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https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/tankies
[Dracula voice] "The same could be said of all ideologues' opinions."
Yeah, well, it was high time I wrote something like this, you guys were like losing your faith in me, heh.
This article already sets the diagnosis for the USA, but I think the phenomenon is not limited to America. I'd say the other factors are that it's been thirty years since the dissolution of the USSR, and some ten years since this whole wave of neo-fascism. Meaning, there is a whole generation of folks who have never had a personal reason to associate soviet communism with anything negative, but were aggravated by literal fascists just going about like they owned the place. As a rebound, some among leftists also went in the extreme direction.
Like I said, I think the phenomenon is not limited to America, though what I had in mind was not so much literally tankies, but rather that the self-identifications as "socialist", "Marxist", so on seem to be coming back into fashion among leftists. (The anarchists were always around, because anarchism registers as "cool" and "edgy", just the right fit for a musician or artist.) Tankies being a rather particular subset of that trend.
Socialists are the ones I've seen with a clear bent on dissociating purported goals from actually-existing outcomes.
in news regarding Things That Fourteenwings Might Flip Out Over
(This wasn't the only thing that the Louisiana state legislature couldn't override the governor's veto of. Here are two others: https://www.nola.com/gambit/news/the_latest/article_cb263f5c-e98c-11eb-bcaa-3b99c779ec87.html . Note that Gov. John Bel Edwards is a Democrat while both houses of the state legislature are dominated by Republicans.)
posting this here so i can read it later; seems like an interesting article
In short, former Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH-11) was appointed to the cabinet by President Joe Biden, and so a special election was called to replace her. In this heavily Democratic (PVI D+30) and also majority-black district, the Democratic primary was between several candidates, the most notable of whom were Nina Turner and Shontel Brown. Somehow the campaign managed to turn into some sort of nationalized drama-fest. From what I've heard, the two of them split various local endorsements, but sparks started flying when some national-level organizations and politicians started entering the race.
Turner, a former Cleveland city councilor and state senator, Turner supported Dem presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in 2016 and and even co-chaired his campaign in 2020, and didn't like Hillary Clinton. She also had some...less than charitable things to say about the Democratic Party in general and even Biden in particular (apparently once equating him to Trump), and was criticized for her disloyalty, with people questioning whether she even voted for Biden in 2020 (which she declined to answer, which probably didn't help; note that we have a secret ballot system so it's not even possible to tell who she actually voted for, beyond the fact that she did vote in 2020). It probably didn't help that one of her surrogates (as in the people a campaign uses as allies to help drum up support) apparently antagonized Jim Clyburn, the current House Majority Whip (a leadership post in the House's Democratic Caucus) and a pretty prominent member of the Congressional Black Caucus (for demographic reference, both Turner and Brown are black women). Still, early on, she consolidated some establishment support from congressional Democrats, and was also seen as a more favorable choice by progressives.
Brown, on the other hand, is a current Cuyahoga County councilor (Cuyahoga County contains the city of Cleveland, for reference), who (from what I can tell) seems to have gradually made a come-from-behind effort (she was down a lot in early polling) by consolidating various people and groups whom Turner didn't mend fences with, including Clinton and Clyburn. Democratic Majority for Israel also started spending on her behalf, introducing the Israel/Palestine issue as an additional dimension of conflict.
On the other hand, Brown's comments that apparently misgendered a trans person (followed by a non-apology of some sort) got some LGBTQ activists up in arms against her. I've also heard of some corruption issues involving Brown, with county contracts going to a relative, or something like that.
While some pundits identify Brown as the more "moderate" candidate and Turner as the more "progressive" candidate for her association with Sanders, I'm not sure there was clear ideological cleavage, as much as just different factions lining up on different sides as the race became nationalized.
In the end, both candidates had raised and/or spent (I forget exactly which) in the millions of dollars, and lots of internet arguments were had, to the point where some elections geeks regarded this as a dumpster fire of a topic and a campaign. And Brown won (by current estimates with most of the votes counted), by a few thousand votes out of over 70000 total votes cast.
And, late in the vote counting, this happened:
FYI the winner of this special primary election is heavily favored to win the special general election, which will be held on election day in November.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/03/trump-spending-millions-gop-candidates-502233?cid=apn
TL;DR
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-tale-of-two-suburbs/
And here is some @lrdgck bait: the article features a photograph containing the following text: PACZKI ≠ doughnut
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2021/05/14/the-souls-of-white-folk
When you stop loading the page at just the right moment, you can read it all.
More on the topic of the bait, what little I know of a Polish community in the USA/Polish Americans tells me that it's quite a messy story. Directly proportional to how irrelevant it is in comparison to any other community of similar numbers, feels like. Feuds back from the old country, insularism, superiority-inferiority complexes, matters involving assimilation into the broader American background, all the related drama.
And I think that some of those things occur in any multigenerational immigrant experience. There're always varying degrees of affinity for their former home that immigrant parents instill in their children, for starters...
TL;DR the service industry in the U.S., which arose in tandem with the rise of suburbs and office work, has cultivated a cultural understanding where the customer has an expectation of being pampered by inferiors, and it's the ultimate cause of the widespread phenomenon of customers being jerks.
(To be fair, I'm not sure how much I agree with this take.)
Incidentally, the article notes that the "virtue signaling" that fourteenwings decried about brands is part of this bigger problem.
On a sidenote, I was about halfway through this article and was wondering what the article's author would think about maid cafés, since they're like, an even more extreme and fetishized version of "the customer is pampered by inferiors". Though they're also an extremely niche part of the service industry, at least in the US.
You know, now that you mention it I kinda wish to hear about a "Massa's cafe" where black folks, who of course own and run the place, pretend they're your, ahem, house Negroes. That would deliver some interesting sociological data.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/09/blame-the-bobos-creative-class/619492/
A long article on the divisions and classes in a modern society, stuff I had some interest in. And a pinch of Biden praise at the end, in case you'd like it to be pointed out right here.
I appreciate the point about residential areas being segregated by occupation, though this phenomenon is not at all new.
I think some of the behavior he associates with the "bobos" is actually just what some of my fellow elections geeks (and other acquaintances) would call "very online". There definitely exist are complex social situations where the rules are unwritten, and some of them are these idea-discussion-spaces where social currency is measured in the ideas that one espouses or subscribes to or even just seems to support by implication. And I think it's interesting to point them out. I've run afoul of some of them before myself. Though I think this isn't at all distinctive to the world of "bobos". Those "very online" spaces, for example, are occupied by people who aren't "bobos" as well. (Furthermore, these "very online" spaces tend to be a misrepresentation (but not necessarily consistently) of real life, and its participants also have a weird tendency to self-cannibalize by way of arguing over basically anything.)
And similarly, while Brooks associates the "bobos" with this hipsterism that looks artistically grungy and stuff, the "bouboors" also like that stuff too.
example of an issue on which I agree with Republicans: hating on big tech and its outsized influence
Also: over 50% of Americans accept theory of evolution
And yeah I think they've tried setting up their own big tech companies various times, with more or less blackjack and hookers depending on who's doing it, but they haven't met with that much success in this regard for whatever reason.
I would surmise that some people are just contrarians for the sake of it, but...who knows.
I don't know the details of this case so can't comment on its merits, but I just thought this might be an interesting discussion of the arcaneness of a recent decision.
So, first, the substantial thing.
I'm not sure if you may have heard about this if you're not in the U.S., but this is a quick explanation of a new law in Texas criminalizing abortion (and then some; I'll explain).
A newly-implemented law, abbreviated "SB8" (for "senate bill 8"), does two things, in short:
1. It makes abortion illegal 6 weeks after the individual's last menstrual cycle. (There are no exceptions for rape or incest.)
2. It allows private citizens (not the government) to sue people who have performed or aided in an abortion, with a minimum $10,000 reward if the suit is successful.
The first thing is a big problem because pregnancy is hard to even detect during that time. And I shouldn't need to say why not making exceptions for rape and incest is a problem.
The second thing, however, is the real new kicker. So, instead of the state government enforcing the abortion ban, this empowers random people to be vigilantes. And indeed, internet communities started popping up with people basically appointing themselves bounty-hunters, trying to make money doing this. And this also includes some people who have specifically gotten others pregnant and are now looking to collect money related to their sexual partners getting abortions.
Also, the law is open-ended enough that one can potentially sue anyone for arguably aiding in an abortion. Someone pointed out, in a particularly disgusting example of what's possible, that a father could rape his daughter, hire a rideshare driver to drive her to get an abortion, then sue the driver. In fact, Uber and Lyft did put out official statements saying that they would cover any legal costs that their drivers might face as a result of this law, in addition to statements indicating their opposition to the law itself.
Given the very serious problems this law poses, there have been a number of legal challenges, of course, and emergency requests to issue a stay on the law had reached the Supreme Court of the United States.
People waited. The law was set to go into effect. SCOTUS...did not issue a stay. (They may still rule it unconstitutional later, but...there's a problem now, of course. And also even more lawsuits.)
Okay, now that I've paid my dues, here's the entirely unrelated stupid thing I wanted to dunk on.
This is a stupid premise.
It's one of the things that prompted me to post this.
But yeah, the suing part is downright weird. I assume the whole thing will get brought down at some point by the Supreme Court?