laxam
2yr ago
Carlson will be remembered as one of the most significant voices of the conservative revival of the mid-2010s and the presidency of Donald Trump.
Revival? Conservative politics was at its peak in the mid-2010's after the Tea Party wave and it has been all downhill since then.
laxam
8mo ago
It also elected Reagan, twice, took Congress back for the first time in 40 years and gave us probably the most conservative policy decade since the 1920s, elected both Bushes four times in total, and won the House nine times (I'll let you guys have 2016, although I think that really was still momentum from the Conservative Movement), the Senate ten times, and brought Republican control of state legislatures and governor's mansions to a numeric height unequaled in a century.
It's not so clear that failing to beat Obama meant it was 'non-viable', although I know that's the self serving story MAGA likes to tell itself.
laxam
8mo ago
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.
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
1yr ago
Nope. There's too many middle-class black people where I live, way too far from the actual ghetto, for this to be a realistic concern. This isn't the 60s. Nice neighborhoods don't turn to shit overnight when blacks flood in from the ghetto. We've built an elaborate social system that pretty well precludes that particular mistake from being repeated, barring overwhelming and abrupt government action. The blacks moving in can afford the housing prices, which means they've more or less got their shit together.
FC, you're Southern, aren't you?
I've found that a lot of people have trouble conceiving of the Suburban South as anything but Bull Connor's Alabama. The idea that the modern South has a lot more black people than other parts of the country and therefore -- blacks less likely or not -- has a lot more middle class black people is just outside of most people's experience.
laxam
1yr ago
Was that before or after they were told how to think about it by the authorities and who the object of their ire should be, at times on completely false pretenses?
I don't know if you're old enough to remember that day, but...before. Absolutely 100% before.
Just because you have a nice, coherent model of how society works that fits neatly in your head, that doesn't mean your model is correct.
laxam
2yr ago
Something tells me that 1/4 Mexican, 1/4 German, 1/2 English Americans are going to have the same white guilt complex as ones that aren’t 1/4 Mexican
It ultimately doesn't make a dramatic difference, but, in most parts of the country, whites are much less than half English.
Outside of Utah, parts of the South, and Upper New England, I would be surprised if most whites in any given area were 1/3 English.
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
1yr ago
He's not a journalist, never went to journalism school, never (except for the 4 hours when it looked like he'd write columns for NYT) worked for a newspaper
I hate living in a world where these two things are qualifiers for being a 'journalist'. Journalism is something you do and journalists are the people who do it, no more, no less.
laxam
1yr ago
"Inventing new legal theories" is an inherent part of the common law system.
All of the laws Trump is being prosecuted under are codified statute, ie. not common law in the strictest sense.
laxam
1yr ago
This wisdom is why the South is currently the most patriotic part of the country instead of a hotbed of political terrorism and separatist ideology.
laxam
1yr 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).
laxam
2yr ago
I majored in American Sign Language to become an interpreter, and our curriculum drew heavily from Deaf Studies. Courses on cultural awareness emphasized the privileging of standard English as a major component of audism (oppression of Deaf people).
It can be astonishing just how deeply critical theory has penetrated into every nook and cranny of the educational establishment and academia.
It's astonishing the level of dishonesty that goes into writing a paragraph like this.
It's not Zelensky doing this. If Zelensky negotiated a surrender to Russia right now, the Ukrainian people would toss his ass to the curb and probably kill him for it.
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