LateMechanic
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User ID: 1841
LateMechanic
8d ago
I could be mistaken, but aren't you yourself a non-american who really doesn't like Trump? It seems like you've been exasperated for months here about the way this administration is handling their immigration crackdown attempt, particularly in regard to bad optics, damaged polling, and hypocritical american values. Taken together though, that sounds more like concern trolling than persuasive analysis.
Trisha Meili wasn't murdered, she ended up living. And all 6 of their taped accounts (including Lopez who isn't counted in the "central park 5" because his parents made sure he didn't confess like the others did), and those of a few other people who had been around them that night, were really pretty consistent. The only difference was that each kid downplayed his own actions somewhat, thinking that they would be fine if they weren't the one who raped her. And the confusion that everyone knew she was raped, but these kids didn't actually see a rape, so they were trying to fit that into their confession incorrectly.
But the consistent picture of an assault and sexual molestation (but not rape, they were really too young and awkward for that) is pretty clear. It would be pretty remarkable if the detectives in a few hours of the untaped interrogation got them all to get on the same page of implicating themselves consistently in a made-up story, especially when they weren't even suspects in the initial questioning of ~30+ kids until kevin richardson happened to mention that the scratch on his eye was done by "the female jogger". Also especially because a few of them were borderline retarded, as was used in their defense. But they still all knew exactly which kid was hitting people with the metal pipe, who was throwing rocks at joggers' heads, and who was ripping her clothes off, etc.
That Reyes came along later and raped the woman who was lying there unconscious and nearly dead, really has no bearing on the assaults committed (on multiple victims) by the above 6 (which were attested to by multiple other kids as well, who somehow avoided being 'framed' by the detectives themselves).
LateMechanic
23d ago
Well, are there many examples of people who bounced back into other (non-independent) jobs after being canceled by the mob? I think Roseanne and Gina Carano never worked again except for some Daily Wire stuff? But part of this is just definitional I guess, where I'm suggesting that a cancellation means it's more serious than a one-time 'eye of sauron' moment of fury. In your post you said Bari Weiss was canceled, but that was just a story about her getting 'dogpiled on twitter' for a tweet a year after she joined NYT, and then she eventually ended up resigning from NYT 2.5 years after that for other reasons. I just wouldn't define that as a cancellation in even a weak way.
I think you're right about the institutional power. Wikipedia is an underappreciated tool here where the skew can range from slight to major, and it really functions as a kind of 'final say' on people's stories.
LateMechanic
23d ago
Yep exactly, the regular broadcast Fox stations just do regular down-the-middle local news like ABC/NBC. Fox News channel is completely different & separate, set up as a cable channel for exactly this reason (avoiding FCC regulation).
By contrast, with Kimmel it was directly the head of the FCC applying the pressure, not MAGAs cancelling their Disney+ to make them fire Kimmel.
I think it was actually mainly a twitter mob here as well. At 9-10am on wednesday there were already angry re-posts of the prior night's kimmel monologue, signal boosted by Elon to millions of views. So Kimmel was basically already the target of the day, for people who had been having a lot of success against their targets over the previous few days. That's why Benny Johnson had the FCC chair Carr on and why they were discussing Kimmel, which got posted that afternoon right before the affiliates announced they were cutting Kimmel.
Everyone who has told a more simplistic story about it being obviously due to a gangster FCC chair threatening ABC, or Nexstar having ulterior motives trying to butter up the administration, seems to ignore this part of the story that the outrage was already well under way on wednesday. (unless I got the timeline wrong myself)
edit: I think I did get part of the timeline wrong, and the monologue was apparently from monday night? Still, it was getting heat on wednesday morning from Elon & twitter.
LateMechanic
24d ago
Yeah they're interchangeable at this point, especially from the perspective of everyone understanding basically what you mean. And the 1-syllable version is certainly easier to be workable offline rather than the 5-syllable one.
I just think there was meaningfully something different being gestured at with the "warrior" part of it that we were seeing in the mid 2010s, while 'woke' was more like new elite manners or religion that especially spread among coastal urban white people who were susceptible to guilt tripping or were looking for meaning. I don't know why it works, but being told that you have the original sin of being born white and thus being intrinsically racist (even if you don't consciously think you're racist), but that the good news is you can repent and strive to actively be anti-racist and elevate PoC in your life while spreading this awakening to others...somehow this did actually work on a lot of people. So at least the way I saw it, there's usually a well-meaning core to wokeness. A lot of these people actually did think the non-woke were simply lacking education about historical injustice or something, while other older boomers maybe just shrugged their shoulders and went along with it to avoid status loss, like "I guess this is where society is going now, I can adapt".
So in my opinion, wokeness is enough to ruin movies/shows/fiction, or to make events or press conferences annoying with land acknowledgements or massive split-screen sign-language translations. But it took some real coordinated meanness/nastiness of self-styled social justice warriors to actively cancel people and salt their earth. This had a different level of commitment where these people knew they were down in the trenches of the culture war and had enemies.
LateMechanic
24d ago
When we're checking for hypocrisy, I think it's important to remember what original 'cancelations' and cancel culture entailed, even if that sometimes comes off as quibbling over degree. Plenty of your post still stands even if we're talking about minor retribution over speech, but some relies on the weight of what we knew as 'cancel culture' that just isn't applicable IMO.
Rather than just being a synonym for 'fired', 'canceled' was instead typified by the twitter phrase "wait, why is this person still being heard from? Didn't we cancel him?" It wasn't just getting someone unemployed from their current job, but instead attempting to actively make them unemployable. A complete salting of the earth by the mob, an ongoing blacklisting from society, kept up by dozens of psychos on twitter keeping tabs on targets for years on end (and rallying the troops if there was a new sighting). If Louis CK or Warren Ellis bounced back with a new sitcom or movie, that company would have been eating a ton of shit and facing boycotts. Pressure was put on their friends, family, and past colleagues to denounce them personally. Ethan Van Sciver was a top artist at DC, but he was openly republican and celebrated trump winning in 2016. For that he was hounded out of DC, and definitely wasn't going to be allowed to jump to Marvel or Image. The SJWs (not really 'woke', which is more of a high society new religion, though we conflate these now) wanted him bagging groceries or working fast food, or preferably just killing himself, and said so. He and some others had to jump to independent crowd-funded comics projects, and then got kicked off Kickstarter from this cancel culture pressure (until finally getting to Indiegogo who held tough).
If Jimmy Kimmel gets a new cable channel show, or tries going independent on Rumble or Substack, and rightwingers follow him around everywhere trying to him fired off those as well ("Do you know what he said about Charlie Kirk in his previous job? He can't be given another platform"), then there's a good case that we've entered right-wing cancel culture. Did people track the Home Depot lady to what job she got next, and go after that one too? Until that point, these seem to be pretty limited acts of retribution, rather than "canceling" people.
LateMechanic
24d ago
I'd say ASMR is as distinctively clear a feeling as frisson, but yeah, definitely two different things caused by practically opposite stimuli. I feel like I've experienced it my whole life, from being in kindergarten and having the librarian read a story to the class, to sometimes when getting haircuts, to even being stuck on the phone with some customer service person taking too long to work through something (clacking away on a keyboard while verbally stalling). So I pretty much knew instantly what youtubers were going for when I started seeing the videos in like ~2012, even with the ridiculous 'asmr' term someone came up with.
My experience was more of assuming everyone else was lying about not understanding it, out of some embarrassment that it was too weird or was somehow sexual. But it does really seem like many people don't get the 'back of the head tingles' feeling. Not sure if that goes for frisson too - are there many people out there who don't get 'chills' from some epic swelling music moment?
Then the asmr videos are trying to inorganically bottle it as a more 'pure cut' for people chasing the dragon, like epic movie trailers have tried to get a few frisson moments down to a science.
Yeah I always look through these links for videos, but it seems to be entirely relayed stories or things that people eventually had to plead guilty to in order to get lighter sentences in the zealous over-prosecutions.
And then you get a game of telephone, where NBC news writes "an explosive device" that made a loud noise and apparently caused psychological trauma because some officers anticipated it might have otherwise been a dangerous grenade, in an article where they also mention (at the bottom of the article) the second worst explosive as "lit what appeared to be a firecracker, but it did not explode". And then here it's upgraded to simply "a bomb".
LateMechanic
1mo ago
I think normie leftists don't know him, but the one's that engage with leftist influencers probably did know him a little. I think you are right that most of them are regurgitating talking points
I wonder if it's close to the way I know Jimmy Kimmel. The only clips I've seen from him in recent memory are him crying when trump won (about all the soon-to-be-victims he's sorry that our country let down), and then him in various clip compilations of establishment narrative control. I don't really know what he's actually like. But after just about every single topical youtube video I watch, one of the algorithmic suggested 'related' videos that pop up will be the latest official Kimmel monologue clip, including him looking smug with a headline about his latest wrecking of Trump/Elon/reds.
People here have been trying to come up with a 'flipside' hated/effective figure to investigate how those on the right might react similarly or differently. With the usual candidates of AOC or Hasan, or even for me maybe Schiff or Chris Murphy, I would still be appalled by a murder, and at least not celebratory from a random lightning bolt death. But with Kimmel, for whatever reason, it's starting to get warmer.
Maybe it's something along the lines of someone who is a volunteer activist culture warrior (rather than an obvious partisan politician or a clearly delineated fox/msnbc participant), who gets big visibility and always presents themselves as smugly winning & wrecking. That seems to be the same kind of flavor of irritated rage that plenty of people get instinctively from seeing a small bit of Kirk, even from just a thumbnail.
LateMechanic
1mo ago
The only way I can picture a 'next shoe dropping' big congealing shift happening among normie liberal masses is more based on who comes out with a strong take, more so than necessarily what the take is. It seems like it takes someone like Chappelle or Jon Stewart to successfully rein people in and to feel a bit ashamed for their previous zeal, or to give the go-ahead that their righteous feelings are directionally correct. I can't think of many others, but these figures are a step above the basic Colbert/Kimmel cultural level (who can come up with great rhetoric for any position but lack authenticity).
I could be wrong about this, but my recollection of the post-George Floyd time period was that it was pretty easy to be hesitant about Floyd as a victim for normies, for the first week. But then Chappelle went viral with his '8 minutes and 46 seconds' angle, and the gas pedal was just locked to the floor after that. And obviously on the flip side, the 'moderating gatekeeper' role is well established.
If nothing like that happens, then everyone is just kind of shooting from the hip, and blame/justifications are going to stay all over the place.
LateMechanic
1mo ago
Some personal best versions, though I think both from the early 70s so not modern remixes:
Oh My Darling Clementine - The Nashville Ramblers
My Way - Honolulu Elvis
And a bit different: Down in the river to pray - Colorado All State Treble Choir (this goes semi-viral every few years since 2019 I think)
attempting to resuscitate random historical egotists I have no connection to who have frozen themselves. Is there any actual incentive for anyone to do so beyond idle curiosity, much less at scale?
Good point. Actually the closest thing that reminds me of is Charles Dexter Ward by Lovecraft, where the necromancer was bringing famous people back to life, only to find themselves in restraints to have any secret knowledge tortured out of them. That's a risky opt-in.
LateMechanic
1mo ago
I think that's a definite correlated result. But it seems like the 'TDS' step must come at some point before that, in order for someone to interpret those things in your first 3 paragraphs with maximum uncharity. A Sam Harris for example, definitely does feel an extreme version of frustration that "he can't keep getting away with it". But that's down the line from his extreme TDS where he treats every little thing uncharitably as pieces of an obvious whole, even though he can agree on any individual piece (when litigated) having completely benign or subjective interpretations available.
LateMechanic
1mo ago
For people who even saw the whole video but linked with some unambiguous caption 'girls fend off migrant predator', they're primed to jump to different conclusions when hearing the older sister screaming "she's only 12, get away from her!"
Given a different context, it's much easier to imagine she's saying that like 'stop filming and trying to get my sister in trouble or embarrass her on the internet, she's only a retarded 12 yr old who was trying to impress the older kids!'
Then there's just left the debate where people can make assumptions about what happened before the video: whether this was probably a poor guy minding his own business who was practically attacked, or finally a pro-social citizen doing his part to police public spaces, or likely a tattle-tale karen trying to get his 5 minutes of fame, or possibly a predator whose pickup attempt failed and is now embarrassed and hoping 2 wrongs make a who-cares.
LateMechanic
1mo ago
Seems almost identical to the video of the minnesota girl saying nigger. We don't see the initial brandishing of the 'weapon' in either case, but presumably right after that, the guy pulls out his phone and tries to bait it out again to share on the internet, even if he has to pursue her a bit. And in both cases, the guy filming suspects he'll be more sympathetic.
LateMechanic
2mo ago
Yeah I think it's just backward-looking in his conception. To the extent it was profitable at all, then that's the extent that the labor turned out to have been 'socially necessary'. So it's supply & demand after all.
I think it basically works as a way to think of where the profit value comes from: putting together inputs and selling the output for more money, thus you got more 'use-value' out of the inputs than you paid for their 'exchange-value'. But I agree with others that there's no reason for Marx to have said that only labor can have a use-value greater than their fair exchange-value (apparently he just switched on a dime while writing Capital and declared that, in order to make the theory of value into a classical labor theory of value, and then got tied in knots trying to justify that declaration).
LateMechanic
2mo ago
That would mean the corresponding labor was not "socially necessary" labor time. Marx was trying to avoid getting down into supply & demand fluctuations, to mainly make a more core scientific approach to investigating where value/profit comes from. But that "socially necessary" term is where he had to bundle it in anyway.
LateMechanic
3mo ago
Hence the panic, because deplatforming just looks desperate and villainous. So it comes down to a bet about what is truly more popular/populist, for whether you'd want to signal boost it or not. And I'd suppose that it's actually pretty likely that a majority of people watching minneapolis and LA protestors trying to impede ICE/FBI/DHS might be fantasizing about an even more aggressive response by the cops like OP. It's at least pretty popular among young normie dudes.
If you're saying that @Hadad's confessed opinion in detailed written motte-form is probably so extreme that it would turn people off, I still wouldn't bet on that.
LateMechanic
4mo ago
My second thought is to reply, 'Say it louder, and into the microphone, please.' Seriously. Go hop on Fox News and give an interview about how you want to shoot protestors and cruelty is the point and God praise Donald Trump. Write your angry, impotent screeds and spread them as widely as possible - under your real name if you can. There's really nothing better for democratic electoral odds than platforming people like you.
I think he might just get accused of trying to copy Asmongold, who appears to have become one of the most popular streamers & youtubers right now with pretty similar commentary (maybe not quite as violent of fantasy, but in that similar direction). And rather than the democrats wanting to smugly signal boost it, they are in a panic over how to counter that popularity.
LateMechanic
4mo ago
At work I use C++ Builder / RAD Studio which makes for ridiculously quick & easy creation of native Windows apps for most any level of UI sophistication, using the VCL windows-wrapper library. Or they have a different library which supports cross-platform native from one codebase. And other than c++, their other language for the same product is Delphi, which I think may be more popular particularly among hobbyists. I'm not a fan of software getting more bloated and laggy in general, so I definitely appreciate the native snappiness.
Most people don't even know these still exist from back in the 90s, when they were Borland turbo pascal & c++ builder, after microsoft poached all those borland engineers to go on to make c# and .net. So it's not exactly the best career choice, if that's your angle. But they are still keeping up with the times, and made a free community version of the otherwise expensive IDE.
LateMechanic
4mo ago
but there is a well-defined understanding of what normally happens to debt that there isnt so much with money
What people thought was their well-defined understanding of government money & debt led to stuff like completely being blindsided by QE not affecting inflation. Monetization, printing the obligations! Or to the japanese bonds widowmaker trades, where people just couldn't believe the interest rate could go down with that much debt. Or indeed, the '90s Italian bonds case where Mosler made his first hedge fund hundreds of millions, taking a free 2% spread by betting against people who thought Italy had default risks for their own currency debt.
How it works so far may be consistent with your theory, but also others where there is still cause to worry.
Hence the content of my very first post to fcfromssc. If anyone feels like the way the system has been run for over a century is irresponsible and must be leading to unavoidable disaster, let them try to prove that case that we have cause to worry! Let's see the hard-nosed analysis about this supposed disaster, from people who understand the zero-sum nature of financial accounting and who can also properly explain everything else going on now and in history in whatever framework they find illuminating.
Don't sign up politically for a sucker play based on feelings & fear, and don't expect your opponents to do so either. All the evidence shows that economic disaster follows shrinking the debt, while good times follow growing the debt. For those who don't want to learn the plumbing, at least consider going with 'nothing ever happens' and take up the grill pill, for your own sanity. Elon wouldn't have crashed out if he realized the deficit is a tool which would be useful to his own goals of becoming multi-planetary, instead of assuming it's an existential threat because we're 'broke' or something.
LateMechanic
4mo ago
If thats why currency is debt
I'm just showing that you can google 'why is cash a liability of the central bank' and get people offering different ways of trying to explain it, if you're confused to the point of asking 'what's stopping them from saying all yuan are their liabilities'.
In my view as I've written, it's just following just the normal IOU/credit/banking logic, but the only thing special here at the 'top' of the money hierarchy is that it's not promising to pay/convert into anything else -- it's just abstract credit. And the reason why anyone treats that credit as valuable is because we're also simultaneously in debt to the issuer (we owe abstract value to the government in tax payments in this case).
It sounds like youre now suggesting something about inflation as the criterion.
That's what I think I've been saying from the start, so I'm sorry if I didn't make it more clear in this chain of replies. Inflation is the constraint on making the deficit too large, providing more savings than people want in aggregate, the excess value of which gets burned off. So that is a discussion about 'real' desired monetary wealth and inflation being self-correction mechanism, which I'm sure we hit at the top of this chain. The evidence of pushing against this constraint is seeing it happen.
Is accelerating inflation the right criterion and old economists where just too worried about going over, or do you object to that criterion as well?
The old orthodox approach was to think you mainly use monetary policy and the interest rate to deal with everything. So they are trying to be vigilant about when inflation is around the corner, and think (thought? maybe it's more up in the air in the last year with countries starting to question this and try the other way around) that raising the interest rate causes unemployment, which is used to curb inflation.
In terms of accelerating inflation, that could just mean the inflation rate going up slightly, which is probably all you'd see from real demand-pull inflation. The real worry that panics people is a spiral where somehow it just keeps accelerating. But you could really only get this if you keep pushing hard with ever-increasing amounts of spending in the face of higher prices, such as having too much government spending indexed to CPI. Or indeed, raising the interest rate, which pays people money just for already having money, which is likely why raising the interest rate is actually not a good tool for fighting inflation in reality. They are probably mostly scarred from the experience in the 70s, without distinguishing between demand-pull and cost-push inflation (unemployment won't stop inflation if it's caused by an oil shortage, etc.).
What do you think of NGDP targeting?
It always seemed goofy, still based on the same assumption the central bankers are wizards that can dial inflation up or down at will. Monetary policy just isn't that powerful, which people would understand if they actually learned the balance sheet assets/liabilities accounting and the plumbing of various operations, instead of thinking there's one special thing called "money" like the textbook said, which can slot into hand-drawn supply & demand toy model charts. That stuff just appears to be brain-breaking.
People rightly want a plausible model for "observations in the real world" before making them loadbearing.
This is all an explanation of how it all already works. It's already loadbearing. Did anyone think the US made it hundreds of years with the debt climbing into the millions, then billions, then tens of trillions by listening to people suggesting that in the long run, 'rational' actors know that the budget will have to be balanced, and thus save all their money for paying judgement day taxes when the long run finally ends?
Occasionally the people freaking out about large numbers actually got their way and reduced the debt significantly, causing our country's only depressions every single time they did it (which also ends up re-exploding the deficit & debt anyway to recover).
precisely what keeps critics of mainstream economics outside the mainstream
Luckily for us all, they usually bring in bankers to run things in government. When they do tap academic economists like bernanke, they have to learn everything on the job, and end up later on trying to get the word out about how things really work.
So the MMTers are often quoting and collaborating with past fed chairs and treasury secretaries, and communicate very easily with the various hedge funders like McCulley & Dalio, and just anyone in finance. They only feud with and can't break through to economists, who have a turf to defend unrelated to accuracy of thought.
The fact that they historically descend from IOUs and there are some conventions left over from that time does not tell us "what it is".
Here's a chicago fed piece that tries to describe it one way, if you like this "But currency is a liability to the central bank that issues it—a promise to stand behind the currency’s value in the future.".
It's just easiest for all the accounting and understanding, to see it as a bearer physical receipt version of the general electronic account credit (rather than the other way around, seeing the electronic reserve balances as promises to pay the physical version). Just all as types of credit from the central bank, which no longer promise redemption into anything, other than abstract value that is accepted by the government for relief from taxes/fees/fines/tariffs/etc.
I agree it's possible that you could do the accounting in other ways, and in fact I think maybe coinage in the US is in a weird spot like that, technically (like they are a liability of the treasury instead of the fed, or even that the treasury doesn't recognize them as a balance sheet liability maybe).
Again, what actual reality stops the fed from listing all yuan as its liabilities?
I'm not really sure what that would mean. Without it actually being a real liability, you could just say it is and that their balance sheet is in a massive capital loss in a fake way?
Technically, what actually stops that in the real world is that what the Fed can do is precisely limited by what congress has allowed in the Federal Reserve Act. But yeah congress amends that plenty throughout history.
Someone gives me 100 gold, and I commit to giving him back 104 gold in a year.
OK yeah I guess that's a gold bond or practically commodity-futures trading. If writing that "IOU 104 gold at x date" note enables any extra normal spending that you wouldn't have otherwise done, that spending would have some inflationary pressure on prices of things you buy. Because again it's the spending which is the relevant thing.
I asked about this because before you suggested employment as an indicator for the right deficit. Do you have any suggestion for something that directly tells me when the appetite for monetary saving is satiated?
It's something you observe after the fact. I think in the original transcript post I made at the top of this chain, mosler called it 'you count the heads of the people in the unemployment line', and you also see what is happening with the price level week by week, month by month, seeing if it starts ticking up.
The mainstream econ version of this, at least 20+ years ago, was called NAIRU: the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment. The level of unemployment below which any extra pushing just gives inflation. But they were treating it in a very strange way, trying to assume and make predictions about it ahead of time "maybe the nairu is now 5 or 6 instead of 7, can we allow unemployment to keep getting lower before we jump in and cool things off?". That posture is only explained if you think you're going to accidentally tip into a spiral which is hard to escape from (which was never borne out).
There's multiple ways to count unemployment, but the basic headline unemployment rate can definitely get down to 2-3% with no inflation, it seems from maybe the last 50-100 years. It's a bit hard to say because policymakers have usually been so cautious that we barely have any experience with demand-pull inflation (usually there's some type of cost-push supply side explanation for inflation). Probably the best evidence would be re-examining the '60s and what mainstream keynesians found trying to push for full employment.
Im very curious what an economics looks like where you avoid these indefinite future end arguments generally, rather than just in this one context.
I suppose it just looks more like just looking at the real world. As they say, the long run never really gets here, we are always in a series of short runs. The actual concrete accounting, logic, and plumbing seems much more useful to nail down and understand first, before starting to build more & more elaborate models on various assumptions. I bet it would probably be a fun job to make DSGE models and papers about theoretical risk-adjustments if you can find someone to pay for them, coming up with new tricks and techniques and assumptions. But I'm not too impressed with the real-world understandings & predictions of most equilibrium thinking, whether in econ or finance. I liked this Keynes quote, compared to Barro-style ricardian equivalence type stuff:
In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
Yeah I had forgotten about that part. The detectives knew she was hit with a big rock in the head as an attempted death blow finisher, so they were probing these 15 yr olds with questions around that, without giving it away. But consistently they all knew nothing about that (even when trying to come up with what the detectives were looking for, they never came close); they only knew about all the other injuries. So that was Reyes with the final attempted murder using the rock.
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