Elections in various countries

[Ares Land]

Of course.

I'm not even sure it is a trick.
I mean the sort of system I described above can perfectly establish and perpetuate itself with everyone involved genuinely believing immigration is the #1 most important issue.


(But I don't think it's perfectly innocent either. I don't believe for a second that our politicians have failed to notice how the RN is politically convenient.)

[Moose-tache]

I find it hilarious that many countries in Europe that were 90% White for most of their modern history (in the metropole, anyway) managed to build progressive economies with strong class solidarity, sipping fancy healthcare from crystal goblets, tut-tutting from the balconies of their opulent public housing at the silly Americans dutifully doing race wars to each other at the decree of their Capitalist overlords. And then four or five medium-brown people show up in a boat and everyone loses their fucking minds.

[Ares Land]

That's a specifically French attitude, I'm afraid.

As everyone here well knows, there is no racism in France; the only problem is that Blacks and Arabs are all criminals.

[Travis B.]

Poles are seen as simply one of the groups which came over to America and of which those who have been here for any period of time have largely assimilated into White America (even though there are places in the US with clearly unassimilated Poles such as Chicago), while "the Russians", as I mention below, are seen as traditional adversaries of the US, and Russia has been seen as not really joined the West after the fall of the Soviet Union but as remaining rather foreign to this day.

This varies deeply by region and time. In the first half of the 20th century what are now meaningless ethnic distinctions were highly noticeable, and people did have serious prejudices against Poles, against Italians, etc. When I was a kid, in the 1960s, people still told jokes about Poles. And when my dad was a kid, Polish was one of the languages taught in high school.

There's not much feeling about Russians here (Illinois) because there's not many Russians. The Poles came to Illinois (and Wisconsin) while the Russians went to New York and New Jersey. And North Dakota for some reason.

My maternal grandmother grew up in Chicago (she was born to first-generation Polish immigrants) and not only natively spoke Polish, but also went to school solely in Polish. Sadly, she forgot all her Polish as she got older, such that she could not read letters from relatives in Poland.

all Hispanics/Latinos are seen as Hispanics/Latinos regardless of race

Whoo boy, that's a can of worms. Even White Americans wouldn't react the same way to, say, Ted Cruz and Celia Cruz.

I should have qualified my statement with that Hispanics/Latinos that "look Black" are likely to be seen as Black rather than as Hispanic/Latino.

[Moose-tache]

That's a specifically French attitude, I'm afraid.

As everyone here well knows, there is no racism in France; the only problem is that Blacks and Arabs are all criminals.

Give yourself more credit; it's definitely not exclusive to France. It's blatantly obvious by this point that the strong labor organization and radicalism of northern England would not have happened if the "Asians" had shown up just a couple of generations sooner. We'd have Sylvia Pankhurst tweeting "Thank God my glorious manorial overlords let me have two bathroom breaks this week. That's one more than the [slur redacted]s! Long live Capitalism!" It's probably the same in Milan, Hamburg, and anywhere else a bunch of working class White Europeans couldn't be divided by race during the critical period of 1850 to 1950.

[rotting bones]

Disclaimer: My pre-breakfast rants don't always make sense.

Unrelatedly, anyone who's not black is "white", whatever that means.

Nah, there's a lot of racism against Latin Americans, Asians, and indigenous Americans, too.

I've been told that in the context of racism, anyone who's not white is black, and the only historically consistent definition of white is "someone who isn't black". It's almost like we're dealing with Yin and Yang, not real people.

I find it hilarious that many countries in Europe that were 90% White for most of their modern history (in the metropole, anyway) managed to build progressive economies with strong class solidarity, sipping fancy healthcare from crystal goblets, tut-tutting from the balconies of their opulent public housing at the silly Americans dutifully doing race wars to each other at the decree of their Capitalist overlords. And then four or five medium-brown people show up in a boat and everyone loses their fucking minds.

Eh, I don't really see cultures as politically consistent entities. IIRC Nazism originated in the writings of a French intellectual. On the other hand, America has been exporting its well-funded right-wing propaganda machine all over the world recently.

There are all kinds of people everywhere. It's all about who is able to seize power at what points in history.

Of course.

I'm not even sure it is a trick.
I mean the sort of system I described above can perfectly establish and perpetuate itself with everyone involved genuinely believing immigration is the #1 most important issue.


(But I don't think it's perfectly innocent either. I don't believe for a second that our politicians have failed to notice how the RN is politically convenient.)

I don't think so. Poor people continue to have their own class interests despite what propaganda they have fallen for. The left just happens to be in disarray at the moment owing to a multitude of factors. In the past, there have been periods where the left was so strong, it was able to carry out great injustices of its own.

If it turned out that right-wing wing propaganda is a natural fit for a majority of this species, then I would lose interest real world politics and support leftist communes. What's the point of promoting a solution that people won't accept?

I'd still say that the trick of making poor people hate poor people from other cultural groups more than they hate rich people, transparent as it may be, simply wouldn't work if it wouldn't appeal to something deeply ingrained in the human psyche.

I'll simply repost something I already posted in this thread:

https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=573

And, the theory that religions - and, for that matter, various forms of bigotry - are simply tricks by the powerful to get the powerless to accept power structures, even if it's true, doesn't really explain why the trick works. Why is there something in the minds of many humans that, when they're fed religious ideas, causes them to care more about these religious ideas than about questioning the power structures they live under? Why is there something in the minds of many humans that, when they're told to hate the one or other group of outsiders, causes them to care more about hating these outsiders than about questioning the power structures they live under? What are these mental features, how do they work, and how did they get there?

It's a bit like when someone is telling the story of someone hacking into a computer system: it's one thing to explain the hackers' motivations, or to explain how the end results of the hack benefited the hackers or the people who hired the hackers, but that doesn't necessarily tell you much about how and why the hack itself worked.

It works because humans feel special when fighting against ancient evils: https://youtu.be/8U7GKdbiA2c Even seeing or reading about other people doing it feels good because it's an evolutionary superstimulus. In real life, things are rarely black and white. If things were black and white, we wouldn't have to effectively solve boring crossword puzzles to decide where to expend effort. Being told that banning easily identifiable tribes will solve all your problems can be as addictive as the taste of a fatty cheeseburger. I think debunkings of obviously incorrect beliefs are popular for the same reason as fighting ancient evils, and debunkings are not as harmful.

This is hardly the only scam that humans routinely fall for. Right-wing propaganda proper is relatively unpopular compared to some of these: https://youtube.com/c/Coffeezilla Many MLM vendors have been the smartest people I knew at the time. Does that mean it's our duty to sell MLMs? Of course not. Those vendors remain humans worthy of being saved despite having made bad investments.

Scams are very common in today's world. I used to get a scam call (usually automated messages about car insurance) every half an hour, and sometimes in the middle of the night, after I came to this country right up until I blocked the dozens of phone numbers they came from. You can't walk in NYC without scammers trying to hand out CDs. However, it makes no sense to infer that humans are essentially "a scam-loving animal". If you try hard enough, you'll eventually find a mark.

[Travis B.]

Scams are very common in today's world. I used to get a scam call (usually automated messages about car insurance) every half an hour, and sometimes in the middle of the night, after I came to this country right up until I blocked the dozens of phone numbers they came from. You can't walk in NYC without scammers trying to hand out CDs. However, it makes no sense to infer that humans are essentially "a scam-loving animal". If you try hard enough, you'll eventually find a mark.

Apparently, many scams are intentionally obvious, to weed out the people who would catch on that something was a scam ahead of time who would be a waste of the scammers' time. For instance, those "Nigerian" scams very often came from places completely different from Nigeria, such as here in the US, but played on the trope of the "Nigerian" scam to eliminate all but the most credulous people.

[alynnidalar]

Unrelatedly, anyone who's not black is "white", whatever that means.

Nah, there's a lot of racism against Latin Americans, Asians, and indigenous Americans, too.

I've been told that in the context of racism, anyone who's not white is black, and the only historically consistent definition of white is "someone who isn't black". It's almost like we're dealing with Yin and Yang, not real people.

You can now also say that you've been told this isn't true, and... doesn't make a ton of sense? Racism against e.g. East Asian people in the US takes very different forms than racism against black people, which takes very different forms than racism against Native Americans. Certainly there's similarities, but like, there's similarities to be drawn between any kind of prejudice in any place. For one simple example, you never would hear black Americans told to "go back home", but such things are absolutely said to Hispanic and Asian people.

(If for some reason you are bound and determined to lump American racism into a small number of categories, I would say more pertinent categories are "white", "black", and "immigrants", with the final category including Hispanic people whose families have lived in a particular place since before it was even part of the US and probably Native Americans, racists not being known for common sense.)

[Raphael]

Racism against e.g. East Asian people in the US takes very different forms than racism against black people, which takes very different forms than racism against Native Americans.

For instance, while white racists - not only in the USA - pretty much universally see themselves as superior to black people, their attitude towards East Asians is sometimes a bit more ambivalent: sometimes, racism against East Asians almost seems to take the form of believing that East Asians are superior to white people, and that this might mean trouble for white people in the long term. Back during the heyday of European colonialism, that attitude apparently formed the base of the

More: show

"Yellow Peril"

form of racism.

[rotting bones]

Apparently, many scams are intentionally obvious, to weed out the people who would catch on that something was a scam ahead of time who would be a waste of the scammers' time. For instance, those "Nigerian" scams very often came from places completely different from Nigeria, such as here in the US, but played on the trope of the "Nigerian" scam to eliminate all but the most credulous people.

That part of the analogy partly carries through. Just because you hear right-wing propaganda from a lot of quarters, it doesn't necessarily follow that a lot of people believe it. Those people are scammers whose job is to be heard and appear legitimate. Even when people vote for their candidates, the voters are sometimes punishing the alternatives. You could argue that in France, a lot of people don't trust the left-wing and centrist parties because of their recent track record.

You can now also say that you've been told this isn't true, and... doesn't make a ton of sense? Racism against e.g. East Asian people in the US takes very different forms than racism against black people, which takes very different forms than racism against Native Americans. Certainly there's similarities, but like, there's similarities to be drawn between any kind of prejudice in any place. For one simple example, you never would hear black Americans told to "go back home", but such things are absolutely said to Hispanic and Asian people.

(If for some reason you are bound and determined to lump American racism into a small number of categories, I would say more pertinent categories are "white", "black", and "immigrants", with the final category including Hispanic people whose families have lived in a particular place since before it was even part of the US and probably Native Americans, racists not being known for common sense.)

I really don't know anything about these subjects, and nothing about prejudice makes any sense. I have never hung out with open racists. Being around them will probably give me a heart attack. I'm just repeating things I've been told. For example, before East Asians became "Asians", they were called "Orientals". If you look at older media, "Orientals" were consistently depicted with darker skin than "Asians" are.

Racists move "swarthiness" around as they gain or lose respect for their imaginary "races". When America was founded, Germans were regarded as "swarthy". Now Germans have become superwhite, and Arabs are "swarthy". In the past, Jews were not regarded as white. Russians weren't white until they built the Soviet Union and competed with the US. Even Swedes weren't white at first. Anyone who makes racists fear for the future of America by displaying native technical skill loses swarthiness. Currently, Iranians are in the ambiguous process of turning white.

[Ares Land]

This is hardly the only scam that humans routinely fall for.

That's a very, very apt analogy. Seeing the far-right as essentially a large scale scam makes a lot of sense.

Apparently, many scams are intentionally obvious, to weed out the people who would catch on that something was a scam ahead of time who would be a waste of the scammers' time. For instance, those "Nigerian" scams very often came from places completely different from Nigeria, such as here in the US, but played on the trope of the "Nigerian" scam to eliminate all but the most credulous people.

I didn't know that but it makes a lot of sense.

[Raphael]

That's a very, very apt analogy. Seeing the far-right as essentially a large scale scam makes a lot of sense.

I think Rick Perlstein has written some articles about how parts of the modern Conservative movement in the USA have been inextricably intertwined with "ordinary" scams for generations.

[Ares Land]

That's a very, very apt analogy. Seeing the far-right as essentially a large scale scam makes a lot of sense.

I think Rick Perlstein has written some articles about how parts of the modern Conservative movement in the USA have been inextricably intertwined with "ordinary" scams for generations.

I'm pretty sure I read one of these. (Something about a mail-order financial scam in the late 90s that proved intertwined with the later rise of the Tea Party and the eventual rise of the alt right... if that rings any bells.)

[Raphael]

Yup.

[alynnidalar]

I'm just repeating things I've been told.

Okay, cool. Now you can repeat what I've told you as well.

[MacAnDàil]

Rich people have different incentives. They are not worried about losing their jobs. They are worried about losing their heads if too many poor workers lose their jobs. The solution to this dilemma is to become an epic fantasy writer, and get the poor to see other poor people as the orcs.

Again, this is not all rich people, obviously.

Here's what happens here, essentially. Racism seems pretty pervasive among all social classes. The lower your income, though, the more likely you are to vote for the RN. That being said, the most important correlation is that the lower your income, the less likely you are to vote at all.
Essentially, if you're poor, there's really nothing on offer for you. The RN was kinda smarter: its platform offers a little something for everyone, besides the racism. (Plus it has been made abundantly clear that all the parties that have been in power really have nothing to offer. The RN is probably worse, then again it's never been in power, so they get an advantage there.)

The RN doesn't rely entirely on the poor either. (I think their safest constituency is the rural middle class.)

The end result is that of course a lot of the public debate is devoted to How Foreigners Sap Your Precious Bodily Fluids. Which means talking about anything else is difficult.

This is entirely to the advantage of the 1% of course so the end result is pretty much what you describe.

I think that the extreme-rightification is the cause, not the consequence of people *thinking* that only the RN has something to offer. Clearly if you are poor and want to vote for someone who would improve the lot of the poor, there are plenty of parties who would do that, none of whom have already had a president: LFI, NPA, LO etc. But none of those have billionaire media empires like Bolloré's hold on Canal+.

[MacAnDàil]

Eh, I don't really see cultures as politically consistent entities. IIRC Nazism originated in the writings of a French intellectual. On the other hand, America has been exporting its well-funded right-wing propaganda machine all over the world recently.

You're maybe thinking of de Gobineau, the French aristocrat that invented the idea of a superior race.

[Raphael]

I think that the extreme-rightification is the cause, not the consequence of people *thinking* that only the RN has something to offer.

It might depend on what you mean by "offer". Most people seem to see only politicians who promise to make things better have anything to offer to them. But I think that things can almost always get worse. For instance, I'm a big supporter of the welfare state. So in an age in which the world is full of right-wingers who would love to destroy what's left of the welfare state, even a politician who only promises to maintain the status quo on that issue counts as "having something to offer" by my standards.

[Ares Land]

I think that the extreme-rightification is the cause, not the consequence of people *thinking* that only the RN has something to offer. Clearly if you are poor and want to vote for someone who would improve the lot of the poor, there are plenty of parties who would do that, none of whom have already had a president: LFI, NPA, LO etc. But none of those have billionaire media empires like Bolloré's hold on Canal+.

The media play a crucial part in there of course!

As for other parties... It takes time for a party to build a voter base and the necessary infrastructure, so to speak. Neither LO nor NPA have had any success in this.
LFI has about what it takes. (And indeed it works quite well in the lower income brackets), but it took fourteen years to get there.

It might depend on what you mean by "offer". Most people seem to see only politicians who promise to make things better have anything to offer to them. But I think that things can almost always get worse. For instance, I'm a big supporter of the welfare state. So in an age in which the world is full of right-wingers who would love to destroy what's left of the welfare state, even a politician who only promises to maintain the status quo on that issue counts as "having something to offer" by my standards.

It's even worse than that, I think. Nobody is going to come out and say they'll destroy the welfare state. Instead they'll promise to maintain it.
So you have to vote for a party to promises to expand it, in the hope that they'll succeed in maintaining it!

[Ares Land]

It looks like the French took the slogan 'become ungovernable' a little too seriously. Here's what we got:

Ensemble (Macron's electoral alliance): 246 seats
NUPES (left wing electoral alliance): 142 seats
RN (far right): 89 seats
LR (traditional right): 64 seats.

Plus change, for a total of 577 seats. Nobody's got an absolute majority.
What's going to happen now? It's going to be a mess. Getting that kind of results under the 5th republic is unprecedented.
Ensemble should seek a government coalition... except there's really only one candidate (LR) and they don't look very interested in getting aboard a sinking ship.
A possibility is that Macron will make do for a year and then call for new elections.

Personally, I think it's a terrible situation. First off, the left did well, but still lost. Second, RN got 89 seats (again, entirely unprecedented) and that kind of electoral success for the far-right is, um, ominous. Plus, they get to repay their Russian laws with public funding. Urgh. Third, it seems likely that some kind of arrangement will be found between Ensemble and LR; which means essentially that only hard-right legislation has a chance of passing.
So, yeah, that sucks.

There's a silver lining to all this, still.
The left did a lot better than I'd have expected a year ago, so there's that.
Macron fucked around with democracy and got a well-deserved comeuppance.
We got a parliament that's actually pretty representative. If that means a bunch of far-right representatives, eh, that's life. (Plus the RN members won't even show up anyway, and when they do they'll do their best to look like idiots.)