Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

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Analytics
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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

Post by Analytics »

Symmachus wrote:
Tue Jun 01, 2021 10:19 pm
Yes, it's true: many concessions were made to Democrats who were in red states. Do you remember what concessions were made to Republicans?
Sigh.

In the words of Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute:
Norm Ornstein wrote:Did Obama Jam Through the Affordable Care Act Without Consulting Republicans or Working With Them to Find Bipartisan Cooperation?

The Obama White House took a number of lessons from the Clinton experience with healthcare policy. First, do not rely on your own, detailed White House plan as the starting point for negotiations in Congress; let Congress work out the structure and details from your goals. Second, try from an early point to get buy-in from the major actors in the health world, including insurers, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and other providers, to at least defuse or minimize their opposition. Third, recognize that the House and Senate are very different institutions, and let each work through its own ideas and plan before finding ways to merge the two into a single bill. Obama and his White House executed those lessons brilliantly.

There was a fourth lesson: Try in the Senate to find Republican support at an early stage, instead of waiting until the political dynamic shifts toward implacable opposition. The failure to engage John Chafee, Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, and their colleagues at an early point in 1993, when they crafted their own plan and were willing to negotiate and cut a deal, proved deeply damaging, if not deadly in 1994. As the midterms loomed and Democrats were on the defensive, Chafee and his colleagues were told by then-Republican Leader Bob Dole that there would be no deal, period.

In the House, that lesson was not applicable this time; Eric Cantor and House Republicans had already made it crystal clear that they were not cooperating under any circumstances. There, Democrats debated the issue for several months, but mostly amongst themselves, before introducing a detailed bill that emerged from committees in July 2009 and passing it through the House later in the year with just one Republican vote.

But with Obama’s blessing, the Senate, through its Finance Committee, took a different tack, and became the fulcrum for a potential grand bargain on health reform. Chairman Max Baucus, in the spring of 2009, signaled his desire to find a bipartisan compromise, working especially closely with Grassley, his dear friend and Republican counterpart, who had been deeply involved in crafting the Republican alternative to Clintoncare. Baucus and Grassley convened an informal group of three Democrats and three Republicans on the committee, which became known as the “Gang of Six.” They covered the parties’ ideological bases; the other GOPers were conservative Mike Enzi of Wyoming and moderate Olympia Snowe of Maine, and the Democrats were liberal Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and moderate Kent Conrad of North Dakota.

Baucus very deliberately started the talks with a template that was the core of the 1993-4 Republican plan, built around an individual mandate and exchanges with private insurers—much to the chagrin of many Democrats and liberals who wanted, if not a single-payer system, at least one with a public insurance option. Through the summer, the Gang of Six engaged in detailed discussions and negotiations to turn a template into a plan. But as the summer wore along, it became clear that something had changed; both Grassley and Enzi began to signal that participation in the talks—and their demands for changes in the evolving plan—would not translate into a bipartisan agreement.

What became clear before September, when the talks fell apart, is that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had warned both Grassley and Enzi that their futures in the Senate would be much dimmer if they moved toward a deal with the Democrats that would produce legislation to be signed by Barack Obama. They both listened to their leader. An early embrace by both of the framework turned to shrill anti-reform rhetoric by Grassley—talking, for example, about death panels that would kill grandma—and statements by Enzi that he was not going to sign on to a deal. The talks, nonetheless, continued into September, and the emerging plan was at least accepted in its first major test by the third Republican Gang member, Olympia Snowe (even if she later joined every one of her colleagues to vote against the plan on the floor of the Senate.)

Obama could have moved earlier to blow the whistle on the faux negotiations; he did not, as he held out hope that a plan that was fundamentally built on Republican ideas would still, in the end, garner at least some Republican support....
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... th/397742/

John McDonough chronicles 161 Republican amendments that made it into Obamacare.
Symmachus wrote:
Tue Jun 01, 2021 10:19 pm
There are multiple problems with two-party systems, the most fundamental of which goes back to psychology. Human beings have a natural tendency to divide the world into “us” vs. “them.” Two political parties reinforces the us-v-them mentality and the simplistic thinking and intolerance that accompany tribalism. “Them” winning becomes an existential threat to our very way of life, which directly leads to things like insurrections at the capital and elected leaders refusing to certify election results.
If it is a natural tendency, then it will happen no matter what. This also happens in political cultures with multi-party parliamentary systems. I have suspicions about this for the reasons I mentioned: every technocratic proposal of a "rational" solution designed to circumvent this or that thing about human psychology is always politics by other means. I know we see this differently, but I would just summarize my comments here by saying that I don't think the political situation is sufficiently explained by looking at politics alone. These kinds of ostensibly wonk-ish discussions are the most insidious because they pretend to be the opposite of the thing their proponents despise but are in fact merely another instantiation of it. I guarantee you that if we banned cable news and had a constitutional amendment establishing four national parties, complete with a Drutman commission to ensure sufficient numbers of conservative democrats and republicans to match the liberal democrats and republicans, we would just end up with an informal system of liberals vs. conservatives (both of which are a species of liberal anyway). Most likely, the Drutman commission would manipulate things so that its favored side wins.
Let me try to understand where you are coming from here. We can't understand the political situation by looking at politics alone. We can't look at it through the lens of sociology, because of all them damn sociologists. So what field can we use to create models that can shed some insight into what's going on?

In any case, I am finding Drutman's insights to be quite interesting, and I'm not willing to dismiss them before I've finished reading his book.
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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

Post by Symmachus »

Analytics wrote:
Tue Jun 08, 2021 9:01 pm

Sigh.

In the words of Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute: (snip snip)
I'm sorry to make you sigh, Analytics, but doesn't it occur to you ever to look at a source that isn't a Democrat (as Norm Ornstein is) or from a media outlet whose bias towards Democrats is clear as day (as the Atlantic is)?

I'm not going to be put in a position where I have to defend Republicans qua Republicans, because I have never supported them. I was a supporter of the law. Republican failings are too obvious to mention: yes, once they realized that could win an election out of this, they weren't going to support it (on the other hand, they also knew their votes weren't needed, until all of the sudden they were). They then beat this dead horse for six years , all the while promising solutions but in the end offering nothing substantial as an alternative or replacement—and people needed something. And they over-applied this strategy to the point that they were holding up unemployment over the damn debt ceiling, which ended only with this ridiculous sequestration nonsense (I'm sure you're that you were just as incensed last year when the Democrats did something equally vulgar but on a much bigger scale with far more lives impacted; the unemployment issue in 2010-2011 made me despise Republicans, but I can't say I feel all that different about Democrats after their performance last summer).

At the same time, I don't assign every political malady to them and reduce it to the binary of Republican vs. Democrat. I also think it is worth understanding where people are coming from—and especially the perspective of their voters. Do you even know of a Republican version of things from someone on the other side of the Obamacare fights that isn't about Fox News or right wing media? All I can tell from your posts here is that this was just some good Democrats fighting some evil Republicans, who are the source of all problems because they are just not good but the Democrats are always just good and also they read the New York Times so they must be good.

It's very hard to take Ornstein's account seriously when he talks about lessons learned (engage Senate Republicans) in one paragraph and then describes in the next how Republicans were basically shut out in House (why wasn't it important to engage House Republicans early on? It tells you a lot about how Obama viewed the House, and Congress in general). Apparently, the lesson was extremely literal: not to engage the other side early on, which should have been the lesson, but just the other side on one committee in the upper chamber. There is no way Bill Clinton would have been that idiotic.

Which of these lessons applies to voters, though? What McConnell understood that Obama and many Republicans in the Senate failed to grasp is that this law was very unpopular with voters. There were votes to be won in opposing it. A clever politician committed to this law would have asked: why is that and how can I rally voters? Obama made a token effort ("If you like your doctor..."), but mostly it was demonizing rhetoric about Republicans, and it has remained that to this day. He was personally popular because he could get voters to support him on a personal level, but he really wasn't a great politician because he couldn't get anybody to support his policies.

I'm sorry but Ornstein's lessons are BS, or Democrats over-learned the wrong lessons. Bill Clinton learned the lessons of his failure on health care: find out where the voters are first. That is why he was a relatively successful president and coasted into reelection and, despite the scandals, had a lot of legislation passed. Fox News existed at that time. Many of the same people were in the Senate in the 90s as were there in the early 2000s. But the liberal answer to voters is always "Fox News propaganda made them do it"—or in other words, voters have no agency or no intelligence, so we can ignore them.

Instructive here is the case of Grassley, who was vocal about his waffling. The reason Chuck Grassley waffled is because, while he was torn in multiple directions, the push-back he received from his voters surprised him and shook him. I suppose you could say he's been lying all these years. But the same thing happened to many Democrats who lost their seats after this law was passed. Ask why that is. If your answer is "Fox News," then you need to ask again, because that just delays the question (why do those people care what Fox News says in the first place?) and doesn't even make sense when you compare votes casts to number of viewers. Maybe the Koch brothers put something in the water.
Analytics wrote:
Tue Jun 08, 2021 9:01 pm
John McDonough chronicles 161 Republican amendments that made it into Obamacare.
I don't see that in the link you provided. I did link you in a previous amendment to the law itself where you can see these amendments. I didn't see anything substantial (one of them was a condemnation of Iran!). Good luck finding a meaningful Republican amendment.
Analytics wrote:
Tue Jun 08, 2021 9:01 pm
Let me try to understand where you are coming from here. We can't understand the political situation by looking at politics alone. We can't look at it through the lens of sociology, because of all them damn sociologists. So what field can we use to create models that can shed some insight into what's going on?
Let me try to understand where you are coming from here. There are only two fields of human enquiry by which we can understand human society: academic sociology and academic political science, both overwhelmingly reflective of the values of the upper-middle class.
Analytics wrote:
Tue Jun 08, 2021 9:01 pm
In any case, I am finding Drutman's insights to be quite interesting, and I'm not willing to dismiss them before I've finished reading his book.
Well, I'm sure they are interesting. I won't dispute that.
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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

Post by Analytics »

Symmachus wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 4:55 am
I'm sorry to make you sigh, Analytics, but doesn't it occur to you ever to look at a source that isn't a Democrat (as Norm Ornstein is) or from a media outlet whose bias towards Democrats is clear as day (as the Atlantic is)? ...I also think it is worth understanding where people are coming from—and especially the perspective of their voters. Do you even know of a Republican version of things from someone on the other side of the Obamacare fights that isn't about Fox News or right wing media? All I can tell from your posts here is that this was just some good Democrats fighting some evil Republicans...
This image you have of me as somebody who gets his information from only politicized democratic channels is interesting, and actually kind of funny. Did I mention that once I attended a conference where Stuart Butler was the keynote speaker, and after his presentation I had lunch with him?

When it comes to criticizing the ACA, there are important things a thoughtful conservative would want to change about it (e.g. eliminate the employer mandate, eliminate employer tax deductions for health insurance premium, lower minimum coverage levels, eliminate some of the subsidies, let insurers compete across state lines, etc.) Most of those changes would piss off unions, the AMA, or the AARP, but if a cadre of principled Republicans were willing to say they'd support the measure if those changes were made, perhaps we could have had a grownup conversation about the tradeoffs inherent in healthcare financing.

And on the other side, perhaps Democrats could have given away all of those things in exchange for a public option, which of course would have pissed off the insurance companies.

But rather than talking about those details and trying to negotiate a law that would facilitate improvement to the healthcare system, Republican politicians made the argument about a fictitious death panels, a fictitious "government takeover of healthcare", and manufactured outrage about nuns getting birth control through their health insurance plans. Those things were fundamentally unserious.

So there are several different issues here, including:
  1. What should America's healthcare system look like? (e.g. should Americans with preexisting conditions be able to get health insurance? Do we want insurance companies part of the system? Should there be a public option? Should employers choose people's health insurance, or should individuals be free to choose for themselves?)
  2. What are principled, informed positions on 1., from the position of both liberals and conservatives?
  3. What do average people on the street think about this stuff?
  4. How do people arrive at their opinions? What roles do psychological, sociological, and economic factors play?
  5. How do propaganda machines manipulate people for their own purposes?

On this thread, I've been trying to talk about the last three issues on that list--the psychological and sociological. I recognize that everybody is an individual with their own complex, not necessarily congruent but not entirely irrational either, reasons for believing what they do. But I do think that psychological and sociological models can help us understand what is going on.

It seems that when I offered a concrete example of #5 on that list ("A Government takeover of healthcare!"), you thought I was making a comment about a different topic that is in category #1 or #2--that I was claiming there are no principled reasons to think Obamacare could be improved.
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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

Post by Analytics »

Since it never occurred to me to ever look at non-liberal news source, ever, I'll provide yet another quote of where I'm coming from.

When Obamacare was being written, the ultra-liberal Jon Shreve wrote in the ultra-liberal Health Watch the following:
It is my premise that the primary reform that is needed within the health care system is a change in our expectations. Making it clear what we expect is the first step, and the second step is adjusting policies to be consistent with the expectations.

Note that clarifying expectations is not an easy task—there are many voices representing both broad and narrow interests, which can quickly turn the task of setting expectations into a long wish-list of changes. I believe that there are two primary expectations which should be made clear:
  • It is everyone’s responsibility to have health insurance coverage.
  • It is the health care provider’s responsibility to achieve the most efficient and highest quality outcome by following the principles of evidence-based medicine.
With these expectations set, it is then critical to follow them up with the appropriate financial incentives, so that our actions and our words are
consistent.
https://www.soa.org/globalassets/assets ... -iss62.pdf

Maybe this makes me a liberal who is incapable of understanding how conservatives think about healthcare in America, but I happen to agree with Shreve on these points. And that might be part of the reason why I find the Republican propaganda machine's response to Obamacare so insidious: it changed the culture and expectations away from these values. All of the sudden, people don't have a responsibility to have health insurance. It's free choice! [They never seem to address the burden this free choice puts on the rest of society but that doesn't matter. Individual freedom baby! USA! USA!]
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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

Post by Symmachus »

Analytics wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:05 pm
This image you have of me as somebody who gets his information from only politicized democratic channels is interesting, and actually kind of funny. Did I mention that once I attended a conference where Stuart Butler was the keynote speaker, and after his presentation I had lunch with him?
I'm not sure what you are attempting to convey with that last sentence, but I don't mean to give that impression, and I don't really have an image of you per se; I'm just responding to what you post here—the Atlantic?—and to your comments about the New York Times and NPR as if they are somehow markers of neutrality, reliability, and sincerity. You don't seem to accept that these organizations, too, are media companies with an agenda, even if they are more sophisticated in how they pursue it and more complex in their make-up. I also cannot detect that anyone other than an elitist small-government Republican can be a conservative and hold a legitimate point of view (i.e. not the product of external manipulation) that should be taken seriously.
Analytics wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:05 pm
When it comes to criticizing the ACA, there are important things a thoughtful conservative would want to change about it (e.g. eliminate the employer mandate, eliminate employer tax deductions for health insurance premium, lower minimum coverage levels, eliminate some of the subsidies, let insurers compete across state lines, etc.) Most of those changes would piss off unions, the AMA, or the AARP, but if a cadre of principled Republicans were willing to say they'd support the measure if those changes were made, perhaps we could have had a grownup conversation about the tradeoffs inherent in healthcare financing.
I agree. Notice how you reduce "thoughtful" conservative and "principled Republicans," though, to someone who only cares about some policy positions that are of limited scope involving taxes and markets. The last decade has shown that many conservatives are, it turns out, not so much Chamber of Commerce people as they are people who are conservative. This is part of the lack of self-awareness I'm talking about: liberals introduce some sweeping proposal that has the potential to affect the culture as a whole but they present it all as if it's just a question over policy details. Anyone who pushes back on anything other than the policy margins is demonized—and then they wonder why the other side is "tribal."

This is the pose liberals have taken, such that we have gone from "we just want to be left alone" in Lawrence v. Texas to "you must be this cake for my gay wedding or I will the use state government to harass you into oblivion" in Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado and "you must refer to me when I'm not around using the pronoun that I designate or you are an anti-trans bigot and will be fired" in some lawsuit certain to appear soon.
Analytics wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:05 pm
And on the other side, perhaps Democrats could have given away all of those things in exchange for a public option, which of course would have pissed off the insurance companies.
But they weren't afraid of insurance companies: they were afraid of voters. This is the fundamental liberal conceit I find not merely false to the facts but corrosive in the way that conspiracy theories are corrosive. Yes, large stake-holders have influence in policy writing, and that is its own problem perhaps that should be addressed in a discussion on political theory and the role of the state in mediating between different power centers in a given society, but at the end of the process politicians are elected by people in their capacity as voters, no matter how dependent they are on donors to fund the means by which they have to make those appeals in the first instance. There is a natural limit to how much influence a donor can have.

Trump. That's all I need to say to make the point.
Analytics wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:05 pm
But rather than talking about those details and trying to negotiate a law that would facilitate improvement to the healthcare system, Republican politicians made the argument about a fictitious death panels, a fictitious "government takeover of healthcare", and manufactured outrage about nuns getting birth control through their health insurance plans. Those things were fundamentally unserious.
Particular instantiations in mass media appear unserious, but they were not rooted in fundamentally unserious concerns. This is something liberals who imagine themselves to be operating in good faith need to accept, or else they should admit what appears to be the case: they actually don't care or are hostile (more have begun to admit the latter since Trump's election). I'm not sure about nuns getting birth control—why would they need it?—but the issue of being forced to provide it became a real issue that spent ten years in the courts. The Obama administration's pursuit of this policy, of not granting religious exemptions in a very obvious case so as to foreclose future challenges, up to the Supreme Court showed that Democrats had no qualms about moving a policy debate on health care into the cultural sphere. And the fears about "government takeover" were not fictitious. As I pointed out, the very first proposal in congress following Obama's state of the union was a proposal for Medicare for All, which will inevitably lead to a health care system where the government dominates and squeezes out private insurance companies for all except upper income people. Medicare for All was the Democrats' line until Joe Biden, who understands how unpopular this is with voters across the spectrum. Outside of the tendentious surveys written by political scientists, government health care is just not popular in this country, and most people dislike government period. But Democrats don't try to make the case why that view is wrong because they don't care about or are not able to appeal to voters: instead, they use special rhetorical effects like "public option" and "Medicare for All" but people see through this. This isn't Fox News's invention, but that's the line they use when they can't win an election or get their policies through.
Analytics wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:05 pm
So there are several different issues here, including:
  1. What should America's healthcare system look like? (e.g. should Americans with preexisting conditions be able to get health insurance? Do we want insurance companies part of the system? Should there be a public option? Should employers choose people's health insurance, or should individuals be free to choose for themselves?)
  2. What are principled, informed positions on 1., from the position of both liberals and conservatives?
  3. What do average people on the street think about this stuff?
  4. How do people arrive at their opinions? What roles do psychological, sociological, and economic factors play?
  5. How do propaganda machines manipulate people for their own purposes?

"principled ,informed"...who the hell gets to decide when those criteria have been satisfied? My impression is that you answer 4 by appealing to 5. But I don't have much faith at all in this idea of propaganda machines, frankly. First, successful propaganda works by pushing just an inch ahead of where a given demographic already is. It's not a machine that you plug something in to get results in a predictable way. Second, it's always the other side that is propaganda, never one's own, and last, it's always the other side's propaganda that is effective, and never one's own (every conservative believes, not without justification, that they have no influence on the culture because the media companies chasing their dollars are second-rate). Liberals lament that they couldn't come to dominate AM radio with Talk America or whatever it was, as if it were just a mysterious force of nature, or actually that Limbaugh was just so much of a liar and they were too noble to compete with that. The latter view says a lot more about what they think of AM radio listeners than anything else. People who listen to AM radio are overwhelmingly working class, and they tend to have a conservative cultural outlook. Rachel Maddow wasn't going to appeal to these people. On the other hand, she became very appealing to egghead wannabes when she moved over to TV, because they watch TV infotainment as part of their habitus and they love the retweetable viral clip because their attention spans are as short as everyone else's.

Media companies are businesses we're talking about, chasing dollars, not propaganda machines trying to whip up votes. It's not that they have no influence; it's that you are wildly overvaluing that influence over viewers and missing what their actual distorting effect is. Fox News came into success after the demise of the so-called Fairness Doctrine because there was pent up mark demand in a huge amounts for a conservative perspective in media after progressive and center-left dominance of the airwaves since the advent of television, not because they were just that good at snagging and brainwashing viewers.
Analytics wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:05 pm
On this thread, I've been trying to talk about the last three issues on that list--the psychological and sociological. I recognize that everybody is an individual with their own complex, not necessarily congruent but not entirely irrational either, reasons for believing what they do. But I do think that psychological and sociological models can help us understand what is going on.

It seems that when I offered a concrete example of #5 on that list ("A Government takeover of healthcare!"), you thought I was making a comment about a different topic that is in category #1 or #2--that I was claiming there are no principled reasons to think Obamacare could be improved.
Well, I'm sorry if I'm not clear in what I'm pushing back against, so I'll try to summarize here, and then you can decide how that fits into your list: you start by making a claim that the side you disagree with is defined in their opposition by lack (of information, of moral scruples, of concern for the common good, of intelligence, of agency, or whatever); as an example, you take a policy position A; you admit that there is some legitimate dissent from policy position A which you label "principled" or something along those lines; you then attribute, in a circular fashion, all other forms of dissent to stupidity or malevolence or the result of manipulation by morally suspect media companies. I then note that most of your critique involves front-loading the analysis through use of language like "propaganda" and "principled" etc. that answers the question before it's even been asked, and that the sources you bring in are advocates and not analysts.

We both, I think, agree with policy position A, but what I'm saying is that arguments over position A and the consequent political effects that we are still living with were not just policy questions but had cultural implications, that discussions about policy A were embroiled in cultural tensions, and that those cultural tensions in some cases pre-exist policy A and extend far beyond the "policy" part of position A —a pre-existing condition, if you will. You want to keep the scope political such that it can be analyzed with the kind of data modelling a political scientist can give you—that is, focus on policy and procedural tweaks—that can then be subjected to rigorous analysis. But my claim is that that limited view distorts what is happening not only on the other side but on yours too.

The thread was initially about fault lines, and my claim here is that these fault lines aren't political but cultural; you can get a much better understanding of the shift that has opened up space for someone like Trump to get elected by watching a bunch of John Wayne films for three days and then all of the sudden watching Magic Mike on the fourth than you can get by reading a sociology monograph written by someone who is in an elite position in society and has a cultural agenda of their own that they hardly disguise because they are hardly aware of it.

Reducing that shift to the manageable dichotomy of partisan politics disguises this shift (or series of shifts) and distorts what you can see and, in fact, makes things worse. I don't know how that fits into your list.
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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

Post by Analytics »

Symmachus wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 5:15 pm
Analytics wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:05 pm
This image you have of me as somebody who gets his information from only politicized democratic channels is interesting, and actually kind of funny. Did I mention that once I attended a conference where Stuart Butler was the keynote speaker, and after his presentation I had lunch with him?
I'm not sure what you are attempting to convey with that last sentence, but I don't mean to give that impression, and I don't really have an image of you per se; I'm just responding to what you post here...
You had asked me, "Doesn't it occur to you ever to look at a source that isn't a Democrat (as Norm Ornstein is) or from a media outlet whose bias towards Democrats is clear as day (as the Atlantic is)?" I hope you can understand why you might come across as somebody who has an image of me as somebody who has not "ever" looked at a source that isn't corrupted by liberal bias. If you had been paying more attention to everything I've said, you'd hopefully realize that somebody who has lunch with a senior fellow of the Heritage Foundation does in fact have a broader set of sources.
Symmachus wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 5:15 pm
I also cannot detect that anyone other than an elitist small-government Republican can be a conservative and hold a legitimate point of view (i.e. not the product of external manipulation) that should be taken seriously.
I provided an example in a message board post of an intellectually congruent conservative position to prove to you that I am aware that such things exist. I did not write a dissertation that catalogs all serious conservative positions on all issues. Just because you couldn't detect from a couple of message board posts what my position is on vegetarian food doesn't mean I don't have one.
Symmachus wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 5:15 pm
Notice how you reduce "thoughtful" conservative and "principled Republicans," though, to someone who only cares about some policy positions that are of limited scope involving taxes and markets.
This is a pattern in our discussion. It's like...


A: Three is a prime number.

S: You don't think there are any prime numbers greater than three!

A: That's not true. For example, five is a prime number. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_numbers)

S: Has it ever occurred to you to turn to a source other than Wikipedia? Wikipedia has an agenda, too! And note how you've limited prime numbers to those less-than or equal to five....

Symmachus wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 5:15 pm
Particular instantiations in mass media appear unserious, but they were not rooted in fundamentally unserious concerns. This is something liberals who imagine themselves to be operating in good faith need to accept, or else they should admit what appears to be the case: they actually don't care or are hostile (more have begun to admit the latter since Trump's election). I'm not sure about nuns getting birth control—why would they need it?—but the issue of being forced to provide it became a real issue that spent ten years in the courts....
The fact they don't need birth control is why their concern wasn't serious. The way group health insurance works is that a basket of benefits is established, and the insurance company guesses how much it will cost to provide that basket of benefits to that particular group. To the extent the insurance company guesses wrong, the estimates are trued-up in the subsequent year.

So, if a group of nuns has an insurance policy that says they will be entitled to, say, unlimited bone-marrow transplants while residing on the planet Mars, the insurance company will charge them $0 for that benefit, because while it might be a trillion dollars to pay for that procedure, if they are sure nobody in the group will use it, they will expect $0 in claims for that benefit. It's the same thing with birth control for nuns--if they don't use birth control, they aren't actually charged anything for it. Group insurance doesn't pay for benefits the group doesn't use. So they could spend millions of dollars in legal fees trying to get the contraception benefit removed from their group coverage, but presuming nobody in the group was using the benefit to begin with, removing the benefit will save the group precisely $0.00. So given that this case is about an unused insurance benefit that is offered for free, what is the rational reason for the outrage?
Symmachus wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 5:15 pm
"Principled ,informed"...who the hell gets to decide when those criteria have been satisfied?
Are you a postmodernist who thinks nothing is true? Since it isn't fair to let anybody decide what is and is not "principled," everything is equally principled?
Symmachus wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 5:15 pm
First, successful propaganda works by pushing just an inch ahead of where a given demographic already is. It's not a machine that you plug something in to get results in a predictable way...
And then it pushes it another inch and then another and then another. At that point you are in a doom loop. That is how I see it, at least.
Symmachus wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 5:15 pm
Media companies are businesses we're talking about, chasing dollars, not propaganda machines trying to whip up votes. It's not that they have no influence; it's that you are wildly overvaluing that influence over viewers and missing what their actual distorting effect is. Fox News came into success after the demise of the so-called Fairness Doctrine because there was pent up mark demand in a huge amounts for a conservative perspective in media....
So, would you say that conservatives in 1987 are just like conservatives today, and that continuously listening to hateful, paranoid rantings for 35 years hasn't influenced the Republican party or its members?

To clarify where I'm coming from, when I talk about the "propaganda machine" I don't mean to imply that, say, 21st Century Fox is engaging in a multi-decade strategy to get Donald J. Trump into the White House so that their sister company in the wall constructing business can get a juicy government contract. Rather, I'm referring to the entire system of media networks, opinion show hosts, editorialists, think tanks, bloggers, politicians, addicted consumers, Facebook posters, etc. These players all have multiple agendas, some of which are political, financial, or psychological in nature. I'm sure extremely few of these people started with the goal of instigating a riot at the Capitol to overturn the results of a Constitutionally valid election, yet that is where the dynamics of "the machine" led.
Symmachus wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 5:15 pm
...as an example, you take a policy position A; you admit that there is some legitimate dissent from policy position A which you label "principled" or something along those lines; you then attribute, in a circular fashion, all other forms of dissent to stupidity or malevolence or the result of manipulation by morally suspect media companies. I then note that most of your critique involves front-loading the analysis through use of language like "propaganda" and "principled" etc. that answers the question before it's even been asked, and that the sources you bring in are advocates and not analysts.
I wasn't frontloading the analysis and wasn't making an argument. I was just stating what the plain facts of the matter were.

It is an objective fact that despite not receiving any Republican votes, Obamacare is, in its bones, the Republican solution to providing all Americans with healthcare financing. There simply isn't anything to "replace" it with that wouldn't fundamentally have the same basic characteristics as the plan first proposed by the Heritage Foundation. Just because I might cite a non-conservative news outlet that explains why this is the case doesn't mean that isn't true.

If you want to prove I'm wrong, don't complain about my sources. Instead, provide me a reference to a serious Republican plan that provides all Americans with preexisting conditions healthcare financing.

In the meantime, consider this:
A liberal news outlet wrote:Noting that in his 25 years in Congress Republicans never could agree on a healthcare proposal, Boehner said, “All this happy talk that went on in November and December and January about repeal, repeal, repeal … I started laughing, because if you pass repeal without replace, first, anything that happens is your fault. You broke it.”

Boehner continued, “And secondly, as I told some of the Republican leaders when they asked, I said, if you pass repeal without replace you’ll never pass replace, because they will never ever agree on what the bill should be. Perfect always becomes the enemy of the good.”

He concluded, “Most of the Affordable Care Act, in the framework, is going to stay there: coverage for kids up to age 26, covering those with preexisting conditions. All of that’s going to be there. Subsidies for those who can’t afford it, who aren’t on Medicaid, who I call the working poor, subsidies for them will be there.”
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2017 ... d-replace/
Symmachus wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 5:15 pm
We both, I think, agree with policy position A, but what I'm saying is that arguments over position A and the consequent political effects that we are still living with were not just policy questions but had cultural implications, that discussions about policy A were embroiled in cultural tensions, and that those cultural tensions in some cases pre-exist policy A and extend far beyond the "policy" part of position A —a pre-existing condition, if you will. You want to keep the scope political such that it can be analyzed with the kind of data modelling a political scientist can give you—that is, focus on policy and procedural tweaks—that can then be subjected to rigorous analysis. But my claim is that that limited view distorts what is happening not only on the other side but on yours too.

The thread was initially about fault lines, and my claim here is that these fault lines aren't political but cultural; you can get a much better understanding of the shift that has opened up space for someone like Trump to get elected by watching a bunch of John Wayne films for three days and then all of the sudden watching Magic Mike on the fourth than you can get by reading a sociology monograph written by someone who is in an elite position in society and has a cultural agenda of their own that they hardly disguise because they are hardly aware of it.

Reducing that shift to the manageable dichotomy of partisan politics disguises this shift (or series of shifts) and distorts what you can see and, in fact, makes things worse. I don't know how that fits into your list.
It seems to me that explaining what's going on in terms of "cultural shifts" that can be understood by watching John Wayne movies proves my point--the right-wing rantings about Obamacare aren't serious, just as their rantings about how the last election was stolen from Trump aren't serious. Their rants shouldn't be taken at face value, but rather should be seen as a manifestation of their psychological reluctance to embrace a complicated modern world.

You should write a sociology monograph about it.
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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

Post by Symmachus »

Ok, I understand what you were trying to say about lunch with Stuart Butler. Thanks. Do you think a life-long think tank person born abroad has a lot in common with conservative voters? Just curious of your impression, since you met him, and you also live around a lot of those voters.

My point on Obamacare remains: there was never a serious engagement with conservatives writ large. That's for the better or not, but major legislation usually needs some kind of mass buy-in. Talking to half the members of the finance committee in the Senate is significant as a procedural issue, but it's not going to get you that. It really doesn't matter that this was a version of a Heritage plan in 1991 or whenever, because Republicans needed to be elected by voters in 2010. There were no serious amendments. But I note that your comments have convinced me that the Democrats have done a great job persuading their voters that they did their best to bring conservatives on board. I think we should be clear, though, that you keep talking about a very rarefied form of Republican and I'm talking about conservative voters, who sometimes vote Republican and sometimes not. Certainly many people who opposed Obamacare had voted for Obama.

I'm not sure why you think quoting Breitbart appeals to me, or why you seem to think I'm defending Republicans. Boehner is obviously correct. As I said, once they realize there was an electoral opening created by Obamacare, they went with it, ordinary people be damned. I'm not defending them, but I am saying that engaging the finance committee and ignoring House Republicans in a serious way, who were much closer to their voters, represents a shallow effort. As a Democratic voter, at the time I was really frustrated, as were a lot Obama's supporters, with the fact that he wasn't doing anything to try promote Obamacare. Jonathan Alter's book, which is very pro-Obama, showed why that was. And it is the height of naïvété to imagine that Democrats weren't also and equally strategic and political in all of this. They were much more so, in fact, than the Republicans.

So, what I've been trying to do, especially in light of the OP, is point to a more fundamental question—why was there a political opening in the first place?—and giving reasons for my dissatisfaction with the answer that it's because of Republican propaganda and lack of scruples. Necessary but not sufficient.
So they could spend millions of dollars in legal fees trying to get the contraception benefit removed from their group coverage, but presuming nobody in the group was using the benefit to begin with, removing the benefit will save the group precisely $0.00. So given that this case is about an unused insurance benefit that is offered for free, what is the rational reason for the outrage?
"If these Christians would have just signed this meaningless loyalty oath to the emperor and allowed a slave to offer sacrifice on their behalf for ten seconds, we would have left them alone."

But your interest-rationality obviously trumps their value-rationality. Obviously. The answer I expect, because I've heard it, will be something about what is best for everyone, not for a small group who believe in unprovable fantasies, and it will be articulated from the sort of hard secular perspective that didn't exist in the public sphere only 20 years ago. In other words, what we have here is a cultural conflict resulting from changed expectations in the public sphere—a "shift" you might call it.
Are you a postmodernist who thinks nothing is true? Since it isn't fair to let anybody decide what is and is not "principled," everything is equally principled?
No, but I don't think people who believe their side is always in the right and the other side, except for a few hand picked outliers, is pathologically unable to cope with reality are in a position to make a sound judgment on that.
And then it pushes it another inch and then another and then another. At that point you are in a doom loop. That is how I see it, at least.
Yes, I totally agree with that, but it is a response mechanism. National Review couldn't stop Trump, nor apparently can Fox News now, and yet there isn't some big media company that is pushing him. I wonder what it could be.
It seems to me that explaining what's going on in terms of "cultural shifts" that can be understood by watching John Wayne movies proves my point--the right-wing rantings about Obamacare aren't serious
To the extent they represent a sentiment shared by voters, I think they should be taken seriously if you value representative democracy or just a stable society in general.
just as their rantings about how the last election was stolen from Trump aren't serious. Their rants shouldn't be taken at face value, but rather should be seen as a manifestation of their psychological reluctance to embrace a complicated modern world.
Lol. The clueless triumphalism is something to behold.

Sounds like a "cultural shift," to use your scare quotes, happened. What do you think is wrong with these people? Why are they psychologically reluctant? Don't they see how wonderful a complicated modern world is? After all, it must work very nicely for you and other highly educated people like Stuart Butler.
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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

Post by Analytics »

Symmachus wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 11:03 pm
My point on Obamacare remains: there was never a serious engagement with conservatives writ large. That's for the better or not, but major legislation usually needs some kind of mass buy-in. Talking to half the members of the finance committee in the Senate is significant as a procedural issue, but it's not going to get you that. It really doesn't matter that this was a version of a Heritage plan in 1991 or whenever, because Republicans needed to be elected by voters in 2010. There were no serious amendments....
For the sake of argument, grant me my naïve premise that for the most part, Obama and the Democrats wanted a universal healthcare system not because they thought doing so would make them popular with voters, but rather because they thought it was the right thing to do. If their objective was to make America better by implementing a healthcare system, would it have done any good to court Republicans? For example, would House Republicans have offered meaningful amendments? Would they have co-sponsored the legislation? Explained to their constituents the merits of the legislation they were helping to create?

On the other hand, if courting Republicans would have done nothing other than give Republicans a mechanism by which to kill Obamacare via endless debate, doing so would have run counter to their objectives. That's what I really think happened.
Symmachus wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 11:03 pm
But I note that your comments have convinced me that the Democrats have done a great job persuading their voters that they did their best to bring conservatives on board.
I think McConnell, Boehner, Limbaugh, Hannity, etc. did their very best to keep Republicans from getting on board regardless of the worthiness of the cause or the merits of the legislation, and that trying to counter that would have been futile.
Symmachus wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 11:03 pm
I'm not sure why you think quoting Breitbart appeals to me....
I wasn't trying to appeal to you. I was trying to mock your belief that I live in a bubble without exposure to conservative views.
Symmachus wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 11:03 pm
"If these Christians would have just signed this meaningless loyalty oath to the emperor and allowed a slave to offer sacrifice on their behalf for ten seconds, we would have left them alone."

But your interest-rationality obviously trumps their value-rationality. Obviously. The answer I expect, because I've heard it, will be something about what is best for everyone, not for a small group who believe in unprovable fantasies...
My answer would be that as part of the social contract we need to follow the rules, even the ones we don't particularly care for. Saying your religious beliefs grant you a license to be exempt from the law opens up all sorts of problems, including how it would necessitate establishing which religious beliefs are the preferred ones that grant you exemption from the laws the rest of us must obey, and which ones are not.

Your metaphor of a "meaningless loyalty oath" shows how desperate these people are to be offended. They weren't being asked to sign an oath, to undergo a medical procedure they don't want, or to pay for a medical procedure they don't approve of. They were simply asked to have health insurance coverage that complied with the law.
Symmachus wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 11:03 pm
Lol. The clueless triumphalism is something to behold.

Sounds like a "cultural shift," to use your scare quotes, happened. What do you think is wrong with these people? Why are they psychologically reluctant? Don't they see how wonderful a complicated modern world is? After all, it must work very nicely for you and other highly educated people like Stuart Butler.
If you asked me what my favorite book is and it had to be literature as opposed to, say, Yuval Noah Harari, I'd probably answer Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The big shocker in the book is that the rich people Pip was trying to impress were really quite pathetic, while the biggest villain in the story turned out to be the biggest hero. In contrast to David Copperfied where the colorful characters are one-dimensional, in Great Expectations people are both good and bad, and different people see different truths that would seem to be in complete contradiction, but in fact just represent different perspectives on complex situations full of flawed people.

My point is that I'm absolutely certain I have biases and blindspots that I am completely oblivious to, and if somebody else has beliefs that contradict my own, they may very well be right. The world is a complex place, and most of what we are talking about are really just models of that reality. And I completely agree with George Box, all models are wrong, but some are useful.

But having said that, some models and viewpoints really are justifiable and some really aren't. John Gee and Robert Ritner are both extraordinarily intelligent and superlatively educated, but that doesn't mean their views on what Egyptology implies about the Book of Abraham are equally valid. And there are lots of sincere people who don't have elite Egyptology degrees who are completely certain that the Book of Abraham is an accurate translation of an ancient Egyptian document. They are wrong. Some people seem to be prone to believe in things that are obviously false, while others are immune. There are reasons for this.

Having said all that, I like Obama's answer to your question. When asked why working class people vote against their interests and instead vote for Republicans, he answered:
President Obama wrote:You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. So it’s not surprising then that they get frustrated, and they look to the traditions and way of life that have been constants in their lives, whether it’s their faith, or hunting, or blue-collar work, or more traditional notions of family and community. And when Republicans tell them we Democrats despise these things—or when we give these folks reason to believe that we do—then the best policies in the world don’t matter to them.
Obama, Barack. A Promised Land (p. 144-145). Crown. Kindle Edition.
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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

Post by Symmachus »

Analytics wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 4:16 am
For the sake of argument, grant me my naïve premise that for the most part, Obama and the Democrats wanted a universal healthcare system not because they thought doing so would make them popular with voters, but rather because they thought it was the right thing to do. If their objective was to make America better by implementing a healthcare system, would it have done any good to court Republicans? For example, would House Republicans have offered meaningful amendments? Would they have co-sponsored the legislation? Explained to their constituents the merits of the legislation they were helping to create?

On the other hand, if courting Republicans would have done nothing other than give Republicans a mechanism by which to kill Obamacare via endless debate, doing so would have run counter to their objectives. That's what I really think happened.
A different perspective from someone who was actually there and who is not Obama:
Eric Cantor wrote:A few weeks later, John and I, along with the other congressional leaders, met with President Obama at the White House to discuss our plan as well as his proposed stimulus bill. Bringing along a one-page outline of our working group’s recommendations, I rather brazenly asked the president if I could hand it out at the meeting. The president agreed, and after glancing at it, he said to me, “Eric, I don’t see anything crazy in here.”

I was hopeful. But later in the meeting, when I mentioned that a stimulus package built around government spending would be too much like “old Washington,” the president’s tone changed. He said: “Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won. So I think on that one I trump you.”

It wasn’t long afterward that we learned that Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, and Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, were well on their way to having a final stimulus package drafted, and they weren’t really interested in any of our ideas.

And so it went with the year’s next significant policy debate: health care reform. For a long time, Republicans had been working on proposals to utilize high-risk pools to help patients with pre-existing conditions, to lower overall costs, and to expand coverage in the small employer market — policies that were compatible with the president’s public goals.

Early in the legislative process, a senior member of the Obama administration came to see me. Ostensibly it was to share ideas and seek a bipartisan way forward on health care reform. The official presented the administration’s preferred policy approach — including mandates, and the “public option,” in which government would compete with private insurance plans. I insisted that none of this would go over well with the Republican members, and as the whip I knew that the public option was a nonstarter. Nonetheless, I was told the president and his team were intent on doing it their way.

The attitude wasn’t much different in public. In February 2010, the president invited the bipartisan congressional leadership to Blair House for a discussion surrounding the health care bill that the Senate had passed. Unlike our meeting on the economy a year earlier, this one was to be televised. It was obvious that the session was more about creating public pressure on Republicans than soliciting our ideas.
Analytics wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 4:16 am
I wasn't trying to appeal to you. I was trying to mock your belief that I live in a bubble without exposure to conservative views.
I responded to what you posted here, not projecting my beliefs about you.
Analytics wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 4:16 am
My answer would be that as part of the social contract we need to follow the rules, even the ones we don't particularly care for. Saying your religious beliefs grant you a license to be exempt from the law opens up all sorts of problems, including how it would necessitate establishing which religious beliefs are the preferred ones that grant you exemption from the laws the rest of us must obey, and which ones are not.
The entire conceptual framework of "social contract" is a liberal framing of how society works, but it not the objective baseline that you assume it to be. In any case, I fail to see how imposing a burden on nuns to seek out and provide alternative access to a practice they consider abominable and violative of their sense of morality, all to satisfy the convenience of a private insurance company and a vocal activist corner of the Democratic coalition, serves any kind of social contract.

I also note that, not only did the Supreme Court find this kind of argument unconvincing because it did lead to state violation of the free exercise clause, but your positivist framing of law—we must obey laws, without any consideration of what is just—opens the door to some very unpleasant forms of coercion—lots of historical evidence of that, as I'm sure you're aware.
Analytics wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 4:16 am
Your metaphor of a "meaningless loyalty oath" shows how desperate these people are to be offended. They weren't being asked to sign an oath, to undergo a medical procedure they don't want, or to pay for a medical procedure they don't approve of. They were simply asked to have health insurance coverage that complied with the law.
You are clearly unable or unwilling to enter a worldview that is not your own. It is meaningless to you, and you apparently have no problem with the state exercising its coercive power to impose an understanding of the reality you identify with, but it is not meaningless to them. That is the key point. The clause "that complied with the law" meant placing a burden on the nuns to find an alternative means by which employees in the non-profits they ran could access medical care that the nuns consider abhorrent to their religiously derived morality. That would be the equivalent, as one of the amicus briefs showed, to requiring a conscientious objector to find their replacement to fight a war that they opposed, whereas the burden should be on the state to do that.

Perhaps you think that moral perspective is mistaken or is stupid or is a sign of their pathological inability to accept your view of the world, but saying that "they just wanted to be offended" denies something I would consider fundamental to human dignity, namely, letting people speak for themselves and taking them on their own terms. So much for the "social contract."
Analytics wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 4:16 am
My point is that I'm absolutely certain I have biases and blindspots that I am completely oblivious to, and if somebody else has beliefs that contradict my own, they may very well be right. The world is a complex place, and most of what we are talking about are really just models of that reality. And I completely agree with George Box, all models are wrong, but some are useful.

But having said that, some models and viewpoints really are justifiable and some really aren't.
I feel we are making progress now, because in justifying that you worldview is superior, you are implicitly accepting the point that there is something more fundamental, something per-political that is going on.
Analytics wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 4:16 am
John Gee and Robert Ritner are both extraordinarily intelligent and superlatively educated, but that doesn't mean their views on what Egyptology implies about the Book of Abraham are equally valid. And there are lots of sincere people who don't have elite Egyptology degrees who are completely certain that the Book of Abraham is an accurate translation of an ancient Egyptian document.
I don't think this is analogous at all; but let me ask you: should we ban the publication of books asserting that "the Book of Abraham is an accurate translation of an ancient Egyptian document"? Should it the viewpoint be chased from the public square, in your view?
Analytics wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 4:16 am
They are wrong. Some people seem to be prone to believe in things that are obviously false, while others are immune. There are reasons for this.
Sounds like the first line of a dystopian novel.
Analytics wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 4:16 am
Having said all that, I like Obama's answer to your question. When asked why working class people vote against their interests and instead vote for Republicans, he answered:
Once again, working class people are just as capable of defining their own interests as you are. They don't Obama to explain themselves to themselves or to other people. I don't know why it is so hard for liberals to understand this. Does the social contract only travel in your direction?
President Obama wrote:You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. So it’s not surprising then that they get frustrated, and they look to the traditions and way of life that have been constants in their lives, whether it’s their faith, or hunting, or blue-collar work, or more traditional notions of family and community. And when Republicans tell them we Democrats despise these things—or when we give these folks reason to believe that we do—then the best policies in the world don’t matter to them.
You this like this answer? I've always found it troubling. This is the same line that successive progressive governments, both Republican and Democrat, have had towards Native Americans and any demographic in the way of their policy aims since after the Civil War. It's a very useful way to justify the application of coercive measures and allocate social control to ends that progressives deem desirable. But "social contract"...

And I have to wonder: do you apply this consistently in your support of policies or only on domestic issues? For example, don't you think it would be a good idea to bring democracy to the Islamic middle east—a place that clings to guns and religion as few others do? After all, they believe things that are obviously false, and we live in a global society now, with international norms and markets, which are implicit forms of a social contract. Obviously, I'm being mostly facetious here, but if you're willing to endorse state coercion on the basis of worldview within national borders, why not across them? After all, national borders are purely conventional and arbitrary—they really are a kind of tradition, but is there really a rational reason why they should be maintained as barriers beyond which your kind of thinking doesn't apply? Many Democrats increasingly don't think so.

On the economics, note how Obama singles out the Clinton and Bush administrations but refers to just "successive administrations," a tacit admission that they fell through his as well. And where does he lay responsibility for that? He just blames Republicans and then ultimately these very people themselves for not supporting his policies. Remind me again, what economic policies did Obama have that helped these people?

I'm also not sure that description is a particularly accurate portrayal of the dynamic. This is a very liberal, Thomas Friedman, IMF sort-of-view: any kind of negative response to our policies is because of some economic reason (which, incidentally, continues to inform so much foreign policy: and it's going so well!). I think the economics is important, but also the fact that the "traditions and way of life" are indirectly undermined or actively attack by the state. I have listed a few examples, but we could list many, many more. In short, there is a lot of evidence that "Democrats despise these things" as do a good many of the free-market ideologues among the elite Republicans.

I had to laugh this morning when I saw the NYT Twitter feed defending the comments of Mara Gay, who is the editorial board. Apparently, she had said something about how she was disturbed to see a number American flags, which I guess now are symbols of white supremacy. Conservatives, predictably, got mad. The NYT PR office then defended her by pointing out that Trump had "politicized the American flag" (but I'm sure no football players had done so), reinforcing her absurd claim. Once again the pattern: liberal takes extreme position by insulting something that five minutes ago was normal, and then story is how bad people were offended by this because, actually, the extreme position is the baseline.

It reminded me of one of your responses:
Analytics wrote:
Tue Jun 01, 2021 2:12 pm
Symmachus wrote:
Mon May 31, 2021 4:25 pm
I can see [anti-patriotism being a knee-jerk reaction to Sean Hannity et. al.] to an extent, but I think this is not a function of partisan politics and reaction. The hostility to the United States is much deeper than that; it is a hostility to a lot more than just the United States, not a reaction to flag pins and "freedom fries."
Of course it depends upon who, specifically, we are talking about. I don’t personally know very many people who match what you are talking about here.
Well, there you go. I just don't understand what benefits come from denying that this kind of aggression, of which this is just one example, is going on and that is pervasive in the institutions of the country (media, academia, government, corporate) that don't merely implement policies in the short term but determine the long-term course of society.
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Re: Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

Post by Kishkumen »

I was reminded of this interesting thread this morning when I saw posted on Facebook a Salon article entitled, "Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right," by Phil Torres.

https://www.salon.com/2021/06/05/how-th ... 3ttpY9WerE

The article, if it can be called that, is a catalogue of the sins of the New Atheists, who are taken to the woodshed for various approximations of crime or at least apparent or alleged moral turpitude. To give you a taste of the "quality" of this screed, I will look at the entry on Michael Shermer:
The founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, which once published a favorable review of Milo Yiannopoulos' book "Dangerous" and a defense of child-rapist Jerry Sandusky, Shermer made a name for himself as a "skeptic."
This is either poorly written, or deliberately deceptively constructed. You tell me. Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, and he has done wrong because the magazine "once published a favorable review" of a book by Milo Yiannopoulos, and the magazine once published "a defense of child-rapist" Jerry Sandusky. This is all before Shermer is identified as someone "who made a name for himself as a "skeptic"."

Let's check into these accusations.

The book review in question was authored by Dr. George Michael, a professor of criminal justice at Westfield State University in Massachusetts. He is the author of Confronting Right-Wing Extremism and Terrorism in the USA, The Enemy of my Enemy: The Alarming convergence of Militant Islam and the Extreme Right, Willis Carto and the American Far Right, Theology of Hate: A History of the World Church of the Creator, etc.

In other words, he is not the kind of person I would expect to write a positive review of a Yiannopoulos book. I think the real problem here is that Michael wrote a descriptive as opposed to condemning review of the book. Here is the final paragraph:
Although many of his detractors hate him, it was the many absurdities of contemporary identity politics that gave rise to Milo, for it was only a matter of time before a counter-movement emerged to challenge the hegemony of the social justice left in the culture of the West. He embodies the irreverent ethos of the mischievous and sometimes mean-spirited online right. Highly entertaining, charismatic, and as he likes to put it, “transgressive,” Milo is one of the most influential figures to have emerged from the rise of the Trumpian right. Dangerous will inform, offend, entertain, and outrage its readers—at times—all at once.
Is Michael really a fan of the alt-right? Or is the author of this opinion piece just upset that the Michael did not write a clearly disapproving review of the book? Maybe extra effort is being made to make Shermer look guilty by association?

My understanding is that Skeptic Magazine publishes a lot of things that others probably would not touch for political or social reasons. The "defense of Sandusky," for example, is an examination of the witness-victims against Sandusky and the reliability of their testimony. It notes that some of the victims participated in recovered memory therapy. No doubt this is an uncomfortable and unpopular topic, but is the fact that Skeptic published the piece to the discredit of Shermer personally?

Shermer's core problem, it seems, is the series of accusations against him personally:
However, his legacy has been overshadowed by, among other things, a protracted history of sexual harassment and assault allegations, with James Randi once calling him "a bad boy" whom numerous people at atheism conferences had complained about. In 2014, he was accused of rape, which he later flippantly joked about on Twitter.
This is the stuff that I find most damning of Shermer, but, then, I am unaware of the current status of these allegations or of any legal (or otherwise) action that has been taken against Shermer. What, however, does it have to do with the "merging of New Atheism and the alt-right"?

The author is about to tell us:
Since then, he has dedicated an impressive amount of time belittling "SJWs" and "the woke," often hurling ad hominem attacks and middle-school insults towards those with whom he disagrees. For example, Shermer has referred to "SJWs" as "mealy-mouthed, whiney, sniveling, and obsequious," and "a bunch of weak-kneed namby-pamby bedwetters." He once tweeted, in Trumpian fashion: "Know this Regressive Lefters/SJWs — you will lose. Those of us who believe in truth & justice will prevail. Yours is a failed ideology. Losers." After I wrote a critique of Steven Pinker's recent book "Enlightenment Now!", which contains many serious errors, Shermer took to Twitter to call me a "cockroach." None of this should be that surprising, since he describes himself as an anti-woke, anti-reparations libertarian who thinks Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" is "a remarkable book."
So these two had a run-in over Torres' unfavorable review of a Pinker book. Ah.

Which leads to the final coup-de-grace:
But be careful: Shermer has also acknowledged, in writing, that he's fantasized about murdering people. "Or, if not actually killing the particular bastard," he reports, "at the very least I imagine dislocating his jaw with a crushing roundhouse knuckle sandwich that sent him reeling to the pavement." This comes from his book "The Moral Arc," which received an extended, glowing blurb from Steven Pinker.
Wow. How awful! :roll:

In any case, I confess to whiplash as I am hit by the strident moralism of Torres attacking the New Atheists. Torres claims to have once loved this movement, but then he was taught better, I suppose, by seeing his heroes hanging with the wrong people, behaving badly, and not standing up for the correct causes and issues in the way he thought they should.

That means that they merged with the alt-right? Like there is a club, and they have clearly decided at a club meeting to throw in their lot with the alt-right. Right.

This is one of those cases where my sympathy and tolerance for both target and shooter have diminished precipitously in a surprisingly brief amount of time. This piece is just more of the outrage porn that floods the internet on all sides and from all sides. You feel sullied just knowing that this exists for some reason. Something calls it forth, someone perpetrates it, and there it is. And no one is better for it.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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