TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
No bio...
User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
8d ago
Just how dumb do you think
you can in as deep denial
live in denial as long as you want
First off, cut it out with this crap, please. Denigrating people who disagree with you as "being in denial" adds nothing productive to the conversation.
In terms of Joe, the best evidence that he didn't take bribes was that Republicans (a hostile party) subpoenaed his bank accounts and repeatedly found nothing of the sort. Joe gave excessive leeway to his son Hunter -- partially from Beau's death, partially from not wanting Hunter to spiral again -- but never discussed anything but simple chitchat with Hunter's "friends". That’s consistent with a father who keeps family and state separated on paper while ignoring the obvious optics problem. Yes, companies will pay decent sums even for this. A few million dollars here and there might be quite a lot in politics, but its chump change for many businesses that would pay even higher sums for (legal) lobbying that also doesn't guarantee outcomes, and which don't even come with access to the President. Some might be willing to pay millions just for the novelty of their firm having dinners where the President makes an appearance.
In terms of the Trump stuff, I broadly agree that the most histrionic Dem attacks weren't true. But that wasn't my point. My point was that there was indeed an issue with Trump's underlings being shady scoundrels. This could easily make a reasonable person think the guy at the top was doing the same sorts of stuff -- but eventually this wasn't proven to be true. Still, there's some degree of a problem with Trump hiring corrupt people just like there's a problem with Joe putting on the blinders when it came to his son.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
8d ago
IIRC every president gets a routine audit from the IRS, but I'm not sure how far it goes in terms of looking for the specific types of wrongdoing R's alleged.
Instead, the House Oversight Committee (under Republicans) subpoenaed his bank accounts and found no wrongdoing.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
8d ago
There's degrees to this. IIRC no President has decreased the US debt in nominal terms in a century, but as long as the debt:GDP ratio is stable then that's OK to some degree at least. But this bill would be a quite massive increase in those terms, when the economy is doing generally well (minus whatever comes of the self-inflicted tariff nonsense).
The immigration appropriations are decent. They're a far cry from the kind of sweeping reform I want, but they're better than nothing, I guess. I'm also a fan of the expanded Defense budget. My main issue is the regressive tax cuts, which are really going to be fiscally damaging.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
9d ago
Hunter wanted to make it seem like Joe was in on it so Hunter could plausibly "sell access", but no money ever made it to Joe. Hunter was obviously corrupt, but there wasn't a link to Joe. Joe even agreeing to make small talk with Hunter's associates was bad no matter how Hunter lied and said they were just his "friends", but far worse was the pardon he gave his son. That's a clear example of corruption. Basically all Presidents have abused the pardon power and it would be better if it was simply abolished outright.
For the Trump-Russia investigation, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Roger Stone were all engaged in a bunch of shady stuff. What they were doing was by no means a "pile of pure shit". The issue for Dems is what those individuals did didn't really reach up to Trump.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
9d ago
This isn't an unreasonable take, but it goes against what Musk is doing now. Trump's Big Beautiful Bill has had a rocky road that has required Trump to help it along, something Trump generally doesn't like doing for legislation. Musk is giving ammo and support to opponents of the bill, and if it fails then Trump will have a lot of egg on his face.
Good questions, I think it's unclear at the moment. The main cleavage point here is whether this is the opening salvo in a huge rift between the two, or if Musk will get his nose bashed in and think it better to just generally refrain from politics (or go back to mainly bashing Dems). If it's the former, which I might peg at about 60% chance of occurring, then yeah, we could see the two really go to bat against each other.
I would guess a lot of people predicted it. They were two big egos, which tend to not get along super well.
Edit: Here's my take from a few months ago. I over-indexed on Hanania's arguments and should have stuck with my gut that two egos that large couldn't get along for more than a few months. I was otherwise correct that Doge wouldn't be able to cut much as a % of government spending, and that it wouldn't be able to touch the bloated elder care subsidies the US has.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
9d ago
The Trump-Musk friendship had already crumbled, but now it seems like it's actively imploding.
Musk went nuclear against Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill", calling it a "disgusting abomination". In response, the White House is "very disappointed" in the criticism. In other words, they're probably saying "fuck you, Elon" behind closed doors. Trump had previously been anomalously deferential to Musk, but if you read between the lines you could see there was trouble in paradise. Musk feuded with other members of the administration and Trump didn't back him up. Musk was causing enough chaos that he was starting to be seen as a political liability, and so Musk was somewhat gently pushed out of his role. People like Hanania who claimed the bromance would last have been proven incorrect, at least on this point.
Trump's budget is broadly awful, exploding the deficit to pay for regressive tax cuts, so I hope it dies.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
10d ago
I see it as quite analogous to the Trump-Russia investigation, i.e. there was plenty of smoke, and several people under the President were up to no good. However, there was no fire despite extensive searching by the opposition party. The connection incriminating the President himself was always missing.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
10d ago
The responsibility for corruption doesn't come from other guys being perfect, and a presence of other corrupt guys, true or imagined, can not excuse your own corruption.
I fully agree with this.
Joe was totally and undoubtedly pocketing bribes
Strongly disagree with this. I've yet to see anyone present any compelling evidence despite the massive Republican fishing expedition on the topic. Incredulity and demands to "stop living in denial" are not arguments.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
But were deportations always so Kafka-esque, or is this new?
There's definitely been a lot of this since Trump came onto the scene. Trump's first term had a lot of this sort of nonsense, trying to do deportations in the middle of the night before the EO's got shredded by the courts. Then Biden's reaction was Kafka-esque in the other direction, letting immigrants say some magic words "credible fear" to basically ensure open borders via loophole. Instead of doing legislation to fix any of these things, both sides just try to keep pulling fast ones, and then seethe when courts intervene or the other side undoes their EO's with EO's of their own. Just complete nonsense from start to finish. Of course the MAGA-leaning sectarian cheerleaders like Catturd are now screeching that the judicial system should be broadly destroyed since they won't give Trump rubber stamps on everything he wants.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
As I said to the other guy: it's an issue of demand, not supply. The price was already cheap enough that it was saturating what (revealed) demand there was. As a toy example, let's say the price dropped to fully $0. Would that lead to infinity words being generated by the slop-meisters, and the entire internet being nothing but SEO stuff? No, obviously not. It can't replace things already being written by humans, nor can it infinitely crowd out something like Google search results -- there can only be one top result, one second result, etc. Plus, well-known sites like the NYT are already heavily favored, and that's unlikely to ever change. Maybe things get slightly worse, but I bet that would be more from AI being able to lie/confabulate more convincingly rather than a cost proposition.
There are a lot of legitimate concerns about AI, but the notion that it will just broadly destroy the internet somehow isn't one of them.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
Republican Congressmen are not actually in thrall to Trump to the degree you seem to think.
They kind of are though. Some House Freedom Caucus members wanted to block the current bill, then Trump told them to fuck off, and now they're supporting the bill.
The fact Trump doesn't get everything he wants has more to do with Trump just being a buffoon who doesn't know how to do politics very well. He can sometimes get his way when he has a ton of political capital, but otherwise his blunt-force trauma style oftentimes fails to work.
Obama was quite involved in passing the ACA, for example, which was a campaign promise of his. source 1 source 2 source 3
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
The issue is the Dems are a hostile party when it comes to immigration, so Republicans should try to make any attempts to liberalize immigration as hard as possible, which generally means passing legislation when R's have a trifecta. Dems will try all sorts of things, and some of them might get through, but good laws can block others, like how DAPA was eventually shredded by the courts for conflicting with the INA.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
I mean sure, he could do both EOs and legislation. But he treats EOs as an end unto themselves, and the MAGA base broadly goes along with it, then goes SuprisedPickachuFace.png when Dems revoke them with a stroke of a pen. Then MAGA rewrites history so that EO's are the only thing that matter, implying things like legislation is fake and winning the Presidency is the only thing that ever matters. This thread has responses that motion towards those ideas a lot.
Trump doesn't actually like making deals that much, he likes having done deals, and announcing that he's a great dealmaker, etc. Biden was far more involved in getting deals across the finish line even in his diminished state than Trump was during either of his two terms. Trump has told a few House obstinate R reps to essentially fuck off and has broadly mentioned he doesn't want huge Medicaid cuts, but he's really not pushing on a day-to-day basis to get legislation done.
Putting a "lower priority" on legislation often means the legislation just doesn't happen, since political capital has an expiration date. There's no reason Trump couldn't have done an immigration deal in his first term when he had a trifecta, but he just... never did it.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
It's always been an issue of demand, though. Indians and Indonesians were always cheap enough that they could "flood the internet" with false, low-effort clickbait, but as long as people had some degree of standards then it wasn't a huge issue.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
The book really isn't the excuse that you think it is. There's some degree of scapegoating, although it's not really of Biden himself moreso than his closest advisors (the so-called "Politburo"). I'd recommend reading the book yourself if you still disagree. Even a person who just hates the Democrats ought to read the book, as they'd find tons of ammo in it.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
I'm not finished with the book yet, but it explicitly rejects the more aggressive notion much of MAGA advanced that Biden was a husk from the start of his Presidency that could barely string two sentences together. It claims there were some issues early on, but it was plausibly just Biden's stutter being a bit worse, and him getting tired a little faster. It further claims the bottom really fell out around the start of 2023.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
I point blank do not believe you care
why are you talking like this?
But you tell on yourself anyway
concerns you as much as you claim you should
and yet you are
First off you should know I have a fairly low threshold for abruptly ending conversations when the other person is disrespectful, uses ad hominems, or makes personal attacks. Nothing you've said so far passes that threshold yet (the comments I quoted are borderline), but I've been on this site long enough to know where it could be headed. When people resort to that I've found that it's best to just not respond to them much from then on. This is unfortunate since I come here explicitly to have my ideas tested, which I'd like to continue as long as both sides are generally respectful towards each other.
It seems as if I've annoyed you. If that's the case I apologize, as that's not my intention. The reason I'm "talking like this" is because I asked for specific examples, but in your reply you didn't give any and instead claimed it was obvious and that I should "read all of the motte" (?) but giving explicit examples really would was helpful so thank you for giving them. My issue with a lot of your examples is that they're not actually corruption -- many of them are bad on their own merits (e.g. border policies) -- but they're not corruption, they're just policies that you (and I) disagree with.
The "puppet president" stuff also isn't what I'd call a central example of corruption. It was also bad, and the Democrats deserve a lot of blame for it, and in some ways it rhymes with corruption since it erodes trust and involves implicit (and occasional explicit) lying, but it's different from, say, selling off pardons.
For the ones like Hunter Biden and the "stolen" election, the main claims of those are pretty much just blatantly false as I've already said. I'd say the Hunter Biden thing certainly would have been a central example of corruption, if the main claim was true.
This is in reference to Hunter's stuff, and it was a claim Hunter (or his associate) made to make it seem like Joe was intimately involved when he actually wasn't. Hunter wanted to make it seem like selling access to his dad was a good deal for the buyer, so that's why he said this even though it wasn't true. Republicans went over Joe's financial records with a fine-toothed comb and repeatedly found nothing.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
It's not clear to me why linking to AI-generated articles is far worse than, say, linking to a human-written article with tons of falsehoods. If AI is writing entire articles and confabulating facts that didn't happen, the problem is that a person linking to the article is assuming those facts are true when they aren't. Why does it matter if a bot wrote them or a human did?
The idea that the internet will soon be swamped in AI generated nonsense isn't convincing either, since Indians and Indonesians were always cheap and could reliably hash out SEO slop for pennies on the dollar. This led to a modest degradation of Google search results, but you could always still find the facts without too much trouble if you were aware of this.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
Here's a good study to add to your arsenal in regards to this topic: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/367325876_Sexual_loneliness_A_neglected_public_health_problem
The distribution of the number of sex partners among American heterosexual men was skewed already, but in just ten years, the distribution of sex partners among men became even more skewed. During the same time, there was no such change in the number of sex partners for heterosexual women. Sex is concentrated within a small, yet sexually active, group of people. In one study, it was reported that the 5 % of the population with the highest number of vaginal sex acts (penile-vaginal-intercourse) accounted for more vaginal sex acts than the bottom 50 % of the population with the lowest number of vaginal sex acts. 4 Using the Gini index, it is found that the distribution of the number of sex partners both for men and women throughout their lifespan is as unequal as the distribution of wealth among the most unequal countries in the world (South Africa Gini 0.63 in 2014 and Namibia Gini 0.59 in 2015). The number of female sex partners is more unequally distributed among single men (Gini 0.60) than the number of male sex partners is among single women (Gini 0.58) although both male and female sex partners are highly concentrated among people. 5 While sex is not like money or wealth in every aspect, the lack of access to sexual experiences can be seen as a concern for distributive justice6 and a problem for public health since an active sex life is beneficial for people’s health and well-being. There are numerous studies that show the link between active sex life and our mental and physical health.7 On the other hand, people experience negative emotional effects when being without access to sexual and romantic partners. Sexual loneliness decreases self-esteem and positive mood in both men and women. Especially for men, sexual loneliness might cause anger and aggression, which can manifest violently.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
I have a post rolling around in my head around that, but it basically comes down to Trump not really liking to do legislation since it's harder than doing EO's, and the party and especially the base broadly respecting that. Trump absolutely could pass sweeping immigration reform if he wanted to, but he doesn't really want to.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
Sure, if they reverse the legislation that would be on them, but undoing legislation is much more difficult that just doing executive orders, which is how Biden basically got to defacto open borders via loophole.
My biggest disappointment has been in how MAGA more broadly has just rolled over and accepted this foolishness. Punishing politicians after they're elected is hard, but MAGA did this to at least some extent when Trump + Elon said we need tons of Indian immigration back at the start of the year. But besides that, they've just held a competition to see who can do the most goofy mental gymnastics to claim Trump is actually doing 7D Chess. Tariff flip flops, egregious corruption, exploding the deficit, incompetence, buffoonery, etc.
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