The current flavour of politics is not pragmatic. It’s a luxury belief system.
The left wing excesses of the 2010s were luxury beliefs, the current thing is all just luxury beliefs too.
Basically, when people are economically comfortable and have no real problems, they’ll blow something out of proportion or just plain invent issues in order to feel something.
I have luxury beliefs of my own, many people do. We are free to hold them in North America. But there’s a cost, and that cost shouldn’t be surprising.
The defense of this regime's economic strategy (particularly the market crash and looming economic hardships) is doing political horseshoe theory and entering Maoist territory with surprising speed.
"You'll be rich because we're so good with the economy" has raced over to "We've been rotting in decadent lifestyles, true strong patriots will be happy to sacrifice for the glory of the fatherland."
"Tons of people globally are screwing screws into iphones. We are going to bring those jobs here."
"Inexpensive goods from overseas aren't actually prosperity. You don't want these things."
"You probably didn't earn your job in the government anyway."
True decadence is looking at a society that is broadly functioning and deciding "we need a fight" and blowing it up just for some aggressive notion of dominance.
It’s an apt description of a perennial feature of politics. People have a pain in the foot, so they shoot a hole in it and complain about having a bullet wound.
More like: they are no longer starving, and can now tend to the pain in their foot.
I've heard similar versions of this argument, usually something about modern poor people having it pretty good because they have microwave, while Carnegie didn't.
>I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. [0]
We're now complaining about people studying painting, poetry, etc.
That Adams quote is nice, and has a similar historical flavour to some of Milton Friedman’s arguments.
That said, choosing a field of study only has the risk of bankrupting yourself.
The excesses of the 21st century, whether that’s blowing up the supply chains that got you out of stagflation, or injecting Maoist rhetoric into academia, will have a much larger and more destructive blowback.
This is the fallacy of composition. A party is made up of diverse independent groups who are demanding different things. When one of those groups gets "comfortable", it allows other groups to become (relatively) louder and steer the party toward their demands.
It's not all the same person, getting comfortable and making up problems.
This isn't the issue. What people choose to do in their personal lives should be accepted or at least tolerated, as long as it's not harming anyone.
> what bathroom they use
This is the problematic part. A male using the women's bathroom is committing a violation against women.
> etc.
This includes males in women's prisons, males in women's changing/locker rooms, males in women's sports. All of which are violations against women.
It isn't about "hating LGBT people" as you suggest, but about compelling males to respect women's and girls' boundaries.
For far too long, a subset of males have been getting away with not doing so, just because these males express a desire to be female. It's quite absurd that it's taken Trump of all people to attempt to rectify this. The political left should have reeled in their activists, who were promoting all this, a long time ago.
> This is the problematic part. A male using the women's bathroom is committing a violation against women
It's mostly men saying this [1]. (Specifically, uneducated men over the age of 50. Especially if they're conservative, Republican or attend weekly religious service.)
Traditional gender roles and stereotypes are part of the reason why some males end up desiring to be women, because they've confused female with feminine. There's nothing wrong with men wearing dresses or indeed any feminine clothing. But thinking this somehow transitions them into being women is ludicrous and sexist.
Ideally we'd be rid of these stereotypes. They're part of the problem.
> Yours, worried and authoritarian, focused on an imaginary moral panic propagated by reactionary Internet forums.
The authoritarian side is the one insisting that males who call themselves women actually are women, and punishing those who disagree. In some states it is actually illegal to have a female-only space. It has to be female plus any male who says he's a woman.
That's not liberty is it, certainly not for women who want or need spaces without any males present.
There are so many cases where this type of policy has demonstrably harmed women. At the most extreme end is males being incarcerated in women's prisons on this basis, who have then raped, sexually assaulted and even impregnated the women locked up with them.
This is the consequence of these "luxury beliefs" capturing institutions of the state.
It _could_ be that, too, but as it turns out, in this particular case, it was the scary scary transes (see their response elsewhere in the thread).
With people who go on about 'luxury beliefs', the belief that they're referring to is nearly always 'trans people are people', I assume because it's such a new coinage (it's only a few years old) and that was what the far-right were mostly scared of at the time.
You are the only one who brought up gender minorities, as well as the TERF I disagreed with.
Anyone wingbrained enough can have luxury beliefs, and I’m not immune.
For example, I previously supported a very liberal drug policy, and still do in many respects… though I realize it failed spectacularly in the fentanyl era and have had to live with the consequences of that.
Better than the alternative? Well, we aren’t ruining as many lives over cannabis…
> They've effectively destroyed the most progressive party from the inside, by having it push ludicrous and unpopular policy
I generally agree with this (as a mostly democratic leaning citizen)
> that privileges males and actively harms women and girls.
But was surprised to see it followed by this. Can you explain your logic here? Not disagreeing. But at a glance it seems to me that it's the rolling back of DEI policies that is privileging males and harming women and girls.
Maoist rhetoric and hyperpoliticization in academia, seeping out to the broader society.
Or in internet cultural terms tumblr/redditization of environments that should be intellectually neutral, because “it’s called being a good person sweatie”
I’m brown. I’m fine. This administration is at war with Americans who aren’t rich.
My taxes are being cut. I’m buying investment cropland on the cheap from idiots who voted for him to trash their livelihoods. They’re mostly white. But they’re not rich.
> you saying you are researching sellers' voting records, then buying the farms of the ones who voted for Trump?
I’m buying cropland from creditors. They can sell it because the farmers are behind on their loans. They’re failing to make payments because we’re in a trade war.
As an ethical limit, yes, I look up the property owner and have only been buying if they’re registered Republican. That doesn’t mean they voted for Trump. (Though they’re all in heavily Trump-voting precincts.) And I don’t think people should lose their farms just because of how they voted. But it does increase the chances I’m not profiting from someone who had nothing to do with a mess they found themselves in versus someone who sort of brought it on themselves.
I’m doing work that makes me money. It’s entirely orthogonal to my skin tone. My point is this administration isn’t helping poor white men, the folks who voted for him, he’s just advantaging those who were lucky enough to start this imperial transition with capital on hand.
Poor people get hurt most by wasteful belief systems. Sure the demographics might correlate positively or negatively with poverty, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s primarily economics.
After all, rich people can eat the extra $$$ imposed by tariffs. Maybe with grumbling… but, at a certain income level paying $5 vs $2 for a can of corn or soup won’t materially affect you, so you can use that extra $3 you paid to complain about immigration, or hierarchies or whatever.
The current flavour of politics is not pragmatic. It’s a luxury belief system.
The left wing excesses of the 2010s were luxury beliefs, the current thing is all just luxury beliefs too.
Basically, when people are economically comfortable and have no real problems, they’ll blow something out of proportion or just plain invent issues in order to feel something.
I have luxury beliefs of my own, many people do. We are free to hold them in North America. But there’s a cost, and that cost shouldn’t be surprising.