Biden Thread

[Montmorency]

Some of the edgier Internet Right speculate that, because the advance child tax credit is so popular among conservative voters, the Republican Party elite will finally embrace Strasserite redistribution and win permanent majorities.

Let's see how that one comes through.

@ Monty

It just gets dirtier and dirtier:

There isn't any news there in terms of the filibuster. We still can't conflate the bare fact that donors influence the decisions of politicians, and vice versa, with resistance to overcoming the filibuster; all national Democratic politicians benefit from large donors, yet the vast majority support filibuster reform.

Because the equation fundamentally remains that the most bought-and-paid-for Democratic senator can contract out their liberum veto to their "handlers" in order to pass legislation redounding to their party's and their own political benefit, while also watering it down to protect - even lard it to reward - whatever donors or constituencies they might need to. Whereas if no law, then no nothing.

E.g. the lobbyist-written U.S. Innovation and Competition Act enacted a month ago.

Thus Sen. Tester supports filibuster reform, Coons has gone from one of its most active defenders to quiet dissatisfaction, Hassan has voiced support for AFAIK everything but abolition, and all first-termers - including Kelly - are reformist on the question. In my opinion individual, non-fungible, characteristics are most relevant in the case of Sinema and Manchin.

Seems like petty cash, right? But:

Not every politician can go big league, but state and local pols are probably the likeliest to sell out on federal felonies over a few grand.

Abstractions help sever links between a subject and clichés, and entrenched views associated with it. If something seems off, the problem is not the abstraction

Maybe it lacks political representation now, maybe it doesn't; but such changes might not require more than an election or two to change drastically, so that is no guarantee going forward.

See, disregarding the logical flaws in your polemic by escaping to the level of meta-abstraction - defending the mere availability of abstraction - does not increase the credibility of your initial attempt here, which was to insinuate jeopardy in the public discourse on subjects like race and gender.

Notwithstanding one's opinion of the Vietnam War, someone urging that American forces ought to be recalled to the mainland in order to stave off Native American genocide of the White majority, in connection with the emergence of the American Indian Movement, could be dismissed without further thought.

You should expect to do a lot of heavy lifting to explain why unsubstantiated potentials from an unsubstantiated harm (that is more often part of an affirmative good) have some kind of precedence over an ongoing national crisis.

At some time during the last 5-20 years, some of the terminology used here might not have been used by any democrat of much significance, but fringe views can make their way to the mainstream; and they have here, in some sense (the candidate's team seemed even more fringe-inspired). I do not register that the relevant fringe groups where such terminology originated faces that much opposition from the 'progressive' side; frequently, it seems that the opposite is the case.

Currently, the path of the Democratic party seems to be one of transformation, not steady state; and some fringes seem to be heading for the mainstream.

Is your point that this terminology or the concepts they denote are bad and dangerous, that it is as bad as you think toppling a statue is, that the two are somehow related, or that they represent a path of objectionable extremism for the Democratic Party? You will, as before, have a very hard time actually supporting any of the above with more than appeal to infinite possible worlds.

But as a matter of fact "trigger" and "survivor" have been mainstream terminology since the Obama era. Hope that doesn't undo you.

For my part, I'll explain why I think fascism is bad. Fascism is bad because it is a violent and wasteful system of governance that is proven to be unstable and destructive to human (and nonhuman) life and potential; the belief and practice that a class of humans are entitled to subjugate and parasitize others has some of the worst outcomes in human history.

Now your turn on why talking about sex crime and nonstandard genders and orientations manifests danger from the left.

To tar such a heterogeneous group of people, which is not well-defined anyway, and whose definition likely varies from country to country and over time, makes no sense, and is a breach of debate etiquette.

Here's the problem again. You're wounded when I recount the specific actions of what is certainly a well-defined group of people, primarily in the context of modern American politics no less, yet you see no breach of etiquette in implicitly condemning the broad left on the basis of almost literally nothing but vague discomfort.

I'm going to demand a higher performance of etiquette from you.

One observation that might not seem very important, but that ultimately is telling something, is that in many (most?) cases, they really did have the might to tear down the statues. If anyone did come out to defend the statues in these cases, they weren't strong enough. So the radical 'left' has space to operate successfully in the public space through means of force. An important question is if such groups will seek to expand this space, and risk more open confrontation with the radical 'right', who might not adequately care about protecting statues to prevent many of them being toppled, but who presumably will mobilize more strongly for other things. I make no predictions here.

In principle those statues can easily be stood back up unless damaged, in which case it's a matter of bureaucratic will to pay to re-accession them; you'll note a few dozen black-clad rioters lack the force to prevent the government from accomplishing that. As it happens, local governments in 2020 tended to be unwilling to generate confrontations over statues in the context of national protests and generally-similar statues being removed bureaucratically in the low-hundreds. Vigilante iconoclasm is nothing new or escalatory in the living memory of America, but the massive protest movement directed willing bodies to the act while also affording them political cover they would not normally have had, and which they no longer have. This make good sense when you further include the international context of 'it always works that way!'

The real space of confrontation you probably ponder would most naturally expand in the circumstance of a Republican seizure of the national state in the near-future. You would expect to see organized, including formal political, resistance to federal authority in blue states, as well as pogroms in red states. This is at least a realistic scenario. Take care to note that such a scenario does not hold out some endogenous change of behavior over time, where politically-moderate insurance lawyers wake up one morning determined to lob Molotovs in the name of Wokeness, but a mass direct response to near-unprecedented escalation of civil conflict by those in power.

Notably, if one opposes the left taking "more open confrontation" under such circumstances, one would be explicitly pro-fascist.

If you are going to use physical force, you better be stronger in terms of arms and manpower. The radical 'left' in the US is not in this position currently, so it would likely end poorly. But this state does not have to last forever, particularly in a country that is going through rapid ethnically demographic changes as well as changing politically landscape, and changing political attitudes.

These groups are not there today, but one day they might be strong enough and radicalized enough that they could want to take on the radical 'right' in the streets. Statues are one interesting point to watch then, since it represents low-level radicalization: no one have to get hurt, but it is still a case of might makes right.

It sure as hell shouldn't last forever. Pretty wild to tut at someone twitching their fist when they have a gun in their face. But as it turns out (see last year's threads) we even have real-world case of extremism on both sides that signals the mismatch in perspective: last year's Trump-enabled public execution of killer anti-fascist Michael Reinoehl by a federal death squad, a downright intensification of the Horst Wessel archetype. But whatever, to channel the relevant rhetoric: maybe the Gay Agenda will drive another self-hating cuck to pick up a gun sometime soon.

But, again being realistic, militant far-left organizations would only proliferate in the event of the ongoing collapse of the US as a polity and the total failure of the institutional Democratic Party to offer meaningful guidance and organizing; otherwise the grassroots energy gets directed through elite-managed channels. In this scenario these fearsome lefties are quickly overwhelmed by Republican-aligned militias and police, and the prospects for resistance fall back onto the electorate (such as through a general strike).

Designating left-wing radicalization a point of anticipation is dubious when we've had generations of right-wing radicalization outpacing it by an order of magnitude. We already know what's going on here.

So in summary, statue violence has an unclear connection to cultural leftism in general or the development of the Democratic Party, the indicia of radicalization are responsive to conditions outside the activities of the Left, and it is uninformative to analyze current events without actually setting them in current events.

What happened with Damore was an example of where 'liberals', many of whom traditionally might have been happy to use science as a weapon against conservative religious individuals, turn down science when it contradicts notions of equality.

That is of course not what happened.

"If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions.”

Considering that men women are based on lineages where the two groups have had very distinct physiologies for anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of years depending on the perspective, differences would be expected. In other words, suddenly "Team Science" is batting for "Team Intelligent Design".

I am not always going to be present to call you out when you engage in this dishonest tactic of motte-and-bailey abstractions. The issue at hand in the Damore controversy was never whether there are non-zero differences between men and women as groups.

I say traditionally above, as there appears to have been a bit of a turn towards a more pro-religious stance among 'progressives' (or that such views are more commonly expressed now). Particularly in defence of Islam, but more liberal versions of Christianity would presumably also pass without too much issue.

Liberals and leftists the world over continue to get less religious by the year, but freedom of religion has always been a liberal plank. For example, most Evangelical Christians are scum, but that's not an excuse to discriminate on a group level. Evangelical Christianity was originally the birthplace of progressivism in the United States, so maybe that's what you're thinking of, but those days are very long gone.

You may wish to discuss the topics that grab the headlines of mainstream media and how they are usually presented there, but those perspectives are, evidently, already well-exposed and on peoples' radar; and debating them is often more akin to kicking up an open door. Unless you are actually facing any of the (typically wacky and probably not very intelligent) radicalized individuals that these articles concern. Interests aside, focusing on these individuals is also simply inadequate to understand a society and predict where it is headed.

So just say what you mean, and make sure it's interesting.

My sense is that you disagree with the cultural Left on values, perceive them as more of a threat to your worldview than fascism, and by that pretext launder some of your own unpopular views on race and gender and civics by inflating criticism of an unpopular impulse among part of the cultural Left. Hence why you don't rely on the old standby of an imminent Communist uprising coming to ban private property, because that particular fish doesn't get at which of your oxes is presently being gored.

For instance, peep this state history curriculum about to be enacted in Texas, with regard to the struck-out clauses. I doubt you would think to have any substantive objection to the authors' agenda.
https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87...f/SB00003I.pdf

It would be something else entirely if you sought out perspectives on how societies should go about memorializing figures as such in public spaces over time. There's at least scope for a grounded discussion; I've read multiple non-worthless thinkpieces in that vein. Or if you just wished to register displeasure at vigilante iconoclasm, I wouldn't pressure it.

But spare me the 'ZOMGbbq teh statues SJdubz gone mad' crap that you clearly can't justify up front.