Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
Do you have a source? I can't find anything about that, and given all the other dumb bullshit that gets made up about him, my priors are extremely low on a 13 year old being an active collaborator.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
George Soros was a literal child when the Nazis occupied Hungary.
I'm going to roll my response into @porkpiehat here, since the thrust is largely the same.
Conservatives correctly point that out and are treated like crazed conspiracy theorists for doing so.
I'm sorry, but no. A perennial problem with cranks is that they find something that is true, conflate it with something that looks kind of like the thing that is true, and then run wild with tenuous inferences from the factoid. Right-wingers don't merely claim that George Soros gives lots of money to progressive causes. There is a whole raft of Soros-related crank theories which go well beyond "Soros gives lots of money to progressive candidates" or even "Soros is the architect behind the American progressive movements" (untrue, but at least not totally absurd) and into "Soros is a global puppetmaster orchestrating civil unrest around the world."
Soros isn't special in this regard
I disagree. Yes, people get worked up about wealthy donors that oppose them and don't get worked up about the ones that support them, but Soros is not treated in a manner equivalent to Koch or Bloomberg.
-- porkpiehat
I don't really buy the argument that it's because he's a foreigner getting involved in local elections. At the very least, I don't think that's anywhere near sufficient to explain the level of paranoia around Soros specifically, which are too wide-ranging and too enduring (my friends were making jokes about Sorosbux like ten years ago, for example) to be explained by something as simple as "Soros DAs". Soros is an American citizen, so compare/contrast RW reactions to other foreign-born billionaires like Rupert Murdoch or Elon Musk or Miriam Adelson. He's not the only billionaire donor quietly putting significant money into state/local elections.
I get that a lot of it is just "It's okay when Our Guy does it, but Soros isn't Our Guy," but as mentioned, he's not even the only lib doing it. No one seems to think Mike Bloomberg is hiring crisis actors.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9d ago
Another example is George Soros
I think this whole post is a troll, but it does give me the opportunity to bring this up: why are right-wingers so obsessed with George Soros in particular? He's not the only billionaire making big political contributions by a long shot. He's not even the only liberal Jewish billionaire making big political contributions. It's not a huge mystery why they're not worked up about wealthy foreign-born figures like Murdoch or Musk, but why not express similar concerns about numerous other wealthy Democratic donors? Is it just that he looks like Palpatine?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
I think the government has no real levers to pull on prices.
The government has fewer lever to directly move prices up or down, but it has a lot of levers that very concretely affect prices. Interest rates, tariffs, other taxes, subsidies, etc... It can also implement literal cost controls if it is so moved (and has). All of these measures have costs/trade offs and prices will vary due to factors outside the control of the state, but it is simply not right to say that this is something beyond policy intervention.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
any other Republican candidate gets beat in both those elections, though narrowly
The question is poorly conceived. A Romney Republican isn't going to get nominated in 2020 or 2024 in a world in which Trump wins in 2016, even if he dies of diet coke poisoning in his first term. The GOP had already been running hot with a populist revolt when Trump won the nomination, and that only intensified over the course of the first term. If Trump dies of health complications or just decides he's bored of being president, the likely successor is someone like Ted Cruz cosplaying as Trump. And that would go very poorly - the hardcore Trumpists, at least so far, seem to accept no substitutes, while the people who disdain Trump are not going to be drawn back by that messaging.
On the other hand, if Trump just... doesn't run in 2016, I think the likely nominees (Cruz or Rubio, neither of whom are really Romney Republicans, but close enough) handily beat HRC. Clinton was a WEAK candidate who would have lost to almost any credible Republican after eight years of a Democratic presidency on sheer thermostatic backlash if nothing else.
Trump boosted Republican voting by low-propensity voters far beyond what it had previously and had major downballot coattails.
He also repels a lot of traditionally centrist demographics like suburban professionals and has likely calcified a massive amount of winnable votes as near-permanent Democrats. And the suburban professionals vote every year.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11d ago
I mean, yes. I predicted that a lot of voters who said they wanted stricter immigration enforcement would balk at the reality of what a mass deportation campaign looked like.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11d ago
I said this down thread: Trump's approval has been in steady decline over the past two years, with a consistent drumbeat of bad news. It's gas and Iran, but it's also ICE goons and corruption and tariffs and being a vulgarian and...
(And it's also pushing bad candidates because they kissed the ring harder)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11d ago
The trajectory of Trump's approval is pretty steadily downward (which is to say not just one thing precipitated a collapse), though I also wouldn't underrate Trump just pressuring the GOP to pick bad candidates.
White men do not lose wars when they decide to fight.
That seems like a questionable proposition with an arbitrarily flexible escape clause. There's a long list of post-WW2 colonial wars in which European powers racked up a long list of losses, and we can find plenty of cases looking further back (Russo-Japanese War, Ottoman-Hapsburg and Ottoman-Venetian Wars, the Crusades, etc...)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
19d ago
And who says immigrants don't assimilate. Imagine they all assimilated fully into D subcultures and values and voted D even harder. Something tells me you wouldn't like that eithe.
The central issue for the hardcore American nativists is that they don't consider anyone but conservative (and preferably white and rural/exurban) Christians to be Real Americans. That, say, East Asians are seamlessly assimilating into the culture of upper middle class secular white liberals is a strike against them, not in their favor.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
26d ago
Hades' art direction has generally leaned towards characters that are beautiful but not sexy. This holds true for both games. Male or female, the characters are almost uniformly very attractive (there are specific exceptions, like Hephaestus and Tisiphone), but there's virtually no sizzle in the presentation. Nor, for the most part, the exaggerated proportions associated with 'hot' cartoon characters.
Even if the rules in practice were more like "protect the stability of the western block using all means necessary",
A somewhat fair criticism of the "rules based international order" is that it was always kind of a real-countries-only club. Practically speaking, this meant democratic states and their key allies. The flip side of this is that most of the objectors were/are autocratic states complaining that they're denied the legitimacy accorded to democracies. They could have that status in an instant by reforming into actual democracies, but unsurprisingly their autocratic governments are not terribly interested in the proposition that only democracies (and their client states) get to have real sovereignty.
I think that throwing away alliances seem short sighted.
It is short-sighted, but one of the (many) flaws of Trumpist thought processes is that they are extremely concrete thinkers. They don't understand benefits that are not literal, material transfers. The US receives massive financial/material benefits from its international position, but that takes the form of things like access to cheap credit and deference to American preferences in allied policymaking, but these benefits are all too abstract for the populist mind. They're not tribute checks or retinues contributed to American military expeditions, so they might as well not exist. Instead, they live in a world where the US is being relentlessly exploited by its allies because it doesn't get everything it wants immediately for free.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
29d ago
It's not even a consequential amount diesel - a few days of domestic US consumption. I wouldn't want to impugn Trump's reputation as a brilliant dealmaker, but one might suspect this is yet another example of him making wildly uneven trades on behalf of the country for the sake of producing a headline win.
I don't think this says what you think it says. It is incredibly weak tea, and fully in line with the "literal child" point I raised.
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