Ask khuzifenq

[Utah Neolib]

Should Cascadia secede and become a true utopia?

[Kamala's side hoe]

Should Cascadia secede and become a true utopia?

The rest of the US and the rest of Canada would be much worse off without our benignly caffeinated, composting, tree-hugging influence.

How would you describe your identity?

This feels even more like a college app essay than Torie's question. Definitely have more to say on the subject than I can cram into one post. It feels like you're asking more than one question here, so check your PMs.

I like both cats and dogs but am more of a cat person. I also prefer tea over coffee but am very conscientious about my caffeine consumption patterns as I'm somewhat caffeine-sensitive. I am more of a lover than a fighter (#simplife), I favor introverted intuition, and I firmly believe pineapples belong on pizza.

But for the sake of answering your question, I'll focus on aspects of my upbringing and formative experiences that have led me to feel like I have more in common with you than almost every other prominent poster here. You're the only other poster I know of who is around the same age as me (give or take up to 24 months), grew up connected to 2 drastically different cultures, was raised in a (relatively in my case) heavily Asian suburban area, attended a public flagship university, has lived in both the West Coast and the South, and is a D-avatar.

Relative to Atlas D-avatars as a whole, I'm more supportive of Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Andrew Yang, and Tulsi Gabbard- for reasons that probably involve reflexive racial/gender identity politics on some level but also mild disillusionment with the Dem establishment, Rose Twitter types, and hyper online, hyper politically engaged left of center types at large.

Relative to you, Mung Beans, and most of the younger Asian American posters I'm probably more libertine on issues relating to morality as 1) I did not grow up in a religious household, and 2) my political consciousness first emerged in opposition to the W administration, which was when the GOP was more Religious Right-dominated than it is now. I'm also relatively supportive of mask-wearing in public, partly because I don't see this as a particularly intrusive or inconvenient measure but also because I'm a relatively health-conscious person. I guess this is my version of OSR's grandstanding on <<Les guerres culturelles [États-Unis] >> - we're both less hardline on these issues compared to our older family members, but more so than the median poster.

Stay tuned for more.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Part 2 of my response to Xahar’s question will delve into the thought processes behind my NationStates world building. Hoping to post that on July 26, assuming I’m not too preoccupied with real life stuff to crank out a mini-essay on how the racial/religious/cultural setting of my post-apocalyptic solarpunk parallel Earth reflect the formative experiences that have shaped my views. PSOL’s recent post gets at some of the psychological themes of cultural in-group vs out-group dynamics, societal balkanation, classism/elitism, the survival vs self-expression values axis of the World Values Survey, post-colonialism, and ecological collapse that underpinned the speculative future history I first dreamed up during high school.

Eating bugs and the possibility of eating bugs in the future is another one of the many food hysterias perpetuated by people who grew up privileged to be squares but not enough to not see the poverty line. The sheer fear of such a future by posting gifs from snowpiercer by cringelords. In reality, eating bugs like crickets sustainably is healthy to do and quite enjoyable apparently, with many people enjoying snacking on crickets to millipedes. With the immense racism following the unfair blaming of wet markets for Covid-19, such a thing takes on a racial element and puts the often white middle class individual’s fear of being declassed and ending up like the poor brown horde of their imagination to the front. Similar hysteria was brought up from the movie Soylent Green, where instead of raising questions about capitalism or the industrial hell that is the modern western food industry, real things with real solutions, instead the privileged opinion leaders went after soy. This goes hand in hand with the gross food processes that feed us crap for cheap and throw any good organ meat away as “undesirable”.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Komrade Khuznetsov, why isn't your avatar burgundy?

TL;DR- The Road to Wigan Pier. A George Orwell book I've never read but completely agree with.

Short answer: I am a registered Democrat IRL (although I was briefly registered as a Green during Obama's 2nd midterm), and I want my Atlas avatar(s) to reflect that.

Longer answer: My meme avatars are moss green (not burgundy) because my points of departure from mainstream Dems have more to do with environmental concerns and addressing climate change- than with philosophical musings on who should own the means of production or blaming billionaires for every societal problem under the sun. (Not that they shouldn't be held accountable for their actions, or that we shouldn't be concerned about economic inequality in the West and elsewhere)...

Relevant Substack post on why college degrees have become so strongly correlated with left-right partisanship and why the 'socialist' movement is basically an elite (read: college grad) phenomenon. Highly recommend reading the whole thing.

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-elite-overproduction-hypothesis

It’s easy to draw a line between this unhappiness and the socialist movement in the U.S. Socialism rapidly became more popular among young Americans in the 2010s, and the Bernie Sanders movement exploded upon the national scene. The socialist movement has people from all classes, but overall it’s far from a proletarian movement — this is fundamentally a revolt of the professional-managerial class, or at least the people who expected their education to make them a part of that class. It’s telling that two of the new socialist movement’s most passionate crusades have been student debt forgiveness and free college.

Aug 25- still too busy with RL stuff for a proper Part 2 to Xahar's question. It'll come at some point this year.

[_.]

Why do you keep calling us iGens man it's cringe please stop

[Kamala's side hoe]

Why do you keep calling us iGens man it's cringe please stop

stfu iGen

It's to show I'm not one of you

[pikachu]

Two questions:

Thoughts on this tweet?

Opinion of David Wu?

[Kamala's side hoe]

Two questions:

Thoughts on this tweet?

Opinion of David Wu?

On a posting hiatus this month (was supposed to start on Aug 29), but that tweet dovetails nicely into my long-anticipated part 2 to Xahar's question so I'll respond to it in that post.

David Wu was my House representative for around half of my childhood. Sexual assault allegations aside, he's a FF for his support for science research and funding, NASA, and voicing concerns over human rights and the rule of law in China (which makes sense given his parents were Chinese Civil War refugees and he was born in White Terror-era Taiwan)- while also supporting student exchange programs between China and the US. (Lean FF overall)

I always thought it was interesting that he matriculated into Harvard Medical School but ended up graduating from Yale Law School instead. Makes you think about how many politicians aspired to go into medicine at some point.

He also reminds me of Andrew Yang in that he grew up in NY state back when the US was less multicultural and more assimilationist than it is now. I think Yang got more flack for some of his statements on America than Wu would've if he said the same things due to Yang being 20 years younger, presumably being more in touch with his Taiwanese-ness and Asian-ness, and a more nationally prominent figure than Wu ever was.

[Kamala's side hoe]

How would you describe your identity?

This feels even more like a college app essay than Torie's question. Definitely have more to say on the subject than I can cram into one post. It feels like you're asking more than one question here, so check your PMs.

Stay tuned for more.

Half-assed Part 2, which delves into a more collective sense of identity and how that shaped my NationStates worldbuilding back in the day.

Thoughts on this tweet?

https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2852&context=luc_theses

I found this paper while looking for something else and I found this paper to be very interesting as it tells a lot about how it feels to be a minority group in a minority. Although the sample is fairly evangelicalish, the paper seems to be really insightful on Second Generation Indian Christians in America.

This 2013 thesis specifically focuses on Malayali Christians.

Compared to other ethnic/racial minorities such as Latino and Black Americans, Asian and South Asians perform better socio-economically. However, research done on South Asian and Asians also show that they face the glass ceiling due to their race and ethnicity, which limits their ability to move to the uppermost tier of American corporate business ladder (Wu 2002; Kibria 2002; Ch 5). These scholars point to the stereotyped image of Asian Americans as “hardworking but not leadership material,” prevalent in the corporate sector (Kibria 2002:133).

This framing reflects and reinforces how "Asian" = "East Asia + ASEAN" in US English

The Tweet pikachu linked has to do with the vagueness of the term "Asian American" and who it refers to. The author of the tweet mentioned that the phrase originated during the 1960s and 1970s to foster pan-(East) Asian solidarity among the extant Asian ancestry groups in the US at the time. His main criticism of the term seems to be that it lumps South Asians into the same group as East and Southeast Asians, even though the South Asian diaspora is sociologically distinct from the diasporas of the first two groups (and arguably are culturally more similar to West Asians).

This criticism gets at why I use the phrase "East/Southeast Asian" on here. It isn't to suggest that the East Asian and Southeast Asian diasporas are interchangeable in any way, but I do think there is a broad CJK + ASEAN identity among the Asian diaspora- especially in the US and among people who grew up after the end of the Cold War- in a similar sense to the "brown/desi" identity among the South Asian diaspora in the Anglosphere.

Part of this is because there's a certain sweet spot of economic development for incentivizing immigration to first-world countries, and the East(ern) Asian countries that developed earlier [particularly Japan, but also South Korea and Taiwan to some extent] have passed that sweet spot, which is why recent immigration from Asia has mostly been from the PRC, the Philippines, Vietnam, and India- countries that are still developing but are also developed enough for citizens to be able to take advantage of the opportunities that international migration brings.

A similar pattern appears here as it shows that as of Q4 2021, New Arrivals to the US had nearly reached those seen before the pandemic. This also has a country-by-country breakdown, with the top ten countries for legal immigration new arrivals in the calendar year 2021 being:

315,724 Total

• (16.6%) 52,469 - Mexico
• (6.6%) 20,759 - Dominican Republic
• (6.5%) 20,381 - China
• (5.1%) 16,079 - The Philippines
• (3.2%) 10,082 - Vietnam
• (3.1%) 9,864 - El Salvador
• (2.9%) 9,100 - India
• (2.8%) 8,865 - Afghanistan
• (2.3%) 7,359 - Pakistan
• (1.8%) 5,816 - Bangladesh

Going back to the idea of a pan-East/Southeast Asian group identity... my impression is that the existing social/cultural divide between the East Asian and Southeast Asian diasporas is mostly due to socioeconomic factors (both in Asia and overseas) arising from immigration patterns (H-1B vs refugee) and to a lesser extent stereotypes about skin tone and other physical traits. The number of "China flu" related hate crimes (or even just microaggressions) that have been perpetrated against individuals of native Southeast Asian heritage is a morbid testament to the broad overlap in physical appearance between East and Southeast Asians and the inability of many non-Asians to distinguish among them.

I don't really get the impression that there's a pan-ASEAN diaspora identity that isn't subsumed into a broader pan-East/Southeast Asian "anime + sushi + hallyu + KBBQ + boba + EDM rave slave" identity that the Facebook group subtle asian traits epitomizes, beyond 1) the shared Indochina refugee experience and 2) the shared Catholicism of Filipino Americans and a subset of Vietnamese Americans. Whatever "pan-CJK" diaspora identity I've noticed mostly seems mediated by a pan-Asian diasporic "evangelical/nondenominational Christian" identity that in my experience is dominated by the Korean diaspora and certain subgroups of ethnic Chinese.

It’s interesting the question’s being asked in the first place because the classic example of the Asian ethnoburb in North America is the San Gabriel Valley/626 and is actually the area which led to the creation of the term. Within California, it’s pretty well known that Asian ethnoburbs are a thing and places like Westminster, the SGV and Fremont have a connotation  but for whatever reason, there’s a perception outside the state that LA and especially the Bay Area are a lot whiter than they actually are.

This perception is ironic to me because growing up I always associated California (and SoCal in particular) as the demographic and cultural hub of East/Southeast Asian America.

I watched a lot of grassroots Asian American YouTubers back when I was in high school around when I started playing NationStates. If grassroot content creators are guilty of perpetuating the narrative that "Asian" includes East and Southeast Asians but not South Asians, it might be partly due to the entertainment industry being based in LA and SoCal having a proportionally smaller South Asian diaspora (relative to Asians as a whole) than the rest of the West Coast or anywhere east of the Rockies.

I can attest to Key Club functioning as a socializing venue for Asian teenagers, although at my high school it also included South Asians.

I made the backdrop for my NS accounts like this to provide context for my personal political and social views without giving away my nationality or cultural identity. Considering how many people on here think I'm Australian and/or (at least culturally) Muslim, I'd say that's worked pretty well.
I chose to emphasize their cultural and ethnic roots and heritage because of the Eurocentric bias on this site. This somewhat reflects my personal cultural heritage, but also reflects my belief that countries do not need to have a Western cultural heritage or a European demographic majority to enjoy first-world living standards and share "developed world values".

My NationStates main accounts are set in a solarpunk refugee state that is racially and religiously diverse, but culturally dominated by South Asians and Muslims in that those groups had a collective hegemony over the "founding" culture. I consciously added a "South Asians = oppressor, East(ern) Asians = oppressed" historical dynamic for various reasons- some based on the casual relationship between fertility rates and medium-to-long-term economic/cultural power, others based on subverting perceptual power dynamics and  cultural stereotypes held by different groups of people in Asia, among the diaspora, and among non-Asians. (There was probably some level of fetishizing the Global South in my adolescent brain, but that's a story for another day).

This was also intended to lampoon the racial history of the US and South Africa and how slavery and apartheid have cast shadows on the cultural and spiritual psyche of both countries. On some level, this reflects the higher aggregate socioeconomic status of Indian Americans compared to Asian Americans as a whole and individual East or Southeast Asian groups. And if you want to go the Bismarck (Atlas poster) route, how well Indian immigrants are represented in tech company leadership.

I consciously made the three main "East Asian" groups in my NationStates main Chinese, Vietnamese and Filipino (hence Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Tagalog all being official languages) mostly because I figured Vietnam and the Philippines would be disproportionately affected by climate change, since they're both relatively populous countries with most of the population concentrated around low-lying coastal areas that would be particularly strongly affected by rising heat and humidity AND rising sea levels. Another factor was because Vietnamese and Filipinos are both relatively well-represented in both the Asian American and Asian Australian diasporas- so on some level I still wanted the ethnic demographics of my future dystopian nation to reflect those of my country and the country of the person who created the game. But a third factor was to subvert the Anglosphere association of "(East) Asian" with "China, Japan, Korea", just because of how prevalent that usage is, so I created a specific historical and demographic context for that semantic shift.

So yeah, a lot of my late-adolescent worldbuilding was rooted in a desire to subvert semantic norms and express my progressive/liberal edginess in a benignly abstract way.

@pikachu I have some more to say on this topic than I suspect the rest of the Leipverse wouldn't be interested in reading (kudos if you've made it this far! it shows you care about my NationStates worldbuilding from like 8-10 years ago haha), so I'll PM you some more thoughts in the next few days or weeks.

[jamestroll]

If you had to choose between living in these 5 states

Missouri
Utah
Arizona
Virginia
Colorado

which would you choose and why

(the five states I lived in )

[Kamala's side hoe]

If you had to choose between living in these 5 states

Missouri
Utah
Arizona
Virginia
Colorado

which would you choose and why

(the five states I lived in )

Depends on how long I'd be living there, and what phase of my life I'd be spending there. Would eventually want to come back to the PNW or California for the long haul if possible.

Colorado = Arizona = Virginia > Utah = Missouri

[Kamala's side hoe]

No one ever asked me to document how one-sidedly pro-Palestine my personal social media is regarding recent international events, but I've posted about it at least twice on this forum now (actually thrice), so I'm just compiling my posts here for posterity.

Anecdotally, the few opinions/reposts/media I see in my personal social media on the recent conflict are all pro-Palestine. This is probably more due to being mostly under 35 and universally college educated than being Muslim, Asian, and/or part of post-1965 immigrant waves- even though all of the non-Jewish/non-white people I’ve seen share pro-Palestine content fall into at least one of those categories. There is also one older person with a BS in Environmental Studies who is married to a Moroccan immigrant and has 2 children with them.

Israel used to be seen as vulnerable, surrounded by enemies and thought about with the then recent memory of the Holocaust in mind. That view doesn't resonate with young people now, there is a huge power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinian population. Their treatment of the Palestinians is obviously oppressive and an injustice that the free world should be ashamed to support. Hamas is the greater evil and terrorism is obviously appalling, but the Israeli response has also been criminal and being fully allied with that would not be a comfortable position.

I regret that I have but one Recommend to give. There are very good reasons why public opinion among my personal social media feed is one-sidedly sympathetic to Palestine and Palestinians.

That being said, the decolonization narrative is false and dangerous. It (falsely IMO) paints Jewish Israelis as “white” and Arab Palestinians as “POC”, the basis of which gets into really murky “race science” logic among other things. Too lazy to find the actual Atlantic piece so here: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cy65O1dMkCi/?

Not a one-liner but I didn't know where else to quote-post this. All normies and even most non-normies definitely don't think too hard about the implications of being "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestine".

Lots of normal people don't follow the specifics of the conflict, they just pick a side and then angrily stick with it. Of course with Israel/Palestine, it leads to stupidity like this. I don't believe though that many people have actually thought it through and think Jewish babies should be killed and Holocaust survivors sent to die in a tunnel in Gaza.

Re: early Oct 2023 USGD thread on declarations of solidarity with Palestine on elite college campuses

The fact that so many of these are law students is especially disturbing to me. You're supposed to have some semblance of rationality to enter the legal profession, and ideally you should have some brains to get into one of these T14 schools in the first place.

Wait, was Dule right about law school students?

It isn't that surprising. Professions that require postgraduate education or have a lot of postgraduate degree holders are generally more woke than professions that do not; this applies to STEM fields as well as the non-STEM fields I assume most of this forum is familiar with.

The pro-Palestine/ceasefire/sympathy-for-Gaza content I see in my personal social media feed tends to be people who work in healthcare. Granted not all of them are medical students/residents, but many are. This makes sense for purely humanitarian reasons, without getting into discussions of international law and identity politics that are emphasized here.

But also...

This is going to sound stupid but a large chunk of this is TikTok. College kids are getting absolutely inundated with one sided content and it's turning them into extremists. I don't mean to sound like Tipper Gore or anything but it's apparent a lot of these kids are just regurgitating what they're hearing in their feeds.

[LostFellow]

No one ever asked me to document how one-sidedly pro-Palestine my personal social media is regarding recent international events, but I've posted about it at least twice on this forum now (actually thrice), so I'm just compiling my posts here for posterity.

-snip-

Don't mean to hijack the thread, but I can 100% share the exact same anecdote with my social media circles, particularly with those still in academia or the younger ones considered gen-z. I get the sense that most folks in professional circles (of which mine is tech-dominated, and to be frank, have stronger likelihood of actually working with companies and researchers in Israel) have many justifiably ambivalent feelings. I also do observe that the gender ratio is significantly skewed towards women for this compared to things like BLM, and I do think that the broader notion of anti-war matches the general socialization of women in western society.

I think that there are currently opposing situations of "news fatigue" lowering activism, but the humanitarian crisis in Gaza dragging on/Bibi squandering their approach tilting greater sympathy towards Palestine.

[Kamala's side hoe]

No one ever asked me to document how one-sidedly pro-Palestine my personal social media is regarding recent international events, but I've posted about it at least twice on this forum now (actually thrice), so I'm just compiling my posts here for posterity.

-snip-

Don't mean to hijack the thread, but I can 100% share the exact same anecdote with my social media circles, particularly with those still in academia or the younger ones considered gen-z. I get the sense that most folks in professional circles (of which mine is tech-dominated, and to be frank, have stronger likelihood of actually working with companies and researchers in Israel) have many justifiably ambivalent feelings. I also do observe that the gender ratio is significantly skewed towards women for this compared to things like BLM, and I do think that the broader notion of anti-war matches the general socialization of women in western society.

I think that there are currently opposing situations of "news fatigue" lowering activism, but the humanitarian crisis in Gaza dragging on/Bibi squandering their approach tilting greater sympathy towards Palestine.

You're all good. If anything I hijacked my own thread by answering a question no one asked.
There does seem to be virtue signal-y reposting of updates from the conflict (or reposts of pro-Palestine rallies) in terms of casualties on Gaza's side from people in healthcare, although it's by no means limited to people in healthcare, or women, or even people who have/will eventually earn a bachelors from a four-year university.

I might come across some sort of pro-Israel content if I felt like scrolling through all the stories in my personal IG feed, but tbh the algorithm is primed to bombard me with musings from a Bangladeshi American medical resident-cum-writer on how his expressed views on the conflict relate to his love for his wife and very young daughter, and not the non-college grad recruiter who occasionally reposts reels mocking trans rights activists and twentysomething feminists who complain about how trashy the men they meet are.

I don't repost this type of content myself, partly because I'd like to think I have a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the conflict than what Metaverse reposts would allow me to express, but also because I try to avoid posting political/current events content on my personal IG story.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

How do you see Remer holding up in 2024? What do you think her odds of winning re-election are?

[Kamala's side hoe]

How do you see Remer holding up in 2024? What do you think her odds of winning re-election are?

I might do another more in-depth answer sometime after next Tuesday, but I think Representative Chavez-DeRemer's odds of winning reelection are at least 40%. Don't have any real firsthand on-the-ground knowledge of any part of OR-5 beyond simply driving through on the highways through/across touristy areas, and my impression of matches who live in the Clackamas County portion of the district.


Also @TimTurner- there is now a "season 3" of this podcast that dives into the people who build the transcontinental railroad in the 19th century and how it relates to the media's role in shaping in-group/out-group biases among Americans throughout the 20th century.

Off the beaten path recommendation: Blood on Gold Mountain. It tells a story about frontier life in 19th-century California (post-Civil War, pre-1881) from a 21st-century perspective, which is probably the best way to market the podcast for members of this forum. Aside from the eclectic background music, I particularly enjoyed the vivid descriptions of California's natural scenery and the architecture of frontier-era Los Angeles.

Thank you for the recommendation.

Anytime.

[Kamala's side hoe]

I might do another more in-depth answer sometime after next Tuesday, but I think Representative Chavez-DeRemer's odds of winning reelection are at least 40%. Don't have any real firsthand on-the-ground knowledge of any part of OR-5 beyond simply driving through on the highways/across touristy areas, and my impression of matches who live in the Clackamas County portion of the district.

I don't think the 2023 elections were a good barometer for this. Leaving my projection unchanged for now.


Re: Polling shows a huge age gap divides the Democratic Party on Israel

And yet we’re being told that critical theory and left wing bias in academia doesn’t exist.

it does, and it's a good thing, but most people get their opinions from friends or social media rather than school. I think the effect of teachers and professors is overstated

Agree with the entirety of this post, even though MB is considerably more ideological and further left than me.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Komrade Khuznetsov, why isn't your avatar burgundy?

TL;DR- The Road to Wigan Pier. A George Orwell book I've never read but completely agree with.

Short answer: I am a registered Democrat IRL (although I was briefly registered as a Green during Obama's 2nd midterm), and I want my Atlas avatar to reflect that.

Longer answer: My meme avatars are moss green (not burgundy) because my points of departure from mainstream Dems have more to do with environmental concerns and addressing climate change- than with philosophical musings on who should own the means of production or blaming billionaires for every societal problem under the sun. (Not that they shouldn't be held accountable for their actions, or that we shouldn't be concerned about economic inequality in the West and elsewhere).

I don't really have any moral objections to the market as a foundational cornerstone of the modern economy. Capitalism and entrepreneurship are good for society, and small business ownership helps build intergenerational wealth and a sense of ownership that is needed to combat racial inequities in society. As a left-leaning twentysomething voter I'm drawn to progressive candidates like Warren, Sanders, Yang, and AOC because they talk about cost of living issues like reforming healthcare, higher education, housing and public transit. Not because I think billionaires don't deserve to exist or because it isn't possible to advance my personal financial situation through hard work and determination.

And I know I post a lot about the media-activist complex and how out of touch Buzzfeed-ish white "Progressive Leftists" can be from the rest of the Dem coalition, but... I'm too David Shor-pilled (or #woke if you wanna put it that way) from my college and post-college experiences to not see the bubble a lot of Twitter media-activist complex types seem to live in.

This Musa al-Gharbi blog post/essay gets at exactly what I was referring to here-

https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/class-conflict-and-the-democratic

The biggest divide in American politics at present is not along the lines of socioeconomic status (SES), nor educational attainment, nor area type (urban, suburban, small town, rural), nor sex and gender—although these factors all serve as important proxies for the distinction that matters most. The key schism that lies at the heart of dysfunction within the Democratic Party and the U.S. political system more broadly is between professionals associated with “knowledge economy” industries and those who feel themselves to be the “losers” in the knowledge economy—including growing numbers of working-class and non-white voters.

The increasing dominance of knowledge economy professionals over the Democratic Party has had a range of profound impacts on the contemporary U.S. political landscape. First and foremost, it has contributed to a growing disconnect between the economic priorities of the party relative to most others in the U.S., especially working-class Americans. As sociologist Shamus Khan has shown, the economics of elites tend to operate “counter-cyclically” to the rest of society, meaning that developments that tend to be good for elites are often bad for everyone else and vice versa.

For instance, professionals tend to be far more supportive of immigration, globalization, automation, and artificial intelligence than most Americans because they make professionals’ lives more convenient and significantly lower the costs of the premium goods and services they are inclined towards. Those in knowledge professions primarily see upsides with respect to these issues because their lifestyles and livelihoods are much less at risk—indeed, they instead capture a disproportionate share of any resultant GDP increases—and their culture and values are largely affirmed rather than threatened by these phenomena. Others may and often do experience these developments quite differently.

Likewise, most Americans skew “operationally” left, favoring robust social safety nets, government benefits, and infrastructure investment via progressive taxation, but trend more conservative on cultural and symbolic issues. For instance, they tend to support patriotism, religiosity, national security, and public order. Although they are sympathetic to many left-aligned policies, they tend to prefer policies and messages that are universal and appeal to superordinate identities over ones oriented around specific identity groups (e.g., LGBTQ people, women, Hispanics, and so on). They tend to be alienated by political correctness and prefer candidates and messages that are direct, concise, and plainspoken. Knowledge economy professionals tend to have preferences on these fronts that are diametrically opposed to those of most other Americans, especially working-class voters.

With respect to values, knowledge professionals skew culturally and symbolically “left” but favor free markets. As statistician Andrew Gelman showed, elites in the Republican Party tend to be significantly more liberal culturally and symbolically than the rest of the GOP yet more dogmatic about free markets. Meanwhile, Democratic-aligned elites tend to be significantly more “left” on cultural and symbolic issues than most Democrats but tend to be much warmer on markets. The primary difference between Democratic and Republican elites seems to lie in how they rank free markets relative to cultural liberalism: those who prioritize the former have tended to align with the Republicans, while those who prioritize the latter have consistently aligned with the Democrats. To the extent that highly-educated people support left-aligned economic policies, they tend to prioritize redistribution in the form of taxes and transfers whereas most other voters prefer predistribution—higher pay, better benefits, and more robust job protections so less needs to be reallocated in the first place (typically at the expense of some market freedom).

Critically, although knowledge economy professionals tend to skew more “operationally right” than most Americans, they often have inaccurate understandings of their own preferences. Perhaps counterintuitively, highly-educated Americans tend to be less aware of their own socio-political preferences than most others in society. Typically, we describe ourselves as more left-wing than we actually seem to be. Studies consistently find that relatively affluent, highly-educated, and cognitively sophisticated voters tend to gravitate towards a marriage of cultural liberalism and economic conservatism. However, they regularly understand themselves as down-the-line leftists. As the economist James Rockey put it:

How does education affect ideology? It would seem that the better educated, if anything, are less accurate in how they perceive their ideology. Higher levels of education are associated with being less likely to believe oneself to be right-wing, whilst simultaneously associated with being in favour of increased inequality.

Many knowledge economy professionals support ostensibly “radical” socioeconomic policies, but in a way that prevents even modest reforms. For instance, they tend to be much more critical of capitalism in principle than many other Americans. They tend to support “the revolution” (however defined) in the abstract, but because revolution does not appear to be in the offing anytime soon (certainly not a leftist revolution) they largely carry on day-to-day in much the same fashion as their liberal peers. If anything, under the auspices of slogans like “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” leftist professionals may show even less willingness to make practical changes in their own lives, institutions, and communities to advance their espoused social justice goals. Individual sacrifices or changes, it is commonly argued, are futile; nothing shy of systemic change is worth aspiring towards.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Komrade Khuznetsov, why isn't your avatar burgundy?

TL;DR- The Road to Wigan Pier. A George Orwell book I've never read but completely agree with.

Short answer: I am a registered Democrat IRL (although I was briefly registered as a Green during Obama's 2nd midterm), and I want my Atlas avatar to reflect that.

Longer answer: My meme avatars are moss green (not burgundy) because my points of departure from mainstream Dems have more to do with environmental concerns and addressing climate change- than with philosophical musings on who should own the means of production or blaming billionaires for every societal problem under the sun. (Not that they shouldn't be held accountable for their actions, or that we shouldn't be concerned about economic inequality in the West and elsewhere).

I don't really have any moral objections to the market as a foundational cornerstone of the modern economy. Capitalism and entrepreneurship are good for society, and small business ownership helps build intergenerational wealth and a sense of ownership that is needed to combat racial inequities in society. As a left-leaning twentysomething voter I'm drawn to progressive candidates like Warren, Sanders, Yang, and AOC because they talk about cost of living issues like reforming healthcare, higher education, housing and public transit. Not because I think billionaires don't deserve to exist or because it isn't possible to advance my personal financial situation through hard work and determination.

And I know I post a lot about the media-activist complex and how out of touch Buzzfeed-ish white "Progressive Leftists" can be from the rest of the Dem coalition, but... I'm too David Shor-pilled (or #woke if you wanna put it that way) from my college and post-college experiences to not see the bubble a lot of Twitter media-activist complex types seem to live in.

Dan the Roman (I-MA) knows what's up. Re: Will non-Western democracies ever become interested in promoting democracy and human rights?

I think there is a lot of racial charges being thrown around, ironically from socialist avatars, when this is actually more of a class issue. "Human Rights"" has always divided between a Middle Class concept of individual rights - which is inherently tied to the belief that what someone has and deserves is tied to what they do in life...

...Ironically, the decline of Western liberal democracy is tied to the Western middle class becoming more like the middle classes everywhere else. The average voter no longer sees Academics, lawyers, the media or business figures as independent challengers to the state power structure, but rather as its creations and tools.

Re: Was Trump winning in 2016 a fluke?

No, given 2010s polarization trends it seems like almost any R would've won in 2016.

Trump damn near holding on in 2020 despite post May of 2020 being the worst environment for an incumbent since Jimmy Carter in 1980 and due to the fact that Trump's post election conduct and 1/6 weren't a bridge too far for an overwhelming majority of the country as well as the fact that Trump is not only poised to be the nominee but is in a pretty strong position to get elected a 2nd time, only reinforces my belief that Trump winning in 2016 was not a fluke.

[Crumpets]

What's the farthest you've ever been from home and what brought you there?

What is your favorite bad movie? What is your least favorite good movie?

Have you ever been arrested or been in any trouble with the law?

[Progressive Pessimist]

How am I supposed to pronounce your username?

[Kamala's side hoe]

How am I supposed to pronounce your username?

How is your username meant to be pronounced? In my internal brain-voice I've been treating the vowels as pinyin, but "khu" and "fenq" aren't pinyin syllables AFAIK.

My brain says something like "khoo-(d)zee-fehn-k". It's derived from my alter ego NationStates accounts "Jamilkhuze" and "Syfenq", whose names have vaguely Perso-Arabic influenced etymologies. "Jamil" is beautiful in Arabic, Khuzestan is an administrative division in Iran, and "Sy" is a corruption of the Sanskrit honorific "Sri".

Real question is how do you pronounce "khuzifenq" or "ugabug"?

I pronounce them ['xu.dzi.fɛŋk] and ['u.ga.bug] respectively.

What's the farthest you've ever been from home and what brought you there?

What is your favorite bad movie? What is your least favorite good movie?

Have you ever been arrested or been in any trouble with the law?

The specific part of China my dad grew up in is several hundred miles further away from the zip code I grew up in than both Rome's Fiumicino airport and the Huacachina oasis near Ica, Peru. Peru is the farthest place I've traveled to without any family members; I was in the Lima area for a weeklong voluntourism trip during one of my college winter breaks.

I'll need some time to think about your second question and what should be considered a "good" or "bad" movie. But I will give a more comprehensive answer to that some point this year. At any rate, I'm really glad Everything Everywhere All At Once is now available on Netflix. I didn't get around to watching it until after it stopped showing in theaters, so I'm glad I don't have to pay anything on top of my existing Netflix subscription to rewatch it.

TL;DR to your third question- never been arrested but I have more than one traffic citation under my belt.

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

TL;DR to your third question- never been arrested but I have more than one traffic citation under my belt.

Follow-up: How does it make you feel that I've been arrested more times than you have?

[pikachu]

1. Rank the metro areas from favorite to least favorite: Seattle, Portland, SF Bay Area, LA

2. Favorite pieces of Asian American pop culture?

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

What are your thoughts on Asian American Literature ?