Skibboleth
No bio...
User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Either we’ll force through a knee-jerk bill with symbolic limits on firearms, or we’ll (correctly) dismiss that as posturing and (incorrectly) do abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
Practically speaking, what measures will gun rights advocates actually tolerate? It seems like the only thing they can countenance is more guns.
It seems to me that there are many ways we could 'reformat' our conception of gun ownership in a way that would preserve the ability of 'the people' to bear arms while making them less available for use in crime or mass shootings (or suicide), but I find it incredibly unlikely that the current American gun culture would find it at all tolerable.
Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.
The best you can do is probably something like move to New Hampshire. The most reasonable thing you can do is nothing.
The odds of concealed carry protecting you from victimization of any kind, let alone a mass shooting, is incredibly low, if for no other reason than because a middle class defense contractor is already extremely unlikely to be victimized and the efficacy of concealed carry in stopping mass shootings is... mixed. It's a psychological prop more than anything.
Mass shootings are, frankly, more analogous to terrorism than ordinary crime. Terrorism doesn't kill very many people, but it does scare people and make them feel powerless because it is outside the 'normal' sociology of murder. Nevertheless, carrying a gun because you might get jumped by terrorists is hard to justify.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Ah, it's one of those irregular verbs: my clever stratagem, your underhanded ploy...
What is it about trying to lubricate the voting process that makes it 'cheating' compared to throwing sand in the gears of the same (e.g. by closing polling places or purging voter from the rolls on dubious grounds), or gerrymandering, or challenging the signatures on your opponent's petition to get them thrown off the ballot, or anything other bits of legal maneuvering used to push and pull electoral outcomes? If we're not alleging actual fraud, what is the objection?
Skibboleth
1yr ago
As has been noted repeatedly, immigrants mostly live in blue states. The "societal costs" are already shared. That's not the issue. The issue is that nativists don't want any significant immigration at all.
"The beatings buses will continue until morale border policy improves"
The overwhelmingly pro-immigration voters living in areas with already high immigrant populations are not going to change their mind because a few more show up. It just doesn't affect their lives that much. You're more likely to see the Feds cut a big check to affected blue states than you are to see a major opinion shift. This policy is grandstanding by Abbott and Desantis to further build their lib-owning credentials.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
but also it's not generally your communities suffering the constant tide of human detritus.
Liberal metropolitan areas are home to the vast majority of illegal immigrants in the US. This has been one of the recurring critiques of conservative nativism over the past decade - that they're complaining about immigrants in places they don't live. The idea that sheltered coastal liberals are forcing southern conservatives to foot the bill for their xenophilia ignores the reality of how illegal immigrants are actually distributed around the country.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
It seems like an incredibly pedantic distinction to say that Donald Trump expanding US involvement in Middle Eastern and African conflicts doesn't count because the US was technically already involved. It doesn't support the notion of Trump the peacemonger.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
The Romans never would have let millions of migrants enter their territory and use their resources.
...they did.
In any event, it's not really clear why we should consider the Romans a model for behavior.
So often a debate does come down to the definition of a word.
"Invasion" rhetoric is classic Motte-and-Bailey equivocation. Nativists want to borrow the alarming connotations of the word to hype up support for radical measures, then, when their critics point out that there's a slight difference between people making dodgy asylum claims and an armed force sacking El Paso, fall back on "invasion has other meanings". If Latinos are "invading" like Japanese tourists, the claim becomes a lot less exciting.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
OP's post is similar in quality to other top level posts here, save for whose sacred cows it brings to the slaughter.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate?
If someone keeps preferring racial discrimination to other methods of filtering, the most parsimonious explanation is that they are racist. If filtering by wealth or education leads to disparate impacts, that might be racist but it also might just be a preference for rich, educated immigrants and the disparate impact on people from the Middle East or Africa is too bad. If they say "I prefer Whites to Asians and Asians to Africans", it requires a lot of mental gymnastics to explain how that's not just racism.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Why is The Motte here and not on reddit? Accusations of racism or other forms of badthink carry a lot of weight even if unfounded.
The thread above this one has multiple explicit white nationalists arguing about the exact borders of their ideology. If the Motte was accused of harboring racists, that's because it was - it has made a deliberate policy of tolerating positions and beliefs that Reddit doesn't want to play host to or are otherwise outside the Overton Window. You can quibble over what exactly qualifies as 'racist' (or transphobic/homophobic/otherwise bigoted) but the content that was getting the Motte unwanted scrutiny from the admins was a) generally not marginal b) generally not imaginary.
I want to be clear: I am not claiming that nobody has ever been subject to bullshit accusations. But people like West and places like the Motte make a really bad case for such accusations being rhetorical superweapons.
All it takes is a handful of people.
You certainly can get in trouble over imagined transgressions, but it's extremely unlikely that any given accusation of racism is going to manifest into actual consequences, especially if there's nothing actually there (for that matter, even if there is). Conservatives get accused of being racist constantly for their views on basically everything (criminal justice, voting rights, immigration, welfare, education, housing policy, transit policy...) and so far it doesn't seem to be making much of a dent.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Why should Texas have to absorb all those people illegally coming into the country?
It doesn't. Many pass through Texas and many remain, but the vast majority wind up elsewhere (and many enter elsewhere, notably California).
Skibboleth
1mo ago
Trump was genuinely pro-oil and gas, thus US oil production reached record highs under Biden due to delayed-action investment.
That's not at all evident in the data. It looks like we need to thank Obama for the upward trend in US oil production. That or people are overcrediting their favorite president for trends that are mostly driven by things other than US executive policy.
Cottagecore and associated cultural trends are 95% LARP. Obviously, there are a few people who really are into it, but my observation so far has been that this is far more likely to mean "I moved to an exurb and picked up a horticulture hobby" than anything remotely resembling actual rural or off-the-grid living. Actually, 95% LARP might be being overly generous; I'm going to guess the conversion rate on people taking the Stardew Valleypill is extremely low. Most people entertaining sanitized fantasies of tradrural lifestyle aren't even going to get as far as the exurban house and gardening hobby.
All of which is to say: I don't think this is a real trend. To the extent that it is a real trend, it is mostly the product of backflow from young professionals crowding into major cities, enabled by the rise of remote work. Social media may be having a corrosive effect on social cohesion, but it's not making people yearn for the pines.
We are locked in with people we do not like 24/7, reading their crappy opinions, we can't just splinter off and make a new community
We can. It's not particularly hard to set up your own forum, and if you're willing to put in a little effort and tolerate some jankiness you don't even need to reply on a 3rd party service to do it. This reminds of third place discourse, where people talk about third places disappearing as if someone came and tore them down, as opposed to that people stopped going to them. You can very easily leave the major social media platforms. We just don't. The problem is
a) these algorithmically driven services may be inferior to organic, homegrown human interaction, but, crucially, they are free and offer a path-of-least-resistance option. You could start your own forum or even go outside and meet people, but Facebook is a click away. Whatever your community of interest is, it probably already exists on reddit.
b) network effects mean there's a lot of value lost in leaving the big platforms for a smaller one. Being the first person to break away from twitter gets you little but a massive improvement in mental health isolation. And, especially for people who view themselves as incumbents, the suggestion that they should leave because of what someone else is doing is deeply irritating - "why should I change, he's the one who sucks". So everyone stays on the big platforms and complains about the moderation policy but never leaves.
the extremist american patriot dream is to aquire assets that allow them to live independently from the country they "love" away from all society and culture on a metaphorical if not literal island
That's more a reflection of how a subset of hardcore American conservative low-key hate America and have despaired of reasserting control by force.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
Quite frankly, I hold the left to higher standards than the right, and I think that the left should be above such behavior.
Why? If you think the right shouldn't be expected to behave when they lose, why do you think they should be trusted with power?
Skibboleth
4mo ago
So maybe we'd stop following ruinous policies sooner.
Surely if progressive policies were so ruinous we'd expect to see anti-progressive strongholds like the Deep South substantially outperforming progressive strongholds like New England.
Skibboleth
6mo ago
In a reversal of traditional stereotypes, the GOP is wracked by infighting while the Dems are maintaining party discipline.
The GOP is wedged. It does appear that the largest segment of the GOP is willing to go along with whoever, but there are more than enough intransigents to scuttle any candidate. The right-wing extremists have fully embraced the far left attitude of "burn it down, we'll sort out the details later" and are nearly as happy to have no speaker as to have one of their own. Anything done to appease them alienates the moderates (such as they are), and vice versa. The far right can't strike a deal with the Dems for obvious reasons; neither can the moderates, both because they're mostly not actually that moderate and because their own primary voters will eat them alive if they do (another leftist meme the right has embraced is purity spirals, see also: "Tom Emmer's not a conservative"). And the majority is so slim you have to satisfy everyone.
Meanwhile, the Dems are, at least for now, content to say "not my monkeys, not my circus". They've made noises about being willing to make a deal, but they don't have much reason to save a GOP speaker without major concessions. They believe, probably correctly, that the spectacle of the GOP being held hostage by its right wing and the looming threat of a shutdown will make them look good by comparison.
Because it doesn't comport with the basic facts. Nobody here seems to be able to answer the question of why, if the Democrats/Blue States are hypocrites who are only pro-immigration when it's somewhere else, they are fine with the literal millions immigrants that live in their states (significantly more, I will note, than in red states - California has ~25% of all illegal immigrants in the entire country, while blue states have twice the overall number). The story the nativists are trying to tell is just nonsensical.
Obviously the accurate term should be "contingent electors", in the sense that these would have been the correct electors if Trump prevailed in his various lawsuits.
If Trump had won his lawsuits with decisive implications for the election, his slate of electors still had to be appointed by the state legislature. In the absence of that, they're not contingent electors, they're nobody. The only contingency is whether or not he won, which he didn't. In Michigan, for example, the fake electors gathered and selected themselves after all the lawsuits had been resolved (not to Trump's favor, needless to say). They subsequently represented themselves to Congress as the true electors from Michigan despite not being appointed by the legislature. That Congress wasn't fooled doesn't make it less a crime, any more than my attempts to shoot you don't cease to be a crime because my gun jams (nor is my sincere belief that murdering you is justified and legal a defense).
Skibboleth
11mo ago
I have a more prosaic objection: I don't find high-end DGU numbers believable. High-end estimates rely on self-reporting, which has two major issues. The first is that respondents could simply be lying. Self-reporting of anything is generally terrible. The second is that a sincere report does not mean an actual DGU occurred - the respondent could have imagined the threat entirely, or they could have pulled a gun to win an argument or similarly be misrepresenting what actually happened.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
That proposition is somewhat undermined by school shootings being more common in the more religious, more conservative South than elsewhere in the US. And virtually unheard of in vastly more secular Western Europe. And also that even in the US, advancing state-enforced Christianity as a remedy to mental health problems is an incredibly fringe position, even on the right.
I think a more likely explanation is that the intellectual paradigm of mainstream American conservatism simply isn't equipped to provide solutions to that kind of problem. It's like asking a progressive to come up with a scheme for regulatory reform.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
It’s an attack on Jefferson, Washington, etc. who saw personal benefit.
I would be somewhat more charitable. "Slavery built America" is best understood as a serious-but-not-literal argument - a reaction to a socio-political milieu that tends to downplay the issues and concerns of African Americans and at worst actively rejects their legitimacy as participants in American society. It's not about attacking the Founding Fathers. It's about asserting their place in American history in the face of people who want to forget about it, Because while there are pretty good arguments that the US would have been better off had it abolished slavery earlier and in a more equitable fashion (the sharecropping system that emerged in the aftermath of the Civil War was better than literal slavery, but still quite suboptimal), the fact of the matter is that it didn't.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
It's really just an extreme form of no-platforming, isn't it?
Extreme no platforming is pulling the fire alarm, not burning down the building.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Jim Crow laws were created because of pervasive white supremacist sentiments in the South. They served to keep southern blacks politically disempowered and economically subordinate to Southern elites while also satisfying demand for racism among the general southern population.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
The practice is universal and has been for literally centuries.
Gerrymandering has been around in some capacity for centuries, but a) that's not a defense of an odious practice b) it is false to say that it is universal. Numerous states have independent redistricting commissions and even when they don't they don't always gerrymander.
reduce accountability to the electorate
Relative to what? I would remind you that hardcore partisan gerrymandering is a relative novelty and for a long time one of the major aims of gerrymandering was protecting incumbents. And what basis do we have to think gerrymandering is superior to boundary commissions?
Skibboleth
1yr ago
I wouldn't consider this to be a republican tactic
I don't know what relevance this has to my point, which is that it seems weird to identify lubricating the voting process as technically legal but actually illegitimate while ignoring the myriad of other technically legal things done to de facto disenfranchise voters unless you are alleging that it fatally compromises election security.
it was the VRA that enshrened it into law.
The VRA and associated case law impose specific requirements on how you draw districts with respect to minority populations. They do not in any way mandate the partisan gerrymandering you see in numerous states (including, prominently, Texas).
That's not what is on the table. It perhaps feels that way to Trumpists, because Trumpism is populist movement and thus first and foremost a cult of personality.
Most of the time, even senior party figures are largely replaceable. If a couple of senior senators got disqualified from either party, people would care infinitely more about the replacement process than the people ejected (they're not even necessarily unpopular - as has often been noted, Congress has terrible approval but people like their guys - but their supporters just aren't attached enough to stand by them if they got into real hot water). In the case of Trump, his followers regard him as irreplaceable and are hostile to even considering alternatives. As such, the possibility that he performed some disqualifying act feels like total disenfranchisement even though the GOP still gets a nominee (who probably fares better) (plus the Supreme Court, ~half of Congress, half the state governments, etc...).
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