Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Frankly, it would be unprecedented for the polls to not change to some degree. Things happen, especially with modern short attention spans/news cycles.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Several thoughts:
(1) I'm not in a position to double-check your research, but from within my Gell-Mann amnesia your piece seems to be a triumph of meticulous digging, well in the spirit of your ATC qualifications scandal piece. Mega-kudos on that.
(2) As usual, the prose is engaging and lively. To be honest, I have little use for the minutiae of wikipedia, but you made me give a shit while I read your piece. Further kudos for that.
(3) As an exemplar of a certain kind of, for lack of a better word, deep-state operative, the Gerard story is quite instructive. However, given that the output of Gerard's crankery is mostly (without casting too many aspersions) ideologically-slanted internet articles, there's still a part of me that looks at all this as a bit of an exercise in navel gazing.
(4) There's a dark, sad part of my soul that looks at this story and sees the death of our lovely walled garden of discussion. Yes, Scott created an amazing community that has spun off in many different directions and brought a lot of talented people together. That's kinda what happens when you take someone with a silver pen and throw human capital at them. But then there's Gerard - just a guy, not nearly as talented a writer as Scott, not nearly as brilliant or high-power-level as many of the posters here; but he has an iron-clad grip on his beliefs, and the sitzsfleisch to just grind away, arguments-as-soldiers-ing his way forward in the ideological trenches day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. There's gotta be an order of magnitude more Gerards, scattered throughout just about every institution, than there are of us, and it really seems like even the most beautiful walled garden (and you really make it seem like pre-ant farm Wiki was just such a garden) will crumble before a Gerardian siege.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Drugs can make people become psychotic (acutely/temporarily)
No kidding. I have a friend who I've known since undergrad. Very smart guy - graduated from high school early so he could play around with robotics, did an undergrad double major in math and philosophy, breezed through a T-5 law school and was doing really well for himself working BigLaw.
However, in addition to the smarts (or maybe as an adjunct to them) this guy was quite neurotic, and developed a quite serious fear of flying. Needless to say he wasn't happy about this, and so started self-medicating with THC whenever he needed to fly. This led to a discovery that he quite liked being high, and in short order he wound up escalating to quite heavy marijuana use.
I'm not sure how long he had this habit or how heavy his use had been, but one morning I got a call asking if I could come pick him up and maybe let him crash at my place for a couple nights...only to find out once I had got him that he was in the depths of full-blown (if well-mannered) psychotic incident, complete with auditory hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, erratic behavior, and mania. I spent about 18 hours convincing this alien inhabiting my friend's body that no, the cars parked out front of my apartment weren't there to surveil him, that the faint sounds audible through the apartment walls was just my neighbor watching a movie, and that no he really didn't need to go find a gun store.
He eventually calmed down and I let him loose when he seemed clearly in control of himself again. Three days later he called and let me know that his doctors had told him it was THC-induced psychosis, and that he really needed to lower his dose. Fortunately it hasn't happened again, but man was that a weird moment.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Europe, a larger safety net
Many European cities are actually far more actively and heavily policed than the U.S.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I'm not treating it as a tea-party thing. To the contrary, it's a fusionist document. Trump doesn't like that stuff - he's pushing the GOP to the left on abortion, entitlements, and foreign policy all at once.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
As if Judaism today is somehow different from the Judaism in 1900 or 900.
But it is. No way in heck would any Jewish community in either 1900 or 900 have outmarriage rates nearing 50%, for one.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Trump has never reacted particularly well to the traditional small-government/social conservative/hawk conservative fusionist tendency, and there's a lot of that - particularly the free market libertarian streak - in the policy bits of Project 2025.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
He’s gotten smarter
Scuttlebutt has it that his campaign discipline is due to his co-campaign manager Suzie Wiles; an accomplished politico who used to be a big DeSantis booster until he alienated her in 2023 at which time she switched to Trump.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
No, black Caribbean immigrants have notably different (usually better) outcomes in the U.S. than ADOS.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
She's not even all that black. She's one quarter black Jamaican, one quarter Irish, and half high-caste Indian. Zero ADOS heritage in there at all.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I mean, he didn't seem like a tired corpse.
Only to someone without a clear memory of what he was like in 2012.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I.e., not even Austin's deputy was told. She was vacationing in Puerto Rico and had to be emergency bum-rushed back to DC when someone noticed that there wasn't anyone in charge at the Pentagon.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Of course, he then lit a lot of that goodwill on fire by bungling the Trayvon Martin case, needlessly blowing the Skip Gates silliness way out of proportion (remember the "beer summit" at the White House?), etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
To my knowledge, you're only allowed to have $850 per contract on PredictIt (i.e. you could bet $850 on Biden-No and $850 on Kamala-Yes, but couldn't go above $850 on either). Thus, I'm not sure how a whale would be moving the market - there's tens of thousands of shares moving each day on those contracts...
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
You need the chain of command of the unit to do the actual striking, plus whatever logistics, signals, transport, and support tail is needed to get the strike package to the target, etc. As I understand it, almost nothing happens in the modern U.S. military with "just a few people."
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Right, because people still knew their history enough that the idea of trying that kind of hardball was beyond the pale. It certainly wasn't for lack of things to try and arrest Presidents over.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Ah yes, because legitimate prosecutions of totally-real crimes are what an opposing-party DOJ will prosecute and indict a hated former-POTUS for...I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Also also, the Founders almost certainly didn't intend this because they knew their classical history, and knew that exactly this kind of post-office lawfare was a primary spur to the rise of Caesar and the Principate over the Republic.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
If we're positing the level of complete totalitarian control such that the military - a good chunk of which will have voted for or otherwise sympathized with the other party - to assassinate political rivals and expect to be obeyed, why would you expect the Justice Department, a much smaller and more politicized branch than the military which also serves at the pleasure of the President, to be able or willing to do anything to stop it?
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Partly why my pet theory about Iraq is that Bush was a good person, maybe even kind of smart, but his main failing was he surrounded himself with the wrong people, and guys like Rove and especially Cheney led him far astray.
Really, Bush wasn't prepared to be a foreign policy president at all. He actually campaigned on comparative disengagement with foreign entanglements, after the perceived overreaching and mistakes of the Clinton forays into the Yugoslav wars, etc. He wanted to be the "education president" and to focus on things like entitlement reform...then 9/11 happened and upended everything.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
You can limit the harms of people’s shit decisions and put barriers in place to deter them making the worst ones.
You can put rules in place. But that only works so long as people either (a) voluntarily follow the rules - which, if they really disagree with the rule and really want to do the thing it forbids, they won't - or (b) can be forced into doing so. And the powerful, wealthy, or well-connected will always be able to disproportionately slip the net.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Things like surgery or drugs you don’t actually need can present lots of risks to patients.
So does life.
Surgeries can go wrong leading to infection or internal bleeding or the like.
So can playing football, or learning to use power tools, or white-water rafting, or cooking.
Drugs can be dangerous in themselves, especially if they have a low fatal dose or are highly addictive.
You can make the same claim about swimming pools.
If a doctor was on notice that over-prescription of scheduled medication would trigger an audit of his practice, he’s unlikely to be a pill pusher.
How large is the doctor-auditing agency you're planning to run, such that it has the capacity to evaluate any meaningful percentage of practicing doctors? And who's staffing it? Are line doctors going to be second-guessed by the type of people who currently disproportionately work in government jobs? Good luck with that.
And even this doesn't stop the problem - it just pushes the issue one step further up the chain. Now you're looking for doctors who are either willing to fake the books (increasing the danger to the people undergoing the procedure because black markets are incredibly unreliable) or who have political pull with the auditing agency. We already see this all over the place; the last head of the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, which regulates and polices significant limitations on alcohol manufacture, wholesale, and marketing, resigned in order to take a job as...an alcoholic beverage control compliance specialist at a high-power law firm!!
You can't stop people from making shit decisions.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
You can't. There will always be people with more power, access, and resources than others. There is no procedural way around this.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
This reply nerd sniped me a bit, but I'll try to push through.
Sorry, it seemed like an interesting discussion :( happy to move it to the new thread if you like!
Having left aside points 1 and 5 for the moment, do my assessments of the other seven factors seem accurate to you?
I mean, my opinion is worth the wind it takes to express it, so ymmv. But no, I don't think your assessments are accurate.
The capacity of individuals to spread ideas, recognize fellow-travelers, and recruit does change drastically in terms of communications technology (the printing press, mass literacy, radio, TV, cellphones, the internet, etc.), technologies of physical movement (railroads, macadamized roads/highways, mass-produced automobiles, cheap commercial air travel), and historical contingency (war mobilizations, migrations, etc.)
I would think it's obvious that the opportunity cost of being willing to do something stupid and potentially dangerous goes up and down with circumstance - particularly how angry the population is, the change in motivating ideologies over time, the alternatives available (e.g. youth unemployment rates), etc.
As to the rate of change, Lenin was correct - "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."
Societies vary wildly in their ability to identify dissidents, let alone coordinate meanness against them. Some societies have the Stasi, others don't. Some have cameras everywhere, others don't. Some use cash, others are all-digital.
Some societies are much harsher against rebels than others; Tsarist Russia, for example, was shockingly lenient, and so is the modern US at least with regard to far-leftist causes in Blue jurisdictions. Makes the success of the Bolshevik revolution a lot less surprising in retrospect.
etc, etc.
She's been mostly hidden during the administration; it won't be difficult for her to stake out different positions that people who don't particularly like Trump but really couldn't stomach voting for a guy who appeared to be non compos mentis will believe. This isn't an election about convincing anyone - Trump's taken all the political oxygen in the room for all but a couple of months for the past decade - but instead about limiting discouragement among supporters. Remember, both the 2016 and 2020 elections went to the candidate who avoided having the last negative news cycle.
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