I'm just going to copy-paste this post by @sj_zero because I have nothing to add:
> At Newcorp, the company running Fox News, employee donations skew wildly towards Kamala Harris, with the #1 recipient of funds by a wide margin being Kamala Harris in 2024. Donald Trump got less than 1/10th of the donations from Newcorp employees.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/news-corp/summary?id=D000067048
"It's all performative.
You're watching Democrats pretend to be Republicans, largely for the benefit of other Democrats."
> At Newcorp, the company running Fox News, employee donations skew wildly towards Kamala Harris, with the #1 recipient of funds by a wide margin being Kamala Harris in 2024. Donald Trump got less than 1/10th of the donations from Newcorp employees.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/news-corp/summary?id=D000067048
"It's all performative.
You're watching Democrats pretend to be Republicans, largely for the benefit of other Democrats."
That's how controlled opposition works.
You give them the little things you don't care about so that you have their ear on the things you do care about.
You give them the little things you don't care about so that you have their ear on the things you do care about.
> so what lefty things do they really care about that you've seen them break the illusion to push on their audience?
Power for the regime.
A great specific example is RINOs.
Fox loves them.
Romney, Cheney, the Bush family, etc. Fox hates Trump.
Like the entire GOP institution, Fox stands for what the Democrats want, but more slowly.
Power for the regime.
A great specific example is RINOs.
Fox loves them.
Romney, Cheney, the Bush family, etc. Fox hates Trump.
Like the entire GOP institution, Fox stands for what the Democrats want, but more slowly.
> Power for the regime is not a lefty thing.
🤝
> I don't think we can look at either party to know what's left or right.
Also true, because they are both aligned with ensuring power for the regime. Sometimes they fight over scaps of that power. Sometimes they switch positions on things.
Cause their highest interest is power, not the local community, not the society.
🤝
> I don't think we can look at either party to know what's left or right.
Also true, because they are both aligned with ensuring power for the regime. Sometimes they fight over scaps of that power. Sometimes they switch positions on things.
Cause their highest interest is power, not the local community, not the society.
We're getting into nuances of words at this point.
Romney was "right" but he's the same spirit animal as Kamala.
🤷♂️
Romney was "right" but he's the same spirit animal as Kamala.
🤷♂️
I like @wjmaggos he usually ends up getting piled on due to the fact that he's willing to participate in this side of the fediverse but this is how the fediverse could be if fediblock didn't exist.
Healthy conversations and the free exchange of ideas should be the norm. I think censorship has put up natural barriers to people's ability/willingness to engage.
Good ideas win absent of censorship.
Healthy conversations and the free exchange of ideas should be the norm. I think censorship has put up natural barriers to people's ability/willingness to engage.
Good ideas win absent of censorship.
> constantly moves targets
Guess it depends on why you're in the conversation.
That's life man. Stuff changes. Can't say my perspectives haven't changed from 8 yrs ago.
I'd rather be having the conversations and exchanging the ideas than end up like reddit.
Guess it depends on why you're in the conversation.
That's life man. Stuff changes. Can't say my perspectives haven't changed from 8 yrs ago.
I'd rather be having the conversations and exchanging the ideas than end up like reddit.
Well his original premise or this thread is that maybe the media is more biased toward the left than most on the left realized.
I can live with that.
I can live with that.
"we banned you, banned your subs, downvoted your posts, and called you Hitler Satan! Where'd you all go?"
Only tangentially related to anything, but...
At the moment, the left is calling for the destruction of Israel and death to the Jews because Israel is more powerful than Palestine, and the strong are always morally inferior to the weak (paraphrasing and simplifying obviously)
Which really makes me wonder if eventually the left will drop abortion as an issue the same as they dropped eugenics as an issue (and they pretend that didn't happen, but as an example, Tommy Douglas, the socialist father of universal healthcare in Canada was a proud advocate of eugenics).
No human is less powerful than an unborn baby, so an adult woman killing that baby because it's powerless, unseen, and inconvenient seems totally at odds with that ideology. It's the ultimate power imbalance. A child who has no choice in being created is totally powerless and dependent, and the powerful adult human female from a rich country kills it.
Bodily autonomy is the argument the left primarily relies on, but in my view an unconvincing argument because rights often end up conflicting with one another. In this case, you have the right of a mother to choose whether to carry a baby to term in conflict with the child (who was created by the usually willful acts of the mother in the first place and didn't ask to be created) to not be murdered. In most circumstances, we would consider this a clear moral choice, the right not to be murdered being the highest right. Consider the argument of American slavery, where the rights for someone to be secure in their property rights ran up against someone else's right to Liberty and not to be considered someone else's property.
Another thing is that women who are typically more left-wing and collectivist with other people's money and freedoms sound like Ayn Rand when it comes to personally supporting a child they acted to bring into being. "It's a parasite! What do we do with parasites? We kill them!!" Particularly women in their second and third trimester have to dehumanize a baby to explain why a baby who could be born immediately and likely survive should be murdered in the womb.
Some might make an argument about freedom and bodily autonomy, but leftism isn't liberalism, leftists don't necessarily believe in personal freedom as a core value. All the most totalitarian regimes of the 21st century started with leftism. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and Pol Pot all ideologically came from leftism, with Mussolini being part of the socialist party in Italy, and Hitler being elected leader of his Soviet during a brief socialist uprising in Germany. It seems there's no reason to think this one freedom is somehow sancrosanct when none of the others are protected.
Modern day China is closer to fascism aka state socialism than Marxist class socialism, but I characterize both as left-wing, hoping to break down society in a revolution and build something new in pursuit of utopia. I think that China will be the first to break with the idea of bodily autonomy for women. As we are on the verge of a population collapse which is going to dramatically change the way people look at having kids, I'm certain that China will be the first country to claim government authority over women's bodies and not just not allow them to have abortions, but probably start forcing them to have kids because to not have kids is "an anti-revolutionary act". Most people don't know that the Chinese government is far from socially progressive in a western sense, being highly racist (there's a lot of talking in the United States today about immigration and citizenship, outsiders cannot get citizenship in China, and a Chinese police track where Africans travel to and perform routine midnight raids on those houses whether there is evidence of wrongdoing or not), considering being gay anti-revolutionary and therefore something to be attacked rather than embraced, and so on so there is no good reason to think that they would follow the Western progressive idea of bodily autonomy for women.
As a skilled craftsman myself, I have often considered a criticism of class socialism's suggestion that the working class "seize the means of production". Personally, I know that a skilled individual is as much ore more "the means of production" as a machine. Give someone with no trades skills a high technology shop with all the latest tools and they won't be able to create anything with it, but a world-class craftsman could potentially arrive shirtless and shoeless in a forest and create all kinds of amazing things (watch "Primitive Technology" on youtube for a great example of this, the guy literally does this). This plays out in practice by class socialist governments effectively enslaving the skilled workforce because they require such people and lack the positive incentives of capitalism to get them to work. In the same way, women's bodies as "the means of production" can be similarly collectivized, and some leftists at times have suggested that women ought to effectively be sexually available to any man who wants them to prevent class systems from developing of attractive and unattractive men. This means that it isn't outside the realm of the possible for leftism to not just abandon "bodily autonomy" as an argument for abortion, but potentially as an argument for women's sexual autonomy in general. This shows the dangers of collectivist ideology, in that it can justify any range of totalitarian control of the individual.
If nothing else, I think the discussion above suggests that abortion isn't necessarily an inherently leftist stance, and instead is more a stance of the left due to previous ideological horse-trading with different factions within the left (giving some space for feminists) than a principled stance based on core ideology. Indeed, one could just as easily make right wing arguments in favor of abortion, including as I implied the objectivist individual liberty argument, or a social darwinist argument. The Japanese historically allowed post-birth infanticide using language implying their agrarian past where farmers would cull weak or diseased plants or animals to ensure the strongest thrive, and a moral argument that infants mostly exist in the spirit world and it's only through their childhoods that they become more human and entrenched in the material world. Sparta famously encouraged infanticide in the name of maintaining a strong warrior aristocracy, a deeply far right idea. In Rome, the patriarch of a family would have the right commit an abortion, and even to kill an infant within his family, and indeed any of his children or even his wife, but far from being framed in a left-wing way, it was due to their deeply patriarchal, hierarchical society.
Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled programming...
At the moment, the left is calling for the destruction of Israel and death to the Jews because Israel is more powerful than Palestine, and the strong are always morally inferior to the weak (paraphrasing and simplifying obviously)
Which really makes me wonder if eventually the left will drop abortion as an issue the same as they dropped eugenics as an issue (and they pretend that didn't happen, but as an example, Tommy Douglas, the socialist father of universal healthcare in Canada was a proud advocate of eugenics).
No human is less powerful than an unborn baby, so an adult woman killing that baby because it's powerless, unseen, and inconvenient seems totally at odds with that ideology. It's the ultimate power imbalance. A child who has no choice in being created is totally powerless and dependent, and the powerful adult human female from a rich country kills it.
Bodily autonomy is the argument the left primarily relies on, but in my view an unconvincing argument because rights often end up conflicting with one another. In this case, you have the right of a mother to choose whether to carry a baby to term in conflict with the child (who was created by the usually willful acts of the mother in the first place and didn't ask to be created) to not be murdered. In most circumstances, we would consider this a clear moral choice, the right not to be murdered being the highest right. Consider the argument of American slavery, where the rights for someone to be secure in their property rights ran up against someone else's right to Liberty and not to be considered someone else's property.
Another thing is that women who are typically more left-wing and collectivist with other people's money and freedoms sound like Ayn Rand when it comes to personally supporting a child they acted to bring into being. "It's a parasite! What do we do with parasites? We kill them!!" Particularly women in their second and third trimester have to dehumanize a baby to explain why a baby who could be born immediately and likely survive should be murdered in the womb.
Some might make an argument about freedom and bodily autonomy, but leftism isn't liberalism, leftists don't necessarily believe in personal freedom as a core value. All the most totalitarian regimes of the 21st century started with leftism. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and Pol Pot all ideologically came from leftism, with Mussolini being part of the socialist party in Italy, and Hitler being elected leader of his Soviet during a brief socialist uprising in Germany. It seems there's no reason to think this one freedom is somehow sancrosanct when none of the others are protected.
Modern day China is closer to fascism aka state socialism than Marxist class socialism, but I characterize both as left-wing, hoping to break down society in a revolution and build something new in pursuit of utopia. I think that China will be the first to break with the idea of bodily autonomy for women. As we are on the verge of a population collapse which is going to dramatically change the way people look at having kids, I'm certain that China will be the first country to claim government authority over women's bodies and not just not allow them to have abortions, but probably start forcing them to have kids because to not have kids is "an anti-revolutionary act". Most people don't know that the Chinese government is far from socially progressive in a western sense, being highly racist (there's a lot of talking in the United States today about immigration and citizenship, outsiders cannot get citizenship in China, and a Chinese police track where Africans travel to and perform routine midnight raids on those houses whether there is evidence of wrongdoing or not), considering being gay anti-revolutionary and therefore something to be attacked rather than embraced, and so on so there is no good reason to think that they would follow the Western progressive idea of bodily autonomy for women.
As a skilled craftsman myself, I have often considered a criticism of class socialism's suggestion that the working class "seize the means of production". Personally, I know that a skilled individual is as much ore more "the means of production" as a machine. Give someone with no trades skills a high technology shop with all the latest tools and they won't be able to create anything with it, but a world-class craftsman could potentially arrive shirtless and shoeless in a forest and create all kinds of amazing things (watch "Primitive Technology" on youtube for a great example of this, the guy literally does this). This plays out in practice by class socialist governments effectively enslaving the skilled workforce because they require such people and lack the positive incentives of capitalism to get them to work. In the same way, women's bodies as "the means of production" can be similarly collectivized, and some leftists at times have suggested that women ought to effectively be sexually available to any man who wants them to prevent class systems from developing of attractive and unattractive men. This means that it isn't outside the realm of the possible for leftism to not just abandon "bodily autonomy" as an argument for abortion, but potentially as an argument for women's sexual autonomy in general. This shows the dangers of collectivist ideology, in that it can justify any range of totalitarian control of the individual.
If nothing else, I think the discussion above suggests that abortion isn't necessarily an inherently leftist stance, and instead is more a stance of the left due to previous ideological horse-trading with different factions within the left (giving some space for feminists) than a principled stance based on core ideology. Indeed, one could just as easily make right wing arguments in favor of abortion, including as I implied the objectivist individual liberty argument, or a social darwinist argument. The Japanese historically allowed post-birth infanticide using language implying their agrarian past where farmers would cull weak or diseased plants or animals to ensure the strongest thrive, and a moral argument that infants mostly exist in the spirit world and it's only through their childhoods that they become more human and entrenched in the material world. Sparta famously encouraged infanticide in the name of maintaining a strong warrior aristocracy, a deeply far right idea. In Rome, the patriarch of a family would have the right commit an abortion, and even to kill an infant within his family, and indeed any of his children or even his wife, but far from being framed in a left-wing way, it was due to their deeply patriarchal, hierarchical society.
Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled programming...
I'm not interested in spitting prepackaged platitudes from others back and forth.
Ideas need room to stretch their legs. The process of writing an effortposts should lead to the writer being different than when they started.
Ideas need room to stretch their legs. The process of writing an effortposts should lead to the writer being different than when they started.
- replies
- 1
- announces
- 0
- likes
- 1
In short, optimizing for brevity in this political and philosophical environment means too much meaning is lost to be meaningful. That's why so many people want to talk to each other but end up talking past each other. (and if you don't like effortposting, you can stop here!)
If the conversation is nothing but platitudes and nobody is understanding each other and everyone is just talking at each other uncritically, then maybe it's a conversation worth killing. The Internet (and places like Twitter in particular) are filled with discussions like that every day, going nowhere except dragging the people involved to Hell.
The problem is a rhetorical tactic called dialectic, initiated by Hagel and promoted by Marx, but today used widely because we're all living in a post-Marx civilization, which requires all words to have a double meaning, so you can say a sentence with words that are designed to have different connotations to different groups listening. It means you need to lay out your argument in its entirety because if you're relying on words meaning to carry shorthand, you're not communicating effectively with anyone outside of your tribe.
An example of this is the word "hate". To the non-left, we've been trained to think of it as the robotic recitation of the isms and phobias. "racist sexist misogynistic homophobic transphobic" as we've been 'educated'. To the left, it's understood that you can hate all sorts of people and it's not hate. Men? Toxic! Whites? Privileged! Heterosexual? Just plain evil! Conservative? Nazis you should immediately punch! It's amazing how liberating it must be to reject hate by hating almost everyone! Of course, you might think "ok so the right can just use the same definition!" no, it doesn't work that way.
One thing I noticed a lot and eventually stopped listening to is experts who would take an innocuous thing Trump for example says, and they'd say with authority "When he says this he really means" and then lays out a completely different, usually bigoted thing he didn't say. Eventually I had to stop listening to those "experts" because they were lying and trying to rewire my language centers. Their statements were baseless, but people listening to them uncritically nodding along and then would hear people outside their tribe and assume the worst, and no conversation could actually take place without long form explanation.
An example of this is "Make America Great Again". While imperfect particularly for marginalized groups, the postwar period was a great time for the average American working class family. They were able to own a home, buy a car (or even two cars), their homes were constantly seeing amazing new technologies that were making the average person's life better -- 75% of refrigerators on earth were owned by Americans, for example. A single earner could support a family, and households could afford several kids and had the space to raise those families. It was also a high trust society. People felt like they could let their kids play outside alone, keep their doors unlocked, and knew their neighbors, and often had social connections such as friendships. By contrast, today most young people feel like they'll never own a home, most young people can't afford cars or fuel, technology is relatively stagnant and the last major new technology was decades ago, two earners are required just to make ends meet and households feel like they can't afford kids at all, let alone several, and even if they thought they could afford several they don't have the space for kids often living in crowded apartments, and people feel atomized, anonymous, and uncared for, often not having many or any friendships. Wages as % of GDP are lower every year, and individuals pay most income taxes. When Trump says he wants to "Make America Great Again", he isn't saying he wants racism and sexism back, he says he wants the ordinary American worker to be empowered again, and yet the left spits on that phrase. The knee-jerk assumption that everyone who wants to "Make America Great Again" actually wants to make America white supremacist again shows the strong de facto disconnect between the left and the working class.
If the conversation is nothing but platitudes and nobody is understanding each other and everyone is just talking at each other uncritically, then maybe it's a conversation worth killing. The Internet (and places like Twitter in particular) are filled with discussions like that every day, going nowhere except dragging the people involved to Hell.
The problem is a rhetorical tactic called dialectic, initiated by Hagel and promoted by Marx, but today used widely because we're all living in a post-Marx civilization, which requires all words to have a double meaning, so you can say a sentence with words that are designed to have different connotations to different groups listening. It means you need to lay out your argument in its entirety because if you're relying on words meaning to carry shorthand, you're not communicating effectively with anyone outside of your tribe.
An example of this is the word "hate". To the non-left, we've been trained to think of it as the robotic recitation of the isms and phobias. "racist sexist misogynistic homophobic transphobic" as we've been 'educated'. To the left, it's understood that you can hate all sorts of people and it's not hate. Men? Toxic! Whites? Privileged! Heterosexual? Just plain evil! Conservative? Nazis you should immediately punch! It's amazing how liberating it must be to reject hate by hating almost everyone! Of course, you might think "ok so the right can just use the same definition!" no, it doesn't work that way.
One thing I noticed a lot and eventually stopped listening to is experts who would take an innocuous thing Trump for example says, and they'd say with authority "When he says this he really means" and then lays out a completely different, usually bigoted thing he didn't say. Eventually I had to stop listening to those "experts" because they were lying and trying to rewire my language centers. Their statements were baseless, but people listening to them uncritically nodding along and then would hear people outside their tribe and assume the worst, and no conversation could actually take place without long form explanation.
An example of this is "Make America Great Again". While imperfect particularly for marginalized groups, the postwar period was a great time for the average American working class family. They were able to own a home, buy a car (or even two cars), their homes were constantly seeing amazing new technologies that were making the average person's life better -- 75% of refrigerators on earth were owned by Americans, for example. A single earner could support a family, and households could afford several kids and had the space to raise those families. It was also a high trust society. People felt like they could let their kids play outside alone, keep their doors unlocked, and knew their neighbors, and often had social connections such as friendships. By contrast, today most young people feel like they'll never own a home, most young people can't afford cars or fuel, technology is relatively stagnant and the last major new technology was decades ago, two earners are required just to make ends meet and households feel like they can't afford kids at all, let alone several, and even if they thought they could afford several they don't have the space for kids often living in crowded apartments, and people feel atomized, anonymous, and uncared for, often not having many or any friendships. Wages as % of GDP are lower every year, and individuals pay most income taxes. When Trump says he wants to "Make America Great Again", he isn't saying he wants racism and sexism back, he says he wants the ordinary American worker to be empowered again, and yet the left spits on that phrase. The knee-jerk assumption that everyone who wants to "Make America Great Again" actually wants to make America white supremacist again shows the strong de facto disconnect between the left and the working class.