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

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
collapsedsquid
mitigatedchaos

@collapsedsquid

Then how do you think the Gen-Z Tumblr teens who are growing up now will turn out?  They’re forming their political worldview during the Trump years, I believe that they were somewhat continuing the trend of the younger Millennials but that’s the sort of thing that seems likely to change.

I’m not sure.  The Obama Administration continued with the droning, and bombing, and disrupted Libya, but its outward presentation, aided by the Media, was pretty chill, and as such it didn’t generate quite the same sort of backlash.  Who will grow up, look at Obama, and celebrate voting for the other party at the first opportunity because they feel like they missed the chance to oppose him the first/second time around?

Like, on one level, they should obviously react to Trump negatively and become Dem voters, right?  

So like, that’s what should happen, but…

Last I heard, trust in the Media is lower than trust in President Trump.  We’ve elected a living internet meme as President, and somehow this has happened.

(I admit, the reaction to the Trump Admin has made me more, rather than less, sympathetic towards it.  Perhaps I’m just evil that way.)

Likewise, the Dems have tied themselves up in idpol knots, and that stuff is toxic.  And aside from that they have other problems.

And the whole gamer thing?  That was supposed to have way less memeforce than it did, but the political awakening of thousands of young people was the Media lying about them over exploded Internet drama.

And the lid’s blown on some of the stuff going on in Europe.  You can choose whether to believe it or not, or whether it’s important or not, but it’s no longer a supremacy of the Liberal narrative that multiculturalism has no downsides whatsoever and is completely safe.

I think, probably, Trump is actually going to generate less generational backlash than Bush did.  That’s what my intuition says.  By being such a meme, he’s turned hatred against himself into a performance, and that has weakened its conversion effectiveness.

It mostly depends on whether we get in another war.

Source: mitigatedchaos politics
collapsedsquid
mitigatedchaos

@collapsedsquid On the other hand, given proportional manpower required relative to population size (small, due to force multipliers), and the wave of response to 9/11, would a draft have prevented the Iraq War from getting launched?

I’m not so sure.  And that’s an enormous political cost to pay if it may not even work for that goal.

collapsedsquid

While the article called it a draft and I sort of continued that, in truth what I think it’s suggesting is some sort of mandatory national service program. “Requiring everyone to serve“ is the phrase used in the article.

And I wasn’t suggesting it as policy, I was discussing it as something to react to.

mitigatedchaos

Right, I just mean the general case of “well America would be less likely to randomly go to war if it had a draft,” since that did come up.  I do think we should be looking for ways to prevent the next Iraq War, I just don’t think that would work for that.  (Though I’m not quite opposed national service in principle.)

As for left-leaning youngsters learning to fight, while the older Millennials are more strongly Democrat, apparently the younger ones are only weakly so, and the dividing line happens to correspond to how old people were during the Bush Administration.

(I don’t think the Bush Administration realized just how much damage they were doing to the cause of Conservatism itself in America.)

Source: mitigatedchaos politics
mutant-aesthetic
mutant-aesthetic

I actually wonder if the Alt-Right changed their message to focus more on exit rather than revolution, how the public attitude towards them would change. Like, if their fundamental thesis was something along the lines of this:

“In order to secure the existence of our people and a future for white children, we would like to have our own Amish/Indian sort of deal where we can peacefully withdraw from a society we find repulsive.”

Obviously by and large it would still be offensive to hardcore lefties and true believer progs, but how would it impact the moderates, the average joe? What about the free speech/gamergater/cultural libertarian crowd? Certainly it wouldn’t make them more willing to adopt the alt-right’s white nationalism, but would the idea of giving these people an exit from modernity be seen as more reasonable than them wanting to take over the US and make it a white ethno-state?

mitigatedchaos

What you have to understand is that everyone in politics is incompetent and ideology-huffed.  In part, because if you aren’t, it’s hard to derive enough motive power.

So, while “White People Reservation” is an order of magnitude more achievable, and two or three orders of magnitude less damaging than “make the US into a white ethno-state,” they aren’t going to take it up as their rallying cry.

politics torches in the night

Now, I know people will object “but the Alt-Right / hard right ARE disconnected from reality!”

But keep in mind those smug forecasts of a 98% Clinton victory.

The hard right don’t need to be totally connected to reality to gain more power, they just need to monopolize key, salient, missing pieces.

I’d consider saying something like “don’t let them do that,” but of course, the intersection of (people who read this blog) (who have the power to change the liberal and left political operatives’ behavior), and (who would actually act on that advice, from me of all people) is basically zero.

politics
osberend
kontextmaschine

Mike Cernovich acquired a copy of that “Shitty Men in Media” list (he was offering $10,000) and is using it to run hit pieces

says he’s going to give the accused a chance to reply, I suspect that’s an excuse to sequence them strung out for maximum news impact, in priority as culture war enemies

slatestarscratchpad

What a moron.

These people are going to get away with it, because the accusations will forever be associated with the alt-right. If he’d waited a week or two, someone else would have taken the bait, published, and the media would have eaten it up.

But now the whole issue has been coded “of interest to racists” and everyone else will be careful not to touch it. The people involved will defend with “You’re accusing me of sexual harassment? Aha, I see you’re a fan of Mike Cernovich” and it’ll never go anywhere.

shieldfoss

here you are assuming Cernovich intends to bring abusers to justice in an effort to help women

which

i mean

osberend

Nah, the analysis still applies if he wants to take down Biddle et al. for being sociopolitical enemies. Where it falls apart, of course, is if he really just wants to gather money and love from guess existing base for “boldly standing up to the hypocritical liberal media establishment,” etc. In that case, he’s actually better if the left drops it as a result of his support, because it gives him more “lone voice crying the wilderness” cred.

mitigatedchaos

Beyond just him, does it not empower the hard right in general if this wagon circling happens?

One of the things that’s been really empowering for the hard right (in my opinion) are conditions in Europe, including sex crimes.  Because of just who was committing those crimes, they were able to gain a temporary monopoly on “justice” as a platform for that particular issue.  

Do people realize how bad that is for Liberals?

They’re building a narrative that the Left and the Liberals are thick with pedophiles, molesters, and sex traffickers, and that when they aren’t committing those crimes themselves, the Left and Liberals are willing to overlook them depending on ethnicity.

Circling the wagons isn’t what the Liberals should do.  The way to prevent the hard right from gaining ground in Rotherham was to be better than they were, by actually enforcing the laws, like they are supposed to and, ostensibly, which is in line with their principles.

We’ve seen that at least some of the hard right are willing to fabricate a narrative if they have to, but a non-fabricated narrative has a lot more solidity to it.  

So maybe they circle the wagons, and this outsider can’t actually take these guys down.  But what if the point isn’t to take them down?  What if the point is recruitment?  Long-term recruitment, shifting the margins of power, which, when you only need a majority, matters.

Their faction is relatively small right now, but it has room to grow in proportion to how badly their rivals fuck up and/or are disconnected from reality.

Source: kontextmaschine rape discourse cw gendpol politics the culture war
the-grey-tribe

You Can’t Have It All (even in communism)

thathopeyetlives

In past ages, communists, socialists, and anarchists were usually reacting to a world in which resources were scarce in general as well as in specific and in which the situation of the poor in general was one of miserable deprivation. Meanwhile, the future potential of automation and robotics – machines which might not merely reduce the amount of work that needed to be done, but largely eliminate it – was not really visible. 

Today things are… different. 


It’s pretty common that I see far leftists more-or-less promising the following after a Revolution: 

1. That it will no longer be neccessary for everybody to work, and moreover that people will be permitted not to work, and yet to have enough to live on, without needing to justify not working to anybody. 

2. That industry will change to vastly decrease damage to the enviroment

3. That material quality of life and industrial capacity will not catastrophically plummet, especially not in things like medical technology


I think that this is… very optimistic. The kind of optimistic that no wise person would ever bet on. 

Some far leftists claim that communism is more efficient and will do better than capitalism. This is unlikely. The Soviet Union did great things – industrializing rapidly after everyone else had a head start and after having the Nazis burn half their country – but they were just catching up to others, and they were oppressive, enviromentally destructive, and didn’t let people not work by any means. It didn’t last. 

(However, in the post-Stalin soviet union, there were some labor rights that would make Americans drool.)


If you combine this with confiscationism and the intersectionality thing where anybody’s position in the grand hierarchy of justified people can be questioned, you have a nightmare: a society that continually eats itself, finding new classes of “bourgeoise” and kulaks and “counter-revolutionaries” to force into slave labor or just murder and loot, so that the Beautiful People can have their gleaming solarpunk utopia and their communism of leisure. 


I do not wish to suggest that I intend to be the enemy of hope; our current system is unjust and needs to be reformed. We can reform it in a way that will turn automation from a curse into a blessing, and which will improve peoples’ lives now and in the future. But this will not be revolution but counter-revolution, and will have no place for bloodstained red flags. 

rendakuenthusiast

Endorsed.

Source: thathopeyetlives politics the invisible fist mostly endorsed the red hammer
tanadrin
tanadrin

This pisses me off so, so much. Warning: what follows is not very calm. Probably not very charitable either. I write “fuck” a lot.

Keep reading

mitigatedchaos

< caring about opinions being actually good vs being seen to be good >

 Well, there’s your answer right there, isn’t it?

Scott may be the Rightful Caliph (or a contender for the position) within Rationalism and its Adjacency, but outside of our sphere, he has all sorts of markers that are low-status, or are tribal low-status, and he poses a danger to a lot of people that are farming status through toxic takes.

I mean, imagine if Rationalism became the new normal.  Sure, this would probably crash a lot of metaphorical trains and the results would be observable in the global GDP, but one of the trains that got crashed would be most of the established Commentariat, their pundits, the outrage-farming, clickbaiting and so on.

New ones would likely develop in the aftermath, because Rationalism doesn’t actually remove all sorts of base human emotions.  However, the new ones would be different people.  

Scott’s social status is zero sum with these people.  His gain is their loss.  They’re going to attack, attack, attack.  They may not even fully know why they’re doing it.

politics the culture war the rationalists
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