Sunshine
5hr ago
That video is infuriating because he almost gets it. He describes the rake in excruciating detail, elucidates exactly why and how people step on that rake, and then, with great pomp and ceremony but zero self-awareness, proceeds to step on the rake himself.
I have yet to see any evidence that the text of the law matters at all. Not just in America but in every country, and not just laws but all written rules and regulations.
Personally, I suspect that approximately 99% of the population is functionally illiterate and operating on the level of the collective psychic unconscious. Rather than "reading" the "text" of the "laws," people simply synchronize their psychic emanations to establish what the majority of those present think the law ought to be, then act as if that was the text of the law. Only on very rare occasions does anyone bother to read what's written down, and when they do their ability to comprehend seems to be garbled by the still-present influence of the collective unconscious.
This is the only way I can explain the current interpretation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, among other things. If anyone was capable of reading it then surely they would understand the meaning of SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED. Since clearly they do not understand and continue to infringe regardless, they must not actually be reading it.
What's the point of writing pages upon pages of legal documents when you know full well that it will only be used as fodder for willful misunderstanding? The text of the law doesn't matter at all. The only thing that matters is who is in the room deciding how to misinterpret that text to favor them.
The Republicans have finally overcome their confusion and started fighting on the real battlefield. They've put their own people in place, and now they're the ones deciding which laws to ignore. They're deporting citizens, violating privacy, closing down whole government departments, and they're having a blast. Why backtrack now?
Seriously though. In a country where DA's routinely refuse to prosecute shoplifters because they're ideologically opposed to the concept of law enforcement, what in the world gave you the impression that laws matter in any way?
"Cease quoting laws to those of us with swords." -Pompey Magnus
Sunshine
1d ago
To be clear, there's already 700 miles of fence along the border. It was built long before Trump came along.
To the extent that a physical barrier is effective at preventing illegal immigration, they've already built one.
I think there is a disagreement here about what you're saying. There are two possible interpretations of this line of argument.
"Current problems with illegal immigration are caused by the text of the relevant laws. Passing new legislation will change the situation on the ground in a desirable way, by asserting some amount of control over illegal immigration."
This is what I think you intend to say.
"The Democrats are not clever enough to invent new excuses to sabotage immigration enforcement, so changing the laws will put an end to the shenanigans once and for all. They won't discover a new interpretation of the text a few years later, or decide that the law is a 'living document' which means they can ignore the literal text. The legal minds who brought you Roe v Wade will not be able to torture this law until it says whatever they want it to say. Adding ten thousand more pages of legislation to the millions upon millions of pages already there will totally change things."
This is what everyone else hears.
I think it's pretty clear that there's more to power than the text of the law. The Republicans seem to have decided to adopt a totally adversarial, zero-sum stance. They seem to have decided that any compromise with the Democrats is a strategic error. They seem to have decided to fight this battle through personnel rather than legislation.
Can you blame them?
Sunshine
1d ago
To add on to this, it seems obvious to me that Trump is focusing on the march through the institutions. He doesn't care about legislation because he's operating under an older theory of power: removing his opponents from positions of power and installing allies in their places.
Sunshine
18d ago
I think there's a core of truth to TPOASIWID that Scott fails to refute.
A system requires a constant inflow of energy in order to continue to function. A tree needs sunlight, a business needs customers, and a state needs tax revenue. Systems tend to evolve into the form that maximizes energy inputs, constrained by local conditions. The shape of the tree evolved independently multiple times because that shape maximizes inflow of sunlight. Similarly, businesses and states tend to evolve into certain forms in order to maximize their inflow of cash. In ancient times states revolved around immovable wealth sources like mines, ports, and bridges that could be easily taxed, and many states orbited around those sources. In modern times state revenue options have diversified, and states have grown larger to suit.
The purpose of a system is what it does, if by "what it does" you mean "what it eats."
Canada is literally bigger than the US, so yes it would be the largest state in the union. It would also be the most populous, edging out California. And yes, it would definitely guarantee that the Democrats win every election for quite a while. Canada's major parties are a centrist party, a left-wing party, a radical left wing party, and a French separatist party. Also universal healthcare has supermajority support from both the left and right, so expect that to become the single most important issue facing the government.
Frankly, it would make more sense to turn Canada into five states than one big one (BC, Ontario, Quebec, Western, and Maritimes).
Sunshine
1mo ago
Trump announced in a post last night that he was considering voiding the last minute preemptive Biden pardons of Fauci, members of January 6 House committee, and others, because an "autopen" was used to sign the pardons. Presidential authority to grant pardons is very broad, and apparently autopen has been used by prior presidents; looks like a losing case if it goes before the Supreme Court.
The version I heard was that the EOs and pardons are being voided on the basis that Biden wasn't aware of them. As in, someone else wrote the pardons and EOs and signed them with Biden's signature without any involvement from the President himself. If true, the autopen is not the source of the issue.
If the Putler view is correct, then failing to defend Ukraine is a mistake. It is a survivable mistake for the US, but a catastrophic one for Europe. (To paraphrase Churchill, if we appease Putler in Ukraine then the US will get dishonour, but the EU will get war).
You lost me here. The idea that Russia is even capable of threatening more conquest is just silly. Ukraine was the softest target in Europe, and Putin has spent years beating his head against it. Both Ukraine and Russia have been bled dry by the war, so even if Putin won a total victory today he still wouldn't get back the manpower and materiel he spent conquering it. There is no way that he's going to come off a victory in Ukraine and move on to Poland, especially not after Poland has had so much time to prepare. And Poland wouldn't even have to fight Russia alone, since it's a NATO member. Given that Putin couldn't even get a clean win against Ukraine, it's safe to say that if he ever goes toe-to-toe with the core members of NATO his ass is grass.
Russia is poor and weak, and it just spent a whole bunch of its dwindling manpower to laboriously pry a few provinces out of Ukraine's cold, dead hands. This was its last gasp.
Sunshine
2mo ago
He defined Conflict Theory in an unusual way, I think. Scott says that Conflict Theory is disproven because people don't act in their own best interests.
That means that, from his perspective, "The other tribe is attacking us because they hate us and want us to die," is actually a statement of Mistake Theory, not Conflict Theory. Because hate is irrational and therefore a mistake, people being motivated to conflict by their irrational hatred is taken as evidence for Mistake Theory rather than against it.
I think a lot of people use those terms differently, but I also agree with Scott on this one. The logical conclusion of Mistake Theory is that everyone just needs to get smarter and stop making mistakes and the problem will go away. That means that proving that the conflict is irrational really is a knock-down argument against Conflict Theory. If the Conflict is a Mistake, then it can be solved with better policy.
Sunshine
2mo ago
This is beautiful. However, it doesn't account for the collapse in the price of gold when Elon Musk takes a spaceship to Psyche 16 and flies it back with 100 quintillion USD worth of gold. We'll be using it as paperweights by the end.
It would be safer to peg it to a basket of goods.
Sunshine
2mo ago
If overdose deaths are suicides, then they're accidental suicides. The proper term for an accidental suicide is "fatal accident". Normally, when someone suffers a serious accident but survives, we give them medical attention to try to keep them alive.
I actually don't have a problem with suicide, provided it's intentional and done right. I think the authorities should make you wait a few weeks to confirm you're really sure you want to die, then shoot you up with lots of fun but deadly drugs.
What I do have a problem with is denying lifesaving treatment to people on the (unproven!) basis that they're a drain on society.
I am skeptical of any plan that involves causing large numbers of people to die on the basis that the world would be better off without them. What if it isn't? You would have just caused a bunch of deaths for no reason.
It'd be pretty embarrassing if you wiped out all the heroin addicts, then a few months later someone came out with a new AI-devised wonderdrug that can cure all addictions with a single pill.
Sunshine
2mo ago
I think you have this backwards. If Eric Adams goes down, it's a reasonable bet the next Mayor of New York will be uncooperative with immigration enforcement. He's not being rewarded for abandoning his duty, he's being extorted into doing his duty because the Feds have dirt on him. If there was no dirt on him then the Feds wouldn't have any leverage.
This is a false equivalence.
First of all, "Radical leftists want to undermine America" is itself a bit more Fox News than I think we normally go. I would probably say something more like "The left wants to weaken America's military, so of course they support closing overseas bases." I think a lot of leftists would actually agree with my framing, and would disagree that closing bases counts as 'undermining' America. They would probably say that America should spend its money on welfare rather than overseas bases, and that closing bases actually strengthens America in all the ways that count. Thus, they don't want to undermine America, they just want to close bases.
The Jewish conspiracy angle leaves a lot of unanswered questions. I do not actually accept the reasoning that Jewish people want to undermine the UK any more than I accept the reasoning that the American left wants to undermine America. I think that the thing you most need to justify when making that argument is the premise. Any time anyone posits a Jewish conspiracy, they never explain the alleged motivation of the alleged Jewish conspiracy. I believe that the American left wants to close military bases, because it makes sense according to their goals (spend less on military and more on welfare). I do not believe that British Jews want to 'undermine the UK’s geopolitical power when the nation is weak and vulnerable' out of sheer evil Jewishness, because that is not a real motivation.
I think if someone went around suggesting that the Vegans were the masterminds behind every Islamic terrorist plot, they would be banned in short order. The problem with the Jewposting isn't the form, it's the sheer nonsense of it. You can't post crazy gibberish and expect to be taken seriously.
Sunshine
2mo ago
This isn't a simple reason at all. You're supposing the existence of an international Jewish conspiracy to explain an odd policy decision. You're raising more questions than you're answering. That's the opposite of an explanation!
Sunshine
2mo ago
The reason this is being done so crudely is because every less-crude attempt made in the past was stopped. If you let them slow you down they'll keep finding reasons to do it until the whole thing grinds to a halt.
There was a limited supply of veto power and it has been squandered on less important issues. Don't blame the bartender for cutting you off, blame yourself for drinking too much.
Elon Musk already took a lot of the available heat. It's an even tougher sell now than it was a few years ago for an advertiser to burn their own revenues to deliberately antagonize both Facebook and the incoming President of the United States out of sheer ideological bloody-mindedness. Doing it now, when you've already seen that the last tech billionaire who faced a boycott like that did not cave in like he was supposed to and instead joined the other team whole-heartedly and is now poised to enact whatever revenge he has in mind using whatever influence he's curried over the last election, would not be a safe investment.
Sunshine
3mo ago
No, what this argument actually boils down to is 'if you're concerned about tyranny then you should not trust the government when they say that extreme measures must be taken because of the ongoing Threat to Democracy posed by the opposition leader.'
I am not afraid of the government being too weak, I am afraid of it being too strong. True Threats to Democracy almost always come from inside the house.
Sunshine
3mo ago
Why should I care more about the fake electors thing than about the practice of rule-by-executive-order, or the fact that the military keeps killing people even though the US hasn't formally declared war since 1942, or gerrymandering, or any of the other sketchy government power shenanigans that have actually succeeded over the past few decades?
It seems to me that there are a lot of actual threats to democracy, and this does not even come close to topping the list.
I really, genuinely, sincerely, in my heart of hearts, don't think 1/6 was that big of a deal. The demand for a Threat to Democracy outstripped supply, so the media spent 4 years trying desperately to turn a molehill into a mountain. The fact that it apparently didn't move the needle at all during the 2024 elections just goes to show that most Americans also don't think that 1/6 was that big of a deal.
The key fact about the 1/6 riot is that there was never any path by which they could have actually usurped the government. The US Government does not operate on Capture the Flag rules. It doesn't matter how many people trespass in which government buildings. Taking over a government usually requires cooperation from an armed force like the military, police, a paramilitary militia, an intelligence agency, or something along those lines. 1/6 had some unarmed old people milling about in the capital. An actual Threat to Democracy must have the ability to actually Threaten the Democracy, as in there must be some chance of damaging it in some way. 1/6 was just one of a series of riots in that time period, and not a particularly damaging or violent one at that. The fact that it was targeted at elected officials instead of random innocent civilians makes it, if anything, less morally fraught than many of the other riots that took place in the preceding months.
Sunshine
3mo ago
Nobody is afraid that they "missed the fascism", except possibly you because your brain is fried from huffing too much politics. Any "fascism" that is so subtle that you can fail to notice it while it's taking place in the cultural center of the world in the midst of a global political media circus (i.e. the election) is no fascism at all.
Fascism is not a mystic totem which once invoked will trigger Armageddon. If it's too subtle to notice, it's also too subtle to affect anyone's life in any way. If it's too subtle to affect anyone's life then it doesn't matter, no matter what scary words you use to describe it. If we can live in a fascist dystopia without noticing or being affected by it, then maybe the problem is that the word "fascist" is being used too lightly.
I dislike the way we treat mental disorders as if they work like bacteria or viruses. We even call them "mental illnesses." Strep throat presents in similar ways every time it appears because it's caused by a particular group of bacteria with particular traits. Autism isn't a species of microorganism, it's a cluster of behaviours observed in some humans. We can observe that many different people exhibit some or all of these behaviours without acting like they're all infected with a particular disease.
To continue the analogy: autism isn't the common cold, it's the act of coughing.
Sunshine
5mo ago
Demanding more effort is not the same thing as demanding less rage. This post is neither rage-posting nor outgroup-bashing, but you're giving it a mod warning for not "providing more than a Twitter link." What's wrong with a Twitter link? Why should you require more effort from top-level posts? Have you considered the possibility that this is actually an appropriate amount of effort relative to the subject matter? Have you considered the possibility that adding more effort to this Twitter link might not actually increase the quality of the post, because more effort is not called for in this particular situation?
As an aside, I think it's in bad taste to use the term MAGA as if it was some kind of entity or group. You only do it once in the top-level post, but you use the term frequently in your replies below.
First of all it's extremely vague. There is no club of MAGA card-holders. You're just using the term to vaguely gesture in the direction of Donald Trump's supporters. When you say "MAGA won" what exactly do you mean by that? What is MAGA and what did it win? If you're referring to the Republican Party's trifecta victory in the 2024 election, I think it would be more appropriate to refer to them by their proper name. If you're referring to something else, then I think you should define what this "MAGA" entity is and what exactly you believe it won.
Secondly, it's disrespectful to refer to an entity or group by a term it does not use to refer to itself. I would say the same thing to someone who went around ranting about "SJWs" or "Feminazis" or "the Deep State." If you have something important to say about the United States civil service or a particular group of activists, your point is not diminished by calling them by their proper name. If you need to refer to them by a derogatory nickname to make your point then that's a clear sign that you don't actually have one.
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