TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
No bio...
User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
27m ago
People just hated Darwin since he was unabashedly left-wing.
The guy who deletes his posts was weird but I don't really think he fits this mold either. His posts were mostly short -- I don't recall him really gesturing at anything particularly bad, but maybe I'm misremembering.
... while right-wing posters get to regularly accuse people on this forum of being delusional, claim outgroup politicians are "foreign agents", claim that anyone who holds specific positions is "too dumb to vote", etc. without even getting warned most of the time.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
AI is not sufficiently advanced to replace senior programmers yet. It's also not making them particularly more productive such that orgs could forgo hiring junior developers.
AI is the current hype bubble so every executive that wants to be thought of as "forward looking" will broadly gesture at it, and news orgs are chomping at the bit to get any scraps of stories that AI is replacing workers. In this environment you should dramatically downgrade your notion that much of anyone is being replaced, and your null hypothesis should be that any stories alleging it are dressing up normal corporate moves as "AI induced". Don't deviate from that understanding unless the evidence is very high-quality.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
I'm not saying what you're saying doesn't exist, but I haven't really noticed it that much on this site. Maybe my radar just isn't attuned to that sort of thing. Can you point me to some examples you think demonstrate that? The best example I could think of this is Curtis Yarvin whose prose is meandering and often difficult to parse, but he doesn't post publicly on this site that I know of.
I don't see how Turok would really pattern-match to that sort of problem in this specific post.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
Any right-winger acting like him would be instabanned
Extremely not true. I've had many discussions with MAGA folks here that degenerate to them doing little more than making a series of personal attacks, I report it, and then nothing happens. Making personal attacks against other people here is far worse than vaguely shaking one's fist at broad political movements, which was what AlexanderTurok did here. Again, I ask as to what exactly was the banworthy part of his post? What specific sentences were the issue that if uttered by right-leaning people ought to similarly catch a warning or a ban in the moderators' eyes?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
"Ownership of the means of production" is a niche academic definition that typically isn't used in real-world contexts. Example: Bernie Sanders is a "Democratic Socialist", and most people no matter whether they're for or against him think the label is reasonable. Yet most of Sanders' proposals have nothing to do with the means of production, and are rather just the standard "spend more on social services" like Medicare For All.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
The statement "happened to get away with it" seems like it's doing a lot of work here. My entire point is the right-leaning posters seem to "get away with it" quite regularly in ways that functionally give them a different set of rules.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
Terrible ban. We get stuff posted here of a similar level of snarling, but pointed at the left, and it regularly doesn't catch these types of bans.
Which of his statements was actually even worthy of the ban here?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class.
It's bizarre to me that you think the political class is inept, and you think the best response is to give them more power to screw things up in the economy.
Socialism at the federal level mostly means endlessly bloating the elder care apparatus, whereas socialism at the state + local level mostly means bribing connected nonprofits and unions to provide various crappy services that don't really work. Zohran's idea for city-run grocery stores is very dumb and will probably be dropped or completely overhauled after a few pilot programs demonstrate how silly it is.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4d ago
Every political movement always thinks the outgroup hit them first, and that they're just perfect little victims who are only trying to defend themselves, and therefore allegations of hypocrisy shouldn't apply to them.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4d ago
This is fairly impressive. Did you make this with assistance of generative AI?
Personally, I'd like a greater breakdown into those controversial and high-impact (landmark) cases, but it's still interesting to know that almost half of all SCOTUS opinions are 9-0.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4d ago
I think that goes too far personally. Someone who e.g. is fine 99% of the time but has occasional severe hallucinations ought to be able to go out and buy food at the local supermarket. If they get unlucky and hit that 1% chance then you probably only have some annoyed retail workers. With guns involved it instantly becomes so much more high-consequence.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4d ago
Trump's cultists are mainstream within the Republican party. I think you're interpreting "mainstream" as in "mainstream media" or something like that, which wasn't what I meant.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4d ago
Obama might have had a broader left cult during the election and shortly thereafter, but there was a ton of disillusionment afterwards with the left thinking he was too moderate. This disillusionment was a nontrivial part of why wokeness started gaining steam. Blacks broadly stayed with him the entire time, while proto-woke white leftists felt betrayed pretty quickly.
"Catturd posts on Twitter" is a non-argument. Joe Rogan just posts podcasts. Greta Thunberg just does publicity stunts. Yet we keep hearing about all of these people because they're important for one reason or another. I didn't claim Catturd was a politician himself, but he undoubtedly has influence on the broader base, which trickles up to those in power through various means.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4d ago
MAGA was against intervention broadly. I don't think I heard a single MAGA aligned person say "boots on the ground are my specific redline" beforehand.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4d ago
I find it much more reasonable to protect the speech of people I disagree with (e.g. Nazis) than to let people with lots of mental illnesses use firearms. Again, no rights are absolute. This is something everyone implicitly agrees with. For free speech we draw the line at incitement. For firearms we draw the line at crazy people (among several other places). If you're pro crazy-people-having-guns, firstly I think that's just silly on its face, and secondly I don't think it really does much to protect non-crazy-people from having their rights not be infringed.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
6d ago
some people like him because he's a fighter who wins for traditional conservative causes like reducing the size of government
??????
Trump hasn't significantly reduced the size of the government, and even explicitly refuses to touch the largest parts of it (bloated elder care in the form of Social Security and Medicare).
I vaguely agree with everything else you said in your post, and thought it was a bit more interesting and insightful than the article the OP posted.
All large political movements have some amount of cultists, but it's a matter of degrees. Biden had almost no cultists. Obama had some cultists especially amongst blacks. But for Trump the cultists are very mainstream. That's how you end up with situations like this, or this, or blatant hypocrites like Catturd becoming leading figures of the movement.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
6d ago
What? MAGA was largely against attacking Iran, right up until Trump did so, then they became very much in favor.
I don't know what your second paragraph is in reference to.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
6d ago
I don't pay a lot of attention to gun rights since it's not a particularly salient issue for me, but I'm softly intrinsically in favor of 2A rights. That said, gun advocates routinely make terrible arguments that alienate me from their views. This post is a good example of that.
The core issue here is that 40 years ago is a long time and there should probably be some automatic statute of limitations for psychiatric stays to fall off your record. Losing rights because of that seems wrong to me, but 2A advocates can't help themselves and go way further:
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There's that absolutist SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED ideology floating around, where any violation of 2A rights is perceived as abhorrent, and thus worthy of maximum outrage. Everyone implicitly agrees with judicial ideology that rights aren't absolute in other regards, as there's no great controversy around e.g. inciting violence being illegal despite the existence of the first amendment. It's the duty of gun rights advocates to show that any given restriction is unreasonable, and I'm sure a lot of them are, but many advocates seem to want to skip this step in favor of leaping to indignant outrage whenever an article like this pops up
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The facts of this case make it clear the guy is just bringing insufficient evidence. The guy's involuntary committal was violent, which ought to raise the bar for expungement. Then all he brings are a single psychiatrist's evaluation report that wasn't particularly sympathetic (The doctor found T.B. "very talkative," "shaky/trembling," "feeling angry," in "too much pain," and experiencing "memory problems." In his August 14, 2023 evaluation, Dr. Dada diagnosed T.B. with "an adjustment disorder and anxiety,") and an irrelevant NP report. Like, really? This man is your martyr?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
6d ago
You can just post the archive link for people who don't want to pay. I don't know why more news sites haven't cracked down on it yet, but it's a trivially easy way to pirate most articles still.
I don't see what's particularly interesting about the article. The family is obviously directly profiting from the presidency, and here Eric gives non-arguments that the family would be richer if it didn't get into politics (perhaps true, but not a germane rebuttal). As for the "political dynasty" stuff, what makes Trumpism so unique is the cultism, and that almost certainly dies with Donald. Maybe Eric could scratch out a future riding on daddy's coattails like a populist version of Jeb Bush, but people like JD Vance and even still Ron Desantis are more well positioned to lead that movement.
The president has wide discretion
They have wide discretion because most of the INA is subject to "may" clauses instead of "shall" clauses right now. Also, R's are looking to have a durable advantage on court appointments due to Dem weakness in the Senate. The idea that R's auto-lose every court case is just not correct.
We've tried things like this before
I don't see any reason for optimism that the compromise
What things have we tried like this before? And why are you talking about a compromise? R's have a trifecta, and immigration is an animating issue, AND Dems are (or were, before the deportation nonsense started) on the back foot on this topic in public opinion. This would be a diktat, not a negotiation.
The deportation LARPing events are stupid wastes of political capital meant to appease fools like Catturd that want to watch a few dozen immigrants be manhandled by armored goonsquads on Twitter and Fox News. This is the type of crap that made Dems freak out when they won the presidency and do defacto open borders via loophole. With the current bent now the public will have even more reasons to associate any enforcement of immigration laws with authoritarianism. It's just a dumb, unforced error by Republicans who are listening to their sectarian cheerleaders instead of trying to be strategic with their approach.
If MAGA actually wanted to deal with immigration, they'd first take the R trifecta and pass comprehensive immigration reform like the old Lankford bill, but an even tougher version. Close the loopholes and make it harder for Dem presidents to not enforce the law. Have more of their executive orders get shredded in the courts like DAPA did during Obama's tenure, and like a lot of Trump's EOs always do. This at least does something to prevent the problem from getting worse, and is the lowest rung on the totem pole in terms of political capital required.
Then, if Republicans want to remove the illegals already here, go after the employers that hire them. Break the incentive structure that acts as a magnet to illegal immigrants in the first place. This will cause economic pain and will take a lot more political capital, but is better than hurling immigrants out one-by-one. Note that I don't really think this is actually a good idea, at least for throwing out the entire illegal population as there are a lot of jobs Americans genuinely don't want to do for illegal-tier prices. I'd go after some of the legal immigrants instead, mainly the H1B scourge that's drenched in fraud and that's actually hurting the employment prospects of Americans for good jobs.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
I can't remember where, but some (reputable) news org said Israel wanted to kill the Ayatollah, but Trump told them no. Iran is at a weak point now, but their most important nuclear research facility is underground and Israel doesn't have bunker-buster bombs. Regime change through internal uprisings is all the Israelis can really hope for if the US doesn't get involved, and hostile action doesn't have a great track record of getting that to happen (rally round the flag effect usually dominates). If the US does get involved, they'll want the US to blow up the facilities they can't reach.
But he's not accusing anyone specifically of believing the things he's pillorying? He's not claiming all Republicans believe what he said. At worst, maybe you could say his mention of the "Online Right" was overbroad, but the way he capitalized it meant it was different than "anyone online who is right wing". Is the issue that you think no single Republican thinks these things? If that's the case I'm 100% certain you're incorrect.
I don't understand how the use of quotation marks in general would be worthy of a ban, or what you mean by "scare quotes". E.g. writing HBD as "HBD" probably just means he thinks it's a euphemism that he doesn't really agree with, but he's using it here for the sake of clarity as that's what it's often referred to. None of his other use of quotation marks seem bad either.
Here's a post from a year ago that came from a right-wing that IMO is far worse, and yet it didn't get a ban or even a warning.
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