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MadMonzer

Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite

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User ID: 896

MadMonzer

Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite

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

					

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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.

I don't. Jews who are paying attention can see the rising anti-semitism on the right. (And in particular, Jews who care about Israel know who was blocking the aid bill). Left-wing anti-semites are more dangerous individually (because they are more violent) but the anti-semitic right arguably includes people like Elon Musk and has far more access to the corridors of power than the Columbia protestors do.

Will more anti-semites be invited to the White House in a second Trump term or a second Biden term (not counting Gulf Arab diplomats etc. who are discreet about their anti-semitism)? It is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

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

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.

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.

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.

β€˜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.

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.

This is sensible. Given the nature of IQ 100-115 normies, allowing them to run arbitrary code on a machine is equivalent to allowing the GRU or Lockbit to run arbitrary code on that machine.

God did not intend every individual to have access to a universal Turing machine. On the other hand, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds did, and the GNU/Linux ecosystem isn't going anywhere because the internet backbone runs on it. In addition, a huge part of the value proposition of the Microsoft ecosystem (particularly relative to Apple) is that it supports organisations doing their own computing without needing to ask Microsoft's permission. Satya Nadella may not want every worker drone to have a universal Turing machine in their pocket, but he wants every enterprise customer's IT guy to have easy access to one. And in practice that means building machines which offer universal functionality to anyone who knows what they are doing.

My impression is that getting a progressive to acknowledge something went wrong with the Sexual Revolution is like nailing jello to a wall.

Mainstream progressive (i.e. sex-positive) feminism is happy to acknowledge that women are not getting off on the casual sex available post Sexual Revolution - they just blame men for it rather than reconsidering whether the Sexual Revolution was a good idea.

What happens after that is anyone's guess. In a literal sense we move back to where we were this January and do another election for Speaker.

I can only see two plausible outcomes:

  • There is another round of humiliating chaos for the Republican caucus, ending with them re-electing McCarthy for the same reason they did last time.
  • The 10 or so RINOest RINOs in the caucus put up a RINO for speaker and the Democrats vote for him.

The Freedom Caucus have zero leverage here. The speaker needs to be acceptable to the median Representative, who (a) is a RINO and (b) will lose their seat if they become associated with the unpopular parts of the Freedom Caucus agenda.

They're pretty much never middle-class white American or Western European kids.

Jeffery Epstein was picking up local white girls in Florida. I don't think any of them would have qualified as middle class, but several of them lived with at least one gainfully employed parent. Virginia Guiffre (the girl in the famous Prince Andrew picture) was working at Mar-a-Lago when Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her, which makes her at least respectable working class.

OTOH, it does look like he was picking on girls who were screwed up in various ways. For example, Virgina Guiffre had already been sexually abused by two men (one in her mother's house, one while living as a runaway) before moving in with her father, and was trying to become a masseuse.

The Roman Catholic Man-Boy Love Association targetted some kids from normie families who were sufficiently functional to be regular churchgoers. (Although the majority of the victims were children in Church-run children's homes, it was buggering the altar boys which gave the scandal legs). In the UK, the sexual abuse extended to pupils at Ampleforth, which was the most expensive and socially prestigious private school in the north of England. The other smaller religious sex abuse scandals tend to follow the same pattern.

The Penn State sex abuse scandal and similar scandals in youth sports (which is as lousy with sex abusers as the RCMBLA) involved student-athletes as victims, who tend to be middle-class, or at least respectable working class.

So although the "Taken" fantasy is almost entirely a media creation, it definitely isn't the case that normie middle-class white American kids are safe from sex abuse. It's just that it tends to involve corrupt authority figures, not stereotypical predators.

WARNING FOR PARENTS - THIS IS IMPORTANT - YOUR KID IS NOT PROTECTED FROM SEXUAL ABUSE BY CORRUPT AUTHORITY FIGURES BY YOUR MONEY, POWER OR COMMUNITY STANDING UNLESS YOU ACTUALLY DO THE WORK OF PROTECTING THEM. This starts by giving them the tools to talk to you about dodgy shit, and making sure they feel safe doing so.

In the 1980s and well into the 1990s the Holocaust was on the back burner in the UK for the same reason - as long as significant numbers of people who remembered the Blitz were still alive, no Briton was going to bellyfeel that anything else was Hitler's worst crime. The way history was taught in British schools was that Hitler was the evil Lord of Evil because he was bent on Alexander the Great/Genghis Khan style world conquest long after this had ceased to be acceptable behaviour. This became a Problem that required large-scale British military intervention to stop him several years before anyone came up with the Holocaust.

During the heroic period of WW2 (for the UK, from the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 to El Alamein in July 1942), we couldn't have been fighting Hitler in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the Holocaust, because the Holocaust hadn't started yet.

FWIW, I still think that the traditional British view is correct (which was also the view of the Nuremberg prosecutors), and that the Holocaust lobby is wrong - Hitler's worst crime was starting WW2. He isn't uniquely evil compared to other warmongering megalomanicas, just uniquely deadly because of the large European population in the 20th century.

I'm equally sure that pro-Israel Jews would prefer someone who moves aid forward while delivering a mild dressing-down for PR purposes to someone who praises Netanyahu to the skies while using aid as a lever to extract concessions elsewhere from his domestic political opponents. The Biden administration is significantly less critical of Netanyahu's policy in Gaza than the Israeli opposition, which most centrist American Jews find a lot more sympathetic than Likud.

This is classic social psych bullshit in a right-wing wrapper. There are two lying-with-statistics tricks going on here:

  1. Non-standard terminology. The definition of "elite 1%" excludes the vast majority of elites who live in rich suburbs. They define elite 1% as meeting all 3 of postgraduate degree (this covers 14% of the population), household income over $150k (trivial for a two-income PMC couple in a HCOL city - two schoolteachers with masters degrees would probably qualify) and living in a zip code with a population density over 10k/square mile (only a few % of the population - looking at zipatlas.com these zip codes are mostly downtown districts, prisons and campuses with their own zip codes, NYC, and dense inner suburbs of LA.) So the most restrictive condition is the population density one, which is not a measure of eliteness - it is a proxy for alignment with the tribe Rasmussen wants to bash.

  2. Garden of forking paths. The authors switch between "the elite 1%", "elite 1% graduates of a semi-arbitrary list of 12 schools" and "politically obsessed members of the elite 1%" as needed to make the point they are making. We don't know how many other cuts of the data they ran before they chose those ones.

Rasmussen are saying that they have surveyed the elite and found that they are out of touch with America. What they have actually done is surveyed the subset of the PMC that chooses to live in the densest 2% of zip codes, and their interns played with crosstabs until they found some subsets of that group who are, indeed, profoundly out of touch with America. This is about as meaningful as doing some vox pops with stoners in downtown Portland.

See this Arnold Kling post and comments for more details.

I think it’s clear that these are the people with actual power and influence, the ones who set the agenda, the key actors in tech, media, government and law. They create outcomes, or lack thereof. Just about every judge would be elite by this definition, along with nearly all AI workers (OK maybe not the work-from-home guys in the Colorado mountains). All lobbyists, the heads of most NGOs, the most important lawyers – everyone except the right-wing politicians who seem unable to achieve any of their goals.

Apart from Manhattanites, quite the opposite. Who has more power and influence - the residents of DC or the government officials who commute in from the burbs? The people of Anaheim and Inglewood or the people of Beverley Hills? 90210 is by the definition used in this study a non-elite zip code.

Upvoted for capital-T Truth.

We can argue about the allegorical meaning of Genesis 2 and how it relates to human sexuality until we are blue in the face, but you should always start with the literal meaning.

The literal meaning of Genesis 2, if you give it its usual context in the Christian story (as, for example, represented by its use as the first lesson in a standard Christmas carol service), is that the original sin was independent moral discernment. Satan's promise is not money, or sex, or power - it is to possess the moral wisdom of God. There are plenty of other scriptural passages reinforcing this. And certainly when I was taught Christian morality, both as child in nominally-Christian schools in the UK and as a potential convert in university, the key message was that the only real sin is rebellion against divine authority, and the drinking and sabbath-breaking flows from that.

All the Abrahamic religions are fundamentally about total submission of human will to God's. Judaism, Islam, and Protestantism all have a tradition of religious scholarship where all moral wisdom that humanity will ever have is already written down in a closed canon of fundamental works (either directly from divinely-inspired authors, or preserved commentary based on lost divinely-inspired sources) and the work of religious scholars is just to interpret it. Catholicism and Orthodoxy both claim that there is a still-living tradition capable of generating new moral wisdom, but that there is no access to God outside it.

This is why "Abrahamic religion bad" comes so easily to non-religious Americans - the great American social experiment is fundamentally about allowing independent moral judgement at the lowest possible level.