Is Moral Bolshevism like Cultural Marxism?
The poor babies, having people disagree with them! How awful that must be.
Did anybody catch the CNN interview with the dude who Trump invited on stage? It's amazing how much like the way born-again people talk about Jesus the guy's responses were. He literally has a cardboard cutout of Trump that he salutes every morning. The crazification factor is a real thing.
I think we should have done away with the practice extending intellectual and emotional charity to people that have no intention of reciprocating well over a decade ago.
No, sorry.
Trump is unpopular. Trump's actual support is pretty hard-core and unlikely to be converted by anything that doesn't hit them in the wallet, and pretty hard at that.
Protests consolidate the overwhelming left-of-Trump majority in this country and, what's more, move liberals to the left.
Indeed, I was just at a relatively impromptu neighborhood immigrants' rights march put on by an equivocally popular socialist organization and an immigrants' rights group (the socialists are maoist in tendency; they've not partnered with the other group much in the past) which drew over 1000 people, most of whom seemed to be typical SMPLS liberals, and by the mid-point of the march, they were shouting "Build a wall? We'll tear it down!" so loud I could hear them blocks away ( I had to leave early). Mere months ago, "we'll tear it down" was too controversial a chant to be successful with this kind of crowd.
Now, they're not necessarily going to be tearing down any walls their own selves, but I think the usual liberal handwringing about direct action is going to diminish a lot. You don't need everyone to go all black bloc; you just need everyone to shift a notch to the left.
To tell the truth, I was pretty impressed. I know that this isn't how actual revolutionary change is generated, but honestly, should we manage to survive Trump, there's some possibility of radical reform, and I am mostly okay with that.
Cleansing the palate with some local events: I was at Rep. BLee's ACA townhall yesterday. It was in a high school gym. All the chairs were full, the rest of the gym was full of people standing, local blog reported attendance at 1,000. One speaker said they had originally suggested his clinic as the location when organizing the townhall a week ago, and said at that time they had expected attendance of ~50.
It was by and large a pep rally /lovefest, since no contingent had anything to complain about Lee's conduct, even the single-payer people who show up to everything. It felt like even that contingent was not in purity enforcement mode but recognized ACA repeal is also a major threat to their desired outcome. But a good pep rally, as they strove to connect people to further activist platforms and actions. A county supervisor also on stage talked about potential state responses, and reminded exhortatively that these responses, like single-payer, might necessarily entail tax increases, and that we need to be steeled for that. And indirectly I think all these townhalls are doing a little to shame Republican congresscritters to have them as well, and face the music.
One of the questions they passed up to the podium, which they said had come up a lot was the potential to impeach. The Representative cautioned people it was early days, a strong case needs to be built, bipartisan support needs to be found somehow, but that it is definitely being worked on. The crowd was ecstatic at this.
Beforehand an aging white guy was asking people for brief video interviews and then trying to push them to say a socialist worker's party, not the Democrats, was the only way forward, on grounds of it being a party containing both workers and bosses, on analogy with a party for both slaves and masters. He did not get traction in the interview I overheard.
It certainly seems like it's the new socialists who are getting traction (Socialist Alternative around here, for instance) and that seems to me to be because they have a lighter touch, are somewhat less bound up with defending the USSR and are doing actual organizing around radical but not impossible things like the MPLS campaign for $15. SWP and the older formations don't seem to be doing anything different than they ever did and so people are really not feeling it.
The Pittsburgh socialists can mostly go fuck themselves as far as I can tell what they are up to (which is limited to signs stuck up around campus). They spent more time attacking Obama and Clinton than they have Trump.
Missing my Mom, former Mount Lebanon art teacher. She was on the picket lines in two teacher strikes during her 25-year career. Got into several shouting matches with parents and administrators and won the "Ms. Nice Guy" award from her local as a result. And she painted most of the signs...
These days, they're only upset out the deer cull.
The guy is obviously a fucking liar who wants to be in the NYT. A white South Carolina small businessman who's a swing voter? A swing voter who's an actual unicorn would be easier to believe in.
The porn addict in the red sweater?
3: A Leninist, but for "nationalism." Or in less tortured language a National Socialist.
The comparison of being a Trump supporter in liberal areas to being gay in the 50s should go right to the top of supporting evidence in favor of the analogy ban. An analogy made by the reporter, not by any of the people interviewed, who then describes a supporter as, "Staying in the closet," and, "coming out" ahead of Election Day.
Also, Mountain View has quite a few tech bros, I wouldn't call it a liberal enclave.
The whole premise of the article is nuts. Anybody who would vote for Trump isn't a moderate conservative.
There's a category of people with not terribly far right positions on the issues by a within-the-Republican-party standpoint, who nonetheless hates Democrats enough that they'd vote for literally any Republican, including Trump and talk themselves into it as the right thing to do. I don't know what to call them except morons, though.
The whole premise of the article is nuts. Anybody who would vote for Trump isn't a moderate conservative. No one gives a shit about Trump voters' feelings.
17: The vote share in the county containing Mountain View for Clinton was around 70%.
19 is compounded by the fact that She-Devil was the Democratic nominee. If you watch Fox you'd come away with the impression she was the most corrupt politician in history just about. Anybody but Hillary is a big component of Trump's win. There's got to be somebody filling in the gap between the crazification factor and 46 percent of the vote.They are composed of the people in 19 and the evil-but-not-crazy faction best represented by John McCain.
As noted before, something like 50,000 people here voted for Trump and for our Democratic Governor. The debate for the upcoming special election is whether we play centrist to try to pick up those people again, or whether we go leftward, and replace them with the unicorn riding as yet unquantified progressive horde who've sat out every election ever, but can be motivated by the magical combination of the right candidate and Donald Trump.
(It's really quite the conundrum: from 2004-2016, Dem governors have won every race. The exact same electorate is voting between 32 and 42% for the Democratic candidate for the US House.)
My conservative Republican representative is having a town hall at the Unitarian Church in Clintonville on Wednesday. I'm thinking it's going to get ugly.
Not all Unitarian architecture sucks.
We're getting a little of this here. You see, people were just so against Trump, but then some people were rude to Chaffetz at his town hall, so they now can't possibly do anything but support Trump, because people shouted at a meeting. I suppose it's possible they'd have been reachable if constituents had only been more gentle, but I kinda think they're lying.
27: Upon further investigation it seems this is going to be an "empty chair" town hall. Our fearless representative has refused to hold any town halls, so we're going to have one without him. That makes more sense --in the unlikely event that he had the courage to hold one, that would certainly not be the location he would choose
The Pittsburgh socialists can mostly go fuck themselves as far as I can tell what they are up to (which is limited to signs stuck up around campus). They spent more time attacking Obama and Clinton than they have Trump.
Which ones? I don't get the impression there's any sort of socialist unity here. The rally downtown today was co-organized by the Party for Socialism and Liberation, who I know basically nothing about beyond that they are hella pro-immigrant/Palestine (and other causes, but those were the most obvious). There was definitely some America-has-never-been-great, we're-built-on-genocide, a lot of problems for immigrants go back to Clinton in the 90s and have been worsened by Obama and other Dems, etc. arguments, but they were mostly able to keep it anti-Trump.
A week or two ago I went to a DSA meeting and it seems like they're only just barely off the ground. They clearly want to work within the Democratic party--one of the discussions was about whether they were interested in supporting someone primarying Peduto from the left. They also had a working group dealing with the PWSA lead crisis and will be meeting with Comptroller Wagner next week.
Contrast that to the anarchists/black-block (I guess?) folk who counter-protested the Oakland march yesterday, who would try to derail with false equivalence chants. If you can't see the difference now, like, what could you possibly need? Some of them didn't quite have the pithy rejoinders down yet ("Hillary doesn't care about you! Also, for that matter, Bernie probably doesn't either!"), so I got the impression that they had a lot of new membership not used to doing this, too.
But I'm probably seeing the opposite bias of you--I see very little of on-campus far-left organizing. My main contact with socialism in college was reading the Maoist International Movement paper over lunch for basically the same reason that LB would read Cosmo on long flights.
And I have to give credit to Pittsburgh police since they let us (n=a few hundred) march in the streets downtown, despite it being abundantly clear that the organizers didn't get any permits, didn't really know what they were doing*, and clearly expected to somehow get everyone to march on the sidewalk. It was bizarre having them apparently decide, correctly, it would be less chaotic and not take as long if we could use one lane of traffic.
* e.g., originally planned the rally for a public square that has been closed for the last three months for winter maintenance; apparently finally realized that'd be a problem yesterday
"Power flows from the barrel of a gun."
"Women hold up half of heaven, iykwimaityd."
(I thought you said something about how it had a lot of words, none of which weren't batshit?)
9: Yeah, SA was apparently among the organizers of the Women's March here, and they had a booth and some amplification equipment, although not enough even for the intersection where they were located. Enough for me to check out their website.
Which are the most likely overall to try to be mostly a wing within the Democrats? DSA?
17
The suggestion that we should view conservatives as a sort of oppressed minority worthy of charity is such a common one in the New York Times that I can't help but question the motives of the people who allow it to be printed. More than any other liberal-leaning paper I can think of, the Times exploits sincere liberal concerns to create legitimacy for extremely reactionary ideas.
I'm waiting for the day they give Milo an op-ed piece or something; it can't be long.
30: I'll look more closely at the posters next time.
This article sums up my feelings on Trump voters.
They're all thin-skinned whiney little shits.
I was just talking to my friend about his parents, who are conservative Catholics in NH. He says his mom voted for Trump but he can tell she feels shame about it, and his dad has drunk the Hannity koolaide in retirement. Hating Hillary was a big piece of their motivation, especially for his mom.
This seems to be a regular beat for this writer. Stories by her since December include:
Conservative Talk Radio Stands by Trump Despite Turmoil
In Ban on Migrants, Trump Supporters See a Promise Kept
One Country, Two Tribes
On New Political Footing, Trump Believers Share His Day
Why 5 Trump Voters Are Going to the Inauguration
In a North Carolina Town, Terrorism Abroad Raises Apprehension
All my years of media rage seem quaint and beside the point these days, but a couple of points on my buds at the NYT,
1) Part of the reason the NYT has been so effective in its "even the liberal" role is the fact that the Editorial Board has generally been somewhat more "liberal" than the news division. And it certainly was the case during the campaign.
2) Now that Trump is President, I am actually more understanding (sort of) of some of the challenges of the news division; if your the paper of record you probably can't appear to go full oppositional.
The NYT is the paper of record. The modal American was some variety of total shit in 2017. Therefore the NYT has to put some writing of total shits on its editorial page.
Really, the fault is in the reader who pays attention.
Can there be different varieties of total shit? I guess yes if there isn't a Platonic Shit.
The Platonic Shit was in fact Plato.
|| Now that we're over 40, has everyone read the woman who worked for Uber thing? |>
46: Seems to me like she has a solid case for a lawsuit. Unfortunately that would make her radioactive to other employers, but damn...
Uber management is as evil internally as they are externally? Imagine that.
The thing about that extreme level of (clearly illegal) gender discrimination is that, while in some cases arguments about equality devolve to softer evidence about e.g. positive recruiting environments, here the negative impact on their own business is kicking them in the face. Risk of lawsuits aside, you'd think there's someone in the company who takes performance reviews seriously enough to realize they're about identifying and keeping good performers. But no, that's too old fashioned and business-as-socialist-unit, letting everyone treat everyone else like shit to get ahead as individuals is the modern way of thinking. It's libertarianism taken to the personal level- at least it seems like they're sincere about their belief that treating everyone like crap is necessary to improve the bottom line. These are the kinds of people who sue their neighbors for having an ugly tree they don't want to look at out the window, not because they care about the tree, but because if you don't fuck everyone you know you're just asking them to fuck you.
Also a good response to the NYT article:
https://twitter.com/Rossalincoln/status/833401605403717632
Excerpts:
Sorry if being against forcing poor people to die if they get sick or thinking nazis are bad looks like I'm acting morally superior.
Idk maybe it's because I *am* morally superior. Especially since getting my feelings hurt doesn't drive me to support nazis.
In the universe this article inhabits, nothing conservatives do is ever inherently political, regardless of what happens.
Meanwhile, liberals are forever guilty of the mortal sin of being wrongfully right. Always our fault when conservatives trash the country.
Re Uber, the Ottoman palace work culture is anecdotally found on Wall Street too.
Well who'd have imagined this could happen, same writer used same source in previous article on Trump supporters, except he straight up says he's a Republucan in that article. But I'm sure he's gettable if Democrats would just tell him it's ok to vote for Republicans!
Incidentally this kind of reporting is such bullshit, when supposed "random man on the street" is actually the same person you call every time you want a quote from a certain archetype. I understand that such sources are often connected to the reporter through friends or other social contacts/organizations, but at some point you risk getting played by your quote factory.
Mountain View has quite a few tech bros, I wouldn't call it a liberal enclave.
Oh holy cow. Ditto for SF. Techbros with their entitled gold-plated egos and stepping on people whose only sin is to be poor. ffs. Lotta, lotta these overfed young richies who think everybody else who isn't as rich as them is just not *worthy*. Glibertarians too.
21- Our city was 87% Clinton 6% Trump. That's a liberal enclave.
From 39:
All my years of media rage seem quaint and beside the point these days, but a couple of points on my buds at the NYT,
I'm not going to copy your entire append, but: it sure seems to me like you're saying "The NYT has to be both-sider-ist, b/c that is the only possibly reasonable position for the paper of record". Which, I think, is bollocks. Now, "The NYT is owned by richies whose attitude is FYIGM", I understand. Or "The NYT is supported by richies from Wall Steet who believe in IBGYBG". Again, understandable.
But both-sider-ist about a fascist? Sorry, no. That's bollocks. Maybe you mean that that's the story they tell themselves at night, so they can sleep without getting blotto on vodka (b/c cheaper, and journo is a dying profession). I could believe that -- that people like Fandos and Tavernise are sufficiently afraid for their careers that they're willing to prostitute themselves long-term to the money power. I could also believe that they're not actually liberal -- from which we get FTFNYT.
Re cheaper- I just realized that in addition to native wine and beer being much cheaper here, name brand booze is also 30-50% less. I just saw a fifth of Tangueray for $15.
That possibly isn't the genuine article.
Tangueray How astronauts get drunk.
Please insert a colon in 61. And make a rude joke about insertion and colons.
Tangueray, as any Flashman fan should guess, is presumably a cocktail of gin and tanguin.
Hmm, I think I just misspelled it but now I'm wondering if it really is a knock off, given that AIHMHB this town has a fake blockbuster video and a fake Dunkin.
63 I'm getting desperate enough here that I might try my luck at such a cocktail.
64 Of course if I had gin I'd just as soon skip the tanguin.
66 It's just the one, I fired off the application last week. Waiting for word but I've heard it can take up to two months just to schedule an interview so I'm sitting tight.
two months just to schedule an interview
The fuck? Good luck anyway.
WaPo talks to actual independents. (And one of them is even non-white.)
||
Apropos of absolutely nothing, here is how I re-discovered that today is Family Day in parts of Canada.
After successfully relying on the Google Maps Traffic feature for timing and real-time route selection of a couple of winter weather-impacted trips, I have been looking at a coast-to-coast snapshot of it as a supplement to my weather nerd radar checking. Doing so today showed the near lack of morning rush hour traffic due to Prez Day. However, Montreal was as busy usual, while Toronto was not. Briefly puzzled by that until I recalled (and then found) a post here on it.
I trust the concept of family has not suffered as dire a fate as that of the Presidency has down here.
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Upon further review:
- It is Tanqueray
- It is "export strength" which is slightly less than the US (43% vs. 47%)
- The bottle is 70cL not 75.
- Price at today's exchange rate is $15.25, which is about the advertised price ($14.99) of a 375 mL bottle at the local liquor megamart back home.