POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[Montmorency]

This is, ultimately, the factor that most empowers institutional racism. Few of those whose actions empower the system that is are racist in inclination or thought. They support the police and the concept of law and order (while often blind to the cultural mores of those police and the economic holdovers of overt racism that place so many of our 'minority' persons in positions where police confrontation is more frequent), they want their kids to go to good schools (while not really thinking about the fact that they have grouped themselves into enclaves of people who look and sound the same because of the psychological comfort thereof), etc.

The Aryan Nation types are very few and have publicly labeled themselves -- thanks for that as it makes them easier to keep track of -- and the vast bulk of those who support institutional racism (which includes, by the way, any number of those persons who are targeted by this implicit system of restraints and control) are not at all racist themselves. They are simply content with the system as it is and do not question that the system itself has enacted itself in a manner that is functionally racist.

We can spot the "Bull" Connors types readily enough, it is the vast mass of kindly people hidden by 'Foucault's mirror' who do not accurately see their own reflections in the images before their eyes.

The complication is that almost no one self-identifies as "bad guy" or "racist." It takes a real worm-brained reactionary of the sort you can only find on the Internet - and who might be half-troll anyway - to outright declare to your face that "racialist" eugenics has been unjustly repressed by effete liberal bleeding-hearts.

Yet millions have much the same belief system and are willing to put those beliefs in practice with policies that obviously damage the welfare of targeted groups. They just think it's the right thing to do.

The pattern of available facts still makes them bad and leaves them as an obstacle to be stopped and overcome. This is pragmatism.

I think we are in agreement. It is in a sense that notion from Socrates that people do not willingly go to the bad, but it is our ignorance that leads our decisions to the bad and it is ignorance that leads people to defend such bad actions.
It is telling that Q anon has sucked so many in under the guise of saving children, that to follow Trump is to save America, that to own the libs is to save their livelihood. They genuinely believe they are on the right side of history.

An alternative theory is that issues like pedophilia and abortion reaching salience on the Right are really about moral laundering*, an eminence front to excuse themselves for adopting values and policies that contribute to actual harm for and against children (among others). I've even seen the argument that the whole anti-abortion zeitgeist arising among conservatives in the 1970s was camouflage for their increasing anti-welfarism and barely-submerged segregationism. Children and fetuses, particularly as pure abstractions, are a convenient - what's the opposite of a scapegoat? - to pin this game around in the guise of single-issue voting because there are no real commitments to make or consequences to yourself in claiming to care about children. There's nothing to do or sacrifice, unlike with advocating a particular vision of political economy, or demanding that the government disadvantage women in the labor market or whatever. ('We can't be wrong, we can't be bad, we think it's important to protect children after all!')

I wonder if the whole Satanic Panic of the 80s ties into this as well...

*Virtue signalling, avant la lettre

You never saw the implicit political tones of the economic systems modeled in the game? Or the authoritarian bent of the whole thing? How can that not be inherently political?

Not sure if being ironic, but this isn't wrong. The philosophical implications of character action and interdynamics in videogames, such as in the common unlimited violence across genres, was possibly the first philosophical question surrounding gaming that reached my consciousness way back when.

S'cool though.

The entire premise of the game is to role-play as an authoritarian leader in a given time period. In hindsight, I am surprised at the relatively even split. I have hundreds of hours in Stellaris and I have never played as anything but egalitarian/xenophile.

I read a media criticism essay once that pointed out that in RPGs players don't often make choices that are philosophically dissonant for themselves. I wonder what that says about the 'kill everything that can be killed' demographic.