EPTUntil I see any evidence whatsoever to the contrary, I consider Democrats Republicans who wear masks and do the very bare minimum to appear to be "better" while not really doing much of anything at all.
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mierin
United States4943 Posts
Until I see any evidence whatsoever to the contrary, I consider Democrats Republicans who wear masks and do the very bare minimum to appear to be "better" while not really doing much of anything at all. | ||
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Gorsameth
Netherlands21369 Posts
On December 05 2021 18:00 mierin wrote: No, we just recognise that the Democrats are not a single hivemind but a coalition of vastly different ideologies that would form half a dozen very different parties in any multiparty democracy united only in their opposition of Republicans.Friendly reminder that eight democrats voted against raising the minimum wage. The fact that actual Americans in this thread (I can forgive people's ignorance who are from other countries and can't see what's happening firsthand) actually believe Democrats are some kind of saviors and Republicans are comic book villains is astounding. Until I see any evidence whatsoever to the contrary, I consider Democrats Republicans who wear masks and do the very bare minimum to appear to be "better" while not really doing much of anything at all. Just like Republicans are a diverse bunch who were infighting constantly when they were in control of all 3 branches and could barely get anything done. Its just that 'maintain the status quo' is a lot easier without a workable majority then 'make progress'. | ||
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Simberto
Germany11339 Posts
On December 05 2021 18:00 mierin wrote: Friendly reminder that eight democrats voted against raising the minimum wage. The fact that actual Americans in this thread (I can forgive people's ignorance who are from other countries and can't see what's happening firsthand) actually believe Democrats are some kind of saviors and Republicans are comic book villains is astounding. Until I see any evidence whatsoever to the contrary, I consider Democrats Republicans who wear masks and do the very bare minimum to appear to be "better" while not really doing much of anything at all. The problem is that when one party consist of comic-book villains, you have no choice but to vote for the other party. And sadly, the republicans actually are comic book villains. I have long used the "What would Darth Vader do" test to figure out how republicans will react to any situation, and it rarely fails. In recent history, instead of becoming less villainous, they are slowly turning from heartless monsters into fascists. So yes, the democrats suck. But in a shitty two-party system like the US has, if one party consists of insane fascists, the other party is the only choice. If no one voted for the insane fascists, this would lead to the big party splitting into two smaller ones. But sadly, half the US thinks that insane fascists is who should rule the country. So no, the democrats are not saviours, they are simply the only choice left, due to the shitty two-party fptp system and the other party being insane fascists. | ||
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farvacola
United States18818 Posts
On December 05 2021 10:39 GreenHorizons wrote: Part of the reason I ask is because I don't think there are commonly used definitions. "Leftism/ist" typically serves to obfuscate whatever grouping people are actually talking about in my experience. I guess what I'm particularly curious about is whether you're attempting to disagree with Marxist rooted class analysis or commenting on what you see as "Leftism's" + Show Spoiler + (I think it's a silly term at this point and don't identify as/with Leftist personally) In other words, are you refuting the conceptualization of mutual class interests among various factions of the top echelons of wealth and power or just pointing out that some people (sometimes sympathetically, sometimes in bad faith) are reductive in their use/communication of it? It's easy for people to confuse one for the other and I think it's an important distinction. I’m fairly on board with class analysis generally speaking, but I very much disagree with the notion that members of a class act in concert or in cooperation with one another. Now the labor theory of value, that I take issue with, but that’s another topic entirely  | ||
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Zambrah
United States7122 Posts
On December 05 2021 02:27 farvacola wrote: It's a mistake to presume that actors like Supreme Court justices make choices as though they're beholden to some command-based structure where they take orders from wealth and power. That's a fallacy that I would summarize as Leftism's tendency to overdetermine the uniformity of power's constituency, especially in the face of an apparent Rightwing victory. Power doesn't beget itself via the neat cooperation of powerful entities, rather it is an emergent, iterative quality of a particular set of circumstances that, as a practical matter, include a ton of behind the scenes squabbling and fighting among power's claimants. I recommend the show Succession because it does a fairly good job of showing that off, but the idea that the powerful are powerful in part because of how they fight and cheat each other goes back to the times of Machiavelli. Said another way, there's an element of complexity at stake in any analysis of politics that often goes unaccounted for where folks are eager for neat and tidy theories of how things got to where they are and where they are going. I don't view wealth and power as some sort of ordered hierarchy or anything like it, just a bunch of class actors that are generally behaving in the same way because once you're in the true wealth-and-power tier in the US you know what it takes to get there and what you have to do to keep it that way. It's like convergent evolution. Its a bunch of individual-esque entities acting similarly and arriving at the same or similar places by virtue of whats to their advantage. | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States22727 Posts
On December 05 2021 21:46 farvacola wrote: I'm confused.+ Show Spoiler + On December 05 2021 10:39 GreenHorizons wrote: Part of the reason I ask is because I don't think there are commonly used definitions. "Leftism/ist" typically serves to obfuscate whatever grouping people are actually talking about in my experience. I guess what I'm particularly curious about is whether you're attempting to disagree with Marxist rooted class analysis or commenting on what you see as "Leftism's" + Show Spoiler + (I think it's a silly term at this point and don't identify as/with Leftist personally) In other words, are you refuting the conceptualization of mutual class interests among various factions of the top echelons of wealth and power or just pointing out that some people (sometimes sympathetically, sometimes in bad faith) are reductive in their use/communication of it? It's easy for people to confuse one for the other and I think it's an important distinction. I’m fairly on board with class analysis generally speaking, but I very much disagree with the notion that members of a class act in concert or in cooperation with one another. Now the labor theory of value, that I take issue with, but that’s another topic entirely I’m fairly on board with class analysis generally speaking — I very much disagree with the notion that members of a class act in concert or in cooperation with one another. Strike me as mutually exclusive (pretty inextricable from class analysis), missing clarifying context (like "unanimous cooperation" or something ), and/or ahistorical (Pinkertons to Steve Jobs & Eric Schmidt) It feels like people say something to the effect of "Tech billionaires conspire to keep their workers wages low" and people pop up to say "No! In fact all tech billionaires don't meet in a VR neocity and plot their collaborative worker exploitation while stroking their evil virtual cats because they have competing interests"(turns out it was emails and emojis in that case) as if that's what they meant and they are unaware of the competing interests at the heart of capitalist ideology, the fundamentals of (bourgeois) democracy in the US etc, rather than the otherwise uncontroversial class analysis (albeit of varying rigor) that it's now pretty clear was underpinning Zambrah's perspective. I take issue with your use of "leftism's tendency", the frequently employed caricature of wild conspiracy (typically used to conflate it with right-wing paranoia), etc but I just wanted to say I don't disagree that there is a reasonable critique about people not clearly/carefully expressing things or having the language/experience to express what exactly they mean (or understand) about the nature of various existing frameworks of class analysis or developing their own rigorous interpretations. | ||
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farvacola
United States18818 Posts
On December 05 2021 23:48 GreenHorizons wrote: I'm confused. Strike me as mutually exclusive (pretty inextricable from class analysis), missing clarifying context (like "unanimous cooperation" or something ), and/or ahistorical (Pinkertons to Steve Jobs & Eric Schmidt) It feels like people say something to the effect of "Tech billionaires conspire to keep their workers wages low" and people pop up to say "No! In fact all tech billionaires don't meet in a VR neocity and plot their collaborative worker exploitation while stroking their evil virtual cats because they have competing interests"(turns out it was emails and emojis in that case) as if that's what they meant and they are unaware of the competing interests at the heart of capitalist ideology, the fundamentals of (bourgeois) democracy in the US etc, rather than the otherwise uncontroversial class analysis (albeit of varying rigor) that it's now pretty clear was underpinning Zambrah's perspective. I take issue with your use of "leftism's tendency", the frequently employed caricature of wild conspiracy (typically used to conflate it with right-wing paranoia), etc but I just wanted to say I don't disagree that there is a reasonable critique about people not clearly/carefully expressing things or having the language/experience to express what exactly they mean (or understand) about the nature of various existing frameworks of class analysis or developing their own rigorous interpretations. I reject the explanatory power of theories that turn on a concept of perfection (i.e. Kant and Hegel), which is why I disagree with most kinds of Marxism that incorporate unflagging concepts of class analysis that deign to predict based on essentialized relations between people and things. For example, most kinds of class analysis are premised on a kind of rational actor theory that presumes that wealth rationally begets itself and can identify what is necessary to do so, but people are not ever truly rational, and just as the hungry, thirsty person acts irrationally in part because of their essential needs failing to be met, the wealthy glutton acts irrationally because their concepts of needs and wants is able to spin off into whimsy detached from base necessity. What looks like a valid assertion that the wealthy class acts in lockstep due to their shared material heritage is actually a simple ideological observation that mistakes its relative accuracy for essential truth, which is why I said power is emergent (its a relation that happens spontaneously) and iterative (it happens over and over again). Just because power looked a certain way before doesn't mean it will look that way again. In that way, a lot of Marxism is itself neoliberal (the idea that actors can be understood and predicted based on their class is practically the same as creating predictive economic models that turn on concepts like rational actors and perfect competition) and I reject that all out of hand as an erroneous wishing away of all the messiest parts of human existence. There is no airtight theory of value nor is there any perfect concept of class that can actually explain what power will do. I prefer something more along the lines of Spinoza/Deleuze, which is to say that there is only one perfect theory, but it transcends the explanatory power of language and can only be gesticulated at in fleeting moments of clarity. In the meantime, we're left to wrestle with the sludge of existence and there's no conceptual way to cut corners and paint a perfect image of what that means. So to bring things back to the subject that started this, I simply disagree with the idea that wealth and power plan for and expect the things that happen like the overturning of Roe in a way that lets us (or them) predict what happens next. | ||
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ChristianS
United States3187 Posts
But at the same time, people’s values and worldviews are infected by class in largely unexamined ways. What is reasonable or unreasonable, and what is possible or impossible, and what kind of world we should strive for, are all informed by class. Maybe the easiest SCOTUS example (although I bet you’re both better-informed than me on this subject) is qualified immunity. SCOTUS essentially created that right from whole cloth. I can’t help but think that a rich white person’s idea of how police and citizens ought to interact as important in that decision. There might be a lot of rights you could imagine inventing from whole cloth if you had a mind to. How much of the modern prison system could be injunctioned away as cruel and unusual, if they wanted? One can imagine a Supreme Court deciding people have a right to food and water, or shelter, or internet, or any number of things. I’m not necessarily arguing they should, just that those things might seem more reasonable with different class sensibilities. Instead, I think the Supreme Court would likely be a major obstacle to most of the major policy objectives GH would have. They’d figure the stuff was not clearly constitutional, and they simply wouldn’t see the need to adapt for it, because they wouldn’t see the need for the policies in the first place. The subtleties might become more obvious under threat. For instance, the court has a nominal interest in protecting civil liberties, but historically their commitment to civil liberties gets awfully weak in wartime. Distributing anti-war tracts might seem obviously protected but the court didn’t think so. Rounding up people based on race and putting them in camps might seem obviously unconstitutional but the court didn’t think so. Is their commitment to, say, property rights so weak in wartime? I don’t know of any specific cases but if a president were, say, trying to seize the wealthy’s property and sell it to pay for the war, I tend to think the court’s spine might stiffen and we’d get some “we can’t abandon our principles just because times are tough” decisions written. TL;DR: I don’t think the court thinks of itself as playing for team Rich People, but I think they reflect rich people worldviews in their conception of society and the law. | ||
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farvacola
United States18818 Posts
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ChristianS
United States3187 Posts
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farvacola
United States18818 Posts
On December 06 2021 04:13 ChristianS wrote: But don’t we still have to strive for universalizable principles? I have to aspire to examining my biases (class-based or otherwise) and, in so doing, at least partially overcome them. Otherwise what hope is there? Absolutely, but that’s just the thing, in striving for universalizable principles, there has to be an ongoing self-critique that keeps the desire to totalize at bay, such as examining ideas for bias as you’ve just rightly pointed out as a good thing we should do. The trick is that there will always be flaws in every concept, idea, or theory, and the act of claiming otherwise (which classical liberalism and many kinds of Marxism share in common as a feature) is a reliable signpost for ideological shenanigans that power often used to further its own ends. To put that concept in vulgar terms, a lot of people make a lot of money from average US citizens categorically buying into individualistic bootstrap theories of how to make it in the US. Power loves neat and tidy outlooks on life that can grab a person’s mind and soul in service of its growth. | ||
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ChristianS
United States3187 Posts
Regarding SCOTUS, the main question I have is what it would actually take for legal protections people have in theory to actually apply in practice. Conservatives have (or used to have) a lot of romantic ideas about how rule of law and due process can solve almost any problem, and honestly I find some of it kind of persuasive in theory. A lot of progressive activism focuses on establishing new protections but frequently there's already something on the books. Practical example (hypothetical, although I think this exact course of events has happened in a few places): police kill an unarmed black man. Public outrage ensues, some Democrats try to capitalize to pass some kind of new regulation to address the problem, and when all is said and done we get, like, an ordinance banning choke holds or something. More ideological activists say nothing changed, more gradualist ones say at least we made some progress. But inevitably within a year police kill another unarmed black man, and in all likelihood it was with a fucking choke hold, and in all likelihood you can look back in history a bit and find out that wasn't even the first time some ordinance banning choke holds was passed. So... what does it take to actually get the protections we're promised? Right to a speedy trial is right there in the constitution, why are people in prison for years without trial? What good is a right to due process if cops can just shoot you in the street? I didn't follow the Rittenhouse trial and don't have any particularly strong opinions on the verdict, but as I recall there was a leftist protester last year that wound up killing someone at a protest, too. It might be interesting to compare that trial to the Rittenhouse trial, except there wasn't one. Law enforcement tracked them down, and killed them. Until courts are prepared to enforce the protections we supposedly have, what does any of the rest of it matter? | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15401 Posts
Finally these fucking idiots are starting to understand. The term is incredibly stupid, made up by whiny white people, and is offensive to actual Latinos. We like our language. Our gendered terms are not oppressive. Men and women alike enjoy the idea of our language having gendered terms. And guess what, Spanish does not have a good way of pronouncing latinx. It’s offensive some whiny shit head on Twitter would even try to redefine our identity And how long did it take democrats to realize it was a bad move to use some Twitter horse shit to redefine a race? The party is just so incompetent it’s wild | ||
KwarK
United States41995 Posts
Hispanics would work though. I’m not defending Latinx, just pointing out that the purpose of the word was to be used when the explicitly gendered word would misgender half the readers. Asking them if they prefer the gender neutral word to the correct word isn’t asking the right thing. | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15401 Posts
On December 06 2021 23:47 KwarK wrote: The poll asked people if they would prefer Latina/Latino or Latinx. It was a dumb poll. The reason Latinx exists is because Latino and Latina are gendered and they don’t know the gender of the reader. They should have asked men if they preferred being referred to as Latinx or Latina. Hispanics would work though. I’m not defending Latinx, just pointing out that the purpose of the word was to be used when the explicitly gendered word would misgender half the readers. Asking them if they prefer the gender neutral word to the correct word isn’t asking the right thing. “They don’t know the gender of the reader” is a fake problem. A group of latino/latina people is a group of Latinos. That’s 100000% ok due to the culture of the language. The idea that you desperately need to know the gender of the reader is a problem from another culture. It has nothing to do with us. The incredible irony is that shit heads on Twitter were attempting to override our culture with their own. It’s just so hilarious it feels like the onion. Me and my family just use the term Hispanic. But my point is that the problem itself only exists on SJW Twitter. | ||
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KwarK
United States41995 Posts
On December 06 2021 23:56 Mohdoo wrote: “They don’t know the gender of the reader” is a fake problem. A group of latino/latina people is a group of Latinos. That’s 100000% ok due to the culture of the language. The idea that you desperately need to know the gender of the reader is a problem from another culture. It has nothing to do with us. The incredible irony is that shit heads on Twitter were attempting to override our culture with their own. It’s just so hilarious it feels like the onion. Me and my family just use the term Hispanic. But my point is that the problem itself only exists on SJW Twitter. My point is that what they wanted to know is whether latinas prefer Latinx or Latino for a group term. Putting Latina as an option makes the poll data worthless because that isn’t on the table. | ||
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Sbrubbles
Brazil5775 Posts
On December 06 2021 23:30 Mohdoo wrote: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/06/hispanic-voters-latinx-term-523776 Finally these fucking idiots are starting to understand. The term is incredibly stupid, made up by whiny white people, and is offensive to actual Latinos. We like our language. Our gendered terms are not oppressive. While I agree with you and think this is incredibly stupid, I'd point out there are home-grown activists here in Brazil who argue otherwise. Then again, much of this type of activism is culturally imported wholesale from the US, both in terms of right and left wing talking points. | ||
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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Mohdoo
United States15401 Posts
On December 07 2021 00:27 JimmiC wrote: My thing with the words we use is I'm ignorant because I don't care, but some people really do so if they are being offended why not just swap. Im old enough to remember when people were called Fireman and Policeman instead of Fire Fighter and Police officer. Almost no in those roles cared because they were almost all men. There was a big uproar at the time and I thought it was silly and pointless. Now we are way later and we have way more of other genders in those roles, did that change make that happen, make them feel better? I do not know, but I do know there has a been a positive change and no negatives, so I think it was a good move. Language constantly evolves, if the reasoning is for gender equality or neutrality that is not the worst reason and I don't see a huge downside. Obviously twitter polls are silly, but I do think it is good to ask. If someone was doing a real poll I would want to here from the people currently impacted, so no other races and also not the Latino CiS males, because of course they are fine with the status quo. If the other group wants the change I'd be on board and if not so be it. I don't think it is offensive to ask the question. Asking how people want to be referred to is just polite whether its gender or name/nick name or whatever. Some people really care, some Jennifer's don't like Jen or Jenny or whatever, just best to ask. In large groups you are never going to make everyone happy, but you have a much better change if you ask. It is possible you are misunderstanding how gender works in Spanish. As an example, Spanish for hand is feminine. Same with Spanish for penis. We generally don’t associate penises with women. Gendering in Spanish is not what most white people think it is. | ||
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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