anyone else notice that the west took a turn for the worse once the concept of signaling one’s own social virtue became derogatory, almost as if cynically deriding all displays of charity and good will is indicative of a deeply cynical and nihilistic society capable of collaborating in genocide

It is difficult for me to express how disastrous this is.

There’s going to be a time in the near future where stories and images like this simply aren’t proliferated anymore.

Waiting for the Ezra Kleins of the world to get with the program is not viable, and past a certain point nobody cares what the precipitating incident was

gonna keep reposting this until i don't have to

www.liberalcurrents.com/we-need-to-t...

A world where everyone is economically secure and progressive principles are so omnipresent as to render any alternatives an abstract question at most is kind of the win condition most of us want to see in some fashion, and yet this exact result has churned out a class of monstrous nihilists

‘Bored writers flirting with fascism just to feel something because they have been numbed by their economic security and the omnipresence of progressive ideology in their lives’ is a dynamic most of us are thoroughly familiar with at this point, but what’s less understood is how one prevents this

My boss: so how's our fourth quarter looking?

Me, the sales manager at the company that makes inflatable frog suits: well, you're never going to believe this, but

I continue to think this is one of the most important and underappreciated media dynamics.

I mean regimes rely heavily on low political engagement so

politicalsciencenow.com/poverty-and-... Not the paper I was looking at, but this produces similar findings

Justification is in the eye of the beholder

A semi-stable totalitarian regime with territorial ambitions has actual consequences for me too!

I mean your approach just flat out doesn’t work as well. I’m trying to find the paper but it’s been found that economic hardship actually has a downward effect on the average person’s willingness to participate in politics, without necessarily impacting their opinion of their political leadership

Fair, I’m definitely coming from the same place. I would rather a speedy restoration of constitutional governance in the US. Failing that, I would prefer a violent break with the status quo that jolts my government out of its complacent denial and harms America’s ability project outward power.

Their consolidation of the judiciary, media, military, security services and the private sector will only grow. The population will gradually become numbed as their economic precarity increases and the opinion forming sectors of the economy continue to situate themselves under the regime’s thumb.

I think forcing them to explicitly remove their political opposition with armed force at this time would create more problems than they’re currently prepared to deal with.

I don’t know how true this is a year or two from now

My point is that crossing that threshold at this time would be actively bad for the administration even if they don’t realize it.

I think the Insurrection Act is a rubicon the administration is not nearly as ready to cross as they think they are

China will not take America’s place because it A: can’t and B: is not trying to

There’s a popular belief that ‘world hegemon’ is a natural role that the US just sorta slotted into by dint of it’s natural advantages, rather than a position that it created for itself with great effort and expense.

The US economy has more forward inertia than virtually any in history, but the prevailing wisdom is that said inertia is literally infinite

It’s just example # 486 of “reasonable nuanced critique of liberalism gets flattened to meaninglessness through a game of telephone”. Cogent critiques of aspects of respectability politics get turned into “it makes you a brave revolutionary to be the biggest asshole possible to everyone”

Liberals believe that there is a referee in politics, even if that referee is just the *imagined* personal opinion of their fellow liberal friends and family and that just does not exist in any comparable way for conservatives.