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spending explosion stimulated the economy enough that the Fed's late 2021 plans to start tightening became very out of date for the actual state of the economy.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
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
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
2mo ago
Libertarianism is incompatible with democracy. I think this is the obvious realization that people like Hoppe had.
Libertarianism + democracy is the end of libertarianism for two primary reasons.
The problem the anti-democracy crowd have is that Libertarianism is incompatible with any other alternative, too. It's always in the interest of those with power to limit the liberty of someone. This is why non-anarchist libertarians tend to like governments of 'limited and enumerated powers, with checks and balances to prevent the concentration of power in one branch'.
laxam
2mo ago
A more mainstream candidate could probably have won Virginia, New Hampshire, and Nevada. And maaaaaybe New Mexico.
Plus, Bush '04 lost Wisconsin by a few thousand votes. Michigan and Pennsylvania may or may not be taller orders.
laxam
2mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo ago
The point is that the Israelis aren't actually a source of instability in the region, except in terms of their relationship with the Palestinians. Get rid of the latter and you've solved the problem. Get rid of the former and you've still got a problem because they're a radicalized Islamist population which hates all of their neighbors.
laxam
3mo 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).
If you break them up into conjugal family units, you can even get some cultural change going.
laxam
3mo 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
3mo 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
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
3mo ago
Maybe. There's probably still more going on than just those particular problems. The theoretically correct answer is that the virtue of the people themselves has declined, so we elect men to Congress who will not govern well regardless of the structure you place them in. This is an appetizing enough answer, although certainly not itself complete.
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
3mo ago
This argument conclusively fell through about 1860. One population in a group of states decided that the other population in a different group of states was not allowed to have the laws their electorates broadly supported, so they formed a massive mob and... well, you know the rest.
1860?
Dred Scott happened in 1857...
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.
laxam
4mo ago
If we could exchange these people for the homeless and the activists, that would certainly be a net win.
laxam
4mo ago
Kinsey's style used to be something you could find along Democrats, too. Especially the budget-hawking-but-only-against-the-military bit is something that could go either way in my eyes.
O'Neill's outlook is definitely post-Vietnam military burnout, but absolutely everything else about him codes hard on the right for the time. There really was no archetype of the Dem leaning special forces guy in the 90s. If anything, he has always struck me as the kind of mostly disinterested (if not actively disgusting) in politics personally conservative but not religious middle aged white guy who would be activated by Trump in 2016.
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
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).
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.
More options
Context Copy link