laxam
9mo ago
It may well be that a reasonable balance for ports vs port workers involves this thug and his hangers-on being sent off to prison for economic wrecking, mass sackings and prompt automation.
Good.
But similarly reasonable balances may be imposed on unruly, arrogant tech-bros by the rest of society.
Good.
Productivity is the source of wealth. Holding productivity back in pursuit of rents is how you get extended (ie. century long) periods of economic stagnation.
What happens when we automated the dock workers, automated the factory workers, automate the retail workers... who will be left to go on strike when they automate us? And then where is our leverage to negotiate anything in the future?
What does happen when they automate all the farm work? Where will we go?
-- Farm laborer, 1860, when 70% of the population worked in agriculture.
laxam
8mo ago
To me it looks like there's a huge disconnect between themotte's view of a typical democrat voter and reality. Just off the top of my head I'd assume there are more low socioeconomic class "that's why I shit on company time" democrat voters in the country than upper class "mcdonalds is too good for presidents" snobs.
Dramatically. The Democrats still win the lowest two income quintiles, it's just by a lot less than it used to be.
laxam
8mo ago
Also AIUI cable providers often pool their customers' downlink and provide much less that advertised speeds at peak times; is the FCC looking into this?
Requiring providers to not oversubscribe their link bandwidth would make broadband multiple times more expensive than it currently is and be wildly inefficient.
laxam
8mo ago
Hostile government actors censoring the media is absolutely something the Founders would be intimately familiar with, on both sides of the coin...
laxam
8mo ago
It may be worthwhile to point out that the Republicans were a minority party for the whole postwar period (often about half the size of the Democratic Party) but elected only two term Presidents (depending on how you want to count Nixon) until HW while the Democrats never had a President get reflected anywhere between Truman and Clinton. Republicans were seen as something of the same, stable party for a long time, even by registered Democrats (there's a reason the Republicans got 'evil' out of the 'evil party and stupid party' dichotomy). Plenty of Democrats wanted to vote for Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan over their opponents.
laxam
9mo ago
The 'crit' term is older than Delgado and actually originally applied to the predecessors of the critical race theorists like him: the critical legal theorists. Once the critical race theorists began to think of themselves as a real distinct group in the 80s and 90s, they were actually the crats, as opposed to the crits, who they were reacting against.
laxam
9mo ago
To the extent that all conflicts can be described as about 'overlapping war goals', yes, and all war is a failure of diplomacy.
The whole exercise just seems to be about embedding the same old Russian gripe about NATO expansion in more respectable, historiographical context. Learned and wise. Except anything is analogous to anything at a high enough level of vague generality.
laxam
8mo ago
W wasn't even a neocon. Although the Bushes like 'compassionate conservatism', they were really just the wild Northeastern Establishment reaching it's dead hand forward into the 21st century.
The neocons were a core part of Movement Conservatism, from the beginning. They had no special connection to foreign policy and the weight of anti-war sentiment coming down on them was more a creation of left wing anti-war media than something central to the neocons themselves. While Reagan's three legged stool makes clear the neocons weren't the only part of the conservative movement, Trumpism has also abandoned the other two legs: the social conservatives have been thrown under the bus on abortion and the business conservatives/fiscal hawks have been shown the door both in rhetoric and actual practice.
The Old Right/Paleos have essentially entirely won the battle and so the Conservative Movement is dead. The Conservative Movement in America was something that grew out of the collapse of the Old Right in the face of the Eisenhower Presidency as essentially another path for opposing the New Deal Consensus. While the. Social base of the MAGA movement allowed for this revival of Paleoconservatism, the base of the New Right in the suburbs is moving Left too rapidly for the New Right to ever revive, so Movement Conservatism is essentially dead. Evangelicals will continue their deal with the devil and Business Conservatives will dither over what to do: go to the Democrats and just pray their socialist wing can be kept under control or try to influence MAGA to be more friendly to them.
But the old Movement is 100% gone.
laxam
8mo ago
Yep. The cold solace that it will be the cabinet and bureaucracy running the government so it doesn't matter if Kamala is an incompetent executive is not comforting at all after the last four years, where the cabinet and the bureaucracy were running the government and they were bad at it.
laxam
9mo ago
Ukraine... gets its independence and neutrality guaranteed by ... Russia
Ukraine already has that. What else you got?
laxam
10mo ago
Women and their community memberships used to be the beating heart of Anglosphere conservatism.
laxam
11mo ago
Concerns about one state lording it over the others, such as Holland did during the era of the Dutch Republic, were very prominent in designing the Electoral College (and other parts of the Constitution) and concerns about party tickets were very not prominent.
Pretty much everything to do with choosing the President is one of those things the Framers got extremely wrong and their mechanism broken pretty much right away.
laxam
11mo ago
Israel's next elections are scheduled for October, 2026. Once the war is over, Netanyahu has no reason at all to hold them early and his coalition isn't in incredible danger of breaking up.
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
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.
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).
laxam
10mo ago
But they went into it saying "I want to write a great sci-fi story that is also diverse", not "I want to write a diverse sci-fi show". The goal was to make a good TV show, not to ensure that black lesbians got more air-time.
It's probably further up the pipeline, too. They're recruiting writers who aren't particularly good at their trade, but they have the right politics and personal identity, so they get hired.
laxam
10mo ago
Luckily, our Constitution bans titles of nobility. In Constitutionalist America, no one is allowed to be black or gay, only the subaltern white or straight.
laxam
10mo ago
Isn't this just the truscum/tucute divide?
Yes, and the tucute side has won through sheer exercise of social power. Now, we must suffer the consequences of the incoherence of their position.
laxam
8mo ago
1844 is the one that has to have hurt the most. So close, after so long, but not able to pull it out, once again.
laxam
8mo ago
To be able to deploy into government extremely-competent people whose market-clearing rate of compensation is far in excess of the pathetic sums we pay the civil service.
This is the way I have heard it described by think-tankers: Democratic shadow governments reside in universities, Republican shadow governments reside in think tanks (which are really just right-wing counter-institutions to the left-wing dominated universities in the first place).
laxam
9mo ago
Some historically conservative states (mostly in the South) are pretty good about Just Building. Montana is probably the best example of a state which has recently reformed its laws to make it easier to Just Build, and they're pretty much a former red-tinged swing state.
So yeah, not wrong.
laxam
9mo ago
American treaty obligations. Tripwire forces. Things that represent an actual threat to Russian attempts to use military force to restart the conflict.
laxam
10mo ago
Austria was not entirely considered a Great Power by the middle of the 19th century (France, 'prostrate' or not, was viewed as the 1000 pound gorilla of the Continent until the unification of Germany) and, as you note, Britain balanced against the Russians when it seemed to be necessary.
However, when the British failed balance sufficiently, they got the two World Wars and an Arms Race or two so, to the extent they didn't balance, they were being actively taught by events why it was important to do so.
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.
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