porkpiehat
4d ago
Ah yes, the famous fiscal conservative Ronald Reagan.
porkpiehat
4d ago
While singing the praises of the lifeboat.
So draft a suitable amendment. Provide a text. Argue convincingly that this draft text, if adopted, will actually constrain Democrats when they're in power as well as Republicans (this will be a hard task).
Yes. This would be good. This should also be done for fixing the Supreme Court at 9 justices (with 18 year terms for new justices if necessary). There's a lot the Democrat Party could do here to restore trust.
porkpiehat
4d ago
An interesting thought experiment. What if, after 1932, the Republican party was socially conservative but fiscally liberal. It might be that we are at the same position as our current timeline vis-a-vis the debt, but with much lower crime, multiculturalism, and degeneracy.
Assuming that spending is constrained by external factors, it doesn't make sense for one party to restrain spending so their enemies can spend twice as much.
Reminds me of the "good" kings throughout history who handed a giant treasury surplus to their successors only to have their successors blow it on extravagance and foreign wars. Today we remember Henry VIII, the spender and warmonger, not Henry VII, the prudent saver.
porkpiehat
4d ago
One thing that needs to be asked is "how many rowers, how many drinkers".
Most people are fine with rowing if it's 90% rowers, 10% drinkers. But then we rescued a lifeboat full of drinkers, and now it's 50% drinkers on the boat. And the old rowers harangue the young rowers "I'm retired now, you need to row twice as hard to pay for me and all the drinkers I rescued. It's the noble thing to do."
Asking young white men to continue to bear the burden of society and make themselves subservient to other groups is no longer tenable.
porkpiehat
4d ago
Frame it and put it on the wall.
The post-Elon Twitter is interesting in that it serves as a sort of distributed intellectual movement that percolates the best ideas up towards people who can actually act on them.
porkpiehat
4d ago
The student loan bribe was worse in that it was targeted to Biden's political supporters, rewarded bad decisions, and made paying off student debt a stupid decision. Better to just wait until the next Democrat gets elected. Which is exactly the point.
Trump's plan just gives money to everyone. Bad, but not to the same extent.
porkpiehat
4d ago
Yeah, this is what made me stop being a libertarian in the normal vein.
Libertarianism only works when enough people in the population are committed to being libertarian. In practice, being libertarian just means losing to people who are more willing to hold the reigns of power. On a national level, libertarians are principled losers.
To their credit, the Free State Project has actually addressed some of these concerns. They actively work to bring libertarians to New Hampshire while making the state unattractive for leftists. And its starting to have some effects.
I often see this style of post by progressives. The same progressive who, if they were in charge, would give trillions to their preferred groups, bankrupting the government in the process. (See: Joe Biden)
"I thought you were conservative, they say. Don’t you want to cut social security? I thought you had principles. Any real man would commit electoral suicide."
But no, handing Democrats permanent electoral victory is not conservative.
Since the 1960s, the people who receive gibs from the government have been a stable base for the Democratic Party. And now we’ve reached the point where net tax paying households are outweighed by net recipients. Mass gibs have been a part of politics since the 1960s. It's just that until now, only one party benefitted.
Which brings us back to this: My rules > your rules applied fairly > your rules applied unfairly.
Obviously this proposal is a bad idea. But if democrats win a trifecta in 2028 more money than this will be spent. It will just go to people who hate America and white people. Better to have gibs for all then gibs for everyone except me.
porkpiehat
5d ago
Lol. But doesn’t he also have just about the ugliest face you’ve ever seen?
porkpiehat
5d ago
It's definitely pseudoscience. Can you imagine someone rigorously trying to study this in the academy. When that happens, I'll freely admit that woke is dead.
But what do you mean by "selection bias"?
porkpiehat
5d ago
As of 2024 census numbers (American Community Survey 1 year estimates) there are 259,694 people in the US who identified as Somalians, already a 60% jump from your outdated number. This is 0.076%, not 0.0005%.
So even though only roughly one in 1300 people in the United States is Somalia, they've already done a lot of damage in Minnesota. Extremely toxic groups are like that.
Bush got a majority of Muslim votes the first time. Family values and all.
Too good to check, and likely untrue, but let's assume it is. The problem is that, bizarrely, after September 11 we opened up the floodgates to Islamic immigration. The Muslim population has roughly tripled since then. And they are consistently one of the furthest left groups.
At only 2% of the U.S. population, they're still too small to care about right? Except that the call to prayer is being blasted from mosques in Dearborn and the Democratic Party is now nominating Senate candidates who think the U.S. deserved 9/11.
The time to stop these problems is when they're still "too small to care about" and before they transition to "too big to stop".
Side note: Wikipedia quality has really plummeted over the last decade. I recommend just skipping it and going right to AI which can pull data directly from the original sources.
porkpiehat
5d ago
We don't really. I feel that it's true but obviously no one is studying this rigorously.
Appearances definitely matter but it's hard to say how much is clothing and broad gender/racial characteristics. Nevertheless, if I see a guy with a face like this, I'm giving him some space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Valuev#/media/File:Valuev-nach-Haye-Fight-2009.jpg
porkpiehat
5d ago
This is the Boomer school of conservative thought, most famously represented by George W. Bush.
Somalians - they're just like us! Good family people, really. Once planted on the magic soil of America they will soon be starting businesses, waving flags, and maybe, gosh darned it, even voting Republican.
And it's just entirely discredited. There is little assimilation. Somalians are a massive drain on the economy, on schools, on the justice system, on the benefits system, on social trust, the list goes on. And its not just in the US. This has been observed in countries like Denmark too, where Somalians remain net negative to the state economy throughout their entire lives, even men, even during the peak earnings years of 40-50 when almost everyone else is hugely positive.
Any policy that encourages the creation of more Somalians in the US is a terrible policy. And why they are a small minority now, its unequally distributed. The places where they concentrate are rapidly enshittifying. The phase change between "they're a tiny minority, to small to care about" to "you need Somalian votes to win an election" happens rapidly. Look at Minneapolis.
So, yeah, I am personally in favor of gibs to Republicans. If we can't take away the blue gibs, then all sides must have gibs!
porkpiehat
5d ago
One idea I've seen mooted is that people with children get a $50k tax deduction or something. Completely useless to fraudsters. Extremely useful to the high performing people who we want to be having children.
porkpiehat
5d ago
age old starve the beast proposals.
Yeah, this makes sense. The government is going broke because we spend all our money on old people and degenerate lumpenproles. This situation is politically unfixable. You can't take away people's benefits. But you can promise benefits to a new group of people. So why not give it to the best, most deserving group? The government is going broke anyway, let's at least split the corpse fairly.
Of course, this proposal is unlikely to pass. But if you force Democrats to vote against it, it reveals their true colors as haters of traditional families.
porkpiehat
5d ago
Your con man argument actually argues for physiognomy, just an imperfect one.
I have a kind and approachable face, so people often approach me for directions or other things. And they’re right to. I am kind and approachable.
But let’s say that 1% of people with my physiognomy have criminal tendencies. Would it not be easy to prey on people? Certainly much easier for me than for the guy who looks like an extra in a mob movie.
porkpiehat
5d ago
I’m not sure which legal authority was used, but the Sanchez government put 500,000 illegals on the path to becoming permanent residents. At least, that was the intention. In the end, estimates are that it will be 1-3 million. There are photos of long lines of angry looking men waiting to be processed. It was this amnesty which sparked the invasion of Ceuta recently.
Agree all around.
My only other complaint here is if Trump and JD Vance are primarily concerned with boosting the overall birth rate alongside helping working families, targeting male income and raising it should be paramount.
IIRC, there's some whitepill data out there suggests married, college-educated whites in the U.S. actually have pretty decent fertility.
Which means the big problem is relationship formation. And its fairly dire. A high income man is much more likely to marry than a low earning one. This relationship does not hold for women. Women want to pair with men who earn more than them, but there aren't enough to go around.
If we want a higher birth rate, we need higher status for men. Which means we need fewer tax transfers targets at women and more targeted at men. Fortunately, we don't even need DEI for dudes. Simple fairness would make a huge difference.
porkpiehat
6d ago
How much do you believe in physiognomy?
Sure, its obviously a pseudoscience. But it's also obviously real in some aspect.
I mention that because everyone in the Lindsay Clancy trial looks exactly like you think they would. The witch who murdered her children. The wronged husband. The elderly women who wanted to let her free. The lone juror who stood by his code. The kindly old defense attorney with a bleeding heart.
It feels like you can read a book by its cover, at least more than random chance would suggest.
porkpiehat
6d ago
In defense of @TheAntipopulist, laws can be a weight on one side of the scale.
It’s kind of like when you sign a waiver to not sue when you bungee jump. You’re not really waiving away your right to sue. But when you do sue, the waiver might slightly influence the jury/judge.
This attitude is only useful when it is clear eyed. Punting on executive action because you need a new law is naive. But laws are still better than nothing.
porkpiehat
6d ago
Also way out of my depth, but might there not be multiple, or even infinitely many, correct solutions?
porkpiehat
6d ago
We thought art would be the first to go, but that’s clearly wrong. AI is bad at producing useable images. I know this won’t always be the case, but by the time an ad exec can produces ads without an art team, other professions will be long gone as well.
porkpiehat
6d ago
Yes. The writer must have a voice and they must have taste. But good enough research is much easier nowadays. (I’ll define good enough as better than 90% of mainstream news articles)
The debt and deficit exploded under Reagan. In the words of the immortal Dick Cheney: "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter".
His biggest legacy is a giant increase in military spending to force the Soviets to respond, thereby collapsing their empire. And good on him for it. No doubt he'd also be in favor of the current Iran conflict, which we are doing on a shoestring budget in comparison.
But of course it's very easy to be in favor of dead conservatives who you assign any beliefs you like to. No doubt there were "conservatives" in the 1980s who claimed to have voted for Eisenhower, but now encouraged people to vote for Mondale because Reagan was "too radical".
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