Oh well yes then I agree with you completely, unless said billionaires are all philosopher kings and don't use their capital to do anything except employ mathematicians and let them decide through group deliberations the best way to allocate the resources to maximally benefit society while staying fiscally sound.

But then we could just call it a government.

Conversely, does this mean that the existence of billionaires in a society is a symptom of mini-authoritarian "governments" emerging from within? Is the limit of this a pretty sight??

(Though I suppose we could all just propogate the myth that the rich are all enlightened folk, and pretend it's more like what I said in the first paragraph.)

Eversor, I see where you're coming from, but I don't fully agree.

I personally think it's very important that this claim that the media has invented the word "ban" is proved wrong. I do agree that this shouldn't be done like a segment from a comedy show, where Spicer's being ridiculed. (LOL, liar! SCORE!)

It is one of the most important aspects of the role of the press in a democracy: fact checking, and confronting people when claims are false. This should not suddenly stop when it concerns the press itself. Sure, it shouldn't be done in a petty, immature way, but it is important that people know the truth.

I have my reasons; the problem with populists is that it's common tactic to undermine the press: accuse the press of constantly attacking you, then do something to provoke them, and reap the rewards as you prove yourself right. Here in The Netherlands, islamophobe Wilders has been doing the same thing for the past 15 years or so, and it's working. The press has become more and more cautious as a result, and this is exactly what they're hoping to achieve. They want to shut down the debate. They don't even want to enter the debate. They just want to spout their one-liners on Twitter and not get any difficult questions fired at them. It's being combined with a general refusal to address the press whatsoever. Wilders simply announced he won't do any interviews, ever, claiming -all- the media are too leftist. He's been repeating it like a mantra, and if you do that long enough, everyone will start to parrot you. It's playing on and abusing the general distrust people have in the media. Make the media the bad guys, play the victim card. Say they are the "elite" who want to silence you, the voice of the people, the martyr. People will gobble it up in droves. Everybody loves a rebel. Everybody loves the guy who's going against "the establishment". There's a huge debate going on about this in the Dutch press. Media are really struggling to deal with populist tactics, and that includes not just Wilders, but also Trump.

And it's not just the press. When Wilders went as far as breaking the law with hateful speach, he immediately went "I will be convicted because the judiciary is all elite and leftist". What's next, the voting system of course. Saying "If I don't win, it's proof the elections are rigged!" Sound familiar?

These are the biggest enemies of the populists: the press and the judiciary, and the populists will do anything they can to silence them. Just look at Erdogan. What happened after the coup in Turkey? News organizations everywhere got shut down for allegedly siding with the traitors. Half the judges in the country lost their positions and were taken into custody.

Already Trump is showing nothing but contempt for the judiciary: "... this so called judge ..."

It's a strategy, and the only way to deal with it is for the press to keep doing their work. Inform the people. You don't deal with a bully by giving in. It'll only get worse.

If the press is being accused of misinforming the people, and they ignore the claim because it is "too petty to address", nobody is going to believe it isn't true.

Show the lies, just don't be childish about it. Do your job and above all, show professionalism.

JoS, I think we might agree on more than you think. What you're describing about Geert Wilders does seem quite familiar. It seems like it's where we're headed. I agree that the press must keep fighting, and must be persistent and vigorously correct members of the Trump administration when they say something that is patently false. I think there's a real danger that the lying and the deceit will be so constant and so regular and so unceasing, that eventually the press won't even want to scrutinize it anymore. It'll seem pointless. We can't let that happen. In fact, I think that, to an extent, Trump is actually right. He *is* at war with the media, but not because of the media just doesn't like him, but because he's trying to instigate a war with the media. The media must respond.

What I disagree with is actually the tactics that much of the media has used, not the strategy. As a direct result of being a free press, the media isn't one organized entity. There's no centralized command that can develop a coherent way of addressing this problem, and then order all the world's journalists to carry it out. The diversity is part of what makes the press free. But it also poses a difficulty, in terms of forming a coherent strategy. It only takes one reporter for the Time's to make some mistake about the bust of MLK being removed from the Oval Office for the administration to claim that "the media" is biased against it.

My point, really, is just that the tactics that CNN uses and that numerous other media companies use aren't working. They have the effective of playing into the hands of Trump. The media has to find some way to talk past Trump, and not allow all of his controversial tweets and actions create an explosion of controversy, which is the exact thing that they're intended to do.

I do think, though, that keeping traditional news reporting separate from comedic skewering is of the utmost importance. And furthermore, satire is actually quite important. Comedy is able to reach at truths that argument and journalism cannot. SNL has been *killing* it lately. Some of those skits capture the crazy carnival-like nature of the Trump administration and the terrifying darkness that pulsates beneath it and is waiting to explode and show itself for what it really is. Trump's use of humor and irony is itself strange and confusing. Its not clear what its effect is.

But just as Donald Trump has confused real life politics with reality television, it seems especially important that we not confuse journalistic criticism with humor and pretend/comedic news shows.

Oh god, there's so much to talk about here. If I had time I could write a book on this.

Here's the "yes" side: Billionaires are rising to replace the government as it fails. Some reports claim that the global rise of austerity, deregulation, and selective enforcement, have spurred demand for well-connected professional managers who are able to navigate the ad-hoc political structures that arise as the bureaucracy is torn apart. There's good evidence for this. Income and wealth inequality are extremely bad, like Belle Epoque bad, but the labor share of income is still unusually high. The TL;DR version is that most new fortunes aren't being created in traditional ways, but instead through labor (executive) compensation. Given that studies have reported very little correlation among executive action, executive compensation, and goods market outcomes, we must conclude that top executives are providing value in other ways. There are many visible examples of this, but a good one off the top of my head is Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, current Alphabet chairman, and well-connected Democrat, who "somehow" dodged US antitrust prosecution for the past 8 years, despite clear violations of those laws, as has been noted by other legal jurisdictions. In terms of potential fines, Schmidt was well worth the billions of dollars he was paid to work as CEO. The demand for super-managers/billionaires will increase as western governments decay into populism, and no longer provide a consistent and accessible means of doing business.

Here's the "no" side: Billionaires are a hilarious accident. It's that massive push, by government and financial services, to get everybody to buy stocks. All of that stuff like tax-deferred and tax-free savings funds (e.g. Roth IRAs and 401ks for the Americans here), employee stock purchase plans, preferential tax treatment for equity compensation, preferential tax treatment for capital gains. This is all ridiculous even outside of the context of this discussion. 40 or 50 years ago, stock speculation was an absurd idea. You'd only ever buy stock if you knew the company and the industry well. But now, stock speculation isn't only routine, but it's practically government mandated. These policies have led us to dumping trillions of dollars into the stock market every year, chasing ownership of a pool of capital that quite frankly hasn't grown at all in over 30 years. Besides being a total ****show for the average stock speculator nee employee, it's wildly inflated the value of company stock, turning the modestly wealthy business owners of the 1980s into the cartoonishly rich hyperbillionaires of the 2010s. There's just not enough stuff for all of these billionaires to cash out, try as they might, so these billionaires are going to literally die off as western governments decay into populism, and no longer prop up a financial scheme that is wildly unpopular among the general public.

Eversor: Yes, it seems we agree. The press needs to address the false information, but preferably as professionally as possible. And yes, satire is really important. We just shouldn't mix the two of them.

Sorry for getting a little carried away, I tend to be quite long-winded. It's just that I'm pretty passionate about the subject.

It's frustrating to see so many people around me approving of Wilders' low tactics, just because "he's cool". Just yesterday he tweeted a photoshopped picture of a rival politician participating in a Hamas demonstration. That's right, a politician spreading fake news. Which is not only distasteful, it is inciting hate. The guy who got photoshopped was already receiving death threats from Wilders supporters.

People don't care. They just laugh.

My Turkish colleague was the worst. I asked her "But what do you think of all these tens of thousands of teachers, judges and journalists being arrested? Aren't you afraid Erdogan will establish a dictatorship?"

Her literal response was: "I don't even want to know. I really, really don't care. He's my hero. He's done so many, many good things for the people. He can do whatever he wants."

Yeah, I'm sure she doesn't care until it affects one of her loved ones back in Turkey.

Also, I'll throw this in here, too, because I'm angry about it.

SJW ****fits about race and privilege are nothing more than an expansion of southern/midwestern race politics into the academic and professional spheres. It exists only so that dubiously progressive parties, like the Democrats, can distract the public by pretending to tackle important (invented) progressive social issues, while deliberately neglecting the only social issue that a government can do anything about, economic inequality.

It's 100% certain that Donald Trump, the Idiot King, is going to do more to advance the progressive agenda than the Democrats ever would, only because he will accidentally poison the global economy and destroy fortunes and executive jobs in the process.

Mark Blyth has a great line about how the center-left told the story that racial animus was what primarily fueled Trump support in order to cover their own asses. It drew attention away and exonerated the centre-left from the role that it played in producing the very economic policies that Trump supporters are so angry about. It seems right on, as analysis: all of this rhetoric about white privilege, or heteronormativity, or the patriarchy -- which convinces racial minorities that everyday whites are responsible for their problems, or that the men as a class within society are responsible for the problems that women face, and so on -- almost comically obscure the fact that the real balance of power is heavily weighted towards a very small group of people who have a power in society that is difficult to appreciate. And it divides the American public against itself. The power that the rich have now isn't the fuzzy, unquantifiable, deeply ambiguous power of "unconscious bias". It's the power to make the government and the economy serve their interests.

To put it in an even more conspiratorial way, it seems that the Marxist analysis of ideology here is at play. It seems that the dominant liberal ideology of the day is designed to make the American public serve the interests of the ruling economic class; 'they're doing it, and they don't even realize that they're doing it'.

Exactly. Like I said before: The 1% won the elections with the help of the common people.

They used to. It's hard to interpret Trump's election as anything but a crushing defeat for the 0.01%. Even if Trump's lying about trade deliberalization, it shows pretty conclusively that the global working class has finally figured out exactly who is ****ing them.

That's scary stuff. I hope and hope and hope that Americans will continue to protest until the day Donald Trump is no longer our president. Americans demonstrating that they're not apathetic and that they care about what happens to our country feels like the one thing that can save us from falling irreversibly into authoritarianism.

Why would this government be responsive to protest?

The government won't be responsive to protest. But a goal of 21st century authoritarianism is to force the people into consent through apathy, by convincing them that nothing that they do matters, that they should keep their noses out of politics if they want to stay out from trouble. As long as we are outraged when the government brazenly oversteps its bounds, there is a possibility of not descending into authoritarianism in the same way that countries like Turkey and Russia have.

And Richard Rorty recognized this much at least as long back as 20 years ago:



Furthermore, in his 1998 book (the topic of that interview), he predicted that the "left", by cutting themselves off from the unions which had certainly been a big part of the civil rights movement, progressives would find shelter at universities, but would eventually in fact wipe out any gains they could possibly make by adopting identity politics as their sole and unifying cause.

Rorty not only saw this "SJW"ism as self-defeating in the long run, but also directly predicted the rise of a 'strong man' which working class whites would rally behind in response:



TL;DR: Some philosopher guy in academia from 20 years ago seems to agree with you.

Turkey had some epic protests. Didn't change anything.

I get what you're trying to say. It's a nice idea. It just won't work. The power of an authoritarian regime doesn't come from public will, it comes from the power to inflict incredible violence upon that public. The US police forces have been infiltrated by nazis (1), the police unions endorsed Trump before the Republican primaries were even over, and I don't even need to say anything about the FBI. The reality is, if a Dictator Trump wanted, he could have protesters shot. And that's assuming people even made it to the protests, instead of getting dragged out of their beds the night before, as happened in Toronto (2).

If things got bad, like Nazi Germany bad, merely expressing your discontent would not be enough.

Well thanks for writing that, it certainly gives me a lot to think about.

I've been thinking lately that Bannon's choice to start out right off the bat with the "Muslim ban" was a cynical ploy to solidify progressives in their identity politic mold. Since Trump seems somewhat unlikely to be able to deliver on all the economic promises he made to the conservative base, I think that Bannon & co. are trying to create enough outrage from the left so that they are disoriented and distracted long enough to prevent them from adopting an actual leftist economic platform that could possibly compete with, critique, or take the place of a failed Trump economic plan. Getting the left to focus on human rights rather than economic issues is also fairly safe, since this display of protest and outrage is very unlikely to enlist conservatives against Trump (and is far more likely to energize them, as videos of violent protests circulate the media).

And I would imagine that this strategy would be highly deliberate.

Also, conservative talk show hosts like Mark Levin are openly opposing the possibility of Trump himself implementing a protectionist economic plan (perhaps because they know it would be a disaster and are worried he might be out of control). But by the same token, they seem to be ready to attack any kind of "leftist" economic agenda in principle (although I am sure they will turn a blind eye when it seems to come out favorably), so that if the left promises to do a better job of it than Trump (after all, they are the left, right?), then the conservatives will still have been well primed in despising leftist economics anyway.

The question is, if the economy crashes under Trump, who will they blame? Obama? UC Berkeley?

(Oh that's, right, I remember who they like to blame.)

Oh man, there's been so many interesting posts.



I never much liked Plato's ideal government in the Republic, as much as I like his arguments against democracy. So no philosopher kings for me.



I think the converse of this statement is true: the existence of billionaires in society is a cause of mini-authoritarian "governments" emerging from within. They have a name: corporations.

The largest private employer in the United States is Walmart. Guess which corporation has also a long history violating labor laws. Consistently unpunished or slapped-on-the-wrist for everything they have done. That's well over a million people in the United States, who have no choice but to work for this company, because what other jobs exist lol. These people who, make no mistake, are governed by Walmart. Your employer governs you.



The rich aren't enlightened, they are pathological. Saving money to the degree they do is a pathology.



You're right, there is absolutely no reason to not mercilessly mock Trump. I also take the assertion that comedy T.V. is somehow not good to be a bit silly, Jon Oliver's show has pretty consistent good information on important political topics. Of course it's not deep, but it's well-researched and presents information clearly.



I honestly believe in a half-conspiracy that the push to get middle-class Americans involved in the stock market is so they won't speak against things like what happened in 2008. If you get the middle class to hold stocks, they won't question or push against the scary bankers say is necessary. It seems to have failed, but I believe that was partly the intent.



Progressivism is inherently an antagonism. Progressives want to progress forward, which implies there are things we are progressing from. Progressing from sexism, progressing from racism, progressing from social inequality. As we have a fairly large amount of young people who are unemployed/able, and most people in the U.S. have internet access, you have large collections of socially isolated people getting mildly politically radicalized in their internet safe spaces, i.e. 4chan for right-wing racists and Tumblr for progressives.

So when you get people who are socially isolated, who are progressives, i.e. crave an antagonism with society, then you do get a large amount of imagined antagonisms. It mostly expresses itself in people saying really stupid **** online, but sometimes it leads to people getting others fired from their jobs for mild misogyny. Really though, none of this actually does anything. It's alot of ennui and sexual frustration being used in extremely unproductive ways.

As for privilege, I've been talking from time to time with people of color about topics like privilege, race, and so on. For the most part I've learned, you can exhaust the topic pretty quickly. As long as you aren't a complete ******* about it, listen for a while, the topic goes smoothly and it's over, and there's literally nothing else to say about it. Of course, people on the right react to it allergically, which helps continue that antagonism. Americans literally just sit around yelling at each other on Twitter for no reason at all. Which, of course, keeps people from, like, getting mad that Ted Cruz exists.


There is a non-negligible amount of people in the Trump camp who are only there because they very explicitly harbor racist and sexist views. Also the median income of Trump supporters is $70,000. While the trend shows that the poorest swept further right this election than past elections, the actual data suggests most Trump voers are doing O.K. financially. That, of course, doesn't mean they don't have legitimate complaints, but I doubt they have any sophisticated view of global liberal trade other than what they learned from Alex Jones or Fox News.


I don't really know of anyone who says "white people are to blame for all of the problems of colored peoples", more that white people enjoy privileges in society that other minorities don't get due to how society is structured, i.e. no conscious discriminatory efforts. There's truth in it, but the crime isn't that in itself, the crime is that it's dominated so much of the discussion that other, more important topics don't get discussed.


Where are you getting that this is Marxist? You can come to this understanding by just reading the texts that have informed the liberal elite. I would highly, highly recommend anyone who's interested in this stuff read the first few chapters of Bernays' Propaganda. It's one of the founding textbooks on propaganda. Published in 1928. So the word "propaganda" is used explicitly here, but the motivations for the necessity of propaganda are explained by Bernays, and are very clear. He says, in no uncertain terms, that democracy only works as a system when the political elites instill in voters ideas that will cause them to vote correctly. The discussion of how easy it is to use public relations to sway people's opinions on politics is open and direct.

Of course, "propaganda" became a dirty word after the Nazis used American propaganda to commit genocide. Literally, they used Bernays, to quote Bernays, "Goebbels, said Wiegand, was using my book Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me. ... Obviously the attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign." The tactics are absolutely used everywhere, but they're kept dark, because if people can see how this mechanism works clearly, they can psychically resist it. But people aren't aware of it, that's how global warming denial can spread so fast. Personally I believe the oft-repeated conservative mockery of California must come from some propaganda source, maybe someone like Rush Limbaugh, first started the attack, and while most conservatives don't listen, his listeners repeat it and soon everyone who is socially surrounded by conservatives believe it, because the propaganda (if you don't know, a term to describe ideas which propagate themselves) works. Of course it's present as well in the left, mostly by anyone who's committed to the Democrat party. Just open any comments section on NYT or Reddit's /r/politics and you'll find these sorts of people.

Still, this is why I'm slow to condemn Trump's supporters. Unless if you have the wherewithal and luxury to sit down and try to disassemble today's ideologies, you probably believe in one. There probably isn't even a "de-ideologized" pure state, maybe it's a matter of degree, I don't know, the point is that, when you have 3.5 millions truck drivers in America, most of them driving alone and feeling lonely, and the only thing they have is ****ty music and Rush Limbaugh to choose from, they're going to listen to Rush Limbaugh. Not to mention that the vast majority of Americans have some sort of commute. I can't honestly blame these people for being racist conservatives, because that's what they're exposed to, that's the social situation they have to be in to survive. They are a product of their environment.

As for Marx, he's probably growing more relevant with each day. More people should strive to actually read Marx, rather than strive to understand arguments against Marx. What little I know of his work has made me realize most everyone is wrong about him.

Well, I mean



It's really easy to believe in someone like Trump when nobody bothered teaching you why you shouldn't. And when I say that, I'm not talking about bleeding heart liberal **** that doesn't matter. I'm talking about history. And yes, that includes Marxism.



It hasn't even been 100 years yet, but here we are. The same damn kind of people making the same damn mistake, all over again.

Whether you blame them or not, or just feel sorry for them, the kinds of people who believe in the stuff Trump says - really believe - are a huge problem. Because they are scared, and angry, and they (rightfully or wrongfully) want to blame everyone else for their problems. That's a really bad outlook, and Trump feeds those feelings, and feeds off of those feelings himself. Even if Donald Trump doesn't become America's Hitler, his supporters are exactly the kinds of people who would join America's SS, because they're exactly the kinds of people who joined Germany's SS. Saying they're a product of their environment isn't going to make them better people, or solve the huge problem they're going to pose for your country.

Brownshirts were a "product of their environment", too. I'm sure their victims felt just as sorry for them.

Just to make this clear, I'm not saying there aren't these kinds of people on the "other" side. There definitely are, and those people are a problem too. All authoritarians are a problem. They just aren't as urgent a problem yet.

Yeah, people loved to cite that article from 538 before the election. I remember it well. But then after the election, there were also studies like this that were put out, which indicate that Hillary Clinton voters and Donald Trump voters live in entirely different economic worlds. But my point wasn't really so much about Trump voters themselves, as about center-left explanations for Trump's appeal. You could see, for example, nearly everything posted by Vox about Trump voters before November 8th (example), where they frequently dismissed the idea that economic anxiety was even a very significant motivating factor for Trump voters.



Until very recently (maybe they still do?), SJWs used the term "white supremacy" synonymously with "white privilege". See this article from the Atlantic. This definition is there:



The point that I'm making is that there is a widely believed understanding of white privilege, which says, not just that whites enjoy more material and social benefits than other racial groups, but that African-Americans are subordinated through the fact that whites receive such benefits. This formulation casts race relations as a rigged zero-sum game, with white privilege depriving African-Americans of benefits as it simultaneously secures them for whites. While the article treats this as a fairly idiosyncratic view, in my own experience it's a quite widespread way of seeing things. I see it all over the place.



From Marxists, of course! See here, here and here. (FYI, I was quoting him approvingly.)



Sounds very reminiscent of Walter Lippmann's 1922 book Public Opinion, where the title of Noam Chomsky's famous book, Manufacturing Consent, comes from. Lippmann's book is also worth checking out.

Last October I drove from San Francisco to CBP Eastport. I didn't see a single Clinton sign north of Sacramento.

Uncanny. OTOH, one thing that hardly took any time at all in the United States (let alone 100 years) seems to have been a singular demonization of the left (starting with the Red Scare?), and clearly persisting to this day.

One nice side effect of this, however, is that (some) conservatives seem to actually be calling out the president for kissing the ass of the ex-KGB strongman in the Kremlin. It seems that Trump's interview with O`Reilly that aired on Sunday really incensed cold warrior Mark Levin (a former Reagan lawyer), who on his radio program today, took a short respite from fighting the nefarious threat of leftism on our court system, in order to express his outrage with the moral equivalence between the United States and Russia made by the president (Trump said to O`Reilly that we too "kill a lot of people").

Yeah, but the thing is, authoritarians don't see that as a moral failure.

I did notice that Levin distinguished between the group he identifies with, the conservatives, and what he was characterizing as populist Trump supporters (the would-be brown-shirts, as you said).

Of course, I would say the moral failing also lies in Republican congress members and their conservative constituents, who prioritize their decades long trench war against activist judges and the federal government, over the faint possibility of raising the larger concern that their big tent approach to politics might make them complicit in all this, and we are back to my basic frustration with conservatives' narrow vision....

I think the problem with his show in particular, apart from bias of omission, is that when he criticizes conservatives, it is always done in a polite voice, but the daily disparegment of liberals is always shouted out at the top of his lungs.

And I am sure that is a deliberate shtick meant to boost ratings / increase the currency of the propaganda he is spreading.

This is the only moral failing worth talking about IMO. This whole trade lib, financial deregulation, extreme means testing, running government as a business schtick reads well in The Economist, but it's what imperiled Trump's supporters to bring out their inner fascist in the first place.

Like, these people - predominantly working class, rural whites - they're legitimately hurting. Don't forget that. They're reacting to an external threat in a visceral, instinctive way. It just happens that threat was predominately created by movement conservatives.

This is accurate. Trump is more the anti-one percent. They hate him. Of course anyone who can use him for their ends, will, and he doesn't seem to be getting alot for the things he's doing for people.



Oh, certainly. These are the sorts of people who read conservative propaganda about how the founding fathers meant for us to all have artillery and have a shelf full of books written by Bill O'Reilly. Assuming they do read. Anything they see from history, must first be filtered by right-wing ideologues.

The thing I find most shocking, though, is how incapable they are of seeing the parallels. There's no perfect comparison from Trump to Hitler, but they are similar in temperament. Trump's tweeted that a judge was wrong!



I'm more just making the simple point that problematic people don't come from a vacuum, so I think we fully agree here. The current right-wing movement in America is a very dangerous threat at all levels. What I mean is, there is a crisis, but I think primary moral responsibility lies on the people inititalizing the propaganda, much how Hitler is responsible for antisemitism by writing Mein Kampf more than the people he conned with it.

I really wonder what the actual method to deprogramming these people is. Right now, they're strengthening the walls of their echo chambers. Pamphleteering might work, because it's untraditional, and they've come to distrust all traditional media.



The amount of people who would join the brownshirts is pretty small compared to the total amount who voted for Trump. At least I hope.



Whether economic anxiety motivates people or whether the concerns are legitimate? Certainly people have economic anxieties, if you've been working a middle-class blue collar job for a few decades, you've basically seen nothing but cuts and people you know losing work and never finding it again. That's a legitimate anxiety, regardless of how much you earn. Especially if you're a low-skill factory worker whose job is threatened by automation. So I definitely see that, but we can't widespread categorize Trump's supporters as lumpenproletariat beggars.

*More below



I feel this is just an equivocation, they're not using "white supremacy" to mean "neo-nazi ideology". Though they definitely are using inflammatory language for no real purpose.

Or who knows, maybe they did mean that white privilege is Nazism, in which case they're stupid.



I don't know. I haven't met anyone talking like that.



Ah, I see, I haven't delved much into the work of Marxists, the little I have read was from Marx himself.


They're definitely in the same vein, and Chomsky is definitely in line too.


*Continued

You see, I wasn't aware that there was an geo-economic divide in voting patterns. I know a good majority of poor people voted blue, but these people must be from low-income city areas, not rural areas. I don't really know what the primary difference is in ideology, but there does seem to be something at play there.


Which red scare? Woodrow Wilson's red scare was a far more brutal and vicious attack on socialist ideal, which makes sense in response to the October Revolution. But the attack on the left is as American as apple pie. Violent suppression of labor unions cuts through all of American history, even though it changed flavor and became far more sophisticated in the 20th century.


Which is the real problem, when people on the right start seeing the left as such a threat that violence is a reasonable answer. Hell, if you look at /r/the_donald on reddit, it's a pasttime of theirs to try and paint the American left as "more violent" than the right, perhaps to preemptively justify violence.

This will also only get worse. I full expect, as AI takes off, that we'll probably see automated anti-protesting equipment. Much easier to be a wealthy elite when you don't have to worry about a people-ran police force. Heh, maybe we can even get automated worker-improving equipment. Ensuring people take appropriately-long breaks.



Richard Rorty isn't just "some philosopher guy", he's one of the most famous late 20th century American philosophers. Rawls is possibly the only more famous/important one, who you can possibly blame for the exact perspective Rorty is criticizing.

Speaking of philosophers and Nazism, I'm not quite sure what to make of Heidegger. On the one hand, his philosophy as far as I've understood of it is brilliant, and certainly widely influential. On the other hand, the guy was literally so gung-ho for the Nazis that he resigned because the Nazis weren't Nazi enough for him. Plus he wrote some pretty explicitly anti-semitic things. It's pretty enigmatic to me.

In that case, I suggest that you tune into AM radio some time. A controversial tweet here and there blown up by the media is a grain of sand next to a mountain of anti-left vitriol being spewed 8 hours a day to truckers.

I mentioned Mark Levin several times, who is the most intellectual right wing propagandist on the AM band, to my knowledge. He has credentials and legal experience, and from what I can tell his bias is not so much of a factual nature, but in his strident delivery and omission of an opposing perspective.

In today's broadcast, he spent the first hour of the show bemoaning an activist judiciary. Levin is a long-time critic of the judicial branch, going back to Marbury vs. Madison (which institutionalized judicial review--Levin characterizes this as "legislating from the bench"), and has written an entire book on how the judiciary has far overstepped its constitutional powers (in his professional--if highly opinionated--view as a practicing constitutional lawyer).



Levin's characterization of Washington vs. Donald J. Trump is as follows: Some liberals (the attorney general of the state of Washington, I imagine) on the west coast brought a case before what they knew would be a receptive judge, whom Levin characterizes as a pro-refugee partisan, apparently according to his resume (although I have not verified this). Despite having been appointed by GWB, Levin says the appointment of judge Robart was part of a larger deal with Democrats, and represented a concession to liberals. Finally, Washington state knew that the ninth circuit is the most liberal of all federal court districts of appeals.

(I might also add that, according to Levin's reading of the constitution, the Congress should have the most power, (apparently) followed by the executive branch, presumably with the judiciary having as little or less power.)

Anyway, whereas we might view the president's tweets as a frightening test of what should simply be an objective check on executive power by the judiciary, people like Levin simply see a liberal activist judge being reigned in.

Which is why we probably got some number of people voting Trump this election on the single issue of Supreme Court appointments....

It's easy. Stop making them feel threatened. Authoritarianism is a reaction, not an ideology.

No, most people won't. But they'll join the Facebook group.

Trump's supporters aren't lumpenproles, they're petite bourgeoisie. There's a difference. Lumpenproles are politically disengaged and indifferent about advancement through revolution. Trump's supporters are politically engaged, willing to entertain revolution (just not communist revolution), and most importantly they model their self image after the high bourgeoisie.

I'm not sure if the US even has a proletariat. Certainly nobody sees themselves that way.



Well there's this:



And then there's this (posted up-thread):



So yeah, it's super regional, and for good reason too.

I mean, I don't know how else to say it. Their **** is ****ed. Rural and midwest US is ****ed. Those two pictures say it better than I ever could. Those people are scared, angry, and they've been betrayed by their country. They have absolutely every right to feel the way they do. The result is horrible, but the pain is real.

(Hopefully Spook is gone again, so I can talk about how badly ****ed the rural US is without autistic screeching and messenger shooting.)

There's video evidence of violence both by and against Trump supporters, to be fair. I'm not sure which group is currently more violent, but I wouldn't trust anything claimed in /r/the_donald.

I'm still at least 90% sure /r/the_donald and 4chan nazism is a dumb joke that internet retards have taken way too far.

I know.

.

I feel like there is just this frighteningly large (despite being a minority) swath of men, particularly the type to traffic in MRA circles, subscribe to /r/TheRedPill, and listen to Steven Crowder, who really quite honestly wouldn't see a single thing wrong with living in an authoritarian state. I am judging them by their own comments.

Oh, and there is also that one IRL friend of mine who actually does suffer from mental illness, and was most fanatically alt-right when it was most out of control.

Like I said before, hardship doesn't create anger, frustrated expectations do. Society tells young men that providing a certain input will guarantee a desired output, but it doesn't actually work that way. That's what Trump's about, and that's what MRA is about.

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Nope, I'm back for good, and I will continue to post things you don't seem to be able to read.

autism joke

tbh jon should be banned for ableism i am literally shaking right now