women(no reasonable person thinks that they do this- pro-life advocates are well aware of the color of the women getting abortions). But it seems like they literally actually believe this?

Of course being a sterile woman is not a good idea if the based patriarchy actually comes about.

I do not know why there’s a progressive idea that pro-life laws exist to boost the white fertility rate by controlling women(no reasonable person thinks that they do this- pro-life advocates are well aware of the color of the women getting abortions). But it seems like they literally actually believe this?

I think some of this is a failure of theory of mind. I mean, I've seen plenty of examples, across both political and cultural divides, of people going "those people can't possibly believe what they say is their reason for doing this thing, so I need to figure out what their actual reason is." Nobody could actually believe a fetus is a human life, so therefore the pro-lifers must have some other, real reason for wanting to ban abortion, therefore…

Or an exchange about Hispanic votes in the election, which went something like:

L: how could so many Latinx voters vote for someone who wants to deport them

R: You know Hispanic voters are citizens, right? And it's illegal immigrants the Republicans want to deport?

L: Everyone knows that when the Republicans talk about "illegals," they don't actually mean undocumented migrants, they mean Latinx.

R: Really?

L: Yeah, nobody actually cares about immigrants' legal status, so when Republicans use the term "illegal immigrant," it's just a racist dogwhistle.

Or the Native woman I stood in line behind at the welfare office about a decade ago and the half of her cellphone conversation I overheard, about her brother's legal trouble and about how, even if white people believe plenty of stuff, not even they could actually believe the theory upon which her brother was being charged, and that clearly they're just pretending so as to add further humiliation when locking up innocent Native men.

Nobody could actually believe a fetus is a human life, so therefore the pro-lifers must have some other, real reason for wanting to ban abortion, therefore…

I mean, we can observe pro-lifers and find that many of them seem to value "enforced monogamy" a lot, but "lives for the sake of lives" not so much, and infer their actual motivation for banning abortion from that.

Based on how pro-lifers talk, I can see clearly how pro-choicers believe the conservatives don't care about the babies, they just want them to "take responsibility" and "not have casual sex".

Sure, it's not just "lives for the sake of lives", the child's innocence of any wrongdoing also enters the picture. Responsibility and the wisdom of having casual sex is mostly orthogonal to this issue.

I mean, calling them Latinx also didn’t help the democrats. I’m really not surprised that someone who used that term unironically has no theory of mind of Hispanics(or anyone else- ‘we’re inventing a new and difficult to pronounce term for you because you might be transgender’ is, uh, not a way to appeal to blue collar people. And yes, that -nks sound is quite difficult for a native Spanish speaker to pronounce, just like those Russian and German consonant clusters are to Americans.)

The native woman also doesn’t shock me; people tend to take personal tragedies as so obviously unjust that they’re evidence of malice from whoever imposed them.

It’s the whole white nationalist plot to enslave women that seems strange to believe. I can get my head around a few people in ivory towers believing unevidenced things that can plausibly be connected to some real rhetoric(there are people who will cite demographic change as a reason to oppose immigration, and great replacement theory is really a thing that republicans believe). But white nationalists tend to be mostly aware that the women seeking abortions are fairly black- and everyone else is too. It just seems strange.

The native woman also doesn’t shock me; people tend to take personal tragedies as so obviously unjust that they’re evidence of malice from whoever imposed them.

In that example, the thing that was so stupid not even white people could believe it? Well, she said things like "they'd been kissing," "she went into his bedroom," and that "everyone knows what happens after that" and that no human being on Earth could possibly believe a woman gets to "back out" once she's gone that far with a man, so charging him with sexual assault is just the White Man dunking on another innocent Native with a patently bogus "crime."

and everyone else is too.

That doesn't actually fit my experience. The times I've talked IRL to left-wingers of my acquaintance, they've been rather ignorant of the racial breakdown of abortion in America, and rather surprised when I've introduced them to the stats.

that no human being on Earth could possibly believe a woman gets to "back out" once she's gone that far with a man,

Really not difficult to believe someone could think the current conception of consent is fantastical and ridiculous. I 100% believe that woman had the right to back out at the last minute, but that right was granted by man, not nature. Some primitives finding it shocking isn’t a surprise, especially when they’re closely related to the man in trouble for it.

That doesn't actually fit my experience. The times I've talked IRL to left-wingers of my acquaintance, they've been rather ignorant of the racial breakdown of abortion in America, and rather surprised when I've introduced them to the stats.

Hmm. You seem to know more progressives than I do, although it seems like common knowledge.

Yeah, the Republican women in my life are having the same sort of confused reaction, going “wait, they think that them choosing not to have unprotected sex is some kind of strike against the pro-life movement?”

But the framing is that the point behind pro-life advocacy is the goal of controlling and impregnating women. Fuentes and the teenage boys doing teenage boy things aren’t helping. But the fact that there’s a significant part of the population that’s going “wow, Fuentes is really showing us what the right is really like” instead of realizing he’s a shock jock provocateur who’s intentionally trying to troll indicates just how ingrained this interpretation is on the left.

Personally this is starting to make me want future Democrat wins, but not because I believe in the Democrats. If the dems win, my life mostly stays the same. If the Republicans win, my life gets worse just because people around me can't deal with it.

That's part of the point of all of this, a goal of those stirring it up.

100% this. It's social pressure designed to wear you down so you grudgingly accept the woke madness America voted to unshackle itself from. You won and you have a mandate, act like it.

You won and you have a mandate

"Won" a bunch of figurehead offices with little-to-no power over the vast Permanent Bureaucracy (and associated institutions) that actually rules.

They tried to kill him so obviously they consider him a threat to their power.

They

Who is "they" here? Are you claiming the attempted assassins were not random nutjobs, but agents of the Deep State?

I mean, maybe one can say that parts of the Secret Service seemed remarkably unconcerned should something happen to him under their "protection," but 'if someone should take him out for us, that would be good' ≠ 'we need to take this guy out'.

I mean, maybe one can say that parts of the Secret Service seemed remarkably unconcerned should something happen to him under their "protection," but 'if someone should take him out for us, that would be good' ≠ 'we need to take this guy out'.

too many weird issues with the situation and handling of it, to be just a lone wolf attack without institutional backing.

Yes, I believe the Deep State tried to have him killed. My first thought after Biden's disastrous debate performance was that they would attempt to do so. Way too much was at stake for them to not even attempt it.

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