laxam
2mo ago
It's just word associations.
That seems to be a substantial portion of all political communications these days. A huge portion of politics (including political 'news', which is usually essentially just propaganda for one side or the other) is finding some way to put two things on a shelf next to each other, one thing universally agreed to be bad and another an unrelated politician, political party, or political idea, and just go, "Eh? Eh? How about it? They're like, right next to each other!"
It's pretty obvious that Hawley either doesn't understand or thinks his audience doesn't understand (and thus doesn't care about making shit up) what Section 230 is about.
laxam
3mo ago
My proposal. We should solve this. My best guess is we need to add mini-legislatures somehow. Congress finds a way to delegate rule-making to smaller focused legislatures that will retain the legitimacy of congress and being Democratic.
It's called the committee system and it has existed since the first Congress.
Subject matter committees allow Congressmen to specialize and the institution to begin to develop durable, institutional knowledge. The problem is that Congress is far too small to allow Congressmen to specialize, given the size and scope of the Federal government, and they're too busy fundraising these days to do a good job of it, anyway.
Still happens, though. Mike Gallagher's China committee is a good example.
laxam
1mo ago
Yeah, there's that, too. We are not Elves and we cannot have their life. We are Men and the fading of the world of Elves leaves us to build our own paradises.
laxam
6mo ago
Why does Twitter cost money? It's just other people providing content...
The irony of trying to own Elon on Twitter costs when he successfully ruthlessly shrank a huge amount of bloat there.
laxam
6mo ago
This is a lot of words to write, "I don't understand why aggregate statistics don't apply to the individual".
Subsets of aggregate data can move in different directions from the summary statistics of the whole dataset. Trying to understand why people don't take selected macro statistics as gospel truth about their own lives is, to use a common phrase, extremely out of touch.
And stuff like this:
- Republicans think the economy is doing absolutely terribly, much worse than Democrats think, and 3) that most of this perception difference is because Biden, a Democrat, currently occupies the White House.
Is bordering on outright delusional. There are more Americans than just Democrats and Republicans and you don't get 55% fair/poor personal financial situation from just Republicans (no matter how much I'd love for 55% of Americans to be Republicans, alas).
What's actually going on here is that the chattering classes and the politicians and bureaucrats they support are finding, once again, that they can't actually tell people what to think about their personal lives. It's baldly obvious that this group doesn't actually know what they're talking about any functionally better than most people and that their ability to cite macro statistics is more an attempt to cast a magic spell than a real explanation of ground truth.
laxam
4mo ago
But to the above I have to say, isn't Person B obviously correct?
Person B is using the, "The world isn't fair/perfect, grow up", defense that was common sense a generation or two ago. I remain convinced that the Internet has forced us to regress so far in terms of social development that what was once common sense is now forgotten wisdom (but, then again, 'common sense isn't so common' is also an ancient aphorism).
laxam
7mo ago
Hearts and minds of people who matter, not yours.
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.
laxam
1mo 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
4mo ago
I have to disagree about O'Neill. SG-1 manages to pull off that rare accomplishment of sometimes being about politics without ever being political. They never say what party Kinsey is from, from what I remember, and the 1990s were a time where his type was available in both parties to be disdained.
The way in which they have Jack handle Daniel's actually peacenik attitudes (even if Daniel is right by plot fiat) is also a bit of a conservative stereotype of the gruff, worldly military man running rough shod over the lefty ivory tower type. The way they handled their relationship (where both get to be right and wrong at different times and both get to be both positive and negative portrayals of their archetypes who both grow by learning to deal and work with the other) is actually exceptionally good writing, both from a character handling perspective and from a 'keeping your show unpolitical' perspective.
The show absolutely is suffused with triumphalism post-Cold War liberalism, but that was a practically consensus point of view at the time and it was something most of both right and left could agree on.
laxam
2mo ago
...wouldn't a large part of that be Trump-era Covid spending, though?
No, inflation expectations across every horizon remained low in 2020 and only really started to go up after Biden's spending spree got off the starting line in 2021. Remember Larry Summers being pilloried for pointing out that the ARPA spent more stimulative dollars than the size of the output gap by a large amount at that time?
The early Biden administration's spending explosion stimulated the economy enough that the Fed's late 2021 plans to start tightening became very out of date for the actual state of the economy. If they had tightened earlier (so, March-April 2021), there might have been no serious inflation but there also might not have been any serious inflation if Republicans had kept the Senate or the White House and not passed the huge spending bills of that year.
laxam
5mo ago
Islam had its Reformation
It also had its own Enlightenment. The Golden Age of Islam and the whole Abbasid Caliphate was very loosey goosey with its Islam, with a focus on education, science, and (often Greek) philosophy for a few centuries until everything got buttoned up during the Middle Ages and especially after Al Ghazali. There's a reason that, of what wasn't from the Greeks, a lot of the recovery of mathematics and philosophy in the European Renaissance was recovery of texts from the Islamic world (which was simultaneously becoming less interested in these things).
laxam
3mo ago
not just an unprovable counterfactual, but a belief of yours which is apparently immune to any sort of evidence against it
Do you not understand the difference between low turn out midterms and high turnout presidential election years?
And 2rafa is right: 2014 was the best recent Republican Congressional year, when they peaked at 54 Senate seats and 247 House seats (more than any time since the 1920's in the House). The fringes of the Tea Party cost the GOP Senate seats in 2010. Remember the Witch? Republicans could have had a Senate seat in Delaware.
laxam
4mo ago
I do not understand the obsession with using precious metals as currency. Why is it better for the value of your currency to be at the whims of a commodity market as compared to managed by a central bank? Are the value of these coins (presumably) going to be pegged to some USD price? Free floating exchange rate? Why would anyone use these as opposed to USD?
Options are always nice. Central banks don't always do a great job managing their currencies and, while metallic standards aren't perfect, they're a workable alternative when your central bankers are having a live one.
I highly doubt Clint Eastwood was trying to hint at white replacement in Gran Turino. By reducing everything to white and not-white, I think you're missing some nuance in terms of dying urban white ethnic communities, romanticism for the glory days of blue collar Midwestern America, what the real meaning of American values is, etc etc.
It's honestly a very conservative movie and there's plenty in it that doesn't just skirt boundaries today, but outright leaps over them. For example, Clint gets out of his beat up old American truck to point a gun at a bunch of young black men -- acting like stereotypical hoods, of course -- then subsequently chastises a young white kid for acting black (although not in so many words). It's also the last movie I've seen to feature what used to be a super common phenomenon of blue collar American men calling each other very offensive slurs as a term of endearment/form of screwing around for fun. It actually is still decently common in the right circles, it would just never be portrayed positively or innocently in a movie anymore.
I guess it can be confused as a movie for Great Replacement messaging, but only because the replacement has already happened in a lot of American urban areas. Clint represents a relic of a piece of America that is already gone, it just happens to pattern match to modern fears.
Edit: To add on a bit more....
I think Gran Turino is ultimately about how the last generation of American immigrants has some important things to pass on to the current generation of American immigrants. It is absolutely positive on American values and, indeed, the thing that the movie portrays the Hmong as superior to Clint's own family at is exactly that: family. It doesn't really make Clint seem worse than the Hmong, just Clint's family, who have gotten selfish and stopped caring about their father (ignoring and dismissing him, to the degree of wanting to stick him in a home and forget about him).
It still portrays everything about those values in Clint as, if not superior to what the Hmong family has, at least having some important things to pass on to the Hmong children about being Americans. Clint's actual children have abandoned that aspect of their heritage and so he passes it on to someone who will have it, instead.
laxam
1mo ago
It looks like 'direction or control' usually means some sort of formal relationship. So, a contract that gives voting power over a company or something like that.
laxam
2mo ago
I mean, they don't have a vitriolic hatred for Bush sr.
I don't know that you can really call it vitriolic hatred, but they certain didn't think highly of him at the time, while he was in office.
The truth is that there is a certain segment of the Left that has and will hate any Republican President whatsoever, under the pretense that they're an incipient authoritarian dictator. Truman accused Dewey of being an American Mussolini.
laxam
28d ago
I don't know about 'horrifically riven' but it did have plenty of civil war and strife over the years.
laxam
2mo ago
I guess my only quibble is with the word 'essential'. It's not crazy to think that, absent the national distractions of the Depression and the War, something along the same vein would have happened even earlier. The Civil Rights Movement was becoming increasingly organized and I'm of the opinion that another important factor was the prosperity of the post-war era. The foundations for that prosperity were lain in the massive productivity gains of the 30's, so an alt-40's where the Depression and the War don't happen could well have seen an alt-Civil Rights movement.
The Cold War provided an impetus, but it was one of many and not an essential one.
laxam
6mo ago
The nature of federal and state funding for Indians as determined by tribe as determined (in many cases) by blood as a kind of reparations (explicitly or implicitly)
A gift-giving, paternal relationship between European/American settler states and native states is a lot older than any sense of white guilt. The US government, for example, has been making at least periodic payments to Indian tribes since the 1790s.
I don't know if I'd call it reparations. This is a traditional form of interaction between the new states and the tribes, including between states and tribes that otherwise had no real relationship.
laxam
3mo 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
10mo ago
I don't really find this account compelling. The Roman Empire was damaged heavily by the efforts of popular military leaders to seize power, but this pattern started long before the use of foederati in the army. Far from decadence and complacency, Rome was damaged by the irrepressible ambition and ruthlessness of generals and soldiers.
It's really more complex than this.
The late Roman Germanic Federates who systematically dismantled the Western Empire to their own benefit were the heirs to a tradition of Roman military federates stretching back beyond the beginning of the Republic. The term itself referred originally to the agreement between the Romans and the other Latins, back when Rome was a first among equals in the Latin League (foedus just means pact or treaty). While the exact relationship between citizen and non-citizen military units in the Roman army evolved over the entire course of the evolution of the state, barbarians (from both within and without the limits of the Empire) were recruited heavily even at the peak of Imperial power. There were whole tribes who specialized in providing recruits to the Roman military, such as the Belgae in Northwestern Europe. In fact, this recruitment of barbarians served as a major engine of Romanization for centuries prior to the arrival of the Germanic federates.
The difference between the Germanics and prior barbarian recruits into the Roman Army is that the Germanic Tribes were adopted wholesale as units into the Roman military, with their military leaders/kings being given high ranks and allowed to continue leading their own men. Whereas, in the past, barbarians were recruited as individuals/small groups and they served under existing Roman officers, the new situation meant that there was a growing component of the Roman Army that was essentially a legitimized foreign military force serving under their own leaders. What happened wasn't a bunch of outsiders conglomerating together into an anti-government force (as mentioned, the individual groups of outsiders had, in the past, had heavy incentives to learn Latin, adopt Roman culture, and bring those things back to their homelands after they mustered out), it was that a potential anti-government force was given legitimacy as a conglomeration.
When the US starts hiring military units wholesale from foreign countries and allowing them to operate under their existing leadership, that's when you start to worry.
laxam
9mo ago
The nutty thing is that, per 538's own data, their bias isn't even that egregious! While they definitely have a Republican tilt, that tilt comes out of them having misses on BOTH sides of the column but just having MORE misses in the GOP's favor.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/rasmussen-reports/
They otherwise have exactly the same kind of shape you would expect a decent pollster to have: Some outliers in both directions with a big mass of near misses in the middle.
laxam
9mo ago
This being Star Trek, Kirk of course has to draw a lesson at the end. And he does . . . but fascinatingly, it's a lesson about hate, not about racism. Racism does not exist for Kirk. He is not even considering the issue.
I've not watched the episode, although I'm familiar enough with it in outline.
The reason the lesson can be about hate is because racism was viewed, in the 1960's, as about hate. Race hate was one of the parts of the contemporary definition of racism. In the same way pre-21st century ideas about racism might say something to the effect of, "It's judging someone on the basis of their race", people in the 1960's would understand racism to mean -- at least in part -- hating someone on the basis of their race. That is to say, the lesson of the episode is 100% about racism, just not as we know it.
While this is true -- as in, you can find people talking about doing things during the Civil Rights Movement for this reason, up to and including Eisenhower administration officials and Earl Warren --, it's also true that the Civil Rights Movement itself was both older (ie. the NAACP dates to the 1900's decade and the organized lawfare against Jim Crow is as old as Jim Crow, with Booker T Washington being the silent hero here. Plessy was a test case brought by early civil rights activists in cooperation with the railroad companies) and that it had been scoring wins prior to the Cold War and the decline and fall of the European empires. Successful school desegregation cases date back to the 1920's and there were increasingly serious efforts to pass a national anti-lynching bill in that decade, only cut off by the coming of the Great Depression.
By about the late 1940's, national public opinion had swung decisively against segregation and it was just a matter of time before politics aligned around doing something about it, Cold War or not.
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