Zompist Bboard Again

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Feb 20, 2024 3:33 pm So, supposedly, in the 2010s, some schools in the USA had anti-bullying campaigns that not only worked in the sense that they actually reduced bullying, but even led to serious resentment among bullies or would-be-bullies, to the extent that some people's politics were defined by them?

I am not in touch with The Youth, but I can read opinion polls. Here's the first one I found, from last year.

Overall: Gen Z— the generation that actually went to school in the 2010s— is the most liberal of any generation, 48% to 33% lib/con.

And it goes down linearly from there: Gen X and older lean conservative.

Cohort changes since 2012 are mildly interesting: Millennials got more liberal, Gen X got more conservative, everything else is statistical noise.

There was a great study referenced on Mastodon a few months back, which I unfortunately can't find; but the point was that people do not get conservative as they get older. Quite the opposite: they get more liberal. But the culture as a whole gets more liberal faster. So you get a phenomenon where people are more liberal than in their youth, but the actuall liberal parties have moved way past them, and they start to feel more at home in the conservative party.

So in short, I don't think this guy's thesis passes the smell test. People who were in high school in the 2010s are in their twenties now— they're Gen Z. And those folks are mostly quite liberal. But "mostly" is doing work there— 1/3 of them are conservative.

On the other hand, if you want to worry, this recent poll divides up "Gen Z adults" from "Gen Z teens", and they find that though the teens are no more likely to be conservative, they are less likely to identify as liberal. But that probably shouldn't be over-interpreted; these are people after all who are not yet voting.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Feb 20, 2024 4:14 pm
So in short, I don't think this guy's thesis passes the smell test. People who were in high school in the 2010s are in their twenties now— they're Gen Z. And those folks are mostly quite liberal. But "mostly" is doing work there— 1/3 of them are conservative.

I don't think that guy is claiming that most Gen-Z-ers are conservative. It's more like the thesis is specifically about the conservative third.

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Feb 20, 2024 4:19 pm I don't think that guy is claiming that most Gen-Z-ers are conservative. It's more like the thesis is specifically about the conservative third.

OK, but then why is that third not increasing?

I'm going to suggest that this is the old etic/emic division again. If you ask conservatives why they're conservatives, of course they're going to talk about their convictions or triggering moments— everybody thinks they considered all the options and chose rationally. But the same sorts of polls usually find that young people believe about the same thing as their parents. And to the extent that that's not true, the tendency is to move leftward.

Just throwing in, it's worth looking under the hood at what is being classified as "liberal" and what is "conservative" in all such surveys. Far too many people pick them up and read in their own assumptions going forward with "following the science, man" -- besides, looking at specific questions or topics is just more interesting and useful than these bundled categories.

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Feb 20, 2024 3:33 pm To be honest, this sounds at least partly too good to be true to me. So, supposedly, in the 2010s, some schools in the USA had anti-bullying campaigns that not only worked in the sense that they actually reduced bullying, but even led to serious resentment among bullies or would-be-bullies, to the extent that some people's politics were defined by them?

Could anyone who is more in touch with "those kids these days" than me tell me whether there's anything to that or not?

This sounds like an interpretation on the same thing as the "cancel culture" backlash. If you say something that you think of as normal and acceptable and face severe social sanction for it, you'll experience this as disorienting and radicalizing. You did something normal and everyone got hysterical about it! Why is everyone so aggressive now? So extremist?

Since Sweeney assigns credit entirely to anti-bullying campaigns from school administrators, and none to the students or the culture at large, the plausiblity of his narrative will depend on the reader's sympathy (or lack thereof) with the managerial idea that culture is entirely the output of incentive gradients maintained by a hierarchy of technocratic experts.

This idea was, as I understand it, markedly conservative until about 2010, and was often combined with the idea that one of the great purposes of capitalism is to discipline the population into acting in accordance with these incentive gradients - see e.g. David Frum. Now it's something conservatives worry about: there's a popular conservative argument, I think originally popularized by Richard Hanania in The Origins of Woke, that poorly written anti-discrimination law created an incentive gradient that requires corporations to fire employees for what Chris Rufo calls "the minutiae of thought, behavior, speech, and association", even when such minutiae are entirely off the clock.

(This is not, of course, a problem that only conservatives face - see the Drupal/Gor fiasco, which caused some conservatives to take up the cause of a lifestyle BDSM practitioner fired for his relationship practices. I personally think it's a little silly as an explanation - managerial positions are both high-trust, thus requiring a high degree of conformity, and political, thus requiring a high degree of apparent normalcy - but that's neither here nor there.)

It would be possible to construct an argument for this implication of Sweeney's position, citing e.g. the one high-profile rescinding of some Harvard admissions over (IIRC) memes in a leaked group chat, but I wouldn't give anti-bullying initiatives that much credit. When I was in high school, a little before the age bracket he's talking about, the students - the stratum thereof that I interacted with, at least - were substantially to the left of the administration on these cultural issues, and at the time I saw the anti-bullying campaigns as somewhere between universally ignored pablum and officially sanctioned bullying.

Another line common among the conservatives I see on social media, though, is that bullying can't be eliminated, only moved around, and successful protections for certain demographics (here "sexual orientation or race") will just make unprotected demographics the targets instead. If high school students can't bully gays, they'll bully Christians, or Republicans, or whatever the administration and the student body will let them get away with. This seems broadly correct to me, so this reply seems plausible: changing professional standards applied to teachers and administrators could cause a rapid change in an incentive gradient that successful bullies follow by definition, and cause formerly successful bullies to rapidly become unsuccessful, if rigorously enforced. The idea of professional standards being rigorously enforced in the context of local politics without support from the local population sounds implausible to me, though.

sooo... fellers.... is orange man gonna win ?

Torco wrote: ↑Thu Apr 04, 2024 4:52 pm sooo... fellers.... is orange man gonna win ?

The impression I get is that word leaders, at least, are expecting a Trump victory. Everybody seems to be working with that hypothesis in mind, at least.

One question I have -- but that probably betrays my ignorance of American politics -- is why nobody on the Democrat side has seriously challenged Biden's bid for reelection. There seems to be little enthusiasm for Biden, and besides he is, indeed, not getting younger.

(I'm aware that Trump isn't much younger nor in much better health... But in my experience at least, Democrats always seem to have to work a little harder at being elected.)

To put it simply, in the US the incumbent president always gets their party's nomination unless they specifically choose to not run again (last time that happened was with LBJ.)

I should note that anyone in the US who can legally vote who does not vote for Biden in the general election is a fool at best.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Fri Apr 05, 2024 8:16 am One question I have -- but that probably betrays my ignorance of American politics -- is why nobody on the Democrat side has seriously challenged Biden's bid for reelection. There seems to be little enthusiasm for Biden, and besides he is, indeed, not getting younger.

Running for president means going from 1% or 5% approval to 51%. The incumbent almost always has an advantage because people know them, and a party hates to throw away that advantage. It's also felt that a primary fight can be divisive— the Sanders runs left some acrimony that was only barely papered over.

It's also an illusion that some new name would be a) more popular than Biden, and b) stay that way. There doesn't seem to be someone who can be plucked from the sidelines, like Obama.

Technocratically, the obvious choice is Kamala Harris, the VP. She would undoubtedly do fine as president. But her approval is actually a bit lower; she wouldn't necessarily be better at reaching folks who don't like Biden, and might have to work harder to retain folks who do like him.

Also note that the opposition to Biden due to Biden's (slowly fraying) support for Israel reflects a vocal minority, and just because people may not be happy with that does not mean that they will like Trump more as a result.

The Democratic Party is run by crypt-keepers (Pelosi), cops (Harris), and cowards (Pelosi and Harris). As far as their West-Wing-soaked brains are concerned, Biden is doing a great job. If Trump wins again, they'll be the last ones to see it coming.

zompist wrote: ↑Fri Apr 05, 2024 3:37 pm It's also an illusion that some new name would be a) more popular than Biden, and b) stay that way. There doesn't seem to be someone who can be plucked from the sidelines, like Obama.

Technocratically, the obvious choice is Kamala Harris, the VP. She would undoubtedly do fine as president. But her approval is actually a bit lower; she wouldn't necessarily be better at reaching folks who don't like Biden, and might have to work harder to retain folks who do like him.

Thanks; that answers the questions I'd been having for some time now.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Sat Apr 06, 2024 7:42 pm The Democratic Party is run by crypt-keepers (Pelosi), cops (Harris), and cowards (Pelosi and Harris). As far as their West-Wing-soaked brains are concerned, Biden is doing a great job. If Trump wins again, they'll be the last ones to see it coming.

That, too

Travis B. wrote: ↑Fri Apr 05, 2024 3:41 pm Also note that the opposition to Biden due to Biden's (slowly fraying) support for Israel reflects a vocal minority, and just because people may not be happy with that does not mean that they will like Trump more as a result.

I wasn't even thinking of Biden's support for Israel, TBH... From what I hear, Biden was already sort of unpopular long before that.

The ironic part is Biden is about the one American president I remember being critical of Israeli policy!

Anybody who's surprised at Biden's support for Israel's current genocide, google his position on unkilled Serbian children (tl;dr: he's against it). But even on other matters, he's a total piece of shit and always has been.

It's been said all over the internet, but it's worth repeating:

The entire strategy of the Democratic Party is to be one yottameter (no more no less) to the left of the GOP, so they can stake a claim to 50% of the Overton window without spooking their donors or rattling their own personal finances. If you accept that this is the only alternative to the Republican Party that anyone deserves, well, I guess you're really easy to blackmail. We all have our flaws. For me, electoralism misses the point of democracy, which is that people should be able to exercise a meaningful choice. Whether or not the person doing all the evil shit is sad and confused while they do it is not, for my money, a meaningful choice.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Sun Apr 07, 2024 6:32 pm It's been said all over the internet, but it's worth repeating:

The entire strategy of the Democratic Party is to be one yottameter (no more no less) to the left of the GOP, so they can stake a claim to 50% of the Overton window without spooking their donors or rattling their own personal finances.

You keep making that claim, and you keep not providing any evidence or arguments whatsoever for it. I guess we're all just supposed to happily receive your wisdom and be glad that you share it with us poor benighted idiots.

If you accept that this is the only alternative to the Republican Party that anyone deserves, well, I guess you're really easy to blackmail. We all have our flaws.

Ah, there's your misunderstanding of what the word "blackmail" means again. "Blackmail" is when you threaten to set someone's house on fire if they don't pay you money. Pointing out to people that, if they don't vote for left-leaning centrists, right-wingers might win and do very bad things, is more like the equivalent of approaching someone whose house is already on fire, for reasons unrelated to you, and telling them that if they don't leave their house quickly, they'll probably burn to death. Pointing out the consequences of people's actions to them isn't automatically blackmail.

But I guess you'll just make a point of announcing that you didn't read this post again, because for you, communication is clearly a one-way street.

I get the annoyances of American bipartisanship; especially since the Democrats are best described at centrists.
Especially since socialist-friendly candidates like Sanders have to work through the Democratic party machine.

As a comparison with a multi-party system... right now voters just aren't interested in left-wing politics, so we get the same centrist vs. far-right match. (Or depending on which European country you look at, centrist vs. centrist, or centrist vs. conservative). So in many way the problem is the same. That said, socialism gets more representation here anyway, in Parliament or in local politics, which does make a difference.

Anyway, yes, I get the annoyance. From a left-wing perspective, Republican and Democrat policy don't look that different. I don't know if it's all the Democrats fault though. Are Americans that interested in socialism? If the answer turns out to be'not that much' well, it still sucks but the situation does reflect public opinion.

There is a lot more than one yottameter of difference between the two.
In terms of foreign policy, it comes down to the world #1 superpower being either led by a grown-up - a grown-up I disagree with on almost every issue, but still a grown-up -- or a not-very-bright four-year old. (It's not just Trump either; I felt about the same about Bush.)

I mean, it still sucks that the Democrats are uninspiring. That said, the problem is not necessarily with bland centrists. The problem is with the voters. Right now about half the voters in almost every democracy in the world feels that all issues could be fixed by a) manly discipline b) regular beatings for the poor c) outlawing all foreigners. There's no short term solution to that except for giving up on democracy altogether.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Apr 08, 2024 4:44 am Are Americans that interested in socialism?

No. Socialism, like welfare, is when you take money from the old and the rich to give it to the young and the poor, which is a ghastly inversion of the true purpose of government: taking money from the young and the poor to give it to the old and the rich.

I got a check in the mail from the governor but it's a special tax rebate so it's fine! The important thing is that I make good money but the government gives me more money anyway. If they didn't give me money, it'd seem like they don't value me as a client, and I'd be insulted and vote for the other guy. It's the American way.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Apr 08, 2024 4:44 am Are Americans that interested in socialism? If the answer turns out to be'not that much' well, it still sucks but the situation does reflect public opinion.

The key thing is that the vast majority of Americans don't know what socialism is and confuse "socialism" with either social democracy or Soviet big-C Communism (not surprising consider that's what they have been told as being "socialism" their whole lives); actual socialism is primarily about worker ownership and self-management of capital, and while the things that come along with social democracy are nice, they aren't actually core elements of socialism itself.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Apr 08, 2024 12:47 pm The key thing is that the vast majority of Americans don't know what socialism is and confuse "socialism" with either social democracy or Soviet big-C Communism (not surprising consider that's what they have been told as being "socialism" their whole lives); actual socialism is primarily about worker ownership and self-management of capital, and while the things that come along with social democracy are nice, they aren't actually core elements of socialism itself.

Yes, though even interest in social democracy seems pretty limited as well.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Tue Apr 09, 2024 1:48 am

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Apr 08, 2024 12:47 pm The key thing is that the vast majority of Americans don't know what socialism is and confuse "socialism" with either social democracy or Soviet big-C Communism (not surprising consider that's what they have been told as being "socialism" their whole lives); actual socialism is primarily about worker ownership and self-management of capital, and while the things that come along with social democracy are nice, they aren't actually core elements of socialism itself.

Yes, though even interest in social democracy seems pretty limited as well.

Depends on whether you consider 1/3 of the country disappointingly low or high.

Here's a recent poll; overall 36% of Americans have a positive view of socialism. This is a decline from 2019 when it was 42%. Over the same time positive views on capitalism have also declined, from 65% to 57%.

Democrats have a higher favorable opinion, 57%. Republicans, no surprise, tend not to like socialism; but surprisingly, 14% of them have a favorable view of it, 23% among people under 30.

I can't find a similar poll for France, but adding up votes in the first round of the 2022 elections, it doesn't look terribly different. (I recognize that this isn't really the same thing, e.g. due to strategic voting.)

A lot of views of the US, domestic and foreign, haven't moved past the 90s. Polarization has advanced a lot; there are far fewer conservative Democrats and next to no Republican liberals. Biden himself is from the centrist half of the party, but he has a much more left-wing party than Obama did.