I'm open that I may be wrong.

I agree Trump is exactly the result of 40 years of us collectively allowing norms to erode. The solution is to continue this process?

I've yet to see anyone explain how it plays out if we follow your method. How does it lead back to a place where civility and fact win arguments?

Sure it will make us feel great and allow us to score short term gotcha moments but how will it lead to the a place where reason and facts win?

Why? To win elections? Because bomb throwers win elections, cf. who's in power everywhere.

To maintain moral superiority regardless of electoral outcomes? Can't say I'm a fan, cf. who's in power everywhere.

I don't think the goal when we participate in politics is for facts to win arguments. Maybe it's yours; it's not mine. Facts are great and important. But politics is about power, not winning a fact contest. It's a post modern world, there's no such thing as some hierarchy of order determined by facts. I'm not suggest we lie to people but this mentality where the end goal is for facts and civility win and then the chips fall from there is a huge leak and unproductive.

In the very end, we're dealing with a value judgement about how much we want to preserve racial egalitarianism. There's no factually correct answer to the question "Is America a place that treats everyone equally or is it an apartheid state where whites get the best of everything and persistently favorable treatment?" It's a moral judgement. Your political opponents set about on their conclusion ("whites get things, everyone else, meh") and have worked backwards into arguments from there.

The goal of politics isn't to preserve the discourse where civility and facts win, it's to acquire power to see our ends are achieved via authority. I'm not here to make sure facts win out, we're here to make sure Sarah Palin and Donald Trump are not powerful people with lots of authority and we are.

Bingo. I didn't even get to the second point.

We have no evidence that Tone Policing arguments are more effective (or even effective at all), -and- we have strong indirect evidence that they are less effective... by both design and in practice.

That indirect evidence being that these Tone Policing arguments are all think-tanked and astroturfed. They don't and can't continue to exist without the constant application of $$$$ and professional man/hours.

Or... let's fixate of FlyWf, if we must. I'm know at least one quote can be quote-mined, belatedly and in retrospect, thanking FlyWf for an epiphany gained as a result of his alleged "yelling & screaming". I can remember exactly zero epiphanies gained, belated or not, from a decade+ of over-the-top whining about FlyWf's tone.

I'm scoring it: FlyWf 1, Nichelm 0.

that's a fair point also and one I don't have an answer too. Perhaps I am arguing how I wish the world were more than how it is but I am not yet ready to concede that.

Looking far down the road I agree adopting the rhetoric of the right will likely help us win the next election or maybe the next few but I cant find my way out of the expectation that it will also lead to a much larger breakdown in society.

I think this boils this whole thread down. I am not yet willing to concede we cant do both. Perhaps I am pollyannish.

Your comment about is being a post-modern world really hits home and it almost certainly the foundation for my hated of this approach.

I was in grad school in the 90s when postmodernism was flourishing. I spilled mountains of ink and yelled myself hoarse in many bars and lecture halls fighting against it.

To this day I think its the single worst ideology ever developed. I simply wont accept it is the norm.

Perhaps I will be left in the dust.

This is clearly a good point, but I think it's also obviously true that if you make this the only criterion for success you might end up where the GOP is: with the ability to win elections but no ability to govern. You have to win but you also have to be able to elect people who are capable of constructing some kind of rational governing policy. So I think Clovis' point that there should be some limits to how much the left embraces the tactics of the right has some validity to it.

fwiw, as far as the Palin thing goes I find it kind of hard to believe that it was purely coincidental, and I'm not super inclined to give the benefit of the doubt, but it hardly matters in isolation anyway. The trend of the right towards ethno-nationalism is pretty clear in the Trump administration, whether that tweet or that headline was intentional or not. That's an alarming and horrifying trend. So I think Chris or Clovis might miss the point a little bit on that, but I also think Clovis seems like a good guy and I agree that sometimes posters here are a bit harsh in their eviscerations of people like Clovis, even when I agree that criticism is warranted. Also, this is a message board so I feel like norms about how to disagree with each other may have little to do with actual politics anyway.

lol @ this self centered endless bull**** to justify white guys being *******s on the internets as some elaborate plan to regain power. You didn't elect a ****ing orange fascist because fly-the-racism-sniffer wasn't an ******* enough to to other white guys who think very similar to him except on some issues.

youre just *******s.

Conservatives seem to recognize without the 5% of their base that's active in the local kkk or whatever that they won't be able to compete nationally in elections (look out how close all the non obama president elections have been since 2000).

So they can't or won't throw them out of the tent, which emboldens them to run wild with all sorts of 14 words storm front stuff which leaks into the conservative media bubble and they have to rely on raised by wolves strategy to avoid being implicit. Pretty gross imo

The fence might not be a very good metaphor for political affiliations. The center (and I think often the center for the center's sake) is a very stable position. It may well be easier to bring a member of the Aryan Nation into the progressive movement (or equivalent transformation) than a hardened centrist.

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/b...fe-after-hate/

and the like

and also



and as a microbettian aside, my 15 yo daughter is a big fan of Phil Ochs (who committed suicide in 1976) and emailed his sister and then talked to her on the phone for about an hour and a half last week. She lives across the country and is 80 years old.

(there are no centrists and there never have been, the entire ideology exists in Acela corridor op-eds)

An oldie but a goodie.

Because that's what people have been arguing. However, based on your showing here, it speaks to reason that if someone did painstakingly go through your posts there's likely going to be many, many other instances of you choosing stupid hills to die on. Maybe you're just a habitual contrarian?


Seems like that's what Clovis is clinging to. To use a couple of Canadian legal terms, is it beyond a reasonable doubt? Maybe not. But on a balance of probabilities this is a slam dunk.

If we leave all the forum 'banter' aside it comes down to a matter of approach. Yes we have to win power but it's simply not the case that our side will always be in power whatever we do (I'll assume everyone agrees with that). Therefore the overall health of society and the system matters as well. These are far from independent of how we behave so how we behave matters.

People are going to have legitimately different views on that (which is a good thing imo). Personally I doubt I'm going to shift far from the attitude of people like JC in the UK on this.

It's easier to be right wing in the US because the message is "you deserve everything you have and people with less deserve that too".

Still up. Still spamming youngcons links.

Are all these youngcons links she has tweeted in the last day using her own comments or are they all this auto-filled stuff? Like, it looks from those recent tweets that her standard is to add a short comment. Perhaps she only leaves the auto-filled verbiage when she likes it.

https://twitter.com/SarahPalinUSA

This. Generally reasoning is a sham. Decisions are almost always emotional. And that's not just an emotional theory, it's well born out in research. People have feelings and then rationalize as best they can. Putting Noam Chomsky on the stage with William F. Buckley basically just showed you that Chomsky was a lot smarter. The real difference between them was that one of them minded when poor people in other countries were murdered and the other didn't though, not that Chomsky's arguments were better.

Maybe that's what "center for the center's sake" would be. It's really just "don't rock the boat too hard"->"that's a little too hard"-> "c'mon things aren't really so bad are they?" and should be called conservatism.

Well said. Let's say we lie and scream our way to victory. Then what?

Dvaut you say you are not advocating lying? If the goal is to gain power to stop the racist Trump administration, why not? Won't the ends justify the means?

Is calling Mexicans cockroaches white nationalistic or just racism. Does it matter?

This is actually an incredibly astute psychological observation; a similar culture could be seen in Nazi Germany--extreme, brutal, dehumanizing violence supporting an exaggerated, prim formality.

FWIW, "my hate is pure" is a common descriptor for this kind of tactic on the left. It was the Twitter bio of The New Republic's social media editor for about a year, for instance.

I like Fly, but I wish he'd just find ways to avoid the effin' expletives rather than making me read a post filled with ****s.

Some of them I assume are ladybugs.

Would you consider yourself racist?

But why not lie to people if this is your view of the world? Is it simply because lying too much might be a suboptimal strategy for obtaining power?

Right or wrong, this seems like an incredibly depressing take.

Which meaning of the r-word are you using here... Secret Heart R-word-ism -vs- Institutional R-word-ism?

http://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/07/is-your-hate-pure