MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
American Jews used to be much more ideologically diverse and spread across both parties. Now they are like 98 percent Democrat and very very far left.
Modern Orthodox Jews mostly vote right, including Republican in the US, but are not particularly politically engaged in countries other than Israel. Haredi/Hassidic Jews vote for the Rebbe's corrupt political machine, and in the US the big ones are mostly nominally Republican.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
Dutch elections happened on Wednesday.
The background is that the cordon sanitaire against the populist right broke after the November 2023 election. After protracted negotiations, Dick Schoof became an independent Prime Minister in May 2024, leading a coalition of the PVV (right-populist, led by Geert Wilders), the VVD (right-liberal), BBB (agrarian populist), and NSC (Christian Democrats LARPing as populists). Schoof's background was as a career civil servant working on internal security - his last job before becoming PM was as secretary-general (the top career bureaucrat in a department, equivalent to a UK permanent secretary) at the Ministry of Justice and Security - he was acceptable to the PVV because he had previously become controversial as the head of the unit responsible for infiltrating mosques and spying on suspected Islamist terrorists. The Schoof cabinet collapsed after less than a year in June 2025 after a row over refugee policy (there were many disagreements, but it looks like the critical one is that the PVV wanted to start deporting Syrian refugees back to Syria on the grounds that the civil war was over), leading the early elections.
The UK MSM has focussed on the legally irrelevant but news-generating (because close) question of which party "won" by getting most votes nationally - the left-liberal D66 are 15,000 votes ahead of PVV with about 30,000 still to be counted. (At points yesterday they were only 2,000 ahead). But this doesn't matter - the Netherlands uses list-based PR and both parties will get 26 seats (out of 150). D66 leader Rob Jetten is the de facto Prime Minister-elect.
We are smarter than the MSM, so lets take a less retarded perspective. This was a throw-the-bums-out election, with all 4 governing parties taking a bath. PVV are down from 37 to 26, VVS are down from 24 to 22, BBB down from 7 to 4, and NSC down from 20 to zero (oops!). So 36 seats lost by former governing parties.
The other loser is the main centre-left list (a de facto merger between the Greens and the PvdA, which is the Dutch equivalent of UK Labour) is down from 25 to 20.
The gainers are D66 (up from 9 to 26), the Christian Democratic CDA (up from 5 to 18, mostly from NSC voters returning to their traditional party), and two smaller right-populist parties. FvD (further right than PVV - they support an EU exit referendum and don't kick out actual brownshirt-and-swastika Nazis) are up from 3 to 7 and JA21 (who split from FvD after FvD leadership refused to kick out some youth activists who publicly stanned Anders Breivik, but now claim to be less right-wing than PVV) are up from 1 to 9.
What are the possible takeaways?
- Coalitions between right populists and non-right populists don't work well for anyone involved. Many such cases - this isn't the first.
- The right populist vote is robust at just over 25%. The total number of seats for right populist parties went up from 41 to 42. Even if individual right populist parties beclown themselves, the phenomenon isn't going away.
- Pasokification is contagious - the merger has Pasokified the Greens rather than reviving the PvdA.
- Fake populists get found out
- Liberal parties cand turn votes
My non-expert guesses about coalition formation (48/150): Parties that will definitely not join a D66-led coalition: PVV/FvD/JA21 - right populist - 42 seats total Socialist Party - far left, basically commies - 3 seats SGP - Protestant fundamentalists - 3 seats Parties that are very unlikely to join a D66-led coalition (13/150): BBB - Agrarian populist - 4 seats Christian Union - Christian Democrats, but more explicitly Christian than CDA - 3 seats PvdD - single-issue animal rights - 3 seats 50+ - single-issue pensioner rights - 2 seats Volt - IAmVerySmart online liberals - 1 seat Parties that might join a D66-led coalition (89/150 with 76 needed for a majority) D66 - left-liberal - 26 seats VVD - right-liberal - 22 seats Centre-left - 20 seats CDA - Christian Democrats - 18 seats Denk - anti-racist, led by assimilated Muslim immigrants - 3 seats
So the only possible majority coalition is the one that combines all four traditional major parties (D66, VVD, PvdA and CDA). A coalition including right-populists is unlikely after what happened last time. It is also hard to form - the total for left and liberal parties that wouldn't touch right populists with a bargepole is 58 seats leaving the right needing to get 76 out of a possible 92 votes while dealing with the bad blood between the former governing parties, and also the rival right populist parties. A left-wing coalition can similarly forget about the right populists, SGP, CU and VVD meaning they need 76 out of 80 available votes while dealing with the People's Front of Judea.
I predict a minority government. D66 historically prefer to work with VVD and PvdA, leaving them 8 seats short of a majority and with plenty of places to go looking for them on a vote-by-vote basis. But the 4-way Grand Coalition definitely could happen.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
I have no idea what is happening in Pokrovsk, but I note that it isn't somewhere where a Western MSM outlet is going to be able to maintain a full-time reporter, and someone has been briefing the Western MSM that it is about to fall on-and-off for about a year now.
The BBC's sources here are a lying Russian general and a lying Ukrainian general. I don't need the MSM to know what lies the lying liars want to tell me. If they can't their own reporter into Pokrovsk, they could shut up. I know it's expensive and dangerous - that's what I pay my licence fee for, and it's why war reporters have the status they do.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
· Edited 3d ago
And yet fewer people with IQs above room temperature press the defect button than "ever" before. (Crime has fallen a lot from the Days of Lead but isn't quite back down to the 1950's low)
In the current year, crime isn't a problem of insufficient deterrence. It is a problem of people so stupid and impulsive that they require a different kind of deterrence - like immediate corrective violence by the nearest available Good Ol'Boy or a Iain M Banks style slap drone.
Phase 1 of modern crime control is to minimise the number of such people:
- Don't import them
- Don't homegrow them by blowing lead dust at kids
- If you do homegrow them, lock them up until they are too old to crime any more.
Phase 2 is to make co-operate the socially normal default (this is the "broken windows" concept) Phase 3 is to make the deterrents we do have sufficiently swift and certain enough that at the margin the IQ needed for them to work on you is lower.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
On a farm, yes. By the mid-20th century, no - Dad didn't reliably get home before bedtime, and in any case Mum knew that immediate punishment was dramatically more effective than delayed punishment.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
5d ago
Although there is clearly a drift to centralisation, it isn't a ratchet. Clear reversals in US history include:
- Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans pushing back against Adams and the Federalists
- The post-FDR pushback (the Administrative Procedure Act regularised the expanded executive branch, Congress put more effort into holding it to account, and the 22nd amendment prevented Presidents-for-life.)
- The pushback against the national security state after Watergate and COINTELPRO (which mostly held up until 9/11)
- The Clinton/Gingrich reforms devolved two big programmes (AFDC/TANF and most of Medicaid) to the States.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
5d ago
· Edited 4d ago
I have heard it said that 1MDB fraudster Jho Low was the only person ever to spend a whole billion dollars on debauchery and loose living. And he had to do things like paid dates with Miranda Kerr in order to do it.
AFAIK truly great fortunes are almost always lost on investments and stocks
Above the "sufficient to endow an upper-middle class standard of living for life" level, the biggest destroyers of generational wealth are division (which overlaps with the 3 F's in that one of the things that divides fortunes is divorce settlements, but the central case is division between children) and confiscation. Investing your entire life savings in pets.com is what retired dentists who think they are smart do. The failure mode of dumb old money is to halve a fortune over a generation by overpaying for mediocre investment advice, which does about the same amount of damage as the entirely standard practice of splitting it between two siblings, and a lot less damage than being in the wrong place at the wrong time when Lenin or Harold Wilson comes calling.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
(I think that there is a point to be made that the latter use is at times actually rather pro-social, allowing people to work around de-banking and donating to wikileaks. But good luck convincing your government of that!)
Although I agree with you that some crimes are pro-social, I think you have to be very libertarian to think that crime is pro-social on net. Binance facilitated all the crimes, not all of which were victimless, notably including terrorism and human trafficking as well as the usual picayune stuff like ransomware.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
Providing you don't release goods or services until the payment transaction is confirmed, Bitcoin itself retains its core security properties even if transmission of messages is unreliable. You just wait longer for transactions to confirm. Bitcoin at rest are even safe in the event of a 51% attack (though transactions are not).
The Lightning network becomes insecure if the network is unreliable - if the owner of Bitcoins in a payment channel can't reliably broadcast a slashing transaction to the blockchain then their counterparty can steal them. And in the event of a 51% attack this can be engineered maliciously.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
Sanctioning their oil exports indefinitely was clearly an untenable situation,
This was one of the two main reasons why I (foolishly) supported the war at the time. The other was as a prerequisite to ending the mutually abusive relationship between the US (and allies) and Saudi Arabia that was Osama Bin Laden's primary casus belli.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
I'd say the Roman Republic was destroyed by a lack of political control over the military, not by the inability of one element of the political leadership to check and balance another. The key points of failure all seem to involve a general whose troops were more loyal to him than the Republic marching on Rome before he could be fired by the civilian ruling institutions.
My informed layman's view is that the system in the Middle Republic worked because the Centuriate Assembly weighted votes in rough proportion to the military utility of the different classes of citizen in the conscripted army, so the people who elected the consuls and the people who formed the consuls army were functionally the same people. Whereas following the so-called Marian reforms you have a long-service professional army drawn from the proles who are effectively excluded from the Centuriate Assembly and don't feel obliged to respect the consuls it elects.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
It wouldn't have been directly equivalent, because the spending he minted the platinum coin to pay for would have been approved by Congress.
When Congress passes a deficit budget without raising the debt ceiling to pay for it, the President is subject to mutually contradictory laws - at which point the concept of obeying the law goes out of the window. I suppose you could argue that if a loophole like the platinum coin exists, the President is legally required to use it as the alternative breaks a law (either the budget or the debt ceiling). When Congress doesn't pass a budget, the legally correct thing is clear - the executive branch should stop spending money that hasn't been appropriated.
The fundamental asymmetry here is that the debt ceiling is constitutionally pointless - it doesn't give the Congress any useful additional powers because if Congress wants the debt not to increase they can just pass a balanced budget. The requirement for annual appropriations is a core structural feature of the US Constitution.
The factual and political logic is the same in both cases - when Congress behaves in a sufficiently retarded manner, the President is going to look for a loophole. It is hard to say that Trump is doing the wrong thing by paying the troops illegally, but he is making a novel move to increase the power of the Presidency at the expense of Congress, and it is part of a pattern of behaviour of circumventing the power of the purse, not all of which was a necessary response to Congressional retardation.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
Fair enough - I agree with you that as a matter of US domestic politics the decision to do Gulf War 2 was over-determined.
I think the message here is "If you are determined for domestic reasons to achieve all of your war aims, people will object less if you don't negotiate a ceasefire and then come back for a second bite at the cherry"
To which the obvious counter-argument is "Yes, but this is the Middle East."
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
AFAICT among Democrats his name is still mud
I don't think this is true, except in the sense that he is a conservative Republican and therefore the enemy. He tends to score well in polls of academic historians, for example, who are 80-90% Democrats. It is (and was at the time) mud among leftists, who resent the fact that he successfully deprived their beloved USSR of the moral high ground. Most Democrats are not leftists, although for most of the last decade this hasn't been obvious because the non-leftist Democrats were afraid of the leftists calling them racist.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
It’s difficult to imagine a scenario after all where the 1991 Gulf War is not followed by another Gulf War eventually.
It's very easy. If the US doesn't start the 2nd Gulf War, there isn't a 2nd Gulf War. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours in 2003 and his WMD programme was kayfabe to deter an Iranian invasion. The only terrorism he was sponsoring was Palestinian terrorism against Israel, which the West was and is comfortable tolerating in countries they don't have any other beefs against. Israel and Saudi Arabia both wanted Saddam gone, but by 2003 both saw Iran as the real threat, which means that the most likely outcome of a 2nd Gulf War (a Shia-dominated government inclined not to oppose Iran) is net negative for them.
There are good reasons for thinking that the world would have been better off without Saddam if he could have been removed by someone competent, but nobody had to remove him. There is no credible scenario where Saddam starts a 2nd Gulf War from his side.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
Paradoxically president does have right to impose tariffs specifically for National Security reasons.
All three courts to consider this question and about 2/3 of the individual judges have said the opposite. SCOTUS is considering it.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
The line I am drawing is "these tariffs were expressly authorised by Congress" vs "these tariffs were not expressly authorised by Congress". I don't think that is an artificial distinction. Nor does SCOTUS, given the existence of the Major Questions Doctrine.
I am happy to admit that the Nixon TWEA tariffs at issue in Yoshida are a corner case that you could reasonably claim as a precedent imposing tariffs based on an implicit authorisation, but both Nixon and the Appeals Court made their case that the tariffs were legal based partly on an express authorisation in another part of the statute book.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
There is a big difference between a limited delegation of authority and a general one. With one possible exception*, the previous cases of executive tariffs were done under the authority of statutes which allowed specific tariffs to be imposed for specific reasons (such as antidumping), not under broad emergency powers.
* Nixon used a predecessor statue to IEEPA to raise tariffs in 1971, which was ruled lawful on appeal, but Proclamation 4074 didn't raise tariffs above the level set by Congress, it just suspended various tariff-reducing executive orders authorised by other statutes. Nixon didn't claim, and the Court for Customs and Patent Appeals explicitly declined to rule on, the idea that the President could use IEEPA to charge tariffs which Congress never contemplated, as Trump is doing.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
I don't think Congress intended to delegate the power to raise tariffs on anyone, at any time, for any reason (including, for example, to punish a foreign politician for telling the truth about Ronald Reagan), which is the power that Donald Trump is claiming. (Trump's lawyers argue that both the President's determination that an emergency exists and the President's decision of who to tariff in response to the emergency are unreviewable by the courts, and can only be overturned by Congress with veto-proof majorities).
If Congress has wordcelled themselves into delegating a broad non-reviewable taxing power to the President, this doesn't change the fact that the Trump tariffs are still an unprecedented usurpation of the traditional taxing authority of the Congress, just one that is technically legal, in the same way that it is technically legal for the President to sell pardons under Trump vs United States. And INS vs Chadha (which invalidated the clause in IEEPA allowing Congress to cancel an emergency declaration by simple majorities) would turn out to have been a Dredd Scott tier mistake by SCOTUS.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
I don't think Congress rubberstamped Obamacare. There was a lot of negotiation between the White House, Pelosi's House leadership team, and the marginal senators who would be needed to get the thing through the Senate. The version of Obamacare that was rushed through without backbench House members having time to agree it was the result of that negotiation - it wasn't the administration's original draft.
That said, your basic point about the imperial Presidency stands. The non-US political science literature sees it as an inherent flaw of presidential democracy with strong political parties (and as something which has happened much faster in every presidential democracy, which isn't the US, usually ending in an autogolpe). In the here and now, the Trump budget shenanigans is a major escalation, and a particularly significant one because the budget is the main tool that a non-veto-proof Congressional majority has against a recalcitrant President.
I expect any attempt to discuss how bad the situation is is going to run into the ultimate scissor around the 2020 election and what it means for assessments of Trump's good intentions. "A president with a record of libertarian activism who stans Milei and poasts about the need to route around feckless Dems and Rinos is trying to partially usurp Congress's power of the purse in order to cut wasteful spending" is consistent with the long bipartisan history of drift towards an imperial presidency, including the general principle that each step on that road feels like a good idea at the time. "A president with a record of populist authoritarian activism who stans Putin, Orban and Bukele and poasts about his plans to attempt an autogolpe is trying to partially usurp Congress's power of the purse in order to defund his political opponents" stinks of burning Reichstag.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
I don't think we disagree. In the instant case the point is that if "imposing 3 trillion dollars in tariffs" is a major question and the MQD applies to the interpretation of IEEPA, then the power to "regulate trade" should not be interpreted as including the power to impose tariffs, whereas under ordinary canons of statutory interpretation it is a close call.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
Reagan liked lower taxes. So does Trump.
Reagan liked cutting rates (and in particular top rates which were far too high at the time) while closing loopholes and simplifying the tax code. Trump likes opening new loopholes and making the tax code more complex.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
"Clinton and Gingrich actually did more to roll back the welfare state and control spending in general" is very much a valid criticism of Reagan. Empirically, the US is only fiscally responsible when there is a Democratic President and a Republican deficit hawk leads at least one house of Congress.
"Starve the beast" is a failed Reagan policy - it turns out that if you cut taxes while promising to protect popular spending, you don't force your political opponents to cut spending when they get in, you just blow out the deficit. The reason why Reagan still has a good reputation on tax is that most of what he did to the tax code was fiscally neutral simplification (lower rates, fewer loopholes).
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
Biden's pullout was also executing a deal made by the 1st Trump administration which the Deep State were trying to manipulate Biden into ratting out of.
I tease "Trump makes us stronk" MAGA supporters about the fact that Trump surrendered to the Taliban, but under the circumstances it was clearly the right call for Trump to surrender and clearly the right call for Biden to implement the surrender agreement. The war had ceased to be winnable long ago.
Spain is already a Great Power under Ferdinand and Isabella, who unite Aragon and Castille in 1479 and complete the Reconquista in 1492, a year in which they also play venture capitalist and sponsor a Genoese nutcase who has the wrong value for the circumference of the Earth and thinks he can sail west to China without running out of fresh water for the crew.
Charles V consolidates the Habsburg Empire in 1519 including Spain, Austria and the formerly Burgundian Netherlands, and then goes on to conquer large parts of Italy (some of which is badged as a reconquest of historic Aragonese territory). When he abdicates in 1545, the Spanish half of the Empire is clearly the senior one, although it includes the now-Spanish Netherlands, which were not part of the Spanish inheritance. But even without the Netherlands, I think Spain including the old Aragonese possessions in Italy is a strong candidate for 2nd-strongest country in Early Modern Europe (after France).
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