MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
I was met with a question regarding my own stance on the matter.
I find if your goal is just to change the subject, saying that the history of the Mandate means that our input is uniquely unwanted by both sides, and that we should take the hint and butt out, works brilliantly. NPCs on both sides are horrified but have no comeback because you are off-script. It's like playing the Sicilian back in the days when everyone was taught opening theory starting e4 e5.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13d ago
Googling "American lawyer average IQ" gives various estimates in the 115-125 range, with comments that successful lawyers (white-shoe partners, lawprofs, federal judges) are mostly going to be 130+.
I am pretty confident Sotomayor is in the 115-130 range - above average for traffic court lawyers, but well below the average federal judge. KBJ is even dumber than her. Kagan, Alito, Roberts, Kav, Barrett and Gorsuch are all smart enough to be e.g. High Court judges in England. I don't have an estimate on Thomas because so much of what he writes is easy dissents (or increasingly, concurrences) where he applies his simple but wrong (at least according to the majority and stare decisiis) law to the facts.
I suspect Alito is the smartest justice, but it isn't obvious because he is also the most partisan of the smart justices and partisanship makes you act dumber that you are.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
14d ago
The good argument is that serious attempts to enforce such a law involve criminal investigations of miscarriages to see if they were induced deliberately, and having criminal investigations of miscarriages is worse than failing to prevent the vanishingly small numbers of abortions that (a) actually happen and (b) the British public want to ban.
The other argument being widely made by feminists is that medication abortion should be available to women who have a reason for avoiding the medical system.
What is really going on is that about 20 women got abortion pills by telemedicine during the pandemic in order to illegally abort post-viability fetuses and were prosecuted for it, and this made the issue salient to the abortion-up-to-birth-for-any-reason feminists but not to WTF-don't-kill-viable-babies normies.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
14d ago
Assuming that the advertisers know what they are doing, the Economist readership is about as highbrow as you can get. If you ignore the filler (i.e. the articles) and focus on the paid-for content (i.e. the ads) there are far more yachts, Rolexes etc. in the Economist than in Tatler.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
21d ago
This depends on the existing mode share in your city. If you start with a high enough public transport share (true for journeys into or within Manhattan but nowhere else in the US, also true for the cores of European cities including London and Paris) then improved cycling infrastructure is taking people off busses and trains, not cars.
But the basic point that replacing a car lane with a lane which moves more people than the car lane (whether on bikes, busses, trams, or anything else) will tend to speed car traffic up.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
23d ago
To be clear, I'm assuming that these people would have to compete against Vance running with a Trump endorsement.
I agree that Vance has the status of "most likely endorsee" now, but Trump is not known for sticking with decisions in the face of events. Trump could decide to endorse a dynastic successor, he could try to run for a third term (which Vance would have to discredit himself with the median voter by playing along with until Trump agreed the game was up). More likely, they could just have a falling out. Trump switching his endorsement to Rubio because Vance didn't clap loudly enough is totally in character.
My wild-ass guess probabilities, conditional on Trump not being dead or unconcealably senile by summer 2028 are:
- Trump doesn't make an unequivocal endorsement because he is still talking about running for a third term (either seriously or as an ego trip) or butthurt about his inability to run for a third term 25%
- Trump endorses a family member 10%
- Trump endorses Vance 30%
- Trump endorses Rubio or someone else with a similar profile 10%
- Trump endorses someone who isn't on the radar now 20%
- Trump does not make an endorsement and calls for a real primary 5%
I agree with you that if an apparently-compos mentis Trump endorses a non-family member then the Republican primary is basically sown up. DeSantisism is right-populist substance but without the reality-TV sideshows Trump generates, and there is no appetite for it among Red tribers in the country. I think this applies even if the endorsee is an obscure MAGA state legislator or a TV personality with no political experience. Even if Trump does endorse a family member, I think the MAGA vote is strong enough that the endorsee still has a >50% chance of winning a Republican primary.
As for Vance himself, I don't see him leaving a Senate seat to be VP for four years before going back into private life.
A significant part of the upside for Vance is the chance that he will become President because Trump (who will be 82 when he leaves office) dies or has a disqualifying medical event that can't be covered up leading to the 25th being invoked. This is a good enough shot at the White House that an ambitious politician would take it even if there was zero chance of a 2028 run.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
23d ago
Shapiro was such an obviously good pick (popular, moderate, highly increases chances of winning an important swing state) that not selecting him his strong Bayesian evidence that being a Jew is considered electoral poison by the DNC. If he's the nominee, leftist anti-Semitism becomes a major campaign issue and major source of internal strife for the Democrats.
Why? The case for Walz was that he was the most left-wing candidate available that could LARP as a regular guy. Shapiro is only an obviously good pick if you see Harris as too left-wing for the median voter and want to balance the ticket with a centrist. Choosing Walz over Shapiro is the obvious thing to do if you are running a left-wing base mobilisation campaign, which is what the Groups wanted Harris to do. It is also the obvious thing to do if you think you are the candidate as a result of a centrist coup and need to shore up credibility with the left (which is what the campaign staffers Harris inherited from Biden did think).
P(Walz as VP|Harris is too left-wing) and P(Walz as VP|Harris is afraid of anti-Semites) are both close enough to 100% that Walz as VP is not strong Bayesian evidence for one over the other. It is Bayesian evidence for both of those theories over something like "The Democrats are sensible moderates at heart, but too incompetent to communicate this to the voters", but if your prior on this in summer 2024 was still high enough for it to be worth collecting evidence against it then I want some of what you are smoking.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
28d ago
What is the track record of 'everything Musk does fails' in the grand scheme of things?
The issue is that the relevant reference class is arguably "everything Musk does since he became a druggie". Until Grok, the last thing a Musk company did that didn't suck was the Tesla Model Y launch in 2019, and that was a minor variant on the 3 - the last difficult thing was the Falcon Heavy in 2018. Since they we have seen the Cybertruck (yuck), the 2nd-gen Roadster (not), the Semi (kinda), the 25,000 USD Tesla (just cancelled), FSD (based on non-standard meanings of "full" and "self" and about 5 years behind Waymo), Starship (subject to rapid unscheduled dissassembly), a deeply underwhelming Boring Company, and Twitter ending up bailed out with XAI's VC money. Oh - and DOGE breaking things without actually cutting spending.
So the case for "Musk has lost the secret sauce" is quite strong. The case for "Musk still has it" is being made by people who are already calling Starship and FSD as successes. The case for "Musk has mostly lost it, but is investable anyway" is that one Grok makes up for a lot of flops.
The bull case for Tesla is based on a pivot to a new AI/robotics business that doesn't exist yet. (Even Tesla bulls don't think the core automotive business is worth more than about 5x10^11 USD), so enough people still believe that Musk can do it again to keep buying the shares.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
22hr ago
The war was always unpopular with the anti-establishment left, who have always been more visible than they deserve given their actual level of public support. It was also unpopular with the anti-establishment right, although I don't know how many people noticed given that the anti-establishment right didn't have a megaphone at the time.
The pro-establishment left mostly supported the war, although my read at the time was I was not the only person with pro-establishment left sympathies who only did so because I trusted Blair to tell the truth about WMD etc. in a way that I didn't trust the Bush administration. Pro-establishment left elites like Senate Democrats or NYT access journalists had access to the same stovepiped intelligence that the Bush administration did, and almost entirely supported the war. That Obama was a notable exception is why he was a strong Presidential candidate in 2008.
The war was net-unpopular by the 2004 election (which is surprisingly close given the good economy) at which point it had become clear that the WMD were at best a small legacy stockpile that had never been a real threat to anything except an invading army and that the administration had got itself into a quagmire by failing to plan for the aftermath of victory. It didn't become shockingly unpopular until about 2006 when it became clear that the US had failed to find anyone capable of governing Iraq except Iranian proxies or Salafi jihadis.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3d ago
The preliminary rounds of the British Mathematical Olympiad are multiple choice. The later rounds move to written solutions because some of the questions require you to come up with a formal proof.
The multiple choice sections of the science O-levels (the more demanding age-16 qualification that was dumbed down and replaced by GCSE) were the first part to go because they were notoriously the hardest part of the paper.
The LSAT reading comprehension questions, which are notoriously effective at actually testing understanding, are multiple choice.
You absolutely can assess intelligence, real comprehension, ability to apply knowledge etc. with a well-designed multiple choice test. What you can't assess is the ability to make arguments or tell stories. A subject like history has to be tested by essay writing because the skill history teaches is about is making arguments. It would be an interesting exercise to replace one-third to one-half of a history exam with a multiple choice test asking LSAT-style questions about a set of primary documents and a (real or cod) extract from a piece of modern historiography drawing conclusions from them. I think it could be even harder than "write 3 essays in 3 hours with a single page of printed notes and no electronic devices".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
I dunno, the sort of a leftist who would have called, say, Obama a neoliberal would be unlikely to call Trump a neoliberal even though Trump's views on economy were to the right of them (or if they did, it would be specifically as an unexpected term with the intent of highlighting that Trump's economic policies aren't as divergent from the standard post-Cold-War Western economic model as he or his fans might like to claim.)
I think that is because they would be calling him a fascist. Trump's right-wing views on the only social issue that matters (immigration) are the most salient thing about his politics.
In addition, part of Trump's political strategy is maintaining plausible deniability that he is to the right of Obama on economic issues, including by attacking elite consensus economic policy from a "left-wing" direction over trade, industrial strategy etc.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
The glibertarian answer to the Riddle of the Flute Children is "Kill the man who asks who gets the flute." But that doesn't change the fact that someone gets the flute and others don't. If nobody is allowed to ask the question, we will get the default answer. And if the default answer is that the flute children fight among themselves then the flute will be broken as surely as it will be broken by the rival Grand High Flute Adjudicators in the Thirty Flutes' War.
Protection from organised predation is absolutely necessary for survival, and social insurance is mostly necessary. And neither can be practically provided by someone who lacks the powers of a Grand High Flute Adjudicator. If the State doesn't provide those things (or fails to do so effectively), other institutions will. And those institutions will coerce their members, and will seek to coerce nonmembers. And that coercive power will be fought over.
Now if we treat the flute metaphor as fact, the question has an easy default answer, that is revealing in the real world. Daddy decides which child gets the flute. "Kill the outsider who questions Daddy's decision" is a peace treaty between lineages. In the cis-Hajnal context where Daddy is the actual married biological father of actual minor children, it is one that works well.
But cis-Hajnal nuclear families are not the default, and "Kill the outsider who questions Daddy's decision" is a bad treaty if the flute children are productive adults with children of their own and Daddy is an increasingly senile paterfamilias who might not even be a blood relative. The human default is to look to extended family for protection against predation and for social insurance, and the normie way of thinking about other institutions that provide those things (including the State, the Mafia etc.) is as fictive extended families - hence Don Corleone's English-language title of "Godfather" and the often-accurate libertarian jibe against the Mummy Party and the Daddy Party. And in practice the people who find themselves inside those kind of extended family institutions are treated like naughty children whose flutes can be taken away if they backtalk Daddy. And so they work (and, more often than not, fight - Western civilisation's record at kicking the asses of fuzzy-wuzzies on the battlefield is even better than our record of delivering unimaginable universal material prosperity) like naughty children. The canonical book on this point is Mark Weiner's Rule of the Clan
The Peace of God predates the Hajnal line, the Hajnal line predates the Treaty of Westphalia, and the Treaty of Westphalia predates SpaceX. This isn't an accident.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
A lack of revolution is understandable
Critically, this is a federalism issue with no important underlying policy disagreement. Non-consensually cutting people's hair (except in specific situations like the military draft) is uncontroversially illegal everywhere. In the modern US, nobody cares whether the same policy is implemented by the States or the Feds except in so far as it works as a litigation maneuver. (This isn't true in Europe, where the EU is not a country and the member states are still seen by their electorates as countries, and a substantial minorities of people are deeply attached to the idea that certain types of decision are made at country level)
Since America became a country and the individual States ceased to be countries (which a lot of people date to the Civil War, but I think happened somewhere between the Monroe and Jackson administrations) federalism ceased to be a principle people actually believed in and became a peace treaty. (Compare the infamous Yonatan Zunger essay making the same argument about liberal tolerance.) And right now, politically engaged Americans on both sides unfortunately don't seem to believe in abiding by the long-standing peace treaties between the Red and Blue tribes.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10d ago
I did remember it, but I was talking about post-2021. The claim a lot of people are making on this site which I disagree with is that there has been a recent increase in political violence.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11d ago
How would you feel if your daughter turned up on your doorstep on the arm of a McKinsey consultant or a white-shoe lawyer (who we affect to similarly desipse)? If most people's answer is positive, it's prestigious and the haters are just jealous.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13d ago
actively chosen a celibate life (be they clergy or otherwise)
My understanding of Catholic (and even more so Orthodox) teaching is that everyone is either called to marriage and family or to a religious life. "Religious life" includes lay and clerical members of religious orders (monks are only ordained if their work as a monk includes ministering the sacraments, and nuns are obviously never ordained) as well as the (for Catholics only) celibate parochial clergy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13d ago
So what do you do? You target the unsympathetic leeches like single guys age 29 playing lots of COD, because those are the cuts you CAN make.
You are insufficiently cynical here. You target the unsympathetic leeches publicly in order to maintain support, and then cut Medicaid for everyone in a bill you don't give your own backbenchers time to read. 29yo single guys playing COD don't consume a lot of expensive healthcare (and when they do it is an ER visit after a car crash - which will end up as an uncollected bill for the hospital if Medicaid doesn't pay) - there is no way you are getting the size of Medicaid cuts the GOP are looking for without taking healthcare away from people who are actually sick, and the people writing the legislation know this.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
14d ago
That’s one example. This is a war that the U.S. is far less clearly involved in than Ukraine and which is clearly about US policy. Global hegemony isn’t waning.
Israel is generally considered to be a US client state even more than Ukraine (which if it is a client state is a shared project of the EU and US). I am not sure if public opinion on this point is correct, but I am pretty certain the people fleeing Tehran see it that way, and would do even if it wasn't for pro-regime propaganda in Iran.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
14d ago
It's worth noting that a 90th percentile liar can lie much more effectively in high-context communications than in text. I agree that people are more inclined to trust a notorious lying liar who is a familiar face and can perform authenticity on camera, but they shouldn't be.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19d ago
Yes - that. We can argue about the ethics of a country defending its citizens' property rights by couping foreign governments till the cows come home, but if we are considering the practical wisdom of doing so then "The 1953 Iranian coup had long-term negative consequences for the West which vastly outweigh the potential impact of an oil company being nationalised" is simply true and needs to be taken into account. In the world of international politics, a mistake is worse than a crime.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19d ago
My guess would be Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, or China.
Checking the list, Romania is richer than all of those, and appears to still be a net exporter of migrant farm workers. But googling suggests that Romania is importing sub-Saharan African migrants to do the jobs Romanians will only do for western European wages.
Argentina has significant numbers of migrant farm workers from poorer South American countries.
I think that leaves China as the most likely answer - it is richer than Brazil or Mexico now.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19d ago
It is noteworthy that the well-run red states (Texas and Florida) don't have mandatory E-verify for private sector employers, and the badly-run red states do.
But then the GOPe never tried to conceal that they were using illegals to undermine worker protections. The main thing Bush Jr did to enforce the immigration laws was sending fake OHSA inspectors into workplaces and deporting any illegal who tried to report a safety violation.
SSDI abusers are generally past prime reproductive age, so the impact on long-term demographic dysgenics is nearly zero.
The decision to treat never-married single mothers as deserving poor was, in the UK at least, both conceptually and temporally separate from the decision to bureaucratise poor relief. I agree with you that it hasn't produced good outcomes.
Under the Old Poor Law, the deserving poor were generally understood to be:
- People with a record of contributing to society who were now too old and frail to earn a living by manual labour.
- Cripples and lunatics (although in practice the resources simply weren't there to support them)
- Widows and orphans.
Wounded or disabled veterans were increasingly considered deserving poor over the course of the 18th century, although they were not legally treated as such by the Poor Law system so if they didn't qualify for the Royal Hospitals at Chelsea (for the Army) or Greenwich (for the Navy) then they often ended up on the streets or in the workhouse.
If a pickup does, in fact, tow significantly better than a full-size SUV that would be a large part of the answer (even if just by perceived option value). Does it?
It would also explain some of the national difference - heavy-duty towing (>750kg trailer and >3500kg combination) requires a license endorsement in the EU (and thus in the pre-Brexit UK) so a lot fewer people imagine themselves doing it.
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