MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
35m ago
"Rich people are morally obliged to contribute to society in ways which reflect the level and type of resources they control" is a social norm, as is "Influential people should form coalitions to punish non-contributing rich people". "This should be centralised and formalised through high taxes" is the political norm, and I don't think it enjoyed supermajority acceptance as a political norm in any time or place except 1945-1975.
The underlying social norms are a lot older than Andrew Carnegie. The Athenian liturgy system is a compulsory but informal version, Republican Rome doesn't institutionalise it but the idea that rich Romans should personally fund public entertainments is a major theme in Roman politics. Medieval feudalism is the idea that rich people should personally fund the very expensive military equipment (warhorse and steel armour) that they and their retainers perform compulsory military service with. (They were also expected to make large donations to the Church). The Victorian concept of noblesse oblige which is probably part of what inspired Carnegiesque philanthropy was based around the idea that rich people who no longer needed to work should take on prestigious-but-burdensome unpaid roles in local government.
The explicit and public rejection of the underlying norm by the Tech Right, with Musk saying that rich people should continue to invest their wealth in for-profit businesses and calling out Bill Gates for letting the side down by donating it, is historically unusual, and the rest of America co-ordinating to punish them would be historically normal.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9hr ago
Social workers are sufficiently badly paid that they wouldn't be doing the job if they didn't genuinely believe that they were helping. I think this is a case where Occam's Razor points to mistake theory and not conflict theory.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9hr ago
Two doctor couples in the UK routinely hire a full-time nanny and a part-time housekeeper, and we have less inequality and higher taxes than you do, so there is something other than taxes or wage compression preventing Americans hiring servants.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
14hr ago
The petit bourgeois (as defined by Marx) in modern society consists mostly of self-employed tradesmen and microbusiness owners. These are the most right-wing occupational group and largely define themselves in opposition to the PMC, which by stereotype consists of employees of large (public and private sector) organisations with large salaries.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
14hr ago
My suspicion is that the costs Presidential security imposes on third parties (road closures, airspace restrictions etc.) are significantly more than the Secret Service budget.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
14hr ago
Israel's response to Palestinian terrorism was mostly to harden the outer perimeter by ending the use of Palestinian day-labour.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
14hr ago
If you normalise sex-selective IVF for white normies, families wanting two children will have one of each and most of the families wanting one child will choose a girl. I suspect the same is true of black babymamas and well-assimilated Asians.
The problem is that you preferentially need to remove the bottom 20% of males to get the benefits of @Testing's idea, whereas this policy would preferentially remove above average males.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
15hr ago
But do people really desire this? I would say the evidence points to people in general wanting to live around and interact with people in their own economic class, not live as a king among the poors.
America is unusual among societies with relatively high inequality in that the "rich" class arranges things to make it easier to avoid poors 100% of the time, not to make it easier to hire servants with the tradeoff of only being able to avoid the other poors 90% of the time. I don't know if this is because America has a cultural norm of fake egalitarianism which makes people want servants less, or if it is because America is worse at policing such that people are willing to make more tradeoffs to avoid poors.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
15hr ago
Arutyunian counts by the criteria I gave, even if GWB wasn't the actual target. His motives for trying to kill Saakashvili make perfect sense.
I think Oswald is marginal. He seems more of a nihilist who picked up communism as an expression his nihilism while living in the US, and then abandoned it as an expression of his nihilism while living in the USSR. And of course "was Oswald a communist or a nihilist" is something I can't find accurate information about with ordinary effort because it touches on Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
18hr ago
Very much agreed. When was the last time someone sane enough to have comprehensible political motives that make sense tried to assassinate a US President? I think it was the turn-of-the-century anarchists.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
18hr ago
I think the athletes are doing most of the work - the guys running 2-hour marathons with supershoes were running sub-2:15 marathons without them.
Also these are $500 trainers - i.e. well within the budget of a middle-class American, an upper-middle-class Europoor, or a DIII college athletics programme - not $15 million F1 cars.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
20hr ago
Liberals don’t care about most of that. They have zero interest in fixing local majority minority schools.
I think this is false. The amount of money shovelled, with the full support of liberal elites and the votes of liberal non-elites, into uplifting children from historically disadvantaged groups (very much including white oiks and chavs in the UK - I'm not sure if class counts in the US) through education and anciliary services is more than we have spent on almost any other social problem except for elder poverty (which we have managed to bankrupt the west over, but we did at least solve the problem).
It is true that this spending has been ineffective for "bad apples and bad bets" reasons, but that doesn't imply zero interest in fixing poor schools, just an inability to triage.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
21hr ago
The US security guarantee under NATO never extended to US support for punitive operations against countries which harboured terrorists. When Israel area-bombs civilian targets in southern Lebanon in order to root out Hezbollah, the US sends cash and ammo. If the UK had area-bombed civilian targets in County Monaghan and County Louth in order to root out the IRA, the US would have sent a Suez-style spanking.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
21hr ago
Yahadut Hatorah is an explicitly non-Zionist coalition of Haredi and Hasidic political parties that consistently gets 6-7 MKs. Back in the 1990s their MKs would refuse to sing the national anthem at the start of Knesset sessions. The anger at a party which was widely perceived as anti-Israel joining the government in 1996 drove the foundation of Shinui as a secular, Zionist, right-liberal party in opposition to Likud - the first pledge in Shinui's manifesto was "we will never join a coalition that includes MKs who don't sing the national anthem". The Haredi parties have improved their behaviour since then in order to become an acceptable coalition party for Netanyahu after 2009, but they still represent the tendency within Haredi communities to treat the State of Israel as a food animal.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
22hr ago
Politically correct taxonomy - it's not just for hominids.
(IIRC Jared Diamond wrote that if any other species did taxonomy, chimps and humans would be in the same genus).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
22hr ago
Most taxonomists consider canis lupus lupus (Eurasian wolves), canis lupus dingo, canis lupus familiaris and the various subspecies of north American wolf to be the same species.
It isn't clear to me why canis latrans is a categorised as a different species given that fertile hybrids exist, although the wikipedia articles imply that c. latrans/c. lupus hybridisation is much less likely in the wild than hybridisation between c. lupus subspecies.
Combining the two topics, it appears that the debate about the origin of dingos has been stilted by concern about Aboriginal sensibilities - Occam's Razor points to the dingo being descended from feral domestic dogs brought over by the ancestors of the Aborigines, but lots of people want the story to be that dingos and humans came over separately and the Aborigines domesticated the dingo themselves in Australia.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
23hr ago
McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee
Two different groups with different agendas. The HUAC was devoted to rooting out actual communists (most famously Alger Hiss), fellow-travellers (like Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles), and people protecting them (like Arthur Miller). McCarthy was putting on a show for the benefit of the "water fluoridation is communism" crowd and pioneered the art of making bad-faith allegations of communist sympathies against political opponents.
Lumping them together discredited the work of the HUAC, it didn't rehabilitate McCarthy. After the Army-McCarthy hearings McCarthy's reputation is rightfully unsalvageable.
The post-1994 (in the US) or post-1997 (in the UK) policy of incentivising single mothers into low-paid work with their kid in subsidised daycare has succeeded. But a single parent in a low-paid job (or, for that matter, a second parent in a low-paid job) which barely covers the cost of childcare isn't directly improving their economic situation by working, only making themselves more deserving of subsidy.
To fix the incentives towards single parenthood, you need to increase the gap in standards of living between two-adult, two-income families and one-adult, one-income families. For the less-than-respectable working class, making single-parent families poorer in general means letting kids starve, but you could abolish the soft preferences for single mothers in the jackpottable parts of the welfare state (like social housing in the UK). And increasing the standard of living of low-paid couple-headed families at that level (where people are not rich enough to pay a lot of income tax) means giving them money, which gives conservatives the ick, unless it is BAH for dependas.
According to conservatives on radio it is Great Society welfare policies that destroyed black American marriage rates.
Also the Moynihan report, which was not by a conservative.
Old-school Welfare treated a family headed by a single mother as deserving poor (having been introduced at a time when most single mothers were widows, or divorced for sympathetic reasons), but a family headed by a man who couldn't hold down a steady full-time job as undeserving poor. The incentive to make yourself deserving poor is obvious.
It remains the case that a single mother is going to be subsidy-dependent (one person can't earn enough to support both her own family and the woman who is looking after the kids while she is working unless she is pulling in an upper-middle-class income) and these subsidies are means tested such that most of the income of a lower-middle-class man who joins her household is promptly going to be means-tested away (or, in reverse, that most of the income of a lower-middle-class partner she ejects will be replaced by means-tested benefits).
Post sexual revolution culture thinks that people should couple up for love and not money, meaning that not redistributing away the (very practical, with a computable cash value) benefits of couple formation is creating a "perverse" incentive. The red tribe agrees with the general principle, but think the required redistribution should be informal through churches (meaning the benefit can be restricted to women who comply with the red tribe's marry-early-marry-often version of modern sexual morality) rather than coercively through the state.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
nothing stopping you from job-hunting a bit again especially towards the end of the internship
And as an intern without an offer, you can openly jobhunt while employed, and even get help from with your jobhunt from your co-workers. You can't do that in a normal job.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Patel is so useless that he does more damage to the administration alive than dead? But if you thought that, you would probably think the same thing about Trump.
If Trump were to die of natural causes tomorrow my heart would want to rejoice, but my head knows that Vance is probably more dangerous.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Every midterm election has been bad for the President's party since 2006. (Both 1998 and 2002 saw the President's party gain seats, 1994 was the Gingrich wave election, and before that there were enough Dixiecrats that the system worked differently).
But there are bigger and smaller midterm defeats. The 2026 Senate map was supposed to be unwinnable for Democrats, and now it isn't.
Historically, the biggest midterm shellackings have happened when the incumbent Congressional leadership beclowns themselves, like the House Banking scandal (1994) or the numerous scandals of the Hastert-Delay paedoCongress (2006). This may be the first time a President destroys his Congressional colleagues without their help.
Nike is much better at marketing than Adidas, that's pretty much it. Also I think most people don't actually care about the nitpicky rules and so the barrier was already broken, does breaking it a second time "but actually" really say anything new?
Breaking it in an actual race gets you recognition from e.g. the Guiness Book of Records, which is what the man in the street takes as official. You can argue about how much the difference between an exhibition race run under competition rules (like the "race" Roger Bannister ran his four-minute mile in) and an event with a team of 41 pacers running in a formation designed to protect the record breaker from air resistance, but from the point of view of achieving the thing we set out to achieve when people started talking about the two-hour marathon, the point is that one counts and the other doesn't.
Also, the 2026 London Marathon was a real race with big money on the line. It wasn't the pacer in from of him that pulled Sawe over the line, it was the risk of being overtaken by Kejelcha that pushed him.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Barkley is deliberately non-commercial though. If there was money in ultra running, Gary Cantrell/Lazarus Lake wouldn't take it, and the infrastructure to get east Africans entered into his events would never come into being.
The (relatively small by first-world professional sports standards, but large by Sub-Saharan African middle-class income standards) money in marathon running is needed to maintain the infrastructure that finds fast runners in what is still darkest Africa. Part of how we got the 2-hour marathon is by sending a talent scout into the kind of remote village in the Kenyan highlands where nobody even dreams of being able to afford $500 trainers in order to find boys like Sabastian Sawe.
Based on my understanding of the restaurant industry which comes from Kitchen Nightmares, 86 means to temporarily take an item off the menu, normally due to a sold-out ingredient but on the show often due to an impulse decision by an insane manager or a gross kitchen screwup.
More options
Context Copy link