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The big problem I'm running into is actually figuring out a realistic positive future for most of rural america. The way agriculture works now most worthwhile farming requires very little labour, and most of what's left (eg. fruit picking) is only economical at unacceptable wages. There are other jobs, but not enough to cover the amount of people. This is of course made worse by the lack of factories that otherwise were places rural people could migrate to work in. Maybe local, flat co-ops could help competitiveness by cutting out profit and administration costs? I mean if it actually worked it would be a great way to get through to them the message that equality and co-operation are vital to their interests. Otherwise you'd need some form of protectionism to combat the absurdly different costs of living and labour protections in foreign countries. The economic policies in play basically mean that unskilled american workers just cannot compete with foreign workers because it's impossible for productivity to compete with the differences in cost per worker hour. Americans can work in services, and compete in highly skilled work, but a significant number of people out in the sticks that missed out on the skilled worker train are just hosed. And because of federation the more rural states can't use the same tactics of developing nations, while also not being equipped to rise above what those developing nations can do. They're just kinda hosed.
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Mar 16, 2016 16:17
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Higsian posted:The big problem I'm running into is actually figuring out a realistic positive future for most of rural america. The way agriculture works now most worthwhile farming requires very little labour, and most of what's left (eg. fruit picking) is only economical at unacceptable wages. There are other jobs, but not enough to cover the amount of people. This is of course made worse by the lack of factories that otherwise were places rural people could migrate to work in. Rural America isn't completely hosed, but it is a self-perpetuating problem. Even if we were to gut our war chest and dump billions into educational reform to give all those rust belt kids the opportunity to get into high-rated colleges, the initiative would be rejected by the adults. My girlfriend's extended family is mostly in like rural northern Pennsylvania and upstate New York, and I can tell you some stories about people who outright reject the idea that higher education has value. College is the place you go to be taught "liberal lies" and come back "thinking you're better than everybody else". Her parents tried to convince her that she was being scammed because she had to take algebra courses as a prerequisite for accounting. Basically, much of the opportunity that you inject into those cultures, if it's not in the form of "honest" blue collar labor, or something that can be applied to the church, will be squandered by anti-intellectualism in the home environment. For every family that has the self-awareness to encourage their kids to seek greater opportunities out in the world, there's like 10 who will gladly accuse their own kid of being a yuppie sellout for leaving town to learn about computers or whatever.
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Mar 16, 2016 16:32
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Ice Phisherman posted:Never, ever, ever underestimate the democrat's ability to throw away a sure thing. John Kerry should have won against Bush if he was just the least bit of a scrapper. A few attack ads with his war record versus Bush Jr.'s and it could have been a totally different race. Instead he didn't run on his strengths and let himself get stomped. This is an after the fact justification. Turnout was exceedingly high in 2004 and Bush still won because he was actually pretty good at knowing what people wanted.
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Mar 16, 2016 16:40
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deadly_pudding posted:Rural America isn't completely hosed, but it is a self-perpetuating problem. Even if we were to gut our war chest and dump billions into educational reform to give all those rust belt kids the opportunity to get into high-rated colleges, the initiative would be rejected by the adults. My girlfriend's extended family is mostly in like rural northern Pennsylvania and upstate New York, and I can tell you some stories about people who outright reject the idea that higher education has value. College is the place you go to be taught "liberal lies" and come back "thinking you're better than everybody else". Her parents tried to convince her that she was being scammed because she had to take algebra courses as a prerequisite for accounting. This. My entire extended family comes from the woods of the Ohio-PA border or Amish country in northeastern Ohio. My mom's side from Pittsburgh and despite having parents with no education, they prioritized school because it turned out being a steel worker and secretary sucked a lot of rear end. They realized that things like education were the best chance for their kids to not have to stretch to make ends meet and keep them from working in the same plants and offices. Now everyone younger than my grandparents on that side has a bachelor's, with most having an advanced degree or going in for one now. Now, my dad's side is the crazy side that got excommunicated from the Amish church that has spent most of the last 70 years fighting any type of progress or innovation. Most of them were bricklayers or construction workers. They used to threaten to disinherit or disown my dad if he thought about going to college and bank on doing construction work or selling Amway gear to earn their fortune...which means naturally that when those relationships fell apart, my dad went to a liberal arts school and then an Ivy league law school while being actively attacked by most of his extended family for joining a taboo profession (law) and in general getting an education. Oh, and that was 90% on student loans since his parents didn't file tax returns so he was ineligible for most federal aid. poo poo, I spend every thanksgiving having to hear about "real americans" from them while he lends a bunch of them money to subsidize the fact that they're all dirt poor with no prospects of fixing their lives because the idea of education, intellectualism, or even basic thought beyond what American Jesus says is illegitimate and a lie meant to take them away from proper living. The idea that it isn't "honest"/manual labor or something that the family has done for generations inherently makes my little portion of the family wrong because we turned our backs on the simple life in favor of fancy book learning and the liberal ivy towers. My grandparents on that side have 8th grade educations with no GEDs and my aunts and uncle got their associate's last decade after their bodies started breaking down from all the work. poo poo, it's heartbreaking at this point that we can go to family reunions where I have to watch my dad sit alone because none of his family will talk to him since he could afford a new Rav4 and sent his kids to good schools where we learned about things like evolution or calculus instead of pouring brick and mortar. That said, it's also heavily generational. The true problem ones on that side are my dad's older cousins, parents, and aunts/uncles. They're the ones who grew up steeped in the old rhetoric of 1950's Amish/rural life that the city was a cesspool of crime and corruption and that it was their Christian duty to remove themselves from that world and focus on a simpler life. The cousins my age are generally looking into trades or even some colleges, and the ones my dad's age are coming around to the idea that even people doing manual labor ought to know more things and be better educated. I doubt many of them will want to do much more than learn things like agriculture or relvant mechanical knowledge, but the difference between farmers with no education and farmers with any type of rigorous degree is that the ones with degrees could help fix that lifestyle and maybe even innovate rural living to where farming can get more done easier and faster. Knowledge bleeds into industries and can turn them around quickly, and the heartland could actually stand to lose some people to education/urbanization if the ones who come back are educated enough to innovate things to where the manpower needed in those areas is less. It's easy for people, myself included, to blame rural america for a lot of the problems we have right now. But being condescending is only going to change the minds of those young and adventurous enough to step out of there and maybe help fix those types of problems.
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Mar 16, 2016 17:01
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Higsian posted:a significant number of people out in the sticks that missed out on the skilled worker train are just hosed.
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Mar 16, 2016 17:02
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deadly_pudding posted:Rural America isn't completely hosed, but it is a self-perpetuating problem. Even if we were to gut our war chest and dump billions into educational reform to give all those rust belt kids the opportunity to get into high-rated colleges, the initiative would be rejected by the adults. My girlfriend's extended family is mostly in like rural northern Pennsylvania and upstate New York, and I can tell you some stories about people who outright reject the idea that higher education has value. College is the place you go to be taught "liberal lies" and come back "thinking you're better than everybody else". Her parents tried to convince her that she was being scammed because she had to take algebra courses as a prerequisite for accounting. This is the same victim-blaming cultural essentialist poo poo Republicans have been saying about black people for the past thirty years. It was wrong then and it's wrong now.
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Mar 16, 2016 19:27
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A particularly good excerpt on this topic.quote:The result of all this [the class divisions in the American education system], according to Bageant? People from rural, poor communities have been virtually programmed for generations to listen not to their own reasoning, but to whoever speaks loudest and most authoritatively on any subject. They respond to simple, emotionally charged messages — even when the the issues that the messages involve are complex and nuanced. They resent, and therefore distrust, those Americans who had greater access to education, or who were taught to question as they were not; Bageant believes this is less about anti-intellectualism/anti-elitism than it is simple schadenfreude [sic; I think the blogger means `resentment'] towards the more fortunate. And they’ve developed the perfectly reasonable survival mechanism of listening to whoever seems willing to help them, regardless of whether those people actually are helpful. Bageant notes cases of conservative politicians who visited rural areas and shared a beer with poor constituents — then turned right around and instituted policies that made health care, housing, food, and education unaffordable for those same people. Frequently these politicians got elected multiple times in spite of this. Loyalty, after all, is one of the values their constitutents were taught in school. One of the left's weaknesses is that it is fantastic at isolating and atomising social trends. It has become susceptible to pathologising and otherisation, and this extended navel gazing about deconstructing the feelings and motives of the sorts of people who vote for Trump probably exacerbates the issue. The fact is, the world has changed. We are on the precipice of a second great technological revolution, which like the previous industrial revolution, will uproot and radically change life for huge swathes of the working class. Rust belt jobs are unlikely to come back because it'll be more cost efficient to automate as much of it as possible. As the standard of living rises in places with traditionally cheap labour, this is the inevitable result of the declining cost of this technology. The economy needs a massive shake up, and a realignment towards capital heavy taxation, basic income and non-algorithmic, creative employment. But why the gently caress should they (the rural and working class) have to take this bitter pill lying down? Their way of life is getting overturned by the march of progress, whilst urban working-class locations are gentrified, they are seen as culturally redundant, and they are right on the money that many a college-educated person looks down their nose at them.
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Mar 16, 2016 19:28
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rakovsky maybe posted:This is the same victim-blaming cultural essentialist poo poo Republicans have been saying about black people for the past thirty years. It was wrong then and it's wrong now. I don't disagree with you  Also, though, I still think that attempts to overhaul education in the rust belt would be met with an attitude along the lines of "resentment" from a segment of the population roughly equal in size to the conservative votership there.
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Mar 16, 2016 19:33
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And what happens most of the time when a kid from a trailer park in West Virginia or the south side of Chicago gets a good college education? They leave and don't ever go back to that miserable place. This is the same principle by which the US and Europe rob developing countries of their intellectual elite. There's no reason poor white communities should just let their most talented people go to live on the coasts after investing in them until age 18. Especially not so they can then serve the same globalist elite whose policies have hollowed out the Garys, Indiana of the world.
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Mar 16, 2016 19:35
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rakovsky maybe posted:And what happens most of the time when a kid from a trailer park in West Virginia or the south side of Chicago gets a good college education? They leave and don't ever go back to that miserable place. This is the same principle by which the US and Europe rob developing countries of their intellectual elite. There's no reason poor white communities should just let their most talented people go to live on the coasts after investing in them until age 18. Especially not so they can then serve the same globalist elite whose policies have hollowed out the Garys, Indiana of the world. An appropriate solution would be to invest in the infrastructure of Gary, et al, and provide incentives for our new service-based economy to start moving into there. It's not a straightforward solution past that sketch phase, though. You have to at least make a show of cleaning up the crime and drug problems, and provide a bunch of tax incentives for tech industries and the like. The locals will still hate all the fancy-smart yuppies who move into their towns for at least a full generation, like what you're seeing in San Francisco right now, and also will resent that you didn't just build a new Ford Factory or whatever that they can work at.
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Mar 16, 2016 19:42
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rakovsky maybe posted:And what happens most of the time when a kid from a trailer park in West Virginia or the south side of Chicago gets a good college education? They leave and don't ever go back to that miserable place. This is the same principle by which the US and Europe rob developing countries of their intellectual elite. There's no reason poor white communities should just let their most talented people go to live on the coasts after investing in them until age 18. Especially not so they can then serve the same globalist elite whose policies have hollowed out the Garys, Indiana of the world. I hadn't thought of this, good point. It's a chicken and egg situation though isn't it? You want people to be educated to build better communities, but that education has a tendency to pull people to areas where they are already concentrated. It takes a unique and special sort of person to return to where they came from to make it better. It takes an even more unique individual to do it in such a way that doesn't feel like they are descending from on high to Lord over the peasants, but to use the tools they have been given to help their communities grow and offer a better future for all of its members.
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Mar 16, 2016 19:43
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deadly_pudding posted:The locals will still hate all the fancy-smart yuppies who move into their towns for at least a full generation, like what you're seeing in San Francisco right now, and also will resent that you didn't just build a new Ford Factory or whatever that they can work at. In my experience, a lot of these individuals don't dislike intelligence in of itself, rather, they dislike the cultural demarcations that go with it. Things like diction and verbosity, different fashion sense and the like, all reeks of the importation of urban and city culture into these communities. It is understandable that there would be resistance to that.
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Mar 16, 2016 19:51
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deadly_pudding posted:An appropriate solution would be to invest in the infrastructure of Gary, et al, and provide incentives for our new service-based economy to start moving into there. It's not a straightforward solution past that sketch phase, though. You have to at least make a show of cleaning up the crime and drug problems, and provide a bunch of tax incentives for tech industries and the like. Agreed. If you want your young talent to stop leaving, you need to provide them some opportunity locally. I can tell you from experience that a lot of graduates migrate far from home because it was their only real chance to make use of their skills. Nobody with a master's degree wants to stay in a place where the only real employment options are working on a factory floor.
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Mar 16, 2016 19:51
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I think it's irresponsible to advocate for higher education without also advocating for making it free or substantially less expensive. The earning power of a Bachelor's degree has not kept pace with the cost of tuition and having a mountain of student debt become a prerequisite to success is another burden that disproportionately affects the poor and working class. And simply enrolling more students is no guarantee of anything, especially if professor-to-student ratios get worse over time.Ocrassus posted:I hadn't thought of this, good point. It's a chicken and egg situation though isn't it? You want people to be educated to build better communities, but that education has a tendency to pull people to areas where they are already concentrated. It takes a unique and special sort of person to return to where they came from to make it better. It takes an even more unique individual to do it in such a way that doesn't feel like they are descending from on high to Lord over the peasants, but to use the tools they have been given to help their communities grow and offer a better future for all of its members.
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Mar 16, 2016 20:10
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deadly_pudding posted:An appropriate solution would be to invest in the infrastructure of Gary, et al, and provide incentives for our new service-based economy to start moving into there. It's not a straightforward solution past that sketch phase, though. You have to at least make a show of cleaning up the crime and drug problems, and provide a bunch of tax incentives for tech industries and the like. But there are thousands of struggling rural and rust belt towns and no where near enough sevice companies that need what those towns can offer. Which is usually just cheap real estate and tax abatements. Many towns have done that, and more often than not all they get out of it is a Walmart. Beowulfs_Ghost fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Mar 16, 2016 |
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Mar 16, 2016 20:18
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Beowulfs_Ghost posted:But there are thousands of struggling rural and that belt towns and no where near enough sevice companies that need what those towns can offer. Which is usually just cheap real estate and tax abatements. Hell in the case of my hometown most businesses will just build right outside city limits since the town is small enough you can drive outside of it easily and then you don't pay any local tax.
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Mar 16, 2016 20:22
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the trump tutelage posted:I think it's irresponsible to advocate for higher education without also advocating for making it free or substantially less expensive. The earning power of a Bachelor's degree has not kept pace with the cost of tuition and having a mountain of student debt become a prerequisite to success is another burden that disproportionately affects the poor and working class. And simply enrolling more students is no guarantee of anything, especially if professor-to-student ratios get worse over time. I should rephrase it and say that, they don't hate where they are from, but that the conditions there are comparatively poor for someone with their skillset. This is a chicken and egg situation because you need a mass of these people to create those conditions. To fix it requires initiative, setting up local businesses and creating demand for new services. Infrastructure is the first thing that needs to be improved, but state governments should offer incentives to set up new ventures in areas where it can provide jobs for local construction, and the means for hands on training for locals. A company I have worked with in the past, Dyson, has always been based in a tiny village in rural England. It is a massive place, with 4,000 employees, hundreds of local apprentices learning advanced engineering principles and gaining experience actually creating and building cool new products. That all started with a dude and an idea, deciding to build his business in a rural area.
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Mar 16, 2016 20:27
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It's really irresponsible to to assert that what rural towns need to do is transition to a service economy - there are real, hard economic limits to the number of service/knowledge jobs that can be sustained by a country like the US, even if we're assuming it is able to export those services to the world (an impossible challenge, especially since those jobs are the ones the countries abroad will want to keep). You need expand the manufacturing base, that's it, there's no other answer. A lot of those jobs will still be more technical in nature, but they're still plenty of unskilled jobs that will come along with it. We're nowhere near the point yet where it's reasonable to automate everything.Ice Phisherman posted:The left has plenty of social justice warriors and a streak of authoritarianism in it as well. You don't have to back whoever the democrats put forward because the republicans are batshit and abusive to everyone on the left. You'll see it shortly after the republicans grow weak, because nothing brings out infighting like a weakened enemy. Why? Because there was not institutional left to present itself into the crisis to take advantage of it. Both because such institutions has already been dismantled, but also that anarchist thinking on the Inherent Evil Of Organization has infected everything, see: the conversations before itt on how a unified party must necessarily betray minorities, so why bother being anything but a loose collection of weak splinters? History doesn't move forwards, mistakes can't be learned from, and solidarity is for shitlords - no politics but identity politics. So long as that continues to be the case, nothing changes. No actually, I didn't concede that it was necessary, I said that there was more breathing room. It's one path that could have been taken to achieve that, but we are where we are. The issue is exactly what you describe - there's still opposition that doesn't want to demobilize. We have the center, that's not the same as winning. The fight only ends when the other side stops fighting. And they only stop fighting when they stop wanting to fight. How do you achieve that, when their natural reaction to what you're doing is to close themselves off? How can you convince them of anything if you can't reach them? This is the point I'm trying to get through to you. Because until you do, until you can convince them, you're always going to be one bad election away from having progress rolled back. The point is to make it normalized. rudatron fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Mar 17, 2016 |
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Mar 16, 2016 23:54
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rudatron posted:No actually, I didn't concede that it was necessary, I said that there was more breathing room. It's one path that could have been taken to achieve that, but we are where we are. The issue is exactly what you describe - there's still opposition that doesn't want to demobilize. We have the center, that's not the same as winning. The fight only ends when the other side stops fighting. And they only stop fighting when they stop wanting to fight. How do you achieve that, when they're natural reaction to what you're doing is to close themselves off? How can you convince them of anything if you can't reach them? This is the point I'm trying to get through to you. Because until you do, until you can convince them, you're always going to be one bad election away from having progress rolled back. The point is to make it normalized. Gay people did succeed in convincing an absolute majority of the American people that homosexuality is normal and natural and should be treated identically to heterosexuality, there is no chance of a constitutional amendment reversing Lawrence or Obergefell.
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Mar 17, 2016 01:33
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VitalSigns posted:Gay people did succeed in convincing an absolute majority of the American people that homosexuality is normal and natural and should be treated identically to heterosexuality, there is no chance of a constitutional amendment reversing Lawrence or Obergefell. Gay people had the help of Capital. Let's see what Capital will do for workers. Or victims of the police they sponsor. Or clean drinking water.
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Mar 17, 2016 01:45
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Hey, can you at least admit that you were demonstrably, probably wrong when you said that homosexuals weren't at risk for losing their homes and jobs in America? Or are you just gonna pretend like that didn't happen now that you've skulked off for a day or two?
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Mar 17, 2016 01:56
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You're forgetting that there is already broad popular support for the necessary protection. It hasn't happened because - like I keep bringing it up, you guys keep ignoring it, but here it is again - it's a partisan instead of a bipartisan issue. Doesn't mean it's time to throw your hands in the air and demobilize, that's dumb, nor does it mean you shouldn't punish people discriminating. But the discrimination ends when the people discriminating stop discriminating. Stick, meet carrot. The picture VitalSigns drew, of A War Of All Against All, is simply not the case.
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Mar 17, 2016 02:23
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rudatron posted:You're forgetting that there is already broad popular support for the necessary protection. Support for =/= exists, you idiot. Edit: You did not say "there is very little support for that discrimination", you said "it does not exist" which is demonstrably, laughably wrong.
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Mar 17, 2016 02:53
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rudatron posted:You're forgetting that there is already broad popular support for the necessary protection. It hasn't happened because - like I keep bringing it up, you guys keep ignoring it, but here it is again - it's a partisan instead of a bipartisan issue. Doesn't mean it's time to throw your hands in the air and demobilize, that's dumb, nor does it mean you shouldn't punish people discriminating. But the discrimination ends when the people discriminating stop discriminating. Stick, meet carrot. The picture VitalSigns drew, of A War Of All Against All, is simply not the case. I never said that, there's no war against straight people nor is it necessary. To even be in a position to offer a carrot though (a carrot like "hey gay people are your family and friends, their rights are your rights") it was necessary to build a supportive gay community as a backstop so people could come out without immediately destroying their livelihoods. And it will continue to be necessary as long as there are towns and states that are trying to economically isolate LGBT people by hook or by crook Crowsbeak posted:Gay people had the help of Capital. Let's see what Capital will do for workers. Or victims of the police they sponsor. Or clean drinking water. Not at the beginning of the movement they didn't have the support of capital, that came later when lots of other people had already changed their minds as well.
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Mar 17, 2016 02:54
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The tragicomic thing about the distrust of identity politics amongst some Leftists is that the distrust is itself another manifestation of the Left's inability to build coalitions. The Left gropes blindly at an explanation for why it cannot effectively mobilize any more and settles on identity politics as too fractious an influence. That isn't to give groups like #BlackLivesMatter a pass, because the impression they give is that they've already won and they're just waiting for the dumb fucks around them to wise up. I think Fredrik deBoer put it best with "The schizophrenia of today’s social justice left is that it recounts all of the ways in which it is currently losing but does it with the belittling attitude of a team that’s running up the score." But by the same token, the campus Marxist group isn't going to get anywhere telling #BLM that they're a waste of time and energy, especially when the #BLM activists are intimately feeling the necessity for their specific action. Maybe if the Left wants to counter right-wing populism, it should cut the hashtag activism/horizontal hierarchy bullshit and form up into politically mobile groups that can form temporary alliances with imperfect allies in the pursuit of concrete policy goals. Nobody's ever going to see eye to eye on every issue, but swallow your indignation and get something done for gently caress's sake. VitalSigns posted:Not at the beginning of the movement they didn't have the support of capital, that came later when lots of other people had already changed their minds as well. unlimited shrimp fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Mar 17, 2016 |
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Mar 17, 2016 03:53
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VitalSigns posted:
Yeah the 2000s would not have been a good time at all for gays without Capital.
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Mar 17, 2016 04:12
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edit: wrong thread. gently caress. FuzzySkinner fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Mar 17, 2016 |
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Mar 17, 2016 04:19
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To bring about greater solidarity, we need to have everyone who earns more than 30K a year work as a day laborer on a farm for a period of five years. Farm work will enoble our people, bringing about Thomas Jefferson's vision of a moral ideal. We will reset the Calendar to 1776.
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Mar 17, 2016 16:05
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Backbreaking manual labor as a path to nobility and virture is only espoused by those who have never done it.
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Mar 17, 2016 17:16
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-Troika- posted:Backbreaking manual labor as a path to nobility and virture is only espoused by those who have never done it. I admit its a great path to developing some basic empathy though
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Mar 17, 2016 17:20
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I admit its a great path to developing some basic empathy though Let's ask some highway workers what they think about Mexico.
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Mar 17, 2016 17:53
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-Troika- posted:Backbreaking manual labor as a path to nobility and virture is only espoused by those who have never done it. The Democratic People's Republic of Wheeling West Virginia should implement strict autarky and emigration controls. Juche is the only way forward for poor communities.
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Mar 17, 2016 18:23
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Ice Phisherman posted:As the republicans realign or outright disintegrate, I forsee a reactionary tea party-like movement on the left once there's finally some breathing room. And I mean that in the most negative way. Loud, organized and unwilling to make compromises. They just haven't had the room to exist yet without getting shut down. The left has plenty of social justice warriors and a streak of authoritarianism in it as well. You don't have to back whoever the democrats put forward because the republicans are batshit and abusive to everyone on the left. You'll see it shortly after the republicans grow weak, because nothing brings out infighting like a weakened enemy. First of all, your whole post was fantastic and a nice touch on the debate of right-wing populism, so thanks for that! That said, such groups do exist, but fail at being anything but independents because it's often an ego trip campaign. The rise of the 'Tumblrite' social justice warrior, back when it was a left-wing use of the term, was reserved for people who were cargo cult progressives who believed that it was basically a contest to show how unacceptable you felt a particular 'wrong' opinion was. In the end this caters into a mindset of blowing into a rage after seeing someone talk about having a fag the other night because they were unaware of the English slang for a cigarette, and instead demand to know how they could internalise their homophobia to that extent. These people do not get elected to office. They never get that far because they only end up in small friendship groups and do not necessarily function outside of those. The social-progressives who do get to office may indeed share the same views on gender identity and racial politics, but tend to have a more pragmatic approach. Now, the ideologue and the pragmatist probably do get on most of the time, but when pragmatism trumps (heh) ideology you can expect a shitstorm to come from the ideologue. You see this right now on the other side, with the tea party and the use of the term 'RINO.' The weakness of the politically active left prevents such extremists from gaining office, and will hopefully continue to do so while pragmatists do the actual pushes for social progress. Which ties into: rudatron posted:I doubt it. Everyone predicted a rise of leftism after the 2008 recession. There was real hope that such a serious crisis would shake people's faith in the way the economy was and had been operated at that time. Guess what? Nothing happened, the political solutions presented to that crisis doubled down on the trends that occurred before it. "The Market Gods are angry, we must Cut Taxes and Loosen Regulations to appease it" *waves stick with barcodes hanging off it*. this. Because it encapsulates what I'm talking about. The Occupy Wall Street was a strong activist base with no head. It splintered into smaller groups with no political clout, and enables very little policy change. They are ideology committed to 'no masters' and means there's no political mastery. Instead, those who intend to enact change, people like Elizabeth Warren, are well aware that the only way to do this is to climb onto one of the giant monsters that dominate the American political scene, and that the Democratic party was the one more receptive to her message. Even now you see Bernie supporters pissed that she wasn't screaming support for him from the rafters, but she is focused on getting things done so she's keeping her head out of the firing line so she hasn't alienated herself from either side of the primary. the trump tutelage posted:The tragicomic thing about the distrust of identity politics amongst some Leftists is that the distrust is itself another manifestation of the Left's inability to build coalitions. The Left gropes blindly at an explanation for why it cannot effectively mobilize any more and settles on identity politics as too fractious an influence. That isn't to give groups like #BlackLivesMatter a pass, because the impression they give is that they've already won and they're just waiting for the dumb fucks around them to wise up. I think Fredrik deBoer put it best with "The schizophrenia of today’s social justice left is that it recounts all of the ways in which it is currently losing but does it with the belittling attitude of a team that’s running up the score." But by the same token, the campus Marxist group isn't going to get anywhere telling #BLM that they're a waste of time and energy, especially when the #BLM activists are intimately feeling the necessity for their specific action. This does happen, but often seems like it isn't since the ones doing that aren't blowhards trumpeting what they're doing. I mean the perfect example of this is the ACLU who defend actual Nazis and paedophiles to defend Civil Rights. Of course, under such a coalition they're a non-partisan organisation, but I'm going to guess their individual members are a broad coalition of political views.
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Mar 17, 2016 18:27
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We already had the "Tea Party of the Left" back in the 70s with the (remnants of the) New Deal Coalition. In both that case and the Tea Party, the problem isn't necessarily extremism, but that the existing system they were used to broke down because of underlying factors. In the New Deal case it's because race became such a volatile issue that it couldn't be ignored in favor of economic coalition. In the Tea Party case it's because whites aren't as large a part of the population as they were in the past.
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Mar 17, 2016 18:47
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The problem that a "tea party of the left" faces, if we're talking about like "social justice warriors" and hardline communists, is that the grievances they have are things that mainstream democrats aren't passionate enough about to defect to, things that the right is actively against, and things that swing voters probably don't care about either way or are not willing to risk. It's not like the Tea Party, where their talking points are just a more spiteful and extreme version of Republican talking points, that still values maintaining most aspects of the socioeconomic status quo, which makes them seem like a viable alternative to another Republican. Your radical left party is going to want to start really dismantling the poo poo out of things, restructuring the police, radically regulating the financial sector, and so on, which will spook anybody who isn't already on message.
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Mar 17, 2016 19:01
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Tesseraction posted:First of all, your whole post was fantastic and a nice touch on the debate of right-wing populism, so thanks for that! Thanks, buddy. I've been thinking about it a lot lately. I'm glad to know I'm being read and not just pissing into the wind. quote:That said, such groups do exist, but fail at being anything but independents because it's often an ego trip campaign. The rise of the 'Tumblrite' social justice warrior, back when it was a left-wing use of the term, was reserved for people who were cargo cult progressives who believed that it was basically a contest to show how unacceptable you felt a particular 'wrong' opinion was. In the end this caters into a mindset of blowing into a rage after seeing someone talk about having a fag the other night because they were unaware of the English slang for a cigarette, and instead demand to know how they could internalise their homophobia to that extent. Oh, I actually agree with you here. I think that we're still up for years and years of disorganization, bad messages and authoritarian identity politics from the left. However I think that anyone with two brain cells to rub together realize that it isn't working. It just needs to filter down to the Social Justice foot soldiers that it isn't working either. Some will change. The electorate is awakening after all. They'll get older, moderate themselves with age, gain perspective and begin to realize that a total lack of discipline, no coherent message and no leaders doesn't work. It didn't change much during the occupy days, but leaders also couldn't be smeared or co-opted either if they didn't have any. Smart people are going to look back at OWS and learn. My guess is that the electorate is awakening to realities and that they're going to try both new and old tactics. You're still going to see identity politics where SJW zealots thrash about stupidly and hurt themselves with their own message due to their belligerence, or people who are so in love with their own poo poo are on that identity treadmill and hate anyone who doesn't understand as an ignorant shitlord even though their message isn't even clear to them. I think you're going to see people who cut their teeth as activists emerge out of that and learn that discipline, leadership, respectability and easy to understand rhetoric are how you get people to listen to you. People who can deliver their message as an elevator pitch to elites or to the masses are going to be effective. Those are not tea party organizations. My guess is that you'll also see people with a warped worldview learn how leadership benefits them, get the right soap box and make the rest of the left look like clowns. You'll have a few leftist tea party luminaries waving batons and realizing that if they get enough clowns to follow them that they'll be courted because they can conjure up warm bodies to vote. I'm also predicating the idea on this. Big media is rapidly disintegrating. I can't think of a single person I know under thirty who has cable. Fox, CNN, MSNBC, etc are going to lose their ability to shape the narrative, and the left, being well positioned, are going to do amazingly well as media empires desperately try to find a way to become profitable and relevant again. They won't really. They'll flounder around like the newspapers. They'll be unable to smear the left as effectively as they did before, and so the left will flourish. Random aside: I think if Netflix wanted to talk about news they'd do amazingly well as they have access to that fickle and most coveted 18-35 crowd. They can even stratify so your average viewer isn't hit with tons of news they don't care about. "Here's what's happening in the world sans Hollywood or bullshit feel good stories. Here's what's happening with the Kardashians. Here's what's happening in politics with actual nuance. Ala carte TV news. It'd be a beautiful thing. So yeah, my guess is that as the right begins to disintegrate the left will finally be able to breathe, look about and find out that there are plenty of people to fight on the left too, because some people just like to fight. The left is an even bigger coalition than the right and have even more reasons to argue. The only reason that they turn out in the numbers that they do is because they're afraid of being abused by the right, and let me tell you, they do get abused. The right shows up so they don't lose their historical prestige and rights, but the left shows up so they don't get eight more years of a boot smashing into their face.
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Mar 17, 2016 22:09
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Ice Phisherman posted:Random aside: I think if Netflix wanted to talk about news they'd do amazingly well as they have access to that fickle and most coveted 18-35 crowd. They can even stratify so your average viewer isn't hit with tons of news they don't care about. "Here's what's happening in the world sans Hollywood or bullshit feel good stories. Here's what's happening with the Kardashians. Here's what's happening in politics with actual nuance. Ala carte TV news. It'd be a beautiful thing.
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Mar 18, 2016 01:25
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the trump tutelage posted:I think the Gay Rights movement is unique if only because any family and friends could potentially find themselves suddenly forced into dealing with the issue directly. The "coming out" phenomenon cut across all class and racial lines. Compare that to issues like police brutality, where it's unlikely a swath of middle class white suburban families are going to unexpectedly find themselves confronted with the excesses of the criminal justice system. Oh I don't disagree, I wasn't presenting LGBT rights movement as a model, merely explaining why it was successful to someone who was complaining that homosexuals created an identity for themselves.
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Mar 18, 2016 01:28
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Go read my posts again, my entire point was that it was natural that they might, but that that's not the long term goal. You keep throwing the word 'necessary' around, without realizing that that encapsulates your own bias - if you believe that some subgroup can only be protected by people inside that subgroup, then it is of course 'necessary'. I'm trying to challenge that assumption, but you don't want to hear it, so you keep spitting out this bullshit of "Wow you just want them to give up!!!".
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Mar 18, 2016 01:40
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rudatron posted:Aside on your aside: The big advantage here isn't the target audience, but the fact that you don't have pre-determined time slot, that you must fill with filler stories because the day was a slow news day. You have 30mins on good days, 10mins on slow days, etc. A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.
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Mar 18, 2016 01:48
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