Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
These are the views of one blue-state reactionary, but I don't particularly like Russia any; I have sympathy for the crappy history they've been dealt, but their current government doesn't spark any joy. The food and drink is pretty good at the emigre restaurants here in LA, even if they're all probably money laundering for something. Plus there's lots of adorable old emigre bakeries and groceries with slightly sketchy but usually delicious dumplings in the freezer if you go to the right part of WeHo. If anything, they're fargroup.
Western Europe, on the other hand, was in-group but recently has been making a pretty serious bid to be outgroup with the way they can't stop freeriding on defense, shooting themselves in the foot over really basic speech and energy issues, confusing institutional inertia for "democracy" itself, and still finding ways to be all snooty and trying to claim the moral high ground from a position of abject weakness. They just seem to be acting completely contemptibly.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
I think "free speech culture" in the context of the 1850's - a far more legitimately democratic (in the sense that actual political and physical power was exercised directly by the demos upon and against itself rather than via an elected/appointed expert/governing class) is something of a category error. The people who mailed Preston Brooks canes in encouragement of his beating of Charles Sumner on the Senate floor were exercising speech just as much as Lovejoy was. So was Cassius Clay in his antislavery advocacy. So was Thomas Wentworth Higginson and the other Secret Six fundraising for John Brown. People clearly were not deterred from expressing their political views.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
And yet that was at the height of print culture, when every town and village worthy of the name had at least one circular paper and most cities had four. I notice that your explanation isn't accurately predicting the historical results.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Adams wasn't strategically obstructing immigration enforcement as a backstop against corruption investigations; the entire political infrastructure of the dominant party in his state demanded the city and state nullify federal immigration law, and Adams is agreeing to buck them in exchange for non-prosecution. A much less worrying state of affairs; much more akin to a mob underling agreeing to flip on his bosses and undercover the organization's money-laundering operation.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
What the hell are you talking about?
Our idiot mayor (promoted far above her competence because of her race and gender) decided to be in Ghana even after she was warned that conditions were going to be particularly dangerous for fires.
The deputy mayor - also a part of the same ethnic political machine - was out of the picture because he is being raided by the FBI for allegedly calling bomb threats in to City Hall.
The third in line - the City Council President who only got the gig after the previous President went down for allegedly racist comments about the same ethnic mafia - was too busy cutting off public comment and oversight over City Council meetings and didn't do anything either.
In previous fire seasons, fire-engines were forward-positioned in the hilly areas to respond quickly to reports of small brushfires before they could spread and get out of control. Efforts were made to clear fire access roads up into the hills and cut away excess brush. DBS inspections were made of properties with notably overgrown brush and fines assessed if the landlords did not engage in required clearance. Etc. Etc. None of this was done, and the fire department itself dedicated to issues of gender and sexual diversity rather than actual fire-fighting effectiveness.
To say nothing of how decades of one-party liberal rule have led to a situation where our municipal water infrastructure is ancient and creaky - unable to deliver the volume of water needed in a true crisis - the DWP has become a byword for corruption instead of competence, and we still have the same number of fire stations as we did when the city had half the residents.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Yes. I think such sentiments are ugly in anyone's mouth, but I also don't think they merit firing.
Of course, back in the days when the U.S. was a real democracy, they merited tarring and feathering, or having the offending printer's press thrown into the local river. But I agree, burning is a bit much.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Revolutions are cool. They have happened in every country. Many countries are better after the fact.
Most countries are made worse by their revolutions. Even the U.S. revolution led to mass emigration of many of the best and brightest, as well as substantial inter-communal violence. And we got lucky that our Revolutionaries set ups something comparatively benign; we could have gotten Bolsheviks, Levellers, Chavistas, Maoists, Taiping-tier religious totalitarians, Bonapartists (who, for all his genius, wound up killing millions from his incessant warmongering, and shoved France from being the pinnacle of Europe into an early demographic transition which broke its power to this day), etc. etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
I wanted the woke to be defeated by classical liberals
The problem is that "classical liberalism" has very little positive substance to it in most formulations; it's usually articulated as something of a meta-philosophy about open competition between ideological groups (free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, equality before the law, etc.). It has very little to say about what the actual positive vision society should be working towards is. Hence its fundamental discomfort with the actual exercise of power necessary to rip out the institutional kudzu the woke has implanted into the liberal's precious "impartial institutions."
My biggest mistake, I think, was to extremely overestimate libs and the left. I really thought they would manage to blunt Trumpism's worst impulses and there would be a sort of stalemate like there was during Trump's first term.
The problem is that there is no institutional check on the left when it gets into power (eg all the nonsense the Biden Administration got up to, as documented ably by Rufo and many others) so the only actual check there can be is the one originally contemplated by the Founders - the full exercise of political power by a successive administration elected to reverse the initiatives of the last.
In fact, the checking of one aggressive force (wokism) by an equally and oppositely-aggressive one (Trumpism) is precisely the balancing of powers and passions contemplated by Madison and the federalists. It's just been so long since we had anything even resembling an equal fight between progressive and conservative forces in the country's institutions that actual open conflict looks like a radical coup.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Indeed, hence the focus on the "very clear in terms of expectations and bright-line rules"
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo ago
one judge has slapped on an injunction. We will see what the ultimate result is.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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.
Yes, but those monarchs are just basically tourist attractions or ceremonial figureheads to lend legitimacy to the government of the day. And those established churches are usually more liberal than our American unitarians. Lastly, the "blasphemy" laws in practice seem mostly to result in Koran-burners getting harsher sentences than some violent criminals, while doing nothing to protect, e.g., Christian anti-abortion protesters. Hard for American conservatives to really be all that in support of any of that substantively, regardless of the label it's all wrapped up in.
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