TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
No bio...
User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
15d 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.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
What are your best predictions for how future warfare will develop?
Anyone who's been paying attention to defense issues in the past few years will point you in one direction: drones, drones, drones. They're going to be omnipresent in basically every serious conflict going forward. From what I've read about troops in Ukraine, they make things absolutely miserable. They're nearly silent killers with the panopticon effect -- it feels like they're always watching, even when they aren't. You get out of your trench for 5 minutes to take a leak, and bam, now your leg is blown off. You're bleeding out on the dirt hoping for medical evac, but the medics don't want to come because who knows if another drone could be on the way. So you lay there, drifting in and out of consciousness while in a puddle of your own piss. Maybe you live, maybe you don't.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
Yeah, mental deterioration is something I also fear. I'm mostly fine living in solitude, but I do have fears of tail-risks involving medical episodes that could be fixed by just having someone to call an ambulance or tell me I've lost it.
I'm checking into a hotel and euthanizing myself with the strongest poison I can get my hands on.
These are strong words to say when you're young, and I've heard this sentiment from many people, but I've seen very few actually follow through.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
Monarchies were just the dictatorships of old.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
I think needing to have "meaning in your life" is largely overrated. Life is largely something you just get through -- nature loved using the stick much more than the carrot. Modern society is extremely cushy in most ways, sanding off the edges of the stick. This is why I see populists as a natural enemy -- they want "burn it all down" for stupid reasons based largely on hallucinations, and they'd take my comfy pillows away in the process.
If I have any life goals, it would be to build something, probably a video game or maybe something with AI. I've made essentially zero progress in that goal, but I have no illusions that the fault lies with anyone other than myself for being excessively lazy.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
while offering much higher stability and avoiding the dumber mistakes
Strong disagree on both of those statements. Democracies are the most stable form of government in existence since they allow for peaceful transfer of power. Hybrid regimes like those in the Sahel or Central America are notoriously unstable and chain coups like they're going out of style. More totalitarian states like Russia and China are more stable overall, and can seem even more stable than democracies... until they aren't. They're brittle and tend to shatter rather than undergo painful reforms. The biggest threat to democracies is rarely a big civil war, but rather descending into Orbanism.
And autocracies make stupid moves all the time. Zero Covid? Also, the whole Communist flavor of autocracies from 1945-1991 was a major unforced screwup.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
Democracy simply does not work.
I agree with the other guy: It's the least awful form of government we have. The only real alternative is dictatorship, which is almost always worse overall for human flourishing. Every time I think the voters are too terminally stupid to be trusted to do much of anything, I watch a video like this and feel even worse about any alternative.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
This is a good critique of the blackpiller mindset.
For what it's worth I asked ChatGPT if there was a more well-known term for the "traction" you were talking about, and it said "self-efficacy", which I think is pretty close but maybe not entirely aligned with the vibes you were going for.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
The main problem I have with blackpilled monk types (and this post is pretty archetypal blackpill despite claiming otherwise) is that it can work while you're younger but it has an expiration date. Eventually you'll have a crisis and medical expenses. What then? If you have no savings then you'll either need to forgo medical care or do the leech thing where you receive medical care and then simply don't pay for it. What happens when you're 60 or 70 and too old to work? If you've calculated everything and know Social Security will get you through it, then OK, that seems fine to me. You do you.
I'd still somewhat worry about peoples' (really just men's) inherent existentialism. Modern generations grow up on Disney movies that tell them life should be wonderful and meaningful, and that'll largely not be true for blackpillers. It won't be horrible overall, but they'll lack a lot of the self-actualization they think they deserve. If they're fine with that then that's OK again, but a lot of them eventually start screeching about how "the system has failed them" and how we need to "burn it all down" just because they were too foolish to make different life choices.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
Because the average voter is intensely stupid about these types of things. On the left you have fools cheering for images of burning Waymos and waving the Mexican Flag in US cities. On the right, the average Republican is at the level of Catturd, and they evaluate things based on what they see on Tiktok and Fox News. If they don't see armored goons manhandling immigrants then they think it's not happening at all. Trying to explain things like "employment incentives" to them will go in one ear and out the other.
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.
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