Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
16hr ago
Not true, actually. Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia" include a plan for gradual emancipation through colonization, and he was a proponent of the portions of the Northwest Ordinance barring slavery from newly-acquired US territories. Virginia was contemplating a plebiscite on emancipation in the early 1830s. If anything, support for slavery got stronger as the 19th century wore on, via what should really be a quite familiar process of reciprocal polarization between south and north. The William Lloyd Garrison radical abolitionists and Calhounian "positive good" types fed on each other to the exclusion of what had been the predominant view that slavery would eventually shrivel and die on the vine after the banning of the slave trade in 1807 (which was done at the first instant the Constitution allowed it, btw).
Supah_Schmendrick
18hr ago
What the fuck is going on?
Politics has replaced religion as a foundational cornerstone of personal morality and identity, and people really don't like having those questioned. Seriously; just look at the polling about whether you'd be comfortable dating someone with different politics/religion and the two concepts have flipped over the last half century.
Supah_Schmendrick
18hr 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
2d ago
TDA, with no conclusion language or question begging (i.e. don't use "invading army", "criminal gang" etc to describe them)
But Tren de Aragua are a criminal gang. That's their purpose for existing. The BBC, no fan of Trump or his deportation agenda, say it started as a corrupt local railway union which extorted carriers and contractors on their section of line, then turned into a prison gang, and now is a "transnational criminal organization" which controls diverse economic activities including gold mining and sex trafficking, and engages in political assassination as well as more commonplace "murder and torture."
The question is whether their activities in the US are in coordination with the Venezuelan dictatorship, as asserted by the administration.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
Biden could function because he was surrounded by reasonable people.
Hardly.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
US legislative branch seems to be very slow and inefficient.
That's because by and large they have given up on legislating as bodies, and instead are some combination of grifters, insider traders, and wanna-be pundits. Also, they're not very representative because turnout is low and very few people are engaged with their local legislative representatives and instead care almost exclusively about presidential/national politics.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d 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
7d 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
9d 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
17d ago
The police catch most criminals.
Citation very much needed.
Supah_Schmendrick
19d ago
Ah side-sword, my beloved Achille Marozzo drills :) :). I trained casually with a school before law school while I was living in a different city, but since then I've not managed to get back into it. I had a blast when I was doing it, and still occasionally leaf through manuals for fun during my free time; I'm trying to slog through a destreza manual right now.
Supah_Schmendrick
22d 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
22d ago
Beyond that, democracy itself is being exposed.
Another way of saying this is that it's reverting to the historical mean in terms of sophistication and rhetoric.
Supah_Schmendrick
22d ago
Or, maybe, the other similar experiences that those two countries have gone through over the last hundred years, plus the common christian heritage for roughly a millennium before that, outweigh the last generation or two's habits when it comes to organized religion.
Supah_Schmendrick
24d ago
That just moves the pressure up a meta level for determinations to be made about what is "valid." The same arguments will be made about sick children, sick spouses, sick family members, &c. And of course things will be fabricated at a higher level than they are caught, and enforcement will be weak.
Supah_Schmendrick
24d ago
It's easier to undermine a policy when the whole point of the policy is to favor some companies/sectors more than others, vs. just setting-and-forgetting a tariff rate. I admit that tariffs are also vulnerable to manipulation, but subsidies are in another universe.
Supah_Schmendrick
24d ago
This is where I start wearing my "don't blame me; I supported DeSantis" shirt.
Supah_Schmendrick
24d 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
24d ago
Hardly; the Senate's revealed preference was for Cory Booker to stroke his own ego for 25 hours straight.
Supah_Schmendrick
24d ago
Okay, but how effective do you think the House will be at policing this boundary? Which House majority will go from "having the votes to pass a bill" to "not having the votes to pass a bill" because a member gave an invalid proxy? No, the pressure to just slippery-slope all the way down to the "proxies can be given at each member's discretion" will be extremely strong.
Supah_Schmendrick
24d ago
I disagree. Subsidies give you (the protecting government) more control over whatever it is you're trying to accomplish.
This assumes that the government is able to actually exercise that control and not get undermined by lobbying efforts.
Supah_Schmendrick
25d 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
25d ago
Of course rules are arbitrary, but when they are set they are predictable and so they can be anticipated and responded to by other actors.
Maybe sometimes, but practically-speaking this is not true; the public-facing "rule" may be constant, but a significant amount of finagling and variability still goes hon behind the scenes through gerrymandered definitions of exceptions or predicate data, or selective enforcement.
You can't get around the "need good and honest people in government" problem.
Supah_Schmendrick
26d ago
A rule isn't a check against arbitrariness; it just moves the fight one meta-level up, to defining and massaging the inputs that go into the rule's equation.
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.”
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