- Trump’s movement to “Make America Great Again” appeals to a deep fear of diversity and social change. That sort of fear is commonplace in all societies, and it has often roiled democratic politics. Yet the threat Trump poses to American democracy has little to do with “populism.” It doesn’t come from ordinary citizens immersed in “culture wars” — even from those who stormed the Capitol on 6 January. They were and are a sideshow. The real threat is from the Republican officeholders who, hours later, supported Trump’s effort to decertify the election outcome. It was not some rush of anti-democratic feeling that threatened American democracy in those months; it was the machinations of political elites determined to entrench themselves in power.
When nazi salutes are being given to cheering crowds in our Capitol it doesn't increase belief in the theoretical power of peaceful change and nonviolent protest. Anybody know what the next steps are when Democrat candidates are removed from polls? Or not permitted on social media?
I don’t think the aesthetics are the problem. The campaign was not really making a huge secret of anything they wanted to do. Trump talked about immigrants eating pers — did you think anyone missed that? He said he’d declare a state of emergency and deport people. Annnd he’s declaring an emergency so he can deport people. People knew what they were getting in this election, so why the pikachu shocked face when they cheer for a Bellamy salute on Inauguration Day? This was all in your face the whole time. I went in deciding whether I wanted cackling Harris or Nazi Trump. Between nothing changing for four years or Project 2025, military deportations, and abandoning Ukraine for the lols. What I don’t see is any serious opposition from leadership. They’re shocked by the salute, but we’ve known the results since November 5. I guess the best we can muster is a day or two of protests, pardons for the important people (not you) and whining because Elon did a dorky version of a Nazi salute. I saw as much outrage over the senator from Minnesota wearing a hoodie. Honestly if this is the tenor of the response, if the best we can muster is “Oh no, not the straight arm salute! Well, anyway…” I don’t see how you actually keep any of our constitutional rights intact. I suspect we’ll still be voting, but it’s like voting in Russia— Putin always just so happens to win in landslide and a lot of opposition leaders fall out of windows.
I think this is correct, especially and most concerningly the prediction for future American elections. I want to talk about intelligent life in the universe with you (btw I recommend looking for planetary magnetospheres with healthy dynamos), but all of the intelligent life inside of me is saying that we actually have to do this stupid ass shit now. We have only each other. The media is almost completely dismantled. I'lll see everyone around I guess. Well I dunno the data says the site owner needs to get way more fascists to retain users, empirically. Hmmm (this is a slash 's'). Rest of the net's a hellscape now anyways (this is true). PS biomass in the lithosphere feeding on radioactivity is an interesting canvas to paint on (idk I think the radiation keeps cell systems limited in complexity, so hmmm, bio is my science weak spot, though), and when I think about the next intelligent lifeform on Earth dominating instead of humanoids, I don't go with chimps, I like to envision the octopi triumphing, for fun. edit: here's two perhaps seemingly opposed views I hold: 1. I think it was more or less an obvious responsibility to vote straight dem in '24 from a harm reduction standpoint, 2. Populist leftism (like the actually good, not-derailed-by-fascist kind of populism, so sort of fantastical, of course) is still very possible (see AOC & Bernie), but it's hard to see the spark of momentum firing off without completely impugning this absolute joke of a corporatist democratic party establishment. Obviously it's really really bad that the dem option was STILL orders of magnitude better. Imagine that campaign... "OK Bill well, fuck 'em, maybe America will be ready for progress the next time we don't have to make it ourselves. I'll take a stand when I'm dead, we always said" two hours laytiuer PSSZTT-Liz Cheney is 15 minutes out of Ann Arbor, things are rolling smooth, everyone. People love this. it's the secret sauce. So many moderates, ripe for the voting. We're not going back.!.. to when.. Kamala was in the admin, just now. And through mid January."Well the focus panels show 53/47 majority 'against' trans Americans..."
"The Harris camp was dragged leftward, mercilessly, and kowtowed (when we didn't come out to pointedly denounce trans Americans in response to a $1 billion dollar bigotry adbuy of lies); all that woke shit (you know! the bad stuff we all hate because we're older than 53) needs to end ASAP, and Trump isn't even that bad, idiots. We ran a flawless campaign!
...
Honestly, I think Carl Sagan was right about the USA. We’ve long since abandoned the idea of seeking truth, and very much prefer comfortable lies. A conversation with the average American would have confirmed this decades ago. I’m not shocked mostly because I was watching the credulous news coverage of effing UFOs (okay we’re calling them UAPs now) and there was no real pushback even among people who like to consider themselves rational. If people still credulously believe it’s possible for alien craft to travel through the galaxy despite the laws of physics denying the possibility, I don’t expect us to have rational arguments about more serious matters. And this plays directly into the hands of fascists as their narratives tend to have the virtues of being simple and easy for people to understand. Reading three articles about climate change is work. Calling it a hoax is simple, easy and requires nothing of the believer. Blaming immigration for inflation, lack of housing, and so on is easy. Talking about home investors buying up every house on the market to make rentals is harder. I’ll agree that we’re on our own. What’s worse is that I don’t think most people can understand their times. Nor can we really sustain the attention and the dedication needed to do anything. We’re the society of the spectacle, everything is on screens or as media stories. And thus we’ll be bothered much more by things that can excite an audience— like the salute — over the boring reality of things that will actually happen.
My primary argument against this line of thinking is that credulity and fascism are nothing new. Sightings of UFOs went up right as sightings of angels and ghosts went down. Stuff we don't understand is always going to be magic, and the "skeptics" that adhere to a strictly scientific viewpoint have simply substituted one religious following for another. We'd like to believe that rationality is self-derived but for the most part it's just another kind of dogma. Can that dogma be derived from first principles? Sure. Do more than a tenth of the people ascribing to that dogma understand what first principles are, let alone have the capacity to derive their beliefs themselves? The principle problem is that the two political parties of the United States were formerly aligned over all but economics and are now divided largely by wedge issues. The resolution of this problem is that the parties differed over economics due to economics being the thing citizens care about the most - the two things that got Trump elected were (1) Immigrants are gonna take my job (see: NAFTA) (2) inflation has destroyed me purchasing power. All the Jan6 nazi-ism is a sideshow but it's a sideshow that allows a bunch of unprincipled ideologues to break democracy. Kinda like how they did during the Red Scare.
I don’t think that’s always been the case. At least in the past, it was expected of those who considered themselves educated would be expected to know something about the subject they were talking about. The new attitude is much more of a feelings based vibe where the only criterion for taking a given position is that it feels right to them. I wouldn’t expect everyone to derive everything from first principles, however I think at some point, you need to at least know how a given system works, or the actual facts on the ground before you form an opinion. But we’re a culture that doesn’t read books, one that will absolutely fall for anything. The Q phenomena was pretty much a wake up call from inside the house. People somehow came to believe that germ theory was fake. Or that Biden wasn’t really in tge White House or something. The threads on numerology of the exact timing of a tweet were insane. We are more credentialed than ever, but I think it would be fairly rich to say that we’re educated. Most people seem to lack the skills to understand anything going on around them. They don’t understand logic, probability, statistics, history, or basic sciences. As such the ability to make rational decisions about how to run a government are lost. People who think demons run Hollywood won’t make good decisions. I think the reason people are so into the culture war stuff is that it provides lots of opportunities to create negative imagery that play well on screens, and that it’s easy to generate a hot take on. It’s spectacles. The freaky looking trans person is a spectacle to dangle in front of the screen to get conservatives big mad, especially if it looks like the6 work in a school. Getting liberals hopped up by showing weird Jim Bob’s unhinged sermon is likewise easy. But this level of discourse is happening because the idea of having long conversations based on factual evidence doesn’t work on a society that runs on vibes.
Up until 1940 or so, "educated" meant "through the 8th grade." Meanwhile the argument from authority fallacy, which is misunderstood by most of the Internet, goes back to at least the romans: "I am an excellent general, therefore I shall be an excellent emperor." For purposes of modern discussion, this "new attitude" goes back to 1951. Prior to modern discussion, of course, it goes back as far as you wanna take it. I think what you're observing is not a lack of evidence, it's a lack of evidence you ascribe to. Bill Gates' 5G microchip vaccines is clearly nonsense if you have a firm grounding in science, but if you have a firm grounding in Joe Rogan, whatever Joe Rogan says is science. I think the mistake most of us armchair intellectuals make is our failure to recognize our own biases while recognizing the biases of others. It was much easier to pretend that everyone is doing their rational best when we were all reading from the same playbook but that doesn't mean our actions were logical. That they happened to be is a tribute to post-war culture and that they are no longer is a condemnation but there's ample evidence that people were mostly pretending to be rational on both sides while actually going with their guts. say hello to my little friend Not a week of my childhood passed without USA Today informing me that over 50% of Americans believed that Elvis was alive. For that matter, the Flat Earth Society went from being a parody run by the Church of the Subgenius to being a real honest-to-god thing. Again, that's not "everyone suddenly got stupider" that's "everyone stopped accepting the same ground truths." I worked with a guy who was an alcoholic until he got clean. In the process of getting clean he decided he needed religion; his method of selecting religion was watching youtube videos for two weeks in search of "evidence of miracles." Surprise, Jesus won! Nominally, that makes him a Christian. Actually, that makes him a feckless rube. The difference here between "christian" and "feckless rube" is that he rejected the authority framework of organized religion. The basic problem we have now is a fractured authority framework, which I would argue goes back to GWB 1 trashing the authority of the "mainstream media" in pursuit of justifications for the invasion of Iraq. The government prosecuting nobody for anything related to the Great Financial Crisis didn't help and once the Tea Party was launched there was a choice between serving the people or the people finding someone who would tell them what they wanted to hear and lo and behold, here we are. Here's what I'm saying. They never did. BUT! They used to be willing to take our word for it. They aren't anymore. Show me a revolution and I'll show you a bunch of smart people being slaughtered. Russia. Biafra. Cambodia. Chile. Burma. Philippines. The people who don't simply do what they're told are a problem for the people who aren't interested in your arguments. If it were "people were smart, but suddenly they're stupid" there would be far fewer college professors shot. If anything, we're lucky that in the United States, the idiots are saying "ackshully I'm smart" rather than "shoot all the smart people." That's a testament to culture as far as I'm concerned. One man's demon is another man's Communist, just sayin' This whole article was pretty much about wedge issues And in conclusion, the vibes were shared, now they aren't, that's the whole problem. At least in the past, it was expected of those who considered themselves educated would be expected to know something about the subject they were talking about.
The new attitude is much more of a feelings based vibe where the only criterion for taking a given position is that it feels right to them.
But we’re a culture that doesn’t read books, one that will absolutely fall for anything.
The Q phenomena was pretty much a wake up call from inside the house.
People somehow came to believe that germ theory was fake. Or that Biden wasn’t really in tge White House or something. The threads on numerology of the exact timing of a tweet were insane.
They don’t understand logic, probability, statistics, history, or basic sciences.
People who think demons run Hollywood won’t make good decisions.
I think the reason people are so into the culture war stuff is that it provides lots of opportunities to create negative imagery that play well on screens, and that it’s easy to generate a hot take on.
But this level of discourse is happening because the idea of having long conversations based on factual evidence doesn’t work on a society that runs on vibes.
> Up until 1940 or so, "educated" meant "through the 8th grade." Meanwhile the argument from authority fallacy, which is misunderstood by most of the Internet, goes back to at least the romans: "I am an excellent general, therefore I shall be an excellent emperor." In terms of formal education, sure, they stopped at eighth grade. On the other hand, they were absolutely reading books, newspapers, magazines, and so on. We have more schooling, but very few people still bother with long form articles, books, magazines, or even long form podcasts with subject experts before making a decision on an issue. My grandfather didn’t have much formal education, but he read a lot of books on history and as such knew a lot about history. That generation also tended to get their news from newspapers not gossip.
This is an assertion, not a fact. More than that, it's an assertion held tightly by liberals with no attempt to ground it in anything. Have you ever looked into it? I have. Lemme show you some stuff. I'ma start with the common knowledge of the "TED Talks Era:" I don't know how many bajillions of views that turkey had when it was new. I was one of them. There was no attribution to it anywhere - "what the hell is a Shift Happens?" Turns out it's an August 2006 IT powerpoint for Arapahoe High School from the math teacher to everyone else, basically saying "wake up it's the Internet." A noble goal, a stellar effort, and given the intended audience it's not surprising that it contains howlers like this one: Estimated by whom? Using what methods? Compared to where in the 18th century? Which, by the way, covers everything from the seed drill through the electric battery. Yet it became a part of the common knowledge - much like it was common knowledge in Korea that sleeping with a fan could kill you, at least until the English language Internet found out about this and started mocking Koreans mercilessly. So how do you measure "absolutely reading books, newspapers, magazines, and so on?" if you go out on your own and try and find that information you'll discover that the information you can find goes back to 2017 or so. You'll also find a lot of nonsense, like the declining relevance of GoodReads as a false proxy for literacy and the wildly-speculative impact of the printing press. FRED has actual data going back to 1990 which, if we're being honest, is just as likely to be measuring the impact of Harry Potter as it is anything else. What has gone up gangbusters is literacy, particularly among minorities, and this is not just an American thing. What that tells you is it was the intelligentsia who were reading the Leatherstocking Tales, not the sharecroppers. "Books, newspapers, magazines and so on" presumes a few things that shouldn't be presumed but most of them loop back to the misconception that "if it's in print it's good" to which I refer you back to my buddy The Protocols. Some anecdata: I used to be ashamed of my paternal grandparents for not going to high school, primarily because my maternal grandparents were kicked out of Harvard and Radcliffe respectively in their last semester (it's a long story). This was before I learned that nobody back then went to high school where I grew up. My maternal grandmother got married at fourteen and popped out two kids before her eighteenth birthday but you know what? She read maybe a dozen Harlequin romances a day. The Harvard crew didn't read shit. So what are we reading, exactly, and why are we using that as a proxy for knowledge? Some more anecdata: I got a buddy who consumes podcasts all day. He can barely read a word because his dyslexia is so severe - IF: between 5% and 20% of Americans have some severity of dyslexia AND: modern technology permits the consumption of information without having to read THEN: is literacy really that great of a proxy for learning and knowledge? And I mean, we haven't even touched on yellow journalism yet. Is watching Fox News better than watching nothing at all? What about reading the New York World? Conservatism comes from the belief that "things were better before." It's a philosophy of nostalgia. it ignores the simple fact that our memories and our heritage aren't neutral, and it ignores the simple fact that our memories and heritage are endlessly rewritten to support our worldviews of the present. "People are stupider now" helps us make sense of Trump voters, but only if we didn't grow up with Reagan voters. The fact of the matter is, American history is gnarly and, for people who weren't white and male, sucked a lot of the time. This country voted the way it did because nobody feels secure in their jobs, and nobody feels secure in their jobs because the Long Boom is over.In terms of formal education, sure, they stopped at eighth grade. On the other hand, they were absolutely reading books, newspapers, magazines, and so on.
