Glassnoser
7d ago
Why are politics in the US so completely dominated by the Republicans and the Democrats, even at the municipal level? In Canada, for the most part, provincial legislatures have their own political parties that have nothing to do with the federal parties, and municipal councils usually don't have parties at all, with the only exception to this that I'm aware of being Montreal. But the municipal parties in Montreal are completely different than the provincial and federal parties.
The fact that everyone has to be either a Democrat or a Republican in the US creates this absurd situation in places like New York City, where the Democratic primary basically determines who will be the mayor.
Glassnoser
21d ago
What I never liked about Kulak was that, whenever he wrote about something I knew a lot about, it was clear he was making a lot of stuff up and had only a very superficial level of knowledge.
The second girl I met through Tinder was one of these people who cannot manage her own life. She was definitely the most dysfunctional person I've ever gotten to know well. She kept flunking out of college because she hardly attended any classes and didn't do any work. She would enroll in a new college every other semester and immediately flunk out. She couldn't keep a part-time minimum wage job for more than a few weeks because she wouldn't go half the time. She didn't need the money because she lived with her parents, but she desperately wanted it so she could buy MDMA, to which she was addicted, alcohol, take-out, clothes, make-up, and bus tickets. When she was unemployed, she would borrow money from me and almost never pay me back, denying she ever borrowed it. Any money she earned would immediately be spent. She didn't even have $3 for the bus to go home, which she stole from me at least once.
She lied constantly, even about inconsequential things like the names of her parents. She briefly suffered from paranoid delusions, in my opinion caused by the drugs. She was prescribed an anti-psychotic, which she did not seem to understand the purpose of other than she was "sick" and this was "medicine". She did not understand that her delusion had been all in her head. She told me about it as though it had really happened. She didn't seem to have made any connection between the delusion and the anti-psychotic she was on. I could not convince her to tell her doctor about the drug use.
She had no attention span. When we met, she was very talkative and would ask me questions, but I could rarely get two sentences into an answer before she changed the subject. She could not watch a movie without repeatedly skipping parts she found boring, which was always most of the movie. She often got bored of me and then started texting other guys she knew while still in my apartment.
Before long, we were just friends. She treated me really horribly and it was clear she wasn't right for me, but I stayed friends with her because I just felt so bad for her. It looked like her life was going to turn into a disaster if no one helped her. But it turned out to be a totally wasted effort.
She really wanted a boyfriend but didn't know how to go about it. I explained to her that a guy who invites her over to his apartment late at night for a first date is not interested in anything other than sex. When she finally got a boyfriend, I explained that he wouldn't stay if she kept cheating on him. She never took my advice.
She somehow got a guy from another city who was too good for her to propose to her. He was really nice, smart, and had a decent job. I seriously considered warning him off of her as I wished someone had done for me, but decided against it. They seemed really happy together. He would regularly make the nine hour drive each way to visit her. He once even drove up to pick her up and take him to meet his family and then, because she was afraid of taking the train home on her own, she convinced him after much resistance to drive her back, adding an extra 18 hours of driving. But the second he left she was meeting up guys and sleeping with them, which she told him about. She was sometimes having multiple one-night stands a week, one of which resulted in a pregnancy which she aborted. Obviously, it didn't work out with her fiancé, who she seemed to really love, but she just couldn't stand being alone.
Early on, when we were dating and I was starting to realize how awful she was, I went through her text messages and found one from her ex-boyfriend, who she always talked about so positively. He just said, without elaboration, that meeting her was the worst thing that ever happened to him. I might say the same.
I didn't get into it much, but despite the incompetence in the rest of her life, she was quite charming and manipulative. She somehow had a few good friends who seemed totally normal. But I find it hard to imagine how she could ever support herself or get a man to do so long-term.
The rallying cry of the pro-Abrego Garcia camp is: "If they can do it to him, they can do it to any of us." In other words, they see no meaningful difference between him and a legal US citizen, and so there is no Schelling Fence that can be drawn between the two.
That is not the argument. The argument is that if they deport people without due process and then once they're deported, claim they have no jurisdiction, then there is nothing stopping that from happening to American citizens. The argument is not that there is no difference between Americans and non-Americans. The argument is these deportations, specifically, can happen to Americans as well as non-Americans.
Suppose someone pointed out that Americans can have heart attacks just like non-Americans. Your argument is analogous to saying that this amounts to saying there is no meaningful difference between Americans and non-Americans. Just because two things are similar in one respect, that doesn't make them similar in all respects.
The slippery slope argument (e.g. Laurence Tribe yesterday, and Justice Sotomayor's concurrence) is that if the government gets its way with Abrego Garcia, there will be no legal obstacle preventing them from treating citizens in the same way.
The problem is not that there is no legal obstacle. The problem is that there is no practical obstacle. It's not a slippery slope argument. They admittedly deported him by accident without any due process. There is literally nothing to prevent that from happening to an American citizen. It would be a slippery slope argument if they were saying they would target American citizens next. But the problem is that they are deporting people without regard to their legal status.
On other hand, the pro-Trump camp who wants Abrego Garcia to stay in El Salvador are not at all concerned that they will be next, because in their view citizens and non-citizens are two morally distinct categories.
It doesn't matter if they are two morally distinct categories if there is no due process to determine under which category a given person falls. What do you even mean by morally distinct categories? I understand they are distinct legal categories, but to say they are morally distinct suggests they have different moral worth based on their citizenship, which strikes me as callous and absurd.
The US government's treatment of citizens abroad is already effectively unconstrained by the law. The government can negotiate for the release of a citizen imprisoned by another country, but nobody would argue that the government is legally obligated to do this, and it's absurd to imagine a court compelling them to do so, because that effectively makes diplomacy impossible.
The US government is paying El Salvador to take, imprison, and abuse, not only its own citizens, but Venezuelan citizens as well. Of course there is a limit to what the US government should be obligated to do prevent such abuse, but it is totally reasonable to ask that they stop spending resources make the abuse happen for no benefit. The US government's treatment of its citizens (or non-citizens for that matter) is not actually unconstrained by law, but even if it were, that would not excuse its taking advantage of that fact to abuse people. One thing I find so shocking about this is, setting aside the legal questions of its responsibilities, the US government seems to have no desire to correct what it admits was a mistake. I don't understand why they are even taking up the position that they are taking, regardless of its legal merits.
This is because, according to the constitutional separation of powers, foreign affairs are a quintessentially "non-justiciable political question". In common parlance this means: If you don't like what the government is doing, the proper way to fix it is through advocacy and the democratic process, not through the court system.
I'm highly skeptical of this, but even if true, then the US government should not be deporting people to countries where it knows that people will be sent to prison without charge, nor should it be considering sending American convicts to prison in foreign countries. It's one thing to deport illegal El Salvadorans immigrants to El Salvador. It's another to deport citizens of other countries, legally resident in the US, who could be sent to a number of other countries or kept in the US. It's another to do this when it's known that they will be sent to a torture prison filled with gang members without charge. It's another to pay the El Salvadoran government to do this. It's yet another to invite them to come to the US from a safe third country and then send them to the El Salvadoran torture prison.
If you are going to argue for separation of powers, you should remember that the whole point of a democratically elected president is to avoid tyranny and to have certain powers reserved to an institution that represents the will of the people. They should be held to some kind of moral standard, if not a legal one. The point of the separation of powers is not to give carte blanche to the executive branch to do whatever it wants in its area of jurisdiction.
But of course the pro-Trump immigration hawks see no need to take it up, because even if these protests have no effect, this does not in any way diminish their confidence that if a citizen were to be treated in the same way, then the backlash would be swift, universal, and sufficient to compel the citizen's return - no court order needed.
This is a bad system though. The US is supposed to follow the rule of law, not mob rule. That's the reason there are courts. That's the reason the law can only be changed through the legislature.
Prior to anything else in the political life of a nation, there must be near-universal agreement on who constitutes the body politic for whose benefit the government exists and to whom they are accountable.
I know it's not a legal document, but I'll quote the declaration of the independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
This is clearly inconsistent with the principle that some people are fair game to be lured into the country and then kidnapped and sent to torture prisons. The founding philosophy of the United States does not consider natural rights to be dependent on citizenship or physical location. They belong to all people. You will not get near-univeral agreement that the US government exists to deem 96% of the world's population to be without rights and free to be abused should they make the mistake of entering the reach of the US government.
Glassnoser
28d ago
This isn't even the full story. The full version includes possible sexual assault, possible lying about sexual assault, minor physical violence, inappropriate emotional outbursts, more cheating, more erratic behaviour, and more crazy dating experiences.
Glassnoser
27d ago
I didn't talk much about the personal side of it, but we dated for three months before I ended it for a number of reasons. She did not take it well and blew up at me, getting unnecessarily confrontational and throwing things at me and shouting. She reached out six months later and we had a friendship where I kept her more at arm's length.
When we first met, she was extremely nice, although her behaviour was clearly somewhat off from the beginning. That lasted about two weeks and then it was like switch flipped and she treated me like garbage. There was maybe a month where she got really into some weird cult and stopped doing drugs all the time and seemed to be improving, but then she started doing hurtful things to me again and I ended it.
Overall, it was a pretty disturbing experience. I had never met anyone like that and didn't even have any substantial dating experience, and had no idea how to handle it. I didn't meet any of her friends for a while, but wished I had so I could have asked what in the world was going on with her. The part I found the most difficult to understand was how you could go from telling someone he's the love of your life one day and refuse to talk to him the next. There was all kinds of other cruel behaviour she engaged in and in retrospect, it seems obvious I should have completely cut her out of my life early on, but she was good at manipulating people.
Glassnoser
21d ago
What do you mean by "analog cyclists"?
Glassnoser
2mo ago
If a judge prevented an American citizen from being expelled from the US because it was illegal, would that be a good thing or would it be a problem because it undermined the country's ability to decide who to keep and who to expel?
There is no scenario where Canada becomes part of the US voluntarily. It just isn't politically possible. Canada has a deep-seated anti-Americanism, which doesn't normally manifest as hate towards the US, but it does manifest as a deep conviction to never be part of the US.
Remember, Canada was largely founded by Americans who were loyal to the Crown during the American Revolution and established new settlements in a freezing cold theretofore sparsely populated territory. It is the only country that was founded in explicit opposition to the founding principles of the US. And then followed two hundred and seventy years of selective migration of Canadians who did not care about this out of the country into the more prosperous and warmer US.
Today, the politics are very different, but not being American is still the single core defining feature of our national identity, which we latch onto because we are culturally so similar. Quebec is another story, in that they have a different ethnic origin and a separate national identity, but they only make voluntary annexation more certainly impossible, because a change to the constitution of this kind would require unanimous agreement by all ten provinces. And if English Canada defines itself by not being American, modern Quebec defines itself by its French language and there is no more sacred political principle in Quebec than the belief that the French language must be protected by law. These laws would undoubtedly violate the first amendment. They violate Canada's own constitutionally protected freedom of expression, but Quebec sidesteps that using the notorious notwithstanding clause. Quebec will not join the US and be forced to give them up.
No amount of economic pressure is going to make Canadians want to give up these cherished identities. For most of our country's history, Canadians have been able to increase their incomes substantially by moving to the US. The profesional class in Canada can still do this, and there is still a significant brain drain. As irrational as it may seem, the ones who remain do not care as much about their material well-being as they do about preserving their independence and national identity, even if they associate it with ideas about peacekeeping and free healthcare rather than loyalty to the British Crown.
Annexation is extremely unpopular and there is an absolute determination not to get stuck with what is regarded here as a seriously dysfunctional political culture.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
The tariffs the US just announced are about 10 to 20 times larger than the tariffs that most other countries have on US goods.
Glassnoser
21d ago
He had an accident that @FiveHourMarathon linked to once and became deranged.
What are you referring to?
Glassnoser
3mo ago
I think you're missing the point which is that this violates her first amendment right to freedom of speech.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Firms that sell goods at the marginal cost of production deserve to survive.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Minimally, it should be able to tell the president to at least ask El Salvador to release him and to stop paying to have him imprisoned.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
The point is it's a tiny share of the budget and much of it is not frivolous spending. If you want to reduce the deficit, these cuts are definitely not necessary, while cuts to social security Medicaid, and Medicare are unless you want massive tax increases.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
I think you're underestimating the extent to which people can fail to accept that Trump's trade policies are the cause of any bad economic effects and the extent to which they can fail to accept that the bad economic effects are even happening.
Glassnoser
26d ago
I thought maybe the doctor would explain that her delusion wasn't real. She had been imagining that she could hear her neighbour saying bad things about her through the walls. It had ended by the time she told me about it (maybe because she was on the anti-psychotic), but she told me about this as though it really had happened and no one had ever suggested to her it might not be real.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
He was not even afforded this small amount of due process required to establish citizenship. He was not deported as the result of any hearing. The result of the hearings was that he won the right not to be deported. They deported him anyway, accidentally and illegally. If they accidentally deported a citizen, at what point would that citizen be able to prove his citizenship before leaving the country? The current system would not put that person in front of a judge before getting deported.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
the administration that flew in a million illegal immigrants under temporary exemptions while only requiring them to put a name and email in a fucking phone app.
Do you have a source for this claim?
Everyone involved in the CBP One program needs to be in prison or deported to a prison.
For having broken what laws?
Glassnoser
2mo ago
The side that believes more strongly in its case will pay all the legal fees.
Glassnoser
3mo ago
I think his intelligence is greatly overrated. What is this high opinion many have of him based on? He made an incredibly stupid comment about how a job is worth a million cheap toasters or something and from that point on, I have not thought he is particularly smart. Sure, he might be a bit smarter than your average politician, but that is a low bar.
He seems to me like someone who is interested in ideas and has some half-decent debating skills, but he is not especially good at actually thinking.
It's not inconsistent to condemn human rights abuses abroad while acknowledging that the scope of the US government and its legal system ought to be limited to its citizens only.
Legally - not just morally - the US government's legal system is not limited to its citizens. Non-US citizens have rights in the US and the US prosecutes people outside of its borders, US citizens and non-US citizens alike.
But, returning to earth, it seems that Bukele's policies are widely approved by the people of El Salvador. On what basis can the American government (or, still less, an American judge) deny them?
On the basis that they are cruel and immoral. Popularity is not a justification. Moreover, if something is popular in the US and unpopular in El Salvador, it's popular in the two places considered together, since the US has 50 times El Salvador's population. If that shouldn't imply that the US gets to decide what happens in El Salvador, neither should the popularity of any given policy in either country justify the mistreatment of any minority there that objects.
But more importantly, you are ignoring the fact that the US government is paying El Salvador to imprison people that it is unnecessarily sending to El Salvador. It can stop doing either of these things at any time, yet it refuses.
The fact that the US is not all powerful is not an excuse for neglecting all moral and legal responsibilities to anyone who isn't a US citizen. The US government is not even trying to undo its mistakes. It would be one thing if the US government were taking all reasonable steps to undo the harm it has done to the people it has sent to El Salvador. Instead, it is doing everything it can to achieve the opposite.
We have Trump and Bukele sitting in a room together, amicably, with Bukele telling the press he can't force Trump to take any his prisoners and Trump telling the press he can't force Bukele to release any of his prisoners. Obviously, between the two of them, there exists the power to bring the prisoners to the US. There is no bona fide attempt on either of their parts to solve the problem. Everything you have said are excuses for subjecting people to inhumane treatment, not actual justifications for it.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
The culture has been pushing for later and later ages. Most people seem to assume it's already 18 and I sometimes see people arguing for 25.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Companies may wish to domicile in your country (especially if you have low corporate income tax rates) in order to access your consumers and/or workforce.
Foreign companies will sell less, not more to Americans, unless they crowd out domestic production (which tariffs necessarily reduce) to sell domestic goods instead of imports, but since overall domestic production would be lower, you don't benefit from this. Tariffs can in no way move production into the country on net. They only change what is produced (e.g. replace services with manufacturing)
If everyone else is doing tariffs except you, then the economy is already distorted; and implementing reciprocal tariffs may "un-distort" the global economy.
No, they can't. They can only add to the trade barriers and add to the distortion. The only way to undistort the economy is by subsidizing trade, effectively paying tariffs for foreign companies, but that just allows other countries to extort you.
If you want to raise revenue and you don't fear a trade war, tariffs may have less of an impact on GDP as other methods of taxation (eg, income tax).
The income tax certainly has a greater impact on GDP because it is easier to avoid buying imported goods than to not work.
If you are going to do protectionism, tariffs are better than subsidies.
Tariffs will change the relative cost of goods, but being a tax they should be net deflationary rather than inflationary.
There is, in effect, very little difference. Subsidies send money to other countries whereas taxes take money from other countries, but most of the tax is incident on the consumers within your country, so the difference is small.
Tariffs allow other taxes to be reduced whole subsidies require other taxes to be raised, so the effect on purchasing power is about the same. If one is more inflationary than the other is unimportant.
It's not a scam. A friend of mine did this as a full-time job for about a year, although he didn't do any of the skilled work that pays $40 an hour, since he doesn't have a STEM background. Another friend did it part-time. I've signed up but haven't yet gotten around to doing the programming qualifications or any of the projects yet. If I do, I can let you know how it goes.
The feedback they gave was that it was pretty mentally exhausting. The tasks are not easy and require careful thinking. The friend who did it full-time really liked it though because he could work whenever.
The biggest problem seems to be that the tasks were running out, though the first friend did a lot of qualifications which made a lot of tasks available to him.
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