Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I'm not a huge fan of alcohol prohibition, personally, but I wonder if that is, to some extent, a luxury believe of mine.
TBH the devil will be in the details of the baseline murder level (if there's already rampant organized crime murders, the addition of alcohol to the black sector may not make much of a dent), how the distribution system of alcohol works in SA, the availability of smuggled alternatives, whether there's local traditions of brewing/distilling that people can fall back on for moonshine, the competence and reach of police, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Temporary Protected Status and Asylum are different legal protections, with different criteria and processes. More generally, what does the term "illegal immigrant" refer to? I am under the impression it refers to people in the United States without a legal status that permits them to remain. That very literally does not include people with TPS (like the Haitians in Springfield have). if "illegal immigrant" includes even people who have legal permission to be here, what precisely are the boundaries? Are there green card holders who are "illegal immigrants?"
"TPS does not eliminate the effect of [an] unlawful entry.” (Sanchez v. Mayorkas (2021) 593 U.S. 409) It, similarly to DACA/DAPA, just temporarily waves a magic wand over otherwise-unlawfully-present migrants because the executive believes that extenuating circumstances make repatriation a bad idea at the moment. Worse, the Biden Administration is affirmatively facilitating the importation of well north of a million migrants who have no reasonable avenue to U.S. citizenship or even long-term work authorizations through the unprecedented expansion of a "parole" authority from the early 50's.
So technically yes, these people aren't "illegal immigrants" in the classic sense of the term; there are legal fig leaves justifying the government's failure to remove them. However, they certainly are not modal immigrants, i.e. people who intend to and are authorized to permanently remain in the U.S. and who in due course will become citizens. Instead, the law has shifted in order to find ways to putatively bless the importation of a millions-strong second-class-citizen helot class entirely dependent upon the whims of the state and their employers. Heckuva job. sarcastic clapping.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Because the ways in which they would be partisan, and their institutional incentives, would be different. Additionally, it is unclear the degree to which the incumbent effect would effect appointments from small legislative bodies, particularly the seventeen states whose legislatures turn over frequently due to term limit restrictions.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
What does the Overton window look like for dialing back Union power?
It's not just a binary of [less power<------------->more power]; it's also a question of scope and legal position in the economy. The U.S. under the Wagner Act has uncommonly-confrontational unions which are limited in scope and operating in a fairly inflexible legal framework. There are other models of unions - German unions are frequently mentioned here, but there are other examples as well - which don't work on this model at all, and have their own benefits and tradeoffs. I have no idea what the modal voter thinks about any of this (which I guess means this comment isn't all that responsive to the question you actually asked...oops :(...) but wanted to make the point that there's potentially room for policy entrepreneurship here.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I'm happy to report that in this case, at least, your assumption was at least partially incorrect. I can't speak to whether you would glean anything from the debate, as I don't know how much you know about either campaign's issue positions. However, it was the furthest thing from bullying both Vance and Walz were very civil throughout, and the debate was far more policy-heavy than the Presidential overcard a few weeks ago. Though they disagreed a lot, they did so politely, and also were ready to acknowledge areas of commonality. Both men saw an approximately 20 point increase in their favorability ratings post-debate, according to a CNN poll.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
asylum-seekers are expected to appear in court
The current backlog is, iirc, somewhere between 4,000,000 and 5,000,000 cases. There are approximately 700 immigration ALJs ("Administrative Law Judges") working on these cases. A year ago, when the backlog was only half as large, the wait-time for a hearing was nearly four years. This translates to effectively open immigration so long as you know to mouth the right platitudes, because what is the point of deporting someone after a decade?
asylum-seekers are expected to . . . have a place to stay and in some cases are given ankle monitors to track their location.
Monitoring like this isn't all that common - as of March of this year, only 185,000 of the over 6,000,000 asylees were in this program, and possibly as few as 19,000 were given ankle monitors. And of course, being assigned to the program is no guarantee of compliance; people just cut the ankle monitors off, and the government cares more about retrieving the tech than it does tracking down the fugitive:
Many men with monitors “cut them loose and take off,” Maria said. “Better if I stay here and follow instructions to the end.”
Two former case workers with a GEO subsidiary, who spoke on condition that they not be named because they wanted to safeguard their chances for future government employment, said it was common for ankle monitors to be removed prematurely, and people who do so are rarely pursued. That’s consistent with the 2015 DHS inspector general’s report, which found that ICE lacked the resources to chase many who abscond.
“ICE has other priorities and most likely will not look for them,” said one of the former case workers, who worked in Louisiana, Florida and Mississippi. He said that if someone did flee, the priority was recovering their ankle monitor — not tracking down the person who abandoned it. “We would visit their house and knock on their door,” the former case worker said, “and at most try to look for the GPS unit.”
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Well, the VP is the President of the Senate. That role is not defined by the Constitution, and right now has been pretty much eclipsed by permanent Presidents Pro Tempore elected from within the Senate itself. However, it could theoretically be made much more powerful if the Senate's rules provided for such.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I would think the major argument against this would be that it massively increases the incentives for a deranged partisan to try and elevate their guy to the presidency through assassination. As such, I don't think repealing the 12th would be a good idea at all.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
They owe their bewildering continued existence to the fact that they function as a bedrock reliable voting bloc
Well...that and mob ties (allegedly). Daggett got out from under prosecution for that when his co-defendant who was testifying against him turned up dead in the trunk of a car in New Jersey, a murder which has mysteriously never been solved! He has even pulled out the old "anti-mafia measures are anti-Italian bigotry!" card
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
the political environment was rather different from the current one in both cases, wasn't it? There was no sense of vibecession/stagnation, disillusionment in the party leadership, general anomie etc.
This is very wrong; both presidents were elected as countermeasures to perceived (and actual) vibecessions.
Especially in Kennedy's case, his cult of youth and personal example were so powerful precisely because they provided an outlet for this broad but unfocused and aimless search for an alternative to what was thought to be a depersonalized, cog-in-a-machine, stagnant society. The late 50's had spawned an intense critique of percieved conformism and rigidity in culture and economy. "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" came out in 1956, the same year Mills published "The Power Elite" and Whyte (who had coined the term "groupthink" in 1952) published "The Organization Man." The Beatniks reached their apex in the 50's, and were clearly reacting to a vibecession avant la lettre: "much of Beat culture represented a negative stance rather than a positive one. It was animated more by a vague feeling of cultural and emotional displacement, dissatisfaction, and yearning, than by a specific purpose or program ... It was many different, conflicting, shifting states of mind." Ginsburg's "Howl" (most famous in this community as the inspiration for the True Caliph's "Meditations on Moloch") was written in 1954-5 and published in 1956 (what was in the water that year?!?).
I don't have my sources at hand to fully dive into the eighteen nineties at the moment, but the fin-de-siecle decades were also stuffy and conformist, which spurred cultural backlash. TR's progressives were just as much a reaction against corruption in government and established political machines as TR himself was an icon in the cultural charge against perceived Victorian over-domesticity...not for nothing were TR's progressives smeared as "goo-goos" (short for "good government").
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I'm not anything resembling an expert on late-soviet history, but I do remember being impressed by Zubok's Collapse which argued that Gorbachev failed primarily because (1) he was really unlucky, (2) he didn't build himself a personal constituency within the state, (3) he was a true believer who underestimated the degree of cynicism and suppressed opposition present in the soviet body politic, and (4) lacked the economic chops to understand the uniquely-complex soviet economy, which was full of odd kludges, hacks, and workarounds accumulated over the years to square necessary interface with the rest of the world with Marxian ideological dogma, and so blundered into speeding up the implosion of the system in the guise of reform.
I can kinda pattern match Kamala to some of these, but I gotta be honest, the comparison isn't exactly leaping off the page...
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
While consuming a succulent chinese meal last night
A succulent chinese meal? Hopefully you go through it without experiencing any manifest democracy!!
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
since the foundation of the NLRB.
As we discussed below, the 5th Circuit is working on that problem.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
This is extremely inaccurate. Lebanon is famously split between feuding Sunni, Shia, and Maronite christian groups to the degree that their constitution sets ethnic quotas for power-sharing. Afghan is also split between many warring tribal-ethnic groups as well, including Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazara, and Uzbeks.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Soldiers routinely commit atrocities worse than your average executed murderer, and yet people have been enslaving prisoners of war for literal milllenia.
The behavior appropriate in group-conflict is radically different from that which is appropriate within the in-group, and as such the comparison is inapt.
Also, the standard practice for millennia was to execute the soldiers, and to enslave the women and children. We don't do that anymore.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Respectfully, there's nothing "obviously fantastic" to me about any of those. "De gustibus nil disputandum" and all, but frankly my (probably typical-minded) prior is that the number of people who would describe those works "obviously fantastic" are a small minority.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Now, more generally I agree that fat people (even "normal" fat people) have a strong tendency to be in denial about how much they eat and how little exercise they do, or about the health effects of obesity.
No, I know exactly how much I eat and how little I exercise. I'm lazy and depressive; exercise sucks compared to eating delicious food and reading a good book or playing a wargame in a comfy chair.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
So, in conclusion, I have come into belief that you should judge people for being obese. Not to say that all fat people are ignorant, entitled, and stupid. But they definitely have at least one of these traits, and should be avoided at all costs.
Consider that the people who get selected to be controversial and entertaining enough to be cast on reality TV, and the interactions which are edited by the producers into the final cut, are not representative of the general population.
Signed, a fatty who knows exactly why he is fat (depression, gluttony, and laziness), and does not expect anyone to do anything for him.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Gorsuch might bite.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Based upon what?
Based upon the fact that the majority of the rank and file GOP activists, lawyers, think-tank fellows, and other people likely to fill the thousands upon thousands of presidential appointment slots in a second Trump term come from institutions that are fairly sympatico with many of the assertions in Project 2025.
It seems uncharitable to tells someone what they believe (or what they will do) after they denounce it.
Yes, and neither candidate this cycle has earned much charity from me. However, I do take Trump at his word that he really does not like being bound by Project 2025, and he certainly wasn't part of dreaming it up (though many people who worked in his first administration and who remain his supporters were). Thus my conclusion that his appointees are likely to be friendly to many of the goals in Project 2025, but that Trump is likely to throw overboard any aspect of it which he believes has become a political liability.
Doesn't this lead to believing whatever you want about your political opponents?
I am trying to draw educated guesses about the most likely outcomes, based upon what I understand the facts to be. I would be happy to be corrected if anything I've said is factually incorrect, or if I'm missing something. My posting history should clearly indicate that I am open and transparent about owning up to error.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I would expect many trump underlings in a 2nd Trump administration to generally act in accordance with the overall thrust of the recommendations there, though the more radical the proposal and the more it diverges from the interests of major interest groups the less likely there are to be serious attempts to implement it. I also expect Trump to loudly denounce any effort which gets sufficient media attention to make him look/feel bad, and possibly fire any bureaucrat responsible for the attempt.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
aka deep spiritual connections to household pets.
This one seems to be a pretty common one, historically. I don't think of myself as very witchy, but I admit getting touched when I read ancient epitaphs for pets: "I am in tears, while carrying you to your last resting place as much as I rejoiced when bringing you home in my own hands fifteen years ago." Or reading about one of Muhammad's companions who was so devoted to his cats that he got nicknamed "father of kittens."
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
In that case, why am I (and I’d imagine, your average American citizen) not familiar with these terrible slave trades and exploitations of labor while I’m reminded of American black slavery nearly every day?
In part because we have a substantial black population that conceives of itself as needing to guilt benefits and sinecures from the hands of whites, while the hispanic and chinese populations do not do so, and the native americans were functionally destroyed aside from a few remnants. Thus, black slavery is politically useful in a way the rest is not, and most politics is whig history in service of contemporary political ends. And the rest is because we have terrible memories of our high school history curricula (or grew up in states without a significant history as part of spanish america. In California we learned all about the encomienda system as part of the Colombian exchange, and conditions in railroad gangs and early-industrial factories as part of early-20th century labor history. For the more advanced stuff you'd actually have to read some college-level scholarship (or just Scott's review of Albion's Seed), but it's not exactly hidden. This is all bog-standard 20th century progressive historiography that the elite are happy to teach to kids; it's hardly forbidden, red-pilled secrets.
If this was football, and your weak team had a miracle one year and beat the strong team in the next county, I imagine you’d be happier to recount the glories of beating the strong team while ignoring the glories of beating all the weaker teams.
Yes, but this is not football, and even if you were right and the metaphor holds, this rationale wouldn't have anything to do with why the actual slavery-supporting Americans imported black slaves because they were convinced that the black people, specifically, were physically superior. You've given a just-so reason for why such mythologies of physical dominance might spring up after the fact - i.e., for your own assumption.
Similarly white Americans have had a history of making their enemies out to be strong, portraying the native Americans they conquered as powerful because if they portrayed them as weak it would make them look unchristian and evil and sadistic.
A lot of the natives were very strong and impressive, for nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes. The white generals who fought them (Sherman, Sheridan, etc.) were quite open about the fact that yes, these impressive people were going to get steamrollered by industrial modernity, and that was sad, but such was the march of civilization. Not all christians believed that power = evil.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Besides that I think white men were fine with the enslavement of black men because they perceived black men as physically dominant/superior in some way. They didn't enslave Asians or natives to any significant degree because enslaving someone smaller than you makes you look bad and doesn't jive as well with Christian theology (see David and Goliath, Nietzschean slave morality etc)
Yeah, no. The nascent latifundia used unfree labor from white people (usually called "serfs" or, in the U.S., "indentured servants", or later "sharecroppers" or company-town folk), native americans (in latin america just look up the "encomienda" system and shudder in horror), and, when they started coming over, chinese immigrants (check out labor conditions on railway gangs in the 19th century) as long as they could; black people were just evolutionarily less likely to keel over dead of malaria (thanks to the sickle-cell mutation) and other tropical diseases than white people in the caribbean and/or US south, couldn't run away back to their tribes like indians, and in the 17th and 18th centuries were flooding the market thanks to very rich and aggressive slave-trading kingdoms on the west African coast. Notably, the places where there were a lot of native americans to enslave, like Mexico and points south in Spanish (as opposed to Portuguese) Central and South America tended to not see a big importation of black slaves and tend not to have large african-descended populations today; there was no need to go to the expense of shipping them in when other unfree labor sources were right there.
I thought the Yakuza were pretty involved in the drugs trade.
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