HaroldWilson
2yr ago
real mass participatory politics with the people consulted at least about major decisions
What does this even mean? Elections are that consultation, and the electorate gets to decide what the 'major decisions' are by the salience of any particular issue come election time. Any more specific consultation than that is hardly necessary for a meaningful democracy, hence why every successful democracy ever has been a representative one.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
So long as we are an empire, an emperor is inevitable.
On what time scale? For all the talk of the disenfranchised working classes, materially they have never had it so good. Liberal democracy brings home the bacon at the moment, why wouldn't it 100 years from now?
Also, if this is meant as a general statement then I don't think there's much evidence for it. Where was Britain's emperor? Of course the British empire did wither away but even as the empire grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries that was, if anything, accompanied by greater democratic participation, more process and bureaucracy and no consistent or continuous increase in public unrest and instability.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
It is signalling, but it's relatively low cost. The point is that I doubt Biden spends much of his time thinking about it, democratic legislators are mostly not going to give it much floor time etc. etc.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Again though politicians are only reticent to boldly contradict public opinion and say that they are doing it because the public reaction is/would be so strong. So they always have to try their hardest to at least appear to be in line with public opinion, or at least appear to think they are in line with it, because if they don't even make the effort the electoral cost is so high.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
People get invited to the White House all the time. I suspect Biden actually has nothing to do with it and he just greets the people who turn up.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I suppose there's no correct answer, but once you start sacrificing your own judgement to public opinion you're on a slippery slope; surely the same principle that applies at 55% opposition applies at 70% or even 90%?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Not sure this is right. What about Hobbes? Surely the relevant point here is whether Jews were under the French state in a similar manner to Frenchmen, not whether they were considered part of the nation of Frenchmen, which doesn't seem especially relevant. They submitted to the leviathan, paid its taxes, followed its laws etc. so why should they not also benefit from its protection?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Yes, 70% of people responded negatively in a public consultation on the law. When questioned, our Taoiseach (prime minister) said that the public consultation was likely swayed by organised groups of dissenters and dismissed it as unrepresentative, when asked why they did the public consultation in the first place if it was so flawed he answered "because this is a democracy" and that public consultations aren't the way things are decided.
I think he is right here. It's useful to know what public opinion is, but it would be a craven politician indeed who dropped a proposed law he believed in just because it wasn't popular. I do have sympathy for a lot of politicians these days because of this; when they follow public opinion at the expense of principle they are called careerists and unprincipled cowards, when they do what they think is right they are accused of being out of touch and ignoring public opinion, you can't win.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I agree that Biden is unambiguously on the 'pro-trans' side but that doesn't mean it's a high priority.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Deputy assistant of nuclear waste management? We're starting to reach quite low into the federal hierarchy now, and he was promptly suspended and then sacked when he was charged with the thefts. Not sure what you're referring to with bathroom bills, I always thought that meant bills that blocked trans people from using the bathroom of their transitioned-to gender, not familiar with any reverse laws. Even if there are some, that hardly means it stands out as a massive priority; literally hundreds/thousands of issues will be legislated on by states and Congress.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I see this scenario as being much more inflammatory than the Brexit border issue but that risk isn't discussed in the media. The paramilitaries are basically incompetent nowadays but having obvious and hated targets appear can only help them.
Really? I could well be mistaken, but I was under the impression that, while not inclined to be particularly favourably disposed to the British armed forces, nor were the Irish notably supportive of nationalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, and the anti-British feeling was only virulent among northern nationalists, not especially any more among Irish themselves. Even if it weren't, these things can't exert influence forever. You'd have be, what, pushing 70 to be 18 at the time of Bloody Sunday?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
US assistant secretary of health I think you mean. If your argument is that Democrats clearly rank trans issues as a high priority because they gave one sub-cabinet level post to a trans person... that's a rather low bar. Was there an 'affirmative action' element? Maybe, I have no idea (but note that with 24 cabinet secretaries and presumably at least that many assistants as well one assistant post going to a trans person hardly represents a great statistical anomaly), but even if there was it hardly proves much.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I think the distinction here is that a President can credibly claim to promise to enact federal legislation (still a bit dubious given his party may have a slim or no majority but still) given how prominent they generally are in directing the legislative activity of their own party these days. Law and order though is not even federal level, mostly anyway, so the influence becomes more obscure. He can as you say use the bully pulpit but that is hardly the stuff Presidential campaigns are made of. 'If I am elected, I will ask state prosecutors very nicely to please crack down, or something'.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Perhaps but Jewish immigration to the U.S. didn't take off until very late into the 19th century.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Are they? Outside of the more online younger types, I really don't think they do make that much of a fuss about it. Speaking to Britain, where while the tribes are not directly analogous or polarised there has been some spread of the American culture war, most of the Labour party, and certainly Starmer in particular, try not to talk about it at all if they can. Activist types do overemphasise it, but among, say, the median democratic state legislator I don't think it ranks very highly.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
The democrats can’t plausibly reclaim that particular political mantle after the prominence of Defund The Police, and there are enough true cop-haters along the Democrat activist base that you’d never get message discipline on the issue.
I mean Biden managed to neutralise it well enough last time, and he has distanced himself pretty clearly from that side of the party. If he felt so inclined, with no real primary challenge this time, he could start leaning into the 'I am the Democratic party' sort of thing even more, stress his opposition to radical measures throughout his career. Perhaps the crime bill thing even becomes a plus! In any case it's not as if the President has that much power over matters of law and order, so what is even Trump's positive case here? There's just not much he can credibly propose.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Great Britain had its entrenched monarchy and parliament.
Slightly puzzled by this. What would the nature of Parliament have to do with the status of Jews in post-war Britain, or indeed the monarchy? Surely the more plentiful economic opportunities in America is the more prosaic explanation?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I don't think this is actually right because mornings before work are kind of dead time anyway for most people. As in, if I've got to catch the 7:45 train, for instance, if I didn't spend 15 seconds looking for a sock pair it's not as if I'm really going to do anything else with that time, so even if you add up those 20 seconds over a year I haven't actually 'lost' any time because nothing would change if I sorted the socks in advance.
More pertinently though I don't think anyone is that ruthlessly efficient with their time as to quibble over a few seconds rummaging around the sock drawer. No one here at any rate, after all we are currently on an internet forum talking about socks.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
That is a simply intolerable solution which would destroy the reputation of the United States, even if you don't mind killing thousands of migrants, and what is more it would be enormously dangerous for the surrounding border populations of both nations.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
it's almost like they just want to ban the guns, so they commission somebody with impressive list of letters after their name to write a bunch of articles that says banning guns is good, and then use that as a justification as if it were the objective truth
I don't think that's what is happening. Hemenway, the most prominent researchers on SDGUs, seems throughout his career to have got funding from general university backing and sometimes federal funding. It's also a little unfair to accuse the anti-gun side of malicious behaviour in this regard when it was the gun lobby that banned the CDC from researching the issue for the crime of producing results it didn't like.
If the policy is "ban the guns", then I don't see why I would want for it to be made effectively. I would want it to be, on the contrary, as ineffective as humanly possible, and maybe even a little more.
What I mean is that without looking to the literature, though of course with a critical eye where appropriate, how does one even formulate tentative answers to questions about what the fact of the matter is about the public health impact of guns and gun control?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Clearly journalists do have to construct a kind of narrative around every ongoing event they report, whether it be election campaigns, sporting events or indeed wars, but there's nothing wrong with that (that is what every historian will try to do in their own way after the war is over after all, journalists are just doing it in real time) as that's the only way to comprehend anything, and I don't think they really are crafting that narrative to fit in a pre-prepared slot. After all, what other interpretation can there be except that Russia has so far failed emphatically? And most Western reporting, while certainly emphasising Russian failure, doesn't seem to me to have gone in particularly hard on Russian incompetence, tending to focus on the role of Western support and the effectiveness of Ukraine defence.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
FWIW, having picked 1964 at random it seems like only one of the ten top-grossing films that year could be classed as 'original', otherwise we have two Bonds, two pink panther films and the others based on books, musicals etc.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Baseball is still pretty popular though, most sports probably attract no crowd at all, men or women.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
If you think it's not worth engaging with for those reasons then fine, whatever, but it still annoys me when people pretend like it doesn't exist and make grand declarative statements like 'it's almost like they just want to ban the guns irrespective of any direct statistical justification'.
And while some of things you say may be true, engaging with it is still surely the only way to at least try to make policy effectively.
Irrespective of how true this is in absolute terms, in relative terms it's nonsense. Since the early 50s nominal median income has risen over 3,500%, while average home prices have risen under 2,000%. So even in what is one of the fastest rising costs of all wages have outdone prices on average. This isn't to say the increase in housing costs isn't awful, but we hardly need an American Caesar to solve that problem, just to relax building restrictions and build more homes.
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