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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31066 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Kissing the Ring.

The vibes of the Trump 2.0 Presidency are already shaping up to be a LOT different than Trump 1.0. How do I know? Here's a list of people that have given $1 million to Trump's inauguration party:

  • Mark Zuckerberg
  • Sam Altman
  • Jeff Bezos

Others are kissing the ring as well. Here's notable blowhard Mark Benioff.

Congratulations to President @realDonaldTrump on being named TIME Person of the Year 2024. This marks a time of great promise for our nation. We look forward to working together to advance American success and prosperity for everyone. May G-d bless the United States of America.

It's even a repost! He had to post it twice in case Donald missed the first one. Not sure what's up with the bizarre censorship of God to make it look like a swear word.

Eric Adams, mayor of New York, has also taken a surprise right turn recently, coming out with some very strong ant-immigrant rhetoric and cozying up to Trump as well.

In 2016, all the power hungry opportunists were on team #resistance. Now they seem to be jumping on the Trump bandwagon. Perhaps they are buying into the narrative (probably correct) that Trump can be co-opted with personal flattery. But to stay in his good graces, they'll need stay onsides while Musk and company go to work on reshaping our government. There's probably a brief window of opportunity for real change here before the inevitable backlash.

So who will kiss the ring next?

The act of defying Trump publicly was itself a form of ring-kissing. Lips were firmly planted on the O-ring of the presumed actual power brokers, the professional intelligensia of media academia and moneyed professionals that propped up the DEI establishment (its a real thing, I saw the contract for DEI consulting services my company had to engage in order to qualify for ESG benchmarks required to be part of fund portfolios). Trumps capture of the presidency was viewed as an aberration, a confluence of sexism and gerrymandering that caught the true powers off guard. The dominant calculus communicated by media was that Trump was a fluke, and the Resistance was just waiting in the wings to resume its rightful place over Trumps accidental reign.

Honestly, the left had a series of surprisingly good accidental victories from 2018 to 2022, allowing midterm senate correction, covid and Roe overreach to be conflated with the presumption that Trump was a spent force. The end of ZIRP cuts much of the fat that could be showered onto the DEI establishment that propped up the power of The Resistance. With that gone, the shadow of power of DEI has been exposed. Now there is a new ring needing to be kissed, and I do suspect it is less disgraceful for the likes of Altman and Zuckerberg to kiss Trumps ring than subject themselves to Joy Reids screeds.

Trump was a spent force

In a sense, is he not? Slim congressional majorities mean that, outside of the most conventional Republican priorities, he would seem to be limited to that which is exclusively within his competence. That would seem to largely restrict him to tariffs, which would be anathema to this very class of economic elites which find themselves reconciled at least in part to Trump, and foreign policy, which if it's anything like last time will consist of some vague populist signalling, and an occasional impulsive and out-of-range but ultimately minor decision like Soleimani or northern Syria, but no fundamental change. Maybe he pulls the rug from under Ukraine? But surely anything too drastic threatens to seriously damage Republican unity. It's all looking a bit like 2016 again - a major political triumph, but it's hard to see that, unless he really goes all in on tariffs (in which case his reputation will survive about as well as Messrs. Smoot, Hawley and Hoover) the country in 2028 looks any different than if, say, Marco Rubio had been in the White House.

Political inefficacy by not having a sweeping unassailable majority is not the win condition, because that is impossible. Focusing on stymieing tactics employed by adversaries is missing the forest for the trees: public official elections are mass referenda of the dominant social mores salient to the population.

The 2016 Resistance insisted that the electoral college was invalid as a referenda because the popular vote was the true means of judging who was actually representing the culture of the nation, as was the 2020 election contestations that sought to delegitimize the results as first principles. In both cases the politicians elected were crippled by the normal morass of government functioning, yet the Culture War - the very title of this forum thread - pays scant attention to inconsequential details like tax policy. Instead, conflict points of salience are debated on moral/intellectual or numbers grounds. No one actually cares about womens sports to care about trans women shitting up the sport, people care about trans women being an exploitation point for bad actors to claim moral unassailability.

The presumption of eventual victory is why Trump 2016 inspired so much more resistance than 2024. Losing the popular vote as well as the electoral college and frankly almost all other down ballots of note is as total a repudiation as can be. Isolated defeats such as prosecutor recalls, no matter how common, can be attributed to tactical failures. There is no intellectual motte to retreat to in this comprehensive defeat, no comforting fact to point at to disclaim the strength of the repudiation. Hell, this election even showed the relief army of minorities turning their banners and joining the enemy enthusiastically.

The democrats basked too long in the glow of Californias massive population inflating the moral merit of their positions. Republicans are used to being told "everyone hates you!", deservedly or not. Democrats have no similar experience, and their fall into infighting to lay claim over the scraps of their coalition is already happening for all to jeer at.

A $1 million donation and some obsequious praise for Trump, in exchange for Trump not going after Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act? Sounds like a pretty darn good return on investment.

I agree. But in 2016, doing this would have been seen as appeasing a literal fascist and was therefore outside the Overton window. At his low point, Trump's biggest supporter in the business world was the My Pillow guy.

Not sure what's up with the bizarre censorship of God to make it look like a swear word.

This is, IME, a habit of many Jews, and also some varieties of Protestant Christians, in line with the "thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain" commandment.

(And a quick check confirms that Benioff is indeed Jewish.)

But, in reply to your general point, I'd hold that this is all just "vibes," and vibes aren't terribly meaningful. I'll point primarily to Keith Edwards's "Delay, Leak, Disobey: How to Counter Trump 2.0 from Within," but also Yarvin's three pieces "It's easy from here," "It's not easy from here," and "Chevron and the professional Republicans," on why Trump's second term will not be much more successful than his first.

That Delay, Leak, Disobey article is amazing. “How to Betray Your Office in 5 Easy Steps”.

Not sure what's up with the bizarre censorship of God to make it look like a swear word.

Early life check? A Jew who was brought in by one of my religious ed teachers in high school to talk about biblical evidence for the ancient aliens theory(liberal Catholicism does bizarre shit like this constantly) did this and I now can't unsee it every time there's a Jew writing about God.

Just FYI, writing "G-d" is a very common thing among orthodox/observant Jews.

I am well aware of this and it's one of the few things that can still trigger my old argumentative atheism. I know the arguments and counterarguments and still just can't shake the gut feeling that it's impossibly stupid to believe there's an all-powerful cosmic being that's affronted by "God" but not "G-d" when typed into Twitter.

Since you don't need to be all-powerful to understand that a person has intended something but not said it, this is a fully general argument against there ever being such a thing as politeness, to anyone (deity or not). God is affronted by one and not the other for the same reason that not saying "thank you" causes people to be affronted even though they know very well that the phrase has no actual meaning.

Also certain sects of evangelicals.

I’ve never heard this, which ones?

Mostly ones aggressively signalling philosemitism.

The vibes of the Trump 2.0 Presidency are already shaping up to be a LOT different than Trump 1.0

I had the same feeling. Not quite what I'd call a whitepill, but something of a counter to the extremely blackpilled narrative of the establishment doing whatever the hell it wants against the wishes of the common people, or even it's own principles. I can't quite figure out why, though. The first term has shown they can oppose him and suffer no consequences, so why the race to bend the knee all of a sudden?

The antics of the FTC and the Consumer Fraud Protection Bureau may have something to do with it. The CFPB has been trying to make itself a micromanager of American business in various ways, and the FTC has been going after Amazon and Google. This may have finally convinced lefty tech executives that they'd better switch horses, or at least go back to the traditional policies of sucking up to whoever is in power.

The Silicon Valley seems to be swinging rightwards in general (a combination of ideological percolation of various ideologies familiar to the forum and tech queasiness with AI regulation and like), so no wonder the most visible tech barons are following the course.

Also, hasn't Adams always been a centrist for a New York Dem?

It's a very good question. I would guess that with billions of dollars at stake, they have their ear to the ground in ways that we don't, and they must have some indication that Trump is coming in better prepared to actually get things done this time around, for whatever reason.

After his first presidential victory Trump was deemed illegitimate because he lost the popular vote, colluded with Russia to steal the election and fooled his voters into supporting him. This time everyone who voted for Trump clearly knew what they were voting for and Trump won by enough that it's hard to claim he did so via fraud. Also, it's very likely that the next Republican presidential nominee will be pro-MAGA. Finally claiming that Trump is less morally qualified to be president than Biden isn't plausible given the Hunter pardon.

Additionally, running with Biden for as long as they did also undermined the competence critiques, while the way they removed him (threatening, but not actually utilizing, the 25th Amendment) undermines process-centric critiques.

so why the race to bend the knee all of a sudden?

taps sign

Because the State Department and the CIA were looking at the dwindling military recruitment numbers in light of an imminent great power conflict, and decided that wokeness was becoming a liability to empire and had to go.

Wokeness is a great ideology for an empire standing at Fukuyama’s end of history, when the main priority is global resource extraction and the only threats are threats from within. It gives infinite excuses for neo-colonialist wars overseas (those tribals in the mountains need to be enlightened about trans rights and feminism by the application of a few 2000 lb JDAMs). It also gives infinite excuses to repress political opposition at home (we have to destroy democracy in order to save Our Democracy). There’s a reason the Obama administration decided to retool the entire military around counter insurgency, and it wasn’t just for conflicts in the Middle East. The military was literally running war games about how they were going to “pacify” troublesome towns in middle America. The only “conspiracy” part about the Jade Helm conspiracy theory was whether Obama was actually planning on using the many many contingency plans that had been drawn up to turn the Midwest into one giant Chechnya, not whether those plans had been made. The military would be turned into a politicized Syria/Iraq style Republican Guard, and minimized in size to make it easier for the political branches to control. Politically unreliable demographics would be driven out and replaced with ones that could be counted on to open fire on the plebes of it ever became necessary.

Unfortunately, all of that stuff is a giant liability when you actually have to think about fighting another country. When Russian tanks rolled over the ceasefire line in the Donbas and Chinese fleets started conducting practice encirclements of Taiwan, the US military establishment started shitting bricks when it realized that the nu-military would last about three weeks in that kind of conflict. There is no buy-in from the civilian population, so no one wants to join anymore. A draft would be a a complete non starter because everyone now realizes how much the government despises them. All the old patriotic illusions are gone. So now the deep state is scrambling to try and do damage control to get everyone back in line.

I don’t think they’re enthusiastic about working with Trump but I think they prefer it to the French Revolution nightmare scenario of an existential overseas foreign conflict running simultaneously with a hot civil war at home. Especially given that unlike back in 2010, if a civil war kicked off now, all parties involved would suddenly be getting mysterious crates of military equipment with Cyrillic writing all over them.

The military was literally running war games about how they were going to “pacify” troublesome towns in middle America. The only “conspiracy” part about the Jade Helm conspiracy theory was whether Obama was actually planning on using the many many contingency plans that had been drawn up to turn the Midwest into one giant Chechnya, not whether those plans had been made.

Where is a good place to read about these war games? Are these contingency plans documented somewhere?

If it's the war games I'm thinking of, these are random towns that get picked to play not-Iraqi villages in wargames because they happen to be located the right distance from the military bases in question. It's a thing that exists but it isn't about oppressing Americans, it's about practicing winning over local powerbrokers in the next pointless middle eastern forever war.

taps sign

here is the sign hosted on kiwifarms so nsfw categorically

The possible (if they succeeded at supplanting their enemies) new elite is much more hawkish on China, at least rhetorically, than the clueless one that's on the way out.

But war..yeah, could break out. But barring an unlikely military/industrial renaissance- the entire military procurement market is as corrupt as the legacy space launch was-, such hot conflict could only go one way.

I guess they're banking on AI being able to do what Soros, NED and Gene Sharp couldn't.

It gives infinite excuses for neo-colonialist wars overseas (those tribals in the mountains need to be enlightened about trans rights and feminism by the application of a few 2000 lb JDAMs)

Woke people in the west would be exactly the demographic to fetishize such communities and most vocally oppose bombing them.

If the woke were intellectually honest/consistant perhaps this would be the case, but this has not been the case historically.

Yes, I think the Columbia pro-Palestine protests were worrying to the establishment because it showed that the younger generations actually wanted an internally consistent and strict application of woke ideology and weren’t content to just go in whatever direction they were pointed in.

How did that George Floyd mural make it to Kabul then?

Found this on Stupidpol Reddit:

In any given country with a very strong religious culture and extreme certainty about its values, traditions and beliefs, there will usually be some small group of people who live entirely off social media and Western liberal thought.

In this case the mural was painted by something called Artlords, set up by Omaid Sharifi, a British Council staff member, Atlantic Council fellow, and holder of a (Donald) Rumsfeld fellowship.

So essentially these are people paid large amounts of money in local terms to express the values of the West in those countries. They will enjoy the patronage of Western media, and we won't really hear the authentic beliefs of the local population, who, typically, hold extreme far-right social views by Western standards but this is obfuscated by using these convenient brown people who the actual residents of the country have never heard of and don't agree with on any matter at all.

The Artlords stuff got lots of fawning coverage from Western liberals, but the fact that it has a George Floyd mural tells you how inauthentic it is.

Sharifi of course is safely in Dubai having fled the country asap

Either deliberate policy(which could well be local allies aping something going on in the US, maybe without knowledge of why it's absurd), or black soldiers who don't necessarily buy into the rest of wokeness but unironically believe anti-black racism is a major problem killing hundreds of black men at the hands of police violence(and make no mistake- this idea originates in the black community itself, not from academia. Academic theoreticians have the good sense to make their incorrect mental models of the world non-falsifiable, eg trans stuff. The black community already unironically believed that racially motivated police violence was a huge problem with a large bodycount being covered up by anti-black racism in society at large; SJWs were late to the bandwagon.)

Probably because there are black people in the military? I think if you polled people who had been on a BLM protest the vast majority would oppose the US having any presence in Kabul.

This is the failure of the Kamala Harris campaign to achieve a close loss, particularly the loss of the popular vote.

I said on here at some near the time when the swap occurred, that it was likely that Kamala would lose the election, perhaps even more likely that she would lose than that Biden would lose, but that the Democrats had to make the swap to try to win the popular vote and maybe hold onto the House, and preserve some argument that they weren't completely spent as an electoral force.

The popular vote win in 2016 provided a talismanic argument for the Dems that they still represented, in some way, the will of the people, and that with better luck or reshuffling of the deck or minor procedural changes they could win again. It was of course legally meaningless, but it was important to the spirit of the team. The Coalition of the Ascendant was still Ascendant, this was white men's Dead Cat Bounce. This time, there is no such rhetorical fig leaf to hide behind. The campaign was a disaster for the Dems. New Jersey was closer to flipping Red than Texas or Florida were to flipping Blue. Kamala lost women and minorities relative to 2020. Culture war issues were largely hidden under the rug by the Harris campaign, who feared to say anything out loud at all. It was a pure defeat.

Where 2016 Hillary's defeat was like a close defeat in which the losing team had more possession of the ball, but the winning team got lucky on a few plays; 2024 was a wall to wall domination, where the winning team was clearly better.

Rhetoric matters.

weren't completely spent as an electoral force

I don't know if it's wise to get carried away here, they lost a single election, and a lot can happen between this one and the next one. I don't know how things are in the US, but at least in Europe the economic vibes are getting kinda weird, and a 2008-style crash could easily see them rebound. I guess this part of my confusion, it's hard for me to see this election as more than a temporary win.

The economic vibes have been weird in Europe for 15 years now.

Europe is over unless the business weecking EC gets the Milei treatment and Council of Europe and the atrocious ECHR that prevents deportations of illegals gets utterly destroyed.

I suppose we never really recovered from 2008, but most of the 2010's felt normal-ish to me.

In my particular European country, 2008 threw the entire political system into permanent disarray. Societal trust never recovered, and the infrastructure-debt incurred by the austerity of the 2010s was never paid back.

I have honestly never gotten the feeling that we properly recovered from 2008, despite many economic indicators showing otherwise. The Southern European countries by and large don't even have those.

infrastructure-debt

What is this?

Investment into infrastructure that's needed, but has yet to happen. In other words, it's what is "owed" to your country's infrastructure to keep everything functional at the desired level.

Speaking for England, we didn’t crash in 2008 exactly, nothing visibly changed. It’s just that from that point, things started slowly deteriorating. The cohort before me were being begged to use up academic funding, mine was scrambling for cash. University fees went up. Salaries went down. Just, very slowly, absolutely everything started getting worse and hasn’t stopped.

Personally I think that the period between Thatcher and 2008 was an illusion. We had nothing real to sell, so we sold our seed corn and our prestige. 2008 was just the day that stopped working.

What was the seed corn that you sold? I’m having a hard time figuring out what you’re thinking of.

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Oh certainly, I'm old enough to remember seeing Forty More Years on the shelves at Borders.

But, to take that as a clear analogy, the Republican party that came back and proved Forty More Years and the Obama Coaltion of the Ascendant false, was very different from the Dubya-McCain era party that was defeated. Not as different as some would have you believe, many of the same guys are still involved, and many of the same aims are still pursued. But the changes are obvious and manifold.

The hypothetical Democrats who come back and win the 2026 midterms and then run the table in 2028 against JD Vance would probably look very different from the Harris campaign. Quite likely in ways we don't quite know about yet! McCain was perceived as a bit left of Dubya on social issues, civil and bipartisan, focused on getting money and corporations out of politics, but hawkish and interventionist on national security; the McCain strategy was certainly not the one that lead Republicans to victory in 2016 or 2024.

The hypothetical Democrats who come back and win the 2026 midterms and then run the table in 2028 against JD Vance

I mean there are two radically different timelines that result in a Dem win in those years. The Dems winning because they retolled and redid there messaging looks way different from the dems just winning because the worst-case scenario about the amount of damage Trump could do to the economy came true and they just win by default.

Kamala lost women and minorities relative to 2020

Can't overestimate the body blow of losing Latinos to a guy they've been trying to protect Latinos from since he came off the elevator escalator. Total narrative collapse.

Only thing worse would be losing black people. That'd be existential.

Can't overestimate the body blow of losing Latinos to a guy they've been trying to protect Latinos from since he came off the elevator.

We warned them to stop calling us Latinx.

I really wish latinx was around when I was in college. Id have had so much fun introducing my latino friends as latinx at parties full of white kids. My friends would have to grin and be polite as I wax effusively about their journey to the hallowed shores of america where their latinx identity would be given the respect in this safe space of understanding. It'd be seeing a human pressure cooker in action.

"Latinx: a word used only by gringxs."

Where do you stand on 'Latines' or 'Latinaos'?

I've noticed the use of 'hispanohablantes' in the wild. While this sounds like a politically correct euphemism, it's at least a reasonable term to use in writing that doesn't, say, break the rules of Spanish grammar and pronunciation.

Hispanohablantes is real and commonly used in the spoken language, it just means Spanish-speakers.

I have never heard an actual Spanish speaker use the term Latinx though, or Latine/Latinao. The furthest Spanish language political correctness goes is 'Latinos y Latinas' or 'chicos y chicas'. Even then, the PC versions are more commonly used by European Spanish speakers, Latin Americans are more likely to use the more concise, masculine/neutral versions.

Willing to believe that(and the translation is literally correct), but to a second language speaker of Texas Spanish it sounds like a politically correct euphemism for which the usual term is 'Latinos'.

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As a US-born spanish speaker "Latines" is obviously the correct term, but is also rarely used outside formal/academic settings. Colloquially everyone just uses "Latino" or "Hispanic"

In the meantime nothing screams "I am an illiterate gringo with a room tempreature IQ" like "Latinx".

In my opinion, latines is as woke as Latinx or Latinaos. Granted, It's the only spoken term that is seeing a push in latino-american, but it's correctly mocked when encountered. The plural is Latinos or Latinas if the group consists entirely of females. Wokies must accept that there are gendered languages.

"Latinaos" I have never seen in my life.

"Latines", (and "e" as gender neutral in general) is indeed the form south american leftists actually use. It seemed ascendant for a while, but luckily there has been a pretty big pendulum swing, so I'd say we have at least another decade until it takes over normal life.

2016 was a bit of a culture shock, a surprise, and widespready expectation of significant restraining factors (both the still-active Never Trump wing of the Republican party and the Democratic Resistance) that would limit Trump's ability to act.

2024's margin of victory and the nature of the transition to date has made it very, very clear those limiting factors are not in play. The Cheney-Never Trumper wing of the party self-destructed after 2020, the Democratic Party is not what it once was, and not only does Trump have a trifect but it is a far more coherent party base, and one with sharp memories for the obstructors of last time.

As a result, there are far fewer institutional barriers to prevent Trump from acting, and so personal diplomatic mollification has a lot more value.

Not sure what's up with the bizarre censorship of God to make it look like a swear word.

Lol, you're going to like the reason. Hint: Early Life

I feel like I've seen plenty of Christians do this too: see gosh or geez for long-standing examples of the practice.

Yeah, but there's a difference between being sanctimonious (or perhaps more charitably, intentionally interpreting 'in vain' so broadly that it covers even the 'positive' expressions, to the point that I'd consider "may gosh bless the United States" to be swearing in reverse, as it were) and noticing that there's a very specific thing/feeling/emotion using "Jesus Christ" (and to a point, "God/oh my God") as an invective or an incredulity uniquely communicates. "Hell" and "goddamn" have the same thing going on to varying lesser degrees but this one's pretty unambiguous.

So if you want to invoke the same expression without doing that directly, you want to use something that sounds like, but isn't, the word everyone else would use to do that. Hence the substitutions in that case.

This is because using the name of God for shock value is a sin. A Christian would not say 'may gosh bless the United States'.

Yes. My parents weren't hardasses. But it was strictly forbidden to use the Lord's name in vain. Discussing God is one thing. Using God's name in a profane manner to call down damnation is something quite different. My parents also forbid "gosh darn" type talk because that's a direct reference to using the Lord's name in vain but pronouncing the words wrong.

I've never seen this when actually talking about God, it's usually for figures of speech that nonseriously invoke God, so as to avoid using the name of God "in vain", which violates one of the Ten Commandments

Can't believe I didn't know that!

I didn't know he was Jewish either, although I suppose I should never be surprised.

-off name implies Slavic country ancestry, as -ov is probably the equivalent of-son but Benioff doesn't sound Slavic.

Also he is a major businessman and Jews are overrepresentated there by more than 10x.

Also…. just look at the guy.

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