7 ms·

I really wish we had a (lower case) republican or conservative party in the US. I hope we survive this fear driven over-stimulated era of politics.

by csours 11mo ago

riffic 11mo ago
-
- xenophonf 11mo ago
  That's easy to say when you aren't the one under pressure.
  - more_corn 11mo ago
    Or one of the 200M people in the blast radius.
- BetaDeltaAlpha 11mo ago
  That sounds like a recipe for chaos and famine akin to Russia in the early-mid 90's
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - petsfed 11mo ago
    Or worse still, Russia in the early-mid 1920s. The Reds very nearly lost the civil war to the Whites, not because of any battlefield victory, or even a concerted propaganda effort. Instead, it was because for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away.
    - Animats 11mo ago
      > for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away. That describes Russia under Putin. Putin considers his regime to be a continuation of Imperial Russia. He's brought back the Imperial Eagle, the Russian Orthodox Church as an arm of the state, considers himself to be the next Peter the Great, and says that his goal is to extend Russia to its traditional boundaries, out to at least the edge of Poland and the Baltics. Communism was a historical accident which has now been corrected.
    - potato3732842 11mo ago
      Would that have been a bad thing? That's have likely been forced to go with a limited monarchy with a legislature and limited democratic characteristics (like most of the rest of europe at the time) in order to consolidate the support, or at least buy the compliance of the factions that opposed them. That might've saved a whole bunch of lives. And looking at it now 100yr later, Russia didn't exactly turn out great.
      - petsfed 11mo ago
        The leadership of the Whites were not the moderate monarchists who just wanted Nicholas to abdicate to literally any functioning adult. They were the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality or death!” types. Their explicit goal was a restoration of pre-Revolution autocracy, whose brutal dysfunction was the explicit reason for the February revolution in the first place. The Whites were not good people, and it’s a mistake to characterize them as simple, noble anti-communist fighters. Most of the White leadership that survived into WWII went beyond just collaborating with the Nazis on invading Russia, but were onboard for all of the Nazi program save for “Ukraine belongs to Germany now”. Don’t misunderstand me, Stalinism was worse for Russia than the Czars, but there’s really no White-victory scenario where it’s all sunshine and roses and limited democracy. That option went out the window with the October revolution. All I’m saying is that there is no better illustration of how bad War Communism got than the fact that people looked at the literal pogroms and said “maybe that’s not so bad”.
  - stackedinserter 11mo ago
    What do you know about Russia in 90's?
- dralley 11mo ago
  Accelerationism never works. There's a long, long list of complete and utter disasters and tremendous suffering inflicted by this moronic logic. Things get better by being made better, not by being made worse.
  - Animats 11mo ago
    > Accelerationism In the AI sense, or in the Israel/Third Temple/apocalypse sense?
- bluescrn 11mo ago
  People fantasize about revolution, but the reality would mostly be huge amounts of suffering and death. And there's near-zero chance that the outcome would be the 'high-tech fully-automated luxury communism' that people dream of. There's many much-more-likely outcome that are worse than what exists now.
  - creata 11mo ago
    > the reality would mostly be huge amounts of suffering and death. I think many of the people fantasizing about revolution are aware.
  - csours 11mo ago
    I think the movie 'Civil War' by Alex Garland was too absurd to be understood by a lot of people - to me it was yelling "IT CAN HAPPEN HERE TOO"
  - potato3732842 11mo ago
    >People fantasize about revolution, but the reality would mostly be huge amounts of suffering and death. There is suffering either way. Which has more area under the curve, fighting about it now, or boiling the frog 100yr and fighting later?
- ActorNightly 11mo ago
  >I would rather prefer the boiler to explode Just to be clear, you really would prefer to live in crumbling infrastructure, with plenty of violence, martial law, and constant worry of whether you are going to get shot or not trying to get basic supplies? Because boiler exploding isn't romantic or cool like you think it is. Imagine the worst possible riot, except country wide.
  - potato3732842 11mo ago
    If the ship is gonna sink there's an argument to be made for letting it go down with those who doomed it aboard rather some unspecified future generation.
  - anigbrowl 11mo ago
    I'm sure people made the same argument against the founders of this Republic.
    - gtowey 11mo ago
      And they were right. The American revolution had more to do with the fact that the wealthy landowners in the colonies wanted to claim even more land to the west. The British crown was getting tired of sending soldiers to clean up the messes the colonists were getting into by picking fights with the natives. Most of that rhetoric about tyranny and freedom was simply propaganda to get the poors to fight on their behalf. And it worked! They successfully conned the other colonists into laying down their lives to make the founders even richer. Somehow it doesn't feel all that different from America today. Something something history, doomed to repeat it.
      - potato3732842 11mo ago
        That is an absolutely delusional position to have and speaks volumes to lack of critical thinking or the effectiveness of propaganda. You are a wealthy plantation owner in 1770. Do you a) grumble about taxes and the British and pay anyway because you like free-ish trade that makes you money hand over fist b) instigate a war that will drag armies all across the countryside of your nation with all the disruption to commerce that entails. If you have a brain, it's not even a choice. They didn't to it because they lacked principals and would do anything for a buck. They did it because they were such ideological zealots who would rather forgo years of commerce, and risk the total destruction of their nation and subjugation of their countryman than bend over and take what they saw as violations of their rights as British subjects. The founders didn't even get substantially richer out of it, many of them got poorer. You can go read about what they did after the war and it wasn't "make money hand over fist". It was mostly figure out how to run a nation, be stressed out and die young. Trading the protection of the dominant and very benevolent for the time world power for freedom you mostly already had in practice is not a trade that pays off in anyone's lifetime. It's a miracle that it worked out at all. Plenty of other countries kicked out the British with not much to show for it.
hamdingers 11mo ago
We have a lower case conservative, pro-status-quo party. The Democrats. Even now all they can talk about is returning to normal (where normal describes the conditions that led to the current state).
- lotsofpulp 11mo ago
  They talk about increasing minimum salaries for exempt workers, paid sick and family leave, infrastructure funding, expanding access to healthcare, etc. How is that lower case conservative, or pro status quo?
  - ceejayoz 11mo ago
    Those are pretty standard policies of center-right / conservative parties in Europe. (Plus the fact that Dems talk about some of these doesn't mean they think they're going to happen.)
    - lotsofpulp 11mo ago
      Seems irrelevant to a discussion comparing US parties. >Plus the fact that Dems talk about some of these doesn't mean they think they're going to happen They literally got ACA passed by a hair, and were just shy of 2 Senate votes needed to enact all those policies I discussed in Biden's original BBB.
      - ceejayoz 11mo ago
        We're talking about a need for a party that no longer exists in the US. Why would we not look to similar examples out there in actual practice?
        hatthew 11mo ago
        this thread comes from a provocative quip that the democrats are conservative, with no mention whatsoever of any context other than america
tootie 11mo ago
At this point, what would that party even be? Their only genuine appeal is to Christian fundamentalists who prioritize banning abortion and LGBTQ rights. There hasn't been a coherent domestic or foreign policy from them in decades.
potato3732842 11mo ago
Small C conservative would be what these days? Iraq invading weed dealer arresting homosexual hating mid-00s "we call ourselves neoliberals bur are nothing of the sort"? Or their counterparts on the other side of the isle who are happy to build up the police state thinking it can do no wrong or happy to regulate the shit out of everything uncritically deluding themselves into thinking it won't become a handout for moneyed interests at the expense of upstarts? As bad as shit is now I think that might actually be worse. While people haven't yet suffered enough to agree to compromise and just wind the whole mistake down, there is a huge consensus on both sides of the isle these days that we have too much government swinging it's weight around in pursuit of things that are bad.

I really wish we had a (lower case) republican or conservative party in the US. I hope we survive this fear driven over-stimulated era of politics.

by csours 11mo ago

I really wish we had a (lower case) republican or conservative party in the US. I hope we survive this fear driven over-stimulated era of politics.

riffic 11mo ago

xenophonf 11mo ago
That's easy to say when you aren't the one under pressure.
- more_corn 11mo ago
  Or one of the 200M people in the blast radius.
BetaDeltaAlpha 11mo ago
That sounds like a recipe for chaos and famine akin to Russia in the early-mid 90's
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- petsfed 11mo ago
  Or worse still, Russia in the early-mid 1920s. The Reds very nearly lost the civil war to the Whites, not because of any battlefield victory, or even a concerted propaganda effort. Instead, it was because for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away.
  - Animats 11mo ago
    > for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away. That describes Russia under Putin. Putin considers his regime to be a continuation of Imperial Russia. He's brought back the Imperial Eagle, the Russian Orthodox Church as an arm of the state, considers himself to be the next Peter the Great, and says that his goal is to extend Russia to its traditional boundaries, out to at least the edge of Poland and the Baltics. Communism was a historical accident which has now been corrected.
  - potato3732842 11mo ago
    Would that have been a bad thing? That's have likely been forced to go with a limited monarchy with a legislature and limited democratic characteristics (like most of the rest of europe at the time) in order to consolidate the support, or at least buy the compliance of the factions that opposed them. That might've saved a whole bunch of lives. And looking at it now 100yr later, Russia didn't exactly turn out great.
    - petsfed 11mo ago
      The leadership of the Whites were not the moderate monarchists who just wanted Nicholas to abdicate to literally any functioning adult. They were the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality or death!” types. Their explicit goal was a restoration of pre-Revolution autocracy, whose brutal dysfunction was the explicit reason for the February revolution in the first place. The Whites were not good people, and it’s a mistake to characterize them as simple, noble anti-communist fighters. Most of the White leadership that survived into WWII went beyond just collaborating with the Nazis on invading Russia, but were onboard for all of the Nazi program save for “Ukraine belongs to Germany now”. Don’t misunderstand me, Stalinism was worse for Russia than the Czars, but there’s really no White-victory scenario where it’s all sunshine and roses and limited democracy. That option went out the window with the October revolution. All I’m saying is that there is no better illustration of how bad War Communism got than the fact that people looked at the literal pogroms and said “maybe that’s not so bad”.
- stackedinserter 11mo ago
  What do you know about Russia in 90's?
dralley 11mo ago
Accelerationism never works. There's a long, long list of complete and utter disasters and tremendous suffering inflicted by this moronic logic. Things get better by being made better, not by being made worse.
- Animats 11mo ago
  > Accelerationism In the AI sense, or in the Israel/Third Temple/apocalypse sense?
bluescrn 11mo ago
People fantasize about revolution, but the reality would mostly be huge amounts of suffering and death. And there's near-zero chance that the outcome would be the 'high-tech fully-automated luxury communism' that people dream of. There's many much-more-likely outcome that are worse than what exists now.
- creata 11mo ago
  > the reality would mostly be huge amounts of suffering and death. I think many of the people fantasizing about revolution are aware.
- csours 11mo ago
  I think the movie 'Civil War' by Alex Garland was too absurd to be understood by a lot of people - to me it was yelling "IT CAN HAPPEN HERE TOO"
- potato3732842 11mo ago
  >People fantasize about revolution, but the reality would mostly be huge amounts of suffering and death. There is suffering either way. Which has more area under the curve, fighting about it now, or boiling the frog 100yr and fighting later?
ActorNightly 11mo ago
>I would rather prefer the boiler to explode Just to be clear, you really would prefer to live in crumbling infrastructure, with plenty of violence, martial law, and constant worry of whether you are going to get shot or not trying to get basic supplies? Because boiler exploding isn't romantic or cool like you think it is. Imagine the worst possible riot, except country wide.
- potato3732842 11mo ago
  If the ship is gonna sink there's an argument to be made for letting it go down with those who doomed it aboard rather some unspecified future generation.
- anigbrowl 11mo ago
  I'm sure people made the same argument against the founders of this Republic.
  - gtowey 11mo ago
    And they were right. The American revolution had more to do with the fact that the wealthy landowners in the colonies wanted to claim even more land to the west. The British crown was getting tired of sending soldiers to clean up the messes the colonists were getting into by picking fights with the natives. Most of that rhetoric about tyranny and freedom was simply propaganda to get the poors to fight on their behalf. And it worked! They successfully conned the other colonists into laying down their lives to make the founders even richer. Somehow it doesn't feel all that different from America today. Something something history, doomed to repeat it.
    - potato3732842 11mo ago
      That is an absolutely delusional position to have and speaks volumes to lack of critical thinking or the effectiveness of propaganda. You are a wealthy plantation owner in 1770. Do you a) grumble about taxes and the British and pay anyway because you like free-ish trade that makes you money hand over fist b) instigate a war that will drag armies all across the countryside of your nation with all the disruption to commerce that entails. If you have a brain, it's not even a choice. They didn't to it because they lacked principals and would do anything for a buck. They did it because they were such ideological zealots who would rather forgo years of commerce, and risk the total destruction of their nation and subjugation of their countryman than bend over and take what they saw as violations of their rights as British subjects. The founders didn't even get substantially richer out of it, many of them got poorer. You can go read about what they did after the war and it wasn't "make money hand over fist". It was mostly figure out how to run a nation, be stressed out and die young. Trading the protection of the dominant and very benevolent for the time world power for freedom you mostly already had in practice is not a trade that pays off in anyone's lifetime. It's a miracle that it worked out at all. Plenty of other countries kicked out the British with not much to show for it.

hamdingers 11mo ago

We have a lower case conservative, pro-status-quo party. The Democrats. Even now all they can talk about is returning to normal (where normal describes the conditions that led to the current state).

lotsofpulp 11mo ago
They talk about increasing minimum salaries for exempt workers, paid sick and family leave, infrastructure funding, expanding access to healthcare, etc. How is that lower case conservative, or pro status quo?
- ceejayoz 11mo ago
  Those are pretty standard policies of center-right / conservative parties in Europe. (Plus the fact that Dems talk about some of these doesn't mean they think they're going to happen.)
  - lotsofpulp 11mo ago
    Seems irrelevant to a discussion comparing US parties. >Plus the fact that Dems talk about some of these doesn't mean they think they're going to happen They literally got ACA passed by a hair, and were just shy of 2 Senate votes needed to enact all those policies I discussed in Biden's original BBB.
    - ceejayoz 11mo ago
      We're talking about a need for a party that no longer exists in the US. Why would we not look to similar examples out there in actual practice?
      - hatthew 11mo ago
        this thread comes from a provocative quip that the democrats are conservative, with no mention whatsoever of any context other than america

tootie 11mo ago

At this point, what would that party even be? Their only genuine appeal is to Christian fundamentalists who prioritize banning abortion and LGBTQ rights. There hasn't been a coherent domestic or foreign policy from them in decades.

potato3732842 11mo ago

Small C conservative would be what these days? Iraq invading weed dealer arresting homosexual hating mid-00s "we call ourselves neoliberals bur are nothing of the sort"? Or their counterparts on the other side of the isle who are happy to build up the police state thinking it can do no wrong or happy to regulate the shit out of everything uncritically deluding themselves into thinking it won't become a handout for moneyed interests at the expense of upstarts? As bad as shit is now I think that might actually be worse. While people haven't yet suffered enough to agree to compromise and just wind the whole mistake down, there is a huge consensus on both sides of the isle these days that we have too much government swinging it's weight around in pursuit of things that are bad.