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innuendostudios · 5 years ago

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The newest installment of The Alt-Right Playbook - Endnote 4: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship - is a little different. This installment was presented live at Solidarity Lowell, and includes a bonus Q&A section. This video expands on the ideas put forth in How to Radicalize a Normie.

If you would like more videos like this to come out, please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

He is intriguing, yet unpredictable. He demands unconditional loyalty. He seems to have an intuitive understanding of what people want to hear but no actual empathy; he treats others as simply bodies or objects. And he’s surrounded by a network of subordinates but the personnel is always changing.

Does it sound like I’m describing The President? Because these are, according to Alexandra Stein, qualities of a cult leader.

Hi. My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, the flagship endeavor of which is currently The Alt-Right Playbook, a series on the political and rhetorical strategies the Alt-Right uses to legitimize itself and gain power. And, if that sounds interesting to you, and you haven’t already, please like share and subscribe.

The most recent episode of The Alt-Right Playbook is about how people get recruited into these largely online reactionary communities like the Alt-Right, a subject which, as it turns out, is real fuckin’ hard to research.

What I want to talk about with you today is how I go about studying a population that is incredibly hostile towards being studied. It involves finding the bits and pieces of the Alt-Right that we do have data on - the pockets of good research, the outsider observations, the stories of lived experience - as well as looking at older movements the Alt-Right grew out of, that have been extensively researched, and spotting the ways the Alt-Right is continuous with them, and trying to extrapolate how those structures might recreate themselves in the social media age.

So it’s… a lot. And, in the process of researching, I found a wealth of interesting perspectives that, by focusing the video on recruitment specifically, I barely dipped a toe in. All that stuff is what I’d like to get into with you today. But I’m trying to thread a needle here: you don’t need to have seen my video, How to Radicalize a Normie, to follow this talk, but, if you have seen it already, I will try not to be redundant. This talk is one part making my case for why I think the conclusions in that video are correct, one part repository for all the stuff I couldn’t get into, and one part how I’ve come to look at the Alt-Right as a result of this research, including some pet theories I wouldn’t feel right claiming as truth without further research, but I do think are on the right track.

This talk is called Isolation, Engulfment, and Pain: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship. We’re going to cover a lot of ground, from information processing to emotional development, but we’re necessarily also going to cover racism and violence and abuse dynamics. So this is an introduction and a content warning: if some of these subjects are particularly charged for you, no offense will be taken if you at any point leave the room. I have to research this stuff for a living, and it is rough, and sometimes I have to step away. We don’t judge here.

Now. Requisite dash of self-deprecation: don’t give me too much credit for all this. I am proud of the work I do and I think I’m genuinely good at it, but much of this video was compiling the work of others. Besides research I had already done and my own observations, the video had 27 sources: three books, five research papers, six articles, one leaked document, three testimonials, four videos, four pages of statistics, and one Twitter joke. I also spoke to four professional researchers who study right-wing extremism and one former Alt-Righter.

Without all their hard work, I would have nothing to compile.

OK? Let’s begin.

We’re gonna center on those three main texts: Alt-America by David Neiwert, a history of the Alt-Right’s origins; Healing from Hate by Michael Kimmel, about how young men get into (and out of) extremist groups, be they neo-Nazi or jihadist; and Terror, Love and Brainwashing by Alexandra Stein, about how people are courted by and kept inside cults and totalitarian regimes.

I began with Kimmel. The premise of Healing from Hate is that extremist groups tend to be between 75 and 90% male, and that you cannot understand radical conservatism without looking at it through the lens of toxic masculinity. Which makes it all the more disappointing that Kimmel has been accused by multiple women of bullying and harassment. I found the book incredibly useful, and we’re still going to talk about it, I just need to caveat here that retweets are not endorsements. Also, if I spoil the book for you then you don’t need to buy it, give your money to someone who isn’t a creep.

Kimmel’s argument is that extremism begins with a pain peculiar to young men. He calls it “aggrieved entitlement.” I call it Durden Syndrome. You know that scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden says, “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rockstars, but we won’t, we’re slowly learning that fact, and we are very, very pissed off”? Yeah, that. As men, the world promised us something, and the promise wasn’t kept.

Some men skew towards social progressivism when they realize this promise was never made to women, or men of color, or queer or trans or nonbinary people, and recognize the injustice of that. Some men skew towards economic leftism when they realize that every cishet white man being a millionaire rockstar movie god is mathematically impossible. But they skew towards reactionary conservatism when they feel the promise should have been kept. That’s the life they were supposed to have, and someone took it from them.

Hate groups appeal to that sense of emasculation. “You wanna feel like a Real Man? Shave off your hair, dance to hatecore, and let’s beat the crap out of someone.” Kimmel notes that the greatest indicator someone will join a hate group is a broken home: divorce, foster care, parents with addictions, physical or sexual abuse. The greater the distance between the life they were promised and the life they are living, the more enticing Real Masculinity becomes. Their fellow extremists are brothers, the leaders father figures.

The group does give them someone to blame for their lot in life - immigrants, feminists, the Jewish conspiracy - but that’s not why they join. They’re after empowerment. According to Kimmel, “Their embrace of neo-Nazi ideology is a consequence of their recruitment and indoctrination process, not its cause."

But once an Other has been identified as the locus of a hate group’s hate, new recruits are brought along when the group terrorizes that Other. Events like cross burnings and street fights are dangerous and morally fraught, and are often traumatic for a new recruit. And experiencing an emotional or physical trauma can create an intense bond with the people experiencing it with him, even though they’re the ones who brought him to the traumatic event in the first place. The creation of this bond is one of the reasons some hate groups usher new recruits out into the field as early as possible: the sooner they are emotionally invested in the community, the faster they will embrace the community’s politics.

This Othering also estranges recruits from the people they are supposed to hate, which makes it hard to stop hating them.

So there’s this concept that comes up a lot in my research called Contact Hypothesis. Contact Hypothesis argues that, the more contact you have with a different walk of life, the easier it is to tolerate it. It’s like exposure therapy. We talk about how big cities and college campuses tend to be liberal strongholds; the Right likes to claim this is because of professors and politicians poisoning your mind, but it’s really just because they’re diverse. When you share space with a lot of different kinds of people, a degree of liberalism becomes necessary just to get by. And we see that belief systems which rely on a strict orthodoxy get really cagey about members having contact with outsiders. We see this in all the groups we’re discussing today - extremists, cultists, totalitarians - but also religious fundamentalists; Mormons only wanna send their kids to Brigham Young. They are belief systems that can only be reliably maintained so long as no one gets exposed to other people with other beliefs.

So that’s some of what I took from Kimmel. Next I read Stein talking, primarily, about cults.

Stein’s window into all of this is applying the theory of Attachment Styles to what researchers calls totalism, which is any structure that subsumes a person’s entire life the way cults and totalitarian governments do. Attachment is a concept you may be familiar with if have, or have ever dated, a therapist. (I’ve done both.)

So, for a quick primer:

Imagine you’re walking in the park with a three-year-old. And the three-year-old sees a dog, and ask, “Can I pet the dog?” And you say yes, and the kid steps away from your side and reaches out. And the dog gets excited, and jumps up, and the kid gets scared and runs back to you. So you hold the kid and go, “Oh, no no no, don’t worry! They’re not gonna hurt you! They were just happy to see you!” And you take a few moments to calm the kid down, and then you ask, “Do you still want to pet the dog?” And the kid says “yes,” so they step away from you again and reach out. The dog jumps up again, but this time the kid doesn’t run away, and they pet the dog, and you, the kid, and the dog are all happy. Hooray!

This is a fundamental piece of a child’s emotional development. They take a risk, have a negative experience, and retreat to a point of comfort. Then, having received that comfort, feel bolstered enough to take a slightly greater risk. A healthy childhood is steadily venturing further and further from that point of comfort, and taking on greater risks, secure in the knowledge that safety is there when they need it. And, as an adult, they will form many interdependent points of comfort rather than relying on only one or two.

If all goes according to plan, that is Secure Attachment. But: sometimes things go wrong when the kid seeks comfort and doesn’t get enough. This may be because the adult is withholding or the kid doesn’t know how to express their needs or they’re just particularly fearful. But the kid may start seeking comfort more than seems reasonable, and be particularly averse to risk, and over-focus on the people who give them comfort, because they’re operating at a deficit. We call that Anxious Attachment. Alternately, the kid may give up on receiving comfort altogether, even though they still need it, and just go it alone, developing a distrust of other people and a fear of being vulnerable. We call that Avoidant Attachment.

Now, these styles are all formed in early childhood, but Stein focuses on a fourth kind of Attachment, one that can be formed at any age regardless of the Attachment Style you came in with. It’s what happens when the negative experience and the comfort come from the same place. We see it in children and adults who are mistreated by the people they trust. It’s called Disorganized Attachment.

According to Stein, cults foster Disorganized Attachment by being intensely unpredictable. In a cult, you may be praised for your commitment on Monday and have your commitment questioned on Tuesday, with no change in behavior. You may be assigned a romantic partner, who may, at any point, be taken away, assigned to someone else. Your children may be taken from you to be raised by a different family. You may be told the cult leader wants to sleep with you, which may make you incredibly happy or be terrifying, but you won’t be given a choice. And the rules you are expected to follow will be rewritten without warning.

This creates a kind of emotional chaos, where you can’t predict when you will be given good feelings and when you will be given bad ones. But you’re so enmeshed in the community you have noplace else to go for good feelings; hurting you just draws you in deeper, because they are also where you seek comfort. And your pain is always your fault: you wouldn’t feel so shitty if you were more committed. Trying to make sense of this causes so much confusion and anguish that you eventually just stop thinking for yourself. These are the rules now? OK. He’s not my brother anymore? OK. This is my life now? OK.

Hardly anyone would seek out such a dynamic, which is why cults present as religions, political activists, and therapy groups; things people in questioning phases of their lives are liable to seek out, and then they fall down the rabbit hole before they know what’s happening. The cult slowly consumes more and more of a recruit’s life, and tightly controls access to relationships outside the cult, because the biggest threat to a Disorganized Attachment relationship is having separate, Securely Attached points of comfort.

And at this point I said, “Hold up. You’re telling me cults recruit by offering people community and purpose in times of need, become the focal point of their entire lives, estrange them from all outside perspectives, and then cause emotional distress that paradoxically makes them more committed because they have nowhere else to go for support?”

Isn’t that exactly how Kimmel described joining a hate group?

Now, these are commonalities, not a one-to-one comparison. A cult is far more organized and rigidly controlled than a hate group. But Stein points out that this dynamic of isolation, engulfment, and pain is the same dynamic as an abusive relationship. The difference is just scale. A cult is functionally a single person having a very complex domestic abuse situation with a whole lot of people, #badpolyamory.

So if we posit a spectrum with domestic abuse on one end and cults and totalitarianism on the other, I started wondering, could we put extremist groups, like ISIS and Aryan Nations, around… here?

And, if so, where would we put the Alt-Right?

Now, I have to tread carefully here. There are reasons this talk is called “How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship” and not “How the Alt-Right is Like a Cult,” because the moment you say the second thing, a lot of people stop listening to you. Our conception of cults and totalitarianism is way more controlled and structured than a pack of loud, racist assholes on the internet. But we’re not talking about organizational structure, we’re talking about a relationship, an emotional dynamic Stein calls “anxious dependency,” which fosters an irrational loyalty to people who are bad for you and gets you to adopt an ideology you would have previously rejected. (I would also love to go on a rant puncturing the idea that cultists and fascists are organized, pointing out this notion is propaganda and their systems are notoriously corrupt and mismanaged, but we don’t have time; ask me about it in the Q&A if you want me to go off.)

So I started looking through what I knew, and what I could find, about the Alt-Right to see if I could spot this same pattern of isolation, engulfment, and pain online funneling people towards the Alt-Right. And I did not come up short.

Isolation? Well, the Alt-Right traffics in all the same dehumanizing narratives about their enemies as Kimmel’s hate groups - like, the worst things you can imagine a human being saying about a group of people are said every day in these forums. They often berate and harass each other for any perceived sympathy towards The Other Side. They also regularly harass people from The Other Side off of platforms, and falsely report their tweets, posts, and videos as terrorism to get them taken down. (This has happened to me, incidentally.) I found figureheads adored by the Alt-Right who expressly tell people to cut ties with liberal family members.

We talked before about Contact Hypothesis? There’s also this idea called Parasocial Contact Hypothesis. A parasocial relationship is a strong emotional connection that only goes one way, like if you really love my videos and have started thinking of me almost as a friend even though I don’t know you exist? Yeah. Parasocial relationship. They’ve been in The Discourse lately, largely thanks to my friend Shannon Strucci making a really great video about them (check it out, I make a cameo, but… clear your schedule). Parasocial Contact Hypothesis is this phenomenon where, if people form parasocial feelings for public figures or even fictional characters, and those people happen to be Black, white audience members become less racist similar to how they would if they had Black friends. Your logical brain knows that these are strangers, but your lizard brain doesn’t know the difference between empathy for a queer friend and empathy for a queer character in a video game. So of course the Alt-Right makes a big stink about queer characters in video games, and leads boycotts against “forced diversity,” because diverse media is bad for recruitment.

Engulfment? Well, I learned way too much about how the Alt-Right will overtake your entire internet life. There was a paper made the rounds last year by Rebecca Lewis charting the interconnectedness of conservative YouTube. (Reactionaries really hated this paper because it said things they didn’t like.) Lewis argues that, once you enter what she calls the Alternative Influence Network, it tends to keep you inside it. Start with some YouTuber conservatives like but who’s branded as a moderate, or even a “classic liberal.” Take someone like Dave Rubin; call Dave Rubin Alt-Right, people yell at you, I speak from experience. Well, Dave Rubin’s had Jordan Peterson on his show, so, if you watch Rubin, Peterson ends up in your recommendations. Peterson has been on the Joe Rogan show, so, you watch Peterson, Rogan ends up in your recommendations. And Rogan has interviewed Gavin McInnes, so you watch Rogan and McInnes ends up in your recommendations.

Gavin McInnes is the head of the Proud Boys, a self-described “western chauvinist” organization that’s mostly known for beating up liberals and leftists. They have ties to neo-fascist groups like Identity Evropa and neo-fascist militias like the Oath Keepers, they run security for white nationalists, and their lawyer just went on record that he identifies as a fascist. And, if you’re one of these kids who has YouTube in the background with autoplay on, and you’re watching Dave Rubin? You might be as few as 3 videos away from watching Gavin McInnes.

There’s a lot of talk these days about algorithms funneling people towards the Right, and that’s not wrong, but it’s an oversimplification. The real problem is that the Right knows how to hijack an algorithm.

I also learned about the Curation/Search Radicalization Spiral from a piece by Mike Caulfield. Caulfiend uses the horrific example of Dylann Roof. You remember him? He shot up a church in a Black neighborhood a few years ago. Roof says he was radicalized when he googled “Black on white crime” and saw the results. Now, if you search the phrase “crime statistics by demographic,” you will find fairly nonpartisan results that show most crimes are committed against members of the perpetrator’s own race, and Black people commit crimes against white people at about the same rate as any other two demographics. But that specific phrase, “Black on white crime,” is used almost exclusively by white racists, and so Roof’s first hit wasn’t a database of crime statistics, it was the Council of Conservative Citizens. Now, the CCC is an outgrowth of the White Citizens Councils of the 50’s and 60’s which rebranded in ‘85. They publish bogus statistics that paint Black people as uniquely violent. And they introduce a number of other politically-loaded phrases - like, say, “Muslim fertility rates” - that nonpartisan sites don’t use, and so, if Roof googles them as well, he gets similarly weighted results.

I have tons more examples of this stuff. I literally don’t have time to show it all. Like, have you heard of Google bombing? That’s a thing I didn’t know existed. The point is, the same way search engines tailor your results to what they think you want, once you scratch the surface of the Alt-Right they are highly adept at making it so, whenever you go online, their version of reality is all you know and all you see.

Finally, pain. This was the difficult one. Can you create a Disorganized Attachment relationship over the internet with a largely faceless and decentralized movement? I pitched the idea to one the researchers I spoke to, and he said, “That sounds very plausible, and nearly impossible to research.” See, cults and hate groups? They don’t wanna talk to researchers anymore than the Alt-Right wants to talk to me. Stein and Kimmel get their data by speaking to formers, people who’ve exited these movements and are all too happy to share how horrible they were. But the Alt-Right is still very young, and there just aren’t that many formers yet.

I found some testimonials, and they mostly back up my hypothesis, but there’s not enough that I could call them statistically significant. So I had to look where the data was.

My fellow YouTuber ContraPoints made a video last year - in my opinion, her best one - about incels (that’s “involuntary celibate,” men who can’t get laid). Incel forums tend to be deeply misogynistic and antifeminist, and have a high overlap with the Alt-Right. If you remember Elliot Rodger, he was an incel. Contra’s observation was that these forums were incredibly fatalistic: you are too ugly and women too shallow for you to ever have sex, so you should give up. She described a certain catharsis, like picking a really painful scab, in hearing other people voice your worst fears. But there was no uplift; these communities seemed to have a zero-tolerance policy for optimism. She likened it so some deeply unhealthy trans forums she used to visit, where people wallowed in their own dysphoria.

And I remembered the forums I researched five years ago in preparation for my video on GamerGate. (If you don’t know what GamerGate was, I will not rob you of your precious innocence. But, in a lot of ways, GamerGate was the trial run for what the Alt-Right has become.) These forums were full of angry guys surrounding themselves with people saying, “You’re right to be angry.” And, yeah, if everywhere else you go treats your anger as invalid, that scratches an itch. But I never saw any of them calm down. They came in angry and they came out angrier. And most didn’t have anywhere else to vent, so they all came back.

I found a paper on Alt-Right forums that described a similar type of nihilism, and another on 8chan. What humor was on these sites was always shocking, furiously punching down, and deeply self-referential, but it didn’t seem like anyone was expected to laugh anymore, just, you know, catch the reference. I found one testimonial saying that having healthy relationships in these spaces is functionally impossible, and the one former I talked to said, yeah, when the Alt-Right isn’t winning everyone’s miserable.

So I think it might fit. The place they go for relief also makes them unhappy, so they come back to get relief again, and it just repeats. Same reason people stay with abusers. I wanna look into this further, so, I’ll just say this part to the camera: if there are any researchers watching who wanna study this, get at me.

Finally, I read Alt-America by David Neiwert, a supremely useful book that I highly recommend if you wanna know how the Alt-Right is the natural outgrowth of the militia and Patriot movements of the 90’s and early 2000’s, not to mention the Tea Party. Neiwert also does an excellent job illustrating how conspiracism serves to fill in the gap between the complexity of the modern world and the simplistic, might-makes-right worldview of fascism.

Neiwert also provides an interesting piece of the puzzle, suggesting what people are actually looking for when they get recruited. He references work done by John Bargh and Katelyn McKenna on Identity Demarginalization. Bargh and McKenna looked at the internet habits of people whose identities are both devalued in our society and invisible. By invisible, what I mean is, ok, if you’re a person of color, our society devalues your identity, but you can look around a room and, within a certain margin of error, see who else is POC, and form community with them if you wish. But, if you’re queer, you can’t see who else in a room is queer unless one of you runs up a flag. And revealing yourself always means taking on a certain amount of risk that you’ve misread the signals, that the person you reveal yourself to is not only not queer, but a homophobe.

According to Bargh and McKenna, people in this situation are much more likely to seek online spaces that self-select for that identity. A fan forum for RuPaul’s Drag Race is maybe a safer place to come out and find community. And people tend to get very emotionally tied to these online spaces where they can be themselves.

Neiwert points out that the same phenomenon happens among privileged people who have identities that are devalued even as they’re not actually oppressed. Say, nerds, or conservatives in liberal towns, or men who don’t fit traditional notions of masculinity. They are also likely to deeply invest themselves in online spaces made for them. And if the Far Right can build such a community, or get a foothold in one that already exists, it is very easy to channel that sense of marginalization into Durden Syndrome. I connected this with Rebecca Lewis’ observation that the Alternative Influence Network tends to present itself as nerd-focused life advice first and politics second, and the long history of reactionaries recruiting from fandoms.

So I can see all the pieces of the abuse dynamic being recreated here: offer you something you need, estrange you from other perspectives and healthy relationships, overtake your life, and provoke emotional distress that makes you seek comfort only your abuser is offering. And I found a lot more parallels than what I’m sharing right now, I only have half an hour! But the thing that’s missing that’s usually central to such a system is, an abusive relationship orbits around the abuser, a cult around the cult leader, a totalitarian government around a dictator. They are built to serve the whims of an individual. But I look at the ad hoc nature of the Alt-Right and I have to ask: who is the architect?

I can see a lot of people profiting off of this structure; our current President rode it to great success, but he didn’t build it. It predates him. It’s more like Kimmel’s hate groups, which don’t promote an individual so much as a class of individuals, but, even then, their structure is much more deliberate, designed, where the Alt-Right seems almost improvised.

Well… one observation I took from Stein is that cult recruiters often rely on two different kinds of propaganda: the winding diatribe and the thought-terminating cliche. The diatribe is when someone talks at length, sounds smart, and seems to know what they’re talking about but isn’t actually making sense, and the thought-terminating cliche comes from Robert Jay Lifton’s studies into brainwashing. So, I went vegetarian in middle school, and, when I would tell other kids I was vegetarian, some would get kind of defensive and say things like, “humans aren’t meant to be vegetarian, it’s the food chain.” Now, saying “it’s the food chain” isn’t meant to be a good argument, it’s meant to communicate “I have said something so axiomatically true that the argument need not continue.” That’s a thought-terminating cliche; something that may not be true, but feels true and gives you permission to think about something else.

Both these techniques rely on what’s called Peripheral-Route Processing. So, I’m up here talking about politics, and, Solidarity Lowell, you are a group of politically-engaged people, so you probably have enough context to know whether I’m talking out of my ass. That’s Direct-Route Processing, where you judge the contents of my argument. But if I were up here talking about string theory, you might not know whether I was talking out of my ass because there’s only so many people on Earth who understand string theory. So then you might look at secondary characteristics of my argument: the fact that I’ve been invited to speak on string theory implies I know what I’m talking about; maybe I put up a lot of equations and drop the names of mathematicians and say they agree with me; maybe I just sound really authoritative. All that’s Peripheral-Route Processing: judging the quality of my argument by how it’s delivered.

Every act of communication involves both, but if you’re trying to sell people on something that’s fundamentally irrational, you’re going to rely heavily on Peripheral-Route tactics, which is what the winding diatribe and the thought-terminating cliche are.

I noted that these two methods mapped pretty cleanly onto the rhetorical stylings of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. But here’s the question: cults use these techniques to recruit people. But can I say with any confidence that Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are trying to recruit people into the Alt-Right?

The thing is, “Alt-Right” isn’t a term like “klansman.” It’s more akin to a term like “modernism.” It’s a label applied to a trend. In the same way we debate the line between modernism and postmodernism, we debate the line between Right and Alt-Right. People don’t sign up to be in the Alt-Right, you are Alt-Right if you say you’re Alt-Right. But the nature of the Alt-Right is that 90% of them would never admit to it.

So are Peterson and Shapiro intentionally recruiting for the Alt-Right? Are they grifters merely profiting off of the Alt-Right? Are they even aware they’re recruiting for the Alt-Right? Part of my work has been accepting that you can’t know for sure. It would be naive to say they’re unaware; when they give speeches they get Nazis in their Q&A sections, and they know that. But how aware are they? I suspect Shapiro moreso than Peterson, but that’s just my gut talking and I can’t prove it. Like 90% of the Alt-Right, it’s debatable.

I don’t know if they’re trying to be part of this system, I just know they’re not trying not to be.

A final academic term before we say goodnight that’s been making the rounds among lefty YouTubers is “Stochastic Terrorism.” There’s a really great video about this by the channel NonCompete called The PewDiePipeline. Stochastic Terrorism is the myriad ways you can increase the likelihood that someone will commit violence without actually telling them to. You simply create an environment in which lone wolf violence becomes more acceptable and appealing. It mirrors the structure of terrorism without the control or culpability.

And I hear about this, and I look at this recruitment structure I see approximated in the Alt-Right, and I remember something I learned much earlier in my research, from Bob Altemeyer in his book The Authoritarians. Altemeyer has been studying authoritarianism for decades, he has a wealth of data, and one thing he observes is that authoritarianism is the few exerting power over the many, which means there are two types of authoritarians: the ones who lead and the ones who follow. Turns out those are completely different personality profiles. Followers don’t want to be in charge, they want someone to tell them what to do, to say “you’re the good guys,” and put them in charge of punishing the bad guys. They don’t even care who the bad guys are; part of the appeal is that someone else makes that judgment for them.

So if you can encourage a degree of authoritarian sentiment in people, get them wanting nothing more than to be ensconced in a totalist system that will take their agency away from them, putting them in the orbit of an authoritarian leader, but no leader presents themself… can you just kind of… appoint one?

Like, if you don’t have a leader, can you just find yourself an authoritarian and treat him like one? And, if he doesn’t give you enough directives, can you just make some up? And, if you don’t have recruiters, can you find a conservative who speaks in thought-terminating cliches just because he thinks they win arguments; find a conservative who speaks in meaningless diatribes because he thinks he’s making sense; and then maneuver those speeches and videos in front of people you want to recruit? If you’re sick of waiting for Moses to come down the mountain with the Word of God, can you just build your own god from whatever’s handy?

Every piece of this structure, you can find people, algorithms, and arguments that, put in sequence, can generate Disorganized Attachment whether they’re trying to or not, which makes every part plausibly deniable. Debatable. You just need to make it profitable enough for the ones involved that they don’t fix it. This is a system created collaboratively, on the fly, with the help of a lot of people from hate movements past, mostly by throwing a ton of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. The Alt-Right is a rapidly-mutating virus and the web is the perfect incubator; it very quickly finds a structure that works, and it’s a structure we’ve seen before, just a little weirder this time.

I’ve started calling this Stochastic Totalism.

Now, again, I’m not a professional researcher; I do my homework but I don’t have the background. I have an art degree. This isn’t something I can prove so much as a way I’ve come to look at the Alt-Right that makes sense to me and helps me understand them. And I got a lot of comments on my last video from people who used to be Alt-Right that echoed my assumptions. But don’t take it as gospel.

Mostly I wanted to share this because, if it can help you make sense of what we’re dealing with, I think it’s worth putting out there.

Thank you.

#video essay

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whitehotharlots · 5 years ago

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No one is gonna “gaslight” you about the pandemic. They don’t need to

I took a break from my daylong panic attack to read through a piece that I saw dozens of people sharing on social media. If you’re in the mood to take a glimpse into the abyss of hopelessness, give it a read.

This is one of the dumbest things I have ever read, but it’s instructive in the sense that it shows us just how absolutely liberalism is not prepared to handle the current moment. If this is the intellectual vanguard of the #Resistance (and judging by those who have shared it, it seems to be), then we should begin mentally preparing ourselves not just for Trump’s reelection but for the very real possibility that he’s just going to be president forever.

The piece is called “Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting,” so right away you know where it’s coming from. “Gaslighting,” has recently surpassed “mansplaining” as the liberal buzzterm that’s become the most meaningless due to overuse. It used to refer specifically to emotional manipulation. Now it basically means “anything that a liberal doesn’t like.” Liberals read a neurotic amount of importance into petty matters of taste and interpersonal relations. They begin, at times, to understand social problems in a structural sense, but they always--always--turn their analysis back to meaningless bullshit that takes place on an individual level. The liberal would never be so gauche as to indict an entire system, no matter how at fault it may obviously be. Instead, he will place blame upon the individuals within the system, those selfish and savage brutes who betrayed the magnanimous intentions of society’s elite engineers.

This author’s analysis is unsurprisingly very muddy. He mentions, correctly, that there is an eerie serenity to scenes of American cityscapes already being reclaimed by nature. He cannot, however, decide whether or not this is a good thing. This is because of the liberal’s fundamental ambivalence toward malignant social structures. Their ethos is founded on pretending to sympathize with society’s misbegotten, but their status and jobs and personal standing demand that they also apologize profusely for the institutions that reap so much misery upon us. This neurosis is somewhat politically viable only because it usually goes unspoken--and that’s why this piece is worth digging into, since it’s so rare to see them attempt to actually articulate this shit.

The author realizes that our society is deeply poisoned. In a twist, he says that such a sad state is not due to any of the litany of usual, intersectional reasons, but because of the pace at which our social lives are conducted. I am dead serious:

The cat is out of the bag. We, as a nation, have deeply disturbing problems. You’re right. That’s not news. They are problems we ignore every day, not because we’re terrible people or because we don’t care about fixing them, but because we don’t have time. Sorry, we have other shit to do. The plain truth is that no matter our ethnicity, religion, gender, political party (the list goes on), nor even our socioeconomic status, as Americans we share this: We are busy. We’re out and about hustling to make our own lives work. We have goals to meet and meetings to attend and mortgages to pay — all while the phone is ringing and the laptop is pinging.

The problem is, see, that we’re thinking about stuff wrong. Not that the ruling elite are openly corrupt or anything. Oh no. I mean, they must be since they’re about to gaslight us, but also they’re not, they’re basically okay:

The greatest misconception among us, which causes deep and painful social and political tension every day in this country, is that we somehow don’t care about each other. White people don’t care about the problems of black America. Men don’t care about women’s rights. Cops don’t care about the communities they serve. Humans don’t care about the environment. These couldn’t be further from the truth. We do care. We just don’t have the time to do anything about it. Maybe that’s just me. But maybe it’s you, too.

Again, he’s coming to the precipice of a worthwhile realization--that we all know society is unsustainable but we can’t do anything about it--but he has to pull back so as to avoid implicating any of the people who actually wield power. That’s the main thrust of contemporary liberalism: sure, society may be fucked, but that’s your fault, not ours.

The ending is a tour de force of empty liberal platitudes that is breathtaking in its ability to place blame upon anyone and anything aside from the people and things that are actually to blame:

From one citizen to another, I beg of you: take a deep breath, ignore the deafening noise, and think deeply about what you want to put back into your life. This is our chance to define a new version of normal, a rare and truly sacred (yes, sacred) opportunity to get rid of the bullshit and to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes our kids happier, what makes us truly proud. [ … ]

We can do that on a personal scale in our homes, in how we choose to spend our family time on nights and weekends, what we watch, what we listen to, what we eat, and what we choose to spend our dollars on and where. We can do it locally in our communities, in what organizations we support, what truths we tell, and what events we attend. And we can do it nationally in our government, in which leaders we vote in and to whom we give power. If we want cleaner air, we can make it happen. If we want to protect our doctors and nurses from the next virus — and protect all Americans — we can make it happen. If we want our neighbors and friends to earn a dignified income, we can make that happen. If we want millions of kids to be able to eat if suddenly their school is closed, we can make that happen. And, yes, if we just want to live a simpler life, we can make that happen, too. But only if we resist the massive gaslighting that is about to come. It’s on its way. Look out.

Just… dear god. Dear god.

We are not facing a crisis of conscientiousness. We are not suffering through mass existential dread because we weren’t mindful enough or didn’t make the right consumer choices or didn’t, like, live in the moment, man. We are staring down the absolute end stage of global capitalism and the complete abandonment of all the pretenses associated with liberal democracy. We are at the start of a very different and much worse stage of existence.

This is why the piece’s central conceit, gaslighting, is so fucking annoying. Because if we’ve learned nothing else from the past 12 years (and apparently we haven’t), it’s that the ruling elite do not need to bother establishing pretense any longer. No one thought the recent Corona bailout was anything other than an upward transfer of wealth and a complete abandonment of the wretched--no one even bothered to argue otherwise, because they knew they didn’t need to. At least a half dozen US senators received advance notice of the pandemic’s severity, and instead of warning people or otherwise working to help their constituents, they sold off stock and kept mum. None of them have received any formal censure, as their behavior was absolutely within the realm of what is acceptable in 2020. Andrew Cuomo, the man presently being lauded as the firm and competent opposite of Trump, used the pandemic as a pretense to push through cuts to social services and renege on bail reform that was past just weeks ago--undoing the last vestiges of progressivism both old and new. Even bleaker: an EU member state is now being ruled by dictatorial fiat under the pretense of the virus, and everyone’s just kind of rolling with it. I mean, really, what’s gonna happen? Brussels gonna step in? NATO gonna invade? Pfft… Not for such a trifling matter as the abandonment of democracy. If they missed a debt payment, on the other hand…

The point is, you’re not going to get gaslit because there’s no need for that any longer. The people who are profiting off of the collapse and destruction of society don’t even have to bother to lie about it. And the only ones doing any gaslighting are the smug liberal twerps who are too scared of upsetting their boss to allow anyone to point out this fact.

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diarrheaworldstarhiphop · 7 years ago

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it seems to me that there is some value in the rise of right wing groups in the sense that cultural consensus or the illusion thereof as driven by the left leaning media has been shattered or at least is breaking down in the public psyche. the loss of legitimacy of late night talkshow hosts telling you what to think can't be anything but a good step towards increasing public awareness and encouraging an interest in thinking for one's self in regards to world events.

“i love democracy, democracy is awesome!”

*votes for independence, with a majority vote*

*leaders of that democracy decide to do “dialog” instead of declare independence*

“w-what?? i don tunder stand????? I thought democracy was perfect and reflects human rights the most???????”

Sorry Catalonia, democracy is merely a distraction to plutocracy lol

The cultural consensus is a meme pushed by liberals in power, as part of their eternal being “on the right side of history” schtick that abruptly (yet temporarily) disappeared late in 2016 lol. Yet they dont connect the feeling of cultural consensus with the fact of political and media dominance..

The only reason why the far right is winning so much is because of disillusioned liberals noping the fuck out of their surface leanings toward leftism from exposure to just how ineffectual and backstabbing their politicians and leaders are. Today’s “fascist” “neonazis” are just furious, disillusioned and bitter liberal or libertarian people who want to tear down the existing system rather than see through a fourth reich. Actually, its hilarious, because they too have the trappings of liberalism also. The altright can only chart their ideology in terms of resisting “progressivism” and the powers that be. Past that, they offer nothing in terms of charting a path post-victory or constructing a state in place of the ones we have already. Just some pathetic marching around with tiki torches going FIRE AND BLOOD since the only thing on their agenda is genocide/mass deportation and nothing else. They, like communist/anarchist radicals, just end up being coopted by totalitarians, because they lack vision in their blind outrage to the status quo. So they end up being manipulated by megalomaniacs/great leaders/kings who do have vision. This is why post-revolution, the great leader continues to manipulate their followers by pointing at, say, the eternal jew or the perpetual revolution (see: communist states refusing to drop the propaganda asserting the revolution is ongoing, like a shitty business with their GRAND OPENING sign up for years and years after). The outrage just gets tempered and harnessed and sustained by the totalitarians who just turn the revolution into despotism.

But back to liberalism:

the mainstream left is completely incapable of leadership or governance that isnt dressed up as resistance to a greater evil. So when they have power, they just sit on their hands until a conservative takes power again, which is why the only time you see liberal activation of activism and application of their values is when a republican or tory is elected. Otherwise they stay quiet until they can point to a conservative to assign blame for the same shit their own assholes in power do. In the meanwhile, they spend their time marginalizing true leftists lol. Like, liberal figures have probably exerted more energy playing down and decrying “bernie bros” than anything trump has done in the past year.

its an umbrella of an ideology that is comprised of cowards and morons who try to liken/delude themselves as jedi against the great sith empire

i mean hell,

the new starwars trilogy even features a “resistance” that represents a galactic superpower, supreme in their economy and political power, angled against the insignificant leftovers of the empire re: “the Order”

It doesnt get more liberal fantasy than that.

in order to make the order a real threat, the film contrives a plot where the order somehow makes an EVEN BIGGER DEATH STAR TO KILLL A SHIT TON OF STARS REAL FAST!!!! even though they have a fraction of the economy that palpatine’s empire exhausted to built their lesser death stars. It’s like the plot of homefront, where the north koreans somehow produce a superweapon to knock out the USA’s power so they can invade and TAKE OVER. its fucking laughably unrealistic and represents this denial of acknowledgement of their imperial power.

even when in a place of total power, liberals delude themselves into thinking they are plucky little good guy underdog resistance fighters. So they mock the very isolated “right wing” media like fox news and punch down at the insular, conservative, impoverished classes likening themselves to heroes for doing so. Which is curious, because liberals simultaneously hold up and honour the insular, conservative, impoverished classes that comprise the Syrian rebels as heroes.

Because liberals loooooove rebels, because they too are rebels of course, united against sith lords and voldemorts

because lord knows this country is dominated by fox news and a republican party that isnt consistently capitulating against the democrats, thusly producing frustrated voter populist uprisings like the ones for perot, the tea party/reLOVEution, and now the altright behind Trump.

the loss of legitimacy of late night talkshow hosts telling you what to think can't be anything but a good step towards increasing public awareness and encouraging an interest in thinking for one's self in regards to world events.

yea, but people will inevitably come around to yielding to other media figures who tell them what to think.

I mean, just think of all the people who already turn off their minds and uncritically digest everything Gavin McInnes, Blair White, Milo Yiannopoulos and Lauren Southern shit out

Many people just decided to “grow out of” their consumption of late night talk show and repalced it with Youtuber ““““Anti-SJW”““““ channels

i feel i meandered a bit

but l

lol

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gyrlversion · 6 years ago

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What Joe Biden Is Teaching Democrats About Democrats

Joe Biden in Fullerton last October. Photo: Leonard Ortiz/Digital First Media via Getty Images

Over the past five years, the Democratic Party has seemed to race leftward so fast that its recent standard-bearers are considered no longer qualified to lead it. Bill Clinton? An embarrassment not welcome on the campaign trail. Barack Obama? A neoliberal whose half-measures should not be repeated. Nor does the new crowd of Democrats qualify by the stringent standards of ideological purity: Cory Booker has ties to Wall Street; Kamala Harris was a prosecutor; Beto O’Rourke once mused about cutting Social Security.

But nobody is thought of as more retrograde than Joe Biden — “a deeply flawed candidate who’s out of step with the mood of his party,” Politico wrote last year. Biden’s heresies are comprehensive: on foreign policy (supporting the Iraq War), social policy (his dismissive treatment of Anita Hill, harsh criminal-justice stances, opposition to school busing), and economic policy (support for the Reagan tax cut, balanced-budget fetishism). And Biden, being Biden, has articulated these positions with cringey sound bites that make the situation even worse.

The prevailing mood toward a Biden candidacy has been a combination of anger that he has the temerity to lead a party that has left him behind and sympathy that he’s too addled to grasp his predicament. A genre of op-ed has developed out of liberals pleading with Biden, with such headlines as “Why Joe Biden Shouldn’t Run for President” (The Week, The Guardian); “I Like Joe Biden. I Urge Him Not to Run” (the New York Times); “I Really Like Joe Biden, but He Shouldn’t Run for President” (USA Today); and, as exasperation has sunk in, “Again, Joe Biden, for the Love of God: Do Not Run for President” (The Stranger).

The poor guy has disregarded all the advice and decided to run anyway. And initial polling has revealed that a large number of Democrats have not left Biden behind at all. He begins the race leading his closest competitors, including early front-runner Bernie Sanders, by as much as 30 points. Perhaps it was the party’s intelligentsia, not Biden, that was out of touch with the modern Democratic electorate.

The conclusion that Biden could not lead the post-Obama Democratic Party is the product of misplaced assumptions about the speed of its transformation. Yes, the party has moved left, but not nearly as far or as fast as everybody seemed to believe. Counterintuitively, House Democrats’ triumph in the midterms may have pushed their center of gravity to the right: The 40 seats Democrats gained were overwhelmingly located in moderate or Republican-leaning districts.

Biden’s apparent resurrection from relic to runaway front-runner has illustrated a chasm between perception and reality. The triumph of the left is somewhere between a movement ahead of its time and a bubble that has just popped.

This is not to say we imagined the whole thing. Beginning in President Obama’s second term, important social movements began to burble out of the left and into American culture. Black Lives Matter helped drive criminal-justice reform to a point where even President Trump went along with a bill to shorten sentences for thousands of people in federal prison. The #MeToo movement highlighted workplace discrimination and sexual exploitation, exposing sexual predators in media, politics, and other commanding heights of culture. In just a couple of years, attitudes seemed to leap forward two generations.

And then, in an economic analogue to these social movements, the Sanders campaign sparked to life a socialist faction inside the Democratic Party. The influence of socialist thought can be seen in Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, the latter of which argues that climate change demands a sweeping reorganization of the entire economy.

News accounts have emphasized the growing share of self-identified liberals in the party as well as the diminishing stigma of socialism among younger Democrats. But political parties are large groups of people, and they change very slowly. Socialism may be growing less unpopular, but it remains quite unpopular. In a recent poll, just 10 percent of Americans held a positive opinion of socialism, and 29 percent said it is compatible with American values (against 57 percent saying otherwise). While the liberal share of the Democratic electorate is rising, it’s only just caught up to the combined share of Democrats who call themselves moderate or conservative. A small majority of Democrats say they wish the party would move in a more moderate direction.

In the New York Times, Frank Bruni suggested that Biden’s “party can’t get enough of the word progressive, but he’s regressive, symbolizing a step back to an administration past.” Yet, according to another recent poll, it seems most Democrats can get enough of the word progressive and also are quite fond of the administration in which Biden served: When Democrats were offered a choice of different ideological labels, “socialist” and “democratic socialist” each drew 1 and 6 percent, respectively, and “progressive Democrat” got 5 percent. Sixteen percent of respondents chose “moderate Democrat,” and 20 percent of them picked “Obama Democrat.”

So why did the media spend the past few years getting the state of the Democratic Party so wrong? One reason is that a numbers of factions had an incentive to hype the rise of the left. The left itself came out of 2016 giddy with its conviction that Sanders lost to Hillary Clinton only out of inertia (or even, the more radical members of the movement claimed, party manipulation). Sanders had won the young, and therefore the future.

In reality, Sanders received lots of votes from people who either appreciated his earnest persona or objected to Clinton for a variety of reasons, including her being too liberal. (Sanders ran up the vote in places like West Virginia and Oklahoma with many of the same conservative Democrats who had supported Clinton over Barack Obama in 2008. Both times, they were registering protest votes against the party and its presumptive nominee. The Sanders movement convinced itself that his success reflected an unsated demand for socialism. The rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—young, nonwhite, native to social media—gave the movement the ideal image of its ambitions. Their plan to take over the party involved repeating that they had already done so.

In this project, they enjoyed the support of the conservative media. Saddled by his own unpopularity, Trump cast his opponents as radical socialists. Last year, a White House economic report hysterically announced, “Coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse,” as if, any day now, bands of bloodthirsty Marxist guerrillas might descend from the mountains. Right-wing media focused almost obsessively on Ocasio-Cortez and a handful of her closest allies, including Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, Massachusetts’s Ayanna Pressley, and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib. That these had a habit of supplying TV-ready controversies made the cycles of outrage perfectly symbiotic. The conservative media would attack Ocasio-Cortez and her crew, who would rally their supporters to defend against the attacks. Both had an interest in portraying her as the Democratic Party’s true leader.

On top of it all, the familiar cast of centrist independents cycling through the greenrooms of CNN and MSNBC found the left to be a convenient balancing tool. Trump’s gross bigotry and authoritarianism threatened to place them in the uncomfortable spot of blaming the country’s problems on a single party. But you can’t make a centrist message out of distancing yourself from one entire party and three members of the other party. To make the comfortable “both sides have gone too far” formulation work, the Democratic left flank had to be portrayed as a dominant force. “Liberals wondering why conservatives who worry about Trump don’t join the Democrats should consider what is happening on their own side of the aisle,” wrote anti-Trump conservative Peter Wehner in The Atlantic. “Progressivism is wrecking the Democratic Party even as crude populism and ethnic nationalism have (for now) wrecked the Republican Party.” This message formed the basis of the Howard Schultz campaign.

The most important ingredient in the delusion was Twitter. It is hard to exaggerate the degree to which the platform shapes the minds of professional political observers. Part of Twitter’s allure to insiders is that it creates a simulacrum of the real world, complete with candidates, activists, and pundits all responding to events in real time. Because Twitter superficially resembles the outside world’s political debate — it does, after all, contain the full left-to-right spectrum — it is easy to mistake it for the real thing.

But the ersatz polity of Twitter doesn’t represent the real world. Democrats on Twitter skew young and college educated. A study last month found that the Twitter-using portion of the Democratic electorate harbors far more progressive views on everything than the party’s voting base.

One striking example of the disconnect took place earlier this year in Virginia. An old medical-school yearbook showed Ralph Northam, the state’s Democratic governor, in a picture featuring a blackface costume and Ku Klux Klan robe and hood. If you followed the debate on Twitter, as nearly all political reporters did, Northam’s resignation was simply a given. The debate turned to when he would step down, who would replace him, and what other prominent people would have career-ending blackface yearbook photographs.

Virginians, however, were split in ways the political elite would never have guessed. Whites and Republicans favored his resignation, while African-American voters believed, by a 20-point margin, that Northam should not resign.

As the Democratic Party in 2019 begins to wake up to the fact that its intellectual and activist vanguard is deeply at odds with both its voting base and the vast majority of its elected officials, the politics of Washington and the 2020 primary are shifting in unexpected ways.

In Congress, Nancy Pelosi survived a campaign in which more than three dozen Democratic candidates, nearly all running in conservative or moderate districts, refused to endorse her for House Speaker. Pelosi, in turn, has embraced the large wing of newly elected centrists that gave her the majority. Pelosi has repeatedly dismissed Ocasio-Cortez and her peers as irrelevant.

“When we won this election, it wasn’t in districts like mine or Alexandria’s … But those are districts that are solidly Democratic. This glass of water,” she said at one event, hoisting a glass, “would win with a D next to its name in those districts.” In an interview, she repudiated socialism (“I do reject socialism as an economic system. If people have that view, that’s their view. That is not the view of the Democratic Party”), and when asked about the faction associated with Ocasio-Cortez, she replied, “That’s like five people.”

Pelosi keeps making this point so insistently and even rudely because, perhaps, the media have kept missing it. Only half of House Democrats support Medicare for All, and slightly fewer representatives support the Green New Deal. (Pelosi’s assessment of the latter — “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive. The green dream, or whatever they call it” — summarized its very dim prospects.) Meanwhile, Pelosi has broken from the left on other high-profile controversies. She has refused to initiate impeachment hearings and held a vote condemning anti-Semitism following Ilhan Omar’s comments accusing Israel supporters of foreign allegiance.

When asked about the faction associated with Ocasio-Cortez, Pelosi replied, “That’s like five people.”

College-educated white Democratic voters have shown a growing concern about structural bias in American society: a transformation owed to social progressives, who tend to be the most skeptical about nominating a white man for president. To them, the struggle against racism and sexism correlates with a belief in increasing representation of women and people of color. Many Democratic voters, on the other hand, have arrived at the opposite conclusion. If racism and sexism are so endemic, they’ve decided, then beating Trump requires nominating a white man. “You’ll always hear, ‘There’s no way a woman can win this,’ and they go back to Hillary,” one voter told the Times. “Even among my female friends.”

Most of the party’s presidential candidates took the claims of the ascendant left at face value when they undertook their campaigns. Candidates like Harris, Booker, O’Rourke, and Elizabeth Warren designed their platforms as if they had to compete ideologically with Sanders. Several of them have already advocated Medicare for All or the Green New Deal, which could expose them to withering attacks from Trump if they win the nomination. Harris told an interviewer that, yes, she would do away with private health insurance. Julián Castro endorsed cash-payment reparations. Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand called for abolishing ICE, before backing off and saying they only wanted to reform it.

None of these plans stands a chance to pass Congress under the next president, even in the best-case scenario. All of them poll badly. (Medicare for All sounds popular until you tell people it means eliminating private insurance, at which point it grows unpopular.) The candidates seem to have overestimated how much left-wing policy voters actually demand. Democratic voters might be dissuaded from nominating their former vice-president if they hear more about his long record or if he repeats the undisciplined campaigning that led to defeats in both of his previous presidential campaigns. But it is already clear enough that he is supplying something much closer to what the party’s electorate wants than either the political media or the other candidates had assumed. A Democratic Party in which Biden is running away with a nomination simply cannot be the one that most people thought existed. Some of Harris’s advisers, the Times recently reported, are urging her to stop mollifying activists and embrace her prosecutorial past.

It might slowly be dawning on the left that its giddy predictions of ascendancy have not yet materialized. Corey Robin, a left-wing writer who has previously heralded the left’s impending takeover of the Democratic Party, recently conceded he may have miscalculated. “We have nothing like the organizational infrastructure, the party organization, the intellectual and ideological coherence, or political leadership we need,” he wrote. “I don’t see anything on the horizon like the cadre of ideologues and activists that made the New Deal or Reagan Revolution.”

The long-term question for the left is whether it can build a movement that can dominate in the real world, not just on Twitter and in some magazines. The short-term question is whether it can leverage what power it does have among activists and intellectuals without blowing up an election many Democrats see as an existential fight for the republic.

*This article appears in the May 13, 2019, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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englishchinesetranslations · 4 years ago

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When your maid keeps breaking your rice bowls, but she’s so beautiful you don’t want to sack her, what should you do? The 18th-century Qing scholar and politician Ji Yun solved this dilemma in Notes of the Thatched Abode of Close Observations: in his parable, the employer simply buys sturdier bowls made of iron, so his hot-but-clumsy serving-girl couldn’t break them.

After the Communists came to power in China in 1949, all workers were made similarly unsackable: private enterprise was abolished and workers were guaranteed employment and subsistence by the state. Under Mao, society was organised into danwei, administrative work units — and sometimes physically gated compounds — tasked with supplying accommodation, food, education and rudimentary healthcare in exchange for close political surveillance.

This material security was known as the “iron rice bowl”, after Ji Yun’s story: a social contract in which each worker could be sure of a position. But when Deng Xiaoping began the process of transforming China from a planned economy to a “socialist market economy” in 1978, that iron rice bowl was melted down for scrap in the country’s newly roaring manufacturing economy.

Since then, 850 million Chinese people have been lifted out of poverty. In the last 20 years, its annual GDP growth has remained above 6% — compared to 1.4% in the EU — and in some years has been as high as 14%. Today, China is less “iron rice bowl” than, as President Xi Jinping famously phrased it, “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”.

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China’s modernisation has also echoed the West’s “millennial burnout” in producing dropouts — albeit with Chinese characteristics. Some are fleeing to lower-pressure regional cities with hipster cultures, or checking out altogether in favour of life as a member of a mountainside commune. And along with the failsons and dropouts have come — as Qi Chen noted in these pages — “feminists with Chinese characteristics”.

So whether they inhabit Chinese state capitalism or the Western “free market” variety, it appears that millennials have some common traits. The escalating sense of competition, pervasive internet culture, consumer excess and dwindling opportunities that characterise millennial life in both worlds seem to produce relatively apolitical individuals trapped between shopping and pessimism, and ambivalent about relations between the sexes and commitments of family life.

Yet we’re used to thinking about ideology as the force that drives politics; people come up with ideas, they spread, they get implemented — that’s how the world changes. But watching China’s warp-speed economic development produce sociocultural changes that are, in many ways, similar to those which have transformed the West makes me wonder: is politics just how we rationalise things that are happening anyway?

Consider, for example, the seemingly grassroots Western social revolution of the Sixties, which sought to challenge traditional norms and obligations, as well as the duty to respect our elders. Since then, we’ve seen a steady shrinking in the size of households and rapid growth in single-person households. (In 2016, EU data showed that two-thirds of households were composed of only one or two people. Households of five or six people accounted for a mere 6.5% of Europeans.)

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No such organic challenge to traditional structures and duties occurred in China. Instead, it was imposed from the top down by Beijing, in the name of economic development. Social scientists were already reporting in 1984 on the concerted effort by the Chinese government to disrupt traditional family bonds in the interests of mass urbanisation and modernisation. It worked: in the last 20 years, the proportion of its population living in urban areas has gone from 20% to 50%. Meanwhile, between 1982 and 2010, multigenerational households have plummeted and single-couple and single-person households have seen rapid growth.

Similarly, some in the West blame changes such as declining interest in marriage and falling birth rates on feminism. But in China, feminism looks more like the byproduct of state-imposed changes in social structure that have redirected resources towards girls and lowered incentives to embrace traditional roles.

So do ideologies such as feminism cause economic shifts, or vice versa? It’s difficult to say. But a look at UK GDP against divorce rates over time suggests that periods of economic growth tend to coincide with spikes in the divorce rate. This is more difficult to track in China, as divorce was relatively difficult to obtain until 2003; but divorce rates have increased steadily since then, and nearly doubled between 2009 and 2019.

In this, China reflects a global shift that has seen marriage rates fall worldwide, while the birth rate is crashing in nearly every country around the globe. Whether social changes emerge organically or through the state, and whether growth causes or is caused by social changes, economic development seems difficult to separate from the attenuation of social and cultural structures.

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None of this is to imply a Eurocentric idea of “development” which assumes China must necessarily follow the same trajectory as the West. But watching similar trends play out in two cultures as ideologically distinct as Britain and China suggests that societies in both East and West do share some social characteristics, in as much as they share material conditions and cultural pressures. (If this is true, it implies the popular pastime of dunking on millennials for their attitude rather misses the bigger picture, as does dunking on the liquefying impact of social liberalism.)

The CCP certainly seems more willing than governments in the West to impose top-down measures designed to mitigate millennial disaffection and the weakening of social norms, for example in its recent announcement of measures to combat the “feminisation” of male youths. But it remains to be seen whether these will have the desired impact.

Beijing, after all, devotes considerable effort to imbuing Chinese youth with patriotic fervour and the will to strive and succeed. But the fact that “sang” culture exists at all suggests some forces can act even more powerfully on China’s youth than the massed pressure of its propaganda regime.

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In any case, it seems likely that as long as China embraces a market economy, it will face the question of how best to mitigate the impact that a market economy has on social structures. So far, the liquefying effect of the “capitalism” bit of Xi’s “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” seems to be mostly held in abeyance by the social policies that make up the “Chinese characteristics” part.

For though many of Xi’s measures seem monstrous from a Western standpoint, from a Chinese perspective they may appear reasonable trade-offs: certainly, while growth may be driving a new progressivism and hammering the country’s birth rate, support for the regime remains broadly high. So for now, the Faustian bargain of a growth-oriented economy still holds, and President Xi retains the Mandate of Heaven regardless of a few disaffected tea-drinkers and commune-dwellers.

But should mass material enrichment slow in earnest or even — as in the West — begin trickling back upwards, the regime may need to find other means of fostering solidarity among Chinese youth. The rest of the world should beware that moment: because in the absence of peaceful growth, the quickest route to national solidarity is warfare.

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cabiba · 7 years ago

Link

by Dr. Ricardo Duchense

Some white men are identifying with the Alt Right as they realize that the goals and norms celebrated by our social order are underpinned by multiple deceptions, suppression of debate, anti-scientific notions about human equality, and unjust opposition to white identity in the midst of outright celebration of minority group rights.

But it is not easy to dissent. The playbook of the establishment is very simple and very effective: claim that questioners of diversity are driven by plain hatred, that they are poorly-educated hicks who can’t stand losing their white privilege, and are too parochial to understand the progressive cosmopolitanism marvelously spreading through the West.

Nevertheless, the establishment is having difficulties keeping men away from the Alt Right due to the widening gap between its ideals and the sickening realities engendered by these ideals, between the ideal of equality and black crime statistics, between the ideal of multicultural harmony and the reality of Islamic terrorism, between the ideal of freedom of expression and the suppression of criticism against Islamization, and between the ideal of gender equality and the feminist acquiescence to migrant sexual assaults.

Still, one can’t help wonder why the vast majority of white males are still entrapped in these ridiculous ideals. The standard answer is that whites have been brainwashed since birth and the media still has a near-monopoly over the news. The establishment controls the narrative concerning all those realities that don’t square with their ideals. They know how to narrate black crimes as instances of discrimination and enduring inequalities. They know how to portray Islamic terrorism as acts committed by a minority rather than by “most peace-loving Muslims.” They know how to portray the shortcomings of diversity as “challenges” that can be minimized through further sensitivity training and the education of children against xenophobic feelings. They know how to ignore countless stories that run against the narrative while playing up stories that demonstrate its success.

This argument is lacking. Many whites know what’s going on and yet they prefer escapism, secure careers, or a comfortable network of politically correct friends and family members, even when they have a chance to take risks. The majority seem to welcome their own demise. One has to wonder if Alt Right men even have the vigor, vitality, and commitment of the 1960s generation. Everyone knows that contemporary White men are emasculated. Feminism is blamed. My view is that white men are the weakest in the world today because they inhabit the most comfortable, easygoing civilization. Prolonged luxurious living, where food is easily obtainable, as the ancient Greeks understood, breeds indulgent men, malleability, and softness. This weakness is a natural consequence of the cyclical nature of history.

Cyclical Decline

Chateau Heartiste and Return of Kings abound with articles of accusations against feminism. The current article by Heartiste is The Innocent Victims of Feminism are Boys. But feminism is a symptom of a wider decline in Western civilization. Western decline has long been written about. Oswald Spengler’s interpretation is the best-known. But even though Spengler spoke about the rise of pacifism, loss of youthful vitality, senescence, and the dissipation of strong identities and moral values in large metropolitan centers, many have a hard time making sense of his biological metaphors; specifically, his talk about the youth, maturity, old age, and eventual death of civilizations, as if they were organisms.

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), writing when the West was still rising, and taking the decline of Rome as his main example, identified three main cyclical phases in the trajectory of civilizations:

1. Anarchy and savagery 2. Order and civilization 3. Decay and a new anarchic barbarism

Vico’s novelty was to suggest that the underlying mechanism behind these recurrent cyclical phases was the changing psychological state of human beings in response to different realities facing them in civilizational development. When humans face anarchy and savagery, they accept the necessity of behaving in ways that are useful for protecting themselves. They achieve this by creating order, which leads to civilized behavior. But once they achieve comfort through civilization, they focus more on amusements, growing dissolute in luxury and incapable of the discipline and seriousness required to sustain a civilization.

These underlying psychological dispositions were long understood by the ancient Greeks and Romans as common-sense observations about how the demands of survival and living without comforts nurtured strength of character, whereas a life of luxury and easy acquisitions encouraged effeminacy and licentiousness. Ancient Greek literature is full of objections to the pernicious luxury of the Orientals, the older civilizations surrounding them: their harems, eunuchs, and their corrupt intrigues. The very concept of the “Orient” came to mean opulent meals, indulgence, wantonness: effeminacy.

But the thinkers of the modern era, the ones who came up with a lineal view of history, starting with the Scottish philosophers Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and Adam Smith, rejected this cyclical view, and argued instead that all societies pass through a series of “progressive” stages: from primitive savagery to agricultural civilizations to a final stage of commerce. It was their view that the last stage of commerce would bring peaceful relations among nations and commercial riches, and thus the necessary conditions for the full development of human potentialities.

The logic of this idea was accepted in varying ways by most modern European thinkers. Marx’s innovation was to reject the idea that commercial capitalism would be the last stage. The subsequent rejection of the unilineal theories of cultural evolution that Franz Boas initiated – the celebration of primitive ways of life, which is currently a cornerstone of multicultural thinking – remains a variation of progressivism, since it asks Westerners to treat less-developed cultures with equal respect while calling for everyone to be integrated into a liberal modern world order dedicated to the elimination of poverty, warfare, and inequalities. All these arguments, from Adam Smith to Marx to Boas, are of the view that humans can be improved through changes in cultural development. Even the environmentalists have been unable to escape supporting innovations that cut back on pollutants and create nature-friendly technologies.

We have underestimated the cyclical argument and the simple truth that prolonged comfort, peacefulness, relaxation, and a lack of stress and tension weaken the human character. I am going to leave the theory of historical cycles for a future post, and here show that long ago, before the age of feminism, there were some astute observations about the emasculating effects that luxurious living had on the male character. I already alluded to the Greek association of Persian or Oriental luxury with effeminacy (which academia now dismisses as part of a “racialist discourse” intrinsic to the origins of Western civilization).

Greek and Roman Effeminacy

The Greeks themselves were later to be viewed by the Romans as over-intellectualized and over-refined in their tastes. As the Romans began to enjoy abundant wealth for the first time following their victories over the Carthaginians, with the upper classes developing an appetite for the refined tastes of the Greeks, and wanting their male children to learn about Greek rhetoric, art, and philosophy, Cato the Elder (234-149 BC) warned Romans of the weakening effects that Greek ways would have on their traditional toughness. Cato, although a Roman noble, was known for his “rusticity, austerity, and asceticism.” He hated the permissiveness and hedonism that came along with luxury. Plutarch observes about Cato:

His enemies hated him, he used to say, because he rose every day before it was light and neglecting his own private matters, devoted his time to the public interests. He also used to say that he preferred to do right and get no thanks, rather than to do ill and get no punishment; and that he had pardon for everybody’s mistakes except his own.

The Greek historian Polybius (200-118 BC), who bore witness to the ways in which Imperial plenty affected the lives of young Romans, noted how:

…some of [the young Roman men] had abandoned themselves to love affairs with boys and others to consorting with prostitutes, and many to musical entertainments and banquets and all of the extravagances that they entail … infected with Greek weaknesses.

Sallust (86-35 BC) would attribute the collapse of the Republican form of government to the corrupting influence of wealth and the resulting abandonment of traditional values:

When toil is replaced by an attack of indolence, and self-control and fairness by one of lust and haughtiness, there is a change in fortune as well as in morals and behavior.

By the time of Livy (64 or 59 BC-AD 17), we have a historian who believed that the decline of Roman morals was irreversible, lamenting in the Preface to his monumental history of Rome that:

…with the gradual decline of discipline, morals slid, and then more and more collapsed, and finally began to plunge, which has brought us to our present pass, when we can endure neither of vices nor their cures.

Don’t Blame Feminist Women

Some years ago, Chateau Heartiste had a post with the strange title Feminism Responsible for the Fall of Rome. It was strange in that no one has ever spoken about feminism in ancient times, but this post, which consists essentially of a long quote from a comment by some unknown person, could find no other way to account for this commentator’s observations about the dramatic changes that took place in the relation between the sexes in Roman times following the arrival of luxurious living. The commentator goes overboard in his efforts to draw parallels between our times and Rome, but is correct in noting that relations between men and women changed drastically, going from a very patriarchal culture in which family life was revered to a situation in the first century AD in which women had more say over financial and family matters, and the upper classes were uninterested in children:

~1 century BC: Roman civilization blossoms into the most powerful and advanced civilization in the world. Material wealth is astounding, citizens (i.e.: non slaves) do not need to work. They have running water, baths and import spices from thousands of miles away. The Romans enjoy the arts and philosophy; they know and appreciate democracy, commerce, science, human rights, animal rights, children rights and women become emancipated. No-fault divorce is enacted, and quickly becomes popular by the end of the century.

~1-2 century AD: The family unit is destroyed. Men refuse to marry and the government tries to revive marriage with a “bachelor tax,” to no avail. Children are growing up without fathers, Roman women show little interest in raising their own children and frequently use nannies. The wealth and power of women grows very fast, while men become increasingly demotivated and engage in prostitution and vice. Prostitution and homosexuality become widespread.

Blaming feminism for this change in Rome is anachronistic. Feminism is an ideology that emerged in the contemporary West as an expression of decline, but in Rome the decline happened without this ideology. Feminism has accentuated decline in our times, and celebrates it. But blaming feminism, or Cultural Marxism writ large, independent of any other factors, misses the fundamental cyclical nature of history. The Great Depression raised the vitality of men, and produced the “greatest generation” and the baby boom, but this was a temporary check on an otherwise declining trend that began in the nineteenth century.

Rise and Decline of Europe

When Rome fell apart, Germanic barbarians revived the West and brought in new blood, vitality, aggression, and expansionism, culminating in Charles the Great’s empire. This empire broke apart with the intrusion of new barbarians in the ninth century, combined with the decentralizing dynamic of vassal-lord relations. While the more brutalizing aspects of the nobility were “civilized” with the spread of chivalry and the Christian “Truce of God” after 1000 AD, Europeans were still full of zest for glorious actions, testified in their Crusading marches from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, the Portuguese rounding of Africa at the end of the fifteenth century, and the Spanish crossing of the Atlantic, culminating in the Industrial Revolution.

Through these major epochs, Europeans came to de-emphasize the martial virtues associated with feudalism, and as they turned to commerce, new virtues came to gain precedence: commodious living, orderly existence, and the Protestant emphasis on hard work (notwithstanding the excessive brutality of the religious wars and the interstate rivalries resulting from nation-building during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries).

David Hume, in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1777), noted this transformation from the martial temper of medieval times to the “sociable, good-natured, humane, merciful, grateful, friendly, generous, beneficent” qualities of the moderns. This was a relative contrast; the eighteenth century was hardly merciful and soft by today’s standards; this was the age of worldwide colonization and the imminent brutal Napoleonic wars. The point is that the violent aggressiveness of earlier centuries, which still prevailed in the religious wars and found its expression in Hobbes’ pessimistic view of human nature, was declining and being replaced by a new form of civilized vitality, industriousness, and an intense desire to master the laws of nature.

In 1836, just a year before the great Victorian Age began, when Britain was known for its military vitality and its consolidation of the greatest Empire in history, John Stuart Mill was already lamenting the fact that:

…there has crept over the refined classes, over the whole class of gentlemen in England, a moral effeminacy, an ineptitude for every kind of struggle. They shrink from all effort, from everything which is troublesome and disagreeable . . . They cannot undergo labor, they cannot brook ridicule, they cannot brave evil tongues: they have not the hardihood to say an unpleasant thing to any one whom they are in the habit of seeing … This torpidity and cowardice, as a general characteristic, is new in the world … it is a natural consequence of the progress of civilization, and will continue until met by a system of cultivation adapted to counteract it (“Civilization – Signs of the Times,” in Prefaces to Liberty: Selected Writings of John Stuart Mill, [Boston: Beacon Press, 1959]).

One wonders what J. S. Mill would have said about the preoccupation of our current manosphere, such as Return of Kings, with clothing, color, fabric matching, and complexion. Victorian men cared about clothing, but with the intent of reinforcing the ideal of the proper British man as being self-sufficient, an adventurer, and scientifically-minded, which they felt was damaged with clothing of rich color; only dark colors, straight cuts, and stiff materials could project hardiness and endurance.

The key in J. S. Mill’s observation is that “torpidity and cowardice” are a “natural consequence of the progress of civilization” and of the comforts brought by bourgeois affluence. The expectation recently articulated in a Counter-Currents article that reading about Rome’s glories can teach current White men to regain their valor and heroism is pure wishful thinking. White men today will never build up their “resolve as great as that of the Romans” by reading about the Romans. The Romans built their character, before and during the time of Cato the Elder, by living at a point in the historical cycle when anarchy and savagery demanded hardness, by working extremely hard as farmers, by living in a very patriarchal culture that had harsh laws and expectations, and by undergoing intense military training and warfare. The Rome of Cato was a civilization at its peak; the West today is senile and childless, its families in decline, preoccupied with appearances, and overall too lazy and comfortable.

Decline is irreversible. The relentless occupation of the West by hordes of Muslims and Africans is an expression of White male decadence and effeminacy. Only out of the coming chaos and violence will strong White men rise to resurrect the West.

Ricardo Duchesne is a Canadian historical sociologist and professor at the University of New Brunswick.

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Robert says:April 11, 2017 at 7:33 am

That is an accepted state brought about by the evil influence of a powerful, and hostile minority which is physically undetectable.

Societies can be sabotaged. We have a virus in our system for which the only cure required to break the spell is the courage to speak the truth while it is still permissible, or should I say legal, to do so.

The Alt-right is here.

Andrew says:April 13, 2017 at 7:06 pm

#1 – The problem is – that humans are covetous. In order for them to focus (after a century of brain-washing – through media), you must destroy their idols (if not physically – you must destroy their romantic image, and prove that they are tyrants – in reality).

#2 – Now…physically – we have no means of defeating war-mongers. But…why are they always in power? It is because they are lauded by gullible societies – who believe that they (the elite) have god-like power. // The secret is: the elite are good liars and good war-mongers, but the weakness in their armor – is what they don’t want exposed about their Satanic life-styles. This includes the following:

-Blood-drinking (look up “adrenal-chrome” – which is the chemical released from the brain to the blood, when a human is being killed)

-Cannibalism (it’s scientifically proven that consumers of human-flesh get a disease called “kuru”)

-Education-Revisionism (every-thing we’re taught is a direct-lie or half-truth; and it all directs us away from any blame of the Jesuits or Zionists)

-Fiat-Banking (we’ve been learning about it (for years) – thanks to G. Edward Griffin & Ron Paul)

-Media-Manipulation (every-thing in movies or on t.v. is a lie; and it all directs us away from any blame of the Jesuits or Zionists)

-Paedophilia (the continental-governments (monarchies), corporations, media, & military are rife with this gross behavior; and it’s all based on the ancient-mystery religions & the “Talmud” – both out of Babylon)

-Murder (of course – goes with the blood-rituals & cannibalism; but these people are also known to “suicide” whistle-blowers; and you might check out Randy Quaid’s press-conference (years ago) about “star-whacking” in Hollywood)

-Voting is no more a solution – than a cure-all drug from a pharmaceutical-company (if cure-alls & votes served their purpose, both the corporations & politicians would be out of a job)

So (my point is) – expose what they don’t want you to expose. Stop (so much) lingering on the representatives in D.C., and begin informing people about the “Illuminati”-connections. (They are the ones sabotaging our world, while we’re distracted – by what’s on media & the D.C.-drama.) // Time’s wasting folks; and its up to our generation to conquer these issues. Our parents’ generation are retired (many of them) – just wanting to relaxing in the sun-set; and the younger people just want to party and stay stupid (and my apologies – to the few exceptions who give a damn).

So – that’s it: our enemies (lying about us) – have turned us into slaves; and we need to merely tell the truth (about them) – to be set free again. (It may induce Martial Law – when they have no exit of refuge, but I’d rather lose my freedom fighting for it – instead of being a vulnerable duck on a pond (waiting to get shot).)

My regards to the “Cess-Pool”-family. Andrew (4-13-17) (5:06 p.m.)

Beth says:April 15, 2017 at 9:19 am

Very interesting. It’s refreshing to hear about other things besides Feminism as the reason for our decline. I’m going to recommend this article on social media. Thanks.

#alt right #feminism #james edwards #Ricardo Duchense

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mr-river7-blog · 7 years ago

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So wrong I made this stupid thing

It was stupid enough to deserve my effort, but so easy to dismiss I’m too lazy to create a proper structure to my writing, so here goes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/opinion/facts-have-a-well-known-liberal-bias.html

This is in response to the above article, listing several points that are so blatantly wrong that I ought to title this also as “’Facts’ Have a Well-Known Liberal Bias”.

The article starts out stating that: “... the Republican Party has become an extremist institution with little respect for traditional norms of any kind.”

One:

the Republican Party has not become extremist.

If anything they’ve become too unchanging, and unable to flow with the current that is American society. One of the main reasons why is...

Two:

the Republican Party is obsessed with traditional norms

Slow to accept gay rights when the majority of the nation couldn’t care less if gays got married - the Republican Party is a staunch defender of traditional American culture. While this can be both good and bad (another topic, another time), the argument that it has little respect for traditions is absurd.

Three:

the party that is both extremist and has hates traditional norms is the Democratic Party.

No this isn’t a case of ‘your party stinks, mine rules’. Both have extreme flaws in both ideology and figureheads; I hate both equally.

Calling the Democratic Party extremist is a little...extreme you might say. Well Mr. Krugman decided to fling shit first so now it’s my turn.

Progressivism is the ideological movement of Change. And yes, this is exactly the Obama “Change we can believe in” slogan, type of change. The progressive movement is all about smashing tradition and reforming society. The Democratic Party loves, panders, and consists of Progressives, and therefore would be the more logical choice of hating tradition.

Finally, the Democratic Party, in their pandering to the Progressive Left, has become, like the Progressive Left...Extreme. Morals and ethics change in society. Slavery, racism, anti-LGBTTQQIAAP, fascism, misogyny, and related issues are ones America tries not to subscribe to. But to keep this short; the so-called “regressive-left”, has become an ideology based on emotions and feelings, more so than facts and reality. Progressivism treats issues like slavery and fascism as relevant issues, and not the relics of history they are - and we’re to blame. Worse yet, many beliefs in this ideology are hypocritical, not based in fact or reality, disingenuous, or actually racist. Some ‘highpoints’ being: You can’t be racist toward white people, the damnation of fascism for it’s dictators while supporting Communism, and the infantilization of American minorities.

...Anyway, back to the article - Krugman then goes on to mention that the mainstream media (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, FOX, etc.) haven’t come to grips with reality. He’s entirely right, for entirely the wrong reasons, stating that:

“Even in the age of Trump, they try desperately to be “balanced”, which in practice means bending over backwards to say undeserved nice things about Republicans and take undeserved swipes at Democrats.”

Which is entirely true - the mainstream media, MSM for now on, is easily and obviously biased towards the left, with the sole exception being Fox News...most of the time. But then he goes on to say that:

“This dynamic played a crucial role in last year’s election; it’s one of the reasons major news organizations devoted more time to Hillary Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.”

Someone’s got to explain to me how Clinton’s email scandal was an ‘undeserved swipe’, and how he conveniently forgot the fact that, in effort to be “balanced” by bending over backwards to compliment the Republicans;

COVERAGE OF TRUMP HAS BEEN UP TO 93% NEGATIVE, AND REMAINS SO!

This is what deception looks like.

But it only gets worse from here: The article then uses this malicious, deceptive point to bash Paul Ryan...by linking his own opinion pieces. Given the absolute garbage above, I’m going to go ahead and not take you as an unbiased reliable source. I was never into APA citations to begin with.

But, wait there’s more! And it’s really bad.

Krugman goes on to criticize Facebook for using The Weekly Standard, an American conservative opinion magazine, as a fact-checker:

“Facebook wanted responsible fact-checking organizations to partner with, and several such organizations exist. But all of these organizations are constantly attacked by the right as having a left-wing bias – so it added The Weekly Standard, even though it clearly failed to meet internationally accepted standards for that role."

Words are important here so I’ll explain why I emphasized two of them above. What this is, is framing - only instead of people being framed, words are. The author’s supported organizations are responsible, to be trusted, and under attack, a malicious act. These organizations are worded as victims of the dastardly right. The reality is that they are not under attack, they’re under criticism. If we take a step back, we can realize that the author has given us no source, nor reason as to why these organizations (which ones?) are responsible. Another step reveals that the so-called “internationally accepted standards” (wow very professional sounding), come from the International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter institute. Some google-fu reveals that Poynter institute is a tiny journalism school based out of St. Petersburg that brands itself as...

Okay full stop here. My standard protocol has me checking linked sources, and verifying that everything is up to snuff, but Poynter has derailed my writing entirely. Let me just list what I’ve found, and I’ll let you decide of Poynter and it’s International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN):

Poynter deems itself the “world’s leading instructor, innovator, convener and resource for anyone who aspires to engage and inform citizens in 21st century democracies”. A big claim and nothing offered to back it up.

Most classes offered by Poynter are ‘webinars’ or DIY self-directed courses. Because internet-based colleges have great reputations just like Ivy-league and other greats.

Poynter has a complicated array of membership levels, partnership programs, benefits, discounts, points and downloadable badges Most schools give you an education and a diploma. This one gives you badges to post to your facebook and benefits and membership levels that sound like they come out of a pyramid scheme.

They reference Pulitzer prize winners, news execs, and prominent national broadcasters as among their advisory board. Most aren’t well known and the Pulitzer-winning journalist, was among the entirety of the Washington Post staff as the winners.

Poynter has tiny blurb of a page on Wikipedia and it’s IFCN isn’t mentioned, nor does it have one.

So to sum this up; our source and guide as to why the Weekly Standard is not up to snuff is:

a self-important network put forward by an online college that nobody knows, cited by a self-described intersectional, progressive, social justice news site (that’s powered by WordPress), and helmed by a former Hillary Clinton campaign research director.

This folks, is our impartial gatekeeper.

(Side note; Personal thanks to WordPress; freely hosting a site for a school project that I used NETSCAPE to view)

But enough on this, it gets better:

The author goes on to check on why Politifact, one of the mythical respected organizations mentioned earlier, is indeed seen as biased. And what better organization to check it’s bias than...The Weekly Standard?? I give up.

Lets take a step back, because this argument is so baffling from beginning to end that I’ll sit here all day if I don’t just quickly sum it up.

Facebook, an organization that is seen by most as more liberal/left in it’s policies, in some weird attempt to pander to the right to seem unbiased, chose to use a conservative magazine as their fact-checkers instead of more popular choices that are seen as left-leaning.

The best course of action, to prove the neutrality of the popular option is, of course, to use the magazine that fails as a fact-checker, to, as the French put it; “Beat a motherfucker with another motherfucker”.

The author then bashes said magazine, as a failure in that role.

Crazy right? Why would you use a source that YOU called bad, as a measure of standard for anything?

To nobodies surprise, the author dissuades the Weekly Standard’s argument! In an acute stroke of enlightenment he manages to posit a hypothesis, sans substantiation!

What do all those fancy words mean?! Is this his crowning achievement? Has he finally managed to make a fair an accurate point? Has he stumbled unto greatness?!

...NO

The translation of my fancy words, as you might’ve already realized, is that he made a point...with no proof, backing, or logic.

All facetiousness aside - the point, asking readers to wonder if Republicans simply make more false claims, is in face to the statistics put forward that Politifact states that Republican claims are found to be false three times more than Democratic claims. My response, given no evidence for his argument is simple:

What if they don’t?

I don’t know if Republicans lie more than Democrats, and I don’t know if Politifact is entirely biased, but I have seen evidence of double standards, and multiple checks on single claims. Point is the author looks like he’s using logic, and even goes to cite sources; but all he’s really doing is taking down strawmen with guesswork.

So what to do after this resounding victory?

How about bring up the very definition of an arbitrary point, and simply call it not arbitrary?

How about slander the GOP as in it just for themselves?

HOW ABOUT GENERALIZE ALL PROFESSIONAL ECONOMISTS TO ONE ORGANIZATION THAT YOU YOURSELF HAVE BEEN CRITICAL OF?!??!?!?

I’m fucking done.

#nytimes #journalism #paul krugman #bias #fake news #sjw logic

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clubofinfo · 7 years ago

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Expert: If you haven’t already, you should check out the article by The New Yorker, “How Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., Avoided a Criminal Indictment.” To be brief, the Trump family was under investigation in 2012 by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office for misleading potential buyers about their Trump SoHo property. This is being overly concise, but the investigation was dropped after Trump’s attorney made a $25,000 donation to the campaign of the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance. That report by The New Yorker was essentially overshadowed in the media cycle due to another story related to Cyrus Vance. Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer donated $10,000 to Vance’s campaign days after the sexual assault case against Weinstein was dropped. Anyhow, that monetary figure of $25,000 is a relevant number as it was the amount of money donated from the Donald J. Trump foundation to the Political Action Committee (PAC) of Florida Attorney General, Pam Bondi. Bear in mind, Pam Bondi personally sought a donation from Donald Trump six days before it was received and this occurred while her staff was considering a case against Trump University. Predictably, that case never came to fruition and Bondi was named as a top member of Trump’s transition team. To be clear, it’s illegal for charities to make political donations. Furthermore, Trump’s organization didn’t properly disclose the source of the contribution by listing another group with a similar name. Despite this horribly unethical and illegal behavior, Donald Trump was merely fined $2,500 by the IRS. The issue of campaign finance receives a rather cursory level of media attention during every presidential election cycle. However, there are numerous lower-level races, the type that only policy wonks seem to follow, in which the issue is virtually ignored by the press. Unfortunately, these elections fly under the radar of the average voter, such as District Attorney or State Attorney General, even though these are positions that have a tremendous impact on our society. During the campaign, Donald Trump openly stated that he personally knew the ins and outs of how special interests have corrupted the system. After all, with a smirk, he also alluded to his own role in this systemic corruption, without providing exact details. Hence, that type of rhetoric appealed to his base because they believed that he would reform the system. Obviously, that hasn’t happened and that brings us back to the present with the latest articles from The New Yorker. This is fantastic investigative journalism. In fact, the content is so impressive that it may leave you wishing that our government officials were acting in the same manner. Here’s the bitter truth. Often times, the heavy lifting of an important investigation gets spiked at the end by an ambitious bureaucrat. In both of these stories, the Manhattan District Attorney overruled his staff and dropped the case. Suffice it to say, the prison industrial complex is a finely tuned machine as long as the defendants aren’t wealthy white-collar criminals or the social elite. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, like most others in the country, has a history of implementing a two-tiered justice system. Nonetheless, Cyrus Vance had received a lot of positive press as a “progressive” prosecutor by simply recognizing the problems. For instance, in 2014 he allowed the Vera Institute to examine the complete records of his office to examine racial disparities, which earned him a lot of kudos in liberal circles. However, Vance’s office has seemingly only practiced “progressivism” when it involved wealthy defendants, such as when it dropped the case against Harvey Weinstein despite possessing an audio tape of Weinstein admitting to committing the crime. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has aggressively prosecuted misdemeanor offenses, with minorities being the primary targets. Last year, black and Hispanic defendants were convicted of marijuana possession in Manhattan at rates of 51% and 46% respectively. Whereas, white defendants were only convicted 23% of the time for the same offense. That was the widest disparity in all five boroughs. This is the same office that is supposed to preside over Wall Street, yet not a single executive of a “Too Big to Fail” bank faced criminal charges after the 2008 mortgage-fraud scandal. The lack of action can’t be blamed on a lack of evidence. Instead, there were several highly-credible whistleblowers who came forward with solid information that should have resulted in putting many white-collar criminals behind bars and creating legal consequences for predatory behavior in the future. In particular, Matt Taibbi profiled a JPMorgan Chase whistleblower, Alayne Fleischman, who singlehandedly gave a slam-dunk case to the DOJ. However, in the end, Jamie Dimon negotiated a settlement in which the company avoided any criminal charges, didn’t have to admit to any wrongdoing, and the financial penalty essentially served as a tax write-off. That wasn’t a one-off situation as there were several other whistleblowers who risked their careers all for naught, such as Citigroup executive Richard M. Bowen. However, time and again, the DOJ avoided Wall Street’s power players like the plague. Instead, New York’s prosecutors have built solid careers by targeting vice crimes, such as drugs, gambling, and prostitution. After all, it’s a wise career decision for bureaucrats to avoid confronting our nation’s most powerful white-collar criminals because there’s a better payday in the future. (This is one of the themes of my book series, Rackets.) One of the central causes behind this systemic corruption is the revolving door between government and the private sector. After serving as the U.S. Attorney General in the aftermath of the largest financial scandal in our nation’s history, Eric Holder returned to the private practice and a multi-million dollar salary. In fairness, it would be inaccurate to single-out Holder as the only former DOJ official to cash-in on his way out. Holder’s former Assistant Attorney General, Lanny Breuer, went to the same firm for reportedly $4 million a year. In fact, there were other members of Holder’s team at the DOJ who returned to Covington & Burling, which happens to be one of the top defense firms for Wall Street’s high-profile clientele. There are many ways in which the revolving door has corrupted our system. Most notably, there has been a mass exodus from Capitol Hill to K Street. Remarkably, there are now 434 former members of Congress working as professional lobbyists and the conflict of interest is obvious. Congressmen can make much more money on the backend as lobbyists as long as they play ball for the special interest groups while in office. This type of quid pro quo relationship is quite visible with government regulators as well. There are too many examples to list in an article, but the current opioid crisis may be the most relevant. It’s no secret that various drug manufacturers and distributors played a major role in the current problem. On the other hand, it isn’t widely known that the DEA regulates those drugs and sets the maximum production levels. The DEA continued setting higher production quotas while the crisis escalated. Bear in mind, many of the former DEA officials who were directly involved in these regulations subsequently found lucrative work with the same drug companies. Then again, Barack Obama was supposed to “fundamentally transform” the way Washington D.C. functioned. In a campaign speech, he promised to “turn the page on policies that put greed and irresponsibility by Wall Street before the hard work and sacrifice of folks on Main Street.” Understandably, it’s much easier to read a speech than to implement actual political reforms at the highest level. However, Obama never acted upon the progressive rhetoric that launched him into office. Thus, he’s now quite welcome on Wall Street. As a matter of fact, it was reported recently that the Obamas are considering purchasing an apartment in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Their potential new home is only a ten-minute drive from Wall Street, which would be very convenient for his next paid speaking gig. As a reminder, just three months after leaving office, Obama accepted a $400,000 speaking fee from the investment bank, Cantor Fitzgerald. Sure, he can read a teleprompter with the best of them, but no one can truly justify such speaking fees in the free market, particularly Wall Street firms that are laser-focused on profitability. That is, unless, such fees are actually helpful for a firm’s bottom line. Hence, there’s no other way to look at such exorbitant fees as anything other than part of an unofficial kickback scheme. Hillary Clinton deservedly took a lot of flak for participating in this corrupt practice, which, in her case, functioned like a preemptive bribe. Conversely, Obama’s $400,000 speaking gig was more like payment for services rendered. By the way, that $400,000 figure is very symbolic because Obama vetoed a bill that would have reduced pensions for former presidents if their incomes surpass $400,000. Even more symbolic, he vetoed that bill on his last possible day in office. Obviously, these types of speeches involving former presidents or presidential candidates capture much media coverage. However, this paid-speaking racket is also fairly common among our nation’s most prominent former financial regulators. For instance, Ben Bernanke, the past chairman of the Federal Reserve who presided over the banking industry in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, received $250,000 for a single speech after leaving office. He’s not alone. Virtually, every high-level official from the Federal Reserve or the Treasury Department has participated in this shady practice, including Timothy Geithner, Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, among many more. To wrap up, Donald Trump accurately labeled our political system as a “rigged game,” but there may be a bright spot. Trump’s numerous blunders and scandals seem to be providing the public with a valuable education about the flaws of our government. With luck, this newfound attention may force some necessary reforms. http://clubof.info/

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