anon_
7d ago
Candidate quality matters more when the fundamental lean is against you. Virginia is D+3, but Jones ran 4 points behind Spanberger. In a closer State, that would have cost him the election.
anon_
12d ago
Western protection of Israel was explicitly cited as a motive for both September 11
I tend to think that bin Laden was more insulted that Saudia Arabia chose protect itself from Saddam by having HW Bush set up shop rather than invoke his Mujahideen who were fresh off defeating the Soviets. That seems more salient in a lot of ways -- it was infidels setting up military bases in the holiest of Islamic countries and it was a personal slight. Moreover, the fight between Islamic Arab states and the secular pan-arabism of Saddam and Nasser was still in full flight.
anon_
12d ago
come out as gay and go on a left wing podcast tour denouncing how toxic right wing ideology kept him in the closet.
Or come out as gay and go on a right-wing podcast tour that if we keep important immigrants, they'll start throwing the gays off roofs. Look at the Hammtramck/Dearborn socialists lamenting the pride/trans flags coming down after they dutifully voted for the brown guys.
anon_
12d ago
By trying to offload one of their pet murderers onto some dank corner of the internet right, they wound up publicizing a relatively niche character. Who has played his moment in the sun pretty well so far.
Man, I need to frame this.
anon_
12d ago
From a realpolitik perspective, I think this is bad.
This is bad for American conservatism in an even more fundamental nature. For a brief period around 2025, you had Trump come in and detached right wing rhetoric from explicit[1] Christianity from the Robertson/Buchanan era. This created room in the nascent Trump coalition for people that wouldn't join if it was explicitly Christian even if they would happily compromise on a number of policies. And the religious wing did indeed get a good number of policy goals (within reason, obviously the anti-IVF folks were gonna be told to STFU). Detaching the rhetoric didn't result in abandoning all their priorities.
Ultimately this is how coalitions evolve -- when they are out of power, there's no sense in fighting because anything is better than 4 more years of Biden/Harris. Now there is a real battle for how holds the reins and who can be in the tent.
[1] Although I think one important piece that doesn't follow here is "blue policies mistreat Christians and need to be stopped" but I distinguish that quite a bit from the movement here.
anon_
13d ago
Yeah. I do wonder how many were productive auto mechanics or bartender or whatnot vs being non-productive.
We used to have jobs for those people that didn’t require reforming them wholesale to let them contribute to society.
anon_
14d ago
Is not having to uselessly prosecute a lifetime felon for the umpteenth time worth some fractional enabling of a more tragic scenario? What's the optimal ratio?
Forgetting the optimal ratio, what is the actual ratio? Like what fraction of individuals killed in what was ultimately judged to be self defense fall into the bucket of "basically OK guy, got in a fight with his neighbor over a dumb thing" vs "hot-headed asshole who nevertheless mostly had his shit together and contributed somewhat to society" vs "degenerate/parasite/criminal that never held down a decent job or did anything for anyone else"?
I'm not sure whether if these three categories are really the right dividing point, but they seem like at least a good start at "lifetime felon" vs "bad neighbor".
anon_
14d ago
Oh I agree, I'm not particularly partisan anyway. But Republicans (or conservatives generally) should probably root for the wing of the Democrats (or liberals generally) that are somewhat less than completely insane.
Even if they are rooting for them quietly.
anon_
15d ago
They warned about it because they considered any possible policy that they didn't like authoritarian.
anon_
15d ago
I'm not sure why would you be antipathetic towards the only part of the Dem apparatus that produces something least resembling nonsense? What purpose could that possibly serve? To elevate the AOC weirdos?
anon_
16d ago
Oh come on. China ended 1988 with a GDP of $325B as compared to the US $5.XT
Almost all of China's growth and power has accrued after 2000.
anon_
16d ago
But will Democrats become double-negative-polarized in his favor then?
I can see it, especially with the Abundance bros.
Dankest timeline, etc...
anon_
16d ago
How would the situation be different, if the House GOP simply couldn't get its shit together? Aren't they generally unable to get their shit together and isn't Trump generally exceeding limits on executive power faster than they can be enforced?
"The House GOP" isn't a singular entity with a cohesive purpose and rational preferences. It is an agglomeration of representatives, and even if they are each individually cohesive and rational, Ken Arrow already told us that this doesn't translate to the aggregate.
anon_
16d ago
Is this what it seems like to me — just more lefty pearl-clutching and crying wolf — or is there something to the arguments James Bruno and Tonoccus McClain are making?
There is lefty overreaction/derangement to actual issues. Just because they would complain at anything doesn't mean everything they complain about is nothing.
An unreliable source crying wolf doesn't actually give you a lot of information on whether there is a wolf one way or the other.
anon_
16d ago
I'm quite sure I can find a shock collar on eBay or FB marketplace.
Not that I think people are scheming to conceal these purchases, but the principle is bonkers.
anon_
18d ago
I agree that the tranch setup distributed risk as advertised. The problem was that much of market (including CDO sellers) believed in their models that used a gaussian copula, which vastly underestimated the tails as compared to a power law.
This wasn't "sellers pull a fast one on buyers" -- that's too simplistic a model. They got into the business because they convinced themselves of an overall model that didn't put enough weight on the tail risks. Then they kept the most junior tranches because of that belief in the low overall risk.
[ There's a related problem which is that gaussian models are extremely sensitive to parameter changes in ways that power laws aren't. When you get to the CDO-squared (a CDO of CDOs) then you the output of one model being fed as an input to another, with the expected impact to accuracy. ]
See, e.g., this excellent summary: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/mrcbg/files/Barnett-Hart_2009.pdf
anon_
18d ago
No, they assumed it was uncorrelated and that you could lower risk by bundling large tranches of mortgages.
That works until there is a large correlated event that impacts all of them at once.
anon_
18d ago
No different than any other public obligation or liability. Might as well shaft municipal bondholders too on this theory,
anon_
19d ago
Right, and I think the OP is trying to shoehorn "the defendant didn't trust the police/state" into that set, as some kind of faux-historical analog of "things that can't be held against you in court".
anon_
19d ago
The problem with the '07-08 crisis wasn't with the returns, it's that the loans were packaged into MBS and sold to investors under a false bill of health. The lessons weren't that you can't have high-risk/high-return assets, only that you must not try to pawn them off as low risk with fanciful assumptions. And that buyers of those collateralized debt must do more diligence.
anon_
19d ago
Why is "civilizationally load bearing" a relevant yardstick? Civilization advances by making all that stuff trivial so people can focus on doing other shit. That's the the measure of civilization, not who produces corn.
And no one that has ever worked in textiles would dare assert that it's in any way worse than an office job. That shit destroys your body.
anon_
19d ago
To be fair, most government-paid civil engineers take a much lower salary than they could in the private sector. So it's not quite that this guy figured out a hack here, only that he sacrificed early to reap a larger return later. Similarly the State took the inverse deal: pay him less now in exchange for more later, in order to make their budgets temporarily look better.
I think the solution for both is actuarial integrity -- defined benefit plans need to be run in such a way that the State pays in year X the expected future costs of all (incremental) future liabilities accrued during year X. The only real exploitation is that voters in X accrue liability for year >X without paying for it, another intertemporal transfer of wealth.
A non-solution (afaict) is for governments not to hire competent civil servants and instead farm that stuff out to McKinsey consultants and others. Not because the McKinsey consultants aren't smart, but because it's a diffusion of accountability that ultimately costs Idaho more than paying competitive salaries for in-house expertise.
[ One astute commenter noted that one good that McKinsey does produce is laundering the low status of working for bumfuck Idaho into PMC-respectability. An excellent observation, if something of a tangent here. ]
Presumably they have a net positive effect on GDP when measured on the spending side, and if we ASSUME they don't declare bankruptcy, or renege and duck out on the debt, or just die early (not something I wish on them), they're helping the engine of Capitalism in this country sputter along.
Eh, bankruptcy is (in expectation) priced into the transactions. Lenders make out fine charging these two 7% interest on their HELOC and car note. It's not like dumping it on the fisc.
Their retirement on the public dime, OTOH, will certainly be dumped on us.
Oh I fully agree. But if the GOP can field a +5 candidate they can win in a D+3 state. That how Youngkin won.
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