[Discussion] Now is the winter of our discontent

Pages

This thread is for the discussion of voting demographics that feel disenfranchised by the current US political landscape. In the run up to the election I expect that there will be a lot of focus on the right-wing Trump supporters, but my impression is that there is widespread discontent across the political spectrum. Is there? And if so, how widespread is it and what are the causes?

(Despite the immediate focus on the US political landscape, examples from across the globe are welcomed, especially if you provide context.)

(Note: not about voter suppression, ID-laws, or the like. We have a different thread for that. Talking about why a group is afraid of that fits just fine, though.)

Well, the election and the inauguration are behind us, but people still seem to be discontent.

I never intended this thread to be solely focused on the right-wing Trump voters, though they were the most obviously dissatisfied with the status quo. There was a lot of left-wing discontent too, and not just the Bernie voters: to pick one example, Black Lives Matter and the related movements have been confronting racism on a very visible scale since Ferguson, and they weren't completely happy with any of the candidates either.

I'm not interested in rehashing the election or trying to figure out how to change the hypothetical Trump voter's mind, or any of the other whirlpools that sprang up right after the election. I am interested in the whys and hows: Why are people discontent? How is that affecting what they do? What we do?

The specific reason I revived this thread is the link below. I originally posted this on one of the other threads, but it was pointed out that it could fit in its own discussion. I figured reviving this thread was the best place for it, since I also have a half-written essay I've been meaning to post here, eventually.

How Technocratic Hyper-Rationalism Has Birthed Right-Wing Extremism

Within the universe of Bay Area startup culture, the Elon Musks are the heroes. They seem to have a broad, sweeping vision of the future. But their true pedigree is measured how they manage to amass massive wealth behind their ideas — their ability to do. They believe they have the necessary tools to game reality. Their thinking is built on top of a hyper-commodified religious devotion to the transformative powers of scientific rationalism and a faith in the sanctity of numbers. This kind of thinking obviously also has a special resonance in the world of videogames, which are made up entirely of rules and systems. But it permeates our culture across many different planes.

Lately their sort of hyper-rationalist thinking has also resulted in some truly bizarre political commentary, like the now-infamous “Trial Balloon For a Coup?” Medium article from several weeks back by Google engineer Yonatan Zunger or the even more infamous “game theory” twitter rant from political strategist Eric Garland.

These math dorks present their cases that they have some sort of keys to unlock the secrets of a highly complex and confusing political realities by crunching the numbers in the right way. Yet unsurprisingly, they are consistently unable to conceive of the truly bizarre and disturbing current reality. The sort of class of technocratic math dorks Zunger or Garland belong to might be able to function within the bubble of Silicon Valley tech culture or the culture of Washington political insiders, but they don’t actually have any insight into what most people in the real world experience and how those things manifest themselves on a broader human scale, because their lives are lived incredibly insulated from these experiences.

Our popular culture has become so steeped in a deeply cynical sort of practicality, where many of us are able recognize the contradictions and hypocrisies of modern society, but we also cynically accept that we can’t really do much of anything about them. The awareness of this incremental progress being largely the result of a long-term collective struggle becomes completely erased and co-opted. By making displays of bigoted behavior as the ultimate embodiment of evil we have a built-in justification for moving selfishly within the system because we’ve displaced our shame of our own cultural complicity with the destruction our way of life causes onto a convenient scapegoat.

This, it turns out, opens the door for people to use bigoted language we have deemed “too far” as a show of power and dominance. People like Milo Yiannopoulos are the end point realization of this thinking — a reality that sustains itself off of a fantasy world completely insulated from any awareness or understanding of the collective struggles of the past. A reality completely nurtured by the self-fulfilling fantasies of hyper-rational objectivism. Instead of technocratic liberals being motivated by some faint glimmer of empathy or awareness for the power struggles of the past and present, the “alt-right” has come to understand them as simply weak and submissive “beta cucks”, controlled by the irrational manipulations of the deficient. In this view, that’s the only reason the privileged technocrats can’t stay true to the principles of their hyper-rationalist reality.

There's a lot more at that link; feel free to dive in and pull out quotes to discuss here. I'm not entirely sure I agree with all of it, but there's a lot there that I do think hit the nail on the head.

Lots of good points in a mish-mash of unsupported claims and dismissive name-calling of the type the author calls out herself. My biggest complaint is that, no, logic and the methods of inquiry are not the exclusive domain of the technocracy. Dismissing or ignoring that removes tools from the toolbox (and that lack is clear in the tottering building of what could be strong points on unsupported, even hateful assertions).

There's a lot of emotion there, and some very good points, but also a visceral reaction against logic, technology and science, when her real problem is with the *trappings* of those that are misused to give legitimacy to misogyny and worse. She wants to tear down the entire building because the landlord put up a sign that is distasteful... And what happens to the tenants? Who cares? If the landlord is evil, then the building and all within it must be too, right?

Far too wide a brush she's painting with.

Robear wrote:

Lots of good points in a mish-mash of unsupported claims and dismissive name-calling of the type the author calls out herself.

Yeah, the key line is this:

As a videogame designer who used to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’m intimately familiar with the sort of asshole who thinks they have a perfect formula for solving the problems that face the world today.

There's a lot of interesting stuff in there, like how maybe Technocratic Hyper-Rationalism is the new Social Darwinism, but it's too caught up in...

...well, the quality of the efforts of the anti-GG side are probably something a lot of us will have to agree to disagree about. I think a lot of the reaction to this piece will be the same as one's reaction to the anti-GG effort in general.

In any case, an example: I think the emphasis on 'right place/right time' over "12th dimensional chess with reality" is a good start, but that need to pin as much blame on "math dorks" as possible blinds the author to the possibility that yes, Russia is involved AND Trump/Bannon were in the right place at the right time. That a system can be both badly balanced AND have a thumb on the scale.

tl;dr: it's a standard anti-GG piece. Some interesting stuff in there, but the emphasis is on making the take as hot as possible at the expense of making something that holds together.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

tl;dr: it's a standard anti-GG piece. Some interesting stuff in there, but the emphasis is on making the take as hot as possible at the expense of making something that holds together.

Agreed. Chicken soup for the SJW soul.

Spoiler:

Use of SJW isn't meant to demean.

Nate Silver has an article about the wide variance in Trump's poll numbers.

Recent polls show that anywhere between 43 and 56 percent of Americans disapprove of President Trump’s job performance. Even if you take the low end of that range, Trump’s numbers are much worse than any past president a month into his term.

But beyond that, there’s a lot of seeming disagreement in the polls about exactly how unpopular Trump is — and even whether his disapproval rating exceeds his approval rating at all.

In the meantime, be on alert for selective citation of polls that are used to advance a narrative. In his press conference last week, for instance, Trump cited a Rasmussen Reports poll showing him with a 55 percent approval rating — neglecting to mention that no other recent poll shows him above 49 percent approval.

But I’ve seen at least as much cherry-picking from liberal and mainstream reporters. In my Twitter feed last week, for instance, a Pew poll that had Trump at 39 percent approval5 got a lot more attention than a Fox News survey which had him at 48 percent instead.

In some ways, the pattern reflected the one before November’s election, when reporters and pundits selectively interpreted the evidence and assumed that Hillary Clinton was a much heavier favorite than she really was based on the polls. Trump is not very popular, but he’s also no more unpopular than Barack Obama was for much of his presidency. If his numbers hold where they they are right now — especially among registered voters — Republicans would probably hold their own in 2018, and 2020 would be another highly competitive election.

What’s different, as I mentioned, is Trump’s approval ratings are much worse than what a president typically enjoys at this stage of his term. So the question is whether his ratings will continue to decline or if he steadies the ship, or eventually pivots and sees his approval ratings improve. It’s possible — I’d wager more likely than not if forced to bet — that Trump’s ratings will continue to decline over the next six to 18 months, at which point he’d be in trouble since he’s starting from a low baseline. But while he faces a lot of challenges — mostly of his own making — he sometimes benefits from news coverage that overextends itself and predicts his immediate demise only to have to pull back later, perhaps making him seem more formidable in the process. We learned that lesson the hard way in the primaries, and then we often watched the same feeding-frenzy mentality take hold in the general election. While the news is unfolding at an exceptionally brisk pace, changes to Trump’s popularity ratings are likely to be slower.

I'm solidly anti-GG, but I've worked in the tech industry for decades, and work hard to conduct my thinking within a framework of logic as much as possible, forcing myself to question my assumptions in spite of my biases. (I'm still biased, just like everyone, but I am capable of figuring out where my blind spots are, where my beliefs are irrational, and accepting that based on evidence.) It's perfectly reasonable to attack tech billionaires for wishful thinking ("tech can solve all problems, even social ones"), but it's unreasonable to blame that on math and logic and technology itself. Those are tools, not ideologies.

Robear wrote:

I'm solidly anti-GG, but I've worked in the tech industry for decades, and work hard to conduct my thinking within a framework of logic as much as possible, forcing myself to question my assumptions in spite of my biases. (I'm still biased, just like everyone, but I am capable of figuring out where my blind spots are, where my beliefs are irrational, and accepting that based on evidence.) It's perfectly reasonable to attack tech billionaires for wishful thinking ("tech can solve all problems, even social ones"), but it's unreasonable to blame that on math and logic and technology itself. Those are tools, not ideologies.

I'm with you, but I feel like math, logic and technology are not Technocratic Hyper-Rationalism.
The former are tools, the latter is an ideology which places an exclusive emphasis on the use of those tools.
e.g. Some asshole telling me neural nets and ml will save the world.
f*ck yourself and your linear regression bro.

*EDIT*
I am also a tech industry dweeb.

I got the impression that the author was attacking the entire worldview underlying Tech ("Rationalism" as she seems to think of it... Thinking bad, feeling good, that sort of Manichean dichotomy seems to be what she has in mind.)

Tools (math, logic, technology, etc) are not a substitute for ideology is my take away, but I'm probably a bit biased thanks to having read Mark Fisher's Vampire's Castle recently.

*EDIT*
I'm confused Vampire's Castle with another fisher blog post on Northstar that I cannot think of now. This is irrelevant to my interpretation of the previous article.

I can't say I got that impression from the article. She seemed to be saying the same thing you are, that treating logic as an ideology and forgetting that people act like people not programs is where the tech dudes are failing. I didn't see that she wanted to throw out math and logic, instead she's saying you can't just use logic to fix society because people are emotional beings. You can't logic someone into not being a racist anymore, it won't stick.
She cautioned against being satisfied with just knocking down or shutting up the problems (Milo, GG, alt-right) once they finally go too far, and that you need to also try to find the source of the systemic problem that causes them to gain popularity in the first place.

edit: quote-not-edit mistake

Robear wrote:

I got the impression that the author was attacking the entire worldview underlying Tech ("Rationalism" as she seems to think of it... Thinking bad, feeling good, that sort of Manichean dichotomy seems to be what she has in mind.)

Maybe it's not very well written. If I play Author's Advocate, maybe this line is important, too:

Instead of technocratic liberals being motivated by some faint glimmer of empathy or awareness for the power struggles of the past and present, the “alt-right” has come to understand them as simply weak and submissive “beta cucks”, controlled by the irrational manipulations of the deficient. In this view, that’s the only reason the privileged technocrats can’t stay true to the principles of their hyper-rationalist reality.

Maybe what the author is trying to get across is that there's a twisted sub-culture, and that twisted sub-culture ignores their fellow 'rationalists' and calls them the twisted ones.

Maybe that gets lost because it attempts to see everything through the lens of this particular front in the fight. An important one, but not that critical. She writes:

This is how reactionary right wing thinking lives harmoniously within the framework provided by hyper-rationalism. Those who are traditionally granted the most power and access in our society — middle class white men — are given the language of hyper-rationalism without any of the awareness or experience to understand the systemic problems facing marginalized groups. The internet media landscape is filled with pundits like Sargon of Akkad who use rationalist and objectivist language to present their sexist, racist opinions as a matter of factual reality. They paint people from oppressed groups as irrational whiners, as people who selfishly abuse and manipulate the system around them — even as genetically deficient — because they have not historically been able to reach the level of measured outcome success as their oppressors within our seemingly objective meritocratic reality. Without the dominance of hyper-rationalist thinking in our culture and the intense social isolation caused by neoliberalism, there is no way for this sort of rhetoric to become so widespread.

Eh, no. I think it overestimates how necessary "hyper-rationalist thinking" is to 'meritocratic' racism spreading. It certainly helped, but I think it's a case where the twisted sub-culture she's talking about is over-represented in her experience, so it's given too much importance in her analysis.

Maybe it makes more sense to rework what she says back down to the scope of her targets, as a way to understand how alt-right thinking can gain ground in a sub-culture where the ground looks so infertile for racist ideas at first glance.

The parts about neoliberalism are of wider scope, but then again, that's where she sounds like a BernieBro, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

edit: maybe one important way to understand an anti-GG piece that goes off the rails is to think of one of the blind spots of nerd culture: the tendency to think that one's own esoteric bit of expert knowledge is the key to solving every problem. Ironic in these cases, but probably worth keeping in mind.

Here argument about the prevalence of "hyper-rationalist thinking" leads inevitably to the conclusion that it's the problem, not the twisting of it. If that's not the case - if she's not arguing against the use of math and logic and rational thinking - then it's lost in the (entirely justified) emotional frothing.

Maybe it's a chicken and egg problem? She's not really considering that these tech-bros might be the same kind of people if they were digging ditches; that their views are largely informed by *brain chemistry*, rather than by the tenets of science and engineering and math. I've never seen an ordinary person start out non-racist, take some computer classes, and turn into an Ayn Rand techbro who thinks everyone gets the level of success they deserve... I kind of felt that she was mistaking a subset of people attracted to these fields because of the way they view the world and think, for a social movement that she believes is the result of being in the fields.

I know that's convoluted; I hope it makes sense. Mostly I'm saying "Logic and math and science are not the problem, mmmkay?".

Robear wrote:

Here argument about the prevalence of "hyper-rationalist thinking" leads inevitably to the conclusion that it's the problem, not the twisting of it. If that's not the case - if she's not arguing against the use of math and logic and rational thinking - then it's lost in the (entirely justified) emotional frothing.

Maybe it's a chicken and egg problem? She's not really considering that these tech-bros might be the same kind of people if they were digging ditches; that their views are largely informed by *brain chemistry*, rather than by the tenets of science and engineering and math. I've never seen an ordinary person start out non-racist, take some computer classes, and turn into an Ayn Rand techbro who thinks everyone gets the level of success they deserve... I kind of felt that she was mistaking a subset of people attracted to these fields because of the way they view the world and think, for a social movement that she believes is the result of being in the fields.

I know that's convoluted; I hope it makes sense. Mostly I'm saying "Logic and math and science are not the problem, mmmkay?". :-)

Perhaps she's mentioning that the kind of people who fetishize about some formal epistemological system that endows them with objective rightness without relying on one or more deities are the ones more likely than others to seek out logic, math, and other techbro domains primarily to gird their worldview. These are the hardcore atheists who rejoice at "destroying" or "slamming" or other violent types of forensic methodologies on YouTube.

Or: that a chicken egg can't but give rise to a chicken, and not a mongoose.

And yet neither are math, logic and science a political panacea.
Basically what I'm saying is that episode of The West Wing where Pres Bartlet sick logic slams the fundies is a pure fantasy that doesn't work out in political realities where logic bombing your opponents rarely does the job.

Pages