The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6hr ago
Princess Leia acted the same way in ANH, but it was presented as a bad thing.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6hr ago
The worst part of these deals is the bailout CHIPS Act which already happened. It appears that while the Intel stake (which is quite large, 9.9% of the company) is technically common stock, the government isn't allowed to vote it independently.
Since it looks like there were strings attached to the CHIPS Act funding which are being dropped, this could be anything from an effective takeover to a mere minor technical restructuring; someone would need to dig deeper into it to find out.
As for the questions:
Does this represent a leftist turn in the Republican Party's view on the state's role in the economy, leaning more towards a nationalist democratic socialism?
No, I don't think so. It's a turn towards industrial policy (so collectivist), but not in the Western leftist tradition. I think Trump is probably taking his cue from Japan and South Korea here. The idea seems to be to make money, not improve the lot of the workers or anything like that.
Are there risks of corruption arising in the Trump administration related to government acquisition of major shares in large companies?
There's always risks of corruption, but this doesn't seem any worse than other things the government does.
Does this represent an expansion of executive authority? What do we expect USG to do with its stakes in these companies?
Does this raise potential conflicts of interest, directly aligning the interests of the Federal government with large firms (rather than their merely influential status today)?
These are the big problems, especially the last. Although I'm far more worried about the other direction, increased political control of the large firms using the government's power as a stakeholder (which may be less limited than the government's more direct political powers). The government acting in ways which helps American companies isn't necessarily bad. Acting in ways that helps Intel and other large firms over smaller competitors is bad, though not particularly novel. But the threat of the government setting Intel's corporate priorities while protecting Intel from competition... it seems we have a microchip shortage, comrade!
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Yes, but both "packing" and "cracking" minorities are disallowed.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Go to any school board or planning committee meeting — these are things that have a real and lasting impact on community life — and nobody shows up and you’d have a hard time to find anyone who knows one out of 5-6 members of that board.
People sometimes do show up for those things. The boards then move to private session or otherwise make their decisions where the public can't interfere. Or on some occasions have people arrested for trying to speak; consider the infamous beating and pantsing of the Loudoun County VA father who spoke up against his daughter's sexual assault in school. People don't show up because they correctly conclude that if their showing up could change anything, it wouldn't be permitted.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
One might also note that until fairly recently, "judicial command" based on the Voting Rights Act included a mandate to maximize minority (in practice, Democratic) representation.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Norm. LOL. Here is the New Jersey map. District 10 is a triskellion. District 6 is your classic salamander. District 3 for some reason has a dagger through the heart of Monmouth County. District 11 is a Republican area plus just enough of deep blue Essex to flip it Democratic. And District 8 is just WTF.
The only "norm" broken here is the Republicans are doing it loudly instead of the Democrats in a back room.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
And so at the end of the day, you end up with the choice of being hijacked into accepting unlimited loss so the people on the low side feel better, or saying "yes, chad" to "If X is rational, it's not bigoted and it's not clear why it should be a bad thing". Or not saying it but acting in the same way, as with Jesse Jackson's famous remark about being ashamed at his relief that someone he heard walking behind him turned out to be white.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
I think they are. The "black activists" are leaders of generally good people in bad circumstances, who are uplifting the rest of said people. The "good ones" are decent people in an otherwise bad bunch, who may be stuck with them or may have escaped but in either case aren't bettering their hopeless community. Sowell's unconstrained vision versus constrained vision.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Frankly, UCLA as an institution should not be in the business of having official political beliefs.
Correct, it should not. But it is.
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-s-steps-to-support-black-life-on-campus
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
I’m not sure that ‘the good ones’ and the ‘black activists working to improve their communities’ are meaningfully different concepts. Sûre, one is a polite euphemism, but the red tribe uses a lot fewer of those in general.
I don't think the right wing would consider black activists to be "the good ones". Or at least not the same black activists that the left wing would describe as "black activists working to improve their communities".
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
I think Trump and Desantis and Abbot have demonstrated that the accelerationists were already in charge on immigration. There really was basically no control of the border and no attempt to remove obvious criminals once they got here. That's why Trump was able to get at all that low-hanging fruit, and why there haven't been really compelling immigration atrocity stories. The best they could do was Abrego Garcia... and he certainly seems like a bad hombre, even if his case was screwed up procedurally.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
The leftists who thought it was a war were routing their opposition right up until the right decided it was one as well. Perhaps they were correct that it was a war -- or perhaps if one side treats it as a war, it is one.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
"My own group"? LOL. When this all started I was an atheist libertarian. I'm still a atheist, and in some ways a libertarian -- but I demand my libertarianism pays off in liberty for me and mine, rather than simply being beliefs which require that I let others harm me. Heck, if you think Trump himself is a religious conservative you're way off base. This motley alliance of people who are seeing Trump beat on the institutions and being OK with it was put together, not by the religious right nor by Trump nor even by J.D. Vance. It was put together by the left itself, who has been throwing everyone who disagrees with them into a political pit with various derogatory labels for well over a decade now.
You've been carefully ignoring all the examples of this that have been presented, instead demanding we ignore all that and continue to give them the maximum benefit of the principles they do not hold and did not grant to us. And when that seemed a little much you retreated to the position of invincible ignorance, that we cannot know that we are right and they are wrong, so we shouldn't treat them as if they are wrong. But ignoring those things doesn't make them go away, and a universal argument against knowledge is just sophistry.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
No, I mean do you think Terence Tao, personally, would endorse MAGA to get more funding?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Do you think he'd endorse MAGA to get more funding? Because I don't.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
"Look, Charles, I know you look at those organisms there and note their similarities and differences and think this is good evidence that they arose via natural selection of variations among the offspring of some parent organism. But Archbishop Wilberforce, he's looked at the same 2500 organisms and he sees in them the hand of God. How are you so sure he's the biased one and not you?"
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
When we examine the world and we see a common self-perception bias about one's self and their own groups, one that all those other groups are blind to for themselves it stands to reason we might also have that same bias even if we don't see it.
This is just a fancier way of saying "How can you really know you know anything, maaan??" And if you believe in perceptual bias that severe, you might as well give up on science anyway because you cannot trust any of the observations.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
But I strongly suspect that Trump would very much like to truth social about the world’s smartest man endorsing a favorable balance of trade or what have you.
And I bet that Tao wouldn't. Not even if pressured by the administration.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Falling back to "How can you really know you know anything, maaan??" is not particularly convincing. Many of the people you have been arguing with have been observing or participating in (voluntarily or otherwise) the culture war for over a decade. And most of the evidence is there, and a good bit of it has been posted.
One example:
The University of California system, in particular, was up until March of this year requiring "diversity statements" for prospective faculty, which were statements demonstrating the applicant's dedication to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. These statements were in many cases not merely one factor among many, but used as an initial screen to exclude non-politically-aligned candidates.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Planck's Principle -- that "Science progresses one funeral at a time" -- has reigned for a long time.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
As I said, they failed, utterly. Their protests fell on deaf ears and the academy became more and more exclusive of any opposing views. It turns out that a key part of enforcing ones free speech rights is force.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
This is the culture war thread, not the random hypothetical thread.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
The mechanism is that instead of limiting free speech and punishing academics for wrongthink, we win at free speech by fighting for the principle. This is what principled libertarian first amendment groups like FIRE are doing.
They failed. Utterly.
What's this, Snow Crash fan fiction?
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