Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8hr ago
You know what I've noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan". But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds.
Crime committed by immigrates provides a sharp flashpoint in a way other crime doesn't. The actual scale of the issue doesn't matter. Actual crime rates don't matter. What matters is that it's not priced in.
I can't speak to Northern Ireland, but here in the US, we have a lot of crime and a lot of avoidable death. We are, collectively, shockingly blithe about it - some people even take pride in it. One black man kills another in an argument? Priced in - everyone will just assume they were gang members, and in any event black lives don't matter. Cops make the worst shoot in the history of law enforcement and suffer no consequences? Priced in - nobody's perfect. A psycho shoots up a school, leaving dozens dead? Priced in - a few dead kids is the Price of Freedom^tm. Reckless driving kills more people than ten 9/11s, every single year? You better believe it's priced in. My grandfather didn't storm the beaches in Normandy so I could drive the speed limit (or, god forbid, take a train like some sort of communist).
A immigrant kills a native? Start building the internment camps and spare no thought for human dignity or individuals' rights. Collective punishment is the only solution.
On some level, I understand it. People really do acculturate to certain risks, to the point where they tolerate seemingly unreal levels of damage, and will get viciously defensive at the suggestion we maybe need to recalibrate our tradeoffs. Crime in particular is an emotional subject, since it is liable to be construed as free-standing anti-social behavior and people react more strongly to malice than misfortune (particularly if the motives are exotic and the victim is atypical). But there's a remarkable lack of curiosity about the actual scope of the issue. The preferred angle is lurid anecdotes (hilariously, the same error they tend to castigate CJRers for with respect to police misconduct). And for some reason the logic of collective judgment and punishment only flows one way. No one in the nativist camp thinks we need to carry out a purge of professional athletes just because professional athletics has a cottage industry in sexual assault cases, or that maybe we should . An uncharitable person might think there's some folks just looking for an excuse to do a pogrom.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9hr ago
If an Irish man used a religious exemption to acquire a weapon to murder somebody
That's not what happened here. Sikhs have a religious exemption that allows them to carry a knife as a religious article. If the murderer had converted to Sikhism in order to acquire a knife with which to murder someone, this argument might have legs, but it didn't.
However, the Irish were and are religiously deviant from the US' predominantly Protestant culture, have a long history of "overperforming" the nation as a whole in crime, and to this day many of them live in ethnic enclaves with distinctive social norms. Really, I'm just trying to get some clarity as to what constitutes non-integration by your standards, since you allude to some yardsticks, but don't state them clearly.
You put "building a parallel society" in quotes and I'm not sure if I should read that as scare quotes.
I'm quoting you. You are claiming that Sikhs are building a parallel society in Britain. On what basis do you claim this? So far, the primary justification you've offered is that they get a religious exemption that allows them to carry a kirpan.
Are Jews integrated in the United States? Are the Irish? Are Texans? What are the standards for 'building a parallel society' such that we should apply it to British Sikhs?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
12d ago
They don't, actually.
Like, I don't know if you interact with some unusually unpleasant set of women, are unusually unpleasant yourself, or simply have perceptual issues, but I promise that you do not need to be in the top quintile for hotness for women to not think you're a creep for existing near them.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
14d ago
I believe the law provides that a single parcel of land is only entitled to a single vote, and you don't get multiple votes for owning multiple pieces of property:
These provisions shall be construed in accordance with the principle of “one person/entity, one vote.” Where a voter is entitled to vote by virtue of being both a resident and as an owner of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote; where a voter is entitled to vote by ownership of two or more parcels of real property, that voter shall be entitled to only one vote.
And since the division of land into parcels is presumably controlled by the government, you wouldn't be able to run your electoral hydra scheme without the cooperation of the city/county.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
21d ago
Are 6000 grants a petty amount?
Measured against the full scope of USAID operations? Yes. More importantly, however, the claimed fraud is not in evidence. USAID money going to things you don't approve of is not fraud or corruption. Musk et al. have lived repeatedly and misrepresented (or simply misunderstood, because they're incompetent) what they found such that I am very skeptical that the bulk of these 6000 cases were even problematic, let alone genuinely corrupt. Even cases of genuine large-scale fraud were exaggerated and turned out to be significantly smaller than claimed.
By comparison, we with Trump are talking about open self-dealing and abuse of the powers of the office, all happening on an unheard-of scale.
His is concentrated and gaudy; the other kinds are diffuse.
The fundamental lie of Trumpism is that if you tolerate his personal depravity and corruption then he will fix big, systemic problems. The reality is that depraved, corrupt leaders do not make decisions in the public interest, and this only becomes worse when you allow then to openly monetize their office. Trump isn't just personally corrupt, either. He also enables and facilities corruption beneath him.
This would carry more weight if Trump's approval wasn't cratering and we didn't have an endless parade of clueless swing voters saying they thought he was just going to use his inflationary policies to lower egg prices. Trump benefited tremendously from gentle, sanewashing media coverage during the election. It's example #1,032,548 of people getting suckered by the most embarrassingly transparent conman. They really ought to have known better, but it's not evidence of much but the fact that most people aren't very discerning.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
22d ago
That doesn't help the "USAID spending was corruption" case. It highlights how insubstantial the objections are and how feeble the attempts to draw an equivalence to Trump's corruption are. The argument is, essentially, that spending money on things conservatives don't like is fraudulent and that these petty amounts are equivalent to direct abuse of office for personal gain and billions in direct self-dealing.
(Underlying all of this was the incredible mendacity of DOGE and assorted fellow travelers in their claims of finding fraud/waste, such that any individual allegation can't be taken seriously without significant additional investigation)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
28d ago
I can't speak to your job specifically, but more generally this presumes the regulation is a net negative. That, in turn, frequently depends on normative arguments about what regulation ought to be doing*. As such, I don't think the concept of "bullshit job" reasonably applies, even if you think compliance officers existing is a net negative for society.
(A regulation can, of course, fail on its own merits, but that's a tangential issue).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
29d ago
Is being a police officer a bullshit job? Professional law enforcement is an occupation that only exists because of legislation creating it.
Graeber would say yes, though that's because he thinks any kind of security work is BS; he also thinks actuaries and corporate attorneys and executive assistants are all bullshit jobs. Conversely, he'd probably think food safety inspector was a real job. This is because "bullshit job" is an incoherent concept that people slap on jobs they think shouldn't exist. They have a variety of reasons why they might think a job shouldn't exist, but they're almost always normative claims about what things are worth doing.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
29d ago
I don't think it's a problem that we keep coming up with new stuff for people to do (I think we will probably see more and more people employed doing things we previously would have regarded as too frivolous to professionalize).
My point is more that administrivia is somewhat self-perpetuating. Partly this is a function of Jevon's Paradox - as we get more efficient at doing paperwork, one of the biggest results is more paperwork. We now control and track and analyze stuff that would have been impractical to the point of impossibility 50 years ago. Contra some of my other respondents, I don't actually think that this work is useless (otherwise they'd get squeezed out by employers looking to cut costs), but I think it is unlikely to go away without a deliberate effort because it also a function of our prevailing employment paradigm.
Having mulled it over, Jevon's Paradox is probably the wrong conceptual reference. For the foreseeable future, you still need humans to do some stuff. This is real, valuable work, but it may not actually take up most of their time (especially if AI actually delivers on productivity improvements). However, their employer still expects them to be available full time, which means they expect to be paid full-time, which means their employer expects them work full time*, which means creating busywork. Sometimes this is merely stuff of marginal value, sometimes it is outright time wasting. Either way, getting rid of this institutional waste heat and shifting to a genuinely fully automated process would require that you both be able to fully replace human activity with machine activity (not simply augment it) and to step outside of how we currently organize work.
*Also the employees generally want full time employment and prefer employers who offer it
Unfortunately, busywork is also subject to Jevon's Paradox.
Building a fully automated economy is going to require conscious effort to build systems that reduce/eliminate human participation. Otherwise the meatbags will just keep making more work for each other.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
30d ago
The problem I have with failure-to-deter and other sins of inaction is that unless you're withdrawing some active intervention they're overdetermined. Obama could have done more to oppose Russia post-2013/4, but so could most of Europe. The sheer indifference of most European allies colored the US' own response.
Specifically regarding failures of deterrence, it is not clear to me what critics of Obama expected him to have done other than something really outside like cooperate in suppressing the Maidan protests.
Frankly, the flip from that to Russia-gate makes me take the left's positions on international relations as deeply un-serious.
I don't think this follows. Obama's dismissiveness of Russia as a source of problems in 2012 has certainly aged poorly, but at the time the US was trying to switch focus from Europe and the Middle East to Asia-Pacific and China (it is still trying to do this) and the broad consensus was that Russia was a gas station with nukes. The flip on Russia was a direct response to Russia doing things. You should expect people to update
Although the other side seems to have never met a proposed intervention they didn't like, which is its own failure mode.
The reason why right-wing anti-interventionism will never have any legs is that the right-wing elite is full of people who fundamentally believe in the crude application of force to achieve positive results and the right-wing base is full of people who think you have a moral obligation to support the team no matter what. The result is that right-wing elites constantly try to fix problems with violence and their supporters always back them because it is practically unthinkable not to.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
He paid hundreds of thousands of crisis actors to fake colossal pro-EU protests in Ukraine, forcing Russia to invade eastern Ukraine to... do something.
"Obama/the US caused the Russo-Ukrainian War" rests on the claim that the Maidan protests were an American op.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
The central examples of fascist regimes we have (Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy) both made ideological fealty mandatory and were extremely interested in regulating the lives of their subjects.
The distinction there is not fascist vs communism but totalitarian vs authoritarian. Authoritarian regimes are often satisfied with mere obedience, and may actively try to depoliticize the population at large. Authoritarian countries tend to have a weak, withered civil society. Totalitarian countries, by contrast, have a powerful civil society that has been annexed by the state.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
Is ressentiment a good model here? As I understand it, the basic idea of ressentiment is, essentially, moral cope. Being unable to live up to your society's virtues, you redefine virtue to reflect the traits you already have (or are at least reasonably capable of attaining). I'm not going to say it describes nobody, but I don't think it describes the prevailing splits in American politics. Those are, I think, mostly about substantive and long-running values disagreements, and those disagreements are not explained by ressentiment.
Right-wing populists aren't abandoning left-wing values they cannot attain; they are rejecting standards they never supported. There's definitely a powerful element of resentment - a feeling that they are denied the status and respect to which they are properly entitled - but that is not the same thing. Not dissimilarly, I think the upswing in left-wing populism is directly traceable to anger over perceived moral hypocrisy and systemic economic failures rather than some tension between their understanding of conventional virtues and what they themselves can achieve.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
All the conservative Chicagoland women are in the collar counties and don't use dating apps.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
I didn't say that they were. It is merely that the South is where efforts to disenfranchise black voters have been most vigorously pursued. And in case it's not clear, I think the suggestion that persistent efforts to disenfranchise black voters have transitioned seamlessly from white supremacist to merely partisan motives should be viewed as totally laughable with extreme skepticism.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
The average Black Southerner cares very little for many Democratic-aligned social endeavors, for example, but not to an extent that they'll vote against them, either.
What is your point? Not agreeing with all of the political goals of candidates they support is not a distinctive feature of black voters (e.g. not all Republican voters are anti-LGBT, but they still support anti-LGBT politicians).
A question of interest might be why the GOP is so incredibly bad at capturing these socially conservative black voters. They're certainly capable of getting votes from extremely poor, socially conservative white voters, often despite openly promising policies detrimental to their welfare. I put it to you that there a significant faction in American politics that is hostile to black civil rights, that post-CRM these people concentrated in the Republican Party, and that black voters are acutely aware of this. The result is that even though there are a lot of socially conservative black voters and even though poor social conservatives may prioritize their social beliefs over economic interests, the GOP does extraordinarily poorly with black voters.
there's also been the parallel and ongoing project demonizing any creation of white shared interests as such.
If you are talking purely about progressive spaces, I find it hard to deny this, but I also find it hard to escape the conclusion that this is because basically every attempt to construct a shared white interest group has been unsubtle white supremacism/white nationalism. Black identity, by contrast, is largely an outside imposition, and by and large black political organization has been organized around civil rights issue; there is no comparable set of issues for white voters.
If you are talking about the full American political spectrum, no. Virtually every conservative space is extremely skeptical of the idea that racism against minorities is a live issue (unless they can find a way to blame the liberals, who are the real racists) while being very receptive to the idea that white people (and particularly white men) are being systematically disadvantaged.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
Did it?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
Why are France and Britain a problem? The transition from 4th to 5th Republic was not a violent revolution; discounting the period of foreign occupation during WW2, France has had a democratic government continuously since 1870. Britain's separatist rebellions came out of disenfranchised subject territories; as well say the US has a discontinuity because it no longer owns the Philippines.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
What does "overpowered" mean? Populous states explicitly punch below their weight relative to their actual proportion of the electorate in all federal elections. The US already has a number of countermajoritarian and outright minoritarian institutions, and the argument is that actually we need the federal government to be less representative?
Electorally I think it’s past time to allow each congressional and senatorial district to issue its own electors. State by state winner takes all overpowers the large states too much in national policy.
Why not just have a direct popular vote for President? Or abolish the Presidency and have Congress select the chief executive?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
That doesn't answer the question of why Southern black voters are so strongly aligned with the Democratic Party. Or why Southern white voters are so strongly aligned with the Republican Party - e.g. in 2023 Brandon Presely got 22% of the white vote in MS, which was an exceptionally good performance (Biden got 17% in 2020 and Obama got even less in 2012).
(It must also be noted that the Deep South has a large rural black population - appealing to rural/urban splits doesn't resolve the problem)
Anti-black racism is sui generis in the United States, especially in the South. Racism, xenophobia, and other forms of bigotry generally push minorities left, but this is, for the most part, garden variety discrimination that you find everywhere to some degree. It wasn't that long ago that ~1/3rd of the US was run by explicit white supremacists and rendered black Americans explicitly second-class citizens (on top of a raft of informal but no less severe forms of discrimination). One of the consequences of prolonged, intensive discrimination was to forge African-Americans into a much more cohesive, organized identity group than pretty much anyone else.
By contrast, "White", "Hispanic", or "Asian" are much more weakly operational groups containing subsets that do not see themselves as having shared interests, e.g. you could probably justify dividing white voters regionally and Hispanic/Asian voters by country of ancestral origin.
To be clear, when I say "an uncharitable person might think there's some folks just looking for an excuse to do a pogrom" I am engaging in rhetorical understatement - there are people explicitly doing exactly that in this thread.
Horrific murders happen with unfortunate regularity, if for no other reason than there are a lot of people and some of them are pretty fucked up. A few weeks ago some Irish rent-a-cops suffocated a man to death. If you peruse a list of people executed in the United States, you'll find a significant share of them are pretty egregious (as in, above and beyond 'mere' murder). The point of emphasizing the horrific nature of this crime in particular is to try and gin up more violence against other people who didn't commit this crime. This is the purpose of the emotive language - don't think, don't empathize, get revenge (on unrelated people).
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