DradisPing
No bio...
User ID: 1102
DradisPing
3d ago
I mean you should keep that in mind. Getting called into a meeting with your manager because GenericUserIsRetardedError showed up in a stack trace for an end user isn't fun.
DradisPing
3d ago
Huma Abedin is a very different case. It's pretty obvious that she was raised to be a sort of foreign agent -- her parents are Muslim Brotherhood activists and they moved to Saudi Arabia to raise her right after she was born in the US.
Most women chasing after Alexander Soros are in it for the money. She was in a better position because she wanted access to power and thus could easily pass all tests about being in it for the money.
DradisPing
3d ago
Monogamy is a huge time saver. A spouse can help you with all sorts of random life crap.
Bezos got married young and doesn't want to learn how to do things like plan dinner parties with his friends while in his 50s.
Sure he could hire personal assistants and prostitutes, but he's got a company to run and it's just easier to have a wife.
DradisPing
4d ago
The US has long been a little weird about ID.
The right was always worried about a communist takeover of the federal government and wanted to make sure they could disappear and live under fake names without too much skill needed. I'm using communist loosely, there are a lot of possible left authoritarian governments that people on the right would feel the need to hide from.
The left really did have a bunch of radicals living under fake names. Some for longer than you'd think -- Sara Jane Olson of the Symbionese Liberation Army wasn't caught until 1999.
After 2001 there was a lot of interest in tightening things up, but by that point there were a lot of illegal immigrants, and neither party really wanted to shake things up too much.
So the US government is a lot worse at identifying individuals than you'd expect. Systems are designed not to work with each other or report obvious problems. The IRS goes as far as setting up their computer systems to allow for people filing taxes with stolen SSNs.
I don't know specifics about e-verify, but I've heard it was mostly designed around making congress look like it's doing something.
DradisPing
3d ago
I've been musing an effortpost about this, but I think that law and order has been an incredibly negative influence. It completely messes with peoples sense of how common things are in society and what the problems are with the justice system.
A crime and law drama that conformed better with the realities on the ground would be a good thing.
DradisPing
3d ago
I see it more as a rejection of Cuomo than any great socialist uprising.
My takeaway is that it's just over for white boomer Democrats. They can keep their current jobs but won't be able to win nominations for any new office.
Ezra Klein had some good articles talking about the progressive theory of power and how it causes problems for city administration.
These are more for background than supporting my argument.
Basically the problem is that progressives are completely dedicated to the idea that billionaires and greedy corporations are the ones causing all of the problems.
However at the city level the problems tend to stem from:
-
Disorderly elements. eg low level criminals like shoplifters, people with sever substance abuse problems, or severe mental illness.
-
Left wing organizations trying to tack on fees to everything to get paid.
Progressives are completely unable to acknowledge that either of those groups cause problems. The idea that left wing groups are just being greedy rent seekers goes against their whole world view.
So you get ideas like government owned grocery stores. During a past attempt to tackle "food deserts", in I think Detroit, a grocery store complained that shoplifting was putting them out of business. A city councillor told them that lossage was just part of the price of doing business in Detroit. So the grocery store shut down the location.
I don't think the solution is really any fundamental social change. The issue is that people on the center left like to play defence for the farther left and hide the crazier elements of their philosophy from the general public. The progressives think that the media hides their beliefs out of some conspiracy against them instead of an attempt to protect them.
There needs to be a documentary series on a major streaming service that, as fairly and calmly as possible, shows what progressive populists believe and what the problems with it are. Right now it's being taught in colleges as the absolute truth with no analysis.
Part of the problem was that the left was too successful in casting things like HBD and culture being deep as unthinkably racist. They were extremely taboo on the mainstream right.
To put things in perspective, ousting the Soviets from Eastern Europe was largely successful. It was still highly taboo to talk about the problems in places like Zimbabwe and South Africa.
As a result it was impossible for anyone on the right to assemble an argument about how removing Saddam wouldn't result in a democratic revolution.
You'd sound too racist to be on TV.
Liberals from a more cosmopolitan background often have the attitude of "everybody knows X, it's just not polite to say it". But Republicans from small white towns frequently don't know it. They're going to go along with poor decisions if you don't let anyone tell them.
Edit:
I seem to be having some communications difficulties with this post. Back in 2009 or so HBD blogs were the only places having discussions about things like cousin marriage in Arab cultures leading to clannishness which caused problems when trying to impose individualist democracy on them.
I'm not even endorsing any particular theory. I'm just saying that the limits on public conversation made it difficult to fight a bad idea.
Even by 2000 if you dove in to the numbers it was obvious in the band of countries running from Hungry to Estonia that things had dramatically improved. A lot of people hadn't updated their priors about how bad things there were in the 80s, we only started to get the real numbers in the 90s.
Certainly in right wing circles it was well known.
The former Yugoslavia was seen as it's own weird thing with a lot of ethic tensions we didn't understand.
More options
Context Copy link