This thing is phrased in a really weird way. First: "The left believe the right are dumb and don't have values" followed by "Evidence the left are correct" then "They're as bad as each other".
He's paraphrasing. E.g. the first part about the left thinking the right are dumb and without values is covered with this quote from the article:
"From the “vast right-wing conspiracy” through the “basket of deplorables” to now, the Democratic message increasingly focuses on the illegitimacy of the ordinary conservative voter’s opinion: ignorant, conspiratorial, and racist, so terrible that the only hope is mass-reprogramming by educated betters."
No, I don't think so. Rather, Taibbi proposes that the very wealthy and powerful see as useful the division of the country into a "stupidity death-cult" vs. "roving bands of Pelosi-coddled Antifa troops looking to 'attack your homes'".
"That's all the media and the politicians are ever talking about, the things that separate us, things that make us different from one another.
That's the way the ruling class operates in any society. They try to divide the rest of the people. They keep the lower and the middle classes fighting with each other so that they the rich, can run off with all the fucking money.
Fairly simple thing. Happens to work.
You know, anything different, thats what they gonna talk about. Race, religion, ethnic and national backgrounds, jobs, income, education, social status, sexuality. Anything they can do, keep us fighting with each other so that they can keep going to the bank.
You know how I describe the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep them showing up at those jobs."
George Carlin had us pegged ages ago.
So did Doctor King:
The other day I was saying, I always try to do a little converting when I'm in jail. And when we were in jail in Birmingham the other day, the white wardens and all enjoyed coming around the cell to talk about the race problem. And they were showing us where we were so wrong demonstrating. And they were showing us where segregation was so right. And they were showing us where intermarriage was so wrong.
So I would get to preaching, and we would get to talking—calmly, because they wanted to talk about it. And then we got down one day to the point—that was the second or third day—to talk about where they lived, and how much they were earning. And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, "Now, you know what? You ought to be marching with us. [laughter] You're just as poor as Negroes."
And I said, "You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor, because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. (Yes) And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white.
And you're so poor you can't send your children to school. You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march."
Virtually everything about that Carlin quote is completely wrong. There is no business in the world outside of news media (which includes the author) that makes or preserves money from the middle class fighting with the lower class. They'd rather the power classes get over their differences so they can make money off them. The top 1% in US pay more taxes in taxes than the bottom 90%. Before you ask, I do think that they should be paying more rather than less.
YouTube, Twitter, Facebook. All 3 make gigabucks from the culture war.
Apple, on the other hand, does not wade into the culture war. What they do instead is make money off people's status anxiety by selling luxury products to people on food stamps.
I'm sure YouTube and Facebook would prefer cat memes and influencers more than flame wars and pundits. The former do not get demonetized and lead to innocent content being demonetized accidentally. The addictive nature of Facebook and Youtube are partially to blame, but even if that ended, that would only slow down the culture war, which suggests that the root cause is elsewhere. They're making lemonade out of lemons, which may incentivize more lemons, but it's not the source.
I agree with you about Twitter as their stock had been stagnant until Trump's election and people started equating tweets as news.
"The top 1% in US pay more taxes in taxes than the bottom 90%"
And yet the percentage is lower. It really doesn't matter the comparative amounts; to put this to an even more egregious extreme, if the top 1% had 99% of the wealth, and paid 20% of that in taxes, and the bottom 99% had the remaining 1% of the wealth, and paid 0 taxes, it's not a sign that all is well, and the fact that the rich are paying -all- the taxes does not somehow make it okay.
And, no, pretty much every business benefits. The whole "keeping up with the joneses" mindset that keeps the wheels of consumerism turning is predicated on class distinctions. Our economy is dependent on consumer spending, and the obscenely rich become rich, and remain so, because of that level of spending by the middle and lower classes (meanwhile they have so much wealth they can't find ways to spend it without literally giving it away)
Again, I would be happy with tax increases with the rich. My grip is this quote:
"The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes..."
It's blatantly untrue, as are most things comedians say, but Carlin somehow is treated like a scholar. The spamming of his quotes only adds fuel to the culture war.
Consumerism is completely orthogonal to polarization. Video games and Netflix promote consumerism and keep the lower classes "distracted" from change. There's no need to intentionally stir conflict. See how much corporations were willing to spend against Trump on the last 2 elections.
It's hyperbole. To try and say "well, technically that's untrue" when it is -obviously- an exaggeration, and being exaggerated to make a point is...well, I see why you're criticizing most things comedians say. I bet you're a lot of fun at parties.
And, see how many corporations also funded Trump. Political polarization keeps people from seeing the robber barons that are benefiting in excess from others own hard work.
Nothing is wrong with a joke, but most people have difficulty separating entertainment from facts. No matter how often Rush Limbaugh says he's "just an entertainer," he's clearly misleading his audience. Also misleading is sandwiching a comedic rant between a serious article and a serious quote by MLK.
> And, see how many corporations also funded Trump
Corporations aren't a unified block. Biden got over half a billion more in funding, which is telling.
> Political polarization keeps people from seeing the robber barons that are benefiting in excess from others own hard work.
This is a narrative invented because if people find a purpose to polarization, they can blame someone else besides themselves. What is the greatest distraction from the proletariat rising up against the "robber barrons?" It's Netflix, not Fox News. Without polarization, people won't suddenly be plotting about how to take down the rich. They'll go back to rewatching the Office. If anything, polarization brings more attention to class issues.
Yup, like many in the civil rights movement, King leaned heavily towards socialism and economic justice (see the Poor People's Campaign) in addition to, and as an integral part of, racial justice. But the Cold War and the boogeyman of Communism meant that that was weaponized against them while the struggle was ongoing, and whitewashed from their history as they became mythologized afterwards. Unfortunately things haven't changed much today - "Black Lives Matter is Marxist" is one of many common tropes used in right wing media where the boogeyman of socialism is alive and well.
>leaned heavily towards socialism and economic justice...
Not to be too on the nose, but another equally valid phrase here is “leaned heavily towards being a christian minister”, which he was. The religious motivations of the civil rights movement are ones we seem blind to, and the only reason i can think of for it is that when i, an american, hear “christian”, i have been taught think “republican suburban or rural white man probably interested in being horrible to gay people” instead of “democratic urban jew or black lady who is super damn interested in workers rights and housing access”. At a certain point one begins to wonder if that isn’t very carefully intentional.
Tangentially: at some point, someone in the media is going to diff AOC’s speeches against the last 150 years of papal encyclicals and realize a few things about where her rhetoric originates. If you s/bipoc/the least of these, it’s slightly easier to see. If you know who Oscar Romero was, it's blindingly obvious.
"GOP" is as much an epithet to those inclined to dislike the party, as it is a proud accolade for those inclined to like the party.
Sort of like "liberal", though admittedly many who use that as an epithet make their meaning clear by changing it to 'libtard' or a similarly puerile play on words.
There were just as many religious motivations behind slavery and segregation as there was for it - actually more, in reality. In truth, evangelical Christianity has been one of the primary tools used to advance and justify segregation and slavery throughout western history, with some going so far as to equate rejection of slavery as no different than rejecting Christ. The predominant denomination of the south, Southern Baptist, was a denomination made because the northerners refused to appoint slavers as missionaries. The KKK has been a faithful supporter of Protestant Christianity. There was notable involvement in the abolitionist movement among northern Protestants, and civil rights activism among catholics, Jews, and northern Protestants - but acting as though that is in any way representative of American religion is missing 99% of the history. The major forces in American religion have always been opponents of civil rights of nonwhites, and it’s only quite recently, with the death and sanctification of MLK that they’ve been revising this history, and lauding MLK instead of calling him a reverse racist. Religion has always broken down among ethnic lines, the majority of American religion defended slavery and segregation as God’s Will.
I certainly agree that white evangelical christianity in its modern (post-1619) incarnation is so completely entangled with american slavery that they’re indistinguishable.
I don’t agree at all that that statement or population is somehow emblematic of “the real religion”, because the unspoken priors there are precisely the sort of white- and christian- centric circular definitions that, for example, white american evangelicals believe and promulgate. It’s giving up the game before you even get started.
Tangentially, the sanctification of Dr. King as an american saint is part of an extremely long tradition of blunting the impact of prophets. If you put someone up on a pedestal you add them to a history that is done and somehow over and safe now. We remember “i have a dream” and tacitly conclude that the dream is realized now; we forget that King died largely hated and in the process of screaming against the war and organizing for (mostly white) trash collectors. And we forget that the work never stops.
To conclude more hopefully, though, I’d also say that people do keep the flame alive — and, i suspect and pray, we’ll look back at this year as a time when the embers were fanned back up into a flame to get some more work done at a great cost.
I don’t want to make any claims as to ‘real religion’, just that religions reflect the values of the communities that hold them.
As to American evangelicals I don’t think we have a lot of disagreement, but I remembered an an excerpt from “Letters from a Birmingham Jail” that I thought was very apt:
I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South's beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious-education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?"
> evangelical Christianity has been one of the primary tools used to advance and justify segregation and slavery throughout western history
This is right if you say "America" instead of "the west". And then you're talking about a timescale of maybe 200 years, tops.
But when you say "the west" you're talking about a longer history of Christianity in Europe. You're talking about the Catholic Church, the Protestant Reformation, all that.
And on long historical timescales, Christianity's record is quite a bit more complicated than that. You can certainly associate it with various sins -- it suppressed the pagans, it launched the crusades, in Spain it justified conquest in the New World, and (though it was its own team) it often sided with royalty and aristocracy. And yet it was not an essentially "pro-slavery" religion. That would be to project relatively recent American evangelicalism backwards onto the rest of Christianity in a totally ahistorical way.
> There was notable involvement in the abolitionist movement among northern Protestants, and civil rights activism among catholics, Jews, and northern Protestants - but acting as though that is in any way representative of American religion is missing 99% of the history.
There used to be a phrase, "mainline Protestant", used to distinguish "normal" Protestants from evangelicals. They're dying now, but those churches used to have huge membership. The kind of Christianity that was "centered" in the past in America (at least in the North) was //not at all// the southern Evangelical variety that so often claims the word "Christian" these days. You're missing the amount of change that has occurred. The Evangelicals were "weird".
Your discussion of "Catholics and Jews" in the context of "abolitionism" is also confused. Catholics and Jews were not //totally absent// from America at that time, but it really wasn't until later that they came over in large numbers. Like, Irish were just arriving around the time of the Civil War (and hadn't even won respect for themselves yet, let alone taking up the political cause of others), and Jews started to really show up later around the turn of the century. You're ignoring the timeline of immigration.
Finally -- your whole dichotomy of "American religion" vs... atheism(?) is confused. In the past, atheism was taboo -- "everyone" was religious to some extent -- and //even so// things like the Civil War happened. Why? Because it was religion that //animated// those movements, particularly within the emerging "white" ethnic group (whose material interests they did not necessarily serve in an obvious way).
Mostly, American history has not been "religious people vs nonreligious people". It's been different kinds of religious people fighting over the contents of their religions. Mostly, the battle lines have been drawn right //through// Christianity in America.
> There was notable involvement in the abolitionist movement among northern Protestants, and civil rights activism among catholics, Jews, and northern Protestants.
I meant those as two discrete times, civil war era abolitionists and civil rights era Jewish and catholic activists. I didn’t claim that Catholics and Jews were active against abolition. I’m fairly comfortable with the history of immigration of different ethnicities into America and the ‘whitening’ of certain immigrant populations, so I doubt I’m ignoring their timelines.
Additionally, rereading my comment you’ll see I try to distinguish between northern (mainline Protestants, but also catholic) and southern Christians, as I mostly associate (possibly incorrectly) evangelicals as tracing their lineages through southern baptist & Midwest fundamentalist denominations.
I never mentioned atheism so I’m not quite sure how you constructed a position from my comment, but that’s not really applicable to any view I hold.
My point in the comment was to disabuse readers of the revisionist idea that Christianity, in particular American evangelicals, are natural champions of oppressed people - and if we measure their net effects on minorities in America in the aggregate, I’d wager it’s mostly been a tool to justify and propagate oppression and segregation more often than not. You are correct that my argument was centered on American Christianity, as even British Christianity (particularly quakers) had a markedly different relationship to abolition than their American southern Baptist counterparts.
I wholeheartedly agree with your argument that the battle lines have been drawn through Christianity, but I don’t think that it split the population into 50/50 proportions.
The civil rights movement was motivated by people wanting civil rights. People on both sides claimed religious support.
Rural white Christians greatly outnumber urban Jewish Christians. Most major denominations discriminate against LGBT people. People who are super damn interested in worker rights and housing access aren't disproportionately Christians in my experience. Some are and some aren't.
> Rural white Christians greatly outnumber urban Jewish Christians
Well, yeah, Jewish Christians, urban or rural, are pretty rare. Black and Hispanic Christians are more common. And if you look at regressive attitudes on race, it's mostly White Evangelic Protestants where those views are concentrated. White Catholics and White mainline protestants are fairly evenly split, and non-White Christians (what usually has big enough samples to show up in broad surveys are Hispanic Catholics and Black Evangelical Protestants) tip strongly the opposite direction as White Evangelical Protestants.
So both sides identify the problem and have different ways to solve it. Keeping the two sides focused on their own method of solving the problem prevents any meaningful change. This keeps the rich ruling class in place as-is for now.
Sounds like they are doing short term self preservation well.
It's short term EVERYTHING it seems to me; no long term plans, just focus on the next election. It's not about improving the country, it's about making your mark during your 2-4 year tenure (in whatever position the politicians may find themselves). And because of the US' broken democratic system that moves towards and maintains a two-party system, it's becoming an us-vs-them fight, with the sides entrenching themselves more and more.
A Dem win or a Republican win (wherever) will not improve things much, it'll just flip flop things around for a little bit and the other side will be pissed off until they win again. It's a downward spiral and I'm not seeing anything being done to break the cycle, it's just damage control and short-term improvements.
Reboot the system, change the democratic system, allow for more varied representation, reduce the power of the president (and for fuck's sake moderate their statements, Trump's twitter diarrhea was an embarrassment to everyone), etc.
He makes specific points about the ways the rich have abandoned social responsibility and the knock-on effects. If you’re looking for a convenient lie, there are plenty of sources for that.
It would be cruel if he blamed the Jews. It would be cruel if he blamed the blacks. It would be cruel if he blamed the poor. Somehow it's not cruel if he blames the rich?
I think the theme is more along the lines of blame people with power, do not blame people without power. It just so happens that people who focus on accumulating money, are usually focused on accumulating power.
Not sure how you can say there isn't any evidence? The wealthy most certainly donate to political causes, campaigns and opinionated non-profits. It wouldn't be a stretch to argue that such money amplifies those entities' power, thus causing societal level problems with the amplified power of their wealth.
It's not 100% valid or exhaustive proof, but at the very least shows that it's a reasonable avenue of exploring rather than shutting it down and calling it "unproven, cruel and vitriolic".
The rich don't control the two political parties. Showing that they do would be the beginning of evidence.
In fact, the Dems' agenda is anti-rich (raise taxes enormously, etc.) and the Republicans are currently controlled by non-college-educated blue-collar people.
This is obvious. If Taibbi has a counter-narrative to the obvious, that's fine, but he needs to present evidence.
> Republicans are currently controlled by non-college-educated blue-collar people.
This characterization lacks credibility. Let's look at some leaders:
- Lindsey Graham [0]
- Mitch McConnell [1]
- Kevin McCarthy [2]
- Ronna McDaniel [3]
Characterizing them as "non-college-educated blue-collar people" is odd. First, what do you have against working class people? Second, what inference are you trying to make with college education?
> In fact, the Dems' agenda is anti-rich (raise taxes enormously, etc.)
Maybe? Bloomberg famously tried to buy an election and the DNC certainly capitulated. I don't know that I'd call that "anti-rich", I think I might use the word "opportunistic". In a time where we're dealing with a lot of inequality guess what kind of opportunity is rife for exploitation? The kind that makes Dick Costolo think he's not "rich". [4]
Essentially, in the wake of Trump, the political class is accepting the inevitability of culture war, and urging it on, as something preferable to populist revolt.
In a rare inversion, the headline is more correct than the article.
The wealthy (really, the elites: a wealthy small business owner has nothing to do with this) want culture wars because they want the middle and bottom fighting with one another, rather than with the elites. They aren't accepting anything, this is what they want, and they have the means to achieve it.
In my experience, the “elites” support better wage laws and worker protections. It’s the small business owners I know that rabidly vote against better protections for wage earners as it would lower their profits, and might affect their lifestyle.
Small businesses do not operate in a bubble. They have to compete with large businesses. And unlike the millionares who sit atop the ladder of large businesses, most small business owners have their livelihood tied in with their business.
Small businesses suffer much more from a minimum wage increase, so of course their owners are against it. Meanwhile, large business owners benefit from a minimum wage increase thanks to the ensuing reduction in competition.
I'm not arguing for or against a higher minimum wage here, but saying small businesses owners "rabidly vote against" it simply because it "might affect their lifestyle" is disingenuous. Both types of business owners have clear incentives which have nothing to do with altruism or avarice.
What you call "elite" (affluent nice people who feel safe enough to be somewhat left-wing) is clearly a very different set of people than is meant in most other comments (wealthy guilty people who feel unsafe and unsustainable enough to screw everyone else).
The craziest part of this american culture war, to me, is that it seems to spill over to the rest of the world.
My sister and I, living in Germany, have a very loving relationship, but we absolutely disagree on almost everything political and basically are stuck in our seperate bubbles.
This gave us an interesting observation: 5 years ago it took us about two to three months, to have a fight over something that started to become a hot-topic in the US.
Over time, this has shrunken to about 48 hours. This is not because our bubbles are particularly US centric, more that it has become envogue to simply discuss whatever gets "the other side" going.
In particularly, it is very interesting that "the other side" is aligning ever more so with the US political spectrum, where in the past such a thing was unheard of, atleast here in Germany. I've heard similar stories from Friends in other Non-US Nations, be it in Asia, Africa, aswell as other european nations.
Does anyone else have similar stories?
This tracks for me, having lots of friends and connections outside of America. Personally I think it’s yet more evidence that what we can often dismissively refer to as a “culture war.” Is a disagreement over fundamental moral issues that we just refuse to talk about directly or really act on.
An example of how the US argues over the death penalty in a way which doesn't happen elsewhere, but perhaps should:
>In fact, opinion polls show that Europeans and Canadians crave executions almost as much as their American counterparts do. It's just that their politicians don't listen to them. In other words, if these countries' political cultures are morally superior to America's, it's because they're less democratic.
Wisconsin outlawed the death penalty in 1853, so that’s hardly a new issue. What’s changed is how much such things are emphasized. Rather than the 2020 presidential candidates talking about meaningful policy differences it was mostly about token issues and identity politics. Occasionally, they would signal which groups they where supporting, but as quietly as possible.
That’s how unpopular choices can become policy. It breaks down to people with strong preferences deciding issues rather than the majority deciding issues. Farmers care a lot more about subsidies than most people making farm subsidies an easy choice.
>The craziest part of this american culture war, to me, is that it seems to spill over to the rest of the world.
It does not seem so crazy to me, after decades of cultural imperialism from America, that we are mirroring the same patterns of behaviour and fighting the same battles. (Just to be clear, I'm not against imperialism)
If American politics are straining your relationship with your sister and you are not even American, sorry to put it like this but only you two have yourselves to blame. Next time your sister brings the topic up say "yeah right" and move on.
>If American politics are straining your relationship with your sister and you are not even American, sorry to put it like this but only you two have yourselves to blame. Next time your sister brings the topic up say "yeah right" and move on.
Don't worry, that's why I emphasised the loving relationship part, we really don't take our political opinions into this and wouldn't have emotional fights about them. Family comes before all that.
I don’t understand “red/blue” shit. For me, it’s “improving quality of life for wage earners and affirming civil liberties / vs not doing the aforementioned” shit.
A cousin in my family has a very valid grievance against business owner uncles that support politicians who don’t want to provide meal breaks or bathroom breaks. This cousin has to work 12 to 14 hour shifts, and eat standing up while working and sneak in bathroom breaks.
It exists mostly because of massive propaganda financed by very wealthy people for whom it is essential to indoctrinate masses to be even more wealthy and powerful.
I don’t understand how it’s propaganda when one can analyze labors laws in various jurisdictions and see that all the areas with labor laws better for workers and poorer people are mostly in areas governed by Democrats.
Thats the whole point, the propaganda is also disinformation and making other issues seem a lot more decisive and important than what really affects the people. The propaganda makes them vote against their interests
Not clear why you are being downvoted. Oligarch Rebekah Mercer has funded/sponsored Breitbart, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, Parler and more. When their sock puppets get out of line--they lose their funding. See Steve Bannon, who now is in the pocket of a rogue Chinese Billionaire. There are many more like her and her father.
This viewpoint (where the unstated understanding is 'the group that is good is Democrats, and the group that is evil is Republicans') is part of the problem.
The viewpoint that both groups are just as bad or just as good for wage earners is a problem.
It’s easily verifiable that Democratic states have better laws for wage earners, and have pushed for policies that benefit wage earners. They’re nowhere near perfect, but there’s no reason to pretend Dems and Repubs are the same.
But it’s also easily verifiable that there are many wage earners in both parties, meaning many who don’t agree with your standards for which policies are better.
That's not necessarily true, because for many people there are issues more important to them than where a candidate stands on issues related to wage earning.
For example, there are many people who in a race where one candidate favors restricting or ending abortion and the other favors reducing restrictions on abortion will choose whichever of the two agrees with their position on abortion, regardless of where the two candidates stand on anything else such as economic issues or foreign policy issues.
both sides push for higher immigration and a globalized market, which have more effect on wage-earners in the US than any policy in "Democratic states". Imo you are missing the forest thru the trees, at scale they really are the same.
The evidence is that immigrants generate positive net tax benefits. The amount of immigrants who are founders of successful business would reflect that the impact is net positive.
AFAIK the idea of immigrants impact being a net negative isn't supported by the studies I have read.
I understand this isn't necessarily in line with the rhetoric du jour.
> The evidence is that immigrants generate positive net tax benefits.
Immigrants as a whole being a net positive might be clear, but the demographics most commonly under debate are things like "refugees" or "illegal immigrants" or "people seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border". Now, it's possible that those groups are still a (financial) net positive, but I'd be a lot less confident in that than "doctors" or "people with a degree".
This also doesn't really address the issue of "what impact does immigration have on US wage earners". An immigrant doctor or programmer might be clearly beneficial financially and to the country as a whole, but the doctors and programmers they're competing with might not be quite so happy. And while those demographics can "take it" so to speak, unskilled laborers facing the same competition are in a bit tougher of a spot.
Even if people agree with you on that, people care about more things than benefiting wage earners. Gun rights are a big deal for a large number of people. Abortion is a big issue for many people, as is immigration policy. Saying that, "One side is better on the things I value!" is startlingly blind to the fact that a whole lot of people don't value what you do, or value things in the same order.
I could just as easily turn it around and say, "It's easily verifiable that Republican states have better laws for gun owners." Now do you see the issue? Your above statement matters only if your primary goal is benefiting wage earners. It would be like me saying that Republicans are better at building a border wall. Maybe so, but that's not top priority for Democrats.
I agree with you. That was my whole purpose of replying to the person that said they are tired of “red/blue” shit. The political situation is not just colors, it has real life consequences on the allocation of society’s resources. If I want my daughter to be able to take maternity leave to properly breastfeed her children, it would behoove me to support a specific party. And the other party wants to spend resources on other things.
There are a lot of single issue voters out there who will happily vote for someone who promises to screw them over financially as long as they are for their pet issue.
More recently, we are seeing the rise of the Zero Issue Voters who don’t care about any particular issue at all. It’s purely a team sport. They love their team, love their candidates and they just want to “own the other side”.
I have no idea if this actually means anything, but I did a couple amusing calculations. If the number of Electoral College votes each state got were proportional to that state's cumulative per capita COVID infection rates, the result would have been 329 Trump, 209 Biden.
However, if we go by cumulative per capita COVID deaths, then the result would have been 228 Trump, 310 Biden.
Why the big swing? I think it is because the big early outbreaks that swept through retirement and nursing homes before we got better at treating it were in big urban areas. By the time it got big in rural areas, we'd gotten a lot better at dealing with it.
It would be interesting to do a similar calculation, but using say the rates over say the last three months instead of cumulative from the start. If someone wants to do that one, a good place to get the COVID data is here [1]. They have links to download the data for all the graphs as CSV files.
> By the time it got big in rural areas, we'd gotten a lot better at dealing with it.
Or by the time it hit rural areas, we'd also gotten better at testing for it. Perhaps the IFR is the same across both demographics, but better testing means a higher proportion of cases were detected later in the pandemic.
I grabbed the data again, and this time used the changes in cumulative cases and deaths over the last 60 days, per capita, in each state for doing the EV reallocation.
Using cases, it comes out 344 Trump, 194 Biden. Using deaths, it comes out 354 Trump, 184 Biden.
The big difference this time is largely rural states that are getting hit much harder than the rest of the states. North Dakota in this allocation gets 35 cases EV and 46 deaths EV, and South Dakota gets 30 and 36. Montana get 21 and 23.
For comparison to some high population states, California is 4 and 4, New York 4 and 3, Texas 8 and 10, Florida 6 and 10.
Now I'd be curious to see something that looks at various sliding windows on the data and sees how to allocations change, but that would be a bit more elaborate than I want to do.
> It’s easily verifiable that Democratic states have better laws for wage earners, and have pushed for policies that benefit wage earners.
The most solidly blue state, California, just enshrined a law to screw over gig workers and has among the worst housing crises in the country for average (and below) wage earners. Both parties are not equally bad, but the idea that the Democrats support working people is pretty laughable at this point. Yes, they’re not as awful as Republicans on these issues, but that’s a pretty low bar and still so far below the wage and labor protections in places like Europe as to be laughable.
I also support ranked choice voting to break the duopolies between Democrat and Republican, but as you said, there is a difference between the two, which is what we have to deal with while we have first past the post voting.
The Democratic Party in California is quite cozy and takes a lot of money from the people who wrote it, so I find this claim of opposition unconvincing.
And did nothing meaningful to oppose it being modified, beside saying they opposed it.
This has been Democrats tactics with this stuff for decades, “we tried to do something good, but then something happened that we couldn’t do anything about it. Sorry.” It’s intentional fecklessness, while posturing at progress, so they can keep getting checks from the tech industry.
They were outspent by almost $200 million. What exactly were you hoping they would do? Why did they go out of their way to write a law when the courts had already reclassified workers? Your conspiracy theory does not make any sense.
Uber and several other gig companies have been operating in violation of California law for about a decade. The state could have shut them down at any time for any myriad number of reasons, but instead got friendly with them and took piles upon piles of their money. This isn't about spending money on any given proposition, but about systemic corruption in the Democratic party, where they'll sell out working people for campaign donations and c-suite positions when they leave office.
Not take money from companies that were in violation of California law from their outset (running illegal taxi services), not take jobs with the companies when they left office (several former, high-level Obama people work at Uber, Kamala Harris’ brother-in-law is behind Prop 22’s legal team), pursued anti-monopoly action against Uber for engaging in market dumping. The list goes on and on.
I fail to understand why you see this whole situation as what happened with one law and one proposition and not the culmination of a bunch of corrupt people who have been in bed with each other for some time.
> Not take money from companies that were in violation of California law from their outset (running illegal taxi services)
What state law were they violating? None. What difference would not taking money from them have done? None.
> not take jobs with the companies when they left office (several former, high-level Obama people work at Uber, Kamala Harris’ brother-in-law is behind Prop 22’s legal team),
What does that have to do with the state legislators, who created AB5?
> pursued anti-monopoly action against Uber for engaging in market dumping.
Republican states tend to emphasize having a good labor market, and prioritize whatever gets employers to offer more jobs. This is a positive good for wage-earners. Democratic states tend to emphasize using government laws to require employers to do things like pay a higher wage. This is also a positive good for wage-earners. They both get lots of votes from wage-earners, and the ones voting for Republicans are not ignorant or blind. They are suspicious (rightly or wrongly) of the effectiveness of government regulations to help them, and know from experience that a tight labor market makes their boss suddenly see the importance of treating their workers better compared to when there was a line of people waiting to take their job if they didn't like it.
The difference between the two is mostly how they think it best to go about improving things for wage earners, who are the vast majority of their voters in both states. Not saying this makes them equal, but the difference is not what you assert.
No offense, but neither the 2 major parties in the US are left/workers rights. I don't see any candidate running on the "improve quality of life for wage earners" platform. for example Joe "nothing with fundamentally change" Biden...and well the last 4 years.
Similarly, see the list of states (and cities) with half decent unemployment benefits, minimum wage laws, non tipped wages, sick leave, required meal breaks, non compete bans, Medicaid, marijuana legalization, etc.
You will see a trend in which parties’ governance wage earners have these benefits (which are a pittance compared to civilized countries in the first place) and which don’t.
While being a very Republican state, Oklahoma has a pretty long history of some very progressive programs. For example, Oklahoma funds pre-K programs for children:
That’s great, but unfortunately, it’s an exception. Again, my comment wasn’t to imply that one party is perfect, but to show that the policies they push make a real difference in people’s lives, especially lower income earners.
That's what people missed about Trump's supporters in 2016. People genuinely believed he was going to work for the common man. He talked about workers rights (in a xenophobic sort of way, but still) he talked about increasing pay for blue collar workers, and about restoring the lost legacy to places that have been abandoned by globalization.
That never got talked about by Trump detractors. Union working class Joe-Schmoe's used to vote democrat, and now solidly do not. There's a reason for that.
Edit: Please note that I never said he did those things, just that they were what he promised. He is completely full of crap on almost everything he says, those promises at the top of the pile. But that is the reason working class Joe love him. He says the things they want to hear.
Talk is cheap. For whatever reason, the increased pay and benefits for blue collar workers exists, by far, in Democrat areas, and is implemented by Democrat politicians.
Some combination of temporarily embarrassed millionaires and tribalism. They may think of themselves as future rich people who can benefit from cheaper labor, and they may be step above the lowest on the socioeconomic ladder, and so want to maintain that hierarchy. As President Lyndon Johnson said:
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
Talk is cheap, but lies win elections, especially when supported by a massive media machine designed to mislead voters.
The output of Fox is bad enough, but the QAnon nonsense isn't some weird aberration that appeared out of nothing. It's the logical conclusion of a huge social experiment to see how much political benefit you can wring from an industrial lie machine.
And it's working far better than anyone on the left was expecting it to.
The downside is that the US now has a huge voter demographic that is literally disconnected from reality. These are the people who scream that Covid isn't real - because something something George Soros and Bill Gates - while they're in hospital dying of it.
This doesn't end well. You can't push a large percentage of your population into delusion without some very destructive consequences. Even if it does mean you keep your Senate seat.
>This doesn't end well. You can't push a large percentage of your population into delusion without some very destructive consequences. Even if it does mean you keep your Senate seat.
I would argue that, for the individuals in question, the long-term consequences literally have no meaning, do not matter, and absolutely are not part of the calculus.
If I get power during my life, and secure my legacy as an important, and very wealthy person, my children can buy away any problem that may pop up for them.
Therefore, my actions of destruction today do not matter, as long as I am the one in power.
This is why I believe it is only going to keep getting worse; if the incentive is to stay in power, at all costs, we're in for a wild ride.
Not sure why you're downvoted, because that sort of populism is exactly what Trump said and ran on. Like most things he said, it's also still 2 weeks away.
Well of course. A man who lives in a literal gold covered Condo, with a history of not paying his subcontractors, vendors and who hired undocumented workers, was certainly going to stick up for the working man.
He said the needed lines, gave them a villain in immigrants (stealing yur jerbs) and then did nothing of the sort for WORKERS. He certainly did go all in on cracking down on immigration, of non-white people, as that matched the narratives of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.
Meanwhile, Oligarchs here are richer than ever, and workers are holding on for dear life. And 72 million plus, voted to keep him in office.
Can't believe you're being downvoted for this, it appears to be an objective truth. Both major American parties would be considered (at the very least) conservative in most other countries. Instead, we're guaranteed, year after year, to be one of the handful of countries without single-payer healthcare, a living minimum wage, mandatory vacation... you get the point. That's without considering that certain American policies affect non-Americans (ie record numbers of drone bombings and caged children will continue regardless of whose smiling face is on television). There are workers' parties in the United States, but they are conveniently relegated to minor/rump status.
So you picked your political allegiance based on the party that most aligns to the criteria that are important to you. That's far from universal and other people have different criteria that are important to them.
Yea, but the point is it’s not color A versus color B. It’s “I pick my political allegiance based on the party that will most likely help those at the bottom of the totem pole” versus “not doing that”.
All of my fellow republican business owners were bristling at the idea of Obama’s executive order increasing the minimum salary for exempt workers. This is because they would have had to pay their immigrant workers $44k per year for 60+ hour work weeks who they designated as “managers”, rather than $30k per year under current rules.
Again, I’m not saying Democrats are perfect, and they are far from it. But at least some Democrat states, and politicians are making an effort, whereas I can’t say the same about Repubs. Hence, it’s not just color A vs color B.
That's a class thing, not a culture war thing, and I bet you'll find many the stereotypical redneck that would also be in support of better working laws, because the stereotypical redneck is also poor and working shit jobs. The thing is they also have strong opinions on guns or abortion or whatever else social issues and this all-or-nothing attitude in politics means they have to align themselves with whatever group they perceive will abuse them less
Consider that your political opponents may also want to achieve the same goals but may have a radically different and less direct method of doing it. Then you might understand that you have something in common with them, and find a way to have civil disagreement instead of othering them.
You could also ask why California has the worst-maintained roads in the United States, has mountains of trash littering the center divide and shoulders of its freeways, has huge numbers of homeless people living in slums just blocks away from some of the highest wage earners (and ostensibly highest tax payers) in the country. How does California vote? That’s not “red/blue” shit.
I agree. Maybe it’s because of various SC rulings making involuntary committal to mental health institutions impossible, and the temperate weather that allows people to exist without homes more comfortably than other places. Maybe it’s other policies, or economic forces. But as you point out, there are real world affects of supporting different political parties.
Do you both know of the concept of out-group homogeneity?
I wonder if that would help. I experience a lot that people expect me to have all kind of weird opinions because they think I'm part of a group which they think holds these opinions. They think I'm part of that group because some of my opinions match with the group.
> If American politics are straining your relationship with your sister and you are not even American, sorry to put it like this but only you two have yourselves to blame. Next time your sister brings the topic up say "yeah right" and move on.
This is good advice for Americans too. The privacy of the ballot box is a cornerstone of America for a good goddamned reason.
I would equally blame the stagnant and supine institutions on the other side of the Atlantic that obsess over preserving the status quo while providing no meaningful alternative to American leadership. Whether it's culture, innovation, finance, it's all the same. Europe has become reliant on America and will accept anything in the name of Diplomacy through Trade.
Excuse me? Germany tries buying gas from Russia and the USA sanctions the fuck out of companies that are even just marginally involved in it.
As for innovation, that's relative. Europe, for centuries, was the undisputed worldwide leader in innovation, now that has shifted a bit to the USA and seems to be on its way to shift to China or maybe India in the next few decades.
There's also the problem that Europe can't really focus on organizing itself in a self-sufficient manner because there's still separatists bitching about everything and always screaming for separation instead of forcing governments to address issues, and the impending rise of fascism in east-europe that may or may not become a huge deal for the rest of the 2020es. The USA has this problem as well, but to a far lesser degree.
Russia's whole political culture is the one of conquest. Their ambition was pretty much always to conquer as much of Europe and Asia as possible, and the mindset haven't changed in XXI century - neither among elites nor among common folk. They're still pretty much a typical XIX century empire, they didn't yet go the shift to focusing on economic domination that UK, Germany, US, Japan went through since.
I would have agreed literally with that statement fifteen years ago. Since then, however, the trends in Russia towards state control over independent press, the politicisation of sports and culture, the blurring of lines not to be crossed (e.g. the annexation of Crimea) and overall clinching of Kremlin power at all costs have made lots of people in Europe worried.
I also wouldn't say "Russia is the enemy", for a number of reasons: first of all, it's not true; secondly, it's not helpful; and thirdly, it obviously breeds distrust and antagonism not only between states but between individual people.
But tensions have obviously been rising, and we are not in the pleasant situation we saw 20 years ago when Russia seemed to be heading towards democracy and increased international cooperation. The current regime in Russia, with its increasingly authoritarian and nationalistic pursuits and somewhat erratic foreign politics, has certainly been feeding those tensions. It would be disingenuous to claim it hasn't.
The whole gas thing is classic Diplomacy through Trade. Similarly for continuing to abide by the treaty with Iran to the degree possible while avoiding sanctions across the whole financial system.
Concrete example of European reliance on the US.
1. NATO
2. The US Fed for liquidity in the EU banking system
3. Acquisition market for companies
4. AWS, Azure, GCE, DO
5. Netflix
My take is that cultural boundaries will erode once it becomes clear the prevailing cultural identity throughout Europe is not French, German, West or East, but unemployed millennial onward. As you say, it will be interesting to see how this turns out.
1. There's still a narrative here in Germany that the big bad USA / trump is wrong for demanding we spend money on our military when we literally signed a contract agreeing to do just that. At the same time, we're in a bit of a unique position where our defence is also in the best interest of the USA.
4. Yes, technological reliance on the USA when it comes to the internet is amazing and terrifying at the same time. Mind you, there is no lack of European alternatives, but somehow these big companies injected a brand-oriented culture into the web-development world on a scale I'd usually expect to see in regards to clothing, not software.
I'll risk sounding ellitist, but I do believe this only works because of the recent influx of newcomers to the world of web and their mentality of doing only what gets them employed. This is a way bigger problem that I could write many pages about, but in this context the important detail is that these people often choose to learn products rather than methodologies, buzzwords and brands rather than theory and logical principles.
> If American politics are straining your relationship with your sister and you are not even American, sorry to put it like this but only you two have yourselves to blame. Next time your sister brings the topic up say "yeah right" and move on.
This. America is not actively shoving its politics into our conversations, we're doing that ourselves (I'm from Germany as well, btw.).
Yes, talking about whatever social shenanigans are currently relevant in the USA is fun, but applying those weird ideas to ones own society is a completely different thing.
America is funding European academics to spread its toxic ideology. It's also shoving its culture in our news, movies, music, etc. Overstating personal responsibility in this matter is naive and very American.
> Overstating personal responsibility in this matter is naive and very American.
Not at all. You could say it's a "western" thing, but definitely not an USA thing (although they do tend to claim it for themselves like they invented it).
What's unique to the USA is the weird idea that personal responsibility is somehow a counter-argument to regulation. "Guns don't kill people, so everybody should be free to own them". At the same time, it's mostly the american left that argues against personal responsibility just because it's considered a right-wing belief.
To come to a conclusion: As so often, the USA is wrong, on both sides. The only "right" mentality, in my opinion, is one that acknowledges both personal responsibility and the option for society to step in.
There's obviously cultural differences, but the political priorities and overall dialogue are just completely different too. Like in Canada, we already have gun registration and background checks (the "common sense" laws that Biden wants but that the NRA says are radical) and the fight is about banning specific classes of assault rifles. In Canada, we already have state health insurance, and the fight is about whether it should cover things like pharmacare, dental treatments, and counseling sessions for mental health. In Canada, the debates about abortion and gay marriage are long settled (1988 and 2003 respectively)— even discussing them is considered political suicide, and the Conservative party has at various points banned back-benchers from attempting to start the debate (for example, by putting forth weaselly, redundant laws about fetal personhood).
You could easily argue that the "Conservative" party in Canada is equivalent or possibly even to the left of the mainstream Democratic party in the US. So yeah, it gets a bit weird when right-leaning people in Canada then also support Trumpian politics— sometimes it's hard to know if they're there after a considered review of the positions, or if it's just a knee jerk "pick the guy on the right" response.
>Like in Canada, we already have gun registration and background checks (the "common sense" laws that Biden wants but that the NRA says are radical) and the fight is about banning specific classes of assault rifles.
The 2nd Amendment issue in the United States is something I don't expect a non-American to understand. The rest of the world tends to take the process of enumerating freedoms positively. The law says you have it or don't.
In the U.S. the culture was framed around the preservation of liberty and the enumeration of the boundaries, and limitations on the ability of government and regulation to encroach. The problem with that is it opens a can of worms constitutionally that increasingly have led to the torture of common language in order to attempt to change the meaning of already passed laws instead of passing new ones which seem to be growing increasingly difficult to do.
Further, you have an entire caste of people specifically trained to use language in unintuitive ways.
As far as "Assault rifles" go, most people can't even define what one is. The fact is, an AR-15 that has the "look-and-feel" of a military patterned rifle is functionally equivalent to more "traditional looking" stock rifles like a Mini-14.
They are the same fundamental device. Neither one is more or less capable of killing someone. To anyone with experience with firearms, the "common sense" espoused by gun control people amounts to hysterics. All it is is a bunch of people tryimg to legislate everyone else's rights without demonstrating any understanding of the subject matter at hand other than being a special interest mouthpiece.
Fair, but my point is that the gun debate in Canada has long ago moved on from where it is in the US. Even the most vocal gun advocates in Canada have come to agree that the exact reforms currently on the table in US are reasonable; they’re good for responsible gun owners, good for reducing gun violence, and have not in fact turned out to be a slippery slope to totalitarian gun-grabbing.
But it's because of this misalignment across a variety of issues that it’s difficult to have a straight discussion of cross-border political alignments— you need to have at least some semblance of a picture of how the Canadian left and right differs from the US left and right. (Another key one, for example, is that the Liberals in Canada officially strive to be a centrist party; the "real" Canadian left is the NDP and Green party, neither of which have ever held power at the federal level, though the NDP have come close a few times.)
> America is not actively shoving its politics into our conversations, we're doing that ourselves (I'm from Germany as well, btw.).
I read a book a few years ago that made an interesting point about cultural exports like TV shows (the book was written pre-youtube and pre-netflix).
If you're a small country (with your own language, culture and traditions) and America has 30x the population of your country, films and TV shows made for the American market will have 30x the budget.
And yet, when that American show is selling broadcast rights in your country, no matter how far they have to drop the price, making a sale makes more money than not making the sale. So the price of the American show will never be out of reach of your broadcasters.
So when a broadcaster imports an American show instead of producing locally, they get a much flashier, more polished product - and it actually costs them less!
And so, for example, Belgian TV shows more scenes in American courtrooms than Belgian courtrooms. And if American TV shows include American politics, they can't help but shove it onto Belgian TV screens.
There's not a moustache-twirling Uncle Sam deliberately orchestrating this, of course. It's just a natural consequence of copyright, deregulation and free trade.
Maybe Netflix is in part compensating for this by giving American-style budgets to productions elsewhere? It seems they have a goal of making a good show or movie from anywhere a source of global revenue.
It suggests a lack of conscious effort to conduct and observe thoughts and actions in a constructive way. To fall into observed patterns of behaviour without intention is no one’s fault but the one behaving, I would think.
That’s not to say there’s no such thing as influence or persuasion. And those can be powerful. Ultimately we can all decide how we engage with our family, person to person, regardless of how the USA or anyone in the USA indicates.
It’s incredibly important to be aware of that and act accordingly. If mainstream media from another country can change your relationship with your sister, it seems to me that something is wrong. Negative external influences aren’t about to go away, so it’s on the individual to be cognizant and vigilant about responding appropriately.
As a Canadian, I'm shocked at the attention the minutia of US politics gets in Canada. I was visiting family and watching the 6pm news and I'd say US politics dominates Canadian national news. It's not unusual for the first 20 min of a 30 min program to be nothing but US politics. Plenty of people say "well, what happens in the US is important to Canada", but what's covered is just stupid political bickering. And it's not even coverage from a Canadian perspective, just regurgitation of what's covered in the US.
Sure, when Trump says something about renegotiating NAFTA, yeah, cover that. When Trump says something stupid about the Democrats, no, that doesn't deserved prime time coverage in Canada. There are too many important things happening in Canada and the rest of the world for that to be front and center.
But I understand why they do it...ratings. Covering outrageous stories gets ratings. Generating outrage gets people to tune in tomorrow to see what happens next.
> When Trump says something stupid about the Democrats, no, that doesn't deserved prime time coverage in Canada.
Frankly it doesn't deserve coverage here in America, either. If he hadn't been gifted billions of dollars in free advertising from all of these networks that hate watch his Twitter feed I don't think we would even have Trump as POTUS. And now he's never going to go away. And they're going to be hate watching his every step to keep "reporting the news." For the life of me I do not understand why people watch the news in this era.
Ratings and possibly a good distraction from how things are at home as well. As an American, I could not believe how many people, also Americans, that I knew that were distraught over Brexit.
This is a very dismissive argument to make. It's just like saying Americans have just themselves to blame for this culture ware and should just stop arguing and move on.
Everyone watches US TV shows and movies. Many media outlets all over the world give way too much attention to US news topics, for reasons that are not really clear to me.
This kind of cultural affiliation is not a personal choice, but brought on by news media and the dominance of US entertainment.
For example, cultural appropriation (or cultural colonialism) versus blackface shaming. First you get somebody to agree about the problematic nature of cultural colonization. Then, you corner them to agree that blackface being problematic in your culture is an unnatural imposition of the U.S. culture into ours. For best results, you "prime" two people separately with each side of the argument, and throw them together in a party, while you drink beer.
Modern journalism and social networks in a nutshell. Wonder when the next big thing will be helping people to sort out their differences, instead of pitting folks against each other.
Maybe the latter is what you do after you finished your beer and popcorn, but it wasn't quite clear in that case.
When we were middle school kids in Slovenia we used to have huge fights and “gang” beef over east side vs west side. We had no idea they were geographical, we just picked a side based on which rapper you liked.
American culture is weird like that. We all consume it via mass media.
I think it’s just an empire thing. During Victorian times everyone was trying to be a little British, or a little French, maybe a little German. Depends who’s closest to you. A long time ago, everyone tried to be a little Roman.
Another way of putting it: News doesn’t tell you what to think, it tells you what to think about.
It's also possible that the US political system is aligning with the rest of the world. The American Republicans now seem a lot more authoritarian and the American Democrats more socialist than they were 10 years ago.
I can't say if it aligns more with the divide in the rest of the world, but saying US politics "spills over" into the rest of the world makes it sound like the US is static. The parties are evolving though: maybe the US is just shifting to toward a more internationally palatable ideological divide.
I can't speak of the political climates of the majority of the world, but at least in Europe multi-party systems aren't that uncommon, and those tend towards less of an ideological divide between the parties than the American bipartisan system, from what I've gathered.
So I'm not sure I entirely understand what you mean with the divide being more internationally palatable. "Spilling over" also doesn't imply the source is static.
Well, you definitely don't live in Leipzig. I can tell you that not everywhere in Germany is like that. In some cities, specially in the East, depending of the soccer team, profession or political views, you are simply not allowed to frequent some places.
I'm American and Hispanic and been to leipzig and the surrounding areas quite often since my best friend lives there. I've partied and bbq'd in the various Dorfs surrounding as well and have never remotely encountered such a thing.
I'm German and been to US many times. Some of my best friends lives there. I've partied and bbq'd in the various cities there and have never remotely encountered such thing like the one cited in the linked article. Do they exist? Definitely. What is your point?
America is colonizing the rest of the developed world. There are probably at least a billion people worldwide (mostly in Europe, but also among Third-World elites) who act American and are invested in America's issues despite never having set foot in the country. The internet has exacerbated this greatly. Just look at the BLM protests in Poland and Japan... or the Amerikaner "digital nomads" who are able to live in foreign countries thanks to the Anglo Internet's worldwide penetration.
Somewhat true. I have friends and relatives in Eastern Europe heavily rooting for the Biden or Trump (usually the less educated or even uneducated) and yet they have no real stake in it but it’s as if they’re voting themselves. And I think they realized that America sets the tone so whoever gets the power will influence them too eventually.
Diplomatic relations with the US matter a lot for the economy and trade - as you've seen in many countries over the last four years.
If you support an authoritarian/populist/homophobic ruler at home (in Poland or Hungary or Brazil or wherever), you also support Trump because he will support your country where a Biden administration will be far less likely to boost Hungary if it costs relationship points with Germany or France...
I'm seeing it, too, and it's annoying. I'm American, but a while back I stopped consuming anything but local news in English for the sake of my sanity. Doesn't work anymore. I keep wondering if maybe I just need to learn a new language? Maybe the mind virus hasn't yet spread to the Swahili coast. . .
I'm at risk of sounding like I'm nitpicking, but I'm not following the popular narrative that it's a problem with America that spilled over into the rest of the world that's at the center of your story.
Many people seem to agree that the rise of social media and its correlated loneliness have pushed people down their rabbithole/echo chamber/whatever people want to call it nowadays. Opposed to the popular narrative, the apparent view from people into the social sciences seem to believe it's a problem with social technologies, rather than it being the inferior North American cultures bleeding out and corrupting our pure untouched global cultures.
I have to agree with the other view that all of us on this planet we are barely evolved hairless tribal monkeys using technology that makes us more anxious instead of secure - and all of these problems are actually pretty predictable from this perspective. It's not Americanification, we just naturally start acting like this when we start using things that make us anxious for clicks.
I think what we’re seeing has more to do with unaccountable invisible architectures (law/governance systems, IP and money) that obscure production processes, than that it’s anything to do with human nature or social media, or us being ‘hairless monkeys’.
> The craziest part of this american culture war, to me, is that it seems to spill over to the rest of the world.
It's more of a bidirectional soup, I think. A lot of the tumult in the US is due to the breakdown of historic norms and views. That has been sped up by social media, but the actual ideas taking hold on one side are largely Marxist, by way of the Frankfurt school, in nature. Those both originate within your own boarders. What you're experiencing is more an echo bouncing back than a spillover, in my opinion.
One thing I've noticed is the whole sale importation of the BLM movement to the UK. I'm not overly aware of the issue facing ethnic minorities in the UK (I live in Scotland where it's almost entirely white with some small asian communities, which isn't to say there isn't racism just few people to discuss it with personally) but from reading around racism in the UK is very different to the US. Despite this we've adopted BLM views wholesale, including call to defund the police.
I fully support discussing racism in the UK and what we can do to counter it but I don't get why we're discussing it as if it's the exact same situation over here with the same solutions. This might to a symptom of London centric-ness where there is far more ethnic diversity and therefore racism.
I agree the UK is not the US and we have different issues in the UK that we are dealing with.
Living and working near London I always assumed the increased ethnic diversity and global outlook in the capital led to less racism.
I assumed it was the rural homogenous countryside that had more endemic racism.
I guess we all misunderstand each other all the time.
>In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one's own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.
There's plenty of secondary sources reporting on this study if you want to have a look for the varying opinions on it but I thought I'd link the source of it itself.
Whether less trust, less cohesion etc. == more racism is something I'm not in a position to draw a conclusion over, but it's interesting nonetheless.
If trust of one's own race is lower also, this seems unlikely to be a consequence of ethnic diversity per se. Rather, I would speculate that, due to the tendency of people to group with their own race, more diverse neighborhoods simply tend to be more transient neighborhoods - places where people are "just passing through" and not really there by choice. There is no point attempting to build community bonds in an area with high churn, and that you yourself plan to move out of at the soonest opportunity.
Unfortunately the BLM rhetoric I
the UK is largely pushed by a bunch of (usually white) middle class students with a hard on for Kimberlie Crenshaw and an utter ignorance of the work done over the last seventy years by black and ethnic minority British anti racists to tackle the racism in British society that arises from our history as a colonising nation. Ironically by privileging black American narratives over those of BAME Britons BLM campaigners in the UK engage in a form of cultural colonialism that silences the voices of the very people they claim "matter." Arseholes.
The average American doesn't even know who Kimberle Crenshaw is. For most of us BLM just means waiting for the next police shooting to show up in the news and on social media (because someone captured a video recording) and hoping our own nearby community isn't involved. Law enforcement in America is a web of federal, state, and local (city or county) laws and no one knows how any individual police officer is trained or what kind of accountability process is in place. The fact that it's different every single time is a huge part of the problem and a source of most of the frustration.
In my opinion American BLM is racist in of itself. There needs to be changes but popularizing the polarities of the topic only serves the ad driven model of media which supports it.
Your opinion is wrong. Full stop. Stating that Black lives matter, and orienting a movement around that statement as an organizing principle, is not polarizing: it’s a recognition and rejection of extant polarization. Polarization which claims lives, specifically Black lives, disproportionately and institutionally. There is nothing racist about naming the phenomenon and challenging it directly. But demanding that the people who have so identified and challenged it find mask the underlying racism in the name of more inclusive language is essentially an argument to recognize and protect racism itself as part of the culture. No thank you.
Of course! I don’t even have enough information to dislike you. Honestly when I see comments like yours I assume the experience is one of cultural exposure and subconscious bias unless I see otherwise. I grew up in a place (Virginia) where (for instance) racism was so much a part of the fabric of everyday life that I didn’t recognize a lot of my own biases. I just thought they were common sense. I didn’t have a framework for thinking of systematic bias, so I started from the assumption that equality is the default absent obvious inequality. And “obvious” was of course experiential and educational, so I didn’t see what my (for instance) Black neighbors considered normal and I didn’t understand how their experience informed their reactions to (for instance) police.
Moving to another place (Seattle) where (for instance) racism is still a part of the fabric of everyday life but a part of the social discussion was challenging as I was introduced to ideas that felt unintuitive. But empathy helped me grow and understand more than I did, and helped me value and pursue that growth.
It also helped me recognize (for other instances) I had unconsciously internalized other biases. I had rejected my own sexuality (I identify queer, demisexual) and my gender identity (I accept he/him/they/them pronouns equally).
I hope a little empathy goes far for you. It’s not often in a followup like this I see someone willing to reciprocate the empathetic spirit and acknowledge a contrary view kindly. Who knows where it’ll take you, but I hope you’ll consider that your experience may be coloring your ideas and that you may have room for other ideas in that consideration.
I don't think anyone is "popularizing the polarities of the topic" when they draw attention to those video recordings and the way they shock the conscience of people.
And I don't like to pick apart semantics, but the way you use the term "American BLM" is a Straw Man and an Ad Hominem deployed in tandem. It's difficult to have a constructive debate when it's posed in those terms.
> might to a symptom of London centric-ness where there is far more ethnic diversity and therefore racism
More flareups, perhaps, especially riots against the Metropolitan police, but more diversity tends to make people less racist as they actually meet people of other ethnicities rather than just repeat what they've heard about people they've never met or seen.
Was the Bristol statue teardown an import? The tactic of just dumping it in the sea was, and the "triggering event" of solidarity protests was, but the underlying question of why Bristol has a statue of a man who committed crimes against humanity had been rumbling on for years and the council had voted down even a recontextualisation plaque.
Scotland has some similar "historical benefits of slavery" questions to look at; Edinburgh's own pro-slavery politician statue (Henry Dundas) is somewhat protected by being at the top of a 150-foot column.
It has been profoundly odd watching UK BLM protesters (almost all of them white and middle class, of course) chanting "hands up, don't shoot"-type slogans recently.
British police officers don't routinely carry guns and therefore couldn't possibly shoot you even if they wanted to. In fact, there is an almost zero probability of anyone in the UK getting shot by the police unless they happen to be committing an act of terrorism or murder at the time.
Duggan was nearly a decade ago though, and he pulled a gun on police when they tried to arrest him. Involved in gangland activities. It shows how messed up some of these sorts of riots are: they invariably seem to be about people who were in the process of attacking the police when they were shot. de Menezes of course is a terrible exception.
> he pulled a gun on police when they tried to arrest him
This is the disputed evidence at the center of the question; the gun was found several meters away from the scene, on the other side of a fence, "wrapped in a sock". There is a protracted argument about how plausible it is that he threw it there after being shot in the arm.
> they invariably seem to be about people who were in the process of attacking the police when they were shot.
If the police shoot someone, then of course all the official reports will say that they were attacking the police. There have been a number of mass casualty incidents in the UK (Hillsborough, Bloody Sunday) where the police or army reports turned out to be lies.
I think what we see here is the result of social media A/B testing on how to get votes, and this playbook is now followed by the rest of the world.
In a democratic society, you have to influence the public opinion to stay/get in power. Propaganda is free, information costs money.
If the majority of voters are not willing to pay for quality journalism, you have to get them engaged by fueling outrage and projecting fear. It doesn't matter what side, as long as there are sides you can join and identify with.
Combined with the fact that American politics do have an effect on the quality of life in other parts of the world (trade wars and refugee crisis for example) and the working (aka non-capital) class suffers in most western societies, it is very easy to project similar fears and foster divisiveness.
Neither CNN nor Fox is quality journalism, "quality" being the adjective you left out.
The NYT also issued an apology for their coverage about WMD which was not rigorously fact checked. One of the reporters, Judith Miller, later joined Fox News.
Quality doesn't mean 100% correct all the time, it means significantly better than the alternative.
Comparing the coverage of different sources is part of how you can reach your own conclusions, instead of blindly adopting whatever opinion is broadcasted to you.
Yes, similar to Schelling points, I call these Schelling fulcra. Not "what do people focus on?" but specifically "what issue illustrates our tribal divisions?"
I generally agree with the notion that the parties raise money off this rhetoric. However the implied group in the title, “America’s wealthy” isn’t covered here. The DNC fundraisers benefit a group of people who don’t generally fall into that category. They’re rich, and powerful sure, but they’re not Jeff Bezos. Americans would do well to be able to tell the difference between the oligarchs and their lackeys.
Seems you have fallen into the paradigm that the article talks about, DNC = Good and moral, and implying that RNC == Bad and Evil
The reality is the wealthy are entrenched into ALL political parties, even the so called "3rd parties"
the DNC is not a "moral and ethical" bull fighting the good fight against the "pure evil" of republicans which is what your comment seems to be implying
The real question to me is whether FaceBook and Google are _deliberately_ complicit in creating devisive bubbles through recommendation systems or whether that’s just an unfortunate byproduct that’s unfixable?
It's not that people want to create division. But the left becomes upset with your product if you show them rightwing opinions, so if you want to have rightwing content you have to make bubbles so they don't see it.
That seems a little simplified, specifically just categorizing it as left wing vs right wing.
If I recall from my Sociology studies, smaller minority opinions (in this case what you call "right wing ideas") coalesce into smaller silo'd communities BECAUSE their ideas do not resonate with any majority.
In a wide open environment, the minority ideas / culture would not survive, so the participants of the minority views shrink the environment into the bubbles so their ideas don't have as much competition.
> In a wide open environment, the minority ideas / culture would not survive, so the participants of the minority views shrink the environment into the bubbles so their ideas don't have as much competition.
How does that square with the commonly accepted observation that "any community without moderation turns into a 4chan cesspool".
>It's not that people want to create division. But the left becomes upset with your product if you show them rightwing opinions, so if you want to have rightwing content you have to make bubbles so they don't see it.
It's funny, but it's actually the opposite.
The right wing folks using Facebook become so incensed and outraged at being shown left wing content that they complain all the way to Congress, and the radical right-wing politicians who are slaves to the whims of the populist movement then haul social media executives in front of Congress and literally pepper them with ignorant conspiracy theories.
Facebook has notably had to wine and dine famous radical conservatives for years to prevent negative press, something they never have to do with the left.
Facebook notably even created "Conservative-only" high level level positions to ensure that their entitled right-wing users were placated. They added outright propaganda outlets to their "Fact Checking Initiative" not based on any objective metric, but on the political calculus of "Both-sides-ism -- we'll put your fact checker next to this liar, both sides get a spot at the table".
When you look at the radical right-wing populist movement, the search for Parler and more right-wing safe spaces, and how they use their fact-free media and conspiracy theory-friendly politicians to push truly ridiculous nonsense, I think you can see the full picture of a quickly-radicalizing right wing populist base that becomes incensed and even violent when viewing left-wing or moderate/centrist content.
Remember, this is an America where Fox News is currently being abandoned for being "part of the Left", and there are millions who are abandoning Facebook and Fox News for Parler and OANN, so you have to see this as the radical right actively seeking out and creating ever more ideologically pure safe spaces.
I don't think it was deliberate. But after they realized it's a problem, they also realized that it's the best way to drive engagement so they do nothing.
It's like an obese person struggling with a diet. I'm sure most of their employees don't want their products to be used to sow discontent. But that sweet, sweet paycheck is so large that it's too difficult to quit.
I'm guessing most of them rationalize it in some way, or figure that they will be on a plane to New Zealand before the effects of this is really felt.
The cause of culture war, as with all wars, is at bottom boredom, and the cure is to find intrinsically motivating pursuits that engage you so much that you look upon the culture warrior the same way you look upon those who spend all day playing videos games.
Oh please. You think it's the poor who is spending hours on Twitter arguing with each other? Or watching CNN for hours a day? They don't have the time nor is it of any consequence to their lives. They're too busy trying to pay this month's rent.
It's all middle and upper-middle class Americans who have the luxury and time to spend time on social media (often at work).
I mean, even poor folks have smart phones with data plans now. You'd be surprised how full facebook is with Twitter screenshots and right-wing "news" orgs in the very poor, rural area that I live.
So, no, it's not just middle- and upper-middle class Americans on social media.
No doubt the cleaning lady I see in my building working 12 hour days trying to house and feed her two kids is prioritizing getting her political thoughts out on Twitter.
As someone who lives in Latin America and sometimes interacts/works remotely with North Americans I get this same impression. For better or for worse, America always seemed like the a place with issues, but with a people which could quickly gather and get shit done. Nowadays it seems you folks worry too much about semantics & ideology (on both sides) and will keep electing the next populist in hopes it'll fix all problems, just like Latin America lol.
Your opponent nowadays is a very pragmatic autocratic regime, with it's own issues, but this corona-crisis at least showed they can keep their mandate of heaven. Four more years in this culture war and you won't be able to get consensus on anything.
In Los Angeles (where I live) the people out in the streets in July during the pandemic protesting and burning cop cars were almost all unemployed young people, a veritable cross-section of all ethnicities in the city.
It's not just about risk. Most protestors had little or nothing to lose or risk anything to be out there.
Clearly, the fact that young people don't have dignified jobs and nothing to do but sit on social media all day and watch viral videos about obscene police violence is the fuel to the fire in this situation. I'm not saying police reform doesn't deserve a reckoning in the US, but there's definitely a correlation in internet use and protests.
> In Los Angeles (where I live) the people out in the streets in July during the pandemic protesting and burning cop cars were almost all unemployed young people
[citation needed]
And even if that was established, “unemployed” is often an axis of social inequity, too.
Social media has made it wildly easy and incredibly cheap to propagate any misinformation. Head over 4chan and you'll see a factory line of ideas being thrown at the wall to see what sticks - which is then further spread across social media.
If you were a foreign power and wanted to sow discord in a rival country, you had to buy off dozens of journalists and funnel money to media houses and hope that they'd at least be secretive, if not effective.
Now you can just pop open Photoshop, come up with 10 memes in 30 minutes, and use your sock puppet accounts to spread them everywhere - an operation that a single person can handle all by himself.
It's incredibly naive to think that social media is not absolutely flooded with propaganda and counter-propaganda by malicious actors. And it's only going to hasten the collapse in democratically minded countries across the world.
> Social media has made it wildly easy and incredibly cheap to propagate any misinformation. Head over 4chan and you'll see a factory line of ideas being thrown at the wall to see what sticks - which is then further spread across social media.
4chan has always been like this. Pre-2007 it was basically the boiler room of the internet. You could find memes before they hit mainstream along with all the shitty ones that didn't make the cut.
I'm sure this natural filtering was disrupted when we brought millions of users online for the first time and convinced them that social media is the internet.
The is true and is just more proof of the oligarchy we live in brainwashing us to believe the "other side" is the enemy while the rich and powerful robs us blind.
It is our fault too. But most people don't care. It is easier to just be A or B. It doesn't help that government officials keep stacking the deck to keep things as is and let money run the game. It is hard to break the corruption cycle when a $1M donation to both political parties all but guarantees you a $1B government contract. We really a way to pass resolutions that bypass Congress sometimes.
The conspiracy theory growth cycle is pretty clear after all these years: something originates on 4chan, is picked up by some independent blog that editoralizes and sanitizes it. The blog post is then spread through Facebook and Twitter before it lands back on 4chan, but now legitimized by coverage on more "mainstream" web (by 4chan's standards anyway).
The Flat Earth conspiracy was easily the best example of this
Despite there being no quantitative evidence of cultural divisiveness being profitable for the wealthy as a whole, it's a popular narrative because it's a simple deflection of blame. Maybe the author should reflect on their own writing rather than point a finger at the rich.
I'm sure Bezos would be happier if the Trump adminstration wouldn't rig a multi billion dollar defense contract in response to his newspaper. Youtube, would make a lot more advertising dollars if they weren't pressured to demonetize so many videos.
I will agree there is a degree of culpability in the general population and a preference to deflect blame on both sides.
I would also agree that it is important to define what "rich" means since making class distinctions and comparisons does change the emphasis and logic considerably.
That said, the (ultra) wealthy tend to profit either way and prefer chaos because it puts an incredible downward pressure on the classes below them. That downward pressure minimizes the likelihood of future competition. It's a long game that only the (ultra) wealthy can afford to play.
Also, leverage is an important consideration. It's easier for a billionaire to leverage 1 billion dollars compared to 1 billion people leveraging 1 dollar. There would be measurable consequences either way, but that billionaire is in a much different position by having singular command of that wealth.
> That said, the (ultra) wealthy tend to profit either way and prefer chaos because it puts an incredible downward pressure on the classes below them.
Is there any quantified evidence that supports this hypothesis? The corporations owned by the ultra wealthy spent a lot more money on backing Hilary and Biden rather than Trump.
All that says is dumping money into an election in a constitutional republic designed specifically to put limits on authoritarian power does not guarantee victory.
I'm comfortable saying there is considerable evidence to back up the argument. However, I suspect any researcher who put forth such a hypothesis might have difficulty finding a grant. Take from that what you will.
Much of the discord would be fixed by banning Twitter, where group hatred gets organized into political platforms. And on top of it, their content editors have a very particular slant, that so far has brought a lot of whining, and nothing positive.
I was sitting here scrolling and my immediate thought was, "Did these people even read the article?" then it dawned on me how late stage this is. People can read an article that speaks clearly about the overarching problem and how it is fueled, but they miss everything that would make a connection to things they value or believe in.
The wealthy as the plotters in this article overlooks a change in the last 50 years. A century ago, private industrial wealth and power were in effect synonymous, but today the industrial wealthy are relative front men to a core of institutional players with considerably less wealth, but who have the levers of policy that pervade every micro aspect of life now.The wealthy people I know are not running the culture wars, they are toeing the party line as an appeasement plan to what they perceive as the mob. In this sense, any opposition they might have had has been neutralized.
The taboo I think is it's not a culture war, it's a class war that sets largely publicly employed people against mostly privately employed ones. For all the rhetoric around race, this is mostly a Girardian schism between white city "burghers" and their country "redneck" complement. The former see their role as global, and the latter see their identity as national.
I don't think even a model with predictive power can do much to mitigate the consequences. It may have festered too long. If you destroy what a culture has built, it will have to contend with you and your organizations to rebuild afterwards.
I'm focused on culture, which are things like family, community, spirit, code, music, sport, art, fiction, and thought. War also is a part of life, and if it ever came to that in my lifetime, I suppose you could say I will be engaged in politics then too, but that kind of reckoning i think is a last resort.
Ironically, the idea that ethnicity and other signifiers are used to divide the working class against itself has been a pillar of socialist thought for over 100 years- it’s not a centrist position.
Edit: you don’t have to agree with the position I just stated but it is a fact that that it is a socialist position and has been since the days of Marx. I’m just pointing out that the author is trying to paint it as a middle position, and it’s not, it’s a left position. In its most extreme form it has a specific name: class reductionism.
Now I think you can make the case that this is too ideological and not good HN material. That’s fine. But if it is HN material is it not fair to make basic points about the topic of the article itself?
was making sense until the bs "both sides" conclusion: "We have two donor-fattened parties that across decades of incompetence have each run out of convincing pitches for how to improve the lives of ordinary people."
I find the ideas of fixing healthcare, reinvesting in our economy and infrastructure, and shoring up our social programs highly convincing. And I'm pretty sure the polls show those ideas resonate across the political spectrum. And I only hear those ideas coming from one party.
Over less than 3 months, a friend of mine's monthly premium went up an order of magnitude - with reduced benefits - to the point where it made no sense to do anything but drop it completely and start seeing a doctor who takes cash.
There was nothing wrong with the concept other than the failure to include single payer. Democrats under Obama managed to come up with something less good which still was a net gain, but it was destroyed by Republicans. Just wanted to make that clear.
What exactly was "gutted" other than the Fine if you did not carry insurance? Which was largely regressive and blatantly unconstitutional but since they labeled the fine a "tax" it just scraped since the court system has not ruled a federal program unconstitutional since FDR threaten to Stack the court.
Apologies, I forgot that discussing partisan politics is discouraged here. This one just gets me riled because there's so much misinformation around it. Regardless of political party, it would benefit us all in the long run to find sustainable ways of improving access to health care.
>>I find the ideas of fixing healthcare, reinvesting in our economy and infrastructure, and shoring up our social programs highly convincing. And I'm pretty sure the polls show those ideas resonate across the political spectrum. And I only hear those ideas coming from one party.
I suspect that is because you view the "solutions" from one party as the sole legitimate "solutions" to those problems.
I.e to you the solution to the problem of expensive and inaccessible healthcare is likely to be Government Single Payer plan, and any political party or person that has a different, market solution to that problem has been deemed by you to "not really wanting to fix the problem" or some other worse kind of evil
Well, the other party had four years in power (and previously many years as the opposition) to propose a viable alternative plan; however, that proposal is nowhere to be found.
There were some small things like price transparency and attempts at regulating drug pricing, but nothing on the scale of a large-enough transformation that is necessary.
I agree with the central thesis -- we should be shaking hands with our neighbors and looking to take back power and wealth from the rich.
But how do you get neighbors to shake hands when one believes that gay marriage is truly evil and another is gay?
Both sides in America constantly fight bitterly over identity politics and it seems like many of those identities are irreconcilable with one another.
I'm non binary and use singular they, and I've had some absolutely incredible vitriol directed at me for nothing beyond, "hi, I'm name. I use they/them pronouns. Nice to meet you!" How do we get past the part where people decide it's ok to tell me I should be sterilized or committed, and get to the point where we start turning towards the capital class together?
The key point is that identities don’t have to be reconciled. There’s no reason a hunter and a vegan can’t work together on common problems, even though they don’t like or particularly respect each other’s lifestyles. On many hit button issues, unfortunately including nonbinary people, we’ve just lost this common understanding that working with someone neither constitutes an endorsement of how they live nor requires them to endorse how you live.
There's also the understanding that working with someone doesn't mean taking an inappropriate interest in their gender identity, their romantic interests, their health, how they vote, and so on.
I consider 'reconciled' to include 'willing to work with'. The behavior I'm calling out are, for example, the people who get abusive immediately when faced with an out group member.
I can work with people whose personal views I consider morally bankrupt. If they start threatening others because of who those others are, that's a problem. And it's an uncomfortably common problem.
People have asked about my politics, and I'll often say simply, "I'm a democratic socialist." and I've had people tell me I'm "a cursed person who has drunk from the trough of the demons" and that I'm "here to destroy freedom and the constitution."
Those aren't exaggerations, those are real quotes in response to a short introduction. I'd be thrilled to get to the point where I could work alongside those types of people.
Yeah; that's really where I tend to give up too. If we can't start with accepting the others' right to exist and be treated with respect, there's no room to find common ground and actually build anything.
It's why I find it so interesting (and concerning) how people respond to, say, college, or urban areas, coming from rural and more homogeneous ones. Some people find themselves realizing that those who are different than them...aren't so different, and learn to accept and respect others despite those differences. Others resist, seeking out others like themselves, building a bubble to operate in, avoiding the 'other', and become even less tolerant than they were before (while also demonizing the 'liberal brainwashing' happening in colleges and big cities and the like, that they saw happening around them).
Not advocating prescriptives, just sharing what has worked for me in my limited personal experience. YMMV.
I keep the initial focus on them and I first introduce myself as a blank canvas with a known role between us. "Hi, what's your name, my name is yourapostasy your new neighbor/who waves at you on your 0500h run every day/who the mailman mixes up our mail all the time/etc." Then elicit details of "their story". People pretty universally love talking about themselves. Somewhere in that tapestry are common threads, and I build upon that. I've fortunately never met someone through this approach so odiously unrelatable we could not bond over something they care about.
After that, it is a matter of time and resources put in the relationship, as long as you maintain a Nash Equilibrium. The more time and resources, the more differences you both will generally tolerate; not a linear relationship, but everyone I've met has a "clearing price" to voluntarily associate with another.
I don't think in terms of "take back power and wealth from the rich", because there are too many layers between us for me to effectively address, and it doesn't scratch my agile itch. I instead have worked towards increasing both mutual assistance capabilities and self-sufficiency at the same time, and reducing my and others' reliance upon capital in an organic fashion. My position is that the capitalists (the 0.1%) have for all intents and purposes "won". They've "taken their 'ball' and gone home". The more I can decouple from capital "churn", the more I can save of myself and those I care for. There are some extremely broken systems (real estate, legal, political, medical, etc.) in the US that take unreasonable levels of capital to access for ordinary income citizens.
Autarky isn't my goal; it's long-term consistent survival at an "acceptable" standard of living without requiring a poll tax of capital out of reach of ordinary income households. Sometimes that takes some involvement with capital, but preferably a more frugal method is used when feasible, trading off convenience/time/etc. that I have more readily available. I don't hate capital nor capitalists. I'm just (in the scheme of a US reality where booking a billion in annual individual income doesn't even place in the top 10 income list) capital poor and working around it as best I can. Let it be noted in this discussion however, that there are many US citizens who would give their left nut to be in my "poor" position; many of us by virtue of being on HN in a well-compensated industry (at this time, I never take good times for granted) are in a similar position. But if you're talking about grand "take them down" terms, I've found I've achieved far more stability, sooner, by pursuing the above path than getting all pissed about a system I have neither the capital nor power to help change at this time.
This might be slightly offtopic but related to this article: what sources of conservative opinion would American conservatives on HN recommend to a liberal who genuinely wants to see things from the other perspective?
Are there any right leaning bloggers/talk show hosts that you would recommend?
Russ Roberts brings a conservative perspective to his interview program EconTalk. (Russ describes himself as a 'classical liberal' rather than as a Conservative.) Though originally primarily focused on economics, the show's topics have become increasingly diverse in recent years. Russ' conversations with people he disagrees with are his best in my opinion and are always respectful and edifying.
I highly suggest you make yourself familiar with Thomas Sowell. He has written countless books on the topics of economics, politics, race, policy, and more. I find he makes the most compelling arguments for the "conservative" side of the spectrum.
The working class is the largest voting block their is. How do you keep them reliably voting against their own economic interests and maintain your position at the top of the economic ladder? Turn one half against the other and divide and conquer. It’s pretty easy to push people into fearing some ‘other’ and tap into that inherent tribalism we have in our primal instincts.
This article seems to imply that the wealthy don't have any stake in the culture war, and stand to benefit most by maintaining the status quo. But that seems to ignore the fact that two of the issues at the heart of the culture war are taxation and government regulations - and one side's stance on these issues is far more beneficial to the wealthy than the other's.
One of the few major pieces of legislation that Republicans actually passed while in power over the past four years were tax reforms which were very beneficial to the wealthy. And the Trump administration changed several of the EPA's environmental policies to be more business friendly (and less friendly to the environment).
Democrats, on the other hand, are in broadly favor of increasing taxes on the wealthy. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in particular had some policy proposals that would have taxed the wealthy quite significantly. Democrats in recent history also passed the Dodd-Frank act, which imposed a number of regulations on the finance industry (and was partially repealed by Republicans in 2018).
These issues are front and center in the culture war. Remember Joe the Plumber and "Drill baby, drill" in 2008? Or Trump's vows to save the coal industry in 2016? And how many times did Pence bring up the subject of fracking in the 2020 vice presidential debate?
"False consciousness is a term used—primarily by Marxist sociologists—to describe ways in which material, ideological, and institutional processes are said to mislead members of the proletariat and other class actors within capitalist societies, concealing the exploitation intrinsic to the social relations between classes." [1]
Maybe it's time to realize that the "culture war" is just the realization that we're all living inside bubbles of information, and that there's no way to reconcile that with a centralized "democratic" government ruling people on the basis of narratives and coercion.
We're most likely heading towards a society of private laws, but the path to that is likely to be very painful.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] thread"From the “vast right-wing conspiracy” through the “basket of deplorables” to now, the Democratic message increasingly focuses on the illegitimacy of the ordinary conservative voter’s opinion: ignorant, conspiratorial, and racist, so terrible that the only hope is mass-reprogramming by educated betters."
That's the way the ruling class operates in any society. They try to divide the rest of the people. They keep the lower and the middle classes fighting with each other so that they the rich, can run off with all the fucking money.
Fairly simple thing. Happens to work.
You know, anything different, thats what they gonna talk about. Race, religion, ethnic and national backgrounds, jobs, income, education, social status, sexuality. Anything they can do, keep us fighting with each other so that they can keep going to the bank.
You know how I describe the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep them showing up at those jobs."
George Carlin had us pegged ages ago.
So did Doctor King:
The other day I was saying, I always try to do a little converting when I'm in jail. And when we were in jail in Birmingham the other day, the white wardens and all enjoyed coming around the cell to talk about the race problem. And they were showing us where we were so wrong demonstrating. And they were showing us where segregation was so right. And they were showing us where intermarriage was so wrong.
So I would get to preaching, and we would get to talking—calmly, because they wanted to talk about it. And then we got down one day to the point—that was the second or third day—to talk about where they lived, and how much they were earning. And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, "Now, you know what? You ought to be marching with us. [laughter] You're just as poor as Negroes."
And I said, "You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor, because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. (Yes) And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white.
And you're so poor you can't send your children to school. You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march."
Apple, on the other hand, does not wade into the culture war. What they do instead is make money off people's status anxiety by selling luxury products to people on food stamps.
I agree with you about Twitter as their stock had been stagnant until Trump's election and people started equating tweets as news.
And yet the percentage is lower. It really doesn't matter the comparative amounts; to put this to an even more egregious extreme, if the top 1% had 99% of the wealth, and paid 20% of that in taxes, and the bottom 99% had the remaining 1% of the wealth, and paid 0 taxes, it's not a sign that all is well, and the fact that the rich are paying -all- the taxes does not somehow make it okay.
And, no, pretty much every business benefits. The whole "keeping up with the joneses" mindset that keeps the wheels of consumerism turning is predicated on class distinctions. Our economy is dependent on consumer spending, and the obscenely rich become rich, and remain so, because of that level of spending by the middle and lower classes (meanwhile they have so much wealth they can't find ways to spend it without literally giving it away)
"The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes..."
It's blatantly untrue, as are most things comedians say, but Carlin somehow is treated like a scholar. The spamming of his quotes only adds fuel to the culture war.
Consumerism is completely orthogonal to polarization. Video games and Netflix promote consumerism and keep the lower classes "distracted" from change. There's no need to intentionally stir conflict. See how much corporations were willing to spend against Trump on the last 2 elections.
And, see how many corporations also funded Trump. Political polarization keeps people from seeing the robber barons that are benefiting in excess from others own hard work.
> And, see how many corporations also funded Trump
Corporations aren't a unified block. Biden got over half a billion more in funding, which is telling.
> Political polarization keeps people from seeing the robber barons that are benefiting in excess from others own hard work.
This is a narrative invented because if people find a purpose to polarization, they can blame someone else besides themselves. What is the greatest distraction from the proletariat rising up against the "robber barrons?" It's Netflix, not Fox News. Without polarization, people won't suddenly be plotting about how to take down the rich. They'll go back to rewatching the Office. If anything, polarization brings more attention to class issues.
Maybe the 99% should have more wealth and income so that they could pay more taxes instead?
The mantra about wealth and income being about merit/hard work/etc, is partially true. A lot of wealth and income has to do with laws/privileges/etc.
The 1% paying more in taxes really means that they'd taken more of the wealth/income. So I don't think that's the solution.
Not to be too on the nose, but another equally valid phrase here is “leaned heavily towards being a christian minister”, which he was. The religious motivations of the civil rights movement are ones we seem blind to, and the only reason i can think of for it is that when i, an american, hear “christian”, i have been taught think “republican suburban or rural white man probably interested in being horrible to gay people” instead of “democratic urban jew or black lady who is super damn interested in workers rights and housing access”. At a certain point one begins to wonder if that isn’t very carefully intentional.
Tangentially: at some point, someone in the media is going to diff AOC’s speeches against the last 150 years of papal encyclicals and realize a few things about where her rhetoric originates. If you s/bipoc/the least of these, it’s slightly easier to see. If you know who Oscar Romero was, it's blindingly obvious.
"GOP" is as much an epithet to those inclined to dislike the party, as it is a proud accolade for those inclined to like the party.
Sort of like "liberal", though admittedly many who use that as an epithet make their meaning clear by changing it to 'libtard' or a similarly puerile play on words.
I don’t agree at all that that statement or population is somehow emblematic of “the real religion”, because the unspoken priors there are precisely the sort of white- and christian- centric circular definitions that, for example, white american evangelicals believe and promulgate. It’s giving up the game before you even get started.
Tangentially, the sanctification of Dr. King as an american saint is part of an extremely long tradition of blunting the impact of prophets. If you put someone up on a pedestal you add them to a history that is done and somehow over and safe now. We remember “i have a dream” and tacitly conclude that the dream is realized now; we forget that King died largely hated and in the process of screaming against the war and organizing for (mostly white) trash collectors. And we forget that the work never stops.
To conclude more hopefully, though, I’d also say that people do keep the flame alive — and, i suspect and pray, we’ll look back at this year as a time when the embers were fanned back up into a flame to get some more work done at a great cost.
As to American evangelicals I don’t think we have a lot of disagreement, but I remembered an an excerpt from “Letters from a Birmingham Jail” that I thought was very apt:
I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South's beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious-education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?"
This is right if you say "America" instead of "the west". And then you're talking about a timescale of maybe 200 years, tops.
But when you say "the west" you're talking about a longer history of Christianity in Europe. You're talking about the Catholic Church, the Protestant Reformation, all that.
And on long historical timescales, Christianity's record is quite a bit more complicated than that. You can certainly associate it with various sins -- it suppressed the pagans, it launched the crusades, in Spain it justified conquest in the New World, and (though it was its own team) it often sided with royalty and aristocracy. And yet it was not an essentially "pro-slavery" religion. That would be to project relatively recent American evangelicalism backwards onto the rest of Christianity in a totally ahistorical way.
> There was notable involvement in the abolitionist movement among northern Protestants, and civil rights activism among catholics, Jews, and northern Protestants - but acting as though that is in any way representative of American religion is missing 99% of the history.
There used to be a phrase, "mainline Protestant", used to distinguish "normal" Protestants from evangelicals. They're dying now, but those churches used to have huge membership. The kind of Christianity that was "centered" in the past in America (at least in the North) was //not at all// the southern Evangelical variety that so often claims the word "Christian" these days. You're missing the amount of change that has occurred. The Evangelicals were "weird".
Your discussion of "Catholics and Jews" in the context of "abolitionism" is also confused. Catholics and Jews were not //totally absent// from America at that time, but it really wasn't until later that they came over in large numbers. Like, Irish were just arriving around the time of the Civil War (and hadn't even won respect for themselves yet, let alone taking up the political cause of others), and Jews started to really show up later around the turn of the century. You're ignoring the timeline of immigration.
Finally -- your whole dichotomy of "American religion" vs... atheism(?) is confused. In the past, atheism was taboo -- "everyone" was religious to some extent -- and //even so// things like the Civil War happened. Why? Because it was religion that //animated// those movements, particularly within the emerging "white" ethnic group (whose material interests they did not necessarily serve in an obvious way).
Mostly, American history has not been "religious people vs nonreligious people". It's been different kinds of religious people fighting over the contents of their religions. Mostly, the battle lines have been drawn right //through// Christianity in America.
I meant those as two discrete times, civil war era abolitionists and civil rights era Jewish and catholic activists. I didn’t claim that Catholics and Jews were active against abolition. I’m fairly comfortable with the history of immigration of different ethnicities into America and the ‘whitening’ of certain immigrant populations, so I doubt I’m ignoring their timelines.
Additionally, rereading my comment you’ll see I try to distinguish between northern (mainline Protestants, but also catholic) and southern Christians, as I mostly associate (possibly incorrectly) evangelicals as tracing their lineages through southern baptist & Midwest fundamentalist denominations.
I never mentioned atheism so I’m not quite sure how you constructed a position from my comment, but that’s not really applicable to any view I hold.
My point in the comment was to disabuse readers of the revisionist idea that Christianity, in particular American evangelicals, are natural champions of oppressed people - and if we measure their net effects on minorities in America in the aggregate, I’d wager it’s mostly been a tool to justify and propagate oppression and segregation more often than not. You are correct that my argument was centered on American Christianity, as even British Christianity (particularly quakers) had a markedly different relationship to abolition than their American southern Baptist counterparts.
I wholeheartedly agree with your argument that the battle lines have been drawn through Christianity, but I don’t think that it split the population into 50/50 proportions.
Rural white Christians greatly outnumber urban Jewish Christians. Most major denominations discriminate against LGBT people. People who are super damn interested in worker rights and housing access aren't disproportionately Christians in my experience. Some are and some aren't.
Yeah, this a smart answer.
> urban Jewish Christians
This doesn't even make any sense. Judaism and Christianity are related but they're separate religions.
> People who are super damn interested in worker rights and housing access aren't disproportionately Christians in my experience.
Nowadays, yeah, though things like food banks and hospitals often still have Christian names, origins, and even (particularly older) members.
And progressive institutions like the YMCA and the Salvation Army were explicitly Christian from the beginning.
But you notice I am mostly naming older things.
Charity and economic justice are different.
Even the Salvation Army and many religious hospitals discriminate against LGBT people.
Well, yeah, Jewish Christians, urban or rural, are pretty rare. Black and Hispanic Christians are more common. And if you look at regressive attitudes on race, it's mostly White Evangelic Protestants where those views are concentrated. White Catholics and White mainline protestants are fairly evenly split, and non-White Christians (what usually has big enough samples to show up in broad surveys are Hispanic Catholics and Black Evangelical Protestants) tip strongly the opposite direction as White Evangelical Protestants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Collar_(film)
Sounds like they are doing short term self preservation well.
A Dem win or a Republican win (wherever) will not improve things much, it'll just flip flop things around for a little bit and the other side will be pissed off until they win again. It's a downward spiral and I'm not seeing anything being done to break the cycle, it's just damage control and short-term improvements.
Reboot the system, change the democratic system, allow for more varied representation, reduce the power of the president (and for fuck's sake moderate their statements, Trump's twitter diarrhea was an embarrassment to everyone), etc.
The article is really interesting, so it's too bad he mars it with this kind of unproven, cruel and vitriolic thesis.
Don't be nasty. Engage in legitimate conversation or be quiet.
It's not 100% valid or exhaustive proof, but at the very least shows that it's a reasonable avenue of exploring rather than shutting it down and calling it "unproven, cruel and vitriolic".
In fact, the Dems' agenda is anti-rich (raise taxes enormously, etc.) and the Republicans are currently controlled by non-college-educated blue-collar people.
This is obvious. If Taibbi has a counter-narrative to the obvious, that's fine, but he needs to present evidence.
This characterization lacks credibility. Let's look at some leaders:
- Lindsey Graham [0]
- Mitch McConnell [1]
- Kevin McCarthy [2]
- Ronna McDaniel [3]
Characterizing them as "non-college-educated blue-collar people" is odd. First, what do you have against working class people? Second, what inference are you trying to make with college education?
> In fact, the Dems' agenda is anti-rich (raise taxes enormously, etc.)
Maybe? Bloomberg famously tried to buy an election and the DNC certainly capitulated. I don't know that I'd call that "anti-rich", I think I might use the word "opportunistic". In a time where we're dealing with a lot of inequality guess what kind of opportunity is rife for exploitation? The kind that makes Dick Costolo think he's not "rich". [4]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindsey_Graham#Early_life
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_McConnell#Early_life_and...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_McCarthy_(California_pol...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronna_McDaniel#Early_life,_edu...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Costolo#Controversy
In a rare inversion, the headline is more correct than the article.
The wealthy (really, the elites: a wealthy small business owner has nothing to do with this) want culture wars because they want the middle and bottom fighting with one another, rather than with the elites. They aren't accepting anything, this is what they want, and they have the means to achieve it.
Small businesses suffer much more from a minimum wage increase, so of course their owners are against it. Meanwhile, large business owners benefit from a minimum wage increase thanks to the ensuing reduction in competition.
I'm not arguing for or against a higher minimum wage here, but saying small businesses owners "rabidly vote against" it simply because it "might affect their lifestyle" is disingenuous. Both types of business owners have clear incentives which have nothing to do with altruism or avarice.
My sister and I, living in Germany, have a very loving relationship, but we absolutely disagree on almost everything political and basically are stuck in our seperate bubbles.
This gave us an interesting observation: 5 years ago it took us about two to three months, to have a fight over something that started to become a hot-topic in the US.
Over time, this has shrunken to about 48 hours. This is not because our bubbles are particularly US centric, more that it has become envogue to simply discuss whatever gets "the other side" going.
In particularly, it is very interesting that "the other side" is aligning ever more so with the US political spectrum, where in the past such a thing was unheard of, atleast here in Germany. I've heard similar stories from Friends in other Non-US Nations, be it in Asia, Africa, aswell as other european nations. Does anyone else have similar stories?
>In fact, opinion polls show that Europeans and Canadians crave executions almost as much as their American counterparts do. It's just that their politicians don't listen to them. In other words, if these countries' political cultures are morally superior to America's, it's because they're less democratic.
"Death in Venice" (http://wayback.archive.org/web/20091009111114/http://tpmlive...), Joshua Micah Marshall, The New Republic, 31 July 2000
That’s how unpopular choices can become policy. It breaks down to people with strong preferences deciding issues rather than the majority deciding issues. Farmers care a lot more about subsidies than most people making farm subsidies an easy choice.
It does not seem so crazy to me, after decades of cultural imperialism from America, that we are mirroring the same patterns of behaviour and fighting the same battles. (Just to be clear, I'm not against imperialism)
If American politics are straining your relationship with your sister and you are not even American, sorry to put it like this but only you two have yourselves to blame. Next time your sister brings the topic up say "yeah right" and move on.
Don't worry, that's why I emphasised the loving relationship part, we really don't take our political opinions into this and wouldn't have emotional fights about them. Family comes before all that.
A cousin in my family has a very valid grievance against business owner uncles that support politicians who don’t want to provide meal breaks or bathroom breaks. This cousin has to work 12 to 14 hour shifts, and eat standing up while working and sneak in bathroom breaks.
That’s not “red/blue” shit.
The world is more complicated than that.
It’s easily verifiable that Democratic states have better laws for wage earners, and have pushed for policies that benefit wage earners. They’re nowhere near perfect, but there’s no reason to pretend Dems and Repubs are the same.
For example, there are many people who in a race where one candidate favors restricting or ending abortion and the other favors reducing restrictions on abortion will choose whichever of the two agrees with their position on abortion, regardless of where the two candidates stand on anything else such as economic issues or foreign policy issues.
AFAIK the idea of immigrants impact being a net negative isn't supported by the studies I have read.
I understand this isn't necessarily in line with the rhetoric du jour.
Immigrants as a whole being a net positive might be clear, but the demographics most commonly under debate are things like "refugees" or "illegal immigrants" or "people seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border". Now, it's possible that those groups are still a (financial) net positive, but I'd be a lot less confident in that than "doctors" or "people with a degree".
This also doesn't really address the issue of "what impact does immigration have on US wage earners". An immigrant doctor or programmer might be clearly beneficial financially and to the country as a whole, but the doctors and programmers they're competing with might not be quite so happy. And while those demographics can "take it" so to speak, unskilled laborers facing the same competition are in a bit tougher of a spot.
I could just as easily turn it around and say, "It's easily verifiable that Republican states have better laws for gun owners." Now do you see the issue? Your above statement matters only if your primary goal is benefiting wage earners. It would be like me saying that Republicans are better at building a border wall. Maybe so, but that's not top priority for Democrats.
More recently, we are seeing the rise of the Zero Issue Voters who don’t care about any particular issue at all. It’s purely a team sport. They love their team, love their candidates and they just want to “own the other side”.
However, if we go by cumulative per capita COVID deaths, then the result would have been 228 Trump, 310 Biden.
Why the big swing? I think it is because the big early outbreaks that swept through retirement and nursing homes before we got better at treating it were in big urban areas. By the time it got big in rural areas, we'd gotten a lot better at dealing with it.
It would be interesting to do a similar calculation, but using say the rates over say the last three months instead of cumulative from the start. If someone wants to do that one, a good place to get the COVID data is here [1]. They have links to download the data for all the graphs as CSV files.
[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/
Or by the time it hit rural areas, we'd also gotten better at testing for it. Perhaps the IFR is the same across both demographics, but better testing means a higher proportion of cases were detected later in the pandemic.
Using cases, it comes out 344 Trump, 194 Biden. Using deaths, it comes out 354 Trump, 184 Biden.
The big difference this time is largely rural states that are getting hit much harder than the rest of the states. North Dakota in this allocation gets 35 cases EV and 46 deaths EV, and South Dakota gets 30 and 36. Montana get 21 and 23.
For comparison to some high population states, California is 4 and 4, New York 4 and 3, Texas 8 and 10, Florida 6 and 10.
Now I'd be curious to see something that looks at various sliding windows on the data and sees how to allocations change, but that would be a bit more elaborate than I want to do.
The most solidly blue state, California, just enshrined a law to screw over gig workers and has among the worst housing crises in the country for average (and below) wage earners. Both parties are not equally bad, but the idea that the Democrats support working people is pretty laughable at this point. Yes, they’re not as awful as Republicans on these issues, but that’s a pretty low bar and still so far below the wage and labor protections in places like Europe as to be laughable.
This has been Democrats tactics with this stuff for decades, “we tried to do something good, but then something happened that we couldn’t do anything about it. Sorry.” It’s intentional fecklessness, while posturing at progress, so they can keep getting checks from the tech industry.
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_22,_App-Based...
No, they were operating in violation of California law for less than a year.
> instead got friendly with them and took piles upon piles of their money.
If that's the case, why didn't they get a carve out in AB5?
> systemic corruption in the Democratic party,
Which overwhelmingly voted for AB5 and was in opposition to Proposition 22. You are alleging corruption without any evidence.
I fail to understand why you see this whole situation as what happened with one law and one proposition and not the culmination of a bunch of corrupt people who have been in bed with each other for some time.
What state law were they violating? None. What difference would not taking money from them have done? None.
> not take jobs with the companies when they left office (several former, high-level Obama people work at Uber, Kamala Harris’ brother-in-law is behind Prop 22’s legal team),
What does that have to do with the state legislators, who created AB5?
> pursued anti-monopoly action against Uber for engaging in market dumping.
Uber was not a monopoly and still isn't a monopoly, as a court already confirmed. https://lawstreetmedia.com/tech/court-rules-that-uber-must-f...
> The list goes on and on.
No item in that list makes any sense. Why did they go through all the trouble to pass AB5 to begin with?
The difference between the two is mostly how they think it best to go about improving things for wage earners, who are the vast majority of their voters in both states. Not saying this makes them equal, but the difference is not what you assert.
https://www.patriotsoftware.com/blog/payroll/states-with-pai...
Similarly, see the list of states (and cities) with half decent unemployment benefits, minimum wage laws, non tipped wages, sick leave, required meal breaks, non compete bans, Medicaid, marijuana legalization, etc.
You will see a trend in which parties’ governance wage earners have these benefits (which are a pittance compared to civilized countries in the first place) and which don’t.
https://hechingerreport.org/why-oklahomas-public-preschools-...
That never got talked about by Trump detractors. Union working class Joe-Schmoe's used to vote democrat, and now solidly do not. There's a reason for that.
Edit: Please note that I never said he did those things, just that they were what he promised. He is completely full of crap on almost everything he says, those promises at the top of the pile. But that is the reason working class Joe love him. He says the things they want to hear.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
The output of Fox is bad enough, but the QAnon nonsense isn't some weird aberration that appeared out of nothing. It's the logical conclusion of a huge social experiment to see how much political benefit you can wring from an industrial lie machine.
And it's working far better than anyone on the left was expecting it to.
The downside is that the US now has a huge voter demographic that is literally disconnected from reality. These are the people who scream that Covid isn't real - because something something George Soros and Bill Gates - while they're in hospital dying of it.
This doesn't end well. You can't push a large percentage of your population into delusion without some very destructive consequences. Even if it does mean you keep your Senate seat.
I would argue that, for the individuals in question, the long-term consequences literally have no meaning, do not matter, and absolutely are not part of the calculus.
If I get power during my life, and secure my legacy as an important, and very wealthy person, my children can buy away any problem that may pop up for them.
Therefore, my actions of destruction today do not matter, as long as I am the one in power.
This is why I believe it is only going to keep getting worse; if the incentive is to stay in power, at all costs, we're in for a wild ride.
I don't think that matches exit polls—lower wage workers still voted primarily democrat, and higher wage workers voted primarily republican: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/...
He said the needed lines, gave them a villain in immigrants (stealing yur jerbs) and then did nothing of the sort for WORKERS. He certainly did go all in on cracking down on immigration, of non-white people, as that matched the narratives of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.
Meanwhile, Oligarchs here are richer than ever, and workers are holding on for dear life. And 72 million plus, voted to keep him in office.
All of my fellow republican business owners were bristling at the idea of Obama’s executive order increasing the minimum salary for exempt workers. This is because they would have had to pay their immigrant workers $44k per year for 60+ hour work weeks who they designated as “managers”, rather than $30k per year under current rules.
Again, I’m not saying Democrats are perfect, and they are far from it. But at least some Democrat states, and politicians are making an effort, whereas I can’t say the same about Repubs. Hence, it’s not just color A vs color B.
See, I can play this game too.
I wonder if that would help. I experience a lot that people expect me to have all kind of weird opinions because they think I'm part of a group which they think holds these opinions. They think I'm part of that group because some of my opinions match with the group.
This is good advice for Americans too. The privacy of the ballot box is a cornerstone of America for a good goddamned reason.
As for innovation, that's relative. Europe, for centuries, was the undisputed worldwide leader in innovation, now that has shifted a bit to the USA and seems to be on its way to shift to China or maybe India in the next few decades.
There's also the problem that Europe can't really focus on organizing itself in a self-sufficient manner because there's still separatists bitching about everything and always screaming for separation instead of forcing governments to address issues, and the impending rise of fascism in east-europe that may or may not become a huge deal for the rest of the 2020es. The USA has this problem as well, but to a far lesser degree.
Good! Russia is an enemy.
Now it is just a conflict between different European powers with varying levels of dysfunctional democracy and corrupt elites.
So what is the basis for hating the Russians now; racism?
And this is based on Putin's foreign policy towards smaller neighbors that it historically controlled.
I would have agreed literally with that statement fifteen years ago. Since then, however, the trends in Russia towards state control over independent press, the politicisation of sports and culture, the blurring of lines not to be crossed (e.g. the annexation of Crimea) and overall clinching of Kremlin power at all costs have made lots of people in Europe worried.
I also wouldn't say "Russia is the enemy", for a number of reasons: first of all, it's not true; secondly, it's not helpful; and thirdly, it obviously breeds distrust and antagonism not only between states but between individual people.
But tensions have obviously been rising, and we are not in the pleasant situation we saw 20 years ago when Russia seemed to be heading towards democracy and increased international cooperation. The current regime in Russia, with its increasingly authoritarian and nationalistic pursuits and somewhat erratic foreign politics, has certainly been feeding those tensions. It would be disingenuous to claim it hasn't.
Concrete example of European reliance on the US.
My take is that cultural boundaries will erode once it becomes clear the prevailing cultural identity throughout Europe is not French, German, West or East, but unemployed millennial onward. As you say, it will be interesting to see how this turns out.1. There's still a narrative here in Germany that the big bad USA / trump is wrong for demanding we spend money on our military when we literally signed a contract agreeing to do just that. At the same time, we're in a bit of a unique position where our defence is also in the best interest of the USA.
4. Yes, technological reliance on the USA when it comes to the internet is amazing and terrifying at the same time. Mind you, there is no lack of European alternatives, but somehow these big companies injected a brand-oriented culture into the web-development world on a scale I'd usually expect to see in regards to clothing, not software.
I'll risk sounding ellitist, but I do believe this only works because of the recent influx of newcomers to the world of web and their mentality of doing only what gets them employed. This is a way bigger problem that I could write many pages about, but in this context the important detail is that these people often choose to learn products rather than methodologies, buzzwords and brands rather than theory and logical principles.
This. America is not actively shoving its politics into our conversations, we're doing that ourselves (I'm from Germany as well, btw.).
Yes, talking about whatever social shenanigans are currently relevant in the USA is fun, but applying those weird ideas to ones own society is a completely different thing.
They choose to cover it.
Not at all. You could say it's a "western" thing, but definitely not an USA thing (although they do tend to claim it for themselves like they invented it).
What's unique to the USA is the weird idea that personal responsibility is somehow a counter-argument to regulation. "Guns don't kill people, so everybody should be free to own them". At the same time, it's mostly the american left that argues against personal responsibility just because it's considered a right-wing belief.
To come to a conclusion: As so often, the USA is wrong, on both sides. The only "right" mentality, in my opinion, is one that acknowledges both personal responsibility and the option for society to step in.
You could easily argue that the "Conservative" party in Canada is equivalent or possibly even to the left of the mainstream Democratic party in the US. So yeah, it gets a bit weird when right-leaning people in Canada then also support Trumpian politics— sometimes it's hard to know if they're there after a considered review of the positions, or if it's just a knee jerk "pick the guy on the right" response.
The 2nd Amendment issue in the United States is something I don't expect a non-American to understand. The rest of the world tends to take the process of enumerating freedoms positively. The law says you have it or don't.
In the U.S. the culture was framed around the preservation of liberty and the enumeration of the boundaries, and limitations on the ability of government and regulation to encroach. The problem with that is it opens a can of worms constitutionally that increasingly have led to the torture of common language in order to attempt to change the meaning of already passed laws instead of passing new ones which seem to be growing increasingly difficult to do.
Further, you have an entire caste of people specifically trained to use language in unintuitive ways.
As far as "Assault rifles" go, most people can't even define what one is. The fact is, an AR-15 that has the "look-and-feel" of a military patterned rifle is functionally equivalent to more "traditional looking" stock rifles like a Mini-14.
They are the same fundamental device. Neither one is more or less capable of killing someone. To anyone with experience with firearms, the "common sense" espoused by gun control people amounts to hysterics. All it is is a bunch of people tryimg to legislate everyone else's rights without demonstrating any understanding of the subject matter at hand other than being a special interest mouthpiece.
But it's because of this misalignment across a variety of issues that it’s difficult to have a straight discussion of cross-border political alignments— you need to have at least some semblance of a picture of how the Canadian left and right differs from the US left and right. (Another key one, for example, is that the Liberals in Canada officially strive to be a centrist party; the "real" Canadian left is the NDP and Green party, neither of which have ever held power at the federal level, though the NDP have come close a few times.)
I read a book a few years ago that made an interesting point about cultural exports like TV shows (the book was written pre-youtube and pre-netflix).
If you're a small country (with your own language, culture and traditions) and America has 30x the population of your country, films and TV shows made for the American market will have 30x the budget.
And yet, when that American show is selling broadcast rights in your country, no matter how far they have to drop the price, making a sale makes more money than not making the sale. So the price of the American show will never be out of reach of your broadcasters.
So when a broadcaster imports an American show instead of producing locally, they get a much flashier, more polished product - and it actually costs them less!
And so, for example, Belgian TV shows more scenes in American courtrooms than Belgian courtrooms. And if American TV shows include American politics, they can't help but shove it onto Belgian TV screens.
There's not a moustache-twirling Uncle Sam deliberately orchestrating this, of course. It's just a natural consequence of copyright, deregulation and free trade.
That’s not to say there’s no such thing as influence or persuasion. And those can be powerful. Ultimately we can all decide how we engage with our family, person to person, regardless of how the USA or anyone in the USA indicates.
It’s incredibly important to be aware of that and act accordingly. If mainstream media from another country can change your relationship with your sister, it seems to me that something is wrong. Negative external influences aren’t about to go away, so it’s on the individual to be cognizant and vigilant about responding appropriately.
As an aside - why? Imperialism seems like something one should obviously oppose. Who wants their lives governed by these forces?
Sure, when Trump says something about renegotiating NAFTA, yeah, cover that. When Trump says something stupid about the Democrats, no, that doesn't deserved prime time coverage in Canada. There are too many important things happening in Canada and the rest of the world for that to be front and center.
But I understand why they do it...ratings. Covering outrageous stories gets ratings. Generating outrage gets people to tune in tomorrow to see what happens next.
Frankly it doesn't deserve coverage here in America, either. If he hadn't been gifted billions of dollars in free advertising from all of these networks that hate watch his Twitter feed I don't think we would even have Trump as POTUS. And now he's never going to go away. And they're going to be hate watching his every step to keep "reporting the news." For the life of me I do not understand why people watch the news in this era.
This is a very dismissive argument to make. It's just like saying Americans have just themselves to blame for this culture ware and should just stop arguing and move on.
Everyone watches US TV shows and movies. Many media outlets all over the world give way too much attention to US news topics, for reasons that are not really clear to me.
This kind of cultural affiliation is not a personal choice, but brought on by news media and the dominance of US entertainment.
> you two have yourselves to blame
That's not how imperialism works.
For example, cultural appropriation (or cultural colonialism) versus blackface shaming. First you get somebody to agree about the problematic nature of cultural colonization. Then, you corner them to agree that blackface being problematic in your culture is an unnatural imposition of the U.S. culture into ours. For best results, you "prime" two people separately with each side of the argument, and throw them together in a party, while you drink beer.
Maybe the latter is what you do after you finished your beer and popcorn, but it wasn't quite clear in that case.
American culture is weird like that. We all consume it via mass media.
I think it’s just an empire thing. During Victorian times everyone was trying to be a little British, or a little French, maybe a little German. Depends who’s closest to you. A long time ago, everyone tried to be a little Roman.
Another way of putting it: News doesn’t tell you what to think, it tells you what to think about.
No offense, I just find this hilarious for some reason. Kids can be so impressionable.
I can't say if it aligns more with the divide in the rest of the world, but saying US politics "spills over" into the rest of the world makes it sound like the US is static. The parties are evolving though: maybe the US is just shifting to toward a more internationally palatable ideological divide.
So I'm not sure I entirely understand what you mean with the divide being more internationally palatable. "Spilling over" also doesn't imply the source is static.
https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/basic-concepts-1kyae
Diplomatic relations with the US matter a lot for the economy and trade - as you've seen in many countries over the last four years.
If you support an authoritarian/populist/homophobic ruler at home (in Poland or Hungary or Brazil or wherever), you also support Trump because he will support your country where a Biden administration will be far less likely to boost Hungary if it costs relationship points with Germany or France...
What BLM protests in Poland? I live there and it's first time I'm hearing of them.
I'm seeing it, too, and it's annoying. I'm American, but a while back I stopped consuming anything but local news in English for the sake of my sanity. Doesn't work anymore. I keep wondering if maybe I just need to learn a new language? Maybe the mind virus hasn't yet spread to the Swahili coast. . .
Many people seem to agree that the rise of social media and its correlated loneliness have pushed people down their rabbithole/echo chamber/whatever people want to call it nowadays. Opposed to the popular narrative, the apparent view from people into the social sciences seem to believe it's a problem with social technologies, rather than it being the inferior North American cultures bleeding out and corrupting our pure untouched global cultures.
I have to agree with the other view that all of us on this planet we are barely evolved hairless tribal monkeys using technology that makes us more anxious instead of secure - and all of these problems are actually pretty predictable from this perspective. It's not Americanification, we just naturally start acting like this when we start using things that make us anxious for clicks.
It's more of a bidirectional soup, I think. A lot of the tumult in the US is due to the breakdown of historic norms and views. That has been sped up by social media, but the actual ideas taking hold on one side are largely Marxist, by way of the Frankfurt school, in nature. Those both originate within your own boarders. What you're experiencing is more an echo bouncing back than a spillover, in my opinion.
I fully support discussing racism in the UK and what we can do to counter it but I don't get why we're discussing it as if it's the exact same situation over here with the same solutions. This might to a symptom of London centric-ness where there is far more ethnic diversity and therefore racism.
Living and working near London I always assumed the increased ethnic diversity and global outlook in the capital led to less racism. I assumed it was the rural homogenous countryside that had more endemic racism. I guess we all misunderstand each other all the time.
From https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9477....
>In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one's own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.
There's plenty of secondary sources reporting on this study if you want to have a look for the varying opinions on it but I thought I'd link the source of it itself.
Whether less trust, less cohesion etc. == more racism is something I'm not in a position to draw a conclusion over, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Moving to another place (Seattle) where (for instance) racism is still a part of the fabric of everyday life but a part of the social discussion was challenging as I was introduced to ideas that felt unintuitive. But empathy helped me grow and understand more than I did, and helped me value and pursue that growth.
It also helped me recognize (for other instances) I had unconsciously internalized other biases. I had rejected my own sexuality (I identify queer, demisexual) and my gender identity (I accept he/him/they/them pronouns equally).
I hope a little empathy goes far for you. It’s not often in a followup like this I see someone willing to reciprocate the empathetic spirit and acknowledge a contrary view kindly. Who knows where it’ll take you, but I hope you’ll consider that your experience may be coloring your ideas and that you may have room for other ideas in that consideration.
And I don't like to pick apart semantics, but the way you use the term "American BLM" is a Straw Man and an Ad Hominem deployed in tandem. It's difficult to have a constructive debate when it's posed in those terms.
When you say "American BLM" as if it were a monolithic entity and attach negative attributes to it, that goes to the heart of the matter.
I don't know how to have a conversation with you from across that chasm.
More flareups, perhaps, especially riots against the Metropolitan police, but more diversity tends to make people less racist as they actually meet people of other ethnicities rather than just repeat what they've heard about people they've never met or seen.
Was the Bristol statue teardown an import? The tactic of just dumping it in the sea was, and the "triggering event" of solidarity protests was, but the underlying question of why Bristol has a statue of a man who committed crimes against humanity had been rumbling on for years and the council had voted down even a recontextualisation plaque.
Scotland has some similar "historical benefits of slavery" questions to look at; Edinburgh's own pro-slavery politician statue (Henry Dundas) is somewhat protected by being at the top of a 150-foot column.
British police officers don't routinely carry guns and therefore couldn't possibly shoot you even if they wanted to. In fact, there is an almost zero probability of anyone in the UK getting shot by the police unless they happen to be committing an act of terrorism or murder at the time.
And of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jean_Charles_de_Me...
This is the disputed evidence at the center of the question; the gun was found several meters away from the scene, on the other side of a fence, "wrapped in a sock". There is a protracted argument about how plausible it is that he threw it there after being shot in the arm.
> they invariably seem to be about people who were in the process of attacking the police when they were shot.
If the police shoot someone, then of course all the official reports will say that they were attacking the police. There have been a number of mass casualty incidents in the UK (Hillsborough, Bloody Sunday) where the police or army reports turned out to be lies.
In a democratic society, you have to influence the public opinion to stay/get in power. Propaganda is free, information costs money.
If the majority of voters are not willing to pay for quality journalism, you have to get them engaged by fueling outrage and projecting fear. It doesn't matter what side, as long as there are sides you can join and identify with.
Combined with the fact that American politics do have an effect on the quality of life in other parts of the world (trade wars and refugee crisis for example) and the working (aka non-capital) class suffers in most western societies, it is very easy to project similar fears and foster divisiveness.
Go back to the start of the Second Gulf war and you had the NYT and other media outlets complicit in the WMD lies.
Neither CNN nor Fox is quality journalism, "quality" being the adjective you left out.
The NYT also issued an apology for their coverage about WMD which was not rigorously fact checked. One of the reporters, Judith Miller, later joined Fox News.
Quality doesn't mean 100% correct all the time, it means significantly better than the alternative.
Comparing the coverage of different sources is part of how you can reach your own conclusions, instead of blindly adopting whatever opinion is broadcasted to you.
And Eric Schmidt is looking at tax havens, ironically reported in the media arm owned by Bloomberg:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-24/wealthy-u...
The reality is the wealthy are entrenched into ALL political parties, even the so called "3rd parties"
the DNC is not a "moral and ethical" bull fighting the good fight against the "pure evil" of republicans which is what your comment seems to be implying
In Taiwan they have social media designed to reward agreement - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/27/taiwan-civic-h... - whether it’s truly successful or not I can’t say but if so, then Facebook and Google could adapt
This is what I have seen professionally.
Edited a bit.
If I recall from my Sociology studies, smaller minority opinions (in this case what you call "right wing ideas") coalesce into smaller silo'd communities BECAUSE their ideas do not resonate with any majority.
In a wide open environment, the minority ideas / culture would not survive, so the participants of the minority views shrink the environment into the bubbles so their ideas don't have as much competition.
How does that square with the commonly accepted observation that "any community without moderation turns into a 4chan cesspool".
It's funny, but it's actually the opposite.
The right wing folks using Facebook become so incensed and outraged at being shown left wing content that they complain all the way to Congress, and the radical right-wing politicians who are slaves to the whims of the populist movement then haul social media executives in front of Congress and literally pepper them with ignorant conspiracy theories.
Facebook has notably had to wine and dine famous radical conservatives for years to prevent negative press, something they never have to do with the left.
Facebook notably even created "Conservative-only" high level level positions to ensure that their entitled right-wing users were placated. They added outright propaganda outlets to their "Fact Checking Initiative" not based on any objective metric, but on the political calculus of "Both-sides-ism -- we'll put your fact checker next to this liar, both sides get a spot at the table".
When you look at the radical right-wing populist movement, the search for Parler and more right-wing safe spaces, and how they use their fact-free media and conspiracy theory-friendly politicians to push truly ridiculous nonsense, I think you can see the full picture of a quickly-radicalizing right wing populist base that becomes incensed and even violent when viewing left-wing or moderate/centrist content.
Remember, this is an America where Fox News is currently being abandoned for being "part of the Left", and there are millions who are abandoning Facebook and Fox News for Parler and OANN, so you have to see this as the radical right actively seeking out and creating ever more ideologically pure safe spaces.
I'm guessing most of them rationalize it in some way, or figure that they will be on a plane to New Zealand before the effects of this is really felt.
It's all middle and upper-middle class Americans who have the luxury and time to spend time on social media (often at work).
So, no, it's not just middle- and upper-middle class Americans on social media.
Your opponent nowadays is a very pragmatic autocratic regime, with it's own issues, but this corona-crisis at least showed they can keep their mandate of heaven. Four more years in this culture war and you won't be able to get consensus on anything.
We don't see protests when the internet goes down; we see them with people are killed by the police.
In Los Angeles (where I live) the people out in the streets in July during the pandemic protesting and burning cop cars were almost all unemployed young people, a veritable cross-section of all ethnicities in the city.
It's not just about risk. Most protestors had little or nothing to lose or risk anything to be out there.
Clearly, the fact that young people don't have dignified jobs and nothing to do but sit on social media all day and watch viral videos about obscene police violence is the fuel to the fire in this situation. I'm not saying police reform doesn't deserve a reckoning in the US, but there's definitely a correlation in internet use and protests.
[citation needed]
And even if that was established, “unemployed” is often an axis of social inequity, too.
Funny that you think the problem is the internet.
If you were a foreign power and wanted to sow discord in a rival country, you had to buy off dozens of journalists and funnel money to media houses and hope that they'd at least be secretive, if not effective.
Now you can just pop open Photoshop, come up with 10 memes in 30 minutes, and use your sock puppet accounts to spread them everywhere - an operation that a single person can handle all by himself.
It's incredibly naive to think that social media is not absolutely flooded with propaganda and counter-propaganda by malicious actors. And it's only going to hasten the collapse in democratically minded countries across the world.
4chan has always been like this. Pre-2007 it was basically the boiler room of the internet. You could find memes before they hit mainstream along with all the shitty ones that didn't make the cut.
I'm sure this natural filtering was disrupted when we brought millions of users online for the first time and convinced them that social media is the internet.
Whose fault is that though?
The Flat Earth conspiracy was easily the best example of this
I'm sure Bezos would be happier if the Trump adminstration wouldn't rig a multi billion dollar defense contract in response to his newspaper. Youtube, would make a lot more advertising dollars if they weren't pressured to demonetize so many videos.
I would also agree that it is important to define what "rich" means since making class distinctions and comparisons does change the emphasis and logic considerably.
That said, the (ultra) wealthy tend to profit either way and prefer chaos because it puts an incredible downward pressure on the classes below them. That downward pressure minimizes the likelihood of future competition. It's a long game that only the (ultra) wealthy can afford to play.
Also, leverage is an important consideration. It's easier for a billionaire to leverage 1 billion dollars compared to 1 billion people leveraging 1 dollar. There would be measurable consequences either way, but that billionaire is in a much different position by having singular command of that wealth.
Is there any quantified evidence that supports this hypothesis? The corporations owned by the ultra wealthy spent a lot more money on backing Hilary and Biden rather than Trump.
I'm comfortable saying there is considerable evidence to back up the argument. However, I suspect any researcher who put forth such a hypothesis might have difficulty finding a grant. Take from that what you will.
The taboo I think is it's not a culture war, it's a class war that sets largely publicly employed people against mostly privately employed ones. For all the rhetoric around race, this is mostly a Girardian schism between white city "burghers" and their country "redneck" complement. The former see their role as global, and the latter see their identity as national.
I don't think even a model with predictive power can do much to mitigate the consequences. It may have festered too long. If you destroy what a culture has built, it will have to contend with you and your organizations to rebuild afterwards.
I'm sure the billionaires are terrified.
I'm focused on culture, which are things like family, community, spirit, code, music, sport, art, fiction, and thought. War also is a part of life, and if it ever came to that in my lifetime, I suppose you could say I will be engaged in politics then too, but that kind of reckoning i think is a last resort.
Edit: you don’t have to agree with the position I just stated but it is a fact that that it is a socialist position and has been since the days of Marx. I’m just pointing out that the author is trying to paint it as a middle position, and it’s not, it’s a left position. In its most extreme form it has a specific name: class reductionism.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.urbandictionary.com/define....
Now I think you can make the case that this is too ideological and not good HN material. That’s fine. But if it is HN material is it not fair to make basic points about the topic of the article itself?
I find the ideas of fixing healthcare, reinvesting in our economy and infrastructure, and shoring up our social programs highly convincing. And I'm pretty sure the polls show those ideas resonate across the political spectrum. And I only hear those ideas coming from one party.
After the latest fixes, insurance for a self employed family of four is about $25k a year after insurance and deductibles.
Over less than 3 months, a friend of mine's monthly premium went up an order of magnitude - with reduced benefits - to the point where it made no sense to do anything but drop it completely and start seeing a doctor who takes cash.
There was nothing wrong with the concept other than the failure to include single payer. Democrats under Obama managed to come up with something less good which still was a net gain, but it was destroyed by Republicans. Just wanted to make that clear.
I suspect that is because you view the "solutions" from one party as the sole legitimate "solutions" to those problems.
I.e to you the solution to the problem of expensive and inaccessible healthcare is likely to be Government Single Payer plan, and any political party or person that has a different, market solution to that problem has been deemed by you to "not really wanting to fix the problem" or some other worse kind of evil
There were some small things like price transparency and attempts at regulating drug pricing, but nothing on the scale of a large-enough transformation that is necessary.
But how do you get neighbors to shake hands when one believes that gay marriage is truly evil and another is gay?
Both sides in America constantly fight bitterly over identity politics and it seems like many of those identities are irreconcilable with one another.
I'm non binary and use singular they, and I've had some absolutely incredible vitriol directed at me for nothing beyond, "hi, I'm name. I use they/them pronouns. Nice to meet you!" How do we get past the part where people decide it's ok to tell me I should be sterilized or committed, and get to the point where we start turning towards the capital class together?
I can work with people whose personal views I consider morally bankrupt. If they start threatening others because of who those others are, that's a problem. And it's an uncomfortably common problem.
People have asked about my politics, and I'll often say simply, "I'm a democratic socialist." and I've had people tell me I'm "a cursed person who has drunk from the trough of the demons" and that I'm "here to destroy freedom and the constitution."
Those aren't exaggerations, those are real quotes in response to a short introduction. I'd be thrilled to get to the point where I could work alongside those types of people.
It's why I find it so interesting (and concerning) how people respond to, say, college, or urban areas, coming from rural and more homogeneous ones. Some people find themselves realizing that those who are different than them...aren't so different, and learn to accept and respect others despite those differences. Others resist, seeking out others like themselves, building a bubble to operate in, avoiding the 'other', and become even less tolerant than they were before (while also demonizing the 'liberal brainwashing' happening in colleges and big cities and the like, that they saw happening around them).
I keep the initial focus on them and I first introduce myself as a blank canvas with a known role between us. "Hi, what's your name, my name is yourapostasy your new neighbor/who waves at you on your 0500h run every day/who the mailman mixes up our mail all the time/etc." Then elicit details of "their story". People pretty universally love talking about themselves. Somewhere in that tapestry are common threads, and I build upon that. I've fortunately never met someone through this approach so odiously unrelatable we could not bond over something they care about.
After that, it is a matter of time and resources put in the relationship, as long as you maintain a Nash Equilibrium. The more time and resources, the more differences you both will generally tolerate; not a linear relationship, but everyone I've met has a "clearing price" to voluntarily associate with another.
I don't think in terms of "take back power and wealth from the rich", because there are too many layers between us for me to effectively address, and it doesn't scratch my agile itch. I instead have worked towards increasing both mutual assistance capabilities and self-sufficiency at the same time, and reducing my and others' reliance upon capital in an organic fashion. My position is that the capitalists (the 0.1%) have for all intents and purposes "won". They've "taken their 'ball' and gone home". The more I can decouple from capital "churn", the more I can save of myself and those I care for. There are some extremely broken systems (real estate, legal, political, medical, etc.) in the US that take unreasonable levels of capital to access for ordinary income citizens.
Autarky isn't my goal; it's long-term consistent survival at an "acceptable" standard of living without requiring a poll tax of capital out of reach of ordinary income households. Sometimes that takes some involvement with capital, but preferably a more frugal method is used when feasible, trading off convenience/time/etc. that I have more readily available. I don't hate capital nor capitalists. I'm just (in the scheme of a US reality where booking a billion in annual individual income doesn't even place in the top 10 income list) capital poor and working around it as best I can. Let it be noted in this discussion however, that there are many US citizens who would give their left nut to be in my "poor" position; many of us by virtue of being on HN in a well-compensated industry (at this time, I never take good times for granted) are in a similar position. But if you're talking about grand "take them down" terms, I've found I've achieved far more stability, sooner, by pursuing the above path than getting all pissed about a system I have neither the capital nor power to help change at this time.
Are there any right leaning bloggers/talk show hosts that you would recommend?
One of the few major pieces of legislation that Republicans actually passed while in power over the past four years were tax reforms which were very beneficial to the wealthy. And the Trump administration changed several of the EPA's environmental policies to be more business friendly (and less friendly to the environment).
Democrats, on the other hand, are in broadly favor of increasing taxes on the wealthy. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in particular had some policy proposals that would have taxed the wealthy quite significantly. Democrats in recent history also passed the Dodd-Frank act, which imposed a number of regulations on the finance industry (and was partially repealed by Republicans in 2018).
These issues are front and center in the culture war. Remember Joe the Plumber and "Drill baby, drill" in 2008? Or Trump's vows to save the coal industry in 2016? And how many times did Pence bring up the subject of fracking in the 2020 vice presidential debate?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness
We're most likely heading towards a society of private laws, but the path to that is likely to be very painful.