Have y’all heard about this QAnon ****? If you haven’t yet you probably will soon.

An alternative is some exogenous force like a war with China comes in and Americans unite around that. I don't know if there's a force from within American politics that can reverse course and bring about a renewal.

I've heard the name. What is it?

China won’t attack the US and trust in public institutions is so poor that attacking them would probably have the opposite effect. And the US would have no allies in that war. And the US can’t afford to do it.

Let me be very, very clear about this, since you've more than one practically accused me of totalitarian beliefs.

People on the left jokes about purges, gulags, reeducation, quite a bit, and quite insensitively. None, and let me be straight on this, none of it is meant to be a serious advocacy. I'm somewhat familiar with the history of purges from left-wing movements in the 20th century, and I take it very seriously that we ought to avoid the mistakes of the past. I've gotten into debates that came pretty close to outright shouting with left-wing friends of mine about Lenin, as I refuse to take him as a role model for the left because of his role in killing people and setting up camps during the revolution.

But you have to understand what the discourse on socialism is like in America. If you advocate anything under the brand socialism, you will be accused of advocating Stalinism. Time and time and time again. The discourse is horrendous in America, people understand zero history outside of a few propagandized talking points, and wield them like an angry child who wants a candy bar. We joke about it because some people are so adamant that medicare for all is two steps from Stalinism that joking about it to mock the people just happens. It's a bit crass but, I'll repeat for the third time, it is not a serious advocacy.



Such a thing is impossible until there are some radical structural changes. There's simply not enough manpower or resources to combat the amount of propaganda and money in the American political scene. I don't think you realize how hopeless the general landscape is for socialism.

To clarify: I think conservatives are just as much driven by motivated reasoning as liberals are, and just as much motivated by visceral, kneejerk responses. However, I think conservatives on aggregate are more likely to recognize that they are adherents of an ideology. Liberals are more likely to claim that they've actually transcended the parochialism of ideology altogether.

So, uh, if you admit that ~30% of Americans are unhinged and want to destroy America, why exactly are you still talking **** on liberals instead of them?

Instead of asking them to reorganize, you might ask why power/money would rather align with the 30% than with the more liberal-minded people (hint: they don't like sharing).

QAnon is a teenaged white supremacist who is pretending to be a top-level intelligence agent on the Internet. He claims Democratic Party and liberal media are secretly child trafficking rings and the Mueller investigation is actually about that, and the Trump collusion investigation is only a cover. QAnon has told his followers to arm themselves and get ready to help him gun down the “pedophile conspiracy” (i.e. Democrats and journalists). A lot of people believe him.

The usual Fox News stuff.

Yes there is. A depression. A real one.

Hey, I literally quoted your own language back at you. If you don't like that your own language has authoritarian connotations, I suggest you use different words.



Duh.



I'm not optimistic. We're headed for catastrophe. We're going down, and the world will be a horrifically violent place and nowhere will feel safe.

Honestly it all confuses me.

A while back Eversor was complaining about anti-liberalism in this thread, before that he was complaining about anti-conservatism, now it seems like he’s using liberal as a catch-all for all people considered on the left - to the extent that he doesn’t recognize the many ideologies to which those people ascribe.

It’s hard not to make this criticism personal when I’m honestly baffled about what position he holds and who he is criticizing. What exactly is your ideology, Eversor?

Power and money does side with liberals. $hillary, my dude. Remember?! Both parties cozy up to big business.

Why?

Well the Reddit thing is just the "m'lady" meme, but since you asked:

(Fedora tip: Finland)

No, in this part of the conversation I've been pretty careful to use liberal as a term that contrasts with left, an by left I've mostly meant something like social democratic.

What's my ideology? Uh, I'm sympathetic to communitarian critiques of liberalism, and that's the north star of my specific brand of pluralism, but I also have sympathies to leftist economics even though leftists are too materialist for my tastes.

I dunno. I was able to find threads depicting him as John De Lancie. As they say on 4chan, it sounds like some "/x/ tier" delusion, right up there with "meme magic".

Oh I see.

Because something somewhere in the world will go wrong. Not a satisfying answer, I know. International orders are established and then they collapse and then there's war. Metternich designed the post-Napolean equilibrium and it lasted for a hundred years until WWI. After WWI, Wilson advocated an end of empire and the beginning of a nation-state based system based on the equality of all nations rooted in a right to self-determination. That order is now under pressure, likely in no small part due to the over extension of its guarantor, the United States. As it pulls back and other countries are responsible for their own security, there's potential for conflict as regions have to find new equilibriums and the old security infrastructure withers. Additionally, the economic inequalities that this international system has produced also will promote instability, as it is produced and continues to produce desperation throughout the world, and people will want their governments to do act on their behalf, leading to aggression.

We've lived in a world where to a large extent the NATO alliance (and also, the standoff between the US and the USSR, and afterwards, US hegemony) has made it impossible for countries to invade, seize and annex other country's territory. We're now moving into a world where that's no longer the case: bilateral relations rather than regional, multilateral orders are going to become more important, which means more shifting alliances, and a very different distribution of military power throughout the globe. There will be much more incentive for countries to throw their weight around. It's a much more dangerous world, where, for example, the incentive to have nuclear weapons is much greater.

Well, I guess it depends on whether you view today as more like the end of the Belle Époque or more like the beginning of the Middle Ages. I consider it more like the latter, since the stresses I see are within the great powers, not between them as in the Belle Époque.

I certainly don’t see the United States in 20 years having either the appetite or the time for bona fide territorial conquest, and a United States that is satisfied with achieving those ends via projecting a sphere of influence is just the status quo.

That was good... I didn't see that twist coming.

I thought so too when I played that game half of my-life-so-far ago ;-)

There are going to be more opportunities for interstate conflict. It's not a stretch: it's already happening. What was it, a year ago when the US killed all those Russian mercenaries in Syria? There will be more of confrontations.

Events like these have always been happening and have never at any time stopped. Even stuff like the annexation of Crimea has been happening well before now. Russian Federation belligerence, in particular, is not new. They’ve been engaged in territorial conflicts since the moment the Soviet Union fell, some of which, like Syria, involved guns pointed at American soldiers. Their repulsion and eventual conquest in Ukraine isn’t really any different from what Russia’s been doing in Chechnya and Georgia since 1991, other than the fact that I guess Ukraine is a NATO buffer zone that CNN has kinda heard of once.

Don’t read this as Putin apologia, I’m only saying this as a matter of fact. Tibet, Golan Heights, North Cyprus, Panama (functionally), East Timor,... annexation is certainly not as common as your run-of-the-mill invade and ****emup anymore, but it never stopped, and it’s not worse today than it’s been in recent history. And the invasions aren’t getting worse, and neither are the dust-ups between nuclear powers (you can thank GWB for setting those bars high, and by that I mean, of course, invading Iraq and intentionally bombing Pakistani border outposts to the point that it almost became another war).

What you’re looking at today honestly - sadly - isn’t any different from the rest of the post-Cold War world peace. You just think it’s worse because of a well studied cognitive bias which at least some people attribute to 24/7 news.

That’s why I really don’t agree with your assessment. International conflict doesn’t seem like an especially important issue right now compared to internal political issues, such as the return of literal frickin fascism throughout western countries, economic/climate migration, overfinancialization and economic fragility.

It's funny to me that you'd call these "internal political issues", since all of them have important international dimensions (to the point that, really, at their most troublesome, they are international issues).

I hope that you haven't somehow gotten the impression that I think that 2016 was some pivotal, transformative year where everything suddenly changed and took a radically different course. I'm not sure from what you wrote that gave you that impression, but either way let me be clear that I certainly didn't mean that. That's not to say that historians won't look back on these decades and think that 2016 was a helpful point for periodization. They may: it's too soon to say, of course. But whether they do will in part depend on what happens in coming years. But if in the future, 2016 turned out to be a pivotal year, it will be because Trump and Brexit aggravated certain tensions that had been brewing for some time.

While there's certainly been conflict since the fall of the Soviet Union, that doesn't mean that things aren't also getting worse. The post-Cold War order has changed significantly since the USSR fell. In the EU and the Middle East there has been a drastic shift that has occurred in the past decade. Over that span of the decades that followed the collapse of the USSR, there has been in Europe an increased integration as former USSR states were gradually incorporated into the EU and NATO, followed by an increased unraveling that has been exacerbated by the 2007-2008 financial crisis, that now is leading to a backlash in the form of euroskepticism and the rise of far-right movements -- it's impossible to say that these far-right movements (and also, far-left movements) in Europe are "internal domestic" issues, because euroskepticism lies at their very core.

NATO is premised on the idea that European countries all share the same security interests: namely, containing the USSR. But now NATO seems like a raw deal for many European countries, because they don't all have the same security concerns: in the south, countries are primarily worried about he migrant issue. In the east, they're worried about Russia. So countries can ask: what's in it for us to be a part of this thing? (Never mind there are indications that Trump is now setting his sights on dismantling it.) Well, one of the advantages of NATO is that European countries don't need to have very powerful armies for their own self-defense, because the US presumably has their back. What happens when NATO disintegrates, and suddenly these European countries are responsible for their own self-defense? It will change the dynamics between these countries significantly, when, for example, German austerity measures imposed on other countries are backed by a threatening military, just to name one example.

And in the Middle East, there has been widespread state failure in the wake of the Arab Spring: in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq and in Yemen. I don't need to explain why this is bad, and all of the ways in which it affects the broader world outside the Middle East (migration being an obvious factor), but needless to say, these simply are not the same conditions that existed in 1989: al-Qaida did not have the capacity to organize at anywhere near the same scale is it did in the 1990s, just to name one example. These days we really want to color al-Qaida and ISIS as marginal phenomena in the Muslim world because we don't want to stir up anti-Muslim xenophobia and we see it as making more difficult the integration of Muslims into Western countries. There's definitely much merit to those justifications, not least because the threat that these groups pose is often drastically overstated: no, Salafi-Jihadist Islamic terrorist organizations are not an existential threat to the United States and its preposterous to suggest that they are. But at the same time, many people also drastically underestimate the way in which the internet has altered these terrorist organizations. There are cells out there that comprise tens of thousands of people. ISIS isn't going away just because we've taken their territory in Syria and Iraq, and neither is al-Qaida. There's an immensely large, well-organized group out there which is on the look out for places where the state barely has a hold on the monopoly of power and is incapable of maintaining internal security.

So, no: things are actually getting worse, and I don't think we've even really seen the beginning of it. The decline of multilateral institutions backed by American military and economic hegemony and the rise of a multipolar world doesn't jsut mean that more tensions between China and the US (and to a much, much lesser extent Russia). It could very well mean that areas of the world that we don't even think of as regions become venues for triangulation between great powers and the other countries that make up those regions (especially as some countries continue to develop and gradually become regional players).

Reid's not going to watch this.

There’s a difference between an issue having “important international dimensions” and being an armed conflict between nations, of the sort you have expressed concern. In each of the concerns I identified there is an element of external forcing, but how each country responds is up to that country, not up to others or the military successes of others.

The break-up of a country is technically “international” too, but it is a silly technicality.

The most recent event my post mentioned was the annexation of Crimea, which happened in 2014. Please explain this part of your post because I do not understand why you wrote it.

None of these things are new at all. Sorry if this seems insubstantial, but I’m not sure what else I can say about it. State failure in North Africa, frustrations and failures of NATO commitments, euroskepticism... this has been happening for a long time. (Look at EU referenda since it began, for example of the latter.) The world isn’t any more dangerous now than it was in 1991.

I didn't watch it, but I was reading about it the other night. What crossed my mind was just how utterly disinterested I've become in Bill Maher's show. After 10 months of mocking and debasing Donald Trump, the man (edit: was still president, and I stopped watching). Ah well, I guess it didn't work on George W. Bush either.

He's always totally sucked. His career is built on his unique ability to be really, really grating.

Yes, I've come around to that view myself. I admit I got a kick out of his show before because he was telling me what I wanted to hear. At any rate it got old fast enough.

I don't see how you can pretend how, as you put it, "the return of literal frickin fascism", which you acknowledge is pressing issue, is not also an international issue, given that skepticism toward international integration is the precise thing that these groups are recoiling against. Concerns about the migrant problem has contributed to the rise of all these movements. The international dimension of the issue is not peripheral: these European countries are constrained in their ability, effectively, to control their own borders, because the Schengen Agreement prevents them setting up border controls.

The idea that the situation with NATO now is anything like the situation in the 90s is totally untrue. In the 90s, NATO was seen a way of integrating former USSR states in Eastern Europe and making them stakeholders in the European project. It was a completely different situation than now: back then, bringing new countries into NATO gave NATO renewed purpose, while now it's unclear what its purpose is at all. It's also the case that during the Obama administration the US has been less eager to maintain its presence, due to the pivot to Asia policy, and that this caused a rift between Europe and the US that began during the Bush administration.

http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/08/02/number-of-refugees-to-europe-surges-to-record-1-3-million-in-2015/

Because it isn’t. Look at the demographics for the alt-right: they aren’t people who have been exposed to global competiton, the failures of international institutions, or migrants. They’re predominantly people from historically low-investment regions where economic migrants and refugees don’t even want to live.

The German shift rightward for example isn’t a uniform phenomenon, it’s happening almost entirely inside East Germany which is and always has been a ****hole. The sentiment on the ground is basically that immigrants are gonna steal their welfare, even though, well, unlike them the immigrants actually work for a living. Not that any of them have ever met an immigrant to ask.

You assume the alt right’s positions are informed, nuanced, and substantial, but their positions are exactly none of these things. They’re the people who have been left behind by modern economies, they’re angry, and they’re gonna blame anything and everybody but themselves. This is what fascism is. The international flavour is coincidental, the outrage would happen the same regardless.

And in the 90s the US *****ed and moaned about subsidizing the defense of the poorer new NATO members and threatened to rip it up. And NATO didnt honor its defense obligations, only occasionally dragged out to give US unilateral actions international legitimacy.

It’s never been especially good or effective. Losing NATO would change precisely nothing that isn’t already gonna happen when the US fails.

The ‘rift’ started in the 1960s - the European economic union was conceived as a counterbalance and analogue to the United States. Because guess what? Countries have always been looking out for their best interests. Sometimes that still means trying to gain leverage over your partners and allies, not only your enemies and rivals.

I want to clarify one thing, just so we don’t get off track here:

I agree these are bad times. Our point of disagreement isn’t about times staying good, it’s about whether existing nations will still be capable of conflicting in the ways you’ve warned about. I don’t think they will.

Why?

What were your motivations in linking this? It couldn't have been because of the intellectual merit, because there is none. Was it just to upset me?

Maybe force in the sense of legal force, in some cases, or social pressure; don't recast everything as physical force.



I'm trying very hard not to get too philosophical because the other posters hate it. I'm also trying to not reply to everything for the same reasons.

I'm not really advocating incivility per se. My stance is more that people make it out to be way more big a deal than it is. Pretty much all complaints about civility are stupid hypocritical bull****. I hate the whole subject and wish people could stop with this meta-level stupid b.s.

Unless you have good ideas for how to actually improve civility and also fix political problems, maybe you should also stop being so preachy towards other people about how they choose to participate in politics.



You've pulled this strawman a few times already. When I advocate for something someone doesn't like, their first move is to claim I'm speaking about something legally. I'm not talking about the legal system. Think of it this way: if a guy who lives on your street sexually harassed your wife when she was walking home, you would be somewhat justified in kicking his ass for doing it. It certainly wouldn't be legal, moreover I wouldn't want it to be legal, but I don't think it would be an immoral thing to do so. There's a gap between what's moral and what should be legislated. I feel the same about punching people who are advocating racial violence.

Not everything someone advocates must become law. Get that through your head so you can stop using this strawman argument.



Why should people be nice to their boss? I think that's stupid. In fact, I think that's morally repugnant. The same argument molds perfectly into someone saying slaves should act civilly towards their masters. When there's real inequality, forcing people to be polite is a moral bad.



Organized protest. Wildcat strikes. Shutting down the buildings of people who hold political and social power, like Occupy Wall Street. Things like that.



None of that will do a single thing. Yes, uncivil action will be far more productive. The wealthy doesn't care about online campaigns, but they ****ing panicked about Occupy Wall Street. Because OWS was actually threatening, which meant it was tangible political pressure.

Basically everything you're saying is perfectly mocked by this tweet:

To see how you'd react?

It's an awkward moment when Shapiro refers to Obama as "Barack Hussein Obama", as if he temporarily forgot who his current audience was, and that his current audience wouldn't see it as a dig, but as the racist dog whistling that it is.