laxam
10mo ago
I'm waiting for a non-self-referential definition of gender that doesn't just mean 'sex'.
So far, nobody has answered me.
laxam
10mo ago
The difference is that Obama is actually good at this. Harris is a prop and she has been her entire career.
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
So fleeing El Salvador because random gangs try to murder people every day because they're not wearing the right tattoos is outside of the definition of asylum.
This was changed by the Biden administration several years ago.
laxam
1yr ago
Sure. Here I was not talking about the Cotton Plantations in the new southwest, but slavery in Virginia, Kentucky, and the Carolinas that mainly was concerned with providing new slaves for plantations in the west. Without the expansion of those plantations, slavery would be no longer be profitable for these states. And these were the states that most powerful and influential in congress: without Virginia and the Carolinas the Confederacy would have been short-lived indeed.
This is difficult to square with the fact that the most enthusiastic proponents of slavery were from the Deep South. The necessary/intractable evil view survived the longest in the Upper South and the only Southern Slave State to get even mildly close to abolishing on its own was Virginia. Publicola actually misses this, too: The reason Southern emancipationists wanted to 'spread out' slavery wasn't to dilute the possibility of post-emancipation genocide, but to draw as many slaveowners out of Virginia as possible so the emancipationists could have any shot at all at winning elections.
laxam
1yr ago
All the “right side of history” framing boils down to is a prediction that future popular consensus will judge Political Group X favourably. I think this argument would be profoundly weak and fallacious coming from any political faction: how arrogant of anyone to think they can accurately predict what the people two generations from now will believe, when they can’t even reliably predict where they’re going to go for lunch tomorrow.
It's not an absolutely terrible argument when used to warn others to really attend to the possible risks they're taking. Patrick Henry had an absolutely powerful speech at the Virginia Ratifying Convention against the ratification of the Constitution:
In his final speech at the ratifying convention, Henry extended the stakes beyond America to the world; indeed, the heavens: He [Madison] tells you of important blessings which he imagines will result to us and mankind in general, from the adoption of this system—I see the awful immensity of the dangers with which it is pregnant.—I see it—I feel it.—I see beings of a higher order, anxious concerning our decision. When I see beyond the horizon that binds human eyes, and look at the final consummation of all human things, and see those intelligent beings which inhabit the ethereal mansions, reviewing the political decisions and revolutions which in the progress of time will happen in America, and the consequent happiness or misery of mankind—I am led to believe that much of the account on one side or the other will depend on what we now decide.
At about this point, the stenographer noted, "a violent storm arose, which put the house in such disorder, that Mr. Henry was obliged to conclude." Archibald Stuart, a delegate to the ratifying convention, described Henry as "rising on the wings of the tempest, to seize upon the artillery of heaven, and direct its fiercest thunders against the heads of his adversaries."
Of course, maybe you are right, because:
The artillery of heaven was not enough. The next day, June 25, the convention voted 89-79 to ratify the Constitution.
There's always been an authoritarian streak to leftism going back to Marx
And, you know, that other guy.
I think listening to a bunch of Marxists about Kant is an exercise in futility. Everything is ego defense of Granddaddy Hegel, all the way down.
EDIT:
But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely
This is Marxism in a nutshell. The ideological superstructure is determined by the material substrate, not the other way around. If you find this disturbing....well, now you know why they find it so important to try to blame Kant for Naziism (you know, that famously individualist creed).
laxam
1yr 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
1yr ago
I wonder if the online right intellecto-sphere will ever figure out that Trump wasn't for them.
laxam
2yr ago
I have a memory of a news article from somewhere in the area of five to ten years ago about a Swedish couple raising their children with no reference to gender or preference for gender appropriate toys/clothes/etc. I remember everyone laughing about how ridiculous the Swedes are on this kind of thing, with the implicit understanding that no one would be that insane here.
laxam
2yr ago
They're giving UA everything good it can possibly use.
Yeah, and all the really good stuff is dependent on a level of infrastructural support and training the Ukrainians can't replicate. Instead, they get the stuff that can be deployed independently, which is usually old or relatively less effective.
Also, if Wagner were near-peer, they'd be wiping the floor with the Ukrainians.
laxam
8mo ago
It wasn't just 'specific features of the US advertising market in the 2nd half of the 20th century', there was a period of ideological homogenization that preceded and was bound up in a discussion about professional ethics which drew on reformism and progressivism in the first half of the 20th century. There's a reason the Press' efforts to portray itself as neutral in the '2nd half of the 20th century' worked: they made a genuine effort to follow the ethical standards set up in prior generations and that convinced a lot of people to buy what they were selling.
This is important because you're not just going up against the leftovers of a series of material causes, you're dealing with an ideology that has deeper roots in people's sense of social right and wrong. It's not just that people look back fondly on the period and want it back, it's that they agree with what was (at least partially) achieved in that period and want it back.
laxam
9mo ago
those who want to do it again
Fascinatingly, there is still a Prohibition Party in the United States. They've apparently run a Presidential candidate in every election since 1872.
laxam
10mo ago
the will of a democratically elected government
Kind of funny coming from a government elected by 33% of the populace.
laxam
10mo ago
There was general deflation at the time. The program was nonsensical, as was usual for a lot of New Deal programs.
laxam
1yr ago
Trump would have been safely defeated and probably too old and beleaguered to run again
And imprisoned. I think, if Trump loses, there's a very high chance he's found guilty in the Smith case and he goes to prison. That hanging over his head is probably a big reason he's so willing to listen to campaign advisors on so many things.
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
I can't find the paper right now, but I recall having read one showing that patients tend to conceal that fact from their doctors and form communities where they help each other find willing surgeons and publicize techniques for duping less willing ones into going along with it.
Isn't that the story of the online trans community in the late 2000's/early 2010's?
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
2yr ago
Then the infrastructure-as-code tools started to emerge. Within about 5 years, an old school SysAdmin was pretty much out of any job that wasn't working on legacy systems in a non-tech-primary organization (think banks, other big-and-heavy old industrials etc.)
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-systems-administrator-salary-SRCH_IL.0,2_IN1_KO3,24.htm
?
SysAdmins still do fine. I'd say a good chunk less than half of all businesses have any modern automation at all in their infrastructure and a tiny fraction have serious, heavy-duty IaC deployments. You're not going to be making dreamy six figure salaries with guaranteed growth throughout your life-long career, but that was something no SysAdmin ever really got outside of the majors. $60-65,000 a year is a really good salary in most of the country.
laxam
2yr ago
They weren’t even allowed to continue to practice their religion privately; the state knew that in order to secure long-term the power and legitimacy of its new ideology, it had to stamp out any displays of the old worldview, no matter how comparatively feeble.
You're attributing a huge amount of capacity to early Medieval states that didn't really exist. It's generally accepted that pagan practices with a Christian gloss persisted for a long, long time after formal conversion. I've seen some historians claim that the countryside in most of Europe wasn't really converted in anything but name until AFTER the Middle Ages, more or less just in time for the Protestant Reformation.
Medieval Catholic Christianity was able to maintain such religious unity over a large area by essentially being hands off once the temples were torn down and the churches put up. Just morph your old cults into veneration of some newly discovered local Saint and you're good to carry on more or less unchanged (for example: It's entirely possible that the Irish Saint Brigid is more or less literally a religio-translation of the pre-Christian Irish goddess Brigid). All the same practices and festivals can be held in all the same places, just with a different name in the middle.
laxam
2yr ago
The major thing he misses, or perhaps only elides to, is that the individualist framework that libertarianism was built on has been utterly obliterated by technological, political, and demographic shifts.
Has it?
For a decade now the Conservative party has thought the way to victory is by tacking ever closer to the middle (actually center left) in order to get the all important 36-37% of the national vote.
It sometimes surprises me how infrequently Canadian elections produce a popular vote majority government and just how small popular vote minorities can be and still win enough seats to form feasible minority or even outright majority governments.
People complain a lot about how undemocratic outcomes in the US are related to the Senate and the Electoral College but it's shockingly common across the democratic world to have governing majorities in parliaments elected by popular vote minorities -- even very small ones! Relatively few countries seem to consistently product popular vote majority coalitions, like Germany, although some countries like Israel or the Netherlands have a habit of building coalitions that are just under 50% of the popular vote.
laxam
8mo ago
He's easily coherent (sometimes moreso than Kamala), he just seems to have no concept of the difference between what's in his head and what might be in other people's heads. He often talks as if everyone is just as online and embedded in the right wing echo chamber as he is, referring to people and events off hand and just kind of assuming everyone understands what he's talking about. This works fine at rallies but it really doesn't with general audiences.
Sometimes, nominative determinism just becomes unbelievably on the nose.
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