Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being an insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Several of the effort-posts I don't have time to write any more are simple surveys of old discussions with links to the evidence answering the questions since. I have a pretty strong impression of how this has gone on balance, but it'd be better to have hard data to make the case.
A 'revisiting old questions' series would be an interesting contribution to the Motte, as long as it was done with an eye to parts of previous arguments that were wrong as well as right. It is often worthwhile to re-test old arguments, and if it can't be done without denials or dismissals that too is worth drawing attention to.
Trump has, on numerous occasions, refused to spend money appropriated by Congress. Congressional Republicans have not complained.
In other words, the majority of Congress has sided with the President against a minority of Congress in a common dispute between the Executive and Legislative branches that depends on the Legislative branch to enforce its preferences.
As well as using his partisan majorities in both houses of Congress to pass recissions under the Impoundment Control Act (which can't be filibustered), Trump has used a dubiously-legal pocket recission to cut spending without a Congressional vote.
In other words, the President has lawfully acted with the ascent of Congress via an act of Congress wherein Congress gave the President pre-emptive permission to do so.
SCOTUS has helped this along by setting up procedural barriers to anyone suing over this.
In other words, the Supreme Court of the United States has maintained pre-existing procedural barriers to attempts to stop lawful acts of a President complying with Congressional law.
Despite the Republican trifecta, Congress did not pass a budget in FY 2025, and does not appear to be trying to pass a budget in FY 2026.
In other words, the Biden administration did not pass the FY 2025 budget during a non-trifecta, the Democrats did and are exercising their Senate filibuster rights to block a budget that would easily pass absent their filibuster, and Trump and the Republicans are choosing to respect the budget filibuster rather than dismantle it as Democrats previously did the judicial filibuster during one of their trifectas.
Rather than moving a mini-CR to pay the troops (Enough Democrats have said they support this that it would pass both houses of Congress), Trump has paid the troops with a combination of private donations and funds illegally transferred from the military R&D budget.
In other words, the Democrats have declined to pay the troops via a number of what would be mutually acceptable ways, such as the sort of clean continuing resolution they have previously and repeatedly insisted on when denouncing the very sort of government shutdown they are pursuing, but have also declined to actually try and stop the R&D transfer or private donations to troops they refuse to allow to be paid by current majorities in Congress.
The White House ballroom is another example of using private donations to pay for what should be Congressionally-approved government spending.
In other words, the Executive is following the law in not spending funds not approved by Congress, by using funds not forbidden by Congress.
On the revenue side, Trump has raised a helluvalot of revenue with dubiously-legal tariffs. He also did a deal with Nvidia and AMD where they pay what is in effect a 15% export tax in exchange for Trump waiving controls on advanced chip exports to China. Export taxes are unconstitutional. There has been no attempt to incorporate any of this revenue into a budget passed by Congress.
In other words, the President applied a legal tariff, did not do an export tax, using trade authorities granted by Congress. Congress, in turn, has not passed a budget to incorporate this revenue, in part due to the President's party respecting the blocking action of the minority party who refuses to permit a budget to pass.
An obvious combination of this type of "deal" and funding specific programs with private donations is to set up a parallel budget where money is raised and spent outside the official Congressional budget process, all backed by more or less soft threats of government coercion. Trump hasn't done this yet, but it is a logical continuation of things he has done.
In other words, Congress established processes outside of its discretionary budget cycle to raise and spend money, which falls into its purview of power of the purse to permit discretionary actions within Congressionally-approved scopes, or even non-discretionary expenditures (such as entitlement spending).
Trump has also claimed in social media posts that he can spend the tariff revenue without Congressional approval.
In other words, even you are not claiming Trump is wrong on this, or attempting to point towards a law of Congress that specifies how tariff revenues are to be spent.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Indeed. Inflation is the final tax for all variations of modern monetary theory.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Not just hours of work, but the intensity of work and the conditions of the work during the hours that are worked. Modern blue collar is still a lot sweatier than white collar, but a modern furnace worker is still working a lot more comfortably than a furnace worker a century ago, let alone a millennia.
Dean
Flairless
5d ago
Ah, but is Ibram X Kendi also a tsundere like Hanania-chan?
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
American hyperagentism, applied domestically.
Only the American state / executive has agency. Everyone else either merely responds, or is forced to take action.
The counterpoint to the crediting of the Pale King with sapience is that we knew even in Hollow Knight 1, but more so in Silksong, that the bug sapience not only exists outside the Pale King's influence, but predated it as well. Whatever effect he did have, there was also a fair bit of lying / exaggeration to self-legitimize and aggrandize himself.
We know bugs after the Pale King maintain sentience without the active presence of a King who no longer is, even though a claim of the era was that those bugs who the Pale King uplifted would devolve if they left Hallownest and the King's grace. Current Hallownest is such a distance from the King, who is long gone and who multiple sources like the Godseeker senses no lingering presence.
We know bugs from outside of Hallownest were capable of sapience in their own right, from the Grimm Troup to the Godseekers who traveled from far outside Hallownest. They alluded to- and Silksong's Pharloom proved- sapient bug civilizations predating and existinng in parallel to the Pale King even as his propaganda claimed Hallownest as the only civilization. Hallownest would have to be some kind of exception in the sense of 'there is no sapience here', rather than the self-sought distinction of 'the Pale King's is the last and only civilization.'
We also know that sapient bugs predated the Pale King in Hallownest itself. We know from the lore tablet in the fungal wastes that there were lore-tab-writing bugs who warily (as in- with consideration) capable of considering the merits of joining the Wyrm-better-known-as-Pale-King, and their stated reasons was preiscience, not a sapience they already had. We have the Mantis Tribe who- though tribal- have traditions and intellect predating and actively resisting the Pale King. And, of course, the unnamed ancient civilization who the Pale King was himself trying to crib from far later.
And we also know that at least some of what the Pale King propaganda derided / dismissed as beastial unthinkingness was in fact sapience of a hive mind whose existence he sought to bury. Different forms of sapience were denied, not recognized let alone celebrated.
By contrast, the specific examples of any individual, tribe, or species of bugs who were personally uplifted, as opposed to raised by a later society who told them they were uplifted and that's why they should revere the god-king, are...?
When I was going through Hollow Knight, the Pale King claims came across with the red flags of unfalsifiable mythology origin of someone who was very keen to write the only findable history, and bury the rest.
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