paulkienitz
paulkienitz's JournalWhat I have come to understand about the republican base is that it all runs on doublethink.
Most of them are perfectly capable of behaving kindly and decently. But inside their minds the dots are left unconnected, and they don't understand, or don't let themselves understand, that what they're voting for is in conflict with the way they like to treat people around them on a personal level. They think they're voting for freedom when they're supporting oppression, they see themselves as embodying kindness yet they enable cruelty, they identify themselves as upholders of the law while they break it, and they have no idea why anyone would ever think they were racist. The people in the Jan 6 insurrection seem to have mostly been wrapped up in some Walter Mitty heroic fantasy; many of them came to a horrible realization later on when they comprehended what they had actually done. (Being dragged into court and charged with a felony does help encourage this realization.) There's always a disconnect, always an element of self-delusion. You'd think that this would only affect a minority but it seems to be the norm among them. I'm guessing that for a lot of them this comes out of being raised with the kind of religion that demands to be believed in without evidence, so their minds are primed for believing lies in any area where the truth would create any conflict with their community. They end up supporting oppressive authoritarianism, yet if the day ever comes when they find themselves subject to authoritarian oppression, they'll be astonished and shocked and have no idea how it could have happened. They won't let themselves understand what they are doing.
on calling weirdos weird
(something I just posted on farcebook)
Branding today's GOP as "weird" may seem like simple schoolyard namecalling, but I think it highlights how the party has gone off the rails in the wake of Тяцмр. It used to be the party for the rich, the reactionary, and the religiose, and as such did genuinely represent a lot of the mainstream... now it's the party for klansmen, conmen, and crypto-bros, for AI evangelists and billionaire stans, for scared xenophobes and terrified gender-scolds, for racists and rapists, for monarchists and militiamen, and for those who just can't deal with the fact that there are women. In short, all of the most hopeless types of dysfunctional outcasts who you least want to spend any time in the company of. The Trumpified Republican party is sending all of these antisocial factions the message that their time has finally come, and if they want the world they've dreamed of, all they have to do to get it is overcome the power of normal people to vote.
There was a time when being weird was kinda cool. But now that society has learned some positives from weirdos of the past, the weirdos we've got left are getting uglier and uglier.
the strange thing is that it's getting worse
It seems to me that advances for feminism peaked a generation ago, and since then misogyny has been regaining mindshare in a way that can't be explained by the inheritance of traditional patriarchal values. Red pill creeps have been forced to invent a whole new ideology of their own to justify it, because they're growing a new base of misogyny instead of just preserving what came before. And it isn't just them -- other indicators are going backwards for how positively women are being seen and treated. For instance, the number of women in IT jobs peaked around 2000 and then started dropping. The anecdotal stories I hear from women about, for instance, poor medical care have gotten worse rather than better over this last generation.
Why do even the most authoritarian right wingers keep using the words "liberty" and "freedom"?
This is the paradox of the US right wing which baffles non-Americans trying to observe our country, plus Americans in the center and left trying to understand the weirdos who keep messing things up for us: the fact that the fascist wing in our country, and all their right-of-center allies, keep pronouncing how much they believe in liberty even as they destroy it. It cannot be made sense of in logical terms, or "libertarians" would be staunch foes of fascists instead of all too often being their friends and allies.
As far as I can see, the answers vary -- there are nuances that differ based on the particular flavor of right winger in question. For instance, those who belong to religious cults define freedom in a narrow specific way: freedom from government authority which competes with the religious authority they want to establish. Their internal rules might be downright totalitarian, but when the government interferes with their ability to impose such an authoritarian way of life, out comes the rhetoric of freedom.
Capitalist types, of course, define it as freedom to make money without the government causing problems when their profits come at a human cost. Small-government types focus on freedom from paying taxes. And racist types may define it as freedom to not associate with minorities, or freedom from being expected to meet some basic standard of decent civil behavior around people they don't like.
The common ground is that they all believe in "freedom for me and mine, but not for you and yours".
If nothing has changed, why is Ye back on? ...and how is Twatter even going to survive?
All the other Musk ventures, no matter how much you dislike his bullshitting and worker abuse, have an upside that some of us can be enthusiastic about. But not this one. This looks like the first Elon company where his involvement consists of 100% fuckup and 0% genius.
And it's gonna stick to him. Twitter is going to collapse at least partially, maybe entirely, and his responsibility for the collapse will be remembered for the rest of his days.
contrast Florida's behavior with California
California may well be getting a larger total of refugees and undocumented immigrants than Florida gets, yet we don't dump them anywhere. In fact, we get dumped into, because most states other than New York like to ship their homeless population here. They call it "greyhound therapy" in the social assistance trade. So we end up taking care of half of the entire country's homeless population, and on top of that most of the immigrants and refugees from the Pacific side. And nobody needs to be sent anywhere else.
Zero excuses for Florida and Texas.
So which is more fascist, Parler or Gab?
I took a peek. Parler had the likes of Newt Gingrich and Tulsi Gabbard prominently featured, and lots of right wing fantasy retellings of recent events... but Gab led off immediately with Trumpsky himself, and only took six more posts to feature someone saying the Jews are behind it all. And RT is on there, acting as bad as the domestic conspiracy theorists. Gab wins — if you're a Nazi, that's the place for you.
They don't want to be ruled by an autocrat, but they do want autocracy
if that's what it takes to retain privilege and patriarchy. They see the end of democracy as a better alternative than letting a long-term majority of minorities and progressives govern in a way that doesn't respect their historical advantages. They feel the loss of control in their own lives and instead of connecting it to lowering wages and wall street greed, they link it to better treatment of women and minorities, thinking that the wrong people are getting things that should be rightfully theirs.
But of course they never spell that out to themselves, because everything to do with privilege and prejudice in this country is constantly wrapped in doublethink and self-deception. They get constantly fooled and duped because they are constantly fooling and duping themselves with rationalizations to tell themselves they're not bigots.
Also, most of them are evangelical, and have spent their entire lives forcing themselves to believe myths and fairy tales instead of evidence. Anyone who can piggy-back on the type of religious authority to which they have granted power over their belief systems, can exploit it to get them to swallow political myths and fairy tales too. They don't need evidence, they only need the stories to reinforce their sense of cultural identity in the same way that religious fundamentalism does.
third parties might be fine if it weren't for the electoral college
The Electoral College punishes third parties and makes them irrelevant unless they can basically steal a majority right away from existing parties. I think that's what the Yangsters are hoping for.
If we had a different voting system, like a ranked choice popular vote, then third parties would fluorish because they could contribute their positives without the penalty of being spoilers for the consensus majority.
I would like to hear somebody articulate a centrist position which acknowledges why centrism has failed and everyone has gone to the edges, which is basically because of income inequality and wage suppression. People are not supporting moderate status quo policies because the status quo is not supporting them back. This is the core of why Hillary wasn't able to sail to easy victory with a centrist position.
there are two Frank Wilhoits, and the one you googled is probably not the one who coined the law
https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservatives-frank-wilhoit.htmlI do like the turns of phrase of Wilhoit #2, like "Conservatism has long been surrounded by an enormous shimmering halo of pseudo-philosophy." I've noticed this myself: that through their punditry and movement leaders, right-wingers like to throw up a big facade of ideals and ideology, when in fact they don't believe in any ideology at all. The entire Libertarian movement is a piece of that fake-ideological facade, and really, so is a lot of evangelical Christianity. It's all a smokescreen for the simple fact that they want themselves to be privileged and everyone else to be suppressed or subjugated.
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