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OwlFancier posted:The idea that the republicans have "lost control" of their party and base or that their current policies are in any way fringe also relies on the assumption that they are exceptional and unprecedented. Well I think there is some truth in the idea of "lost control," though I don't think much control has been lost. Trump breaks significantly from Republican party orthodoxy on several issues. For example the Republicans have long been the party of liberal free trade, and the Trump tariffs are a real poke in the eye for bigwigs like the Koch brothers. He has also broken substantially with the neocon foreign policy philosophy which has long had hegemony among Republicans. However I don't think down ballot Republicans have substantially shifted towards Trump's positions on most of these issues. Most of his differences with orthodoxy are not representative of a sea change in public opinion, but rather are products of long existing forces that have mostly been kept in the background by dumb luck.
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Oct 22, 2018 18:54
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Prester Jane posted:Last month ice announced that they had "lost" 1488 children. This was in addition to the 1475 children they had lost just three months prior.* That is genocide. Stop talking out of your rear end and trying to dismiss an active genocide. What you are doing is evil and there is absolutely no excuse for it. Well, reading the USA Today article posted, they added a follow-up correction stating that the 1,488 children were not taken from parents, they crossed the border without them. Later reports clarified that the kids were actually placed with sponsors screened by the US Dept of Health and Human services (for criminality and competence, but not legal status). Later reports on the status of the kids clarified that most were in the care of family members, but 20% of said sponsors didn't respond to a 30-day follow-up phonecall from ICE for obvious reasons. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/1500-missing-immigrant-children-federal-government-fact-check-2018-05-29/ https://www.brit.co/what-is-and-isnt-true-about-1500-lost-migrant-children-that-outraged-the-nation/ Still a poo poo situation but no, they aren't in mass graves Prester Jane posted:This is more willful ignorance. I can't believe you're trying to use the pr spin that a bunch of sociopathic ghouls are putting on an act of genocide to dismiss both the severity of the genocide and the culpability of the political constituencies who are cheering the genocide. You misunderstand, these aren't my beliefs but the beliefs of those defending the camps. In regards to whether or not this is 'normal', I don't see this as an escalation of what the foreign policies of Bush and Obama have been doing to kids overseas for years, only they were doing it in a greater severity, in greater numbers. Their lives are crucial, but their distance from US soil shouldn't diminish that. But the tirades of "this is not normal" is a defense mechanism against the *really* scary idea that these things have actually been going on for decades, with the full support of a president or two you probably liked. Which is sort of why conservatives didn't care one lick about socialism or the deficit until the day Obama took office. They formed tea parties and started protesting non-existent tax hikes because their slice of media had formed their worldview In the meantime, Obama massively expanded the size and budget of the border patrol and broke all-time records for deportations for 6 of the 8 years he was in office. As you can imagine, that broke up a lot of families. This was done in attempt to compromise with the GOP to support immigration reform. It didn't help, the right didn't want to acknowledge that a democrat was being a hardliner on immigration, and the left didn't want to either. Maintaining a black-and-white worldview was a greater priority than supporting their own stated policies. Ask yourself why this is About the only positive thing I can say about Trump is that he is precisely the sort of corporate caricature that can get the public to start paying attention again, in the same way the mere presence of a black president caused the GOP to win 60 congressional seats in 2010. Had Hillary won, they would have likely done the same again this year. Trump had the added bonus of having none of the competence or "across-the-aisle" support that Bush had, which is what enabled him to embark on foreign wars that much more closely resembled actual genocide
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Oct 22, 2018 19:01
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If anything concretely represents a degradation of the body politic its the extremely normal anti-latinx police agency disappearing precisely 1488 kids no more no less.
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Oct 22, 2018 19:12
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"Disappearing" as in, "sent to vetted relatives who then didn't answer our callback within 30 days". Which has much different implications than the "disappeared" in the usual fascist/communist sense (sent to 'vocational camp' w/incinerators and never seen again) The former of which, yeah, is pretty normal when it comes to ICE trying to get in touch with undocumented immigrants. Which is why CPS should be handing the matter. In the meantime the press is going to focus on China's muslim concentration camps to make ourselves feel better.
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Oct 22, 2018 19:25
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OwlFancier posted:The idea that the republicans have "lost control" of their party and base or that their current policies are in any way fringe also relies on the assumption that they are exceptional and unprecedented. It amazes me to no end how some idiots out there are still saying Trump is an aberration of republican rhetoric rather than a result of it. Have any of these dipshits in the media and DC ever listened to Limbaugh or Savage? They have been saying immigration will destroy America for decades. They have been saying Christianity is under attack for decades. They have been saying we need to "rebuild" our military for decades. Trump is the inevitable result of this rhetoric goddammit. The republican party has always been the Christian and White Nationalist party since the 60s. Have these pundits and politicians ever picked up a loving history book ffs? No wonder Trump won. As for civil war, my rear end is taking no part in it. I'll be getting high and shitposting in C-Spam with the rest of ya'll instead.
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Oct 22, 2018 21:54
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Slutitution posted:It amazes me to no end how some idiots out there are still saying Trump is an aberration of republican rhetoric rather than a result of it. Have any of these dipshits in the media and DC ever listened to Limbaugh or Savage? Trump's an aberration, in the sense that he's outright echoing right-wing punditry rather than simply pandering to it. Bush's policies were just as damaging to the national and foreign agenda, if not more so, because he could effectively sell himself as a moderate to a much more cooperative press and democrats. No Child Left Behind was a disastrous handout to charter schools and for-profit education companies and it still got 91 votes in the senate. Same case for the wars The advantage of bipartisianship is something that Trump burned for the sake of base "populism"- if he encourages enough hordes to the polls then he won't need centrists But even his populism is a marketing spin. The guy got less votes than either Romney or McCain, two candidates whom are not considered representative of GOP voters simply because Obama was the one running against them. Trump's presidency is largely a symptom of plummeting democratic turnout, which hopefully has been solved by now. Voter turnout is contingent on the perception of the current state of Washington, which nowadays has more to do with the party occupying the white house more than actual policy Had Hillary won the right would have lost their minds and blocked every single appointee up until swarming the current midterms while democrats had every reason to stay home, again. So it's just a matter of whether a right-wing congress or white house is more damaging
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Oct 22, 2018 22:39
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In conclusion, Bernie should have won.
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Oct 23, 2018 08:09
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Prester Jane, since you seem to have strongly disagreed with my opinion about trends in opinion among the American public and Republican party, would you care to comment on those pew polls I've posted? I'd just like to understand how your ideas mesh with the empirical observations.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:19
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je1 healthcare posted:Trump's an aberration, in the sense that he's outright echoing right-wing punditry rather than simply pandering to it. Bush's policies were just as damaging to the national and foreign agenda, if not more so, because he could effectively sell himself as a moderate to a much more cooperative press and democrats. No Child Left Behind was a disastrous handout to charter schools and for-profit education companies and it still got 91 votes in the senate. Same case for the wars Trump got 2 million more votes than Romney and 3 million more than McCain. In fact, he has the highest popular vote of any republican President in history. This is even after Gary Johnson got 4 million votes, which experts have said would have gone to Trump if Johnson was not on the ballot. Hate sells, news at 11.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:36
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Squalid posted:Prester Jane, since you seem to have strongly disagreed with my opinion about trends in opinion among the American public and Republican party, would you care to comment on those pew polls I've posted? I'd just like to understand how your ideas mesh with the empirical observations. Those polls don't even vaguely say what you are insisting they are. You are seriously quoting a poll that measures Democrats attitudes towards immigration and insisting that it proves that Republicans haven't become significantly more radicalized over the past 10 years or so. It's asinine. The data you posted has absolutely nothing to do with the actual discussion. You concede the data (mostly) does not break down by party affiliation and is further limited specifically the topic of immigration, and then you're trying to use that to declare that the Republicans have not become significantly more radicalized in the recent past. Your post was really not worth addressing other than to point out how irrelevant your evidence is. Prester Jane fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 20:33
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I mean the situation is literally that we have Republicans cheering on the literal genocide of brown children, and you're trying to hold up a couple of opinion polls to prove that the American public hasn't become more radicalized. Like.....wut? Edit: having reread your posts- from my perspective you are trying to argue that because we could see the iceberg coming, the iceberg piercing the Titanic's hull does not represent a significant escalation of the icebergs influence on the Titanic's situation. Prester Jane fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 20:42
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I mean if icebergs broke hulls via gradual intersection with them over the course of decades... What gives you this conception of political attitudes as having all or nothing barriers around certain points? If you want an ice based analogy a glacier carving a valley would be a rather more apt one, i think. Systematic slaughter of brown children to meet political goals has long been acceptable, the latest development is merely the method via which they are slaughtered domestically. Again this is the country that has indiscriminately carpet bombed various parts of the world constantly since the end of the second world war and has a proud history of imprisoning and torturing anyone and everyone basically for fun, why the hell would it be a different thing for them to just build child murderprisons for foreigners? Why is this the line that represents some event horizon of evil? You have to see that it's clearly an arbitrary distinction to try and set it apart from the rest of the US's foreign and domestic policy? OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 21:20
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Prester Jane posted:Those polls don't even vaguely say what you are insisting they are. You are seriously quoting a poll that measures Democrats attitudes towards immigration and insisting that it proves that Republicans haven't become significantly more radicalized over the past 10 years or so. It's asinine. The data you posted has absolutely nothing to do with the actual discussion. Maybe I wasn't clear enough about restating my arguments. With these polls I have tried to argue that the average Republican is not significantly more "radical" in their political beliefs than they have been in the recent past. Those polls regarding attitudes towards immigration do in fact suggest Republicans are not noticeably more anti immigrant in their beliefs and feelings than they were ten years ago. Unfortunately they didn't have good time series for all the statistics they had, but here's one more that suggests we haven't seen increasingly negative feeling by Republicans towards immigrants:  Republicans just haven't changed that much at all in recent history. From your phrasing and emphasis on Trump administration policy though, it seems you are not actually interested in the beliefs and feelings of Republicans, but in the turn towards more radical policy. If you would actually look at my post history though you can see that I've brought this up several times, so I'm not clear with what you are even disagreeing with anymore. Certainly compared to Bush II, Trump is far more dangerous for undocumented immigrants. I just don't think this reflects an actual change in the wants and desires of the Republican electorate. Owlfancier is right though that cheering the slaughter of brown children is hardly new to American politics. Why here's a brief quote regarding one Republican administration's attempts to spin brutal crimes committed in the mid-eighties: 
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Oct 23, 2018 22:53
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Slutitution posted:Trump got 2 million more votes than Romney and 3 million more than McCain. In fact, he has the highest popular vote of any republican President in history. This is even after Gary Johnson got 4 million votes, which experts have said would have gone to Trump if Johnson was not on the ballot. Hey you're right! I'm an idiot, disregard post
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Oct 24, 2018 00:35
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OwlFancier posted:Again this is the country that has indiscriminately carpet bombed various parts of the world constantly since the end of the second world war and has a proud history of imprisoning and torturing anyone and everyone basically for fun, why the hell would it be a different thing for them to just build child murderprisons for foreigners? Why is this the line that represents some event horizon of evil? You have to see that it's clearly an arbitrary distinction to try and set it apart from the rest of the US's foreign and domestic policy? uhhh, sir, do you mind not regurgitating Putin talking points like this? Only facts are allowed in this thread. #resistance
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Oct 24, 2018 01:55
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The Caravan will arrive at the border on election day. Republicans will lose the elections badly. The day after the election some members of the Caravan attempt to force themselves in. A group of armed CHUDs are there waiting, and kill hundreds before getting into a firefight with law enforcement. Mass casualties on both sides. Copy-cat attacks by angry, armed CHUDs erupt across America. Trump declares martial law. A week of non-stop carnage across the nation leads Trump to issue an executive order to suspend the results of the election for "national security reasons". In a 5-4 decision SCOTUS upholds the order.
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Oct 27, 2018 16:44
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Hey Squalid and Owl Fancier; hit me with another one about how republicans are not clearly radicalizing and escalating at present. The thread could use some more textbook examples of normalcy bias.
Prester Jane fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Oct 27, 2018 |
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Oct 27, 2018 16:47
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qkkl posted:The Caravan will arrive at the border on election day. Republicans will lose the elections badly. The day after the election some members of the Caravan attempt to force themselves in. A group of armed CHUDs are there waiting, and kill hundreds before getting into a firefight with law enforcement. Mass casualties on both sides. Copy-cat attacks by angry, armed CHUDs erupt across America. This is some bizarre fallout 76 prequel fan fic but I'd like to see chapter 2
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Oct 27, 2018 17:14
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Prester Jane posted:Hey Squalid and Owl Fancier; hit me with another one about how republicans are not clearly radicalizing and escalating at present. The thread could use some more textbook examples of normalcy bias. I'm not sure why I would hit you with that given I was saying exactly as much on the last page. Was I not clear enough? However in light of recent events why don't we have a look at another statistic which aught to be an indicator of right-wing radicalization: Rates of hate crimes.  There are various problems with reporting and definitions, so I wouldn't look to closely at the numbers. However this trend is probably correlated with the "true" rate, which has seen a long term decline in step with other types of violent crime. You might notice this graph ends at 2014, which is rather relevant because hate crimes actually increased in frequency since 2015, although the total for 2018 has actually gone down compared to the first half of 2017. Hopefully that trend will continue. There is good reason to believe the election of Donald Trump had something to do with this short term increase, i.e. that his election was not normal.  "Detrended" just means things like regular seasonal changes and long term increases/decreases are removed, so any big spikes represent deviations from expected behavior. As we can see here the election of Donald Trump co-occurred with a huge jump almost as bad as the one after 9/11. The weirdness of 2016 is also evidence when you compare normal quarterly trends, indicating things got worse as the election approached and then after Trump's win, which is congruent with my impression of things at the time.  These recent trends are bad, and its not hard to see who is responsible. Where you and I mostly differ, Prester, is the timeframe at which we are looking at the problem. If you look at trends over the last 2-4 years and extrapolate them indefinitely into the future, things must look very dire indeed! If instead you look at the larger forces which operate over periods of 30+ years, we get a very different picture. To understand modern issues it is probably necessary to take both perspectives. Squalid fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Oct 27, 2018 |
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Oct 27, 2018 19:19
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There we go, that's the good poo poo right there.
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Oct 27, 2018 19:22
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loving lol at "if you look this 30-year chart that mysteriously ends four years ago right before the dranatic escalation began then you'll see that there has been no dramatic escalation. I am very smart." 
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Oct 27, 2018 19:27
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Squalid posted:These recent trends are bad, and its not hard to see who is responsible. Where you and I mostly differ, Prester, is the timeframe at which we are looking at the problem. If you look at trends over the last 2-4 years and extrapolate them indefinitely into the future, things must look very dire indeed! If instead you look at the larger forces which operate over periods of 30+ years, we get a very different picture. To understand modern issues it is probably necessary to take both perspectives. then a rise again right after trump was elected and continuing in 2017, then dropping again in 2018 in relative terms. edit: https://csbs.csusb.edu/sites/csusb_csbs/files/2018%20Hate%20Final%20Report%205-14.pdf  again, the data isn't in compiled yet for 2017-2018 in this report, but they are expecting to see an increase in 2017 and a decrease from 2017 in 2018 based on preliminary data. people often look back on the 1990s with rose-tinted glasses but it was not so. BrutalistMcDonalds fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Oct 27, 2018 |
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Oct 27, 2018 19:31
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Meanwhile in reality: New data shows US hate crimes continued to rise in 2017.quote:
Your entire post is the very definition of misusing data to argue in bad faith.
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Oct 27, 2018 19:35
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Did you miss the part where I said hate crimes increased in 2017? I thought I was pretty clear. I can understand why you feel so invested in this issue Prester Jane, but I promise you I am not trying attack you personally. I said quite specifically that hate crimes have increased in the recent past, so it's hard to understand where you are trying to go with this. Looking at long term trends again, the decrease is actually more dramatic than the charts I posted indicate, as total hate crimes have decreased even as population increases and vulnerable minority populations like Muslims and openly LGTB populations have increased even faster.
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Oct 27, 2018 19:57
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Yes and there is still a significant and clear escalation over the past few years. The 30 year trend of decreases stopped back in 2014 and has started to climb back up, quickly. I'm taking it personally because I'm a member of one of the communities that is severely at risk as a result of this escalation and I don't appreciate people poo-pooing what's actually going on by waving charts around (that don't even cover the period of time I'm discussing).
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Oct 27, 2018 20:05
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Prester Jane posted:Yes and there is still a significant and clear escalation over the past few years. The 30 year trend of decreases stopped back in 2014 and has started to climb back up, quickly. I'm taking it personally because I'm a member of one of the communities that is severely at risk as a result of this escalation and I don't appreciate people poo-pooing what's actually going on by waving charts around (that don't even cover the period of time I'm discussing). Did you miss where I specifically pointed to that increase, posted two graphs demonstrating it, and suggested its relationship with the modern political environment? What exactly do you think I've been talking about?
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Oct 27, 2018 20:10
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The right wing is poo poo and full of murder happy nutters and has been for a long time is pretty much entirely consistent with my position? Also I mean, this might be UK bias speaking but mail bombs are pretty normal afaiac though I appreciate Americans prefer to fund them rather than actually play with them themselves. When you get to people firing rocket launchers at government buildings then you're competitive. Like if you want examples of right wing nutters murdering people far more successfully than half-arsed mail bombings for years then wikipedia has a great list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States#2010%E2%80%93present Again the contention is not that the right wing are not violent lunatics, the contention is that they have been violent lunatics for a long time. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Oct 27, 2018 |
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Oct 27, 2018 20:27
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HorrificExistence posted:trump did this; the "angel" families did this
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Oct 27, 2018 20:45
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This thread is on the money. Structurally speaking, USA is overdue for (or already experiencing) a spike in political violence, although it's up in the air how serious its consequences are going to be. According to Peter Turchin's data, there are both a 200-300 year and a ~50 year historical cycle or political instability and at the moment both are pointing up from historical lows. The 2020s are gonna see action that is probably not going to be too amazing in itself but may herald a beginning century of struggles. (I was going to post a chart, but getting some protocol error message and too lazy to get it hosted, just turn to page 8 if interested.) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.901.5055&rep=rep1&type=pdf uncop fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Nov 2, 2018 |
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Nov 2, 2018 20:59
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the 10-20 year horizon is large scale political terrorism, the long horizon conflict is gonna be great lakes region vs the world
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Nov 2, 2018 22:40
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uncop posted:This thread is on the money. Structurally speaking, USA is overdue for (or already experiencing) a spike in political violence, although it's up in the air how serious its consequences are going to be. According to Peter Turchin's data, there are both a 200-300 year and a ~50 year historical cycle or political instability and at the moment both are pointing up from historical lows. The 2020s are gonna see action that is probably not going to be too amazing in itself but may herald a beginning century of struggles. Looking at the article it has some interesting ideas, but the author seems to quick to draw grand conclusions from thin evidence. I think it makes sense that there are cyclical patterns to political violence. I remember another paper by an economic historian which I've sadly lost that found anti-immigrant political movements almost always appear and gather political support after recessions. However regardless It's definitely wrong to ever say a country is "overdue" for violence, for the same reasons its wrong to say California is overdue for an earthquake or a volcano overdue for an eruption. Such events don't work on fixed time scales, and Turchin says that himself. quote:It is important to note that secular cycles are not cycles in the strict mathematical sense. The period of oscillations is not fixed; instead, there is a statistical tendency for instability waves and, alternatively, periods of vigorous population growth to recur on a characteristic time scale. It would be strange if it were otherwise – the structural-demographic model describes only one set, albeit an important one, of factors affecting population and instability dynamics.
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Nov 3, 2018 00:16
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https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/...r%3D1738%23pti6 скоро рассвет
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Nov 5, 2018 22:35
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kZASM8OX7s
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Nov 5, 2018 22:54
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYOu_lgLgzo
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Nov 5, 2018 23:11
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uncop posted:This thread is on the money. Structurally speaking, USA is overdue for (or already experiencing) a spike in political violence, although it's up in the air how serious its consequences are going to be. According to Peter Turchin's data, there are both a 200-300 year and a ~50 year historical cycle or political instability and at the moment both are pointing up from historical lows. The 2020s are gonna see action that is probably not going to be too amazing in itself but may herald a beginning century of struggles.
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Nov 6, 2018 06:45
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Squalid posted:Looking at the article it has some interesting ideas, but the author seems to quick to draw grand conclusions from thin evidence. There's so many variables in this subject that it's hard to make any real determination about cycles. Perhaps the biggest one in this case is that the US is a democracy, and its political environment reflects that. In a dictatorship, you see wave after wave of political violence from revolts against tyranny from the every man in the street. The US is largely exempt from that as a democracy, since the state doesn't operate on the whims of one man who's only goal is to maintain power for himself and his family or close friends. There's a veneer of accountability that helps to stave off that kind of instability. However that does not mean that the US system can avoid political violence altogether, obviously. Our fundamental problem that democracy isn't able to address is when the majority, or close to a majority, is wrong, the only political infrastructure we have to address it is civil war. In the case of the US, we're still dealing today with what amounts to the confederacy, despite the fact that the confederacy were defeated, shamed, and Atlanta was burned to the ground. The GOP today is a continuation of the redeemer movement that emerged during reconstruction, which itself was a continuation of the confederacy, and with the prominence of that movement even to this day, civil war is always a possibility. The Compromise of 1877 is little known, but it could one day be looked back on the same way we look back on the Treaty of Versailles, because it removed federal troops from southern states, allowed Southern whites to recapture control in their state governments, and gave them the freedom to deal with race issues on their own terms. It was an acquiescence to a confederate military insurgency at the time, and it recreated many of the conditions that caused the previous civil war to break out. The result has been a century of turmoil, from the Jim Crow laws, to the civil rights period, to today, with the right wing populism rooted in many of the racist ideals of the Confederacy, and holding up monuments of Confederate losers, traitors, and bigots as their symbols. I'm honestly surprised we haven't had a second civil war already. This may not be the most tense moment of the past century when it comes to the North and South dynamic the US has always had to contend with, but the severity of the problem today is irrelevant to the fact that there still is a problem lurking beneath the surface, always threatening the structure of the country. When we see poo poo like in North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin, where outgoing Republicans have/are undermining incoming Democratic governments by limiting the powers of their offices, which goes completely against the spirit of the fundamental ideas of the American system, or the voter suppression laws enacted in the South to take the right to vote from minorities, it's still the same insurgency, the same ball and chain on the ankle of the American system that we've been dealing with for centuries now. These people may view themselves as patriotic Americans when it's convenient, but it's quite clear they view themselves as distinct from Americans. That their values and beliefs take precedence over the institutions and ideals this country was founded on. With that as a pillar of their ideology, combined with how regressive their views are, it's hurt this country in ways we'll never fully know the extent of. It's been such a long process now that in a lot of ways, the opponents of the old Confederate system just accept it as business as usual. I don't know if it will be during our lifetimes, but I think at some point, there's going to be some sort of event that exposes that insurgency for what it is, in such a way that people are no longer going to accept it as just a part of the American system. If a civil war kicks off in the US, it will be because of that. From the Southern whites side, the most likely culprit would be the continuation of the demographic changes in the US that are seeing white people become less and less influential. From the reaction we saw to something as mundane as Barack Obama's presidency, I think the real prospect of becoming complete passengers in the American system could provoke major secession movements in Republican dominated states. From our side, there's always the potential of something like the violence in Bleeding Kansas, the beating of Charles Sumner, and the John Brown trial that could radicalize and mobilize an anti-confederate movement in a matter of months. Theoretically, these cases could be dealt with peacefully, but it's much more difficult now than it was in the 1860's, because the line between the north and the south has gotten so much blurrier over the past century and a half. Now there can't be a clean split, and with the context that this issue has persisted for over a hundred years without any peaceful resolution to it coming out, it's hard to see how it can be solved without a fight. So civil war may well be on the horizon. Whatever the case, I don't think the  tactic of the last 100 years is going to hold up for the next 100 years. Volkerball fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Dec 8, 2018 |
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Dec 8, 2018 16:01
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There's no geographical line to break on, it'll be rwanda style neighbor against neighbor
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Dec 8, 2018 16:28
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Volkerball posted:Whatever the case, I don't think the tactic of the last 100 years is going to hold up for the next 100 years. Yeah, I wouldn't disagree. In this thread I've repeatedly emphasized the importance of long term trends which we have seen over the last 30-50 years. That's not to dismiss the short term trends of the last 2-10 years, which is what people like Prester Jane have pointed to as the most important. We have to be able to look at both the big and little pictures to get a full sense of where we stand. When looking at the potential of increasing conflict I think it pays to consider the ontogeny of violence. Why do we see repeated cycles of civil war and conflict in some countries, while others remain continuously peaceful and stable? Why do we often see chaos during the succession of dictators? I think in any system powerful people will be ambitious. Good governments give them mechanisms through which to expend their energy in nondestructive ways. In places like the US every few years you have a chance to run in an election, and you can trust that its at least possible to win, even with a little vote rigging here or there. Failing to win has little consequence, you can always try again later. All that's required to try and win within the system is to agree to the basic rules, you lose an election you admit it and move on. Or you can at least bribe someone who already won. In nondemocratic systems there's no outlet like that. Either you acquiesce to the existing power or you go into rebellion. When there's a change of government, especially to offices with poorly defined succession rules like in Presidential dictatorships, the stakes are especially high. The game is winner take all, whoever wins the contest gets everything. The more powerful someone already is in the system, the higher the stakes as their potential rewards and penalties for winning/losing get higher. There's no point playing by the rules if you're going to get your head chopped off as a counter-revolutionary or purged for communist sympathies for losing. If we know the game is rigged nobody is going to play by the rules anyway. When Republicans strip Democratic governors of their power and steal elections, or call elections they lose fair and square "rigged," or block Supreme Court nominees in violation of all existing tradition, they are threatening the rules of the game. The comparison to the southern secessionists is apt. Before the Civil War they abused every rule of the game. The results of elections didn't matter to them, there was no circumstance in which they were ever willing to give up slavery, no matter the result of elections. I think the modern Republican contempt for popular sovereignty reflects ideological continuity with 19th century slavers. They want voting to be restricted to the "responsible" or people with skin in the game (i.e. property). It's what I referred to earlier as "tactical radicalization". It's got real bad over the last decade or so, and its real bad, even as rates of civil violence have generally decreased over the same period. Today Republicans especially, but Democrats increasingly as well, are pushing the rules of the game to the breaking point. By doing so they are delegitimizing the institutions of government. If you are a revolutionary this is actually good. If the rules are rigged we want to dispose of them anyway. If If we can't agree on the rules governing the system though, the only recourse is violence. If the progressive base gets its way and a future Democratic administration packs the Supreme Court, the result definitely isn't going to be that everything returns to normal with Republicans acquiescing. The only possible result will be the complete destruction of the institution of the Supreme Court as it exists today, and I have no idea into what we would see it transform. Whether it is good or necessary to destroy these institutions is a different question, and another I don't know the answer to.
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Dec 8, 2018 21:06
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Yeah, it's a tough question. I wonder what the Romans or Greeks would tell you about their form of government back when their empires were falling apart. I imagine you could ask a Roman back then what the best government system in the world is, and they'd probably tell you that there was no better system than imperial or republican Rome, despite the fact that political assassinations and brutal crackdowns were an integral part of how the system operated. That for all the flaws, it's not like any of those tribes on the outskirts were doing anything to aspire towards. I feel like in a lot of ways, the American attitude towards American democracy is kind of the same way. That with the rapid collapse and atrocious human rights record of communism, the blatant injustice of the fascist monarchies and dictatorships of the world, and the long term stability of the US, that our system is viewed as the best anyone could expect to do. But if a time traveler from 1,000 years in the future came back and got to ask us this question, I don't think they would buy our arguments. The cracks in the American system are really starting to show, and it's clear that a new system of government that is capable of balancing the need for government to be accountable to people, an unquestionable dedication to the values of dignity, equality, and human rights, and the need for a government to be able to defend itself against internal challenges that threaten those values, a little better. I don't know the answer either, but I have a feeling it's a question a lot more people are going to be asking over the next decade or two. It could lead to an enlightenment, where people build upon the American system to capitalize on the strong points and fix its many flaws, or it could lead to a dark age, where nothing is able to replace the failed American experiment with its better, or even its equal. I'm hoping for the former, but I have nothing to contribute to prevent the latter.
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Dec 8, 2018 21:53
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Volkerball posted:Yeah, it's a tough question. I wonder what the Romans or Greeks would tell you about their form of government back when their empires were falling apart. I imagine you could ask a Roman back then what the best government system in the world is, and they'd probably tell you that there was no better system than imperial or republican Rome, despite the fact that political assassinations and brutal crackdowns were an integral part of how the system operated. That for all the flaws, it's not like any of those tribes on the outskirts were doing anything to aspire towards. I feel like in a lot of ways, the American attitude towards American democracy is kind of the same way. That with the rapid collapse and atrocious human rights record of communism, the blatant injustice of the fascist monarchies and dictatorships of the world, and the long term stability of the US, that our system is viewed as the best anyone could expect to do. But if a time traveler from 1,000 years in the future came back and got to ask us this question, I don't think they would buy our arguments. The cracks in the American system are really starting to show, and it's clear that a new system of government that is capable of balancing the need for government to be accountable to people, an unquestionable dedication to the values of dignity, equality, and human rights, and the need for a government to be able to defend itself against internal challenges that threaten those values, a little better. I don't know the answer either, but I have a feeling it's a question a lot more people are going to be asking over the next decade or two. It could lead to an enlightenment, where people build upon the American system to capitalize on the strong points and fix its many flaws, or it could lead to a dark age, where nothing is able to replace the failed American experiment with its better, or even its equal. I'm hoping for the former, but I have nothing to contribute to prevent the latter. There are countries with governments that exist today that work far better than the american one what is this weird bullshit.
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Dec 9, 2018 02:51
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