If there is a difference, it’s that fewer people tend to die when there’s a deliberate revolution versus an accidental one.

The rich consume overwhelming resources, and we are entering an obligatory period of decreased resource availability. Do you think they’ll voluntarily give up part of their lifestyle in order to make life more tolerable for working people? Because they haven’t yet.

"woke" politics are a far cry from stalinism

I wasn't able to pay the proper amount of attention but I believe the two episodes I listened to on the trip from Kansas to Texas are relevant to this discussion. I believe they are episodes 154 and 155 of the Jocko Podcast (available on YouTube and elsewhere). The first one has Peterson.

Sure, but despite his hyperbole, there are troubling authoritarian aspects to some of these developments.

Not clear to me that the lack of total resources will be a politically salient issue as much as the distribution of resources.

Was Reagan a revolutionary figure, because he ushered in a fundamental change in policy that profoundly altered the social and political fabric of the country? If Bernie Sanders were president, could he be considered a revolutionary figure, if he was able to implement his agenda?

Like I said.

If you accept the normal definition of revolution as the overthrow of an incumbent social order, then no, Reagan clearly wasn’t a revolutionary. The purpose of neoliberalism was and remains clear: to reinforce and even extend the influence of capital as a ruling class.

Similarly, no mentally weak american social democrat can claim to be a revolutionary either, for the same reasons. Elect a president on a platform of nationalizing all industries and then we’ll talk about revolutions.

Well, if that's how we're defining revolution, than I'd go so far as to say that I doubt where headed towards a massive competition based on conflict over resources. Economic issues aren't really the salient political issues that are promoting social friction in the country right now.

Oh, but they are.

Actually, at least in America, not really. Other than the tiniest minority we practically live like kings here.

^

IDK what would be the reasoning otherwise. Are we to think people REALLY care what English professors are writing about?

What do you mean? I mean, we all know Peterson was completely wrong about C16 and its implications, and falsely framed it as governmental tyranny or some ****.

Kings with no savings I guess

^

Sure, that's dumb but compared to the impoverished of the world...

a subsistence farmer in a ****hole has a longer runway than you do.

Eeeeeh... Socialist gonna socialist.

I'd hazard that a lot of the most politically mobilized people out in the country right now are amongst the better off. That was certainly true in the 1960s. Sure enough, SDS embraced a radical politics, but they were primarily composed of upper middle class and middle class college students who on average had excellent financial prospects (enviable to Millennials, certainly). And some of those guys went on to blow up federal government buildings and trashed Chicago during the Days of Rage.

Ok, sure, but as I said multiple times, I'm not defending Peterson's view.

I guess i'm just thinking of a bunch of other woke politics bull**** that I don't feel like Googling right now.

Eeeeeh... neolibs gonna neolib.

Let me make this easier for you to digest.

Left liberal parties genuinely care more about rich people and big business interests than they do about you. Liberal economics have been exhaustively failing everybody, so in order to maintain their control over the left-wing coalition without having to implement economic reform they’ve been promising unenforceable, unquantifiable social reform. This started slow (e.g, Hillary Clinton’s abrupt campaign trail decision that gay people aren’t firewood after all), but has accelerated recently in light of diminishing returns. Now they are giving voice to extremists.

Meanwhile, people on the right have also been failed by liberal economics. Conservative parties want to blame the liberals, but because they also don’t want economic reform, the problem has to be those unenforceable, unquantifiable social reforms the liberals promised but did literally nothing to implement. These people are opposed to liberalism because it hurts them, but their understanding of liberalism is the social justice part only. What does a rally against social justice look like, again?

The liberals are desperate to frame this as a public moral failure (the people are racist) because acknowledging it as a liberal policy failure means they’d have to actually do something about it. Instead it’s all... turf the deplorables, then we can get back to business as usual. Like anybody wants that.

I would appreciate the citations so I can know what you're referring to

We've been over those arguments countless times. Mark Blythe mades this point in a lecture he gave in 2017. I must've posted it in this thread in... 2017?

Okay, fine, but only because it didn't take much effort: https://nypost.com/2019/05/20/richard-carranza-held-doe-white-supremacy-culture-training/

(Also, despite my sassiness, I'm not trying to be a dick; I just realized I've committed myself to more work than I want to do to really substantiate my point.)

Good for you.

Thanks for making them so digestible, nonetheless.

I fail to see how what you linked is remotely authoritarian. It's pretty dumb, but not that.

Re: if it’s economics then why aren’t the activists poor

Because activism is a luxury that poor people can’t afford.
Because middle class people have much more to lose than poor people do.

Woke politics is becoming a litmus test ideology. Senior individuals in government bureaucracies expect their employees to subscribe to these beliefs. It's not hard to imagine that upward mobility could require subscribing to this nonsense. It seems genuinely bad to present a certain and very rigidly defined analysis of power as uncontested truths that an "educated" person is expected to know, and it seems genuinely bad that government institutions that make decisions that impact people's lives would have these ideas governing decisions about how to distribute public resources.

Is it authoritarian? It's a coercive ideology, and, it's increasingly getting a grip on government institutions. Certainly not Stalinist, but I'd go so far as to say it's troubling. I mean, at the very least, it's undeniably these ideas aren't confined to the campus quad anymore. (Never mind that many conservatives actually double down and say, "No! The thing that really bothers us is the unruly students!" but what can you do?)

Add this: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/us/sat-adversity-score-explained.html

Do you think there was similar hand-wringing when market fundamentalism swept government institutions, too?

Right, that makes sense, but middle class people often aren't mobilized by economic issues. Those middle class people who're actually politically involved seem to be motivated more by, say, anxieties about erosion to abortion rights, or Trump's immigration policy, or police brutality against African Americans. Some of those issues certainly have economic dimensions, but I don't think people who're protesting are necessarily driven by rational/economic self-interest.

You don't think it's weird that we went from OWS/G7 riots to this in 7 years?

https://news.gallup.com/poll/248159/healthcare-once-again-tops-list-americans-worries.aspx

IDK, seems like race relations etc are pretty low relatively.

And that's despite relentless coverage of racial issues, too.

It's the US, so the #1 reason "the availability and affordability of healthcare" really means "job security", which really means "my economic precarity"

lmao

https://crooksandliars.com/2019/07/larry-kudlow-can-t-understand-why

I hope someone asks him about this in ~1-3 years when we are in full blown recession and can't cope with it because the planet is in a state of violent disequilibrium

I don't know what planet they're describing, we've just had the biggest discounts on stock since 2007. That's gonna fill up the 401(k)s of middle class folks everywhere.

Federal spending and the budget deficit is #2, despite the fact that the government's budget is far removed from individual's personal concerns and interests.
Hunger and homelessness is #3 despite the fact that voters are virtually never homeless.
Crime and violence is #6, despite crime rates being at historic lows.

I suppose I look at this list and the fact that #1 is healthcare doesn't tell me that individuals are necessarily voting to maximize their rational/economic self-interest.

Never mind that this poll is pretty far removed what brought us to this place in the discussion in the first place. Let's remember what we're talking about in here. We're talking about what will be driving political violence in the future. Are we really interested in what the average American voter thinks is politically salient? Or wouldn't we want to consider the views of those who would be more likely to take up arms in favor of a political cause?

Most people are intuitively aware that deficit growth without population growth means future taxation.

How conspiratorial do we want to get here? Fourth wave feminism and Black Lives Matter are inventions of a cabal of wealthy Democratic and Republican donors to distract the American public from income inequality and channel American frustrations over the issue into less threatening causes? Or maybe Abbie Hoffman, Herbert Marcuse, and all the other figures of the New Left back in the 1960s were also on the Koch Bros. payroll, and also were also intentionally serving the interests of the rich, by moving the left away from a focus on labor issues and towards minority rights?

I mean, what do you think *actually* happened? Because I do think it's weird that we went "from OWS/G7 riots to this in 7 years." But I also think it's weird that 9/11 happened, but that doesn't mean that burning jet fuel can't melt steel beams.

I've already said what I think happened.

Ok, where? Give me a quote.