FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
15hr ago
Exactly. If you don't like the America we live in today, you can't love Ronald Reagan. He compromised with the New Deal, he made Social Security and Medicare understood as permanent entitlements for "hard working" old people, even as he tried to roll back welfare benefits for working age young people. Reagan brought on The End of History, but maybe that wasn't such a good thing after all for conservatives.
Another thing to keep in mind is that one of Reagan’s main conservative bonafides was winning the Cold War, and it is starting to feel more and more lately like America didn’t actually win the Cold War. China won the Cold War, while the USA and USSR both lost.
I don't know where the saying originates, but I've heard many times that Athens recovered from its defeat in the Peloponnesian War very quickly, while Sparta never recovered from its victory. America may never recover from what it did to win the Cold War.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
15hr ago
Short, sharp interventions have been out of vogue since some time around Iraq.
No, we just argue about making them shorter and sharper, but we still haven't moved into another paradigm. Obama's foreign policy operated within the same system as Dubya's, the Reagan paradigm, but trying to keep it to drones and special forces instead of heavy ground troops. Obama's interventions in Libya, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen were all built around the same foreign interventionist playbook. Trump made lots of noise about being an isolationist, and at times I've applauded him for it, but he kept up drone and special forces campaigns begun by Obama in his first term, including the strike against Abu Bakr and Suleimani, and in his even-more-schizo second term he's bombed Iran in the shortest and sharpest way he could. Trump is trying to break the paradigm, but he hasn't yet constructed a cohesive edifice that shows what he actually wants to do: he talks America First then acts Israel-only. Arguably Biden's pull out from Afghanistan was a move against that paradigm...and it was roundly panned by everyone, sometimes on dishonest technical ground, but really for spiritual reasons.
Neoliberal economics survived the dotcom bubble only to become a permanent wedge after 2008
People are dissatisfied with neoliberal economics on both sides of the aisle, neither side has constructed an alternative. Our economy still functions as a neoliberal Washington consensus corporate financial system. The big banks are still big and still bailed out by the government, the big insurance companies are still causing the same problems as before the ACA, outsourcing and deindustrialization continued apace. Have corporations been pushed from power in any way since 2008, have admins since 2008 been any less in bed with corporations? Sure we've swapped General Motors and General Electric and IBM for Nvidia and Oracle and Meta, but the economy is still built around corporate profits and the stock market. The way it has been since Reagan.
Obama and Trump both talked about moving past the current paradigm into new territory, nobody has done it yet. Trump has yet to build a cohesive economic model or foreign policy. He gestures in new directions, he has not yet completed the change. Maybe President Vance will.
I've mentioned this before, but I return to it because it remains true.
Circa 2016, when we were starting to realize that Trump was a real candidate, I attended a lunch talk with the Yale constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar. Amar is a brilliant scholar, whatever you think of his political opinions. One of his core arguments that day in 2016 was that Barack Obama was about to become what he labeled at the time a "Turning Point President." His basic thesis was that when you look at American political history, when a President wins 1) Two consecutive terms and then 2) gets his chosen successor elected after him, then that sets the paradigm (a Turning Point) that the country operates under until another Turning Point when a new paradigm is established. So if Clinton had won in 2016, Obama would have been a bona-fide turning point, and we would be operating under the Obama paradigm today. It's a Hegelian triad, Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis, kind of system; a turning point president represents a new Synthesis that becomes the next Thesis.
But the upshot of this logic is that we are currently operating under the Reagan paradigm. Developed and attenuated, altered with each passing presidency, but we're still within that paradigm. When Reagan came into office, the last president to achieve this feat was FDR, and between FDR and Reagan we were operating within FDR's New Deal paradigm. The Democrats during that time tried to expand the New Deal, the Great Society and whatnot. Even Republican presidents during that period, Eisenhower and Nixon, were operating within the New Deal. Eisenhower adjusted the New Deal to make it more conservative, and Nixon signed a lot of liberal legislation but otherwise tried to reign in the New Deal and not to overturn it.
Reagan overturned the New Deal paradigm. He struck a fresh synthesis, of social conservatism that would manage change, pushing family values while mostly surrendering on race issues and the sexual revolution. Free market capitalism, free trade, race neutral corporate meritocratic success, these were the core values of the Reagan Revolution. An assertive foreign policy that brushed off post-Vietnam malaise with short and sharp foreign interventions that did the job and left town.
And we've operated under that ever since. Clinton's third way Dems were an adaptation to that paradigm, an effort to soften it and move it left. Dubya operated within that paradigm, dominated by the overseas interventions of his term. Obama said forthrightly that Republicans had been the party of ideas since the 1980s*, and sought to change that, but he still operated within a corporatist, capitalist, free trade, Washington-Consensus paradigm, with a foreign policy built around assertive American exceptionalism and short sharp interventions. Perhaps Obama thought he could establish a new paradigm, but he didn't, and I debated with Amar at the time if he even could claim one regardless of HRC's results.
If you hate the status quo, you have to hate Reagan as he actually existed. You can, of course, revise Reagan to make a myth of something you do support, but you can't love Reagan and hate the world we live in today. It's his world, it's his America.
*"I think it's fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10-15 years in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom," Obama said in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
To add to what MadMonzer said:
Wins Above Replacement and Replacement Level became popular as analytical concepts because they capture the reality that the "average" player in the major leagues is actually really good, a team full of average players would be pretty good, and an average player costs a decent amount of money/resources to acquire. What you get for "free" (a minimum contract and no draft capital) isn't an average player, it's a replacement level player. So once you determine what a "free" player looks like, you can determine how many wins a player was worth over a free player, and on the free agent market you can determine the value of each win.
Compare to the financial concept of the Risk Free Rate of Return, you don't compare your return on an investment to zero, you compare it to what you would have gotten without taking on added risk. This lets you both assess how much return you got on an investment in a more rigorous way (if I made 5% on an investment over a time period when I could have gotten 4% in FDIC insured CDs, I actually made 1% over risk-free rate of return), and determine the cost of risk you're taking on (in an efficient market every percentage point over RFRR represents a chance of losing your money).
The closest real analytical concept in politics is the polling around Generic Democrat and Generic Republican ballots, where respondents are asked if they would prefer to vote R or D without candidate names attached. But in most people's imaginations, the Replacement Level candidate looks like a person, every congressional district has a local mayor or councilman who will run for anything or an ambitious young ADA who pictures himself getting to congress someday. There was a prominent local lawyer for years in my town who would always accept the Democratic nomination for a position if the party couldn't dig up another candidate, he never won and my great aunt used to joke that "the poor guy couldn't get elected dog catcher," but he was always willing to be on the ballot, that's probably what a replacement level candidate looks like.
I bring this up because you want to distinguish Replacement Level from Average, the Average major league baseball player is really good at baseball and at $8mm/WAR on the free agent market an Average player is worth about $16mm/yr. An Average candidate for President is factually a really smart and accomplished person, a good politician*. Even somebody who makes it pretty far in the primaries is damn good at the game.
Which is where I would differ with my learned friend in argument @MadMonzer : Hillary Clinton, for all my dislike of her policies and my dead-ender belief that Bernie got rat fucked, was an incredibly good politician. 2016 Donald Trump was just that good that he ended her career. She was a way above average candidate in terms of experience, in terms of her ability to rally institutional support and scare off opponents, etc. There's a reason only joke candidates ran against her.
Bringing it back to the NYC mayoral race, this is a case where you have three below-replacement candidates running against Mamdani. Cuomo is a disgraced former governor with a litany of scandals**, Eric Adams probably sold his soul to Donald Trump to avoid federal indictment, and Sliwa has a tan line from his beret. Replacement level for Mayor is probably a lesser CEO in the Bloomberg mold, or something like that, and none of them reach that level.
*I'll note here that when I talk about a "Politician" I'm including within that identifier their whole machine, their advisors and handlers, their braintrust, the power behind the throne, the people that are referred to in political reporting as "[Candidate]-World." I don't think trying to untangle the influence of different factors is useful, it's better to just lump them all together than to try to argue who the man behind the curtain is. In this conversation George W Bush is also Karl Rove; Barack Obama is also David Axelrod; HRC was also John Podesta and Bill Clinton; Joe Biden is probably mainly his tight universe of advisers.
**My favorite Cuomo story I read was that he told a male intern that if he got a boob job he would make a hot tranny. Which is just top tier sexual harassment: invent a woman to harass if none are available.
When, if ever, is it appropriate to refer to someone as a 'parasite?' I don't mean in a literal sense, only in the political/economic sense. My instinct says 'never', its a very dehumanizing term... but I had that resolution sorely tested this week.
Your instinct is probably correct here. Not because it is dehumanizing, but because I don't think it's an easy classification system. You probably only get a consistent classification of parasites versus hosts, makers versus takers, whatever you want to call it.
Are Landlords parasites? Are people who own large amounts of stock? Are people who profess a willingness to work but are currently out of work, or make so little money that they rely on government relief programs to get by? What if they credibly argue that they could be making more but-for technology/immigration/bum-knees/whatever? What about people who make a lot of money, but they do it by selling things that are bad for us? Are drug dealers makers or takers? What about the Sacklers? Is a prostitute who supports herself and saves enough for retirement a parasite?
Is my neighbor the farmer a parasite? On the one hand, he is doing the single most essential labor in the world, growing food I eat. On the other, he's broke without an elaborate system of tax breaks, subsidies, exceptions to laws, and the generalized good-will that causes me to buy local sweet corn from his stand rather than at the supermarket.
It's a tough move to make consistently.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Men travel to escape from themselves, but it does not work. For wherever you go, there you are.
Sure, but where do you come from? Your genetics, sure, but also you are the product of your experiences, of how you grew up. It's hard to contend that there is no impact from formative experiences throughout your life on personality.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
No, it doesn't.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I'm surprised that people who are terrrrrrrified of Socialism aren't using the obvious weirdness of the election to discredit Zohran.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
The hectoring boomer "you're not allowed to vote for him" tone is so incredibly bad it makes one doubt the supposed competence of the billionaire bloc that forms the anti Zohran forces. If they're this stupid, he might be right that they don't deserve all that money.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Fatherland is ™️ for Hitler in the American mind, so motherland is used where you're not trying to imply fascism.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Also it was on the tip of my tongue, Charles V abdicated from ruling half the world and lived out his life in a monastery.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
My low stakes conspiracy theory (my wife and my mother are both big royal family watchers) is that he married Meghan Markle specifically to quiet people who liked him more than William, as after that there was no way he could be king.
Either way, he needs to get his ass in gear and become Grand Duke of Kiev.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Tbf this is what an 87 year old told me, not necessarily the current system, they might have reformed that trick out of the system by now. Though I've no doubt there are other tricks.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I have a family friend, retired Statie. He's been retired my entire life. He just bought a Z06 Vette, which is a bitchin' ride, and I joked that I wanted right of first refusal on it in his will. He bought it essentially because he liked the sound, he doesn't even drive it over 50!, and because he has no kids and too much money and he's gonna die soon.
And he's been very open about working the pension system, and the way every State Trooper cooperates to do it. The pension system determines salary based on average of your highest three years, including overtime. So in every barracks they know when it's your years to salary max, and you pick up every possible hour of overtime, and guys coordinate to call out sick at convenient times to get you more overtime, and you get every special assignment to hunt a fugitive or handle an event or whatever, so you look at the salary numbers for these guys and there are always precisely three balloon years to max out their pension.
Relatedly my litmus test for a True Small Government believer is, how do you respond to the data showing NYC has way more firefighters than they need.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
It's just hard to separate the role from the psychology of the man where the difference is so stark. Decades ago Harry was known for his impulsiveness, his wildness, for his refusal to be led around by anyone.
But this is a philosophy of personality question. I don't think personalities exist absent context. The starting quarterback and the backup quarterback on the high school football team have different personalities, but the backup is only the backup because of the existence of the starter.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Prince Harry the heir is different man that Prince Harry the spare. He never married Meghan Markle, he married a black American divorcee specifically to avoid being compared to his brother.
William, by contrast, is certainly ready to be king. He's had 20 years of adulthood to prepare! And it would be great for the UK! The last time they had a monarch that young was 1968! Shake the cobwebs off and dance!
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Sure but that's not modernity. Life and healthspans were different, expectations of the ruler were different. Were King Donald a modern king and I a modern monarchist, I would advocate for his abdication, or at least for stepping back in favor of the heir. Fwiw, I think Charles should do the same, you don't want to end up with a long run of men who wait a lifetime to be king. I'm not sure monarchy really works without early and violent deaths intervening on occasion, you wind up with gerontocracy.
We see this very pattern in our best example of a ruling monarch today, King Salman of Saudi Arabia who has largely abdicated in favor of MBS. Salman recognized the danger of the Saudi throne being passed from aged brother to aged brother, a gerontocracy where crown princes died of old age, and skipped over many heads to get MBS next in line and passed him power to get things moving.
Given Donald's age, he should be putting one of his two and half grown sons on the ballot. Absent that, I think even mooting running Donald is evidence that MAGA, or at least some interpretations of MAGA, is a lot more fragile than it may appear.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
When thinking about this issues, I always try to find some old time equivalent and how would it go.
In the "are we dating the same guy" case the old time equivalent is that enough people know each other, and talk to each other often enough, that someone will see your Jack out at a bar across town with some girl who isn't you and if they don't tell you they'll tell someone who will tell someone who will tell you.
Or in the case of "Tom's a serial date rapist," the old time equivalent is that you heard a rumor that Tom and Susie were parking up at the lookout and no one quite knows what happened but Susie missed school the next day and they stopped talking so it must have been something bad, because Susie was wearing Tommy's class ring all the time and she stopped right away.
The way you achieve something like this today is by trying to build a dense community around yourself, have lots of friends, talk to them a lot, and date only other people from within that community who also have lots of friends they talk to a lot.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
It's bizarre to advocate for an 80 year old man with three and a half grown sons to run for a third term. If Trump were a monarch, any reasonable monarchist would be advocating for him to abdicate and retire in favor of one of his children.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
To be clear, I'm not really attached to either definition, I think the word "gay" is inconsistently used and applied, such that using it in conversation or argument to exclusively mean either the act/sin-based or identity/attraction-based definition is likely to run into snags when two people are using the word to mean different things. Without clarifying our definitions all we're going to achieve is shouting our definitions at each other, so I asked you to clarify what definition you are using to get the conversation moving more productively.
Personally, Homosexuality and sexual orientation is something that I'm intellectually struggling to define at this point. I really don't know what I think Homosexuality is. The "Born This Way" argument seems to have been more or less abandoned, repealed without replacement, by the LGBTQWERTY types. Not long ago Posner would cite the "helper in the nest" theory when writing an opinion on gay rights, the Born This Way theory was a keystone to the entire gay rights movement. Now, it is treated as either an assumption or an irrelevancy, but it isn't even part of the catechism anymore. When I ask woke friends of mine, queer themselves, what the current theory of homosexuality is in this month's issue of The Gay Agenda, they shrug and say idk it doesn't really matter anymore.
Alternatively, homosexual behavior is a pure choice that anyone can make. That doesn't feel right to me, as there is no situation in which I would be attracted to a male, I can't imagine a situation where it would occur to me to engage in homosexual activity. I can imagine most things that I don't like being appealing in some context, Islam or Hockey or beans on toast or genocide, but homosexuality I can't imagine. So there clearly must be some genetic difference between me and the men who are gay. But no one seems interested in telling me what anymore.
Idk, it's something I'm pretty lost on at this point if I stop to think about it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
It just depends what you want to use the word "gay" to mean. If you want to indicate a certain variety of sinner, then it's best to use the "screwing anyone with a Y chromosome even once, in any manner, regardless of context" definition. If you want to try to describe a group of people with similar attributes, then calling people attracted to Traps gay isn't really very useful, they don't share attributes with most of the rest of the group.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
What's a 1919 tattoo symbolize?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
No my argument is that a guy who is attracted to a tranny prostitute with good tits is more likely to also be attracted to Sydney Sweeney than he is to be attracted to Jaxson Dart; so calling him gay would generally fail as a predictive model of the world, he isn't likely to act like the other people I call gay.
Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is knowing it doesn't belong in a fruit salad.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
Those two definitions are going to sometimes return conflicting signals. One definition is essentially the definition of a crime or a sin, a thief is someone who takes something that isn't theirs. The other is the definition of a predilection or a disease, a kleptomaniac is someone who constantly desires to steal things. Conflating the two definitions leads to communications breakdowns.
A frat boy who wakes up still drunk and drives his lifted Jeep Wrangler home and kills a moron cyclist riding his bike at 4am* is a killer, in the sense that his actions caused the death of another, and he is guilty of the appropriate crime of manslaughter. But he isn't a killer in the sense that a hitman or a gangbanger is, or even in the sense that a Navy SEAL who has never committed a crime** is a killer. We learn nothing about the frat boy's (literal) killer instinct or bloodlust from his drunk driving disaster, it has little predictive value as to the risk that he will kill again. Vehicular manslaughter, as a crime of killing, is mostly non-predictive of a tendency towards killing in other situations. Similarly, special categories exist, killing in the military is poorly predictive of killing in civilian life.
Normally these two definitions of gay will work together. If you want to have sex with a dude, your attraction algorithm probably contains other dudes. But having never been to Thailand or spoken with a ladyboy customer, idk what their attraction algorithms look like. Certainly I doubt most of the gay men I know want to have sex with a post-surgery (breasted) tranny.
*Me
**lol
I'm kind of excluding you and me from the category "everyone" here. I guess "everyone relevant on the political spectrum" would be more accurate, but less felicitous.
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