TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
Leftist conspiracy theories are arguably much worse because they tend to be held by people in positions in power, compared to powerless yokels on the right.
Republicans hold power approximately 50% of the time in the US. Like... uh... you do know who's president now, right?
Mainstream people on the left hold the conspiracy belief that low African-American test scores are the result of systematic racism.
Not a conspiracy, as I explained to FCfromSSC
Dingbats like Tucker and Candace have low status audiences.
They're big audiences though. Tucker and Candace are regularly near the top of the biggest podcasts in the US. They're very influential within MAGA.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
These largely aren't conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are typically things that allege multiple actors secretly coordinating for malign purposes, while concealing the real plan from the public.
Some of these like "Trump is a Russian asset" are borderline I suppose, where weak versions are just normal partisan attacks while strong versions definitely do veer into conspiracism.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
That's not what "charity" means in the context of political discussions.
And I remember in the wake of his death that a lot of people on this site it was "too soon" to say anything negative about him. It's been a full year and that's still not long enough? He was a political operative, who helped accelerate the Republican party's epistemological decay. That's worth discussing at some point.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
Both sides
Conspiracism isn't nearly as big of an issue on the Left today compared to the Right. At least not without sneakily changing the definition of a conspiracy theory to "partisan fact I disagree with", which is different.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
No I don't really blame Napoleon III for being unable to address France's demographic issues for the reason you laid out: nobody's really demonstrated a consistent way to fix it. That's why I said he had a mediocre hand.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
There's a difference between winning an election on a platform (which demonstrates some baseline level of popularity) and actually pushing it through, and then sustaining it in the long term. So yeah, Republicans might not have gotten long-term victories on the issue in 2010, but it was still a priority that some voters were willing to push for.
And you don't have to go that far back in time to find more unconditional fiscal health. The US was fine in the 1970s for instance.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
The material value is held constant, that's the point, and that's why we use it to see how real goods have changed cost, not in fake currency
Just because it's a physical good doesn't mean it's somehow "true" value in a metaphysical sense. Physical goods are just as susceptible to speculative price spirals as intangible goods. It was true for tulips and it's true for gold.
Looking at a single good like beef is also bad since it mistakes perennial supply chain issues with long term trends. It's almost exactly like the comparison in egg prices people were making against Biden, which were a short-term issue that were resolved once chicken herds recovered. Beef prices are almost guaranteed to follow a roughly similar trajectory.
Yes, there are specific goods where an hour of work in 2026 might earn you less than it did in 1975. But that's not true of the prices of things overall.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
In what way is it uncharitable?
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
I'm nothing if not consistent on some points.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
American conservatives have an allergy to having the state give money to the poor which they know is going to disproportionately go to blacks. But it certainly didn't stop America's penchant for shoveling money to the Olds through SS + Medicare. It might have even supercharged that to some degree as a replacement for typical socialism. America isn't that much less socialist than the rest of Europe.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
Napoleon III flitted from whim to whim, and France's population growth slowed substantially which essentially ensured it would no longer be the pre-eminent land power in Europe. Then he utterly failed to contain the rise of Prussia, which would go on to wreck France in multiple wars over the next century. A lot of this wasn't his direct fault, but Napoleon III certainly played a mediocre hand badly.
And yeah, I also think Trump is a step below Napoleon III.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
The median voter's commitment to deficit reduction was indeed waning by the 90s, so the achievements of Clinton and Paul Ryan were short-lived. It was still alive to some extent which is how they were possible in the first place, but this was no longer the 70s or even the 80s.
How did the modern electorate get to be the modern electorate
Simple: The primary problem is that voters in both parties really, really love shovelling money to the Olds. The issue is Social Security and Medicare. D's like giving money to the poor, which disproportionately goes to Blacks, but that's not the primary issue. It's the voters worshiping SS + Medicare.
In death, Charlie Kirk reaped what he sowed.
It's the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. On his death, there were many in the Right who believed he could serve as the martyr that would finally force the Right to "get serious". This meant very different things to different people from retaliating for cancel culture, to aggressively implementing Trump's immigration agenda, to turning the US into an outright dictatorship and instituting the Day of the Rope. In the end, none of this happened since his death got bogged down in endless conspiracies.
It's no secret that the Republican party under MAGA really likes conspiracies. They let you substitute wishcasting for evidence. Kirk pushed a lot of conspiracy theories from big ones like [The 2020 election was stolen] to [Aghanistan's collapse was engineered to import D voters] to [J6 was instigated by the FBI/Antifa/BLM]. He also pushed smaller ones that are closer to simple misinformation, like implying the Covid vaccine makes you blind and paralyzed. But for Kirk, all of these conspiracies were instrumental. They all pointed in the same direction: helping the Republican party, or more specifically Trump.
But conspiracy theories have a tendency to mutate. When you let in epistemological rot like this, some of it might end up being turned against you during the course of factional infighting. That's exactly what happened in the case of Kirk's death. Sure, the official report from the mainstream media (bah!) is that he was killed by some rando named Tyler Robinson. But... isn't that just a little too convenient?
Tucker Carlson eulogized Kirk by presenting the Biblical narrative as a story powerful people in Jerusalem “sitting around eating hummus,” adding that “there’s always one guy with the bright idea, and I can just hear him say, ‘I’ve got an idea. Let me just kill him.’”
Candace Owens opened her show the day after Kirk's memorial by mocking Erica Kirk and claiming Charlie had been "betrayed" by someone within the TPUSA, either Jewish donors or Erika Kirk herself because golly gee, didn't Charlie's wife seem a little too enthused about going on camera after his death?
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
Fiscal responsibility was an election winning platform in both the 90s and in 2010. The idea that Republicans save and the Democrats spend it all to win all the elections is not accurate.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
Wages today are higher in real terms, not just nominal terms.
Gold is a bad metric since it's highly speculative these days. The past year especially has seen gold rise at very high rates disconnected from any actual underlying material value. If gold is your metric then Obama, Trump 1, and to a large extent even Biden were great presidential terms, while Trump 2 has been an economic catastrophe. Obviously this isn't really the case.
The idea that people are poorer today than they were 25, 50, or 100 years ago is a popular populist talking point but it's just consistently wrong.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
Another round of looting the country.
Another round of justifying it by exaggerating the outgroup's policies and claiming "we're only spending in retaliation for how much spending THOSE guys did!!!"
Another round of populist-induced amnesia where everyone forgets the country was on solid financial footing a few decades ago.
Another round of everyone looking around for where the money went, while conveniently forgetting about Social Security and Medicare.
Another round of the electorate thinking the deficit is fake, and that we could trivially fix it if only we targeted [favored boogeyman] (choose one or more of foreigners, immigrants, billionaires).
It's all so tiresome.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
Can we just agree Trump is now Caesar?
I don't like this comparison because Caesar had a successful military career and was overall competent in many respects. Trump is much closer to a jumped-up Hugo Chavez or Napoleon III.
Democracy just doesn’t work in non Anglo and definitely non European societies. It’s time for an emperor.
Democracy is fine, it's the electorate that's the problem. And an actual dictatorship would almost certainly be worse in the long run.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
Immigrants are actually less likely to engage in crime than natives overall. Deporting the criminal immigrants can produce a small effect, but Trump basically ran out of criminal immigrants a while ago.
The pay and hiring is likely to be concentrated in a few sectors, and normie voters have a consistently bad habit of focusing only on the negatives. They'll ignore any positive economic effect attributing it to their own "hard work", and then complain about $15 burritos or whatever.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
The "trap" is rising expectations where families respond to having more money by blowing it on stuff like bigger houses, vacations, and fancy crap. It's a normal human reaction, but not one many people are aware that they'll likely fall into themselves, and then they become unhappy when they have to have 2 people working to maintain the same spot on the lifestyle treadmill.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
Wages today are significantly higher than before the days when women entered the workforce.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
Are you arguing against the main point that ICE slackened standards? If you are, this article supports my point quite explicitly with an ICE insider (who voted for Trump) saying "they lowered standards". And again, it would be very difficult for any company or agency to hire at this rapid of a clip without cutting corners.
And I don't understand the point your making on a lot of the smaller claims.
- Are you claiming financial difficulties are a non-issue for ICE agents? It makes them much more susceptible to bribery, which is why ICE normally wouldn't take them if they knew about it beforehand.
- Are you claiming that a case being dismissed with prejudice somehow vindicates Penland? The county paid out 75K to settle the issue, and then dismissing it with prejudice is a routine judicial procedure where the case is ended permanently.
- Are you claiming with the 170 / 582,000 number is the full extent of the problem? The 170 figure is a deliberately incomplete count, with reporting explicitly saying this was a (significant) undercount since the government doesn't track these incidents.
But I don't think those specific issues are particularly important relative to the overall trend.
Doing the same thing they're doing in all the other states, but it's "targeted" because "political experts say", even as they admit that the state is a hotbed for immigrant fraud.
Trump's own statements heavily implied this. It's not "political experts say". It's stuff like Trump responding to questions about Minnesota immigration enforcement with non-sequiturs like "it's a corrupt voting state. I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times."
Minneapolis is just the only one that had Walz staffers and government employees actively coordinating activist harassment and likely using internal government tracking data such as license plate readers to help the activists impede and harass agents.
Not a thing. Amanda Koehler had worked in D politics previously but that's very different from the Walz admin itself coordinating obstruction or leaking government surveillance data.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
When was the last time a "small-government republican" to actually took meaningful steps to reduce the size and scope of the federal government?
Paul Ryan at least took meaningful steps towards this goal at the height of the Tea Party movement shortly after 2010. Before that the Republicans effectively boxed in Clinton and got him to reduce the deficit in the 90s.
When was the last time a president of either party took meaningful steps to reduce illegal immigration
Biden did near the end of his term after letting in 10 million. Trump 1 and Obama were both fairly decent at constraining the flow of illegals. Trump 1 tried to attack the stock of illegals but mostly failed.
Trump's only real substantive changes were tax cuts through deficit explosion (bad!) and SCOTUS nominations (good, but mostly due to McConnell).
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
The Republican party also gained quite a lot of political capital from their stances during this time. They were even able to effectively box Bill Clinton in and get him to balance the budget somewhat. These were popular measures that helped win Republicans elections, since there were enough voters who valued these things relative to other priorities to make it so.
Again, the idea that balanced budgets are political poison akin to cooperating in a defector's game is an overwhelmingly modern phenomenon based on how the electorate moved. The problem is the modern electorate.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
Incentivizing people not to work is in fact a bad thing. If it led to a significant spike in fertility then maybe it might be justifiable. This is not the case, however.
I'm not sure what you think Warren's book does to buttress your argument. The thrust of her book is that when people have more money from an additional worker in the family, they spend that money on things instead of saving it.
The anniversary produces an upsurge of talk about the topic, and then some of that talk is negative. It's not unheard of, or even particularly uncommon to hear things like "MLK cheated on his wife" on Apr 4 (the anniversary of his assassination) or on MLK day.
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