naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
Also, what are the arguments against LVT, besides low-effort "taxes are always bad and raising them is evil?" Genuinely curious for well thought out reasons why an LVT would be a bad idea.
Edit: For those new to this idea, a Land Value Tax in it's most basic form simply says we should tax away the value of the land, and only let people who sell land profit off of the 'improvements' they make, such as buildings, restorations, etc. For instance if you bought a piece of land and tried to sell it 1 year later off pure speculation, doing nothing to the land, you would not receive any profit.
My concern with LVT is that I regard most kinds of property tax (as well as income tax) as fundamentally immoral, for basically Nozickean reasons, and I do not regard that as "low-effort" in the slightest. I am fine with sales tax, insofar as government facilitates exchange through the medium of regulated money; when you use the government-facilitated exchange, you should also pay for the maintenance of that exchange. I am okay with property tax to the extent that the use and enjoyment of your property depends on government police powers protecting borders and private property rights, but even here I favor strong homestead protections; for property you live on, especially, I regard tax foreclosures as strictly immoral. In the U.S. today, almost all tax dollars fund purely redistributionist aims, and I do not think there are very many plausible justifications for the amount of redistribution we do (though there are probably some cases where it's justified, particularly where negative externalities are imposed on the public by private actions).
I get the impression that some of the basic ideas of Georgism/LVT may be compatible with my view, but presumably someone who paid the value of land, and never improves it, can only sell for the (present) value of the land. Any "profit" they make is down to fluctuations in the market that are beyond their control. One of the most basic rules of business associations law is that whoever bears the risk, reaps the reward. The way you've described LVT here ("tax away the value of the land"), privatizes risk of holding unimproved land, while publicizing rewards. That seems to me just as objectionable as publicizing risk while privatizing rewards.
But I have not made a careful analysis of Georgism (beyond reading what Scott says about it) so I'd be interested in any corrections you might be able to offer my view.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
shouldn't we want land to be controlled by the people who can create the most value on it?
I cannot possibly create the most value on the land I own, so, no. I want land to be controlled by bona fide purchasers for value with clean chain of title.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Yeah, @FCfromSSC understood me correctly. "Too good to check" doesn't necessarily mean that the story is false--it means:
Essentially, either a tale so perfect, or a confirmation of extant prejudices so wonderful, that to actually investigate, to possibly find out that it's not true, would be a shame.
But this has created a bit of a rhetorical shortcut where people will say "oh, that story seriously confirms $OUTGROUP's bias, so they're not even going to check if it's true, therefore it's false."
I feel like it's necessary in such cases for me to acknowledge things like: yes, Biden suffering from dementia would confirm a number of my existing priors. Nevertheless, we have historical precedent of similar things actually happening, so it should not be regarded as only a partisan position at this point to suspect that the President is mentally unwell. There seem, as you and others observe, to be many good reasons to genuinely wonder whether President Biden is a fully-functioning Chief Executive.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
So, uh... I apologize for what is ultimately a somewhat low-effort response, but I can't resist. The answer to your question can be found in this book.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Why should I read this book to know why I should read?
I mean, I don't know that you should, but since you asked the question "why read" I sort of assumed you were interested in an answer. If you have asked the question insincerely (which seems to be the case) then it doesn't especially matter how I answer you. But if you actually want an answer to the question you took the time to ask, then that is why you should read this book, or the one @baj2235 linked below--or indeed, you could perhaps read many different books, and decide for yourself that you've been right all along ("that was indeed a waste of time and effort--I shouldn't read, and I no longer need to ask the question!") or learn something new ("ah--so this is why I should read, I see now").
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
The problem is most legible for the self-employed. For them, income tax is just an additional way of taxing profits after they've already been taxed as transactions. So like--you open up a shop, you charge $100 in labor to fix someone's iPhone. Depending on where you live, you also have to collect 6% or 10% or 12% in sales taxes on that money, to pay to the government. But hey, you've got $100! Well, no, now you also have to pay over 15% in self-employment taxes, and another 5% or 15% or 35% or whatever in income taxes to the government because... why? You already paid tax on the transaction, if it's not enough to support the system of exchange, then raise taxes on the exchange!
It's a little less clear for those who collect salaries or wages, but consider that in the U.S. your paycheck does get taxed directly, as an exchange, before income tax withholding kicks in--Social Security and Medicare amount to a 15.3% tax if you're self-employed, though most people have about half that amount paid by their employer rather than having it come out of their paycheck. That looks much more like a tax on the exchange of services for money than a tax on income per se (though it would be better, I think, if it were a flat fee rather than a percentage).
You might say "well, it's six of one, half dozen of the other" but even if that's numerically true, the math can function as a shell game for government actors. How often have you heard something like, "I don't mind paying taxes because I like to drive on roads!" A large chunk of most state transportation budgets, however, is fuel taxes--which makes sense. If you don't use the roads, you don't pay for (that part of) them. When there's a clear connection between the tax being levied, who it's being levied on, and how it's being spent, that benefits citizens by keeping systems accountable. That kind of transparency can, I think, help prevent cost disease. If your paycheck is getting charged, essentially, sales tax for the transaction between you and your employer, with the explicit purpose of keeping the nation's monetary system functioning, people will think of it very differently than if they're essentially pouring money into a general slush fund for Congress to spend on god-knows-what.
And really, in a system of fiat currency, it's kind of silly to have taxes at all. This is a more complicated argument, but basically the point of taxes used to be that the government needed your money to pay soldiers and pave roads. Under a fiat currency system, the (federal) government doesn't need your money; your money is worthless to a government that can make as much money as it wants. Really taxes aren't even a question of revenue, taxes are just one of many interlocking opaque and unaccountable systems the government and its cronies can use to regulate the economy, or in other words, to control people. For their own good, maybe! But that's the kind of thing I would prefer the government be forced to do explicitly, if it's going to be allowed to do it at all.
So basically, sales taxes are better because they are a step toward government transparency and accountability. It's okay to tax your paycheck as an exchange. But calling it an "income tax" so you can effectively double- or triple-tax certain exchanges (by multiplying the number of "exchanges" ostensibly taking place) is exactly the sort of thing I regard as morally impermissible government behavior.
Not sure where to begin with this really. Governments can't spend in any great capacity without taxation, whether or not you want to call it a 'question of revenue' or not. The government can't borrow without the presence of taxation guaranteeing to debt holders that the government will eventually fulfill its obligations. Nor can it simply 'print money', the consequences of financing expenditure with only creating new money would be absurdly inflationary.
I would recommend you begin by thinking more carefully before making sweeping declarations about what governments "can't" do. The second part of this paragraph demonstrates why you're clearly wrong about the first. Governments can, and do, "simply 'print money'" all the time. And yes--when they do that, it's inflationary! We know it's inflationary because we've watched it happen time and again throughout history. It's weird to say "governments can't do X, because it causes Y" when the suppressed premise is "and we know it causes Y because governments somewhat routinely do X." What you really mean is that governments shouldn't do X, for further reasons to be explained.
A claim I encountered some time ago, that I've been contemplating for a while, is that taxes are now the primary backstop of the dollar's value. You can find other ways to exchange goods and services, you can barter or use other currencies or whatever, but the only way to pay government taxes is with government-approved currency. So at some level you want your transactions to be taxed, because that is both how the currency you have maintains its value, and how you can secure receipts declaring that the government's monopoly on force should not be used to confiscate your property.
The more I think about this, the more I feel like the switch to fiat currency is something we as a civilization have yet to sufficiently digest. Part of me continues to suspect that fiat currency was just a horrible mistake. I'm aware of the reasons why it was done, and the arguments for how it greased the skids for American prosperity. But that's the kind of trick you can only pull once; when you do it, a bunch of stuff comes apart and the sociological distortions created by those trends are hard to predict beyond "probably not great."
But part of me wonders if we just failed to sufficiently commit. A major practical development that ended the Confederated U.S. and gave rise to the Constitutional U.S. was a bunch of unpaid soldiers. Would the question of soldier pay have arisen under a system of fiat currency? I think no--the U.S. cannot run out of dollars. Those dollars might be worthless, but that's a different problem! When the U.S. government "borrows" money, it's actually a bit of a farce; in a fiat system, the U.S. cannot possibly default on any of its dollar-denominated debt unless it chooses to do so (by refusing to print the necessary dollars). "National debt" is just a way of printing tomorrow's fiat dollars, today! And inflation is a tax on people who have money (both now, and later). The question is, if the government collected no taxes, and instead printed money to finance expenditures, would the resulting inflation be a greater tax than extant taxes, or a lesser tax?
That's an empirical question that will presumably depend in great measure on psychological factors (namely, how people perceive inflation versus taxation). It is not an empirical question I think will ever be answered. But this is why I think about the "taxes give your dollars value" argument a lot. If it's right, then one inescapable "cost" of maintaining a functioning system of economic exchange just is confiscating some amount of people's money from time to time--because if you don't, then people will get rid of money as fast as they can, exchanging it for durable goods and other stores of value. And not poor people's money, because they won't think about or understand any of this, but rich people's money, because they are the ones who are most afraid of having their goods confiscated by state-sponsored bandits and extortionists ("revenue services"). To successfully pay the protection racket, they must agree to participate in the sovereign's monetary scheme. But this functionally disincentivizes certain kinds of success, and it makes the task of transforming income into wealth more difficult, essentially protecting the existing rich from competition that might otherwise rise from the lower classes.
This is why the apparent death of small-government conservatism (which was never very healthy to begin with) is so frustrating to me. The appropriate way out of this mess, as I see it, is to keep the government small enough to drown in a bathtub. Imagine a government that collects sales tax alone, and primarily finances expenditures through inflationary money-printing. In such a government, the way to keep inflation low is simple and obvious: keep expenditures down. Every decision to use the government monopoly on force would be accompanied by a tax on everyone with money, in the form of inflation. That's about as direct as accountability gets. And yes--I can imagine that this could be hell on the economy in a variety of ways. But my argument is a moral one. I want to increase liberty, and decrease the use (or threat) of government coercion against citizens doing nothing but living their lives. If stealing was the only road to general prosperity, it would be better for people to make peace with being paupers.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
My girlfriend (a contrarian to the core, to my great satisfaction) likes to say that the social justice advocates of today were probably people who, if you put them in the 1950s, would be nosy church ladies.
I was raised in a religious community and I marvel at how many of today's social justice advocates are literally the same people who were the nosy church ladies in decades past. Not just the same sorts of people--the same specific people. Some of them are still church ladies, too--but those who have stopped being church ladies did not ride out on a wave a new atheism. Instead they rode out on a wave of righteous indignation concerning gay marriage or some other social issue they saw their church as being "out of touch" on. Thinking through my extended family, this category covers about a third of the women, but not one man in ten.
Actually, now that I'm drawing up tallies, I'm realizing with a dull non-surprise that none of the formerly-religious men in my extended family who took up atheism in the last, oh, three decades or so have adopted any "social justice" views as a result, while far more than half of the women (a smaller absolute number) who severed ties with their churches are now extremely vocal leftists. This harmonizes with demographic reports I've seen but I'd never before sat down and really thought about it.
It's hard for me to model such a complete lack of principles without referencing the NPC meme. But the best I can manage is just that these are people who are predisposed, for whatever reason, to enforce social expectations to the best of their ability. One day they woke up and saw that the social expectation that they go to pride parades was stronger than the social expectation that they go to church potlucks, so they stopped making casseroles and started making rainbow flags. Charitably, social cohesion is just the point for them; less charitably (but maybe more accurately from an evopsych perspective), the opportunity to snub others while raising one's own status in the most powerful in-group may also be an attractive position.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Here:
On September 7, 2020, this post was made on /r/themotte and got +20 upvotes:
As the poem goes, sooner or later the Saxon begins to hate. And I have more than just begun.
[...]
The truth is that I fucking hate them. [...] I don't want a compromise anymore. I don't want to go our separate ways in peace. I want to hurt them and I want to win.
[...]
I would rather die and fail and men say 'at least he tried' than to throw my own flesh and blood to the wolves that swim in Cthulhu's wake.
[...]
I doubt we are in for a short victorious war but I think the right will come out well in any civil conflict.
I reported this to the mods, who did nothing. After waiting some time, I reported it to the reddit admins, and the AEO promptly deleted it. To my knowledge, this was the first AEO action against /r/themotte. The mods discussed it via modmail but issued no warnings or ban to the user in question.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I'm reading Cathy O'Neill's Weapons of Math Destruction. It has been on my TBR pile for... too many years, now, which makes some of her case studies particularly interesting, in retrospect. I'm a little over halfway through, however, and so far she seems to not appreciate the difference between these two positions:
-
Automated, opaque data aggregation and processing is, by its nature, damaging to something important (e.g. rights, economies, society, mental health, whatever)
-
Automated, opaque data aggregation and processing should be used only to advance my political goals
It's not a bad book, exactly, but I'm concerned that by the time I finish reading it, I will just feel annoyed that it came so highly recommended. A lot of what she says seems basically right, but she essentially telegraphs the eventual capture of so-called "AI alignment" by progressives ideologues. Her hope does not appear (as, I think, advertised) to understand how the application of algorithms to human existence might be objectionable per se, but to find a way to make sure that algorithms apply to human existence only in ways that progressives like.
But in one sense O'Neill accomplished something interesting, at least: she successfully, if inadvertently, became the trendsetter for today. With art generators in the West being specially trained to not produce nudity or violence, while art generators in China are trained to not produce pictures of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, "AI aligment" "experts" the world over are chattering about how we will avoid building bias into our AI tools by, apparently... building the right bias into our AI tools. In so doing, they are apparently--it so far appears--channeling O'Neill.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
CWR and The Schism aren't the dominant forums because they came after in response to specific complaints. Had it been CWR that opened first after the Culture War got booted off of SSC, it'd be the big dog.
That's an interesting claim. Are you aware that /r/CultureWarRoundup was created five years ago, while /r/TheMotte was only created three years ago? Perhaps more importantly, the earliest thread on /r/CultureWarRoundup is dated to the "Week of November 19, 2018." I am less sure about this, but as far as I can tell the earliest CW thread on /r/TheMotte is dated to the "Week of February 11, 2019."
In other words, the calendar says your explanation fails. What do you suppose explains your mistake?
I agree that the community matters, network effects matter, and not everyone followed Zorba (or baj, or Cheeze) specifically--but the community clearly had the choice between CWR and TheMotte from the inception of the Motte at latest, and the community mostly chose the one with Zorba at the helm. The Schism is... something else, really, but if we treat it as the post to CWR's pre, then the Zorba-maintained Motte is neither the oldest nor the newest iteration of the post-r/SSC culture war community. It's just the biggest.
I'm not "remembering" anything, much less misremembering--I literally just went and checked, because your claim seemed plausible to me, but proved on examination to be wrong. You said:
Had it been CWR that opened first after the Culture War got booted off of SSC, it'd be the big dog.
My first thought was to check the subreddit creation dates. But as you suggest, it occurred to me that a subreddit may be created but not "opened." So I went looking for the original roundup dates, and CWR "opened" and was running CW threads basically immediately when SSC started having conversations about the split. It opened first, several months before TheMotte. When the roundup was "booted," CWR was already open and running, for the express purpose of being the new location. Everyone could have gone there.
Everyone didn't. The vast majority followed Zorba's team.
And it doesn't really matter very much to me who was first, or why people ultimately moved, beyond the claims I've already made and against which you have presented no counterevidence (only speculation). But it does seriously damage your credibility, in my view, to maintain your position here, in the face of strictly factual evidence against your claim. It's okay to be wrong, everyone's wrong sometimes. But not everyone is rational enough to update their beliefs in the light of contradictory evidence.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I appreciated the article, but it is a little funny watching Millennials reinvent the Eternal September.
One thing that the essay suggested to my mind is that maybe I should think more about how the Internet and academia have co-evolved in the last ~50 years. The geekiness of American universities was eroded first by athletics, but later--and much more powerfully--by credential inflation in the job market. The essentially "democratizing" process of expanding college from perhaps 5% of the population to nearly 50% has had similar effects in higher education as democratizing the Internet has had in online spaces, with popularity crowding out capability as the primary measure of success. Increasing competition for "top spots" without proportionally diversifying the availability and character of what gets recognized as a "top spot" has injected all sorts of crab-bucket distortions into both systems. But the Internet's development arc has moved much more quickly; if the analogy holds, then watching how the Internet develops from here may be informative as to the future of academia. Which I do not find encouraging.
Guess I will just have to hope the analogy is bad...
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
How "automatic" are we talking? Most I'm familiar with have automatic lids with proximity sensors, and the lid piece is completely removable from the can itself. While cleaning the lids can be annoying, it's a small wipe-down; the can itself can be removed and hosed off without danger to the electronics in the lid.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Uh, anyone in the UK willing-and-able to comment on this?
From my warped, media-driven perspective across the pond, like... it looks something like this.
-
Boris Johnson is a frighteningly intelligent person who managed to become PM and pull off Brexit, freeing the UK from the placid bureaucratic tyranny of Brussels but also from a variety of economically beneficial arrangements with the continent
-
During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, Boris Johnson ultimately failed to heed Dominic Cummings, turning about-face on a number of lockdown policies which Boris did not, apparently, regard himself as bound by (channeling a lot of U.S. Democrats here)
-
The economy, predictably, suffers; whether this is due to COVID, Brexit, both, or neither, is a question that will help many economics professors secure tenure
-
Maybe there is some philandering by someone important in here somewhere? Recollection vague...
-
A bunch of people resign from positions in Boris' administration
-
Liz Truss becomes PM
-
Six weeks later, someone gets manhandled in the Commons over a vote?
-
Liz Truss resigns as PM
-
Maybe Boris is coming back?
It's just not clear to me, at all, how Boris managed to get himself removed in the first place; it feels like he was removed for little tiny stupid stuff after massively succeeding on all the issues that genuinely mattered to him and his supporters. He apparently should have heeded Cummings on COVID (and perhaps many other things, too) and it looks like Boris reaped the consequences without actually learning his lesson. But Truss is apparently just wildly incompetent, or maybe she's just catching the blame for what is really Boris' economy?
What's really happening, there. Help me out.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
The original plan of the UK government, which is to encourage individual measures such as handwashing and voluntary distancing, is thrown out for the lockdownist policy that originated in China and was copied by countless other nations. Cummings is of the impression that, if we had done this earlier, we could have reduced the number of deaths.
Huh. For some reason I thought Cummings was the architect of the original approach, and that the draconian lockdowns marked the beginning of the end for Cummings. But maybe that was based on my impression of his comments to media when he broke lockdown to be near relatives when his wife got sick.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Almost anyone who closed on a house in the United States in the last month paid more for that house than it is worth today. Where I live, homes saw about a 65% increase in value over the last 2 years. In the last few months, they've decreased by between 5% and 10%. Will they lose another 10% in the next 6 months? That doesn't seem like a completely crazy prediction to me, I've lived through enough housing cycles to know how wildly prices can swing. But anyone who owned their home before COVID-19 will still be "up" well over 30%, and most will have mortgages in the 3%-4% range. By contrast, in 2008 it was common for people to be carrying mortgages at over 8%, and second mortgages covering their "down payment" (to evade the cost of PMI) at well over 10%. Barring an extreme and sudden spike in unemployment, people are just not going to be losing houses the way they did in 2008.
(In my own area, inventory is a tiny fraction of what it was five years ago. As prices cool ever-so-slightly, supply might finally be starting to catch up to demand... but it's not going to close that gap overnight.)
Recession, yeah, I think there's a pretty broad consensus on that happening. I think we get some hard numbers a week from today? But the practical implications are unclear to me. I think the whole world is still, essentially, finding its footing post-COVID. In the U.S. we responded by debasing our fiat currency to an unprecedented extreme, so we can't expect a quick return to equilibrium.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I have no idea what you're seeing. There is a weekly thread for this week pinned at the top of that sub right now, and it has 87 comments.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
everyone with eyes
Please refrain from consensus-building language. If you see a shit-show, tell us what you see! But don't insist that only the blind could disagree.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
dindu rap
constantly spreading society-eroding degeneracy stuff
Though you're right about Jews ruining society, especially the gay ones! (Or should I want them not to breed?)
This is a place for discussing culture wars, not waging them. Yes--I'm aware how rarely it ends up working that way! Nevertheless--it is our aspiration. This is just way too much "boo outgroup" in one post. Your substantive point can be made without a parade of weak man examples. Don't do this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
For my own clarification, is it "consensus-building" idioms and expressions that are outlawed, or actual consensus building?
What do you think the difference is, in a text-only medium? If you say words to the effect of "everyone knows" or "everyone agrees," you're almost certainly literally wrong. But if we let everyone get away with saying things that are literally wrong on grounds that "we know what they meant," this creates a bailey in which people can make very strong claims ("everyone with eyes agrees with me") but, when challenged, can retreat to innocuous claims ("it's just an idiom, besides, even if everyone disagrees about the specifics, they at least agree on the general point, I wasn't saying anything controversial!").
This place is called the Motte because we don't want you playing in the bailey.
So either you understand what I'm saying, and you realize that you've been caught with your hand in the cookie jar, and you're going to do better--or, you're still confused, in which case I would tell you, personally, to avoid "consensus-building" idioms, because you do not use them sufficiently artfully to prevent people from thinking you are actually consensus-building.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
The misbehavior of others does not excuse your own. We don't always catch every rule violation, or always take the time to address them, because, well, there are actually too many for us to manage that. So you should never take a lack of moderation as a sign of anything at all.
Your nested parenthetical remarks is nonsense wrapped in nonsense. This is simple: if you do not wish to be admonished as a grade schooler, then do not argue like one.
That is, I am the outgroup in this case.
Everyone is someone's outgroup, though. The goal is light over heat. Your approach was too much heat, not enough light. Do better. Or don't, and we'll ban you. And if that means the community dies, like--I've already noted elsewhere that the mods of this space do not hold its perpetuation as a terminal goal. So, you know. Don't threaten me with a good time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
It's very hard to believe this question has been asked sincerely, but you're also getting a lot of questionable answers. White southerners were very often racists, in the classical sense of believing in their inherent racial superiority. But you're right that simple racism is probably not sufficient to support Jim Crow laws all on its own.
If you know anything about the history of the Civil War, though, you know that after the Civil War, the South was Occupied Territory. All the newly-freed slaves formed an enormous voting bloc, and they all voted Republican. This was a huge opportunity for carpet baggers from the North to break into federal politics, which were substantially dominated by a New England elite. If the Southern states were to have anything approaching self rule ever again, it was extremely important to disenfranchise the Republican-captured black electorate. And so: Jim Crow.
Once you've got the practical foundation of "we need to disenfranchise black Republicans" in place, then the rest of the stuff--anti-miscegenation, segregation, etc.--follows pretty naturally from the prevailing (racist!) worldview of the politically powerful whites in the "Reconstructed" South. But the New Deal starts bringing black voters over to the Democratic Party, and segregation becomes a regional issue rather than a party issue for much of the 20th century. After that, it was just a matter of institutional inertia.
Of course, people in the past didn't know many of the things we know now, but that doesn't mean they were stupid. The idea of a racially diverse nation had never really been tried; nationality and race were (and in most places still are) indistinguishable concepts. Native Americans are to this day allowed to (encouraged to!) live in racially segregated communities, and presumably some well-meaning individuals saw parallels there as well. So I don't mean to suggest that there were no plausible arguments (beyond racism) for Jim Crow laws. I just think that, in purely political terms, the desire of Southerners to cast off, if not the yoke of the Union, at least the yoke of the Republicans, is quite sufficient to explain their desire to disenfranchise black voters by whatever means necessary.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
is this a little too strong?
Well, maybe! "What's a race" obviously matters a lot in deciding the question. Rome was pretty diverse overall but also mostly, and most of the time, segregated by dint of geography and language--Roman citizens had freedom of movement, vassals less so. Irish migration to Britain versus British migration to Ireland is something I don't have any priors concerning, and I know even less of Russia.
The apparent willingness of the Spanish and (to a lesser extent) Portugese to "go native" is also interesting, but Mexico becomes a country in the same approximate era as the Civil War itself, and I would tend to characterize the Mexican people as more a mixed people than a diverse people. This may be the idea that was working in the background of my thought process, there. Humans have been migrating, and mixing, forever. But "mix" or "exterminate" seem to have been the default historical options, followed eventually by "colonize," which ends up being a confusing combination of the two. "Mixing" with blacks was often explicitly not the goal of even the white, progressive abolitionists who spearheaded the North's anti-slavery efforts.
In a way, this plants the seeds for contemporary ideas about race--is the ultimate outcome for the United States to be a slightly-whiter-and-blacker version of the aboriginal/European mixed heritage that dominates South and Central America? Or is it to become a collection of pseudo- or actual-ethnostates, from the Navajo and Apache and Cherokee reservations, to Black and Christian nationalist microstates, and so forth?
Well, that's pretty far afield, but the point is that maybe it is a little too strong... but still I think something new was being tried, there, even if I have failed to characterize it perfectly, and that whatever it was, it continues to have unique consequences today.
The degree to which "Biden is not in control" satisfies the ingroup narrative criteria for "too good to check" is extreme.
However, consider the current White House webpage on Edith Wilson:
This is probably the best (and, today, most celebrated!) example of a president who was not the president. (I suspect, if the script were flipped in a possible world where we had a woman president today, a First Gentleman who stepped in to "functionally [run] the Executive branch" would not be regarded as a hero.) As other posters have noted, "the president is being controlled by others" is a common accusation from any given president's outgroup, but we do have historical examples of it happening, so it's insufficient to write such accusations off without examination.
I don't get the impression that Jill Biden is intellectually up to the task of handling the Executive, but she does seem to have her hands mostly full with handling Joe. Though his gaffe-prone career makes it a little difficult to say with total confidence, he really does seem to be in the early stages of a dementia-style decline. And I would bet that someday, when it no longer carries a political cost to do so, someone will write a book, or even a White House webpage, about the "heroes" who ran the government while Joe Biden was in decline.
(But maybe not--there is some indication, albeit disputed, that Ronald Reagan's final years were somewhat comparable to the current state of the Presidency, but I'm not aware of anything praising Nancy Reagan or George Bush for keeping things running smoothly. I also think that the media's prior enjoyment of accusing Trump of being mentally ill, while today carrying water for Biden, does represent clear bias, but that particular bias likely surprises no one.)
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