simplicitus is a very optimistic chap. Wish I could take a few hits of what he's smoking.

So what you're saying is that Republicans, many of whom do base their values on things like religion, national identity, class or racial superiority, do have a justified fear that their values are under threat?

Yes, their values are under threat from Western civilization (properly understood) not from the takeover of Islamic militants. They seem to be confused about such things, which is my point.

edit: to get to where they are they need to start from the premise that Western civilization is actually a largely white-nurtured enterprise that includes things like the prosperity gospel, opus dei, not being gay, football, and respecting authority.

https://twitter.com/danwlin/status/883144846055264256

Another way to understand my point. I'm fine with them saying egg headed know it all liberals and feminists are ruining America. In a narrow sense, from their limited perspective, they are right.

However, what the egg headed know it all liberals and feminists are doing is continuing the project of the enlightenment, basically the essence of wester civilization, that brought together Europe and allowed it to dominate the globe, undertake colonization (oops), and establish The US, Canada, etc.

So when I hear Trump/Bannon/Miller say Western civilization civilization is under threat from the Muslims and the browns, it seems to me like a coach yelling at his players to play harder when the team is up 105-6. What is worse, he's mistakenly directing his strenuous exhortations to the cheer squad and the equipment staff. He's correct that something is wrong, but it's not the game, it's that he has a brain tumor and his wife is sleeping with her dentist.

An example. I just did a litigation matter for a 100 person Chinese software company, working closely with the CEO/founder. It was completely ABC. I would tell him the law, what issues we needed to worry about, what points helped or hurt the case. He would provide useful info, indicate other relevant facts given the legal landscape, etc. Now, he's had some dealings with the west, but he was Chinese born, bread, and educated, and was just like a Western client, but smarter (comp sci degree from MITish college in China). I think he appreciated the fact we could go after a competitor with some confidence in the system and the rule of law. He didn't have to know me personally, we didn't need to bribe anyone, it was relatively painless. (Hell, I wish it required more work. The opponent settled early.)

Now, we didn't talk politics, but he seemed just fine and dandy with rational, rules based, regulated capitalism. And his businesses basically runs on science and engineering. He's not about to join the red guard to overthrow the imperialist oppressors. The only ones who do that are the one's who don't have anything or got it all stolen by the imperialists. Basically, whether in China or Pakistan or Boliva, people want stuff and don't want to be screwed. Western civilization, for the most part, does that better than anyone else. The Saudi's can build a madrassa in your city but a movie theater in that city will convert a lot more people.

Bannon can ***** when 90% of box office revenue goes to Isis made films of people stabbing infidels for Allah. But, as Isis knows, it's the other way around.

Chapo is great but it is what it is. "Dirt bag leftism", and anything further left than social-democracy has proven to be nothing more than an anti-reactionary force against the status quo.

Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

People were talking about misogyny earlier, specifically within the GOP. This thread talks about how the recent "CNN Blackmail" hoax mirrors GamerGate directly:


https://twitter.com/Quinnae_Moon/sta...17935610531840

yup

Welp, new Tapatalk update sucks as per usual, and this post will probably have a damn signature, but Tapatalk now parses both the [tweet ] bbcode AND naked links to Twitter in the same way, so the (once much appreciated) practice of using the bbcode and the naked link is now redundant.

Well that's good because being cosiderate of others is kind of a pain tbh.

If nothing else, listen to The Reading Series of Shapiro and Douthat's respective books.

I personally feel they go a little bit too hard for my tastes, perhaps inadvertently, with absolving trump voters of their agency and responsibility, but I'm used to that by now as everybody seems to do it, and I don't deny a person's cathartic venting. The thing to note is their gameplan was to have HRC win and attack her from the left, rightfully so, but the election put the monkey wrench in the works. This whole new idea of actually having to face the reality of 62 million people actively pulling that lever might never be truly broached and reconciled in a meaningful way.

Yeah, this might be The End for me.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.3d98ea30bb55


p.s. I mean that now I'm a nihilist, not that I'm gonna jump off a bridge.

Trump is like their last gasp wild swinging punch in the culture wars that even though they landed they still lose in the long run.

As much as trump has made me view W in a better light, he's made me view Reagan in worse. Which I didn't think was possible.

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/23/us...e-streets.html


just to pick one thing

I think you are of course correct that the right has done wonders by very, very intentionally conflating "Western values" with "right-winger concerns about the potency of the white male" and not actually western values and they have done very, very well conflating the assault on "Western values" to broaden from "stuff terrorists do" to "the cabal of terrorists, liberals, feminists, migrants, academics, intellectuals, globalists who are set against white male tribalism."

Obviously the things they see as transparently and obviously bad, the things they fret about as threatening and undermining widely held social values (terrorists, unchecked immigration, BLM, mandated birth control coverage, gay marriage, Chinese manufacturers) have precisely no coherent meaning UNLESS you view it in the context of white male tribalism. Of white guys feel anxious and threatened about their standing in the social order.

Then obviously the whole thing makes sense, that these people feel dispossessed (as you note, in many ways rightfully so) and have created a narrative yarn to lump all of their enemies together, and to pretend that the things that matter deeply to them (white male primacy and social power) are actually just innocuous shared collective values ("Western values").

Trump's speech, the entirety of Fox News programming, Breitbart's front page, etc. etc. should be seen in that prism and basically all other interpretations are doing it wrong.

I don't think he's exactly wrong and I'm a pretty pessimistic guy these days.

I've said it before but the long-term ascendant winner here is capitalism and market orthodoxy. Long term for as long as most of us have been living -- THAT'S the ascendant power right now. EVEN after Trump, particularly since Trump will knowingly or unknowingly further its interests anyway -- the long term value set that is winning over the past 75 years or so are those values that comport with the interests of finance capitalism.

Once we acknowledge that as ~basically true, you can make predictions from there as to what the future holds without drastic, revolutionary changes if we continue on our ~present course. And I mean drastic changes far more disruptive than Trump.

So take values that assist markets like market rights egalitarianism (e.g., allowing blacks, gay people, women, etc. to participate fully in the market, in labor, as consumers) -- there's no way those are going to be rolled back meaningfully. I do think the days of the whites-only lunch counter are gone; stories about gay people in cinema and theater are here to stay. Gay people are going to continue to be welcomed as co-workers and in our stores and the backwaters where that isn't true -- they're fast disappearing. Women are going to own businesses and control a lot of wealth. Predictions that portend a return to feudalism or whatever I think are way off the mark.

Now, once you get beyond market rights and into a wider array of social and political dignities -- that's a far dicier proposition.

Similarly, take science. That will have a set of dual fates, imo.

Science in service of technology and markets will be here to stay and is here to stay. Science that builds to conclusions that actively harm or impede markets (see global warming, emerging research about animal sentience and how they feel pain, etc.) are going to be met with reflexive doubt, with superstitious assumptions, with appeals to traditional values and the old order, with censorship, with propaganda campaigns that are allowed to flourish in spite of science.

How many vibrant small-l liberal democratic rights will survive? Hard to say. Obviously some measure of authoritarianism or rolling back tax-and-redistribution schemes which provide economic sustenance to people who can't or don't produce that much -- those laws and that money doesn't service capital and they are certainly on the chopping block. Certainly some forms of censorship are entirely useful to markets, and I expect to see those sorts of freedoms rolled back to a degree.

Religion and traditional order that questions any sort of consumption or inhibition of the human impulse -- e.g., religious norms against gambling or usury or conspicuous consumption -- those are going to be eroded further.

I am very very dour about the changes of the full menu of "Western values" but whichever ones are servile to capitalism are a fantastic bet to survive. Any sort of value set that assumes all humans have dignity, even poor people, or that cherishes any sort of old religious norm or standard that impedes capitalism -- those are probably going to get continual boots to the face.

Western value are an eclectic mix of stuff that abet capitalism and impede capitalism and I think if we sort those values by "service to capital and markets," you'll get the ~proper ordering of which will thrive and which will continue to be assaulted.

And so to bring it full circle, the vast array of mediocre white people fueling Trump are very likely victims to the forces of capitalism and the evolution of norms that are also eroding things liberals cherish. Per Original Position earlier:

Obviously. But critically, I would call the threat to their values valid. 'Justified' is a bit of a loaded term. The threat is obviously real and manfiest. This is probably where I depart with a strident form of leftist thought that all market outcomes are inherently bad. Tons of these people DO have disgraceful values and so their erosion is a happy circumstance.

Back to my pessimism, though. The seminal tweet that can't be improved on:



https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/stat...679492?lang=en

This seems to me to explain it succinctly. In the future, you get the choice of bloodthirsty capitalists or bloodthirsty racists, but you gotta choose one. Nowhere in this movement is a vibrant left or really any sort of coherent defense of of the total package of Enlightenment values that can challenge either. The left and defenders of the Enlightenment gestalt seemingly unable to build any sort of meaningful way out of having to compromise with one. You see the debate all the time in the American left about the direct of the Democrats.

The understandable, big fear about specifically the Trumpian style -- I think why he rankles the left just so much -- is that he constitutes the idea of a sort of triangulation or a hybrid between the two poles in the future. The grand deplorable capitalist compromise. I think that's why some of you are understandably pushing back on simplicitus's optimism, because of the idea Trump sits atop a movement that represents both.

Frankly imo he seems too incompetent to pull it off. Right now the administration is a total clown show and deeply unpopular and the Republicans aren't doing much beyond Trump's Twitter Trolls. But obviously, the future of the modern right-wing movement may be a better organized, more competent and effectual compromise between the two as a second best ideal for both sides. That finance capitalism needs bloodthirsty racist idiots as the democratic buttress to allow them to do business without pesky leftist regulations and tax schemes, and the bloodthirsty racists need the finance capitalist elites to get access to money and power. The result is the mediocre white continues their life as a normal schlubs, anxious about how to pay for this and that and the forces of capitalism and the elites have to rub shoulders and do business with the boorish morons and their representatives like Trump. But they each get something.

I think you are underestimating the way automation is going to undermine capitalism. It will have to adapt dramatically to the increasing small wealth generating value of human labour happening alongside human wealth increasing dramatically.

Longer term I'm very optimistic because it's inherently a great thing but unless we get ahead if it (which I'm pessimistic about) then there's going to be a lot of pain along the way

Automation and approaching the Singularity would be something in the 'big disruptive change' category that I mentioned in post #44126. It was exactly the kind of thing I had in mind along with global environmental changes, a huge pandemic, nuclear catastrophes, etc. The known-unknowns, the stuff people speculate about or can make plausible prognostications for but which have enough uncertainty about them such that we shouldn't assume them.

It's nothing as dramatic as the singularity. It's a steady increase in the mass of people who cannot escape poverty or improve their status by working.

Unaddressed, It will steadily increase anger and frustration with the system and political institutions.They will still vote. They will 'find' people to blame

Automation may drastically increase unemployment, but there will be so much political and cultural opposition to any kind of "universal basic income." It's gonna take a 2nd great depression for that to happen, IMO. Kind of like how it will take half the US to be underwater before people actually try to take global warming seriously.