ApplesauceIrishCream
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User ID: 882
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
What's going on between Democrats and Saudi Arabia?
Middle East foreign policy is one of the many topics where Republicans and Democrats favor different strategies. One of the central differences for the past several years has been the US approach to Iran--Republicans are opposed to the current Iranian regime, and want to contain it/promote a counterbalancing partnership of sorts (Abraham Accords--Trump), while Democrats would prefer to normalize relations with Iran (Iranian Nuclear deals--Obama and Biden).
Saudi Arabia fears the potential of Iranian aggression, as Iraq is no longer a meaningful buffer, so there is a certain tension between the agendas of the Saudis and the Democrats.
Are the Dems trying to warm relations with Iran?
Yes.
Where does that leave Israel?
Very much opposed to the Middle Eastern foreign policy of the Biden Administration, willing to make deals with any Arab state that will take their calls, and inclined to solve their own problems with Iran in the absence of US support.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1mo ago
Also in the theme of keeping games-related comments together, some good news!
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is now on Steam!
It's old and the UI is a bit clunky (though fan patches can help), but it's a beloved classic for a reason. Prokhor Zakharov is my guy all the way for gameplay reasons--probably a popular choice in these parts--but there's something to love in each character. For a (very) deep dive into the interplay of game mechanics, storytelling, and philosophy of SMAC, I also recommend the classic blog series Paean to SMAC: Meditations on Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
ApplesauceIrishCream
4mo ago
Assuming every Senate seat is filled, present, and voting, conviction and expulsion requires 67 votes, not 60. I don't think either party can get to 67 without either a reasonable fraction of bipartisan support or a truly enormous political upheaval (60 is difficult, but possible). In Biden's case specifically, the only way he gets expelled is if a big chunk of Democratic leadership decides to remove him; even in that case, I strongly believe they would engineer his resignation instead.
ApplesauceIrishCream
11mo ago
Fun framing story. I'll take a stab at explicitly stating the point of the narrative so that people can correct me if I missed something, or as a starting point for those who found the intent here to be a bit opaque.
Is there ethical consumption under capitalism? In each case, the narrator/purchaser is collecting Funko Pops solely to fill out his collection--I'd say this is pretty morally neutral as motives go--but the consequence of each purchase will be different, based on how the seller intends to spend the money received. The ultimate question raised is whether the narrator/purchaser is morally responsible for any of the known ends that his money will help finance, and whether there are intuitive break points where an observer should say, "By making this purchase in this context, you have done something morally wrong."
In the first case, we've got animal rights/animal cruelty/meat consumption, where the purchaser is a vegetarian/vegan. The second exchange concerns two oppositely-coded political figures, both of whom are known for a long history of good deeds, and a much more recent highly-controversial action, where the purchase/ownership of the figures will stoke up the culture war. The third instance depicts a controversial single figure (J.K. Rowling is the obvious example), where the seller is not a supporter of the figure, and proceeds from the sale will not in any way return to her. The fourth deal is another controversial figure, where some of the funds will go to the political support of his views. And finally, we've got literally Hitler, fundraising for his local death squad.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I've been trying to get myself to do a writeup of Walter Russell Mead's four traditions of American foreign policy, because he was confronting exactly this question in the late 1990s--the various conflicts involving the breakup of Yugoslavia produced an anti-intervention movement on the Republican side of the Senate, which lost to the pro-intervention faction led by President Clinton. This also seemed, on first blush, to be a reversal of the left-coded anti-war movements in earlier decades.
In short, Mead proposes a two-axis framework, where each quadrant contains the interplay of the axes and also an intellectual pedigree particular to the US. One axis is the usual hawk/dove; the other is nationalist/internationalist. (Here, "internationalists" favor more widespread and ongoing engagement with other nations, while "nationalists" prefer to interact with other nations only when necessary, and reserve most of their attention to domestic affairs.)
Hamiltonians are the dovish internationalists, who have a particular interest in expansive trade and the promotion of American business interests abroad. They don't have strong opinions about how other countries run their own affairs, so long as Americans have robust access to foreign markets.
Jeffersonians are the dovish nationalists, whose central ideal is perfecting democracy at home and avoiding foreign entanglements that might distract or corrupt American national purpose. These are your classic anti-war isolationists.
Jacksonians are the hawkish nationalists, who mostly don't care to have extensive involvement with other nations, but react with vigorous force to assaults on American interests and especially American honor. Unlike the other traditions, Jacksonianism is predominantly a grassroots/populist tradition, not elite.
Finally, the Wilsonians are the hawkish internationalists, who want to promote democracy, human rights, and other American ideals abroad whenever possible. The neoconservatives of the late 70s are a central example, but so are President Clinton's interventions in the former Yugoslavia in the 90s.
At different points in history, these traditions have individually been more or less popular, and have allied with each other in varying combinations. I think the overall framework makes a fair amount of sense descriptively, and a few thoughts towards refinement/critique.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I wouldn't be shocked if he aced his SAT math, given MIT Physics major/Math minor, but neither would I be impressed.
Assuming that he was a decent student, but not outstanding in context, and that he organized his classes with at least a half-assed gesture towards efficiency, something like the following describes his math education:
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5 on the AP Calc AB exam to test out of single variable Calculus general requirement (18.01).
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Multivariable Calculus (18.02, general req) and maybe Differential Equations (18.03, Physics major req) his freshman year.
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Physics Flexible track with Math as his focus area--three more math classes after DiffEqs. Let's say Linear Algebra (18.06), Combinatorial Analysis (18.211), and Introduction to Numerical Analysis (18.330).
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Two more math classes to finish off his math minor. Possibly Probability and Statistics (18.05) and Principles of Discrete Applied Mathematics (18.200).
(Also, the rest of his Physics major.)
130 IQ isn't unreasonable. Very smart; not exceptional. The above courses are roughly the minimum you'd need for his major/minor combo, and nothing I've seen indicates a student that was punching above his weight through grit, determination, and excellent organizational skills.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I'm more inclined to think that subversion can be done well or poorly, like much else. Parody and pastiche seem like natural subcategories of subversion, and those require considerable creativity to execute well. I find less value in the more purely iconoclastic approaches to subversion, though.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I think the "grimdark" label is often misapplied; remember, the setting that gave the trope its name is Warhammer 40K. It's not just a general "do bad things happen onscreen" measure; it's an evaluation of specific story elements.
"Grim" is a measure of the characters, in terms of moral motivations. The protagonist is an anti-hero, and the conflicts are gray vs. grey or gray vs. black. There are no classic altruistic heroes here; a grim story is cynical about people and how they work.
"Dark" is a measure of the moral center of the setting itself. No good deed goes unpunished; virtue is for fools. If there's a higher power, he's at best completely disinterested in justice, but he might just be Tzeentch straight up. Dark stories are cynical about ultimate justice and whether good deeds have meaning.
Sanderson is a good example of an author who is not grimdark, and he explicitly rejects the concept. Yes, the Elantris and Mistborn settings are deeply broken, but the protagonists are trying to fix things, and their efforts are rewarded. The brokenness of the settings isn't a grimdark immutable constant; it's the result of previous bad choices and calamities that can be addressed.
I don't believe you understood the critique being made. Those protesters were not merely making the claim "oh no, RvW will be overturned." They were claiming that the removal of RvW would lead to something in the vague ballpark of a Handmaid's Tale dystopia. This is, at a bare minimum, a much stronger claim.
On the Republican side, a sentiment like "republican judges are cucks, they'd never go through with it" was not insincerity, it was fatalism, based on the long history of Republican-nominated Justices who refused to overturn RvW. This was a plank in the Republican platform, a campaign promise made at every opportunity, the basis of an endless number of fundraising pleas, and for nothing until Dobbs.
Edit to add: I'm not a fan of McCarthy's style there either. But I'll give him half a point for stating straight up that he wanted Barrett to be the vote necessary, but just didn't think she would.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
When you try to discuss a serious economic initiative and get met with mostly value based responses, or have people literally calling you a vampire (and getting 15+ upvotes), it's hard to feel like folks are willing to discuss Georgism rationally.
It sounds like you believe that discussing a proposal rationally must involve decoupling values from policy?
As I understand it, Georgism is a particular type of tax policy. As such, it is trying to achieve a particular end (funding government) via a particular method (land value taxation). There are many possible approaches to evaluating policy; because of the particular field, I'll start with what a professor of mine called "tax logic." It states that the overarching goal of a scheme of taxation is to maximize revenue while minimizing nth-order disruptive effects. (This is why you get so-called "tax loopholes;" it's an attempt to achieve a better fit between revenue-extraction and tolerance for revenue-extraction.)
However, the "nth-order disruptive effects" that we're trying to minimize covers a ridiculously broad field of types--we're looking at everything related to tax-tolerance, from the direct and mechanically obvious (taxing everyone at 100% of wealth crashes the system pretty immediately) to the squishy, intuitive, values-laden metrics of "taxing [activity A] at triple the rate of [activity B] seems unfair; double the rate might be justifiable, but triple is excessive." The whole point of measuring against tolerance is the insight that tax systems operate most efficiently with a high rate of buy-in; unless a high percentage of people find the overall system generally acceptable (with low-level grumbling), you're going to lose more from enforcement costs than you gain via enforced compliance.
Values-based evaluations of tax policy are essential, because if a policy does not adequately map to the values of those taxed, you don't get that buy-in, enforcement costs skyrocket for less and less return, and your shiny theoretically-perfect tax policy collapses in ruin. Tax logic is exceedingly pragmatic, and one of its cornerstones is recognizing that optimized tax policy evaluates for the society you have, not the one you want.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Yes, I'm familiar with the "set rules, draw by algorithm" method. (And there are rules that people find generally agreeable for this process; compactness and existing political/geological boundaries are good examples.) One issue is that when you make a list of popular and well-justified rules, it becomes hard to simultaneously satisfy them. The bigger deal is that someone has to code the setup, and someone has to approve the result, and these are capturable positions. Unfortunately, it is very very hard to make a job "apolitical" and also retain accountability in cases where a partisan sneaks in--Madison et al. tried their best at this exact problem with judges, and various controversies with the judiciary only emphasize the limited success you can have.
...There's another, and much bigger problem, though. If you district by naive algorithm like this, Republicans win the districting process an overwhelming majority of the time. The reason is the actual, on-the-ground political map--Democrats tend to cluster in cities, Republicans dominate the towns and rural areas. The goals with political gerrymandering are sometimes known as "packing and cracking"--pack one district with all the opponent voters you can stuff in, 90%+ if you can get it, and crack other concentrations between districts, with no more than 40-45% opposition. If your opposition is already clustered, packing and cracking are much easier to accomplish using inoffensively shaped districts.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Chait's argument holds just as well for Chait, who makes no effort whatsoever at concealing his overwhelming bias. The people at the conference are The Enemy, and they must be Stopped At All Costs. He's nothing more than a Democrat operative with a byline, as they say.
The reason this is relevant is that every take he has is pre-loaded with hostile assumptions--the very opposite of charity--and it takes Kremlinology skills to dig through the bias to come up with any type of neutral reading of what was said. Only at that point can you evaluate whether anyone said anything useful.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I'll give it a shot at the mistake-theory explanation, and it's pretty simple: it is a combination of virtue-signaling and innumeracy.
Conflict explanation--it's malice for the outgroup. Mistake explanation--it's at best thoughtlessness; "a combination of virtue-signaling and innumeracy" isn't a position that I'd describe as...intellectually respectable?
This is where I'm confused--I thought that Scott's advocacy for viewing disagreements as mistakes was at least partially rooted in charity: let's assume the best of those we disagree with. But in this case, it sounds like the mistake version rounds to some version of "just dumb," and it's not obvious to me that this is a more charitable explanation than malice. Both are bad; is anti-intellectual thoughtlessness clearly better than hatred?
Does a steelman exist? Is there an answer that would reflect well on progressives? If yes, what is it? If no, what's the point in picking dumb vs. evil?
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I view them as not noticeably different from neo-Nazis. Both are inclined to romanticize the worst ideological failures of the twentieth century, and while both can find grains of value and/or justification here and there, the Everests of skulls suggest to those wiser folk that the search for meaning will be more fruitful elsewhere.
(Also, both groups have their LARPing edgelords and their true believers. The mix is likely similar.)
ApplesauceIrishCream
6mo ago
I find it ironic that as recently as 2005, the most culturally-prominent example of the Confederate battle flag was widely recognized as a pure expression of regional pride, and not at all a racist symbol. As it happens, that example isn't as much of a tangent as you'd think.
It's important to realize just how $Current_Year this iconoclastic movement is.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
No, it does not matter if they are intended as jokes or not, it still builds the same meme. Especially when the schools are also rife with sincere and unironic efforts to undermine parental authority, the "joke" actually plays out as "haha, only serious."
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
That's not really the full picture, from the American pro-life perspective. As a grassroots movement, it was very far from fringe: solid majority position in the Republican party, and a minority position among Democrats--until the fallout from Obamacare hit, there was a small caucus of pro-life House Democrats, though it's gone now. Prior to Dobbs, the controlling precedent was Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, which functionally replaced RvW--of note, the "Casey" that PP was suing was the pro-life Democrat Governor of Pennsylvania.
When you're talking about the Supreme Court, it's got few enough members that you might as well refer to the individuals rather than aggregating trends. Roe/Casey would have been overturned decades ago, if not for a string of Republican appointees that refused to pull the trigger--Kennedy, O'Connor, Souter, and Roberts. At least publicly, their appointing presidents (Reagan, GHWB, GWB) made common cause with the pro-life movement, and promised to appoint originalist justices, except oops...oops...oops.... Even then, each of those presidents did appoint justices who either were part of the Dobbs majority, or would have been if they'd still been on the Court (Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, Alito). Trump was unusual in that all of his appointees joined Dobbs, instead of just half.
So, yes, Dobbs was a "big surprise to everyone," but only in the sense that the pro-life movement had decades of experience supporting candidates that ultimately betrayed them, and expecting Trump's vetting to succeed where Reagan's, GHWB's, and GWB's did not looked like starry-eyed optimism at best.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I would say that's evidence, yes, but far from the best evidence. It's easily dwarfed by the absolute mountain of evidence uncovered by Prof. Sander at UCLA that the UCs were comprehensively violating Prop 209 since shortly after it was passed, and that evidence was covered up by UC Admissions while the UC Administrations told massive straight-face lies for the next decade or two.
One of the methods was using multi-pass evaluation of admissions packets where the first pass sorted into "admit/marginal/no admit." For some odd reason, when the second pass went through the "marginal" category, 75%+ of black applicants got an admissions offer, and approximately 0% of white and Asian students were accepted.
I knew some black students in the UCs that went there well after Prop 209, but before Prof. Sander's discoveries. They expressed bitterness that they were seen as affirmative-action students, despite Prop 209 clearly making racial preferences illegal. "Unjustified racism," they called it. And yet they'd been betrayed, and the suspicions of the "racists" were actually correct. They did get in under lower admission standards.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
The simplest and most accurate explanation is that "many of Trumps young online supporters and the alt-right in 2016-2018" weren't conservatives. Trump is first and foremost a populist who found the biggest issue that was unrepresented by the elites--systemic non-enforcement of immigration laws--and then broadened his base of support by promising to faithfully represent the interests of traditional conservatives as well (who also had reasons to dislike and distrust the R establishment).
In very general terms, most traditional conservatives are Republicans. The fit is far from perfect, and you can find exceptions near every boundary, but the overlap is substantial and central. You also have the loose group of "Republican-leaning independents" who 1) aren't Republicans, but 2) prefer Republicans to Democrats. Bits of this loose group can be found among centrists, libertarians, far-right fringes, etc.
There were people in 2016 whose top two choices were Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, in either order. From a left vs. right perspective, this makes no sense, but from a populist vs. establishment perspective, it captures rather neatly a broad, eclectic, extremely diverse "group" that felt unrepresented by the elites of both parties, and wanted a disruptive outsider who would shake things up. The populist sentiment won resoundingly in the Republican party primary--the top establishment candidate came in third--and lost in the Democratic party primary.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
You can make a good case that a bit of further nuance is needed, but here's a different example: an amputation. Cutting off Joe's foot would be very violent in some contexts (assault/maiming), but not generally considered violent in others (surgical removal of a gangrenous foot).
In the case of surgery, you could view it as "intending to hurt Joe's foot" or "intending to help Joe." In the case of maiming, there is clearly an intent to hurt, regardless of whether you're looking at Joe or Joe's foot.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I guess I got lost in the wording, then. It was not obvious to me that naraburns was speaking about himself.
Even so, I also don't see how the idea that "Biden is not in control" particularly reflects on Joe Biden. Certainly I have a low opinion of the man from years back, but he's not morally responsible for things outside his control. On this specific topic, I am particularly irritated with Jill Biden. She's the one who married the guy, and I do not believe that this charade is in Joe's best interests. Elder abuse is an ugly thing, and that's what this looks like to me.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
It isn't clear to me that she had any sort of plan or agenda, she simply changed her mind when asked.
Yes, that was largely Meshkout's take as well. I believe it's a failure of theory of mind to chalk it up to randomness or whimsy, and it was obvious to me what her likely thinking entailed.
Meshkout's eleven words was an unusual request--as Dean says above, signaling through exceptional effort. The judge decided to take it seriously, as a test of Meshkout's credibility and judgment--that it wasn't a last-ditch effort at empty posturing on behalf of a client that didn't deserve it. The correct lesson to draw from the situation is to use that request--or similar--in cases where you are sincerely trying to prevent a miscarriage of justice and not use it in other cases. It's an opportunity to preserve the integrity of the signal.
In light of this, the essay's response of "it was so random, what can it mean" was intensely frustrating.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I would make a distinction between "fringe" and "extreme." "Fringe" would mean very unpopular; maybe 1% of the population believes [X], so it's a fringe belief. "Extreme" means far from the "average" view (for some calculation of average). So fringe ideas can show up wherever they like on any political spectrum, while extreme views can be much more popular, but not centrist.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
If you are "shocked/saddened" that someone might disagree with you, this community may not be for you.
Your post is a central example of attempting to build consensus and trying to enforce ideological conformity, which is against the rules.
Scott's opinions are not above criticism, but this forum is for discussion and debate, not emotionally-loaded attempts at shaming.
Source? This is internally inconsistent. Yes, CNN and WaPo settled--which means, they gave Nick some substantial amount of money, amount not publicly known. They would not have done so if his cases were dismissible.
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