EAll

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Sometime in the past few years it dawned me that the 10ish year period in which jobs numbers simply dominated all economic coverage will be a discrete era where eventually you'll be able to talk with adults too young to remember it themselves. And it will be hard to fully capture the feel of it.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

She's had a lot of success laundering far right, crankish views as a sort of reasonable centrism for people brave and smart enough to challenge the establishment, and I'm a little worried she can replicate that success with a new, larger audience.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

The lowest inflation since the Great Depression occurred in the Great Recession (prices not increasing much or even decreasing is a symptom of things going very, very poorly). I do not personally recall this as a time of wide economic satisfaction. Though maybe I was in a fugue state.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I engaged this a little further and learned that: 1)Property rights are incompatible with political equality 2)Liberalism entails respect for property rights 3)MLK advocated for racial political equality. Therefore: 4) MLK was an opponent of liberalism. QED motherfuckers.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Specifically, he was criticizing a specific faction who had sympathy to black political equality, but didn't like boycotts, marches, sit-ins, etc. because they thought it unpopular and argued to wait it out for a better time. This does have modern equivalents, but that's not "liberalism."

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

"Moderate" is a relative term. If I think you should be killed, the view that you should just be in prison becomes the moderate stance. That doesn't mean MLK wrote his letter criticizing people who think you should be imprisoned instead of killed, because that's not the context of the letter.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

"You're morally free to and perhaps even obligated to break sufficiently illegitimate laws, (but probably should prepare yourself for the risks of doing so)" is a basic position compatible with liberal thinking found in esoteric liberal documents such as the Declaration of Independence.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Liberalism does not require an absolute respect for the rule of law and a key idea in liberal political theory is that the law can be illegitimate if it does not sufficiently respect individual rights or derive from a just process of determining it.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

To be clear, "MLK criticized liberalism because he criticized moderates and I think of liberals as moderate" is just a straight logical fallacy. "MLK implicitly criticized liberalism because I personally think private property rights are incompatible with political equality" is somehow even worse.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Suppose I think that true freedom - moral agency - is not possible unless everyone is compelled by the State to acknowledge God. Does this mean I get to argue that anyone who talks about freedom agrees with theocracy via transitive property, or are people allowed to have their own opinions?

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Is this your view - that property rights are incompatible with a free society - or MLK's view? Is this something MLK argues, or is it something you believe to be true and take as an implication of what MLK wanted? Do you see a difference?

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

That's why we sometimes distinguish between liberal in the larger sense of Western liberalism - small "l" liberalism - and liberal in a narrower sense referring to the developments within the views of self-described American liberals from around the turn of the 20th century.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

What he was attacking was not all that different from what people sympathetic to civil equality for gay and lesbian citizens who nonetheless felt it was unwise to advocate for marriage equality thought. If you were to criticize this moderate stance, that wouldn't mean you are criticizing liberalism.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Property rights theory is important to the development of liberalism, plays a role in liberal thinking, and is something that distinguishes it from genuinely different views. Liberal ideas about property was not what MLK was criticizing in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

They don't currently. The Republican party of small "l" liberals is currently dead, replaced by a illiberal, fascist-like movement mostly centered around Donald Trump and white supremacism. That said, support of liberal democracy isn't the only feature of liberalism, but is an important one.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

More importantly, whether you think of it as moderate or not has nothing to do with what MLK was talking about when he was referencing the moderates in the 1960's to talk about differing attitudes about methods for achieving civil rights.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Liberalism is a political point of view about individual liberty, equality before the law, legitimacy of the government deriving from consent of the governed, tolerance of pluralism, etc. How moderate it is or isn't depends on the context in which it is found.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I don't believe I am, and one of the key features of what makes someone a liberal is their support of liberal democracy.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I don't think this is right, incidentally, and I think if you got a peek inside of the brains of a lot of your more ideological liberals, there's probably an awful lot of "We're going to have to kill these bastards..." going on right now.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I think some of this sentiment that liberals can't be the one who won the good wars comes from people having a hard time reconciling their image of a liberal meekly going about their day with someone wanting to swing that terrible swift sword.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

It's not, and I suspect social media has poisoned your thinking on this point. Try to read it again without that interpretation explained to you in posts coloring your vision.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

The "white moderate" MLK is talking about there is not liberals. That is an equivocation between his meaning - white (religious) leaders sympathetic to civil equality, but wary of direct political action to achieve it due to feared unpopularity - and leftists who think liberals are "moderates."

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I just wrote a post taking a stab in the dark that you might be misinformed by the out of context reading of this that routinely goes viral on social media. That letter is not a criticism of liberalism or liberals.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

There's a decent chance the comment you are replying to is (mis)informed by the fact that MLK's criticisms of "the white moderate" in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail frequently go viral on social media in a way that pulls it out of context to suggest MLK hated the libs.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

We have lots of historical examples where political factions no longer respect the formal or informal rules of civil society, only for that to be pushed back. I'm not saying that it won't get even worse before it gets better here, but it's also not true that it's definitely chaos forever now.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

The most famous words uttered in the entire civil war is a brief speech rallying people to the cause of liberal ideals.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

The conditions that led to the Union army being in the hands of liberal political leaders was the result of building popular support for liberalism, and attempts to maintain popular support of their war effort frequently relied on appeal to liberal values.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Now now. Let's all be grateful that the superior economic engine of communist totalitarianism kept the Soviet Union well-equipped to fight the Nazi war machine.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

"Participatory democracy isn't likely to succeed in the face of authoritarian consolidation of institutional media keeping the GOP appetite for fascism strong" doesn't make it so something like, "so let's call for mass general strikes" a superior option. That's even more doomed to fail.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I think the situation is bleak, but fascist movements do rise and fall. People let go of their mania. That America cannot count on the might of, well, America to help it out is worrying, but giving up doesn't solve anything either, so you fight it until it's not possible to fight anymore.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Obviously? Leftist discourse on Bluesky has developed this insular quirk where "liberalism" gets associated with all the elements of left of center politics certain parts of left of center politics dislike to the point that the liberal factions in the civil war and WW 2 cannot be called liberals.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

You can 1:1 imagine Trump instead of FDR as President with this current Congress in the late 30's and I'd personally be surprised if the US wasn't overtly part of the Axis powers in that hypothetical scenario. Best case for the allies would be American neutrality.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

And if she does lose, that's going to produce a lot of dubious claims about how specific candidate choices matter while ignoring this basic dynamic. Given how the online left works, that's going to probably involve a lot of smug insistence that it's all about economic populism.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Collins should be in trouble assuming a reasonably fair election environment simply because the mid-term cycle should favor Democrats and it's a swing state. I wouldn't go and bet your life savings on her loss, but it wouldn't be surprising.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Did it? Because in this case, I think the campaigns picked up on already preexisting conversation. Not every idea campaigns try to amplify is developed in a board room by them.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

And why does Harris get tarred with the idea that she slept her way to the top, but not Elizabeth Warren? How is it that people thought this was true of her specifically if gossip chains grounded in some facts some people were persuaded by along the way play no role?

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

If people just develop political beliefs ex nihilo and post-hoc rationalize them with policy preferences and ideology in all cases, why do you think that people change their mind about things like tariff policy? I think they take cues from people they see as thought leaders. You think?

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Where'd that meme on FB come from? The idea that Harris slept her way to the top is grounded in her relationship with Willie Brown and game of telephoned with a dose of sexism from there. These things don't just pop into existence uncaused.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

The reason people can come across as having sophisticated political preferences while not being able to pass a middle school level knowledge test about how government works is that people are really effective at reading the room. It helps to focus on who has disproportionate influence over the room.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

There were a lot of people who had a great deal of worry that Clinton was profoundly corrupt person wrapped up in ambition and scandal while not being able to articulate why that is so. They got those views, in part, from people who believed this for more specific reasons.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

"Harris slept her way to the top" comes from people who actually have wrong, but quite detailed opinions about her biography that eventually filter down to the level of one-liner gossip. My point is that influencing *those* people - the elites if you will - pays dividends down road.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

This does *not* mean they are getting all the detail. Again, someone who spends hours a week talking about Von Mises axiomatic reasoning isn't necessarily convincing their uncle of an idiotic version of property rights theory. But their general political attitudes and values might rub off.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

You seem to think I'm saying that people hear policy speeches then convince other people of detailed policy views. I am not, in fact, saying that. I am saying that people engage in political discourse and develop impressions from that which less involved people in their networks then pick up on.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I think even beliefs like "Walz is a pussy" are disproportionately influenced by ideologues who have detailed opinions of masculinity they develop in political dialogue with others and this trickles down to other people through their social connections.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Even if we *wanted* to talk about working class in this Marxist sense because we got a humanities degree and developed a belief along the way that choosing the right words is like casting a spell, it doesn't change that's not at all what people are talking about when *they* use the term.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

More to the point here, when people talk about someone as a champion of the working class because they have a mustache, wear flannel, and talk about union organizing a lot, "working class" isn't describing doctors and upper management at large companies. That's not what's they're getting at.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

JD Vance might not be going around convincing people of a version of Nazi-like thinking that developed in Less Wrong forums and Claremont group chats, but he says stuff that other people get the gist of and absorb into their values and identity that trace their roots back to that.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

That doesn't mean they gather people around a kitchen table and try to convince them of exactly what they think. It's that their beliefs get absorbed by others in a simplified form. Someone who is really into Von Mises paleolibertarianism makes people around them more skeptical of taxes as unjust.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

No, only a small group of people are animated by detailed policy positioning and debates over political philosophy. But those people develop beliefs about how the world does and should work and they exert a great deal of influence in their social networks

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

There's a dark version of this happening every minute of every day on the far right where ideological white nationalists are convincing each other of terrible things, then they're going out and spreading the gospel of what they learned through little conversations and memes.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

What I'd add here is that one of the ways democratic politics works is that that the kind of people this person is referring to as "wonks" get convinced of ideas, then they go around convincing less attuned people in their social environment of what they believe. It's good to reach them.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

The odd thing here is you're trying to explain the correct use of these terms even though your use is the more unusual, niche' one. Happily, I at least mostly know what you mean, but you are unwilling to return the favor to the larger world of language users.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Yes, the "working class" is tightly associated with blue collar work, though that can include some non working class positions - such as in the skilled trades - and the working class is a larger category involving some non blue collar jobs such as low level, non-professional office positions.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

When someone fetishizes the working class as the salt of the earth authentic representation of true America, they very rarely mean your fortune 500 company's director of people and culture. They're talking about stereotypes of relatively low-paying labor with minimal training requirements.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

This is the way it is used in common parlance and how relevant fields would use it. This is a distinct meaning from how you might use it in a Marxist book club where you plan out the revolution, but the neat thing here is you can understand what someone means while not liking their word choice.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

He's using it in the normal sense of a class of labor in relatively low-paying jobs often involving manual or repetitive labor and minimal professionalization, not in the sense of owners of capital vs. everyone else who works that you likely think it means.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

If your response is, "Well, that's what you think as a wonky wonk," I don't think that matters. Abraham Lincoln speeches read as fairly intellectual, "wonkish" affairs. I don't take that as a reason to dislike him as a politician. My job isn't to guess what might play to rubes and support that.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Yes. The average voter also isn't making their mind up about who to vote for 3 years out from an election and tends to surf media waves right before the elections are held, so I'm not sure that matters much. I like Pritzker because he correctly articulates problems and realistically responds.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

You're getting fundamental change right now. It's not going great. You're going to after Hitler, you're turn yourself into oblivion.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

To who? I think Newsom looks like an opportunistic slimeball who is the evil President in a made-for-TV movie. I'm not sure how that plays with others. My evaluation of Pritzker isn't based on how I think how he plays with a voter simulation I've conjured in my imagination. I just like him.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I was just noting that Pritzker at the moment hasn't had a meaningful bounce in his national popularity whereas Newsom has to draw a contrast. I don't think this is a set in stone pattern for 2028 and even hinted at that when I suggested this might just be a function of cable news coverage.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I'm fairly skeptical of the prospect of meaningfully free and fair elections in 2028, but you have to spin a couple of plates here as one condition to having them work is still being prepared should they happen.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Hard to know. Newsom is the obvious contrast here where his polling explosively shot up. I think the low-key lesson here is favorable airtime on MSNBC is still a major determinant of Democratic opinion polling.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I like what Pritzker is saying and doing, and have had him as my top 2028 candidate as long as I've been forced to think about such a thing. I've been paying attention to his polls because of this, and none of this so far is translating into national popularity. We'll see.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

But we're not talking about regions here, are we? We're talking about your unwillingness to blame specific people for their fascist beliefs after someone rightly inferred that your "fascism is caused by material precarity" thesis implies they are to blame for fascism.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

No. I think we overbuild infrastructure to rural communities, unfairly subsidized with taxes, creating malincentives for where to live leading to unnecessary sprawl and its attendant environmental harms, but I don't think rural citizens should lose hospital access due to how their region voted.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I think this tension likely just arises from you being married to the idea that fascism must derive from material want, but also wanting to believe the have-nots are the protagonists in your moral cosmology, but the result is you treating the poor like blameless children.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

You seem to recoil at the idea they should be hold morally responsible for their behavior - treating them as your noble savages - but it's not clear why given that you think this while arguing they are specifically the problem.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

You are explicitly arguing that the working class poor / are being distracted by the wealthy to blame vulnerable minorities as scapegoats and endorse fascism. If you don't blame them for being fooled, why do you hold them blameless for the choices you specifically attribute to them?

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

And if that's what you think, that the poor can be fooled by propaganda from the rich, you're most of the way to just agreeing that propaganda can make people fascists. It's not a big step to let go of the, "But only if your standard of living is beneath a historically very high bar..." part.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I think the implication here is that they are too intellectually deficient to be held individually responsible for their being "distracted" by rich paymasters into blaming vulnerable minorities for their economic suffering. Seems, idk, wildly offensive.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Ignoring for a moment that it's not really the poor who are the primary political constituency of alt-right/fascists in the US, suppose that is the poor who are going in for the scapegoating. Do they not bear any responsibility for their beliefs? Why would they be blameless?

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Making people richer can help them while not preventing them from developing fascist ideas. Do you think the only benefit to improved standard of living is fascism-prevention?

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I know the thought is, "But if you adopt *my* socialist/communist views, then fascism can truly be averted. It's the only way." But 1) those views don't actually produce overflowing material prosperity either and 2) are not a reliable output of democratic participation. It's still anti-democratic.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

If all possible realistic versions of distributed material abundance leave a democracy vulnerable to and on the inevitable path to fascism, then all you're saying is that democracy is a glide-path to fascism. Congrats, you're just arguing against democracy - the prelude to fascism.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Ever since the existence of chatrooms, there have been bubbles of conversation highly critical of Rawls you can just stumble into where you'd think they'd have a problem with contractarianism and whathaveyou, but it turns out they struggle to think hypothetically. I know of no other Internet.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I think you should re-read what I wrote again. My point *wasn't* that no one should feel the need to censor themselves in any social situation.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

If you *like* that sort of interaction, I'm all for forums existing that allow you do that to your heart's content. You should be free to choose it. It's just that in order to have large forums with healthy engagement, you need to stamp that out so it only exists at a low hum.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I don't disagree with this. I think a health forum culture involves disagreement and some tolerance for dialogue people feel hurt by or are offended by. I also think there is sufficiently hostile interactions, particularly around implied or explicit threats, that require direct censorship.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Yeah. I don't think those work quite as well as centralized moderation, which leaves us with the evergreen problem of needing good people with sound judgment in charge of your forum's moderation. There is a point of choice here, but that choice is in which forum cultures you participate in.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

My point wasn't that no one should ever feel the need to censor themselves in any social situation. That's an odd read of what I was saying. There are differences between good decorum and bad decorum and we can make judgments about which is which.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Why should I leave when you're the one who sucks?

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I've been a forum mod before. I prefer a light touch, but even I would think there comes a point of where targeted, trollish harassment and threats requires you to kill posts and suspend/ban people. You kill your forum if you let them just dominate interactions.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Individual blocks doesn't solve the problem of other people censoring themselves to avoid having abuse lobbed at them. It gives the abusers a heckler's veto forum-wide discussion, and some people just solve this by not participating at all.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

That Twitter is dominated by neo-Nazi content is a real disadvantage because neo-Nazis are quite unpleasant to a lot of people. Sadly for planet Earth, that alone isn't enough to make all those people jump ship to competitor products, so it'd be nice to sweeten the pot over here.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Twitter's main advantage comes in the form of a powerful network effect, not its relative absence of abuse. One of the ways you compete against its advantages - such as its vastly superior integration into society - is by offering a compelling environment to dialogue in.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Wow, so you're suggesting that someone needs to be a billionaire to be right? Presume much?

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I don't understand your overread and offer condescending sarcasm default mode of response. I did not at any point suggest no other factors are relevant.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

There's an idea that if people get a sufficient wealth and freedom, they'll just opt not to have that many children to avoid the burden and/or opportunity cost of having children. But once you hit the "money is no object" range of wealth, birth rates go back up, so that's probably not right.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I'm not assuming that. I'm saying that's how it currently works. Whether you want people to build extended family networks or free child-care co-ops has nothing to do with whether that's happening.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Things turn around the mid 6 figures in the US. And whether we want to or not, we simply can't do that. And part of the secret sauce of that might be that you can hire people to help around the house, which requires a pyramid of labor no matter how well off people are.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I've said this before, but I'd be shocked if at least some of them weren't domestic abusers in their personal lives. Solving this without a moderating system that allows you to rack up offenses and eventually suspensions/bannings is difficult. It distorts the social environment.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I didn't even mean Stancil specifically, who is his own Internet phenomenon. I just mean there's prolific posters who I see all the time show up in mentions of other accounts drawing in a dozen+ or so hateful replies from their followers as serial offenders. They just like being abusive.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

The problem is that they have friendly interactions with some of the bigger accounts that have popular followings with 1 or 2 degrees of separation, so a solution like "simply isolate them" doesn't work.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

I suspect Stancil is right that it's really just a a relatively small number of ring-leader accounts generating a lot of the harassment style interactions where mobs form. I definitely have seen a couple dozen accounts show up in all sorts of contexts pulling in abusive interactions.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Sometimes the mobs are just wrong about what they think and sometimes when they're not, the experience of being collectively mobbed is still way of proportion to the offense. Looking around to see what everyone else is attacking and joining in is a heuristic that has some fail cases.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Often I agree that the wrong thing is, in fact, the wrong thing, but it's especially obvious that there's a lot of abuse junkies in the mix when the target isn't even wrong.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

But the old problem of vicious pile-ons for saying the wrong thing - usually from a leftwing point of view - is definitely present here.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Yeah, I think this is more about people who either have a large enough audience to generate a lot of replies, are reading a lot of content from the same, or get very unlucky and manage to become an lolcow of the moment.

EAll (@ealluia.bsky.social) reply parent

Check out the replies to this: bsky.app/profile/jame... You can generously block away the people responding here, of course, but it's hard to imagine this not having some sort of pull on what people tip-toe around in conversational choices.