The simplest answer is don't join any side that insists you believe nonsense. That's always an option, and it's silly to deny that it is. On the margin, you joining a side is unlikely to significantly affect their chance of winning, but you are likely to be dragged down to the level of the side you join.
Unironically build your own Cathedral to take on The Cathedral. Like the Haredim - their parties Shas and UTJ are now part of Israel’s government and they are probably one factor as to why Israel is one of the few countries where young people are more conservative.
This is going to be so important in the future IMO. Have correct beliefs and say it's protected by freedom of religion. Have a parallel economy and high birth rates. I thought the Mormons were going to do this but they seem to be falling apart.
Why it works for Hasidim (whether here or in Israel) and not Mormons would be an interesting subject. One could observe that Israel’s Hasidim have something we don’t- support from mainstream conservatives (i.e. Shas and UTJ being in Likud’s coalition)
Well, conservative Christianity in any form is pretty much the ultimate evil according to the ruling class, constantly targeted with comparisons to Hitler, Nazis, etc. Judaism, on the other hand, is a sacred cow that is pretty much untouchable and above all criticism. This seems like a pretty obvious and significant factor to consider. And I don't really have anything against Judaism, the conservative religious Jews seem to align much more closely with my values than many so-called Christians. But it just seems like a pretty obvious explanation for why they're more able to "build their own cathedral."
Israel is a nation where there is no debate about whether it has a right to exist, or whether its founders were evil bigots. Probably changes the dynamics a little bit.
Rs in America know that the evangelicals and Mormons will vote for them anyway, so they don't feel any need to accomodate them.
In the fragmented Israeli political landscape, small parties can torpedo a government and cause an early election. That is a lot of power, and with power comes true respect.
I feel like the closest comparison to Hasidim are Amish/Mennonites, who are also doing fine.
I struggle to think of a branch of Judaism to compare Mormons to, but only half-jokingly, the first that comes to mind is Black Hebrew Israelites.
I think sometimes people have a tendency to treat how preposterous a religion is as this exogenous variable that is irrelevant to its success -- perhaps arising out of the contemporary West's tendency to treat all religions as equally preposterous -- but I think that's an error.
If Rabbinic Judaism were the one true religion, the Hasidim (or at least the Haredim, of which the Hasidim are a part) would probably be the ones coming closest to doing it correctly -- i.e., trying to determine what all of God's commandments are and structuring their lives and their community around obeying them. They're the ones living closest to how Ashkenazim traditionally lived, which is a lifestyle that had staying power.
The fact that it is treated as a serious issue by almost every government in the world seems to suggest there's something to it. The left certainly love their lies about "we have 5 years left to fix this or the planet becomes uninhabitable!", but that doesn't mean the more reasonable "if we do nothing for another 30 years this is going to be very unpleasant for our grandchildren" is false.
(1) Not every government in the world. Governments representing over 50% of the CO2 emissions (China and India and Indonesia) don't seem to be remotely suckered.
(2) Even if they were in on this game - I think for myself, not bow to the elites as they manipulate.
(3) I wrote some of the code for one of the first climate models (in mid 90s). I am not some rube hick. I won't even begin on how accurate they are (let's assume they are perfect in what follows).
(4) I teach thermodynamics and fluid dynamics and heat transfer (the essence of climate models) at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Please - no "believe the science" horse poo for me.
(5) If we do absolutely nothing it will make zero difference to the climate. As China alone emits more than the USA and all 27 nations of Europe combined. And India is close behind China.
(6) If we do nothing CO2 levels are expected to rise to still be 50% below their 500 million year average. Which I choose because that is the period where life thrived on earth. Sometimes with CO2 levels 500% higher than currently.
(7) Temperature is a secondary variable and more difficult to predict. A sum total of zero climate models have temperature levels rising higher over 400 years - than the 500 million year average temperature (when life thrived on earth). Not even over the mean!!!
(8) Water is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. When are we demanding taxes from idiots for pissing?
(9) "if we do nothing for another 30 years ... poor grandchildren" is so childish. Do you really think that differs from "give me all your money or you will die!" in level of cheap-shot manipulation?
Left: "give me all your money and more power - or all your grandchildren will suffer miserably !!!"
People with a Brain: Oh well then. In that case. Since it was so well argued that time. Of course.
(10) Honestly? Not a suspicious bone in your entire body?
Your very first point is already totally wrong. China and India are both very committed to de carbonizing. I don't think there's going to be much fruitful discussion here.
Every government (in the white west at least) also takes left wing ideologies on race and transgenderism completely seriously despite their obvious absurdity. Every government originally tried for "zero COVID" and such. So "every government does it" is a terrible excuse for anything.
You clarify with white west though. Literally all governments, including ones that only have anything to lose by believing it like oil states. Not to mention the entire fossil fuel industry. I don't think they are all just playing along.
Also, I clarify with "white west" because I assume these are the governments you care about. Otherwise, the implication would be that we should look to China and Russia as our arbiters of truth. I really, really dislike and distrust the governments of the White West, but not even I would go that far. And it is also fairly obvious that every other country which even pretends to care about something like "climate change" only does so because they are following the west's lead.
Non-white countries do not take "climate change" seriously. I could probably argue to you that white countries don't either, but the non-white ones most definitely do not. We're just gonna have to agree to disagree on that one.
My point is that I'm willing to adopt weird beliefs to get by. However if the belief is that I'm an inherently an evil person who doesn't deserve human rights due to my identity, thats a bridge too far. The gender stuff is also so harmful that I can't look the other way.
My perspective is to watch and wait. I think that's literally all you can do on an individual level. Maybe prepare in case SHTF one day, who knows if it will or not. But other than that, I genuinely think there's not much to be done besides to wait for the system to start collapsing in on itself, and maybe then some opportunities begin to open up.
Jan. 6 spooked a lot of people. Sorry righties, trying to launch a coup kind of pissed those of us off who still like democracy. Oh, and the vaccine thing.
That and our welfare state is much smaller than a lot of other rich countries. The GOP tries to do things like privatize Medicare.
A socially conservative (or even moderate at this point), economically liberal party could do really well, which is why the Democrats and the GOP collude to stop it. That's kind of where Trump ran, and then he got in and the Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act so the insurance companies could hit us with surcharges for having had asthma again.
If you give people a choice between communism and fascism, you'll be dismayed by how many people who don't like either vote for whichever one you hate more. "Hey, you asked..."
If you give people a choice between Gilded Age capitalism with MAGA characteristics and woke capitalism with some semblance of a social safety net, well, you'll be dismayed by how many people who don't like either vote for whichever one you hate more.
The left rioted for a whole summer, did 8 billion in damage and killed 25 people. Jan 6th wandered around in hallways. Your massive hypocrisy is noted by anybody with a brain.
What about the vaccine thing? The use of unnecessary force, or the fact that it didn't even work very well?
Somebody else doing something stupid is not a reason to do it. You do know that?
Calling something fascism doesn't mean it is. It only means that person has no ability to defend their ideas with arguments.
I agree both parties suck. But the leftists are full totalitarianism these days. Full censorship. Full weaponization of the government against their political enemies. Full abuse and confuse children. Full on DEI racism.
Not the liberal philosophy. Just a fringe of twitter activists who unfortunately have too many Fortune 500 hr managers and Ivy League deans of student affairs in their sway. (And, frustratingly, npr.) But it’s nothing like the center of gravity of the Democratic Party.
2) Start pretending You're a black trans woman. Likewise.
Seriously, I'd hope for a plausible 3rd Party in '28. Yang is a pretender. (Although I donate to them) I don't think No Labels is organized enough to make a difference. And they may decide not to run anybody, so there is that too.
Oh! Well, in that case, You WIN the Oppression Olympics!! You're on easy street for the rest-a Your *life.* BTW, if You're in the market for a grievance, I got a boatful-a them to sell Ya! Never been used!!
Just accept that you are a low-IQ person, independent of your whiteness. Your problem is that you are trying to think these things out for yourself, and you don't have the chops.
"pretend to believe in their low IQ ideas about race and sex"
Ideas like what? Their ideas about race and sex are the least wrong things they believe.
The naive views on both those topics are mostly correct. It's the "enlightened" views that are delusional, because they're based on talking yourself out of the obvious. You have to get into bottom 10 - 20th percentile conservative attitudes before they really go off the rails.
Richard, have you ever given the question of gerrymandering any intellectual honesty? Lines based on population density rather than lines based on voter history is the dichotomy; non-gerrymandered lines are still “squiggly”.
Especially considering what a non-issue it is in other countries that don't have this broken update mechanism. Electoral boundaries are shifted in Australia all the time in response to changing population demographics and nobody bats an eyelid, because it isn't being done for partisan political gain.
I think it`s easier then that. What is an important part of being "low-status"? That would be inability to freely access society`s resources. The Right`s scams target the elderly & politics-obsessed, because that`s the only people they are capable of extracting resources from. The methods are low-status, because the targets are low-status.
The high-status scams don`t register as scams, because they are fitted to the tastes of their targets. The money collected for BLM went into buying mansions for charity organizers. Sam Bankman-Fried accidently clicked the wrong account and gambled away money. And also purchased mansions. Theranos managed to screw up and be actually punished, but if they handled things with more finesse, I could see it being just a silly mistake of a promising, young woman.
And those are just examples of extreme greed. At normal levels it`s just government or charitable foundations issuing checks for 100s millions dollars to "promote antiracism" or "count the sperm of penguins for science and environment". The high-status scams are legalized.
There’s something to this, but SBF and BLM aren’t the equivalents of Trump, Gingrich and the RNC. SBF in fact claimed he gave equal amounts to Democrats and Republicans. One side is run by the scammers, while the other has scams.
On further reflection, where cons run scams libs run rackets. They are powerful and can racket institutions and high-status individuals. The right can't do that. The mass of elderly people is basically their only source of income, and their methods reflect that.
I almost always agree with You. And can't thank You enough for Your analysis.
However, I would observe that the Ds are run by acolytes of the Woke Religion. Biden's as Woke as they come, right? And SBF? He's claimed a lotta things. I dunno any-a them are close to the truth of the matters. TY again.
SBF claims - versus what we know. $37 million to Dems vs under 1 million to a few key RINOs (read McConnell).
Also SBF: "I feel bad for those who get f***ed by it. By this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths [sic] so everyone likes us."
But he is not running a scam... Sure.
I think you are pushing way too hard to make your round theory fit its square hole.
Excellent observations in general. I’ve long loathed how the American right tolerates scams.
But you make one error which Bayesianism would have avoided: if the Democrats HAD stolen the election, the same scams about fighting election fraud would still be seen. I think you’re incorrectly inferring that they didn’t from the existence of the scammers. (I think they *did* steal it, but I’m not going to hijack the discussion here to explain why, I just think you need to remain open-minded rather than assuming scammers are always wrong about diagnosis as well as about remedy.)
I agree. It's possible (and I think very likely) that there *was* significant election fraud, mostly from the left, AND that there are people scamming $$ off of well-intentioned voters on the right. While doing nothing to really change the situation.
I have understood his point as, that even if elections are 100% stolen, we need to pretend that they are honest to maintain the system. The costs of illegitimizing the system outweigh the costs of not having your guys in charge. My personal definition of winning an election is being in charge after the election happens. Unless you can leverage claims/evidence of fraud into taking over or actual success at next election, it`s just whining.
What then would the remedy be? If trying to point out the fraud is ineffectual whining, and voting harder will simply be nullified by, y'know, the outright cheating?
A Republican friend responded on Facebook when I posted your article in his feed:
Literally EVERY SINGLE POINT the guy made was incorrect. It's hard for me to point out specifics when there's not a single correct word. The highlight was the overall message, that conservatives in 2022 are similar to the black community of 2005, which is transparently absurd on its face. Our communities aren't falling apart at the seams, 1/3rd of our men don't end up in prison, we don't have massively disproportional poverty rates, the comparison is stupid on every level.
Furthermore, the anti-vaxx and election skepticism positions are not foundational to the Republican Party, nor are they baseless scams. We just had the entire medical establishment approve a vaccine that even VAERS admits has injured nearly 1 million people. We just had an election where the rules were changed in the middle of the game in a manner which exclusively benefited one party. I am not the intellectual equal of a welfare consuming black single mother who names her daughter Starquasia because I notice those things, and Hanania is a moron for claiming such an absurd position.
Did a single major Republican candidate run on an anti vaccine position? Did a single major Republican candidate other than Kari Lake run on a platform which said the 2020 election was stolen? Even the premises which he's working from as to what Republicans are saying is just incorrect. We can't get a single candidate to talk about either stance, yet he's claiming them to be foundational. It's just dumb.
“ Our communities aren't falling apart at the seams, 1/3rd of our men don't end up in prison, we don't have massively disproportional poverty rates, the comparison is stupid on every level.”
It would be genuinely hard to have a conversation with someone with reading comprehension skills this poor. Obviously, the point isn’t that MAGA is forming into Bloods and Crips street gangs and shooting each other in the street. The fact that he relies on VAERS reinforces the point.
I actually said that to him before I saw your reply. He’s young and smart but he is full of p*ss and vinegar (ex-football player). As a born-again Christian, he is very disturbed by social trends. Culturally speaking, it does feel at times that the US is being run by a Woke USSR.
Don't you think that must at least partially be because the vaccines were so controversial? For instance, I was not even aware of VAERS before 2021 despite being alive and getting many vaccines for decades, but I heard about it every damn day from anti vaxxers in 2021. People being made aware of a system, predisposed to questioning the pandemic narrative, must have a large effect on reports.
Again, how many people knew of VAERS during swine flu? Could be literally less than .1% of the population. I don't know that, but I've never heard anyone talk about it before. If that data exists I'd be interested to see it. Surely now its way, way higher.
Do you mean per capita VARS reports? Because otherwise that's an inane claim; The number of vaccines administered went up, so the number of post-vaccine health issues obviously must go up too, even if the vaccine caused none of them.
Yes, this is trivially true because VAERS is a data collection system. It is impossible to establish a causal relationship for any one data point even in theory. The large number of plausibly-vaccine-induced side effects are confounded by COVID-19 itself and perhaps simple increased alertness to side effects.
The finding in PA and WI from those State Supreme Courts is that Democrats IGNORED election laws to benefit themselves in 2020. What people who aren't covering for cheaters - call cheating.
But if you were on the receiving end of known and proven cheating. And the cheaters were denying THAT it ever even existed. And they refused to even debate even looking at the ballot harvesting possibility, you might be suspicious. Given the existing pattern and all.
I think if would be fair to give recipients of known cheating some earned slack. Maybe even concede they have a right not have it happen again. Especially in ways (Carter Commission, Mail-in ballot fraud conclusions) everybody once admitted were very prone to fraud and more cheating.
Given the distrust and tension levels and all ...
Maybe nonsense like must be evil for "questioned its legitimacy." could take a short breather?
I don’t completely disagree with your thesis but I think it’s a difficult line to draw. You mention coulter, she’s made some good points about how scammery plagued the trump admin. While this is true, she then pivots back into a more comfortable form of scammery that by this point she should be able to see. This scammery being the comfortable conservative politician who gets some wins legislatively and electorally, such as Reagan or now Ron desantis. The major paradigm shift of the ‘16 trump campaign was him looking at the Republican Party and saying “yeah this is literally all fake, you people are equivalent to the fake democratic parties they had in east Germany, this is the definition of controlled opposition”. His subsequent failures in office don’t invalidate this critique. Not really sure what the solution is but the right seems doomed either way, they could pick trump again and probably lose as he does more of his stop the steal shit or they could pick desantis, maybe win, get a few good legislative wins but ultimately return to the fake allusion that they’re not a fake oppositional party
There’s a controversial thesis that integration policies actually increased racial tension and hostility between black and white people. With affirmative action, forced busing, etc. in the South, two groups that were once segregated were now together, but black people still were treated worse, and the difference was more obvious now that there were white people to compare themselves to. And that’s where the idea of “acting white” sprung up. John McWhorter has an excellent essay on it:
That’s not, however, an elite institution encouraging hostility. John Brown, he encouraged hostility. Hardly an elite, institution, or a combination of the two. Elite institutions encouraged desegregation. Desegregation showed the oppressed how bad the disparity really was. The elite institutions then came up with things like affirmative action to coalesce the integration, which encouraged White Hostility, not non-white. So I just want to clarify: The Atlantic article does not demonstrate that elite institutions encouraged hostility, it says that the knowledge gained by integration fueled a very legitimate human emotion known as rage.
Looks like I misread your initial comment. You are right about this. Elite institutions did try policies meant to integrate black Americans. There was a lot of pushback from non-elite whites (which Barry Goldwater channeled), and that led black Americans to take a very oppositional stance.
Increased black rage at least in the 21st century (look at generational cohort polling responses to questions on the prevalence of racism) is largely a function of an increasingly skewed media and academic environment.
There is no other plausible way that Gen Z blacks rate racism as a higher barrier to progress than their older peers, or black respondents from decades prior. You can say that tech allowed for increased exposure of racially-charged incidents that people may not have otherwise been aware of, but every metric indicates absolute improvement across each decade. So anomalous incidents are given increased media exposure.
And even with respect to the rise of black oppositonalism in the 60s/70s Tyler's argument does not hold up. It was not as if without integration blacks would have been unaware of then-existing disparities between them and whites, even if they tended to live in different neighberhoods.
Again, every metric was improving for blacks in the 60s-70s, but an oppositional culture arose and they blew the opportunities that they had.
So why didn’t the Black Panthers exist before racial integration? Both of you seem to be ignoring that White Rage is a result of integration. During Jim Crow, the purpose of the KKK was paramilitary. After integration, the KKK’s purpose was to re-segregate through terrorism, which then had involved the federal government which put the KKK on the proverbial ropes for being terrorists. The Black Panthers meanwhile in sunny integrated california, are routinely experiencing state-based violence, which when they responded to it, led to assault weapon bans and open carry bans. But while all that was happening, millions got locked up.
But yeah, pre-integration, minority populations knew about the disparity, sure. Just like the Haitian slaves. I’m left with the impression that Mike here believes in racial stratification because racial stratification has occurred in the past and thus ending it would be dangerous for those at the upper stratums.
Consider the phenomenon of "Radical chic" that Tom Wolfe wrote about, where a certain kind of status competition among different classes of white people causes some set of them to throw their financial and rhetorical support behind the most extreme and anti-social elements of minority political movements, just so that those same white people can claim a stronger commitment to the ideals of equality or minority rights or what have you than other white folks. I think that's a part where the encouragement part comes in.
You could also consider the moronic, overheated rhetoric of somebody like Susan Sontag saying "the white race is the cancer of human history" as a kind of indirect encouragement of this hostility. If white people are so awful, what black person in their right mind would be dumb enough listen to them? My sense is that in general, people on the hard left who call themselves socialists and communists and who would seek to delegitimize the entire system are quite willing to play footsie with disaffected minority groups, and this includes stoking or hyping historical racial grievances.
Sympathy is hype, fascinating take Gordon. Reconstruction fell apart and the KKK stepped in to fill the void left by the plantation system and southern states. That was clearly the preferred path. 🙄
Even more fascinating is that the racists are not to blame for the rage, but rather the elite who are seeking to edge out other elites and, somehow related, *communists* 😂 who had an ideological stance that necessitated then to highlight the injustices that made the american capitalist class (follow me here) the same american capitalist class attempting “radical chic”.
Typical conservative contrarianism. Sorry, “oppositional culture”. Don’t blame Jim Crow, don’t blame 3/5th compromise, don’t blame Pan Am flights of crack cocaine and CIA agents (who later went rouge, talking about Noriega here),
No it’s the whities trying to edge out other whities. Say, do you think owning slaves was a good way to edge out other whities? Oh but that happened so long ago, right Gordy? So yeah, I’ve considered it. And i’m sure it makes the comfortable feel secure. Toodles.
No. Oppression is what lead to that. See, you can’t desegregate or integrate a society that was cosmopolitan from the start.
And as far as this little thought experiment goes, basically easing up on Haitian slaves will lead to the extermination of white people in Haiti, what is the alternative? That’s why people find this sort of *shit* so controversial. If one says “integration caused the Aryan Brotherwood” as a positivist claim, what is the normative claim? And if the claimant will say “i am not making a normative claim” well great, but the readership will. And so I ask,
If: Integration leads to Aryan Brotherwood
Then: What is to be done?
Then; was integration a mistake?
Then; why would one prefer KKK/A.B ideology as public policy in order to avert the formation of said groups?
Are the other commentators not daring to say it because it’s shallow analysis that is easily refuted and thus controversial? The idea that the Black Panthers started because California was integrated is laughable. The idea that the Black Panthers got started because of self defense against White Rage in the Golden State isn’t so much an idea as documented history. That’s why Richard keeps it in the macro-analysis, so he can misinterpret massive data sets. The moment you break those data sets down, well it’s almost like reality has a “liberal” bias. Fuentes is also well-known for being a controversial fool. I read Hanania’ shtuff because Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball used to have him on Rising. The guy lives in Austin for a reason hahahaha
Would black Californians be exposed to the full effects of white rage if it weren't for integration? While racial segregation was bad, it did have the positive effect of reducing the number of KKK or other hate attacks on black Southerners.
An interesting parallel can be made to the California prison system. Prisons in Cali used to be segregated, but then when prisons forcefully integrated, whites were the minority, and were regularly attacked by black gangs. A group of white bikers got together and started the Aryan Brotherhood to protect and organize whites, and became the top white gang in the US prison system. Now Cali prisons are self-segregated, and still full of racial tension. Integration does lead to oppositional groups forming.
Musk drops the info showing precisely how Twitter interfered in the 2020 election, and the very next day you go on a tirade calling people who questioned the malfeasance in 2020 - for which there is extensive EVIDENCE - election deniers?
Too cryptic for me. I think you are claiming I am changing the subject.
But I am not. The discussion is twitter censorship AS the election interference.
My post referenced one prong of the extensive 2020 Democrat cheating in that election.
That censoring involved a major story about one of the candidates, that was massively censored, a month before the election. And surveys say 16% of voters would have changed their vote had they known. Enough to change the election.
All the "lies about the election fraud" seem to have evidence coming out that they are *not* lies. Huh.
Where have you been?
Ballot harvesting in WI - illegal.
Unsupervised drop boxes - illegal all over the place.
Zuckerbucks - illegal. And ruled as such in courts of law.
That election was giant sham and full of (now court ruled) cheating.
Pretending Democrats were not cheating, and more importantly to me - pretending Democrats were not getting away with cheating (when we have tons of evidence and rulings), is a problem, for me. My problem is with people who are excusing clearly wrong behaviors (with evidence and court cases) - by calling normal people "stupid" and "deniers" using long paragraphs.
I dunno how much of what You wrote is accurate. But this is a FACT:
When the States electors were certified mid-December 2020, the election was *over*. Everything Trump tried after that was, if not in the letter then in the spirit of it, *illegal.*
Keep in mind, Trump had zero, zip, zilch, NADA EVIDENCE to back up his claim the election was stolen. *Not* "saying" that it couldn't turn up. Just that Trump had nothing while he was *caught* trying to steal the election.
You did that to try and imply that your (now very provably wrong) opinion somehow follows from the initial fact. It doesn't follow - even without evidence.
And it definitely doesn't follow given that we now have double digits of court cases proving your opinion to be wrong (most past the appeals stage - so final).
Nobody here is stupid enough to fall for such a blatant logical fallacy. Maybe try this comment at Vox.
Anybody who knows what John Eastman was up to knows Trump was up to no good. Everybody knows Trump threw everything he had against the wall to see what would stick. And they know that nothing did. He had nothing. This from the "man's" own mouth:
"Are you talking about disinformation or are you talking about lies? There is a more beautiful word called disinformation.”
He was, I guess, spreading "disinformation," not lying through his teeth, when he said the election was stolen.
These are not opinions. These are the facts of the matter. Do I think I could convince someone like You too look at them in an unbiased way? Never. *That's* an opinion, Champ.
(2) Don't know Eastman, nor "what he was up to ...".
(3) Nothing stuck - because the system is corrupt. That is what bothers me. But I don't have TDS like you, so I can see a lot more.
(4) The Democrats cheated. I am fine calling that "stolen" in common-speak (which is what Trump speaks). I don't give a rip what the technical definition of "stolen" is.
(5) Here are the real facts:
(A) $500M GOTV targeting only Democrats - using State machinery = illegal. Which is cheating. Which is "stolen".
(B) Big-Tech censoring is election interference (and an unreported campaign contribution) = illegal. Which is cheating. Which is "stolen".
(C) 100% election participation rate at WI nursing homes is Ballot harvesting = illegal. Which is cheating. Large enough to sway WI (a swing state) = "stolen".
(D) I could go on for with many others. But I don't need to. Any one of those make the claim that "2020 election was stolen" true.
(6) "Disinformation" is the Orwellian leftist speak for "facts I don't like".
So yes, for a leftist the facts above are "disinformation" - facts you don't like.
(7) I don't need to look at these facts in an unbiased way. Courts have ruled on them. You need to look at them in an un-TDS way.
The basic point about election fraud that keeps my mind open to the possibility: Let's say for a moment that there actually was fraud. Do you think the government has the capacity to basically deny its own legitimacy by acknowledging such a fact? I believe that it does not. Given the totality of my observations and experience regarding the behavior of government, I am quite confident that it would never come out and admit that an election was decided by fraud, no matter what the reality is. In exactly the same way that Dr. Fauci is never going to wake up one day and suddenly get on TV and say "sorry guys I was wrong about everything."
So, trying to figure out whether fraud actually decided an election or not is sort of besides the point. The regime will behave in exactly the same manner regardless. I think you need to decide whether you are invested in maintaining the status quo or not. If you like the status quo, then the correct thing to do is side with the regime and always pretend that everything is above board, no matter what. If you are dissatisfied, then you should take claims of fraud seriously and demand transparency, even though you are probably never going to get it.
Your analysis of the stupidity of the Right is of course very much correct, but how do you square the greater discernment and intelligence of the Left (which I do agree exist) with their own beliefs in falsehoods? Is it simply that their scams are that much better-orchestrated? A specific example is the belief (or at least emoted conviction) among huge portions of the American Left that Trump was controlled by the Russian government, and that opposition to their domestic agenda is too animated by paid Russian agents, despite no evidence existing for these things. I've raised this to other people and they hand-wave it away as meaningless; I don't think it is meaningless. I think when the entire literate class acts for the better part of five years as though their President is an agent of a hostile foreign power, that is actually more important than whatever dumbery Dinesh D'Souza is peddling that week.
As I hinted at, my suspicion here is that the scam is just bigger and better, but still a scam for that. Right wing conspiracy theories over the 2020 and 2022 elections are penny-ante and stupid. (D'Souza's peerlessly asinine "2,000 Mules" a particularly fly-ridden, stinking example.) Left wing conspiracy theories over the 2016 election dominated the discourse for years, led to all manner of investigations, a chilling effect against support for Trump, and primed the pump for our current proxy war in Ukraine. In other words, they actually worked. Is that the only difference?
It is own the lib culture that defines many republicans. As a faculty at Dartmouth, I was a student advisor for college republicans chapter prior to 2016. College Republicans advocated for lesser regulations, strong military and some social conservative issues ( like Abortion restrictions, religious liberty etc.). However, the new crop of college republicans are just so different. They have hosted James O'Keefe ( Project Veritas), Andy Ngo (some guy who opposes Antifa) and Candace Owens. The people hosted by Dartmouth college republicans are just to outrage liberals on campus and they fall for it. But the reputational damage is much more severe. For old republicans on Campus, Professors, staff members etc, we want to support college republicans but their choice of guests and antics are just boorish.
The college republicans even called for more American professors and less foreign ''imports". You can champion immigration restrictions but at Dartmouth, faculty selection ( At least in Science and Engineering) is strictly based on Merit. In their newsletter they called an Indian professor who is a pioneer in machine learning ( computer science) and has won multiple grants from Google and Nvidia a foreign import and said his job must have gone to an American. The faculty selection was transparent, computer science department invited all the applicants to a seminar where they gave a 30 minute presentation followed by 30 mins questions by faculty selection committee and 30 minutes of question by anyone in the room. Every applicant's CV was open to college republicans, so was the seminar which was recorded. Instead of making nuanced arguments of why this Indian professor was a wrong choice or they could have pointed out a better candidate instead they just made simplistic argument that he was not American. In my view, he was the most qualified but a good argument could be made to say another American applicant (also of Indian heritage) was equally well qualified. But, the new republican movement is interested in creating outrage and not any valuable arguments. So naturally, they went with a low-IQ take about not hiring this Indian Professor just because he is not American.
"but at Dartmouth, faculty selection ( At least in Science and Engineering) is strictly based on Merit."
And so here is where we know you are lying. As Faculty in Engineering myself I know hiring is strongly influenced by gender and race. In fact, at a minimum you have to interview the correct quota of phenotypes or write a report explaining why you violated the religion of DEI. And if your department does not reflect society genetics - your Dept Head will have to appologize to the DEI overlords every single year until it is "fixed".
I am glad to see the new GOP students demand thought diversity at Dartmouth with real speakers. And I am even more pleased that somebody who is happy to be the weak and controlled opposition no longer has any influence with the new generation.
It is well past time to pushback on leftism. You failed spectacularly at that, so see ya.
Out of 68 faculty members at Thayer Engineering school at Dartmouth, 16 of them are women. We have one black professor, we have 12 Asians ( Indian and Chinese). So, no it is not reflective of the society. Asians are overrepresented in faculty and blacks are severely underrepresented ( less than 1%)
As faculty members, we are under pressure to take more female PhD students. There is some pressure to take more African American grad students. However, at least tenure track faculty positions at Dartmouth are not influenced by DEI pressures. It is important to be truthful. If you are a Faculty at Dartmouth engineering you know it is false to claim hiring decisions for faculty is influenced by DEI. If you are Dartmouth engineering faculty member, you know after George Floyd protests, DEI sent us a petition to sign to acknowledge STEM has anti-black bias. I know for a fact that more than half of faculty members did not sign the petition. We have pushed back on DEI, but we cannot push back if college republicans continue to make extremely unsavory arguments especially when they called an extremely qualified Indian professor foreign import. As you know DEI does not consider Asians ( Chinese and Indians) as worthy minorities anymore. So, for DEI it would not matter if the new faculty member was white or Indian or Chinese.
Faculty composition in Engineering is an area the administration is always trying to "address" with their DEI racism and underhand anti-merit actions.
"Unsavory arguments" as a weak excuse against presenting differing viewpoints at Dartmouth - sounds pretty darned "controlled opposition" to me. Dissembling at its finest.
Dartmouth has leftist students because it only admits leftist students. The admissions essays are obvious requirements to state DEI bona-fides. Why did you allow that?
I am sure the story about the Indian Prof is far far deeper than you are stating.
Because you are clearly an old-style RINO who is really just advancing the leftist agenda from inside the GOP. Anybody who is offended by Candice Owens is a joke. What on earth do you have against a reporter (Ngo)? You don't want him reporting on antifa? Why on earth not? Dartmouth should be giving Ngo awards - not having its sole GOP (supposedly) faculty member badmouth him.
Yet you do not dispute our faculty composition is not diverse by DEI standards. We have just a single black faculty member, we have just about 20% women faculty members. I am sure you know that DEI wants more black and female faculty members and less Asian and white faculty.
According to you everyone is a RINO. I want a GOP that reduces size of government, that wants to stand for law and order. Do you understand that civil rights act of 1964 and more importantly civil rights restoration act of 1987 forces universities to do DEI. Reagan bucked all the pressure and vetoed the civil rights restoration act of 1987, but his veto was overridden. The college republicans talk smack about Zombie Reaganism, but they should talk about actual policy solutions rather than silly culture wars. Until 1964 and 1987 civil rights acts are repealed or significantly modified we cannot overcome wokeness. Democratic administrations frequently use their power under civil rights act to demand more DEI or lose federal money. The only way out for colleges is to be like Hillsdale and not recieve any federal money. As you know it is not possible for research universities, as a large portions of research grants are federal.
Instead of repealing Title IX of civil rights act, which is the root cause of gender wokeness, the new conservatives want to protect Title IX from woke left. It is all beyond parody at this point. And the only reason I can think of for their really weird positions like not repealing title IX but instead to protect it, is that the politics of college republicans is just reactionary. They do not want to change anything, but they want to rile up the left. And you know as well as I know, as a faculty member you cannot be open about every opinion without being ostracized and protested by students every day. I guess that is the reason both you and me use pseudonyms online. But what college republicans are doing further paints every republican on campus as reactionary.
Lastly, I am not offended by Candace Owens. I just hate the fact that conservatives just like liberals treat blacks as some people who have unique moral authority. It is the exact reason republicans have elevated mediocre candidates like Herschel Walker. If Walker was white, he would face intense shame from republicans. The new republicans like democrats give blacks higher moral authority and call upon mediocre people like Candace Owens to give talks when there are numerous well read white commentators and politicians. While they criticize DEI for promoting undeserved black students and faculty, in their own life, they promote undeserved black candidates like Herschel Walker and Candace Owens( who by the way actually won a settlement from city for phony racial discrimination and if she was an honest person she would have refunded the money after her political awakening).
Not everyone is a RINO. Just the people badmouthing Owens (perfectly intelligent), Ngo (perfectly doing his job), and smearing Project Veritas (for uncovering the truth?). How on earth the RINOS let the leftists walking over them - if project-veritas keeps uncovering the inconvenient truth, right?
We get mewing from RINOs about Walker being "stupid", while not a peep about a literal mental vegetable being elected in PA. And I will take stupid all day long. Reagan was no genius. Neither was Trump. They both did more for reigning in leftist stupidity than 100 Bushes and 1000 Romneys, put together. Or you - who can't even tolerate a conservative speaker on your campus for fear of it upsetting the people you endlessly cover for.
"But denying election results is in its own category. In any kind of social system, some things are optional and can be negotiated, but a few fundamental rules make civilization possible. . . The idea that you should accept election results falls into the latter category. "
Using the term "Election Denier," like "Holocaust Denier," is just sloppy circular logic. You start off by assuming the 100% fairness of the election, then dismiss all evidence to the contrary as self-evident "denial" of true facts. It's a breeze to win a debate when you simply assume the opposing view is stupid and wrong ab initio, and therefore anything they could say is inadmissible. Your brain chooses this path for two reasons. First, it's so much easier than investigating and explaining why, for example, 33% of the voting machines in Maricopa County -- supervised by the Dem secretary of state who was running for Governor -- simultaneously and inexplicably malfunctioned on election day, throwing the election to said objectively awful Dem candidate. Second, if you questioned the "all elections are always fair" party line, you yourself would be branded a "denier" and expelled from the ranks of socially acceptable internet pundits.
But the uniparty line is exactly backward in saying that citizens aren't allowed to question the elections run by their governments because the mases having faith in elections is so important to legitimize elite decisions. The official arrogant dismissal of well-founded suspicions is more corrosive of faith in democracy than the the suspicions themselves. Besides, what could possibly encourage cheating more than a rule that: "no one is allowed to allege cheating, no matter how much it looks like cheating."
Citizens who get screwed by extremely and obviously fishy events deserve slightly better than a backhanded dismissal that no facts are needed to refute a "denier." Indeed, a government or elite that says cheating is impossible by definition is plainly lying. (Read about LBJ stealing his 1948 Senate race if you want to learn how it's done). If you want confidence in elections you need to SHOW people they are fair, not just tell them to STFU.
>Second, if you questioned the "all elections are always fair" party line, you yourself would be branded a "denier" and expelled from the ranks of socially acceptable internet pundits.
I think you hit the nail on the head. There is a class of people who are smart enough to know better than the "fraud is impossible" position that they take, but at the end of the day, they value their self-image as balanced respected high-minded etc. "intellectuals" more than they value the pursuit of truth, and this simply prevents them from investigating certain avenues that are too socially dangerous for them.
I agree with your claim that much of "conservatism" now is simply oppositional culture. I try not to even identify myself as a "conservative" any longer, although I'm certainly very right wing and I do hate the left.
I don't agree that the right is somehow more scam-happy or lies more often than the left, and you don't seem to present any evidence for this claim besides anecdotal. Right-wing scammers are common, of course, but to pretend that they aren't also everywhere to be found on the left is completely absurd. I would argue left wing scammers are more troubling because the regime openly endorses them. Of course, you've shown in previous posts that you have a "right wingers are idiots" bias, so meh.
I also disagree with your proposed "solution" of simply voting harder next time. We can speculate in several different directions about possible ways for the right to gain power or achieve policy goals, but if you look at the big picture, the conventional "vote harder" line simply doesn't work. The country has moved farther left non-stop regardless of election outcomes since WWII (arguably before, but WWII is the organizing event for the current regime, so).
Conservative election victories have, at best, provided nothing more than a speed bump in this trend, if even that. This has remained constant over many decades, suggesting that it is a feature of the regime itself, not something that can simply be overcome if we finally figure out the right way to vote. It's like communism, at a certain point you need to recognize that this just doesn't work no matter how many times you try it over and over again.
I believe this is why "election denial" has gained so much steam on the right, even if many people engaging in it cannot fully articulate this motivation. The system *does* appear to be rigged against the right, in ways that are far more subtle and effective than outright election fraud (although I believe that does happen as well). Even if we accept your premise that the right loses because they are stupid, my counter-conclusion remains correct--right-wing policies cannot be effected and right-wing ideologies cannot gain power under the current regime. To say "just vote harder" is to endorse the status quo, whether you like it or not.
Speaking of scams, the leadership of BLM are making out like bandits, buying mansions with supporter cash. And it looks like all those "low-IQ conspiracy theories" about Big Tech putting its thumb on the scale at election time were true as well. Nothing but thieves and liars at both ends of the political spectrum. How pathetic to see anyone claiming that their side of American politics is full of virtue and intelligence, and that only the other side has a lack of these characteristics.
One look at the ridiculously absurd things believed by the Left indicates they are the low IQ group. Especially in light of the fact the the so-calked conspiracy theories are all proving true. But these ill educated narcissistic libs like the author can’t see beyond their up turned noses. LOL low IQ indeed.
I dont know why you insist so much on the "liberalz have higher IQ"
when holding quasi-religious. , laughable, dogmatic beliefs as "we are all equal" ( zero evidence for this) "men can give birth", or "damn social-economical factors, muh poor blacks" (when Natives in reservations have it worse and their crime rate isnt as high).
it seems to me that they give up any pretense of individuality and original thought to be part of the "higher status" flock, like sheep perpetually hounded by their elites
On the one hand, I love the piece, as it makes a case not made anywhere near often enough. On the other hand, by hand-waving at Abrams, Clinton, Kerry (Diebold!), and Gore, who brought us the modern-day never-concede grift, the argument is weakened considerably. Abrams turned election denial into a massive fundraising engine and a platform for personal celebrity that was in full operation until just last month.
I wonder if what you are on top of is a broader, multi-partisan delegitimization of democratic outcomes by the current elite class.
I must’ve been brainwashed by the media, because I was under the impression that Gore, Kerry, and Clinton all conceded their election losses and Trump didn’t. And I somehow missed them calling for new elections, demanding future candidates say they won, trying to appoint alternative electors, personally pressuring state level officials to throw out the election results, encouraging their followers to storm the Capitol, etc. But besides that, exactly the same thing!
They conceded, but barely - recall HRC's campaign to overturn 2016 in the electoral college votes and the celebrity videos that accompanied it - and only as they continued to de-legitimize the winners and the process. HRC has claimed the election was stolen from her many times, the 'Russians placed Trump in the WH' was mainstream D for years, and Abrams built her entire persona on the notion that she was the rightful winner.
I agree that Trump asking for a 2020 claim as some sort of loyalty oath is dark, but I see it as just a particularly crude variant of the same elite trend.
To make any comparison between Trump and previous candidates is like saying slapping someone in the face and shooting them are the same thing because they’re both forms of violence.
In that case, given that the argument is that this a partisan affliction, what do you see as the difference between Abrams and Lake? Abrams has been feted, including award show appearances and the creation of a TV character to honour her, and built a massive fundraising apparatus from claiming election theft and not conceding. Lake won't concede, and will likely end up on a less-lucrative but equally-persistent tour.
From the outside, it looks like an appeal that works very well on both sets of voters. What still seems so interesting to me in what you are arguing is how compelling these arguments now seem to be, and how readily they are deployed. Did we have equivalents of Abrams and Lake thirty years ago?
I think Abrams is a uniquely bad figure and her and Lake are about equal in this respect. But Abrams as far as I know never raised money on the premise she would use it to overturn the election. And Trump is on a different level than both of them, and more important to Republicans than Abrams is to Democrats.
I think you might want to take into consideration how the imbalance in general societal power affects this behavior. For decades, the left has ruled nearly every important institution in the country. I think you could probably say it rules every single one of them today, even the military, with the only possible exception of Twitter if you want to count that. The leftward trend has been obvious and relentless.
Conservatives have been left grasping at elections as the last place where they can actually exercise any power of their own, even if it's still relatively fleeting. This also means that when conservatives lose even that, they are effectively cornered. They begin to perceive, correctly in my opinion, that their options are to either give up or flip the board. So, they choose to flip the board via "election denial."
If the power dynamics were flipped, I would speculate that the left would be just as amenable to the same basic motivations and behaviors. While the left does also like to "deny elections," it is not done with the same desperation and urgency, because at the end of the day they can afford to lose a few elections confident in the belief that they will still eventually get their way.
On Jan 9th, Trump: "The new administration will be inaugurated on January 20" "My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power." (prior to the transition).
Clinton in WaPo "Trump is an illegitimate president". (3 years after she lost).
Evidence says ... brainwashed. Sorry. First statement looks like concession to me. Second does not.
The temperature in the pot was much lower back when Gore, Kerry, etc. were in play. We can clearly see that there is a difference in kind between George W. Bush and Trump, in terms of how acceptable they are to the regime. I would speculate that if Trump had somehow won the 2020 election, you would've seen something akin to Stop the Steal from the regime, although the specifics of how it manifested would necessarily have differed.
I would also speculate that the left wing version may have been something far more "dangerous to democracy," since we are going with the premise that elections matter. Trump wanted the election thrown out, but the regime wanted him gone, so his bid to do so failed. What if Trump won, and there was a movement to throw the election out by the losers--who would not really be Joe Biden personally, but rather the liberal regime as a whole? I think this version of "election denial" would have a far greater chance of actually having the election overturned or otherwise inducing genuine civil strife. I'm old enough to remember election day and we all fully expected that it was going to be George Floyd x100 if Trump actually won.
I want to be part of the higher status tribe but
1 I can't bring myself to pretend to believe in their low IQ ideas about race and sex and
2 the liberal philosophy is all about hating white men and I'm a white man.
What are we supposed to do?
The simplest answer is don't join any side that insists you believe nonsense. That's always an option, and it's silly to deny that it is. On the margin, you joining a side is unlikely to significantly affect their chance of winning, but you are likely to be dragged down to the level of the side you join.
Become a rationalist lol
Unironically build your own Cathedral to take on The Cathedral. Like the Haredim - their parties Shas and UTJ are now part of Israel’s government and they are probably one factor as to why Israel is one of the few countries where young people are more conservative.
This is going to be so important in the future IMO. Have correct beliefs and say it's protected by freedom of religion. Have a parallel economy and high birth rates. I thought the Mormons were going to do this but they seem to be falling apart.
Why it works for Hasidim (whether here or in Israel) and not Mormons would be an interesting subject. One could observe that Israel’s Hasidim have something we don’t- support from mainstream conservatives (i.e. Shas and UTJ being in Likud’s coalition)
Well, conservative Christianity in any form is pretty much the ultimate evil according to the ruling class, constantly targeted with comparisons to Hitler, Nazis, etc. Judaism, on the other hand, is a sacred cow that is pretty much untouchable and above all criticism. This seems like a pretty obvious and significant factor to consider. And I don't really have anything against Judaism, the conservative religious Jews seem to align much more closely with my values than many so-called Christians. But it just seems like a pretty obvious explanation for why they're more able to "build their own cathedral."
As always it’s the cowardice and greed of conservative elites, or that of the GOP compared to Likud
Israel is a nation where there is no debate about whether it has a right to exist, or whether its founders were evil bigots. Probably changes the dynamics a little bit.
A different voting system.
Rs in America know that the evangelicals and Mormons will vote for them anyway, so they don't feel any need to accomodate them.
In the fragmented Israeli political landscape, small parties can torpedo a government and cause an early election. That is a lot of power, and with power comes true respect.
I feel like the closest comparison to Hasidim are Amish/Mennonites, who are also doing fine.
I struggle to think of a branch of Judaism to compare Mormons to, but only half-jokingly, the first that comes to mind is Black Hebrew Israelites.
I think sometimes people have a tendency to treat how preposterous a religion is as this exogenous variable that is irrelevant to its success -- perhaps arising out of the contemporary West's tendency to treat all religions as equally preposterous -- but I think that's an error.
If Rabbinic Judaism were the one true religion, the Hasidim (or at least the Haredim, of which the Hasidim are a part) would probably be the ones coming closest to doing it correctly -- i.e., trying to determine what all of God's commandments are and structuring their lives and their community around obeying them. They're the ones living closest to how Ashkenazim traditionally lived, which is a lifestyle that had staying power.
Why don't the same reservations apply to the right's weird beliefs about vaccines and climate change?
Because fear-mongering (climate change) is the oldest dirty-trick in the political repertoire, and nobody with a brain would ever fall for it.
Left: "Give me lots of money and more power - or you will all die !!!"
Any Functioning Brain: Sure. Sure I will.
What about the apocalyptic doomsday cult didn't tip you off to them?
The fact that it is treated as a serious issue by almost every government in the world seems to suggest there's something to it. The left certainly love their lies about "we have 5 years left to fix this or the planet becomes uninhabitable!", but that doesn't mean the more reasonable "if we do nothing for another 30 years this is going to be very unpleasant for our grandchildren" is false.
(1) Not every government in the world. Governments representing over 50% of the CO2 emissions (China and India and Indonesia) don't seem to be remotely suckered.
(2) Even if they were in on this game - I think for myself, not bow to the elites as they manipulate.
(3) I wrote some of the code for one of the first climate models (in mid 90s). I am not some rube hick. I won't even begin on how accurate they are (let's assume they are perfect in what follows).
(4) I teach thermodynamics and fluid dynamics and heat transfer (the essence of climate models) at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Please - no "believe the science" horse poo for me.
(5) If we do absolutely nothing it will make zero difference to the climate. As China alone emits more than the USA and all 27 nations of Europe combined. And India is close behind China.
(6) If we do nothing CO2 levels are expected to rise to still be 50% below their 500 million year average. Which I choose because that is the period where life thrived on earth. Sometimes with CO2 levels 500% higher than currently.
(7) Temperature is a secondary variable and more difficult to predict. A sum total of zero climate models have temperature levels rising higher over 400 years - than the 500 million year average temperature (when life thrived on earth). Not even over the mean!!!
(8) Water is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. When are we demanding taxes from idiots for pissing?
(9) "if we do nothing for another 30 years ... poor grandchildren" is so childish. Do you really think that differs from "give me all your money or you will die!" in level of cheap-shot manipulation?
Left: "give me all your money and more power - or all your grandchildren will suffer miserably !!!"
People with a Brain: Oh well then. In that case. Since it was so well argued that time. Of course.
(10) Honestly? Not a suspicious bone in your entire body?
Your very first point is already totally wrong. China and India are both very committed to de carbonizing. I don't think there's going to be much fruitful discussion here.
Google: China is building more than half of the world's new coal power plants. 2022.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2317274-china-is-building-more-than-half-of-the-worlds-new-coal-power-plants/
I have no doubt you don't want to have a discussion. Leftism is indeed impossible to defend on it merits.
Nothing like a good apocalypse to close the mind.
China Is Still Building an Insane Number of New Coal Plants
While the rest of the world turns away from the fossil fuel, China is investing big in coal-powered electricity.
https://www.wired.com/story/china-is-still-building-an-insane-number-of-new-coal-plants/
Leftists must just hate the invention of search engines.
What is going to happen when people can tell leftists are lying in 3 clicks, AND speak freely? Gird your loins.
Of all the climate scientists only you have the truth. So glad we have you to steer us straight so we aren’t hoodwinked. Thanks.
When did I say I was the only one? What makes you think I am the only one?
Not even a teeny-tiny itty-bitty bit questioning of the oh-so-convenient narrative? Just flat out accepting every single thing you have ever been fed?
Covid vax will stop you getting covid. Still good with that?
Everything the elite have ever told you has always turned out to be 100% honest?
You're welcome. I tried.
Every government (in the white west at least) also takes left wing ideologies on race and transgenderism completely seriously despite their obvious absurdity. Every government originally tried for "zero COVID" and such. So "every government does it" is a terrible excuse for anything.
You clarify with white west though. Literally all governments, including ones that only have anything to lose by believing it like oil states. Not to mention the entire fossil fuel industry. I don't think they are all just playing along.
Also, I clarify with "white west" because I assume these are the governments you care about. Otherwise, the implication would be that we should look to China and Russia as our arbiters of truth. I really, really dislike and distrust the governments of the White West, but not even I would go that far. And it is also fairly obvious that every other country which even pretends to care about something like "climate change" only does so because they are following the west's lead.
Non-white countries do not take "climate change" seriously. I could probably argue to you that white countries don't either, but the non-white ones most definitely do not. We're just gonna have to agree to disagree on that one.
My point is that I'm willing to adopt weird beliefs to get by. However if the belief is that I'm an inherently an evil person who doesn't deserve human rights due to my identity, thats a bridge too far. The gender stuff is also so harmful that I can't look the other way.
My perspective is to watch and wait. I think that's literally all you can do on an individual level. Maybe prepare in case SHTF one day, who knows if it will or not. But other than that, I genuinely think there's not much to be done besides to wait for the system to start collapsing in on itself, and maybe then some opportunities begin to open up.
You and 95% of the other people I run into feel this way.
But still Democrats win elections ... somehow.
Jan. 6 spooked a lot of people. Sorry righties, trying to launch a coup kind of pissed those of us off who still like democracy. Oh, and the vaccine thing.
That and our welfare state is much smaller than a lot of other rich countries. The GOP tries to do things like privatize Medicare.
A socially conservative (or even moderate at this point), economically liberal party could do really well, which is why the Democrats and the GOP collude to stop it. That's kind of where Trump ran, and then he got in and the Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act so the insurance companies could hit us with surcharges for having had asthma again.
If you give people a choice between communism and fascism, you'll be dismayed by how many people who don't like either vote for whichever one you hate more. "Hey, you asked..."
If you give people a choice between Gilded Age capitalism with MAGA characteristics and woke capitalism with some semblance of a social safety net, well, you'll be dismayed by how many people who don't like either vote for whichever one you hate more.
tl;dr There are two parties and they both suck.
Except Jan 6th was a riot, not a coup.
The left rioted for a whole summer, did 8 billion in damage and killed 25 people. Jan 6th wandered around in hallways. Your massive hypocrisy is noted by anybody with a brain.
What about the vaccine thing? The use of unnecessary force, or the fact that it didn't even work very well?
Somebody else doing something stupid is not a reason to do it. You do know that?
Calling something fascism doesn't mean it is. It only means that person has no ability to defend their ideas with arguments.
I agree both parties suck. But the leftists are full totalitarianism these days. Full censorship. Full weaponization of the government against their political enemies. Full abuse and confuse children. Full on DEI racism.
Not the liberal philosophy. Just a fringe of twitter activists who unfortunately have too many Fortune 500 hr managers and Ivy League deans of student affairs in their sway. (And, frustratingly, npr.) But it’s nothing like the center of gravity of the Democratic Party.
Hear hear!
1) Don't brag about Your high-IQ. ;-) = wink
2) Start pretending You're a black trans woman. Likewise.
Seriously, I'd hope for a plausible 3rd Party in '28. Yang is a pretender. (Although I donate to them) I don't think No Labels is organized enough to make a difference. And they may decide not to run anybody, so there is that too.
Pretending? I AM a black trans woman. Thank you for your bravery 👏👏👏👏
Oh! Well, in that case, You WIN the Oppression Olympics!! You're on easy street for the rest-a Your *life.* BTW, if You're in the market for a grievance, I got a boatful-a them to sell Ya! Never been used!!
TY for Your reply. Made my day, Sir.
Just accept that you are a low-IQ person, independent of your whiteness. Your problem is that you are trying to think these things out for yourself, and you don't have the chops.
Do what everyone else does when they have a boss, or a spouse, throughout history.
Lie.
The minimum amount possible, of course, and privately seek out people you can tell the truth around.
"pretend to believe in their low IQ ideas about race and sex"
Ideas like what? Their ideas about race and sex are the least wrong things they believe.
The naive views on both those topics are mostly correct. It's the "enlightened" views that are delusional, because they're based on talking yourself out of the obvious. You have to get into bottom 10 - 20th percentile conservative attitudes before they really go off the rails.
1 kids should have their genitals removed due to a phase/being a tomboy
2 having laws and police is racist
3 America is an oppressive patriarchy and the way to fix it is to make every job just nonstop DEI hystrionics
Or just keep calling minorities demanding equal rights racist.
/s
Any thoughts on the going-ons in Canada btw?
Army is still 90% white as is police.
They're mad, but mostly civnats who want true equality.
Richard, have you ever given the question of gerrymandering any intellectual honesty? Lines based on population density rather than lines based on voter history is the dichotomy; non-gerrymandered lines are still “squiggly”.
Especially considering what a non-issue it is in other countries that don't have this broken update mechanism. Electoral boundaries are shifted in Australia all the time in response to changing population demographics and nobody bats an eyelid, because it isn't being done for partisan political gain.
I think it`s easier then that. What is an important part of being "low-status"? That would be inability to freely access society`s resources. The Right`s scams target the elderly & politics-obsessed, because that`s the only people they are capable of extracting resources from. The methods are low-status, because the targets are low-status.
The high-status scams don`t register as scams, because they are fitted to the tastes of their targets. The money collected for BLM went into buying mansions for charity organizers. Sam Bankman-Fried accidently clicked the wrong account and gambled away money. And also purchased mansions. Theranos managed to screw up and be actually punished, but if they handled things with more finesse, I could see it being just a silly mistake of a promising, young woman.
And those are just examples of extreme greed. At normal levels it`s just government or charitable foundations issuing checks for 100s millions dollars to "promote antiracism" or "count the sperm of penguins for science and environment". The high-status scams are legalized.
There’s something to this, but SBF and BLM aren’t the equivalents of Trump, Gingrich and the RNC. SBF in fact claimed he gave equal amounts to Democrats and Republicans. One side is run by the scammers, while the other has scams.
$400,000k speeches given by the Clintons, Obama etc. are scams.
On further reflection, where cons run scams libs run rackets. They are powerful and can racket institutions and high-status individuals. The right can't do that. The mass of elderly people is basically their only source of income, and their methods reflect that.
I almost always agree with You. And can't thank You enough for Your analysis.
However, I would observe that the Ds are run by acolytes of the Woke Religion. Biden's as Woke as they come, right? And SBF? He's claimed a lotta things. I dunno any-a them are close to the truth of the matters. TY again.
SBF claims - versus what we know. $37 million to Dems vs under 1 million to a few key RINOs (read McConnell).
Also SBF: "I feel bad for those who get f***ed by it. By this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths [sic] so everyone likes us."
But he is not running a scam... Sure.
I think you are pushing way too hard to make your round theory fit its square hole.
I expected some objectivity. I see none.
SBF claims notwithstanding, its' pretty well documented that he gave far more money to Dems than to GOPers
Excellent observations in general. I’ve long loathed how the American right tolerates scams.
But you make one error which Bayesianism would have avoided: if the Democrats HAD stolen the election, the same scams about fighting election fraud would still be seen. I think you’re incorrectly inferring that they didn’t from the existence of the scammers. (I think they *did* steal it, but I’m not going to hijack the discussion here to explain why, I just think you need to remain open-minded rather than assuming scammers are always wrong about diagnosis as well as about remedy.)
I agree. It's possible (and I think very likely) that there *was* significant election fraud, mostly from the left, AND that there are people scamming $$ off of well-intentioned voters on the right. While doing nothing to really change the situation.
I have understood his point as, that even if elections are 100% stolen, we need to pretend that they are honest to maintain the system. The costs of illegitimizing the system outweigh the costs of not having your guys in charge. My personal definition of winning an election is being in charge after the election happens. Unless you can leverage claims/evidence of fraud into taking over or actual success at next election, it`s just whining.
What then would the remedy be? If trying to point out the fraud is ineffectual whining, and voting harder will simply be nullified by, y'know, the outright cheating?
I worked in gov and can confirm billions of fraud in unemployment insurance and other programs. Check out DOL IG reports and GAO reports.
A Republican friend responded on Facebook when I posted your article in his feed:
Literally EVERY SINGLE POINT the guy made was incorrect. It's hard for me to point out specifics when there's not a single correct word. The highlight was the overall message, that conservatives in 2022 are similar to the black community of 2005, which is transparently absurd on its face. Our communities aren't falling apart at the seams, 1/3rd of our men don't end up in prison, we don't have massively disproportional poverty rates, the comparison is stupid on every level.
Furthermore, the anti-vaxx and election skepticism positions are not foundational to the Republican Party, nor are they baseless scams. We just had the entire medical establishment approve a vaccine that even VAERS admits has injured nearly 1 million people. We just had an election where the rules were changed in the middle of the game in a manner which exclusively benefited one party. I am not the intellectual equal of a welfare consuming black single mother who names her daughter Starquasia because I notice those things, and Hanania is a moron for claiming such an absurd position.
Did a single major Republican candidate run on an anti vaccine position? Did a single major Republican candidate other than Kari Lake run on a platform which said the 2020 election was stolen? Even the premises which he's working from as to what Republicans are saying is just incorrect. We can't get a single candidate to talk about either stance, yet he's claiming them to be foundational. It's just dumb.
“ Our communities aren't falling apart at the seams, 1/3rd of our men don't end up in prison, we don't have massively disproportional poverty rates, the comparison is stupid on every level.”
It would be genuinely hard to have a conversation with someone with reading comprehension skills this poor. Obviously, the point isn’t that MAGA is forming into Bloods and Crips street gangs and shooting each other in the street. The fact that he relies on VAERS reinforces the point.
I actually said that to him before I saw your reply. He’s young and smart but he is full of p*ss and vinegar (ex-football player). As a born-again Christian, he is very disturbed by social trends. Culturally speaking, it does feel at times that the US is being run by a Woke USSR.
> We just had the entire medical establishment approve a vaccine that even VAERS admits has injured nearly 1 million people.
Doesn't VARS include any health issue that occurred shortly after taking a vaccine, even if there's no evidence pointing to a causal link?
VAERS reports *skyrocketed* in 2021. Literally (and I do mean literally) 10X the baseline over the past several years.
But sure. Nothing to see there. Pay no attention to the data.
Don't you think that must at least partially be because the vaccines were so controversial? For instance, I was not even aware of VAERS before 2021 despite being alive and getting many vaccines for decades, but I heard about it every damn day from anti vaxxers in 2021. People being made aware of a system, predisposed to questioning the pandemic narrative, must have a large effect on reports.
Yes it reminds me of increases in “hate crimes” and “hate incidents” as soon as the left starts taking about these things.
Compare how the Swine Flu vaccine rollout to the Covid vaccine rollout.
362 adverse events ended the Swine Flu vaccine campaign, and (so far as I can tell with a limited search), NO deaths.
Covid had 10,000 deaths reported through VAERS. TOTAL number of deaths reported through VAERS from 1990-2019: under 100.
Yeah, increased reporting MUST be the cause. MUST be.
Again, how many people knew of VAERS during swine flu? Could be literally less than .1% of the population. I don't know that, but I've never heard anyone talk about it before. If that data exists I'd be interested to see it. Surely now its way, way higher.
Do you mean per capita VARS reports? Because otherwise that's an inane claim; The number of vaccines administered went up, so the number of post-vaccine health issues obviously must go up too, even if the vaccine caused none of them.
So, you're claiming that 1000x more vaccines were administered in 2021/22 than 2019? Because TWO deaths were reported in 2019.
Total adverse effects reported in 2019 (all vaccines): 55000.
Total adverse effects reported in 2021 (Covid): 837300.
Total adverse effects reported in 2021 (other vaccines): 32300.
Yes, this is trivially true because VAERS is a data collection system. It is impossible to establish a causal relationship for any one data point even in theory. The large number of plausibly-vaccine-induced side effects are confounded by COVID-19 itself and perhaps simple increased alertness to side effects.
I wouldn't say many candidates made 2020 a center of their campaign like Lake, but many questioned its legitimacy.
Anybody not questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election is not thinking.
The evidence for various forms of Democrat cheating during that election is overwhelming.
They certainly changed election laws to benefit themselves, but outside of that, I've not seen anything convincing.
The finding in PA and WI from those State Supreme Courts is that Democrats IGNORED election laws to benefit themselves in 2020. What people who aren't covering for cheaters - call cheating.
I mean I agree, in that sense they did cheat. But the claims about mass ballot stuffing and fake votes seems totally unfounded as far as I can tell.
It does seem unfounded.
But if you were on the receiving end of known and proven cheating. And the cheaters were denying THAT it ever even existed. And they refused to even debate even looking at the ballot harvesting possibility, you might be suspicious. Given the existing pattern and all.
I think if would be fair to give recipients of known cheating some earned slack. Maybe even concede they have a right not have it happen again. Especially in ways (Carter Commission, Mail-in ballot fraud conclusions) everybody once admitted were very prone to fraud and more cheating.
Given the distrust and tension levels and all ...
Maybe nonsense like must be evil for "questioned its legitimacy." could take a short breather?
I don’t completely disagree with your thesis but I think it’s a difficult line to draw. You mention coulter, she’s made some good points about how scammery plagued the trump admin. While this is true, she then pivots back into a more comfortable form of scammery that by this point she should be able to see. This scammery being the comfortable conservative politician who gets some wins legislatively and electorally, such as Reagan or now Ron desantis. The major paradigm shift of the ‘16 trump campaign was him looking at the Republican Party and saying “yeah this is literally all fake, you people are equivalent to the fake democratic parties they had in east Germany, this is the definition of controlled opposition”. His subsequent failures in office don’t invalidate this critique. Not really sure what the solution is but the right seems doomed either way, they could pick trump again and probably lose as he does more of his stop the steal shit or they could pick desantis, maybe win, get a few good legislative wins but ultimately return to the fake allusion that they’re not a fake oppositional party
“Starting in the 1960s, elite institutions started to encourage black communities to take a hostile attitude towards mainstream American society. “
By letting them in?
There’s a controversial thesis that integration policies actually increased racial tension and hostility between black and white people. With affirmative action, forced busing, etc. in the South, two groups that were once segregated were now together, but black people still were treated worse, and the difference was more obvious now that there were white people to compare themselves to. And that’s where the idea of “acting white” sprung up. John McWhorter has an excellent essay on it:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/acting-white-charge-origins/594130/
That’s not, however, an elite institution encouraging hostility. John Brown, he encouraged hostility. Hardly an elite, institution, or a combination of the two. Elite institutions encouraged desegregation. Desegregation showed the oppressed how bad the disparity really was. The elite institutions then came up with things like affirmative action to coalesce the integration, which encouraged White Hostility, not non-white. So I just want to clarify: The Atlantic article does not demonstrate that elite institutions encouraged hostility, it says that the knowledge gained by integration fueled a very legitimate human emotion known as rage.
Looks like I misread your initial comment. You are right about this. Elite institutions did try policies meant to integrate black Americans. There was a lot of pushback from non-elite whites (which Barry Goldwater channeled), and that led black Americans to take a very oppositional stance.
Richard Hanania adamantly disagrees with us, Sheluyang
Well, much of his success from from his controversial views. I appreciate his newsletter as he often says things no other commentator dares to say.
Increased black rage at least in the 21st century (look at generational cohort polling responses to questions on the prevalence of racism) is largely a function of an increasingly skewed media and academic environment.
There is no other plausible way that Gen Z blacks rate racism as a higher barrier to progress than their older peers, or black respondents from decades prior. You can say that tech allowed for increased exposure of racially-charged incidents that people may not have otherwise been aware of, but every metric indicates absolute improvement across each decade. So anomalous incidents are given increased media exposure.
And even with respect to the rise of black oppositonalism in the 60s/70s Tyler's argument does not hold up. It was not as if without integration blacks would have been unaware of then-existing disparities between them and whites, even if they tended to live in different neighberhoods.
Again, every metric was improving for blacks in the 60s-70s, but an oppositional culture arose and they blew the opportunities that they had.
So why didn’t the Black Panthers exist before racial integration? Both of you seem to be ignoring that White Rage is a result of integration. During Jim Crow, the purpose of the KKK was paramilitary. After integration, the KKK’s purpose was to re-segregate through terrorism, which then had involved the federal government which put the KKK on the proverbial ropes for being terrorists. The Black Panthers meanwhile in sunny integrated california, are routinely experiencing state-based violence, which when they responded to it, led to assault weapon bans and open carry bans. But while all that was happening, millions got locked up.
But yeah, pre-integration, minority populations knew about the disparity, sure. Just like the Haitian slaves. I’m left with the impression that Mike here believes in racial stratification because racial stratification has occurred in the past and thus ending it would be dangerous for those at the upper stratums.
Consider the phenomenon of "Radical chic" that Tom Wolfe wrote about, where a certain kind of status competition among different classes of white people causes some set of them to throw their financial and rhetorical support behind the most extreme and anti-social elements of minority political movements, just so that those same white people can claim a stronger commitment to the ideals of equality or minority rights or what have you than other white folks. I think that's a part where the encouragement part comes in.
You could also consider the moronic, overheated rhetoric of somebody like Susan Sontag saying "the white race is the cancer of human history" as a kind of indirect encouragement of this hostility. If white people are so awful, what black person in their right mind would be dumb enough listen to them? My sense is that in general, people on the hard left who call themselves socialists and communists and who would seek to delegitimize the entire system are quite willing to play footsie with disaffected minority groups, and this includes stoking or hyping historical racial grievances.
Sympathy is hype, fascinating take Gordon. Reconstruction fell apart and the KKK stepped in to fill the void left by the plantation system and southern states. That was clearly the preferred path. 🙄
Even more fascinating is that the racists are not to blame for the rage, but rather the elite who are seeking to edge out other elites and, somehow related, *communists* 😂 who had an ideological stance that necessitated then to highlight the injustices that made the american capitalist class (follow me here) the same american capitalist class attempting “radical chic”.
Typical conservative contrarianism. Sorry, “oppositional culture”. Don’t blame Jim Crow, don’t blame 3/5th compromise, don’t blame Pan Am flights of crack cocaine and CIA agents (who later went rouge, talking about Noriega here),
No it’s the whities trying to edge out other whities. Say, do you think owning slaves was a good way to edge out other whities? Oh but that happened so long ago, right Gordy? So yeah, I’ve considered it. And i’m sure it makes the comfortable feel secure. Toodles.
I seem to have severely overestimated your reading comprehension skills. My mistake. Carry on.
Same.
Affirmative action created a demand in higher ed for competent Black teachers and scholars that exceeded the supply
Higher ed filed positions with charlatans such as Leonard Jeffries (uncle of Dem caucus leader Hakeem, btw)
Charlatans preached racism, antisemitism, etc., thereby fostering hatred.
No. Oppression is what lead to that. See, you can’t desegregate or integrate a society that was cosmopolitan from the start.
And as far as this little thought experiment goes, basically easing up on Haitian slaves will lead to the extermination of white people in Haiti, what is the alternative? That’s why people find this sort of *shit* so controversial. If one says “integration caused the Aryan Brotherwood” as a positivist claim, what is the normative claim? And if the claimant will say “i am not making a normative claim” well great, but the readership will. And so I ask,
If: Integration leads to Aryan Brotherwood
Then: What is to be done?
Then; was integration a mistake?
Then; why would one prefer KKK/A.B ideology as public policy in order to avert the formation of said groups?
Are the other commentators not daring to say it because it’s shallow analysis that is easily refuted and thus controversial? The idea that the Black Panthers started because California was integrated is laughable. The idea that the Black Panthers got started because of self defense against White Rage in the Golden State isn’t so much an idea as documented history. That’s why Richard keeps it in the macro-analysis, so he can misinterpret massive data sets. The moment you break those data sets down, well it’s almost like reality has a “liberal” bias. Fuentes is also well-known for being a controversial fool. I read Hanania’ shtuff because Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball used to have him on Rising. The guy lives in Austin for a reason hahahaha
Would black Californians be exposed to the full effects of white rage if it weren't for integration? While racial segregation was bad, it did have the positive effect of reducing the number of KKK or other hate attacks on black Southerners.
An interesting parallel can be made to the California prison system. Prisons in Cali used to be segregated, but then when prisons forcefully integrated, whites were the minority, and were regularly attacked by black gangs. A group of white bikers got together and started the Aryan Brotherhood to protect and organize whites, and became the top white gang in the US prison system. Now Cali prisons are self-segregated, and still full of racial tension. Integration does lead to oppositional groups forming.
Musk drops the info showing precisely how Twitter interfered in the 2020 election, and the very next day you go on a tirade calling people who questioned the malfeasance in 2020 - for which there is extensive EVIDENCE - election deniers?
How stupid do you think your readers are?
Give us a break.
Motte and bailey tactics are common among those in oppositional cultures. Change the subject from the lies about election fraud to Twitter censorship.
Too cryptic for me. I think you are claiming I am changing the subject.
But I am not. The discussion is twitter censorship AS the election interference.
My post referenced one prong of the extensive 2020 Democrat cheating in that election.
That censoring involved a major story about one of the candidates, that was massively censored, a month before the election. And surveys say 16% of voters would have changed their vote had they known. Enough to change the election.
All the "lies about the election fraud" seem to have evidence coming out that they are *not* lies. Huh.
Where have you been?
Ballot harvesting in WI - illegal.
Unsupervised drop boxes - illegal all over the place.
Zuckerbucks - illegal. And ruled as such in courts of law.
That election was giant sham and full of (now court ruled) cheating.
Pretending Democrats were not cheating, and more importantly to me - pretending Democrats were not getting away with cheating (when we have tons of evidence and rulings), is a problem, for me. My problem is with people who are excusing clearly wrong behaviors (with evidence and court cases) - by calling normal people "stupid" and "deniers" using long paragraphs.
I repeat. Totally on topic. And give us a break.
I dunno how much of what You wrote is accurate. But this is a FACT:
When the States electors were certified mid-December 2020, the election was *over*. Everything Trump tried after that was, if not in the letter then in the spirit of it, *illegal.*
Keep in mind, Trump had zero, zip, zilch, NADA EVIDENCE to back up his claim the election was stolen. *Not* "saying" that it couldn't turn up. Just that Trump had nothing while he was *caught* trying to steal the election.
First you state a fact.
Then you state a wildly unsupported opinion.
You did that to try and imply that your (now very provably wrong) opinion somehow follows from the initial fact. It doesn't follow - even without evidence.
And it definitely doesn't follow given that we now have double digits of court cases proving your opinion to be wrong (most past the appeals stage - so final).
Nobody here is stupid enough to fall for such a blatant logical fallacy. Maybe try this comment at Vox.
Sorry, "friend."
Anybody who knows what John Eastman was up to knows Trump was up to no good. Everybody knows Trump threw everything he had against the wall to see what would stick. And they know that nothing did. He had nothing. This from the "man's" own mouth:
"Are you talking about disinformation or are you talking about lies? There is a more beautiful word called disinformation.”
He was, I guess, spreading "disinformation," not lying through his teeth, when he said the election was stolen.
These are not opinions. These are the facts of the matter. Do I think I could convince someone like You too look at them in an unbiased way? Never. *That's* an opinion, Champ.
(1) Not your friend.
(2) Don't know Eastman, nor "what he was up to ...".
(3) Nothing stuck - because the system is corrupt. That is what bothers me. But I don't have TDS like you, so I can see a lot more.
(4) The Democrats cheated. I am fine calling that "stolen" in common-speak (which is what Trump speaks). I don't give a rip what the technical definition of "stolen" is.
(5) Here are the real facts:
(A) $500M GOTV targeting only Democrats - using State machinery = illegal. Which is cheating. Which is "stolen".
(B) Big-Tech censoring is election interference (and an unreported campaign contribution) = illegal. Which is cheating. Which is "stolen".
(C) 100% election participation rate at WI nursing homes is Ballot harvesting = illegal. Which is cheating. Large enough to sway WI (a swing state) = "stolen".
(D) I could go on for with many others. But I don't need to. Any one of those make the claim that "2020 election was stolen" true.
(6) "Disinformation" is the Orwellian leftist speak for "facts I don't like".
So yes, for a leftist the facts above are "disinformation" - facts you don't like.
(7) I don't need to look at these facts in an unbiased way. Courts have ruled on them. You need to look at them in an un-TDS way.
(8) Not your champ either.
The basic point about election fraud that keeps my mind open to the possibility: Let's say for a moment that there actually was fraud. Do you think the government has the capacity to basically deny its own legitimacy by acknowledging such a fact? I believe that it does not. Given the totality of my observations and experience regarding the behavior of government, I am quite confident that it would never come out and admit that an election was decided by fraud, no matter what the reality is. In exactly the same way that Dr. Fauci is never going to wake up one day and suddenly get on TV and say "sorry guys I was wrong about everything."
So, trying to figure out whether fraud actually decided an election or not is sort of besides the point. The regime will behave in exactly the same manner regardless. I think you need to decide whether you are invested in maintaining the status quo or not. If you like the status quo, then the correct thing to do is side with the regime and always pretend that everything is above board, no matter what. If you are dissatisfied, then you should take claims of fraud seriously and demand transparency, even though you are probably never going to get it.
Your analysis of the stupidity of the Right is of course very much correct, but how do you square the greater discernment and intelligence of the Left (which I do agree exist) with their own beliefs in falsehoods? Is it simply that their scams are that much better-orchestrated? A specific example is the belief (or at least emoted conviction) among huge portions of the American Left that Trump was controlled by the Russian government, and that opposition to their domestic agenda is too animated by paid Russian agents, despite no evidence existing for these things. I've raised this to other people and they hand-wave it away as meaningless; I don't think it is meaningless. I think when the entire literate class acts for the better part of five years as though their President is an agent of a hostile foreign power, that is actually more important than whatever dumbery Dinesh D'Souza is peddling that week.
As I hinted at, my suspicion here is that the scam is just bigger and better, but still a scam for that. Right wing conspiracy theories over the 2020 and 2022 elections are penny-ante and stupid. (D'Souza's peerlessly asinine "2,000 Mules" a particularly fly-ridden, stinking example.) Left wing conspiracy theories over the 2016 election dominated the discourse for years, led to all manner of investigations, a chilling effect against support for Trump, and primed the pump for our current proxy war in Ukraine. In other words, they actually worked. Is that the only difference?
It is own the lib culture that defines many republicans. As a faculty at Dartmouth, I was a student advisor for college republicans chapter prior to 2016. College Republicans advocated for lesser regulations, strong military and some social conservative issues ( like Abortion restrictions, religious liberty etc.). However, the new crop of college republicans are just so different. They have hosted James O'Keefe ( Project Veritas), Andy Ngo (some guy who opposes Antifa) and Candace Owens. The people hosted by Dartmouth college republicans are just to outrage liberals on campus and they fall for it. But the reputational damage is much more severe. For old republicans on Campus, Professors, staff members etc, we want to support college republicans but their choice of guests and antics are just boorish.
The college republicans even called for more American professors and less foreign ''imports". You can champion immigration restrictions but at Dartmouth, faculty selection ( At least in Science and Engineering) is strictly based on Merit. In their newsletter they called an Indian professor who is a pioneer in machine learning ( computer science) and has won multiple grants from Google and Nvidia a foreign import and said his job must have gone to an American. The faculty selection was transparent, computer science department invited all the applicants to a seminar where they gave a 30 minute presentation followed by 30 mins questions by faculty selection committee and 30 minutes of question by anyone in the room. Every applicant's CV was open to college republicans, so was the seminar which was recorded. Instead of making nuanced arguments of why this Indian professor was a wrong choice or they could have pointed out a better candidate instead they just made simplistic argument that he was not American. In my view, he was the most qualified but a good argument could be made to say another American applicant (also of Indian heritage) was equally well qualified. But, the new republican movement is interested in creating outrage and not any valuable arguments. So naturally, they went with a low-IQ take about not hiring this Indian Professor just because he is not American.
"but at Dartmouth, faculty selection ( At least in Science and Engineering) is strictly based on Merit."
And so here is where we know you are lying. As Faculty in Engineering myself I know hiring is strongly influenced by gender and race. In fact, at a minimum you have to interview the correct quota of phenotypes or write a report explaining why you violated the religion of DEI. And if your department does not reflect society genetics - your Dept Head will have to appologize to the DEI overlords every single year until it is "fixed".
I am glad to see the new GOP students demand thought diversity at Dartmouth with real speakers. And I am even more pleased that somebody who is happy to be the weak and controlled opposition no longer has any influence with the new generation.
It is well past time to pushback on leftism. You failed spectacularly at that, so see ya.
Out of 68 faculty members at Thayer Engineering school at Dartmouth, 16 of them are women. We have one black professor, we have 12 Asians ( Indian and Chinese). So, no it is not reflective of the society. Asians are overrepresented in faculty and blacks are severely underrepresented ( less than 1%)
As faculty members, we are under pressure to take more female PhD students. There is some pressure to take more African American grad students. However, at least tenure track faculty positions at Dartmouth are not influenced by DEI pressures. It is important to be truthful. If you are a Faculty at Dartmouth engineering you know it is false to claim hiring decisions for faculty is influenced by DEI. If you are Dartmouth engineering faculty member, you know after George Floyd protests, DEI sent us a petition to sign to acknowledge STEM has anti-black bias. I know for a fact that more than half of faculty members did not sign the petition. We have pushed back on DEI, but we cannot push back if college republicans continue to make extremely unsavory arguments especially when they called an extremely qualified Indian professor foreign import. As you know DEI does not consider Asians ( Chinese and Indians) as worthy minorities anymore. So, for DEI it would not matter if the new faculty member was white or Indian or Chinese.
Faculty composition in Engineering is an area the administration is always trying to "address" with their DEI racism and underhand anti-merit actions.
"Unsavory arguments" as a weak excuse against presenting differing viewpoints at Dartmouth - sounds pretty darned "controlled opposition" to me. Dissembling at its finest.
Dartmouth has leftist students because it only admits leftist students. The admissions essays are obvious requirements to state DEI bona-fides. Why did you allow that?
I am sure the story about the Indian Prof is far far deeper than you are stating.
Because you are clearly an old-style RINO who is really just advancing the leftist agenda from inside the GOP. Anybody who is offended by Candice Owens is a joke. What on earth do you have against a reporter (Ngo)? You don't want him reporting on antifa? Why on earth not? Dartmouth should be giving Ngo awards - not having its sole GOP (supposedly) faculty member badmouth him.
Yet you do not dispute our faculty composition is not diverse by DEI standards. We have just a single black faculty member, we have just about 20% women faculty members. I am sure you know that DEI wants more black and female faculty members and less Asian and white faculty.
According to you everyone is a RINO. I want a GOP that reduces size of government, that wants to stand for law and order. Do you understand that civil rights act of 1964 and more importantly civil rights restoration act of 1987 forces universities to do DEI. Reagan bucked all the pressure and vetoed the civil rights restoration act of 1987, but his veto was overridden. The college republicans talk smack about Zombie Reaganism, but they should talk about actual policy solutions rather than silly culture wars. Until 1964 and 1987 civil rights acts are repealed or significantly modified we cannot overcome wokeness. Democratic administrations frequently use their power under civil rights act to demand more DEI or lose federal money. The only way out for colleges is to be like Hillsdale and not recieve any federal money. As you know it is not possible for research universities, as a large portions of research grants are federal.
Instead of repealing Title IX of civil rights act, which is the root cause of gender wokeness, the new conservatives want to protect Title IX from woke left. It is all beyond parody at this point. And the only reason I can think of for their really weird positions like not repealing title IX but instead to protect it, is that the politics of college republicans is just reactionary. They do not want to change anything, but they want to rile up the left. And you know as well as I know, as a faculty member you cannot be open about every opinion without being ostracized and protested by students every day. I guess that is the reason both you and me use pseudonyms online. But what college republicans are doing further paints every republican on campus as reactionary.
Lastly, I am not offended by Candace Owens. I just hate the fact that conservatives just like liberals treat blacks as some people who have unique moral authority. It is the exact reason republicans have elevated mediocre candidates like Herschel Walker. If Walker was white, he would face intense shame from republicans. The new republicans like democrats give blacks higher moral authority and call upon mediocre people like Candace Owens to give talks when there are numerous well read white commentators and politicians. While they criticize DEI for promoting undeserved black students and faculty, in their own life, they promote undeserved black candidates like Herschel Walker and Candace Owens( who by the way actually won a settlement from city for phony racial discrimination and if she was an honest person she would have refunded the money after her political awakening).
Not everyone is a RINO. Just the people badmouthing Owens (perfectly intelligent), Ngo (perfectly doing his job), and smearing Project Veritas (for uncovering the truth?). How on earth the RINOS let the leftists walking over them - if project-veritas keeps uncovering the inconvenient truth, right?
We get mewing from RINOs about Walker being "stupid", while not a peep about a literal mental vegetable being elected in PA. And I will take stupid all day long. Reagan was no genius. Neither was Trump. They both did more for reigning in leftist stupidity than 100 Bushes and 1000 Romneys, put together. Or you - who can't even tolerate a conservative speaker on your campus for fear of it upsetting the people you endlessly cover for.
"But denying election results is in its own category. In any kind of social system, some things are optional and can be negotiated, but a few fundamental rules make civilization possible. . . The idea that you should accept election results falls into the latter category. "
Using the term "Election Denier," like "Holocaust Denier," is just sloppy circular logic. You start off by assuming the 100% fairness of the election, then dismiss all evidence to the contrary as self-evident "denial" of true facts. It's a breeze to win a debate when you simply assume the opposing view is stupid and wrong ab initio, and therefore anything they could say is inadmissible. Your brain chooses this path for two reasons. First, it's so much easier than investigating and explaining why, for example, 33% of the voting machines in Maricopa County -- supervised by the Dem secretary of state who was running for Governor -- simultaneously and inexplicably malfunctioned on election day, throwing the election to said objectively awful Dem candidate. Second, if you questioned the "all elections are always fair" party line, you yourself would be branded a "denier" and expelled from the ranks of socially acceptable internet pundits.
But the uniparty line is exactly backward in saying that citizens aren't allowed to question the elections run by their governments because the mases having faith in elections is so important to legitimize elite decisions. The official arrogant dismissal of well-founded suspicions is more corrosive of faith in democracy than the the suspicions themselves. Besides, what could possibly encourage cheating more than a rule that: "no one is allowed to allege cheating, no matter how much it looks like cheating."
Citizens who get screwed by extremely and obviously fishy events deserve slightly better than a backhanded dismissal that no facts are needed to refute a "denier." Indeed, a government or elite that says cheating is impossible by definition is plainly lying. (Read about LBJ stealing his 1948 Senate race if you want to learn how it's done). If you want confidence in elections you need to SHOW people they are fair, not just tell them to STFU.
>Second, if you questioned the "all elections are always fair" party line, you yourself would be branded a "denier" and expelled from the ranks of socially acceptable internet pundits.
I think you hit the nail on the head. There is a class of people who are smart enough to know better than the "fraud is impossible" position that they take, but at the end of the day, they value their self-image as balanced respected high-minded etc. "intellectuals" more than they value the pursuit of truth, and this simply prevents them from investigating certain avenues that are too socially dangerous for them.
I agree with your claim that much of "conservatism" now is simply oppositional culture. I try not to even identify myself as a "conservative" any longer, although I'm certainly very right wing and I do hate the left.
I don't agree that the right is somehow more scam-happy or lies more often than the left, and you don't seem to present any evidence for this claim besides anecdotal. Right-wing scammers are common, of course, but to pretend that they aren't also everywhere to be found on the left is completely absurd. I would argue left wing scammers are more troubling because the regime openly endorses them. Of course, you've shown in previous posts that you have a "right wingers are idiots" bias, so meh.
I also disagree with your proposed "solution" of simply voting harder next time. We can speculate in several different directions about possible ways for the right to gain power or achieve policy goals, but if you look at the big picture, the conventional "vote harder" line simply doesn't work. The country has moved farther left non-stop regardless of election outcomes since WWII (arguably before, but WWII is the organizing event for the current regime, so).
Conservative election victories have, at best, provided nothing more than a speed bump in this trend, if even that. This has remained constant over many decades, suggesting that it is a feature of the regime itself, not something that can simply be overcome if we finally figure out the right way to vote. It's like communism, at a certain point you need to recognize that this just doesn't work no matter how many times you try it over and over again.
I believe this is why "election denial" has gained so much steam on the right, even if many people engaging in it cannot fully articulate this motivation. The system *does* appear to be rigged against the right, in ways that are far more subtle and effective than outright election fraud (although I believe that does happen as well). Even if we accept your premise that the right loses because they are stupid, my counter-conclusion remains correct--right-wing policies cannot be effected and right-wing ideologies cannot gain power under the current regime. To say "just vote harder" is to endorse the status quo, whether you like it or not.
Speaking of scams, the leadership of BLM are making out like bandits, buying mansions with supporter cash. And it looks like all those "low-IQ conspiracy theories" about Big Tech putting its thumb on the scale at election time were true as well. Nothing but thieves and liars at both ends of the political spectrum. How pathetic to see anyone claiming that their side of American politics is full of virtue and intelligence, and that only the other side has a lack of these characteristics.
One look at the ridiculously absurd things believed by the Left indicates they are the low IQ group. Especially in light of the fact the the so-calked conspiracy theories are all proving true. But these ill educated narcissistic libs like the author can’t see beyond their up turned noses. LOL low IQ indeed.
I dont know why you insist so much on the "liberalz have higher IQ"
when holding quasi-religious. , laughable, dogmatic beliefs as "we are all equal" ( zero evidence for this) "men can give birth", or "damn social-economical factors, muh poor blacks" (when Natives in reservations have it worse and their crime rate isnt as high).
it seems to me that they give up any pretense of individuality and original thought to be part of the "higher status" flock, like sheep perpetually hounded by their elites
On the one hand, I love the piece, as it makes a case not made anywhere near often enough. On the other hand, by hand-waving at Abrams, Clinton, Kerry (Diebold!), and Gore, who brought us the modern-day never-concede grift, the argument is weakened considerably. Abrams turned election denial into a massive fundraising engine and a platform for personal celebrity that was in full operation until just last month.
I wonder if what you are on top of is a broader, multi-partisan delegitimization of democratic outcomes by the current elite class.
I must’ve been brainwashed by the media, because I was under the impression that Gore, Kerry, and Clinton all conceded their election losses and Trump didn’t. And I somehow missed them calling for new elections, demanding future candidates say they won, trying to appoint alternative electors, personally pressuring state level officials to throw out the election results, encouraging their followers to storm the Capitol, etc. But besides that, exactly the same thing!
They conceded, but barely - recall HRC's campaign to overturn 2016 in the electoral college votes and the celebrity videos that accompanied it - and only as they continued to de-legitimize the winners and the process. HRC has claimed the election was stolen from her many times, the 'Russians placed Trump in the WH' was mainstream D for years, and Abrams built her entire persona on the notion that she was the rightful winner.
I agree that Trump asking for a 2020 claim as some sort of loyalty oath is dark, but I see it as just a particularly crude variant of the same elite trend.
To make any comparison between Trump and previous candidates is like saying slapping someone in the face and shooting them are the same thing because they’re both forms of violence.
In that case, given that the argument is that this a partisan affliction, what do you see as the difference between Abrams and Lake? Abrams has been feted, including award show appearances and the creation of a TV character to honour her, and built a massive fundraising apparatus from claiming election theft and not conceding. Lake won't concede, and will likely end up on a less-lucrative but equally-persistent tour.
From the outside, it looks like an appeal that works very well on both sets of voters. What still seems so interesting to me in what you are arguing is how compelling these arguments now seem to be, and how readily they are deployed. Did we have equivalents of Abrams and Lake thirty years ago?
I think Abrams is a uniquely bad figure and her and Lake are about equal in this respect. But Abrams as far as I know never raised money on the premise she would use it to overturn the election. And Trump is on a different level than both of them, and more important to Republicans than Abrams is to Democrats.
I think you might want to take into consideration how the imbalance in general societal power affects this behavior. For decades, the left has ruled nearly every important institution in the country. I think you could probably say it rules every single one of them today, even the military, with the only possible exception of Twitter if you want to count that. The leftward trend has been obvious and relentless.
Conservatives have been left grasping at elections as the last place where they can actually exercise any power of their own, even if it's still relatively fleeting. This also means that when conservatives lose even that, they are effectively cornered. They begin to perceive, correctly in my opinion, that their options are to either give up or flip the board. So, they choose to flip the board via "election denial."
If the power dynamics were flipped, I would speculate that the left would be just as amenable to the same basic motivations and behaviors. While the left does also like to "deny elections," it is not done with the same desperation and urgency, because at the end of the day they can afford to lose a few elections confident in the belief that they will still eventually get their way.
On Jan 9th, Trump: "The new administration will be inaugurated on January 20" "My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power." (prior to the transition).
Clinton in WaPo "Trump is an illegitimate president". (3 years after she lost).
Evidence says ... brainwashed. Sorry. First statement looks like concession to me. Second does not.
I just read the words.
The temperature in the pot was much lower back when Gore, Kerry, etc. were in play. We can clearly see that there is a difference in kind between George W. Bush and Trump, in terms of how acceptable they are to the regime. I would speculate that if Trump had somehow won the 2020 election, you would've seen something akin to Stop the Steal from the regime, although the specifics of how it manifested would necessarily have differed.
I would also speculate that the left wing version may have been something far more "dangerous to democracy," since we are going with the premise that elections matter. Trump wanted the election thrown out, but the regime wanted him gone, so his bid to do so failed. What if Trump won, and there was a movement to throw the election out by the losers--who would not really be Joe Biden personally, but rather the liberal regime as a whole? I think this version of "election denial" would have a far greater chance of actually having the election overturned or otherwise inducing genuine civil strife. I'm old enough to remember election day and we all fully expected that it was going to be George Floyd x100 if Trump actually won.