laxam
9mo ago
She apparently earned it in the sense that she was on the phones calling all the Party people she needed to call to prevent an open convention pretty much the moment Biden dropped out. She apparently has some kind of knack (hard to call it a 'talent') for internal party politicking that got her where she is today.
The problem there is that was also the talent Hillary Clinton had and she was much better at it.
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
And that sort of classical liberalism was controversial in the 60's when Star Trek was doing it with the OS and, if not controversial, at least something people had in mind as a sore point when TNG was doing it in the 80's.
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
8mo ago
Yes, for 60 some years now what people meant when they said 'Conservative Movement' is dead.
laxam
8mo ago
Tariffs are generally a bad idea in the modern world. While consumption taxes in general are good, by applying them only to imports they have to be much higher (and this cause much more dead weight loss) than a general sales tax would.
A lot of the things said about tariffs by the media are stupid and pretty much just campaigning for the Democrats, but that doesn't actually make tariffs good.
laxam
9mo ago
I have trouble considering it much of a morph, considering how much Protestant fundamentalism had to do with the Temperance movement from the beginning.
North American housing crises are manufactured. There are no limiting resource constraints. Limited zoning limits the number of houses. Fewer houses means for expensive houses. There are other factors at play, but zoning is the disproportionate cause for high prices across the continent.
YIMBY may be associated with the Left and all its social dysfunctions and annoyance these days, but the economic consensus on this one preceded the Left's adoption of YIMBY. Pretty much the only dissent you see, academically, is from the further Left, who ultimately wants only publicly owned housing and is offended by the sheer existence of market rate housing and, even then, their work sucks.
A century and a half ago, NYC had more than a million utterly impoverished immigrants dumped on it when the city and the immigrants were vastly poorer than they are today. This was no problem, from a housing perspective: They threw up a bunch of apartments and tenements and housing stayed under 15% of even the very low income of those immigrants.
laxam
9mo ago
It's especially surprising because there was just an election last year where the Democratic judge was elected on pretty much straightforward partisan electoral lines: Abortion. And he's in the majority on this one.
Looks like there is an ounce of integrity left in that body.
laxam
10mo ago
Slaveowners were a tiny portion of the British population. They were powerful disproportionately to their numbers, but they would never have been able to resist abolition by force like the American South could.
If the Revolution has failed/never happened, the British slave owning population would have been much larger and more widespread -- remember, most Northern states abolished in response to the ideology of the Revolution.
laxam
9mo ago
Trump is intelligible in the sense that, if you're already familiar with the context he's speaking in, you can follow what he's trying to say. However, of you're not, you'll be lost.
His chatter about the Charlottesville fact check in the Biden debate made it exceptionally clear that he struggles to actually bring a point home and land it. If you knew already that Snopes had changed the status of the fact check then you could follow perfectly well what was going on but, if you were coming in cold, his point came off very weak and diffuse.
laxam
9mo ago
There absolutely is such a law. Even in high theory, the situations where wages != Marginal labor product are situations of monopoly/monopsony, which are fought by breaking up the monopoly/monopsony. What do you think the proper word for a union with a chokehold on a service with an inelastic supply is? If you guessed monopoly, you'd be correct.
And it's funny you would bring up housing costs, which is an industry where construction productivity has been stagnant for most of a century and where severe supply restrictions are the underlying cause of price increases. This is another situation where the entrenched, rent-seeking interests need to be broken and the market allowed to function again, just like with the ports.
Breaking this union would be an unmitigated good for the country.
laxam
9mo ago
Something I've often wondered about lately is how the world went from a system where winning territory by military conquest was just the way things were done, to our current system where the idea that one country would invade its neighbor for such base motives as gaining territory is viewed as scandalous.
American hegemony. While the particular details of a Wilsonian internationalism weren't carried forward entirely intact, the system of global diplomacy supported by the American foreign policy Establishment in the aftermath of WWII was premised on the idea of sovereign nation states participating peacefully in international institutions that respected human rights understood in an American sort of way (sort of).
That, combined with nuclear weapons, made territorial conquest Problematic. It actually still happens and countries even mostly get away with it from time to time, but it rests less easily on the global consciousness than it did in 1780 or even 1880.
laxam
9mo ago
Article 5 can't be triggered by Europeans joining someone else's defensive war.
laxam
10mo ago
Pretty much anywhere there was an abundance of land that was tied into the global trade network. If you could get enough land to be a commercial farmer for relatively cheap any time before mechanization in the 1920s, you'd be set, no matter how you started off.
laxam
8mo ago
I'm not saying they weren't arrogant about their odds the other way. But Bernie would have gotten whooped by Trump both times, just from airing commercials with him personally identifying as a socialist between the DNC and Election Day.
There's a reason Democrats pretend very hard to be moderates no matter how left wing they are.
laxam
8mo ago
Hillary Clinton wasn't woke in the slightest; anyone who could be remotely described as such was already in the tank for Sanders.
This is the opposite of my memory of 2016. Hillary was the candidate of Institutional Woke and Sanders was the last stand of the Old Left fighting to keep the focus on class issues instead of identity politics.
laxam
8mo ago
Polling aggregators almost invariably create averages for state polling, too. The people giving probabilities, the modelers, also base their modeled outcomes off of state polls, so they're aware the Electoral College exists.
What's the actual record of prediction markets?
laxam
9mo ago
Being a woman's movement and with a relationship to progressive politics was absolutely not mutually exclusive with being an evangelical movement, especially prior to the Civil War.
Protestantism and especially English or Scandinavian inflected Protestantism was heavily correlated with Temperance for a very long time. There's a reason many dry counties left in the South are heavily Protestant even though they're deeply conservative.
laxam
9mo ago
While all true, the other three Democratic judges in dissent prove that it's still very easy to just spike the procedural issue and vote your interest, anyway.
laxam
9mo ago
Thus, it may be formally correct, according to the "rules-based international order"/maps drawn up by Anglos and their allies, that the 1948 war constituted an initial attack by the Lebanese against Israel, but if you don't put much stock in Western mapmaking then it is easy to instead see as a desperate attempt by a people to resist the occupation of part of their lands.
That rules based international order is what gives them any rights in the first place. Without it, they're peasants who need to be taught their place, so complaining about them being attacked by the greater power is foolish. If they didn't want to be hurt, they should have stayed out the way, like the little people have been doing for millennia.
laxam
9mo ago
Well, it would be more productive if you could explain what you think are the relevant ways in which the analogy fails
I did, right at the beginning: there were many more powers involved in the international politics of WWI than there are in the Ukraine war.
On top of that, we have a sufficiently high contrarian population that going too hard for your side might even just wind up generating sympathy for the other side directly.
They don't need me for that. Western contrarians have decided Russia is Really The Good Guy all on their own (well, mostly).
They 'ratfucked' him because they were fully aware a self-identified socialist would get crushed in an American election and stood the chance of poisoning their brand for an extended period of time.
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