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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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The "radically altered makeup" of Seattle has precious little to do with this considering that it's whites who are most enamored with pro homeless politics.

Singapore's parliament is a mix of Indians, Chinese, and Malays. It's not a homogeneous elite and in a (de facto) one party state there's not much objective competition to get on the ballot.

in a one party State there's not much competition to get on the ballot

Look I understand you've been taught that your political formula does this in school, but there's very little reason to believe this is true. In fact I'm more ready to consider Aristotle when he argues the opposite is true.

I think it requires a lot more intelligence and studying to become a civil servant in Singapore than in Seattle. And indeed that this is how it's elite self selects in lieu of ethnic preference.

Civil servant? We're talking about elected positions. Please post the objective requirements to get elected in Singapore.

We're talking about elected positions.

No we're not, we're talking about the ruling elite, which is not the same thing.

You can't vote the elite of a society out of power. The people who run things, make actual policy decisions are rarely the same people that nominally have the power to do so. I don't like this as a formalist myself but it's just a fact of life.

I mean come on, do you really think Joe Biden runs the United States? That Vladimir Putin decides things on his own without large constraints from his stakeholder's interests?

If we're going to have a serious discussion about the sociocultural dynamics of how a society functions we first have to agree to basic Machiavellian premises. There's an infinite amount of fictional stories you can tell yourself about what's going on, if we don't ground ourselves in pragmatic, value free analysis of power, this conversation is pointless.

What does Joe Biden have to do with crazy hobos in Seattle?

The elected officials of Seattle do not object to the status quo and do not promise any changes. The voters of Seattle do not mind and continue to elect those officials. There's no need to invoke Machiavellian epicycles when the elected officials and electorate are in total agreement on the issue.

It's not the "deep city hall" that keeps the hobos on the street, it's the vox populi.

There is no such thing as "the people" much less "a voice" for this nonexistent entity. The voters of Seattle do not elect the officials, the officials have themselves elected by them.

If a magical dictator took power in Seattle and cleaned the streets by force, the same people that vote for the current representatives that do nothing about it would support him wholeheartedly. There is no point trying to attribute any will to the masses and any attempt to do so renders political analysis nonsensical.

In Seattle and Portland it is whites who vote most zealously for the radical left. Blacks and Asians are both more moderate.

Seattle's district hasn't elected a Republican representative since the seventies, it is fully a one party polity. The only distinction is within flavors of democrats. In my experience, the most pro-homeless people are white, and Asians have much less sympathy for letting people colonize the streets.

You've elided the point. Even in uber-liberal Seattle, the share of Whites voting for Democrats is lesser than the share of Asians, of Blacks, of Hispanics, of...

I haven't elided the point.

Nobody who wants to win in Seattle runs as a Republican. Do you think it's the blacks' fault that Seattle hasn't elected a Republican in 44 years? Or the asians'? No, this is the will of the whites who live there.

I wasn't able to find a lot of good data, but here is one post: https://www.google.com/amp/s/southseattleemerald.com/2022/12/09/how-race-and-class-converged-in-the-2022-elections-in-seattle/%3famp

However, those rightward shifts among BIPOC are not uniform. Asian-Americans in South Seattle are shifting harder to the right than Black people are, which follows national trends. Additionally, People of Color in South Seattle and SKC are disproportionately getting redder whereas People of Color in the Eastside suburbs are actually shifting blue. This means class is a catalyst for Republican gains among People of Color: working class voters of color are shifting red while wealthier voters of color are not, but even getting bluer.

This is especially noticeable in the Chinatown-International District, where GOP fear tactics have helped shift this neighborhood dramatically to the right (although, noticeably, the Little Saigon part of the CID got bluer while the Chinese parts west of I-5 got much redder).

That is, parts of Seattle that are more likely to vote for Republicans are those that live in areas with less white people.

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