Commenter Archive

There will be no consequences for this, because everybody already knows that CRT is charlatanism. Its entire purpose is to speak moral truths wholly unburdened by petty concerns about facts.

I'm sure anyone who actually knows what CRT is knows that, but I'm sure everyone who got their knowledge of it from Jimmy Concepts and Reactinoary Rufo believe that.

Oh yeah, the pastor's post is like this one. He's basically asking other Evangelicals not to be mad, because they still are and he thinks they shouldn't be.

Here's the post, in case you're interested.

I see meme after meme, man.

My dad (an Evangelical) posted two posts earlier this week, one arguing that the thing everyone's pissed about wasn't what they're pissed about, and one sharing his pastor's substack post arguing that even if it was what so many of them think it was, they shouldn't hate, because it's un-Christian, and folks from his Church and elsewhere in conservative Tennessee are still in there arguing that it was what they say it was, and that they should definitely hate. So yeah, they're still pissed.

Scrolling Twitter or Facebook? If you're looking for Evangelicals, it's gotta be Facebook. If you scroll through Evangelicals' Facebook posts, you'll find plenty in the last 24 hours.

This is tangential to your point, but one of the things that's really struck me about conservative rhetoric over the last 4 years (and really for a decade or more before that, as the "election fraud" obsession grew among them) is the extent to which they talk about the attempts to overthrow the last election, and their willingness to overthrow any future election they lose, as an effort to save democracy. There are historical examples of exactly this (subverting democracy by claiming fraud/cheating, and describe your actions as saving democracy), and they're not the ones you want your political right to be imitating.

I don't know how representative they are, but Evangelical Facebook is still posting about it, though they've gone from 100% "The Olympics are the devil" to like 50% "I'm boycotting the Olympics" and 50% to what they were doing before, talking about how stupid they think Harris is, and that they believe she slept her way to the top.

If you don't follow the Brooklyn Rail Field Notes, I recommend it. Lots of really interesting stuff in a magazine that is mostly devoted mostly to poetry, literature, and art reviews/criticism (so also a good place to find interesting novels you might not see reviewed elsewhere) and some original short stories and poetry.

Here's a long piece on demographic decline from a left perspective. It has a really interesting deep dive into historical trends in population growth and decline, and their relationships to material conditions and relations of production.

To be clear, Freddie is about as representative of any segment of the left as I am of professional basketball players, having played the sport (mediocrely) in high school.

Yes. This is the sort of situation that I'm not sure any party in our system could avoid, were it to happen to one of their politicians, because the incentives for the politician and his people to hold onto power are just too strong.

More than Biden, I blame Biden's people, who clearly knew how it would look if he had a lot of exposure, and spent the last couple years seriously limiting how much we saw of him, and limiting his message when in public (limiting that made it seriously difficult for him to actually sell himself as a candidate).

The closest I come to an actual conspiracy theory is the idea that there may have been a faction within Biden's camp that believed he shouldn't run for reelection, and it was this faction that pushed for a debate before the convention, knowing his performance would be a disaster.

I don't really know what he is, but "presidential primaries are immune systems" sounds like something David Brooks would write.

LF1 just reads like the writing of someone who's become so accustomed to contrarianism that they don't know how to write anything else. Primaries are immune systems? What in the hell kind of silly centrist nonsense is that, particularly in a year in which the Republican primary has, for the second time, given them Donald Trump?

I suspect I'm around more leftists, and a larger variety of leftists, than just about anyone else who spends any time on this site, and I've seen a lot of leftist reactions to Biden stepping down and Harris becoming the presumptive nominee (OK, the reactions to Biden stepping down were celebration, 100%, but the reactions to Harris are varied), none of which look like LF1's, because LF1's requires both a lack of understanding of how primaries work with incumbents, and because I don't know a single leftist who considers the candidate selection process of either party to be in any meaningful sense democratic. I mean, is a primary more democratic than the party just picking among a handful of donor- and party-preselected candidates and the weird vanity candidates who like the attention but have no real interest in winning the nomination? I mean, does the Great Basin Desert get a bit more rain annually than the Red Desert? Sure, but that doesn't make either of them rainforests.

Hell, when American officers lead the army against protesting war veterans and their families" who are just trying to get by during an unprecedented economic depression, we make them some of the most celebrated, and highest-ranked generals in the history of the country.

The Aaron Sorkin op-ed (which he's retracted, lol) is interesting in this context, because he is in some ways the 2024 equivalent of Posner in the mid-Aughts, though instead of lamenting the death of a breed of (intellectual) conservatism, Sorkin is lamenting the death of the weird fantasy version of liberal politics he had, perhaps not created (it was a thing going back as long as I can remember; I think of it almost as the Tom Brokaw version of how politics is done), but popularized with his TV show(s). That myth has little to do with the content of the politics -- it would, in fact, be weird to call it a political ideology -- than an idea about how politics should be done, and who should be doing it. As political myths go, it has to be one of the most annoying, and at least in terms of the way it made liberals view Obama, e.g., I think that myth has been generally harmful to liberal politics.

His love of the Becker-Posner blog is probably the most telling. I disliked that blog intensely, but they both spent pretty much the whole latter half of the Aughts decrying the direction that conservatism was taking; arguing, in fact, that at least for Posner, that conservatism as he knew it was, by the end of the first Bush administration, either dead or in its death throes. That Vance would think of that as the best blog on the internet suggests an affinity for their views, which makes his embrace of Trumpism and the worst impulses of the American right seem like a much bigger change in world view than it would have otherwise, at least to me.

Don't get me wrong, I think a lot of more moderate, business conservatives made this transition, starting in January '09, and continuing into the Trump years. And besides, pretty much all of us change as we age. So I'm not suggesting that the change is somehow disingenuous, just that it is in fact a big change from loving a blog that's pretty old school conservatism, with one of the writers literally one of the dudes who laid the intellectual foundation for neoliberalism, an ideology he also worked hard to popularize over decades.

It's a logo for an air maintenance group or operation, though who knows which. If you look for air force/air national guard maintenance groups/operations logos, you'll see several with gear logos.

I know this only because my grandfather was an airplane mechanic at Robins Air Force Base once upon a time.

(And my uncle continues to work with an air maintenance squadron at Robins, though as a civilian engineer, not a mechanic).

I was recently watching an interview with a well-known philosopher, Robert Pippin, filmed in November 2023, and he suggested Biden would harm the Democrats in the 2024 election because, as he argued, despite a very good record on crime and the economy, his age and cognitive decline made him incapable of making that case publicly, so that the Dems would be better off if Biden stepped down. I figure we have to giver jo, some props got calling that a year ago.

I'm confused by the China hate. The first definite case was December 1, 2019; Chinese scientists had sequenced the genome by late December, released a public health notice (with some misinformation, but it was very early and there's no evidence that they were intentionally misleading rather than simply being ignorant), mandating masks in public, on December 31; the world was aware by January 8; and the American mainstream press was publishing articles by mid-January. Again, there was some misinformation in early Chinese public releases, particularly related to transmission, but the Chinese government had a public health advisory within 2 weeks of the sequencing, and had a massive response team building hospitals and staffing them within a few weeks of the first recognized case.

The worst thing the Chinese government probably did was delay the WHO's public health emergency declaration until the end of January. That may have had an affect on some people's travel, but really, by the point the WHO was trying to declare an emergency, it was probably too late, not because China had hidden anything, but because they hadn't shut down all of Wuhan in December, which seems like an excusable thing given that the U.S. would almost certainly not have shut down an entire city or state either under those circumstances (or, as our own COVID response showed, under any circumstances). Then China did shut down Wuhan, and for about a year, their mortality rate went down in China outside of Wuhan, while we and the rest of the world continued to fumble (eventually China got hit hard, as we all know, because you can only contain a virus like that for so long, which is all the more reason not to blame China for it getting out in the first place).

Was China perfect in their response, then? No, not by any metric. Would any country have been? No. OK, maybe New Zealand. But the rest of the world would have fumbled at least as bad as China. I consider this to be just one more example of the irrational hatred for China among Americans, an irrationality that is increasingly pervades both parties' China policies (did you hear Vance last night?), and which increasingly threatens the peace, economic stability, and even the climate of this country and the entire world. It'd be good if people cut it out.

I think I said congrats on Twitter, but just in case, congrats!

He's frequently on Twitter. I'll tell him you said hi.

I am most likely in a tighter, more opaque bubble than most people -- most of my offline social circle consists of people to the left of anyone currently writing for or commenting on this blog, and the only centrists or liberals I follow on Twitter (my primary online haunt) are former OTers and some Austin locals -- but I still have a glimpse into the conservative world, and MAGA world in particular, on Facebook, because I grew up in a very conservative place, and most of my Facebook friends from back there are conservatives. Over the last 16 years, I've watched their demeanor, their rhetoric, in some cases, their entire online personalities change, to become increasingly hateful, increasingly fearful, increasingly invested in a cult of personality, increasingly openly racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic, increasingly open to the idea of a violent political conflict.

People I always thought were extremely nice and kind, and from whom I'd never heard a bad word about anyone, are now regularly posting incredibly racist and sexist memes about Harris, calling liberals groomers, posting incredibly racist anti-immigrant memes, obsessing over conspiracy theories (especially about the 2020 election), etc. It is incredibly disturbing.

By the way, the last few days, after the assassination attempt, have been something to behold on Facebook.

I think Musk likes to talk about culture war stuff because he thinks it motivates his target audience, but there's no doubt why he's moving Twitter (X) to Texas (after already moving Tesla's headquarters about 2 miles from my home): Texas is a much more "business friendly" state than California: not only are the taxes lower, but Texas basically gives out money to corporations (we have a whole fund for it), and as the Gigafactory just outside of Austin has shown, Texas environmental and transportation agencies treat regulations as more suggestions than rules when applied to large corporations (Tesla has been dumping waste water, and they built a tunnel under a major highway with a cursory TXDoT review and before the local permits had been granted, with no consequences, while Space-X has been an environmental disaster for parts of south Texas).

My hope with Twitter is that Musk will realize what some other Silicon Valley companies have learned when moving to Austin over the last few years: sure, the tax situation is great, but most of the best people you'd need to run such a company, much less to make it better, either don't want to move to Texas, or find out quickly when they move here that they don't want to stay.

I started to write a thing about how there is a form of futurism on the right, among the Effective Altruists, and in particular a subtype of Effective altruists, the longtermists , but even that sort of futurism is a fantasy futurism, obsessed with fictional threats, as a way of avoiding any of the potentially terrifying, more realistic views of the future. Its' a sort of anti-future futurism.

Obviously mid-20th century futurism had its own fantastical components (not just the Nazis; I'm still angry I don't have a flying car from the Jetsons), but the longtermist futurism is a futurism that denies all of the possible futures in favor of imaginary ones.

This is where we have to agree to disagree, I suppose. While I have not heard any mainstream offline liberals refer to conservatives/Republicans as fascists recently, I've heard pretty much every other part of that from mainstream liberal sources ranging from NPR to members of Congress to the sitting president. Whether it's a winning strategy is, of course, another question. Hopefully the Dems will come up with a strategy that's less "The other guys are really bad," and more, "Here's what we want to do," but it's the Dems, who seem convinced that they are a perpetual opposition party even when they're in power, so...

It is true that my politics are outside of the mainstream (I don't know the OP, so I can't compare our politics), but it is very mainstream now to treat the current manifestation of the American Right as hostile to democracy, as authoritarian, as nationalist, as racist and xenophobic, etc. Most everyday liberals might be wary of calling this fascist, for a variety of reasons, but it is at least that the OP is getting at with the label.

And it's worth noting that you can find prominent members of the American Right who embrace each of these, and not a few who would embrace all of them (see, e.g., the open embrace of nationalism at the convention, or the appreciation for Orbán among many Republicans, including the current VP candidate, etc.). So yes, these ideas are popular among a monitory of voters, but they're still what they are.