Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Both republican and democratic defense secretaries are speaking out about Trump firing senior military leaders in an unprecedented fashion.
Even if we grant everything else in your comment, what does this have to do with "democracy?" Is it undemocratic for a civilian head of state to exercise control over the leadership of the professional military?
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Yes, but a bilateral conflict is how you reach a new stable equilibrium; one-way ratchets don't have any brakes.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
The overt, propaganda use of a text can be significantly distinct from its artistic merits (eg: Triumph of the Will, which is both noisome NSDAP propaganda and beautifully shot)
Supah_Schmendrick
5mo ago
People renaming stuff for ideological reasons is bad actually.
Right. This community knows this progression. neutral rules are best, but once someone defects then trying to uphold the neutral rule is basically the same thing as unilateral disarmament.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo 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
2mo ago
Ive said this before but i think it bears repeating. Any definition of the "online right" that excludes the various Limbaugh and Brietbart succesors who comprise the core of the Tea-Party/MAGA movement, the Rogan-listening Bar-stool bros, and the crunchy-con/trad-cath homesteaders is excluding the vast majority of the online right by volume and is thus unfit for purpose.
It's like writing a history of the "new left" of the 60's and 70's and focusing on the Panthers and Weathermen...i.e., understandable, but myopic.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo 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
2mo ago
At its best, democracy works by providing feedback to leaders. Government adopts an irrational policy, the market has a reaction, and officials hopefully take that information into account.
This sentence isn't even wrong.
"At its best, [government based on the principle that sovereignty is vested in the people and wielded by periodic plebiscites or representative elections] works by providing feedback to leaders."
No, it works by either, in its representative form, selecting leaders from among a pool of candidates, or in its direct form by allowing the masses to select policies themselves. I think Hanania might mean "market liberalism" or possibly "modern political polling" or even "modern rapid-communication technologies."
"Government adopts an irrational [NB: according to whom, and on what time scale?] policy, the market [stock? futures? bonds? currency? commodities? CPI?] has a reaction, and officials take that information into account."
This really feels closer to divination than any serious theory of political economy.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Scalia was, in fact, semi-famous in the legal world for always hiring at least one "counter clerk" (aka, someone who disagreed with Scalia on significant issues) in part so that he'd have someone smart in the room to play devil's advocate.
Of course, he didn't always pick winners; one such "counter clerk" was Ian Samuel, who later as a professor admitted to perving on his students, was broadly disgraced, but appears to have clawed his way back to respectability as an in-house regulatory counsel for big corps.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Tariffs and trade deficits are the one thing he's been banging on about consistently since the 1980s. Seems pretty inevitable that he was going to try something to do with them.
Supah_Schmendrick
30d ago
I seem to remember that the Drug War of old included an element of "it's your own fucking fault, just don't do drugs" and it still failed horribly.
Your memory is at least partially incorrect; drug use fell precipitously during the peak of the DARE era:
On the question of drugs themselves, it seems like Americans, especially teenage Americans, really did change their minds about how dangerous drug use was. Gone were the days of cocaine paraphernalia on magazine covers. For example, high-school seniors (the group for which we have the most data) in 1979 were relatively sanguine about cocaine: only 32 percent said there was “great risk” in trying it. By 1994, that figure peaked at 57 percent. Support for drug-law reform also sputtered out. In 1977, 28 percent of Americans said marijuana should be legal, a 16-point gain over the preceding eight years. In 1985, though, support was back down to 23 percent, and it rose only barely to 25 percent in 1995. The dream of marijuana legalization was dead for a generation.
Initially, the War on Drugs also had a remarkable effect on the total number of people using drugs. The share of high-school seniors using any illicit drug peaked in 1979, at 54 percent. It then fell more or less continuously for the next decade, bottoming out in 1992 at 27 percent. The class of 1992, in other words, was half as likely as the class of 1979 to use illicit drugs. Similarly heartening trends obtained in the adult population. In 1979, there were an estimated 25 million illicit drug users, including about 4.7 million cocaine users; 4.1 million had ever used heroin. By 1992, those numbers had fallen to 12 million, 1.4 million, and 1.7 million respectively.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
The best execution of the policy would likely have been to let the call happen for some period longer than 5 minutes, and document thoroughly discussions and decisions about the custody of the 2-year-old, but with the same result (assuming that the mother did in fact want to keep the daughter with her, and the father did not have some legal right to contest that.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
There are plenty of us in California who are capable of understanding, and even believing, modern right-wing arguments. We just don't mix in San Francisco techie society.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
There is no policy from the Biden administration that even comes close to the destructive idiocy of these tariffs,
The high inflation caused by the runaway government money-printing destroyed a helluva lot of wealth. The decision to throw the border open resulted in quite a lot of harm. Just to name two.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
All that said, I do find it funny that most modern proponents of meritocracy do not challenge what is probably the biggest modern source of un-meritocracy in the West, which is inheritance. Even the most wild-eyed free market libertarian who advocates for pure meritocracy typically does not call for all humans to be put on a truly level playing field, which could only be done by forbidding parents to pass on their wealth to their children. And the truth is that, whatever you think about passing on wealth to children, all meritocratic ideologies that accept inheritance are at best just nipping around the edges, and not addressing the biggest un-meritocratic phenomenon in the whole human world.
This is because we don't want to optimize for consumption, production, or accumulation within single human lifespans. Not for nothing do we have the proverb: “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
I've noticed a tendency in pop history to equate "doing something notable" with "being someone good", whereas within academic history, historians are much better about maintaining an objective distance from the figure being studied. I think it's pretty telling that this objective distancing is often labeled "wokeness", but that's a digression.
The difference is, "woke" history is "whig" history - trying to read back present day moral notions and fashions back into the past as if they were objective (they're not). Actual good history doesn't sugarcoat the past; it immerses you in it so you can understand the actual norms and mores of the time and thus figure out for yourself who was being a giant piece of shit given the society they were in.
It's like trying to have a conversation across a language barrier. Woke history assumes that the phonemes " /ˈnɪɡə(ɹ)/" are always and forever a fighting-words-tier slur, because they are in standard contemporary American english...but doesn't bother to figure out whether or not the person they're talking to in fact speaking chinese or korean.
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
3mo ago
The US could sort out the corruption and drugs,
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh citation very much needed.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
No, "democracy" is the idea that power vests in the expressed will the people, and frankly the only politics that most people know anything about is presidential politics. With apologies to Madison, the house is not the body closest to the needs and desires of the people, because most people can't name their representative and few people vote in those elections when there isn't a presidential race to goose interest and drag lower offices along on its coattails.
The Demos, whether for cultural, material, techological, or irrational reasons has decided to place its trust in an elected hetmanate occupying the office of the President, imbuing the occupant with totemistic responsibility for just about everything, regardless of his formal ability to cause or prevent the events in question. This has been done with the connivance and acquiescence of the legislative branches, who voluntarily have surrendered most of their actual power to the executive, and have contented themselves with insider trading and playing wannabe-cable-news pundit on CSPAN.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
"Social trust" isn't just between a population and its rulers, but also between the members of the polity themselves. Perception of crime, "thickness" of social bonds, community engagement, etc. That also has been going down thanks partially to increasing diversity but also thanks to the internet which has everyone staring at a screen instead of each other and staying in instead of going out.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Hardly; the Senate's revealed preference was for Cory Booker to stroke his own ego for 25 hours straight.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
I have a lot of sympathy with postmodernism, and have little patience for the trad LARPing that some of the less well-thought-out posters here seem to embody,
This seems like a contradiction; trad-LARPing in the digital age is insanely post-modern and Baudrillardian.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
The police catch most criminals.
Citation very much needed.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
It's a lot harder to sympathize with people as just another political advocacy organization when the thing they're advocating for is an islamist terror group, which is one of the closest things we have these days to out-and-out hostis humani generis.
And to be clear, that would be as true for people waiving Boko Haram or Janjaweed flags as Hamas or Hizbullah.
The anti-zionists would have a much easier row to hoe if the palestinian oppostion were still secularist/leftist.
Madison in Federalist No. 45 wrote that "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite."
The Tenth Amendment explicitly states: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Of course, all this assumes that people will be most involved in their localities and states, with only sporadic contact with national-level politics. That theory didn't really survive contact with modern communication and transportation technologies.
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