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US Politics: flaking out and coming uncorked


DanteGabriel

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Just now, DanteGabriel said:

Wherein we find just how much world-threatening ignorance, bigotry, and petulance Republican Senators will stomach in order to get tax cuts and put a boot on women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people.

To that point:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/24/16534770/trump-corker-tax-cuts

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This, truly, is the modern Republican Party in one tweet. Establishment conservatives agree with virtually everything Corker is saying, but the devil’s bargain they’ve made is that debasing themselves to support Trump will be worth it if they can reform the tax code and unwind Obamacare. But if they support Trump and fail to pass their agenda — as has been the case thus far — then they will have mortgaged their souls for nothing, and that will truly be unforgivable.

[...]

It’s worth noting that this is not just the way Republicans are treating their support for Trump — it’s the way they’re treating their support for all the extremist candidates their party is embracing. Alabama’s Roy Moore, for instance, believes homosexuality should be illegal, Muslims shouldn’t be permitted to serve in Congress, Sharia law is being imposedin unnamed American communities, and federal statutes should be ignored or supersededwhen they conflict with his interpretation of the Bible. He is as unfit to serve in federal office as any candidate in memory, and Washington’s Republicans know it — they mounted an all-out, albeit unsuccessful, campaign to defeat him in the primary.

So why endorse him now? “He’s going to be for tax reform, I think,” Ohio Sen. Rob Portman told Politico.

I'm not sure of the long-term calculus here -- 

1) Debase yourself and sell your soul to the corrupt, dishonest (moreso), and insane side of the right 

2) Cut taxes

3) Profit!

I don't see how the profit is long term and lasting after 1.

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4 minutes ago, Week said:

I'm not sure of the long-term calculus here -- 

1) Debase yourself and sell your soul to the corrupt, dishonest (moreso), and insane side of the right 

2) Cut taxes

3) Profit!

I don't see how the profit is long term and lasting after 1.

Are you saying that Underpants Gnomes are Republicans?

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4 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Are you saying that Underpants Gnomes are Republicans?

The Underpants Gnomes are at least honest that they don't know the central part of their plan.

eta- Frankly, I was using the metaphor in my head and rewrote the post in such a way that it doesn't entirely make sense. :P

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4 hours ago, Ormond said:

Being a personality psychologist who profoundly believes in individual differences, I think it's valuable to talk about different kinds of people attracted to all sorts of ideologies.

I think you are wrong, though, to assume that those who presently have the most extreme positions on the alt-right are those whose minds will be hardest to change. There are many examples in history of people who had very extreme hateful beliefs who reformed. And those alt-right members who have "milder" beliefs are probably better able to rationalize them by pointing to the crazies and saying "well, I'm not as unreasonable or completely prejudiced as they are."  One needs to use different arguments with people in the different sub-groups, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to change anyone's mind if the appropriate circumstances exist. 

I feel like it would be common sense that, on average, it’s harder to change the minds of people with stronger ideological beliefs, but I’m willing to defer to you here. And I wasn’t trying to imply that it’s totally impossible, just more difficult.  

As to the bolded, that’s why I thought it was important to establish subgroups. A lot of my background is in political messaging and it is common practice to do this so that you can craft what you think will be the most effective message.

 

3 hours ago, mormont said:

As Ormond points out, it's wrong to assume that you can do that by differentiating ill-defined sub-groups within the larger mass. Such sub-groups aren't mutually exclusive in membership - people shift from one to the other over time and may have characteristics drawn from more than one: and not all members of a particular sub-group would anyway be vulnerable to the same types or degrees of persuasion. People are all individuals.

 

I’m well aware of that. That’s why I tried to structure it the way I did. I attempted to make it look like a hierarchy that one progresses through on their way to becoming a Nazi (the trolls were hard to fit in it because they’re different).  Perhaps I failed to communicate that. And while you’re correct that a crafted message targeting members of subgroups wouldn’t be effective on every member, it’s still a lot better than a message geared towards all the sub groups.

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Besides, as noted, most of these sub-groups existed in the actual Nazi party, so the attempt to create a distinction is pointless. It only serves the idea that there are 'real' Nazis and others who aren't morally as bad - even though those people are at the very least enabling and supporting the worst elements. That just provides moral cover for bigotry while achieving little or nothing that is constructive in countering it.

I’m trying to better understand them, not absolve them of blame. One could argue that the ones who weren’t true believers, but enabled the monsters any way are every bit as bad as them, if not worse.

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And it fails to recognise the power of outright naming an ideology for what it is, in countering that ideology. That is a tactic that's more likely to work in shrinking and stifling this repellent movement than acquiescing to their shitty rebrand is.

Let's not do their work for them. Nazis by any other name are still Nazis.

Here’s the thing, my fear is that by lumping people who aren’t Nazis together with the actual Nazis, you might actually push them closer to them. I worked in a couple of psychology labs in college, and one of them was specifically studying how positive and negative feedback affects people depending on if they’re in the in group or if they are an outsider, and in every condition we tested with one exception we found that negative feedback from an outsider about your in group drives you closer to said in group. Now to be clear we weren’t studying it in regards to political ideologies, but there is enough overlap to lead me to believe that it could work similarly.

3 hours ago, Paladin of Ice said:

Fair enough. It's always best to know the enemy. But honestly, the effort should be made to stop the process before they ever join. Unfortunately half the time beforehand they're just angry, possibly poor kids with no direction until some shithead gets them turned onto white supremacy. After you get to that point, they either have to wake up early and drop out of the movement themselves, or it becomes like getting someone out of a cult.

I agree, and that’s why I tried to create a spectrum of those on the alt-right and those that might possibly join. I believe that better enables you to help someone change courses before it’s too late. It will give you an idea of where they are in the process and better tools to help them see that they’re beginning to head down a dark path that’s difficult to turn back from.

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2 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

I love how the people that scream the most about Sharia law are the same people who scream the loudest when someone wants to move a ten commandments statue out of a courthouse.

See, it's fine if we impose religious rule because we know that it is good and right and moral because it comes from our holy book.

It's wrong if they impose religious rule because it's wrong and immoral because it's from their holy book. Obviously their religious rule would be wrong, it's not from our book.

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21 minutes ago, Paladin of Ice said:

See, it's fine if we impose religious rule because we know that it is good and right and moral because it comes from our holy book.

It's wrong if they impose religious rule because it's wrong and immoral because it's from their holy book. Obviously their religious rule would be wrong, it's not from our book.

And forget the matter that there hasn't been a single case that they could refer to insofar as Sharia Law being observed in the States. It's pure fantasy.

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16 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

A forget the matter that there hasn't been a single case that they could refer to insofar as Sharia Law being observed in the States. It's pure fantasy.

Same with voter fraud. Another fantasy problem where the "solution" is making life more difficult for the poor and PoC.

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26 minutes ago, Paladin of Ice said:

See, it's fine if we impose religious rule because we know that it is good and right and moral because it comes from our holy book.

It's wrong if they impose religious rule because it's wrong and immoral because it's from their holy book. Obviously their religious rule would be wrong, it's not from our book.

A lot of it is from the same book though!

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23 hours ago, dmc515 said:

I agree that the center's last-best hope to keep power under such a scenario is for the "center" right and left to unite into one party, but my sarcastic quotation marks belie such a possibility.  Fact is, while I may love the Tuesday Group or Murkowski and Collins right now, that doesn't change the fact I still couldn't stand most of them in the same party as myself - ok, maybe Collins, but definitely not Murkowski, and that's the point.  Further, most multiparty systems do indeed have one "mainstream" party each for left and right, so just assuming off of history here.

ETA:  Sorry, to actually answer your question - yes, I meant four different parties that could and would reach a 15% threshold.

I'm not sure I agree. At least not consistently. It's totals plausible to have periods where four parties all consistently meet the minimum threshold, but I think you'd normally have three parties that always fluctuated between 25 and 35 percent of the vote. And that would leave little room for a fourth party to hit the 15% mark. What would be more likely in my opinion is that one of the three major parties would split and you'd have a period with two larger parties and two or three smaller parties that might have a chance of meeting the threshold. But after a period of time (that might not be very long) those three parties would reform to produce a third competitive party and what remains from that would be too small to make it. 

And you will sit there, side by side, with Murkowski and like it! Besides, in this hypothetical, the modern Republicans would probably drop the facade and quit carrying the right's water. 

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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/on-safari-in-trumps-america/543288/

Yah, guys, you are a prime example of locking the barn door after the cows are gone. Listening tours and wonkery -- fail.

BTW, it's also useful to hear what people outside the country, which I am, have to say about what's going on with the USA.  Just normal people going about their own business here.  And how shocking it looks to a USian how functional this country appears in contrast with the US, including the damned economy.  Back home I pay for the fastest internet possible, and it is slow and glitchy.  This hotel room's internet, the free wifi spots all over the place -- are a hundred times faster and more dependable.

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1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

It's totals plausible to have periods where four parties all consistently meet the minimum threshold

Not sure what you're basing the rest of your analysis on, but my point was right now each party would clearly split in two with all four factions obtaining substantial ( >15%) support.  The record polarization is why this would be exactly the worst time to (somehow) switch to a multiparty system because the increased ideological distance between factions will continue to aggravate centrifugal and ultimately destabilizing trends.  This is why I mentioned Sartori - he emphasized it was not just number of parties but ideological distance that generates unstable multiparty systems (this is actually his main contribution building off Duverger).  And while I'm not sure ideology is the best way to describe the current differences (and I'm not sure it ever was), there is measurable increasing distance both between and within each party right now. 

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

And you will sit there, side by side, with Murkowski and like it! Besides, in this hypothetical, the modern Republicans would probably drop the facade and quit carrying the right's water. 

I most certainly will not!  The use of social/racial issues to generate support is certainly much more low-class than the GOP establishment's emphasis on taxes and curtailing entitlements, but the latter is frankly just (or at least nearly) as odious to me.

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