[HN Gopher] The case against crisis-mongering
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The case against crisis-mongering
Author : cjbest
Score : 124 points
Date : 2021-08-13 13:48 UTC (1 days ago)
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| echopurity wrote:
| > privately owned business corporations ("capitalism") have done
| a great job bringing down the cost of photovoltaic panels,
| developing electric vehicles that people want to drive, creating
| promising fake meat substitutes, and otherwise creating the
| building blocks of a sustainable economy.
|
| Even if we attribute this stuff to "capitalism" (instead of
| "workers" for example), I'm pretty sure none of it is actually
| sustainable.
|
| >Now of course we don't have carbon pricing, and I think we never
| will because it's hideously unpopular. But that's the essence of
| the climate crisis -- not an ideological crisis for liberalism,
| but tragically a crisis of mass indifference.
|
| So we don't have carbon tax because of mass indifference to the
| planet being destroyed? Otherwise carbon taxes? Whatever, lib.
| gdubs wrote:
| The author's point seems to be that everyone exaggerates in a
| direction that best serves their desired political outcome. What
| he misses is the obvious -- he exaggerates as well, in the
| direction of "moderation." His desired outcome is that we all
| take a moderate approach, and the rhetorical device used to get
| there is that 'crises are all exaggerated.'
| thinkharderdev wrote:
| I'm not sure that is a fair characterization of his
| preferences. This is a guy who just wrote a book called "One
| Billion Americans" which argues that we should quadruple the US
| population through both pro-natalist policies and more
| immigration. I wouldn't really consider that a "moderate"
| position.
|
| His other shtick though is "popularism" which is just that
| politicians should focusing on doing things that are broadly
| popular. It is (on my reading at least) not so much that this
| is "desirable" in a normative sense, but just that it is the
| only way to actually make progress.
| buu700 wrote:
| It's an interesting idea. So much of the US is just
| uninhabited land. I could see such policies not leading to
| overcrowding, but rather to increased development and
| economic growth across the country, particularly if combined
| with something like the Homestead Act.
| XorNot wrote:
| Your point is "people try to make compelling arguments". Well
| duh, but it's not an actual rebuttal.
| joelbondurant wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember when liberal didn't mean liberal
| police state social authoritarian.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Humans are built to survive adversity. We got so good at it, we
| took over the planet. Now there's _lots_ of humans who haven 't
| ever faced serious challenges (by previous standards of everyday
| survival), and they need to feel the drama and triumph humans are
| programmed for even without the actual life threatening events
| that used to prompt those feelings.
|
| So for many, there's _always_ going to be an imminent apocalypse
| thats more interesting and urgent than any of their actual day to
| day problems.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| > We got so good at it, we took over the planet.
|
| C. Elegans would like a word!
| tvirosi wrote:
| I don't believe in this perspective. I think most people are
| sick of it (and would live healthier lives if they were allowed
| to focus more attention on their immediate surroundings) but
| that it keeps being refueled by profit desperate news
| corporations.
| isoskeles wrote:
| If most people were truly sick of it, there would be no
| market for news corporations to exploit.
|
| People are also "allowed" to focus their attention on
| whatever they want. It seems like you're saying we are
| powerless to ignore the news, although I am curious if you
| mean something else.
| tvirosi wrote:
| People are "allowed" to ignore drugs and nicotine but it's
| pretty hard and culture and laws help us constrain the
| lower bound will power you have to have in order to live a
| life. I'm not necessarily saying drugs and news addiction
| are as strong or as destructive but there should probably
| be some "let's act in a way that's good for the public"
| ideas floating around rather than pure "the free hand means
| it's moral" motivated greed.
| jerf wrote:
| I think they are sick of it, but not because the grandparent
| post is wrong. They're sick of it because the emergency is
| "supposed" to be something you can overcome, feel triumphant
| about, and move on to the next thing.
|
| But the emergencies in the media don't work that way. It
| doesn't matter how much you recycle, the media will keep
| screaming about catastrophe. It doesn't matter how many solar
| cells adorn your roof, the media will keep screaming. It
| doesn't how careful you are with your children, the media
| will keep screaming about child abductions. It doesn't matter
| if you pour hundreds of hours into organizing your
| neighborhood and fighting local crime, the media will keep
| screaming about crime.
|
| It's the nature of this particular beast.
|
| Consequently, you're never able to escape the "crisis"
| atmosphere, and stay stressed full time. That's not normal,
| especially in the absence of real, proximal crisis of that
| degree.
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| What I gather from your comment is that the media thrusts
| big societal issues (sustainability, climate change, child
| abuse, crime) upon the individual. When the individual
| tries to address these issues with their own actions or
| purchases, it's has zero impact on the reporting of the
| crisis.
|
| I can conclude that the only sane things for an individual
| to do is not to counter these issues with individual
| actions, but to instead organize for a societal response
| strong enough to change the media narratives, or switch off
| the media completely and live life as best as one can.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > switch off the media completely and live life as best
| as one can
|
| This is what I do. And I am confident that no matter what
| choices I make individually, they have no impact
| whatsoever on a global scale.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Yeah the trick is to turn off and tune out the media
| altogether. You really don't need to be hearing about
| everything that happens in the world and a non-stop
| partisan narrative interpretation of it. It's really not
| good for you, or anyone else. Turn it off. Go outside, go
| hike, go fish, play video games, whatever, just turn off
| the news. Remove the news feed from your phone. Add
| extensions that block news feeds on social media. Delete
| social media apps with feeds. Cancel your cable
| subscription. Go outside, enjoy your short life.
| spamizbad wrote:
| I agree. How much not-for-profit, non-state media, non-clout
| chasing fear mongering content is there? It does exist but
| the scale is small.
| thinkharderdev wrote:
| Honestly I think that there is quite a lot of non-
| fearmongering media out there. The Economist strikes me as
| a good example. And in general I think if you read any
| "respectable" (Economist, NYT, WSJ, WaPo, La Monde, etc.)
| newspaper as a whole on a day-to-day basis you wouldn't
| come away from the experience being especially scared or
| fearful. The problem is that it all gets dumped into the
| social media slurry and what a lot of people consume (in
| practice) is a sort of curated selection of the most
| sensationalist individual stories across the entire media
| ecosystem.
| spamizbad wrote:
| The Economist does a fair bit of fearmongering when it
| comes to China and inflation.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| I think one dimension of crisis mongering is how drastic
| the stakes are portrayed. Its one thing to discuss
| discerning trends or potential problems, and another to
| portray every problem as a struggle of between good and
| evil in which the balance of the universe hangs. The
| Economist tends to stick to the former side of the
| spectrum than the latter in my experience.
| bko wrote:
| That's partly true, but it's also true young people look out
| for adventure and meaning. They've been fed the story that
| they can delay starting a family until well into your 30s.
| Dating apps don't help. They're overeducated and
| underemployed.
|
| So you have young people in their 20s with no sense of
| purpose. Why not LARP on twitter and pretend you're saving
| the world by trying to ruin the lives of people you don't
| agree with?
| Covzire wrote:
| People like this are easy to manipulate in the extreme, I
| fear we're in the midst of a pandemic of sociopaths
| practicing their art, more than anything. There's no end in
| sight either.
| zamfi wrote:
| > So you have young people in their 20s with no sense of
| purpose. Why not LARP on twitter and pretend you're saving
| the world by trying to ruin the lives of people you don't
| agree with?
|
| I'm not sure if you're suggesting this, but I think it's
| more about attention and feelings of social acceptance,
| than it is about purpose.
| bko wrote:
| Maybe. The reason I think it's more about purpose than
| attention and social acceptance is that Twitter is
| probably the platform with the most vocal social activism
| and its relatively pseudonymous. So your Twitter profile
| doesn't really carry any weight in real life social
| interactions, so it's less signaling than something like
| Instagram. And twitter is pretty ephemeral as well, so
| attention doesn't stay. I've seen someone with 15
| followers dunk on some popular figure on Twitter, get
| mentioned in the NY Times (which is pretty weird) and
| they gain maybe 5 or 10 followers. I'm not even
| exaggerating. So it's not even 15 minutes of fame. It's
| nothing
|
| People find purpose in dunking on others and they do it
| almost as a job. They even give up other social
| obligations and post regularly between certain hours.
| namdnay wrote:
| If they were sick of it, they wouldn't lap it up. People like
| drama. If they didn't we wouldn't have reality TV
| filoleg wrote:
| Yeah, it reminds me of the anecdotal phenomenon I've
| observed, that the kind of people to say "god, i just
| haaate getting involved in drama in general" are the ones
| to be most likely to stir up that drama in the first place.
| throwaway_4253 wrote:
| Hmm, I think there's a difference between heavily
| fictionalized external personal drama and the diffuse,
| anxiety-provoking miasma of social media and mainstream
| news headlines feeds.
|
| Even if there isn't a huge difference, I feel like the
| relationship is more like that of an alcoholic or other
| addict. Do addicts really "like" their drug? Surely most of
| them know at some level that it's really unhealthy, and
| there's diminishing pleasurable returns even in the short
| term, but they still crave it as a release from their short
| term anxieties and problems.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > If they were sick of it, they wouldn't lap it up
|
| The evidence does not support that.
|
| People will often ignore their own plights (from which they
| are tired and feel trapped or impotent) to engage in remote
| problems with a feeling of authority and power. Voting for
| a federal office is the ultimate diversion. Rather than
| argue and campaign for local changes where they understand
| exactly what impact they can make (or not make), they
| invest in a far away problem for which they feel like there
| is a different performance profile.
|
| People are sick of some crisis mongering, they just like a
| change of pace.
| dheera wrote:
| > Humans are built to survive adversity.
|
| No, we aren't. Adversity from other humans, but not adversity
| from nature.
|
| Natural disasters routinely kill huge numbers of people,
| because we don't know how to deal with them.
| simonh wrote:
| Not all adversities are immediately lethal, but many will
| kill you eventually if you don't adapt.
|
| Anyway It's not necessarily the surviving the immediate
| disaster that's evolutionarily selected for. No adaptation is
| going to make a human volcano or tsunami proof. It's the
| survivors piecing a viable way of life back together in the
| aftermath that matters.
| raspasov wrote:
| Apart from obvious disasters, nature has also killed pretty
| much every human that has been born, so far.
|
| It seems pretty good at what it does! :)
| luffapi wrote:
| Humans are built to progress technologically and socially. It
| would be weird and unnatural if people didn't want things to
| improve. It doesn't matter how bad things were in the past.
| Your argument is a bit like saying we shouldn't work on new
| CPUs because what we have now is so much better than an abacus.
| fullshark wrote:
| This is just the attitude of bored people online who comment on
| politics and imagine themselves as keyboard warriors. Most
| people have genuine problems that consume their lives instead.
| andi999 wrote:
| With imminent apocalypse do you mean things like acid rain/tree
| dying, energy (oil) crisis, next ice age coming, nuclear
| destruction of the planet, nuclear hazard of power plants, Ozon
| layer depletion?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| There's an old, old saying in the news business, which predates
| 9/11 and almost everything else:
|
| "If it bleeds, it leads."
|
| There was _always_ an incentive to lead with disaster. I 'm
| probably mangling this quote, but someone (British?) said about
| the media:
|
| "They can't tell the difference between a bicycle accident and
| the collapse of civilization."
|
| To which the response was "Actually, a veteran newsman knows
| perfectly well which one is the better story."
|
| That kind of sensationalism seems almost quaint now. _Everything_
| is the collapse of civilization.
| oofabz wrote:
| This is a well-written and insightful article, but I don't think
| it's good for HN. Divisive political and culture war issues are
| thoroughly covered elsewhere. I would prefer HN to focus on its
| unique niche and show me new ideas I have not encountered before.
| thewarrior wrote:
| So a summary of this essay:
|
| 1. Donald Trumps presidency in no way justifies the claim that
| the United States is drifting towards fascism
|
| 2. BLM protests have stopped happening so this is probably not so
| much of an issue now.
|
| 3. The US and EU economies grew with a small drop in emissions so
| global warming will be fixed. Have these been adjusted for the
| fact that a lot of the activities that support a first world
| lifestyle have emissions outside of it ?
|
| It's difficult to take any of these claims seriously. The idea of
| social mobility is now dead for most Americans , the citizens of
| the richest country to ever exist. People are putting off getting
| married or having children as a result. Life expectancy for white
| men in rural areas has been decreasing for the first time ever.
| Half the country no longer trusts the election results or
| vaccines.Unless emissions drop to zero by 2050 we are looking at
| 4 degrees of warming by 2100. Even This relies on the invention
| of as yet unknown carbon capture technology.
|
| Large parts of the earth will become uninhabitable this century
| barring some insane technological breakthroughs and feats of
| international cooperation (given we can't even give poor
| countries vaccines) and even if that were fixed social mobility
| is declining in much of the rich world. This sounds like
| something written by someone ensconced in a nice little bubble of
| privilege.
| zzzeek wrote:
| If it helps the inevitable greying of your post on HN, I mostly
| agree with your assessment of this article. The argument and
| particularly graphics showing how GWB was compared to nazism
| were trying to make a comparison that I feel is not apt at all,
| I protested the GWB iraq war and I remember the comparisons
| made of GWB's presidency to facism. My personal experience is
| that era, while scary for what the future held, was _nothing_
| like what the Trump presidency was and what in many ways
| continues to be as we are no way out of the woods on this one
| yet. Not the least of which was the quite widespread semi-
| concerted effort by both non-elected and elected members of
| local, state, and national government to overturn the actual
| election, culminating in an attempted violent overthrow of the
| government. There was not a word of that in this article 's
| attempt to compare today to the GWOT era.
|
| I follow Yglesias because I think he is interesting and he
| doesn't infuriate me the way a complete troll like Taibbi would
| and I do appreciate his cold, tactical look at politics. But
| his brand really seems to be that "hey this is OK, we can relax
| and this is just the same old same old", and as you mention, if
| you are living in a bubble of privilege, you can totally go
| with that and have a nice day. The kind of argument that works
| just great until the moment a few states decide to nullify the
| 2024 electoral college results, the house that was lost in 2022
| due to gerrymandering goes along with it gleefully, and then
| that argument kind of didn't work at all. But until then, it's
| a super appealing message to those whose lifestyle can
| accommodate for it, he is trying to build up his new blog and
| his new name as a totally independent writer, and it's pretty
| interesting that he's on the front page of HN of all places.
| noahtallen wrote:
| > hey this is OK, we can relax and this is just the same old
| same old
|
| Another important point is that the "same old same old"
| wasn't actually that good for plenty of people. The point of
| understanding history like the world wars is to understand
| the ideas that led to them and hopefully learn a few lessons.
| Well, extreme economic distress along with xenophobic
| nationalist rhetoric led to the rise of Nazism. It's hard to
| avoid comparisons when similar rhetoric gets used in the
| modern day. It led to wars in the past, so it is hugely fair
| to at least be cautious about it today.
|
| While climate change is a new one, if we indeed can't reverse
| the effects (even if we keep it stable from now on), we'd
| still be looking at big changes wrt food and water sources.
| It's completely fair to be concerned that could lead to
| resource scarcity. We know from history that when that
| happens, you get total revolution (see France and Russia). So
| if that's a possible outcome, it's fair to think "ok, how do
| we avoid that?"
|
| Sure, scaremongering is wrong, and media does it all the time
| by over-emphasizing the amount of murders compared to, say,
| the amount of cancer cases. But there are still loads of
| things that should hopefully make us concerned for our future
| and try to do better in the present.
| blagie wrote:
| What I would more like is The Case for Resilience.
|
| We have a crisis every so often. As a society, we ought to be
| able to survive it. That might be a pandemic, war, climate change
| (whether man-made, or from a volcano/asteroid/etc.), nukes, or
| what-not.
|
| Being resilient means:
|
| * Some level of economic isolation. Each region ought to be able
| to produce the bare necessities for themselves, and supply chains
| shouldn't be brittle. This has less economic impact than one
| might predict, since limiting the flow of some goods doesn't
| limit the flow of information, and the limits can be pretty mild.
|
| * Some level of excess capacity. Free market capitalism wants
| everything to be just-in-time and as close to 100% capacity as
| possible. Machines sitting around idle are bad. Resilience
| demands we can quickly reallocate resources in response to
| change.
|
| * Having some amount of stuff stockpiled, be that N95 masks or
| food.
|
| * Having something like FEMA or the military, only competent.
|
| * Proactively addressing potential threats. If something has a 5%
| chance of wiping out mankind or sending us back to the stone age,
| we should deal with it. We only get an expected 20 tries.
|
| I don't believe a lot of the climate change predictions. I don't
| think we have any idea as to what will happen; it's a chaotic
| system. Academic incentive structures don't support honest
| publications either. Things may turn out far better, worse, or
| most likely, just different than predicted, and reasonable people
| can disagree.
|
| I think if we can agree to aggressively and proactively deal with
| potential threats, though, exact estimates on odds of all of
| those outcomes don't matter so much. And if we can deal with
| those 5%-odds threats, the need for fear-mongering goes away.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| That's a fantasy of resilience, not a case for resilience. You
| only get that kind of resilience when you have a political
| system capable of planning ahead on extended time scales, and
| which is explicitly committed to looking after its people more
| than than its leaders.
|
| With a few debatable exceptions, that's not true of any country
| on Earth.
|
| And it's certainly not true of the planet as a whole. Which is
| the level at which it would need to operate to deal with
| planetary challenges.
| blagie wrote:
| Then how do we get one? Our model democracy is a quarter
| millennium old, and showing signs of wear. How do we put in
| place a better system?
| dahart wrote:
| So, you're suggesting we should prepare for unlikely events,
| seems reasonable as a general thought. And at the same time
| armchair questioning the best science we have on climate change
| without any specific evidence, contributing to the very doubt
| that has already fueled our inaction and inability to prepare
| to date. How are we to be resilient and prioritize preparedness
| when we can't agree on the priorities? Certainly we can't just
| 'be prepared' for anything that could possibly happen in
| anyone's imagination, right? We do need to take a look at
| history and the current state of things and make some educated
| guesses as to which crisis might actually happen. We don't have
| infinite amounts of money and resources and time, do we?
|
| Given your stated distrust of research, how exactly do you
| propose to be proactive? This isn't a choice between 5% odds,
| pulling a number from thin air and framing it that way makes it
| seem like there are easy choices. What if the choices are
| closer to between six million wildly different possibilities of
| one in a billion odds?
| blagie wrote:
| The best science, in climate change, in COVID, and in many
| other areas, just isn't very good science. That doesn't mean
| we shouldn't prepare. We make decisions on limited evidence
| all the time -- in business, investments, and in war, there
| is a certain fog.
|
| I think where scientists went wrong -- and what contributed
| to doubt and fueled our inaction and inability to prepare to
| date -- was exactly from the type of manipulation you
| described. In the nineties, scientists correctly believed we
| should do something about the climate, but to affect change,
| they politicized science.
|
| In the case of climate change, if you read right-wing media,
| they'll point to failed prediction after prediction expressed
| with great confidence 10 or 20 years ago, and use that to
| discount the whole concept of climate change. If that same
| data had been presented with confidence intervals -- and
| /real/ confidence intervals, not just based on statistical
| measurement error but on the possibility of models being
| wrong -- I think we'd actually be a lot further along.
|
| If the choices were "six million wildly different
| possibilities of one in a billion odds", the risk would be
| 0.6%, and the case for acting wouldn't exist. As it is, I'd
| give perhaps 75% odds for the need to act on climate change.
| Precision is important.
|
| But no, a lot of possibilities aren't hard to model or a
| reason not to act. We assign probabilities, and give a
| distribution. We have major wars perhaps every 50-100 years
| in most parts of the world. Recent past has been stable, but
| we've had windows of stability. Pandemics are on the rise,
| due to growing population and more commute. We can come up
| with likely scenarios, and they all have a lot in common.
| dahart wrote:
| You didn't answer the question. How can we prioritize
| funding and actions? What are you going to fund, exactly,
| and how will you get enough people to agree to it, vote for
| it, etc.? A lot of people already agree with you that we
| should prepare, and still we haven't prepared. Why?
|
| The reason everything went wrong is that scientists haven't
| used confidence intervals? Hehehe, I don't think that has
| anything to do with it. Please be more specific, which
| papers, which predictions are you talking about? Who made
| them, and when exactly? Right-wing media has a tendency to
| misquote people and frame truth as failures too, and has
| been systematically trying to erode public trust in science
| and truth. I don't think right-wing media's political
| claims have any bearing on what we should do. Adding
| confidence intervals wouldn't help anything; they're
| opposed to regulation and to change of entrenched big
| business, it doesn't matter what the science says, they're
| against it because it affects somebody's profit.
|
| One big mistake you're making here is suggesting that all
| science is making predictions, which is false. Most
| science, and much of the best science, doesn't make any
| predictions at all, and doesn't need confidence intervals,
| because it's identifying and explaining past history, not
| the future. We don't need science to predict that the
| temperature will go up, because we can see the trend over
| the last 10 or 50 years. Scientists aren't telling us the
| climate is going to change, they're telling us it already
| has changed. Adding a confidence interval won't make that
| any more convincing to climate change deniers.
|
| Hard disagree that the best science isn't good, and that's
| another hell of an armchair claim to make. I'm sure, like
| everything, some of it isn't very good. See Sturgeon's Law.
| But some of it is great. Watching Fox News will not help
| you identify the good stuff.
| noahtallen wrote:
| This is a fantastic point. I personally agree with the climate
| outlook, but also agree that most things end up being different
| in some way when they happen. (Could be better, could be
| worse.)
|
| Resiliency helps us avoid squabbling about what might or might
| not happen and instead focus on being prepared regardless.
| Guthur wrote:
| Honestly it seems no one really understands what fascism actually
| is.
|
| What fascism used to be was ultra nationalistic, non democratic,
| centralised control of people's lives and the economy for the
| greater good of the state. And I means these to the most extreme
| you can possibly take these ideas, that's fascism.
|
| The word has no meaning when you throw it around against anyone
| with slightly conservative view points.
| atemerev wrote:
| To learn what fascism is, I highly recommend reading the book
| of its founder: "The Doctrine of Fascism" by Mussolini. It is
| short, up to the point, and clearly defines the subject.
| Basically it is an ideology centered on subjugating the needs
| of an individual to the needs of the (national) government.
| "Strong nation through collective action".
| roenxi wrote:
| I'm not sure people care. The median pundit seems to have an
| unshakeable belief that they aren't going to bear the big-
| picture consequences for bringing back failed 1900s political
| ideologies.
|
| Given the absolutely absurd number of real-world experiments
| run over the last 2,000 years the ultra-short-term view people
| have of political history is a bit silly. Eg, I don't even know
| what the whipping boy was before facism. Possibly Bonapartism.
| We've tried everything at least thrice by this point and it is
| clear most people don't want to learn from the past and aren't
| particularly interested in having a clear language to discuss
| politics with.
| DenisM wrote:
| > I don't even know what the whipping boy was before facism.
| Possibly Bonapartism
|
| It depends on the time and place. The favorite boogeyman of
| the Bolsheviks were the bourgeoisie at first, followed by the
| Mensheviks (communists of slightly wrong persuasion), and
| then counterrevolutionaries. The boogeyman for they royal
| regimes of the 19th century Europe was the French revolution,
| anything not sufficiently orthodox was automatically suspect.
| lazyant wrote:
| That describes pretty much every dictatorship or tyranny; from
| "right wing" ones to "communist" ones.
|
| Words (like this one) can change their meaning in their popular
| use and that's fine but probably better to use better terms,
| especially with emotionally loaded ones.
| tlogan wrote:
| The word fascism lost its original meaning. Not it just means
| "nazi" - or something bad. Not that fascist were good but they
| were different kind of bad than nazis.
| minikites wrote:
| What is your opinion on liberals being compared to Soviet and
| Chinese communists?
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| are we talking about someone that believes in free speech, a
| free press, private property, the Rule of Law, opposes
| cancel-culture, believes in social policies, free elections,
| Separation of church & State, supports a progressive
| taxation, abhors violence as a way to change govt, and
| generally supports the constitution?
|
| Or, are we talking about someone that believes in
| controlled/regulated speech, a controlled press, speech
| codes, reductions in private property, Law as a living
| construct, supports cancel-culture, thinks of the State as
| the Church, wants massive wealth redistribution, supports
| violence as a means to change govt, and does not support the
| constitution?
| luffapi wrote:
| Both your personas are oddly constructed and not really
| representative of a political quadrant with state-
| individual empowerment on the vertical access and state
| backed private property on the horizontal.
|
| Free speech, reduction of private property, dissolution of
| centralized state and wealth redistribution are all very
| classic bottom left (anarchist) principles for instance.
|
| I would think anyone below the center line vertically (so
| anarchists to free market libertarians) would support what
| you call "cancel culture" since is a powerful form of
| direct action.
| s7atic wrote:
| > I would think anyone below the center line vertically
| (so anarchists to free market libertarians) would support
| what you call "cancel culture" since is a powerful form
| of direct action.
|
| No liberal is the other alike, but some would argue that
| privacy is a prerequisite of freedom. Calling out someone
| with intent of harm is a violation of their privacy and
| civil rights. This can have a chilling effect and promote
| homogeneous thought and expression, which is inconsistent
| with basic liberal values. Maybe a distinction between
| anarchism and liberalism is that the former want no
| regulation at all, while the latter embrace legislation
| that protect civil and human rights.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Ooh! 21 tropes in 2 sentences, that's very impressive.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
| leereeves wrote:
| Actually 10 distinctions between "liberals" and
| "progressives", demonstrating that there are many
| criteria by which progressives are closer to communists
| than to liberals.
| namdnay wrote:
| What wrong with "law as a living construct"? So only the
| bill of rights is valid and we should drop the other
| amendments?
| somebodynew wrote:
| The eleventh amendment was a "bug fix" to the
| constitution. The original constitution had wording that
| accidentally allowed a citizen to file a suit against a
| state directly in the supreme court. Nobody in the
| government intended for this to be possible, but citizens
| began suing states and this conduct was upheld as
| constitutional.
|
| At the time (1794), this was resolved by amending the
| constitution to make the desired change. If the same
| unintended wording had gone unnoticed until today, it is
| very likely that the supreme court would simply decide
| that the outcome as written was not desirable and throw
| out the suits.
| leereeves wrote:
| Good example. Opposing "law as a living construct"
| doesn't mean the law shouldn't be amended or "we should
| drop the other amendments", it means the courts should
| follow the law as written (including amendments) and not
| redefine it as they choose.
| namdnay wrote:
| So a civil law system, rather than common law? Yeah they
| have that in France, it comes with its own issues (very
| slow to adapt - women only got the vote in the 60s, and
| the death penalty was still there until the 80s if I
| remember correctly)
| leereeves wrote:
| Not just in France. Most of Europe and the Americas use a
| civil law system, except for former British colonies.[1]
| This includes many nations that gave women the right to
| vote before the US did. And as for the death penalty,
| well, the US still has that.[2] So your examples haven't
| convinced me that civil law is slow to adapt.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#/media/File:M
| ap_of_...
|
| 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dustin_Higgs
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| Not civil law vs common law, or, common law vs
| continental law [1]
|
| In using the Constitution as a living document which can
| be interpreted by an activist judge, rather than the
| constitution as written [2], as passed by the
| states/amendment (originalism), interpreted by precedents
| from the collection of rulings, and caselaw.
|
| [1] https://www.lawteacher.net/free-law-
| essays/constitutional-la...
|
| [2] https://www.swindlelaw.com/2017/10/originalism-
| living-consti...
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| Orwell wrote this way back in the 1940s. He said by then the
| word "fascism" already meant "something we don't like," whereas
| "democracy" meant "a system we like."
|
| EDIT: Figured I'd go pull the full quote.
|
| ---
|
| When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's
| work is its living quality," while another writes, "The
| immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar
| deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference of
| opinion. If words like _black_ and _white_ were involved,
| instead of the jargon words _dead_ and _living_ , he would see
| at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many
| political words are similarly abused. The word _Fascism_ has
| now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not
| desirable." The words _democracy, socialism, freedom,
| patriotic, realistic, justice,_ have each of them several
| different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.
| In the case of a word like _democracy_ , not only is there no
| agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from
| all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a
| country democratic we are praising it: consequently the
| defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy,
| and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were
| tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used
| in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses
| them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to
| think he means something quite different. Statements like
| _Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet Press is the
| freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to
| persecution_ , are almost always made with intent to deceive.
| Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or
| less dishonestly, are: _class, totalitarian, science,
| progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality_.
| hmfrh wrote:
| > What fascism used to be was ultra nationalistic, non
| democratic, centralised control of people's lives and the
| economy for the greater good of the state. And I means these to
| the most extreme you can possibly take these ideas, that's
| fascism.
|
| That's not entirely true.
|
| As Umberto Eco says[1]:
|
| > Eco grew up under Mussolini's fascist regime, which "was
| certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian,
| not because of its mildness but rather because of the
| philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common
| opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy." It did,
| however, have style, "a way of dressing--far more influential,
| with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would
| ever be."
|
| And he identifies 14 typical features of fascism:
|
| > 1. The cult of tradition. "One has only to look at the
| syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major
| traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by
| traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements."
|
| > 2. The rejection of modernism. "The Enlightenment, the Age of
| Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this
| sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism."
|
| > 3. The cult of action for action's sake. "Action being
| beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any
| previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation."
|
| > 4. Disagreement is treason. "The critical spirit makes
| distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In
| modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as
| a way to improve knowledge."
|
| > 5. Fear of difference. "The first appeal of a fascist or
| prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the
| intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition."
|
| > 6. Appeal to social frustration. "One of the most typical
| features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a
| frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic
| crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by
| the pressure of lower social groups."
|
| > 7. The obsession with a plot. "Thus at the root of the Ur-
| Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly
| an international one. The followers must feel besieged."
|
| > 8. The enemy is both strong and weak. "By a continuous
| shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time
| too strong and too weak."
|
| > 9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. "For Ur-Fascism
| there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for
| struggle."
|
| > 10. Contempt for the weak. "Elitism is a typical aspect of
| any reactionary ideology."
|
| > 11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. "In Ur-Fascist
| ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly
| linked with the cult of death."
|
| > 12. Machismo and weaponry. "Machismo implies both disdain for
| women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual
| habits, from chastity to homosexuality."
|
| > 13. Selective populism. "There is in our future a TV or
| Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a
| selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the
| Voice of the People."
|
| > 14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. "All the Nazi or Fascist
| schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an
| elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for
| complex and critical reasoning."
|
| Many of which absolutely apply to the previous US presidency.
|
| [1]: https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-
| list...
| Guthur wrote:
| And some also apply to the current incumbent so I'm not
| really sure what we should draw from that.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| You should recognize them as fascist adjacent, as they
| rightly are.
|
| Most of the things on the list are actively bad in any
| political system. Half of them are inexcusable. A few are
| essentially descriptions of populism being acted upon, and
| a few are typical reactionary features.
|
| For example, current Polish governing party fits: 1, 7, 8,
| 11, 12, 13, 14.
| spamizbad wrote:
| The US is a democracy but it's always been flirty with
| fascist elements. So it's no surprise you can look at the
| American government, under any president, and see some
| fascistic elements at work.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| We also support socialistic elements too.
|
| In the Marxist sense, we are a _synthesis_ . Our
| competition is most likely the Chinese Communists which
| have broadly adopted capitalism, but retain the
| oligarchic power structures at the top, and state control
| of enterprises. They represent a different _synthesis_
| krapp wrote:
| Fascism isn't binary, it's a spectrum. Trump was closer to
| the "Literally Hitler" end of the scale than Biden is to
| the "Literally Stalin" end, but many symptoms of fascism
| are endemic to American culture and politics.
| zzyzxxz wrote:
| It's more fair to compare Presidents with George
| Washington than with their predecessors. I can't imagine
| George Washington standing in front of a church holding a
| bible upside-down, or advocating that people ought to put
| cleaning fluids into their lungs.
| krapp wrote:
| I see what you're trying to do, but be careful... while
| Trump may have cheated his employees (according to
| affidavits from the many lawsuits against him,) George
| Washington owned men as slaves.
| atemerev wrote:
| It applies to many modern governments, which was exactly the
| author's point.
| ttonkytonk wrote:
| _There's a big tradition on the left dating back at least to
| Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs, the
| Climate" of insisting that building a zero-carbon future requires
| the adoption of radical anti-capitalist politics. And I think
| that people who insist that liberalism can't reckon with
| contemporary crises are from that school of thought.
|
| But it's completely absurd._
|
| As long as capitalism is the guiding light of society, it's
| probably absurd to think a solution is possible.
|
| The capitalists control the politicians, and the voting populace
| underestimates the degree to which they can be manipulated.
| hiddencache wrote:
| Regardless of what Tyler Durden said:
|
| > "We're the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We
| have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a
| spiritual war, our Great Depression is our lives."
|
| The 90s were a pretty fortunate decade. The threat of nuclear war
| had passed with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the economy
| was chugging along fine, and terrorism hadn't yet taken centre
| stage. Certainly that's the way I remember it - maybe through
| rose-tinted glasses (?)
|
| But nevertheless, maybe a quiet life without crises isn't such a
| bad thing?
| wittycardio wrote:
| But we aren't the middle children of history. I'd argue that we
| are amongst the first few generations where humans have become
| too powerful for their own good. That era started with the
| nuclear bomb when we first had the ability to destroy
| ourselves. Thankfully very small groups of people have ever had
| to take responsibility for that and they've mostly managed to
| do okay so far. However now with mass industrialization and the
| spectre of climate change we've reached a point where every
| single human is responsible for our collective future. We have
| to fight our evolutionary and historical instincts to preserve
| the planet for ourselves and all other life. So there is a
| crisis upon us, it may be different in nature to the ones
| before but its certainly no less challenging. For a far better
| argued view on this I would recommend "The precipice" by Toby
| Or
| sharikous wrote:
| Definitely rose tinted glasses. I don't know where you live but
| it depends on that. For example they were the years of
| slaughters in former Yugoslavia, terrorist attacks in Israel,
| various wars in Africa
| lixtra wrote:
| Or the Rwandan genocide
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
| cblconfederate wrote:
| things in africa and israel are not better today. The
| yugoslav wars were kind of to-be-expected since yugoslavia
| split at that time and they largely ended in the 90s. There
| 's more war today than in the 90s
| https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace
| lixtra wrote:
| The >500k bump from the Rwandan genocide is not in their
| battle related graph. If you scroll further down, you see
| it in "Other forms of large-scale violence". Taking the
| up to date death toll of Syria you could say that the
| situation is as bad as in the '90.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Wearing my rose tinted glasses too
|
| the direction of the 90s was pointing at was, cosmopolitanism,
| techno-utopianism, radical secularism. I can't help to think
| that the decades that followed were a big regression from that
| with human tribes forming around the most ancient, base
| anxieties of the species. Unfortunately this decline was not
| captured in the the arts which became significantly less
| significant
| hliyan wrote:
| I remember only two international crises -- the Gulf War and
| Serbia. when protecting the Earth against asteroid impacts
| started receiving what felt like more than its fair share of
| news coverage, even as a teenager I knew that the world must be
| in a great place. With the Internet taking off, I thought it
| would be the dawn of a golden age. Of course, that came to an
| abrupt halt on 2001/9/11.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| american culture had done that decades ago. the political
| culture of outrage did spill over, a little, but it didn't
| really catch on anywhere else
| systemvoltage wrote:
| We also connected the entire world together, thanks to Big
| Tech. Silicon Valley culture is imposed on the world whether
| you like it or not:
| https://www.economist.com/international/2021/06/12/social-me...
| VictorPath wrote:
| Strange no mention of Covid as a crisis the US would struggle to
| handle. The most popular news network in the US is Fox News, and
| it is (although not uniformly) skeptical of vaccines, masks,
| lockdowns or even if Covid is real and killing the people its
| killing. We can look at the rising delta variant infections and
| deaths to see how the US handles this.
|
| Also missing is the threat of a full-scale war between nuclear-
| armed powers. There hasn't been a real non-proxy war between
| major powers for 75 years, but is there anyone who thinks
| tensions between NATO and Russia or China have been decreasing or
| even level? They have obviously been increasing, so the potential
| of a nuclear crisis walks alongside all of that. Former Secretary
| of Defense Robert McNamara thought so, as do others.
|
| He says he is in an area with as progressive and pro-climate a
| local government as you could want, then he says he had to fight
| for his own initiative to put solar panels on his roof. Every
| year more carbon pours into the atmosphere. His assertion that
| amounts to "liberalism is not preventing this, but is capable of
| understanding it" is not encouraging. Like Covid, major
| corporations at the center of the economy and hegemony are
| actively involved in spreading the idea that this is not even
| happening, which many buy into.
|
| Insofar as fascism and events like Charlottesville, a town voted
| to remove a statue, a number of people came to protest, many
| openly calling themselves fascist. One townsperson marching to
| remove the statue was deliberately run over and killed by the
| other side. It's a manifestation of a fascist movement and it had
| a certain size and result. People are not wrong to notice
| Charlottesville or other things like that and see some level of a
| fascist threat, the question is how large it is - he is probably
| right that some reactions to such things are overblown, but
| they're not reacting to something that doesn't exist. I probably
| agree with Yglesias on the odds of the country becoming fascist
| in the next decades, but with Charlottesville, storming the
| Capitol to stop the election count and such things, it is correct
| to concern those on the watch for fascism, even if as Yglesias
| says, this can become overblown.
|
| Also some people just have a historical perspective Yglesias
| doesn't get. Like an imminent collapse of the middle class would
| strongly portend an attempted fascist seizure of power.
|
| One sign of a sea shift - liberal is an old word, and speech
| codes, measures against hate speech, blocking presidents on
| platforms like Twitter, canceling and the like are departures
| from liberalism. The groups and institutions which formerly
| supported freedom of speech are now in favor of different things.
| There may or may not be good reasons for this but it is a
| departure from liberalism. That these institutions and groups
| which formerly embraced liberal ideals with regards to speech
| have now abandoned them is a sign of changes within the
| institutions he discusses. Liberalism hasn't changed, the
| formerly liberal groups and institutions have abandoned aspects
| of liberalism, for good or ill.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| > One sign of a sea shift - liberal is an old word, and speech
| codes, measures against hate speech, blocking presidents on
| platforms like Twitter, canceling and the like are departures
| from liberalism. The groups and institutions which formerly
| supported freedom of speech are now in favor of different
| things. There may or may not be good reasons for this but it is
| a departure from liberalism. That these institutions and groups
| which formerly embraced liberal ideals with regards to speech
| have now abandoned them is a sign of changes within the
| institutions he discusses. Liberalism hasn't changed, the
| formerly liberal groups and institutions have abandoned aspects
| of liberalism, for good or ill.
|
| I think the divides between progressives and liberals are
| becoming more stark.
|
| I live in a deep blue area, and some of my friends proudly
| proclaim they are liberals and _not_ progressive. Was talking
| with a neighbor recently and she mentioned her background in
| the Intelligence Community, and her support for law
| enforcement. She is friends with local LE , and helped them
| with a recent case. Emphasizing that she is totally against
| defunding, her ideas on police reform was 100% body cameras,
| and beefing up their training. Not a progressive.
| gizmo385 wrote:
| "Defunding the police" is often bandied around and
| characterized as though the most common position amongst
| progressives is a full defunding of the police and a society
| without any law enforcement. Are their progressives that
| advocate for that? Absolutely! But I don't believe that
| belief represents the majority (or even really a significant
| percentage) of progressives.
|
| I consider myself a progressive and I simply believe that we
| have, over the decades, thrust the management and resolution
| of societies ills onto law enforcement. At the same time, we
| haven't also invested in the kind of training for officers
| that would help them effectively occupy that role. So instead
| of having them occupying that role while also thrusting
| billions of dollars to militarize them at the same time, how
| about we talk a large portion of that money and use it to
| fund the communities that are struggling? Let's fund mental
| health counseling and other social programs that can help
| address some of the root causes of criminal activity instead
| of pushing all of that money into enforcement, which merely
| seeks to crush the problem after the fact with overwhelming
| force instead of addressing the underlying systemic issues.
|
| I personally don't think that is an unreasonable or radical
| position, and one that I think a large number of American
| progressives would agree with. I don't think a large number
| of American progressives would agree with the proposition of
| entirely refunding law enforcement (and neither do any
| Democratic senators, as shown by the vote earlier this week).
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I've been saying stuff like this for years. "News" is always _bad
| news_ and they almost never follow up with similar levels of
| celebration for resolving a problem. The Kuwaiti oil fires were
| supposed to burns for _years_ and be a global environmental
| catastrophe. They were put out in six months.
|
| We did not dance in the streets about this miracle. We were on to
| wringing our hands about something else.
|
| Disaster response is generally better than it used to be. We
| aren't grateful or amazed. We take it for granted and complain
| about it failing to live up to our expectations.
|
| That doesn't mean we don't have real problems. That's not me
| being in denial or uninformed.
| rdiddly wrote:
| While nothing lately has made me "doubt the basic tenets of
| liberalism," quite a bit of public speech has made me doubt that
| the given speaker understands said tenets. Not necessarily this
| writer, but then again he doesn't state them either, so there is
| at least room for doubt. "There oughtta be a law" that anybody
| who uses the word 'liberal' or 'conservative' must take a quick
| detour to define what they mean by that. Suddenly we would all
| know what we were talking about. I think it would be eye-opening.
| Deception thrives in an environment of code-words, shorthand and
| oversimplification. That's what Newspeak was supposed to be all
| about, right?
| zzyzxxz wrote:
| The abusive tactic known as DARVO begins with downplaying,
| denying or deflecting. I sure read a lot of those things in this
| article. I hope the author learns more rhetorical techniques, the
| one they used here made them come across as abusive.
| tqi wrote:
| Please list some examples.
| disposable1312 wrote:
| >Some of the most potent images produced by the political right
| in the 2020 cycle featured looters and rioters smashing stores
| and burning buildings in major American cities. Donald Trump and
| congressional Republicans, these ads warned, were the only thing
| standing between these rioters and your home.
|
| Acting like things happening under his rule were a problem
| detached from his responsibility. If only every leader could get
| away with this.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I am not even an American, but in a huge federal country like
| the US, not everything can be attributed to the presidency -
| negative or positive. Governors, state senators etc. have a
| responsibility too, and they should not be able to shirk it by
| screaming "look at the bad guy above me!"
|
| It is actually similar in the EU. The EU and the Commission has
| a lot of power, but not enough to pin everything on them. Local
| politicians _love_ to point towards Brussels, though, everytime
| they fsck something up.
| mberning wrote:
| Most of those cities being razed over the summer have been
| under complete democrat control for years.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| So the police departments that should be defunded according
| to some Democrat activists were/are under control of
| Democrat politicians?
|
| It seems that the main parties in the U.S. are _really_ big
| tents. In another system, they would have split up to 6-7
| smaller and more coherent parties. (That would nevertheless
| have to compromise on their ideas when forming coalitions,
| so not a dramatic difference.)
| AntiWFH wrote:
| No cities were razed you dumbass.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| > Local politicians love to point towards Brussels, though,
| everytime they fsck something up.
|
| When I lived in Europe they did not point towards the EU and
| say, "we are going to handover much of our lawmaking power to
| these EU bureaucrats", but, that is exactly what has
| happened.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| There are some quotes by former EK chairman Juncker that
| touch on this:
|
| "We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and
| see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most
| people don't understand what has been decided, we continue
| step by step until there is no turning back." (1999)
|
| "If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we
| will say 'we continue'." (On the 2005 French referendum on
| the Lisbon Treaty)
|
| ""Britain is different. Of course there will be transfers
| of sovereignty. But would I be intelligent to draw the
| attention of public opinion to this fact?" (2007)
|
| "When it becomes serious, you have to lie." (2013)
|
| "There can be no democratic choice against the European
| treaties, one cannot exit the euro without leaving the EU."
| (2015)
|
| This mentality contributed a lot towards Euroscepticism. It
| is not as if Brussels is a confederacy of angels.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| He said a lot of other things which put a much more
| humane gloss on your selective compendium.
|
| https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/jean-claude-juncker-
| quot...
|
| As for Brussels not being angels - it's true it's not
| enough of an immigrant-hating racist and corrupt failing
| state for some people.
| jrgoff wrote:
| I agree with your general point, but not as a response to the
| gp. If the president and congressmen who were in power and
| were then running for re-election have no responsibility for
| the unrest than what was the point of them being re-elected
| to stop it? Either they can do something about it and didn't,
| or they can't do anything about it but for some reason are
| campaigning as though they can.
| mberning wrote:
| Every administration in my lifetime has done this. Taking
| credit for certain things and shifting blame for others is not
| unusual. The state of the economy is the most shining example.
| Animats wrote:
| In the US, we can look back at 1975-2000 as a period when nothing
| really bad happened. 1900-1950 was far worse.
|
| "There's a big tradition on the left ... insisting that building
| a zero-carbon future requires the adoption of radical anti-
| capitalist politics. But it's completely absurd." Yes. We're in a
| good position on energy. As the fossil fuel sources are running
| out, we now have good alternatives. That wasn't true 20 years
| ago. 20 years ago, solar panels cost too much, and wind turbines
| were not big enough.
|
| 2022 will probably be the year that perception of this turns
| around in the US. That's when all the good electric work vehicles
| ship. The electric Ford F-150, the electric Ford Transit, and the
| big electric Freightliner trucks are all starting volume
| production. A year from now, most American blue-collar workers
| will have ridden in an electric vehicle at least once.
| buu700 wrote:
| Both sides have a tendency to cry wolf. Bush was awful, but he
| wasn't Hitler. Romney was treated particularly unfairly during
| his presidential run.
|
| Regardless of one's feelings on Trump, it's clear that he wasn't
| treated entirely fairly by the media from the start. Sure, for a
| while they would tiptoe around calling him out for outright lies,
| but I also saw how his words and actions would at times be
| twisted and presented with with bad faith or the worst possible
| meaning taken as a presumption.
|
| He may have been extraordinarily corrupt, and a constant
| embarrassment to the country on Twitter, but in terms of policy
| he was a relatively vanilla conservative. I've even given him
| credit for being the first president to enter office supporting
| same-sex marriage, and more broadly I don't dislike the
| libertarian-ish element of his base that also supports that in
| addition to legal weed.
|
| None of the above negates the fact that Trump and his allies
| spent at least the second half of 2020 attempting to subvert our
| electoral process, came very close to succeeding, and then
| attacked the United States with intent to violently usurp control
| of the government. It doesn't negate that Trump-inspired white
| nationalist militias are currently the greatest domestic terror
| threat in America, while Trump continues to stoke their anger
| with lies. Whether his coup was "fascist" or parallels the
| actions of 34-year-old Adolf Hitler is irrelevant. I'll criticize
| the left for crying wolf as loudly as anyone; it doesn't
| logically follow that wolves don't exist.
| mythrwy wrote:
| I'm with you up until "and then attacked the United States with
| intent to violently usurp control of the government".
|
| That isn't what happened and is exactly the type of inaccurate
| and unfair characterization you mention previously.
| buu700 wrote:
| It absolutely is not. Unless you're claiming that the 1/6
| footage was all deepfaked and/or an Antifa false flag
| operation, the issue seems pretty unambiguous.
| mythrwy wrote:
| Agreed, absolutely is not what happened. I don't deny a
| riot happened that day. Which is the kind of thing people
| are actually being charged with. As they should be. I'm not
| in favor of riots.
|
| But where do you see "intent to violently usurp" in that
| footage? That's inaccurate and over the top rhetoric of
| exactly the kind you call out earlier.
|
| I don't believe false flag. There may (or may not) have
| been agitators who were other then Trump supporters, but if
| so it wasn't too hard to do and a large number of Trump
| supporters behaved criminally. No argument with that. But
| it was not an "attempt to violently usurp the government"
| by any reasonable definition.
| buu700 wrote:
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/10/hang-
| mike-pe...
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/nancy-
| pelosi-...
|
| https://www.npr.org/2021/03/19/977879589/yes-capitol-
| rioters...
|
| If it's "over the top", it's because what happened was
| over the top. The language I used is literal and
| accurate.
| mythrwy wrote:
| A guy in a viking suit with bear spray was out to take
| over the government? NPR and Washington Post say so
| (after 4 years of claiming Trump was the antichrist).
|
| They are grasping at straws trying to build an
| (unreasonable) narrative.
|
| Where are the insurrection charges in court?
|
| No, what happened was a bunch of people were upset about
| an election they perceived as fraudulent and wanted
| certification stopped until an investigation was
| performed (also not reasonable, the electors had been
| certified at that point and it was done deal). Also Trump
| didn't help matters. Once the state electors were in it
| was over for him, fraud or no fraud. There wasn't
| reasonable time to audit anything and he did no one any
| favors by getting the crowd whipped into a frenzy.
| buu700 wrote:
| Being an idiot in a viking suit justifies attempting to
| assassinate multiple acting government officials for the
| purpose of interrupting the certification of the
| election. OK.
| mythrwy wrote:
| I'm sorry I strongly disagree your language is either
| literal or accurate.
| klyrs wrote:
| Trump was treated more than fairly by the press. He thrives on
| and encourages controversy. They played directly into his hand
| at every step of the way. When he plays the victim, that too is
| an act. He's a reality TV star, he's a heel, and people on both
| sides gobbled it up.
| buu700 wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing with most of that, quite the opposite.
| What I take issue with is the media being brazenly unfair in
| select instances, which needlessly gives Q cultists
| ammunition to help radicalize "normies".
|
| It's something I would take note of every once in a while,
| but I would have to think and/or research to come up with
| more than one or two examples offhand. The biggest one that
| immediately comes to mind is the infamous "very fine people
| on both sides" quote.
|
| I've watched and read the full context[1]. He's not saying
| that _all_ people on the neo-Nazi side are good, but that
| _some_ of them were there only to peacefully protest in
| support of the legacy of Robert E. Lee. It 's like the
| difference between Archie Bunker (a bigoted goofball, but
| mostly just an earnest guy struggling to deal with changes in
| society) and a literal militant Klansman/neo-Nazi.
|
| That sentiment may be distasteful in itself to many people (I
| personally think Lee is just as undeservingly venerated as
| Rommel), but it's far less extreme than what he's been
| presented as having said. I'm not even saying that Trump's
| statement was necessarily correct; I'm saying that if he
| misrepresented the facts on the ground, and/or if what he
| (actually) said was arguably a dog whistle, that's what he
| should have been criticized for.
|
| I'm a huge fan of Joe Biden these days, and it still leaves a
| sour taste in my mouth that during the campaign he cited that
| out-of-context quote as his motivation for running.
|
| ---
|
| 1: https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-
| trump...
| magwa101 wrote:
| As in all things, what is the goal? Human population growth and
| well being? Or is it a thriving diverse planet? Or are they one
| and the same?
|
| If we survive and end up with a lifeless urban planet that feeds
| us is that success?
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I had a man in an nazi costume point a gun at me during a
| Portland protest.
|
| How could I possibly be "over-exaggerating"? Do I need to be
| dead? Would that make the author approve of my experience?
|
| OP can stuff his privilege. This is yet another of example of
| "Well, everything is fine for -ME-, why doesn't everyone else
| just relax since you're all the same anyway..."
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| That man isn't generally representative. If you reactive the
| world is full of people like him, you will over react.
| exolymph wrote:
| Don't attend LARP event if you don't want to encounter LARPers.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| So to you a social justice protest that is met with armed
| LARPer counterprotestors becomes a LARP event.
|
| Got it.
| thinkharderdev wrote:
| I doubt he would claim you are over-exaggerating your
| particular experience, nor do I think he is insisting that no
| terrible things happen at all (which would be an obviously
| insane thing to say). But is it actually *worse* now than in
| the past?
|
| I think we have a way of remembering the past as much rosier
| than it actually was which leads us to think the present is
| much worse than it actually is. We tend to think of last summer
| as a particularly volatile time in the United States but as a
| point of comparison during periods in the 1970s we averaged 5
| bombings a day in the US (https://time.com/4501670/bombings-of-
| america-burrough/). At various periods between the 1960s and
| the 1990s we had riots in American cities orders of magnitude
| more destructive than anything that happened during the summer
| of 2020. Not to mention the long and sordid history of
| pervasive racist violence from Reconstruction onward (see
| https://www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-
| massacr...).
|
| That is, the point is not that everything is great now so
| nobody should complain about anything but it is also a bit
| ahistorical to think that we are in some sort of
| unprecedentedly dangerous moment of history.
|
| There is a boarder point as well which I think that we not only
| see this moment in aggregate as some moment of catastrophic
| danger but each *individual* issue is something of transcendent
| importance and we will all be doomed if we don't fix it right
| this moment. It leads to a sort of paralysis where you can't
| actually solve anything because you can't make tradeoffs when
| EVERYTHING is an emergency.
| black6 wrote:
| Equating the orange man with fascism while ignoring the collusion
| between the pharmaceuticals industry and the current US
| administration is disingenuous at best, and malicious lying-by-
| omission at worst.
| joelbondurant wrote:
| You're allowed to have this opinion, just not on the USA
| communist Internet.
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