Comment by aebtebeten

5 days ago

<anger>

Maybe it looks to you as if those who voted for Trump believed they were acting _against_ authoritarians, but I've lived among them.

I was still living in their midst when they tarred and feathered the Dixie Chicks (as they were then) for having the audacity to say GWB's Iraq Adventure might not be the most wonderful thing since sliced mayonnaise. (could we say they "cancelled" the Chicks?)

Then they claimed to be voting for DJT (a public figure whose bully bona fides go back at least 4 decades, eg https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6131533-trumpdeathpe... ) on an "isolationist" platform.

But now they're cheering Operation Southern Spear as if it were a homecoming game, as they did for GHB's Iraq. My local paper even had https://x.com/KatieMiller/status/2007541679293944266 (sorry for the X link) in it this morning.

They may say they're voting on a mind-your-own-business-principle, but whenever you look at what they do, they've consistently been voting on a leader-principle.

</anger>

Q. How do you describe a principled authoritarian follower?

A. "The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind"

  Inner Party  Pigs
  Outer Party  Dogs
  Proles       the Equal animals

8 comments

aebtebeten

Reply
gsf_emergency_6  5 days ago

you are talking about the base that Trump knows he can always count on. they don't matter as much these days. (I completely forgot about them no airquotes) I'm not sure David Graeber ever publicly got angry at these guys, however*

Ask PH (or Algolia it) about who he is angry with on the left. Those who drove the Swing voters (the prole equivalent of interchangeables) over to the other side or got Biden to "abdicate" . Loosely reminds me of the turncoats at Sekigahara and Bosworth Field

https://www.hkml.net/Discuz/viewthread.php?tid=125577

(*The rival camps that the Trump "inner corporatists" take seriously are SV "inner-outer party" (Shu Han?) and WallStreet/Fed (Wu?). With their bands of incorrigible rationalists/technocrats.

Imho Trump _wants_ leftist intellectuals distracted from his true strategy, and this is why he's more careful with Mamdani-- enemy of my enemy yada yada)

  • aebtebeten  5 days ago

    https://webcdn.guangming.com.my/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/i...

    One of the ways to learn a smattering of a language would be to look at YouTube comments; sentences of the form "in YYYY they still made real music" and "is anyone watching in YYYY?" seem to occur in every natural language.

    (for Sekigahara I wonder if part of the issue was credibility: if Tokugawa promises so many koku, you can be pretty sure you're getting them [and in the event he even lasted into his 70s] but if Ishida promises you so many koku, well, a lot can happen in 7-8 years: what are the chances that young Toyotomi will honour Ishida's old deals?)

    Edit: come to think of it, both Shu and Wu do spend many of their waking hours trying to figure out how to intermediate themselves into any possible otherwise-dyadic transaction... Wei supposedly does as well, but compared with Shu and Wu, at least here, Wei has a light touch.

  • aebtebeten  5 days ago

    > they don't matter as much these days

    True, but you were talking about voting Trump/Harris, which pretty much implies the wide electorate, no matter who the real selectorate may be.

    (speaking of selection, I completely forgot to include the judiciary in previous models. Would the whole Civil Rights thing have even happened if it hadn't been for the Warren Court?)

    [Not that Warren was an angel, but despite his bigotry in other ways —or maybe because of it?— he was able to win state office by just winning both party's primaries, which I hadn't even known was a thing]