US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2464

On June 30 2020 03:02 ChristianS wrote:
@IgnE:

GH made this about food. Among artistic endeavors, I think food is probably one of the easiest for the layman to come into a foreign cultural context, understand what is happening, and produce their own version of it that doesn’t totally miss the point.

But come on. You’ve never seen someone decide they’re going to insert themselves into a foreign context and fumble through making their own version of a cultural product they don’t really understand? Have you ever heard an all-white choir perform “Shut De Do” or “Day-O”? It’s not about familial connection (at least, not necessarily), but art exists in a cultural context and you perceive, understand, and create it differently when you are immersed in its cultural context than when you are not.

Again, approached with humility I think seeing a product of a foreign context and trying to understand it, imitate it, and transplant it to your own cultural context can be a valuable endeavor, but that is what you’re doing. Absent that humility it’s easy to instead diminish that product to a limited set of caricatures, which can look like (and often is) mere mockery

On June 30 2020 02:55 Slydie wrote:


This is weird, in my world, a LIBERAL would dislike both facemasks and restrictive abortion rights. Afaik, US conservatives are actually extremely liberal in many ways (guns, civil liberties), but restrictive in others (abortion, drugs.) Is it even a coherent ideology? My own points of view as a Scandinavian raised cynic and die-hard social liberal are probably not completely coherent either, but I don't understand how the GOP is knit together of seemingly opposing values.

On June 30 2020 02:59 nath wrote:


The only reason the shift seems rapid to you is that those who are on the receiving end of "impoliteness" (and much worse stuff) only get to come out and redefine the norm once there is enough power to support it, which really takes years and years of slow progress; its not a rapid shift even if it seems so from the outside and to someone who is not on the receiving end of this "impoliteness".


Many of these different definitions and visions of colonialism can be unified under a loose umbrella (and have, among many different tribes/groups of people). To me the term is very useful as we can be proactive in trying to suppress and prevent some of these harmful patterns from repeating themselves, and to do that we need to have some sort of identification and classification of it.


Wow. This disheartens me too much to respond right now. Hopefully I can collect my strength and call you out on this later. It is sad that someone as intelligent as you thinks this. Many people's ancestors do not look very kindly upon your words.

On June 30 2020 02:55 Slydie wrote:


This is weird, in my world, a LIBERAL would dislike both facemasks and restrictive abortion rights. Afaik, US conservatives are actually extremely liberal in many ways (guns, civil liberties), but restrictive in others (abortion, drugs.) Is it even a coherent ideology? My own points of view as a Scandinavian raised cynic and die-hard social liberal are probably not completely coherent either, but I don't understand how the GOP is knit together of seemingly opposing values.

On June 30 2020 03:43 Nevuk wrote:

Liberal and Conservative have different meanings in the US than the rest of the world. When people reference the global meanings of the word in a conversation where they could get mixed up, they say "little l liberal" or "little c conservative" (it's not done often).


Libertarians tend to be the traditional meaning of liberal here. However, american libertarians are... weird. Some of them don't think abortion rights are libertarian, some do (something along the lines of the freedom of the child). Some of them also are just republicans, as far as I can tell. I think it's because some people started calling themselves libertarians after mainstream GOP does really stupid things (it was common in 09-10 due to Bush's unpopularity).

American Liberal refers to Keynesian economics and liberal social policies. Conservative refers to liberal economics and conservative social policies. Leftist refers to anyone who has issues with capitalism fundamentally.

There are still some Conservative Democrats, but almost no Liberal Republicans exist anymore. There's been a rapid sorting starting around Obama's election where the parties started to sort ideologically.

On June 30 2020 03:16 IgnE wrote:


Ok well I was responding to the point about food. I don't dispute that art is contextual. I don't dispute that an all-white choir can make one cringe. But is it cringe-worthy because it's appropriation per se or is it cringe-worthy because they can't excise themselves from the picture? because the totality of the performance is wrong? because the intentions don't align or blind to symbolic/historical meaning? because the audience can't help but ask what the point of this performance is? whether there's a dissonance between the intention and the various symbolic and imaginary dimensions of the song? It also seems hard to separate out a baser gut reaction to the violation of a social norm, a social norm that might have originated for good reason as an important rule of thumb to rule out bad actors.

If you think there's a deep symbolic meaning to tacos that makes any taco made by a non-Mexican a travesty and a mockery then I guess we just disagree. The cultural appropriation furor over white-owned taco trucks has always been more about white privilege/positioning and monetary compensation/reparations to the "owners" of culture than it was about bad art.

On June 30 2020 04:01 ShoCkeyy wrote:


It can be easily said that most US citizens don't know what any of those words mean. I always find it funny to see republicans bitch about liberalism.

On June 30 2020 04:33 Nevuk wrote:
I didn't say congress. I mean in the US total, based on polling self identifications.

On June 30 2020 04:39 farvacola wrote:
TIL that closing the federal courts to certain kinds of immigration claims is not a truly important issue and that therefore Justices Ginsburg and Breyer’s siding with the conservatives in that case can be ignored in service of an unbalanced talking point that is popular in some media circles.

And that’s only one case, there are more where particularly Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan have sided with the conservatives, only leftist court watchers don’t run to their equivalent to the FedSoc press to decry the oh so unfair treatment of judicial conservatives.

Sotomayor is the only leftward Justice who doesn’t seem keen on the horse trading that occurs all the time, which is probably part of why she’s the best one currently on the court in the first place

On June 30 2020 03:32 IgnE wrote:
I wasn't speaking about my personal feelings about whether the shift in politeness was "too rapid" or not. What I meant to imply was that other people have protested that it is too fast for them. And whether you think it was too fast or not, or whether you think it gained subterranean steam decades before it erupted, is kind of irrelevant to their self-reported experience, ignorant or not. I would argue that in the last decade norms about what is and is not acceptable have changed quite a bit, but I don't really care to argue the point, nor do I mean to indicate that this is particularly onerous. It's just an observation.

On June 30 2020 03:32 IgnE wrote:
"Colonialism" has many uses in many contexts, and some of them can be quite useful. I did not mean to imply that it has not and cannot be used to great effect. I only meant to say that I have seen it used quite a bit in opinion pieces, twitter posts, blog posts, to refer to contemporary cultural phenomena, and even to refer to psychological formations and patterns of thought in the minds of people born in the 1990s, as if what Fanon was talking about in French Algeria is the same thing happening today among BIPOC. What precisely does "colonialism" add to the analysis of domestic subject formation in the contemporary United States? I am not saying it has no relation, but it's almost always undertheorized with vague equivalences being drawn between disparate historical situations.

On June 30 2020 03:32 IgnE wrote:
I look forward to your future call out.

On June 30 2020 04:52 Introvert wrote:


You know those aren't on the level of even the other rulings in the past few weeks where other Gorsuch and Roberts have sided with the Democrat appointees. We know they vote together more on close rulings anyways, I can get thr numbers later if you really want them. Occasionally Kagan and Breyer come over if Roberts does his usual water-it-down thing, even many "victories" aren't wins and they leave open huge holes for the future.

And we can look at the way things have gone. Despite decades of majority GOP appointees, the left's social agenda continues to slowly become law through the courts. Not without hiccups, and certainly their economic agenda has been less successful... but we all have eyes.


edit



And of course I think she's easily the worst, and Kagan is the best lefty. I do however like Thomas, and part of that is similar to why you like Sotomayor, so there you go.

On June 30 2020 04:52 Introvert wrote:


You know those aren't on the level of even the other rulings in the past few weeks where other Gorsuch and Roberts have sided with the Democrat appointees. We know they vote together more on close rulings anyways, I can get thr numbers later if you really want them. Occasionally Kagan and Breyer come over if Roberts does his usual water-it-down thing, even many "victories" aren't wins and they leave open huge holes for the future.

And we can look at the way things have gone. Despite decades of majority GOP appointees, the left's social agenda continues to slowly become law through the courts. Not without hiccups, and certainly their economic agenda has been less successful... but we all have eyes.

On June 30 2020 04:27 Introvert wrote:


We know what it means in the American context, that's quite good enough for american politics, obviously.

The idea that there are more conservative Democrats in Congress than liberal Republicans is, of course, absolutely bonkers, but it's something the left almost wishes were true, given how often it's repeated. However, it is true that by self-identification, there are plenty of both still left among the general populace. It's especially funny to read on the say Roberts does his more and more frequent split-the-baby approach while destroying his institution. You'd probably have to go back to 2005 to find the last time a lone Democrat appointee sided with the conservatives on a truly important issue, but somehow the 4 lefties are never called out for being partisan hacks or ideologues. There's pretty much never ant question how they'll vote on an issue the left really cares about.