aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
4mo ago
Again their caucus shouted down an attempt for a moment of prayer. T
They had just had a moment of silence and the moment of prayer was a kind of silly suggestion that was opposed. No one opposed the moment of silence.
aqouta
4mo ago
username attached to a lot of commentary about woke-era pressure campaigns, or George Floyd, as they were happening. Care to refresh it?
My username was and I endorse their position in opposition to this new wave of cancelations.
aqouta
4mo ago
This whole attempt to lionize Kirk after his death has been extremely black pulling, as a leftist.
Rather than litigate his actual statements as other are doing, isn't this a good game theoretical move? Reducing the value of assassination as a political tool by amplifying the status of the message meant to be silenced seems like a good feature.
I'm not implying to owe anyone anything. I'm simply pointing out that sympathy isn't something you owe someone, it's something you feel. So when we talk about whether you feel sympathy for some one we're talking about you and who you are as a person.
When the loud shot rang out across the court yard it scared Charlie's young daughter. She ran to her father for safety as the life drained rapidly from his body. You don't have to change your belief, proscriptions or politics for this reason, in fact I think it would be foolish to. But to not feel some sympathy here implies a blackened heart. I hope for your sake that you have just misunderstood what sympathy is because the alternative is so bleak.
aqouta
4mo ago
Sure it is tragic, but it doesn't mean he is owed sympathy. And the lack of that sympathy doesn't make people sociopaths any more than a lack of sympathy for illegal immigrant mothers being pulled from their homes and deported, makes other people not sociopaths.
The concept of being "owed" sympathy is just kind of incoherent to me. You should feel sympathy for someone who finds a bad and undeserved end, who leaves a wife and young daughter behind. Not because they're owed anything but because you are a human who should sympathize with such a person and situation. If you fail to sympathize with this then it's not really about him, it's about you. I think we must enforce the borders and acknowledge that there are sympathetic people that will be harmed because of that. Sympathy doesn't mean you drop everything and do whatever helps the person you're sympathetic to.
aqouta
4mo ago
There are a lot of different mutually exclusive factions that make up the trans coalition. You might have transwomen who demand to be considered ontologically categorized the same as natal females support a cisman wearing a dress to queer the gender binary but would strongly object to any insinuation that they were doing basically the same thing. Morphological freedom alone can't explain this conflict, you need additional axioms.
To be sure there are people who call themselves trans who might fully endorse and live by this maximally vague morphological framework, but I'd argue they are a vast minority, especially among vocal activists.
aqouta
4mo ago
One of the lessons in the fable about the Sword of Damocles is about living by the ramifications of your own positions.
There's often this kind of misunderstanding of risk at the heart of internet disagreements. He was obviously willing to live with the ramifications of his positions, some negligible risk of dying by gun violence. That is discharged already just by him going about day to day in a world with higher than counterfactual risk of gun violence. This doesn't at all mean him pulling the short straw and the risk coming due isn't tragic as he acknowledged in his comment.
aqouta
4mo ago
Will we then be permitted to discuss openly the role that trans identification seems to play in political radicalisation?
I think the whole story is pretty straightforward. you have a group told by their allies that their political opponents want them dead and whose political opponents often take glee in being cruel to them. It's really not rocket science how you get radicalized people out of this. Especially if you believe, like I do, that this is a population particularly susceptible to memes and inserting themselves into narratives. People looking for reasons that they don't fit into society.
I've many disagreements with trans activists but I really don't think this is like a hormones cause radicalization thing. If they were left alone and allowed to live out their fantastical identity then I don't think they'd be particularly violent, well at least as far as the baseline for men.
there's no particular way to cash that out that doesn't validate transgenderism
Yes and no. You get one of the material objects that the trans advocates want for free but they make wider ontological claims. i.e. "men should be allowed to have gender reassignment surgery and be feminine men" is something morphological freedom would endorse but trans activists may not.
I think you and the OP are making pretty different claims. Maybe the OP, in their TLDR uses dialectic terms, but the problem is you can make a just so dialectical story about anything as they do. If you see the HBDers as wrong so the Yarvinites aren't on the synthesis edge but instead the regressive edge. If you see HBD as right then they're a synthesis of the older pure racism with modern science. This structure can't actually do anything but affirm your priors. You could take this structure and decide that women really are physically the equals of men. And the application to Gaza? What is that even supposed to mean? What is the Thesis and Antithesis of Gaza? It a quagmire, a lose lose situation, not some kind of dialectical question.
aqouta
4mo ago
This is Whig history. Even your positions contradict themselves.
But what the lessons of Uncle Roy and Jim Jones should teach us is that being wrong for a long time in public is dangerous. It can destroy your credibility, it can overthrow regimes, it can lead to a reaction much worse than the problem ever was to begin with. The dynamic of truth-telling as revolutionary act that Yarvin purports to espouse, is most dangerous when the regime chooses to be obviously wrong.
It was the establishment that pushed trans in sports and female equality and now as the tide turns it is the establishment that seems to be coming around to opposing it. What then should we learn from your proposed righteous arc of history? Which establishment can we assume at the Walters? This is an acid that dissolves itself.
People are registering their strong beliefs so I'll make a notch to register that I have no strong idea here. People from the future coming back to paint the motte as strongly and wrongly being overconfident one way or the other I am your bane. It seems hard to predict how this will shake out from the smattering of evidence we have.
aqouta
4mo ago
Then I guess it cannot, even in principle, be done so I would like to not hear about it as a problem and we shouldn't bonk down norms in order to fail to solve it.
aqouta
4mo ago
Just inflate the debt away to virtually nothing, swap to a Gold and/or Bitcoin standard, and keep rolling.
Ok so you want to default on the debt and then switch to a hard currency that would make doing this again impossible and thus you'd have to have higher taxes because you cannot deficit spend. This is a very silly plan.
And I am not joking. I live in Florida. We have no income tax. We have no estate/gift tax, we have comparatively low property taxes. And we're discussing getting rid of the property taxes altogether. Most revenue is sales tax.
Well yes, your state is where a tremendous amount of those social security and Medicare dollars are being funneled to from younger states to retirees. florida is the fifth oldest state
aqouta
4mo ago
So why don't we take your plan to it's obvious logical conclusion, say "who cares about the debt" and just stop collecting taxes all together?
aqouta
4mo ago
It looks like tax revenues were stagnant until the Trump tax cuts
Tax receipts were stagnant until Q3 2020 nearly 3 years after the tax cuts and GDP growth was steady the whole time. If the tax cuts increased revenues I'd expect GDP to accelerate after the cuts and the tax revenue to track it. I think you're vastly underestimating what exactly it would take for the tax cuts to actually pay for themselves, it's an incredible claim. When you make a nonnegligible cut to taxes you need an immense about of increased total economic activity to happen to offset that. The effect would have to be tremendous. It would show up on the GDP chart and it doesn't.
aqouta
4mo ago
Europe's problem is strangulating regulation. I should note that I don't love taxes and prefer they be low. My only point is that you can't forgo tax revenue and then bemoan the national debt. You pay for the debt with taxes.
aqouta
4mo ago
You don't have to actually cut entitlements at all. You can just raise taxes and use that money to pay down the debt(or at least close the deficit so you aren't creating more debt). The guy in the the white house can make that call. My point is we're currently breaking eggs and receiving no omelet.
aqouta
4mo ago
It is not clear to me that this is absurd, given that revenues rose after the cuts were initially enacted.
revenue was already trending up due to a market boom. Classic economics would say that you should pay down your debts during a market boom, but we opted to run the market even hotter. An argument can be made for this, but not one that pretends to be concerned with government debt load. but this is a slightly different question. It would probably be helpful to look at an actual chart of US tax receipts and a chart of US GDP around the time of the DJT tax cuts(Jan 1 2018) you can see that GDP continue to trend up and the tax receipts stayed stagnant. The GDP trend really doesn't seem to react much if at all to the tax cuts indicating we're not really touching that laffer curve at all.
You're expressing a high degree of confidence that tax hikes won't negatively impact the economy. Why?
Tax hikes do slow the economy, no one really contests that. The question is does it slow it down so much that they actually lower tax receipts, which just there is no real indication of this happening and places with much higher taxes don't really even see this happening. The laffer curve is a theoretical thing and there is no reason to believe we're on the edge of it.
aqouta
4mo ago
There are many more factors that go into tax receipts than just the tax rate. The economy itself was booming, a trend that predated the tax cuts, and inflation juiced the nominal rate. The straightforward reduction in revenue is that we would have collected substantially more revenue without the cuts to the tune of trillions of dollars.
aqouta
4mo ago
Yes, they were an extension of the previous Trump cuts, they still create a straightforward reduction in revenue. No it is absurd to suggest we are on the side of the Laffer curve where higher taxes would reduce total tax revenue, we're not even close to that point and no one seriously suggests we are. They are not justified as a means to maximize tax revenue, only on the grounds that people like to have more money and they will if they are taxed less. A position I think is reasonable but it's at direct odds with a desire to pay off the national debt. If we're serious about paying down the national debt we have to raise taxes and there is no real alternative, even if you cut entitlements to the bone.
aqouta
4mo ago
The position I'm responding to is that Trump cracking a few eggs of norms is worth it if that's what it takes to get the debt under control I'm pointing out that we're getting eggs cracked and the debt is not being taken under control. I'm sure we could have some debate about how best to get the debt under control, I agree some reductions in entitlements, particularly the absurd wealth transfer from the young to the old that is medicare and to a slightly less absurd degree social security come to mind. But as far as I can tell we have a bunch of cracked eggs and rather than a balanced budget omelet we have nothing to show for it. Of course the most obvious place to start would be getting rid of the literal trillions of dollars(over a decade) in tax cuts that he passed.
Or, alternatively, explain to the various taxpayers why THEY should be on the hook for programs they generally don't receive a direct benefit from.
I would like the extra costs to be put towards paying down the debt, having a lower debt burden is in fact a way us tax payers are benefiting.
aqouta
4mo ago
The US won't be able to solve its debt crisis if all procedures and checks and balances have to be followed.
Ok but Trump is not addressing the debt crisis, he's giving tax breaks that far exceed any cuts and hamstrining our industries with hare brained tariff schemes while demonstrating no understand of economics whatsoever. The old ways made us the richest nation earth has ever seen. I certainly favor some reforms, and even some stuff the Trump admin has done, but if your overriding concern is the budget then Trump is not using his smashing of norms to actually address that.
It's important to note on the prayer thing that it was called for literally seconds after they had just finished a moment of silence for Kirk. The whole thing was performative, they could have prayed during the moment of silence if they wanted to. I half expect if the prayer motion went through they'd then call for a brief poem in his honor and escalated until someone objected so they could get this type of headline.
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