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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31782 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Following up on my post from yesterday welcome to day 2 of the United States House of Representatives attempt to choose a Speaker. The current favorite is former House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) though he has been unable to gather the needed majority (or even plurality) of votes of members of the House needed to secure the Speakership. As of the third ballot yesterday there were some 20 Republican holdouts against McCarthy, of which he needs at least 13 in order to get more votes than Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) the Democratic Party nominee for speaker. The fourth ballot is currently underway and interestingly the Republican protestors seem to have changed their candidate from Jim Jordan (R-OH) to Byron Donalds (R-FL). Overnight it seems Trump has re-endorsed McCarthy for Speaker, we'll see if that moves the needle for the Republican holdouts. As of the time of this writing Donalds has acquired 7 votes, more than enough to keep McCarthy from acquiring the majority and likely guaranteeing a fifth ballot.

Assuming McCarthy eventually becomes Speaker (something I still think is the most likely outcome) how does he effectively run the House? The Republican majority is quite narrow (222-212) meaning the defection of only five Republicans can sink any legislation he wants to bring. Effectively this is a similar problem to the one Democrats faced in the Senate this last term, where the support of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were required for them to effectively utilize their 50+tiebreaker majority.

ETA:

At the end of the fourth ballot the results stand at:

Jeffries - 212

McCarthy - 201

Donalds - 20

Present - 1

So Trump's continued endorsement does not seem to have moved any of the holdouts to McCarthy. One member (I missed who) changing their vote from McCarthy to Present has to be concerning for McCarthy. Since election requires a majority of votes cast for a person (Present votes don't count) if more Members follow it decreases the total needed for election. If those Present votes are coming from McCarthy then that moves Jeffries closer to being elected Speaker, as the current plurality vote haver.

I wonder if this is the new strategy from moderate Republicans. Threaten to vote Present and lower the threshold and get the Democrat selected Speaker unless the holdouts get behind McCarthy. Presumably the holdouts would prefer even McCarthy to Jeffries. It would take 12 (I think) members voting Present to put Jeffries over the top, assuming he gets all 212 Democratic Party votes.

ETA2:

At the end of the fifth ballot the results stand at:

Jeffries - 212

McCarthy - 201

Donalds - 20

Present - 1

No movement from the prior vote. Trying to understand how one side or the other break the stalemate here. Doesn't seem like anyone has attempted to put forward a compromise candidate. Seems unlikely McCarthy supporters are persuaded to back the HFC candidate in the needed numbers, though they have peeled one off and another is voting Present. Seems unlikely the HFC members come back to McCarthy. In 1855 when the House had failed to choose a Speaker after two months and over 150 votes the majority agreed to elect whoever got a plurality as Speaker to finally end the voting. Maybe that's a possibility here but would be pretty risky since Jeffries has consistently been the plurality winner. All it would take is 6 HFC members staying strong and you'd have a Democrat Speaker of a majority Republican House (who could immediately remove him if they wanted).

ETA 3:

At the end of the sixth ballot the results stand at:

Jeffries - 212

McCarthy - 201

Donalds - 20

Present - 1

Still no movement. No idea how this stalemate gets broken.

ETA 4:

After returning at 8pm ET the House adjourns until noon tomorrow by a vote of 216 to 214.

Stupid speculation, but: what if the MAGA/Trump wing is holding out because some meme putting Kevin's face next to Joseph's has been circulating? I see the potential for meme warfare there.

Running the House is fairly irrelevant. Democrats have the Senate and White House so they will not pass any normal budget anyways, it will be 2 big omnibus bills to fund the government last minute or the Republicans will be tarred with shutting down the government. Nothing else substantive will happen.

Look at what Pelosi was able to do to Trump when she had the house.

House committees have real power. McCarthy promised to let committees use their subpoena powers to launch real investigations, but he wants to keep a rule change Pelosi made where members can't put forth a motion to replace the speaker.

So Gaetz et all are afraid he's just lying to get elected. Then the'll have no recourse.

Look at what Pelosi was able to do to Trump when she had the house.

Only really worked with collusion by the FBI and other 3 letter agencies. When they choose to gum up the works for the new "Church committee" it will end up being feckless, and spending the majority of its time litigating in the unfavorable jurisdictions of East VA, DC, Maryland, and the DC Circuit.

Seems like republicans are breaking into an 8 person negotiation team and then voting again at 8pm.

Contra my earlier statement this appears very positive for McCarthy if they are voting again tonight.

I guess we could just not have a House of Representatives for a while. If it goes on long enough Democrats might break for McCarthy so that something can get passed.

I think that's unlikely. It would basically be an invitation to be primaried in the next election. "My opponent voted to hand Republicans control of the House of Representatives" attack ads would write themselves. Maybe if we made it long enough that the government was in danger of hitting the debt ceiling or something.

They need 17 or so people, I think there are more Dems that are entrenched enough that it'd be nigh impossible to primary them, at least not without the support from the top of the party. And if it's done under the orders from the top, then they'd be pretty safe.

Depends on Cook PVI for the district. Reps who are trying to hold on to a R+N>0 or D+N<2 district showing their leadership by getting some sort of political benefit from electing McCarthy and that they "care about getting things done" can use that as a strong appeal.

The seemingly eternal dysfunction of the American government, as ordained by the founding fathers or so I've been told never ceases to amaze me.

Like Belgians, Americans would rather not have a government than let it run unpopular edicts.

The limits of this show in the politicization of escape valves like the courts, but in principle it's an admirable demonstration of the solidity of Liberal engineering of institutions.

That one could run the world hegemon like this and still trounce organized autocracies would be even more admirable, if Congress actually had anything to do with it.

This is something that seems like such a disconnect. People say “what, do you just want there to be no federal government?!?!”

…yes? What does the federal government DO most of the time other than take my money and spend it on shit that is meant to destroy my way of life and make it harder for me to raise my family?

This is a genuine question. What is the federal government doing for me that my state couldn’t do? I’ll give you the military, but what else?

The first and biggest boon the federal government brings us is uniform federal laws. In a republic with minimal federation interstate laws could become disparate enough to cause logistical and commercial problems. As a really nonsensical hypothetical, MN, IA, MO, AR, and LA could band together and say "it's illegal to ship goods through our state without paying an interstate transit fee", and theres no way around them on the ground without crossing into Canada. The federal government stops this nonsense from happening.

More realistically in a world without federal regulation state regs would be a giant mess and we would lose tons of efficiency to having a million little x state to y state compliance experts and all the insane bureaucracy that would come with it. It would be way less profitable to sell stuff to americans if shipping stuff had 50 different sets of rules.

I also think that having some uniformity in laws helps keep America from polarizing to an actual national divorce level. If california can make wholistic veganism mandatory and texas can outlaw saying the word vegetarian, we really might start living in our own corners and not seeing eachother as at all similar. National identity is essentially a federal IP.

Most of that nonsense happens anyway. Look into the significant complexity for direct-to-consumer interstate (ecommerce) alcohol sales. Combine the classic sales tax layered regime (which is already much more complicated post South Dakota v. Wayfair) down to municipal levels with fun state/county/municipal regulations like limiting how much of certain types of alcohol can be delivered to a given address in a calendar year (book keeping with indexing based on addresses rather than accounts and hope nothing is missed because of semantically equivalent but literally different street names). On the other end of the spectrum is the influence of things like CARB on the national vehicle market because of CAA waivers that in practice once granted by a friendly administration cannot be revoked by a later hostile one or at least have not been given the ability for lawsuits to hold up the revocation until the hostile one is replaced (8 years at the longest) by a friendly one. In practice California in particular has leveraged its population and economy to influence or de facto regulate national commerce and the 9th circuit has played along with SCOTUS typically denying cert. They did grant cert in National Pork Producers v. Ross so that may change. It is much less profitable on a per-unit basis scaling up to cross state lines or go national, but that very barrier to entry becomes a major competitive advantage for larger businesses that have already invested in compliance. There is also a small but thriving market in companies that sell compliance-as-a-service.

oh man, i am aware of and annoyed by how alcohol distribution is set up. Idunno if its national or just some states but where i'm at, a brewery HAS to sell to a licensed distributor and not directly to a customer, which prettymuch ruins any comparison to a free market. Anyway, i think the difficulties with alcohol shipping is a pretty good indicator that federal regulation can bring a uniformity that is preferable to each state having bespoke rules. Like, as bad as things are now, without federal regulation that small but thriving compliance sector would become a ubiquitous and heavy player in interstate commerce.

This is a genuine question. What is the federal government doing for me that my state couldn’t do? I’ll give you the military, but what else?

People vary on whether this is actually a good thing, but enforce certain rights, e.g minimum wage, abortion legality, no slavery, etc.

There are benefits to having a national system in certain areas like healthcare, postal services, highway construction, etc. where it'd be very awkward for each state to need to find a way to individually interface with each other, although the US federal government is dysfunctional enough it doesn't always see benefits.

Well I think that minimum wage is pretty obviously a bad thing (as we have unfortunately been forced to see demonstrated in real life as "living wages" have immediately meant "rent increase and dozen eggs is now $7."

Slavery is done. The laws were passed 150 years ago, and we don't need a bunch of busybody congressman in Washington there to make sure nobody tries to bring it back.

Abortion "legality" is an excellent example of the type of vote pandering by societal destruction that I want the government to stop doing.

There are benefits to having a national system in certain areas like healthcare, postal services, highway construction, etc. where it'd be very awkward for each state to need to find a way to individually interface with each other, although the US federal government is dysfunctional enough it doesn't always see benefits.

I'd love to hear these articulated. To go point by point:

  • Healtchare: What is the federal government doing WRT healthcare that is in any way beneficial to me? They create a system where I have to waste hours of my time and hundreds of dollars to get simple things like antibiotics, and yet mail out safe crack smoking kits to drug addicts to make it easier for them to live in tents in the street and do crack. I would like the federal government to FUCK OFF of my healthcare, please and thank you.

  • Postal service: the USPS is a great idea. In practice, it is a box in my driveway where a guy delivers trash every day that piles up on my kitchen table and eventually gets moved to another box on the driveway where another guy comes and picks it up. I see absolutely NO downside to replacing the USPS with UPS and FedEx and would LOVE it if mailing me something cost a minimum of $5.

  • Highway construction - highway funds are used as leverage to get states to implement ridiculous, unpopular federal policies. No I don't agree that this is a good thing. If the federal government wanted to work on absolutely mundane boring things like writing regulations around how wide an interstate highway lane should be, then great. Stealing my money to give it to Pete Buttigieg so that he can use it to pre-campaign for president by flying around the country and "giving" this money to various state infrastructure projects feels comically corrupt and horrific. No.

Nobody has pointed out what I think is the biggest benefit, which is the U.S. Dollar. Backed by the Federal Reserve, it's the most reliable financial instrument that exists, and the citizens of the U.S. as well as the rest of the world have benefited substantially by this arrangement. It has its downsides as well, of course, and is not worth an unlimited amount of tyranny.

Okay the dollars is a good one! In fact I would say: I'm frustrated at the current state of the federal government because they're putting the stability of the dollar at risk.

I have the opposite concern actually, that I increasingly feel that the federal government is pressuring me to accept policies that I don't care for and don't really approve of, because it's financially good for the bank that we call the U.S. Government and its many executives.

I’ll give you the military, but what else?

If I'm not mistaken, wasn't even this not necessarily the case pre-1900/pre-WWI?

Supposedly McCarthy has agreed to have a Church Commission ran by Massie. This needs to happen.

What, like a commission on churches? Did something happen recently, or is this the Congressional equivalents of book club?

It’s to investigate the alphabet agency over reach. Just the guy they named it after.

I believe it is a reference to the Church Committee, also known as the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Though, this would be a House Select Committee rather than a Senate one.

There was a famous Church Committee relating to abuses by the IC.

Which resulted in... the creation of the FISA court. So my hopes aren't high that any such committee will accomplish jack and/or shit other than further entrench the IC's power.

Presumably the holdouts would prefer even McCarthy to Jeffries.

From a perspective of achieving their policy goals, McCarthy would be more likely to work with the holdouts (albeit not very likely: he's already spoken out against 'politicized impeachments', for example). From a perspective of their own political outlooks, I'm hard-pressed to imagine a better reinforcement of their claims regarding Republican centrists as Democratics-lite than even an unsuccessful move by moderate Republicans toward Jeffries.

One could hope for policy promises, but on top of the bit where they aren't going to get their policy goals either way, given the quality of these politicians I'm not expecting them to prioritize their mission.

I don’t see McCarthy as the most likely. Seems like he has to drop out. My money is on scalise.

I would be interested to see somebody nominate Scalise and see how many votes he could pull off of McCarthy or Donalds.

If McCarthy wins the speakership, probably by giving concessions to the freedom caucus, then he has to negotiate to get at least a few democrats backing him to pass any bills. Most likely these democrats will be lead by Cuellar or Gordon.

As for the negotiations, Chip Roy is probably the republican to watch; he’s fairly upfront about his conditions for backing McCarthy and is respected by the freedom caucus.

The main difference between the Democratic issues with the Senate in the previous Congressional cycle is that the Democrats actually needed to try to get legislation passed. The Republicans in the House don't have that burden, as any partisan policies they'd try to enact would just get instantly shot down by the Senate or the President. This makes the Speaker's job a lot easier since all he really has to do is obstruct Biden's agenda, and maybe have enough unity to launch performative investigations like the Dems did with the Jan 6 commission.

I agree that trying to pass meaningful legislation with a majority that's this slim and rowdy would be very difficult if not outright impossible, but McCarthy doesn't have to do that.

IMO those are not performative investigations to me like Jan 6.

The gaslighting, censorship, big-tech/alphabet agency merger etc are very real issues to me. I don’t see a way to deal with them without having hearings. Msm won’t cover it. Official corruption by Biden is a lesser but still important issue. COVID/Fauci investigations. These are the only issues that matter to me.

Would also like some antitrust investigations and discussions on how to deal with Aaple, Amazon, and Microsoft. Non of these companies exists today with the antitrust enforcement microsoft faced in the early 2000’s.

The information environment has collapsed in this country. The focus of this house should be on working to illuminate this issue and working to improve the information environment. None thing else matters.

And it would be nice to begin to work on the next big thing. The social media wars of 2015-2022 are nothing compared to Turing Test passing AI chatbots hitting the market from 2025-2035.

They're "performative" in the sense that little action is likely to be accomplished besides throwing mud at the other side's reputation. Partisans almost always believe investigations against {ingroup} are silly and frivolous, while investigations against {outgroup} are important, serious, and likely to uncover heinous crimes!

Not sure what impact an R House would have on investigations into antitrust stuff, since I was under the impression that fell under the domain of the FTC, which is nominally under the control of the Executive, although I've never really understood who gets to order the regulatory agencies around.

Raising awareness is enough for me. Free speech is as much about a culture of free speech as specific laws.

Impeaching Biden is pure partisanship but I think it’s deserved due to the first impeachment being about investigating Bidens corruption.

Granted McConnell is probably just as corrupt as Biden.

Wait until you learn these chatbots and AIs are almost universally trained to be woke... https://reason.com/2022/12/13/where-does-chatgpt-fall-on-the-political-compass/

Imagine a world where everything we do relies on AIs as much as we rely on the internet, and where there's no possibility for AI to express a non-woke opinion or give a non-woke advice.

I assume chatbots won’t have the same network effects as social media so we will end up with all sorts of chatbots.

I understand that making and training a chatbot currently requires some hardware, manpower, time and knowledge (which is probably patented up to high heavens). So I'm not sure how high is the barrie to entry there - i.e. would be something akin to Parler/Gab/Rumble possible?

Can you even patent things like this? I’ve never heard of say calculus being patented, hardware to a great extent is commercially available.

Even if you could patent say something specific - don’t these guys don’t even know what the AI does to make a response? So it would be a vague patented.

Can you even patent things like this?

Why not? Software and algorithmic patents are still very much a thing. In fact, I happen to be on a couple of them myself (through my employer, so I don't really own anything). You can't patent facts, but you can patent algorithms and means of achieving a goal - which is what training a model is. You can't patent calculus, but you can patent something like this: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7840625B2/

don’t these guys don’t even know what the AI does to make a response? So it would be a vague patented.

Vague patent + expensive lawyers = trouble for the newcomers. It's like the rhino case - rhinos are said to have poor eyesight, but with their mass it's not really a problem for them. They can trample you in so many ways that do not require precision. Avoiding them would require precision. Same here - not being smashed by a vague patent would be a problem for newbies, not for the incumbents.

Also, I think you are not entirely correct about the epistemic situation there. What is going to be patented is how you code & train the model, and this is pretty well understood. What is not very well understood is how exactly each piece of training data influences the model parameters and what exactly you need to do for a given model to make it to return a given result, and given the result, how to trace its emergence from the training data. I.e. if your model says the cat is a dog, it's hard to figure out why it happened and which parameters you need to update to fix it. At least this is my understanding of it. But it's a hard problem in general - e.g. see the halting problem and its various consequences, or in general how hard it is to debug programs. That doesn't prevent anyone from patenting algorithms.

Interesting but past me.

Are these things open sourced? Which might prevent patenting if the first discoverer open sources it?

Could be some interesting legal challenges. And if the GOP can win elections they could always just pass laws getting rid of these patents. It would seem wrong to have AI locked up in a few mega corps and everything’s controlled by lawyers.

So maybe change the law. I don’t think society would like 3 megacorps controlling AI and 350 million Americans with no AI.

More comments

I'm less sanguine. The resources necessary to train a 10 trillion parameter AI won't be available to scrappy young startups. Governments and woke megacorps seem poised to dominate the AI landscape.

The House could spend the entire next term on Hunter Biden and the Twitter files, and even find smoking guns about Joe Biden's involvement, and the MSM still wouldn't cover it except to complain the Republicans were obstructing the passage of necessary legislation. Nobody would be moved because no one would hear about it except Fox News watchers. So such investigations would indeed be entirely performative.

You need to fight the battle. Maybe it doesn’t get thru. But the alternative is surrender. What else can you civil war? You need to try talking to people before you escalate.

Also eventually you can abolish the alphabets to help you get the message out.

How is any investigation into Fauci not performative? I understand that a lot of people didn't like his recommendations, including myself at times, but the guys was an advisor. He had no real power when it came to the pandemic, just outsize influence. And this influence is completely Trump's responsibility. There was no natural reason for Fauci to be the face of COVID—the head of the CDC would have made more intuitive sense then an infectious disease expert from NIH—but Trump and his advisors felt that a respected expert would be more credible than a political appointee. And when the respected expert who was appointed for his credibility started saying things that Trump found politically inconvenient, now he needs to be behind bars. Trump tried to minimize Fauci's role but by that point he was already America's accepted expert and would still make a ton of TV appearances. Any congressional hearing is just going to be a bunch of scientifically illiterate politicians arguing with one of the nation's leading experts. They may get a few soundbites that will be replayed on Fox News that they can use for fundraising, but other than that the whole thing will be quickly forgotten.

He had no real power when it came to the pandemic, just outsize influence

I'm not sure the difference is there. If whatever the guy says is getting done, then it's power. If the guy says knowingly false things, or gives advice that is not to the best interest of the advised, that's fraud. Just like if you hire a lawyer, he doesn't have the power to force you to follow his advice, but if he lies to you and defrauds you, he is still liable. There's certain relationships where there's an assumption of trust and duty of honest service and government advisor is certainly one of such relationships.

How is any investigation into Fauci not performative?

To a measure, any investigation would be performative because DoJ under Biden (well, actually under any Republican too) would never prosecute a Democrat, and especially not Fauci, and the House has no power of independent prosecution, as far as I know. That said, just airing out all the dirty laundry has its own value, as would having Fauci on witness stand and having him publicly declare he didn't know about anything bad and forgot everything he was doing (which he inevitably will, as does everybody in such a situation). It's not justice, but at least it'd be a tiny step in a direction of justice. Sometimes, however sad it is, it's the most we can hope for.

Comparing Fauci to a lawyer that has a fiduciary duty to his client suggests to me that you don't actually understand the responsibilities and law surrounding what the poster you're reply to alluded to. These two roles are nothing alike.

I am not claiming they are legally the same thing. I am claiming there are many situations (all of them legally different, yes) where you have no power to force somebody to follow your advice, and yet have the responsibility to give that advice honestly and with the interests of advised in mind. And if you do not do that, you will be considered doing something wrong and likely be open to sanctions. How exactly the sanctions would look like in each particular case, and what laws govern each particular case, is immaterial - what is material is the responsibility.

Nothing alike legally, perhaps, but laws are just fever dreams BS'd up by some guy in a powdered wig. Whereas: morally? Why is it not analogous?

How about funding and covering up GoF research in China?

Your ignoring that Biden was president for most of the time and Fauci got worse after Trump was no longer president. At that point anything he did was rubber stamped.

They are performative in the sense that they don't result in any legislative action, but like you I think they are warranted and will be fascinating.

I eventually want legislative action, but the hearings this year will be about raising awareness, changing public opinion, and setting justifications to gut the fbi/cia/etc when the power occurs.

And perhaps greatest of all convincing the American people about the power of free speech.

And on Fauci I do want him to answer some hard questions on COVID. He has said before he tried to manipulate people with his policies and I want a much more thorough interview on that. I also want to hear a lot more about his view on masks. He flip flopped on masks. And his private communications indicate it was his true belief masks weren’t effective. The government has never released data on why they changed their mind. I’ve been banned on enough sub Reddit for being anti masks that I’d love to hear the “expert” tell us why he flip-flopped. And like maybe point to some science

Hasn’t Fauci already testified in front of the senate?

Under democrat rules. Interview will be different if under Republican.

This makes the Speaker's job a lot easier since all he really has to do is obstruct Biden's agenda, and maybe have enough unity to launch performative investigations like the Dems did with the Jan 6 commission.

Agreed, and I'll tack something else on - many people currently aligned with the American right (myself included) don't really care if the federal government "gets stuff done". Sure, there are affirmative policies that I'd like to see happen, but I'd be more than happy to settle for a simple paralysis of the federal government in the short run. I'm not getting the ATF abolished in any case, so just not cracking down with additional restrictions would be better than the alternative.

That’s a good point.

Frustrating, that the defectors may see no consequences for making everyone else’s jobs harder. But I suppose that’s arguably their mandate.

What's the argument for cooperation? Recent developments have convinced a lot of Republicans that the existing system is no longer workable. Will cooperating help fix that regrettable state, or will it simply enable the forces that created it?

Conversely, what important work is this obstructionism blocking? If they all fell in line, what desirable outcomes might we reasonably predict?

Suppose a number of Republicans defect and elect a democrat speaker. This would likely be a disaster for the Republican party... but the Republican party has already been a disaster for its constituents. The likely long-term outcome seems to me to be a purge of the GOP establishment. Why should this be considered an unacceptable outcome to someone who views the GOP establishment as their enemy?

were oversight and investigation happening? If not, then they aren't being stopped so much as delayed in their start, and my understanding is that one of the questions being answered here is whether they'll start at all, and if started, whether they'll be pursued aggressively.

It becomes an issue if there's actually some critical, bipartisan matter that needs legislative attention and the GOP's inability to form a governing coalition in the house is the major holdup.

However, as you've noticed and mentioned the issues that get bipartisan support are usually ones that favor the establishment's existing agenda so the only question is whether the voting public will take issue with it or not, I'd say.

With all that said, this entire situation really, REALLY pales in comparison to the revolving door of Prime Ministers that the UK experienced in 2022, so in my mind taking some time to build an actual coalition around an agreeable leader is a very worthwhile endeavor that doesn't reflect poorly on the GOP in and of itself.

so in my mind taking some time to build an actual coalition around an agreeable leader is a very worthwhile endeavor that doesn't reflect poorly on the GOP in and of itself.

True, but they have had two months to do that since the elections, and given the lack of progress to date, including no progress whatsoever during 24 hours of focussed attention on the issue and 6 roll-call votes, it isn't clear how taking more time is going to help.

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