Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
On it's face I think that if we don't care about federal education policy and allow states to just educate as they please, there should be practically no issue with destroying the entire department.
Then what does the fact that there is a lot of people who are really quite invested in the department not being destroyed tell you?
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
And yet China can build an entire metro systems in less time than it takes New York City to add 1 station.
Building into greenfield is, perhaps, easier than renovating entrenched systems with significant entrenched interests.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
one judge has slapped on an injunction. We will see what the ultimate result is.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
I...am not so certain that "siding with Democrats on sexual tolerance" is a full descriptor of Trace because I don't think he's all that into the sort of obligatory pride stuff and trans stuff that the Dems are doubling down on. But point taken.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
Depends on which portion of which state's OSHA you're dealing with. I recently had a professional reason to run something by a particularly-specialized branch of Cal-OSHA and it was an absolute piece of cake. Incredibly business-friendly...I think every single person I talked to was at least a 10-year industry veteran who migrated over to the government side once they were ready to work fewer hours per week and get started on accumulating a pension (or at least gave that impression to my jaded eyes). Super easy to work with, very clear in terms of expectations and bright-line rules that the client was also happy with.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
That type of legal jiu-jitsu appears to be a major feature of the current administration's approach to regulatory matters, i.e. the repurposing of the Obama-era U.S. Digital Service into Musk's U.S. Doge Service.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
I mean, all of this is percentages and magnitudes across large populations, so of course there are going to be outliers of all kinds.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
Yes, of course. But if a topic engages someone enough that they spend non-trivial portions of their life discussing, investigating, and inveighing against certain approaches to it, one would expect to be surprised if the party openly and aggressively not on their side got their vote because of other ancillary issues which they seemed to not care as much about. It betrays a certain tension or inconsistency.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
Ashkenazi Jews - the stereotypically neurotic ones - are also white. Especially so in the Larry David/Woody Allen-esque liberal NYC progressive-assimilated jew type. Those sorts of jews overwhelmingly are in or the product of mixed marriages.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
There is no such thing as "unambiguously makes that misrepresentation impossible." The Civil Rights Act of 1965 was passed with the direct, spoken intent of not permitting such things as ethnic quotas or racially-preferential hiring/"affirmative action." It got perverted into, depending on who's doing the enforcing, either outright requiring or just permitting such actions anyway.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
Well, rhetoric goes a lot of different directions for a lot of different reasons, but no, a lot of it is aimed at the most dedicated and smartest people out there, because that's where your activist hours and donor dollars come from. Moreover, there is evidence to show that smarter people aren't necessarily better at seeing through bullshit, but instead are just better at constructing and adapting bullshit to defend their own aesthetic and personal preferences and pre-existing intuitions.
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
It's not a question of "being fully on board with my team;" it's the prioritization of what is fundamentally an aesthetic choice ("these chuds are low-status and have low-status views; I don't want to think of myself as being like them") over purported principal ("people shouldn't impose racial gatekeeping mechanisms on hiring for life-and-death public safety positions").
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
They don't have to, and shouldn't have to just because people don't actually understand the state of the law and the left is willing to strategically misrepresent and/or lie about it when it suits their purposes (for the record the right isn't much, if at all, better). Significant powers have already been delegated to the President, or arguably unlawfully usurped from its constitutional power as commander in chief (e.g. protection from at-will removal).
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
No, because at a certain point you wind up turning everyone into us ashkenazi and generating crippling neuroticism along with the increased IQ.
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
For reference, I'd put myself below the median poster in the SSC/Culture War Threat diaspora, and I got a 171 on the LSAT first try when I was applying to law schools back in 2014.
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
As much as I love your comment, please consider that the vast majority of current legislators, as well as a disproportionate amount of political commentators have law degrees or legal backgrounds - often elite ones - and all it's got us is ever-more sophisticated rounds of "obnoxious bad-faith argumentative games."
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
Yes, a lot of the people outraged today are hypocrites who thought it was just fine when Obama and Biden were abusing their authority. So what? Do you think it's actually bad for presidents to do this, or do you think it's only bad when it's not the president you voted for? If the former, then what do you expect to be the outcome of each president being encouraged by his supporters to expand his powers? That your party will be in power forever so it's okay?
Yes, it's bad when presidents abuse their authority and Congress is dysfunctional and supine. But it is worse when abuses of authority are only ever policed in one direction and thus policy only ever moves as a one-way ratchet. That dynamic is far more unhealthy than the underlying abuse itself because it cuts at the popular legitimacy of the democratic process entirely, and also leads to degradation of the quality of the party in power (see California, Illinois, NY, etc.).
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
I am less convinced than you are that Trump couldn't have done this the "right way" with actual laws.
Respectfully, are you an administrative lawyer? How familiar are you with the Administrative Procedures Act and the dozens of legislative and executive actions which together, in concert, have intertwined to create the tangled mess that is the current administrative state? How familiar are you with the history of the legislative veto and INS v. Chadha?
It's not reducible to schoolhouse rock-tier "you need congress to pass a law," and you shouldn't minimize the legal and bureaucratic infighting that's taking place.
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
Fox News recently broadcast a "helicopter ride-along" to the southern border, where they accompanied border agents at night as they scanned the riverbanks for intruders. The searchlights trained on a man who was attempting to lay low in the brush; he made a run for it, but was inevitably captured. The camera lingered as he was handcuffed and put in the patrol truck, to ensure that the viewers at home got a good look at their hard-won trophy. Even for an amoral Nietzschean overman such as myself, there was something slightly nauseating about how brazenly exploitative the whole ordeal was. Your moments of desperation, packaged and commodified by a foreign mega-conglomerate and sold as entertainment.
Or, perhaps, this is attractive to voters as a concrete example of a policy which they have consistently demanded for decades, frequently gotten lip-service toward from multiple politicians in both major parties, but have never actually seen consistently and seriously enacted. It's not packaged and commodified desperation; it's visual evidence that they are finally, for once, getting what they have been promised.
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
Yes but that's not how it will be framed and discussed. It will be "$X Billion cuts to Medicare!1!1!!!"
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
If Congress, which is the body which actually passes laws, wants to stop him, Congress can. Except, to raise the idea is to immediately understand how ridiculous it is, because Congress hasn't exercised real policymaking judgment in more than a vestigial way for half a century. It's all been seconded (in a dubiously-legal manner, not made any more impressive by everyone refusing to take responsibility for calling it out) to the executive, who now is demonstrating the truth of the proverb "what the hand giveth, so it may take away."
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
Hits really close to home. I, a young autist-in-training from the provinces, was enamored of DC and the chance to influence world events in high school. I duly went off to study international affairs at an inside-the-beltway school and immediately ran into a brick wall of these people and suffered basically a minor nervous breakdown at the shock of having my ideals shredded right in front of me. Not a pleasant part of the bildungsroman.
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, author of "On the Consolation of Philosophy," which is referenced in the same post.
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
What family needs a five or six bedroom house? Sharing rooms has historically been the norm, and still is for most people who actually have big families (i.e. the poor).
Indeed, hence the focus on the "very clear in terms of expectations and bright-line rules"
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