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[zompist]

My main objection is that both left and right are in full survive mode right now.
How many people now don't feel like civilization is hanging by a thread? It's also pretty hard to explain why that is, given that we're decidedly in the most prosperous and secure period of human history so far. (I have ideas about that.)

The main divide is that each side find the other sides' concerns ridiculous or offensive.
The left feels we're about one bad day away from a fascist/capitalist dystopia, assuming we're not currently living in one, and assuming an environmental apocalypse doesn't get us first.
The right feels we're about one bad day away from a communist/lesbian dystopia, assuming we're not currently living in one, and assuming the global Jihad doesn't get us first.

Interesting point. Yes, everyone feels the situation is dire, and yes, you can make a case that things have never been better.

But, both things can be true at once! That's kind of the hallmark of the modern era. Things could change for any of us in a flash: a nuclear war, a fascist takeover, a mass shooting, a major depression. Or there could be a slow descent into horror: climate change, jobs evaporating into permanent precarity. At the same time, things are better in so many ways than any time in the last 6000 years.

That said... Maybe that explains why the left has a tendancy to fragment, and why left-wing groups hate each others' guts. (Splitters!)

Nah, the left has always been that way.

I'm not sure I agree. If you scratch a conservative long enough, you eventually get to the core of selfishness that is at the heart of the matter. There's a deep, deep fear that people of color and Muslims will end up costing you money and sex.

The point here isn't about conservatives fear of The Other; it's about whether they have tribal loyalties. And they do, to other people like themselves. They're always celebrating it, in fact: they love to put out their tribal emblems. Nerst is quite wrong to think that they only care about family and friends. Heck, just look at Nort's last post, which is full of solidarity with "flyover country", a place where he doesn't live.

A theory I worked out over coffee, inspired by the American politics thread: the political compass is just a natural reaction to rapid societal change. They are, at heart, a SWOT diagram. Given any change, you'll find people who love it and others who hate it.

Fair enough, though I'm not sure the rate of change is that high for anywhere before 1800. But then, in a monarchy or aristocracy, politics looks very different anyway.

[Ares Land]

But, both things can be true at once! That's kind of the hallmark of the modern era. Things could change for any of us in a flash: a nuclear war, a fascist takeover, a mass shooting, a major depression. Or there could be a slow descent into horror: climate change, jobs evaporating into permanent precarity. At the same time, things are better in so many ways than any time in the last 6000 years.

Yeah, it's really the paradox at the heart of our own era. Besides, the pessimism is necessary: the nuclear fears of the Cold War era feels a little over the top now but that fear was the very reason I'm not scratching a living in a nuclear wasteland.

The point here isn't about conservatives fear of The Other; it's about whether they have tribal loyalties. And they do, to other people like themselves. They're always celebrating it, in fact: they love to put out their tribal emblems. Nerst is quite wrong to think that they only care about family and friends. Heck, just look at Nort's last post, which is full of solidarity with "flyover country", a place where he doesn't live.

Conservatives talk about loyalty and solidarity, but do they act on it?

The talk here is that the Left abandoned traditional working class bastions, and that the RN is now the only real left-wing party. I've talked to many RN voters, concentrating on policies that would help working class bastions and the "real" (read: white) working class. The experience was enlightening: all policies that could possibly help is shot down as 'utopian' or benefitting 'welfare queens' until the end result resembles something like libertarianism.
(You can, in fact, do the opposite, starting with a libertarian and ending up with a RN voter. I talked politics with a libertarian at a party some years back. After a while he grudingly conceded that I was on to something with my 'utopian schemes' but that it could only work if society was 'homegenous', by which he meant whites-only, of course.)

Now, I don't know how my experiences would translate across the Atlantic. But I think it would. Trump ended up governing like pretty much any other Republican, after all.


(Well, in any case, I hope I'm right. Selfishness and greed we can work with. They're even positive factors in a healthy society: the trouble is more that they're getting out of control, but we don't have to get rid of them entirely. If it's tribal loyalty we're dealing with, then we're well and truly fucked. )

[zompist]

The point here isn't about conservatives fear of The Other; it's about whether they have tribal loyalties. And they do, to other people like themselves. They're always celebrating it, in fact: they love to put out their tribal emblems. Nerst is quite wrong to think that they only care about family and friends. Heck, just look at Nort's last post, which is full of solidarity with "flyover country", a place where he doesn't live.

Conservatives talk about loyalty and solidarity, but do they act on it?

The talk here is that the Left abandoned traditional working class bastions, and that the RN is now the only real left-wing party. I've talked to many RN voters, concentrating on policies that would help working class bastions and the "real" (read: white) working class. The experience was enlightening: all policies that could possibly help is shot down as 'utopian' or benefitting 'welfare queens' until the end result resembles something like libertarianism.
(You can, in fact, do the opposite, starting with a libertarian and ending up with a RN voter. I talked politics with a libertarian at a party some years back. After a while he grudingly conceded that I was on to something with my 'utopian schemes' but that it could only work if society was 'homegenous', by which he meant whites-only, of course.)

This is a valid criticism, and it does make conservatives' claim to speak for poorer whites suspect. If we start saying "Sure, we'll help, what should government do?", they go silent.

But I'd point out that "what should be done for our tribe" isn't really how conservatives think. Instead it's "How can we fight the people who we think are harming our tribe?" To the left, Trump was risible because he did very little to help his own voters and much to harm them. But they loved him because he spent four years hurting or railing against their enemies.

Now, I don't know how my experiences would translate across the Atlantic. But I think it would. Trump ended up governing like pretty much any other Republican, after all.

There was endless discussion here about Trump in 2016, and there were times when Trump seemed to champion populism over liberatarianism-- which would have been a significant change to GOP policy. But as you say, he threw all that away when governing. I don't think it's because it all meant nothing; I think it meant that from December on, he was surrounded by conservatives, who applauded him when he said conservative things and ignored him when he said populist things.

(If you look at large-scale political compass results for the US, there really is a huge swath of populists: socially conservative, economically liberal, the opposite of libertarians. And the libertarian quadrant is nearly empty.)

[bradrn]

This license for ‘googleimagesrestored’ is one of the most amazing macaronic texts I’ve ever seen. It may be of interest to some people here:

Code: Select all

                         Jollo LNT license
                     Version 1 - February 2015
  
  Copyright, 2019. fanfare.
  
  Vu, fare wanderer, confronted with raw, programmatic instruction
  dans la forme la plus pure.  A hesitation, troubled to the terms
  qui ce license affirme. Par un voyage du explorer le mechanisme 
  et ponder la fabrication. Voila! La remide: egress sans risque.
  
  Sans trace (Leave No Trace) via sept principales:
  
  0. Modifique language en advance. L'Apposer Jollo LNT license
     with copies en distribuer. 
  
  1. Non responsible pour neglige programme du problematique. 
  
  2. Non sympathie pour neglige programme du problematique.
  
  3. Non permission l'modifique under any circumstance.
  
  4. Non permission distribution under any circumstance.
  
  5. Respect les programmatic instructions.
  
  6. Non interfere avec l'harmonie d'une amitie.

(‘Jollo’ appears to be a machine translation service. I suppose this license attests to the ‘quality’ of its translations…)

[zyxw59]

Is that an originally French license text translated into English, or vice-versa?

[Pabappa]

Odd. Why would the license terms for one product appear in another, though? I'm confused. Being as it's free software I have to wonder if it's just some sort of elaborate prank. Either way, I've seen translations that bad before, but only in the very early days of machine translation software, .... the only example i can remember is "cuatro prominent scientists" from astrobio.net's short-lived attempt to automatically translate its site into Spanish.

[Vijay]

I promise you it is not difficult to find worse translations both from and into Indian languages.

[MacAnDàil]

One reason I dont like the "(de)coupling" axis is that it doesn't recognize that it's conservatives, not liberals, who are passionate about tribes of people like themselves. That mostly comes down to white, Christian heterosexuals. Nerst has mistaken populist resentment of minorities as a rejection of non-family attachments of any sort. No, what they don't like is having to treat people of color, Muslims, Jews, and gays as human beings. They are, and are encouraged to be, very loyal to people like themselves.

Indeed, sometimes people talk about ‘identity politics’ nowadays as if politics has never involved identity before. Politics has always involved identity: national identity, class identity, ethnic identity, religous identity etc. When it's supposedly about religion, it's usually actually about religious identity. Just now that it’s transgenders’ gender identity that’s the only ‘gender politics’?

I'd suggest 'Populist' vs 'Globalist' (though that's not idea either).

I think that the term ‘globalist’ is overused, and
a) is often applied to people who are not necessarily more or less globalist than their opponents
b) especially considering that right-wing populists and fascists often converge: Trump and Bolsonaro share a lot, despite being from different ends of the Americas. They are both heavily into destroying Native American land for multinational corporation profit too.

[cedh]

I'd suggest 'Populist' vs 'Globalist' (though that's not idea either).

I think that the term ‘globalist’ is overused

Maybe something like "tribalist" vs. "universalist"? But this once again feels not quite neutral enough...

[Travis B.]

One thing that complicates this, though, is that one can believe that all groups have a right to their own identities and ways, and that all people should favor things close to home, while at the same time one should not reject people belonging to other groups just because they do not belong to one's own, a position that is neither populist/tribalist nor globalist/universalist but rather synthesizes the two.

[Ares Land]

One thing that complicates this, though, is that one can believe that all groups have a right to their own identities and ways, and that all people should favor things close to home, while at the same time one should not reject people belonging to other groups just because they do not belong to one's own, a position that is neither populist/tribalist nor globalist/universalist but rather synthesizes the two.

That, erm, doesn't work like you think it does. The logical next step is then to accept that white conservatives have a right to their ways and to favor their own, and, well, everybody knows how it goes from there.


While I'm here, the coupled/decoupled axis isn't about tribalism, btw. It's more a question of what you owe society as a whole.
On the decoupled end, you have a closed set of formal obligations to society and that's it. Your relationship with society could be written down, in a relatively short list. In essence, the Bill of Rights.
On the coupled end, obligations are open ended and can't be written down. In essence, "ask what you can do for your country."

[WeepingElf]

Two days ago, I found the name Mia[&*!#]a on a web page - according to context, the name of a Japanese musician. Of course, it really is Miyashita

[Travis B.]

One thing that complicates this, though, is that one can believe that all groups have a right to their own identities and ways, and that all people should favor things close to home, while at the same time one should not reject people belonging to other groups just because they do not belong to one's own, a position that is neither populist/tribalist nor globalist/universalist but rather synthesizes the two.

That, erm, doesn't work like you think it does. The logical next step is then to accept that white conservatives have a right to their ways and to favor their own, and, well, everybody knows how it goes from there.

Well it typically is combined with that one does not have a right to be a bigot, but rather that all people have to be accepting of other groups.

I often find myself leaning in this sort of direction, because I believe groups have a right to their own languages, cultures, religions, or like, but at the same time believing that no one has a right to be illiberal or bigoted, that other people have to be similarly accepting.

[linguistcat]

Well it typically is combined with that one does not have a right to be a bigot, but rather that all people have to be accepting of other groups.

I often find myself leaning in this sort of direction, because I believe groups have a right to their own languages, cultures, religions, or like, but at the same time believing that no one has a right to be illiberal or bigoted, that other people have to be similarly accepting.

And this is where the paradox of tolerance comes in. It's good to be tolerant of others in general, but even the most tolerant of people should be intolerant of baseless intolerance. Otherwise, groups that are baselessly intolerant will eventually replace the ones who are tolerant, often violently.

[Raphael]

Did anyone, in Science Fiction or elsewhere, predict the impact that miniaturization would have on the world, before the rise of Cyberpunk?

[Ares Land]

I'd say Richard Feynman did, especially with There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom

[Vijay]

Given that I already started a Dravidian Language Varieties thread, would it be a bad idea to also start an Indo-European Language Varieties thread?

[Ares Land]

I'm all for it. What kinds of IE languages did you have in mind?

[Vijay]

I intended all Dravidian language varieties to be fair game for the Dravidian Language Varieties thread, and I intend the same for an Indo-European Language Varieties thread, despite the unusually large geographic spread of Indo-European.

So far, I've only posted notes on two varieties of Malayalam (and a short comment on Tulu), but they're from a TV show that covers not only varieties of Malayalam but also at least one variety each of Paniya, Tamil, Tulu, Telugu, and Beary, so I definitely intend to cover a more diverse range of Dravidian languages. A similar thread for Indo-European might help bring more attention to certain kinds of languages that aren't discussed much on this forum (Indo-Aryan languages, for example) but would also allow discussion of some languages that are more familiar to ZBBers (including English!).

[Ares Land]

I intended all Dravidian language varieties to be fair game for the Dravidian Language Varieties thread, and I intend the same for an Indo-European Language Varieties thread, despite the unusually large geographic spread of Indo-European.

That sounds very ambitious but in a good way!