Guest post: The reaction is starting to manifest
Originally a comment by Artymorty on While Tatchell rages.
The left walked right into this, and they’re so entrenched, we’re seeing a mass exodus to the right among the very youngest cohort of voters and young adults.
There seems to have been a delay of a few years between cause and effect, when the left went all-in on radical gender ideology, and the reaction among the electorate to it.
Well, it’s been a few years, the reaction is starting to manifest among the masses, and I fear the left is about to discover that it’s a MASSIVE rejection, and it will all be too little, too late for them.
And it breaks my heart, becuase there are global, universal, grand matters that the right are woefully short-sighted about. And in general, I just can’t bring myself to shift to the right. Trump and that madness aside, there are fundamental ideological views, and even personality traits, that are preferred by the right over the left, that I just absolutely find to be less informed, less balanced, less agreeable, than those on the left — or at least the left of my principles, if not at all the mess of the real-world left, with its witch-hunts and its pronoun madness…
Strange and scary times…
Aertymorty: I suggest you consider moving to the political Centre, as I did a few years back now.
On some issues, the Right is wrong, like say, AGW and climate change. On others, the Left is wrong, like on this trans bullshit and the Iraq War. On the latter issue, the late and great Christopher Hitchens divided the Left into two factions, one pro-totalitarian and the other anti-totalitarian, with himself in the latter category.
Works for me. I have never disagreed with the latre Hitch on anything.
So, Omar, if you never disagreed with Hitch on anything, you agree that abortion is wrong and should be illegal? To give him credit, he did advocate for reproductive rights in the form of birth control and sex education, but there are some issues where he led with his head, not his heart.
I cannot point to anyone that I could say I agree with them on anything…including myself. I have said many things that I no longer agree with, or that I didn’t agree with at the time, but I wasn’t sure because I was trying to formulate an opinion on a complex, nuanced subject. If I can’t agree with myself on everything, how could I agree with anyone else on everything?
iknklast: I did say ” I have never disagreed with the latre Hitch on anything,” which was in the domain of those opinion of his that I was aware of. If he said abortion should be illegal then I cannot agee with him there. As regards your statement that you can’t agree with yourself on everything, that reminds me of a poem I encountered in my primary school days:
“I love myself. I think I’m grand. / When I go to the movies, I hold my hand. / I put my arms around my waist. / If I get fresh, I slap my face.!”
Well he was wrong about Iraq though… Not for any squishy reason but that intervention is a component part of why the Ukrainians are doing our fighting for us and why ISIL came into being. Even with the Islamic State reduced to annoying the Taliban Iraq is an Islamist shithole.
Blood Knight: It’s a counterfactual and a matter of opinion, but Saddam Hussein made it onto the front cover of Nigel Cawthorne’s Tyrants: History’s 100 Most Evil Despots & Dictators. along with Hitler and Stalin no less. Saddam, through his reign of terror, managed to keep the lid on the Sunni-Shia brawl that has been going on in Islam since the death of The Prophet (pbuh.) So when the Bush 2 intervention removed him in vengeance for 9/11, re which Saddam was just an innocent bystander, it was on for young and old again in Iraq..
Just goes to show; tyranny is a risky business. And with that I am sure the two Vlads, Putin and Dracula, would heartily agree.
https://www.amazon.com.au/Tyrants-Nigel-Cawthorne/dp/1782126961
Omar
No, the left, were largely correct on Iraq. There were no WMDs, Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. This is not a matter of opinion, or differing moral values – on sheer issues of fact the right was wrong.
So far as consequences go the war to topple his government ended up destabilizing the region. This in turn led to higher oil prices, which I personally think are an underrated cause of the great recession.
That war also served as a precedent for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
GW Bush’s bid to ensure the ICC and ICJ couldn’t prosecute American war criminals has also undermined the courts’ standing on the world stage, being cited by every tinpot dictator for why they themselves aren’t answerable to that court.
Further, it took attention away from the war in Afghanistan – turning an already difficult fight into an inevitable loss that has seen the Taliban return to power, now with a reputation for having defeated and humiliated the world’s largest superpower.
Rather than reducing tyranny, Bush’s decision to invade Iraq ended up bolstering it. And all of this was perfectly predictable, because it was all predicted at the time.
Entering a war requires pretty strong pretext that the Iraq war lacked, and what pretext was there was later found to be a pack of lies. One cannot maintain that the right were correct on Iraq in any way.
Beyond the W jokes (If W were president during Pearl Harbor, he might have invaded Mexico), the Iraq invasion might provide a general model for the foolish use of military power. We went in under false pretenses, with a poor understanding of the situation, and the most insubstantial plan for the day after.
Platitudes like “We will be greeted as liberators!” fluttered around, but seemingly nobody understood that Saddam was the lid on a seething caldron of resentments. The idea that people who have never lived in democracy would spontaneously figure it out was absurd enough to have disqualified the entire venture. Invading Iraq was the single greatest foreign policy blunder in the history of the United States.
Yes, Saddam was a very bad guy, maybe one of the 100 top bad guys of all time. We should remember forever now that “he is a bad guy” is not a sufficient reason to invade a country.
Hitchens was ignorant about Iraq, and he refused to acknowledge his ignorance, compounding his error. As the Economist said, “On the most consequential political issue of the last decade of his life, the bullshit got Christopher Hitchens.” His failure on that issue, unfortunately, came to obscure the many things he was right about, reminding us that even a clever fellow can be an idiot sometimes.
https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2011/12/16/the-struggle-against-bullshit
Going back to ArtyMorty’s point, the trans madness is an “own goal” for the Democrats. They really didn’t have to go there, and it’s going to cost a lot of votes. The electoral situation for decades now has been that most of the contest is already decided: certain states will always vote for one side, certain states for the other side, and the decision comes down to people who could go either way in a small number of states. The Democrats wouldn’t lose a single state by saying no to transing children and putting creepy dudes in women’s prisons. They may lose several by doing the opposite. And that points to a problem: perhaps if they’ve become too obsessed with their version of correctness to win, they’re also too doctrinaire to govern effectively. Which is sad, because the other side is even worse – for decades now, the Republicans have run on the idea that government never works and if you elect them, they’ll prove it.
Well said, Papito. The other thing about the Democrats is that they have too big a tent. We always hear about the big tent, and how good that is, but the bigger a tent, the quicker you can collapse it. There are so many constituencies that look to the Democrats to do their wishes, because there is no way in hell they will find a home in the GOP. The problem is, these constituencies are not in broad agreement, and there is a wealth of competing issues. TRAs and feminists really don’t co-exist well because what one wants is in violation of the other’s rights. There are gun control advocates and no gun control except over my dead body, and the party cannot balance the two issues. There are pro-choice and anti-choice advocates in the party. There are liberal Christians, moderate Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and atheists.
The Democrats are in a real spot, since many of their constituencies are one issue voters, or expect them to be “perfect” on every issue. A lot of TRAs forget Biden has given them what they want because of Israel, for instance.
Meanwhile, a lot of Republicans will vote for the Republican nominee simply because he is a Republican. This isn’t really any better, IMHO, but it makes the entire situation rough going for those with (D) after their name.
It’s not just centre-left politics, it’s centre-left media, too:
We all know that Fox News is a dishonest propaganda machine, but the New York Times and CNN have completely undermined their credibility as reporters of the truth.
We’re tribal primates and we rely on networks of trust to make sense of the world and get through life with a sense of security, safety, and understanding. The institutions of democracy have utterly failed to grasp that above all else they need to maintain their trustworthiness in the information-overload age. Telling people they’re obligated to disbelieve their very eyes about the sex of others is such a visceral act of untrustworthiness that many people find a stronger sense of trust when they listen to Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson.
At the end of the day, humans, being tribal primates, act on feelings and instincts above all else. No one feels they can trust people who tell them that the very foundation of humanity — the fact that humans come in two sexes — is a lie. It takes incredible amounts of cognitive work to override our animal, instinctual reaction against that lie. Only the idle minds of the middle classes would ever bother to try to maintain such a foolish project. The high intellectual cost of subscribing to gender ideology is exactly what makes it so appealing to people who envision themselves as intellectually superior to others. (See: the skeptics movement.) But also, the high intellectual cost of subscribing to gender ideology is exaclty what makes everyone who doesn’t have the luxury of resources to commit to a full-time performance of moral and intellectual superiority to recoil from it.
If you were a scheming kleptocrat or dictator looking for a way to undermine the intellectual class in order to control the populace, you would fall head over heels in love with gender ideology. It’s the perfect trap.
@# 6: The US and allies believed that Saddam had WMD because he boasted of having them. They took him at his word, were genuinely surprised when they found that he had none, a fact that they quickly verified after the invasion.
Had he possessed them, the safe assumption had to be that he would have used them rather than finsh up on the end of a rope. (Remember that Hitler only missed out on developing them because they rested on the theories put up by Einstein, who was a Jew.) Had Adolf been less of a galah, he could have got hold of The Bomb, and used it to alter the face of Europe quite considerably. German physicists were further along that track than were their Allied counterparts.
@# 7: “We went in under false pretenses, with a poor understanding of the situation, and the most insubstantial plan for the day after.” In other words, ‘if the US had not gone in, the world today would be far better off.’ An unverifiable counterfactual. The safest course was to take Saddam at his word. No ifs or buts about it, IMHO.
Omar, we went in under the pretext of Saddam giving aid and support to Al Qaeda. That was not true. That is the reason the US public went along with it. They believed Iraq was involved in 9/11. And everyone I talked to that supported the war did it because they believed not only that Saddam had nukes, but that he was on the verge of using them on the United States, attacking us in our own beds, so to speak.
In short, a false pretense. Even if he had nukes, that isn’t justification for invading the country, since a lot of countries have nukes. We have nukes; does that justify invading us? No, of course not. And may I point out, we are the only country to date that has used them on anyone!
Also, the premise that he was a brutal dictator, while correct, was not justification, either. There are a number of brutal dictators in the world, a number of countries led by tyrants. If that is a justification for invading Iraq, then it must be a justification for invading any other country led by a dictator. We don’t do that. Why? Because it is in violation of international law, and because it is impractical, and because it is morally odious. Also, because it would probably destabilize other regions like it has destabilized the Middle East.
Yes, I realize we installed Saddam Hussein. I realize we were culpable (at least, our CIA was; I don’t hold the average US citizen responsible for every damn miserable thing the government does, except to the extent that we vote the assholes in. I’m not sure how many Americans would have gotten behind many of the things the CIA does, but it is so highly secretive, we know little about it.)
tl;dr: We are not the world’s policemen, and allowing a president to just send troops anywhere he doesn’t like the leader is folly at best, criminal at worst.
@#11: I followed the build-up to the Iraq War with great interest and close reading of the evidence around the existence of WMDs in Iraq. Remember that there had been multiple inspection teams on the ground in the preceding decade. It was pretty clear to me to a vey high probability that there were no such weapons.
The “they” of your first paragraph was not a monolith. Some may have believed and been surprised, others were in my view cynically building a case on flimsy and cherry-picked “data”.
This. It’s not just lying, it’s actual gaslighting. It sits atop the gaslighting mountain on a rainbow throne.
Your perceptions are wrong, and everything you know about biology and language is wrong. Your mind can’t be trusted, because it’s filled with ignorance and oppressive bigotry. You must rely entirely upon us, the experts, to act as your eyes and ears and moral compass. We are the arbiters of reality, and you are helpless without us.
“It sits atop the gaslighting mountain on a rainbow throne.”
*****
My team of typing monkeys occasionally earns an extra banana.
Was Saddam Hussein a bad guy? Yes, according to his foes, but how much of that was propaganda?
Are Iraqi women better off now than when Saddam Hussein was the bad guy? Most assuredly they are not.
Iraq once had a secular government where people were free to follow or not a religion, where women had all the rights we expect women to have – independence from men, bank accounts, careers, education, choice of clothing, choice of partner, freedom to travel.
All gone because an arrogant, ignorant little shit of a governor tilted the playing field in favour of his arrogant and moronic brother whose greatest justification for invading, and destroying, Iraq was ” That man tried to kill my daddy”.
But it’s AOK, America does what America does best – destroy the hopes and dreams of foreigners and Americans go back to watching repeats of Matlock and congratulating themselves for being ” Team America World Police” .
iknklast @# 12:
That covers two of the three factors in play re Iraq, and you give a good case re those.
But the third was oil, and Saddam was in a position to take control of a huge hunk of the world’s supply of it, and to use it for political blackmail as he chose. Turning off the tap would likely bring crowds out in the streets of Iraq cheering his humiliation of Islam’s ‘Great Satan.’ But every western motorist would be hit in the hip pocket at their every visit to a service station, with them all demanding to know what their government was going to do about it. But at the same time, admitting that oil had any part in it was not exactly a dreamliner flight to the moral high ground. Oil, IMHO, was the unadmittable clincher.
Arty, terrific comments as usual.
Just thinking out loud here, as it were–
Is it the centre-left? I think I’d call it the “popular left”. Maybe it’s wishful thinking on my part, but I don’t think the average centre-left person buys all the nonsense that has captured what’s called “the base” (in the US, that usually refers to loud extremist types.) The centre may go along with vague appeals to “trans rights” because the media frame the conflict as gender-nonconformists versus those nasty homophobes and religious nuts, but when they stop and really consider particulars my guess is they’re far more nuanced in their thinking than the ideologues.
The media have been captured by trans activism, but trans activism in turn grew out of the unholy marriage of the radical left with postmodernism. It’s become popular, but it’s not inherently centrist (or even necessarily leftist. And I refuse to consider it “liberal” in the philosophical sense.)