laxam
2yr ago
It's oppositional defiant disorder spreading to older whites. While ODD is something that is, from time to time, provided as a cause for black youth underperformance in schools, it's not something you've seen attributed to older whites. The perception of mistreatment by authority creates a permanent attitude of anger and defiance.
This can sometimes feel like just part and parcel of the way modern society seems to outright encourage mental illness in the general population. Attitudes and outlooks that, given time to fester, can develop into something almost clinical are celebrated and spread far and wide, coping mechanisms and other attempts to deal with mental health issues like this are denigrated and people are exhorted to reject them.
I don't really know what should be done about it. It has kind of metastasized into a pan-social malady that can't be addressed entirely because it's distributed and deeply entrenched.
laxam
1yr ago
This is a little more exhortative than analysis or discussion.
Is this place supposed to be a recruiting ground for 'wy' Nats?
laxam
9mo ago
Yep. In all other ways, Trump is a candidate I could hold my nose for because the alternative is worse.
But, until he concedes the 2020 election, I will never vote for him or anyone who jumps on the Stop the Steal bandwagon, period.
laxam
1yr ago
Israel was well on the way to coming to an understanding with its neighbors prior to 10/7.
The role of the global hegemon here, if we're really talking about 'just do whatever creates stability' would be take the population of Palestine, break it up into families, and scatter them around the globe, then decapitate the regime in Tehran and hand the reins over to a transitional government and leave. The Middle East would calm down very quickly.
laxam
8mo ago
I feel that the conservative movement has come to a healthier space where they differentiate the university and educational establishment that they hate from intellectualism in general. This worry did not materialize.
Trump essentially killed the conservative movement. It's not healthy, the old base now hates it and it's institutions have had to choose between sacrificing their souls or irrelevance. Just go to a MAGA space and say the word 'neocon' and see what happens.
MAGA doesn't even trust Conservative intellectual institutions. What progress is still being made (say, what's happening in Florida), is localized, not part of the national movement, which has shattered and died in most places.
laxam
10mo ago
Is not wearing a tie lazy?
Yes.
Should we be concerned about male modesty?
Yes.
Is this supposed to be that hard?
laxam
8mo ago
History is more contingent than that. And it's not clear that MAGA is particularly well equipped to perform better. The old Movement Conservatism elected Presidents and won elections, too. Outside of Trump himself, MAGA has mostly lost Republicans elections over the last eight years and I'd bet it'd lose this one, too, if the Democrats hadn't chosen an invalid and then an incompetent to be their standard bearers.
laxam
8mo ago
It also elected Reagan, twice, took Congress back for the first time in 40 years and gave us probably the most conservative policy decade since the 1920s, elected both Bushes four times in total, and won the House nine times (I'll let you guys have 2016, although I think that really was still momentum from the Conservative Movement), the Senate ten times, and brought Republican control of state legislatures and governor's mansions to a numeric height unequaled in a century.
It's not so clear that failing to beat Obama meant it was 'non-viable', although I know that's the self serving story MAGA likes to tell itself.
laxam
11mo ago
They starved MAGA candidates of support in the midterms
One of the big reasons Vance won his Senate seat at all was because McConnell drowned Ohio in NRSC money.
You're stuck in the same oppressor-oppressed mental dynamic the Left has. Trump is the GOP right now. All of the party establishment positions are filled with his people. Pretty much everyone who ever opposed him speaks glowingly of him at the Convention (or they've left the party).
Stop playing the victim.
laxam
1yr ago
Who said anything about invading?
Kill the Guardian Council, the President, the top layer or two of the cabinet and the IRG, and tell the people who were trying to overthrow the government because of the overreach of the morality police that they're in charge now and leave the place to its own devices.
Seriously, OP talked about stabilizing the Middle East. The Oil Princes just want to make money, the military in Egypt wants more or less the same, the Turks just want to be able to play regional hegemon, and the Israelis just wanna feel like they won't all be killed for letting their guard down. It's the Iranian government that throws a wrench into the works. Get rid of them and break the back of the IRG and there's no longer going to be anyone who cares enough to spend time destabilizing other countries (and the Arab world will be all too happy to quietly wash their hands of the Palestinians).
It has yet to happen anywhere, any time. There's always something else for people to do.
Competing states are absolutely advantaged by higher productivity but you and I aren't states or economies or large firms.
No, but we are advantaged by higher productivity, too. The 'golden age' of the post-war boom was possible because of higher than usual productivity growth from the 1920s through the 1970s.
People benefit from being wealthier. Higher productivity makes us wealthier. It's pretty straightforward.
laxam
10mo ago
I am annoyed by how weak the Republicans are. Increasingly, 2016 seems to be a flash in the pan.
2016 wasn't a flash in the pan, it was a brick wall that all the momentum the right had been building since 2010 smashed to pieces against.
laxam
11mo ago
and there's a very decent chance that they would actually lose the conflict militarily to boot
This is delusional. Obliterating the formal militaries of near peer competitors is the one thing the US military is utterly dominant at. The US loses wars when you go all fourth generational warfare and wait for the American public to get tired of hearing about the steady trickle of dead American soldiers and foreign civilians (who are innocent and mostly women ad children, of course).
laxam
1yr ago
The law is much less over-reaching than no_one (and most of the bill's critics) is making it out to be.
laxam
1yr ago
If Western governments had the reach to mobilize the failed protest movements Iran has had over the last decade, we'd have just overthrown the Guardian council and been done with it.
laxam
2yr ago
Mental health in general is almost entirely about whether something substantially prevents someone from functioning normally.
laxam
2yr ago
Trump was given a curated list to pull names from.
Mitch held a seat and Trump did what he was told. The one, huge, unequivocally great thing he did wasn't him, because you have to be delusional at this point to think Trump is good at doing anything but trolling the hell out of the libs.
laxam
11mo ago
This is a place where people pattern match 'leftists are upset about a white on black killing' to 'the whites must be innocent' a little too readily. Is the media often wrong about this sort of thing and only able to enforce consensus through sheer exercise of power? Of course. Were they wrong in that instance? Nope.
laxam
1yr ago
Austrian economics correctly states that this leads to over-investment: investment is unbacked by corresponding saving, causing a bubble and mis-allocation of economic resources.
I was waiting for this. The rest of the post prior has all of those usual """dog-whistles""" that it was like a twist in a movie you can see coming from miles away.
Is it 2008 again? I remember the internet being full of this kind of thing (and being one of the contributors!).
Anyway, it's important to point out that 'full reserve' theorizing is not 'Austrian' economics, it's Rothbardian Austrian economics. The original ABCT doesn't require it to avoid business cycles and Hayek's formulation can be re-cast in essentially monetarist terms as about the interplay of the supply and demand for money without much modification. The supply of loanable funds (a nominal quantity) does not necessarily represent the full production possibilities of the underlying economy (a real one). That is, there are 'real' savings that are not represented by nominal savings at a given price level/quantity of money. The demand for money will be driven, in part, by the investment possibilities created by real savings, so a full reserve banking system will under invest in production, while the fractional reserve system the Rothbardians are against would be able to invest enough for the economy to reach its production possibilities frontier without going beyond it and generating a business cycle.
As to the rest of your post: a lot of what you're talking about with population discount rates would probably be covered in post-war Keynesian literature on the propensity to save/consume. The empirical validity of a lot of it varies, I'm sure, but I can't imagine it's any more questionable than your last two paragraphs.
laxam
1yr ago
There were many people who said "local costs are up in some goods more than average statistics would suggest". My beef isn't with people who concluded that "because of this + negativity bias, things feel worse than they actually are", it's with the people claiming "because of this, economic data are rigged and useless".
Perhaps you might have saved yourself a lot of words had you considered, "Maybe I'm wrong about the actual state of things for many people", and, "The economic data are accurate within the gamut of what they're actually measuring", aren't mutually exclusive things.
laxam
1yr ago
Is it to discuss policy? Is it to discuss aggregate public perception? Averages matter.
Which averages matter a lot.
Of course, there is no real policy discussion going on with these discussions of macro statistics. It's just Lefty professionals sneering at the rest of the country and saying, "Why won't you just do what I tell you and vote for the Democrats?"
laxam
2yr ago
Personally, I think the organized efforts of the media, big tech, and the federal security apparatus to both conceal truths harmful to democrats and propagate lies harmful to Republicans is probably what, if anything, is going to get the Democrats elected in 2024.
It's kind of weird how that didn't get enough Democrats elected in 2022.
Or 2016.
Or 2014.
Or 2010.
laxam
10mo ago
Maybe I'm the one that's off my rocker
You are. Clinton was a profoundly weak, unpopular candidate. She had 35 years in the public spotlight and there just was not anything to like there for the majority of Americans. No one running in 2016 could have beaten her in the landslide she deserved, but the 2016 election was Generic, Boring Republican Candidate's to lose.
2016 was a very Republican year and Clinton was a terrible candidate. As it was, Republicans across the country ran ahead of Trump, from House races to Senate, Gubernatorial, and even further downballot. A more boring election where you don't get all the negative partisanship Trump creates that has lower turnout than 2012 instead of higher turnout benefits those other Republicans even more.
No shit. They need cash and weapons now, not the support of internet contrarians who will always hate them because they had the audacity to be invaded by the Russians.
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