Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
10hr ago
Socialism at the federal level mostly means endlessly bloating the elder care apparatus
To be fair it also means doling out increasingly huge wodges of cash to professional activist organizations and favored political client groups.
Supah_Schmendrick
11hr ago
That really depends on what you mean by "left wing." But yeah, that's a structural problem for left wingers in a functionally one-party progressive political milieu.
Supah_Schmendrick
15hr ago
It's New York so of course the populist candidate is going to be a socialist, but is this really any different than the rise of right wing populists in Europe in effect?
Yes; the RWP rally around a policy - immigration restriction and recognition of islamicate/SE Asian cultural incompatibility with western norms - which cuts both against official ideology as well as the fundamental moral order of the post-WWII first world ideal.
NYC electing Mamdani is literally a 50-Stalins criticism of the existing order. "We haven't socialismed hard enough/real socialism has not been tried!"
Supah_Schmendrick
15hr ago
The problem with socialisms are two - people are selfish and tragedy of the commons. For the first the only socialist solution that works so far is to beat them into submission.
Hardly; this just optimizes for the selfish people getting control of the clubs. Marxism has never truly grokked that people's ideological statements and interpersonal solidarity can be faked or hacked.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
A TrumpSon run would almost certainly capture significant quantities of credibility on the third leg
Unlikely; I've seen no evidence that any of Trump's kids possess his humor or stage presence - major reasons he did so well.
Supah_Schmendrick
13d ago
My gut says that living in dense cities is somehow injurious to the human spirit and generates a lot of sicknesses downstream.
I think this is likely because you have not been exposed to smaller, prettier, and orderly, but still dense town environments.
Supah_Schmendrick
13d ago
I'll quote @gattsuru here:
... the Obama administration issued thousands of work permits under DAPA after the Fifth Circuit [entered an] injunction [blocking the practice], and then said oops. A further hundred thousand reprieves were granted after the Obama administration swore before the court and in written submissions that they would not act on the memo while the court was ruling on the preliminary injunction to start with. During appeals the Obama administration held that it could offer whatever individualized discretion it wanted, so long as no one made those decisions because of the DAPA rule. Nor was this problem specific to DAPA. The Obama admin repeatedly refused to follow both statutory requirements and court orders mandating notice to a state for settling refugees, up to and including directing state charities to not tell state authorities.
To say nothing of how the Biden administration twisted and turned to do anything possible to refrain from enforcing the actual law on the border.
The left has a track record of breaking the law and ignoring court decisions in order to keep the border open, then trying to hide the ball under obfuscatory administratrivia.
Supah_Schmendrick
13d ago
They have all three branches of government
The majority in the House is less than 10, and there are a lot of clowns in the GOP caucus who can and gleefully will screw everything up on their pet issue du jour.
Supah_Schmendrick
13d ago
If we assume 12 million illegal immigrants (range I saw was 11-13), that's a cool 30 years at the current rate with a cost of $200.6 billion (not including 30 years of inflation).
Yes, but overt deportations are not the only thing happening. During the same period, there is evidence that sizeable self-deportation, most likely in the hundreds of thousands of individuals, has occurred.
Supah_Schmendrick
13d ago
The reason right-leaning news is growing is that it at least tries to get the facts right
Ehhhhhh....some yes, many others no. The pressure to cater to the consumer's pre-existing beliefs is very strong, and right wingers are just as susceptible to confirmation bias and all the other old, familiar rationalist hobbyhorses as lefties.
Supah_Schmendrick
13d ago
Blackbagging by ICE seems to be an extrajudicial process by design
You need to clarify what you are talking about. Are you talking about arrests of individuals who already have a final order of removal or order revoking a lawful visa against them? Are you talking about arrests of individuals based on probable cause that they are in the country illegally? A secret third thing? Immigration law is very complex and, yes, mostly delegated by act of Congress to the administrative branch through administrative adjudication, and discussing it based on vague generalities actively obscures more than it enlightens.
Supah_Schmendrick
18d ago
Meanwhile college students do hours of boring, grinding work and studying in the hope that in 4 years they can get a solid entry level job
Do they, though? What with AI and grade inflation, they increasingly can't really read or do basic math. I don't think this stereotype is as universally applicable as it was before.
Supah_Schmendrick
18d ago
It's almost never about the personal impact of the transgression on the transgressor themselves; it's about modeling and justifying the behavior to people for whom it would very much be harmful (i.e. the mass of the hoi polloi).
Supah_Schmendrick
26d ago
Does anyone know why they named it to have the same acronym as Biden's "Build Back Better" plan? It feels like a deliberate choice, but I'm not sure why.
Trump calls lots of things Big and Beautiful. In his 2016 campaign the border wall was "big, beautiful." He's called the U.S. a "big beautiful department store"; an EO dedicated to eliminating information siloing in the government promised to build "one big, beautiful dataset", the various diplomatic initiatives his administrations have undertaken have promised "big, beautiful deals," etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
28d ago
I seem to remember that the Drug War of old included an element of "it's your own fucking fault, just don't do drugs" and it still failed horribly.
Your memory is at least partially incorrect; drug use fell precipitously during the peak of the DARE era:
On the question of drugs themselves, it seems like Americans, especially teenage Americans, really did change their minds about how dangerous drug use was. Gone were the days of cocaine paraphernalia on magazine covers. For example, high-school seniors (the group for which we have the most data) in 1979 were relatively sanguine about cocaine: only 32 percent said there was “great risk” in trying it. By 1994, that figure peaked at 57 percent. Support for drug-law reform also sputtered out. In 1977, 28 percent of Americans said marijuana should be legal, a 16-point gain over the preceding eight years. In 1985, though, support was back down to 23 percent, and it rose only barely to 25 percent in 1995. The dream of marijuana legalization was dead for a generation.
Initially, the War on Drugs also had a remarkable effect on the total number of people using drugs. The share of high-school seniors using any illicit drug peaked in 1979, at 54 percent. It then fell more or less continuously for the next decade, bottoming out in 1992 at 27 percent. The class of 1992, in other words, was half as likely as the class of 1979 to use illicit drugs. Similarly heartening trends obtained in the adult population. In 1979, there were an estimated 25 million illicit drug users, including about 4.7 million cocaine users; 4.1 million had ever used heroin. By 1992, those numbers had fallen to 12 million, 1.4 million, and 1.7 million respectively.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Yeah my comment was more along the lines of a neutral point of information. Any excuse to tell the weird story of Ian Samuel (RIP First Mondays; you were a good podcast while you lasted) and plug ALAB, which is wrong about most things but funny.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
We have been over this - the bill wasn't really a compromise; it was a back-door way of legalizing the hitherto-flagrantly illegal stunts the Biden Administration, like the Obama administration before it (but more so) had been using to throw the borders open.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Scalia was, in fact, semi-famous in the legal world for always hiring at least one "counter clerk" (aka, someone who disagreed with Scalia on significant issues) in part so that he'd have someone smart in the room to play devil's advocate.
Of course, he didn't always pick winners; one such "counter clerk" was Ian Samuel, who later as a professor admitted to perving on his students, was broadly disgraced, but appears to have clawed his way back to respectability as an in-house regulatory counsel for big corps.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
If you're using the latter ottoman and tsarist empires as your models, that's kinda telling. Neither was a particularly fantastic place to live, were intellectually and culturally stagnant, and were so politically unstable they suffered fairly frequent and serious revolutionary insurrections.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
The rationing systems during WWII I think were a success.
Yes, but the objectives of the market change between war and peacetime in highly relevant ways.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
If there's a high and specific mens rea requirement like "corruptly" or "willfully," you can get away with less specificity in describing the actus reus
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I refuse to debate you further about the exact technical definition of "purpose" and whether it exists objectively or just subjectively, no matter how much you want to have that debate.
Okay, I don't particularly care about technical definitions; I was asking because I didn't understand what you were trying to get at with "not just a sense of purpose but an actual purpose," which seem to me to round to the same thing.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I don't think so, because I don't know what an "objective" purpose would even be, hence my original question. An omniscient being would be aware of an infinite number of perceived purposes for a person, but that doesn't make any of the purposes non-subjective.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I don't care to litigate the proper definition of the word "purpose". So long as you agree that the concept exists, I think we can agree that it's a different thing from the perception of it, which is my point.
I'm not sure I do agree that the concept exists independently of an observer/interpreter, either external (as in the case of someone reading code), or internal (as in a person asking "what is my purpose").
The best example in America are Germans. Germans went from being a fairly-unassimilated minority, with high non-english persistence and significant ethnic lobbying...to completely dissolved in the American "white" mainstream over the course of two generations. Of course, we all-but criminalized the teaching of German in schools and fought two wars against their coethnics with pretty stringent propaganda against the inherent evils of "Germanness," but it worked.
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