It's no secret that the Republican party under MAGA really likes conspiracies. They let you substitute wishcasting for evidence. Kirk pushed a lot of conspiracy theories from big ones like [The 2020 election was stolen] to [Aghanistan's collapse was engineered to import D voters] to [J6 was instigated by the FBI/Antifa/BLM]. He also pushed smaller ones that are closer to simple misinformation, like implying the Covid vaccine makes you blind and paralyzed. But for Kirk, all of these conspiracies were instrumental. They all pointed in the same direction: helping the Republican party, or more specifically Trump.
This is incredible use of equivocation of the word "conspiracy". I can name twenty such "conspiracies" that are not even talked about as such on the left. Ranging from overarching theological ones such as that all men consciously and unconsciously conspired to create the mystical "system" of patriarchy to oppress all women to a very specific conspiracies promoted by academia such as that Republicans want to create uninformed voters who will get them in power.
I am not doing this in some tu quoque ad hominem. But telling that some large voting bloc of tens of millions of people believes "conspiracies" is like saying that water is wet. For instance I can say that the death of George Floyd was the hallmark of conspiracy lunatics taking over the public discourse in 2020. If tomorrow some crazy person killed Kamala Harris, you can immediately assign conspiracy theories to her, her supporters, her detractors and everybody in between. It is useless category in such a broad definition.
Candace Owens opened her show the day after Kirk's memorial by mocking Erica Kirk and claiming Charlie had been "betrayed" by someone within the TPUSA, either Jewish donors or Erika Kirk herself because golly gee, didn't Charlie's wife seem a little too enthused about going on camera after his death?
In context of above "conspiracies", maybe you are aware that for instance former Young Turks progressive Anna Kasparian is highly supportive of Owens theories. She endorses Owens, Carlson and is fully behind them. So by that metric I can say that It is no secret that DNC under progressives really like conspiracies. Including that of Kirk murder. Now some people say it is a cynical ploy by leftist operatives to split the vote and demoralize Republican voters for the upcoming elections. But that is exactly the point, it by itself is a "conspiracy theory", and yet another potential thing for you to list as such. It is all an incredible mess.
IME homeschooling is fairly middle class-
Of course it is, as I argued above it is because it is worse from the both systems. You still pay taxes for public schools but opt out for every single benefit starting from free lunch to free babysitting basically. For lower middle class or poor there is no real choice, they either put their children into public schools or lose half of their dual income including taxes that is there to support the necessities.
The proposal is there to at least partially offset this. How insane it is to have $20k taxpayer money per year to educate 6-10 year old children on basic things, while the school system fails to teach them anything. You can pay $10k to parents, have them organize pods and the rest and check if the results are at least comparable to public schools. Government saves half the costs on taxes and children stay with their mothers and pods.
By the way there is also another alternative for more business savvy people. Just fund one of the famous "learing centers". Rake in money from public funding, give parents some kickback and just profit not only from "education" but also from free lunches and the rest of it. That is the no-brainer arbitrage of the current insane system. People are up in arms and disgusted when they find such a fraudulent schemes by Somalis or other communities in Minnesota who do that under veneer of leftist blind eye policy. But this is literally what is right now happening in the public school system such as New York: just huge money siphoning scheme where teachers, teacher pensioners and various contractors extract money while not teaching kids reading or math and not even giving any kickback to parents. That is the true travesty.
You are arguing the current situation. If you are a family with two or three children, the cost is $24k-$96k per year for schooling for a taxpayer just for K-12 system. You are forced to work, but one parent is working entirely to pay just the official schooling costs. If you decided to homeschool, now you have worst of the both worlds: you pay taxes and you forego one income in the family. Of course only some people can afford it, mostly driven how terrible the school is. Moving children out of that system makes homeschooling more advantageous on the margin, which actually saves taxpayer money.
Of course there is more in it. If you have stay at home mum, you save on other costs such as cooking and delivery, cleaning plus the person can still do some gig or part-time work, especially via unofficial channels such as bartering. On top of that you have other advantages: my wife researched discounts, she researched obscure government dotation schemes not even related to kids. It takes time and effort to do that and in fact saved us a lot of money. The whole system is incredibly perverse.
georgioz
3d ago
Stay at home with kids means less usage for other things such as preschool and other programs, so it is to put private alternative on more competitive footing. It could actually save taxpayer money.
georgioz
3d ago
What does “dead” mean? Lots of artists still employed at video game and animation studios, lots of artists still taking commissions on patreon and the like, etc.
It is already a dead career. Just one example: email as technology was invented in 1970s. By late 1990s the email was basically default communication option for businesses. But it took another two decades for paperless office to become reality. I remember stories even in 2010 when there were people literally printing emails and creating paper folders from that. It all ultimately stopped probably after COVID as the electronic communication finally got accepted even by most backward companies.
The AI will be much more quick. All the infrastructure is already there. People are used to digital communication, they are used to outsourcing from god forsaken countries and all that. In a sense it does not matter if you outsourced your art design to somebody living 1000 miles away with whom you communicate via chat, or even in India. It is a very small step to outsource it to to OpenAI, iterate on the design via chat or voice session and get the product. Maybe I am wrong and it will not take 5 years, but maybe 10 or 15 years. But the writing is on the wall.
Am I the only one who thinks the proposal is excellent, and that it is an inherent good to support families (even if its limited to more traditional ones)? Its probably better for us to support some families than not?
I think that if anything, this is even underestimated. For instance the cost for educating students in K-12 system ranges for $12k in Mississippi to $32k in New York per year. So in a sense if some family does homeschooling with children having regular retesting, they should get the same support - as in such a case the family literally saves tens of thousands of dollars for taxpayer. And I'd like to see the tests having the same standards as let's say lower quartile in public schools. By the way with the current results of let's say New York public schools, 40%+ of students would fail if they were homeschooled.
Now we live in an insane system where we need dual income family, where the salary of a women with three children does not even cover the cost of their preschool or K-12 education, and the result is that there is almost 50/50 chance that they will score well belove the required grade level. The efficiency is horrendous. I think this proposal goes well in hand with age old starve the beast proposals.
georgioz
4d ago
It is much worse than age old Christian Democrats vs Social Democrats duopoly, in which the losing party would hold these positions to control power. It was designed to give the government legitimacy, to appease to voters voting for losing party so they viewed the system as legitimate and at least somewhat under control, it fostered participation at least in this form of oversight.
The current Brandmauer system is banana republic "winner takes all" democracy. It is much more dangerous than just simple duopoly, even more dangerous than what is now seen in US.
georgioz
4d ago
A lot of platitudes about the ideals of democracy completely gloss over the "two wolves and a sheep voting on what is for dinner" part. If your electorate is sufficiently homogeneous (all sheep, or even all wolves) this isn't an issue, but in practice a heterogeneous democracy really depends on a shared sense of liberal civic values: voters need to accept that nobody gets blasphemy laws, or they'll keep voting for them.
There always were blasphemy laws in place, in fact we probably live in an era of highest moral panic of hate speech, where saying magic words such as f-word or n-word in recent case can get you to jail. Not to even talk about bans on social media platforms, getting fired from work etc. It is arguably stronger than being told you are commie during Cold War or actually blaspheming against God before then.
And worse, there isn't even broad agreement on what "a shared sense of liberal civic values" should be.
Yes. I recently argued that Culture War is in fact a religious war. There is no sense of liberal civic values, because there is huge disagreement about values, which is domain of axiology and theology. And so we live through culture war raging religious conflict of highly incompatible religions and ideologies.
On the other hand, this seems like a slippery slope that draws into question what citizenship even is. Making it possible to kick out people recognized as citizens seems like a dangerous Chesterton's fence to tear down. For one, it gives the government the ultimate power to kick out citizens it dislikes. This seems like a real danger to a democracy where people are supposed to have disagreements and come to agreements through dialogue. It also draws into question what it even means to be German in the first place. Would anyone be safe if such a law was allowed?
You do not have to pose this as some theoretical thing. There are precedents, including my own motherland where I was born: Czechoslovakia. After the war in 1945 then president Edvard Beneš promulgated decrees that did as follows:
- Decree No. 12 in June 1945: stripped all Germans, Hunagrians and traitors of the nation of their agricultural land
- Decree No. 33 in August 1945: automatically stripped citizenship from Germans and Hungarians, except for those who could prove that they remained loyal to Czechoslovakia during war.
- Decree No. 108 in October 1945: stripped the above of all property without compensation.
And just to remind you, this was exiled allied antifascist democratic government prior to 1948 communist coup. This was all done in the middle of ethnic cleansing and remigration of over 3 million Germans and 100,000 Hungarians from Czechoslovakia (around 20% of the population), many families lived in these lands 500 years+. To this day these decrees are nonegotiable pillars of Slovak and Czech law including Amnesty law 115/1946, which established that any atrocities or crimes during expulsion were pardoned. All of them were reaffirmed by Czech and Slovak judiciary and parliamentary powers as late as 2000s as untouchable. Both countries still exist, they are part of EU and NATO although these decrees were in contention by Austria, Hungary and Germany during admission process. And EU obliged and put their legal experts on it and declared that nations have sovereignity over citizenship and that basically bygones should remain bygones for political expediency. Maybe you may have visited Prague and stayed in expropriated house from some unfortunate German family, while some nice local Czech tour guide gave you lecture on history of Czechs and their famous beer introduced by Bavarian brewmasters who are now long ethnically cleansed from the country. The End of story.
I think remigration and denaturalization can be done no problem even if it seems insane now. In fact, the blueprint is there from COVID era - all it takes is for a country to declare sufficiently supported state of emergency and universal human rights, civil rights, constitutional protections, international law and everything else stops mattering. I am not saying that it is likely or something like that, but in current day and age I do not think it is outside of realm of possibilities. For instance you have countries like South Africa who do the same but in silent mode - expropriating property, open racial and ethnic discrimination and you barely read about it. Apparently South Africa is upstanding member of UN, WTO and international community. Another tolerated genocide and ethnic cleansing is that of Serbs from Croatia during allied supported 1995 Operation Storm in context of Yugoslav wars despite Geneva Conventions, international law, human rights and all the rest.
Having something like that is not a totally outlandish thing to imagine. And it does not necessarily have to have any domino effect even 80 years later down the road.
Technically this is of course possible. For instance Hamas won 44% in 2006 elections in Gaza, the coalition around Hezbollah won 40% in 2022 Lebanon elections.
Of course this only shows the fragility of the our democracy™ sometimes also known as liberal democracy. It is always appeal to majority but with the caveats of human rights. Majority builds legitimacy - e.g. here they will say 55% are not AfD. While human rights are there as a grounding for moral argument for unpopular policies. So trans and naturalization of immigrants are human rights, and thus part of our democracy™. If unelected EU bureaucrats rule by fiat, it is under the veneer of human rights or sometimes The Science™ etc. - even if they literally subvert democratic norms, try to ban opposition parties etc. It is democratic from where they stand in their worldview.
In the end I think this liberal consensus is nonsense from their own standpoint, especially if they lose both legs. If they lose majority, they lose legitimacy. However the rights discourse is also based on the very same pilar. Slogan housing is human right or even asylum is human right depends on enough people shouting and more importantly enforcing it. There is no objective grounding, it is not as if such a right was found on an asteroid floating around Jupiter or whatnot. As soon as people start mocking it and refuse to uphold it, it stops being a right. In fact the same erosion happened to article 12 of Universal Declaration of Human rights (right to privacy of correspondence) and now every state and their underling browses through your correspondence for fun. So why not article 14 about asylum - just give the same caveat that asylum is technically there, but it only covers airplane ticket to Rwanda or French Guayana or whatnot.
In a reverse, ban on mocking The Prophet is nowhere near universal human right, but it practically became one by virtue of threat of violence if broken despite it never being marked as such. In a very same secular logic, human right is just a strongly worded law or custom with accompanied attempts to convince or shame and blame or even threaten people into accepting it.
This is not how it works in practice in multi-party parliamentary democracy:
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There are long-standing political norms of giving opposition posts related to control of power. They are lead various oversight or budget comitees, there are constitutional provisions where substantial minority of MP can start procedures such as compel investigations, summon ministers to explain stuff etc. There is considerable power given to opposition - doing away with it is exactly in line with what is usually called as tyranny and Trumpian norm-breaking. This is BTW already happening, which creates interesting and dangerous precedent including constitutional court rulings etc.
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Voting is nowhere near unanimous. MPs travel, they get sick. Many laws come not from EU and not from state government, there are procedures of how to introduce votes for amendments to laws etc. In practice, many laws require much more than just agreement inside coalition.
In practice such a rainbow coalition is hell to manage - you have to have coalition of greens (Die Grünen), literal commies (Die Linke), pro-business libertarian party (FDP) as well as Christian democrats (CDU/CSU). It is vastly different from US, where each House Member or Senator has to have 50%+ votes. In Europe the most radical lunatics can get 5% and get into parliament. They are structurally not dependent on some governing body like DNC or RNC, they are dependent on their own donors and voters.
If you construct such a coalition, they have hardly any overlap, they have vastly different opinions on things like budget, taxes, regulation and literally everything. It is impossible to present a program that would not cross some red line of some party. So even if they are disciplined, they don't get anything done and it increases power of opposition. If they get together and get something done, it then crosses red line of some party thus angering the party base and voters. It is lose lose situation.
I think this is not such a novel idea. The acceptance of car culture in USA was to large part driven by the fact that owning a car or two was middle class signifier and defensive measure. I think Europeans will eventually learn the same - if your rich neighborhood is one subway station away from crime ridden hellhole, you will have that spilled into your subway station and from there into the neighborhood. In that sense being cut off from public transit is the logical thing to require. We already see the same pattern in European cities, where natives flee to the surrounding towns and villages.
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