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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
mitigatedchaos

But What About the Right?

mitigatedchaos

There may be some people that read this blog and think “you’re criticizing the Left for doing these things, but the right-wing and American government do some of them, too.  Does it not backfire for them?  Why do right-wingers get a pass?”

And, in fact, it does backfire for them.  It has been backfiring for decades, and has damaged them in the culture wars.  Yes, they haven’t constantly lost electorally, but they’ve lost the mindshare they used to have, and the faith in the establishment.  It’s a price paid in National Will.  

What does America look like without anti-war counter-culture from the Vietnam War?  What does America look like if people have higher trust in the national institutions, in families, and so on?  There was, apparently, once a time when people talked of men of science, industry, and government working together to build a better world, but sadly, at that very time, that combination did not deserve that level of trust.  

How many of these movements and shifts are reactions to betrayals that were not deserved?

To hold power over the long term, to create something that lasts, it isn’t enough just to seize control.  One must be worthy.

The Right, in many ways, has not been.  And they think that’s about Christian morality, but it isn’t really, not as they conceive it.

mitigatedchaos

What did the Nazis do for eugenics?

They utterly destroyed its public legitimacy until the present day.  

Now, some people might say “but what if they won?”, but a lot of why they sucked had to do with what made them Nazis.  Generic renegade German Ultranationalists waging a war of conquest might have been bad by many standards, but they would not have been as bad as the Nazis - and they would have wasted fewer resources on genocidal extermination.

What have Stalin and Mao done for Communism?  What was won with blood was stripped away.

And yes, sometimes you can get away with it.  Force is a real and basic nature of this world.  Sometimes you can have such overwhelming power that you can seize a whole continent and reduce the original natives, and their petty wars with each other, to a marginal force or even a distant memory.

But then, what happens afterwards?  In ten years?  In one hundred or two hundred or more?  

Where are the Mongols now?

politics

But What About the Right?

There may be some people that read this blog and think “you’re criticizing the Left for doing these things, but the right-wing and American government do some of them, too.  Does it not backfire for them?  Why do right-wingers get a pass?”

And, in fact, it does backfire for them.  It has been backfiring for decades, and has damaged them in the culture wars.  Yes, they haven’t constantly lost electorally, but they’ve lost the mindshare they used to have, and the faith in the establishment.  It’s a price paid in National Will.  

What does America look like without anti-war counter-culture from the Vietnam War?  What does America look like if people have higher trust in the national institutions, in families, and so on?  There was, apparently, once a time when people talked of men of science, industry, and government working together to build a better world, but sadly, at that very time, that combination did not deserve that level of trust.  

How many of these movements and shifts are reactions to betrayals that were not deserved?

To hold power over the long term, to create something that lasts, it isn’t enough just to seize control.  One must be worthy.

The Right, in many ways, has not been.  And they think that’s about Christian morality, but it isn’t really, not as they conceive it.

politics flagpost
bpd-anon
bpd-anon

argh my dad believes the parties never switched and also hitler was a leftist

cookingwithroxy

Well, the parties switched plenty of times in the past, but Hilter was a socialist. Like he’s the best example that ‘working for the common good’ doesn’t mean you can’t be evil. He was working for the common good! of those he considered to be human. Which wasn’t most people.

Or maybe he’s a good example of ‘politics is more messy than left/right’.

idontevenknowfriend

A defining characteristic of the left is working towards a bigger government. It’s pretty much what originally separated the left and the right.
Any authoritarian regime, be it fascist or communist or something else, is inherently left-leaning on at least one of the political axes

bpd-anon

Explain the following policies backed pretty much exclusively by right wingers in the modern day:

1. The government getting involved in whether women can have abortions

2. The government getting involved in whether gay people can marry

3. The government getting involved in what bathroom trans people go to

4. The war on drugs

These sure sound like bigger government things to me

mitigatedchaos

It turns out that no one actually supports smaller government.

politics
ranma-official
fortune.com

McDonald’s Says its Wage Hikes Are Improving Service

Turnover is down, and customer service scores are up, company says.
dispatchesfromtheclasswar

So McD’s increases employee wages 10% and the move leads to massive unemployment, forces restaurants to close, & bankrupts the company the first sales gains in over two years for the chain!

Almost like treating your employees like human beings mean they treat their customers better and the customers notice or something.

Hmm.

karalora

Almost like the easing of financial desperation makes you happier overall, causing you to have more energy at work and to pass the happiness along to others, including customers.

durnesque-esque

Can you imagine?

grumpy-goompa

no one is against giving people slight pay increases. people are against giving people a high pay rate ($15) for (what is generally considered) “unskilled” labor.

ranma-official

a large amount of people  are not just against giving people pay increases, but they successfully lobby against them even having any form of leverage to ask for these experiences. there is a strong movement to get rid of the minimum wage so that anyone can decrease their laborer’s wages down to $0 and “”””experience““”“

mitigatedchaos

Eh?  Is that a thing in Russia?  Because I’ve only heard of AnCap and Libertarian types arguing for the abolition of the minimum wage in America, and their movements are not really all that strong.

Source: dispatchesfromtheclasswar politics
flakmaniak

Anonymous asked:

No, gentrification is the result of a fight over positional goods. Giving people money doesn't help when the thing they're competing over will always be scarce.

argumate answered:

In a hypothetical society where everyone is equally wealthy, no one would be forced to leave their home due to rising rents.

In a hypothetical society where everyone is equally wealthy except for a small number of billionaires, then at most a small number of people etc.

In our current society with a great disparity of wealth levels, etc.

mitigatedchaos

It isn’t a 100% positional good.

You can actually build more housing units, if you’re allowed to.

Not uncoincidentally, this would also lower housing costs and the risk of gentrification in the first place, or at least lower damage associated with it.

Or we could just continue not building new housing units and simultaneously say white people leaving an area bad and also that white people moving into an area is bad.  Surely this will help the poor, somehow.

flakmaniak

I get really annoyed when I hear that “housing is a positional good” stuff. No, it isn’t. First off, obviously not having a house sucks. (Ok yes presumably no one is saying that “housing at all” is positional.)

But second off, no, even “nice housing” isn’t a positional good. I currently live in a nice house in a nice suburb. This would be no less of a boon to my quality of life if more people got to do so. (I can hear you guys revving up the “well it’s impractical to structure society so that everyone can live in a suburb” arguments, but that’s not my understanding of what a positional good actually is.)

Anyway, I have an actual, real, non-social-status interest in having things like “a bunch of rooms as opposed to two” and “a decent-sized kitchen” and “a nice backyard” and “a placid neighborhood that is quiet and that you can walk around at 3AM without running into anybody”. (Well ok it’s sometimes not quiet but that’s neighbors’ lawns being mowed/leafblown/whatever by presumably-poorly-paid immigrants.)

Anyway the point is, “having trees around” (I live on a hill with plenty of trees) is actually Just Nice, regardless of whether I have more trees nearby than other people.

Again, you can scream “status!” all you want when looking at pictures of my neighborhood, but that doesn’t do anything to diminish the aesthetic and practical value of living here. (And yes, I’m in walking distance of a grocery store and the town center, about a mile each, so the “can’t do anything” argument falls apart too.)

(I guess this has bled over into being annoyed at the suburb-hate; not sure if the suburb-haters just have totally alien preferences or if they’re thinking of different styles of suburb. But I can attest that the one I live in is quite nice, and the “suburbs are hell” objection always rang false to me for that reason. Maybe most of them are hell, and I lucked into one of the nice ones.)

I guess the last move in the game is to say that wanting more than 9x9 feet to live in is bourgeois, huh? Something about how it’s Inherently Evil to like taking walks under the trees on cloudy days to buy snack food at the supermarket. I guess I can’t compete with deontology.

mitigatedchaos

I guess the last move in the game is to say that wanting more than 9x9 feet to live in is bourgeois, huh? Something about how it’s Inherently Evil to like taking walks under the trees on cloudy days to buy snack food at the supermarket. I guess I can’t compete with deontology.

Well, logically, if one demands unlimited right of reproduction, then that could be the conclusion one comes to.

But I think it’s being driven more by other concerns.  These anons going in to Argumate’s blog seem to be totally unaware of the idea that one can build taller (which is also a way to get more square footage).

Land is a lot more limited, but it’s possible to build buildings with dozens of floors.

There’s this idea that “there’s only so many housing units to go around” and “the rich are hoarding them all” or something along those lines.  That isn’t really true, and the rich aren’t necessarily as rich (or perhaps, there aren’t as many of them) as people think there are.  There is no adequate stock of rich people houses that we can just seize and be done with it.

And quite frankly, it ignores a really, brutally obvious policy that could be applied if rich people keep building “too many” big rich people houses while poor people don’t have enough housing units - pass a luxury tax for large or expensive housing units and award that money as tax credits to developers building more affordable housing.

I’m not saying that’s an optimal policy, either.  It’s just way less dumb than not building new housing because rich people might do it.

People might object, too, that the taller buildings won’t have enough transport/etc infrastructure - so make them take out an infrastructure deposit into the municipal fund instead, again, this is a problem that can be solved.

Now, it’s true that there will still be some fighting over hot spots.  But that hurts way, way less if the rest of the housing is outrageously priced.

Source: argumate concrete and steel
collapsedsquid
stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com

Economic roots of post-truth politics

Here’s a conjecture: the rise of “post-truth” politics (defined by the OED as a process whereby “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals”) is in part the product of deindustrialization. What I mean is that...
collapsedsquid

Here’s a conjecture: the rise of “post-truth” politics (defined by the OED as a process whereby “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals”) is in part the product of deindustrialization.

What I mean is that in manufacturing, facts defeat emotions and opinions. If your steel cracks, or your bottles leak or your cars won’t start, all your hopes and fancy beliefs are wrong. Truth trumps opinion.

Contrast this with sales occupations. In these, opinion beats facts. If customers think a shit sandwich is great food, it’ll sell regardless of facts. And conversely, good products won’t sell if customers think they’re rubbish. Opinion trumps truth.

(Finance is a mix of these. In trading and asset management, beliefs are constantly defeated by cold hard facts. In asset gathering, sales and investor relations, however, bullshit works.)

Isn’t it therefore possible that a shift from manufacturing to other occupations will contribute to a decline in respect for facts and greater respect for opinions, however ill-founded? In 1966 – when employment in UK manufacturing peaked – 29.2% of the workforce were in manufacturing. This meant that millions more heard tales from fathers, husbands and friends about how brute facts had fouled up their day. A culture of respect for facts was thus inculcated. Today, however, only 7.8% of the workforce is in manufacturing and many more are in bullshit jobs. This is an environment less conducive to a deference to facts.

Hot take on how method of labor influences mode of thought.

mitigatedchaos

I hereby award this take one pepper for spiciness.

I can think of two supportive facts. One is that post-truth politics seems (I might be wrong) to be less strong in countries where manufacturing still looms large in culture if not in economics, such as in Germany or Japan.

However, many of the people decrying Post-Truth Politics don’t particularly care for the policies of Japan, and Japan’s politics are quite different from Germany’s.

the invisible fist the culture war
argumate

Anonymous asked:

No, gentrification is the result of a fight over positional goods. Giving people money doesn't help when the thing they're competing over will always be scarce.

argumate answered:

In a hypothetical society where everyone is equally wealthy, no one would be forced to leave their home due to rising rents.

In a hypothetical society where everyone is equally wealthy except for a small number of billionaires, then at most a small number of people etc.

In our current society with a great disparity of wealth levels, etc.

mitigatedchaos

It isn’t a 100% positional good.

You can actually build more housing units, if you’re allowed to.

Not uncoincidentally, this would also lower housing costs and the risk of gentrification in the first place, or at least lower damage associated with it.

Or we could just continue not building new housing units and simultaneously say white people leaving an area bad and also that white people moving into an area is bad.  Surely this will help the poor, somehow.

uncharitable

I actually suspect that the switch to identity politics over class politics may have been based on a growing ineffectiveness of class politics.

“BUT THE POOR!” lost ground as more cached arguments were built up against it, even if it wasn’t entirely justified.

“BUT RACISM!” still had a lot of bite and could circumvent some of those cached arguments.  So, it’s natural to shift to it and build the platform around it.

It had a lot of bite, anyway.

There was always the focus on what was morally right, even in the minds of people who claimed they didn’t believe in morality, over what was effective policy, so now we get a lot of talk about guilt, or about pie in the sky ideas of “dismantling the systems of X oppression requires dismantling capitalism” (and people remember how “we need to dismantle capitalism” went last time), and not so much about “we should distribute multivitamins to the poor.”

I mean, that does sometimes get through, but the zeitgeist doesn’t seem to care about it as much as it cares about language policing and thinks that beneficial policies will just naturally unfold once everyone acknowledges their sin.

politics
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