TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
No bio...
User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
The POTUS absolutely helps set legislative priorities. This is even more true for Trump, who's basically the God-King of the Republican Party at the moment.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
People who have actually read the book will understand that it gives a fairly scathing account overall. Collecting all the anecdotes along with the storyline of how it happened very much is good journalism.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
If you cared about corruption by anyone as much as you claim, you should already have investigated the claims against the previous administration, and you would have had no choice but to conclude that it at least looks fishy
Again, I must insist you list out a few examples of the corruption you're talking about. Because I did investigate some of the more major allegations. The claim Biden "stole" the 2020 election was 99.9% pure hallucination/confabulation. The Hunter Biden stuff was true in regards to Hunter being a dirtbag but critically lacked the link connecting to Joe, which was always the point in the first place.
So what exactly are you talking about?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
You really don't know? How can you claim Trump is worse if you can't even list a few things off the top of your head. I even gave an example in the other comment (though you did remove it when quoting it, so maybe there's some gaze-averting going on).
Which comment are you referring to? I'm not trying to be obtuse here -- I did a ctrl+f on all your comments in this thread and nothing immediately stood out, but maybe I'm just missing something.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
I specifically referred to Biden since I knew much more about his scandals than Nancy Pelosi's alleged insider trading. If Pelosi is doing that then it would obviously be bad, although I haven't seen much evidence that she's actually doing it. Not that I've looked super hard, I'm aware of it on the periphery of my knowledge but I've never delved that deeply. If you have an article or two that make convincing cases I'd be more than willing to give them a read.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
Just because the outgroup is spamming untrue attacks doesn't abrogate responsibility for one side. I'm reading through Original Sin right now, and the fact that Republicans constantly made incorrect attacks against Biden and Democrats more broadly was a big part of why the Dems ignored Biden's mental decline -- they could treat it as just another desperate attempt to smear Biden in the long gish gallop that was always going on. To them, the "Biden is senile" line could be treated as just another "Obama was born in Kenya" or "Joe is pocketing bribes from Hunter" line. If the Dems had a responsibility to actually report Biden's decline (and they absolutely did, IMO), then Republicans have a responsibility to clean up their side too, no matter what the other side is saying or how untrustworthy they are.
I'm not claiming one scandal was worse than the other (MAGA will always claim anything Biden and co. did was infinitely worse than what Trump is doing), I'm demonstrating the principle.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
what is there to actually do here?
Stronger internal criticism, like what MAGA did when Musk implied we must have open borders for Indians back in December. That would at least be a good start.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
They're smuggling because they have a chip shortage, and the smuggling isn't meeting all their needs.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
Good catch. I'm sure there will be many more examples to add to the pile by the end of Trump's term.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
Both the enforcement and the law were broken.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
What corruption were the past few Democratic administrations engaged in that exceeded the level of magnitude and blatantness that Trump is now engaged in? Even if you can list examples, why is your response to imply that makes Republicans immune from criticism now, rather than asserting that both parties deserve criticism when they're doing bad things?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
But that is not where he's actually focusing his efforts.
Yes, and that's a bad thing. He's spending his (legislative) efforts right now passing regressive tax cuts that will blow out the deficit even further. It would be much better if he focused on long-term immigration reform instead.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
People should be critical of every US politician to the extent that they actually engage in corruption. Tons of Republicans made accusations that Joe Biden was receiving huge kickbacks with Hunter as an intermediary, but that was mostly false in regards to Joe actually getting any money. I did criticize Joe for pardoning his son though. The problem here is that the two parties are not equal in corruption, at least for now. It's plausible that Dems will become worse in the future and use Trump's current actions as justification for their own awfulness. I'll criticize that if it occurs.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
Corruption in the military is particularly hard to deal with since much of it is secret, and it's not like a society can just totally disband its military if things go too wrong. Perun has a good video on this, with his bit at the end being particularly pertinent. Even though corruption will always exist to some degree, it's much better to live in a society where it's at least not blatant and generally seen as a bad thing that should be dealt with, as opposed to a country like Russia where it broadly runs rampant.
Exploding or minimizing the definition of "corruption" largely seem like post-hoc justifications for bad behavior rather than genuine attempts to understand the issue. If the valences were reversed, e.g. if Hunter Biden received a $200M jet and gave it to Joe, do you think Republicans would make a stink about it? I certainly do.
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.
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