Ecgtheow
10mo ago
America and the EU spend similar shares of GDP on law enforcement we just spend a much larger share on prisons than the EU does.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I'm not sure going from being the Mayor to the third largest city or a District Attorney to teaching at a college is failing up. In terms of salary it might be, since Lightfoot only made 216k as mayor of Chicago and the average Harvard professor makes 190k she could easily see a raise. I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect one term politicians to sink into ignominy. If you lose in a 70-30 landslide there's still going to be someone with a cushy job to hand out in that thirty percent. And if you look at what Happens to right wing Failures like Sam Brownback or Paul Ryan they usually end up at some Christian College or on the Board of a Major Company.
I'd say the incentive problem is on the other side. Being a high ranking politician is low paid compared to the other options available to those with the skills and connections to get elected, and attracts considerably more unpleasant scrutiny and stress. Teaching undergrads is probably about as remunerative and much more fun than being a prominent politician. That means elected positions attracts narcissists and ideologues and if you want to fix that you have to make retaining the position lucrative and pleasant, so that people do whatever they can to keep winning rather than doing one term, cashing out and kicking back..
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
That's definitely true in nominal terms but it also feels like a popular sentiment you could say at anytime in American History and people would agree with you which makes me curious if we have any objective metrics on it.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
I've always been somewhat annoyed by signs and bumper stickers that say the Marines or the Army protect my freedom. The guys manning the ICBM's protect my freedom and safety, everybody else does power projection in service of sometimes praiseworthy and sometimes horrible foreign policy objectives.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Is there a recent historical example of barbarian mercenaries taking over the empire? There's instances in Africa where one ethnic group within a state created by an Empire dominates the military and uses that to rule society. I'm not sure African post-colonial states have comparable social and economic situations to the U.S. though.
If the American military suddenly became 70% Uzbek or something they wouldn't have a substantial share of the civilian population behind them, and there wouldn't be a primary export industry like oil or rubber or diamonds to seize control of and distribute revenue from to cronies.
This looks like it's something from Europe and I don't know much about that. In the U.S. the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System exists and my understanding is that it's basically a log of any clinically significant adverse events that happen to someone in a certain timeframe after vaccination. Doctors and members of the public can report these adverse events, and it's not required that they know the vaccine caused the event. This data is useful if you contrast it with base rates for particular conditions and demographics, e.g. if men 18-24 are showing up with myocarditis in the VAERS system much more often than they are in the general population of hospital admits. Looking at the raw total of VAERS events isn't helpful since the purpose is to do broad data collection about adverse events occuring after vaccination whether or not they can be definitively traced to the vaccine.
My guess is that this is something similar, that there were 1.6 million reported adverse events in some population of European vaccine takers but that doesn't tell you anything unless you contrast it with base rates.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Sure, but are trans people claiming to literally have wombs and produce eggs or are they claiming to be their preferred gender for all socially relevant intents and purposes? A step-father who is closely involved in his wife's kids life from a young age does have lived experience as a father. If you exclude him from father-daugher themed events or correct his kids whenever they call him dad are you standing up for scientific accuracy or being a jerk?
We also have bio-mom's for women who give birth but put their children up for adoption.
I have a cousin who was adopted by my uncle, he divorced his first wife and she lost custody due for reasons he doesn't talk about but which must have been really bad since women don't usually lose custody. He married my aunt and they raised my cousin together since she was three. My cousin therefore has a bio-mom who isn't involved, an adoptive mom who she has occasional contact with, and a step-mom who has been her full time care-giver since age three. We can talk about the metaphysics of motherhood in circles but I can tell you which one she calls 'mom' and who gets the flowers on mother's day.
There was an interesting Slow Boring newsletter last week about how men 18-24 would answer questions like "do men have a right to know where their girlfriend is at all times" or "will it create relationship problems if a woman earns more" in a more feminist way then previous generations of men, but self-ID as feminists less. The theory was that young men weren't comparing themselves to the population as a whole they were comparing themselves to similarly aged women and saying 'well if that's feminism I'm not that'.
Basically if the overton window is shifting left we might see an increase in conservative self-ID without major shifts on the actual issues. Have opinions on abortion or gay marriage or women's place in the workplace changed? This article doesn't list individual issues but I doubt it. I would expect their to be a lot of polarization on trans issues people weren't previously paying attention to, and if social conservatism gets redefined as 'no trans women in women's sports, but yes gay marriage' then yeah I would expect a rise in social conservatism.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Ah, but the fiscal effects: taxes must increase because budgets must increase. Why? Solving problems is no longer the goal of the government; now, issues must be managed. Societal woes must be serviced by specific groups of unionized government employees. Union contracts have to be renegotiated because wages have to increase with inflation and/or remain a multiple of the minimum wage.
Federal Receipts as a share of GDP have bounced around within the same 15-20% range since the 1950's. Labor productivity has followed a roughly linear trend . Public Sector unions are still around but private sector unions are dead as a door nail compared to the pre-enshittification era. Here's a Brookings report outraged that we're hitting a record high of roughly 11 million Federal employees, but their graph shows we had roughly 9 million in 1984 and we've had a 40% increase in population since then so I'm not sure there's been a large proportional change.
Your talk about American Libertarian Capitalism but the era of triumphant deregulation before Conservatives started to admit that globalization deindustrializing the 'heartland' was bad lasted thirty years from 1980-2008?
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
The Hold Steady has a song about this called Guys go for looks, girls go for status.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Could you specify where in the FBI reports they discuss this. Your link goes to a list of forty multi-page PDF's.
I think this is the part of Comey's statement where he discusses the issue
For example, seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters.
He says 'concern matters' rather than 'contain materials' which seems to imply a discussion of something classified Special Access rather than the transmission of the special access materials themselves.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
If we're talking anti-corruption reform one that probably won't happen but would be a good idea would be a guarantee that any politician removed for corruption reasons is replaced by a member of the same party. Make it a vote of their co-partisans from their home state legislature or something but the key would be removing the incentive to cover up a co-partisans corruption to keep a majority. That wouldn't help when it's a big time figurehead like Trump but it would help get rid of embarrassments like George Santos.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
But this is fairly easily defeated by pointing out that in 1933 no-one had recently tried to genocide the Jews, but this time they actually were. The fact that systematic extermination hadn't been seen before was insufficient defence against it happening in 1933, and so by analogy it's no defence against it happening to whites in 2023.
I'm not a big fan of the 'holocaust means Israel gets to do settler colonialism' argument but your argument is either trivial or really bad. If your point is "an unprecedented thing happened once, therefore the probability of it happening again is not 0", then sure, but that doesn't tell us anything about what the actualy probability is. If your point is the probability of Jews getting genocided in 1930's Germany is similar to the probability of whites being genocided in 2020's America that's ridiculous. Just the difference in population share should be enough to indicate the situation is wildly different before we even get into the waves of pogroms that swept Eastern Europe during the Russian Revolution and the relative recency of Jewish legal equality in Germany.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Trump's conduct here is bizarre, what is the upside of retaining these documents? Why consent to being recorded and then say "hey rando, check out these top secret invasion plans I definitely didn't declassify." Why lie to your lawyers about moving the documents? If you're willing to not just "accidentally" misplace some classified documents, but defy a subpoena to return them why be so sloppy? Why not have Nauta photocopy them and return the originals?
I can buy that Alvin Bragg's indictment was a politically motivated hit job advancing a novel legal theory, but I just can't see that with this. They gave him an out when they asked him to return the documents and he lied to his lawyers about returning them all. This isn't the clever deep state ensnaring Trump, this is him agreeing to be recorded showing classified military plans to some writer. It's either idiocy or some genuine belief that he's above document retention law.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Let's check and see if there is any non-outrageous explanation for this. Skimming some news articles available it looks like the legal argument made was that her initial detention of him was illegal and so their ensuing struggle was self-defense. The Deputy says his own mother called the cops on him and was holding a knife when the Deputy arrived, leading the deputy to assume the schizophrenic man was a violent threat so she put his hands behind his back and a struggle ensued.
The video opens with them already struggling and her gun is in her hand. The gun fires twice while they're struggling with it then he gets it and she runs out of frame, he fires in the direction she ran out of frame. The defense lawyer says they found the bullet hole from that shot in a nearby garage door and it was in a different direction from the bush she says she ran to for cover. It's possible she changed direction once she was off camera and he wasn't aiming at her.
If they show he's not aiming at her with forensics, and we only have her testimony that he fired the gun and it jammed I can see the jury acquitting him of attempted murder. The jury hung on the charges of resisting arrest, battery against an officer, and removing her firearm. I guess the defense lawyer convinced at least one member of the jury that the initial detention was unlawful. I wouldn't have guessed that you can legally resist unlawful detention and I'd be curious if anyone with legal expertise wants to comment on that.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
That would be news to Trump who is on tape on page 15 of the Indictment complaining that the plan to invade an unnamed country (probably Iran) he just 'found' is still classified so he can't use it to refute Mark Miley's claims that Trump wanted to Invade.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
I'm sure it's a 10,000ft overview rather than a plan with all the details and specifics, but that'd still probably be of interest to foreign intelligence. I'm also not sure how seriously to take Trump's claim that he just 'found' this document and it wasn't something he intentionally took from the White House. The fact that there was some sensitive intelligence in them suggests he didn't just mix them in with his mementos, but I also highly doubt he had some plan to sell this stuff to foreign countries. Why he took on serious legal jeopardy to hold on to these things seems pretty inexplicable other than the belief that he is personally immune to document retention laws or something.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
It's nice that he just kept the war plans in his highly secure hotel bathroom and showed them to memoir writers rather than faxing them to our enemies but that's still obviously illegal.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
On page 15 they have him on tape bemoaning the fact that he didn't declassify the plan of attack on a foreign country.
Page 15 of the indictment is worth a quick read. Trump is recorded with his knowledge and consent by an unnamed writer and a publisher working an upcoming book, at the time (July 2021) he was being critiqued in the press by a "Senior Military Official" (probably Mark Miley) who claimed he was concerned Trump was going to order him to attack [Country A] (probably Iran ) and he dissuaded Trump. Trump wants to convince the writer and publisher that this criticism is unwarranted, so he opens this recorded meeting by saying "Look What I found, this was [the Senior Military Official's] plan of attack, read it and just show... it's interesting". Later in the meeting, Trump says:
Trump: I just found, isn't that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. (*Here I am assuming he means the public disagreement not a legal case) *
Staffer: mm-hmm.
Trump: Except it is like, highly confidential.
Staffer: Yeah [Laughter]
Trump: Secret. This is Secret Information, Look, Look at this. You attack, and--
Further in the conversation
Trump: This was done by the military and given to me, Uh, I think we can probably right?
Staffer: I don't know, we'll, we'll have to seem Yeah, we'll have to try to--
Trump: Declassify it.
Staffer: Figure out a -- yeah.
TRUMP: See as president I could have declassified it.
Staffer: Yeah [laughter]
Trump: Now I can't, you know, but this is still a secret
Overclassification is definitely a problem, and every administration seems to have some sort of classified documents mishandling scandal, from Colin Powell, to Petraeus, to Clinton, to Nikki Haley and now Trump. That said, recording yourself showing some random writer a 'plan of attack' for a potential invasion of "Country A" while bemoaning that you forgot to declassify them while you were president is an astounding own goal. I just have trouble buying this is 'the Deep State' cleverly ensnaring Trump when he could have just returned the documents or not done ridiculous things like this. It can be true that they are out to get him, and that also he lied to his lawyers and blundered into putting himself in legal jeopardy over an easily resolvable document handling issue.
They also have him on tape showing a writer and book publisher a 'plan of attack' on 'Country A' and then bemoaning the fact that he didn't declassify it while he was president.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Hanania was asked to speak to the Yale Federalist Society, i.e. a bunch of future red state judges and clerks, about his 'Woke Institutions are Civil Rights Law' hypothesis. While he seems remarkably devoted to biting the hand that feeds him by expressing his contempt for the conservative base he is not without influence.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
This is correct. Wokeness is humanities academia fed through the incentive structure of social media. It's purpose is not to signal distinctiveness between blue and red, but between impure blues and properly pure blues. It originates with the overproduced elites on the margin looking for ways to distinguish themselves or get their peers ejected so they can win the next round of musical chairs on their way to tenure. It took existing liberal ideas and upped the extremity to the necessary point to distinguish themselves from other blue tribers.
I think right wingers really misunderstand the role of the institutional democratic party in wokeness. The Democratic Party has to get the votes of an aging electorate in an electoral system designed to over represent rural people. Academia, the entertainment industry and social media back in the 2010s all have much stronger incentives to appeal to the sensibilities of young educated people then the Democratic Party. The Democratic party gets dragged in the direction of wokeness by it's young election campaign staff working a year or two as a career stepping atone but the people invested in it's long term success understand who they have to appeal to.
Obama wasn't pro-gay Marriage in 2008. He ran on an 'all of the above' energy policy and presided over a massive shale boom and a 74% increase in oil production. He isn't responsible for the shale drilling revolution, but he didn't stop it either. He's a competent politician who understands that increasing gas prices is political suicide and the path to cutting emissions is keeping gas prices stable while subsidizing clean energy.
People forget that after George Floyd mainstream Democratic outlets weren't pushing defund the police they were pushing 'eight can't wait', a series of modest police reforms like banning chokeholds and shooting at moving vehicles. Deray McKessen went on Pod Save America, the Bill Simmons podcast and GQ, he got written up by Vox and endorsed by Ariana Grande and Oprah. This got rolled into the George Floyd Justice in Policing Bill the Democratic house passed in 2020 which had a national registry of police misconduct and an end to qualified immunity but didn't cut police funding. But this activist campaign for police reforms got absolutely wiped out by the attention grabbing divisiveness of 'Defund the Police' which took over Twitter and social media. Obama as a competent politician criticized the slogan as an expensive signal saying "do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?"
I don't think the two situations are remotely comparable. Site owners removing accounts from a list of mods is much easier than removing protestors from a physical space.
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