Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
So when you protest the actions of, say, the Chinese government in West Turkestan/Xinjiang, the appropriate action is to vandalize the local Szechuan takeaway joint just because it happens to be run by a coethnic? That's stupid.
And yes, there are mostly-secular "as-a-jews" who have fully-aligned with the progressive quasi-religion. This is not new; this was the story of the Trotskies and the Kurt Eisners and the Bela Kuns and the Rosa Luxemburgs, and it's now the story of the Peter Beinarts and Norman Finkelsteins, and even much of the modern Reform movement, which, not-unlike many of the mainline protestant denominations, has broadly de-sacralized and merged into the general progressive mainstream. Not for nothing has it been called "the Democratic Party at prayer". These folks are tokens in the anti-zionist movement providing identitarian PR cover the same way Robin DiAngelo and other "white-privileged allies" are for the "antiracist" movement.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Yes, hence my edits in the quote.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Here's the problem:
JewsCubans/Irish are a very small minority. Anti-semitismCastroism/Orangism being of central concern in the Western mind is not like preferences for the Indian lower castes or black Americans, it's a product of ideology and/or elite power.
Or it's that geographically-concentrated diaspora groups are pretty good at organizing and affecting policy, like any other politically-serious interest group.
Ah yes, that's why they're smashing up jewish-owned businesses [1], [2], [3], [4], are going after the main jewish student services organization on college campuses - hillel - and yell at protests things like "go back to Europe" and "go back to Poland."
EDIT: But even if the protests were immaculately limited to the Gaza conflict, the fact that we have a substantial diaspora population here means that it will have a political impact, just as there were conflicts between different factions of Ethiopian immigrants/diaspora in the U.S. over the recent Tigray War, there were big Armenian protests in LA over Artsakh, the Cuban expat community has long-exercised outsize influence over the U.S.'s Cuba policy, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Roughly as many jews live in the U.S. as do in Israel.
Without getting into the weeds here, I think you've slightly misjudged the call of the question. The issue isn't "who started the mudslinging," or even "was the anti-Romney campaign particularly egregious" - instead what is being asked here is "what were the inflection points which activated the Trumpian base sufficiently for him to arise in 2016?" The anti-Romney campaign is one possible answer, regardless of whether the Dem's rhetoric was in part accurate, or if the heat wasn't a substantial change from what came before.
Personally I think the Romney campaign was a lost opportunity, not a Trumpian precursor. Proto-Trumpian folks did not get all that excited about Romney; they were the ones boosting Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain and Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum in the primaries. A Romney win, if followed by competent government (a huge if in the modern-day) was probably the last serious chance the GOP's "respectability" faction had to wrest the party's momentum away from the insurgent TEA-party/populist wing which ultimately coalesced under Trump.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Most of the soldiers fighting in Ukraine weren't old enough to vote for the security agreements in the 90s
Although given reports that the average UKR soldier is now in their 40's, they might not be far off.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
You're also missing - the need to appease various institutional interests in his own government; the desire to not be seen to back down or "lose"; epistemic closure brought on by only interacting with friendly media; and others.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
There's also the specter of US soft-blob money (USAID, State, etc.) money drying up so people scrambling for new grifts over to hard-blob (DoD, NATO, security services generally).
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Did Obama's USDS administrator purport to be able to fire any government employee? Cancel federal government contracts? Impound congressionally appropriated funds?
What is the functional difference between DOGE administrator firing someone and DOGE administrator "recommending" the firing to the Executive Office of the President who rubber-stamps it?
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
I read that as talking about the desirability that the members of the senate don't turn over as frequently as those of the house.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
I don’t know any wokes IRL. I have no idea if they’re generally like this.
I do, and in my (small-sample) experience the woke tends to scale with general neuroticism and social dysfunction. The people I know who have their lives together, even when they have very, very progressive object-level beliefs don't behave in stereotypical "woke" ways or create nearly as much drama (though they are much more likely to indulge the drama of others).
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
It inexplicably describes Greene as a "medical professional".
Lawyers use templates. Sometimes they don't proofread well enough or strip out all of the stuff from previous versions.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
And while I'm not sure if administrative law judges are "constitutional" I'm pretty sure that having no judges at all isn't going to do anything to preserve my constitutional rights.
You're missing the whole Article III branch. ALJs are executive employees.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Yes, it's called "democracy." Vox populi, vox dei. Or something.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Two wrongs doesn't make a right, buddy.
Actually they do; tit-for-tat-with-forgiveness is a pretty great strategy for incentivizing everyone to behave.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
That reduces his incentives to rig the election for a successor
Each state runs its own elections.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
The president doesn't have to enforce laws he doesn't want to
In practice this happens, but it really shouldn't - the President is constitutionally-charged with "faithfully" executing the law. The weaponization of enforcement discretion into a presidential pocket veto is a particularly nasty bit of constitutional hardball that's developed recently.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
This executive order shifts power from the conservative to the-- as you call it-- "dynamic" aspect of the government. And conservatives are happy about this? What?
Consider that your theoretical understanding of the role of the various branches is not fully capturing the conservative critique of modern government. The executive already was asserting dynamic authority to make huge policy changes expressly against the will of Congress - e.g. massive expansion of the sweep of "civil rights" legislation, Obama and Biden's policies on immigration, and Biden on COVID policy and student loans - but only when it aligned with certain types of left/progressive priorities. Conservative attempts to push back on these innovations were blocked by recalcitrant and occasionally-outright-insubordinate bureaucracy, creating a one-way ratchet effect. The most recent generation of conservatives have abandoned "traditional" constitutional order for fighting fire with fire and trying to enable conservative executives to act in ways that previously only left executives could.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
The Legislature is meant to be the conservative aspect of the government.
The legislature was meant to be the popular aspect of government. The Senate was supposed to be more deliberative, but there's nothing in, e.g. the Federalist Papers iirc that takes this view.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
how is it possible for the executive, through an executive order, to expand the scope of executive power?
Because the executive is not always exercising the full scope of his powers to their fullest extent at all times, and the constitution and laws are not all-encompassing rulesets. If and when the President tries to do something new, we have to figure out whether that's OK or not.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
How seriously should we take this reproach?
If it comes out of Trump's mouth, it has been pulled straight from his ass, or may as well have been. There's very little coherence in the fine specifics of what he says. He doesn't exercise lawyerly-fine tuning of his language, which is what we've grown to expect from politicians (mostly because most of them are or were lawyers), and it's a bad mistake to operate as if he does. At most, look for a directional valence of the remark - here, "I'm willing to badmouth Ukraine because I'm trying to get the Russians to give me things I want - ending the overt war in Ukraine."
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Are you sure? Which side is antifa on? Which side were Sacco & Vanzetti on? What side are the IWW and the student movements of the 60's and 70's on?
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
The major communist parties of Europe weren't American-funded. Europe has a quite a strong revolutionary-left tendency on its own, completely independent of and long-pre-existing Soros/GAE-bux.
Because this leads to photos of children being separated from their parents by law enforcement, which makes a majority of voters sufficiently sad/uncomfortable to vote against it.
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