dasfoo
4mo ago
or else you have a chomskyite view of russia as soviet union which you fondly remember as a noble altruistic project that was sadly misunderstood by the ungrateful eastern europeans
My most pro-Russia friend is also a Chomskyite former-Leftist who has found himself realigned as a Trumpist right winger, and I've always found the consistent position on Russia informative even if he denies it's relevant. This faction was anti-US Imperialism (pro-communist) in the 1980s and are anti-US Imperalism (anti-WEF/neoliberal Communism) now, with Russia as the noble bulwark against The West. I have to say that Putin's narrative building in this regard has been very shrewd. He's known which buttons to push.
dasfoo
5mo ago
Sisters Brothers was fantastic.
I also loved Sisters Brothers as well as A Prophet. This is not to the same standard.
dasfoo
8mo ago
No, I'm honestly just emotionally over it all.
This is OK. Just stop paying attention to politics. It will make little difference to your life beyond the improvement of shaking off the stress.
Almost any claim that X disaster will happen if you don't vote for Y is garbage. Most people just keep working, living, loving and tune out politics.
dasfoo
11mo ago
Where I think a lot of other solutions fail is that they are only aimed at 1 type of homeless person and there is no coordination with the services that address the other types of homeless people. In my model, there is coordination so that misidentifications of type can be transferred to the appropriate wing within the all-encompassing system.
It also, importantly, removes all of the homeless individuals from mainstream society until they are fit to rejoin it. For the Cat-1s, it would be voluntary, but presumably if they are genuinely Cat-1 this is exactly the absent support that they are looking for.
dasfoo
11mo ago
I don't think you can retroactively prosecute anyone for something that wasn't a crime at the time they committed it, right? I can't pass a law today making posting on The Motte illegal and then charge you for posting yesterday.
Also, in this decision reversing Chevron, don't they explicitly say something like "This doesn't make all previous decisions that relied on Chevron reversible." At least there should be some general protection against these kinds of cascades of retroactive illegality.
Further, I would add that I don't think anyone could argue that -- generally -- an admin agency acting under Chevron was committing crimes by interpreting the laws as directed; rather they were operating under an error and without malice.
dasfoo
8mo ago
One of my bullshit detector modes is applying the "Cui bono?" rule: If true, who benefits from it?
I don't see a tactical or political advantage for Israel to be doing this as a matter of policy: Committing high-value troops to take out low-value targets? And certain carry a highly negative publicity penalty? What's Israel's ROI on assassinating pre-teens?
On the other hand, we know that Israel's enemies love to play the Victim PR game, exaggerating and even inventing tragedies that cast a shadow on Israel's claim of moral legitimacy. What's the Hamas ROI on shooting a few of their kids in the head if it means widespread outrage aimed at Israel? While it's hard for me to imagine such a craven tactic*, Hamas has more to gain from this than Israel does. If they're faking the shootings, the ROI for them goes up even more.
- I also can't imagine the craven tactic of positioning military assets in schools and hospitals, but we know Hamas does this and that Israel appears to take greater care to avoid civilian casualties. So these priors also lean me further toward: "If it's happening, Hamas is doing it." Alternatively, it could be a rogue Israeli soldier who has snapped, but seems unlikely to be a sanctioned military effort.
dasfoo
5mo ago
A friend of mine who is an accountant got sick of living in the Portland area and moved to rural Kentucky where he was able to buy a lot of land. He's been there for two years and can't find any clients in his new state. He's a good networker, but they do not trust outsiders (and, according to him, are largely too dumb to understand what he does). It's friendly but he's not one of them. He gets a majority of his new clients from our referrals in the purpler Portland suburbs and comes out twice a year for in-person meetings.
dasfoo
11mo ago
That just makes me think of Hippias Minor, in which Plato's Socrates proposes that the man who does evil deliberately is better than the man who does it accidentally, in that he is more capable.
I think the opposite is true. The man who does evil deliberately intends evil -- wanton suffering, pain, misery -- and will continue to do it because evil is the goal. The man who does evil accidentally has a non-evil goal and may be persuaded to pursue that goal through a different, non-evil path. Believing that a person is better because they are more capable of pursuing evil successfully is itself an evil notion and Socrates should drink some hemlock for even thinking it.
dasfoo
4mo ago
I don't think Russia can be a true ally in its current political configuration, so any potential realignment in that direction is likely temporary if it is even real.
"The West" -- U.S., Canada, Europe -- as the enduring post-WWII alignment has been called, is only successful because all nations have a long-term survival incentive to cooperate with each other, based on their common-enough values and the accepted dynamic of U.S.' larger status. Any country who wants to compete with U.S.' status and has different non-cooperative values is never likely to make a long-term ally.
I know there are Russia-stans who have an alien-to-me notion of Putin as a benevolent victim of Western aggression who would love to nestle into an accepting U.S. bosom (once it's purged of its Euro-centric WEF neoliberals), but that seems like a fantasy that is bound to end like the Hitler-Stalin pact.
dasfoo
8mo ago
Is what you're seeing a shift in core conservatives, or is it a shift in the center as SJ evolution pushes an increasingly-broad spectrum of people into oppositional alliance?
Probably the center, but I think the right -- or, the people who have become "the right" since Trump -- have fewer intellectual obstacles in the way of embracing. Even the religious conservatives, who used to be the sexual scolds, have at the essence of their ethos the aggressive male sexual imperative of "be fruitful and multiply." They want to keep it in marriage, but if kids do not feel empowered to acknowledge the hormonal impulses that will lead them to marriage, it's a non-starter. I'm not sure the left has, at their essence, a procreative sexual ethos. They want to deconstruct all of the old natural impulses and replace them with new "enlightened" ones, which is the opposite of the innate physical urges.
dasfoo
10mo ago
Another reason why the left currently worries me more is that their delusions are deeper than the right's delusions.
Yes: The left is smart and understands the system and has been re-engineering it for decades. I am far more wary of smart people who know how to accomplish bad things than dumb people who might accidentally break some stuff but don't know how to permanently damage the structure of it. It's a grim choice, and I can't endorse either one, but I know which one is more frightening.
dasfoo
10mo ago
Why is she gunning for debates with mics on, now? It’s clear her team think she can say nothing for an hour while interrupting Trump and looking ‘strong’.
Trump defeats himself when he can't stop talking, which is why his 2020 debate with Biden went so poorly for him due to his constant interruptions, but in the 2024 debate Biden had several uninterrupted moments of looking old and weak. A closed mic helps Trump even though/because it goes against's Trump's nature.
dasfoo
10mo ago
I think about that a lot, for what it’s worth. Asking Pence not to certify the election seems like a bright line though.
If not for the 2020 election shenanigans I’d probably agree that he’s just like the prior republican candidates and we’ll see him as tame in ten years compared to the New Threat.
I struggle with this, too. I am anti-Trump for many reasons -- mainly that he's civically corrosive and ignorant of how to operate as president -- and I certainly think that he handled the aftermath of the 2020 election poorly. And I'm glad Pence stood up for order over chaos. However, I don't think that Trump (and the circle of hucksters that he attracts) being typically dumb in his reaction to a very fishy election negates that there was a lot of very fishy stuff going on with that election. IMO everything Trump did made it worse and not better, but the legitimacy of the gripe is still mostly unexamined and very concerning.
dasfoo
10mo ago
Saint McConnell saw the necessity of this 30 years ago and went all in on his career to get the courts where they are today.
And who is ironically hated by MAGA as a swamp creature when his ability to navigate the swamp gave them Dobbs. I'm fairly certain that he made a deal with Trump in 2016: We GOP holdouts in the Senate will support you if you let us pick all the judges. It's emblematic of Trump's know-nothing approach to government and the blind cult of personality in his followers that McConnell is so despised by the new right.
dasfoo
10mo ago
Biden kicks the bucket sometime around late September and Harris gets a sympathy bump in the polls, and also makes her President thankfully with only a very narrow window in which to screw something up before the election.
I was thinking that they might be holding a 25th amendment claim in their pocket for an October boost if they feel they need it. Get some "first female president" good vibes to propel them over the finish line.
dasfoo
11mo ago
CBS news on the USSS saying their counter-snipers fired a single shot.
We can see the counter-snipers behind the stage on Trump's left take a few shots, but it's my understanding that it was the counter-snipers to the right of the stage that took the kill shot. I think the team on the left had their view partially obscured by a tree near the edge of the AGR building.
So, without indulging in conspiracies, the three different shot reports are easily accounted for: Crooks, and two counter-snipers.
If the counter-snipers to the left were local police and not SS, that would explain the discrepancy of the "single-shot" description coming from the SS.
dasfoo
4mo ago
The conservative in me wants slow, methodical cuts that do the least damage to the good parts. But I also understand that those cuts are easier to block/mitigate, and maybe the best thing is to destroy and rebuild the good parts. People will suffer in the process, but that's true of all change.
dasfoo
4mo ago
Audiard's previous fiim, Sisters Brothers, is an interesting, complicated, funny and heartbreaking contemplation of masculinity using the lens of the traditionally masculine Western genre (not at all the silly comedy of its marketing campaign), so it wouldn't surprise me if he had something more subversive on his mind in Emilia Perez. He's clearly capable of it.
Point to actually existing government. "Do you really want Joe Biden/Donald Trump deciding how much toilet paper you're allotted or what books are worthy of being published?"
Yes, I like to say, "Never support giving the government any power you wouldn't want your least favorite politician to possess." It's remarkably unpersuasive, because the notion that the means of government is more important than the ends is completely lost on post-1960s liberalism.
EDIT: IMO this is why it's so easy for the right to assume that the left supports electoral fraud: it would be insane to want an all-powerful government and also support literally Hitler having a shot at winning. Of course, you would fix an election to prevent that from happening.
dasfoo
11mo ago
Think of it like one of those towns around a prison, but the prison itself has stronger drug treatment and mental health wings that are all part of the same system with the goal of rehabbing from one category to another.
dasfoo
11mo ago
Most Democrats want him gone. They voted for him in the primaries but now he's a liability.
Did they? He ran (virtually) unopposed and only got something like 15 million primary votes. They didn't need to vote for him, and they mostly didn't.
Will the long-buried Biden hair-sniffing stories finally see the light of day? Or will the media come back to Biden's corner now that he's fighting back?
It's interesting how my Reddit in the last week has been overrun with "Trump's Best Buddy Jeffrey Epstein" and "Trump accused of raping a 13-year-old" posts across a variety of subs. The anti-Trump bots are out in force and aiming low. If "Biden's Top 10 Underage Gropes" doesn't get equal roll-out, someone is shirking their solemn responsibility.
dasfoo
11mo ago
My idea for dealing with homelessness is to create a series of remote contained cities -- using BLM land -- that are essentially economies built around a hospital-prison-treatment-community college complex.
Let's say there are 4 categories of homeless:
- Economic
- Addiction
- Criminal
- Psychotic
The Cat-1 Homeless can live in apartments or housing and get jobs in the cities that serve the complex staff. There will be restaurants, groceries, everything a normal small city might have, as well as job in the complex. So there is plenty of opportunity for employment. They will also be enrolled in the college to develop other skills -- maybe with a focus on addiction treatment and social work. When they are on better financial and educational ground, they can "graduate" back to the real world.
The Cat-2 Homeless go to the addiction treatment center. They can "graduate" to Cat-1 or fail to Cat-2.
The Cat-3 Homeless are repeat offenders who have either failed Cat-2 or have been deemed mentally well enough to not belong to Cat-4. Through good behavior, they can graduate to Cat-1.
The Cat-4 Homeless are for the serially mentally unfit. these would need drastic oversight so as not to repeat the failure mode of the old state mental hospitals that turned into hellholes.
These cities would need to be far enough away from other cities to discourage foot traffic and have some kind of low-security system that checks people in and out. They are essentially halfway houses on a larger scale.
Maybe there can also be a wilderness area on the outskirts of these town for those homeless who aren't Cat 2-4 but who just wish to live in outdoor camps off the grid of normal society.
dasfoo
11mo ago
I wonder if they could mollify her with a spot in the historical record books as the "first woman president" by pushing Biden out early in exchange for selecting a different ballot replacement? She can dine out on that for the rest of her life, and even run again in 4 years if she wants to as "former president Harris."
dasfoo
5mo ago
It is funny when a trans person says or does something that shocks progressives. By nature, trans people are defiant and refuse, in the most essential way imaginable, to be boxed in. Even if you don't think they suffer from a mental illness -- which would bring a whole other level of unpredictability to their thoughts, words and actions -- expecting them to conform to any model would seem to "deny their existence" as much as any bathroom law might.
Importantly, Nixon was never charged with anything, so we don't know exactly what the pardon was intended to subvert -- but the underlying crime of the Watergate break-in was related to Nixon's reelection campaign, and reelection campaigns are not official duties of the president but are separated by statutes (isn't that correct?) that draw a clear-ish line between presidential duties and campaign activities. So isn't it likely that if Nixon had been charged, it would've been related to his political campaign -- using presidential powers in the service of his campaign? -- which would be categorically outside of his enumerated presidential duties.
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