Skibboleth
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User ID: 1226
I'm saying hardcores are the most turned off by lack of quality.
Are they? Hardcore fans can be very persnickety, but they'll also grade their favorite IPs on a curve. This is the sort of thing where it's hard to generalize with confidence, but I've been involved in Star Wars fandom since I was like twelve, and looking back one of the things that stands out is the extent to which me and my fellow Star Wars devotees would heap praise on material that would struggle to get a passing grade if it didn't have "Star Wars" on the cover.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Most illegal immigrants already live in a couple of metro areas, generally in blue states or blue cities in red states. The issue is not really about the distribution of the notional burden of illegal immigration; it is a fundamental dispute whether or not illegal immigration/asylum seeking is even a big deal.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
An interesting side note to consider - if your ultimate goal is to get rid of immigrants these stunts may be counterproductive.
“It’s safe to say what’s going on is a pull factor, which is somewhat ironic given the criticism from some of these same governors involved in this about various pull factors that they claim already exist,” Magnus told The Times. He said social media plays a part in the problem because it is enticing “when migrants hear that there are buses that will take them to locations where they are told they will receive benefits and job.” Magnus noted that human smugglers use the same information to lure migrants.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Blue states already share the cost, and annoying municipal officials is not going to persuade Democratic legislators to spend vastly more on border security (which Abbott and Desantis already know).
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.
"Immigrants" as a class are different than the types of persons who have no other option but to "sneak" in.
All immigrants, legal and illegal, tend to wind up in blue states. Red states tend to be lacking in economic opportunity and the comparative lack of major cities or pre-existing communities makes them relatively unattractive.
The ones crossing the border are almost certainly a much, much larger burden and net drain on resources than those that follow "proper channels."
What's your model?
I challenge you to show that blue states, especially Northern ones, have as many undocumented immigrants as Southern border states.
"Southern border states" includes includes California. If you mean "traditionally southern states" (or just red states on the border), that's literally just Texas.
As for where illegal immigrants end up:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/03/11/us-metro-areas-unauthorized-immigrants/ (this is measuring by metro area, rather than state, and some of the cities spill across state borders - New York being the most prominent)
Per DHS numbers, out of the top 10 states, we have
Blue States (CA, IL, NY, NJ, WA): 4.33M
Red States (TX, FL, GA, NC): 3.33M
Purple States (AZ): .33M
CA and TX account for about half of their respective categories.
An older (2016) study from PEW gives us the tally below for all statse: https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/interactives/u-s-unauthorized-immigrants-by-state/
Red States: 4.22M
Blue States: 5.76M
Purple States: .62M
If you want to compare Texas to the northeast, that's 1.6M vs 2.3M (states counted: CT, DC, MD, MA, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VA)
Skibboleth
1yr ago
I posted this as a reply to someone else further down the chain, but I'm going to repost it as a top-level response:
Where illegal immigrants end up:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/03/11/us-metro-areas-unauthorized-immigrants/ (this is measuring by metro area, rather than state, and some of the cities spill across state borders - New York being the most prominent)
Per DHS numbers, out of the top 10 states, we have
Blue States (CA, IL, NY, NJ, WA): 4.33M
Red States (TX, FL, GA, NC): 3.33M
Purple States (AZ): .33M
CA and TX account for about half of their respective categories.
An older (2016) study from PEW gives us the tally below for all statse: https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/interactives/u-s-unauthorized-immigrants-by-state/
Red States: 4.22M
Blue States: 5.76M
Purple States: .62M
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Per the PEW study I cited, the top five states by percentage of population are: NV, TX, CA, NJ, and MD (in that order). In absolute numbers: CA, TX, FL, NY (FL and NY are separated by an estimated 50k - 775k vs 725k). And CA has a lot more than TX in absolute terms. The DHS numbers are broadly similar, at least at the top.
The core point I am getting at here is that the narrative pushed by American nativists that conservatives are bearing the financial and social "costs" of liberal xenophilia is not supported by the information available. This entire conversation appears to really pivot on Texas specifically.
Martha's Vineyard
The obsession with places like Martha's Vineyard is why I think this entire endeavor is about lib-owning.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Taken at face value, this seems like a strong argument for race blind casting. You* can't simultaneously say appearances don't matter and make a big deal out of casting a non-white actor (or otherwise portraying) for a customarily white character. Maybe you don't need Black Panther, but if you're going to argue for that you ought to be open to black Captain America or Hispanic Iron Man or female Thor. Or, say, black Ariel.
*rhetorical you, not you specifically
Skibboleth
1yr ago
While I don't care about the race of characters per se, I care a great deal about adaptations being faithful to the original.
What does that mean, though? There are certainly stories where changing the race of certain characters at the very least demands some justification, but there are plenty where it does not. Does it really make any sense to insist that Hamlet only be played by Danish actors? Was it a problem that Tom Cruise played the role of a Japanese man in Edge of Tomorrow? (Or, if you want something more recent, basically everyone in Bullet Train).
Skibboleth
1yr ago
So there's no legitimacy to complaints about black elf OCs in Rings of Power or black Ariel?
I think you're overthinking this. It really is quite simple.
In principle it's not that complicated. In practice it doesn't seem quite so straightforward. I see this argument advanced when it comes to changing a character's appearance, but it tends to get applied in very selective and arbitrary (and one sided) ways. No one complains when adapters change, e.g. a character's hair or eye color, height/physique. Recasting a customarily white character tends to provoke a far stronger reaction than vice versa (nobody complained about Neeson or Hardy in the Nolan Batman films, for example), but also concerns about authenticity/fidelity go out the window if the casting choice is sufficiently cool (approximately no one complained about SLJ as Nick Fury or Jason Momoa as Aquaman, despite them bearing virtually no resemblance to their character's original appearance).
Skibboleth
1yr ago
If it is good the complainers just get laughed at and ignored.
Also, ASoIaF is way less iconic than LotR.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
I'm going to stay with my usual schtick and say actually everything is fine. The weird corners of the internet are still there. In many cases they're doing better than ever, because the nerdy adolescents have been nerdy adults with software engineering jobs and six figure incomes to throw at their esoteric hobbies. Yeah, the normies invaded the internet, but the normies didn't get online so they could join SomethingAwful or 4Chan or your sci-fi versus debate forum with twenty users. They joined the internet to use Facebook. The only thing that is truly lost is the sense of exclusivity - the feeling that the internet as a whole was a preserve from normie influence.
I think Le Conte's problem (cf. @MeinNameistBernd) is that she has chosen a life path that demands she be engaged with the most toxic parts of the normie web.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
I think Hillary was a massively flawed candidate because it was so close. 2016 was a cripple fight, not a clash of the titans. Trump was an appalling candidate and in 2016 he didn't have incumbency or anywhere near the fully developed cult of personality he did by 2020. Clinton had a trainload of baggage, including an active FBI investigation and decades of GOP attacks. I think it's quite probable that if Tim Kaine (or almost anyone basically competent who wasn't as politically radioactive as Clinton) had been at the top of the ticket then the Democratic candidate would've won handily and we'd be talking about how weird it was that the GOP nominated an insane reality tv star as their candidate. Conversely, someone like Rubio or Jeb might've been mediocre candidates in the grand scheme of things but they probably would've mopped up Hillary.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
While I can't claim to have had the foresight to predict that actually Ukraine would put up ferocious resistance, I'd argue in retrospect it shouldn't have been that surprising - the Ukrainians had popular uprisings that threw out pro-Russian political leadership in 2004 and 2014, then fought an 8 year war against Russian invasion (albeit on heavily constrained terms). While breaking with Russia was internally contentious, it should have been clear that on the whole that Ukraine had the will to fight. Why we all ignored that, I'm not sure, other than everyone agreed that Ukraine was a joke of a country and Russia was a "near-peer" military of the United States.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
That's one of those hard questions of politics because in any adversarial scenario involving millions of people there will always be assholes.
It's not just a matter of 'there will be assholes'. It's that motivated reasoning is extremely common - if you're mad you lost and work backward from the conclusion that you must have been cheated, nothing the winner can do will convince you. Even if you're well aware you lost fair and square this principle incentivizes you to act as if you believe you were cheated. It's essentially a heckler's veto for election results and seems unusable in practice.
The 2000 presidential election went to the Supreme court. Maybe 2016 and 2020 should have to.
I don't see how this is a remedy. The 2000 presidential election didn't go to the supreme court. A specific issue in Florida's election administration went to the supreme Court, and it did pretty much the opposite of convince people that the election outcome was proper. Fairly or not, the view of most Democrats was that Bush won because conservative justices put their thumb on the scale.
Then there's the question of what are we bringing before the court in 2016 and 2020? None of the serious accusations against Trump in 2016 really had any bearing on the legitimacy of the election from a process standpoint, and the 2020 voter fraud allegations are so broad and nebulous that there isn't really a thing you can bring up (you could pick through the various court cases brought by Trump to try and find something, but they're basically all laughable).
I’ve argued previously that the biggest liability of this New Right is free speech absolutism. So long as they incorporate a subculture which is really loudly invested in, say, using slurs, they will continue to polarize fresh enemies.
Is the New Right absolutist on freedom of speech or is it simply defensive about the unpopularity of its own speech? If we're identifying the New Right with people like, e.g., Sohrab Amari, they might use absolutist rhetoric when one of them gets banned from twitter, but then they'll turn around and argue for banning speech they disapprove of (and not in a 'ban from privately owned social media' sense).
This is a sticking point for me with Cowen's overall analysis - I don't think the New Right is rooted in libertarianism/classical liberalism at all. Amari and Dreher are integralists, Yarvin is the neoreactionary, Carlson is a bit of a chimaera but at heart seems to be a paleocon, etc... but the common thread of wanting to use state power to remediate culture war losses puts them quite far from classical liberalism (to say nothing of rising anti-capitalist sentiments).
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Are we watching the same movie?
Clearly we're not, because in the film I'm watching, conservatives are losing basically every culture war battle: race, religion, drugs, sexual mores, abortion, immigration, LGBT. Rural America is dysfunctional and dying. The soft power of conservative communities has never been lower, with conservatives basically reduced to trying to secede from civil society because they're completely unable to gain any traction. Instead of going to church the kids keep moving to the big city, turning gay, and engaging in unmarried cohabitation with a trans atheist who immigrated illegally from Mexico, and there's no indication that this is reversing.
These political defeats are not totally unqualified. Gun rights have been entrenched, the post-Dobbs status quo remains to be seen (though I am fairly confident that it will highly unsatisfying to most pro-life activists), economic and environmental policy are much more of a fight, and conservatives still enjoy a tremendously favorable position when it comes to the exercise of hard power. But the idea that we're witnessing a liberal implosion seems pretty dubious.
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
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).
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
When you do it at the last minute in response to an ideologically ginned-up fake crisis which you ginned-up in part precisely so you could do this, all the while complaining that other people aren't respecting "institutional norms".
So what? If it is legal and we're not claiming it fatally compromises election security, what is the problem? Is the claim that these people aren't entitled to vote?
That the praxis of Western democracy in it's entirety has become fake and gay... [A]n autistic loyalty to the rules while shrugging your shoulders at the result has confused means with ends.
What does that mean? It's not like Republicans can't win elections, and if the media memeplex blares out left-propaganda 24/7 in an effort to "manufacture consent"*, it doesn't seem to be succeeding.
*scare quotes mine
Skibboleth
1yr ago
This argument assumes that "legal" is equivalent to "moral", "acceptable". Alternatively, the laws are wrong, and the laws that establish the laws are also wrong.
Alright, what is the moral complaint about enabling people to exercise their right to vote, especially given that per the initial point we are not positing a fraudulent election?
Our system requires buy-in for its continued operation. What you're looking at is the metastasizing death of buy-in. People conclude that the system is not capable of operating in their interests
What does that mean? Do these people have the right to vote? If so, why does facilitating the exercise of that right undermine buy-in? I struggle to find a charitable interpretation for this.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Your question presupposes legitimacy-by-default of the existing, highly complex political system, when the system's fundamental legitimacy is the question at hand.
When the system's legitimacy is being questioned because of people exercising their right to vote, I think it's reasonably to ask why.
Convince a large, reasonably cohesive slice of the population that the system is not capable of delivering acceptable outcomes, and they will not necessarily argue indefinitely over where exactly the system is going wrong
Why are they convinced of this?
The other guy points out that his dice win too often to be fair.
The other guy claims that, but considering the other guy wins about half the time, we have to question whether or not his objection is in good faith or he is just being a sore loser.
When dealing with vast, complex systems, people observe outcomes and judge the system thereby. Our current system has delivered unacceptably bad outcomes from a Red perspective, and it's done it long enough that there's no reasonable hope that the problem can be corrected within the general processes and norms of that system.
What outcomes? Reds win half the time (frequently despite having less than half the electorate). If you mean the culture war, it turns out there's no vote you can cast or election you can win that will make your kids respect you.
Average TV executive
From personal experience: Netflix has made adaptations of the Magicians and the Witcher. I quite liked both of these shows, but I haven't read the books they're adapting. I've also spoken to friends who have read the associated books and they were generally displeased. Generalizing from two personal anecdotes may not be the most epistemologically robust thing to do, but it hasn't stopped anyone before and it conveys the point: new audiences members don't care about fidelity to the source material. The real risk of disrespecting the source material is that you may lose the spark that made the original appealing, but that's mostly just a general risk of adaptation.
On the subject of fidelity to the source material, another Amazon show: The Expanse. Especially in later seasons, The Expanse takes quite a few deviations from the novels, reworking plotlines, changing characters, etc... It was nevertheless fairly well received by fans of the books. I don't have a thesis for why this is, I merely note it.
I would also note that creative types don't have to be actively pushing agendas. People tend to unconsciously other people think like them and share their tastes/beliefs. Woke writers will write woke shows because that's how people behave.
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