Trump

[funkstar]

In addition to Contrapoints (above), another excellent breakdown is provided by Innuendo Studios' series on the Alt-Right Playbook.

Ultimately, though, it seems American political discourse is just flat-out broken.

[Cloudane]

Thanks, that was an excellent series of videos too

It's scary how easy it is via things like Youtube bubbles to at least get dragged towards clicking through video after video of the centre-right and looking up to them a bit (Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin etc), going through the whole "you have to get out of the echo chambers and expose yourself to those you disagree with" thing and then by association at least listening to fascists, thus further legitimising them. Maybe finding the odd tiny bit of reasonableness in what some far-right cunt like Milo says when he uses his best snake oil salesman stuff on a Rubin interview.

I see through it now, how many leftists do you see on the "totally neutral, free speech, got to listen to all sides" Rubin Report? He's not a fascist I don't think, by any stretch, but a Useful Centrist conned into becoming a willing enabler and platform provider for them. But it took remembering to actually watch some leftist stuff ("my side") to realise what was going on and snap out of it.

Now imagine you're an impressionable 14 year old trying to take an interest in politics and of course being on 4chan, Twitter etc. I fear they're going to be harder to sort out.

[Harlequin]

Thanks, that was an excellent series of videos too

It's scary how easy it is via things like Youtube bubbles to at least get dragged towards clicking through video after video of the centre-right and looking up to them a bit (Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin etc), going through the whole "you have to get out of the echo chambers and expose yourself to those you disagree with" thing and then by association at least listening to fascists, thus further legitimising them. Maybe finding the odd tiny bit of reasonableness in what some far-right cunt like Milo says when he uses his best snake oil salesman stuff on a Rubin interview.

I see through it now, how many leftists do you see on the "totally neutral, free speech, got to listen to all sides" Rubin Report? He's not a fascist I don't think, by any stretch, but a Useful Centrist conned into becoming a willing enabler and platform provider for them. But it took remembering to actually watch some leftist stuff ("my side") to realise what was going on and snap out of it.

Now imagine you're an impressionable 14 year old trying to take an interest in politics and of course being on 4chan, Twitter etc. I fear they're going to be harder to sort out.

It might be an interesting experiment to replace "fascists" with "Marxists" and swap "left" and "right" in the above.

[Cloudane]

It might be an interesting experiment to replace "fascists" with "Marxists" and swap "left" and "right" in the above.

Maybe, but I don't think "the west" (who we mostly live and interact with) particularly has a problem with Marxism or leftism though does it? I mean, maybe if you listen to Peterson complaining about some tiny minority of overenthusiastic leftists in universities, or a bunch of snarling alt-rightists on 4chan, then it might seem that way - but in the real world we're voting in right wing governments with right wing policies and generally doing a lot of right wing things so I'm really not too worried about us turning into the next soviet union any time soon.

Anyway what Marxists? Is Contra a Marxist for being genderfluid and criticising fascists or something?

[zip accident]

It might be an interesting experiment to replace "fascists" with "Marxists" and swap "left" and "right" in the above.

Maybe, but I don't think "the west" (who we mostly live and interact with) particularly has a problem with Marxism or leftism though does it? I mean, maybe if you listen to Peterson complaining about some tiny minority of overenthusiastic leftists in universities, or a bunch of snarling alt-rightists on 4chan, then it might seem that way - but in the real world we're voting in right wing governments with right wing policies and generally doing a lot of right wing things so I'm really not too worried about us turning into the next soviet union any time soon.

Anyway what Marxists? Is Contra a Marxist for being genderfluid and criticising fascists or something?

We really need something to replace Marxism, it was philosophically and physically outright silly, but we do need something for alienated youth to think about.

[snaff]

It might be an interesting experiment to replace "fascists" with "Marxists" and swap "left" and "right" in the above.

Maybe, but I don't think "the west" (who we mostly live and interact with) particularly has a problem with Marxism or leftism though does it? I mean, maybe if you listen to Peterson complaining about some tiny minority of overenthusiastic leftists in universities, or a bunch of snarling alt-rightists on 4chan, then it might seem that way - but in the real world we're voting in right wing governments with right wing policies and generally doing a lot of right wing things so I'm really not too worried about us turning into the next soviet union any time soon.

Anyway what Marxists? Is Contra a Marxist for being genderfluid and criticising fascists or something?

Over 40% of the economy is direct government spending. The private economy is stuffed full of failed, zombie corporations kept alive by government issued debt and market manipulation that crowds out productive private activity. Living standards have been dropping for decades, masked by bad debt and government-led wealth transfer. So-called free markets hang on the words of government bureaucrats. The socialists have a stranglehold on the economy and the daily lives of ordinary people. The harder it becomes to hide what's going on, the more our freedom to speak will need to be curtailed.

[Harlequin]

It might be an interesting experiment to replace "fascists" with "Marxists" and swap "left" and "right" in the above.

Maybe, but I don't think "the west" (who we mostly live and interact with) particularly has a problem with Marxism or leftism though does it? I mean, maybe if you listen to Peterson complaining about some tiny minority of overenthusiastic leftists in universities, or a bunch of snarling alt-rightists on 4chan, then it might seem that way - but in the real world we're voting in right wing governments with right wing policies and generally doing a lot of right wing things so I'm really not too worried about us turning into the next soviet union any time soon.

Anyway what Marxists? Is Contra a Marxist for being genderfluid and criticising fascists or something?

To people on the harder right, all people with strong left views might be labelled 'Marxist' just as, for people on the harder left, all people with strong right views might be labelled 'fascist'. I was wondering if the experimentally altered post could have more or less equal meaning and impact to a right-wing audience as your original presumably would for a left-wing one.

[Cloudane]

Over 40% of the economy is direct government spending. The private economy is stuffed full of failed, zombie corporations kept alive by government issued debt and market manipulation that crowds out productive private activity. Living standards have been dropping for decades, masked by bad debt and government-led wealth transfer. So-called free markets hang on the words of government bureaucrats. The socialists have a stranglehold on the economy and the daily lives of ordinary people. The harder it becomes to hide what's going on, the more our freedom to speak will need to be curtailed.

Keeping failed corporations (i.e. capitalists) alive is socialist? I.... don't get it.

Living standards have been dropping? Though young at the time I remember in the 80s and early 90s seeing the awful council estates, houses that looked barely held together, the sheer number of homeless (which unfortunately have skyrocketed again since your Tory mates took over in 2010). Now aside from the resent resurgence of homelessness people's houses seem pretty good, we have internet, smartphones, TVs as big as the window used to be.
And freedom of speech is still there as it has always been, you won't get arrested for publicly criticising the government. To claim that it's not is usually a dogwhistle to bigots to tell them not to be shy about ranting about Muslims or whoever the current target is.

To people on the harder right, all people with strong left views might be labelled 'Marxist' just as, for people on the harder left, all people with strong right views might be labelled 'fascist'. I was wondering if the experimentally altered post could have more or less equal meaning and impact to a right-wing audience as your original presumably would for a left-wing one.

Well, maybe. Thing is I'm not calling every right winger a fascist. I'd call Trump one as he does way too many demonstrably fascist things, but take some rabid bible bashing traditionalist like Peterson: right wing (no matter how often he says he's centrist) but not a fascist.

[Little stoned kiwi]

I presume, from similar discussions with other people, that snaff is arguing for a reduction of the state so they don't interfere with the market.
Regardless of the methodology or structure, they all break down under the pressure of people being self-serving cunts.

[KlaxonCow]

The left / right divide is a false dichotomy.

Society is composed of individuals. The individual, collectively, comprise society.

They are one and the same thing. Just at different levels of abstraction.

If you like, the plural of "the individual" is "society" and the singular of "society" is "the individual".

So the idea of sacrificing one for the sake of the other is an illogical paradox.

To attack the individual for the greater good of society leaves you with a society where every single individual is miserable - so what sort of "society" is that? - or to attack society for the benefit of the individual leaves you individuals who're their own isolated little islands from everyone and everything else - and what sort of a life is that?

It's like having a couple of pub quiz teams who insist on blindly answering every question with "true, true, true" on the one team or with "false, false, false" on the other team, expecting a singular answer to be correct for every question, regardless of what that question is and regardless of whether it's even a "true of false" in the first place.

At best, if we've actually got a "true or false" round, then we can expect a 50% success rate by nothing more than random chance. That's the theory. So we've had left-leaning governments and right-leaning governments - how much do you estimate each one got pragmatically right, in terms of a working functional system?

No, not a perfect 50 / 50, granted. There is a margin of error here. But perhaps you're getting the gist of what I'm saying. Most voters, at least subconsciously, understand the point - because the most common complaint voiced among the electorate, when polled, is "there's no point voting, as all the candidates always end up amounting to the same thing".

More over, this "tribal" team-based sport ends up with both sides just "points scoring" against their opposite number. And, somewhere along the way, they've both forgotten that the whole original point of all this in the first place was trying to work out how we can make for a better society - that is, a better life in which we can live in.

When you turn it into a team-based sport, then what happens is that both teams obsess over not being the other team and proving the other team to be completely wrong to its core, so they naturally push each other to the extremes and the discussion does nothing but further and further polarise and divide.

And the grand problem we've seen repeatedly from this is that we're neither served by tyrannical communists nor by tyrannical fascists either. In their quests to enforce their worldviews, both sides of the divide become tyrannical and that, in my view, is the actual fucking enemy here.

Because, in a sense, I don't recognise Marxist left / right. Certainly, the grand problem with Marx, straight out of the gate, is that he presents us with a confused paradox - "all men are equal" and yet he immediately says "there's two types of people - the Bourgeois and the Prolateriat - and they must fight an eternal war with each other". So which one is it? Is there only one tribe of man that needs to learn how to live with itself, or are there two tribes of man - good and evil, depending on which side you see yourself as being on - where one tribe needs to defeat the other?

Well, as a humanist, I opt for the former. There is one tribe of man and it's a symbiotic relationship.

After all, if the "workers of the world unite", who exactly are they working for?

If not for a Bourgeois boss, then they must be working for themselves - in which case, does that not make them Bourgeoisie and not Prolateriat? If, as a self-employed businessman, they achieve great success, do they not become their supposed "enemy"?

Be it "bash the rich" or "kill the poor", both are biting the hand that feeds.

Because, oh factory owner, if you kill off the poor then who exactly is going to staff your factory? Who is going to build your mansions and your supercars? Who's going to climb down into the sewers and unblock all the shit? If every man becomes an island - that "there is no society" - then, sorry, you've got to do everything yourself (and that, by the way, is an impossible task, so good luck in this new Utopia you've created for yourself).

It's a symbiotic relationship. Because that's how we humans - a social species - operate and that's how we've come to such great success so far, in comparison to all our animal cousins.

Fuck "tribes" of all descriptions. Our true common enemy is death, disease, natural disasters and, well, the rest of this often hostile uncaring universe.

How should we work together - or alone - to leave this shit hole we find ourselves in just that little bit better than what we were originally given?

And that's the real point, I feel. Politics is nothing but re-arranging deck chairs (too often aboard the Titanic). Shifting wealth from one place to another. Shuffling the deck which already exists, but not, unto itself, capable of adding or removing cards from our hand.

It's actually science and technology that has consistently made all of our lives better. Refrigeration, transport, central heating, vaccines, agricultural machinery, the Internet, etc., etc..

Whilst the politicians argue, the scientists and engineers and technologists are the ones busy actually making your life better. Go on, tell me I'm wrong.

[Dio]

Doesn't every scientist and technologist and engineer continually tells us that it's not the tech that's evil, it's the uses people put it to? Why would they need to do that if the tech always made our lives better?

Isn't most of our dystopian SF based upon the assumption that the latter is true for a given value of 'better', and the resulting corporatism wins and turns out to be worse?

It's much easier to control a million people with a thousand people if the thousand people have more tech than the million.

I don't even need to mention weapons: for every tractor there is another couple of football fields of the Amazon cut down for farmland.

[KlaxonCow]

That's a rather disingenuous rebuttal, I feel.

As I never said tech, in every instance, always makes things better and cannot make things worse. So that's a bit of a strawman there.

And, of course, the claim isn't that every tech, in every instance, makes things better. But only that, if you didn't have it, then very little would ever get better again - as we'd have no progress and would just be stuck as we are, going through all the political permutations - shuffling the deck - but never really progressing anywhere.

Plus, of course, there's nothing inherent in a tractor itself that insists you have to destroy the rainforest. That's a separate non-tech political / economic decision.

If we economically valued the rainforest at the level we ought to, then it'd be ridiculously too expensive to go there and people would find somewhere else to go instead - they go for the rainforest because our economic system erroneously deems it "of no value".

I'd also simply say that, regrettably, science comes to us "piecemeal" in practice. So we often find ourselves in an "in-between state" that's not great.

For example, we invent the machines first. But we're still lagging on the power technology - renewables, battery storage, nuclear fusion, etc. - so the tech is, unfortunately, contributing to global warming, as we're powering it mostly from fossil fuels. But that's a matter of timing, not some "intrinsic evil", as it can all be just as equally powered on the better power tech to come.

(And now that battery tech has finally gotten to the level where it's feasible, we're actually seeing rather rapid change. Nearly all car manufacturers have an electric or hybrid car available. Some have pledged to completely switch by a certain date. Whilst it's more for political show than anything - as the estimates and predictions suggest that this is already going to happen anyway, without government assistance, simply due to the economics - the fact that the government has pledged that, in 2040, only hybrids and electrics will be allowed is at least a demonstration that things are changing quickly, that they can even say that at all.

Speaking of economics, an electric car has less parts. Easier assembly. The reason why it's more expensive than an ICE (internal combustion engine) car at the moment is because car battery tech remains expensive. But with all the manufacturers pledging new hybrids and electrics, the investment towards "economies of scale" have been consistently improving and, at current rates, it's estimated that a new electric car will be cheaper than a new ICE car by about 2025. Which is the economic tipping point and it's not that far away.

And we have seen, on a windy sunny day months back, the milestone of more than 50% of all our power in the UK coming from renewables. Where the renewables were actually in the majority. Sure, baby steps. That was just one fleeting moment so far. But we will get to a point where that's always true at every single moment, and not just one.)

So, I'd also say that sometimes whether tech is good or bad can be a matter of timing too. It looks bad now, as the only way to power it is by burning things and that's not great.

But if we switch over to a renewable infrastructure then it not only means it's no longer causing that "burning shit" problem, but the point about renewables is that they are renewable. If your solar panels generate enough to power your home then, as the Sun's not going anywhere for the next 5 billion years, you'll always be able to keep it powered for what is, to all human intents and purposes, forever more.

Bad timing. The wrong order. If the renewable tech had come first, then this other tech wouldn't be causing the problem in the first place.

And, sure, you could say that we'd never have bothered with renewable tech unless there was a problem there to be solved with it in the first place. But this is kind of what I mean about it being a matter of timing. You're looking at these things in transition, but if you were, say, a hundred years ahead looking back from the "end state", as it were, then you can clearly see that all this now is just a transition of technologies from one to the other.

Is it perfect? Of course not. That abstract concept cannot actually physically exist in this universe.

But, bottom line, this is the best we're ever going to get.

[gilesgoat]

Doesn't every scientist and technologist and engineer continually tells us that it's not the tech that's evil, it's the uses people put it to? Why would they need to do that if the tech always made our lives better?

Isn't most of our dystopian SF based upon the assumption that the latter is true for a given value of 'better', and the resulting corporatism wins and turns out to be worse?

It's much easier to control a million people with a thousand people if the thousand people have more tech than the million.

I don't even need to mention weapons: for every tractor there is another couple of football fields of the Amazon cut down for farmland.

<tinfoil hat>

It's YOU willingly falling into the trap of clouds, cloud services, Facebook, personal assistant AI ( Alexa, Cortana, Pebble, etc. ), remote storage, "free" services, STREAMING
SERVICES, it's-been-already-done-by-some-else-don't-need-to-do-it-know-well-how-it-works, false freedom, false freedom of choice, commodity-vs-what's-really-better, LAZYNESS, AMAZON,
GOOGLE, etc.

Ultimately you get SO DEPENDENT by THE SYSTEM that you can't even imagine a life without it and at that point you are a total slave of it that will do whatever it'll ask you to do.

Specifically "give me your money until you have any to give me".

</tinfoil hat>

[Dio]

KC, I've often heard from scientists that scientists / engineers would be better than politicians at running the world. Indeed, it's a view I used to espouse myself in my younger days. But I'm pretty sure that's wrong. Most of us are to a greater or lesser extent overoptimistic, naive, pretty awful at reading others positions / intentions / motivations, too rules-driven and not good enough at looking at the bigger picture. (Just looking at the way the political makeup of this board or indeed most tech companies differs from The Rest Of The World clearly illustrates much of it).

Look more close to home, at the working environments we're mostly in. It is equally dysfunctional if it's too engineering-led or too management-led. Only when you get the balance right, and have great managers working as a team with great engineering does it actually work.

I agree that our current governmental systems overemphasise politics and underemphasise the very general field of science, but not by an awful lot in the general case.

[Cloudane]

If we're to get technical, a very good way of looking at political alignment is the Political Compass: https://www.politicalcompass.org

Puts me a few points into the bottom-left, fwiw. Not the far top-left with Stalin. But the thing is in the context of Trump and his base we're dealing with the so called "alt-right", the ones with the green frog symbolism. Sure they are individuals and have their own positions on the compass if they're to stop posting Trump memes for long enough to have a look, but who are either too thick to think in two dimensions or purposefully ignore it because it doesn't suit their view of the world, but basically just align themselves with the mostly 4chan based collective and see everyone who advocates anything remotely socially progressive (rights for LGBTs, a view of immigration other than "shut the borders", religious freedom for anyone other than Christians, equality for women, some sort of concern about the number of innocent non-whites in the US getting shot by police etc) to any degree at all, as "a leftist" or "an SJW" which in their world is a mini-Stalin. There's nothing else, only them and "leftists". Only they rarely seem interested in the economic side of things, more the social one, but they'll lump you in with the economic far left so that they can link you with the atrocities of the Soviet Union (they also make the "Hitler was a leftist" argument so they can somehow link you with him too) and argue that your support of gay marriage will lead to the deaths of millions.

I don't think of things as a polarised left/right. But you have to put your mind in the place of people who do, to try and get an idea of what's going on.