Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Arguments about lifestyle creep fall deaf when food, housing, and healthcare the big 3 cost considerably more.
As an aside, the big 3 are housing, healthcare, and transportation. Food is not a trivial cost, but it comes in well behind those items for most households. The very specific subject of burrito discourse really is straight up lifestyle creep, but let's leave it aside, since I think your point is more about the general subject of affordability and why political leaders (particularly GOP leaders) don't seem to rate it highly.
The US middle class opportunity has changed in negatives ways for reasons that don't benefit me, and I didn't ask for, and instead of my political side agreeing to help address these issues, they are telling me to support a foreign war
Why would they act any differently? You're probably not going to vote for the Dems in November, and even if you are, the vast majority of their supporters consider it unthinkable. The style of American conservative politics has increasingly become a collectivist one in which vertical obligations only flow upwards. You owe your country (and, by extension, conservative political and economic elites) uncritical, unflinching loyalty. You are owed nothing (especially not by your betters).
In general, GOP leadership does not care about middle class affordability issues. And I do not mean that in a cynical sense where all pols are frauds who only pretend to care about things as a means to scam votes from the gullible. That does happen, but most politicians have real preferences and political goals, and they're usually not particularly coy about them. Republican political leaders tend to be conservative culture warriors (and thus largely uninterested in affordability except instrumentally), pro-business gentry (mostly putting them on the opposite side from the middle class, whom they would like to pay less, charge more, and work harder), or National Power types (who are primarily focused on international competition, not the welfare of citizens). Trump himself may have run on affordability in a rhetorical sense, but most of his banner policy ideas were things that were going to make things more, not less expensive.
To be a little charitable to the politicians, affordability-minded middle class voters often have incoherent preferences. They hate inflation, but they also hate high interest rates. They want housing to be cheap, but they want their house to appreciate in value. They hate how the US healthcare system works, but are highly skeptical of any changes. They want public services but hate taxes... Sometimes this is different subgroups with different preferences, but frequently it's not, and politicians find it safer and easier to do nothing than upset voters by trying to fix things. It is not some mystery why housing keeps getting more expensive, for example, but the actual solutions are widely unpopular.
edit: I misremembered the balance of household expenses
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
Contra common but incorrect belief, police in the US do not enjoy immunity from criminal liability. If the cops murder you, that's still murder, etc...
The problem is twofold. First that many civil rights violations aren't actually crimes. If the police search you unlawfully, they're not guilty of any crime, they just acted improperly and any evidence they found would be thrown out. You might be entitled to damages, but probably not. Second is that in the event an officer does commit a crime in the course of their responsibilities, the legal system will generally bend over backwards to excuse them. Police are of the strong opinion that they don't make mistakes or commit crimes, prosecutors are strongly incentivized to be on good terms with the police, and juries will extend officers the extreme benefit of the doubt.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
What Jeanine Pirro gets out of it is that she gets to be US Attorney for DC. Pirro is nominally qualified for her position, but in practice has been a tv personality for the past 20 years; no other administration would put her in this kind of role.
With Trump's coterie of subordinates, there's a pretty clear mix of opportunists and sycophants. One of the attractions of working for Trump is that because he can't/won't source talent from conventional recruitment pools, you can jump directly to positions of power if you know the right people and are willing to lick boot.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
15d ago
Kitty stared at Lyle bitterly. "I see," she said at last. "So that's what you get, when you drain all the sex out of one of them… You get a strange malodorous creature that spends all its time working in the garage." - Bruce Sterling, "The Bicycle Repairman"
Any explanation invoking "neoliberalism" unironically should be treated with extreme skepticism. I have a suspicion the explanation is a more pedestrian (though not less concern) factor than the deep-seated moral rot in society that forbids us from torturing children: low-friction hyperstimuli. It used to be that if you wanted to see naked ladies or go gambling, for example, it entailed a certain amount of effort and exposure. You had to leave the house and go to a strip club or casino and be seen doing it. Now you can do all that without getting out of bed, and without the attendant risk of humiliation for being seen by the wrong person. That's going to have a certain... anesthetizing effect on people who are susceptible to those vices or otherwise agentically challenged.
(Aside specifically re: ineffectual school dances. I've seen this subject come up before, and all I can say is that this is elders cargo culting rituals of their own youth without any of the attendant actual institutions needed to make them work. Yeah, it turns out a bunch of adolescent boys who don't dance recreationally and aren't allowed to talk to girls 99.9% of the time aren't going to do so hot when you throw them in a room with a bunch of girls they don't know.)
In old times, military profession was highly prestigious and military schools had choice of the best students. Now, aspiring elite human capital goes elsewhere, and military is increasingly seen as dumping ground for losers and rejects.
"Military school" is not the same thing as the military academies. The service academies, while they are not necessarily academically elite in the way an Ivy is, are still prestigious and competitive institutions with far more applicants than spots. Their graduates are, on the whole, "elite human capital."
Military schools are not that. While I'm sure there are many perfectly respectable institutions for martially inclined children of Good Families, the overall connotation of a military school was and is a disciplinary institution for delinquents. The kind of place a judge offers you as an alternative to juvie. The author invokes elite international students, but to cast a critical/uncharitable eye on the examples he presents, it looks a lot like foreign elites looking for a place to dump their underachieving sons because better institutions wouldn't take them.
As to the status of military service, I have to ask what the point of comparison is. I think it's fair to say that the prestige associated with military service has declined since the 2000s, but that is primarily a recession of the post-9/11 war fever. From a broader perspective, it is more or less as respectable as it has ever been to be a common soldier.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
21d ago
I disagree. Joe Abercrombie did it (and then he wrote three superb follow-up spinoffs, and then for an encore he did it again). I think you could argue Tad Williams did it before Martin ever put pen to paper.
I think the actual problem is that GRRM is just undisciplined and demoralized (and tbf, if I was in his position I would be as well), having written himself into a much more pedestrian corner involving too many loose plot threads rather than anything to do with the thematic aspect of his work. Another problem is that GRRM isn't actually all that grim dark. ASOIAF can be quite cynical and/or "realistic" at times, but it is shot through with a heavy strain of romanticism and that undermines critique-of-Tolkien angle. He can't square the circle between what he wants to write and what he has written thus far implies.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
21d ago
My point is a) Troy is a bad movie b) it has the exact same aspect of projecting modern sensibilities onto the Homeric narrative. You cannot complain about Nolan's Odyssey lacking fidelity to the source materially and then turn around and praise Troy for sticking to the text.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
22d ago
that at least does seem to have tried to stick to the story
Not sure I'd agree. It completely cuts out any of the supernatural/divine elements, condenses the Trojan War into like two weeks (most of which is Hector's funeral), kills like half the cast in the opening engagement (IIRC Menelaus and Ajax die almost immediately), and takes sides much more overtly than the Homeric narrative. It is explicit that the war is a power play by Agamemnon, with Helen's abduction merely as an excuse, and there is not a whiff of the extensive honor culture that pervades the Iliad. Also, the dialog is terrible - apparently written by Benioff of Game of Thrones fame - and the all-star cast can't save it.
(Hilariously, Nolan was tapped at one point to direct Troy, but was passed over.)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
27d ago
I grasped that. They're missing the point, if so. Like it or not, you don't get much credit for pro-social behavior that is also to your direct profit. The point is to be visibly philanthropic (or at least invisible) so people don't think you're a Bond villain.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
27d ago
If you're talking about Musk, you have that backwards. Musk has almost completely avoided the traditional philanthropic noblesse oblige of the extremely wealthy while being publicly self-aggrandizing.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
27d ago
but something that humble billionaire can do alone or with few friends.
Have a chat with some of your peers to stop acting like weirdos in public.
Unironically, the best thing billionaires as a class could do for their political reputations:
a) stay out of public sight, and in particular stay out of public politics. You don't even need to actually stay out of politics, just minimize the degree to which you are seen to be involving yourself. There's basically no way to not be seen as a corrupting influence on politics (because you inherently are), so the next best thing is to not be seen. Don't engage in conspicuous consumption (like, say, renting Venice for your wedding), don't try to make yourself a celebrity, don't promote yourself as a political player, etc...
b) set themselves up as Patrons of Humanity rather a jealous and superior species that needs to protect itself from the unwashed masses (this seems to be a problem really specific to tech billionaires). Do your best to look like you are Giving Back. You don't even need to be effective about it. In fact, you probably shouldn't, because the effective thing to do would be to focus on humanitarian aid in developing countries, whereas you need to be concerned with the electorates of the countries you actually live and do business in.
Compare/contrast the level of hate directed at Rob Walton vs Rupert Murdoch. They're both right-wing billionaires and Walton is dramatically wealthier than Murdoch, but Walton doesn't seek out the spotlight whereas Murdoch has actively positioned himself as a kingmaker and propagandist-in-chief.
I stand corrected. I'm not super interested in quibbling about the specific numbers, since the point is taken that food is higher than I recalled and healthcare lower, but I would at least note that USDA estimates put food expenses at ~10% of household income. They are looking at disposable income, however, which may factor into the difference. I suspect healthcare may loom larger because by and larger you're not going to have a really bad year where your food costs shoot up an order of magnitude.
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