Snowstalker's Ten Truths

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

Screw it, this trend isn't dying yet. Some points are deliberately dumbed-down into bumper sticker format as to imitate Mr. Ramaswamy himself.

[Alben Barkley]

1: Absolutely not, at absolute best Bernie would have done better by winning Michigan but still lost the election.

2. No, and to say so is an insult to actual victims of apartheid states.

3: Based on Umberto Eco's definition it clearly is, but that definition is highly controversial in political science.

4: I do not accept or believe this. Too many countries have managed to make a mixed economy work.

5: Most "media criticism," be it "poptimism" or not, is a bunch of bulls--t anyway. I don't think anything of value has been "destroyed," even if "poptimism" is particularly eyeroll-worthy.

6: Absolutely not. Which is really saying something, because modern Russia is an abortion of a state. It still hasn't come close to reaching the lows of the worst of the Stalinist regime or possibly even the Brezhnev regime.

7: By definition, no. You can maybe argue in practice it often has resulted in that, but I know of too many well-meaning and decent conservatives to truly agree with this in good conscience.

8: Not if you actually care about getting things done!

9: No, most of America's present problems either go back much farther (are remnants of the flaws of the Constitution itself or beyond) or are much newer (for example, Trumpist populism is not really related to Reconstruction in any coherent way).

10: LOL, hell no!

Congratulations! You just managed to get me to vote "NOTA" for the FIRST TIME in ANY of these!

[Vosem]

1: I doubt it, particularly given the mistakes he made in 2020, but it's hard to say and I could imagine whatever event caused him to beat Hillary in the primary also causing the right side of the aisle to be less united. Disagree but not super strongly.

2: No; as I noted on AAD the comparison is interesting primarily for illuminating the extent to which Israeli policy -- especially in the 2000s -- often seems 180-degrees-opposed from apartheid; for example by forcibly removing the ethnicity dominating government from settlements rather than forcibly removing the disfavored ethnicity. Contrasting Gaza withdrawal with the 1959 Self-government Act makes this very clear.

3: No; the Republican Party does not want to set a societal goal of conquering other states. It wants to make setting societal goals impossible. (Although I considered being edgy here and voting "Yes", since you wrote ur-fascist here, referencing the Umberto Eco essay, rather than fascist, but I think the Eco essay is not useful because its description was broad enough to apply to literally all political movements anywhere, left or right. In this sense the Republican Party is ur-fascist, but so are the Democrats, Libertarians, Greens, and all others.) I think what you're trying to say here is that it is an organization whose goal is seizing power in an authoritarian way, but I also don't think this is true; I think the Democrats are closer to this in mindset although the reality means they really don't have this goal either.

4: No, I think by definition they are the same, which was one of my ten truths.

5: Sure, although I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. First yes.

6: No, modern Russia is much wealthier (which is the most important way to contrast societies) and is actually freer in important ways, although this says much more about the USSR than about modern Russia. (For example, you can simply leave to avoid the draft, and no one will stop you. I met distant relatives in Moscow in 2016, but these people now live, I think, in Petach Tikva.)

7: This doesn't feel like a coherent thought -- surely the point of any ideology is determining who is to be weak and who is to be strong? 'Conservatism' in the abstract might refer to keeping these relations the way they are now, but the word 'always' makes me think you're referring to, like, the set of all 'conservatisms' everywhere, and these are not even that uncommonly revolutionary ideologies that propose to radically change who is weak and who is strong.

8: Yes, but this is a low bar to clear.

9: I'll go with a sure -- it's important to realize that Reconstruction was a failure (which Atlas red avatars don't seem to necessarily think) and it's important to consider why it failed -- but one could just as easily say that 1619 was the source, or something like that. (Fundamentally, it failed because it misunderstood the motivation of ordinary Northerners in supporting the Civil War; Hayes was a much more natural nominee than Grant for the party of Lincoln. This party still exists, in fact, although their 1870s enemies are long gone.)

10: It is a US state, so in some sense it is fine, yes.

Yes: 5, 8, 9 (a very close one though), 10
No: 1, 2, 3 (although as exactly written 'yes', given what you're obviously trying to say here 'no'), 4, 6, 7 (I think this on is incoherent, 'not even wrong')

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Reconstruction probably was not a failure. The core job of Reconstruction was to reintegrate the Southern states and reunify the country as one. It did ultimately achieve this. "Radical Reconstruction" (i.e. protect civil rights for blacks, hold off the Reedemer Democrats) was a failure, but this was only the goal of ultimately a minority of Northerners, as 1874 showed (with a lot of the country responding to Radical Reconstruction at least as negatively as people in 2008 responded to America staying in Iraq).

[Aurelius2]

Only #5, which is an issue I don't particularly care about. #2 and #6 are particularly lol-worthy, and reminds me why I don't bother talking about Israel on here.

[Dr. MB]

1. yeah ofc, I'd be betraying everything that brought me into politics if I said otherwise
2. yeah and debating over the precise definition of apartheid or exact analogies of South Africa is useless, what they're doing is bad and shouldn't be defended in any form
3. increasingly so and so
4. obviously, and to deny this is to deny reality
5. not really, there's value to a lot of different genres of music and art, it's still important to critique commercialization and the music industry though
6. for the most part, yes
7. yeah, preservation of hierarchy and the existing social order is their overarching goal
8. depends on what metric
9. well it goes a little deeper than that but yes
10. never been

Good list though. probably better than most of the ones I've seen

[bagelman]

1. No. He would have won, but not only would it not be "easy", Clintonite elites would've engineered roadblocks that Hillary never saw.

2-4: agree, although #2 is more complicated and it's worth noting that Palestinians would rather destroy Israel than coexist.

5. Disagree? Media criticism still exists. But I don't know much about this topic especially relating to music.

6. Disagree, internet providers were much worse in the USSR than Russia. Also Russians can leave the country and there are fewer gulags (I think).

7. Agree

8. Maybe

9, 10: Agree

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

#1
Bernie would have easily won against Trump in 2016.
Easily won? Nah. He would probably be slightly likelier to win than Hillary, but Rs would have no desire to play nice with him and the way he was treated vis a vis Hillary Clinton would likely be flipped. Disagree.

#2
Israel is an apartheid state.
The word apartheid being used in this way is kind of misleading and misses major details. It's not a point worth obsessing over, though. Disagree, but that does not assign said actions as having a seal of approval.

#3
The Republican Party is ur-fascist.
Agree, but so are the Democrats.

#4
The material interests of management and labor are inherently at odds.
This one is interesting. Marxism's class thinking is a considerable influence on me, but I have generally seen class conflict more from a "lets keep the peace" point of view than a "workers of the world, unite!" one. So it can be at odds, but it is not inherently at odds depending on how they work with each other. I guess I vote Agree but it's complicated.

#5
Poptimism has destroyed media criticism.
I guess Agree, but I don't feel the slightest bit really knowledgeable on this at all.

#6
The Soviet Union was better than modern Russia in every major way.
This is an interesting comparison, and life in the Soviet Union was seen through a grossly exaggerated lense in Western culture, but the word 'every' is a bit of a problem here. Disagree.

#7
Conservatism has always basically been about upholding control of the weak by the strong.
Maybe agree in terms of results? The weak have always been, in relative terms, controlled by the strong, in pretty much any system. Agree I guess.

#8
Kennedy was a better president than Johnson.
I actually agree, though I'm proud of LBJ (the best Texan president), Kennedy even surpassed him.

#9
The failure of Reconstruction is the root of most of America's modern problems.
Disagree, for reasons already outlined.

#10
New Jersey is a perfectly decent state.
Agree

So, Agree on 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10; Disagree on 1, 2, 6, and 9.

[LAKISYLVANIA]

Agree with

1,2,3, 6,9,10

Don't disagree on the others, i just abstain from those.