Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[The Minsky Moment]

First of all I . . . I believe all the same things I sued to believe in: importance of tradition, self-reliance, family, cautious of government over-reach.

Great slip

[The Minsky Moment]

The cartoon is not talking about congress though. At least, it isn't necessarily talking about Congress.

But Congress does not exist in a vacuum; it is a representative body that reflects the expressed preferences of the people.  When GOP reps in Congress are moving the right, it is fair to infer that is because GOP primary voters are selecting more right-wing candidates, and it is fair to infer from that fact that GOP primary voters are themselves veering sharply to the right.

But when we see that Dem reps are not moving significantly to the left, we cannot make those same inferences.  And while it is not impossible to explain a significant leftward drift among large numbers of Americans that has virtually no impact on the ideological position of representatives of the left party, something more than anecdote is required to make the case.

[Barrister]

The cartoon is not talking about congress though. At least, it isn't necessarily talking about Congress.

But Congress does not exist in a vacuum; it is a representative body that reflects the expressed preferences of the people.  When GOP reps in Congress are moving the right, it is fair to infer that is because GOP primary voters are selecting more right-wing candidates, and it is fair to infer from that fact that GOP primary voters are themselves veering sharply to the right.

But when we see that Dem reps are not moving significantly to the left, we cannot make those same inferences.  And while it is not impossible to explain a significant leftward drift among large numbers of Americans that has virtually no impact on the ideological position of representatives of the left party, something more than anecdote is required to make the case.

But if you're just looking at congress...

WHen Trump was in power he certainly had a difference in tone, but what was his only legislative achievement?  A tax cut that almost any republican president would have passed.  Beyond that they didn't have much of a legislative agenda to speak of.

Biden though?  Spent pretty much his entire first year trying to pass the massive Build Back Better bill, which was an enormous expansion of government.  It was far more left-wing than the centrist vision he campaigned on.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Here is the thing, I have functionally no respect for Berkut's position because Berkut isn't a pod person. I think basically everyone is in agreement that there's an annoying, whiny element to the far left, particularly amongst the "very online" crowd, university campuses etc that do annoying and censorious things. By the way, that element was always there, it was definitely there on campuses in the 90s, 80s, 70s and 60s.

To me, that isn't actually the meat of the issue. The meat is that the actual elected Democratic party hasn't moved toward being a far left party, it is basically still a centrist party. The areas where the Democratic party has actually moved left, are basically policy areas where the whole country has moved left. Basically the entire Dem party supports gay marriage now--as does a big majority of the country, as one example. The Democrats are not meaningfully more far left versus the "national baseline" than they were in 2005 or 1995.

The Republican party absolutely is.

Because Berkut is not a pod person, and Languish is not a Twitter battle, I would think this is a place where we could be honest--the whiny, stupid lefties who do whiny stupid things are being deliberately weaponized by far right propaganda, they are "Flooding the zone." They are making the Democrats pay the price for "having a far left", when that is something intrinsic to the nature of big tent parties, and largely unavoidable it also largely has nothing to do with the policies Democrats promote or how they impact people's lives.

Back when I was a Republican, it would be the equivalent of trying to hold me accountable for like, Pat Buchanan or David Duke. Those guys were extremists who happened to also run as Republicans, something I had no control over. Back in 2010, I would completely genuinely have said the same thing about the Tea Party--that they are nutty extremists, but don't represent the party. I left the party because the extreme became the party, I could no longer say "in the two party system we will both have a stupid fringe, that fringe isn't my whole party", the fringe did become the whole party in the GOP.

This simply did not happen with the left. The fringe of the right, that now controls the party, wants you to think so. Because Berkut isn't a pod person, I expect him to be smart enough to realize this, but instead he is repeating pod person lines straight out of Ben Shapiro's ass. It's unbecoming.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Given the vast disparity between the active harm the Republicans are causing, the fact their extremists have taken over, the fact they are passing tons of unconstitutional laws aimed at hurting minorities so that people can get on Fox News, the fact they are creating hate campaigns against transgender people (who whatever you think of them, they don't seem to live easy lives, and they are a vanishingly small part of the population--they don't deserve to be the victims of a national pogrom), the fact they are creating fascist institutions within their parties and attempting to implement them in actual State legislatures and governments as well--anyone among sane people who sits around repeating their propaganda, must be seen as part of the problem.

[The Minsky Moment]

WHen Trump was in power he certainly had a difference in tone, but what was his only legislative achievement?  A tax cut that almost any republican president would have passed.  Beyond that they didn't have much of a legislative agenda to speak of.

Biden though?  Spent pretty much his entire first year trying to pass the massive Build Back Better bill, which was an enormous expansion of government.  It was far more left-wing than the centrist vision he campaigned on.

I think this does more to show the extreme nature of the ideological divergence on the right.  Not only did the the 2016-18 GOP - will full control of all branches of government - do nothing of substance other than a tax cut, but post-2018, it has dispensed entirely with any legislative agenda at all, culminating in the 2020 non-platform and the renunciation of any legislative agenda for 2022.  What is left is commitment to rhetorical culture war as an instrument of mass mobilization for the sole purpose of seizing and exercising power and control over the instruments of the state, power for the sake of power alone.  It signals a rejection of the substance of representative democratic government at the same time as the party increasingly estranges itself from the forms.  Thus, the lack of a legislative agenda does not signal lack of ideological commitment or tactical flexibility but rather is a sign that the GOP is veering so far to the right that it is drifting outside the spectrum of constitutional government in the US. It is becoming in the Weimar era sense an anti-democratic party of the right.

As for the Democrats, I would disagree about the characterization of BBB as I don't think "leftiness" is determined by the top line price tag of an omnibus bill but what the bill does. The BBB's substantive components - additional funding for child care and pre school education, for solar credits, expanded health care benefits etc were mostly pretty mainstream stuff.  But that debate doesn't matter because BBB didn't pass and it didn't pass because it didn't get enough *Democrats* to vote for it.  So in evaluating where the Democrats actually *are* today in terms of legislative agenda, it is the infrastructure bill, an eptiome of sensible centrism.

[Berkut]

The cartoon is not talking about congress though. At least, it isn't necessarily talking about Congress.

But Congress does not exist in a vacuum; it is a representative body that reflects the expressed preferences of the people.  When GOP reps in Congress are moving the right, it is fair to infer that is because GOP primary voters are selecting more right-wing candidates, and it is fair to infer from that fact that GOP primary voters are themselves veering sharply to the right.

But when we see that Dem reps are not moving significantly to the left, we cannot make those same inferences.  And while it is not impossible to explain a significant leftward drift among large numbers of Americans that has virtually no impact on the ideological position of representatives of the left party, something more than anecdote is required to make the case.

I think it is pretty easy to explain that difference. Trivial even, and not even particularly controversial.

The GOP let itself be captured by the right wing crazies. The Tea Party and such. As such, the composition of the political representation of the "right" reflects to most extreme members of the right.

The left has avoided that, thank god. The left has NOT let the Democratic Party get captured by its most radical elements. This is a good thing, and something we should continue to resist, and part of that involves not kidding ourselves about their existence and desire to do to the Democrats what the Tea Party did to the GOP.

[Admiral Yi]

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2022/04/25/why-social-psychologist-jonathan-haidt-says-americas-institutions-are-in-trouble

I listened to this interview on NPR the other day, about squashing dissent and the resulting structural stupidity.

TLDNR: Democrats are not the stupid party, Republicans are the stupid party.  But important segments of Democrat aligned society--universities, media, Hollywood--are structurally stupid.  These institutions are important because they generate knowledge.

[DGuller]

Here is the thing, I have functionally no respect for Berkut's position because Berkut isn't a pod person. I think basically everyone is in agreement that there's an annoying, whiny element to the far left, particularly amongst the "very online" crowd, university campuses etc that do annoying and censorious things. By the way, that element was always there, it was definitely there on campuses in the 90s, 80s, 70s and 60s.

To me, that isn't actually the meat of the issue. The meat is that the actual elected Democratic party hasn't moved toward being a far left party, it is basically still a centrist party. The areas where the Democratic party has actually moved left, are basically policy areas where the whole country has moved left. Basically the entire Dem party supports gay marriage now--as does a big majority of the country, as one example. The Democrats are not meaningfully more far left versus the "national baseline" than they were in 2005 or 1995.

The Republican party absolutely is.

Because Berkut is not a pod person, and Languish is not a Twitter battle, I would think this is a place where we could be honest--the whiny, stupid lefties who do whiny stupid things are being deliberately weaponized by far right propaganda, they are "Flooding the zone." They are making the Democrats pay the price for "having a far left", when that is something intrinsic to the nature of big tent parties, and largely unavoidable it also largely has nothing to do with the policies Democrats promote or how they impact people's lives.

Back when I was a Republican, it would be the equivalent of trying to hold me accountable for like, Pat Buchanan or David Duke. Those guys were extremists who happened to also run as Republicans, something I had no control over. Back in 2010, I would completely genuinely have said the same thing about the Tea Party--that they are nutty extremists, but don't represent the party. I left the party because the extreme became the party, I could no longer say "in the two party system we will both have a stupid fringe, that fringe isn't my whole party", the fringe did become the whole party in the GOP.

This simply did not happen with the left. The fringe of the right, that now controls the party, wants you to think so. Because Berkut isn't a pod person, I expect him to be smart enough to realize this, but instead he is repeating pod person lines straight out of Ben Shapiro's ass. It's unbecoming.

The extreme elements of left are not represented in political bodies for the most part, but they're definitely influential.  Just a few days ago, NASCAR forced Denny Hamlin to undergo sensitivity training because he mocked Kyle Larson's bad move in the last race with a tweet (or retweet) of cartoon from a show that's currently running on Fox.  The problem?  The person depicted in the cartoon was Asian, and Kyle Larson is of partial Japanese ancestry as well, so that was deemed to be the insensitive part.

Let's think this through:  NASCAR, hardly a liberal college on the woke scale, feels enough pressure to do something incredibly stupid.  It's not because some congresspeople passed a law forcing it to do that, it's because the general situation is perceived as such that corporate suits feel like they have to abandon all reason and common sense when dealing with certain issues.  People don't just get subjected to power projected by the government, there are more sources of power in people's life.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Here is the thing, I have functionally no respect for Berkut's position because Berkut isn't a pod person. I think basically everyone is in agreement that there's an annoying, whiny element to the far left, particularly amongst the "very online" crowd, university campuses etc that do annoying and censorious things. By the way, that element was always there, it was definitely there on campuses in the 90s, 80s, 70s and 60s.

To me, that isn't actually the meat of the issue. The meat is that the actual elected Democratic party hasn't moved toward being a far left party, it is basically still a centrist party. The areas where the Democratic party has actually moved left, are basically policy areas where the whole country has moved left. Basically the entire Dem party supports gay marriage now--as does a big majority of the country, as one example. The Democrats are not meaningfully more far left versus the "national baseline" than they were in 2005 or 1995.

The Republican party absolutely is.

Because Berkut is not a pod person, and Languish is not a Twitter battle, I would think this is a place where we could be honest--the whiny, stupid lefties who do whiny stupid things are being deliberately weaponized by far right propaganda, they are "Flooding the zone." They are making the Democrats pay the price for "having a far left", when that is something intrinsic to the nature of big tent parties, and largely unavoidable it also largely has nothing to do with the policies Democrats promote or how they impact people's lives.

Back when I was a Republican, it would be the equivalent of trying to hold me accountable for like, Pat Buchanan or David Duke. Those guys were extremists who happened to also run as Republicans, something I had no control over. Back in 2010, I would completely genuinely have said the same thing about the Tea Party--that they are nutty extremists, but don't represent the party. I left the party because the extreme became the party, I could no longer say "in the two party system we will both have a stupid fringe, that fringe isn't my whole party", the fringe did become the whole party in the GOP.

This simply did not happen with the left. The fringe of the right, that now controls the party, wants you to think so. Because Berkut isn't a pod person, I expect him to be smart enough to realize this, but instead he is repeating pod person lines straight out of Ben Shapiro's ass. It's unbecoming.

The extreme elements of left are not represented in political bodies for the most part, but they're definitely influential.  Just a few days ago, NASCAR forced Denny Hamlin to undergo sensitivity training because he mocked Kyle Larson's bad move in the last race with a tweet (or retweet) of cartoon from a show that's currently running on Fox.  The problem?  The person depicted in the cartoon was Asian, and Kyle Larson is of partial Japanese ancestry as well, so that was deemed to be the insensitive part.

Let's think this through:  NASCAR, hardly a liberal college on the woke scale, feels enough pressure to do something incredibly stupid.  It's not because some congresspeople passed a law forcing it to do that, it's because the general situation is perceived as such that corporate suits feel like they have to abandon all reason and common sense when dealing with certain issues.  People don't just get subjected to power projected by the government, there are more sources of power in people's life.

Public figures whose wealth is based on their public persona have had to play Kabuki theater on all kinds of shit for my entire life. It's not new. Some of the topics are new, which maybe that's what scares this group of graying whites in this forum to death, dunno.

[Berkut]

Here is the thing, I have functionally no respect for Berkut's position because Berkut isn't a pod person. I think basically everyone is in agreement that there's an annoying, whiny element to the far left, particularly amongst the "very online" crowd, university campuses etc that do annoying and censorious things. By the way, that element was always there, it was definitely there on campuses in the 90s, 80s, 70s and 60s.

To me, that isn't actually the meat of the issue. The meat is that the actual elected Democratic party hasn't moved toward being a far left party, it is basically still a centrist party. The areas where the Democratic party has actually moved left, are basically policy areas where the whole country has moved left. Basically the entire Dem party supports gay marriage now--as does a big majority of the country, as one example. The Democrats are not meaningfully more far left versus the "national baseline" than they were in 2005 or 1995.

The Republican party absolutely is.

Because Berkut is not a pod person, and Languish is not a Twitter battle, I would think this is a place where we could be honest--the whiny, stupid lefties who do whiny stupid things are being deliberately weaponized by far right propaganda, they are "Flooding the zone." They are making the Democrats pay the price for "having a far left", when that is something intrinsic to the nature of big tent parties, and largely unavoidable it also largely has nothing to do with the policies Democrats promote or how they impact people's lives.

Back when I was a Republican, it would be the equivalent of trying to hold me accountable for like, Pat Buchanan or David Duke. Those guys were extremists who happened to also run as Republicans, something I had no control over. Back in 2010, I would completely genuinely have said the same thing about the Tea Party--that they are nutty extremists, but don't represent the party. I left the party because the extreme became the party, I could no longer say "in the two party system we will both have a stupid fringe, that fringe isn't my whole party", the fringe did become the whole party in the GOP.

This simply did not happen with the left. The fringe of the right, that now controls the party, wants you to think so. Because Berkut isn't a pod person, I expect him to be smart enough to realize this, but instead he is repeating pod person lines straight out of Ben Shapiro's ass. It's unbecoming.

Horsehit.  I do not at all repeat anything put of Shapiros ass, or Rogans for that matter.

The Dems have NOT been captured by the whiny ass leftys you are talking about, but that is not because they are not *trying* to capture it, it is because us assholes in the middle fight against it.

What I don't get is that you think you are some kind of hero for holding the exact same views that I do about " whiny element to the far left, particularly amongst the "very online" crowd, university campuses etc that do annoying and censorious things."

The only difference is that you think we should pretend they don't exist just because the right weaponizes them, and I think that just because the right weaponizes them, we shouldn't pretend they don't exist and they have an agenda of their own that is worth resisting.

I don't want the left to become dominated by the CC crowd of left wing culture warriors who think shouting down anyone who disagrees with them with accusations of bigotry is desirable, and I also didn't think the right wing dumbass Tea Party people would ever succeed in doing what they did to the GOP.

You and CC can call me names and insult me all you like, but that doesn't change anything. Disagreeing with the radical left doesn't make me a pawn of the radical right, even if it is a convenient way to ignore my arguments.

[OttoVonBismarck]

"Not part of the radical right", but "chooses to spend most of his time crying about the same things they cry about." Mhm.

[Berkut]

Given the vast disparity between the active harm the Republicans are causing, the fact their extremists have taken over, the fact they are passing tons of unconstitutional laws aimed at hurting minorities so that people can get on Fox News, the fact they are creating hate campaigns against transgender people (who whatever you think of them, they don't seem to live easy lives, and they are a vanishingly small part of the population--they don't deserve to be the victims of a national pogrom), the fact they are creating fascist institutions within their parties and attempting to implement them in actual State legislatures and governments as well--anyone among sane people who sits around repeating their propaganda, must be seen as part of the problem.

Given what the radical right has achieved in destroying the Republican Party, anyone who insists that we must ignore the radical left and their efforts to radicalize the Dems must be seen as part of the problem.

[DGuller]

Public figures whose wealth is based on their public persona have had to play Kabuki theater on all kinds of shit for my entire life. It's not new. Some of the topics are new, which maybe that's what scares this group of graying whites in this forum to death, dunno.

The normalization of "you think that because you're white" argument is another irritant that makes people perceive the influence of extreme left.  Not only is that a horrible argument when it comes to the power of convincing people, but it's also racist.

[Berkut]

"Not part of the radical right", but "chooses to spend most of his time crying about the same things they cry about." Mhm.

That is just a fucking lie. 

I do no at all spend most of my time, or most of my posting talking about the radical left at all. To the extent that I do spend time on it, it is because I think it is important - incredibly important - that the left stay the adult in the room, seeing as their isn't another option.

I post about a lot of shit, and I think anyone who has paid any attention to my views know exactly where I stand in regards to whether I am "part of the radical right"

So please feel free to go fuck yourself. What an asshole.