quiet_NaN
1mo ago
putting American lives in danger by publishing
You are making that sound like a bad thing. If it is truthful reporting (and your verb "to publish" seems to indicate that you were not contesting that), then it is a good thing, not a bad thing.
I will grant you that there are some things which are net negative when published. For example, knowing what the nuclear launch codes are will not contribute to the readers having a more accurate map of the territory. Likewise, knowing which fetishes some celebrity is into will normally not update the world view of the readers to be worth the damage to the privacy.
Your sentence is really analogous to "When the teacher reported the dad who was fucking his kid to the police, she destroyed a happy family."
Our greatest ally
You sardonic phrasing makes it look like Israel and its inhabitants are pursuing a singular purpose. Please consider the possibility that not every Jew everywhere is following the master plan of the Elders of Zion all day long. If Bibi had published a press release where he praised the Americans for their support, that would indeed be a faux pas. But the utility function of reporters is different from the utility function of governments, both in Israel and elsewhere, for very good reasons.
quiet_NaN
1yr ago
It is bad taste for any group whose primary purpose is not a dating pool to systematically rate the hotness of that pool, no matter the gender.
These lists tend to become common knowledge, and some people will end up on the bottom part of the list or being rated an average of 1.3 out of ten (but people -- especially people going through puberty -- might also be uncomfortable being rated really high). If the victim had actually asked to be rated, this would be different, but in all likelihood, they do not prefer an supposedly objective (it's a number! numbers don't lie!) rating of their hotness to become common knowledge.
The outcome of these lists is not so different from writing "X is an ugly pig" on the blackboard. As that is bullying, I would classify creating such lists as at least likely to lead to bullying.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Six members of the Milwaukee ICE ERO Task Force planned to take part in the arrest of Flores-Ruiz on April 18, 2025. This included ICE ERO Deportation Officer A, Customs and Border Protection Officer A, FBI Special Agents A and B, and Drug Enforcement Administration (“DEA”) Special Agents A and B. The agents were generally dressed in plain clothes and intended to effectuate the arrest in as low-key and safe of a manner as possible.
No ATF? No FEMA? Not even the Coast Guard or the Marshall service? How could a mere six agents from only four federal agencies possibly hope to prevail against an unarmed immigrant?
And no, I checked, the badge of the "ERO Task Force" features a DHS seal with an eagle, not a scantly clad manga girl. Missed opportunity there. Sad!
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
They will be correct for the duration of Trump's term.
If the Democrats then take back the Presidency (and Trump's economic policy makes that likely), they might decide to keep the policy of deporting citizens to foreign prisons.
Sadly, I don't think they will have the balls to go for Trump himself, but all the J6 convicts which he pardoned would be prime candidates.
The thing about civility is that it might seem superfluous while you are in power, but you might not stay in power forever. And once a civilizational seal is broken, it is hard to reforge it. (Sure, it worked out well for the Nazis, who were given criminal trials by the Allies (and later very lenient West German judges), instead of the Allies simply rounding up everyone with a SS tattoo and gassing them (and their families, if you insist on evilness near-parity), but in general it does not.)
So I would very much prefer nobody getting deported to overcrowded foreign prisons (and especially not without a criminal trial!), as this seems to be the easiest boundary to defend.
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
Most of the stuff you mention is entirely orthogonal to ignoring the court system. Police getting deployed is a political decision, and the safeguard against politicians failing to stop violent protests is to vote them out of office. Law fare -- while problematic -- is explicitly using the court system.
If you have a story about someone who was imprisoned for a gun regulations charge, and the courts ordered their release and then the democrats said "haha" and kept them imprisoned indefinitely, please share it.
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
One necessary prerequisite for this that America must signal its willingness to commit. If Ukraine believes that Russia believes that American is fickle they won't come to the table in the first place, if Russia believes it America will flake out they will violate the agreement when convenient.
Well, we are talking about Trump here. From where I can stand, Trumps MO is to take the policies of previous presidents and reject them on general principles. Obama made a deal with Iran, therefore Trump will break the deal. NK was kept isolated, thus Trump will of course meet with Kim. The Biden administration has supported Ukraine against Russia, so Trump will naturally support Russia against Ukraine. Previous presidents have expertly wielded soft power to make the US the uncontested No 1 superpower in the world, so of course the first thing Trump does is to talk about annexing Greenland and Canada.
If the US commits to stationing troops in the non-occupied parts of Ukraine as part of a peace deal, then I would fully expect these troops to miraculously being ordered back to the US about a week before Putin takes the next bite out of Ukraine. From what we have seen so far, the US under Trump is only slightly more neutral than Belarus is.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
I think that the US political system is bad (FPTP, EC, special interests and all that), but not anything near maximally bad. For generations, politicians have bent the rules to benefit their side, gerrymandering, running smear campaigns, voter suppression and all that, but while the political institutions were full of infighting, they were generally playing by certain rules. Respecting the constitution, the vote of the people (no matter how much you worked to mislead them before they cast their vote) and peaceful transition of power were all part of that.
As seen in J6, Trump is not playing by the same rules. I am not sure if he even has a concept of objective truth, but he certainly decided that as he did not like an outcome in which he lost, it was false and hence the product of fraud. He then also made that terrible bid to overturn the certification of the election using his mob, which was breaking very much with mos maiorum. Luckily, his hare-brained scheme did not work.
While the institutions certainly engaged in lawfare against him, they were also not willing to break their core principles to get rid of him. The deep state certainly did not murder him, nor did 'they' commit election fraud to defeat him. When he was elected, the Biden administration let power transition peacefully -- either because his handlers could not even think of a different way to behave or because they knew very well that the same institutions which will stop Trump from permanently grabbing power would also have stopped Biden.
quiet_NaN
9mo ago
my belief that the absolutist anti-death penalty stance is evil.
I disagree with you there. Modern society has the means to imprison people for decades.
I see the punishment of the worst criminals not in terms of revenge, but merely as society deciding 'you have hurt people badly enough that we will reduce the amount of freedom to enjoy to a degree where you will not be able to hurt anyone again'.
I do not believe that a state should punish murderers by killing them. Or torturers by torturing them. Or rapists by raping them. Or cannibals by eating them. There is all kind of scumbag behavior which decent society should not reciprocate.
Of course, I am also not going to glorify the median inhabitant of death row as some kind of martyr. Murderous fuck got himself caught and killed in some weird rite by the barbarians inhabiting the new world. Not gonna shed many tears for him.
--
I think that having the death penalty seems like a weird hill to die on for anti-crime people. It is not universally accepted in the US, only 12-13 states still execute people. It provides a rallying point for the people opposed to it, from BLM to pacifists.
I get abortion as a CW topic. It matters. I would estimate lifetime abortions per capita to be somewhere between 0.1 and 2. Depending on your stance, that is a lot of innocent fetuses brutally murdered or a lot of women forced to give birth.
The death penalty might have been more cost effective than lifelong imprisonment in 1800 or 1900, but these days it is not (thanks to the efforts of the anti crowd). Clinging on to it for reasons of tradition only seems weird, like running a coal powered train line through some suburb.
quiet_NaN
1yr ago
The gist of it is that Zack claims that identifying the word "male" with having the Y chromosome is carving reality at its joints, while saying that whoever decides they identify as male should be called male is a strictly worse way of describing reality.
The post implies that EY and Scott kinda agree with the biological definition being more robust in principle, but endorse the trans-favoring position out of political considerations.
I am mostly on board with Scott and EY here, even though I agree with Zack that in theory the chromosome-based definition is more robust. Being willing to die on definitional hills seems stupid. Once, "Sir" referred exclusively to English noblemen. From that, I could make the argument that the service industry should not refer to male (whatever's definition) customers as Sir unless they are indeed OBE or whatever.
But this is would be extremely stupid. Language evolves. Definitional battles are not worth it. What the Sequences would recommend doing would just be to taboo the words "male" and "female" to dissolve the conflict. Instead, we just swim with the tide.
Contrary to common belief, most interactions of humans in our society are not resulting in common offspring. The utility of tagging humans by whom they could breed with is basically zero (and in any case we would also want to encode fertility information if we were serious about that). Social genders are simply a weird leftover remnant, just like "Sir". We can adapt such words whatever we want them to mean.
Unlike blankly denying the possibility of any HBD because it would be to ugly to be true, calling a trans-man a man has no significant real life or epistemic costs. It would be different if we insisted that the cis-/trans-prefix and talking about sex chromosomes is verboten, and society would advise a trans-man, and cis-woman couple to just try to following a cycle calendar or specific sex positions if they have trouble conceiving a child.
The woke definition has big upsides for trans people for little costs, so I would prefer it even if I was language czar and could decide what "male" means. The ratsphere pushing back against that would be as ludicrous as if the New Atheists had decided that their No 1 priority was getting rid of "OMG" in chats.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
If rampant sexual degeneracy ruins most young people as spouses, the remainder is about as 'free' to behave traditionally as they would be in solitary confinement.
I do not think that the ungendered version of the argument works. In high density areas (where your "sexual degeneracy" is more frequent), it does not matter if 99% of your generation do not qualify as a partner, the remaining 1% is still a decent-sized pool. If Jehova's witnesses can manage to find another JW to marry, then traditionalists should likewise be fine.
Now, I could be wrong and you could be lamenting how hard it is for 20 year old tradwives-to-be to find a virgin man who is making enough money to provide for a family, and how all the men have been "ruined" through either unmarried sex or porn.
Given traditionalist double standards, I think it is more likely that you are lamenting that there is a dearth of virgin women wanting to marry and start a family, and how all the 20 yo's want to go to college, will likely go through multiple boyfriends, perhaps suck a few cocks at parties, experiment with lesbianism or try anal sex, at which point you would consider them ruined.
As someone who himself gets laid less than I would likely have before the sexual revolution, let me say I have about zero sympathies.
All these arguments against the sexual liberation (mostly of women) could as well be made about the liberation of slaves in the US, which removed a lot of liberties previously enjoyed by the plantation owners. White families who had for generations enjoyed stable jobs as overseers were suddenly without employment. Today, a white guy can not hope to find blacks to work on his plantation for housing and basic food even if he promises not to whip or rape them. Instead, he is expected to pay them. The indignity!
I am always skeptical of claiming that we should not give one group the freedom to chose what to do with their lives because it will have downstream indirect effects which will harm other groups. (The exception is when the effects are obvious and heavily infringing that other group's freedoms. For example, legalizing anti-tank weapons would lead to a lot of people being blown up, or legalizing violent rape would unduly infringe on the liberties of the victims.)
We did not stop freeing the slaves because we were unsure on how this would affect the social order in the South or the price of tobacco. We went ahead and dealt with the indirect consequences as they appeared (badly, often).
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
"When you strike at the King, you must kill him." Well, Trump has been struck, and struck again, and he's alive. Now he is revoking the privileges of access and largesse from those who he disfavors. This is not being a petulant baby, this is rewarding friends and punishing enemies. It is exactly what was done to him by his enemies.
To be fair, the Democrats throwing the book at him was downstream of him denying the election result and vaguely encouraging his goons to stop its certification. So one might equally well say: "Try to occupy the Capitoline Hill, expect to end like Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus".
Except that DC did not actually go all Nasica on Trump. The SCOTUS decided that presidents have immunity from treason, and that was the end of it. Sure, the DAs tried to get him for every technicality they could, but given him the kind of sentence his supporters got for J6 was not on the table. Nor did Biden use his newly cemented immunity and veto powers to drone strike Trump (which probably would have been a bad thing -- normalizing political murder has its own downsides).
I will also grant you that Biden was part of the rising nepotism, preemptively pardoning his son for all crimes he might have committed.
But the attitude displayed by Trump and put into words by you is 100% that of a tinpot dictator or warlord. Likely every US president likely needs a bit of a narcissist streak -- "I am the one who can serve his country best as the president" is not a very modest thought. But with Trump there is not even a pretense for doing the job for the common good, it is all ego with a side of kleptocracy. I would say he is half-Lannister: he can only be relied to pay his debt to people who wronged him, no matter how petty the grudge.
It might be illustrative to constrast Trump with GWB. Both were reviled by the left. The policies of W were actually a lot more damaging than the policies of the first Trump administration. W used torture as a matter of national policy and started two different wars which achieved little beside killing a lot of people and fattening the military-industrial complex on the taxpayers dime. The Swedes gave Obama one of the most ridiculous Nobels ever simply for not being GWB. The phrase war criminal was frequently heard on the fringe left.
But when Obama came along, GWB faded from media attention. No AGs were especially keen on getting him whatever way they could. He remains a welcome guest at state funerals.
I would argue that this was mostly because he followed the standards in accepting the end of his presidency. He did not incite McCain to take over DC to continue the Republican rule. Nor would he himself pulled any J6 shit if the SCOTUS had awarded the presidency to Kerry instead. In short, he was willing to play mostly by the unwritten rules. The game might be rigged, it might be crooked, but there are still some rules to it.
Trump does not. His instinct is to flip the game table if he loses. And that is why the establishment decided to go all lawfare against him.
quiet_NaN
5mo ago
I think that there are solid reasons why democracies have developed cultural antibodies against Nazi aesthetics.
Now, I get not leaving everything which has ever been used by Nazis barren. For example, there are only so many two-letter acronyms, not using SS for something useful seems a bit of a waste, so I am fine with you Americans abbreviating social security thus. Likewise, just because some Neonazis like 18 and 88, even the Germans will not go all tetraphobic (yes, I know) on these numbers.
On the other hand, if someone were to say that we should reclaim "Heil Hitler", because after all, what made the Nazis bad was not their greetings but their genocides, I would reply that this is a terrible idea. It would be like saying that glowing cigarette butts -- unlike wildfires -- are generally not dangerous to humans, and thus we can throw them away without a care.
Of course, Musk's salute is a lot more ambiguous than "Sieg Heil", but in general I think that the gesture should better stay in the cordon sanitaire for a few more centuries.
My theory is that Musk did this deliberately to troll people. I disapprove.
(Also, I re-read SSCs parable of talents from 2015 recently. Scott mentions Musk no less than nine times, as an example of someone who is clearly gifted and doing good on a scale most of us could never hope to do. With a decade of hindsight, this reads somewhat bizarre -- sure, Musk did some great stuff, like making electric cars cool and establishing reuseable first stages, but he also did quite a few things which do not seem worth emulating.)
quiet_NaN
1yr ago
Meta: I think this post is not appropriate as a top level post.
The content thematic would easily qualify it for the culture war thread.
I would still think it is a bit short for the CW top level post, little more than a link and a few lines of context.
Compare with that natural selection post. At least that post was articulate enough, even if I also disagree with its content (but much less vehemently).
Having top level posts like this (from the quotations from other comments, I am not reading the link) makes us appear like a bunch of internet racists. At least we could try to appear to be a bunch of eloquent internet racists.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I'm sure the public would be perfectly fine believing that nothing untoward is happening if the media was on the side of the ruling administration and either not talking about it or dutifully framing it and reminding normies that these are people who broke the law and are getting their comeuppance (however fitting that is to the facts).
Kind of tangential, but whenever I hear people complaining that the media is reporting unfairly on Trump (which, to be fair, you are not saying), I want to play a very sad song for that guy on the world's tiniest violin. Trump made his first baby steps into politics by condemning the Central Park Five, and not surprising to anyone with the benefit of hindsight, he was full of shit when he did so. Decades later, he elected the fringe conspiracy theory of birtherism to make a foray into politics in earnest, followed notably by the denial of the 2020 election result. Even his White House press releases look like the ramblings of someone who has long lost contact with anything resembling objective truth. So if his political demise comes at a totally fabricated yellow press story of him fucking a male underage porcupine, I would call that poetic justice.
Now, I am a lot more sympathetic to both deontological and consequentialist arguments against twisting the truth to foil him. The deontological argument is basically that by adopting a Trumpian nihilist irreverence for what is true, the press is basically throwing overboard the most important quality which separated them from him. (Or at least part of it -- see SA on Bounded Distrust.) The consequentialist argument is that you can not out-bullshit the master bullshitter, and that the way to prevail against him is not to get dragged down to his level. (Not that I would call the spinning the MSM did on this story Trump level dishonesty, sure, they did spin it and selectively reported the facts to suit their agenda, but if this was instead a WH press release I would be fully prepared to later learn that Honduras is not a country and people do not have mothers because humans multiply through fission.)
And sure, from some cosmic perspective, Trump probably does not deserve to have lies told about him, in the same way that Billy the fucking Kid did not deserve to have his life snuffed out by a piece of lead.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Eating shit has a comparable health effect to living in the sewers.
This is more like "if you sleep on the ground in the woods, it is probably not worthwhile to spend a lot on makeup".
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
Good news, with your attitude, you are not alone.
- Jehova's Witnesses believe are opposed to blood transfusion for reasons which are orthogonal to the experimental method.
- Many religions are opposed to most forms of sexuality and/or contraception without any evidence that it leads to bad outcomes.
- Likewise, dietary restrictions.
- Some people believe that various forms of genital mutilation are beneficial or required not as a matter of empirical evidence, but for inscrutable cultural reasons.
Of course, if you want to convince the grey tribe specifically, just stating that obviously blood is sacred or puberty blockers are evil or pigs should not be eaten is not going to convince anyone.
Edit: I wrote that taking "gender transitioning prepubescent children" as a straw man for puberty blockers, but on further reflection I think that I would even cover gender affirming surgery. Sure, I think that operating on the genitals of ten-year-olds is a terrible idea, but that is contingent on empirical observations about the state of medicine, and if our tech level was higher, I would be open to evidence that it is beneficial for kids to change their gender a few time, or that placing a brain in a robot body increases QALYs for that matter.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
Just noticing and then going tit-for-tat. There are some occasions where going tit-for-tat is a good move. I do not think that this is one of them.
Take tariffs. Tit-for-tat is fine, because you can make it explicit that your tariffs are retaliatory.
Contrast with terrorism. If members from group A blow up random members from group B, then there are generally responses which are much more efficient to stop these incidents than members from group B starting to blow up random members from group A (unless you are in Somalia or something -- and even then targeting the murderers would likely be strictly preferable). In fact, retaliation would be likely to increase the rate of incidents.
If Whites start to (more) openly discriminate against non-Whites, then of course the wokes will whine how unfair and racist that is and how the government should put its hands on the scales even more.
Now, if a Republican state was saying "as long as the federal government is openly preferring minority-owned businesses, we will openly prefer any businesses which do not qualify for preferential treatment from the feds", that would be a limited tit-for-tat, like retaliatory tariffs. Sure, the wokes would also whine how incredibly racist that is, but a smarter member of the public would recognize that the goal was to have a level playing field, not to establish the fourth Reich.
Realizing if you don't, you have no future.
Rumors of white genocide have been exaggerated, European-origin DNA will be common in the US population for the foreseeable future. For all the efforts to achieve equality of outcomes, the odds of a white person to make it big are still better than for a black person, which is possibly HBD-related. In the contemporary US, Whites might get a -2 racial malus to both sympathy and government handouts, but that does not make White characters unplayable.
Plenty of groups get treated unfairly, and in most cases, making their victimhood a core part of their identity is actively harmful. Women and men, straights and queers, all sorts of ethnicities, can legitimately claim that sometimes, they are treated unfairly. And that sucks and they should push for a better society, but in most cases they should play the game with the cards they have been dealt, rather than embracing their victimhood.
Telling the multi-ethnic society "your game is so rigged against us, we will not play" and going to raise chickens in some rural white-only community, or emigrating to Hungary does not seem an appropriate response to the present level of disadvantage.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
The distance between California and Texas seems to be at least 500km, and more like perhaps 1500km between the big cities.
An illegal in California can likely not just take a plane from LA to Houston for a weekend of murder, mayhem and pet-eating. (If he can, then the federal government could fix that.) Nor can he likely afford it. Perhaps he can take the bus (which would also be preventable through legislation), or drive there by car. He can certainly hike through Nevada and New Mexico.
The costs of going from CA to Texas are high in terms of time, money and deportation risk. Assuming that Texas is fully cooperating with ICE, the cost of staying any substantial amount of time in Texas are high in terms of deportation risk, likewise.
If I were an illegal, having perhaps paid most of what I own and risked my life to get into the US, and CA was safe and Texas was not, then there would be nothing in Texas which would be worth the risk of deportation. As much as people like to dunk on California, it is likely still a hell of a lot better than whatever country the illegal came from.
If you model illegals as rational actors, then having states which do not enforce immigration law is a great boon to everyone other state, because the net migration will be towards these safe states.
If you model illegals as particles undergoing Brownian motion, then sure, a few will diffuse into Texas. But new illegals will also get in from abroad, so you need to keep up your deportation effort indefinitely either way.
Things would be different if California had the power to let new illegals in, or if immigrants had a generation length of a year, with their population rising exponentially. Or if there was nothing worth stealing in the illegal-friendly zone, but plenty worth stealing in the MAGA-zone 200m over.
I guess an argument can also be made that if the illegals are not deported now, some bleeding heart liberal (like me) will naturalize them in a decade, at which point they can come to Texas and nobody can do anything about it.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
@ControlsFreak: Please take note. Someone managed to report on a current event without spending hours researching the sources or getting a warning/ban for a low effort comment.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
So what happens once nobody that owns anything of substance is a US Person?
My proposal did not hinge on the nationality of the owner, or them being a natural person or identifiable. As long as the asset is physically within the US, the US can tax it just fine.
I also think it fairer to tax investors in the country of their assets than in their country of residence, which is the opposite of what the US is doing. If a US citizen builds a thriving business in Somalia, I simply do not see how this is Uncle Sam's business (apart from the wealth transferred in or out of the US, perhaps). She is certainly not depending on the US to secure her property rights or provide legal security. By contrast, if a rich Swiss person is buying a mall in the US, he is asking the US for a lot more: that the US shall uphold the doctrine that individuals can own unlimited amounts of land, that the police please prevent robbers and looters from ruining his investment, that the court system be fair and not rule against him just because his name sounds too French. Let him simply pay the same capital gains tax a US citizen who owned the same property would pay, and if he does not like it, he can always invest in China or India instead.
This would have an additional practical advantage. For the billionaire class, becoming a citizen of a tax haven is not a big problem, while investing their wealth in a tax haven will likely be difficult. Sure, your social media company will not pay taxes, just restrict profiles to residents of the Cayman Islands. You want to pay taxes in Ireland? No problemo, just design, produce and sell your smartphones there.
Are you going to start seizing American companies from their shareholders or something?
In so far as taxation is theft, yes.
More importantly, does anybody even read Hayek anymore?
I just looked up the guy on WP and did a ctrl+F tax:
Hayek was against high taxes on inheritance, believing that it is natural function of the family to transmit standards, traditions and material goods. Without transmission of property, parents might try to secure the future of their children by placing them in prestigious and high-paying positions, as was customary in socialist countries, which creates even worse injustices. He was also strongly against progressive taxation, noting that in most countries additional taxes paid by the rich amount to insignificantly small amount of total tax revenue and that the only major result of the policy is "gratification of the envy of the less-well-off". He also claimed that it is contrary to the idea of equality under the law and against democratic principle that the majority should not impose discriminatory rules against the minority.
Hm, it seems some vandal replaced his ideas with neoliberal strawmen.
I disagree with him about inheritance tax. Say we have a progressive inheritance tax which caps the amount parents can pass to their children at 10M$. A billionaire with a single child might spend 990M$ to on "placing them in prestigious and high-paying positions", instead of only the customary few millions for Harvard, private tutors and so on. But he will find that spending money on education and prestige has diminishing returns. The last million he spends on his kid will not be increase their lifetime earning potential by 1M$. Turning your child into a movie or sport star, or sponsoring them to run for public office is all nice and well, but even if it works, most stars are not billionaires and most public officials do not manage to grift billions either.
Progressive taxation can very easily be justified through utilitarianism. There are diminishing returns to wealth and income. The difference between driving a 500$ car and driving a 10.5k$ car is a lot bigger than the difference between driving a 100k$ car and driving a 110k$ car.
I think it is generally more enlightening to look at wealth inequality than income inequality, because what counts as income will be subject to zillions of complex regulations of tax law, while wealth is much more easy to quantify. Just assume that everyone gets born in some natural state without a penny to their name, and if they end up being a billionaire, they must at some point have increased their net worth in a way which would in principle be taxable (unless the gains were made in Somalia).
The wealth Gini for the US is 0.85. Students of mathematics will notice that this is a lot closer to one (one person owns everything) than zero (everyone has equal wealth). If we use wealth as a proxy for "taxation potential", we can see that Hayek when he asserts that raising the taxes on the 0.1% would amount to insignificantly small amount of total tax revenue.
In the US, the marginal federal income tax goes from 10% (for the first 11k$/year) to 37% (for dollars made above 578k$). Looking at WP, it looks like the highest income quintile pays more than twice as much taxes as all the other quintiles combined. This means that if you do not want to change the budget, a flat tax rate would have to be roughly the same as the 24% effective tax rate charged to the fifth quintile, say 22%. (In reality, it would likely be a bit closer to the 29% the top 1% are paying.)
If you tax the poor quintile (currently taxed at 1.5%) that amount, the effect will be that they will unable to make ends meet, so one way (social security) or another (prisons), the state will have to pay for their cost of living.
When he whines about the rich people being suppressed by the poor minority, my response is that there is no human right to unlimited wealth. Capitalism is neither just nor god-given, but it is a system which works much better than all the other systems which have been tried, so societies are willing to accept high income inequalities to reap its benefits. The present deal seems very favorable to the 1%, and asking them to pay a lot to keep the status quo does not seem inherently unfair.
Assuming that the WP excerpt was a fair summary of Hayek's ideas about taxes, I can understand why he is not widely read today.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
One could tax every property by default. A mailbox company in the Bahamas hold that tenement? Either they cough up the taxes, or they lose their property. A publicly traded company increased its market cap by 20% in a year? Great, just print shares for Uncle Sam worth 0.2% or the market cap.
This might deter foreign investment, but especially in housing, foreign investment is just driving up prices, which is a boon only to a minority.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Hot take: this does not really belong in the CW thread because it is not controversial. Nobody seems to be contesting that Trump has done most of the above. His defenders mostly claim that this is normal politician behavior.
Most congress critters are sponsored by big companies in their home state and certainly do their best to help these companies afterwards, sending the gravy train their way etc. Some go beyond that and do a bit of insider trading on the side. Only a few are open about taking money from foreign interests with an implied quid pro quo.
Allow me a metaphor. Except for a few (Bernie Sanders?), every politician farts in the whirlpool. There are certainly quite some who occasionally pee in the whirlpool too. But Donald Trump has just removed his trunks and taken a jumbo-sized shit in the whirlpool.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Seldom have I heard a story where I had so little sympathy for any side. It makes the characters in the alligator river story seem like paragons of morality by comparison.
Like, if a kid tries to steal from your sons bag, perhaps don't call him a racial slur? Unless he is like 14, even calling him a "little shit" would probably be in bad taste.
And if you observe some Karen calling a kid a racial slur after he has just tried to steal from her kid's bag, perhaps leave it at a "shut the fuck up, you racist bitch", and don't escalate to social media?
And if you repeat racial slurs while someone is pointing a camera on you, and you are not already openly a KKK member, nor are Donald Trump, don't be surprised if the shitstorm hits you.
quiet_NaN
6mo ago
I think Putin's casus belli is made very slightly more valid if Zelensky speaks Russian.
Hard disagree. Annexations to culturally unite a people are /so/ 1930s. We don't do that any more. If Olaf Scholz was to invade Austria, which shares a lot of cultural history with Germany, that fact would not make it better or worse than an invasion of the culturally more distinct Poland.
Want to unite your people in the 2020s? Let them vote to join you, don't invade.
From their links which do not go to youtube or what I presume are amazon pages of sex toys, it seems like the gist of the complaint is that some high school refused to remove two books from their library.
Sure, having a school which allows a book in their library which contains a crude comic of some guy (?) giving another guy (?) a BJ is exactly like the teacher of your daughter and 70% of your school board being fucking machines who are presumably going to rape her or something.
I mean, we had that story with a school district and some ruling wrt religious objections, but that sounded much more serious that this "random school has slightly naughty queer book, and even after possibly someone unsympathetic to these books being elected to some position, they still did not remove them. The soap box, the ballot box have failed, the jury box is just a waste of time so now it is time for the cartridge box!!!11"
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