#unvirtuous politics on main

[eightyonekilograms]

On the one hand, it's very bad epistemic and discursive practice to say about your opponents "you don't actually believe the things you're saying; you're just pretending to". But on the other hand, in the specific case of right-wing media pundits, it keeps being true, as revealed by subpoenaed communication. First the Sandy Hook lawsuit demonstrated that Alex Jones knows he's just making this all up, and now the Dominion/Fox News lawsuit has revealed what Tucker Carlson actually thinks of Trump when the cameras are off:

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait ... I hate him passionately ... We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”

This isn't really going to change anyone's view of anything, but personally I at least appreciate that I can be free of "rationalist charitability guilt" when I take as a given that these guys are knowingly full of shit.

[eightyonekilograms]

I just remembered that the other blackpill here is that we've probably completely blown a once-in-a-generation chance to undo Volckerism (running the economy with a slack labor market, low interest rates, and low inflation), which should have been the triumphant conclusion to decades of progressive struggle.

Consider: after the GFC, Obama did the "wrong" thing* (too little stimulus), and that made the recovery take many years longer than it needed to, with the economy in the doldrums for most of the 2010s. Meanwhile after Covid, Biden did the right thing with all the stimulus and the economy bounced immediately back to a white-hot labor market, in the wake of a shock which could've meant another entire lost decade. And the response to this among the left has been just pure bitching and bellyaching, which Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman are gleefully cackling at from whichever pit of hell they're in.

Campaign strategists are probably now going to do the rational thing and assume that pro-labor economic stimulus and monetary policy is electoral poison, which means we're back to another few decades of Volckerism. All because progressive edgelords on the internet would rather burn the world to the ground for social media clout than actually learn how the economy works.

* This wasn't entirely his fault because the R Congress cut down a lot of Obama's stimulus proposals, but with that being said I don't think the Democratic establishment of the 2010s was prepared for IRA levels of stimulus even if they'd had the Congressional majority to do it.

I guess the underlying blackpill around the current economic data is that if Americans find 6.5% YoY inflation in 2022 to be totally intolerable while the job market is as tight as it has ever been and wage growth is way up, how on earth are we ever going to do massive public investment?

if you imagine a future where the US government spends very heavily on infrastructure, welfare, etc, this is really not a good sign about its political viability

[centrally-unplanned]

The implied "theory of history" of the latest Fantasy RPGMaker "Kingdom Ruling" games I have been playing is always pretty consistent, even if its something of an emergent phenomenon. These games are a narrative, a narrative where the player "inserts" into the story, which means its gonna be a narrative of progress in some form (even if it has ups and downs). The player will "win", and you need a reason why they win and others lose - but in real life people rarely "win" at rulership to the extent these characters do. So how do they pull it off, and what is the implied model?

Good vs Bad People: Very commonly, the duke of this or that duchy is either a good person or a bad person - loyal & virtuous, or corrupt & venial. The problem the kingdom has is that too many unvirtuous folk have risen to the ranks of power.

Note while the above is often explicitly stated, it is also used as a sort of narrative shorthand - have a subplot about illicit slave markets in the capitol city? Replace the implicated mayor with someone you narratively know is good, and so the problem is gone, and you can now ignore it. You can walk away without feeling like you walked away, since Good Person is there to handle it.

Power of Friendship: So where do all of these good people come from? Sometimes its just things like visual coding, we all know what a "good" and "bad" character looks like in a JRPG. But the bread-and-butter is that as the main character you build up a group of friends. Classmates from the Magic Academy, childhood friends, a random barbaric wildchild you seduce with sweets, w/e. You play as them sometimes, they have cute scenes together, become friends, and so on. You get exposed to their personalities and humanity and generally the narrative constructs them as being emotionally invested in the protagonist & plot. And then they & their own families and friends (who get trust by association) can populate out the "bureaucracy" of your country when these problems come up. Obviously they won't take that opportunity to simply pursue their own interest, friends don't do that.

And in particular these aren't regular friends: they are nakama, a band of brothers, forged in the fire of battle and bound by the steel of the sword.

Also sometimes you are boning all of them.

Crisis = Opportunity: And the final piece of the puzzle is the hammer that makes any piece fit: copious amounts of violence! These stories are almost always war stories; primarily of course because in fiction "war is awesome" and it provides a big narrative throughline and all that, but also because that is the justification for the scale & pace of change. You could just take a peaceful-but-corrupt country and start beheading civil servants & nobles, but its a tough sell morally and realism-wise. But have those same people engaging in rebellion, raiding, or other forms of violence, and now they can die on the battlefield - and be undone by clever schemes and the abilities of the heroes as opposed to idk IRS investigations of tax irregularities. It also justifies that nakama as mentioned above, you need a reason to fight and therefore bond. And it confirms one's morality; war is a mirror that shows you the true self; coward, hero, villain, martyr, etc.

On top of that it provides an excuse in reverse, as to why the country had so many "bad" figures in the first place. It was peacetime, they played their game "inside the system" and you can't purge them without breaking the peace.

---

Okay, so what all that sums to is that this genre's median "theory of history" is that societies decay over time as Bad People populate the ranks of power, and things like crime, poverty, etc come from that decay. Good people could purge that, but too many lost the Game of Politics to the Bads. Eventually of course some crises comes along that breaks the weakened system. This allows for people of talent and good moral virtue to rise to the top again, purge the bad elements, and the arc of combat forges a class of moral leaders who will rule justly into the future.

Now obviously I do criticize the realism of this model - most societal problems are structural, emerging independently of the moral stance of the leaders in question and not amendable to HR reshuffles. It is stridently anti-materialist in a way I must object to. However, its a game, its not trying to be history, I'm not here to bash on that. It is a coherent model - it works! It explains history and its cycles and ebbs in a narratively satisfying way. (and ofc I am simplifying strongly here, it has more elements).

What I do find funny is how intensely Romance of the Three Kingdoms it is. Its an extremely specific outlook on what makes the mettle of a kingdom, how virtue flows from the top, how nations rise and fall in cycles based on that. Which isn't surprising - they are universal-enough themes of course, but the genre is "Japan"-RPGs for a reason. They may all be mainly styled after western fantasy aesthetics but their storytelling conventions come from Japan's own historical fiction literary tradition, which is intensely derived from China's.

But of course this is now a global tradition, most of these games don't come from that ecology of 1980's-1990's JRPG makers clustered around Tokyo & Osaka anymore. The legacy of that influence endures though, due to both a deep cultural history of how these things evolved ("genre staples") and also because the ludology of these games implies certain narrative directions. At this point its what audiences for these games all over "want".

Which, as always, is neat!

[queenlua]

ugh religion/politics venting

* today i read the latest in the depressingly long series of incidents in the saga of, "the Southern Baptist Convention simping for the goddamn child molesters/enablers in their own church." i know i'm phrasing that in the maximally inflammatory way; i don't care. it's not like there's a whole fucking gross awful history here or anything

anyway i have felt bizarrely emotional about it, for someone who left that church over a decade ago and has no strong attachment to it otherwise. i guess it's like, i read that article and thought to myself "jfc, where are people even going nowadays, like, if your church's senior leadership sucks that much you gotta leave, right." and i was sort of tempted to call up some of my old church-y friends and ask "ok where are you going now," but... (1) hahaha a lot of my church-y friends left all churches whatsoever a long time ago, and (2) the ones who remain, like, i'm not close enough to them to ask, right? if i called them and randomly asked them intrusive questions about their Religious Organization Feelings, they would peg me as the obnoxious chick who left to go become a coastal liberal elite and now is being a dick to them. and i mean i wouldn't be trying to be a dick but i would be being awfully nosy and presumptuous, right

anyway, my wondering about that sent me down a whole rabbithole of "which congregations are actually growing in the US nowadays anyway," and while it's gratifying to see that the SBC shrinking, i don't exactly love the growth of pentecostalism in its place, right, seeing as "pentecostal brainworms" is at least partially responsible for like 50% of my trans friends getting kicked to the fucking curb by their parents the second they Deviated From The Script. so, y'know, fuck that

i did learn that the "free will baptist" denomination skews surprisingly young and, wow, what a kickass name for a denomination. i know nothing else about them but i hope they're as cool as the image in my head

...anyway, all that idle research didn't really do much to assuage how fucking weirdly furious i am over the SBC. like, i sincerely think the SBC mostly sucks and hasn't been redeemable pretty much ever, but it was also a cultural juggernaut in my youth, and one sort of hopes one's cultural juggernauts might find some way to reform into something humane, or at least fade away with grace. it's somehow secondhand humiliating and depressing to see it devolve into what i knew was always there at its core: gross old men power-tripping and protecting their own and never never never coming down on the side of anything that felt good and right in my heart of hearts

* unrelated but since i'm being unvirtuous and Politicsing On Main anyway:

every goddamn thing i've read out of netanyahu's mouth makes me want to punch his stupid face in until his skin is paste and the paste is mush and the mush is fine little bits of organic matter to feed the soil. and still the dude will not have suffered enough. not to be former-southern-baptist or anything but: i hope keeping your precious status & deliberately inflaming the most brainpoisoned rightoids in your nation & all that other shit is worth the fires of hell that await you after buddy!!!!

i don't have a Sophisticated Take on the israel/gaza stuff, but. at the end of the day i have cultivated a caveman's sense of morality, as a reaction to my tendency to over-intellectualize, and that caveman's sense of morality imo has served me pretty well, for instance: when The Big Guy is beating the everloving shit out of The Small Guy, the thing that is happening is fucked and i don't care who started it, it's gotta stop well before, i dunno, "bombing the shit out of a bunch of kids" for fucking starters. this works for an awful lot of Big Guy vs Small Guy scenarios. try it sometime

(i hate that i even remotely feel the urge to caveat it this way but to be clear: bibi & his homicidal campaign != judaism. judsaism rules, antisemitism is bullshit. but no more fucking more kids dying in a stupid campaign, ceasefirenow etc)

[tototavros]

the claim that "x enables crime, so x needs to be regulated" is easy enough to debunk, but even "x's sole purpose is crime, so it needs to be regulated/banned" is still bizarre to me

i can understand it on some level with "states should have a monopoly on the practice of crime/violence" but i certainly don't agree with it, and it seems like an excellent example of Seeing Like A State, just because you can't see a use for it doesn't mean that non exist

[eightyonekilograms]

Some five years down the line I feel like @the-grey-tribe was right and I should give Harris more credit: I don't agree with him all the time, but he's just about the only famous "classic liberal annoyed by the illiberal/identitarian left" who hasn't completely gone off the deep end (contrast Jesse Singal, Glen Greenwald, Michael Tracy, and thousands of others). The anti-woke mind virus just fucking devoured so many people and I hate it.

conspiracy theories that Dawkins is a crypto-Anglican

[eightyonekilograms]

If you're too young to remember the 2012 GOP primary or weren't tuning in, the basic dynamic was: there was this one guy (Mitt Romney) who was the elite-picked obvious nominee, but the Republican base all hated him, so we went through a cycle of "base picks random guy because of a Fox appearance, he shoots to the top of the polls, media declares him the frontrunner and that Mitt Romney is over, guy stays on top for six weeks until everyone realizes he's a doofus, guy plummets into irrelevance, repeat." We did this like six or seven times with the entire cast of Republican archetypes, including

The Aw Shucks 85 IQ Texan,

The Evangelical Who Wants the Gays Put to Death,

The Guy Who Denounces Democrats for Being Anti-Family After Cheating on Three Different Wives, and of course

The One Minority They Could Find That Year

Anyway, it looks like 2024 is going to be exactly the same thing— we've already gone through The Girl and Florida Man as the contenders who appeared, peaked, and faded in the span of a couple months; next up is Indian Reactionary— except with the script flipped: this time it's the base who has the guy at the end who is the inevitable winner even though nobody likes him, while the party powerbrokers are flailing around trying to prop up a series of short-lived alternatives.

History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.

[eightyonekilograms]

Of all the people in the political realm I don't understand, Pence is probably the one I understand the least. Dude, the people whose votes you were courting tried to have you killed. And not even reluctantly: they eagerly marched to a "who will rid me of this meddlesome priest" dictum to murder you. And then you went around groveling for their votes.

"Cuck" is (or at least was, it seems to have dropped out of fashion recently) a really overused insult, but Mike Pence really iswas the biggest cuck American politics has ever seen.

[eightyonekilograms]

“lol will we even notice when Joe Manchin leaves”

you are so stupid you shouldn’t be allowed to vote. learn how the fucking government works, you smug, virtue-signaling, low-information dipshit.

[eightyonekilograms]

And I’d like to point out, for the zillionth time, that Congress already has the power of the purse. If they want to cut spending, they can pass a budget which does that. The debt ceiling is an incoherent bit of nonsense where Congress simultaneously demands that the Executive branch both spend and not spend money, and your complaints about the debt trajectory of the country are a completely unrelated debate. Scrap it.

It's pretty concerning to me that the current stand-off boils down to the Republicans saying, essentially,

"Cut programs that Morlock-Holmes might use to make his life better or we will drive the entire country straight into a brick wall at top speed."

Partly for selfish reasons, duh, but also that it's more than a bit alarming that the Republicans are extremely confident that if they wrench the steering wheel and smash us into a brick wall that it won't hurt them with the voters at all.

[eightyonekilograms]

Dean Preston on the SF BoS now adopting the "she was totally asking for it, going out dressed like that" approach to handling car break-ins

UC Board of Regents rejecting a proposal for student microunits at below market rate in UCLA because of "mental health" concerns, when 6% of UCLA students are homeless

I swear to god California psuedoprogs are going to be my supervillain origin story.

[eightyonekilograms]

What’s most interesting about the op-ed is its candid admission that the education backlash, which progressives have dismissed as overblown, is very real. The authors concede that “a sense that the focus on race and social justice in Virginia’s schools had gone too far, eclipsing core academic subjects” produced a “furious backlash” in that state, as well as in San Francisco and New York, where voters also rebelled against progressive efforts to deemphasize calculus in California and scale back magnet schools and tracked courses elsewhere.

But after acknowledging that voters are furious with left-wing education policies, Berkshire and Schneider argue that the problem isn’t the policy but the voters. Or, more specifically, they blame Democrats for making voters care too much about educational achievement. Their solution is for Democrats to stop emphasizing educational achievement and instead focus on schools as venues for inculcating social values.

[eightyonekilograms]

Very annoyed at the judgmental pearl-clutching of a bunch of journos going "half the US didn't watch the Jan 6 hearings!". Of course I didn't watch the fucking hearings! What could I possibly gain from watching them? Nobody in Trump's circle is going to see any punishment for 1/6, no matter what is revealed, so as far as practical consequences they're an exercise in pointlessness. I'm not voting R in '22 or '24 or whatever no matter what comes out of them, so it wouldn't have any effect on my personal behavior either. And on the off chance there is some vital new info emerging from this charade, I'm sure I will hear it ten thousand times on Twitter.

If you want to be a political junkie and drown yourself in this shit, you do you. Leave me out of it.

[eightyonekilograms]

“hate capitalism and its perpetual use of buzzwords” oh man I have some bad news for you dude

[eightyonekilograms]

Since basically my entire life has been in a low-inflation environment, I thought I knew about all the various effects, but I didn’t realize how fucking stupid it makes people. Were the 70s like this??

[eightyonekilograms]

Standing up to the Blob and deciding to get out of Afghanistan was the one unambiguously really good, fully credit-worthy thing Trump and the GOP did during his entire presidency, and now they’re disavowing it completely to Own the Libs.