Like, my point is that Progressives 'win' mainly because they do have narrative control, and that narrative control allows them to actually write the widely believed account of history
"progressives" (and their alternative, "reactionaries") don't really exist. "Progressive" is really just the label used to describe the people with narrative control. If progressives ever lose in a more than temporary fashion, in short order they will be the ones harkening back to an idealized past while the former "reactionaries" will style themselves as the faction pushing ahead towards a glorious future.
"Accelerationists" and "conservatives" actually exist (relative to each other) but they can be anywhere on the political spectrum. It's just, "fast, reckless change" versus "slow, measured" change.
GBRK
9mo ago
You'd have to criminalize renting to illegals, both residential and commercial. And selling property to them too. Setting up a business entity/LLC. They can and do just set up entire mini economies in some areas of cities. You'd have to criminalize so many different things to make moving here unappealing.
And? If murder and theft are bad, then it's completely sensible to criminalize assisting people to murder and thieve. If illegal immigration is bad...
Though regardless, it wouldn't even be necessary. If nobody was willing to hire illegal immigrants, they wouldn't have any money to pay rent, or buy property. If they make a shell and hire themselves... boom, illegal, you get to sue them directly and also deport them. (And also you get to sue anyone who hires such a shell company without doing their due diligence.)
And if someone really wants to come here to spend their own money, not take any local jobs, and not be eligible for welfare... Congratulations! You have a tourist industry.
GBRK
9mo ago
but what happens when they refuse to go?
You're looking at this in completely the wrong way. Immigrants aren't "refusing to go." they're "deciding to stay." Illegal immigrants (unlike refugees) are ineligible for welfare and therefore pulled only by the prospect of relatively well-paying jobs at their destinations. Without those jobs, they don't have a reason to stick around. Yes, there would still be some need for traditional border security work: spot removals of immigrants that turn to crime would still be necessary. But mass deportation would require a draconian expansion of government power to work while at the same time just not being necessary. The vast majority of illegal immigrants would just leave if job opportunities dried up.
You're fixated on deportation as a solution, but deportation is build-the-wall style performative nonsense. It's like trying to catch-and-release house mice. All the incentives remain the same. As long as your trash is open and there's food on your floors, the mice come back. Republican political leaders don't support deportation because they think it'll work, they support it because they know it won't. People angry about immigration vote for them-- and the rich people that own the factories, meat packing plants, industrial farms, and hotels illegal immigrants work in vote for them too.
And besides-- you've heard about the difference between positive and negative rights, no? Turning "freedom from immigration" into a positive right requires government enforcement... and government enforcement requires sufficient political consensus that your enforcement apparatus can't be subverted by money-grubbing contractors or suborned by the opposition (i.e, me). That's why the only effective solution is the bounty system-- turning it into a negative right that citizens can largely enforce themselves by pointing out immigration-friendly businesses that "harmed" them.
Also, before you say something about how I like immigration and therefore am incentivized to propose a bullshit plan that wouldn't actually work, I'd like to point out that I'd take effectively the same approach to fighting climate change, and am in favor of the existing abortion bounty law and also in favor of the SEC whistleblower reward process that works similarly.. Getting citizens to inform on each other works. Imagine if your neighbors could sue you for getting your recycling wrong. You'd be a LOT more invested in separating the glass, paper, and aluminum, right? I'm pro-illegal-immigration, but this is genuinely how I'd try to stop it.
GBRK
9mo ago
I indict the administration of elections at all levels
It sounds like you're assuming that democracy is and has always been a sham. (Or at least, has been a sham since some undeterminable point in the non-recent past.) But if democracy was merely a facade over authoritarianism, then we should expect there to be little difference in how "democratic" and "nondemocratic" states behave-- and little difference in their economic and military outcomes. But a cursory examination of history demonstrates exactly the opposite. If you compare european countries, the wealthy and prosperous ones are correspondingly less authoritarian, and while the authoritarian states pretend at democracy, they're transparently worse at in in various ways. If at some point the US stopped being democratic, we should expect some sort of regression towards an authoritarian mean-- except the US economy is one of the best-performing advanced economies worldwide.
There's still a lot of space for anti-democratic intervention; when it comes to elections "stolen" isn't a checkbox, it's a gradient. But self-evidently, whatever efforts the democrats have been making are on a lower order-of-magnitude scale of effect than the structural anti-democratic interventions of the electoral college and the fixed size of the house of representatives.
It is in the interest of the California Democratic Party to win California elections
Not exactly. The point of forming political parties is to acquire power and resources-- not for the party, but for the individual members of the party. In a competitive environment, yes, it's in the interests of the members to work together to defeat common enemies. But as a group eliminates its competitors, intra-group conflict rises in intensity... and many of those specific factions and people involved see that, toward the tail end, if the group finishes eliminating its competitors-- then suddenly they have no more bargaining power within the group. And all of this happens fractally.
So-- a member of the californian democratic party has incentives to force state elections to be as fair as possible, even at the expense of the CDP, because relative to their own state their greatest enemies are members of their own party.But they want national elections to be tilted as far towards the national democratic party as possible because "california" is one of the biggest factions in the democratic party, and can be confident that they can re-task federal resources toward themselves if only they can eliminate the republican party as a real competitor.
But a member of the Pennsylvania democratic party has exactly the opposite incentives-- they're in a fight for their life locally, but the national status quo (of getting money funneled toward them from the national organization that they can in term hand out through patronage networks to advertisers and campaign staff) heavily benefits them. If the national election was less fair, suddenly they would get a much smaller share of the democratic party's overall bucket of goodies.
And yes, presumably you have people who just want to win their city council seat at any cost... but they in turn rely on staff with unpredictable allegiances. Is that poll worker here because they feel a deep allegiance to the democratic party or to democratic ideals? Do my supporters vote for me because they genuinely like me or because they think I'm the least-worst option? Is any specific person in my hierarchy going to accept orders to fake ballots or are they going to rat me out to the media for a paycheck and (if they're lucky) a book deal?
I won't claim that no malfeasance goes on. But stealing an election and winning an election require a very similar set of skills and resources. Positioning yourself to do the former puts you most of the way toward doing the latter. And considering the existence of explicitly adversarial factions with difficult-to-gauge power and unity, it becomes very risky indeed to try and steal elections in any blatant way. That's why Obama gave up his position to trump in 2016 and why trump gave up his position to biden when he lost in 2020.
GBRK
9mo ago
I'm uninformed, sorry. It's just something I've been noticing in news articles especially regarding LSD-- that some drugs increase various measures of neuroplasticity. [ex.] (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-022-01389-z). I don't know if I'd finger neurogenesis specifically, but I'm fairly confident something is going on.
GBRK
9mo ago
The difference between teenage boys and black people is that teenage boys actually are disproportionately likely to be violent, irrational, and antisocial for unambiguously genetic reasons. Societies fall apart when they fail to take that into account.
Criminalize hiring illegal immigrants.
I'm pro-immigration (especially if it's illegal, since that means we don't need to pay for their welfare.) But that's legitimately the policy I would propose if somehow I was in charge and republicans offered to completely capitulate on climate change if I found a way to put illegal immigration near-zero.
You wouldn't even need to spend government funds to enforce it. Just copy that abortion bounty law-- let people sue anyone they point to that can't prove they only hired people with work authorization.
Without the "pull" factor of jobs, economic migrants just wouldn't come here.
GBRK
9mo ago
What is the steelman for the establishment being unable to steal elections?
The fact that they didn't in 2016. (Unless you believe trump and hillary were secretly on the same side.)
The establishment must be at least one of: {unwilling, unable}.
And anyways, every political faction is fractally composed of sub-factions feuding over electoral legitimacy. Ideological alliances can put aside power-grubbing for the common good, but if you're going to assume cynicism in the first place, history has endless examples of the aristocracy fighting against central tyrants because they'd rather do the tyrranizing themselves. If you give your king too much legitimacy he doesn't need to delegate to you anymore. Rigging swing state elections would benefit national parties, but destroy the outsize power and influence of the local parties.
GBRK
9mo ago
There's probably no need to enact sweeping cultural changes to solve a problem that will soon be fixed or moot with technology. Hyperspecialize your kid if you want to, but we're already looking into pluripotent adult-derived stem cells and how to induce neuroplasticity with antidepressants. We'll be able to learn implicit skills like children at any age, while using ai and the internet as a source of arbitrary amounts of high-level insight. (Most of that insight will be bullshit, but massive redundant parallelism covereth many sins.)
GBRK
9mo ago
It's scientifically engineered to be addictive, not good. There's a difference. McDonalds food near-universally tastes like salty cardboard. And it's that very addictiveness that makes it bad for you-- modern food is terrible not merely on some "heart disease % per gram" scale, but because its hyperpalatable nature goads your lizard brain into eating way too much of it.
And ironically it's not reasonably priced-- unless you're talking about the coffee specifically, maybe. McDonalds prices aare comparable to much better restaurants unless i go through the rigamarole of getting the app and buying their deals. And since time and not-being-advertised to both have value, on net McDonalds is a bad deal.
GBRK
9mo ago
So, what's the path for DJT to 20x its revenue without any increase in operating cost?
Corruption. There are any number of ways a US president can use their office to make a corporation wealthy and powrrful. And-- it's also potentially a way to launder money into DJT's pocket. Much more efficient than the usual book deal/speaker fee shenanigans.
I predict that most serious presidential candiates, from this point on, will have suspiciously well-performing stock.
GBRK
9mo ago
McDonalds IS trashy though. Literally bugman food.
I mean-- okay-- I grab 40 nuggets sometimes and devour them like a starving caveman introduced to high fructose corn syrup. But also I literally drink soylent so I think I know what I'm talking about here.
It is actually a scandal that a member of the elite should publicly prefer such garbage, low rent food. It would be fine if he just liked it, but it should be a dirty secret instead a publicity stunt.
GBRK
9mo ago
Interesting. Though-- it looks like the big takeaway from that post (assuming it's true) is actually rather the opposite of the standard "dumber people breed more" line. Rather, it implies that the cultural value we've placed on phenotypic intelligence has increased to the point where convergence on intelligent behaviors is reducing the fitness of being genetically predisposed towards intelligence-- everyone trying to act smart makes it less efficient to actually be smart.
I say this because the other thing this paper points out as declining is a genetic predisposition towards being thin and tall, despite the fact that our culture obviously favors and provides reproductive success to people who embody those things. That would be in line with non-genetic causes of height and thinness (i.e., enough money and leisure time to be healthy and fashionable) becoming decisive over genetic causes (and therefore tradeoffs, like heart disease chances for height or digestive issues for thinness)
GBRK
9mo ago
She gambled on the tech market going up, and also supported a lot of pro-tech-company legislation. I don't think pelosi is special, but that's definitely a conflict of interest. Politicians should be forced to put their assets in a trust like carter did, or better yet liquidate most of wha they own and dump all their money into an index fund.
GBRK
9mo ago
Neocons jettisoned... Vance
Using a strict definition of neoconservative, Vance isn't. But he's exactly the kind of person who would have been a neocon during their era. It's why I actually kind of like him on a personal level, even though hypothetically I'd still vote in walz over him for president. Don't confuse paternalism for populism.
GBRK
9mo ago
The current default is a reduction of IQ from generation to generation
Proof? The flynn effect strongly suggests otherwise.
GBRK
9mo ago
I'm not saying personal antipathy didn't play a role, but that same news article provides a list of other arguments. "Mean tweets" is just the attention-grabbing headline-- the meat of the dispute is a bog-standard environmental/bureaucratic power struggle.
“I do believe that the Space Force has failed to establish that SpaceX is a part of the federal government, part of our defense,” said Commissioner Dayna Bochco.
Things came to a head in August when commissioners unloaded on DOD for resisting their recommendations for reducing the impacts of the launches — which disturb wildlife like threatened snowy plovers as well as people, who often have to evacuate nearby Jalama Beach.
Commissioner Justin Cummings voted to approve the plan but said he was still uncomfortable about a lack of data on the effects of launches and that he shared concerns about SpaceX’s classification as a military contractor.
GBRK
9mo ago
I think I need to urbanism-pill you.
Suburban vigour is essentially illusory. The per-capita cost of providing infrastructure and services is higher in suburban and rural areas, which makes annexing suburbs fundamentally a drag on urban economies. New, fashionable suburbs often look well-run-- providing a good balance of services to taxes, but that's often a product of debt-financed ponzi schemes.
And-- car-centric infrastructure (highways, parking lots) designed to serve suburbs have turned out to be dramatically negative for cities.
What you say here:
As a result the outlying areas will view the city politics as corrupt, dysfunctional, machine politics until those kinds of voices are represented.
... may accurately reflect the perception of these outlying areas, but does capture the truth. Because what you say here:
These are all well run... areas. Those populations would have a moderating and improving impact on City politics.
Is definitely wrong. These areas appear well run, but that's a consequence of an unusually beneficial status quo. It's a consequence of-- and I hate to use this term-- "white supremacy." No, seriously. Politicians during the era of suburbanization and white flight prioritized structuring their cities to benefit their ingroup-- which turned out to be the white people living in the suburbs, rather than the black people living in the inner cities. Those people are gone now, but infrastructure lasts for a long time, and second-order effects last for even longer. You can still see the traces of roman city planning in modern european city centers. Their roads have disappeared but their grid patterns have not.
The reason businesses are dependent on commuters is because commuter-friendly infrastructure made it feasible for people to move outside the cities in the first place. That's not an argument for cities continuing to cater to commuters, it's an argument for cities incentivising people to move into the city limits, boosting the city's tax base, economy, and political power all at once.
And-- at least in the cities where NIMBY's don't hold sway-- we're seeing exactly that happen. The 15 minute city concept is infuriating for suburbanites, and it should be. But as an urbanite, I'm very pleased at all the new apartment complexes with integrated shops on their bottom floors, the traffic calming measures, the expansion of public transit, the proliferation of parking meters, and so on and so forth. And all those things are happening despite the fact that I live in a very red state.
So wrapping around to your original point-- that non-urbanites don't trust cities... well, I won't say they're wrong to do so. But their reasons for mistrusting cities are the wrong ones entirely.
GBRK
9mo ago
You can, but only if your side has a principled, self-interested commitment to truth as an asymmetric weapon married to a genuine, shared concern for the mutual welfare of its adherents.
So in short, it's impossible for any group larger than Dunbar's number and also impossible for most of the groups smaller than it.
GBRK
9mo ago
as it makes almost every decision made at least potentially political.
It's darkly hilarious to see this complaint because it's such a horseshoe moment. The rightwing has fully embraced the idea that the person is political-- along with all the annoying drawbacks thereof. It's like a carcinization of politics... every ideology descends inevitably identitarian marxist populism, including the ones that hate all three of those things.
GBRK
9mo ago
Most violence happens within the ingroup. 54.3 percent or people murdered were killed by someone they knew. The same doesn't exactly hold for assassinations, but there's a trend of assassins having more in common with their targets than their targets' political enemies. Charles J. Guiteau was definitely on Garfield's "side." Lee Harvey Oswald was closer politically to Kennedy than Nixon. John Hinckley Jr was nonpolitical, but at the same time had been attempting to become an entertainer.
And given how the US presidency works-- with the designated survivor being the vice president-- this really makes perfect sense. If you hate the president, replacing him with a vice president you also hate that meanwhile becomes much more radically against you is a terrible idea. But showing "your side" that they shouldn't risk betraying your cause/better go even further in your direction makes more sense.
With all that being said, I wouldn't blame specifically trump for the assassination attempts since it's not like his rhetoric exists in a vacuum. But it's not like we're not seeing equivalent forms of radicalism in the democratic base. See: BLM, pro-palestine protestors sabotaging their own side. Trump's base just happens to be more male, more armed, and therefore more violent.
GBRK
9mo ago
I think that's a direct restatement of what DirtyWaterHotDog said. Was that your intention, or were you trying to argue with him?
GBRK
9mo ago
I respect the self-consistency here. Guns AND drugs-- no dividing them! Either people have a right to hurt themselves or they don't. Though like the nanny-state liberal I am, I want pigouvian taxes on both guns and drugs. The average citizen should be able to afford LSD and an M82, but pistols and wrapping papers should be way more expensive.
GBRK
9mo ago
Until we get annexation of metropolitan areas it's just going to be like this.
If you're advocating for this policy on the basis of culture-war reasons, prepare to be dissapointed. If you're advocating for this policy on the basis of being part of a non-urbanite interest group, prepare to be very dissapointed. In the short run you'd probably stand to benefit, which is why I as an urbanite would oppose you. But in the long run I think I'd get the last laugh.
The ultimate redpill is that none of this culture war stuff actually matters. It's all just cynical economic interest groups. The republicans are the rural party, the democrats are the urban party, and that's been true since they were called "Federalists" and "Democratic-republicans." And, historically, integrating provincial/national and metropolitan governments tends to benefit urbanites, not rurals. Consider the likely results of removing the electoral college as being illustrative. Or look at paris/france, rome/rome, vienna/austria, moscow/russia, etc.
Some states are disproportionately rural/suburban and to have their power balanced between multiple cities. In those cases, it's actually feasible for a rural/suburban coalition to partially dominate the urban areas. See: the missouri state government's control over Kansas City's police force. But that's ultimately a fragile equilibrium given anticipated climate-change driven migration from heavily urbanized coastal areas plus the new ideological YIMBY trend towards densification. Our future is destined to be more urban, not less-- even actual degrowth would hollow out suburbs and rural areas first. (See: what's happening in Japan.) Any effective attempt to oppress urbanites will just motivate people to move to rural/suburban areas and mold them in their image.
Ironically a republican success on immigration would only boost this trend. More homogenous cultures accommodate denser living-- the reverse of what caused the original white flight/suburbanization. It doesn't actually matter what that culture ultimately ends up being. Democrats would adapt to serve it, and then turn around to put their boots on ruralite necks.
You're looking at the real vs play money market. Trump has 60% on sweepcash but only 52% on the play money market. The real money market tracks the other real money markets because people do arbitrage, but the play money market is only partially correlated, either because people believe the real money markts are being manipulated (by the crypto investor or by people hedging bets on other classes of market), or because people who want to bet in the real money market bet against their intended position in an attempt to manipulate their entry price lower.
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