HaroldWilson
7mo ago
This is obviously not a principle without limits though, and for a lot of people being avowedly racist is beyond that limit. How would it even be possible not to take that attitude into the workplace?
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
based on whatever definition of what's appropriate
There isn't a single mainstream workplace in the Western world where saying 'normalise Indian hate' would not be considered unprofessional.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
from the not-unreasonable analysis that they can get a pretty sizable college sports scholarship -- and sometimes even bump up a tier or so of college acceptance -- out of it
If that's the rationale then it's a good thing it gets destroyed. Sport is one of the best things humans have ever created and it's awful to see it made into a tick-box for life advancement, especially among the sort of upper-middle-class parents who throw money at in that way.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
it sounds like basic internet edgelordism
I think this overestimates the average person's familiarity with internet culture. Most people over the age of say, 40, I think would still find these pretty shocking things to say in any context, and with politics starting to de-align on age again these are definitely plausible Democratic voters. It's hard to spin this as a 'charge' of racism when he literally self identified as a racist.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
character assassination
Ah, the old 'character assassination' technique of reading what someone wrote six months ago, it's like Stalin's purges this. It is not some 2021-level neurotic woke cancelling. This was a man being an unrepentant racist last summer. If you want to work for the government, don't self-identify as a racist on a public forum.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
No, that predicts a reduction in spending, not in the deficit. Whatever savings they do make will no doubt be eliminated and then some by the customary budget-busting Republican tax cut.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
Trump's successor in 2028 can cite all the cuts under DOGE as progress even if the national debt is still much higher.
I mean never underestimate the stupidity of the American people etc. etc. but if this really is what they're doing then all this implies is that the Trump administration are charlatans whom the people should hold in utter contempt. If they actually don't even care about the debt what are they even doing? Why are they bothering? Is the only animating principle of the modern American right to indulge their desire to punish the 'establishment' because of whatever chip they have on their shoulder?
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
Well just immediately this seems to be suggesting that on the basis of 60,000 redundancies the Federal Government will be saving $30 billion. It seems to me just a trifle unlikely that the average employee of these 60,000 is costing the government $500,000 p/a.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
most of the complaints about Trump in the last 2-3 week boil down to "he did what he said he was going to do"
More I think it's 'he did what he said he was going to do and not only has it turned out to be exactly the disaster everyone predicted it would be it's all about a rounding error of US spending'. If Trump actually cared about excess spending he'd be focused on the three real items of US spending - medicare, medicaid and social security. Everything else is window dressing. This is why the cuts to USAID, NIH etc. are so galling - it's going to do quite a lot of damage all over the appearance of overspending, all totally orthogonal to the real issues behind the deficit.
"the normies" have demonstrated that they are not going to just believe/do whatever they are told
They haven't demonstrated that. All they have demonstrated is that they are going to believe whatever they're told by someone else, but sadly this time someone both more stupid and malicious than anyone involved in the bureaucracy or mainstream media. Twitter is awash with absurd lies about USAID spending which people repeat but it lets them indulge the fantasy that they can meaningfully tackle spending without cutting things they care about or raising taxes. Americans - or at least about half of them - have simply decided they like being told they can have a free lunch.
he would hire Musk to take a chainsaw to the federal budget
What odds would you put on the deficit being lower than it is now when Trump leaves office?
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
this would have been considered the Crime of the Century™. The government and the media would have shouted the identity of the attacker to the heavens. The resulting riots would have been described as "fiery but mostly peaceful", and all the usual suspects would be calling for a national conversation on white racism.
That's obviously nonsense though because right-wing murders/terror attacks absolutely have happened in the last decade in Britain and they all fell out of the news eventually just like this will. An asylum seeker was stabbed in April last year over the small boats crisis and nobody cared - people even forgot about Jo Cox pretty quickly.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
defacto support growth hindering policies
This is a pretty preposterous thing to say days after Labour just announced major reforms to judicial review in order to prevent infrastructure projects being delayed and blocked, something the Tories only ever made worse - see also their support just expressed for airport expansion, which prompted much wailing and gnashing of teeth from Tories, Greens etc. They need to go much further which these types of structural reform, but they now finally appear to be getting moving on the right track.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
Fine but that can just as easily be achieved by donating to whatever Trump/Trumpian candidate or PAC.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
There are degrees - Trump is in a particularly high-risk group for corruption because he doesn't really seem to believe anything particularly strongly except that he should be President. As OP says, there is no way mainstream Democrat (or moderate Republican) would do this kind of thing without getting an avalanche of shit from their allies as much as their opponents, but because it's Trump his opponents are past the point where his stock can go any lower and his allies would never dare criticise him.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
just muddy the waters by talking about all child sex abuse
The article does definitely does cover race and gives an airing to both sides.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_child_sex_abuse_ring
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telford_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough_sex_abuse_case
etc. etc.
"grooming gang moral panic in the UK"
There is no article with that title.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
Elon letting the world know about the Pakistani rape gangs in the UK
I don't understand the strange conspiratorial language people use when they talking about Elon talking about the rape gangs. It was hardly forbidden knowledge, I mean there was an extensive Wikipedia page(s) about it. The reason nobody outside Britain knew or cared is because people generally don't know or care about things that happened over a decade ago in foreign countries. How many people outside Britain know anything about other very important British political issues from the time? Could the average American offer even a sentence on other scandals like the death of David Kelly, infected blood, the postmasters, News of the World or Windrush?
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
I think reading this as pro-Lynn or 'IQ-realist' is a total failure in reading comprehension, irrespective of what Scott 'actually' believes. He explicitly isn't asking whether Lynn's estimates are right or wrong, merely saying that his estimates are consistent with both a pro-HBD and anti-HBD stance, since both would simply account for the apparent discrepancy in different ways.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
That certain companies are drifting away from DEI doesn't imply that that the relative prevalence of DEI policies is largely a function of government disposition, nor even that those programs were uneconomical or counter-productive. In many ways it seems likely that extensive DEI stuff was a zero-interest rate phenomenon. When capital was scrambling about for productive uses, putting some of it into DEI to try to improve hiring/retention/productivity may have been perfectly rational, even if it has ceased to be now interest rates are higher.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
Imagine a Trumpist asking progressives to publicly admit that DEI is a scam designed to unfairly siphon away resources from white and Asian men but that they just like the Democrat's plan for health care a little bit more
Perhaps they don't use precisely those terms, but this sort of thing gets said by Democrats/progressives way more than Trumpists would ever criticise Jan 6. The whole post-election period has seen quite a lot of hand-wringing over perceived excesses of wokeness costing Democrats, from many people firmly within the progressive/Democratic/left-center-left coalition, far more at any rate than Trumpists are willing to say 'I think Trump behaved poorly in re Jan 6 but my agreements with him elsewhere overcome that objection'.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
The coup and the War in Donbas, at minimum, happened and were upsetting to Russia, and it is not even remotely outside of the historical norm for such situations to eventually escalate into a full-blown war.
Fine, but if you're going to go down this road, we can equally say that it is not remotely outside the historical norm for nations to respond threats to their territorial integrity with the strongest possible response, nor is it out of the historical norm for major powers to support parties engaged in conflict with their geopolitical adversaries. So this kind of analysis gets us nowhere in assessing the moral standing of the parties.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
This is unfair because it forces people to take the subways and the subways are full of murderous lunatics.
What I find rather odd is that when it gets pointed out that objectively public transit is safer than driving the usual response is to say that the subway feels less safe/salubrious and is therefore a qualitatively worse experience than a car. This is a reasonable line of argument, and I am all in favour of stronger law enforcement in public transit, precisely because I so believe in it, but so often the people making that argument are those who would never tolerate such wishy-washy lived experience arguments in any other setting.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
Even in Europe nobody takes public transport if they can avoid it.
As others have said, this is total nonsense. The vast majority of even the highest earning city lawyers and bankers in London take the tube or suburban rail to work, and to get around to other leisure pursuits too.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
In the first place all those except tradespeople who require a van can, and indeed mostly do, commute in by transit - in the second place, all that will happen is that for things like plumbing in the area prices will simply rise by the cost of paying the charge, so in the end all the costs get passed on the users of the services, which would seem ideal.
HaroldWilson
8mo ago
While America obviously has a particularly unique relationship with cars, I think like every other congestion pricing system people will moan for a while but very quickly the outrage will die down and no-one will care. It's nice for once for politicians to ignore the whiners who shout the loudest and have the foresight to realise that you should just do good things and not worry a great deal about transitory unpopularity.
The sacred cow of not being avowedly racist? Pretty sure that's been a bipartisan sacred cow for quite a long time now.
More options
Context Copy link