This Ravelry thing

Ravelry has banned pro-Trump anything on the grounds that the Trump administration are white supremacists.  Various people are declaiming that this is an obvious failure of tolerance.

Just in case someone is suffering from a sincere confusion on this point; an expectation of tolerance on your part -- you expect to be tolerated -- required the exercise of tolerance on your part.  You have to extend to others the tolerance you expect to receive.

White supremacists definitionally don't do that.  As an ideology, it's about imposing a strict hierarchy, enforced with violence.  ("I might not murder you this time" is not tolerance.)

There's a much longer description about acting to constrain other's choices and how the material goal of justice is to expand the scope of just treatment to all people, but it really isn't necessary.  An expectation of tolerance is isomorphic to an agreement that you're not special.  Anything with "supremacist" in it fails that agreement.

Death cults, self-image, and goodness

https://twitter.com/KashannKilson/status/1141876248563474433

has in other places people making remarks to the effect of "the Right has become a death cult".

Of course the right has become a death cult.

It's the only way they can think of themselves as good people.

This is why you don't think of yourself as good.  This is why you try to avoid good and bad as labels; think about the material consequences directly, because good and bad elide all sorts of stuff into what you got taught before you were five.  In a stable benevolent period, that could perhaps be responsible, but in the times we live in, it's not responsible whatsoever.  Everything will change and there will be both great trouble and no status quo for centuries.

As far as the right is concerned, if they look at material consequences -- we're headed at something between the Eocene Thermal Maximum and the End Permian nine-tenths-of-all-life extinction -- they've been advancing unwise policies by not-especially-licit means for forty critical years, from 1980 to the present.  It turns out greed is still a sin, value cannot be measured with money, and that wealth is not virtue.  If those facts are accorded the status of facts -- things incontrovertibly of the material world, independent of belief or unbelief both together -- then it's impossible for the people whose policies created the disaster to be good.  (It calls into question the utility of any moral frame as a basis for decision.)

If they're not good, they get to have a severe existential crisis; it doesn't even need to be a religious existential crisis.

As it gets more and more difficult to keep from noticing that, nope, not good; it has to be from the viewpoint of hypothetical insect survivors in a million years to even suppose this could be good, the bad insecurity management -- which is always about trying to disdain facts in some way or another -- gets more and more violent because primates.  The larger the pile of skulls, the greater the vehemence and conviction.  Maybe they just have to bring about the End Times, there's a theology for that.

This can work on fellow primates; the wetware doesn't distinguish correctness and conviction. 

It doesn't work on the rain.

Uncertainty

People in general cannot stand an uncertain future.

If you have no power, you invent rituals and do what you can to create a belief that it will all work out somehow.

If you have power, you use that power to create the closest approximation of a certain future you can get.  This is where the organization of society around making wealth generationally persistent comes from; wealth is the tool to produce a status quo and through that status quo a predictable future.

Today, no certain future is possible.  We don't know what the climate is going to do; any honest person is going to tell you that it depends a lot on what we do for the next year, the next five years, the next ten, but also that we're in a future of large error bars somewhere between the Eocene Thermal Maximum and the End Permian.  (That's between "a third of ocean life" and "ninety-odd percent of ocean life" going extinct.)

This is intolerable; people deal with it generally by insisting it isn't happening.  But it obviously is happening, and the conflict between what is endurable and what is factual is destroying the mechanisms of government.

The fix is to create belief in a plausible reliable future.  There is a plausible reliable future, if we can manage to both remove the tiny number of extremely rich people blocking access to it in favour of the doomed status quo and to all work hard to enact it.

The first critical step is to require elected representatives to publicly agree that they will indeed destroy the status quo in favour of the reliable future.

Capitalism destroys value

I've said this before, but it's been awhile and @GreatDismal had a short thread reminding me of it.

Value is the ratio between benefit and cost.  It's contextual; five hundred dollar shoes that let you walk without pain (unlike all those other shoes) are great value.  Maybe not for someone else, but for you.

In general, if a business is trying to deliver value, they're competing to sell you something that gives you greater benefit per unit cost.  A value-delivering business needs to be making a profit -- they want to stay in business, and using profit as a measure of value-add if you're not making a profit there's no general agreement that you're adding value -- but must not be, cannot be, motivated by profit.

A profit-maximizing business -- the point is to make as much money as possible -- has to do at least one of reduce the benefit or increase the cost.  That is, they deliver less at a particular price (increasing their profit margin) or charge more for the same delivery (increasing their profit margin). 

Once you accept profit maximization as a legitimate objective, this is systemic; intent doesn't much enter into it.  As a result, you get people lamenting that it's no longer possible to buy a new-made pair of pants of the quality that was generally available in 1980.  The drive for maximized profit -- capitalism -- has destroyed the ability within human civilization.  (This is far from the only example!)

Think of profit-maximization as a virtue is analogous to a fungal parasite, slowly pulling all the nutrients out of its living host organism.   It's not markets, it's not exchange; it's about the destruction of value to capture a greater share of the money.  (Money which is useless after the inevitable collapse.)

Greed remains a sin.