Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Move a department to the heartland. Move the Department of the Interior to... the interior. Build a new "Joseph Robinette Biden Building" for its HQ. This shows his commitment to the common people and sticks a finger in the eye of the DC insiders who shanked him. It also might take the wind out of the sails of the Republicans who would be more loathe to axe jobs in Kansas than in DC.
This can't happen - particularly the construction of a new federal building - in less than like 3 years. No way on God's green earth a lame duck president could do it.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
The problem I have with social constructions is that virtually everything in society is at some level a social construct.
I once heard this problem neatly solved with the saying "a house is a social construct, but I do rather prefer to live in one"
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
He's not perfect - his reading of statute in Bostock is strained and sophistic at best. But I'll trade that for getting the Nondelegation Doctrine and the other big constitutional questions right.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Trump is likely to replace the two most conservative justices with ACB types.
I hope for more Gorsuches.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Will this resume again in Trump pt II
This is in large measure a legal question. An aggressive, competent, and creative Trump DOJ could throw many monkey-wrenches in the works, to say nothing of tax legislation changing the rules around philanthropic foundations and non-profit status.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
summer Olympics (in 2028)
This is going to be in Los Angeles, and so likely will be a mild disaster.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
RDS (clearly the party will be JD’s after this term though I could obviously see RDS as a running mate)
how so? DeSantis has thoroughly flipped the ur-swing state crimson, and has no rivals as the most efficient and effective governor in the country both on ordinary, non-partisan QoL issues (disaster response, infrastructure condition, etc.) and highly-partisan culture war issues (fighting higher education, voting reform, etc.) JD Vance is no-doubt a major winner here; he's done a fantastic job on campaign. But I would be shocked and saddened if DeSantis was marginalized in the GOP moving forward. Competence like he's displayed has got to have a seat at the table because it's not enough to have good optics; you have to deliver.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
But this potentially feeds into the larger possibility of Trump winning the popular vote
If this happens it'll chiefly be because Trump narrowed his margins in places like NY and CA by 10+ points
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
As it stands now, I’d minimally double the terms of most offices.
One interesting thing is that IIRC the Federalist Papers contemplated that Cabinet Secretaries would need Senate advice and consent to be replaced, and generally serve across administrations. That might be a reasonable blend of longevity in office but with rapid accountability for particular screwups.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
An Augury! An Augury!
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
It's an election, though, not a bloody melee.
Elections are, in no small part, symbolic melees. We do things memetically and through balloting as a slightly-more-symbolic version of the "stand on opposing hill-tops outside of spear range and ineffectually chuck things at each other while yelling to establish bravery and dominance" paradigm that prevailed throughout most of human history, and a much-more-symbolic version of the "line up in two opposing phalanxes and grind against each other until someone breaks and runs away" that got more common in Europe during recorded history.
Either way they're still contests with dominance and submission on the line; we've just decided to accept proxy battles for the real thing.
Hopefully we're just doing the exhortation thing because our psychology evolved through far less history with elections than with bloody melees (100s of years vs 100s of millennia?)
Exactly.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
I would appreciate any links you have to hand on this; I'm trying to keep a better library of supporting evidence for my beliefs.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
What's the point of all of this? This isn't a football game where scoring points confers an obvious advantage. If Trump is up by 5 points in June or Harris is up by 5 points in July, it has absolutely no effect on the actual election.
No, it's a referendum on whose tribe is larger, better organized, and has seized the moral high-ground of the culture. Pumping up your own supporters through exhortation (we're winning - one more great surge of effort, comrades, and we shall triumph!) or demoralizing the enemy through propaganda (your puny candidate is weak and is failing! Abandon hope and don't waste your efforts and resources in what is obviously a doomed cause!) are valid tactics.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
I mean, it may well be that women over all are more likely to be nosy busybodies, or to go drunk with petty power. The old stereotypes of the gossiping shrew and harridan didn't come from nowhere, just like the male stereotypes of the sex-obsessed brute and violent thug didn't come from nowhere. But I don't know if the effect translates to the modern day, or if so how big it is.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
With Peanut, a lady in Texas presumably sent the complaint to a lady in New York who sent the city services to take the squirrel out back and shoot it. Clearly that's just a coincidence...right? Or is there something darker in here. Like....is the Karen meme deserved and legitimate?
My day job involves handling a lot of regulatory compliance matters and fighting administrative accusations not entirely dissimilar to the P'Nut saga. In my experience while women appear to be slightly overrepresented among the public complainants that I ultimately find out about (which is a small minority of all complaints - my state regards the identities of complainants to public agencies as privileged), there's no particular trend when it comes to which bureaucrats are particularly censorious and which are more lenient. The culture of the particular district office or subunit appears to matter a lot more.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Unfortunately "society" has little oversight over how government actually functions on a day to day basis, as things are currently constituted. I wish it were different, but I feel that it's important to recognize where incentives and structures pull actual day-to-day functions away from their idealized/theorized function.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Who do you think will win, Trump or Harris?
I do not know.
Relatedly, do you think there will be issues certifying the election results?
If Trump wins, I place an 75% probability that Rep. Jamie Raskin carries through on his implied threat to not certify the election results, as he tried to do in 2016. I doubt that he can get a critical mass of democrats to join up with the effort, however.
do you think we'll see outright political violence?
I would not be surprised if there were extensive protests which degenerated into limited looting sprees in major cities in the event of a Trump victory. I would be surprised if more than 5 people nationwide were killed.
Overall, how was your experience of this election? Did it seem noticeably different from any recent elections in any particular way?
The media bias was cranked up to 11, and the candidate quality (with the pleasing exception of JD Vance) was through the floor.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Given that the government doesn't have the ability to enforce all the laws all the time, it makes sense to deliberately ignore inconsequential violations and focus on consequential ones.
No, this isn't how it works. Given that the government doesn't have the ability to enforce all the laws all the time, it makes sense to deliberately ignore violations which will take a lot of time and resources to remedy and focus instead on easy ones. This is why we get anarcho-tyranny - people trying to get away with laziness and justifying it with moneyball-esque "efficiency" metrics.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
An addition:
The government hires people to do various jobs. Government jobs do not tend to pay as well as similar jobs in the private sector, but are known to have better work/life balance, better job security, and great retirement benefits. Thus, government jobs tend to select for a more ... relaxed ... type of person than the private sector.
One of the functions of government workers, especially in animal control functions, is to respond to public complaints. This involves a lot of work and disruptions to normal in-office routines, and thus is disfavored by the type of people who tend to take government jobs. However, because public anger is one of the few things that can get government workers in real trouble, such complaints must be visibly and aggressively addressed. On the other hand, the person being complained about has nothing to offer the government workers.
Therefore, when the state agency got multiple anonymous complaints about P'Nut, they were incentivized to take serious action to (1) demonstrate that they took the public complaint seriously, (2) generate as little additional work on their end as possible, and (3) avoid receiving any further complaints on this subject. They had no incentive whatsoever to give a damn about P'Nut or his owner, and likely negatively predisposed towards them because they're the reason there was a complaint in the first place.
Easiest way to solve the problem is to find some pretext to seize and dispose of the subject of the complaint - P'Nut.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Are happily married women with children being mobilized by abortion?
That phrase describes an increasingly-shrinking minority of women these days. And ones with teenage and older female children may well vote on vicarious fears/worries about abortion access.
Are sexless 20-somethings with nose rings shitting themselves over having to carry a purely hypothetical baby to term?
Young people are low-propensity voters, and overwhelmingly progressive for other reasons. The abortion talk is aimed at 35+ women, who are much higher-propensity voters.
Does anyone have an actual model for what's going on for this issue?
Sure, women find the idea of not being able to even have the option of terminating a pregnancy intolerable, even if they might otherwise want to keep the kid. Also, our culture denigrates devotion to family and unpaid child-raising as a life-style.
Are the Democrats really out here convincing every single woman that it's perfectly normal to find yourself needing an abortion, and it will kill you to give birth?
More like, "it's perfectly normal to find yourself needing an abortion, and banning "normal" abortion care will kill you." Of course, these stories are complete and total BS, not attributable to abortion restrictions. But most people don't look behind the screaming media spin.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Which demographics is she pulling in 2024 that Biden DIDN'T pull in 2020?
The argument I've heard (I'm not a polling or campaigning expert, so I can't really gauge how true it is) is that Kamala is relying upon a massive swing among women, of a similar magnitude of the increases in turnout that the Obama candidacy relied upon among black voters. This isn't related to her own sex, but instead a combo of abortion fears and disproportionate female distaste for Trump and concern about potential authoritarianism. That kind of reasoning is the only way that ads like this make sense to me. It also explains why Kamala prefers to go on SNL (demographic overwhelmingly elderly) than Rogan (demographic primarily young and male).
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
This isn't padding, though? What's the difference between asking Claude for a technical answer as done here, or summarizing one's own inexpert googling?
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
W wasn't even a neocon.
Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condi Rice were, though. Even W's speechwriters like David Frum were.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Swaying votes isn't the point - it's all about voter activation and turnout now.
The most famous version of this kind of attack that I can think of was the 2016 Bastille Day attack in Nice that left 80+ dead after a guy drove a dozen-ton small semitruck down a beachfront promenade.
Edit - whoops, sniped by @ArjinFerman
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