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Mona Pereth
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13 Nov 2020, 5:18 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
I really see a few reasons why people are voting for him who wouldn't do so simply because he's what the Republican party has.

The first - if you ever have a chance to watch Mark Blyth's 2016 'Global Trumpism' it's a really important one. He's of course said many very astute things since and had a book that came out this year called Angrynomics which is, like Global Trumpism, detailing how all of the west is going for populists. Second, and in somewhat a similar manner, Eric Weinstein pointed out something when talking to Sam Harris about this - it's that the middle and working class who are either losing jobs or getting significant wage cuts and can barely make ends meet or don't have $500 for an emergency have a sense that it's the Davos plutocrats who've been ripping them off. In line with what Mark Blyth was saying about populism it's sort of like this with 'He's not a centrist kleptocrat - he's something else, I'll vote for him' or even 'He's probably not anything great but he's at least likely to do damage to their priorities, an enemy of an enemy isn't always a friend but he's all I've got - I'll vote for him'.

Agreed. The problem here is the weakness of organized labor here in the U.S.A., resulting in a lack of sufficient attention to working class issues by Democratic Party politicians, resulting in an opening for right-wing populism.

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Another thing that's also probably helped Trump a lot is Robin DeAngelo and Ibram X Kendi as well as all of the black block and BLM activity people have been seeing, ie. even if they didn't like Trump they saw someone who was more likely to stand up against Maoism, and for police, and worried that Biden would be captured by the extreme elements of his own party.

Today's American leftists are not "Maoists" -- far from it. See Conservatives Are Comparing Racial Justice Protestors to Maoists by John Feffer, Foreign Policy In Focus, June 17, 2020: "Right-wing 'intellectuals' uncomfortable with the Black Lives Matter movement have latched onto a dubious historical analogy."

Be that as it may, I've encountered quite a few people who feel very threatened by what they call "political correctness." To me this seems a like very odd choice of one's main issue in deciding whom to vote for, because "political correctness" pertains mostly to behavior by private entities, not anything enforced by the government. Nevertheless, a few acquaintances of mine have said they voted for Trump on account of that issue, even though they were otherwise left-leaning.

Alas there are a lot of white folks who feel very threatened by BLM, about which I have mixed feelings. (I feel that their anger about police brutality and racism is certainly justified. On the other hand, "defund the police" is NOT the answer. The needed reforms will cost more money, not less.)

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
I tend to think that the people who take the QAnon stuff seriously are likely the same kind of people who would have been Steve Quayle or David Icke fans years ago.

It seems to me that QAnon would likely appeal to several categories of people, including:

1) The afore-mentioned Steve Quayle or David Icke fans.
2) Christian "spiritual warfare" types, including Catholic charismatics and ultra-traditionalists as well as Protestant/evangelical charismatics and Pentecostals.
3) The "Patriot" movement, including militias.
4) Miscellaneous people who feel disenfranchised for whatever reason, and who don't know enough about politics to have any idea how things really work.

It also wouldn't surprise me if some Trump supporters were to have made a specific effort to promote QAnon in battleground states for the specific purpose of increasing support for Trump in those states.

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
The other thing, ie. pedophilia and positions of power, it's probably really important to nail down the mechanics of what that is and why if it's a thing - whether it's people getting too depleted under stress, pedophiles hiding out in workaholism where success is a side effect of their coping mechanisms, etc..

Child sex abuse exists, alas. It should be no surprise that there are some child abusers in positions of power. What's unlikely is that they constitute a massive age-old world-ruling organized conspiratorial cult featuring ritual child abuse.

And there's probably no simple, single pattern to elite child sex abusers either. We shouldn't expect there to be a simple, single explanation for all instances of child sex abuse, just as there isn't a simple, single explanation for all murders, by elite people or by anyone else.

We can only hope that more of them get caught, as Jeffrey Epstein eventually got caught. But grand conspiracy ideology isn't helping anyone catch the real abusers.

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
The point is, anything that's dazzlingly lurid like that which we don't have good explanations for is a gold mine for Christian spiritual warfare podcasters and everyone who wants to talk about breakaway civilizations who are sowing chaos to come back with ready-made replacement institutions, computer chips, or whatever else. For what information warfare's getting to be it's not a good time for us to still be rolling in Victorian taboos on certain information, we have to be adults and understand these things to the best of our ability for what they actually are.

What's needed is better education in "social studies" including history.


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techstepgenr8tion
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13 Nov 2020, 8:02 am

Mona Pereth wrote:
Today's American leftists are not "Maoists" -- far from it. See Conservatives Are Comparing Racial Justice Protestors to Maoists by John Feffer, Foreign Policy In Focus, June 17, 2020: "Right-wing 'intellectuals' uncomfortable with the Black Lives Matter movement have latched onto a dubious historical analogy."

I think what scares both conservatives and liberals is that there's a head of steam in the movement which is guiding it in authoritarian and anti-liberal directions. It's less about a known intent (there likely is no one singular drive) but the tools that are being used which generally target nuance and use various forms of social extortion. I'd be inclined to say that rather than calling it deliberately Maoist it looks like the organic forces that are bringing it to the forefront and how they're manifesting, mostly in the way of evolutionary game theory, looks similar and it might not be entirely crazy to be concerned that the means being used will yield similar threats. I don't know what your level of familiarity with Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian are but they're people who are left of center, among seemingly many, who have been voicing those concerns and if anything it seems to be a core concern for liberals and the conservatives like Douglas Murray who hold John Stuart Mill liberal ideas as central to functioning democracy.

I'm guessing most of your friends who ended up being on the left and still voting for Trump are people who are deeply concerned about inequality in the country and solving race poverty issues but are much more concerned about the dangers of the means being used achieving pyrrhic victories or worse. That's where a lot of people I think are. James Lindsay actually did come out as having voted for Trump due to his research and concern over that specific issue.


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13 Nov 2020, 9:25 am

So is it just a conspiracy theory or some sort of cult?



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13 Nov 2020, 10:00 am

The_Face_of_Boo wrote:
So is it just a conspiracy theory or some sort of cult?

Cults usually provide something like a place to live, leadership, codes of conduct which means instant social bridges to people within that cult - just that they do with this with the price usually of telling you to cut all contact with the outside world. I don't think QAnon does any of that except offering the echo chamber and conformity part of that. It sounds like an example of the kinds of OCEAN (five factor) pileups that the internet is good for as people self-select and self-sort.


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13 Nov 2020, 11:51 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Mona Pereth wrote:
Today's American leftists are not "Maoists" -- far from it. See Conservatives Are Comparing Racial Justice Protestors to Maoists by John Feffer, Foreign Policy In Focus, June 17, 2020: "Right-wing 'intellectuals' uncomfortable with the Black Lives Matter movement have latched onto a dubious historical analogy."

I think what scares both conservatives and liberals is that there's a head of steam in the movement which is guiding it in authoritarian and anti-liberal directions.

What is "authoritarian" or "anti-liberal" about BLM?

The complaints I've seen about leftists being "authoritarian" or "anti-liberal" have pertained not to BLM per se, but to the decades-old quarrel over so-called "political correctness" -- essentially a conflict over changing etiquette norms, with young elite college students (and some other people too) being too impatient to impose their new norms du jour. This longstanding conflict has been amplified during the past 10 years or so via Twitter and other mass social media, whose structure is intrinsically conducive to mob mentality.

What I don't understand is why anyone thought the solution to this conflict was to elect a President with no sense of etiquette at all, and who was obviously unfit for the job.


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13 Nov 2020, 2:34 pm

Mona Pereth wrote:
What is "authoritarian" or "anti-liberal" about BLM?

The complaints I've seen about leftists being "authoritarian" or "anti-liberal" have pertained not to BLM per se, but to the decades-old quarrel over so-called "political correctness" -- essentially a conflict over changing etiquette norms, with young elite college students (and some other people too) being too impatient to impose their new norms du jour. This longstanding conflict has been amplified during the past 10 years or so via Twitter and other mass social media, whose structure is intrinsically conducive to mob mentality.

I can't bring all of the specifics to mind at the moment (can dig into it further if needed), antisemitism was one that I do remember having come up. When you get critical race theory involved the set of tools itself is the problem. Liberalism in the old classical Enlightenment sense is about finding the best tools to solve problems, ie. scientific method approach. The problem with critical race theory is the two words 'race' is sandwiched between, ie. it's a branch of critical theory. Not all postmodernism is equal and the right ontological applications yield useful insights, it's the pop or pragmatic variants of it that are a problem because it ends up getting taken that the world only amounts to power structure and dominance hierarchies, it's where 'by any means necessary' becomes appropriate because claims of the vital necessity of certain structures to a nation's health (all involved of any race) doesn't land. The problem in this case is that the tools are pure power struggle, they're decompositional, and from that it's the idea of destroying the current system and rebuilding it from the ground up. With several of the key thinkers in critical race theory racism is implicit in every interaction whatsoever, that it's not present isn't a possibility just that might be turned down to near zero. Ibram X Kendi would argue that legislation and activity that result in inequality are inherently racist, I can agree that the outcomes could be seen that way however there are very different ways of resolving that - stakeholder impact studies on big decisions is the more classic and scientific approach, building a fourth wing of the government to deal with racial equality where that bureaucracy like any other is looking after it's own longevity is another.

The problem of an organized hunt for racism, especially when it's not far more structural and manifesting in lack of current wealth from past injustices rather than overt racism on a social level, you get to a place where the structures charged with paying attention to racism become like any other institution which was built on a particular struggle whose core mission was resolved as far as diminishing returns can readily yield. Particularly if the mission statement is abstract enough this lends itself to such bureaucracies or institutions being corrupted by their own survival needs. Racism to whatever degree it's in the system needs to go and we do need to do what we can to help minority entrepeneurs and leadership cultivation as well as better education and STEM. What we don't want to do is have the search for racism turn to dredging, the damage exceeds the returns.

The other part, really my least favorite, is how racial tensions feed a for-profit media. What's also horrific is the consideration of who the media would make more money from - Trump or Clinton. Yes they hated him, he was also an orange cash cow.

Mona Pereth wrote:
What I don't understand is why anyone thought the solution to this conflict was to elect a President with no sense of etiquette at all, and who was obviously unfit for the job.

To solve a completely different set of problems, and it seems like the critical race theory issue only hit with enough velocity for people to pay much attention to it this summer with George Floyd and the aftermath.


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13 Nov 2020, 2:53 pm

One of the additional challenges with US politics right now, and this is going back to the Tristan Harris 'The Social Dilemma' problem, is just how much we're catered to in the direction of our own predilections. This is where it gets real easy to think pretty much everyone outside a given bubble is either horribly misinformed, cynical, or a lunatic. There are some cases like David Icke subscribers or QAnon where it seems obvious fairly quick, others where the whole underlying story of what's going wrong in the country and the details people are amplifying are fundamentally correct but it's the way they're getting modulated that's the problem - ie. it's a bit like the media bubbles are like trying to evaluate the landscape through a funhouse filter. It's a bit like everyone's trying to do sensemaking on LSD without any trip experience.


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13 Nov 2020, 3:03 pm

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/qanon-supporting-rep-elect-marjorie-greene-calls-on-new-congress-members-to-not-wear-oppressive-masks/ar-BB1aZKC2?ocid=msedgntp

^^ Need I say more.


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13 Nov 2020, 3:07 pm

They are starting to gather.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatod ... 6265591002


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13 Nov 2020, 4:49 pm

Qanon, blood libel, and the like are just indicative of the antisemitic nature of most conspiracy theories--especially the grand conspiracy theories. Any time someone talks about an international or marxist conspiracy, they're consciously or unconsciously blaming the Jews for their glorious fatherland's problems.

As for BLM and left protesters being Marxists or maoists--this is straight bs. Those fighting for racial justice in America have always been accused of hating america at best or being funded by foreign governments. People absolutely accused MLK of being funded by or manipulated by the USSR. This is nothing new.
Most BLM protesters I would argue aren't even leftists--let alone Marxists. You do not even need to be on the left to protest police brutality. You do not need to be on the left to protest racial inequality. BLM is only a partisan issue because the dixiecrats have spent the last half century poisoning one party until it almost completely alienated black voters and became the party of choice for white supremacists. Police impunity is beloved by white supremacists, and the GOP can't afford to alienate such a loyal voting bloc.


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13 Nov 2020, 5:49 pm

roronoa79 wrote:
Those fighting for racial justice in America have always been accused of hating america at best or being funded by foreign governments. People absolutely accused MLK of being funded by or manipulated by the USSR. This is nothing new.

That's part of why it's important to separate efforts for achieving equality from CRT.


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13 Nov 2020, 6:39 pm

roronoa79 wrote:
Qanon, blood libel, and the like are just indicative of the antisemitic nature of most conspiracy theories--especially the grand conspiracy theories. Any time someone talks about an international or marxist conspiracy, they're consciously or unconsciously blaming the Jews for their glorious fatherland's problems.

As for BLM and left protesters being Marxists or maoists--this is straight bs. Those fighting for racial justice in America have always been accused of hating america at best or being funded by foreign governments. People absolutely accused MLK of being funded by or manipulated by the USSR. This is nothing new.
Most BLM protesters I would argue aren't even leftists--let alone Marxists. You do not even need to be on the left to protest police brutality. You do not need to be on the left to protest racial inequality. BLM is only a partisan issue because the dixiecrats have spent the last half century poisoning one party until it almost completely alienated black voters and became the party of choice for white supremacists. Police impunity is beloved by white supremacists, and the GOP can't afford to alienate such a loyal voting bloc.

BLM are not Marxist in the sense that their main priority is not class warfare but identity politics.
Is Black Lives Matter Marxist? No and Ye
Quote:
So what is Black Lives Matter really about?

Many conservatives insist Black Lives Matter is a Marxist, anti-police, radical organization that wants to tear down America. Meanwhile, most liberals simply view Black Lives Matter as a heroic movement and powerful slogan signaling support for racial justice and opposition to police brutality.

Both are right. There is Black Lives Matter™️, and there is “black lives matter.”

No doubt, the organization itself was quite radical from the very beginning. Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors described herself and fellow co-founder Alicia Garza as “trained Marxists” in a recently resurfaced video from 2015.

“We actually do have an ideological frame[work],” Cullors said of her organization. “We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories.”

Meanwhile, the national organization’s official platform, published in 2015, contained a specific call to “[disrupt] the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”

At the local level, official Black Lives Matter chapters are essentially far-left front groups that use racial justice as a Trojan horse for leftist policy and ideology. For example, the official organization Black Lives Matter DC openly dedicates itself to “creating the conditions for Black Liberation through the abolition of systems and institutions of white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism.

Unsurprisingly, conservatives have bashed the radical group en masse.

These kinds of conservative criticisms of Black Lives Matter are widespread. And on one hand, they’re right: The official Black Lives Matter organization is Marxist, is anti-American in its values, and its views are rightfully alarming to anyone who believes in the Constitution, capitalism, and civil society as we know it. But in applying their reflexive response to all Black Lives Matter supporters, conservative critics are failing to see the forest for the trees.

A whopping 51 percent of the public tells pollsters they support “black lives matter.” Most of these people, I suspect, don’t even know that there is an official Black Lives Matter organization. And I’m sure hardly any of them could name Patrisse Cullors or Alicia Garza.

However, it’s by no means just conservatives who err in their approach to Black Lives Matter. For one, many on the Left fail to acknowledge at all the Marxist roots of the official Black Lives Matter organization, and thus, paint anyone who objects to the organization as racist, unthinkingly inveighing: “How could anyone not support black lives?” This kind of clever naming of a controversial movement, similar to “Antifa” supposedly standing for “anti-fascist,” makes it easy to baselessly paint critics as extreme and immoral. Yet this is a reductive oversimplification that serves only to divide.


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25 Nov 2020, 3:50 pm

Sidney Powell is a beacon of hope to sad Qanon supporters by Donie O'Sullivan, CNN, Tue November 24, 2020.

Quote:
...

The groupthink there: President Trump was not only going to win the election — he was going to win it in a landslide. Anything other than that result would be evidence of mass election fraud.

...

For three weeks they've been clinging to the idea that a miracle was coming, that Trump would emerge victorious and liberals would be left in tears.

...

This is where Sidney Powell has come in. Powell had, working with Trump's legal team, become a key face of the false allegations about election fraud. Trump's legal team distancing itself from her did little to change that in the minds of the QAnon believers who see her as their hero ....

...

... she claimed, with no evidence, a mass Democratic Party conspiracy to cheat in the election coupled with foreign interference by the ghost of Hugo Chavez, and mentions of China and George Soros thrown in for good measure.

Her diatribe was so lacking in evidence it was even called out by Fox News' Tucker Carlson. For some QAnon followers, however, it was a sermon — a set of talking points and conspiracy theories they could coalesce behind, an opportunity to keep the fantasy alive.


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25 Nov 2020, 3:55 pm

The_Face_of_Boo wrote:
So is it just a conspiracy theory or some sort of cult?


It was leveraged heavily in Trump's reelection bid. Republicans have no issues with lying about catching child predators, so much so that they're undoubtedly interfering in that very real process.

There is no q anon, anonymous was hunting real pedophiles before some GOP strategist decided to disseminate lies on 4chan for edgy, hateful, self-important morons to flock toward.


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25 Nov 2020, 6:00 pm

How it feels to me hearing these conservative conspiracy theories:

"Alright, my fellow true, American patriots, conservative politicians obviously can't win elections because *throws dart at board* George Soros is *throws dart at board* using laundered money from *throws dart at board* the Ukrainian government to *throws dart at board* fund election fraud so that Democrats can *throws dart at board* harvest the blood of christian children so they can *throws dart at board* grant AOC eternal youth."


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25 Nov 2020, 6:32 pm

Mona Pereth wrote:

Given the exploding numbers of QAnon believers these days, the above quote is terrifying. Given Trump's desperation to remain in office, I fear the possibility that he might, at some point in the not-too-distant future, decide to claim that the fervent beliefs of his most loyal and devoted supporters are in fact the truth, and try to use that as a basis for imprisoning all his political opponents.


Well, that didn't happen, as I predicted.
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