Skibboleth
No bio...
User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Different election results do yield different policies. The structure of the US government, however, means that there is heavy status quo bias - 50% + 1 is not adequate to radically alter policy.
Further, "winning" doesn't guarantee you get what you want because it's easy to talk a big game until you actually have to wield power and worry about fucking up (either by making a bad decision or alienating voters with incoherent demands - witness the GOP stumbling at the 1 yard line on ACA repeal or past prevaricating over the debt ceiling).
you make elections more or less irrelevant. Add to that the demonization and censorship of dissent, and I'd say it's on you to prove these "public consultations" are in any way meaningful.
I'm going to need you to elaborate, because this looks like a complaint about being unpopular and a wheeled goalpost.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Actually securing the border would be both directly costly (you'd need both far more physical infrastructure and far more border guards) and indirectly costly (exacerbating existing labor shortages; many red industries depend on hispanic labor). Nativists genuinely wish there was less immigration, but relatively few are willing to pay the price for it.
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
What is she going to do that McDaniels isn't? RNC leadership is already Trumpist, as far as I can tell, and "the Republican Party is useless" is largely cope for their rather dismal electoral record.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Do you think this accurately reflects the state of criminal prosecution in the United States, and if so, how do you account for the hundreds of thousands of people in pre-trial detention?
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.
Skibboleth
15d ago
the powers-that-be
There should be a requirement that if you're going to use vague and allusive terms that you define those terms so people can know who you're talking about. Don't just say 'elites' or 'the powers-that-be'. What specific people/organizations/institutions do you mean?
Skibboleth
4mo ago
The first time CBP mows down a family of six, public support would evaporate in an instant (though the odds of such a policy ever making it to implementation are basically zero, since it would be comically unpopular and probably unconstitutional to boot).
Or would start openly acting like proper invaders
How many people do you think will continue buying "invader" rhetoric when the bodies of children are being paraded around on every media outlet in the world?
I think you're severely overestimating the popularity of the Coatesian 'white supremacy' anti-racist paradigm versus normie lib 'don't be a dick' anti-racist paradigm.
(I suspect you also underestimate the prevalence of racism, which leads to further confusion)
I kept thinking to myself who are these white supremacists that they think run the country? If this country was run by white supremacists, they would be doing a terrible job.
Your confusion arises from semantic differences. When someone like Coates or Kendi talks about "white supremacy", they don't (just) mean mask-off segregationists or white nationalists. They don't even mean closeted white racists. They mean the whole accumulation of things which collectively acts to keep white people at the top of the socio-economic heap*. You can probably find a direct quote from one of the above that articulates this without my paraphrasing, but it's late and I'm on my phone, so I'm leaving that as an exercise for the reader.
Crucially, in this paradigm, it is entirely possible for society to be white supremacist despite the fact that everyone including racist white people profess to oppose racism and look at efforts to form explicitly white organizations with intense suspicion. Disparate impact and outcomes are the key indicators.
*though they'll also be quick to note that the US also has a pretty long history of explicitly giving preferential treatment to whites.
Skibboleth
5mo ago
Stole from whom, exactly?
The president gets to nominate SC justices. Customarily (see @guesswho's remark about trust), the Senate almost always accepts them, even when the president is from an opposing party. It has rejected them on occasion (or nominees have been withdrawn when it was clear they were headed for rejection). Garland was neither rejected nor withdraw. McConnell simply refused to hold a hearing or consider the nomination.
Yes, in theory, the Senate can do whatever it wants. In reality, what McConnell did was extremely unusual, compounded by the handling of ACB's nomination making it clear that his arguments with respect to Garland were unambiguously in bad faith. If you keep mashing the defect button, don't be surprised when your opposition starts Noticing.
Skibboleth
5mo ago
It is incredibly frustrating to me to hear any blame for all of this garbage placed on the people that currently live in the places people want to go
To be fair, it's very easy to blame them when they hold that they have a right to monopolize both the commons and other people's property for the sake of their own preferences.
Given the way things are going, the Palestinians (or at least the Gazans) will be remembered as perennial losers who wanted to kill Jews more than they wanted to survive. They didn't have to be fucked. There is a direct line between their refusal to back down from maximalist goals of destroying Israel and their present fate of slow strangulation.
I'd be willing to bet that if the Palestinians had adopted Gandhi's strategy, there'd be a Palestinian state right now. But nonviolent resistance until your adversaries are humiliated into submission isn't glamorous as war to the knife against your hated enemies. Hell, if they pursued a more regular unconventional war focused on Israeli military targets they might be there. But as long as they continue to preferentially target Israeli civilians and as long as they continue to assert their intention to destroy Israel there's no way the Israelis will compromise. And every so often there will some harsh reminder to the international community as to why.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
Trump was free to bring his objections in court (which he did, to universal failure) and his allies in Congress were free to raise objections (which they did, though their colleague found them unpersuasive). He was even free to hold a rally in which he whined about how he'd been cheated.
Any claim to merely "contesting" the election evaporated when he sent a mob to attack Congress. It would be irresponsible to let him go unpunished and irresponsible to let the threat of further treason from his followers be a deterrent.
Skibboleth
1yr ago
Why? This seems to be hinting at "all trans people are inherently disordered" but if you don't grant that premise (as most gun control advocates won't) it is not a problem at all (and is an argument in favor of red flag laws).
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
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
1mo ago
I apologize; I misinterpreted the question.
I don't think it's a very useful question (or at least not one I have a useful answer for), because I don't use the term except in reference to people who self-describe as such. You can look back to late 18th/early 19th century liberals, but that's a political context that's almost unrecognizable to today. I guess if you want my short answer: classical liberalism properly refers to a historical political tradition which has been succeeded by various offspring.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
The electoral reality in the US is that many states have a history of very overtly disenfranchising certain kinds of voter. This colors basically everything about electoral reform in the US.
voter ID is a ridiculously low bar that the GOP should be able to hammer home, but the fact that they cant speaks volumes to their weakness/idiocy.
Anyone who deeply cares about mandatory voter ID and is really worried about vote fraud is already a die-hard conservative.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
Declare yourself trans/queer and you'll have affinity groups supporting you at high-status jobs.
Trans individuals earn significantly less than their non-trans peers and are more likely to work low-status jobs in food service or retail.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
If it makes you feel any better, your opponents feel approximately the same way about you.
Does anyone actually get any pleasure out of this? Does anyone think it's doing any good?
Consider reading the sacred texts:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
Skibboleth
3mo ago
the theological ground of these ads is spurious
Does this actually matter to anyone? Religion as practiced by most adherents is a loose collection of rituals and superstitions that serves chiefly as a tribal identifier; to the extent that such people follow their own religious doctrines, they tend to pick and choose what already fits their values while selectively ignoring anything that doesn't. This is why, for example, you can have an explicitly pacifist faith that decries the accumulation of wealth serve as the official religion for a bunch of bling-obsessed warrior aristocrats without everyone's head exploding or decamping to a better aligned belief system.
In the last iteration of the thread, someone articulated the point that right now Christianity is very heavily right-coded and enjoys a fairly poor reputation with young people (not unrelated). These commercials seem best understood as attempts to challenge both of those perceptions. It may not be true to some platonic ideal of Christian theology, but you can say that about most Actually Existing Christianity (it's only relatively recently that they mostly chileld.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
better organized in terms of transportation, porta-poties, trash pick-up etc
See, this is the crux of it. Even if this was true (of which I am skeptical), none of this is relevant. The goal of a protest is not to stand around politely, then leave with your trash in an orderly fashion. It is either to be such a colossal nuisance that you can get concessions for stopping or to build sympathy for your political movement by baiting the police into kicking the shit out you. Conservative protestors occasionally try to cargo cult left-wing protest tactics, but tend to be either too docile (zero impact) or too aggressive (generate negative sentiment).
Skibboleth
4mo ago
SF is more or less the poster child for "I will do anything to end homelessness but build more housing". It's not surprising that their spending on homelessness has failed to resolve the issue when they've made only the most tepid efforts to actually house the homeless rather than just ameliorate their conditions.
Housing isn't the problem. Drugs are the problem.
Drugs aren't the problem. They're a problem, but West Virginia has one of the highest drug overdose rates and lowest homelessness rates (this pattern is true in weaker forms across the rest of Appalachia and parts of the Midwest).
Skibboleth
10mo ago
This has been the strategy from the start. Russia wants to bleed out Ukraine
It was not. Russia opened the (hot phase of the) war with a series of incredibly ambitious maneuvers and risky airborne operations, indicating they expected to be able to end the war very quickly. These efforts all failed, mostly disastrously (the southern axis of advance towards Odessa stumbled at the gates of Mykolaiv and :checks notes: Voznesensk?, but they still wound up in possession of Kherson Oblast and didn't get mauled, so massive W compared to the northern axes).
Some say the mysterious $6.2 billion accounting error was paid to Prig.
The people saying that are idiots. Not only do they have zero evidence, it doesn't make any sense. The "accounting error" was not a pile of cash or a number in a bank account. It's games with the valuation of equipment transfers.
Has this ever actually been a problem? All the hand-wringing about treacherous immigrants during the world wars came to nothing.
More options
Context Copy link