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Yeah, the big point Brooks misses is that wealth and hereditary privileges are the problem and they're typically correlated with education. But he just sees education.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 14:44 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 01:31 |
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Main Paineframe posted:Brooks is like that - he tends to blend his own personal resentments and humiliations into his own conservative ideology. For example, he developed his strong hatred for marijuana because he once showed up to English class mega-stoned on a day he was due to give a presentation, and is forever haunted by the embarrassment of incoherently stumbling through his presentation in front of the whole class. David Brooks when he was an even bigger loving nerd than he is now, in 2014 posted:For a little while in my teenage years, my friends and I smoked marijuana. It was fun. I have some fond memories of us all being silly together. I think those moments of uninhibited frolic deepened our friendships. Well, he was right about the prices dropping 90%. As a habitual cannabis user I don't even think he's wrong, necessarily, about the effects. I would be a different and perhaps "more effective" person if I didn't smoke. But I'm doing fine and it's my life, gently caress you, David Brooks. But that's besides the point. To use broad generalizations about weed making you lazy, based on his own experience of being a dumbass, and then to equate said laziness with "immorality," and then to argue that for that reason, people should continue to get locked up for something you did as a teenager, yeah, it sucks really bad.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 14:50 |
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Main Paineframe posted:Brooks is like that - he tends to blend his own personal resentments and humiliations into his own conservative ideology. For example, he developed his strong hatred for marijuana because he once showed up to English class mega-stoned on a day he was due to give a presentation, and is forever haunted by the embarrassment of incoherently stumbling through his presentation in front of the whole class. It's too bad Brooks decided to not be this fuckin' cool the entire rest of his life
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 14:53 |
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Main Paineframe posted:Brooks is like that - he tends to blend his own personal resentments and humiliations into his own conservative ideology. In my experience, this is true of most conservative thought. There’s a reason people use the term “reactionary”. My mother has justified a whole slew of racist beliefs and concepts because she happened to be a kid driving through Baltimore with her family when the riots kicked off in Baltimore in ‘68. That basically made her afraid of Black people for the resting her life completely unable to take a step back to understand the “why”.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 14:53 |
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Morrow posted:Yeah, the big point Brooks misses is that wealth and hereditary privileges are the problem and they're typically correlated with education. But he just sees education. Knowing nothing about Brooks except that article, it reads more like he does understand those are the problems and sees elite level education and the benefits it brings as being one of those problematic privileges.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 14:55 |
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Main Paineframe posted:showed up to English class mega-stoned Literally my entire teaching career. Lecturing about language and rhetoric while out somewhere near Neptune is awesome, what a dweeb
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 15:11 |
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Not gonna lie, I'm almost a little jealous, I haven't been able to get "oh man I don't even know what's going on!" stoned in like 15 years.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 15:26 |
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There's nothing very shocking about that op-ed. Far right reactionary politics are just looking at the same problems as the far left and going "I think traditions, a lot of enforcement that I'm special and the best, and blood will solve this". Getting really close to understanding class consciousness and then turning hard right is the gimmick.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 15:32 |
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But Brooks isn't hard right, and if he ever was he hasn't been in a long time. It would be less weird if he was, because we're used to rhetoric akin to that coming from people like Tucker Carlson. Brooks has actually gone one step further than most anti-Trumpers and been extremely pro-Biden, to an extent I've seen from few other prominent opinion writers. Not just for "protecting democracy" from Trump, but for his policies as well. If you want to say that Joe Biden is right wing, there's absolutely an argument for that, but he's very, very far from representing the American "hard right." We should probably give credit to Brooks for recognizing the moderate conservatism that's (unfortunately) inherent in the Obama/Biden/Democratic governing style and being willing to endorse it as a result. Most people on the "moderate" side of the GOP got dragged to the right by the party; Brooks seems to have been actively repelled by it and is getting pretty close being a normal right-leaning type of Democrat. Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Aug 4, 2023 |
# ? Aug 4, 2023 15:36 |
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Mellow Seas posted:But Brooks isn't hard right, and if he ever was he hasn't been in a long time. It would be less weird if he was, because we're used to rhetoric akin to that coming from people like Tucker Carlson. The problem here is that the moderate conservatism he so loves has long been the distinctive style of the educated business elite. Pretty much all the policies he cites as evidence of the elite class's evils are positions that were pioneered and pushed by moderate conservatives. I'd go so far as to say that he's not aiming this article at liberals, he's aiming it at anti-Trump Republicans like himself, although he doesn't quite realize that. He claims to be preaching the evils of progressives, but most of his actual policy examples are things like "supported the draft during the Vietnam War" and "backed free trade above all", positions that fall much closer to neoliberalism than to progressivism. Other than his out-of-nowhere rant against words like "cisgender" and "intersectional", he spends the entire article railing against the precise positions held by his own center-right cohort. And that includes positions he previously held as well. Today, he blasts policies like "free trade" and "open immigration" as the blind selfishness of the elite class ignoring the impacts of those policies on the poor. But Brooks himself is on record just a few years ago backing the supremacy of free trade and open immigration - and, in fact, openly blasting the Trump movement for resisting those things. Today, he says that it's only natural for the working classes to oppose free trade, but in 2016 he said that Trump's anti-trade policy was "massively unjust" and that "free trade has been wonderful for this country on balance". Today, he says that immigration is hurting the working class, but in 2018 he said that "the case for restricting immigration is pathetically weak". In that regard, today's article seems like nothing more than blatant hypocrisy from a man who's seen where conservativism is heading and has decided he needs to cling onto the tailgate of the Trump movement after all.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 16:18 |
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Mellow Seas posted:But Brooks isn't hard right, and if he ever was he hasn't been in a long time. It would be less weird if he was, because we're used to rhetoric akin to that coming from people like Tucker Carlson. Brooks being ardently pro biden fits with his whole out of touch elites thing. Biden doesn't have an elite degree and during the obama years the classic liberal elite smear was that biden was a gaffe prone dumbass. Biden has the whole middle class joe thing going on, taking the train and eating ice cream. Like buying into this vision of biden that thomas frank critiques: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/22/joe-biden-mystique-election-democrats
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 16:30 |
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Mellow Seas posted:But Brooks isn't hard right, and if he ever was he hasn't been in a long time. It would be less weird if he was, because we're used to rhetoric akin to that coming from people like Tucker Carlson. He thinks the youth are infected with cultural Marxism, he's hard right. Just out of line with the current flavor of hard right.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 16:34 |
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This might hurt Joe in Michigan. https://www.thedailybeast.com/cornel-west-owes-more-than-half-a-million-in-unpaid-taxes
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 16:40 |
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drawkcab si eman ym posted:This might hurt Joe in Michigan. Relatable as hell. If someone running for president has never struggled how can I trust they understand what the working class is going through?
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 16:41 |
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selec posted:Relatable as hell. If someone running for president has never struggled how can I trust they understand what the working class is going through?
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 16:56 |
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Super relatable struggles, making so much that you can underpay your taxes by $130k in a single year. Who among us hasn't had that greedy fist of big government as the difference between getting by and landing on the street?
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 17:03 |
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Killer robot posted:Super relatable struggles, making so much that you can underpay your taxes by $130k in a single year. Who among us hasn't had that greedy fist of big government as the difference between getting by and landing on the street? It’s definitely more relatable as an experience; being in debt is pretty common for most Americans, and being shamed for being in debt is also another fine American tradition. The scale is different, but again, pretty common American experience to be bad with money. Hell Joe Biden was terrible with money and the brokest member of the Senate for a while there, wasn’t he? That’s a bag fumble for real. I think it’s nice we’re finally getting presidents and candidates who have as hosed up financial problems and weird gently caress up screwup relatives as the rest of us. To be fair it didn’t take national press attention to get my dirtbag cousin to acknowledge his out of wedlock child, just some c’mon dudes at family functions, but it’s relatable as hell.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 17:09 |
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Gumball Gumption posted:He thinks the youth are infected with cultural Marxism, he's hard right. quote:[Nationalist conservatives] are wrong, too, to think there is a wokeist Anschluss taking over all the institutions of American life. For people who spend so much time railing about the evils of social media, they sure seem to spend an awful lot of their lives on Twitter. Ninety percent of their discourse is about the discourse. Anecdotalism was also rampant at the conference—generalizing from three anecdotes about people who got canceled to conclude that all of American life is a woke hellscape. They need to get out more. There is a 2018 piece (that I think somebody else may have linked?) that invokes cultural Marxism to refer to the youth's approach to identity politics, but that is not done with the lens of the conspiratorial right wing view of cultural Marxism that's it's a deleterious elite plot to demote the white race; he sees it as a legitimate and organic cultural and academic development, even if it's not one he necessarily agrees with. If you read that column he doesn't really "pick a side" as much as he fairly dispassionately describes (and does not render judgement on) a generational divide that definitely does exist. quote:On the left, the big difference is over meliorism. The older liberals are appalled by President Trump, alarmed by global warming, disgusted by widening income inequality, and so on, but are more likely to believe the structures of society are basically sound. You can make change by voting for the right candidates and passing the right laws. You can change individual minds through education and debate. He also describes the generational divide on the quote:The generation gap on the right is less dramatic. It’s less politically important because the young don’t influence the G.O.P. much; the old Trumpians do. His conclusion: quote:Whether on left or right, younger people have emerged in an era of lower social trust, less faith in institutions, a greater awareness of group identity. They live with the reality of tribal political warfare and are more formed by that warfare. So he thinks cultural Marxism exists (and the concept well predates the current right wing fervor over it), and that the youth are influenced by it (if it exists, they are), but to use a word like "infected" when he just kind of seems to see it as "a thing that's happening" rather than a grave threat to society seems off base. In the piece from yesterday, too, he describes the psychological effect of inclusive "woke" language on the people who don't (or won't) "get it," but he's not saying that their interpretation is correct, or that it's wrong to consider inclusiveness when we choose our words. In this case, explaining is not disapproving. Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Aug 4, 2023 |
# ? Aug 4, 2023 17:14 |
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Natty Ninefingers posted:david brooks develops class consciousness in the nytimes Op-Ed page. The writers room has really outdone themselves this time. Brooks is another Niebuhr fan. Moral Man and Immoral Society is outright a class analysis of American society. For example when MLK refers to the “white liberal” that is from Niebuhr’s class analysis from Moral Man. I haven’t seen a new public main stream explicit class analysis in my life time. A lot of very specific folks, public figures, read Brooks. And several of those figures will see this class analysis and know where its roots are from. And if we are lucky it will prompt their own class analysis. Morrow posted:Yeah, the big point Brooks misses is that wealth and hereditary privileges are the problem and they're typically correlated with education. But he just sees education. He’s noting that wealth and privilege gate elite education, and then this gate the meritocracy making it hypocritical. Hieronymous Alloy posted:I mean, he's so close to grasping that the answer to these issues is socialism, and people who can't get socialism, turn to fascism instead. . . . but he just can't get there, mentally. It's like watching a Renaissance astronomer derive calculus from first principles, just so he can figure out how many epicycles to add to make sure the planets all orbit correctly around Earth. It’s a given with Brooks that he will frame the analysis perfectly and then miss the basket.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 17:18 |
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selec posted:I think it’s nice we’re finally getting presidents and candidates who have as hosed up financial problems and weird gently caress up screwup relatives as the rest of us. Jimmy Carter wasn't that long ago
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 17:22 |
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Judgy Fucker posted:Jimmy Carter wasn't that long ago And GHWB had a gently caress up of a son.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 17:25 |
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Here's some class analysis in the atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/trump-american-gentry-wyman-elites/620151/ I think there has been quite a bit of class analysis in recent years in mainstream publications. I mean the books brooks talks about on meritocracy are also mainstreamish- at least mainstream enough to find in a barnes and nobles. And, I think most of brooks class analysis has already been expressed going back to his much earlier writings. What new elements are in this recent op ed?
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 17:25 |
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Judgy Fucker posted:Jimmy Carter wasn't that long ago Apparently the key to getting presidents with "real problems" is to elect a Democrat from a former slave state! Paging Mr. Warnock.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 17:27 |
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selec posted:It’s definitely more relatable as an experience; being in debt is pretty common for most Americans, and being shamed for being in debt is also another fine American tradition. Great, now do the latest article about how that young professional pulling $300k/yr is living hand to mouth just like the rest of us. Since that's what this is. There's nothing in this story suggesting the guy with a net worth that ranges from one to several million ranging on source (and steadily growing for the sites that give any data over time) is particularly struggling or in debt: he's just not paying taxes. That's a "Well that's just smart" in some circles as we saw from Trump, but not an expression of relatable hardship. To be clear, it's not like he's some billionaire skating on all his bills: he's more a Joe Biden than a Donald Trump in how relatable his finances are. But like the endless pie charts showing how $20,000 vanishes into mansion payments and vacation funding every month, more people would reasonably see that and think "I wish my gross income were as high as his unpaid taxes" than "This just shows how hard we all have it." For someone wanting politicians who practice what they preach, it definitely has more meat than past gems like "Out of touch Joe Biden has a nice vintage car" or "Nancy Pelosi buys $10 ice creams." Are you sure you're not giving it a favorable interpretation because you liked him better before the story hit?
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 17:28 |
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Judgy Fucker posted:Jimmy Carter wasn't that long ago yeah, im not sure there have been that many presidents without hosed family problems. liek there is also the reagan daughter that was alienated. plogo fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Aug 4, 2023 |
# ? Aug 4, 2023 17:29 |
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Alkydere posted:So kind of like the guy who figured out the oddities in Uranus's orbit was caused by another planet and predicted Neptune's location (it was found within a year using his math) ...but couldn't figure out why Mercury's orbit was so erratic, threw up his hands and said there was a planet even closer to the sun perturbing Mercury's orbit. Not with the year. Uranus was found the *day* Le Verrier's letter arrived. selec posted:Relatable as hell. If someone running for president has never struggled how can I trust they understand what the working class is going through? Indeed. Who among us has not been so wealthy that they have disputes with the IRS on the order of half a million dollars? DeadlyMuffin fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Aug 4, 2023 |
# ? Aug 4, 2023 17:29 |
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Mellow Seas posted:...does he? He seems to think it's a useful descriptive term, but not an expressly negative one, and considers it wildly misused on the right. Here are some things he's written about it: Read it through the lens of this article from a couple of years ago, and it'll make more sense. He agrees with right-wing critiques of "wokeness", but he doesn't think "wokeness" is a real threat, because he believes it can only survive in the coddled ivory towers of elite circles and will be rapidly ground down to nothing by the real world whenever it escapes those spaces. He feels that it's all inauthentic social posturing in rich-person universities, and that these "savage word wars among the highly advantaged" (as he puts it) cannot survive real capitalism. He believes that the working class doesn't like "wokeness", and that business will only do the bare minimum needed to attract fresh grads of elite colleges who haven't yet had the woke brainwashing lifted by exposure to real jobs and real America, so "wokeness" will have little to no real-world impact. I also can't help but notice how smoothly his view lines up with right-wing rhetoric about "virtue signaling". quote:My friend Rod Dreher recently had a blog post for The American Conservative called “Why Are Conservatives in Despair?” He explained that conservatives are in despair because a hostile ideology — wokeness or social justice or critical race theory — is sweeping across America the way Bolshevism swept across the Russian Empire before the October Revolution in 1917. quote:People who engage in this discourse have been enculturated by our best and most expensive schools. If you look at the places where the splashy woke controversies have taken place, they have often been posh prep schools, like Harvard-Westlake or Dalton, or pricey colleges, like Bryn Mawr or Princeton.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 17:34 |
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DeadlyMuffin posted:Not with the year. Uranus was found the *day* Le Verrier's letter arrived. I know you just goofed on the names, but I think it'd be a fun philosophy of science paradox that Uranus was found via the perturbations Uranus caused on another, as-yet not found planet's orbit.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 17:36 |
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selec posted:It’s definitely more relatable as an experience; being in debt is pretty common for most Americans, and being shamed for being in debt is also another fine American tradition. I think people who have a net worth of $1m+ should pay their taxes. If more wealthy businesses/individuals paid their fair share of taxes, then we would probably have better funding for social programs to help out the less wealthy who are currently in debt
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 17:45 |
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DeadlyMuffin posted:Not with the year. Uranus was found the *day* Le Verrier's letter arrived. The point is that no candidate is unique this way—they all have foibles or things we’d look askance at, financially and personally. It’s just West’s political position and (I would argue) race that makes him being called out this way notable. It’s by no means a barrier to power; we have a Supreme Court justice who laundered poo poo-tons of debt through baseball tickets, and that wasn’t a meaningful barrier to a lifelong appointment to the highest court of the land. Sounds like West is just behaving in a class-appropriate fashion for the job he’s seeking to me.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 17:48 |
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I get selec's point - there are probably a lot of people who hosed up financially in a way that was the result of their own carelessness, there are people who cheat on their taxes, there are people who have hosed up children, and there are people who are hosed up themselves and struggle with addiction, and attacking Hunter isn't going to help much with any of those people. It's like making fun of Trump for being fat and eating McDonald's - you've just insulted half of the country in attempting to insult one guy.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 17:58 |
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Railing against rich people dodging taxes and being a rich person dodging taxes is pretty hypocritical. It's not like Biden is out here blasting people for having hosed up kids or Trump is out here calling people fat in a derogat- ah wait...
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 18:09 |
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Brooks and the Romney types somewhat understand that they could make conservative frameworks for UBI and parental leave but then when you tell them that they'd have to pay taxes for it, throw up there hands because they can't possibly be held responsible for others in society.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 18:15 |
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To keep the Discourse going, Vox's Zack Beauchamp is comin' in hot at Brooks.Zack Beauchamp, Vox posted:I regret to report the economic anxiety theory of Trumpism is back Not paywalled and there's quite a bit more (it's actually longer than the Brooks column) so feel free to click on through. Obviously a lot of good points (and a lot of them have been made here); I think he kind of neglects the idea that economic insecurity can exacerbate an existing tendency towards white identity politics - i.e. that somebody will not be looking for someone to blame if they are happy with their lives. I think the studies Beauchamp cites attempted to control for that effect, but I'm not sure how successful they have been. Financial comfort wouldn't cure Trumpism - many Trump voters would keep the same outlook if they were affluent, and many are affluent - but I don't think it hurts. Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Aug 4, 2023 |
# ? Aug 4, 2023 18:27 |
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Its kind of a shame to see Cornel West hasn't been paying taxes because of what he supports. From his website under issuesquote:Massive investments in satisfying the social needs of everyday people. Medicare for all including humane mental healthcare, decriminalization of drugs, and creation of humane rehabilitation sites. Decent housing for all, quality education for all, free college tuition for all, and jobs with living wages for all. Abolishing poverty and houselessness. Targeting the vicious legacy of white supremacy by ending mass incarceration, demilitarizing policing (abolishing Cop-Cities), and promoting reparations for past unjust treatment of Black people. Prioritizing the empowerment of indigenous peoples. Protecting the reproductive rights of women and ending all forms of patriarchy. Securing the rights of LGBTQ+ and Trans-Peoples. Treating every migrant and asylum seeker with dignity and implementing fundamental changes in immigration policies. Public financing of elections with ranked-choice voting, eliminating the Electoral College and a national holiday for voting. Democratizing unaccountable monopolies and oligopolies with workers' control. Alot of this stuff requires taxing rich people like Cornel West more. I don't know his positions on increasing taxes but him not paying his taxes makes me think he's not as sincere. Although he could just object to his tax dollars going where it goes now. The article doesn't have a response from him, but I would like to see what he says about it. I agree that there is a ton of hypocrisy in every presidential candidate though, him not being uniquely better isn't surprising, but somewhat disappointing. It's not really relatable though, he owes more in yearly taxes than I've ever made in a year. Edit: He did say this in response, but I don't even know if they posted the full quote because of the comma at the end. quote:“My brother I have asked my accountant to respond to these charges some of which are not true,” West wrote from his iPhone. gurragadon fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Aug 4, 2023 |
# ? Aug 4, 2023 18:58 |
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gurragadon posted:I don't know his positions on increasing taxes but him not paying his taxes makes me think he's not as sincere. Although he could just object to his tax dollars going where it goes now. The article doesn't have a response from him, but I would like to see what he says about it. I mean I don't think "individual taxpayers should decide whether or not to pay taxes based on whether or not they approve of individual budget items" is compatible with being a democratic socialist. Like there are possible mitigating factors that could make it not as bad, but if he refuses to pay taxes because he doesn't like the government he should be running for the Libertarian ticket.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 19:07 |
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Thats fair. I wonder about his motivations because I am sympathetic towards personal protests like that but that is a Libertarian thing and West hasn't indicated why he didn't pay his taxes yet.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 19:26 |
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The Brooks column isn't 'almost there' - it's his surrender flag, his story of how he learned to stop worrying and love the Trump and Trumpism even as Trump is repeatedly indicted for trying to overturn democracy. The Vox article Mellow Seas linked ably notes how uninterested Brooks is in actual facts - he makes no effort to check whether anything he says is correct. He's only interested in telling a narrative, one that - although couched as contrarian wisdom - is permission for the elite right and the radical centrists to know that their priors were right all along: Trumpism is just economic anxiety, and therefore righteous. It's intellectual cover for the never-trumpers to rally to Trump and present a united front in defense of coups.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 19:29 |
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One of the key conservative demographics is what were called the 'battlers' in Australia; bourgeois boomers who think they're working class despite owning their third investment property and/or a car dealership. They cling to the old cartoon aesthetics of 'working class' while having open hatred and dismissal of the actual working class. Interestingly this goes with the younger generations of reactionaries going full Nazi because they were promised this lifestyle and don't understand why they didn't get it, and either they learn material conditions or all into the endless barrage of propaganda blaming their lack of success on insufficient oppression of everyone else they're told they're in competition with.
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# ? Aug 4, 2023 19:32 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 01:31 |
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:The Brooks column isn't 'almost there' - it's his surrender flag, his story of how he learned to stop worrying and love the Trump and Trumpism even as Trump is repeatedly indicted for trying to overturn democracy. The Vox article Mellow Seas linked ably notes how uninterested Brooks is in actual facts - he makes no effort to check whether anything he says is correct. He's only interested in telling a narrative, one that - although couched as contrarian wisdom - is permission for the elite right and the radical centrists to know that their priors were right all along: Trumpism is just economic anxiety, and therefore righteous. David Brooks, June 15 posted:I try to be a reasonable person. I try to be someone who looks out on the world with trusting eyes. Over the decades, I’ve built up certain expectations about how the world works and how people behave. I rely on those expectations as I do my job, analyzing events and anticipating what will happen next. I think the reason he came up with the narrative he has, while ignoring data that contradicts it, is because he's always been a "narrative" columnist. I mean, you saw how stupid and frivolous his column about weed legalization was. It's partly a style and it's partly laziness, and it's worked for him his whole career, so why would he change now? As for how he came up with this particular narrative, like Beauchamp says, it's been around in some form another since the escalator, so it's an easy one to latch onto. Ghost Leviathan posted:One of the key conservative demographics is what were called the 'battlers' in Australia; bourgeois boomers who think they're working class despite owning their third investment property and/or a car dealership. They cling to the old cartoon aesthetics of 'working class' while having open hatred and dismissal of the actual working class. = Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Aug 4, 2023 |
# ? Aug 4, 2023 19:37 |