Goodguy
12hr ago
To be fair, most people here weren't advocating that Trump should get into a new Middle East war, constantly announce random tariffs and then cancel them, and spend what seems like months talking about some ballroom that nobody cares about.
This election does show how far the country is from deporting 100 million people like some here want. The right didn't even manage to go 2 years before blowing up.
Isn't the power to amend the Constitution unlimited? Theoretically, an Amendment could strike out the entire previous text of the Constitution and replace the whole thing with a sentence that says "The purpose of the government of these United States is to implement fully automated luxury gay space communism."
Edit: apparently I was wrong. It's almost unlimited, but not completely unlimited. You have to continue to allow states to have equal suffrage in the Senate unless they voluntarily give it up:
"The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate."
In all my time of paying attention to politics, I don't remember ever seeing a Vice President so boldly question one of the President's core policies (Iran war in this case). Maybe I'm forgetting some examples, but this seems quite unusual to me.
I don't know what Vance truly believes about Iran. My guess is that he genuinely has no interest in waging the war. I remember some news that Vance was skeptical of the war before Trump launched it. But this is definitely good politics one way or another, if Vance wants to stay a major player.
Wild to see Vance rushing to put forth the optics that he basically agrees with Nick Fuentes on major aspects of where the right should go from here. (And these are actually some of the main things that Fuentes has been excoriating him for.)
Goodguy
1d ago
I agree. Being rightly or wrongly perceived as the side that is more focused on bread and butter issues is huge. Republicans ceded it back to the Democrats through wrong focus and unforced errors at the same time as the Democrats partly realized that they should talk more about the economy and less about woke stuff. Luckily for the Republicans, I'm not sure that the Democrats will be able to resist the sort of smug wokeness and belief in having an "on the right side of history" mandate that got them in trouble in the past.
Goodguy
1d ago
Now let's see if Democrats learn the lesson of "we do well if we focus on the economy, we avoid turbo-woke stuff, and we take advantage of the other side's unforced errors".
Or if they instead decide "ahhhh, 2016-2026 was just a bad dream... the voters are telling us that what we really need to focus on is electing history's first black transwoman President".
What's actually going on with Abbott? I don't follow Texas politics at all so I have no idea, I thought Abbott had it on lock even though I expected Dems to probably take both the House and the Senate. Unlike the House/Senate map, in which prediction markets have had Dems doing well for a while now, the Hinojosa rise seems to just date back to... today.
Goodguy
1d ago
Oh, weird. Link currently works for me when I'm logged in but I see [Deleted by user] if I'm in incognito mode. Don't know why.
Now it works for me in incognito, too. Maybe temporary issue.
Goodguy
1d ago
Apologies for the short top-level post, but I just made a Midterms thread so that there can be a place for more off-the-cuff sort of midterms discussion without getting it scattered all over the culture war thread. Might be useful.
Goodguy
1d ago
The political problem with Iran for Trump is not just that the war affects the economy. It is also that Trump is perceived as devoting energy to waging the war rather than focusing on domestic issues such as the economy. This will tend to cause a reduction in Trump's popularity without being directly captured in polls that ask how important people think foreign policy is relative to other issues.
I'm not a Christian of any sort, but I will say this... the idea that a good god is trying to free us from an evil god makes more sense to me than the idea that there is only one god, this god is good, and this god also gives infants horrible diseases on a regular basis cause of muh free will or something.
At the end of the day though, the good god / evil god dichotomy doesn't make much sense to me either. It feels emotionally resonant in a way that is deep but still somehow superficial compared to true depth. It too is a bit brittle like the rantings of a crazy homeless man. Like Revelations.
The truth, I think, is something deeper than any of those Christian ideas... Christianity has nice symbolism and it points to some important true things, however.
Goodguy
2d ago
I think the optics are good for Trump when it comes to immigration and when it comes to helping beat back leftist excesses like trans in women's bathrooms and defund the police. But the optics are bad for him on bringing back manufacturing, improving the economy for the average person, avoiding pointless wars, and AI.
Note: I am not making a judgment here about whether Trump lived up to his actual promises or not. I'm just talking about how his promises are widely seen. For example, Trump never promised to not attack Iran, indeed he has a long history of anti-Iran statements. However, many people assumed that he wouldn't attack Iran, and attacking Iran has hurt his popularity I think.
The Democrats, on the optics level, do have an agenda that can attract many people. Their economic agenda is more wealth redistribution from the wealthy to the not wealthy. Their foreign policy agenda is to do what Biden was doing. Their negative view of the AI revolution is likely to be popular. Their social agenda is one of their weak points, but they have learned a bit from what happened a few years ago and now seem more aware that peak woke is unpopular with the general electorate and that it might be a good idea to run a white man even if you really really think that a black woman deserves to be President, or whatever.
Again, I'm not making claims about what the Democrat agenda actually is or how well it would work in practice. Just what the optics are like.
Goodguy
2d ago
I think most innovators will stay in the US even if there is more wealth redistribution, as long as there is not so much wealth redistribution that being based in the US becomes less attractive than being based in some place like Dubai or Singapore.
There is a lot of political terrain in between what the US is now and what Europe is now.
Housing is young people's biggest expense, so if I acquired FDR-like power I'd probably try to use Federal force to push through construction of more housing in cultural hubs. That already would go a long way. There would be second order effects, but I think the sense of optimism and dynamism that would result might make them worth it.
the arc of history bends towards communism
I don't think that's set in stone. In any case, the current bending towards socialism becoming a viable force in American politics again could be stopped by another New Deal-like compromise in which the wealthy make things better for the poor and the middles. I do not know if today's wealthy have the insight to do it, the will, or even the necessary political levers to make sweeping changes instead of getting bogged down in bureaucracy and regulations.
Now if by communism you mean social leftism, as the trooning example seems to indicate... I also wouldn't be so sure. I think that wokism is too authoritarian to ever be popular for long in a modern psychological climate... which is why it reached its high water mark a few years ago and has since receded a bit.
Goodguy
2d ago
That would be a significant escalation of degrading norms.
I'm not so sure. Republicans tried to do it to Bill Clinton when he was President in 1998. They had plausible legal grounds to do it, but it's not like it would be hard for Democrats to find plausible legal grounds to do it to Trump.
Goodguy
2d ago
The Internet isn't closed. The censorship of Reddit just made people go elsewhere or make their own sites. Even at the peak of woke censorship, the Internet never came close to actually being closed.
There were and are instances of payment providers refusing to work with people, but they are so rare that calling the Internet closed because of them would be like saying that schoolkids in the US are constantly being terrorized by mass shooters.
The far-left has Reddit and other places, but the far right is not left out. In some ways the Internet is more friendly to the far-right now than it was even 15-20 years ago. The far-right didn't have anything with the size and algorithmic subtlety of Twitter back then, now it does. When I say that, I'm not saying that Twitter is a far-right site, cause it's not. I'm just saying that you can go there and be pretty much as far-right as you want if you don't explicitly call for violence (but that's easy to work around).
The Internet is not closed, but it is heavily surveilled. One can assume that anything one does online goes into a government computer somewhere, whether or not a human ever ends up looking at it (and with AI, that doesn't matter). Thanks, Bush. Thanks, Clinton. Thanks, Bush 2. Thanks, Obama. Thanks, Biden. Thanks, Trump.
Goodguy
3d ago
I have actually considered trying to figure out how to make money from both sides at the same time. I would find that amusing. However, I'm not sure if my conscience is sufficiently loose to let me engage in the necessary deception. Maybe I should let go of such qualms if I really want to really become a political player at some point.
My more fundamental motivation is that: I am neither a left-winger nor a right-winger -- however, I don't currently see a way to create a viable movement that would represent my actual political desires. The next best thing, then, is to play the left and right against each other in a way that prevents either from taking complete control, maximizes the chances of things that I want happening, and perhaps lays the groundwork for creating a movement that does reflect my desires.
Goodguy
3d ago
My political strategy is not to create a leftist hegemony. It is to keep the left and right balanced against each other in such a way that each of the two groups, both of which I largely despise, is restrained by the other.
In my strategy, one of the "useful idiot" roles that I have for the right is to prevent leftist censorship.
Goodguy
3d ago
Very different situations given the types of immigration the two countries get.
Goodguy
3d ago
I dislike both the Democrats and the Republicans, so for me one useful thing would be if I could use the Muslims to hurt the Democrats when the Democrats become too powerful and hurt the Republicans when the Republicans become too powerful.
I also dislike the size of US military spending and the US Presidency's pretty unrestrained ability to make war, so Muslims could also potentially be used to affect US foreign policy in ways that align with my goals.
Goodguy
3d ago
Given demographics, Islam is almost certainly never going to be powerful enough in the US to accomplish any of the goals some of its subsets have that I find most annoying, such as imposing authoritarianism or ending social liberalism. So if I look at things from a self-centered chess-playing perspective, then in the US I am relatively comfortable with tactically using Islam against my more significant political opponents if and when there are opportunities to do so. I'd just want to make it clear to Muslims that no, this does not mean they should feel free to go beat people up for being Jews or whatever, or try to impose some sort of anti-free-speech pro-Palestinian regime on college campuses. Stick to electoral politics where you can be useful to me without doing bad shit.
Goodguy
4d ago
The USSR in 1950 had about a 4-5 male-female ratio because of the war. So if this theory of male-female ratios being the dominant factor in explaining the sexual revolution is true, one might expect the USSR to have experienced a stronger sexual revolution than the US did. And from what I can tell based on ChatGPT-ing, that did not happen. The USSR did have a sexual revolution after the war, but it was not stronger than the one the US had.
That said, there is another factor to be considered: the USSR had a more socially conservative government than the US did, and one more willing to meddle in sexual matters. So it is possible that the government's attitude suppressed what would otherwise have happened in the USSR. However, if the government managed to suppress it than maybe the male-female ratios are not as strong as what the theory holds.
The state of AI ability is an empirical question, but to me is a fascinating topic nonetheless. To quote Jurassic Park, "You did it. You crazy son of a bitch, you did it."
Humans actually did it. They created AI.
This struck me suddenly just now, after several hours of working with AI.
It's strange... it's as if for many of us, the actual fact hasn't quite sunk in yet. For me it's still sinking in, I still haven't really wrapped my head around it. Is it even possible to wrap one's head around it?
It almost makes me think of Lovecraft's concept of coming into contact with something that uproots one's understanding of humanity's place in the world so much that one retreats from it with psychological defense mechanisms that try to blot out the knowledge, or reduce it to something manageable. More likely, though, than that explanation is the more ego-damaging explanation that I've just been slow on the uptake, lol.
AI was always some thing in the fuzzy horizon... maybe 50 years away, maybe 100, who knows? It wasn't supposed to actually just happen.
But it did happen. We are the human beings who happen to be alive at that point in human history where humanity genuinely, for the first time ever, has created artificial intelligence. If you want to get speculative, you could go into interesting questions of 'hmm... that seems like quite the coincidence doesn't it? why us specifically? us the people who are alive right now? is it possible that that's a bit too much of a coincidence to really be a coincidence?'... but I'll refrain because that way lies fun but completely unproveable speculation about simulation hypotheses and so on. And in any case, maybe there's nothing more special about being the people alive when AI was created than being the people who were alive when the first nuclear weapons were created.
But still... shiiiiiiit. What the fuck? Humanity actually did it. The crazy bastards did it. It exists. Not only can it code and prove new mathematics, but I've also seen it make novel (as far as I know) connections between various more personal or more humanities type ideas that I talk to it about.
I feel like I'm still catching up to the fact that it exists. I know some people are way ahead of me. Some are behind.
Fire is amazing. Penicillin is amazing. Nuclear weapons are... I won't say amazing, but impressive. Artificial intelligence has a different quality though. The creation of alien intelligence, on Earth. Something you can talk to. Something that routinely does novel things. Not yet to the point of writing an actually interesting... well... novel, for example. But routinely does novel things on a somewhat smaller scale when it comes to art and psychological insight. And a grander scale when it comes to mathematics, it seems, though my math understanding is not sufficient to follow any of the recent proofs.
The implications are to some extent difficult to talk about simply because they are so huge.
All that sci-fi speculation about the psychological and social impacts of contact with alien intelligence... are starting to become a reality.
Goodguy
6d ago
My problem with it is that the UX fucking sucks. They're now the Anglosphere's premier place for long-form political commentary by writers outside of traditional media. It would be nice if they unfucked the UX.
As for paying, I don't see any problem with that. How are we going to get decent long-form political content on a large scale if people can't make a living doing it? Yeah there is the occasional Scott Alexander who has a day job and enjoys writing essays in his free time. But there are limits to that approach. If you want to do some actual in-depth sleuthing, for example, some real investigative journalism, there's only so much you can do in free time while having a day job.
Except we have examples of the US government doing massive mobilization efforts when it decides to. The Civil War. The New Deal. WW2.
Does state control over the economy cause problems? Yes. Can it successfully help large masses of people? Also yes. The existence of many negative second-order effects don't mean that there are no first-order effects that help people. The USSR did actually successfully uplift millions of people from being peasant farmers. Would it have been better to uplift them in a more capitalist way? Probably. In a less bloody way? Definitely. But a lot of uplift did happen even doing it the bloody communist way.
The reality is that if the US government fully unleashed its monstrous powers, spurred by a strong enough motive, it could actually lower prices and give many people better jobs. There would be second-order effects, but a lot of uplift would actually happen. It's quite possible that the negative effects would be worse than the positive effects. And for some people, that would be completely fine. "Who cares if the economy as a whole deteriorates and we let the government be totally authoritarian, if I personally rise" is a self-centered but perfectly coherent approach. "Who cares if we let the government be totally authoritarian and the economy as a whole deteriorates ten years from now? I'm broke now, I need to pay bills now." is also a self-centered but perfectly coherent approach.
And that's before we even get into the possibility that at some point AI might actually make fully automated luxury communism possible for the first time in history.
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