Hate letters from coastal elites to middle American whites
November 21, 2016 § 72 Comments
Peter Woit is the physicist who wrote the book Not Even Wrong, which I highly recommend if you are interested in the subject matter. The Pauli quote in my masthead/sidebar comes from Woit’s book. I keep him in my blogroll so that I remember to check in on what he has to say now and then. Woit projects a compulsive honesty in expressing his own views that I can’t help but appreciate in fellow human beings, even when my own substantive understanding of a particular subject is a universe apart.
I’ve never noticed him writing about politics before, but the recent Presidential election was apparently traumatic enough to bring him out of his shell. For the most part that is probably not a good thing: people who talk about their political views almost universally end up lowering my overall estimation of their personal wisdom, which I suppose shouldn’t surprise any of my regular readers. One of the many deleterious effects of liberalism is that it tends to make everyone falsely believe that their own uncultivated political opinions are worth more than flatulence particulates embedded in a couch cushion.
Woit’s honesty, however, is valuable. He describes one of the motivations of middle American white people voting for Donald Trump:
You’re angry at well-off coastal elites who you feel look down on you and your culture, and you want to spit in their face by voting for Trump. If so, you are quite right to feel the way you do. From a lifetime spent among such elites I can tell you that, yes, they do look down on you. Most people here in New York City probably do think you’re an ignorant racist. Your problem though is that Donald Trump is one of us. He’s a well-off New Yorker through and through, looks down on you every bit as much as others. If elected he will govern in the interest of his tribe, not yours. If you think otherwise, you’ve been conned. All you will accomplish by a vote for Trump is to convince people in New York, Washington D.C. and California that you really are even more ignorant than they thought, a racist fool taken in by an obvious con.
Coastal elites by and large hate, hate, hate middle American white working people. If you are part of the middle American white working class coastal leftists really do blame everything that is wrong with the world on you, as ridiculous as that sounds. You are the Low Man. More than anything the elites wish for some Final Solution which can be carried out to utterly destroy these perfidious subhumans who, in their spare time away from keeping the lights on and the toilets flushing, continue to screw up the emergence of universal egalitarian emancipation.
All forms of liberalism require a Final Solution, and the Final Solution has to be carried out as an unprincipled exception: in this case, the mass extermination of despised middle American whites has to be implemented in some way which does not challenge liberalism itself. Even Literally Hitler insisted upon absolutely equal rights among the Herrenvolk: it was only the subhuman oppressor-untermensch who fell outside of the protections provided by freedom and equality, precisely because the subhuman oppressor class was – as it always is – a contemptible impediment to the emergence of the free and equal new man.
The Final Solution for destroying the middle American white working class was and is supposed to be mass third world immigration. Leftist elites absolutely know[1] that mass third world immigration is a poison designed to utterly destroy middle American whites and salt the earth upon which they used to live. Europe is a proving ground for the efficacy of this particular Solution. The following comes from an email received by Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta from a regular correspondent, as published by Wikileaks (reformatted for clarity):
Unlike the Multikultis, the German working class cannot block out or distort awful reality and needs to live in the real world.
For example, I have a hunch that there are precious few Multikulti converts to be found among German bus drivers. In another clip, a German bus company spokesman explains that even immigrant pensioners beat up bus drivers.
Let me also show you images of a 78-year-old German female shopkeeper hit 50 times in her face by a 14-year-old Bosnian. The young robber belongs to a family granted asylum by Germany. Heart-warming, don’t you think?
The coastal elites in the USA are counting on it.
[1] Hat tip to Evolutionist X.
Zippy Catholic 
He’s a well-off New Yorker through and through, looks down on you every bit as much as others. If elected he will govern in the interest of his tribe, not yours. If you think otherwise, you’ve been conned. All you will accomplish by a vote for Trump is to convince people in New York, Washington D.C. and California that you really are even more ignorant than they thought, a racist fool taken in by an obvious con.
And in Conservative* Cuckooland, Trump is being praised as the next Constantine by none less than Michael Voris himself. I’ve also heard things along the line of “God gave us Trump as a mercy to let us repent” etc. etc. Even now, people are banking on ascendancy to the Presidency to make an honest man out of Trump.
That’s right folks–people are hoping that the same office that wheeled and dealed with Stalin for the enslavement of Europe and gave the Chinese the ability to undercut domestic manufacturing will make an honest man out of a bullshitter.
Speaking of which, has Roosh Valizadeh become Augustine of Hippo yet?
Of course, if I point all this out, I get screamed at as an SJW. What a world….
*Conservative here meaning “not leftist.”
” If you think otherwise, you’ve been conned. All you will accomplish by a vote for Trump is to convince people in New York, Washington D.C. and California that you really are even more ignorant than they thought, a racist fool taken in by an obvious con.”
This undoes all the good of his comments up to this point because he is assuming that the middle Americans ought to care what the coastal elites think of them, and that if they didn’t vote for Trump/ voted for Hillary then the coastal elites would think significantly better of them – and presumably treat them better – neither of which is true.
And why does he assume that the middle Americans have been conned by Trump, simply becase they voted for him? Most people (wrongly, IMO – I don’t ever vote about anything) seem to suppose that they ought to vote – so if they don’t vote for one candidate (because she is actively evil, incompetent and manifestly unable to function due to sever neurological disease), then they will vote for the other. This doesn’t mean they have been conned.
My strong impression is that Brexit was a vote against the elite project for national suicide and self-hatred – but certainly not a vote *for* any of the politicians who led the Leave campaign, indeed the Leave campaign was all-but irrelevant since it was minuscule and subjected to a total media smear campaign.
What we have at present in the UK and the USA is a first – and almost wholly negative – phase of an awakening (but only the beginning). The main benefit of Brexit and Trump is that tens of millions of people now know they are not alone, but are in fact a significant majority (esepcially when the reported-vote distorting effects of media vilification, mass voting fraud, intimidation, abstention from voting etc are factored-in).
Bruce Charlton:
Agreed, though keep in mind that he wrote it before the election and almost certainly expected Hillary Clinton to win.
Again agreed — under the ‘vote for the least objectionable viable candidate’ principle (with which we both as intransigent non-voters disagree, but which most people including coastal elites hold) it made perfect sense for them to vote for him.
Even stipulating that he is a complete fraud the choice was between someone who was actively working toward their destruction as her explicit policy and someone whose hands will be at least somewhat tied by how he marketed himself.
It is interesting that Bill Clinton was marginalized by Hillary’s campaign precisely because he advocated making an appeal to white rust belt working class voters, an approach that his wife and her campaign staff decisively rejected.
Have you seen this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXxGPDBRUzs
Notable as Matthew’s actually says that both elephants and donkeys consider the current immigration policy as correct.
Also notable that the squabble about H thinking she wouldn’t pay a “political cost” for trying to get all the latino illegal alien supporters amounts to “She didn’t tell the correct lie or she should have lied better.”
As relates to this post, implicit in Woit’s analysis of this “con” is that there was some other option. Do any of you think Jeb, Rubio, Cruz, etc. are dissimilar? And now there are reports that Cruz is being considered for SCOTUS…
Part of the final solution was eight years of Hillary after the eight years of Obama and now that the final solution has been, at least temporarily, wrecked, the anger and outrage is in proportion to the impossibility of their final solution not happening according to their professional plans.
The Liberal Collective (DNC, Media, RINOs, Academy, Hollywood, AmBishops and AmCatholics etc) was blowed-up but it is already rapidly being reassembled and it will be operated by Barack Hussein Obama from his Washington lair.
The Lying Liberal in his Lair directing the raging machine.
Prolly this is wrong, but Ol’ Mick is happily looking forward to the war 🙂
Aethelfrith,
Considering Michael Voris is blatant heretic I suppose I am not surprised he’d view a politician as a great leader….
Let me guess–sedevacantist?
Mick,
Obama is way too lazy to operate anything. I’m not even sure he will have enough energy to give speeches for $250,000 a pop. He will probably “write” a few more books and play golf.
[…] Source: Zippy Catholic […]
Comparing Trump to Constantine is just goofy, but what makes Voris a heretic?[*]
[*] Other than in the sense that we are probably all material heretics because we don’t grasp some doctrine or other correctly, in the context of a modern Magisterium that mostly doesn’t bother correcting objective error anymore.
Aethelfrith,
Certainly not, and thanks for asking instead of assuming.
Zippy,
Not to go into excruciating detail, but several of his videos that purport to teach theology are actually teaching things anathematized. By itself, this is just material heresy.
[When I was getting my theology degree the joke was ‘give us 15 minutes and we’ll learn your favorite material heresy].
Even with his loud announcement of his theology degree (like I just did) this isn’t *so* bad.
The problem is that he has been shown, very clearly, that his teachings are heretical, has acknowledged this as true, and has left the ‘educational’ videos up and active.
When a trained theologian knowingly teaches things contrary to dogma it is material heresy.
I personally reach out the Church Militant about twice a quarter trying to get this changed, but despite his acknowledgements he refuses to change more than a transcript here and there.
By that argument Zippy himself is a “blatant heretic” as there are posts in this very blog and W4 that are quite heretical on usury, and Zippy himself has corrected Zippy, but not removed the posts.
We should all remember that St Peter was the first heretic.
There is value in Zippy leaving the post up but visibly correcting himself. That shows not only an error, but the correction and sets an example of correcting oneself. There is no value in someone leaving uncorrected false teaching where others can see it.
TomD:
Ha, I do try to link to updated posts when I think I’ve gotten something wrong.
My understanding is that heresy is a proposition contrary to doctrine, that a material heretic is any baptized person who asserts such a proposition, and a formal heretic is a material heretic who has been formally censured by the Magisterium and nonetheless obstinately persists in asserting the heretical proposition. I may be wrong about that, though I haven’t been formally censured by the Magisterium.
Of course we should all do our best to avoid being material heretics, and this is especially true of folks who are teaching/preaching/blogging, and even moreso those who claim credentials.
I obviously know (and therefore assert) nothing in particular about the claims about Voris/CM.
True, but not all posts are marked, though I understand why they’re the way they are (and given that the Usury FAQ is highly linked it’s not a major issue). Simply not updating a video (which takes a significant amount of energy) does not indicate “blatant” heresy – continually releasing new videos with the same heresy would be more indicative.
For example, almost everyone is a positivist liberal heretic, even the “good guys” (see: Wanderer, Remnant, SSPX, etc). We pray for them, even if we don’t “support” or read them.
We all need to keep walking the narrow path, even if we’ve successfully figured out part of what the true, good, and beautiful is.
(My post cross-posted with yours) – Most of the “unupdated” posts are on places like W4 and in sub-comments, which would be unreasonable to fully update. And you’re probably a heretic with regards to lying, too. 😉
That’s a good point that formal heresy is really hard to do anymore; the Magisterium isn’t really doing much formal condemnation these days, as far as I know.
I suppose the more important point that should be made is that salvation is not by avoidance of heresy – many heretics are in Heaven; for example St Thomas Aquinas – but he loved Christ so much that had the Church corrected his material heresy during his life he’d have gladly submitted, just as Peter took correction from Christ for his abandonment of Him.
Love God, search for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, and submit to authority.
“Formal heresy” doesn’t have anything to do with a formal censure; it’s just the good old Scholastic classification into matter vs. form. Material heresy is a statement that objectively deviates from Church teaching; but one may subjectively be innocent if the deviation is an honest mistake. Formal heresy requires one to know that a statement has been declared false but adhere to it anyway. (Of course, a formal censure is one good way to know that a position is heretical….)
TomD: I’ve heard Aquinas called a lot of things, but not a heretic! In retrospect, something like his position on the Immaculate Conception would technically qualify, but I don’t think it would be correct to call St. Thomas a heretic, even materially, since at the time the Church had not made any pronouncement that he was disputing. But naturally your point still stands that salvation is not a theology exam.
I’m with Bruce Charlton. The coastal elites believe lies about people like me and I’m supposed to care what they think? (Well, I care, but not in the way this fellow would like).
And when he describes Clinton as “a competent, honest centrist candidate,” I wonder what planet he’s living on. Her centrism makes her comfortable with a woman having her child’s head crushed by forceps in mid-delivery, even as its body is still in the birth canal. Whatever evil lays claim to Donald Trump’s soul, it doesn’t include that.
Tom D,
Very valid points about older works. Yes, of course we are allowed to grow and to learn. But I was unclear – Mr. Voris also continues to point to the videos in question as teaching aids and makes new videos incorporating the same errors.
No; ‘formal heresy’ just means you know that what you teach is contrary to the Church and continue to teach it; it isn’t as “severe” as it sounds in English.
Please note: I am not condemning Mr. Voris! I haven’t the authority, for one thing. I was simply musing about something without going into enough detail to make my thoughts clear to others.
To expand; in my experience for American Catholics material heresy in general tends to result in Americanism.
Well, I don’t see why that would be such a ridiculous statement. Hillary election loomed as a time of increased persecution and having avoided her certainly looks like christians were given a “breather”. This might yet turn out to not be the case, but I can completely understand why people would see it that way.
While I agree the comparison with Constantine is really far-fetched (although I think the text seems more like a call for president Trump to follow his example), the Roman Emperor wasn’t substantially different from the office of President of the U.S.A. in this. I mean, it probably had far less crimes associated to it since the world has so many more people in it today, but still…
Well, sure, on a certain high school level nobody should care what faggy New Yorkers giggle about at their spirit cooking parties.
But knowing that they want you dead and the earth under the gardens you love salted does seem to be pertinent information politically.
Also, I’ll re-emphasize what I said in the OP, which is that Woit is being honest in the sense that he is telling us what he really thinks, which is not the same as what I think.
And why does he assume that the middle Americans have been conned by Trump, simply becase they voted for him?
Probably because he is a known con man. Then there are these salt of the earth who depend on a strong social safety net but keep electing people who promise to dismantle it by overwhelming margins. When 60% of a rural county is on Medicaid (about half of of which is explicitly due to the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare) and then 86% of said populace votes for Trump, and previously a governor who vowed to dismantle the state exchange) then they are telling me they are happy to cut their own throats. I feel sorry for them but they deserve the negative consequences of their votes.
While I don’t doubt racial tensions played a role in the election, considering how much better Obama did with many of these same voters I don’t think it played as great a role as Zippy claims. Furthermore, the liberal reasons for favoring immigration, third world or otherwise, can be more easily attributed to below-replacement birthrates among whites and a fundamental belief that America has always been a nation of immigrants. This doesn’t imply that multiculturalism is necessary or that immigration should be unrestricted, only that immigration in general is seen as an overall positive rather than some insidious plot at white suicide/genocide. I know Zippy and others dispute the notion of America as a proposition nation, preferring the blood and soil paradigm that should make Native Americans the “rightful heirs”, but for liberals that is simply not an option.
Step2:
You are assuming that it is middle American whites who are the racially conscious ones. But middle American whites are not really very race conscious at all, as I have explained before. It is coastal elites who hate middle American white working class people qua white.
It was leftist contempt for working class white people qua white which led Hillary Clinton’s campaign to (unlike Bill in the 90’s) shun them, which led to her loss of the Rust Belt states that Obama won.
Zippy:
Yep. Woit’s article told me that Woit hates Flyover Americans. His case that Trump does is poor, and appears to be some form of projection; i.e., Woit assumes that because Trump is a wealth coastal elite, then he must actually hate Flyover Americans. That tells me more about Woit than Trump.
That’s correct. It’s my opinion (as a white man in flyover country) that Obama’s presidency has done some work to make them reconsider. White Working Classes believed the left’s claim that the races are equal; therefore whites had been successful because they had white presidents and with a black president blacks would “assume their equality” (finish school, get married, work, etc.) alongside whites. Blacks just needed an example, you see. Then blacks would “cling to Bibles and guns”, too.
Instead we actually harvested: Presidential lectures on racism, Beer Summit, Scoldings from the AG, BLM riots, campus disruptions, anarchy at U of Missouri, flash mobs of white robbing whites, flash mobs of blacks beating whites, cop killings, daily accusations of white racism from the press even in minority-on-minority crimes…
I don’t think white working class people have taken up racial consciousness, but they now care less about minority problems.
[…] racial tolerance and live-and-let-live attitude of middle America though is not at all shared by coastal elites. Coastal elites contemptuously despise middle American white people specifically as white people. […]
I find the competing narratives of how Trump pulled this off to be quite amusing.
On the one hand we have the mainstream press continuing to discredit itself by pushing the narrative that some substantial percentage of 62 million American voters are white nationalists and KKK sympathizers, and that Trump’s victory has empowered a new era of minority oppression, fascism, and out-and-out racism. It’s amazing that this narrative has legs at all since it would be struck down in an instant if journalists and newspaper editors cared about facts, but if we’ve learned anything this election cycle it is that very few people allow facts to get in the way of their emotions.
Then there is the narrative embraced by Woit and others that Trump’s success is due to exploiting middle America’s rage that the system isn’t working for them, and telling them what they wanted to hear. In this narrative, middle America isn’t to blame for desiring Trump’s proposals, it makes sense that they would desire them. They’re just fools for being conned by an obvious snake-oil-salesman, a phony nationalist who wears cheap Chinese suits and has his ties manufactured overseas. Under this narrative we have much to fear not because President-elect Trump is Literally Hitler(TM), but because, as Michael Brendan Dougherty put it:
And then there’s guys like Scott Adams, who correctly predicted Trump’s victory an unprecedented 15 months ago based on the idea that humans are just about incapable of making rational decisions, and that Trump would use his skills of “Master Persuasion” to cause enough voters to make the emotional decision to vote for him. This sounds a lot like the con-man narrative, yet in Adams’ view, we have nothing to fear, because regardless of what Trump does he’ll be able to persuade enough of the country that this is what we wanted all along.
Quite frankly, I don’t know what to make of this spectacle, but it certainly is entertaining. Perhaps it is a sign that we are closer than ever to the the singularity.
donnie:
Whatever the narrative, the specific thing that the narrative has to explain is how Hillary Clinton lost the Rust Belt states that both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama won.
Indeed. I.e., it is the Current Year.
The best are the arguments that Trump voters are stupid for voting for Trump because he lied about everything he’s going to do, and we’re doomed because he’s going to do everything he said he’s going to do.
In that case, I suppose Adams might be on to something. Not only does his theory that Bill Clinton, Obama, and Trump are all “Master Persuaders” explain why each of them won the Rust Belt states while non-persuader Hillary lost them, it also explains why a majority of the country believes Bill Clinton and Obama were good Presidents even though their foreign and domestic accomplishments were forgettable at best and horrifyingly disastrous at worst.
donnie:
Adams is correct in his assessment of Trump’s salesmanship, and I would include Bill Clinton in the same “master salesman” category. Obama is different: he was the first affirmative action president, so exaggeration of his accomplishments and muting of his detriments will be exogenous rather than endogenous. Not that his salesmanship is terrible, mind you: but its effects are definitely exaggerated by his victim group status.
Adams calls Trump’s salesmanship “persuasion” to make it sound like something more woo-woo and profound than it is in fact, and Adams’ broader worldview is a load of postmodern subjectivist crap.
But again his assessment of Trump’s salesmanship is accurate.
Always remember, just because postmodernism is right about positivism being crap, doesn’t mean that it is also not crap. So just because Adams can figure out salesmanship doesn’t mean his denial of rationality is correct.
He makes a weird comment at the end about how his “movie” of the world allows us to be the heroes or something, which makes no sense. In his “movie” we’re not only all in a movie, we’re being strung along by a con artist who has everybody fooled so thoroughly most people don’t realize they’ve been fooled. Who would want that to be true?
I think his point is that you realize what’s going on, and so you’re the hero of your movie (because YOU are smart and see everyone else as being dumb) and so can be amused.
It is interesting to note that Adams repeatedly reaffirms that he doesn’t vote because he doesn’t agree with any of the candidates. This allows him to stand outside the fire and pontificate (which he openly admits he does, pointing out that he says things so that he will be ‘right’ no matter what happens).
[…] stop taking jobs, and since it’s white Americans who are the ones that the elites are attempting to run out on a rail, or worse, they correctly surmised that it was white Americans who that message resonated with the […]
I remember not thinking much of God’s Debris, though I do think Dilbert is genius. I haven’t read his newest book.
Adams comes out and supports Trump later on.
Adams is a smart man, and carries postmodern rationality about as far as it can be carried, but I feel his election prowess mainly rests on the fact that modern elections are circus shows with no real effect – as they must be if you can have supposedly “diametrically opposed candidates” and still have undecided voters near the election. You can only be undecided if the choices are similar, not literally completely opposed.
Or to put it another way; people talk as if the elections are what democracy says they are, but they vote as if they’re what Zippy says they are, and give them roughly the southern half of of a north-bound rat.
Adams “supported” Trump – did he ever say he’d vote for him? When I was following him he was going from not voting for anyone to supporting Hillary for “safety” to whatever.
TomD:
One of the obvious ‘tells’ for the irrationality of elections is that the results are formally determined by the aggregation of ‘undecided’ voters in ‘swing’ states: citizens of maximally indifferent states who are themselves maximally indifferent while still bothering to participate at all.
malcolm,
Yeah, as others have stated and as you can more or less pick up in that post of his, Adams is pretty out there in his postmodernist rejection of reality. In his view, we’re actively conning ourselves everyday when we delude ourselves in to believing that free will, morality, and rationality are part of the human experience. So from Adams point of view, if you’re going to brainwash yourself with your own movie of reality anyway, why not make it one with a happy ending?
I think his observation that human beings largely don’t make decisions based on reason and logic is true. I think his explanation for this, that human beings are really just “moist robots” that are largely incapable of reason and logic, is about as ridiculous as it sounds.
Aristotle and Aquinas argue basically the first part, and conclude from it that virtue, the habit of doing good, is therefore very important.
Voris is a heretic is averred but no substantiation produced
The Angelic Doctor is a heretic but no substantiation is produced
It seems as though the election has not just unhinged identified liberals.
St Thomas’s heresy is well known – he denied the Immaculate Conception. It is manifestly material, as it had not been proclaimed by the Church at the time, and (clearly) if it had been, St Thomas would have corrected himself. Frankly, if he wasn’t misled by the “quickening” I think he’d have argued it for himself.
Material heresy is not the big bugaboo people think it is. It’s simply holding a position contrary to Church doctrine. Church doctrine develops (but doesn’t change) so the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception has always been true, even if that wasn’t manifest at the time.
I used St Thomas as an example that saying “look heresy” is not necessary the best or most useful thing one can do. Instead, when presented with heresy, the correct doctrine should be enunciated, as Zippy does here and elsewhere.
TomD,
OT: I can certainly be wrong about this, but I didn’t think it was possible to be a heretic per se regarding an erroneous opinion on an open question of the Faith – particularly a question of the Faith that had been quite “open” for a while. That doesn’t excuse anyone for being wrong, and I suppose one could even seriously sin by being wrong in such situations. But the sin would be of a different sort than heresy. My understanding was that being in error regarding an open question of the Faith was like a near occasion of heresy, similar to any other near occasion of sin – with all its inherent issues of culpability and potential for immorality. Is this different from your understanding?
Oh, it’s not a sin at all. Material heresy is a act. The sin comes in when you persist in heresy after correction by the Magisterium (though it may also be sin after correction in general, I don’t know but I suspect so).
So people who hold the “unreasonable interest” position are material heretics, but probably aren’t sinning (though those who should explain it and have not probably are, but who am I to judge?). After reading the Usury FAQ, and studying the reference Magisterial documents, it (may) become the sin of heresy.
At least that’s what I’d think, but then again I’m just a commentator on a blog by a clown named Zippy.
(As a side note, this is why “Church Father says X” is not the end of the line, as a given Church Father may be wrong about something; the Magisterial teachings require something more than that, lots of them, etc. Some, such as Tertullian, even wandered into heresy themselves.)
Another way to put it is the charge “you’re a material heretic” is not very useful; much more useful is describing the heresy, and the contradicting doctrine. Saying “X is a material heretic” is an argument ad hominem par excellance, and usually not helpful.
Step2:
Then there are these salt of the earth who depend on a strong social safety net but keep electing people who promise to dismantle it by overwhelming margins. When 60% of a rural county is on Medicaid (about half of of which is explicitly due to the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare) and then 86% of said populace votes for Trump, and previously a governor who vowed to dismantle the state exchange) then they are telling me they are happy to cut their own throats.
Of course, maybe they’re sick of sucking at the welfare teat like a ‘good little underclass’ is supposed to do in the progressive scheme and are desperate for decent jobs.
I couldn’t tell if your 8:57 comment was aimed at me, but if it was:
..knowing that they want you dead and the earth under the gardens you love salted does seem to be pertinent information politically.
It might even be useful if I didn’t already know it.
I’ll re-emphasize what I said in the OP, which is that Woit is being honest in the sense that he is telling us what he really thinks, which is not the same as what I think.
I’m well aware that he supports the gutting of full-term babies and that you do not. You laud his honesty twice in the main post. So honesty in defense of iniquity is now some kind of virtue? Such can be found on a thousand liberal websites. When he pays Clinton the same compliment, I think he’s lying. When he calls her centrist, I think he’s lying. So it remains unclear to me why he stains your blogroll.
Bill:
My impression of Woit’s honesty comes from his writing on physics (about which he is actually knowledgeable). Again reiterating what I said in the OP, I’ve never seen him write anything political before this.
Tom D
Originally, St Thomas Aquinas was spot on re immaculate conception, then he denies it and, later, he came back to original position.
Step 2:
Trump never said anything about dismantling the social safety net-quite the opposite. He wants to do away with Obamacare as presently constituted because many are getting hit with exploding premiums. I don’t know how anyone could confuse him with Paul Ryan.
Of course, maybe they’re sick of sucking at the welfare teat like a ‘good little underclass’ is supposed to do in the progressive scheme and are desperate for decent jobs.
That area is in the middle of coal country and those mining jobs aren’t coming back. They may be able to get other jobs into the area if Trump can put up tariffs without starting a trade war. However those jobs are unlikely to be decent paying union jobs since Trump’s administration is going to be staffed to the gills with anti-union Koch lobbyists. There is also a strange work ethic involved here, lots of people picked up and moved halfway across the country to get the few decent jobs available during the Great Recession but these rust belt towns are demanding that the jobs be brought to them. And from a political perspective it is absurd to place the many problems of global trade only at the feet of Clinton or Democrats generally. I remember when NAFTA passed and there was no greater cheerleader for it than Rush Limbaugh. He even faked moving his studio to Mexico to mock anybody who was worried about outsourcing. Now I’m supposed to believe Rush cares deeply about the plight of the working class.
Trump never said anything about dismantling the social safety net-quite the opposite.
All politicians lie but Trump goes above and beyond. Trump is an egregious liar, he has lied about his own publicly recorded statements. It is in effect a challenge to the memory of the listener, does Trump’s present assertion replace your knowledge of his past statements which contradict it? And who is crafting these budgets and bills that Trump has promised to sign if not Paul Ryan?
My impression of Woit’s honesty comes from his writing on physics
Yes, the physics looks interesting. I’ve always wondered how a man can be so smart in one area and vacuous in another. I wonder what motivates him. Personally, if I didn’t believe that human life was sacred from its inception, my interest in the laws governing the universe would flatline.
You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
This quote seems pertinent in that, when one see the racial hatred, you cannot unsee it.
I thought it was a revealing slip when President Obama, on his final European tour, warned against a “crude sort of nationalism”.
So much of this election seemed to really be about manners. The problem with Trump, according to a significant number of #nevertrumpers, was his crude manners. The correct manners would be those of what the alt-right came to define as a SWPL (or in Obama’s case, a BPLSWPL, pronounced “BippleSwipple”). The crude manners were the manners of middle-class Americans.
Now we find out from no higher authority than the current leader of the free world that the problem with nationalism is not that it is wrong but it’s just that it is “crude”. I.e. it’s a little crude to love your own people, stick up for your own side in a fight, think your mother is better than any mother on the planet, etc. It is uncouth. Bad manners. No Hillary Clinton rally would start with the pledge of allegiance. That would make Democrats feel icky.
It was a fratricidal election, in many respects: complaining about your brother-American’s manners while simultaneously asserting that any American who doesn’t immediately *love* the manners of a recently transplanted Yak farmer from Irkutsk, is a xenophobe.
So, Pres. Obama’s insertion of the modifier “crude” raised an eyebrow. Was he saying that nationalism is only wrong when it is crude? Or nationalism is always wrong because it is always crude?? Either way…
Step2:
That area is in the middle of coal country and those mining jobs aren’t coming back.
I’m not trusting the NYT being definite on that, just as I didn’t trust their predictions that Trump would lose etc. etc.
Tariffs and subsidies can have significant impacts on any industry.
There is also a strange work ethic involved here, lots of people picked up and moved halfway across the country to get the few decent jobs available during the Great Recession but these rust belt towns are demanding that the jobs be brought to them.
I’m not aware of such ‘demands’; it seems like you’re confusing the rust belt workers with college students’ actual demands of free college.
And speaking of work ethic, what work ethic does the progressive scheme of sucking on the welfare teats inculcate, pray tell?
And from a political perspective it is absurd to place the many problems of global trade only at the feet of Clinton or Democrats generally.
I don’t think you need have any worries on that account; they’re probably quite mad at the Republican elite who went along with NAFTA too.
GJ,
Tariffs and subsidies can have significant impacts on any industry.
Sure, but tariffs against coal imports would be useless as we are a net exporter of coal and placing tariffs on alternatives like oil would be a tax that harms the entire American economy – and since transportation on average accounts for about a quarter of coal’s delivery price an increase in oil prices would affect coal producers more than other industries. Moreover, the abundance of surface-mined coal in Wyoming (40% of total domestic production) requires fewer workers than underground mining (8x greater output per employee), so in addition to domestic competition from natural gas there is also domestic competition within the coal industry involved in those lost mining jobs. Subsidies are corporate welfare, there is no reason corporations should be allowed to suck on the government teat if it is so corrupting of citizens. When will our lazy, unethical corporate overlords stop begging for handouts?
tariffs against coal imports would be useless as we are a net exporter of coal
‘useless’ is nonsense as a significant amount of coal is imported.
Moreover, the abundance of surface-mined coal in Wyoming (40% of total domestic production) requires fewer workers than underground mining
You seem really hung up on the fact that the coal industry cannot be fully restored to its former glory. So what? Many jobs can be restored; no one’s aiming for the perfect.
Subsidies are corporate welfare, there is no reason corporations should be allowed to suck on the government teat if it is so corrupting of citizens.
Nah, it’s just the progressive scheme of welfare that is so infantilising.
When will our lazy, unethical corporate overlords stop begging for handouts?
Yes, all those green energy subsidies should be removed and redirected to help poor and desperate workers through coal subsidies.
GJ:
That is a good point. A ‘net’ for any parameter is just the result of adding up the pluses and subtracting away the minuses: bean counting. But human beings, communities, and their livelihood are not beans. Arithmetic doesn’t make the ontological occurrences represented by those numbers disappear. Every policy hurts some and helps others, and treating this as a ‘net’ is dehumanizing.
Free trade versus protectionism seems like one of those reductive false dichotomies to me. If a strong manufacturing base in the US is an important aspect of the common good then to Hell with optimizing for maximally cheap consumer goods and maximally wealthy coastal elites who hate middle America.
I’ve never understood that argument – “making it so people will have jobs means they won’t be able to buy cheap chinese crap!” So who gives a care? Even if the iPhone manufacturing labor costs double to $14 from $7, do we really care?
But then I remember that most people are living sola consumerism – salvation by cheap chinese crap alone.
GJ,
It isn’t a matter of fully restoring to coal to its former glory, it is a matter of understanding long term industry trends and realizing that for the foreseeable future you are fighting an uphill battle just to maintain coal mining employment at its current levels.
I can certainly understand the horror of subsidizing clean, renewable energy in favor of coal. If we are going to redirect subsidies from an energy sector, we should start with the very profitable oil and gas industry first.
Zippy,
Every policy hurts some and helps others, and treating this as a ‘net’ is dehumanizing.
In this case I couldn’t disagree more, especially since he seems fine with disparaging those relying on social safety nets. If we start setting up tariffs on commodities in which we have an oversupply it is self-defeating if any country decides to reciprocate. The only reasons we import the small amounts of coal we do (about 1%) are because of transportation costs to a few regions and/or currency valuations. There isn’t any fundamental problem in the supply/demand structure that should be addressed by tariffs – and I’m not fundamentally opposed to tariffs in cases where there is shown to be dumping or other clear market manipulation happening.
Step2:
I know too little about (and have too little interest in) the coal industry specifically to argue it. But I do agree with the general principle that American trade agreements should be good for American workers, not just stockholders in American corporations. And that even beyond that economic optimization uber alles does not serve the good of the USA: that strategic industrial capacity within our physical borders and dignified work for the American working class takes precedence over achieving global efficiencies, etc.
But all of this is kind of smoke blowing from my perspective, because having the wrong policies is really the least of our problems.
In regards to trade and such, efficiency must not be considered the highest good, but sometimes the best bad option is letting a town or industry fail and freeing up resources for better uses. Finding the golden mean between inhuman efficiency and neo-mercantilism seems like a daunting task. It’s a problem that goes far beyond my competency.
I totally agree that there is other point outside of economic efficiency. The welfare of people and strategic ressources being one.
There is even more non-economical factor in favour of “inefficient” industries. There is the common, there is also beauty. Local food, local architecture, local art, some degree of differences participate in a richer world.There is also local law, custom, habits which might be more adapted to the area/people or just an expression of their character and choices. Subsidiarity is an argument for some “inefficiency” (from the point of view .of free market radical). Some argument in that favour, warning some crazy reactionary catholic stuff mixed with the good stuff : http://www.traditioninaction.org/OrganicSociety/A_029_ClosedEconomy.html
http://www.traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/j046ht_Democracy-7.html
And on the efficiency part, it depends of your definition of “efficient” a lot. A coal industry might be more efficient done in USA, but Chinese being cheap (and slave) worker, yeah, it is cheaper to exploit chinese worker. It also send you to hell to support it (just wage).
Even if they are paid just wage but are still cheaper because of lower cost of life, there are not the most efficient at doing it. USA has better legal system, more capital, more machinery, et cetera. They would do it better. So there is less efficient use of capital. And there is externalities. Now you have destroyed and industry in USA and e supported one in China. It will take more effort for USA to back in Coal industry is some high tech discovery make coal more efficient to do. It makes chinese industries have more financial capital and human capital. Their industries can build long term and become more efficient in their use of capital and start higher value industries. Like Japan did. Meanwhile USA has lot of unemployement because worker could not find easily new job (it does not happen by the magic of free market) and lot of trade deficit means the country owe a lot of money to foreigner, making it even harder to compete for they are poorer.
A longer version of the same argument :
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-fletcher/the-theory-thats-killing-_b_846452.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-fletcher/americas-trade-deficit-is_b_823785.html
It will take more effort for USA to BE* back in Coal industry IF* some high tech discovery make coal more efficient to do
I should have read myself again more.
a vote for Trump is to convince people in New York, Washington D.C. and California that you really are even more ignorant than they thought, a racist fool taken in by an obvious con.
Maybe. But many who voted for Trump were under no delusion of his nature. The point for them was not that Trump would be significantly different, or somehow not one of them. It did not matter that Trump was the Tweedle Dee put up by the powers that be (PTB) against Tweedle Dum, also put up by the PTB. What matters is that Hildebeast was presented as the choice of the PTB and she was for whom all decent people were to vote. Voting Trump was simply a FU to the PTB, even if it was only a symbolic FU.
I note that one comment I’ve not heard much this election is “they’re both the same” – which I think is the main reason Trump won. He’s not a pasteurized process American politician (even though he actually is just another aspect of American liberalism, one perhaps more in tune with the country than people realize (or want to admit)).
I can certainly understand the horror of subsidizing clean, renewable energy in favor of coal.
Remember when nuclear energy was going to be too cheap to meter? Good times . . . good times.
TomD:
The clash was between “I feel your pain” 90’s liberalism and “I hate you because you are white and don’t feel guilty about it and are therefore racist” 21st century liberalism.
[…] of authority. Exercise of authority under liberalism is always sociopathic, carried out via unprincipled exceptions, because of the way liberalism frames the question of […]