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MadMonzer

Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite

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joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC

				

User ID: 896

MadMonzer

Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 896

Indeed, it's a humiliation ritual. Again, I cannot even name one statue of Stalin or Lenin that suffered the same fate.

Neither Stalin nor Lenin betrayed their country. This kind of ritual humiliation was SOP for traitors, which Lee was - or at least an unsuccessful rebel, which counts as a traitor under the traditional rules. You can argue that Lenin was a traitor to the Kerensky government, but he was a successful rebel so it doesn't count.

The most likely candidate I can think of is an amendment regularising the administrative state if it appears to be under serious threat from the conservative majority on SCOTUS. Nobody wants to live in a world where the clownshow that is Congress has to deal with the technical detail of bank capital adequacy or aviation safety, and very few people want to live in a world where those things are not regulated at all.

Before the McCarthy speakership fiasco, it looked like an Administrative Procedure Amendment would pass easily if needed with votes from Democrats, moderate pro-business Republicans, and conservative Republicans bought by the incumbent banks, airlines etc. I suspect in today's climate a lot of Republicans would be afraid of being primaried if they supported it (a majority of the voters in low-turnout non-Presidential Republican primaries appear to be the kind of anti-establishment conservative who would be happy to watch the world burn if libs were sufficiently owned as a result), so it would be difficult to get the required supermajority.

* IANAL, but my reading of the Constitution is that the administrative state is unconstitutional for the same reasons as the Air Force under any sensible interpretation scheme other than "living constitutionalism". But both the administrative state and the Air Force are good ideas, and should have been regularised by constitutional amendments which would have passed easily at the time.

Trump derangement syndrome is an escalation, but the blue tribe thought the Obama-Kenya conspiracy theories were a huge escalation and didn’t really distinguish between the randos who said it and the GOP higher ups who explicitly disavowed it. If Rubio had won the 2016 election we may well have been seeing the same level of derangement, admittedly with less ammo.

The "randos who said it" included Donald Trump - who became a GOP higher up when he was nominated for President. Both Trump's popularity with the anti-establishment right and his extreme unpopularity with the pro-establishment left (and large parts of the pro-establishment right) start here. When Obama published his birth certificate, Trump claimed the credit for making him do it. Per Wikipedia, Trump didn't publicly acknowledge that was a US citizen until September 2016 - i.e. after fighting the Republican primary as an ambiguously-repentant birther.

Falsely claiming that a major party candidate is ineligible is an attack on American democracy. The GOP primary electorate nominated Trump despite (definitely) or because of (probably) his willingness to do it anyway. Trump's base within the GOP is people who think that Democrats always cheat, that they get away with it because the GOP establishment are cucks, and that Republicans should cheat back harder. This is more obvious post-Jan 6 than it was then, but Trump's opponents brought receipts in 2016.

Fundamentally, the scary thing about Trump is that he behaves as if American elections are kayfabe on top of an underlying system of raw power politics, and his supporters love him for it. If American elections really are kayfabe, this makes him someone who breaks kayfabe and gets away with it, which any wrestling promoter knows can destroy the franchise. If you think that American elections are not in fact kayfabe, then he is the worst threat to American democracy since elections really were rigged in 1960's Illinois. In either case, he needs to be stopped.

I think pet of the issue here is that the prior on Joe Biden being corrupt is low, so you need more than circumstantial evidence to make people who are not already anti-Biden partisans care.

The theory that the MAGA crowd are pushing is that Joe Biden decided to run a large scale influence peddling operation, employed his junkie failson as a key fixer in it when he could have hired a professional, and then didn’t spend the money. That is possible, but it is not likely compared to a junkie failson ripping off clueless foreigners by selling influence with Dad he didn’t have and spending the money on blow and hookers.

These threads tend to be risk assessments, with some people thinking there is a serious risk of nuclear exchange, and some people seeming to discount that risk.

I'm curious about what kind of risk assessment people typically engage in.

I am also a professional risk manager, and trying to model what people are thinking, I think the big difference is not in our assessment of the existential risk from Russia going nuclear. It is in our assessment of the potential risk from conceding to Russian nuclear blackmail.

Given that Russia has chosen to wage a war of unprovoked aggression under the umbrella of nuclear blackmail, the civilised world has two fundamental options (I am deliberately oversimplifying here):

  1. Call Russia's bluff by credibly threatening serious consequences if Russia tries to use nuclear weapons to win the war in Ukraine. This creates the existential risk that Russia is not in fact bluffing, that Russia treats the serious consequences as nuclear escalation leading to armageddon.

  2. Fold, and tell Russia (and China and any other future barbarian nuclear powers) that they can use nuclear blackmail to get whatever they want (up to and including NATO's blessing to reinvade other countries they have just been driven out of after launching an unprovoked war of aggression and losing conventionally). As well as the immediate cost to Ukraine and Ukrainians, this aggravates two existential risks:

a) Loss of credibility Neville Chamberlain style leading to an increased risk of nuclear armageddon due to a future miscalculation.

b) Massive nuclear proliferation in a world where the ground rules no longer include "nuclear states do not invade their non-nuclear neighbours under the umbrella of nuclear blackmail" the way they did in the Cold War (remember that Truman sacked MacArthur for threatening nuclear escalation against North Korea). If Russia gets enough of Ukraine (and the four provinces they have just purported to annex counts) then acquiring nukes yesterday is a matter of basic survival for countries like Poland and Vietnam (and arguably Iran and Saudi Arabia). And if every medium sized country has nukes then the armageddon risks of both a Cuban Missile Crisis and a Stanislav Petrov event increase by orders of magnitude.

As far as I can see, we all agree that risk 1 is a low-probability high-impact risk we would prefer not to take. Some of us thing risk 2 is low-probability low-impact because Russia should make only reasonable demands on Ukraine and then go home. Others (including me) think that risk 2 is a high-probability high-impact risk because massive nuclear proliferation is a racing certainty if nuclear blackmail works. And some people seem to think that there is a low-probability high-impact risk that Russia is going to drive straight to the Rhine once we tell them that we won't resist if they say nuclear boo.

This thread has been hugely educational about how non-idiots see race relations in America. Thank you to KMC and rallycar-jepsen for having an incredibly polite conversation about an incredibly fraught topic, and to everyone on the Motte for creating a community where they feel safe to have it.

The big idea of sex-positive feminism is that women should be able to pursue sexual pleasure in the same way men do (ignoring the fact that men who pursued sexual pleasure freely were considered rakes and being shot by the girl's father or brother was a real risk). From this perspective, the sexual revolution has failed because women are not in fact getting off on the casual sex they have been liberated to have - the "orgasm gap". The Big Lie of the Sexual Revolution was that women were leaving a lot of sexual pleasure on the table pre-Revolution by abstaining from casual sex. At a marginally more cynical level, it was that the average 20-something woman was leaving a truly humungous amount of sexual pleasure on the table, because she could get X amount of casual sex if she wasn't sexually repressed, and a man getting X amount of casual sex was a superstud.

If you can't admit that men and women are different in ways which mean that normal women were never going to get off on the kinds of casual sex available in a competitive sexual marketplace, then the cope is to blame men for being selfish and inconsiderate in bed. This is a big part of why the "campus rape crisis" and related debates about sexual ethics are so insane - the mischief the sex-positive feminists actually want to deal with is poor technical performance in the bedroom, but the only language they have to deal with it is consent.

Religious conservatives and sex-negative feminists both agree that casual sex in the society that exists is inherently degrading to women, that women should choose not to engage in it, and that men should be punished for engaging in it. Their inability to admit that they are allies on this point was a running joke among libertarians and sex-positive feminists since at least the 1990s - I first came across it in PJ O'Rourke's 1994 book All the Trouble in the Word

I think someone who claimed a hooker payoff as a business expense on their taxes would be prosecuted for tax fraud if they had powerful enemies, which Trump does. But that would be a federal charge, and Merrick Garland is playing his cards close to his chest.

This particular indictment is driven by Bragg's ego and desire to advance in NY lefty politics, not by a desire to convict Trump. Hence the weak charges - Trump is guilty of a lot more serious crimes than misrecording the Stormy Daniels hush money, but nothing that is both media-friendly and chargeable in New York state court.

I suspect the federal indictments will be less bullshit and will include serious crimes of which Trump is actually guilty.

At some point more and more individuals will be caught up in interstate lawfare wars. Trump is just the tip of the iceberg.

Trump isn't a victim of this kind of interstate lawfare. All his legal problems relate to behaviour which (if he did it) is illegal everywhere, and the claims of jurisdiction are pretty clear-cut.

Trump's current legal troubles are:

  • Federal cases with a clear federal cause of action (the Mar-a-Lago documents, the federal Jan 6 case)
  • New York cases where jurisdiction is proper because NY is the Trump Org's principal place of business (the Stormy Daniels payoff, the bank fraud case) or the behaviour alleged took place in New York (the E Jean Carroll rape and defamation lawsuits)
  • A Georgia case relating to interference with a Georgia election.

"This kind of lawfare" strictu sensu - i.e. seeking to regulate the worldwide behaviour of businesses outside your jurisdiction on the basis that they did some business inside the jurisdiction - has been SOP in the US for a very long time. From my perspective as someone who has spent most of my career working in non-US multinationals, the biggest issue is random insane civil verdicts in US state courts, but there are a number of federal policies which are also objectionable - especially sanctions on Cuba and the law attempting to punish companies for participating in the Arab boycott of Israel. Countries other than the US do not do this - for example the UK only attempts to regulate British companies and British-based activity of foreign companies. In general, countries other than the US take the view that, as applied to international trade in goods, this kind of behaviour violates the WTO treaty, which says that countries can only discriminate between identical goods based on whether or not they have a trade deal with the country they were made in, not on who made them.

What Texas is doing is something slightly different in that it ties the requirement to doing business with the Texas government, not to operating in Texas. This is less objectionable from a jurisdictional comity perspective, because the Texan government is acting as a market participant, not a sovereign, and has the right to choose who it does business with in the same way as any other entity (FWIW, I have no idea if the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment does or should regulate States as market participants). This kind of behaviour used to be rare except for mission-driven organisations like charities and political parties - normal people care about what they are buying, may care about how it was made, but do not care about the general ethical record of the people making it. The idea that public sector customers should take an interest as customers in the out-of-jurisdiction activities of the companies they do business with is new - AFAIK it dates back to left-wing campaigns about corporate tax compliance in the noughties.

It will be interesting to see how Texas's attempts to enforce this against Wells Fargo pan out. If this was a term in a contract "Wells Fargo will not discriminate against a firearms entity" then at common law it would probably be unenforceable as a restraint of trade and/or a contract to break the law in a (legally) friendly jurisdiction. But making it a pre-contract enquiry means that Wells Fargo are pretty clearly guilty of a fraudulent misrepresentation.

I feel like this kind of interstate lawfare is exactly what the interstate commerce provisions in the US constitution were meant to prevent.

This is the important point - a world in which every jurisdiction tries to regulate activity outside its territory - particularly if that regulation is driven by idiosyncratic local politics rather than being an attempt to enforce widely-shared norms - is very bad from the point of view of making it legal for normal people to do business normally.

I think people in this thread are underestimating how dysfunctional this is. A party caucus in a legislature isn't just a talking shop for mutually sympathetic legislators - it is an agreement to accept party discipline in order to gain the benefits of power. The whole point of a caucus being in the majority is that the caucus votes internally on issues like who to support for the speakership, and then they all vote the same way. If you can't get the caucus to vote together, then you have a majority in name only. Despite the classic meme status of "I belong to no organised political party - I am a Democrat", the Democrats never managed to f*** this up in this way, even when their party was split between Northern leftists and Dixiecrats.

The incoming House republican caucus held its internal vote after the elections in November, and voted 188-31 (by secret ballot, which is the norm for internal party votes) in favour of McCarthy. The whole point of being a caucus is that all 222 Republicans are now supposed to vote for the duly selected Republican candidate (i.e. McCarthy) in the public vote. The rebels (who do not include Jim Jordan himself - he voted for McCarthy like he is supposed to, and indeed nominated McCarthy on the second public ballot) are the real RINOs here - they are not accepting the basic responsibilities of caucus membership. If the Republicans can't agree on a Speaker, then in a very real sense they are not the majority.

This is why we are not seeing a move to choose a compromise candidate (according to gossip on various right-wing websites, Steve Scalise is acceptable to both factions). McCarthy thinks he is entitled to the speakership because he won the Republican caucus vote and the Republicans are in the majority. And if the Republicans were an organised political party rather than a clown show he would be right. And the 188 Republican congressmen who voted for him think they are entitled to the benefits of being in the majority, and the 31 dissidents should vote with the party if they want to share in those benefits. And if the Republicans were an organised political party, they would be right.

If the Republican rebels don't climb down after making their point for the cameras and the majority Republicans negotiate, then there are not two organised parties in the House with the Republicans in the majority. There are three parties (Democrats, Republicans, and MAGAtards) with nobody in the majority. And Scalise wouldn't be a Speaker leading a majority party, he would be a Speaker leading a coalition.

First, torture including torture as part of military intelligence gathering as well as counterinsurgency was used for thousands of years probably in every war humans fought.

And here is the rub. The argument the anti-torture crowd are making is not "Torture is useless for all purposes." It is "Statements made under torture are unusually unreliable, and therefore interrogation under torture does not produce actionable intelligence." The premise has been a principle of English evidence law since time immemorial (the first explicit documentation that torture evidence is never admissible in English courts is as late as the 1460's, but Fortescue implies that the rule was old in his day), and the conclusion follows from it as night follows day.

The famous medieval civil and ecclesiastical torturers did not use torture to extract intelligence - they used it to extract confessions (usually true ones, as is the case with all corrupt policing, but frequently false ones) - because this worked in Roman-law inspired systems including Canon Law everywhere and Civil Law in most of Continental Europe.

In wartime, we don't have as much visibility because military law isn't a thing until modern bureaucratic states. We do know that medieval knights liked to "get medieval" on defeated peasants and townsfolk, but this doesn't look like torture for intelligence gathering - based on my knowledge it is a combination of sadistic revenge and torture as a terror-weapon to deter future rebellions. "Getting medieval" on knightly POWs was prohibited by the rules of Chivalry (which doesn't mean that it didn't happen, of course, but it does mean that it was not seen as a usual incident of warfare).

When military law does become a thing, the first written prohibition of torturing POWs appears to be included in the 1863 Lieber Code (issued by Abraham Lincoln to govern Union troops in the Civil War - again the Lieber code states that it is formalising a rule that has existed for a long time. The Lieber Code formed the basis of the 1907 Hague Convention which was the first international treaty prohibiting torture in wartime. The Hague Convention was agreed by military leaders who all agreed that aggressive war was legal and sometimes ethical, and from the records of the debates leading up to the Convention we know that they would not have banned torture if they thought it had military utility.

The reason for this is obvious. Telling someone in a position to inflict pain on you truth they don't want to hear is a bad idea (just like speaking truth to power in any other context), and we all know this viscerally. The only way to make the torture stop is to work out what the torturer wants to hear, and tell them that. So the only truth you can extract under torture is the truth you already know. In theory you could develop a technique of interrogation under torture where you "calibrated" the victim's response by asking questions you did know the answer to and punishing incorrect answers before switching to the information you actually wanted. In practice, nobody has done this, and the people who have the expertise required to do it are unanimous that you would be better off offering a hot meal and a cigarette in exchange for sincere co-operation.

The most famous example of systematic use of torture for intelligence gathering in a counterinsurgency was the French in Algeria. They lost that one. The most recent example was the waterboarding of KSM and a small number of other high-value Al-Quaeda captives at CIA black sites. Eventually KSM realised that what he needed to say to stop the torture was that Saddam Hussein was helping him. Obviously, that was believed stat by the Bush administration. They lost that one too.

And yet all the places people want to live have such governments...

The relationship between McCarthyism and The Crucible is more complex than this, in a way which explains why 1950's anti-communism is as thoroughly discredited as it is.

The Crucible begins with allegations, backed by evidence, that a group of young women including Betty Parris and Abigail Williams were dancing naked in the trees (which was clearly illegal and considered dangerous in Puritan Salem, even if we moderns don't see it that way), that Tituba appeared to be casting spells on them (something everyone in 17th century Salem agreed was possible and dangerous, even though it isn't), and that they suffered strange symptoms as a result (which we now believe to be ergotism caused by rotten grain, but nobody knew that at the time). So the first batch of witchcraft allegations are serious and true in-universe. It then moves on to random accusations against low-status easy targets as Tituba and Abigail try to deflect blame (we don't know who most of the women called out are, but we are later told that Goody Good and Goody Osburn were dubiously sane old maids and that Goody Osburn had been homeless at one point). And then in the second act we get the bad-faith accusations against respectable middle-class Salemites. Miller is deliberately vague as to whether these are motivated by factional politics (there was an ongoing feud between the Putnams and the Nurses in real Salem, and Miller's Giles Corey thinks the whole thing is a plot by the Putnams to steal his land), personal beefs (like Abigail being butthurt after Proctor dumped her), or attempts to silence opposition (like the arrest of Proctor).

This is supposed to mirror the decline and fall of 50's anti-communism. McCarthy starts out by going after actual communists like the Rosenbergs, moves on to people on the left who are a bit weird, acquires a reputation for using bad-faith accusations of communist sympathy to silence opposition, and eventually ends up using bad-faith accusations of communist sympathy to pursue personal beefs. Remember the reason that McCarthy ultimately fell is that he dishonestly denounced various army officers who refused to give his lawyer's catamite a cushy job.

So the message Miller is trying to present is twofold:

  1. Like witches, communist fellow travellers are probably not as dangerous as you think they are (which did not age well)
  2. If you promote overzealous witch-hunters, you end up with a culture where dishonest allegations of witchcraft are a routine political tool (which did - with swapped partisan valence it is the core argument of liberal anti-SJWism)

Although his first targets are now known to be guilty, there is zero doubt that by the end McCarthy was spamming dishonest allegations of communist sympathy as a political tool, and that the anti-communist movement in the country fully supported him in doing so. This should have, and did, discredit anti-communism, and boost anti-anti-communism as an organising principle for the radical left - with the unfortunate side effect of partially rehabilitating communist fellow travellers. If McCarthy didn't want that to happen, then he should have admitted that George Marshall was a patriot and that Peress' promotion was routine based on the number of years since he graduated dental school.

Although anti-fascist movements spamming allegations of "fascist" against non-fascists are a dime a dozen on the anti-establishment left, they never had an HUAC/SSCI-sized platform until the Great Awokening (I also think they were idiots spamming "fascist" against almost everyone, rather than using it as a calculated tool against political opponents the way McCarthy did with "communist" or the ADL increasingly do with "Hate"). We are already seeing the consequences - organised anti-fascism is seen as a bad joke on the anti-establishment right, and the anti-establishment right is increasingly losing its desire to avoid looking fascist. In Italy, we have an actual fascist Prime Minister, in the sense that Fratelli d'Italia's predecessor party claimed spiritual continuity with Mussolini's Fascist Party and received the endorsement of the Mussolini family on that basis. We are also starting to see the pro-establishment right treat organised anti-fascism as a partisan grift, although they are still afraid of it. We are even starting to see (so far unsuccessful) attempts by the pro-establishment left to neuter woke-stupid the way the Army neutered anti-communism in the Army-McCarthy hearings.

If woke-stupid and dishonest anti-fascism fail, then even the good anti-fascism is going to be caught in the collateral damage, and there will be some inevitable (and unfortunate) rehabilitation of fascism and fascist fellow travellers, and Planet of Cops will have the same kind of reputation that The Crucible does now.

How is that wishy washy? You have to contort yourself into a pretzel to come to any other conclusion.

It is wishy washy because Hunter Biden is a liar, and it was a statement he made at a time when he was motivated to lie - the foreign crooks he was dealing with wanted to bribe Joe (although paying Hunter for access would be 2nd best), and would be much more willing to pay off Hunter if they thought the money was reaching Joe.

The "10% for the big guy e-mail" is one crook sending a note to another saying he was going to put aside some money for the big guy, but no money was actually put aside for Joe Biden except, possibly, in Hunter's head (unless there is non-public information about a segregated account, but if the Republicans had that I suspect they would have leaked it by now).

The fundamental problem with making "Joe Biden personally was on the take via Hunter" stick based on a jigsaw of weak evidence is that normally a lifestyle that exceeds known clean income is a key piece of the jigsaw, and Joe's lifestyle between VP and President was entirely consistent with what he has always claimed to be in his financial disclosures, i.e. an old guy with a net worth in the low double figure millions.

Ironically, it leads to a case for an interesting question - if Trump had merely attached his vibe to Ted Cruz' political platform in 2016, would he still have won?

No, if Ted Cruz's platform includes monkeying about with Social Security (which he supported as a Senator, but went quiet about once he started running for President). The fact that Trump was not affiliated with the traditional right wing of the Republican party and was therefore credible when he promised to protect Social Security and Medicare was critical to his ballot box success.

DeSantis can't win the presidential election even if he takes the primary, Trump can.

Trump would have lost to an empty suit in 2016 in the Democrats had managed to run one and did lose to an empty suit in 2020. Thinking that Trump is unusually popular with the median voter is "How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him" level stupid. DeSantis, on the other hand, was re-elected by a landslide in what used to be considered a purple slate.

But P-A problem leads to empire building.

In the case of a well-regarded tech company like Google, I don't think it is necessarily a P-A problem. It is hard to talk about the usual metrics like PE vs index because so much of the S&P 500 is tech megacaps nowadays, but I think for most of the last 10 years stock market investors valued $1 of cash in Larry Page's pocket higher than $1 cash in their own pocket because they thought Larry was able to buy companies like Waymo and Deepmind and they couldn't.

Notoriously, growth investors hate dividends.

Boris is intelligent. Unfortunately many British politicians studied PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) at Oxford, which is notoriously an easy subject. (Why doesn't a PPEist get up in the morning? Becuase then they wouldn't have anything to do in the afternoon) Boris studied Greats, which is basically a broad-based course in Ancient Roman and Greek society based on reading the primary sources in the original languages. It is traditionally seen as the hardest course Oxford has to offer, although the mathematicians and physicists naturally disagree. His tutors said he could have got a First if he applied himself.

Boris's vices are laziness and incuriosity, not stupidity.

Rather more than half, given that 1st-world Asian countries did in fact prevent 80-90% of the deaths relative to a US baseline, and "the best SV companies" are presumably claiming to be more competent than Taiwanese bureaucrats (are they? Good question, and I don't know the answer). In terms of the combined cost of COVID mortality and morbidity and of unnecessary and ineffective preventative measures, the US was shockingly bad (and the UK was almost as bad - the only thing we got right was the vaccine rollout).

Preventing 1/2 the US deaths isn't the level of competence of the best SV companies, it's the level of competence of a slightly-above-average first world government bureaucracy.

There are definitely English people who will discriminate against anyone with a recognisably American accent (and we can't tell Anglo-Canadian accents from American ones). This is part of the normal anti-Americanism that exists close to the surface among substantial minorities of the population basically everywhere. But we can't recognise different American regional accents and, even if we could, we wouldn't be able to map them to social class, which is what Brits are really trying to read from people's accents.

My (French-born and native French-speaking) secondary school French speaker said that PMC French people look down on Quebec French as an uncultured dialect for uncultured people in the same way posh British people used to look down on American English. I have no idea if this is a good analogy or not.

‘Never again’ with regards to WWII refers to the litany of unprecedented and unrepeated human rights crises in the war, not to the existence of a war.

As a comment about the cocktail-party talk of Anglo-Jewish in elites early 21st century America, this is probably true, but as a statement about the global political response to World War II, it is profoundly false. The people who live through WW2 and the institutions they set up were all about "Never again" with regard to total war between the great powers.

The first test is how the Western allies handle Stalin's post-war demands, and given a choice between "Never again" as in don't commit/assist/cover up epic human rights abuses and "Never again" as in don't risk a war with Stalin over petty shit like human rights, the West chooses peace. The Cold War begins with conflicts over spheres of influence, not Soviet crimes. The rhetoric of the Truman doctrine is about defending democracy against totalitarianism, but the actual policy it was first used to justify was supporting what were effectively right-wing military governments in Greece and Turkey against probably-popular Communist-backed revolutions.

The Preamble to the UN Charter begins "We the Peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war..." and sets up a whole bunch of conflict-resolution institutions, some of which were intended to have teeth (although the Cold War meant that the Security Council never functioned as intended). It specifically declined to set up human-rights enforcement institutions - Article 2, Principle 7 is "Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state "

The Schuman Declaration setting up what would eventually become the European Coal and Steel Community specifically states that the aim is to make another war between France and (West) Germany impossible, but does not mention human rights. The EEC/EU doesn't even acquire a formal commitment to human rights until 2000.

This isn't surprising - World War II was an order of magnitude more deadly and destructive than the Holocaust. Comparing these Jewish Holocaust death tolls to these total WW2 death tolls, the only country where Holocausted Jews were a majority of the dead was Czechoslovakia (which was spared the worst of WW2 in a paradoxical but genuine success for Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy).

In Russia and China, "Never again" obviously refers to the invasion and ruination of their countries by Germany and Japan respectively - it is a call to make sure that you are at the table and not on the menu next time. So not "Never again a war", but "Never again a war without a quick victory". For obvious reasons, not about the Holocaust.

It is easy for Americans to think silly things about WW2 because the United States was spared most of the negative consequences. Continental Europe was basically trashed from Saint-Lo to Stalingrad, as was China. The UK was bombed, blockaded, and bankrupted. Japan was nuked. As the people who actually lived through all this die off, Americanised western Europeans are starting to think the same silly things. This is bad.

Also prevents 30 Years' Wars. You know how they say "every safety rule has a corpse behind it" and suchlike? Freedom of religion is the peace treaty to end a war that depopulated most of Central Europe.

The thing I have been noticing recently is, when a project inevitably blows past all budgets and timetables, people are like "we should just finish it, the cost won't matter decades from now".

Given the politics of Anglosphere infrastructure projects, this is a rational defensive measure. The main way special interests block projects is by using one set of proxies to drive up the cost by lobbying for scope creep (particularly through the environmental review process) and then using another set of proxies to blame the project's proponents for uncontrolled cost escalation and demand that the project be killed for cost control reasons.

If project supporters commit to going ahead regardless of cost escalation, then this doesn't work (until the cost reaches macro-economically significant levels like CAHSR of HS2).

Trump did not incite a riot in any way, shape, or form. There is simply no reasonable line you can draw between Trump's statements (which, among other things, were not made at the site of the riot) and the riot. Not by the Brandenburg standard, and not by any standard which has been applied to any politician since Brandenburg.

The line from Trump's speech to the riot is that Trump's speech is a but-for cause of the riot. If Trump doesn't assemble the mob and tell them to go to the Capitol, they don't go to the Capitol. No mob, no riot.

The questions "Did Donald Trump incite a riot?" and "Can Donald Trump be criminally prosecuted for inciting a riot, given the 1st amendment?" are not the same question - "incite" has an ordinary English meaning, and on the ordinary English meaning of "incite", Trump so did. The 1st amendment is, for the obvious good reasons, over-protective of political speech - it isn't surprising that it is possible to incite a riot while (just) staying within the boundary of protected speech. Trump shouldn't be prosecuted for inciting a riot, and he isn't being prosecuted for inciting a riot (both the Federal and Georgia indictments focus on his various attempts to overturn the election before Jan 6th). That doesn't mean he didn't incite a riot.

Growing up in the UK, our pro-free speech tradition has tended to rely on John Stuart Mill's On Liberty for the moral (not legal) limits of free speech in contexts that look like incitement.

An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.

Trump assembled an excited mob at the Ellipse, told them that the politicians in the Capitol were stealing an election, and then told them to go to the Capitol and "fight". On the John Stuart Mill test, he has (just) exceeded the bounds of protected free speech. Under the Brandenberg test, he (just) stayed inside it. On this point, the law is on Donald Trump's side, so I am going to pound the facts. Donald Trump did, in fact, incite a riot on January 6th.

  • -15

If the lack of smart, educated conservatives was driven entirely by institutional gatekeeping, then there would be a lot of smart uneducated conservatives, and the adverts on conservative websites would be for educational trips to Rome and the St John's College extramural programme. In fact, the adverts on conservative websites (except explicitly Christian ones) are for crypto scams and acai berry colon cleanses, suggesting that there is a real difference in IQ.

Richard Hanania isn't trolling when he complains about how dumb American conservatism is in the Current Year - he is expressing frustration. This is new, but not that new. George W Bush had to pretend to be dumber than he was in order to be a serious right-wing candidate for President, George HW Bush did not. The only powerful right-wing tendency that would appeal to an intellectually curious 130+ IQ is tradcath.

[Yes - I know Elon Musk is on the right, and a genius. But his right-wing fanbase don't like him because he builds electric cars, they lie him because of his low-effort shitposting]

I sometimes wonder if Saddam Hussein was aware there were no WMDs in Iraq - up to the point where resolution 1441 passes the UNSC, he acts like a man who has WMDs and expects to lose power if he gives them up.

I also think that W would have received a sufficient amount of stovepiped intelligence to convince anyone who doesn't start out with the prior that the entire US national security elite are lying liars that there were WMDs in Iraq. Apart from the fact that the national security establishment are lying liars who knew what the White House wanted to hear and were happy to provide it, Cheyney and Rumsfeld were exceptionally able DC power players, partially controlled the flow of intelligence to the Oval Office, and wanted the war even more than Bush.