laxam
1yr ago
The other Arab states couldn't care less about Israel. The Baathists were the only ones who ever actually disliked Israel at higher echelons of government and Saddam is dead and Assad has got bigger problems to worry about. The monarchies occasionally make anti-Israeli noises for their populaces but otherwise don't give a damn, Egypt has been sucking on the American military funding teet in exchange for peaceful relations with Israel for so long that the mask-for-money has become just standard Egyptian policy, and other Arab states are too distant to actually be bothered.
laxam
1yr ago
The IRG is a few hundred thousand personnel. If 'a few layers' was more than a couple of thousand people I would be shocked.
laxam
1yr ago
Dunno, but Iran has had several waves of very large scale anti-regime protests. I think you could prevent something exactly like the Mullahs taking back over if you just hand the government over to the right people. Iran isn't really like Iraq, it's a more developed place, even with the sanctions.
laxam
1yr ago
I think signing on the R ticket and declaring we give too much money to Ukraine and Israel is a really bad way to grift.
That's an absolutely exceptional way to grift. People like Trump and Kari Lake have been doing it for years and raking in the small dollar donations by the millions for years.
When are you people going to realize that you are the establishment. You are the power now, so every time you sneer about the establishment neocons what you're actually doing is sneering as the heel to the face. The """"establishment"""" is terrified of voters that think like you do and have been bending over and spreading wide for almost a decade to try to please you. All they've gotten for it is cascading electoral failure. As someone who likes it when Republicans win, I'm not very happy about that.
laxam
2yr ago
My wife and I work around this by completely banning having a cookie by yourself in the house. If you want one, you have to get one for the other, too. This means you have both the impulse control of each person as well as making it relatively rare for both people to be craving cookies at the same time, so it's very rare for us to have more than one or two each. I can't think of the last time we've done anything even close to having a whole box in one sitting.
It also helps we don't keep particularly delectable cookies like flavored Oreos in the house at all, anymore.
laxam
2yr ago
I'm going to take a wild guess and say you probably think it's fine for the federal security services to collude with Twitter, facebook, google, and most major media corporations to manipulate the information available to voters.
Not particularly. I just don't think it's enough to win elections all on its own. A bit better distribution of votes and the GOP picks up 10 more House seats (the 10th closest seat last year was NC-13. The Dem won by a tad less than 9,000 votes out of 250,000 cast. Vote distribution across distributions based on turnout differentials and last minute independent swings and the like are a bitch. The Democrats complain about them constantly). Some saner Gubernatorial and Senatorial candidate choices and the GOP probably picks up a few governor's mansions (or refrains from losing them) and a Senate seat or two.
As an example, the AZGOP received more total votes in House elections than the AZDEMS by more than 300,000. While the AZGOP ran two more candidates than the AZDEMS, it was still a larger gross than Katie Hobbs got in the gubernatorial election and just an inch more than Mark Kelly in the Senate election. The AZGOP also swept the vote totals in the state house and senate, (58-42 and 55-45, respectively, although again the AZGOP ran more candidates in both, 8 more -- two of which were independents who got less than 2,000 votes total -- in the state house, and 1 more in the state senate). Same story in PA: the vote gross was heavily weighted toward the PAGOP in both the state and Federal House elections (by 400,000 in the state house and a bit under 300,000 in Federal House elections). While the gross here doesn't total to more than Shapiro or Fetterman got, there was the obvious anchor of Mastriano that wasn't present in AZ (Lake had her problems, but she was a very talented television presence and knows what she's doing when speaking to the public. Mastriano had no media presence at all and didn't speak to any audiences that weren't entirely in the bunker for him), borne out by the fact the PAGOP US House candidates totaled almost 500,000 more votes than Mastriano got.
Same thing in GA, where both the state and Federal House gross vote totals would have won outright, without the need for a runoff. Same in Nevada, even.
People can and do vote for the GOP, they just need good candidates (and some luck with voter distribution, and Dem gerrymandering doesn't help -- while I'm more skeptical of the jump to gerrymandering accusations than most, some places, like NV, are egregious) and they can do well. People just need a reason to think voting GOP is a good idea. Depending on how this all shakes out, this may be turn out to be that idea. If deal that was worked out successfully instills budget discipline without people experiencing major damage to their lives and livelihood, it certainly counts as a reason to me.
laxam
2yr ago
This isn't burning the system down, this is getting the Democrats elected in 2024.
laxam
2yr ago
Your claim is McCormick would do better than Oz in suburbs and independents except Oz polled ahead of him with those groups and did better with one them in the GOP primary. McCormick's demo was foxnews boomers who did vote for Oz in the general. Oz got killed not because of indep or suburbs, but because no working class people showed up to vote for him. This is why I think McCormick would have done even worse.
1.3 million people voted in the Republican primary, 5.3 million people voted in the general. Primary results don't mean much for the general, otherwise Mastriano wouldn't have gotten blown out everywhere.
it's convenient for the people who have been failing in PA
What's convenient is that, every time a horrid, worthless candidate gets pushed over the primary top by the Orangenfuhrer, their loss is always excusable by something. Even if those losses are totally discordant with how other elections in the state went, like Oz and Mastriano running hundreds of thousands of votes behind the GOP House candidates in PA, or how the AZ GOP Treasurer obliterated their Democratic opponent. There's always some excuse.
Also, Trump's 2016 'get out the vote program' in PA...received fewer votes in PA than Obama, both times.
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
In addition to his general popularity with radical youth, Bernie was a candidate for the very online.
Again, they would have run ads with him calling himself a socialist, all day, every day, for six months before the election and he would have lost by 5+ points.
laxam
9mo ago
I don't see a law saying that wages must keep pace with productivity:
Right there:
- The wage equals the value of the marginal product of labor.
In a world of high automation, one could easily argue that all workers are less productive and deserve much lower wages.
That's not the way productivity measurement works.
Automation makes individual workers more productive.
A labor productivity index can be calculated by dividing an index of output by an index of hours worked
We have observed a general trend in the last 50 years where productivity rises much faster than wages rise: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
EPI is a bullshit factory think tank funded by labor unions to produce propaganda. Their """researchers""" are paid to sit around all to figure out how to twist economic statistics to push their ideological agenda.
If we're going to go for low quality sources, here's a reddit thread on that bullshit graph:
https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/6rtoh4/productivity_pay_gap_in_epi_we_trust/
The EPI graph is an embarrassment designed to draw in ignorant young people on the internet to believing something that isn't true because it's not like they can check it. Pretty much everything you've absorbed about the economy from the internet is bullshit lefty propaganda.
And I think the best chance we have of that is by not totally and unflinchingly embracing automation (even when it makes a lot of sense). We should establish a precedent where the gains of capital and automation are distributed even to wildly unsympathetic people.
And I think we should let consumer preferences drive the evolution of the economy.
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
9mo ago
No, I'm saying the moral foundations on which that international order are built are the same as the moral foundations on which a rights based worldview are built. Throwing out the one costs you the other.
laxam
10mo ago
Right, but if you started poor somewhere it was realistic to save up and get that land, that's the best circumstance to be poor in: you're not going to be stuck impoverished. That's someplace it's significantly better to be poor in than in London at the same time.
laxam
10mo ago
The failure to prevent a unified Germany is pretty much what I mean when I say Britain 'failed [to] balance sufficiently'.
laxam
10mo ago
It was at the time, although progressivism was a dead word that only got revived in the 90's after conservatives succeeded in making 'liberal' a dirty word.
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.
laxam
10mo ago
Against Clinton, that's not as much an anchor as it should be. She was the anti-charisma and had the reputation of a flaming pile of shit among the general public.
I think pretty much any Republican who could speak coherently and with even a modicum of force could have beaten her in 2016, but Republicans like Jeb or Rubio would have sparked off a base revolt, anyway, while in office. Only someone who could credibly pursue immigration restriction would have been able to please the base and those two are the exact opposite.
laxam
10mo ago
If it took us three generations to get here, it'd be unreasonable to expect us to take less than three generations to go back. Baby steps.
laxam
10mo ago
This is after about a century of reforestation. Parts of the East coast used to be just as intensively cultivated/settled as any part of Europe. Massachusetts now has significantly more forest than it did in the 1920's, for example.
laxam
11mo ago
Don't forget: they were also battle hardened after a decade of war against Iran.
laxam
1yr ago
And universal sufferage only 100 years old.
Suffrage without respect to class is significantly older in this country and glimmers of it date back through initial settlement.
I don't know about 'horrifically riven' but it did have plenty of civil war and strife over the years.
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