Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Obvious that’s the issue with the bill - declare a national emergency. Gain unlimited power.
You sweet summer child; the country has been under multiple continuous states of emergency for decades. Technically we're still under the state of emergency declared by Jimmy Carter over the Iranian Hostage Crisis.
The Congressional Research Service prepared a Report in 2019. Take a look.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I don't want to blame Americans if it's not their fault, but this kind of thing - the whole progressive angle of antifa and the rest of it- is largely driven as an online phenomenon
In part, unfortunately, there's a particular type of usually female, mostly-secularized, American urban liberal Reform Jew, who is unconnected with many day-to-day or theistic aspects of the religion, but for whatever reasons still wants to feel a very strong Jewish identity. This almost always manifests as extreme neuroticism, persecution complexes, and substitution of political ideology for theistic moral precepts.
I don't know if you can blame individuals in this archetype for all of the "Gringotts is Antisemitic!" panic, but I've seen multiple such individuals give ideas like this credence and credibility, at least in lefty identity-driven circles. So it seems likely to me that on balance they're contributing to the trope.
I'm tempted to pattern-match this to how deracinated people on an identity's periphery are more likely to develop toxic simulacra of that identity - Hitler was Austrian, not German; Ghandi developed his ideas about Indian nationalism while living in an ex-pat community in Zimbabwe; it took American "blacks" to invent Pan-Africanism, etc. - but that reeks of a just-so story and I'm not sure if the full historical record bears it out. It's an idea I've been playing with for a while, however.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Because let’s be honest here — the Arab world is shit at football
They are absolutely not shit at funding football, however, which is also an important consideration. Notwithstanding football's self-perception as a game of poverty, it needs massive amounts of money to exist at the scale and in the way it currently does. The oil sheikhdoms have supplied a truly stonking amount of that money (e.g. Man City, PSG, Newcastle, Aston Villa, Sheffield...plus all the Etihad, Emirates, and Qatar Airways sponsorship deals...et. al.) and as such certainly have a stake in the footballing world, even if its not backed up by their national play on the pitch.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
If you have a vision for building a better society, you would also be obsessed with improving competence.
This just begs the questions "better in what ways" and "more competent in what?" If the ideologues really do think that, e.g., racism, prejudice, and just plain old meanness are the cause of all society's ills, why wouldn't it make sense for them to honestly invest in educational systems that try to be more competent at not being mean to kids, and similarly try to be more competent in teaching kids to not be mean themselves?
I agree with you that technical skill and competence is quite important, and that modern education is not geared towards fostering it. In fact, I think that modern education is quite prepared to suppress competence when it tends to produce outcomes which do not appeal to modern progressive aesthetic or moral sensibilities, and that this tendency is extremely bad. However, I don't think that your criticism shows hypocrisy - to the contrary, it shows the dangerousness of the earnest belief in bad ideas.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
No president is fully in control of the federal government; it's far too large, distributed, and procedurally-bound to ever be controlled by a single person, no matter how mentally-acute and/or vigorous they may be. With that said, there are a number of policy decisions which seem to evidence Biden's particular influence. E.g., the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trump tried to do something similar several times, but was stymied by the Pentagon and his own distractability. Biden, on the other hand, has allegedly persistently been a dovish voice in Democratic foreign policy circles since his service in the Obama Administration (a stance sometimes attributed to the influence and then death of his son Beau).
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
This seems seriously confounded. Personally, I would put money on the size and reach of the "shy MAGA" effect increasing, rather than decreasing this election. Further, midterm elections are always odd in terms of mobilization and turnout. Further further, the Democrats do a very good job of goosing enthusiasm in certain places at certain times through the use of pop-up NGO/activist movements. I would hesitate to draw a conclusion about the effect of voting integrity measures from this one election alone, especially given that the most recent comparator elections - 2020 - were extremely irregular in terms of voting mechanics and enthusiasm and thus not likely a useful comparator for anything
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
The migrants have as much or as little right to be in Martha's Vineyard as they do in McAllen, TX; restrictions on interstate travel in the U.S. are prima facie unconstitutional. They will suffer less privation in shady Martha's Vineyard than they would in outdoor detention facilities in the dusty Texas desert, so this is actually an improvement. Moreover, they're being shipped to one of the least violent places in the country; far away from the human traffickers and cartels. What, can undocumented people not cut the grass, caddy the golf courses, cater the garden parties, and nanny the fur-babies of the Vineyard? Is there not a massive New England employment crisis for lack of workers? Surely there are some "jobs Americans just won't do" there! I've heard that this kind of enriching diversity is a positive gift!
This is one of the best political stunts of my lifetime, because it is finally an example of chickens coming home to roost for the sanctimonious rich NIMBYs who are always so eager to be so charitable and hospitable with other people's neighborhoods and lives, but then insulate themselves and their own from the predictable consequences of their ideals. The migrants are already being used as chattel by the smugglers and the wealthy progressives who prioritize not having to see awkward and uncomfortable images that would result from enforcing the actual law and having an off-the-books workforce to abuse. This is just a teeny tiny step towards actually evening the burdens. You know, having the rich and privileged do "their fair share." Like a prominent Martha's Vineyard denizen said, "The defining issue of our time" is working "to apply the same rules from top to bottom" and not "settl[ing] for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by."The ruling class who refuse to preach what they practice must be made to put skin in the game, otherwise they have no reason not to continue to disassociate from the rest of the country and let it go to ruin.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Overt cultural pressure is less important now that banks, universities, bureaucracies, and schools are, in large part, captured by wokist moral reasoning.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
California's Vice Governor has written the Secretary of State (and released the letter as a press-release) as follows:
Dear Secretary Weber,
Based on the Colorado Supreme Court's ruling in Anderson v. Griswold (2023 CO 63), I urge you to explore every legal option to remove former President Donald Trump from California’s 2024 presidential primary ballot.
I am prompted by the Colorado Supreme Court's recent ruling that former President Donald Trump is ineligible to appear on the state’s ballot as a Presidential Candidate due to his role in inciting an insurrection in the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. This decision is about honoring the rule of law in our country and protecting the fundamental pillars of our democracy.
Specifically, the Colorado Supreme Court held in Anderson v. Griswold (2023 CO 63) that Trump’s insurrection disqualifies him under section three of the Fourteenth Amendment to stand for presidential re-election. Because the candidate is ineligible, the court ruled, it would be a “wrongful act” for the Colorado Secretary of State to list him as a candidate on that state’s presidential primary ballot. Furthermore, Colorado’s Supreme Court cites conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch to make their case, saying the following, “As then-Judge Gorsuch recognized in Hassan, it is ‘a state's legitimate interest in protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process' that 'permits it to exclude from the ballot candidates who are constitutionally prohibited from assuming office.’”
California must stand on the right side of history. California is obligated to determine if Trump is ineligible for the California ballot for the same reasons described in Anderson. The Colorado decision can be the basis for a similar decision here in our state. The constitution is clear: you must be 35 years old and not be an insurrectionist.
There will be the inevitable political punditry about a decision to remove Trump from the ballot, but this is not a matter of political gamesmanship. This is a dire matter that puts at stake the sanctity of our constitution and our democracy.
Time is of the essence as your announcement of the certified list of candidates for the March 5, 2024, primary election is coming up next week, on December 28, 2023.
Thank you for all your work to make our state’s elections a shining example across the country and world and for your time and consideration on this urgent matter.
Best,
Ambassador Eleni Kounalakis (RET.) Lieutenant Governor
This seems clearly poised to grade the road for CA to follow CO's lead. And while this is initially just for the primary election, this is clearly laying the groundwork for removal of Trump (as the presumptive nominee) from the November ballot as well. It also sets CA on track for potential nullification of any actions taken by Trump in the event the 2024 election returns him to office.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
I think you'd have to be basically Buddha to stop doing that. Every snap emotional impression - every "eww" or "woah!" - is a miniature moral judgment; deeming something good/beautiful/impressive or bad/repulsive/piddling.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Reuters reports that “Violence by armed gangs has fallen 'drastically' since the emergence of a vigilante justice movement that has seen at least 160 suspected criminals killed in the last month, a report by local human rights research group CARDH said on Sunday . . . CARDH said 'almost no' kidnappings had been recorded in the last month and counted 43 gang-linked murders, down from 146 in the first three weeks of April.”
Between this and Bukele's crackdown, forceful anti-crime methods are having a bit of a moment in the western hemisphere. I'm happy to hear that they are working a bit - Lord knows the poor Haitians have suffered a lot.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Nevertheless, the issue is settled that the law is valid. Everyone now understands that it can and will be used that way and it is futile to even attempt to argue that it is unconstitutional.
Absolutely not. Courts at the trial level routinely vary in their analysis/implementation of various statutes. The issue is not legally "settled," and if this charging practice becomes more widespread I would expect plenty of constitutional arguments from defendants.
What might be settled is a pattern and policy in certain prosecutorial offices of charging disfavored speech as "intimidation" under this particular theory.
What certainly is settled is an increased willingness in PMC strongholds to weaponize lawfare and prosecutorial discretion to target conservative activists. Insofar as the process is the punishment, this has been successful. Forum-shopping trial courts has also brought trial-level successes. It remains to be seen how any of this does on appeal, (IIRC).
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I can confidently say we are in the midst of a full-bore Communist revolution.
No, no, we're only dabbling in expropriations.. Moral panics and holiness spirals aren't just communist - you'll find them in Calvin's Geneva and Yankee Boston just the same as in Decembrist St. Petersburg.
Mostly just duplicating what other posters have said, but it seems to me that there are several possibilities, any or all or none of which may apply in any particular case:
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you and your female interlocutors have different interpretive frameworks for what types of crappy interactions are sexualized. E.g., a vagrant staring aggressively at you gets interpreted as rude, but a woman in the same position might attribute the stare to her sex.
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superficially similar types of unhappy events really do impact women differently. E.g., same staring vagrant, but where he makes aggressive, unblinking eye contact with you, he would instead stare at a comparable woman's breasts.
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you are not as observant as you think you are, and miss subtle events which are obvious and discomfiting to the women who are victimized. E.g., /u/hooser's "grinding" story below, which seems like it would be very hard to spot.
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you are not taking the same public transit at the same time or in the same place as the offenders. We know that antisocial behavior is not evenly distributed across the population, or even across individual sub-populations. Even in a "bad" neighborhood, most of the criminal behavior will be committed by a small local minority. Thus your wide range of transit use does not mean you are necessarily-likely to have bumped into particular antisocial conduct, particularly when you are not the desired target demographic.
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the women are, either consciously or subconsciously using sexualized incidents, which are a politically/culturally-approved complaint, as a cover or justification for less-acceptible reasons.
Supah_Schmendrick
12d ago
Yeah, where else in history has a populist, vernacular, radically anti-clerical, vegetarian, dualist form of Christianity that denied the literal truth of the eucharist ever popped up? Clearly with the death of the Cathars all prospects for a pacifistic, gender-egalitarian Christianity died forever and for all time.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
And yet there were approximately a million serfs in France when the Revolution kicked off in 1789.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
I constantly wonder what it is about the dumb people looking alike that makes it politically salient.
It's not about intelligence, it's about violating one of the basic tenets of our civil religion - that making a comparison between "black" and "white" which imputes negative characteristics to "black" is bad and wrong, because easily pattern-matched to bad, unenlightened white southerners and colonialists from the 19th Century.
But no, that's not what we see. Just the Holocaust, only the Holocaust, and anything else is a footnote. In fact, suggesting that the Holocaust isn't that special is apt to get you called anti-Semitic. So the objection isn't to teaching the Holocaust, it's to teaching only the Holocaust as an example of how Jewish people are oppressed in a special fashion that separates them all the way up to the modern day.
I agree that the fixation on the Holocaust is unfortunate (and I say that as someone raised Jewish who is just effing tired of hearing about it, along with all of the constant WWII metaphors about everything. It's the historical equivalent of shitty Harry Potter references on the internet.)
I suspect that this thing you're noticing has two major causes: (1) legibility bias, and (2) an unfortunate confluence of normal immigrant-group paranoia and network effects.
First, I think it's fairly intuitive that one reason the Holocaust is much more prominent in the West than, e.g. the Khmer Rouge, the Holodomor, or the Indonesian genocide is simple legibility. The Nazis left behind copious records, in an accessible Western language, concerning deeds done by a defeated power that contemporary politicians, archivists, and historians had no incentive to hide or shield from scrutiny. There's plenty of scholars and even laypeople who can translate and read the primary sources. There were plenty of people in the West who had personal knowledge of some part of the whole thing. And the Holocaust is tied up in the story of WWII, which has collectively obsessed the West for the past 70 years. For all these reasons it's very easy to go do research on the Holocaust and the Nazis more generally, and a natural and continuing wellspring of general public interest.
By contrast, those other events you mentioned are significantly harder for Western scholars to get at. The Khmer Rouge and the Indonesians left behind fewer records, in far-away parts of the world, in languages that aren't frequently translated into English or which have much intersection with a large scholarly community in the West, concerning events that few in the West have personal knowledge of. Moreover, the modern Cambodian and Indonesian governmental and archival systems aren't the best or most sophisticated. It's hard to do that kind of research, to say nothing of the fact that if you write your dissertation on those events, it's unlikely to be widely read (unlike a lot of Holocaust work, which is). Similarly, the primary sources for the Holodomor were locked behind the Iron Curtain, and even since the fall of the USSR access to records has been spotty at best (to say nothing of problems of fabrication, destruction, falsification, etc.)
So the Holocaust gets written about and has exhibits made etc., because, like the drunk looking for his keys under a streetlight, that's where the light is.
Second, it's not uncommon for immigrant groups in America to obsess over recent ethnic trauma. Armenians in my city are very vocal about the genocide of their people committed by the Kurds and Turks during and after WWI, and are also very vocal in their political and personal support for the modern country of Armenia in its battles with Azerbaijan. In DC, which has a large Ethiopian community, there have been large protests and counterprotests over the recent civil war, which includes an alleged attempted genocide of the Tigrayan people in the north of the country. On that basis I don't think it's all that unusual for Ashkenazi Jews in the U.S. affected by the holocaust to place lots of importance on it personally. However, due to network effects and a higher average IQ than normal, Ashkenazi Jews are more likely to work in white-collar, knowledge-work applications - particularly media. Add in a touch of that ever-present mental spice "typical mind bias," or "the things I care about are objectively the correct things to care about because everyone who doesn't think like me is crazy," and this means that Ashkenazi-specific neuroses and concerns get more play than the median minority group otherwise would.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Probably because there's nowhere to camp at - if it's in a walkable neighborhood it doesn't have a humongous parking lot around it
You are not giving the homeless enough credit for their willingness to set up camp on sidewalks, door-steps, and gutters even where that blocks the public right-of-way.
Nor are you giving the dysfunction of U.S. legal and governmental structures enough credit: in the western united states enforcement of anti-public-camping ordinances is illegal unless the city can demonstrate that it has an empty homeless-shelter bed for every single homeless person in the area.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Do you have absolutely no empathy for someone in west Africa dying of malaria?
I do have empathy for them. But empathy enough isn't a good enough reason to do something, not when I'm already groaning under the unmet weight of already-extant duty:
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I have a duty to my ancestors who made my life possible, and to carry on that line into the future.
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I have a duty to my family who worked and sweated and sacrificed to raise me, and must pay that forward by working and sweating and sacrificing for my future children.
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I have a duty to the people who I work with, who have invested in and rely upon me.
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I have a duty to the people who live near me, who I share streets and parks and utilities and schools and commerce with, and who have to share those things with me.
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I have a duty to my countrymen, who in times of danger are sworn to lay down their lives for me, and for whom I may be called to lay down my life in turn.
Out and out in concentric, relational circles. That's a LOT of duty in the modern world, and I'm not at all certain even all my effort and resources and will is doing a good enough job. Thought and resources I devote to things outside those concentric rings of responsibility is, in a real sense, a defection against those important things. Moreover, because those outside things are far from me and I'm not enmeshed in iterated responsibility with them, I'm not likely to understand what any intervention would do, outside of the most superficially-obvious results.
Better to focus positive efforts on the things close by, to which I am already bound. As for those things far away, the most effective thing I can contribute is a general promise to treat fairly and virtuously with strangers when they come into my life.
Politics: small countries need big friends for investment, trade, etc., and Israel is politically radioactive over the Palestine issue. Moreover, because all of Israel's neighbors in the region either actively despise it or grudgingly strike cynical realpolitik deals with it, it can't operate as a regional trade, manufacturing, or services hub the way other powerful small countries do.
Natural Resources: i.e., Israel doesn't have really any, and doesn't have the oomph to secure it's own supply chain from neighbors. This includes very important things like energy and water.
Geostrategic Considerations: Singapore controls one of the most heavily-trafficked shipping lanes in the entire world, as well as having British colonial legal traditions and political relationships, Chinese-diaspora economic acumen, and access to the cheap labor and developing natural resources of most of South-East Asia right next door. Israel is in a backwater part of the Mediterranean, with access to the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa thrown in as booby-prizes.
Security: Israel obviously is not in a great neighborhood, security-wise, and is also involved in at least three cold wars (Iran, Palestine, Lebanon) which could turn hot any moment. Thus, it is not an attractive target for investments in expensive, complicated, easily-damaged industrial plant, and has to devote far more of its resources to defense than comparator nationstates.
Social Unrest: Israeli politics and society are actually strikingly fractious, and significant portions of Israel's population think that economic activity is at best a second-place good to studying Torah and Talmud. Worse, because of the state's ethnic and religious affiliation, such groups have solid claims on public support for their underperformance.
Etc., etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I'm less clear right now on exactly what delineates the claim that the left hates Jews.
The left has historically played host to a wide range of activism sympathetic to the Palestinian side in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. This can range from everything from genteel two-state-solutionism, through the Boycott, Divest, & Sanction movement, to borderline (or at least claimed) anti-Semitism.
Second, leftist attacks on fat-cat capitalists and vulture financiers have verged into imagery that can be interpreted as referring, obliquely, to rich jews.
Third, and most provocatively, radical strains of black activism (such as the Nation of Islam) can be extremely anti-semitic, and during the past few decades there have been a series of anti-jewish incidents in the black community from the Crown Heights riots in the late 90s, all the way to the recent shootings a kosher grocery in New Jersey (iirc).
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
The dude can apparently recite a significant chunk of the Odyssey (or was it the Iliad? I can't remember) in the original ancient Greek, which was impressive to me. Maybe I'm an easy mark. He also debated Mary Beard for IQ2 on "Greece v. Rome," taking the side of the Greeks. I don't know...which American national politician could do that, even at the level he's doing? He may not be great shakes by academic standards, but measured against the bog-standard politician he sure seems smart to me.
Supah_Schmendrick
1d ago
Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.
I'm not sure what culture you're from/what tropes you're dealing with, but the idea that "women don't care about politics" hasn't been a significant part of anglosphere culture for at least the last 200 years, as far as I can tell. Instead, women have been at the forefront of just about every moralistic movement that I can think of in the anglosphere, from religious awakenings, the abolition of slavery, progressive uplift of the lower-classes, anti-alcoholism, anti-drugs, etc. A certain species of feminine moral busybodying over far-away causes actually gets lampooned from time to time in mainstream anglosphere literature.
Because no-one with the political power to do so takes metro, or even really remembers that it exists. Seriously, the only reason I know that LA even has a subway (as a native Angeleno) is because my best friend from law school is a train nerd and public transit enthusiast.
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