When asked why he went “all-in” on Trump by Tucker recently Musk thought and said that he believed if Trump lost it would be the “last election ever”. That if you run the math on how many asylum seekers they flooded the swing states with the last few years, realize they are all fast tracked to getting the vote five years after their asylum claim, then it’s inevitable that there will be no more swing states. The left will win every election and “turn the entire country into California”.
He listed several reasons why that would be bad, but the proximate cause of his going all in was his perception of how immigration would change the future electorate.
So to be clear *The World’s Richest Man* hates the status quo enough and thinks it’s about to get worse enough that it’s worth in his words risking everything and he’s totally fucked if Trump loses.
*btw, this is a good example of why your pussy temper tantrum over voting Trump is so childish, just do it
Generally agree with this except Trump just isn't the anti-status quo candidate that he was presenting to be in 2016. Also, it's rich coming from liberals that they like the status quo when everything they talk about is how evil and bad it is
I agree and this is one reason I won't vote for him. Everyone else doesn't see things this way though. Most people are eternally stuck in 2016. The vast majority of rightoids still see Trump as the guy who is somehow going to really stick it to the establishment, which is why he got the nomination again so easily. And liberals play into it by continuing to lose their minds over him.
You can't treat with progressives like they're capable rational humans. They aren't those things. They're effectively shells possessed by a violent evil ideology. They're pawns being used by something larger than themselves to force itself into your life.
You cannot reason people out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
This isn't a friendly difference of opinion over varied policy prescriptions, it is a fundamental disagreement over what the moral framework of society should look like.
Reasoning with someone doesnt mean converting then to your position. If your complaint is that they wont be more like you, then youre just as much the problem
The thought process of a progressive is easy to understand... it's the same as that of a schoolyard bully. "I want power, so I'll shout, cajole, and threaten you until you give it to me. If you don't, I'll threaten violence."
1. The same people who are voting for the status quo in this narrative also believe that everything about the status quo is horrifically racist and sexist and colonialist and so on and we need to burn America to the ground.
2. It’s not the status quo that they love. It’s the bureaucracy.
If I may ask a question. How are you going to keep modern liberals out of your non-liberal federalist states?
I live in a traditionally conservative county. In the past 10 years many retiring and younger raving liberals have moved here. They learn nothing from the disasters they have created in the cities they leave. They bring the chaos with them: wreck one place and move on to another saner place and destroy that. Rinse and repeat.
They will send in a black and sue you for racial discrimination. They will demand you bake a cake. Their rights will be violated. They are the sacred-victims and become the entitled parasites. The mechanism they use is human rights. Conservatives, it seems to me, have no defense.
I would think the simplest and most elegant thing to do would be stop race and sex quotas and bring back freedom of association. Let the bureaucracies deal with that. Otherwise, I see little hope for the US, regardless of who wins elections. The sacred-victim, entitled-parasite culture must come to an end. But I think it will have to destroy itself before it does and that could take quite a while
Implicit in such a bargain is that liberals allow red states to be red. If they can't manage that, then of course such a bargain won't work. I specifically said in the post that I'm not optimistic that this can work, and that is specifically because I think liberals cannot control themselves. This is worth bringing up as a counter-point to liberals who try and portray right-wingers as the aggressors in this conflict. In my experience, conservatives are in fact more amenable to a "live and let live" solution, but are usually denied that option by the behavior of liberals.
So this is more or less my perspective on things as well, which is nice cause I don't find that many people who see it this way. There are a few things I'd note tho:
First is that the "clown world" movement started around 2012/2013 with the advant of the privilege hierarchy due to gay marriage and first black president becoming a thing, as well as social media and thinkpieces. It was extremely weird to live through Obama's election supposedly signalling that racism is over and having everyone suddenly discoverthat there's more racism than ever before and everyone at the top (bottom?) of the privilege hierarchy is responsible. The left claimed that such victories would solve things but instead they only found themselves propelled to go even further. This is approximately when I started believing that the conservatives were unfortunately correct about the slippery slope thing.
The second more important thing is that the engine for the leftist movement is post modernism and the conservatives fundamentally have no answer to it. If anything they have no answer to anything. Religious fundamentalism doesn't work as an effective ideological framework in 2024 and hasn't for a long time. As such there's no good counter argument for why people shouldn't make the changes that the left propose, and that's on top of the word games that are involved in their agendas. I mean there are reasons why the things the left proposes are wrong, they just can't be easily articulated within the postmodern framework. Here's an article from 2014 that put me on to how this works. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/
I disagree that religion is an ineffective ideological framework, I rather believe that it is the only effective one. But I agree with you in the sense that we aren't likely to see some kind of major religious revival that somehow turns the ship around. The ship isn't turning around, no matter what anyone says or does. This is the fault of human nature, not of any particular ideology or philosophy. Empires rise and fall. Truth (i.e. religion) persists throughout such events, regardless of how many or how few people ultimately decide to abide by said truth.
It's a nice thought, that everyone would be willing to pick up their marbles and just go home and remain acquaintances if not friends. For the leftists, it won't work that way and they know it.
First up, the NE and the left coast are unsustainable as separate political entities without gracious cooperation from the heartland and the South. A massive proportion of agriculture, energy production and refining, and industry occurs in states with "deplorable" leadership and population. Allowing the most productive portion of the US to form its own autarky freed from socialist policies would only result in the leftist enclaves being put in the fast lane to total economic collapse.
Second, the leftists are playing for ALL of the marbles. They embarked on their project of one world government to rule them all in the early 1900s and they haven't given up on it yet. At best they are circling the NATO wagons and looking for the sweet spot tune in the Matrix that will keep the White population building and maintaining the tools of Empire for at least another generation or two. Nothing that endangers those plans will be permitted to be considered.
An amicable divorce is not going to happen. If the people causing the problems were that reasonable the divorce wouldn't be necessary.
There is absolutely no reason why different regions of the United States cannot maintain economic ties while differing in cultural and social norms. The United States trades with all sorts of other countries which have wildly differing cultures with little to no issue.
Your second point is the more salient one. Leftists have won non-stop for a century or more, so they see no need for compromise. Why negotiate for a truce when it seems obvious that you're going to win the war? The possibility of going our separate ways must be raised because it justifies the right fighting back as legitimate self-defense. If the left refuses this option--and I agree that they will, until and unless they actually start losing the fight--the right is then fully justified in holding nothing back in its counter-attack. After all, we wanted to have peace, but you said no.
Much agreement, particularly with the solution of returning to a higher degree of federalism. The alternative is for large numbers of people to realize everything they thought made them a good person for decades has been false, which most people don't easily do.
--"My side of the game has done nothing but lose, and lose badly, for a hundred years or more. At best we win the occasional battle, but this only ever serves as a mild speed bump in the overall march of “progress.” "
The few Right victories aren't just speed bumps for the Left, they are punishable heresies. Every step Rightward is countered with ten steps Leftward. They don't just end Jim Crow laws, they enact the Civil Rights Act and amend it regularly, which has more reach and enforcement than Jim Crow ever had. Counter-intuitively, I suspect that if we returned to more federalism to the point that the Left felt they were in full control of their blue states, they would actually focus more on the day-to-day of governing and less on using their positions to wage political wars on their ideological enemies.
--"There has to be some degree of compromise where the right no longer feels that they always lose on everything every single time and they’re being spit on for it."
Unfortunately, the Left seems to genuinely believe they are the ones losing all the time. It's in their metaphorical DNA, they must represent the oppressed, so they must always tell their client groups that they are under assault from Right. At best, they can admit to having won recent victories on the road to progress, but against a backdrop that says all of history before that was losses.
I'd be curious to look into when the Left merged oppression ideology with progressive ideology. Whenever those two ideas merged, they effectively took up the position that they are simultaneously on "the right side of history" but also "historically oppressed and under assault."
>Unfortunately, the Left seems to genuinely believe they are the ones losing all the time. It's in their metaphorical DNA, they must represent the oppressed, so they must always tell their client groups that they are under assault from Right. At best, they can admit to having won recent victories on the road to progress, but against a backdrop that says all of history before that was losses.<
They have the luxury of indulging in this LARP because they have lived their whole lives having never been faced with the possibility of truly losing power. Even Donald Trump's 2016 victory was quickly--and correctly--assessed as another speed bump in the path of progress, not a harbinger of a real paradigm shift. I expect that if these people were ever faced with a genuine threat of defeat, a lot of the performative crap would stop and we'd see a change in tone. People will remain hysterical right up until the moment they realize that they might actually need to come to the negotiating table.
>I'd be curious to look into when the Left merged oppression ideology with progressive ideology. Whenever those two ideas merged, they effectively took up the position that they are simultaneously on "the right side of history" but also "historically oppressed and under assault."<
This merger appears to have been completed during the 60s with the rise of Civil Rights, in which communist thinking was merged with identity-based grievance-mongering, although I'm sure the roots go back however much further.
"Unfortunately, the Left seems to genuinely believe they are the ones losing all the time. "
In a sense, the Left is in fact losing all the time. It depends on how you define "the Left". Bernie Sanders was the champion of the Left, not Biden or Harris. Biden and Harris are just as unpalatable to many leftists as Romney and McCain were to many conservatives.
But beyond this, the woke in particular are losing to *reality itself* all the time. Yes, the woke cancel people a lot, they get a lot of their preferred policies put into place, but the policies themselves often don't work as intended because reality itself gets in the way. Much of what the woke wants is simply impossible to achieve, so they *feel* like they're losing all the time even if they do hold many positions of power and influence. They're like children who want to eat loads of ice cream every day and not do any exercise and not suffer any health problems from it. Seriously, their ideology is THAT broken. So it's like... the woke win the election on what to eat against the conservative, they voted on 2000 calories of ice cream per day while the conservative voted for something bland but at least healthy. The woke expected this to be utopia, and after awhile of heavy ice cream consumption, they're starting to get very sick from it. The conservative lost, but the woke also lost in a way.
The big question for the next 5-to-20 years is if the left (broadly speaking) can manage to free itself of the woke mind virus. Perhaps sadly, I don't know if there's much conservatives can do here. It's a battle the left has to have with itself.
Great diet analogy. You are always losing if your primary opponent is reality.
Also agreed on the 5-20 year question. Part of the mind virus is its implicit belief that the right is evil. So criticizing from the right is pointless, counterproductive even as it probably just cements them more in the contrary belief.
"Unfortunately, the Left seems to genuinely believe they are the ones losing all the time. It's in their metaphorical DNA, they must represent the oppressed, so they must always tell their client groups that they are under assault from Right. At best, they can admit to having won recent victories on the road to progress, but against a backdrop that says all of history before that was losses."
Victim card ideology demands a constant supply of victims. This is the politics of envy writ large.
> Unfortunately, the Left seems to genuinely believe they are the ones losing all the time. It's in their metaphorical DNA, they must represent the oppressed, so they must always tell their client groups that they are under assault from Right. At best, they can admit to having won recent victories on the road to progress, but against a backdrop that says all of history before that was losses.
In a sense they are. Their real fight is against reality itself and they keep losing that fight no matter how much power they acquire.
If you think the status quo is bad, you have a ludicrous lack of persective of what the random state of politics is like. The status quo that Trump represents is Putinism. Putinism is bad.
I very specifically spoke to this sort of thinking in the post. Current situation; future trajectory. Even if someone's current situation is relatively good, if they are facing a future trajectory in which things only ever get worse and worse with no apparent stopping point, it's completely rational that they'll look for a way to change that.
100 years of defeat? Seems a little over the top. If it’s really been that, doesn’t there have to be some underlying tendency that is changing things in the direction you don’t like? Seems unfair to blame democrats.
Broadly, the effect of technology on culture. Technological change is the reason culture has been changing so fast. And I’m guessing that whatever 100 years of changes you disapprove of are mostly connected with the transformation of social roles to due to economic changes.
There are a whole lot of changes I disapprove of, so while that's probably true for some of them, I'm skeptical that it would be true for all. For instance, I don't really see how technology has caused us to no longer put violent criminals in jail, or if it has, I fail to see why that's a good thing.
Hyperbole, no? There are 656,000 violent offenders in state prisons right now. Defund the police was popular for a minute and now American politicians can’t bury it deep enough. For trends that are not driven by technological change, they’ll tend to fluctuate over time rather than moving consistently in one direction for 100 years. If for example social emphasis on retributive justice is influences by affluence or something like that, maybe there’ll be a long term trend of less punitiveness. But I dunno.
Does it mean the end of free speech? Well, Waltz has promised just that.
Does it mean the end of free elections? Well, the 2020 election was brazenly fraudulent and if the Dems win again in 2024 it will probably be the last real election in the country as Elon has noted.
Republicans try to steal elections, and baselessly accuse Democrats of the same to distract voters of that fact. People like you deserve no respect. You are a toxin to political discource.
This is brilliant. I don’t see how to square the circle. It’s like we are living in two completely different worlds now. The one rooted in physical realities has been devalued in favor of the naive Utopianism that can only come from the minds of people who have never actually done anything in the real world. And the zeitgeist is accelerating away from physical reality at warp 10. We have naive people making energy policy that will guarantee blackouts. We have idiot warmongers starting wars that we cannot win. And then we have the rest of us clinging to reality hoping to just hold the system together for a little longer. Something big is about to break and the TDS crew has no clue whatsoever. It’s like they have replaced every thing wrong in the world with Trump like you say and they honestly believe that he is a proxy for their own idiocy. I can’t escape the feeling that this all ends very badly. They are racing to debase the military but when the shit goes down do they really believe that the army will turn their guns on us? I don’t see it. I’ve seen from the beginning that every right that’s taken away is a right that’s necessary for the left. They are digging their own grave. Every tool in their wicked arsenal will be used against them and they deserve it.
This article makes no sense unless you want to jettison half the people living in this country who see lots of bad stuff and lots of bad people propping up the bad stuff. Orange Man is bad for the bad people. He’s not bad for the 50% and growing # who want him back in office with his policies. Get over yourself. Your TDS is brain numbing. Take a look around. It’s WWIII or peace; inflation of low prices and a good economy for people who aren’t the elites, it’s lower taxes, it’s less govt in your face. It’s less censorship. You want more? Reincarnate the Soviet Union or East Germany. Somewhere else. Not. Here.
Trump isn't so much a problem as a symptom of the problem, and the problem is the status quo.
+1
When asked why he went “all-in” on Trump by Tucker recently Musk thought and said that he believed if Trump lost it would be the “last election ever”. That if you run the math on how many asylum seekers they flooded the swing states with the last few years, realize they are all fast tracked to getting the vote five years after their asylum claim, then it’s inevitable that there will be no more swing states. The left will win every election and “turn the entire country into California”.
He listed several reasons why that would be bad, but the proximate cause of his going all in was his perception of how immigration would change the future electorate.
So to be clear *The World’s Richest Man* hates the status quo enough and thinks it’s about to get worse enough that it’s worth in his words risking everything and he’s totally fucked if Trump loses.
*btw, this is a good example of why your pussy temper tantrum over voting Trump is so childish, just do it
Generally agree with this except Trump just isn't the anti-status quo candidate that he was presenting to be in 2016. Also, it's rich coming from liberals that they like the status quo when everything they talk about is how evil and bad it is
I agree and this is one reason I won't vote for him. Everyone else doesn't see things this way though. Most people are eternally stuck in 2016. The vast majority of rightoids still see Trump as the guy who is somehow going to really stick it to the establishment, which is why he got the nomination again so easily. And liberals play into it by continuing to lose their minds over him.
It's not as if we're burdened under the weight of viable alternatives. . . .
This. The choice between Trump and Kamala is the most obvious fucking choice ever. Anything the blob is this afraid of I am 100% for
And that they are the resistance lol!
You can't treat with progressives like they're capable rational humans. They aren't those things. They're effectively shells possessed by a violent evil ideology. They're pawns being used by something larger than themselves to force itself into your life.
Counterproductive and objectively wrong take
When have you ever met a progressive capable of rational thought? They're viscous and angry, like rabid dogs. You can't negotiate with a rabid dog.
You can negotiate if you make a genuine effort to understand the thought process rather than just tryinf to pwn
You cannot reason people out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
This isn't a friendly difference of opinion over varied policy prescriptions, it is a fundamental disagreement over what the moral framework of society should look like.
Reasoning with someone doesnt mean converting then to your position. If your complaint is that they wont be more like you, then youre just as much the problem
The thought process of a progressive is easy to understand... it's the same as that of a schoolyard bully. "I want power, so I'll shout, cajole, and threaten you until you give it to me. If you don't, I'll threaten violence."
Aww, shit, I’m not a rational human? Goddamn it. This sucks.
> I’m not a rational human?
Apparently not.
I recommend working on yourself, improvement is possible.
How encouraging!
1. The same people who are voting for the status quo in this narrative also believe that everything about the status quo is horrifically racist and sexist and colonialist and so on and we need to burn America to the ground.
2. It’s not the status quo that they love. It’s the bureaucracy.
If I may ask a question. How are you going to keep modern liberals out of your non-liberal federalist states?
I live in a traditionally conservative county. In the past 10 years many retiring and younger raving liberals have moved here. They learn nothing from the disasters they have created in the cities they leave. They bring the chaos with them: wreck one place and move on to another saner place and destroy that. Rinse and repeat.
They will send in a black and sue you for racial discrimination. They will demand you bake a cake. Their rights will be violated. They are the sacred-victims and become the entitled parasites. The mechanism they use is human rights. Conservatives, it seems to me, have no defense.
I would think the simplest and most elegant thing to do would be stop race and sex quotas and bring back freedom of association. Let the bureaucracies deal with that. Otherwise, I see little hope for the US, regardless of who wins elections. The sacred-victim, entitled-parasite culture must come to an end. But I think it will have to destroy itself before it does and that could take quite a while
Implicit in such a bargain is that liberals allow red states to be red. If they can't manage that, then of course such a bargain won't work. I specifically said in the post that I'm not optimistic that this can work, and that is specifically because I think liberals cannot control themselves. This is worth bringing up as a counter-point to liberals who try and portray right-wingers as the aggressors in this conflict. In my experience, conservatives are in fact more amenable to a "live and let live" solution, but are usually denied that option by the behavior of liberals.
Don't be afraid to shake the box.
If things go poorly, you can just shake the box again.
Hopefully...
Probably...
Hmm...
Okay, well, uhh...
Sixty-percent of the time, it works 100% of the time.
So this is more or less my perspective on things as well, which is nice cause I don't find that many people who see it this way. There are a few things I'd note tho:
First is that the "clown world" movement started around 2012/2013 with the advant of the privilege hierarchy due to gay marriage and first black president becoming a thing, as well as social media and thinkpieces. It was extremely weird to live through Obama's election supposedly signalling that racism is over and having everyone suddenly discoverthat there's more racism than ever before and everyone at the top (bottom?) of the privilege hierarchy is responsible. The left claimed that such victories would solve things but instead they only found themselves propelled to go even further. This is approximately when I started believing that the conservatives were unfortunately correct about the slippery slope thing.
The second more important thing is that the engine for the leftist movement is post modernism and the conservatives fundamentally have no answer to it. If anything they have no answer to anything. Religious fundamentalism doesn't work as an effective ideological framework in 2024 and hasn't for a long time. As such there's no good counter argument for why people shouldn't make the changes that the left propose, and that's on top of the word games that are involved in their agendas. I mean there are reasons why the things the left proposes are wrong, they just can't be easily articulated within the postmodern framework. Here's an article from 2014 that put me on to how this works. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/
I disagree that religion is an ineffective ideological framework, I rather believe that it is the only effective one. But I agree with you in the sense that we aren't likely to see some kind of major religious revival that somehow turns the ship around. The ship isn't turning around, no matter what anyone says or does. This is the fault of human nature, not of any particular ideology or philosophy. Empires rise and fall. Truth (i.e. religion) persists throughout such events, regardless of how many or how few people ultimately decide to abide by said truth.
It's a nice thought, that everyone would be willing to pick up their marbles and just go home and remain acquaintances if not friends. For the leftists, it won't work that way and they know it.
First up, the NE and the left coast are unsustainable as separate political entities without gracious cooperation from the heartland and the South. A massive proportion of agriculture, energy production and refining, and industry occurs in states with "deplorable" leadership and population. Allowing the most productive portion of the US to form its own autarky freed from socialist policies would only result in the leftist enclaves being put in the fast lane to total economic collapse.
Second, the leftists are playing for ALL of the marbles. They embarked on their project of one world government to rule them all in the early 1900s and they haven't given up on it yet. At best they are circling the NATO wagons and looking for the sweet spot tune in the Matrix that will keep the White population building and maintaining the tools of Empire for at least another generation or two. Nothing that endangers those plans will be permitted to be considered.
An amicable divorce is not going to happen. If the people causing the problems were that reasonable the divorce wouldn't be necessary.
There is absolutely no reason why different regions of the United States cannot maintain economic ties while differing in cultural and social norms. The United States trades with all sorts of other countries which have wildly differing cultures with little to no issue.
Your second point is the more salient one. Leftists have won non-stop for a century or more, so they see no need for compromise. Why negotiate for a truce when it seems obvious that you're going to win the war? The possibility of going our separate ways must be raised because it justifies the right fighting back as legitimate self-defense. If the left refuses this option--and I agree that they will, until and unless they actually start losing the fight--the right is then fully justified in holding nothing back in its counter-attack. After all, we wanted to have peace, but you said no.
Much agreement, particularly with the solution of returning to a higher degree of federalism. The alternative is for large numbers of people to realize everything they thought made them a good person for decades has been false, which most people don't easily do.
--"My side of the game has done nothing but lose, and lose badly, for a hundred years or more. At best we win the occasional battle, but this only ever serves as a mild speed bump in the overall march of “progress.” "
The few Right victories aren't just speed bumps for the Left, they are punishable heresies. Every step Rightward is countered with ten steps Leftward. They don't just end Jim Crow laws, they enact the Civil Rights Act and amend it regularly, which has more reach and enforcement than Jim Crow ever had. Counter-intuitively, I suspect that if we returned to more federalism to the point that the Left felt they were in full control of their blue states, they would actually focus more on the day-to-day of governing and less on using their positions to wage political wars on their ideological enemies.
--"There has to be some degree of compromise where the right no longer feels that they always lose on everything every single time and they’re being spit on for it."
Unfortunately, the Left seems to genuinely believe they are the ones losing all the time. It's in their metaphorical DNA, they must represent the oppressed, so they must always tell their client groups that they are under assault from Right. At best, they can admit to having won recent victories on the road to progress, but against a backdrop that says all of history before that was losses.
I'd be curious to look into when the Left merged oppression ideology with progressive ideology. Whenever those two ideas merged, they effectively took up the position that they are simultaneously on "the right side of history" but also "historically oppressed and under assault."
>Unfortunately, the Left seems to genuinely believe they are the ones losing all the time. It's in their metaphorical DNA, they must represent the oppressed, so they must always tell their client groups that they are under assault from Right. At best, they can admit to having won recent victories on the road to progress, but against a backdrop that says all of history before that was losses.<
They have the luxury of indulging in this LARP because they have lived their whole lives having never been faced with the possibility of truly losing power. Even Donald Trump's 2016 victory was quickly--and correctly--assessed as another speed bump in the path of progress, not a harbinger of a real paradigm shift. I expect that if these people were ever faced with a genuine threat of defeat, a lot of the performative crap would stop and we'd see a change in tone. People will remain hysterical right up until the moment they realize that they might actually need to come to the negotiating table.
>I'd be curious to look into when the Left merged oppression ideology with progressive ideology. Whenever those two ideas merged, they effectively took up the position that they are simultaneously on "the right side of history" but also "historically oppressed and under assault."<
This merger appears to have been completed during the 60s with the rise of Civil Rights, in which communist thinking was merged with identity-based grievance-mongering, although I'm sure the roots go back however much further.
"Unfortunately, the Left seems to genuinely believe they are the ones losing all the time. "
In a sense, the Left is in fact losing all the time. It depends on how you define "the Left". Bernie Sanders was the champion of the Left, not Biden or Harris. Biden and Harris are just as unpalatable to many leftists as Romney and McCain were to many conservatives.
But beyond this, the woke in particular are losing to *reality itself* all the time. Yes, the woke cancel people a lot, they get a lot of their preferred policies put into place, but the policies themselves often don't work as intended because reality itself gets in the way. Much of what the woke wants is simply impossible to achieve, so they *feel* like they're losing all the time even if they do hold many positions of power and influence. They're like children who want to eat loads of ice cream every day and not do any exercise and not suffer any health problems from it. Seriously, their ideology is THAT broken. So it's like... the woke win the election on what to eat against the conservative, they voted on 2000 calories of ice cream per day while the conservative voted for something bland but at least healthy. The woke expected this to be utopia, and after awhile of heavy ice cream consumption, they're starting to get very sick from it. The conservative lost, but the woke also lost in a way.
The big question for the next 5-to-20 years is if the left (broadly speaking) can manage to free itself of the woke mind virus. Perhaps sadly, I don't know if there's much conservatives can do here. It's a battle the left has to have with itself.
Great diet analogy. You are always losing if your primary opponent is reality.
Also agreed on the 5-20 year question. Part of the mind virus is its implicit belief that the right is evil. So criticizing from the right is pointless, counterproductive even as it probably just cements them more in the contrary belief.
"Unfortunately, the Left seems to genuinely believe they are the ones losing all the time. It's in their metaphorical DNA, they must represent the oppressed, so they must always tell their client groups that they are under assault from Right. At best, they can admit to having won recent victories on the road to progress, but against a backdrop that says all of history before that was losses."
Victim card ideology demands a constant supply of victims. This is the politics of envy writ large.
> Unfortunately, the Left seems to genuinely believe they are the ones losing all the time. It's in their metaphorical DNA, they must represent the oppressed, so they must always tell their client groups that they are under assault from Right. At best, they can admit to having won recent victories on the road to progress, but against a backdrop that says all of history before that was losses.
In a sense they are. Their real fight is against reality itself and they keep losing that fight no matter how much power they acquire.
If you think the status quo is bad, you have a ludicrous lack of persective of what the random state of politics is like. The status quo that Trump represents is Putinism. Putinism is bad.
I very specifically spoke to this sort of thinking in the post. Current situation; future trajectory. Even if someone's current situation is relatively good, if they are facing a future trajectory in which things only ever get worse and worse with no apparent stopping point, it's completely rational that they'll look for a way to change that.
100 years of defeat? Seems a little over the top. If it’s really been that, doesn’t there have to be some underlying tendency that is changing things in the direction you don’t like? Seems unfair to blame democrats.
What do you think that tendency is?
Broadly, the effect of technology on culture. Technological change is the reason culture has been changing so fast. And I’m guessing that whatever 100 years of changes you disapprove of are mostly connected with the transformation of social roles to due to economic changes.
There are a whole lot of changes I disapprove of, so while that's probably true for some of them, I'm skeptical that it would be true for all. For instance, I don't really see how technology has caused us to no longer put violent criminals in jail, or if it has, I fail to see why that's a good thing.
Hyperbole, no? There are 656,000 violent offenders in state prisons right now. Defund the police was popular for a minute and now American politicians can’t bury it deep enough. For trends that are not driven by technological change, they’ll tend to fluctuate over time rather than moving consistently in one direction for 100 years. If for example social emphasis on retributive justice is influences by affluence or something like that, maybe there’ll be a long term trend of less punitiveness. But I dunno.
What do you suppose Putinism means?
Does it mean the end of free speech? Well, Waltz has promised just that.
Does it mean the end of free elections? Well, the 2020 election was brazenly fraudulent and if the Dems win again in 2024 it will probably be the last real election in the country as Elon has noted.
Republicans try to steal elections, and baselessly accuse Democrats of the same to distract voters of that fact. People like you deserve no respect. You are a toxin to political discource.
I see your complete ignorance of what's going on isn't stopping you from talking.
This is brilliant. I don’t see how to square the circle. It’s like we are living in two completely different worlds now. The one rooted in physical realities has been devalued in favor of the naive Utopianism that can only come from the minds of people who have never actually done anything in the real world. And the zeitgeist is accelerating away from physical reality at warp 10. We have naive people making energy policy that will guarantee blackouts. We have idiot warmongers starting wars that we cannot win. And then we have the rest of us clinging to reality hoping to just hold the system together for a little longer. Something big is about to break and the TDS crew has no clue whatsoever. It’s like they have replaced every thing wrong in the world with Trump like you say and they honestly believe that he is a proxy for their own idiocy. I can’t escape the feeling that this all ends very badly. They are racing to debase the military but when the shit goes down do they really believe that the army will turn their guns on us? I don’t see it. I’ve seen from the beginning that every right that’s taken away is a right that’s necessary for the left. They are digging their own grave. Every tool in their wicked arsenal will be used against them and they deserve it.
> We have idiot warmongers starting wars that we cannot win.
Do I have bad news for you about wars.
Hint: pretending the world outside the US doesn't exist won't make it go away.
This article makes no sense unless you want to jettison half the people living in this country who see lots of bad stuff and lots of bad people propping up the bad stuff. Orange Man is bad for the bad people. He’s not bad for the 50% and growing # who want him back in office with his policies. Get over yourself. Your TDS is brain numbing. Take a look around. It’s WWIII or peace; inflation of low prices and a good economy for people who aren’t the elites, it’s lower taxes, it’s less govt in your face. It’s less censorship. You want more? Reincarnate the Soviet Union or East Germany. Somewhere else. Not. Here.
This comment is confusing to me. You understand this was a post railing against TDS, right?