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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 6th, 2023

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  • Mm?

    I hadn’t really wondered about the Republican government’s strategy and goals - they’re safely presumed to be broadly racially divisive, both for the immediate benefit of satisfying the racist inclinations of the politicians and much of their voter base and the longervterm benefitvof dividing the people against themselves - but that’s an intriguing idea.

    Yes - just by filing the suit, they’ve already signaled to other businesses that discrimination is not only okay, but expected.



  • Ah… yes. I see something I’d been missing.

    For anyone that does not believe that objective reality changes upon the whim of someone high in societal hierarchy, yes, it is absolutely blithering insanity.

    Broadly, though more in the context of Nietzscheanism vs. stoicism, I’d noted the distinction between those who believe that reality can be forced into alignment with preconceptions and those who believe that conceptions must follow reality.

    Sort of like the linguistic distinction between prescriptivism and descriptivism, but on a much greater scale.

    (And as far as that goes, I think that prescriptivism is obvious bollocks).

    I’d never really considered that same distinction in a broad political context though.

    I suspect part of the problem is that I’ve never been even the slightest bit authoritarian. I used to be further to the right (never really past barely right-of-center, but still much further than my current hard left), but since I never had any use for authoritarians, my experience with the right was mostly old-school right libertarians - people who advocated for some government interference in private lives because they believed it to be necessary to mitigate harm.

    I don’t think I’d ever really considered the idea of people believing, if not stated quite this way, that authority can literally change reality - can force reality to take forms other than whatever it is by which they’ve chosen to be offended.

    So… yeah. It’s likely not that they so grossly misperceive reality but that the whole idea of trying to accurately perceive it in the first place is foreign to them, since they believe that it - whatever it might be - really is subject to the dictates of puffed-up egomaniacs in suits. So all they need to do is get the “right” puffed-up egomaniacs in charge, and it’ll just magically change to whatever they prefer.

    Oh… and…

    Yeah - they stay trapped in that delusion because they never see their preferred puffed-up egomaniacs’ failures to alter reality as a counter to their delusion. Instead, to them, it must be that the puffed-up egomaniacs with [D]s after their names have altered reality in the “wrong” direction. So the solution is to try even harder to get the puffed-up egomaniacs with [R]s after their names in office, so they can wave their magic wands and reshape reality into the form they prefer.

    And that’s another benefit to binarism too. I’ve been mostly ascribing the tendency to binarism to the need for self-affirmation and the benefits of backhandedly convincing oneself that one is a good person simply by dint of the fact that one is not part of the (falsely) dichotomous “bad” opposition.

    But yes - it also undoubtedly spins off, to some degree, from the misconception that the only reason the world has problems is that the “wrong” puffed-up egomaniacs with magic wands are in power.

    Mm… yeah. Things are falling into place. Thanks.




  • I’m not trying to show them anything, and I’m not talking about good or bad faith.

    I’m talking about the rank and file conservatives who believe the self-serving lies of the bad faith actors in office, and specifically who believe the astonishingly obvious lies that a private company choosing entirely on its own to implement some policy (like requiring masks or following DEI hiring practices) somehow represents government overreach, and that the government then interfering to dictate what the private companies can and cannot do somehow represents the elimination of government overreach.

    That’s not just the lies of bad faith actors - that’s blithering insanity.

    And again, I’m not talking about the people who spin that insanity - I’m talking about the people who believe it - who seemingly unquestioningly believe, literally, that freedom is oppression and oppression is freedom. I have no idea how they manage to do that, and it baffles and fascinates me.


  • What you’re talking about is perfectly in keeping with the expected actions of power-hungry jackasses, and likely isn’t news to much of anyone, and certainly not to me.

    And it’s not what I’m talking about. The “they” you’re talking about here are the policy-makers and officials and their spokespeople. That’s not who I’m talking about. And the set of lies you’re talking about - advocating some set of legal restrictions, then changing the promised reach of those restrictions - is not the dynamic I’m talking about.

    What I’m talking about are the rank and file supporters who think of themselves as pro-freedom, and who apparently sincerely believe that they’re being oppressed by the government when the government is not actually involved (such as Walmart requiring masks during Covid or Starbucks implementing DEI policies), then apparently sincerely believe that they’ve been freed from government overreach when the government steps in and interferes (such as banning masks or banning DEI).

    I don’t understand what’s going through their heads. Obviously they’re some combination of stupid, ignorant and partisanly blinded, but even that doesn’t seem sufficient to explain away such a glaring set of misconceptions. They quite seriously and apparently sincerely claim they’re being oppressed by the government when the government isn’t even involved, then that they’ve been freed from government oppression when the government steps in and interferes.

    It’s seriously as if they live in a fantasy world in which up is down, not just figuratively but literally. This isn’t just self-serving lies and manipulation - it’s more like mass schizophrenia.

    And it baffles me.





  • This is an example of one of the things that most baffles me about the right in the US today.

    They have this whole narrative about government overreach, but the reality is that while, for example, government agencies did have DEI policies, they were internal. There was no interference in businesses - the businesses that had or have DEI policies chose to on their own.

    Then the Republicans come in and what do they do? They ban DEI, not just in their own agencies, but in private businesses. So in reality, we’ve gone from a situation in which the government did not interfere and businesses freely chose their own policies, which the right characterizes as government overreach, to a situation in which the government attempts to directly intervene and control which policies companies may or may not put in place, which the right characterizes as freedom.

    How does that even work in their own brains? I understand the human capacity for self-delusion and confirmation bias but surely there’s some sort of upper limit, which the MAGA right should’ve already passed.

    ???