Skibboleth
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
8mo ago
The "deep state" is a motte-and-bailey where the motte is public choice theory and the bailey is that a cabal of civil servants controls the USG.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
who predict or expect a foreign policy crisis if trump wins , but always fail to articulate what this entails
I can't ascribe this to anything other than not paying attention:
(for just one example I dug up in 20 seconds)
Maybe you agree with these prognostications, maybe you don't. Saying that Trump's critics can't or haven't articulated their positions is just confusing.
I guess they have to keep toeing the 'orange man bad' line even though he was not that bad
"'Orange Man Bad' is the 'Buy index funds' of political commentary.". If historically left-of-center political commentators who have spent the past 8 years criticizing Trump and his policies continue to do so, odds are pretty good that they actually believe it.
If anything, the sudden flurry of "Oh, Trump wasn't that bad"-type statements from figures who previously criticized him reeks of groveling and bet-hedging. Jamie Dimon doesn't have to worry that Biden is going to punish him for making critical statements. Likewise for his many critics within the party who have 'come around'.
Skibboleth
6mo ago
https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1714525590873575600
Photograph of the aftermath in the daytime.
Skibboleth
29d ago
But really, it just enrages me, when I can still muster such feelings, that believing in colorblind meritocracy, free speech, presumption of innocence, biological reality, "my rules, applied fairly," etc., is now coded as "right-wing."
Because no one believes you. Whatever you, personally, believe, it all stinks of embarassed conservatism. People make fun of self-identified "classical liberals" because the label has been spoiled by bigots hiding behind a mask of libertarianism (libertarianism that for some reason only seems to extend as far as their own preferences). I like meritocracy too, but I've met too many people for whom 'meritocracy' means never having to think about how society allocates opportunities.
I could go on, but I'm on my phone and that makes composition awkward, so I'll leave it at this: I find this comment darkly hilarious because the kind of people who populate the Motte are exactly the reason you are treated to a presumption of bad faith.
This seems like a willful misreading. Do you think "dominate" means "conquer by force of arms"? Because it's not as if the EU has been putting up vigorous opposition to Russian hegemony absent US spinal prosthetics.
Skibboleth
8mo ago
I don't know if this post is a parody or not, but I have to ask how anyone looks at Vivek Ramaswamy and doesn't clock him as an obvious grifter.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
Just, what the fuck guys? Can’t we just be the normal ones? It shouldn’t be hard by comparison. But instead we’re attacking normality. We’re doing goofball shit.
The world is turned upside down: conservatives and liberals are extremely confused because they are accustomed to and expect to be setting and rebelling against norms respectively. Obviously, this is far more discomforting for conservatives than liberals. They lack the mindset, the institutional capability, and the practical knowledge to be good counterculture rebels. (This, incidentally, is a major reason why conservative protests are usually incompetent). The coalition members with the most energy for this kind of politics are the people you least want to hand the microphone.
Skibboleth
7mo ago
Otherwise, "we're a sanctuary city so long as none of the alleged refugees turn up on our doorstep" is just virtue signalling.
What share of illegal immigrant/asylum seekers/etc... do you think wind up in California? (Spoilers: it's a lot, considerably more than Texas)
LA and the state of CA have perfectly adequate reasons to oppose migrant busing without exposing themselves as secretly anti-immigrant hypocrites:
- lack of coordination from TX government
- Denying precedent for the principle that TX can shuttle indigents or undesirables to CA in lieu of handling them itself
- Ideological belief that shuttling migrants around is unethical.
The preponderance of evidence suggests this is an exercise in lib-owning, so it really shouldn't be surprising that liberal governing bodies are opposed to it.
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
28d ago
People usually call themselves "classical liberals" because they pointedly want to distinguish themselves from social conservatives. What I am saying is that many/most (though not all) such people are just garden variety conservatives who are embarassed by their own socially conservative views and/or the association with other conservatives, so they come up with stories to tell themselves (and others) how the party left them behind or the SJWs forced their hand or something similar, the point of which is say "I am not really a conservative."
the people who pull the strings in the federal government seem to be okay with defacto open borders.
Easy: the US does not have de facto open borders. "De facto open borders" is a mood expression of nativists who don't like current state of immigration enforcement. If we actually had de facto open borders, immigration would be unfathomably higher.
The people who "pull the strings" are wedged because there's no magic solutions to the material factors driving Latino migration. Nobody wants to spend the exorbitant sums it would require to actually physically secure the southern border. Nobody is willing to countenance just shooting them. Unfucking Latin America to the point where you don't have tens of millions of people who'd rather be an illegal or quasi-legal day laborer in a country where half the people hate them than stay where they are is a nontrivial exercise, and there isn't much support for that either (try and sell the guy who wants to deport all the Mexicans on spending trillions of dollars failing to develop Latin America). On top of that, the US is like most developed countries in that it has an aging native population that demands increasingly high standards of post-retirement living at the same time the retiree-worker ratio is getting worse, so it also just needs immigrant labor.
New York and other cities are howling about migrants being bussed into their communities, but so far seem reluctant to change their sanctuary city policies.
NY and other blue states already absorb the majority of immigrants, including illegal immigrants and asylum seekers. The central objection remains that the migrant bussing project is done in a maximally disruptive and uncooperative way.
Skibboleth
7mo ago
This requires admitting that immigrants are "undesirables"
No, it requires admitting that TX regards them as such.
This doesn't appear to have enough reason behind it to even refute.
When large groups of people tell you they believe X for reason Y, you should generally believe them.
Or, to put it another way, if they have such a problem with migrants, why do they have no problem with the literal millions of them already there? What it is about a few additional busloads that makes it a bridge too far? Nativists prefer to believe that this exposes their opponents as hypocrites because it vindicates their own sentiments ("our enemies secretly agree with us"), but it doesn't square with reality.
What do you think lib-owning is, if not exposing their hypocrisy and virtue signaling?
Showing off to your supporters that you're tough and cruel to the people they hate.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
We replaced homophobia with political enmity, not indifference.
The enmity is because the homophobia, to a large degree, remains. Many homophobes have grudgingly agreed (or been forced by law or social pressure) to not actively persecute homosexuals, but their position remains that homosexuals are not legitimate members of society and should be tolerated only on the condition that they keep it to themselves - don't express affection in public, don't "shove it in my face", don't say gay acknowledge homosexuality. And, of course, many of them do persecute homosexuals.
Indifference is reacting to two men kissing in public the same way you'd react to a man and a woman kissing in public, not tolerating private homosexuality.
Skibboleth
8mo ago
My point being that when someone says "the deep state sabotage Donald Trump" or words to that effect, they probably do not simply mean "his executive policies got slow rolled because the civil servants in charge of executing them were liberals who didn't believe in the policies".
Regarding the partisan lean of government employees, I refer other comments in this thread. I don't think there is some intrinsic quality of government employment that makes it skew dramatically liberal (and indeed, certain types skew very conservative for pretty much the same reason in reverse).
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
8mo ago
"Every mentally competent adult citizen is entitled to vote" is a Schelling point because basically every proposal to "raise the bar" winds up being a veneer over "people I disagree with shouldn't vote" or "people I like should have privileged status".
Skibboleth
6mo ago
For contempt because in part I view it as a fundamental right to be contemptuous of court
What does that mean? Contempt of court is ignoring the authority of the court. No one can stop you from doing that, but the court has to have the authority to bring you into compliance. To say that they can't do that is to, in effect, say that participation in the legal system is voluntary. Do a crime and then just say no to prosecution.
Normies are the natural constituency of the center-right - the sort of people who think "life's good, don't rock the boat too hard". Swifties are generally weapons-grade normies and the female equivalent of grillo-centrists. Yeah, they're "feminists", but it's an extremely anodyne feminism whose practical beliefs are probably mostly shared by a lot of conservative women (e.g. I have a hard time imagining what my mother or her sisters would say if their husbands suggested they shouldn't have careers). The problem for the American right is that the center-right is dead and the Republican party is (or is at least perceived to be) dominated by reactionary populists and religious conservatives. Not only does this coalition want to rock the boat, many of them are saying the boat is rotten and needs to burned down and replaced.
The argument is that Kissinger enabled genocides/mass murders in Cambodia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, East Timor, etc... and thus bears responsibility for millions of deaths.
I'm not sure how much I buy that argument. Kissinger generally reacted to these events with callous indifference and took the position that they shouldn't affect US foreign policy (see also, his illustrative remark about Soviet Jews: "If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."), but that sort of indifference is pervasive in international politics and Kissinger was mostly just crass enough to be on the record saying it instead of mouthing platitudes. While it doesn't exactly speak well of his moral character, attributing responsibility to him in particular mostly seems to stem from the tendency to treat the US as the only country with agency.
his role in normalizing relations with China probably saved way more Asian lives than he killed.
Almost nobody actually thinks in these sort of brute consequentialist terms.
I somehow doubt that either Hobbes or Burke would endorse the premise that one ought to be able to simply refuse to be prosecuted for murder. And even if they did, I'm not sure why that would matter.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
I find it reminiscent of many pro-Chavismo arguments from Western leftists I read some 15 years ago: authoritarian populism is more authentically democratic than liberal democracy because the former (supposedly) draws upon mass popular support while the latter uses sterile proceduralism to deprive The People of their voice while pretending otherwise.
This was mostly due to the fact that they liked Chavez' economic policies and needed a way to rationalize supporting an increasingly dictatorial government while claiming to still believe in freedom, human rights, etc...
For the contemporary American populist, it is much the same dilemma, except from the right. Your electoral fortunes have been tenuous at best and you're clearly losing the popularity contest with the younger generation. You can try to retool your message to be more appealing, or you can argue that corrupt institutions are creating a false consciousness and need to be swept away.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Ah, so people won't protest Republican voters from voting for their preferred candidate, so long as those people approve of that candidate.
They won't protest Republican voters from voting for their preferred candidate, so long as that candidate doesn't have some very specific disqualifying infractions.
From the leader of the insurrection to a billionaire-turned-governor from North Dakota, the GOP’s large candidate field — down to seven candidates — features a wide array of figures, all of whom are antagonistic toward voting and democracy to varying degrees. No one skips out on suppressing the vote, all the way down to your average GOP voter suppression policies, like photo ID requirements.
Maybe the Republicans should stop supporting voter suppression if they don't want Dems to complain about it? Expecting the opposition party to like your candidates is a bridge too far (notably, we're not quoting anything the GOP says about Dem candidates), but nobody is trying to get Haley or DeSantis (or RFK Jr.) disqualified.
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.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
One thing they shouldn't do is start throwing more dynamite in the flaming pile.
If you want to preserve institutions, constant escalation is not the way to do it. And that of course goes for both sides.
On the contrary, that is exactly what they should do. Doubly so considering the top-down nature of the affair. The imperative is to send a message that you can play the game or you can sit out, but you cannot try to flip the table. If you can call for an insurrection and then call a mulligan when it fails, there's no reason not to do so every time you lose.
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.
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.
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