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Notes -
Alright folks, election is over, now it's predictions time! I want your predictions for what actually gets done in terms of the Republican party platform for 2024, from this site:https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform
I'm just going to go with the top 10. Now of course these are not precisely defined predictions, but in general I'm going to be predicting something like "is this problem solved, to where the majority of Republican voters would feel it's either no longer an issue, or at least will be happy with what got changed?"
Let me know if you have thoughts on a better way to do this. Now, onto the predictions!
1 SEAL THE BORDER AND STOP THE MIGRANT INVASION
I give this a 70% chance, high conf. that major action is taking to secure the border, make illegal immigrants' lives worse in the U.S.
2 CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY
I'd give this a 15% chance, med. confidence. This one is a doozy.
3 END INFLATION, AND MAKE AMERICA AFFORDABLE AGAIN
30% chance, low confidence. Too many factors in the economy and I don't trust Trump's plan.
4 MAKE AMERICA THE DOMINANT ENERGY PRODUCER IN THE WORLD, BY FAR!
60% chance, med. confidence. There is a lot of low hanging fruit. If Trump and co. can wrangle the bureaucracy, this could happen!
5 STOP OUTSOURCING, AND TURN THE UNITED STATES INTO A MANUFACTURING SUPERPOWER
30% chance, low confidence. It's definitely possible, but rising prices of goods makes this real unpopular.
6 LARGE TAX CUTS FOR WORKERS, AND NO TAX ON TIPS!
40% chance, medium confidence. Gosh I hope so!
7 DEFEND OUR CONSTITUTION, OUR BILL OF RIGHTS, AND OUR FUNDAMENTAL FREEDOMS, INCLUDING FREEDOM OF SPEECH, FREEDOM OF RELIGION, AND THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS
95% chance, high confidence. I don't see freedoms/rights getting worse under Trump, personally.
8 PREVENT WORLD WAR THREE, RESTORE PEACE IN EUROPE AND IN THE MIDDLE EAST, AND BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY -- ALL MADE IN AMERICA
95% chance, low conf. we avoid WW3 under a Trump term. 80% chance we end the war in Europe, med. confidence. Idk about the dome
9 END THE WEAPONIZATION OF GOVERNMENT AGAINST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
40% chance, medium confidence anything significant gets done. The Deep State goes Deep.
10 STOP THE MIGRANT CRIME EPIDEMIC, DEMOLISH THE FOREIGN DRUG CARTELS, CRUSH GANG VIOLENCE, AND LOCK UP VIOLENT OFFENDERS
55% chance, medium competence. I think cracking down on crime is doable but, again, quite unpopular for optics. we'll see.
Reason: "Neither Harris nor Trump Is a Friend of Free Speech"
Can't speak to the flag burning, but the airwaves are publicly owned and granted by the government. If they are being flagrantly misused to spread proven lies and undermine the public which owns them, why shouldn't the license get pulled?
Likewise, libel and slander laws exist. Why shouldn't Trump avail himself of them same as people have against him?
I’m sure if Trump actually had a legally compelling case he would have already filed, but he hasn’t. That implies to me that he wants to reduce libel protections. (I don’t think he wants that for idealogical reasons, or even has strong convictions about it. I think he’s just personally upset.)
Plus, ‘undermining the public’ goes both ways. Should news organizations reporting on ‘Haitians are eating the cats’ be shut down?
Listen, he lost a libel case for denying he raped a woman. Because now if you deny you committed a crime, that's calling the person accusing you a liar, and that's libel.
A lot of people have lied about him. "Compelling case"? I hardly see how that matters.
Only in the most tortured interpretation of events. He actually lost the case for calling Carroll a liar, saying she was only accusing him to get publicity for herself and sell books, implying that she was working for the Democrats and/or that she was paid and suggesting she should 'pay dearly' for her accusations. It wasn't some legal trickery by which his denial was construed as implying she was a liar, he literally said she had made it up to sell books.
Didn't she?
Let's say I accuse you of raping me. You know that you have never raped me. You can honestly say you're innocent! You can also say, with 100% certainty that I am making it up. It shouldn't be libel for you to say that I'm making it up, because you are in a position where you can say that with certainty. Maybe I made it up because I am mentally unstable. But if I was also publicizing a book at the time, then you could reasonably infer that I made up to sell the book.
And this seems like the inference that everyone makes. Most liberals take this libel suit as evidence that Trump has been proven of rape in court.
I suppose this depends on the semantics of 'proven'. But the jury did in fact find that Trump had sexually abused Carroll (though not raped her), so in that sense he has been proven of sexual abuse (and of actual malice in his statements) in (a) court.
https://www.scribd.com/document/644110955/gov-uscourts-nysd-590045-174-0-1
If you want to make the case that Trump was reasonable to accuse her of lying, fine, but that's not the argument @WhiningCoil was making, who said that Trump had merely denied the accusations and that counter-accusation of lying was merely something people had read into his initial denial, not something he had explicitly done himself. However that would be merely a critique of the factual findings of the jury, not of their logic or of that of the trial/libel laws/judicial system themselves.
The jury's findings are about as ridiculous to me as Cardinal Pell's conviction in Australia. The story as portrayed has no basis in reality. It is really telling that Carroll's story was that Trump raped her and the jury didn't agree. Carroll's story is that Trump met the legal definition of rape - penetration with a penis - but the jury disagreed. The jury collectively said, "No, your story breaks the laws of physics and anatomy, but we will just change your testimony to 'fingers' instead of 'penis' and then pretend that doesn't have implications on the reliability on the rest of what you said."
It's not semantic to say that there is a crucial standard of evidence lacking that would have been required in a criminal conviction.
It is natural, when denying an allegation, to provide an alternative explanation for the facts. It is part and parcel of denying an allegation. If you ask a kid if she ate a cookie, she will deny it by saying, "No, the dog ate it." The explanation is part of the denial. It shouldn't be libel to provide an alternative explanation when someone is accusing you of something.
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He actually did file two lawsuits recently.
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Because of the 1A. Fox News and OAN should be allowed to broadcast their opinions. The regime shouldn't be in the business of telling them what they can and cannot say. Trump is arguably a public figure, although some people are saying he is a Marxist born in Kenya. Big if true.
Fox News is cable though.
I think a lot of people have forgotten what Broadcast means and why there's a legal distinction.
In short, there is a limited spectrum of channels we can have on broadcast TV and radio. There are strict rules that the government has implemented to ensure that this limited resource is allocated "fairly." It's not like the Internet where everyone can talk at once.
I don’t see any good reason the current broadcast arrangement can’t be torn up, it no longer serves the same public purpose it had back before cable news and the internet.
It’s basically just a structural subsidy to a cartel at this point.
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I don’t think the first amendment requires giving person A, B, and C a subsidy that isn’t given to anyone else. In fact, one could flip this on its head and say providing the subsidy is harming the freedom of speech rights of others (since relatively speaking their speech is more expensive)
My response is silent on the subsidy. I'm asking who decides what is "fake news", or whether speech "undermines the public?". Trump says his regime should determine that, in accordance wit his whims. The Reason article points out why this might be a bad idea as far as the 1A is concerned.
But this is my problem with Reason types—they never account for context. Yes, it would be bad if government routinely goes around punishing people for speech the government doesn’t like. But it would also be bad if the government routinely went around rewarding folks for speech the government likes.
So NBC, ABC, and CBS get billions of dollars free subsidies from the government. They were rewarded with this because it was thought broadcasting things like the news was in the public interest. But it has become obviously clear that those three organizations aren’t broadcasting the news but acting as an appendage of the DNC. Why should the government subsidize the speech of the DNC?
Take away the subsidy and let ABC, NBC, or CBS bid on the broadband. Use the money to pay down debt.
Thats an entirely different argument. If thats where the goalposts are, then Reason types would be on board, as it isn't about one man labeling something "fake news". The context is very different from what is being proposed team Trump which sneaks in viewpoint discrimination under the guise of free speech.
If he is actually consistent of free speech, then there wont be objections by reason types.
Ehh we shall see. And those are proposals being put out by people close to Trump (eg Sacks).
These are the same reason types who got upset about mask bans when ignoring the giant thumb government had put on masking.
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He doesn't just want to use existing laws, he said he wants to 'open up' libel laws. It's also just pretty pathetic - did Obama ever threaten to sue Birtherists for libel, much less threaten to 'open up' the laws to get at them?
Obama had a media environment an order of magnitude more friendly to him and his goals, there is simply no comparison between the simpering star struck media under Obama and the vast open collusion between the great majority of the media & academic landscape to take every opportunity to blatantly attack, lie and mislead about Trump.
This is a pretty revealing answer, since it indicates that the real grievance isn't actual libel, it's the overall hostile media landscape, and it's pretty chilling for a President to suggest that laws be changed in order that he can lash out against media outlets that don't like him. If he's that sensitive to partisan or negative coverage, he shouldn't be in politics.
Not quite as revealing as you might think; laws are made for man, not men for the law.
If a law or set of laws are not working as intended or being enforced unevenly, you change the law. The point of a law is what it does. The point of Libel / slander / defamation laws is to prevent large public actors from egregiously publicly lying on purpose in order to damage or destroy someone.
There’s nothing inconsistent in thinking that those laws exist for a reason, and seeing the Trump case as a good example of why those laws exist, noting that they clearly aren’t having the desired deterrent effect, and then saying we need to do something about that.
We’ve completely sacralized massive media companies, to their benefit. But they can be shamelessly bad actors too in the same way that companies that make chemicals, arms, cars, etc are.
I’m not necessarily agreeing that “opening up” libel laws in the right move, but there’s nothing inherently incoherent or pernicious about it.
This problem still existed under Obama it was just camouflaged by a sycophantic relationship between big media and power.
Fine, that's a legitimate point (which I completely disagree with but let's leave that for one second), but it's still probably a bad idea to have a sitting President be the one to make that case. If there is one person with reference to whom we probably ought to err on the side of freedom of speech as regards libel, it is the President. If libel laws really should be broader, it should be very easy to make that case without having to centre it around a politician who dislikes what his media opponents say.
What accusations/lies against Trump from mainstream media figures do you think Trump is currently prevented from taking libel actions against that he ought to be able to if and when an 'opened' libel regime took effect (and that represents some higher/more sinister plane of lying that any previous President did not have to deal with)?
So here’s the departure for me; while I don’t find the idea around reforming libel laws necessarily objectionable, I don’t actually agree that this is the best strategy.
Trump tends to take the most extreme opening love as a bargaining chip, which is a common business tactic and something he outlined as part of his preferred strategy in “The Art of the Deal”.
I think legacy media alternatives like long form podcasts, Twitter/X and Substack are completely eating the legacy media’s lunch, and the worst actors are suffering the necessary consequences of tanking their reputation after so many years of blatant lies and manipulation.
I’m personally quite optimistic that the necessary change is already well on its way through pure consumer choice and the breaking of the hard wall of censorship & collusion. The preference cascade is already here, political capital is better spent elsewhere.
I don’t know enough specifics about current libel law to spell out which particular things are actionable, but I do hope that the trump organization litigates to the maximum extent possible through current law without trying to force a square peg through a round hole.
As for the uniquely dishonest treatment of Trump by the media, that’s eight plus years in the making with too many example to name.
The Russia Hoax is the obvious big one, but I distinctly remember the first small example I saw myself that made my radar go off just a tad; it was his during his first trip to Japan, the whole fish food row with Shinzo Abe. This footage starts exactly a few seconds after Abe overturns his box of fish food over, but is cut where it was to make Trump maximally look like an oaf when he was just following Abe’s lead.
That stupid footage was like a whole news cycle, super early in his presidency. And it just got progressively worse after that. After the tenth incident like that I simply started to assume I was being lied to when someone said something negative about him, and I tended to be right much more often than not.
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Completely agree. Anyone broadcasting vaccine misinformation or transphobia contradicting consensus public health science on public airwaves should be shut down.
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Because "public" does not exist - it's just an imaginary entity to make our conversations easier, but there's no actual thing as "public" that owns anything. What actually happens is that the government functionaries are controlling the speech over the airwaves, and as we have found out multiple times, they can not be trusted not to abuse this function, even if they have best intentions at the start. And being human, they rarely even have the best intentions. That's why the best method to prevent the abuse is to deny them the power of control.
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Re: #2 a reporter asked J.D. Vance something like "how are you going to round up and deport 10 million people".
He said this, which I think is a great answer:
Secure the border and stop new people from coming in
Arrest and deport the 500,000-1 million known criminals who have sneaked into the country
Prosecute people who hire illegal immigrants so that they self-deport
It baffles me that no previous Republican government has done this. It's such an obvious low-hanging fruit. The fact that JD is suggesting it makes me think that this may be the first US government who actually want to reduce illegal immigration.
And it always baffles me how people don't conclude that maybe Republicans haven't done this because they can't.
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The people who employ illegal immigrants tend to ones that republicans want to keep happy.
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It’s almost as if the Mitt Romney types liked having all those illegal immigrants driving down wages.
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Yeah I think Trump can easily win #2 if you include self-deportations, even if his program isn't particularly effective in terms of per capita removals, there's just a lot of people here who will probably leave.
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There's also things that could be emulated from the example of Tony Abbot in Australia — were Trump and Congress able to get such things enforced. But it doesn't matter how much they want to do the things you list, when all the permanent bureaucrats actively work against them.
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Pretty much nothing, because the Constitution hasn't described the actual structure and functioning of our government for at least 80 years, and so, no matter what powers the president and congress are s'pose'da have according to musty old texts nobody in DC cares about, in reality they have basically no power over the Permanent Bureaucracy.
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Let’s have some ‘black-pilling’ on the mass deportation front.
Mandatory nationwide e-verify and fines for employers (which will probably be blocked by liberal GOP senators + the filibuster anyway) aren’t going to lead to millions of illegal Central Americans self-deporting. By the way, many European countries already have their equivalents of this and still huge huge numbers of illegal migrants. American hospitals will still (under their own duties of care) treat these people for free when they walk in with an ailment, charities will still feed them, plenty of people will still hire them cash-in-hand or in less than scrupulous businesses.
Even the shittiest, worst life possible in America is still an order of magnitude better than life in Guatemala or Honduras for anyone but the tiny local elite. No threats are capable of leading to self-deportation for the bulk of illegal immigrants. They will always take their chances in the US. The worst life possible in the US is better than the average life in Haiti. Heavy enforcement may affect things at the margins, but not the majority.
The pull factor will remain as long as birthright citizenship does. For the last 25 years, the number 1 test for any GOP nominated SCOTUS judge should have been “Will you rule birthright citizenship unconstitutional”, because this is the ONLY thing that matters when it comes to immigration. Instead they decided that maximizing the production of underclass babies was the central duty of American conservatism, and here we are with ACB and so on. Parents sacrifice themselves for their children every day, it is a fundamental behavior. As long as an illegal immigrant evades ICE long enough to have a child (and America is a big, big place), their descendants are as American as you or I. As long as this is the case, illegal immigration will always be huge.
#2 is true for Haiti, but not as much for other parts of Latin America. Honduras, Guatemala, etc are crappy places to live, but they’re ‘normal lower middle income country’ crappy, not ‘Haiti Afghanistan and the worst parts of sub Saharan Africa’ crappy. There are plenty of underclass Americans who split a rented bedroom in a bad neighborhood, ride bikes, and eat shitty food while working two crappy jobs. You are drastically overestimating the standard of living of Americans who, for whatever reason, cannot function normally.
On the other hand, economic growth in Mexico and declining TFR in Latin America reduces immigration pressure to begin with.
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I wouldn't be that black-pilled.
Looking at the illegal immigrant numbers under Trump and then again under Biden you see a huge spike. We will now revert to the 2016-2020 Trump numbers or maybe even less because he's got more buy in this time.
Not everyone will self-deport, but some will. It's probably already happening. Somewhere there is a migrant who is 50/50 on whether to stay or go. Trump's election alone will push him to 51/49 and he'll leave.
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What about the Tony Abbot method, as described by the Dreaded Jim here:
…
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I think appointing judges who would rule the constitution unconstitutional is bad actually.
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I got curious in just asking, "What was the largest deportation operation in American history to date," i.e., what's the line he has to beat? Operation Wetback? Wiki says something about a little over a million "returns", but I'm fresh to the immigration lingo and had to look into "returns" vs. "removals". I guess that "returns" can include anyone who is caught, but basically doesn't fight it in court; just says, "Ya got me; take me hoooommmeeeee." Whereas "removals" have formal deportation orders. I believe that a "return" could also include silly examples, like an example of someone I heard about who screwed up and applied for their visa too early (for another country) such that it expired before they got there, but nobody caught it before they flew there, so they were turned back at the airport.
So, I wonder which curve is he getting graded on? Then I found that removals were still stupid low in the years of Operation Wetback compared to more recent times. Returns at that time look to be about 2/3rds of the peak. Eyeballing totals would put the peak in 2000, something like 1.85M (driven by the peak in returns, around 1.7M). Removals peaked in 2013 at about 400k. There's a few more years in the less-immediately-readable more recent yearbook.
Concretely, on what metric would this prediction market resolve?
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Alright, I'll bite.
Hah, quite a line right here! but fair. Thanks for biting friend.
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I wrote last week about how my circle was reacting poorly to the Trump win, but also how their reaction wasn't as bad as 2016. My latest update is, it's still pretty bad, probably worse than it was last week, but still not quite as bad as 2016. But I'm starting to get that feeling again like I'm the crazy one, simply on the basis that everyone I know in meatspace seems to think a complete disaster has befallen us. Furthermore, I think I need to retract my previous statement that my exposure to this strong sentiment is because I went to a very leftist college. I'm now seeing a lot more of this from people who I know outside of that school.
I have a number of people posting multiple times per day about some kind of issue du jour, ranging from high school boys chanting the Nick Fuentes thing, to screeds about how people will (literally) die due to Trump being in charge, for whatever reasons. And I spent the weekend with family and friends who wouldn't stop talking about it, also. It was a lot of signaling and complaining and without any real acknowledgement that over half of the country voted for Trump, including huge gains in lots of minority groups, and that maybe that means something.
So far, from a personal standpoint, this is not off to a good start, and I worry this next four years will be as personally trying as the previous four, with regards to my ability to keep my cool and not feel like a crazy person when surrounded by those in my life and their insistent attitude about Trump. Personally this is starting to make me want future Democrat wins, but not because I believe in the Democrats. If the dems win, my life mostly stays the same. If the Republicans win, my life gets worse just because people around me can't deal with it. But I also can't bring myself to really take these people's fears seriously, since I do feel like this chicken little routine happens every time a Republican gets elected (from my limited experience), without the Republicans even doing anything that bad.
Are other people also seeing an escalating level of this sentiment? It seems maybe like the anti Trump machine had some rusty gears and a slow start, but it's starting to get going again.
That's part of the point of all of this, a goal of those stirring it up.
100% this. It's social pressure designed to wear you down so you grudgingly accept the woke madness America voted to unshackle itself from. You won and you have a mandate, act like it.
"Won" a bunch of figurehead offices with little-to-no power over the vast Permanent Bureaucracy (and associated institutions) that actually rules.
They tried to kill him so obviously they consider him a threat to their power.
Who is "they" here? Are you claiming the attempted assassins were not random nutjobs, but agents of the Deep State?
I mean, maybe one can say that parts of the Secret Service seemed remarkably unconcerned should something happen to him under their "protection," but 'if someone should take him out for us, that would be good' ≠ 'we need to take this guy out'.
Yes, I believe the Deep State tried to have him killed. My first thought after Biden's disastrous debate performance was that they would attempt to do so. Way too much was at stake for them to not even attempt it.
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too many weird issues with the situation and handling of it, to be just a lone wolf attack without institutional backing.
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My in laws are out of their damned minds. I saw a support thread for the subreddit in the region I moved away from. There was a thread where ladies were trying to find places to get their tubes tied.
I moved to a much more culturally tolerable area almost 4 years ago now. It's improved my quality of life by magnitudes. I highly recommend it. The private school we send our daughter to still has a lot of far lefties, because private school. But most people we run into, or other parents we meet at the park, are very culturally aligned with us.
I don't know how to deprogram people who uncritically believe every Democrat hoax from the last 8 years. They're in too deep at this point. My FIL was compulsively going off about how all the corporatist and oligarchs won, totally ignorant to the fact that Harris was the big money candidate with the most corporations and oligarchs behind her.
Take that, conservatives?
Yeah, the Republican women in my life are having the same sort of confused reaction, going “wait, they think that them choosing not to have unprotected sex is some kind of strike against the pro-life movement?”
But the framing is that the point behind pro-life advocacy is the goal of controlling and impregnating women. Fuentes and the teenage boys doing teenage boy things aren’t helping. But the fact that there’s a significant part of the population that’s going “wow, Fuentes is really showing us what the right is really like” instead of realizing he’s a shock jock provocateur who’s intentionally trying to troll indicates just how ingrained this interpretation is on the left.
The challenge with striking against the pro-life movement is it's unclear what exactly the pro-life movement wants. Do they want more children or fewer?
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I do not know why there’s a progressive idea that pro-life laws exist to boost the white fertility rate by controlling women(no reasonable person thinks that they do this- pro-life advocates are well aware of the color of the women getting abortions). But it seems like they literally actually believe this?
Of course being a sterile woman is not a good idea if the based patriarchy actually comes about.
I think some of this is a failure of theory of mind. I mean, I've seen plenty of examples, across both political and cultural divides, of people going "those people can't possibly believe what they say is their reason for doing this thing, so I need to figure out what their actual reason is." Nobody could actually believe a fetus is a human life, so therefore the pro-lifers must have some other, real reason for wanting to ban abortion, therefore…
Or an exchange about Hispanic votes in the election, which went something like:
Or the Native woman I stood in line behind at the welfare office about a decade ago and the half of her cellphone conversation I overheard, about her brother's legal trouble and about how, even if white people believe plenty of stuff, not even they could actually believe the theory upon which her brother was being charged, and that clearly they're just pretending so as to add further humiliation when locking up innocent Native men.
I mean, calling them Latinx also didn’t help the democrats. I’m really not surprised that someone who used that term unironically has no theory of mind of Hispanics(or anyone else- ‘we’re inventing a new and difficult to pronounce term for you because you might be transgender’ is, uh, not a way to appeal to blue collar people. And yes, that -nks sound is quite difficult for a native Spanish speaker to pronounce, just like those Russian and German consonant clusters are to Americans.)
The native woman also doesn’t shock me; people tend to take personal tragedies as so obviously unjust that they’re evidence of malice from whoever imposed them.
It’s the whole white nationalist plot to enslave women that seems strange to believe. I can get my head around a few people in ivory towers believing unevidenced things that can plausibly be connected to some real rhetoric(there are people who will cite demographic change as a reason to oppose immigration, and great replacement theory is really a thing that republicans believe). But white nationalists tend to be mostly aware that the women seeking abortions are fairly black- and everyone else is too. It just seems strange.
In that example, the thing that was so stupid not even white people could believe it? Well, she said things like "they'd been kissing," "she went into his bedroom," and that "everyone knows what happens after that" and that no human being on Earth could possibly believe a woman gets to "back out" once she's gone that far with a man, so charging him with sexual assault is just the White Man dunking on another innocent Native with a patently bogus "crime."
That doesn't actually fit my experience. The times I've talked IRL to left-wingers of my acquaintance, they've been rather ignorant of the racial breakdown of abortion in America, and rather surprised when I've introduced them to the stats.
Really not difficult to believe someone could think the current conception of consent is fantastical and ridiculous. I 100% believe that woman had the right to back out at the last minute, but that right was granted by man, not nature. Some primitives finding it shocking isn’t a surprise, especially when they’re closely related to the man in trouble for it.
Hmm. You seem to know more progressives than I do, although it seems like common knowledge.
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I mean, we can observe pro-lifers and find that many of them seem to value "enforced monogamy" a lot, but "lives for the sake of lives" not so much, and infer their actual motivation for banning abortion from that.
Based on how pro-lifers talk, I can see clearly how pro-choicers believe the conservatives don't care about the babies, they just want them to "take responsibility" and "not have casual sex".
Sure, it's not just "lives for the sake of lives", the child's innocence of any wrongdoing also enters the picture. Responsibility and the wisdom of having casual sex is mostly orthogonal to this issue.
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There is this infamous evolutionary just-so story from the manosphere days of yore titled War Brides. It is almost a 100% conjecture and goes like this:
Preposterous, right? And yet I cannot prevent me from thinking about this whenever I read another hysterical article about female Western journalists trying to make the 4b movement (essentially a Lysistrata-style boycott on sex and child bearing) happen in the West. Add to that a couple of social media posts about "not even my very progressive husband getting any for a long time" and a haphazard conclusion presents itself:
In the face of defeat, which woman in her right mind would mate with a member of the losing tribe?
Given that, which man in his right mind would remain a member of the losing tribe, if he had the option of converting? The bulk of the Afghan National Army could figure out the answer to that one, why not Western men?
If Trump keeps on winning so much that his fans become tired of winning AND if men living in larger cities can keep prestige employment while not swearing fealty to Woke Inc., it's reasonable to assume that we will see an even larger shift in the political realignment of men than the one we observe now.
They can borrow a page from Islam, and engage in taqiyya.
You say that as if it isn't already widespread practice.
(lays finger alongside nose)
Thanks for the reminder to rewatch The Sting.
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What has Trump actually won, really? What makes people — on both sides — think he's going to be any more "in charge" of the executive branch than Biden currently is?
I don't think he has. He has the track record of an unusually ineffective administrator.
But this is about perception and status. It's about who won the popularity contest, not about who's in charge of the bureau of boringness.
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From that NPR link on 4b:
Koreans didn't have a word for sex until the West brought them one?!
Don't know how it happened in Korea, but a lot European countries ended up borrowing it too. The native word for sex often feels (extremely) vulgar, and the non-vulgar alternatives are either vague euphemisms, clinical multi-word phrases or compound words in languages like German. "Sex" by comparison is pretty handy - short and neutral.
Also seems to be a thing in Japan, if some media is to be taken as representative.
Interestingly (to me) another euphemism for sex is etchi or エッチ which is itself the pronunciation of the letter H, which in turn is a representation of the romanization of the word 変態 (hentai or perversion).
The term's arduous journey softens the tone from the original hentai meaning--エッチ really just is a noun for sexual intercourse --but it's one of those weird words in Japanese.
There is a term 性行為 or sēkoi which means sex, but it's a clinical term (think "intercourse"). Sēi means sex or gender, koi means "deed" or "behavior."
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I think it just doesn't sound right otherwise. To match with the other terms, they need something that is short and not ambiguous. The standard term for the act of sex (sexual relations) is three syllables. They could shorten it to two, but then it would just mean "relationship".
There are also taboos about talking about sex, where even the common euphemisms and clinical terms are not uttered much in public. I guess using the English loanword is the most socially acceptable way to specify "act of sex" in print.
Also radfems seem to get their craziest ideas from their academic connections to the anglosphere, so they use loanwords more than the general public.
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Ditto on the 'moved out of a blue bubble' to a mixed area. It's remarkable how much chiller and more functional everything seems to be. I was just at my kid's Veteran's day pageant. Never once in my older child's school career (in Oak Park, IL) did they ever do anything Veteran related I ever knew about.
Anyway...that's the way Amerca works best: conservatives and liberals in neighborly competition trying to make difficult things work. I couldn't see it from within the Blue Bubble of Chicago.
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Ask them what tangible thing they predict and what concrete plans they have to mitigate it. Worked wonders the last time around when the "Trump (2016) is going to put the gays in camps!" hysteria was all the rage. You can even feign ignorance if that's more up your alley.
Who's this Donald Trump guy? Wasn't he on the Apprentice or something?
A civil war you say? In Spain?
I unironically think probably the best way to get people to drop the histrionics and making politics their primary identity is to just lead a happy life and flamboyantly feign ignorance of anything political. Oh, I didn't vote. Or, I voted Trump, because Biden banned abortion.
You can't reason people out of something they didn't reason themselves into.
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You know, that actor who played the bad guy in Two Weeks Notice
I thought he was in "Home Alone 2"?
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As much as I hate remakes in most cases, I keep imagining a modern take on Back to the Future featuring a Cybertruck and an oblique reference like this to the "Who is the president in 1985?" "Ronald Reagan." "Ronald Reagan? The actor?" gag.
"The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with a complete lack of style?"
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I've often dreaded the inevitable Back to the Future remake/reboot that Hollywood will jump on once the stubborn owners of the franchise die off. I just wonder how they'll manage the whole central plot line involving near-incest and a boy punching out another boy in order to protect a girl and win her heart.
Marty McFly will have to be a woman, likely black and gay/bi. Martina's equivalent-age father from the 90s being sexually aggressive towards her just isn't going to be as funny as the actual male Marty getting sexually assaulted by his equivalent-age mother from the 50s. Changing it to her mother could work for laughs and for the spectacle, but then the central plot being around getting her lesbian/bi/bi-curious mother to pair up with her father would probably not be acceptable to Hollywood.
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These are the biggest things I've seen them be afraid about:
I never understood what people think the mechanism is that connects the re-election of Trump with worse access to abortion than is present in the status quo. These are the only things I can think of:
I agree this almost certainly won't happen now because the margins in the Senate and House probably don't allow for it, but in the world in which Republicans made a more convincing sweep of both chambers it wasn't off the table, surely. Certainly, had a ban reached Trump's desk I doubt he'd have had the guts to defy most of the Republican party by vetoing it.
It really depends on whether Trump or the rest of the GOP is more willing to call the other’s bluff.
When I put it that way, you already know the answer. I suspect Trump would sign a 15 week abortion ban(he opposes late term abortions), but the Republican Party doesn’t defy trump well at all.
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Most people don’t know Jack about constitutional law. Many of them thought Roe was the only thing keeping abortion legal and that it would automatically become illegal everywhere the second it was overturned. They probably think Trump can and will ban abortion with an executive order.
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To steelman:
And this is something that's not that objectionable, but it's also extremely likely to have a number of very unpleasant numbers reported by a government agency.
Great steelman, thanks! I am updating towards some of the panic being less unfounded than I previously thought.
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"Women's reproductive health" paired with "threat to our democracy" were the core planks of the Harris campaign and she lost on them because they didn't hold up to reality.
Anyone who ranks those two "issues" as their top two is not seriously engaged with reality. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that. They probably function well in a day-to-day sense (hygiene, going to work, performing chores etc.) but their comprehension of American Federal and Constitutional Law, geopolitical realities, cultural currents, and a theory-of-mind for about 70m other Americans is zero.
I see a lot of political campaigning - "messaging" - as starting with a true but boring premise and then stacking a lot of vibes on top of it. Harris' true messaging core was "I am not Trump." This is plainly and obviously correct. But "I'm not the other candidate" isn't actually a campaign strategy, so you have to build something more substantial on top of it - or do you?
The Harris campaign decided to layer vibes-on-vibes. Abortion is now a loser of a topic because American's are (1) Very self-contradictory on how they feel about it and (2) As exit polls showed, American's are able to separate candidate-from-issue in regards to abortion. Trump won Missouri, and Missouri based state abortion protections.
The "threat to our democracy" narrative is a different loser. For those on the fence, it comes across as histrionic, overwrought, and hyperbolic. You can play doom-edited videos of January 6th all you want but the fact of the matter is it's old hat. It also begs the question - if Trump is such a threat to democracy are you, Kamala Harris, advocating for vigilante justice should you lose? Will you actually organize an armed resistance of some sort. No no, of course not. Peaceful transition of power and all that. For your own supports, it creates a sense of mission where the stakes are too high. If I'm a Harris support (haha, it's fun to laugh) and I truly believe the "threat to democracy" line ... how can I even have a conversation with a Trump supporter or someone still deciding?
So, if these are loser issues, why make them platform planks? Because a lot of politics comes down to ingroup / outgroup and it's easy to default to ingroup sloganeering and vibes. Much like the Hillary campaign, 50% of the Harris defeat is on the fact that she ran a dogshit campaign and made the worst VP pick in history (Sarah Palin no longer GOAT'ed). I'm starting to see some stories that Shapiro said no to Harris and not the other way around ("We didn't break up, I dumped you!") but I consider this to be ex post facto spinning.
But then again, I'm probably wrong. Trump's across the board win - Electoral, Popular, house, senate - paired with 95% (approx) of American counties drifting right compared to 2020 really does mean this is a realignment.
I'm not sure why this begs that question. Thinking that Trump is a threat to democracy as well as that responding to his victory via armed resistance would be an even bigger threat to democracy are both compatible positions to hold.
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I mostly just brag about how much money my portfolio is making. Oh? You believed all those economist that said the economy would be devastated if Trump won? Again?!
I'm already up $100,000 on my fairly modest holdings, and it's been less than a week. At the rate we're going I might retire early in 4 years.
I'm KICKING myself that I didn't think to slide more money into $TSLA in the leadup to the election.
It was obvious that a Trump win would benefit Elon directly and bounce Tesla higher. It's up over 40% since the election.
I didn't even do anything different, because I'm not a reactionary investor. I just let everything I normally do ride. Granted, I have significant holdings of BTC, COIN and NVDA, and BTC and COIN seem to be directly benefiting from Trump optimism. But even my safer index funds and blue chip stocks have done fantastic this week.
I had money on Ted Cruz winning, and I otherwise decided to let things ride, which has paid off too thus far.
But I'm also selling off the last of my Crypto holdings for the time being because I STRONGLY suspect the current leap is overoptimistic, and it'll correct by or before January. For reference, I originally bought a (small) position in Bitcoin in 2014.
Ultimately yeah. I avoid reacting to any one event. But there are still times when I wish I had been bolder on certain moves.
It's hard to imagine an administration as hostile to Crypto as the Biden admin with Gary Gensler. Trump could follow through on zero of his promises, and shit canning Gary would still be an enormous boon for crypto.
It still suffers from the problem of not having much you can do with it aside store it for the long term.
And ultimately that's why I'm pulling out, I got other things I want to do with the money.
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I thought the stock market would go down if Trump won, so I was holding my money to buy stock after the election. Now the market is at an all-time high, so I'd feel dumb to buy now. Serves me right for listening to the media, I guess.
My existing portfolio is doing great, though.
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Instead of gloating and waging the culture war, please be better and have some empathy for those who have been facing mental health struggles with the outcome of an election that impacts the lives of millions of Americans, especially women and minorities.
For example, I’ve been in a real dark place since Wednesday.
The aftermath of the election exacerbated the situation I was already facing due to this market bull run since 2023, where my leveraged equity ETF allocation has grown far too quickly. My effective leverage ratio is far higher than I would like.
I’ve already exhausted my rebalancing options in tax-advantaged accounts. Selling to further rebalance in non-tax-advantaged accounts would result in substantial realized capital gains that would reduce my accumulated capital losses from 2022 and prior. My net worth to income ratio is such that I’d be unable to make a material dent in this with future income for at least several months. Why don’t I just make more money; am I stupid?
I’ve been buying short-term US treasury ETFs with newly earned income to try and reduce my leverage ratio (buying vanilla unleveraged equity ETFs reduces my leverage ratio too slowly). However, this feelsbadman: I’m earning the risk-free on the treasuries, while paying risk-free plus a presumed spread and a management fee on the leveraged ETFs (which tends to be hefty for leveraged ETFs).
How could Trump-voters do this to me?
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To be fair, I did a gentler version of this with my now-ex and she said he was going to repeal Roe and the ACA. I told her there was no way they'd get Roe past the supreme court, and, well, we had insurance through work so the ACA wouldn't hit us. She ended up being fairly accurate...
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I'm not seeing it personally. I even logged onto Facebook for the first time in ages and people seem to be posting about normal people stuff not politics.
I've encountered no wailing or gnashing or teeth or insane behavior.
But it's likely that TikTok is deliberately pushing that angle.
Try spending some time on Tumblr. Given the stereotype of your average Tumblrina, the responses have been exactly what you'd expect. Hundreds of thousands of women are going to die of miscarriages each year, and hundreds of thousands more are going to kill themselves to avoid being forced to give birth after being raped by their uncles. Latinx are going to be rounded up into death camps and mass-murdered. The "fascist Supreme court" is going to "overturn Brown v. Board and the entire 14th amendment" (Yes, those are literally from a post I saw.) Some claim the 13th amendment is getting repealed.
I didn’t even know that Tumblr still exists! I thought it died after Yahoo bought it and they banned porn.
Imagine the sort of Tumblr's who would stay on Tumblr without porn.
Well, just on current Tumblr-ites that also frequent this forum, there's at least me and@mitigatedchaos.
And me. I enjoy pretty pictures, birds, and occasional completely unhinged fandom takes. Compared to Twitter, I find it quite peaceful, and there's far less obnoxious political posts to scroll back, either supporting or in opposition to my views.
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And I approve! It was meant to be a joke, but I realize now it might have seemed a bit mean-spirited, which I apologize for.
It's actually as short as it is because I cut off a bit of a nerd spiel. One of my favored commentators for analyzing video games (specifically Elden Ring) was- for some unfathomable reason- only posting on Tumblr. It was just that level of 'niche access' and 'you have to really be dedicated to this topic' that I now associated with Tumblr, for its highs and its lows.
Could you provide a link/direction to said Tumblr? You posted an in-depth examination of the Ring Cycle/Elden Ring relation a while ago and I have been fascinated by the level of thought hidden away ever since, given that I almost entirely missed your interpretation of Ranni's storyline. I've been wanting to know more ever since.
The Tumblr person for EldenRing is @yournextflame.
I don't remember if they had anything about the Ring Cycle in their pieces- that was me just being more familiar with the director and the material- but they have some great cross-cultural insight into the Japanese language/connotation/cultural context that doesn't always translate to the English fandom.
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See also: Danegeld, negotiating with terrorists
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My personal social circle is unhappy and distressed and posting lots of doomer posts, but mostly sane. They think the world is going to suck with Trump in charge, but they aren't threatening to leave the country or start underground railroads or join the 4B movement.
Online, it's hard to tell to what degree all the cataclysmic tweets and videos from leftists melting down hysterically and screaming that we're going to enter an era of plantation slavery and the Handmaid's Tale are nutpicking (the reason LibsOfTikTok is so popular is that Millenials and Zoomers so freely provide so much content) and to what degree they reflect a genuine widespread sentiment.
I know that Tumblr is very far from a representative sample, but the histrionic posts coming across my dash thanks to the #politics tag have been plentiful enough to exceed mere "nutpicking."
Well, "very far from a representative sample" indeed. If there is anywhere that I would expect 90% of the posts to be hysterical meltdowns, it's Tumblr.
Incidentally I'm kind of amazed that the word 'hysterical' hasn't gotten y'alled yet.
I'm not sure what "y'alled" means. Is this a reference to some feminists saying it's a "gendered" insult?
It's a reference to such sentiments as "Instead of saying 'you guys', which is etc., try something like 'y'all!'" A typical example of a larger pattern.
Oy. I do that at work all the time. I'm actually afraid to say "you guys" anymore.
My Dad said y'all. My Grandpa said y'all. His father probably said y'all.
I hope one day you may be find the courage and fortitude to return to "you guys", but in the mean time I'm giving you your y'all pass. No longer should you feel like a y'all carpet bagger. Y'all away. Y'all freely. Y'all without any shame, consideration, or fear.
Progressives want to claim it for themselves. Edgelords want to re-re-code it into oblivion. They can come and take it.
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This change is really weird to me, as someone from the heart of “you guys” territory. I had a lot of progressive friends in school who always said “you guys.” They didn’t think of it, it was just what people said, not something anyone needed to police.
They also weren’t the wokest of the woke I knew, so maybe the others were into it.
But if we’re going to pick a gender-neutral plural you, I nominate “you’uns”.
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I'm pretty sure it's a reference to Reddit moderators locking a thread with a stock phrase like "y'all can't behave".