So, the current president of the US and the...

bambamramfan

Anonymous asked:

So, the current president of the US and the political party that controls the government won, this year, on a platform that, in part, openly appealed to white nationalists. The only thing I have seen from the rationalistsphere about this fact is A) telling people they're overreacting and B) treating people like monsters because they don't condemn the punching of a prominent neo-nazi. Why is this? Why the commitment to pretending that the "left" in the US is the real danger?

bambamramfan answered:

A fair question. I agree with @raggedjackscarlet the other day that lots of anti-SJ types are underestimating the possibility of right wing dictatorship.

I think a lot of people are struggling with how to deal with Trump, and honestly no one has found a good way to do so yet. He’s like the zombie we’ve shot all our ammunition into, and keeps on coming. Finding out how to defeat him is a top priority.

But let’s not ignore how much of the world is a liberal order - ie, focused on rights like free speech and property and voting and privacy, rather than trying to merge all of society into one collective body under the Leader. Even if Trump isn’t a rights based liberal, he doesn’t run all of society. Paul Ryan is a libertarian, and most Senators can be fit under this rubric. The richest CEOs of the richest companies are good liberals (like Tim Cook.) The top bureaucrats at all agencies believe in this worldview, not to mention the media and academia.

So if you’re worried “liberals might hate me and wish me harm” vs “fascists might hate me and wish me harm” that former group still has a lot more power to do so. And if liberals promise to be kind to each other and protect each other, actually the fascists will find there isn’t much they can do to us.

I at least reject very much political programs that try to unite everyone around hating “one idiot.” Even the most dangerous idiot in the free world is still one dude. The question is the system that gets everyone to play along to his stupid antics.

Don’t read his twitter.
Don’t believe what his federal agencies say and who they accuse of crimes especially.
Don’t give him ratings.
Don’t turn in immigrants and Muslims.
Don’t accept his “us vs them” mentality.

…is how I fight Trump. Dodge the draft and evade taxes if it becomes necessary even.

I admit this doesn’t sound like the most effective plan ever. But in absence of a guaranteed way to defeat him, for the love of god, stop beating each up or other bystanders.

*****

Also you are not a monster if you want to punch a Nazi. It’s okay. These are pretty normal urges shared by many people. I hope you don’t do it, but I definitely don’t think you are a monster. Like, how would you even log onto to tumblr and submit an ask if you were? The monitor would melt and your claws would crush the keyboard. No you’re totally human.

mitigatedchaos

@anon The rationalsphere isn’t condemning people for not condemning the punch, that I’ve seen. They’re condemning people that are celebrating it as a general principle.

@bambamramfan

I think a lot of people are struggling with how to deal with Trump, and honestly no one has found a good way to do so yet. He’s like the zombie we’ve shot all our ammunition into, and keeps on coming. Finding out how to defeat him is a top priority.

Social status competition and (yes, really) virtue signalling, emotional satisfaction, and other things caused all the ammunition to lose its teeth.

This is actually a side effect of unethical tactics. Basically antibiotic resistance mutating as an effect of overuse of antibiotics.

Every politician against the Left was decried as “racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynistic”. Every position on immigration other than open borders was described as “racist”. Any criticism of Islam, which is not a very liberal religion and is tied into politics in ways that other foreign religions are not, was met with accusations of “racism”.

What is the correct tactical response on the Right to these things? To just flat out stop caring. Having swamped the field of racism/sexism/etc accusations with noise (I outright ignore uncited accusations of sexism these days), so many people have stopped listening that you can put in actual racists and cover for it by accusing the accusations of being fake! Because, to the typical viewer who doesn’t have time to research, often enough they actually are fake.

This is what Trump is. He is the antibiotic resistant bacteria. He is the strain that survived because people were busy applying antibiotics en masse to the common cold, which isn’t even caused by a bacteria in the first place.

I don’t know how to unbreak those tools, because I don’t know how to take them away from idiots and status-craving unethical people. If I make a new signal for “no, this guy is actually racist, he doesn’t just want to enforce existing immigration laws”, it will be hijacked by these same politicals who will use it to lie for status, resources, and power.

It will also be used to attack me and people like me.

Locally, there are still people I trust with a sexism/racism/etc accusation, but that number is shrinking.

politics the left trump

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bambamramfan

marcusseldon

I said I’d talk about politics less, but I feel like I do need to get this out of my system.

There’s an idea going around both on my dash, and people I know in person, that the behavior of people on the left is what caused Trump to be elected. Different groups get the blame, whether it is rich white liberals in Silicon Valley, DC, and Hollywood, the campus left, black lives matter, internet SJWs and feminists, mainstream media journalists, late night comedians, or some combination of these, the theory goes that Trump was essentially a white working class middle finger to the condescension, radicalism, and disrespect toward traditional values of members of these various left-wing groups. People who put forward this theory say that to win back Trump voters, the left needs to be kinder, more compassionate, and less radical toward white working class (WWC) culture, values, and way of life. The claim is that if only the left were nicer to WWC people and respected their way of life more, Trump would have never even won a Republican primary, let alone an electoral college majority.

Now, leaving aside whether it would be personally moral and virtuous to be more compassionate and less radical toward the WWC (probably to at least some extent), I want to raise doubts about whether this perspective is actually useful for winning elections and defeating Trumpism.

No doubt many WWC people, and those sympathetic to them, feel condescended to, disrespected, and that their way of life is under attack by the left. There is also no doubt that there have been individuals and groups on the left that have been openly hostile to the WWC way of life, where “white male” is an insult, conservative Christians are publicly degraded and mocked, performative flag-waving nationalism is seen as not just gauche but stupid and hick-ish, and where white rural people are assumed to be personally racist and homophobic.

But, all political movements are going to have their assholes who degrade the other side and openly disrespect them. It’s easy to miss when you largely live in left-wing bubbles online and off, which I imagine is true of most people on my dash, and is certainly true of me, but the right has their own version of this, and it’s popular. There’s a post going around my dash about a condescending line in a Meryl Streep speech, and how this is an example of liberal condescension that created Trump, but I guarantee you that more people listen to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity on the radio every day than saw that Meryl Streep speech. And Limbaugh and Hannity on an almost daily basis disrespect, mock, and condescend to liberal constituencies, values, and ways of life. And guess what, Republicans still won.

People like Limbaugh and Hannity, not to mention Fox News and Breitbart, make their money by inflaming a sense of grievance and resentment of the left among the disproportionately rural, older, religious, and WWC Republican base. These outlets have far more political reach and power than random SJW blogs, the campus left, black lives matter, actors or tech billionaires giving speeches, or even late night comedians.

In the educated liberal bubbles that I and many people in my online and offline circles reside in, the reverse can seem true. It can seem like left-wing culture is omnipresent and the right is completely stifled by blacks lives matter, SJWs, and late night comedians. But in other circles, which comprise nearly half the country, the reverse is true.

In many ways, the left is already on net more compassionate to the WWC than the right is to left-wing constituencies. There were countless articles in left-wing outlets talking to Trump voters in order to understand and sympathize with Trump voters. I don’t think I’ve ever once seen an article in a right-wing outlet that went to Harlem, San Francisco, or Ann Arbor, trying to compassionately understand the motivations and lifestyle of people on the other side from their point of view.

So the idea that the left must hold itself to an even higher standard on compassion and than the right to win elections seems implausible to me (again, leaving aside whether holding ourselves to a higher standard would be more virtuous and moral).

Even if the left was nicer to the WWC, I don’t see that changing vote patterns, or making the WWC feel any less resentful and under attack. Suppose 90% of the left-wing people who are being blamed for the rise of Trumpism became nicer. The Limbaughs and Hannitys and Breitbarts of the world, and the millions who follow them, wouldn’t take a step back and say “you know, maybe the left doesn’t hate me or my way of life”. No. They would continue to cherry pick the worst examples, as they already do, from a smaller set of mean liberals in order to inflame cultural resentment and grievance among their followers, and they would also continue to see things that I think aren’t mean and are true that the left says, like that black people have a rougher relationship with the police than other groups, as offensive and attacking their dignity and way of life.

I’m not saying there’s no way to convince some of these people over to the left. But, pointing the finger at the meaner (and numerically smaller) strains of the left and thinking that if only for them being condescending and disrespectful we would be in a golden age of liberal dominance in politics doesn’t strike me as true or productive.

bambamramfan

So I get your frustration, and a lot of what you say is correct. It’s far too tempting to say “Hey leftists-who-disagree-with-me, YOU’RE the reason our enemy won!” without sufficient proof. That’s just opportunism.

And we should treat the WWC (and all of the WC) in this country with compassion, and we should help their material needs, regardless of whether it wins us elections. Trying to come up with political justifications for basic human decency is a bit creepy.

(Plus, not to mention a Far Right resurgence is occurring across the entire developed world. It seems very petty to blame that on a few annoying American liberals. There are deeper trends here.)

I feel you here.

However, there is some countervailing evidence here.

1. If we’re not being condescending to them, we should listen to what our enemies are saying. And in between accusations of corruption and defending the free market, Republican voters seem really, really upset about Political Correctness. Obsessed with it, and explicitly saying they support idiots like Trump just to defy Political Correctness.

You can dismiss what they say and come up with other reasons they voted the way they did (they just want to be racist, or economic anxiety) but then that is being patronizing because you aren’t really listening anymore. If you listen, Political Correctness is a huge deal to them, and teasing out the source of that sounds like a worthwhile endeavor.

2. A lot of this is just projection from some left-of-center allies about the illiberal tactics used by establishment social justice, such as extreme arrogance, dismissiveness, shallow analysis, using institutional power to punish dissenters, and a bunch of other mindkilling, groupthink tactics. Said allies (or, former allies) really hated those tactics, and so rejoice in blaming them for the defeat of the mainstream SJ candidate.

Projection is not a good source of analysis of course, and so they might be wrong that this really caused Trump’s victory. But said establishment really should pay attention to how many enemies it has, even “on its own side.” Their tactics are really ticking off their friends, causing dissension every step away. SJ can try to ignore this dissent and pain as long as they wield the hammer, but don’t be surprised when their enemies leap at any weakness as a chance to earn some rhetorical points.

Social justice has enraged and alienated conservatives, libertarians, moderates, socialists, communists, and artsy anarchists. At some point it will have no friends left except the business-friendly / socially liberal wing of a city-based party.

3. Something happened between 2012 and 2016. There’s some reason Republicans started really getting into unbridled rudeness and race-baiting. You can’t even wholly blame Trump for finally opening the floodgates, he tried in 2012. What the hell happened to make voters so much more racist, or at least racist-tolerant? It’s not like there are a lot more immigrants around or other normal causes of racial strife (let alone to explain the tolerance of crude sexual behavior.)

And to the unaided eye, one of the real changes of the past 4 years was the political visibility of intolerant liberalism. So it’s at least worth considering “the thing that changed in the last 4 years, is somewhat responsible for the rather different outcome this time around.”

mitigatedchaos

Regarding #1: If a 100% black company is okay, but a 100% white company “isn’t diverse enough”, this implies whites are inherently worth less than PoC. If women have equal beneficial capabilities to men, but men are uniquely violent and oppressive, this implies women are better than men.

I think people can feel this even if they don’t consciously realize it.

Also, as one of those alienated types, those tactics you mention make SJ a liability to me in many ways.

Source: marcusseldon politics gender politics race politics trump

bambamramfan

Jon Stewart, John Oliver…mostly enact the pure arrogance of the liberal intellectual elite: “Parodying Trump is at best a distraction from his real politics; at worst it converts the whole of politics into a gag. The process has nothing to do with the performers or the writers or their choices. Trump built his candidacy on performing as a comic heel—that has been his pop culture persona for decades. It is simply not possible to parody effectively a man who is a conscious self-parody, and who has become president of the United States on the basis of that performance.”

Zizek citing Stephen Marche
(via slavoj–zizek)

Source: slavoj--zizek politics trump

collapsedsquid

Noah Smith is doing his “you people on the left need to be re-conciliatory, join up with moderate conservatives like McMullin to fight Trumpism“ that’s continuing his “The US is turning into civil war spain“ idea.

And he’s presenting it like people on the left are too prideful to do it, which some are. But the other problem with this he’s not addressing is that this plan could basically be “We’re about to be shipwrecked in the middle of the ocean, so what we need to do is to tie ourselves to the heaviest and fastest-sinking piece of the ship!“

whatevernatureis

Boring answer is that granting the premises there’s risks and benefits to either strategy, and while the risks and benefits for one strategy or the other might in principle be calculable, the noise of motivated reasoning means we won’t be able to tell which strategy is “right” ahead of time.

I’m largely in the camp that we should do what we can to defend liberal-democratic norms and make a coalition with anyone else who is also defending liberal-democratic norms, whatever else their views may be. Granted, that’s partly because there’s no real coherent agenda with broad support among the left, and we shouldn’t be picky about ideological purity when we don’t know what our ideology is.

(I mean, Bernie and Elizabeth Warren are very popular on the left, but their popularity is more about personality and symbolism than policy)

collapsedsquid

I think the agenda with broad support is social democracy. That’s what the Bernie and Warren supporters want, that’s actually something that exists, and it’s a goal that can be worked towards.

And I’m not sure what level or type of support the left is expected to give. Is the left supposed to agree with McMullin when he says the Real Problem is the size of the US deficit? That’s the problem here, what exactly does this “coalition“ entail? Who gets thrown under the bus?

The closest thing to an answer I could think of is the generic culture war “Tone down the PC“ thing. But even leaving aside the morality and possible damage of that decision it’s tricky because it’s not something that can be given away, I don’t think it’s so much the law that pisses people off as the actions of people. It’s not available to give up.

mitigatedchaos

I think we could actually get some support for social democracy. I don’t think it will be as pragmatic as I’d like, but a relatively coherent social democracy that is not indifferent to the conditions of WWC rural Americans could rally up some enthusiasm and take some of the pressure off of automation.

And yeah, social democracy exists, and unlike Communism, it doesn’t involve killing lots of people.

I’m not sure how well it would work when combined with Globalism, which seems to be a thing the Left really does not want to remove, which I want to see removed.

On top of that, I recently had someone argue that all cultures are equal, despite my clearly explaining that FGM is cultural (not even religious), and them appearing to be opposed to FGM. So I’m not sure how much pragmatism there is to be had.

politics trump social democracy the left globalism

I think this dust-up on transgender soldiers will actually burn some of Trump’s political capital.

I’ll let you in on something about his power - previously, a lot of these things where he got the media all fired up over something, he had at or near majority support from the actual citizens or it was something most people outside of politics just don’t care about.

This one’s gonna be a lot narrower. The opposition will be able to get some actual traction out of it.

politics trump

wirehead-wannabe

thathopeyetlives

First question: What does one even do about Russia secretly interfering with our politics? If people are actually involved (and apparently Flynn was) you can impeach or disqualify them. Trump has been president for a few weeks and has managed to screw up royally, so we could kick him out, but earlier on… you’re kinda out of luck unless you want to totally screw up the politics.

Second question: What is actually going on? Is Trump genuinely trying to be friends with Russia and enemies with China (stupid plan in a world that successfully avoids war!) or just Putin wants to weaken the USA with idiot leaders or what?

wirehead-wannabe

My gut feeling is that either that Putin blackmailing/threatening/bribing Trump, or that authoritarian leaders with a socially conservative support base flock together. Or both.

mitigatedchaos

Russia + China is not an unreasonable combination. So yes, I think preventing that is part of it. China is about to enter a period of decline, but it’s still more likely to become a global hegemon than Russia.

I think there are several things going on here.

Trump actually does have some level of respect for authoritarian rulers, I think. Even I sometimes look at China and think about what could be accomplished if all the NIMBYs were stopped from holding up projects, even though I know actually doing that wouldn’t work out so well. But I think half of it on Trump’s part is just signalling.
The sanctions over the Ukraine, as far as I can remember, have not actually been lifted and are likely to stay in place, as far as I can tell.
Russia itself is less powerful than it has been, both in terms of its economy and its conventional military. They couldn’t really invade America even if they wanted to, and they aren’t going to become a global hegemon. China is a much greater threat to America’s global power long-term, depending on just how bad all their looming crises become. China also sticks out more to his base because it wasn’t Russia that the jobs got offshored to.
Trump is probably seeking to cooperate with Russia when it suits America’s interests, rather than just fight Russia across the board. In part, he wants to signal this to Moscow.

This also depends on just how you define “America’s interests”. If you think of democracy or global capitalism as being synonymous with “America’s interests”, then I don’t think Trump agrees with you.

Trump probably does find Islam threatening in a way that he does not actually find Christians, Hindus, gays, transgender people, etc threatening. So, let’s suppose he wants to drain the migrants out of Europe. Right-wing parties are gaining steam, and others are shifting right on the issue. But so long as there is nowhere to put the migrants, the media can pelt the nativists with stories about migrant suffering. Enter the Syrian “safe zones” plan from his campaign. Paying off the construction of temporary housing and mass issuing of rations is cheaper than a lot of military action, it keeps the migrants out of Europe, and it creates somewhere to put them for when they leave Europe without triggering the same level of media-based political fallout. However, to do this, he needs support from Russia/Putin.

Trump is signalling that he does not care if Syria is ruled by a tyrant. He’s willing to compromise if it gets him his safe zones.

Source: thathopeyetlives politics trump

We won’t know if the Trump Presidency was properly bad until later. The Left/Libs cannot be trusted to be honest in their criticisms, or consistent. They’ll attack using whatever they can - they even btched about him eating steak “wrong”.

If you get swamped with maximal criticism no matter what, you might as well just ignore the criticism and go with your own conscience.

It isn’t that I think he’s great. It’s that you can’t trust people who were completely blindsided, and who are ideologically pre-committed to opposition, to accurately evaluate the situation. You wouldn’t trust most right-wing pundits on Obama, after all.

Trump bowled over the mainstream Republicans because he had three core issues - less trade, less (stupid) war, less immigration. He will be judged by whether he meets those goals, not left-wing goals about maximizing undefinable “diversity”.

politics trump cw

theunitofcaring

Anonymous asked:

Where does "we're legitimately afraid for ourselves and our families" fit into the narrative? Do they just not believe us?

theunitofcaring answered:

Actual supporters of Trump correct me if I’m wrong but I think they’d say “you’re afraid because the left has deliberately promoted hysteria and fear; the things you’re afraid of aren’t going to happen”. Like, I think they legitimately do not believe that someone could be scared of Milo because they are scared he’ll say their name on stage and then they’ll be beaten or strangled or deported or murdered over it, I think they model fear of Milo as ‘the left has deliberately self-modified to find anyone who is not cowed by leftist orthodoxy terrifying’.

So yeah, they don’t believe you (or they believe that your being scared has almost nothing to do with their behavior). Unless you or your loved ones are an undocumented immigrant or a refugee, in which case I think they’d say ‘well yes I am endangering your family but I don’t have an obligation to endanger my family to protect your family”.

This is not exactly encouraging but I think it’s roughly a description of the thing.

mitigatedchaos

From the Trump supporters I know, this is reasonably accurate.

politics trump

mutant-aesthetic

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Julian Assange 🔹 on Twitter

“10/ Here's Singapore's long term prime minister Lee Kuan Yew:”

a-sleepygoldenstorm

What neither side of US politics wants to admit: the promotion of identity politics combined with the declining white super majority has led to turbo charged white identity politics. Since Dems catered for non-white identity politics, Trump and the GOP took hold of white identity politics.

Most countries that do not have a 70%+ super majority ethnic group have ethnicized electoral politics.

mitigatedchaos

Yes, my fear is that Lee Kuan Yew is right.

Source: a-sleepygoldenstorm politics torches in the night racepol

collapsedsquid

mitigatedchaos

I reasoned the PC stuff was like antibiotic resistance in bacteria. It doesn’t matter today, it doesn’t matter tomorrow, but one day, 30 years from now, multi-drug-resistant TB develops and the problems pile on and on from there.

…but if you can keep developing new antibiotics fast enough to keep up with it, you can sort-of ignore your bad practices and the collateral damage they cause.

I thought that’s what was happening, and that the reckoning wasn’t going to be until 2028, as the result of a slowly building fire of, well, various mens’ movements refusing to comply with male gender roles (something already in progress at the fringes). Instead the tension was lurking beneath the surface across multiple axes, but the media didn’t want to talk about it and people would be socially punished for talking about it sometimes, so it wasn’t as visible.

I’d like to think there is some new path where the word “Racism” can be made powerful again, but I cannot find it. It would require socially punishing false accusations of racism, which simply isn’t feasible under the current ideological framework. I’m not one to buy into the “Contradictions of $Ideology” idea much, (since most of the people pushing it are Communists ignoring the ‘contradictions’ essentially inevitable to their own system,) but I think this is partially a case of that.

In some ways I welcome the Populism, though. My estimate of corporate oligarchy and permanent majority has declined significantly.

politics trump identity politics

ranma-official

theonion:
“SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass....

Source: theonion queue

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

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Julian Assange 🔹 on Twitter