Hate · 2:53pm November 11th
EDIT: I've had an astonishing amount of hate directed at me for writing a post against hate. I think I've figured out why: because I wrote that the left and the right are basically the same. I didn't mean that they're equally right or wrong on every issue. But I think that for every horrible thing that conservatives want, there is a horrible thing that the left wants. For every insane religious belief conservatives hold, there is an insane religious belief the left holds. For every lie told by conservatives, there's a lie told by the left.
In fact, I have to rethink whether I it's evil to think of someone as evil. I'd have been better off thinking of my attackers as evil. If I had, I wouldn't have gone on explaining, when most of the opposite side was only hoping to keep me talking long enough to find some scrap they could quote out-of-context to call me a Nazi.
They weren't able to do even that. Jaxie tried, first by saying that all centrists are either cowards or are secretly right-wingers pretending to be centrists, and therefore I'm a coward and a right-winger; then by implying that my claim that resolving everything at the federal is unwise, means I support slavery and oppose interracial marriage. So MrNumbers gave it a try, and had to resort to saying that one paragraph in an article by Dorothy Thompson proves I'm Nazi material. This is shotgun psychoanalysis from a man who never met me. It's all farce, but deadly serious farce.
I am sorry if I implied that every person on the left and on the right is driven by hate. I think the movements are driven by hate.
This post has a long intro section, which provides context for the events I describe. The most-important part of the post is between the headings This is the important part and Speculations about group hate. Detractors are arguing about the less-important parts, and ignoring the important part.
November 10, 2024
The day after the US election, I saw some despairing blogs and comments on fimfiction. Which I understand. Some of you will have personal negative consequences from it. I'll probably have to leave the US if Obamacare gets revoked. Without that insurance, my yearly medical expenses would be at least twice my yearly income.
But two kinds of posts disturbed me: the ones that said everything is lost, and the ones that said Trump's win proves that most Americans are evil.
The former, because it's saying that things can't get any worse, and there's no more hope for the liberal democratic system of public debate. The latter, because it says everyone who disagrees with you strongly enough about any one of the many issues in this election is not human, but a manifestation of a transcendent malevolent force. Both are false, and both amount to calls for civil war.
If you think things can't get any worse now, you'll change your mind if there's a civil war.
I saw one post that said both things, from someone I have met in person. I read the comments and saw only agreement with him. So of course I rushed in where angels fear to tread. And learned something terrible about myself.
A lot of things bothered me about party politics this year, but one stood out for its frightening bizarreness: Neither party was trying to win. Like they had already given up on democracy, and were warming up for a rage-quit.
When you were a kid, did your parents ever make you do something you really didn't want to do? And you had no choice, so you did it; but you did it so badly and destructively that they never asked you to do it again? That's what the parties usually look like to me lately. Kids who don't wanna do this "democracy" shit anymore, and just want to lash out.
Trying to win would mean not going to extremes that would buy you little but lose you lots of voters. Like not just stopping illegal immigration, and not even just proposing to deport illegal aliens legally, but proposing to use the Alien Enemies Act on them. Like arguing against free speech as a tool of oppression. I could give lots of examples on both sides, but people would just fight over them.
I think Harris and Trump were trying to win (as best as their intellects would allow), but the people who put them there were not. They wanted to win, but they wanted something else more.
The purpose of democracy is to keep anybody from getting their way all the time. But these days, folks seem to want to get their way all the time. Last week, I'd have told you the problem is that people want to "be true to their principles"—by which they mean mouthing them, not getting to implement some of them. Maybe because saying the approved things in their social circle, or even just saying what they think even if it's unhelpful, is more important to them than winning the election.
This week, I'm inclined to say they wanted to do whatever seemed like it would hurt the other side the most. Not "hurt" as in "diminish their chances of achieving their policy objectives". "Hurt" as in "punch them in the face." I can understand that now, in a way I never could before.
I'd hoped that the losing party would stop and reflect on why they lost, and on what they look like to the other side. Then move closer to "the center"—a poorly-named place; more on that later—and thus win the next election. And this would then make the other party stop, and reflect, and also move closer to "the center".
Game-theoretically, this should work. Historically, it has worked, sometimes. I think.
Not today. This loss is making the losers more insulated and extreme, while encouraging Trump to stretch his ambitions even farther.
One thing about my stories that no one has noticed yet is that they almost never have bad guys. Even the Butler in "Ἐλπίς" sees itself as merciful when it pleads for the final death of the world. Even the narrator of "Bedtime Stories" regrets his life choices by the time he gets to "The Sea Pony". Even the guards in "Twenty Minutes" don't like what they're doing. Even Twilight in "The Corpse Bride" thinks she's doing the right thing when she murders Fluttershy. I have no Iagos or Raskolnikovs.
Most popular literature outside of romance, most-notably Tolkien and Star Wars, pushes the 3000-year-old Zoroastrian narrative of an eternal war between good and evil. I think these stories have had a terrible, divisive effect on America. It's true that some fraction of people with some not-yet identified inborn brain defect and/or childhood trauma are, for most practical purposes, evil. But they aren't great in number, and they're not the people who commit the greatest atrocities. They can't trust each other enough to cooperate. Even most school shooters and unpaid assassins [0] aren't psychopaths. They're more-likely people who care too much about justice.
Today, in an age when most civilized people believe that war is bad, and no war can be blamed on an inability to communicate or on a life-or-death zero-sum struggle for survival, the way to create a great movement that does evil is to convince people that they're fighting evil. The only truly evil choice is to believe in evil. The moment you do, you become part of the problem. [8]
I wrote those last three paragraphs in the comment I posted on that blog, and plenty else as well. I saw myself as trying to rescue people from hate. What I meant to say was basically that the Democrats should think about all the dumb things they did to scare people and piss them off before they jump to the conclusion that everyone who didn't vote for them is an evil racist fascist.
The original poster responded that I was being an asshole for replying to his outcry of pain with a long angry rant saying things that no-one would say to someone they wanted to maintain a relationship with. Then he went on to make a lot of speculations about my psychology that no one would say to someone they wanted to maintain a relationship with.
The audience concurred. One person denied that an experience with him that I recounted in my comment had ever happened. Later he walked it back a little, to suggest there was possibly a misunderstanding, but when I read his first reply, I was shattered. I thought he was simply lying. And if I couldn't trust him, I couldn't trust anyone. Any one of them, that is.
I read what I'd written, which I'd thought was a reasonable response with touches of humor. It was not. I was angry when I wrote it, though I didn't realize it at the time. It was much too long.
That's not the terrible thing. Bad, stupid, embarrassing; but not terrible. This next part is about the terrible thing, and the reason I'm writing this post.
Please don't blame either party in the comments. I'm declaring a truce, just here, just for this one blog post. Many people on both sides are addicted to hate. Republican ads which were not focused on legitimate topics of debate like trans in sports, but simply on the fact that there are trans people. Death threats on J. K. Rowling's posts and "Die Cis Scum" T-shirts. Etc., etc. We must not ask here today who does it more. That's what the hate wants you to do. It wants to suck every discussion into that vortex of who is better, even when both sides are terrible.
This is the important part
I want to talk about my brief experience hating: how it hooked me, what it felt like, why it's so appealing, how to recognize it, how to resist it, and non-partisan speculations about why it grows and spreads. I want to warn everyone, of all political views, that you can't just dip your toe into it, that it's addictive and can grab you suddenly.
After I re-read what I'd posted rashly, I felt the way I usually do after doing that: ashamed, sick, anxious to repair the damage, uncertain what to do next. And while I was considering what I should say, and whether to say anything at all, a thought crept into my mind: Why would you want to be on good terms with any of those people, anyway? They hate you. They lie and betray you. Worrying about them is useless and pathetic.
I listened to that voice, and it calmed me. That's right, I thought. Just let them go. I can't be their friend and don't want to.
The voice, encouraged, went on. You've been hurting so much, for so long, because all these "friends" keep attacking you, your friends, your country. Look at them. They are liars, they are vicious, they are selfish, they are fools. All of them. You know who I mean. Let them go.
At that moment it seemed to make sense. I imagined two clouds of points that I could clearly separate into "them" and "us", as long as I saw only blurry points instead of the faces of real people I knew. Just us and them. I wouldn't have to feel bad or anxious anymore. I wouldn't have to struggle to communicate with people I thought were deluded. I felt a load of worry fall from my shoulders.
I suddenly realized I wasn't angry anymore. I felt calm. My mind seemed as cool and clear as a mountain spring. I could just stop caring about them. Their feelings aren't legitimate. Their inner workings are dishonest. They're…
… not really people, are they?
So I've been right all along. I am a good person. Their hate only proves that. I want their hate. I should be ashamed if they don't hate me.
And you're not alone. They have enemies. Lots of them.
That was true, I thought, not noticing that I emphatically did not believe that.
If you join up with their enemies, the voice suggested, you could hurt them.
Hurt them? What would that accomplish?
It would hurt them. That's what it would accomplish. It would hurt them, and you would feel great.
And that "hurt them" hung in the air before me like a prize. A purpose. If I took it, I would have something to live for again.
I reached out and touched it,
and it
felt
Good.
I felt
Strong.
Confident.
Clear-headed.
Superior.
Purposeful.
Focused.
And now I had something to look forward to. Hurting them.
This all happened very fast. I had just typed something about "letting go of hate", and I re-read it and thought—not in ponderous words, but in a burst of feeling—"Why would I ever want to let go of something that felt this wonderful?" [1]
I thought I knew hate, but this was different. I've had better reasons to hate people. But sometimes I was helpless to hit back, and then hatred just felt like despair and self-loathing. Sometimes I had nothing more to fear from the person I hated, and then it felt pointless and stupid. Sometimes I had something else in my life to live for. Sometimes I knew the person too well to hate them.
But this time, the conditions were perfect, and I could hate the way people were meant to hate. This hate wasn't painful, frustrating, or confusing. It didn't make me tremble with rage. It felt natural. Like I was finally getting in touch with the way I was meant to be, the way we were all meant to be. All these complaints about modernity from right and left, all the agonized calls to destroy this inhuman civilization keeping us all down, were not wrong. They were all calling for the restoration of a basic human right: the right to hate.
I never knew hatred could feel so good.
But I'd recently gone on a binge reading the autobiographies of heroin addicts, and everything about this–the banishment of pain, the sudden rush of wonderful feelings, and the gain of something to live for, all there for the taking if I just let go of everything else in my life to chase this feeling–sounded just like what junkies felt during their first hit of heroin.
Heroin also feels really good. It's also natural to feel good on heroin. It chemically connects with a deep and ancient part of human nature. And it will destroy you, wreck the lives of people around you, and likely lead some of them to heroin, too.
When I eventually remembered that, I pushed hurt them away, even though all that pain immediately came back again.
I tried to just carry on like nothing had happened. I wrote some replies to comments. But just being on that web page with all that hate, lots of it directed at me, made me start hating again. It was stupid and hypocritical of me to try to defuse their hate when I couldn't defuse my own. I was doing just what the hate wanted me to.
I decided to back up and do what (I thought) I should have done in the first place: post my screed on my own blog instead of someone else's. I began writing an enumeration of the ways the Democrats had made people hate them, and how they could have done things differently.
Next morning I woke up, and the hate was gone. So I thought.
I drove out towards Pittsburgh, a long way down country roads, and it seemed there were more dead animals along the road than usual. I may have passed two dozen dead groundhogs, possums, deer, porcupines, and unidentifiables. It bothered me. I felt a little collective guilt. Then I passed a dead raccoon, rolled over on one side, and it reminded me of the raccoon that stood its ground and hissed, and roared a surprisingly loud raccoon roar at me when I tried to chase it out of my yard a couple of nights ago. It wasn't going to budge for any half-hearted threats. I'd had to lunge at it and aim my boot at its stomach before it ran.
As I was looking at that dead raccoon, just in the moment I saw its face before it flashed on by, a thought rose up in me. It passed too quickly to verbalize, but I understood it, and in language it would be something like this: We killed you, you stinking animal. Because we're humans, and we're better than you.
I've never thought anything remotely like this before. It was the hate. While I was guarding the front door against it, it had snuck in the back.
Speculations on what causes group hate
When ticks bite a host, they inject immunomodulators that suppress the immune system, painkillers and anti-inflammatory proteins that delay detection of the attack, and anticoagulants and vasodilators that keep the infected blood flowing. Hate becomes contagious when it suppresses our reason and our sympathy, and any thoughts that would distract us from hating.
Hate defends itself from reason by undercutting reason. One of the main ways it does that is by convincing its host that the "enemy" is evil. Evil in the way that Christians call Satan evil: one who delights in causing pain to others, for its own sake. Like in The Screwtape Letters or Perelandra, both by famed Christian fantasy author C.S. Lewis.
Once the host believes someone is evil, when they hear someone else's reason for opposing them, they'll reject it as a lie if it isn't an evil motive. Then they'll psychoanalyze the person and come up with a crackpot theory of their real, malicious reason.
The question our society is really arguing about is whether the benefits of civilization are worth giving up hate for. The left and the right are both on the side of hate. They need each other to exist. They're cooperating, though they don't know it. I think what we're seeing is a case of memetic evolution. The hate meme spreads once it has two hosts who (a) hate each other, and (b) cause collateral damage in their fight. Their warring makes everyone else angry, scared, and hopeless, and thus easier to infect.
It's the silent majority who are the other side, the uninfected population that's still for civilization and friendship, and against hate. They aren't "the center"; they're far away from both left and right, whose mutual determination to roll back liberal humanism and use the government to enforce their own morals on everyone puts them so close together they may as well kiss. [2][5]
Unlike COVID-19, herd immunity will not save civilization. Memetic immunity can evolve. But only to specific memetic viruses, and only over a time period that appears to be 400-500 years: the time from the rule of Constantine to the rule of Charlemagne, and from the time of Muhammed to the time of Avicenna.
Hatred is ancient. Probably unique to mammals, but surely preceding primates. It's been attacked many times, in many places; but I don't think it's ever been put on the defensive in an entire culture until sometime after World War 2. Even the Church allegedly founded by Jesus clawed through the Middle Ages with the help of large doses of hate and fear [3].
The theory of group selection was squashed so easily by farcical mathematical models that assumed the selective advantage of a gene is a constant and did not include group selection, and bald lies like "all selection is at the level of the gene" [6], to conceal the fact that hate is natural, and played a crucial role in our evolution.
But we need to face up to that fact. The questions that are really at stake in the West today are: Can we live without hate? And do we want to? The combatants are the left and the right, versus the liberals and the moderates. And only one side is fighting.
Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that he must lead the German people with hate, because hatred was stronger than love. So far, it looks like he was right. [7]
You can look at the culture war as a bold experiment, trying to replace the empty space left by our shrinking racial hatred with political hatred. Then we can keep both civilization and hate, and half of our love and friendship. All we have to give up is truth, science, freedom of thought, and the intelligence to self-reflect.
That enumeration of things the Democrats did wrong isn't here today, because it isn't safe for me to write it. Even if I could write it rationally and dispassionately, there would be comments, and I'd have to reply. Some of them would be hateful, and I'm not strong enough to fight the hate right now. [4]
I see notifications today that more people replied to my comments on that blog. I haven't gone back to look. Don't know if I ever will. If I go back there and there's another dose of hate waiting for me, it'll leap from them to me like fleas from one dog to another.
So I'm sitting here anxious and uncertain again, sick to my stomach, tired. I remember how confident and strong the hate made me. How it made me feel really good for once.
And I miss it a little.
[0] The link is to a summary of the typology of assassins in James W. Clarke, American Assassins: The Darker Side of Politics, Princeton University Press 1982, p. 14-17. Table 1.3 of his later book, Defining Danger: American Assassins and the New Domestic Terrorists, Transaction Publishers 2006, gives the number of potentially sociopathic Type III assassins in that study as just 4 out of 18.
[1] I've long been puzzled by people who insist that they think in words. When I speak, it usually takes a tenth of a second to form a thought, then almost a hundred times as long to wait and see how that thought rolls off my tongue. Are there people whose consciousness is all downstream of the words? How can you know what you're really thinking, if all you can hear is its translation into words? I filter out my worst thoughts before they're verbalized--
[2] I traced the origins of the phrases "left wing" and "right wing" in English using Google n-grams. They have nothing to do with the French Revolution. They were first used in English in the 1920s, and came from Russia by way of England. They were originally used for the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. It wasn't until 1977 that the phrase "right-wing conservative" was used more-often than "right-wing socialist".
[3] Many of the most-famous early Christians, like Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertullian, Origen, Athanasius, Arius, and Augustine, were motivated largely by hatred of heresies and heretics. I know lovers of Augustine will protest, but he is the person most-responsible for constructing the Orthodox justification for torturing and killing heretics. His sublimation of hatred into false love is not unique.
[4] Fareed Zakaria talked about 3 of them on his show on CNN tonight, if you're interested.
[5] You can trace the intellectual origins of both the left and the right in the US today directly back to John Calvin, who helped establish an oppressive theocracy in Geneva, Switzerland starting in 1541. The right, through the Baptists and Presbyterians; the left, through the churches and seminaries founded by the Puritans and their offshoots, including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
[6] Richard Dawkins popularized the phrase in his book The Selfish Gene, chapter 5. But selection almost never occurs at the level of the gene. He wrote that because evolutionary biologists studied selection at the level of the gene, because they didn't have the biotechnology, math, or computational power to do anything else. If all selection occurred at the level of the gene, there would be no such thing as linkage disequilibrium. Selection occurs at the level of the gene only when individual genes, not whole genomes, are competing with each other to reproduce. This occurs only with transposons and a few similar cases. The selection that causes cancer occurs at the level of the cell. Most selection occurs at the level of the in-dividual organism. There are clear cases where it occurs at the level of the group, such as with the slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum.
[7] To anyone who asks, with raised eyebrows, "Why are you reading Mein Kampf?", I say that if you haven't read Mein Kampf, you don't really care if Nazism reincarnates in some new disguise, because you haven't even bothered to learn to recognize it.
(It is really long and tedious, though. And some of the most-revealing things aren't in the expurgated editions, which were expurgated by the Nazis in the 1930s to cover up Hitler's most psychopathic thoughts.)
[8] I said that the only evil is to believe in evil. This is self-contradictory if taken as a statement in Boolean logic. If believing in evil is evil, then once someone does it, evil exists, right?
Well, I'm using a narrow definition of "evil": the belief that someone is deliberately doing something very bad, just for the sake of being bad. That does happen sometimes, especially in young children. But it isn't usually happening when we use the word "evil". We call Hitler "evil", but he thought he was doing good. We call him "insane", but our law doesn't hold insane people responsible for their actions. How can we resolve these things?
Upstream of his decision to kill Jews, he made decisions that crippled his rationality. One of those decisions was to believe that Jews are evil—that they delight in wickedness. People seem to commit the very worst atrocities when they think they're fighting evil. The conquistador who smashes an Aztec baby's brains out to save it from hell. The Puritans burning witches. The Nazis killing Jews.
So I say, the point when Hitler was actually evil, in the Christian sense of consciously choosing the bad over the good, was when he decided that Jews are evil, in that same sense. Reason would have shown that real Jews, some of whom he knew, are not that way. IIRC, a Jewish doctor once saved his mother, and charged her nothing, because she couldn't afford it.
His meta-decision at that moment was to make this crucial decision based on something other than reason. That abandonment of reason is what we can hold him accountable for. After that point, he was insane. But he chose that insanity, whether gradually, or all at once.
Likewise, when someone decides that a person who disagrees with him must just like being wicked, that is where evil enters in.
This is one of the most subtly important parts of the post. The Founding Fathers knew that the system favored the charisma to be confidently wrong over any actual leadership qualities, so they layered checks and balances over checks and balances. One of those checks and balances was the modern interpretation of the Second Amendment, which promised horrific amounts of bloodshed in the civil war that would erupt if the government became too tyrannical. The idea is that the government would change course if that started to become a real concern. Like many ideas of statecrafters, it seems the idea doesn't have quite as much basis in reality as we all thought before we tried it. (Explaining is not condoning)
People who dig far enough back in my history will have no trouble learning my political orientation if they really want to; I've never tried to hide it. I do have opinions, and they are strong ones, but there are a great many reasons not to voice them here. Part of it is that I don't want to be one more bit of kindling in a growing bonfire. Another part is that I feel no matter what I say, people who I consider friends will react very poorly, and I don't want to trigger anyone's alienation habits because I happen to disagree with them on something. But mostly it's because I am here for the pony and want to stay on-topic.
Despite all that, I considered writing a blog in the last few days about the election. But the more I consider it, the less I feel it would benefit anyone. So I've chosen to sit back and let everyone else do their thing. Eventually the site will go back to its status quo.
As for your blog, it was an interesting read. I can't say that I agree with everything, nor could I say I disagree – it's a nuanced topic and I'd have to think on it for a while. Yet that's also the biggest takeaway for me; it seems like so many people have forgotten that it is possible for a subject to be nuanced. I feel like that's one of the major issues we have nowadays.
An excellent analysis, and I can relate to parts of it. Something I would like to add, with regards to this part;
I believe that the culture war, rather than being intended to replace racial hatred, is intended to replace (or reintroduce) orthodox religion as a way to further divide the population with hatred. The qualities you mentioned as having to give up, "truth, science, freedom of thought, and the intelligence to self-reflect"; all of those must fall by the wayside in the face of fervent faith and absolute, single-minded belief.
When those creep back in, worming doubt and disillusionment into believers' minds, the true believers must double-down on their hatred and scour any doubters from "Us"; the purity spiral. Lack of belief in a single tenet is treated as total conviction for the "evils of Them".
(edited by request) (edited by further request)
That would be the rational move, game-theoretically, in the two-party, first-past-the-post system we have now.
If voters believed in that system.
What we found out is how many of them (especially leftists and far-leftists) do not believe in it, and don't see participating in it in a "rational compromise to get the least-bad option now while we work for something better next time around" way as a useful technique.
I think part of the problem is that the horrendous election results we've gotten for these last three cycles or so (and really, arguably since around the year 2000) are products of how we vote more than anything else. How we vote does basically everything significant to determine who parties are able to field as candidates and still have any chance of winning. Sometimes (like this time) it determines if one side can even win at all, no matter who they run. There may have been no possible winning candidate for the Democrats in this one; Leftists and more centrist Democrats are increasingly not the same and many of either won't vote for the other with the one vote they have, but in the two-party system where the split between left and right is close to 50-50, they'd have to be willing to vote for each other for either of them to have a chance. And that just didn't happen.
It leads us to a weird conundrum: in a first-past-the-post system, it's possible that there was never a way for Democrats to win, so it was never actually much of an election at all, but rather a process of going through the motions to create the perception of validation for the Republican's appointment of Trump. On the other hand, I don't think Trump and the right-wing in their current rather extreme form is actually very popular as an overall consensus of who and what most Americans would want, given a meaningful choice. In something like a ranked-choice voting system, I think there's a good chance Trump would have gotten absolutely slam-dunked on.
Which voting system you prefer is ultimately a matter of your perspective on political philosophy and political science, and whether or not you think the results the first-past-the-post + electoral college system we have in place is producing results that are useful or intended in some way. Personally, I don't think so, and I favor going to a ranked-choice system, for a lot of reasons that I think have compelling arguments. To be open and own one of my biases-of-the-moment about it, one of those arguments is that I think it would have destroyed Trump's chance at being President again, and I think Trump is profoundly bad for this country and for a lot of people I know. But there are a lot of more objective reasons as well.
This is why I base all my politics on the fact that King Arthur shall someday return from his convalescence at Avalon and return to once again lead the British Isles into a lasting peace.
First off, I hope your health care will remain affordable for you. I've read a few too many horror stories about how that, and student dept, can ruin a person. Next, I saw many anguished blogs on FiMFiction lately and I stopped in to read one post from a person toying with the idea of renewing their passport post haste. (I skim all the blogs on FiMFic, there are so very few.) There was one reply in that blog from someone who did not agree that Trump's re-election was a bad thing, and immediately there was a reply putting the pro-Trump person down. I called for mutual understanding and kindness. That was not well received. As I said in my reply, if you want to write a compelling discussion in fiction, you would do well to at least listen to opposing opinions and marvel. On a different, journal-centric platform, I used to read posts by a person who had the handle of "Levelhead". They heartily supported Sarah Palin and would not budge on the idea that calling yourself a maverick was a poor choice for a potential leader. A maverick is an unbranded calf that anyone can grab, brand, and herd on off to the slaughterhouse. Long story short, we are all monsters (where are the mastodons?) but we are empathetic monsters. Kindness and understanding would go a long way toward avoiding the abyss. I learned that the original poster dropped the ban-hammer on the dissenting voice so I dropped out of that echo chamber. I think Trump's re-election is bad news and I fear that all progress on putting the breaks on monopolies is going to be lost, and that the scapegoating of minorities is going to rise, whether they be visible or not.
I'm afraid that your rant was a bit long and I skimmed a bunch of it, even the evolutionary biology aspects. It's been quite a while and my handle on genetics is very rusty. Heroin sounds like bliss, but I'll give it a pass.
5815320
I think you're on the mark, and I think the US needs to have a serious discussion about having a parliamentary system, or a system where the voters can rank-order the candidates instead of picking one. Or at the very least, individual states could write amendments to their state constitutions to divide up electoral votes according to the popular votes. Non-swing-states should be motivated to do this, so they don't get ignored!
The way he slam-dunked the primaries makes me doubt that. But I don't think either he or Harris would've gotten elected.
This is a genuinely important statement. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Let's not forget that the most widely circulated translation of Mein Kampf was translated by a Jew.
5815321
After expelling all those English-speaking invaders, of course.
I find myself very much of a mind with you here. Of course the morning after the election, there were lots of despairing blogs posted here, and that's fine. Like you, what caught me were the number that ascribed the result to hate. Well not just that, but I'll get to that in a moment.
Sure, some of the people who voted for Trump did so because of hate. Some of the people who voted against him did so as well. But it's always struck me as disingenuous to immediately assume anyone opposed to you is stupid, evil, or both, as if there can be no rational reason anyone would possibly disagree. People are more complex than that. Pick just about any divisive issue. There are perfectly intelligent and reasonable people on both sides of it, but too many arguments begin with the assumption that this is not the case and then proceed with that as a given.
What else struck me is the number of blogs ascribing the result to hate, decrying that hate... and then responding with equal and opposite hate. How does that solve anything? That's just being part of the problem and furthering the "us versus them" mentality. I thought about stepping in to ask cooler heads to prevail on a couple of them, but then I just knew I'd get into the same situation you describe, getting flamed back for failing to agree that this is a sign of the apocalypse and spending days and days ignoring reply notifications and being stressed about it. I found it disappointing the number of communities (blogposts, Discord channels, etc.) that threatened to exclude people based on how they voted. One of them had a statement on their info page that any <long list of insults> who'd voted for Trump was unwelcome anymore, oddly juxtaposed with server rules to avoid drama and "be excellent to each other." If they'd been problematic and disruptive, sure, but they'd probably have been booted already in that case. I was genuinely afraid that if I tried to defuse things, I'd be placed on the wrong side of the "if you're not with us, you're against us" line, assume which way I'd voted, and label me as persona non grata. (While there's probably a perception of how I vote, most people would be wrong, and it wouldn't be the first time someone made that bad assumption, then ran with it to a very erroneous conclusion.)
Fortunately, the rhetoric seemed to die down as quickly as it came up, at least in the places I inhabit.
A lot of people worried about making it through the next four years.
A lot more people just trying to make it to the weekend.
I wasn't expecting to hear that you favor a split government. What are you concerned today's federal democrats would do with a trifecta that you think would be too extreme?
5815318
I didn't say so in the post yet when you wrote this, but I'd like people not to say things like this in this post's comments. What you did there at the end is what I wanted to warn people against doing. When you feel you're on a roll, that's when you're in danger.
It also doesn't accomplish anything when done the way you did it. I don't know the right way to influence people, but the way you did it definitely will just make people on the other side angrier, and make them dismiss you as a stupid crank, even if what you say is true. I know from experience.
If you really want to keep those last two paragraphs, write them in your own blog post, then put a link to that in your comment here. I'll give you some time to do it yourself.
5815362
Sorry; it's a good question to ask, but I'm not going to answer questions like that on this post. I need to restrict my talk about politics only to resolving discussions I've already opened, or for talks that are for some reason urgent, until I get into a healthier headspace.
Hypocrisy notice: I am in fact working on a post with political implications, which is not the sort of thing I generally want to post on this blog, but it's all data-analysis, and I think very important, and I've been working on it for a long time already.
5815382
I have to be honest, I'm not 100% sure now which part of those you're objecting to, but I also don't need to be; it's your blog. I appreciate that you saw I tried to comply with what you said and gave further details rather than delete the post. I'm going to play it safe and remove both paragraphs. No offense intended, but I'm not looking to make my first blog on this site in regards to politics; I'm here for pony, and I try to only post about politics at all when it involves something happening here on fimfiction. Hopefully that edit will be satisfactory, and if not then I'll change it further.
Well said, sir.
I lost a friend to the hatred, after the 2016 election. (To their credit, my friend lasted two years before the hatred spilled over hard enough, to where he quit our gaming group.)
I definitely don’t know how to help anyone who doesn’t want to give up the hatred. I’m no psychiatrist or anything.
But if you (generic) do want to avoid the hatred yourself, then I would humbly suggest not watching shows from political propaganda channels, which are well known to use fear mongering and hatred peddling as their primary techniques. CNN, Fox News, etc, etc.
Isolating yourself from contagious hatred is difficult when your friends have succumbed; it’s much easier to turn off a TV channel.
That’s just step one I guess, but at least it’s low-hanging fruit.
I gotta figure people who like magical ponies are more likely to want to let go of hate, so I have high hopes for our community. :)
5815318
I believe the quote is "if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him" and I don't care enough to look up who said it originally. It's a good quote that's more true than a lot of people want to admit.
Some of us care about things other than the direct personal negative consequences merely to us personally.
This is a very weird and badly supported logical leap; that the assertion of evil is also an assertion of a persons inhumanity.
There is nothing more human than evil.
This is essentially an assertion that you want the entire American system of governance to be one of endless, grinding gridlock where nothing gets done and problems cannot actually be addressed, and it is WILDLY at odds with your position that you want the US to adopt a more parliamentary form of government. Parliamentary forms of government, especially legislative supremacy ones, are constructed around tearing down veto points and ensuring that whatever ideological coalition can assemble 50%+1 of a legislature elected to as closely resemble the ideological preferences of the people electing it can govern as it sees fit.
I prefer such a system on ideological grounds; I have a strong commitment to a government that is able to govern via majoritarian principles but also that such a government should be constructed to as closely resemble the voting electorate as possible. But I cannot make a case for such a government on effectiveness grounds. Germany has a very clever and very good system of electing the Bundestag that combines all the best elements of geographically bounded constituencies with all the best elements of proportional representation top-ups. Israel has THE single most pure system of proportional representation in the world. Neither country is doing great at the moment when it comes to leadership and governance.
And I would note that your preference that one party control the Congress and another the White House would mean that the Affordable Care Act would never never, ever been passed. Neither would almost every bit of productive legislation of the past twenty years or so. You throw out this abstract preference without an actual nuts-and-bolts analysis of "what do both ideological coalitions actually DO when they form a united government."
You wildly misapprehend the point of a justice system. Justice systems exist as formal dispute resolution systems. They don't exist to preserve ideas about open debate except in very narrow senses when the state itself is involved in censorious actions.
This is very, very badly supported. The fact that the aesthetics of how both parties go about winning has long been upsetting to you personally is not really a sign they aren't trying to win. An enormous number of people sunk an enormous amount of effort into trying to win.
This, again, is badly supported, and sounds like a you problem.
You know that people who generally care more about winning than anything else tend to be viewed as weirdos without strong animating principles, yes? People who treat politics like sports, where the only goal is to find the proper calculation to put up bigger numbers, are generally speaking not engaged in it productively.
This is also incredibly badly supported.
Democracy has many virtues, but its entire purpose is not some weird notion of preventing people from getting their way. What possible virtue would there be in a system whose central animating purpose is "it is BAD if people get their way all the time, and we should prevent this." People not getting their way all the time may be a side effect of other things democratic systems do, but it isn't the purpose of democratic systems.
The main purpose of democratic systems is order.
They don't provide particularly better governance than authoritarian systems of societal organization. The wisdom of the voters is vastly overrated, and "the People" with-a-capital-P do not exist as a functional constituency whose will is easily discernible and is always manifestly correct and virtuous. What they DO provide is a way in which to dismiss one government and appoint another without needing to either wait for an autocrat to die and then rolling the dice on their successor, or trying to remove them yourself, which is highly risky and likely to involve oceans of blood.
And that's it. With sufficient buy-in to a democratic systems from most of those involved, the system of working out who shall rule becomes orderly. The need and the incentives for violence diminish, which is generally a good thing. That's the usual purpose of a democratic system; providing a venue for people through which they can gain and exercise power in a way that isn't disorderly. Most ways of gaining power have, traditionally, been wildly chaotic and destructive.
The nature of democratic systems is that they will usually not involve people getting their way all of the time, because most societies cannot muster that level of consensus. But that's a side effect. Not the intended purpose.
Why?
This is only a good move if you lost an election based on being ideologically incompatible with winning elections in general. There are TONS of ways of losing an election and many if not most of them do not involve this.
You consistently over the years have demonstrated an unswerving fealty to the idea that the center has some kind of inherent virtue and it is always better if political parties are moving towards it regardless of what the membership of those parties want or the substantive ideological content of the center. Indeed, you have in the past written many words about how you regard intraparty democracy as a plague on the republic because it makes parties more extreme (there's almost no evidence for this at the Presidential level) and that parties should be organized in an authoritarian top-down fashion in order to prevent the membership from getting dangerous, destructive ideas like "I should have one votes worth of influence in how the party I am part of is run."
The center is just another place. It has no especial virtue. What ideological beliefs comprise the center at any given time might. But the center itself does not.
You think?
Your politics posts are often long on abstract theory and your own immediate hangups with your preferred aesthetic preferences for society and short on actual nuts-and-bolts history.
So let's take a look at this in the context of American postwar political history.
The Republican Party of the 1950s reacted to being locked out of the Presidency for twenty years and usually barely only able to muster legislative majorities by reaching out to a formerly apolitical general who was WILDLY popular and nominating him. Eisenhower was largely a man of the center... but he was an anomaly within the party he nominally headed, so much so that he often had a lot of trouble with his own Congressional caucuses and indeed his most famous speech is him turning his own guns on his coalition as he left office. But sure, that's kinda-sorta a move to the center, even as the Republican Congressional caucuses were beginning to be eaten alive by brain worms.
The Democratic Party did not react to Eisenhower by moving to the center. They nominated JFK and when he was shot LBJ, both of whom ran on visions of radically transforming American society in the same way the New Deal did. This was electorally successfully.
The Republican Party did not react to Nixon (in '60) and then Goldwater getting annihilated by moving to the center. They re-upped with Nixon '68, who was literally doing treason to get elected, and who brought us Henry Kissinger in foreign policy and a studied disinterest in domestic affairs that weren't reactionary cudgels he could use. This was electorally successful.
Carter was absolutely a turn to the center; he was the only Democratic President of the postwar era to actually govern to the right of his Congressional caucus. He was electorally successful.
Reagan was a hard-right turn, not a move to the center. He was a hard right turn and WILDLY successful. So was Bush after him.
Clinton was a turn to the center, and was also a very successful President.
Bush was a turn to the right, not to the center.
Obama is an odd beast to categorize, as is Romney. I would argue that neither of them represented turns to the center; both represented their coalitions where they'd basically been the last time they'd held power.
Trump was a massive rightward turn, not a move to the center.
Biden, a move to the center.
Trump comes back like a zombie and is even further to the right.
There's a pattern here and it is that moving to the center is not necessary to ensure electoral success, at least for one major political party. And if you don't need to move to the center to succeed politically, the only argument for moving to the center is on the merits, that is, the substantive ideological content OF the center and how congenial one finds it.
You said this in 2016 as well and spent YEARS complaining about it... and then the Democrats nominated the walking embodiment of centrism and won with him, and governed from your beloved center for four years, and then did it again in 2024.
Eventually maybe you'll stop worrying about things that don't happen. Maybe you'll also eventually start evaluating politics based on substance and ideology, rather than taking airy fifty-thousand-foot views of "a plague on both their houses" that don't come to pass.
You wildly and fundamentally misapprehend Tolkien's narrative, which is a classically Christian narrative of "there is nothing evil can do which will not redound to the greater good, and it is already foreordained that eventually evil will be forever vanquished and a new world born in which all are united in the grace of God."
This has a lot of philosophical, moral, and ethical problems, but it isn't a weird implication of a forever war. Quite the opposite in fact.
This is a strange, crabbed definition of evil, one that removes almost all agency from almost all people.
You have a very long history of regarding what is going on in peoples heads as more important than what their actual real-world actions and the consequences of them are. "Most people believe they're doing good!" So what? You are what you do. Good intentions aren't nothing, but they also aren't ultimately very significant against what you're actually doing. The notion that evil is due to some kind of inborn defect rather than something ordinary people can do in ordinary, dare I say banal, ways is, again, badly supported.
Imagine writing in 2024 that evil doesn't exist, except for people who believe evil exists, who therefore become evil.
People are what they do.
As opposed to you, who would never, ever make a lot of speculations about peoples psychology, and certainly has not done so in the post I'm responding to.
5815308
Yeah, it's real interesting. I see people trot out the "defense against tyranny" defense of 2A all the time (which wildly misapprehends what the actual amendment is about; it was meant to secure the nation from foreign threats and potentially the several states from the federal government, NOT as an individual right to build an arsenal) and they always want to discuss it as an abstract notion, a view from fifty thousand feet.
When in fact we have a quarter of a millennium of history to analyze the right to keep and bear arms, both individually and collectively, and the times it has been used to resist the tyranny of the state are... essentially never. America's fine, responsible gun owners and militia members could have used their guns and militias to rise up and kill slavers and slaveowners. They did not. They could have risen against Jim Crow, against the unchecked corporate slaughter of the Gilded Age, against all manner of other petty and major tyrannies imposed by the state and by private individuals, and they did fuck all. Typically when people who profess to take the 2A seriously do rise up, it is for shockingly idiotic, selfish reasons, rather than for liberty.
In exchange for this complete lack of actual resistance to tyranny we get all the downsides of a society awash in guns.
Yeahhhhhhhh.
You did a lot of comparisons to 2020 regarding voter turnout. I don't think that is quite a fair comparison because that year had a very low barrier to entry due to mail in voting that does not exist to the same extent in 2024. It would be better to compare with 2016 voter turnout data.
The democracy in the US is no more. The root of the problem - the growth of irresponcibility ("I cannot do the wrong choices, because I am good - and I do not like to think I can be wrong because it is uncomfortable and toxic. If anything goes wrong with me because of my choices - its the world/system/<put a name here> is wrong and bad, not my choice was wrong") and co-dependency ("We will do anything to make You feel good but never ever let You become good - so You will stay dependent on us and choose us to keep on feeling good").
5815480
That's a good point. 137.5 million Americans voted in 2016. A lot less. It does undermine one of my main contentions.
5815475
Murcushio,
The fact that Americans have never had to overthrow the government with their guns could just as well be taken as proof that it worked.
Pointing out that Southerners did not rise up with their guns to overthrow slavery as evidence that it doesn't work is silly, because most Southerners (with guns) were in favor of slavery. Pointing out that Northerners did not rise up with their guns to overthrow slavery is silly, because they did. Pointing out that the slaves did not rise up with their guns to overthrow slavery shows why it's good for the people to have guns.
I don't think anyone theorized that guns would be used to preserve other people's freedom. That's not how it works. Sorry, it isn't a perfect solution for all ills.
No, because the ones suffering from Jim Crow typically did not have guns.
They did, many times. Usually, they didn't have enough guns. The unions usually lost, but those were military defeats, not a rebuttal of the right to own guns. You could make a case that the unions would have made more progress using non-violent means, but you didn't make that case.
I think that The Johnson County War, in Montana, 1889-1993, is a case where the common people having guns worked pretty well. It wasn't against the national government; it was a war between the ordinary and the wealthy ranchers. The wealthy ranchers got together and formed a band of assassins to kill their political opponents, and the people grabbed their guns and fought back until the Feds came in and rescued the wealthy ranchers. They weren't punished, but they didn't try it again.
If they didn't take their guns and rise up against perceived petty tyrannies, that's probably a good thing.
More importantly, you're being a dick, again. I explicitly asked people not to make partisan comments. You're doing that, and in an obnoxious and arrogant way. I'd delete your comment now, but I don't want people to think I'm representing it unfairly.
You probably think you're trying to convince people of your point of view, but I don't think that's what you really want. You're being angry, scornful, offensive, and sloppy. You act more like someone trying to rally people who already agree with you around you, than someone trying to persuade others. That may be productive in politics, but it is not what I want to happen here.
5815474
I wrote a post about how I wrote a long, angry comment on someone's blog, and regretted it. You're doing the same thing.
I wrote,
Did you miss that part?
If I engage with your post, I might start hating again. I'm very tempted to do so, because I think it's quite careless and sometimes factually inaccurate. Like, I'll just mention,
I've written many words about intraparty democracy as a plague? I may have written that the way we run our primaries is bad, because I believe the way we run our primaries is bad, and maybe we shouldn't have primaries at all. I don't see how you can say there's "almost no evidence [that primaries make parties more extreme] at the Presidential level" when we are all here reacting to a spectacular case of that right this moment.
I've written that parties should be organized in an authoritarian top-down fashion in order to prevent the membership from getting dangerous, destructive ideas like "I should have one votes worth of influence in how the party I am part of is run"? You lie, sir. You lie. Whatever I've written that you are trying to spin into this, you've distorted it so much that the word for that is lying. Your comment contains other lies, as well; and assertion of things as facts that are not; and dismissal of evidence I have presented by simply saying "there is no evidence"; and points made not because they're relevant but merely to score points. But I am willing to grant that you might believe all these things.
For the record, I think our inter-party hatred today began when Karl Rove whipped the Republican bloc in Congress into an authoritarian, top-down command structure.
I would like to reply to the rest of your comment, which contains some information, but also much careless, hasty thinking. But I'm already too angry. I'm trying to recover from hate, and you're trying to pull me back in.
5815508
Except that the argument that we should be awash in guns and the right to own them should be strongly supported individual right is predicated explicitly on "gun ownership prevents tyranny; if the goverment becomes tyrannical, the people with the guns will rise up and contest it."
Well, for that to be true there need to be examples of people doing that; the government has often been extremely tyrannical. "The people with guns liked that tyranny, though, so they didn't rise up against it" severely undercuts "the guns are needed to stop tyranny." Because if they're not gonna do that, they should have their murder toys and the massive pile of bodies that come with them why now?
The state did this, not private gun owners.
This argument is used all the time. More to the fact, even if it weren't, "Gun owners will use guns to preserve only their own freedom; not anyone elses" severely undercuts the case for gun ownership as an individual right, especially given the massive downside.
Who mentioned unions? I didn't. More to the point, to characterize defeats of worker power in an American sense as military defeats is simply wrong in nearly all cases.
The vast majority of union actions did not involve violence on their part; unions typically ended up on the receiving end.
Fascinating that you portray my position on firearms as being explicitly and necessarily a partisan comment.
Didn't you make objections to people making judgments about your own psychological state and motivations literally as part of the thesis of this post?
This is a stylistic and aesthetic objection, not a substantive one.
5815510
You don't have any idea what my emotional state is, nor is it particularly relevant. Whether I am angry or not is actually irrelevant to the substantive content of anything I, or anyone else, has written.
Yes. This is you on November 20th, 2016. (I'm about to reference this post a lot.)
I believe it is fair to characterize "US democracy has failed because of primaries" as a position which makes it reasonable to say the person espousing it views intraparty democracy as a plague. Or a blight, or a menace, or other words that mean "bad." You wrote a ton of words in that post, like an enormous amount, about why intraparty democracy is bad and threatens the entire nation and needs to be ended quickly.
This is not me lying; this is me reasonably interpreting your own words:
And of course the piece de resistance:
Emphasis mine in all cases.
(Do you think I don't read what you write, and remember it? Because I do. I have to. You're a serious writer who brings big guns to every fight, as you should, and the only way I can compete with that is by coming complete.)
So yeah. It is absolutely fair to characterize someone saying the things you have said, and which I've cited, and linked to, as holding the idea that the notion of "I should have one votes worth of influence in how the party I am part of is run" is dangerously destructive. You literally wrote that this idea causes massive failures of democracy! What is that if not a dangerously destructive idea?
These are not lies.
We literally had this out right here on your blog two years ago; I actually ran the numbers. What I came up with is that even if you count Obama and Dubya as examples of a primary selecting the more ideologically extreme candidate, you end up with five out of sixteen instances in which the more extreme candidate is selected. That rises to six out of seventeen if you include this year. And this is, again, being generous to your thesis; if we exclude Obama and Dubya, which we should, that drops to four out of seventeen. And Trump's 2016 win, as noted in the prior thread, has some SEVERE structural flaws.
So yeah, primaries at the Presidential level select for extreme candidates is badly supported in general. And it isn't like the smoke-filled room was better at excluding extreme candidates; the smoke-filled room selected Goldwater and Nixon, after all.
5815524
I don't think so. Your writing is toxic, and spreads hate. I think it's because you're angry. If you're not angry, something else is wrong on your end.
You left out the next sentence:
So you took a passage in which I said that our democracy has a common failure mode, due to its aristocratic origins, and that we could try to fix it; and quoted part of it to claim that I support authoritarianism instead of democracy. So if you weren't lying, you were reading very carelessly.
If primaries were the only form of intraparty democracy, that would be fair. I did in fact say in that post that "the party" should choose its own candidate, without a primary. So I grant that point.
I don't think that anymore, partly because it sounds dumb to me now (I'd already acknowledged the problem with it in that post), and partly because the Democratic party heads picked Harris. I think there are ways to fix voting within a party, and I think there are ways to fix voting between parties so that we don't always end up with just 2 parties. I think both parties might recognize that they're losing more elections because they hold primaries; and they could vote, using inter-party democracy, to do something differently. I think it might be better for party affiliations not to be allowed on the ballot, and to lower the effort needed to get on the ballot.
If you had a spaceship that blew up only 1 time out of 4, would you say there's almost no evidence that it's dangerous? This is binary thinking.
The smoke-filled room is not the alternative. A better alternative is many candidates and a ranked voting system, as Winston has already discussed, instead of primaries. If this is unworkable, then tell me why it's unworkable, instead of assuming that it must mean that I support the only alternative you can think of.
5815539
It's both really not, and this is richly hypocritical given your own body of work, which is chock-full of conspiracism and claims that various groups are engaged in ruinous ideological projects that poison minds and spread evil. You can't have it both ways.
That you support authoritarianism instead of democracy in the specific context of intraparty decisionmaking, yes. I said that because you did say that. The entire post is there for anyone to read. Maybe you didn't mean that, but that's what you wrote.
Expecting a political process to have a failure rate that can be achieved by physical engineering projects is unrealistic; there is no political process that can survive contact with a sufficient number of bad actors. The comparison I did completed didn't evaluate ideology or cast judgment on whether the extreme or centrist candidates governed well, for example, merely how good the process was at your stated goal of wanting it to pick candidates closest to the center. It gets VERY good results on that score; a political process that hits your preferred outcomes 75% of the time is actually very good by most metrics. (Within reason; if your preferred outcome is something like "the election results in a clear winner and a peaceful transition of power" and you fail one time in four, that's very bad. But if your preferred outcome is something like "I want parties to select candidates of a specific kind of ideological temper" and it only fails in that one time in four? That's incredible.)
This has not worked when it has been tried. People still usually know what functional political coalition various candidates represent, and when they don't that's a bad thing. It also, I think, fundamentally misapprehends the nature of politics. Politics is a team sport. Someone who is going it alone is likely to be very, very bad at it, because the only way anything gets done politically is getting a whole bunch of people facing in more or less one direction at more or less the same time. This makes parties inevitable. Attempts to stop them are doomed to failure and cause their own pathologies.
Removing party affiliation does not remove the need for coalition politics; it simply obscures it, attempting to conceal from voters what political coalition they're voting for.
Even if we count "primaries are causing a lot of election losses" as a proven fact and leave aside "party members feel, quite reasonably, they should get to pick candidates on a roughly equal basis to all other party members" the modern primary process for President is extremely small-d democratic. What are the alternatives to it that are superior to how they're structured now and also democratic in nature?
I'm legitimately confused here. How is making the tweak to "everyone still votes for candidates, it's just done via ranked choice now" NOT a primary? Like, you could call it something else; the UK and Canada and Germany and whatnot have different terms. (In the UK it is called "re-selection" for example.) But it is still functionally a primary.
Doing ranked-choice voting would only be a minor tweak. Almost all Democratic primaries for President and most Republican primaries award delegates on a proportional basis already and attract a large number of candidates before winnowing starts. They don't use ranked-choice voting because elections systems that are proportional don't typically need it; they're already slicing everything up by proportion. Ranked-choice is suboptimal compared to proportional representation because it's still winner-takes-all, it just moves to try and make sure the winner is most broadly acceptable.
Now, you might argue "we should ditch the conventions and delegates and move purely to ranked-choice" or even "we should abolish the state-by-state process for president and do it truly nationally." Sure. There are LOTS of forms a primary can take. Right now its "many candidates and a proportional award of delegates."
You could tweak that to "many candidates and ranked-choice voting, winner takes all." But that's still a primary; it doesn't NOT become a primary because of that tweak.
The Congress is a different story. Parties still use FPTP primaries there, allowing for plurality winners. (A tiny handful of states do it differently.) We should absolutely move to some sort of proportional system there. But again: would still be a primary.
I don't like complicated things and unfortunately politics and the events happening in people's minds are among them.
The closest I have to balance between comprehensiveness and being comprehensible is this video:(the subtitles Should be good to read for everyone)
【美国从来不缺哈里斯？一口气看懂特朗普为何能再次当选总统-哔哩哔哩】 https://b23.tv/U9DoKWv
And no, I don't have access to Twitter, Google, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram and all those international websites so I rely on second hand information.
Hard to see through all that chaos when lots are still emotional over this, but I think there are some significant points to be made even just from scratching the surface of some facts.
And it's true, learning to see through "us and them" is important, good for working together for a bigger cause or just remain friendly buddies.
This was a good read, thank you for taking the time to put your thoughts here.
I know there’s plenty of flaws with it, but it reminds me of the Horseshoe Theory of politics. Perhaps things can change
Thank you for this.
I don't hate footnotes but I heavily dislike them. I wish people would either not use them on-line or at the very least do one of two things: put a notice at the start that there are footnotes or use a footnote in the first paragraph to show that there are footnotes. I'm one of those people that has to know what the footnote is within the context it is called out so therefor I need to have two instances open so I'm not scrolling up and down the post. It's especially tough while on mobile, which is typically where I read most things. I had to stop reading this when I hit the first notice of a footnote and then come back to it on my computer.
One thing I do hate when it comes to footnotes is them being out of order! Why are [2] and [5] together?! Why is it not [2] and [3]? I can sort of understand when a footnote is within a footnote, such as [2] containing the callout to [3], but that is not the case here! These footnotes are all over the place! What is the point of having them numbered if they are not going to be in number order?! It's infuriating to me to see this sort of thing.
(While the above is slightly hyperbolic for the sake of comedy it is indeed my true thoughts on the matter. Footnotes upset me but I can deal, meanwhile out of order footnotes upset in a different way that isn't as easy for me to deal with.)
On another matter what was the original title for the blog? You just said you renamed it but not what from, leaving people who didn't catch it the first time left wondering what it had been called.
On the topic of the blog itself I have a close relationship with hate, one that I struggle a bit with still. My hate burns hot and fast, from having suppressed it growing up until I couldn't any more. I try very hard these days to not let the hate win.
Most times I'm successful, but even now the keyboard I'm using is missing two keys from fits of rage and slamming my fists on the desk near it.
Most times. I wish it was more times.
5815474
Here is a very common feature of human psychology which you've pointed out:
It's a mistake, of course, but a perfectly natural consequence of the way humans are wired to make this mistake, when we're not paying attention.
The trick is that not only is the OTHER just as responsible for themselves as WE are, but also (more importantly), WE too must be manipulated like the recalcitrant children WE are, because WE are just as bad as THEM.
Most folks stop after the first half of the previous sentence, which plays right into the hands of the political propagandists: because if you were to start thinking that the OTHER is responsible for their EVIL STUPIDITY, then you'd HATE them. Just like Mr. Mein Kampf discovered, hatred is a much more powerful motivator than anything else, for getting people off their duff and into the voting booths to follow our masters' orders. And that hatred sure does feel good doesn't it! It's addictive, it'll keep us coming back. So, either we get roped into the HATE, or we get roped into believing that using the dark arts to manipulate the OTHER is totally fine and good (never noticing that the same is being done to US). [1]
Also, if you think that "there is an enormous tendency in American political debate to act as if only (OUR PARTY) ...," then that is powerful evidence that you have not in fact been watching "American political debate." You have been watching political propaganda from (OUR PARTY), which, of course, makes (THE OTHER) sound like stupid children who need to be manipulated. There's your step one: stop that. Stop listening to that stuff.
You've got to give up the hatred, you've got to stop asking for more poison in your ear. Turn off the propaganda channels: CNN and Fox News and MSNBC and all that garbage.
Try ponies instead? I mean I don't know, but it's better than poison. On the other hand, probably every four years there's an influx of pony stories that are also literally mind-poison, as a result of people crying over some election. So uhh, watch out for that, I guess.
You know what sometimes helps me? Going meta: thinking about the way we think & feel, or communicate, psychology stuff. Stuff like this post, for example. Also, lately I've been getting into variant Sudoku; it's a lot more fun and interesting than classic Sudoku. I also really enjoyed everything from Scootertrix Studios' youtube channel. :)
P.S. Here's a fun exercise you can try on your own: turn on the OTHER's propaganda channel and watch one of their shows for five minutes, and count how many dark arts manipulation techniques you spot. Now turn on OUR propaganda channel for five minutes and see how many of the same techniques are in use.[2] You cannot do it! Even now, you are getting defensive and claiming that OUR propaganda channel isn't propaganda at all, it's NEWS. You're just watching the NEWS and how could you possibly give that up!? Aren't you a virtuous citizen, capable of caring about more than only your own life!? Of course you are, not like those OTHERS. HOW DARE THEY put the word "News" in their EVIL propaganda channel's name?! Not like US! WE HATES THEM! WE HATES THEM SO MUCH, PRECIOUS!! You cannot do this exercise. I'm sorry. I'm sorry this happened to you. It's time to say "oops" and give it up. Give up the poison in your ear.
P.P.S. You know what I've found does not help at all? It's when I psychoanalyze people who didn't ask for it. They always seem to think I'm treating them like recalcitrant children who are victims of their own nature, who must be herded and manipulated. Well, rest assured, the same applies to me, and I'm sorry. Sometimes it's a thin line between psychoanalysis and psychology.
Footnote [2] -- Naturally, the manipulation techniques vary among the various political parties, due to the differing personality profiles of their target demographics. Nevertheless, all humans have a lot of psychological stuff in common, so there's still plenty of common ground.
Footnote [1] -- The way out of the trap is to give up all that US vs THEM thinking. Switch to a new paradigm, as they say.
Not joking, this post is up there with Meditations on Moloch for me. This is something that's bugged me about politics for nearly a decade now, and you've made it very concrete. I've noticed myself slipping into Hate habits occasionally, but I could never label it clearly enough to stop reliably. Hopefully this will make it easier for me to catch myself doing it.
Childish, facile conservative drivel disguised as philosophy. You aren't more enlightened about human emotions, you are more ignorant of the structure of human society, and in lieu of attempting to understand the complex structures that guide our government, you are settling on a vibes-based analysis.
Everything you have said here is wrong. All of your statements are wrong individually, and the arrangement of them is wrong collectively. At no point did you approach anything that might be called a fact-based argument.
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Case in point, Bad Horse being labeled excommunicate traitorous.
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I wrote a line by line rebuttal explaining why every single thing he said here was wrong: https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/1056001/team-bullshit
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I wrote a line by line rebuttal: https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/1056001/team-bullshit
I hope the backlash directed at you because of this blog doesn't hurt you. God knows I have absolute hatred for Trump, but I truly believe you did the right thing by writing this instead of calling for violence against everyone who voted for him. Thank you, Bad Horse.
I feel like I'm reading something I would have come across in 2016. It's centrist philosophizing that I feel like the last 8 years should have been enough evidence against. The notion that people aren't taking subjectively evil actions against groups and oppressing them. That there's some kind of middle ground to find between anti-oppression and oppression, instead of aiming for no oppression.
When you say you'll have to leave the United States if Obamacare is repealed, you will be part of the financially oppressed brought on by the efforts of the right to oppress you.
You make the effort of striving towards the middle ground technicalities between these two sides. But technicalities shouldn't be given some kind of moral high ground relative to actual hurt and inflicted suffering. I feel like that's part of what you won't take away from the backlash here that you should take away from it.
In 1963, MLK Jr. wrote
I don't consider myself smart or eloquent enough to usually comment on this type of discussion without holes or failings in my opinions. But I see this post and I see how I used to think 8 years ago before my thoughts grew away from the technicalities and towards the concrete moralities of what I saw happening to people.
You request that people leave partisan comments out of this discussion, and while that stems some of the emotional commentary, when the post is about events that may as well be partisan, I feel like that's really missing something there.
If you and yours are going to be, maybe still fine, but worse off than before, shouldn't even that be a big deal to you? You open with mentioning it but brush away that reality in favor of finding the technicalities and I just don't really get it.
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I am a strong proponent of ranked-choice voting. In fact, I like the theory of an Electoral College to force some randomness into the system. That said, our current setup, where states allocate votes in a winner-take-all fashion, is an unrespectable travesty. States should be forced to allocate their votes proportionally or—if the state has a total of 5 or more EC votes—they must have a referendum on each Presidential ballot of whether to allocate the votes proportionally or to assign 1 vote to the winner of each House district plus the two “Senate” votes to the overall state winner.
Or a regular ranked-choice nationwide popular vote is acceptable, too. My slight preference for a modified EC arises from making it a game one can Moneyball instead of letting it accumulate the mythology of being the pure will of the people that can be used to justify a tyranny by the majority. However, the current EC setup is voter suppression (with the minor exceptions of Maine and Nebraska). Ask any California Republican or Oklahoma Democrat.
I’m a major cynic of primary elections. Not that I believe they are necessarily worse than corrupt deals in smoke-filled rooms…
I typed the rest of a paragraph railing against primaries in general, but deleted it while formulating the following example because of the realization that FPTP is especially corrosive and distorting in a primary election compared to the general. Both exhibits from 2016.
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I’ve never read that book myself, largely on account of the recommendations of my history profs savaging its writing quality. If they had been as terminally online as any of us, they would say something like, “The average /mlpol/ schizo makes a more persuasively coherent argument for Nazism than Mein Kampf.”
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I haven't read the uncondensed version--it's enormous! But it isn't making a case for Nazism. It's mostly autobiography, and Hitler talking about himself and his opinions, which he always loved to do. And explaining himself so candidly that I have to think Neville Chamberlain would not have placated Hitler if he'd read the book.
I had the good luck of hitting on a condensed version that had the awful parts preserved, like the part where he calls the German people "sheep", and says he will lead them with hatred and lies. And the part where he explains that the way to make change is to find some target group and demonize and dehumanize them, and unite the people behind hating them. And then, once you've built your coalition and taken over, you must get rid of the people you dehumanized; because if there are any of them left around, people will start feeling sorry for them.
Nowhere in that section does he use the word "Jew"! What I regard as the true core of Nazism, the thing we must recognize and prevent from rising again, is not about Jews, except as representatives of free trade, free thought, and liberalism.
It also had the part where he says that, if you are a minority of the population, you can silence the majority by ganging up on the most prominent people who oppose you, and shouting them down, inspiring fear in everyone, until no one dares oppose you, even if most would like to. He said he copied that tactic from the other socialist party.
And the part where he says that the way to get people to overlook all your small lies is to tell one great, big lie, and tell it over and over again. It's important for the lie to be almost ridiculous, so that people will think you wouldn't dare tell it unless it were the truth. I don't quite remember his reasoning, but his argument was that you can shove one outrageous lie into the public's mind by repeating it over and over, and shouting down anybody who says anything else; and after that, they'll believe anything you tell them, because it's easier to accept one more little lie than to admit you wrongly accepted a great big lie.
It is really quite revealing.
BTW, the term "social justice" comes from the Nazis. It literally signifies that justice should not apply to individuals, but to social groups. In the Nazi meaning of "social justice", you seek justice for races, not for individuals.
Unfortunately, when I wanted to quote those parts, I couldn't find them in any of the abridged editions currently in print that I checked. I suspect they were translated from the later Nazi editions.
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Oh, I renamed it from Hate to Team Hate.
I didn't mean it like, "The team that hates"; I mean it as "The special kind of hatred you get when you have a whole team hating another team."
Footnotes are out of order because I kept adding footnotes as I revised, and I just gave up on renumbering them all every time I added another foot note. Fimfiction doesn't do that automatically. Wait; actually, I think it does now. I think there's a footnote operator, but I forgot how to do that.
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In the first place, my interpretations probably rely less on conspiracies than yours do. I believe that most things which look like conspiracies, are the results of game theory, social dynamics, memetic selection, and memetic group selection, not of conscious conspiracy. I even said so in the very post which you are calling chock-full of conspiracism:
More importantly, I try to avoid insulting the specific person I am replying to unless they've insulted me. You're the one who started up being rude with me. When you write replies, they are very often sarcastic and scornful. Even more towards other commenters than towards me, I think. I can understand your being rude to me now, as we are in an antagonistic mode. But you were rude to one or more commenters who'd said nothing to you, and nothing to deserve rudeness other than that you disagreed with what they said.
But this is my subjective judgement, and I expect you don't agree.
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Yeah turns out the drug addicted maniac was a shitty writer.
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I don't want to find a point midway between the 2 parties and balance there, on a seesaw. As I wrote, I don't believe the "center" is between the left and the right. The left and the right are mirror-images of each other. They agree about more things, or at least more supremely important structural things, than they disagree. One of the most-important things they agree on is that they are absolutely certain that their views are correct, that they can't make any compromise with the opposite party, that anyone who disagrees with them is wicked, and that anything less than total victory is unacceptable.
These beliefs lead inevitably to war, or else to the oppression of half of the population. You must not dismiss opposition to them as "technicalities".
By "center" I mean not someone who is the average of the left of the right, but someone who still believes that we can work problems out in public debates where no one is punished for speaking their mind, and all data is admissible; and that we may keep peace by making compromises that no one is happy with.
No; the right has made no effort to oppress me. I believe my plight is caused mostly by earlier legislation regulating healthcare and insurance, which created the absurdly high medical expenses and the bizarre insurance system we had before the Affordable Care Act. The right thinks they're being oppressed by being forced to pay for other people's medical care; and I can't deny that they're paying for mine. So maybe I'm oppressing them.
But I can't get further into this matter without talking about specific political issues, and I do NOT want to do that on this post. I think the important part of this post is the part about my experience with hate. Everything else is just context and speculation.
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"The right has made no efforts to oppress me."
You're a cishet gentile white male. The actual literal Nazi party would not have made an effort to oppress you. The fact that you are not oppressed by the particular government in power does not mean that they are not oppressive.
If I correctly understand what you're saying here...and if I think about which party has had a lot of its politicians making a point of wanting to get rid of 'Obamacare'...
Are you saying that you now believe staying in the United States might endanger your physical survival? Because of current political events? And you believe you might find yourself becoming a refugee, forced to beg for merciful livesaving help from some country other than the one where, so far as I know, you were born and raised?
I'm sorry if politicians kill you, Bad Horse. Sorry in the sense of 'I will be sad and I will miss you.' I tried my best not to get you killed.
(Edited in first seven minutes after posting, in italics)
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So much this
Also, because I am pissy and for once I just don't /care/ about diplomacy
1) Edit your shit down, this could have been half the words and then I might have read the whole thing.
2) What I did read was naive drivel. An appeal to a world that does not exist, has never existed, and likely never will exist.
3) I have no more interest in making nice or forgiving. America voted for a pathway that leads to people like me getting exterminated. I will fight it with everything I have because it's that or, at some point down the line, at best I get a quick bullet to the head.
I don't have hate for you. You make me furious because for someone so seemingly intelligent you manage to be so completely, thoroughly, and repeatedly /wrong/. I have no illusion this will break through that cloud of pigheaded stupidity.
Actually, that's an insult to pigs.
But most of all, I pity you, because your world is so unimaginably small and you have absolutely no idea how tiny it is because you've never truly visited another.
You're older than me. Grow up and act like it.