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When, if ever, is it appropriate to refer to someone as a 'parasite?' I don't mean in a literal sense, only in the political/economic sense. My instinct says 'never', its a very dehumanizing term... but I had that resolution sorely tested this week.
Two separate examples bubbled up through the twittersphere:
First, consider an 'early retired' couple. They have been held up as a sympathetic example of citizens who will be deeply impacted by losing their health insurance subsidy. But a bit of reading shows something... surprising:
Okay, first and foremost, its sheer statistical fact that your average 60-year-old will OBVIOUSLY consume more medical services now and in the immediate future than your average 30-year-old. Hence the risk premium for the 30 year old would ideally be much, much lower. But if they're in the same risk pool, the 30 year old is having to cover a LOT of conditions, medications, and services they are vanishingly unlikely to use. AND, if the 30 year old is paying taxes... they're contributing to the subsidies that those 60 year olds are using to cover things like:
That. Issues that arrive in older age or due to a rough lifestyle. This seems sort of sympathetic. And yet:
$127,000 per year? On pensions? This legitimately sounds like a princely sum to me. And... early retirement? That they achieved through working for governments? Bill the Civil Engineer, and Shelley who worked in banks and other state institutions? This is NOT your stereotypical blue collar family who busted their ass for decades to set aside a nest egg.
For God's sake. An extra $15k-20k a year is NOT going to bankrupt anyone worth a low seven figures. I cannot square that circle at all. And if they're not worth low 7 figures then how the hell did they decide to retire in their 50's? Oh, wait:
They just wanted to consume more. That's... fine on its own, but I don't think you get to complain if you drop out of the workforce early that those remaining in the workforce don't want to fund your trips or medical care.
Being slightly uncharitable, I read this as a couple that very intentionally gamed certain financial systems in a way that let them extract a lot of personal benefits from comparatively little effort and input, and are continuing to do so after they retired by sloughing their largest non-optional expenses on the next generation.
And finally. No dependents. Its not like they've got mouths to feed and kids to raise. Every dollar they spend here on is solely on themselves, and contributes 'nothing' to the future productivity of the country.
There's a counter argument that they've quite possibly contributed more to the system in their working years than they've extracted. Maybe. But I cannot be convinced that they are justified in receiving $15-20k a year paid by young, healthy people who are still trying to build capital... when they clearly possess the means to pay their own way. Of course, government pensions are ALSO being paid for by younger generations' tax dollars. So this does start to seem quite... parasitic.
They've worked about 30 years, and they'll be retired for 25-30 more, it seems likely that they'll have extracted more wealth from the system, especially if they divert said wealth from productive uses, than they put in when all is said and done.
Second, a pair of illegal immigrants residing in the U.S.
Twitter thread with commentary Here. Original video here.
They're DREAMers, so not the most blatantly offensive example of illegal immigration. But after learning about their situation I still don't want to share a country with them:
They have three kids. They're not married. First two aren't his. She's a SAHM.
Caleb calculates they'll owe about $3,300 in federal taxes this year (the commentary thread wrongfully implies he pays zero).
Own a house.
$133k in 'bad debt.' (that is admitted/disclosed)
Total debt (including the house) is $420k.
Early 30s.
So, at the very least the house can be seized to cover most or all of that debt if they ever just stopped paying. But hearing the rest of their financial situation and how aggressively they (well, mostly her) spend money and I'm really forced to assume they're getting financial support from some other programs to eke out more than a basic level of existence.
I am at a loss as to how these people could be considered a net benefit to the country. Unless one of those kids goes on to cure prostate cancer or something, booting them out would have no noticeable negative effect. To be faaaaair she seems to be the main problem. If it were just him cranking out work it'd be hard to be offended.
But we have two non-citizens and their kids enjoying, from the sound of it, a living standard higher than the median American in their age bracket (just counting the home ownership, for sure) and overall paying little into the system at present, and racking up enough debt that its questionable if it'll ever get paid down.
Presumably they have a net positive effect on GDP when measured on the spending side, and if we ASSUME they don't declare bankruptcy, or renege and duck out on the debt, or just die early (not something I wish on them), they're helping the engine of Capitalism in this country sputter along.
And yes, YES there are plenty of U.S. Citizens who are doing WORSE than this. Caleb has had many of them on his show.
But ask me how I'm damn near certain that these two aren't saving enough for retirement and will not save enough for retirement (around the 41 minute mark she talks about pulling money out of her retirement) so if they're around in their late 60's they're either still working with no end in sight OR have figured out a way to sponge benefits out of the government to maintain their livelihood and yet still die with a mountain of debt someday.
I doubt they'll be in any position to retire early like Bill and Shelley up there. It certainly seems like they're choosing to live parasitically, but unlike the early retirees they still have a lot of good working years in front of them to make up the difference.
Two separate cases that are only similar in the abstract: couples who have gamed parts of the U.S. economic system so as to have their lifestyles paid for without contributing as much to it as the support they have extracted (yet). Bill and Shelley managing to pull off a plan that would be virtually impossible to repeat for anyone much younger than they: get the state government pensions + the Fedgov subsidies and then stop working well before most people could afford to do so.
This raises a question: are 'we' really supporting this entire apparatus on the efforts of some small and possibly shrinking minority of our actual population? Without getting too Randian, what's the ratio of productive/unproductive left now?
It leads me, specifically, to ask: HOW MANY PEOPLE DO WE HAVE IN THIS COUNTRY PULLING THESE KINDS OF SHENANIGANS. There have to be known strategies that are shared amongst groups on how to follow these paths, exploit edge cases, take advantage of lax enforcement, or otherwise slip into niches that allow you to live 'above your means' for some period of time if not indefinitely. On the individual level its rational. On the population level, the equilibrium can get dangerously unsustainable. Have we crossed that tipping point? I don't know. Feels like it to me.
I personally recall visiting a friend in college and learning that both of his parents (in their 50s) were 100% disabled, getting checks from SSI. Both were mobile but certainly had some impairments... but what stuck with me is more the fact that they had a massive collection of Disney movie memorabilia (especially Tinkerbell) all throughout the house, displayed on shelves floor to ceiling, and even then I wondered "who paid for all this and how does buying these kinds of trinkets square with the claim that you're unable to support yourselves and need government help? Clearly you've got money to spare if you can spend it on things that has no investment value."
We've got some indeterminate number of guys like Oscar paying $3500/year in taxes into the system. We've got some indeterminate number of guys like Bill pulling $15,000/yr OUT of the system in insurance subsidies. WHO THEN IS MAKING UP THE DIFFERENCE. Someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my country is dying.
Today was payday for me. I had a really good month last month. And yet I look at my actual pay stub and see that ~24% of that will never even touch my account due to Federal Taxes. Florida has no income tax, so I can be certain that money is going to pay for all kinds of lovely U.S. Government programs. And now, I have to wonder, what portion of that is going to help Oscar and Natasha raise their kids and pay their mortgage. What portion is paying down Bill and Shelley's insurance premiums so they can take a cruise, or fly to Australia or whatever.
I've KNOWN how bad the Government money faucet was for the past 15 years. Trump and DOGE showed just how blatantly fake/fraudulent much of it is, earlier this year. But this here has me putting a face on the issue and that makes it feel personal, even though I have no direct grievance against these folks.
Here's my personal history:
Never used welfare, food stamps, or even unemployment insurance. Have literally never pulled money from a government program to pay my bills... other than the Covid stimulus.
I've held two government jobs in my life. One was Census Enumerator, the other was Public Defender for the State of Florida. Its not inconceivable that I could work for the Gov't in the future, but right now I have no intention to return. No pensions for me.
I've made some boneheaded financial decisions in my life. Its not even a joke to say that I've only been able to reach my current financial position because I was trading Crypto in 2014-2020, and it happened to work out for me. I have never rugpulled a memecoin or otherwise indulged in the scammier parts of that ecosystem.
Yet. YET I've managed to maintain my life on what I earn, and follow most of Dave Ramsey's advice to have adequate savings, minimal (unsecured) debt, and I fully intend to sock away enough to retire on my own even if I never get to draw a social security check.
I'm unmarried and have no dependents so I'm pretty much boned on my tax bill, although I do use some strategies to mitigate the damage.
I have debt comparable to Oscar and Natasha, but on a good day, when everything shakes out, I'm probably at around $250k net worth, and diligently reducing the debt load as I go.
I have not taken an extended vacation in almost exactly 5 years. I could afford to, but it feels irresponsible for various reasons and I've chosen to prioritize financial stability for so long its hard to break that habit. For the right woman, perhaps.
And some days I feel like an utter buffoon when I can see people living a lifestyle that matches or maybe even exceeds my own by making choices that, while individually rational, are deleterious to the overall fabric of the civilization they exist within. Its bad enough if they're burning up our surplus wealth that could have been put to productive use, all the worse if the capitalist machine itself starts to break down under the strain.
One of my favorite little storybooks as a child was The Little Red Hen. The hen goes around seeking assistance from the other animals to make some bread from scratch. Finding no help, she completes the whole process herself. and at the end of the day when the bread is done all the animals follow the wonderful smell and show up hoping to get a piece. And she politely tells them to fuck off. (I also read The Rainbow Fish as a child, that message didn't stick.)
I start to feel like that's going to be my life trajectory. Building as much as I can through my own efforts while trying to cooperate with others, who have found alternate ways to subsist, and then when I finally sit down to enjoy it all, in this version the farmer shows up with a shotgun and says "these other animals are hungry, you're gonna share half that loaf with them." Bluntly and uncharitably, this seems like the logical outcome of the many policies that the Boomers implemented over decades to keep themselves financially secured into old age, which has left a lot of cracks and crevices in the mess of various entitlement programs that various amoral latecomers can latch onto and coast along even after the Boomers are gone.
All paid for by whatever percentage of the population is suckered into actually producing wealth and paying their taxes every year.
I don't want to dehumanize them. Bill and Shelley seem like good people. Oscar seems like a decent guy. I want my fellow Americans to thrive, along with most humans on earth. I do NOT want to tolerate a system that has such a mix of malincentives and avenues for cheating that it is actually easier for the low-conscientiousness hordes to simply shove handfuls of seed corn into their mouths and demand payouts from the most productive members of society than it is for them to maintain a job, not acquire too much debt, and live within their means with enough saved to sustain them into old age.
But human beings are exceptionally good at finding ways to drive excess calories into their own bellies at the expense of others. You might even say this is the actual basis for the entirety of the culture wars: which tribe will do most of the work, and which will consume most of the rewards. Bastiat had it right a long time ago. I don't blackpill over this stuff, but I do wonder how one is supposed to feel when the entirety of your civilization depends on your demographic continuing to accept a status quo that confers benefits on everyone BUT your demographic.
Oh, did you hear that California is going to put a Wealth-Tax Proposal on the ballot next year?
I'm sure its nothing to worry about.
This appeared in my history, so I've probably linked it here before, but as far as interesting old blog posts about welfare go...
I'll quote the pieces I think most relevant in response to your post, but I encourage reading the whole thing.
And if you want a bonus:
If you've gotten through the above, superior thoughts, I'll scratch out a few of my own down here.
As far as I can see it, welfare is the summation of a few factors:
The result is a bunch of policies that address pressing first-order concerns, but have some pretty nasty second- and third-order consequences that are extremely difficult to talk about while retaining sympathy for the people involved.
Can welfare continue to exist in its current form? Not forever, sure, but forever is a long time. How long can it last? Until the rubber hits the road, which is probably keyed off of the sharp population declines in our near future more than anything. There's a reasonable argument to be made that Europe (to a greater extent) and the US (to a lesser extent) are currently getting choked out by welfare. But that's somewhat besides the point. The reality is twofold: first, that welfare will continue until the affected nations are more or less forced into a New Deal of sorts, because those benefiting from welfare planned their lives around receiving it and aren't remotely prepared for the consequences of not having it; and second, that it is much, much better to not be on welfare than to be on welfare. Look at your two examples. The first couple have their future at the mercy of regular politics - their future is not under their control, and if Idaho should ever become unable to pay their pensions, they will be in unbelievably deep trouble. The second are in wild amounts of debt and are going to be barely scraping by, eternally. Their (presumable) food stamps are a pittance compared to how they've decided to sell themselves into slavery for the benefit of the banks. Either their consumption will sharply dry up once their income equals their debt payments, or they declare bankruptcy and lose everything and will never have a house again. Is either case remotely enviable? (Also, I'm pretty sure that way more of your money is going to cases like the first one, and barely anything is going to the second one. Social Security and Medicare together are about 33% of the budget, and only around 5% goes to food stamps, child tax credits, etc. The second couple is more outrageous from a morality point of view, but the first is vastly more expensive.)
Couple of things you mentioned that stood out to me.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that standard economic measures like GDP are flawed insofar as they only capture production and not reproduction, when it's pretty clear that the latter means a lot more in the long term. So if everyone's just looking at GDP for a vibe check on how the economy is doing, they get the totally wrong perspective and miss the steamroller coming down the road.
For America specifically, the source of this support is not so much "the productive" as "the debt." For 2024 the debt (1.9T) is comparable in size to Social Security (1.5T). So there are people buying US bonds on the principle that the government will pay them back before it has to raise taxes. That is bound to stop at some point in the near-ish future (order of decades, not years). When it does, either the welfare will stop or taxes will go up, or probably both. This is the "New Deal" territory I was talking about earlier. Who knows what exactly will happen here? Easy to make predictions, but reality has a habit of surprising you.
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To be fair, most government-paid civil engineers take a much lower salary than they could in the private sector. So it's not quite that this guy figured out a hack here, only that he sacrificed early to reap a larger return later. Similarly the State took the inverse deal: pay him less now in exchange for more later, in order to make their budgets temporarily look better.
I think the solution for both is actuarial integrity -- defined benefit plans need to be run in such a way that the State pays in year X the expected future costs of all (incremental) future liabilities accrued during year X. The only real exploitation is that voters in X accrue liability for year >X without paying for it, another intertemporal transfer of wealth.
A non-solution (afaict) is for governments not to hire competent civil servants and instead farm that stuff out to McKinsey consultants and others. Not because the McKinsey consultants aren't smart, but because it's a diffusion of accountability that ultimately costs Idaho more than paying competitive salaries for in-house expertise.
[ One astute commenter noted that one good that McKinsey does produce is laundering the low status of working for bumfuck Idaho into PMC-respectability. An excellent observation, if something of a tangent here. ]
Eh, bankruptcy is (in expectation) priced into the transactions. Lenders make out fine charging these two 7% interest on their HELOC and car note. It's not like dumping it on the fisc.
Their retirement on the public dime, OTOH, will certainly be dumped on us.
In an efficient market, that's true. Is that even legal right now? I know that college admissions have changed over time (and between jurisdictions) between unmeritocratic discrimination being illegal and required.
I would not be the slightest bit surprised if charging previously-illegal immigrants the real cost of a loan (or just denying them) was blocked by anti-discrimination laws.
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Nervous laughter.
Sorry, I came of age during the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage crisis, I am overtly sensitive to the whole "Just give money to financially irresponsible people and hope that in the aggregate we make adequate returns to justify the risk" approach.
I'm sure SOME lessons were learned since then. Maybe not the right ones.
I'm sure it'll be fine.
The problem with the '07-08 crisis wasn't with the returns, it's that the loans were packaged into MBS and sold to investors under a false bill of health. The lessons weren't that you can't have high-risk/high-return assets, only that you must not try to pawn them off as low risk with fanciful assumptions. And that buyers of those collateralized debt must do more diligence.
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I have mixed feelings about this.
As you alluded, it isn't clear how many jobs are civilizationaly load bearing to begin with. Mine certainly isn't, unless you count having and raising children, and, no, that isn't counted at this point, in these discussions. Depending on what they are, it's not clear how many people can or should do them. Mr and Mrs Tinkerbell collectors might not be able to do them even if they were in good health (again, depending on what they are). 200 years ago almost everyone would be farming and making textiles, and since farming and textiles have become relatively niche, it's unclear how many of the "jobs" that have replaced them amount to watching one another's children and walking one another's dogs. We're apparently close to automating even emails and spreadsheets.
If I had heard about this 100 years ago, I would have supposed people would work a lot less, or we would have something like a UBI, but that's not what we have. Maybe we have bullshit jobs and gaming the system instead? Which isn't great, plenty of people are upset about the current state of affairs. I don't particularly want my kids to spend 40 hours a week, for 40 years doing fake work, that seems in some ways worse than farming and textiles, but it seems to be the direction we as a civilization are heading in.
Why is "civilizationally load bearing" a relevant yardstick? Civilization advances by making all that stuff trivial so people can focus on doing other shit. That's the the measure of civilization, not who produces corn.
And no one that has ever worked in textiles would dare assert that it's in any way worse than an office job. That shit destroys your body.
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Parasitism, stripped of the morally-loaded connotation, is ultimately a classification of a symbiotic relationship between different species of organisms. The notion that symbiosis is an extremely widely-observed behavioral pattern in the Animal Kingdom, but for some reasons human relations can never be understood like that, is an artifact of political correctness. As far as the question over when is it appropriate to refer to someone as a parasite, you can say almost never. But when is it appropriate to understand relations between races of people as symbiotic, the answer is almost always. Take something like the behavior observed in the Animal Kingdom we call aggressive mimicry:
Foreign races of people establishing themselves in a host society- their identity, cultural signals, political influence, is unequivocally a symbiosis, its mere existence is derived from its interaction with its host.
But is in-group elderly care a parasitic relationship? The Elders of a society are typically the ancestors of the descendants investing in their care, so describing that as parasitism would not really conform with that classification of relationship observed ecologically. The impetus for elder care has in-group evolutionary advantages that explain its existence.
Take a racial and cultural identity like black. It exists purely in symbiosis with a host society. It depends on the host society for everything. It only exists relative to its host society. Without its host, it would not exist. Same with "Dreamers", foreigners who embed themselves in a host society. "Dreamers" only exist because of the long-term interaction between foreigners and their host body. That is a symbiotic relationship, in contrast with elderly care.
There are clearly non-parasitic symbiotic relationships. "Chimerica" is a symbiosis between America and China but one that is mutually beneficial. But when foreigners embed themselves in a host and demand all sorts of political, cultural, and economic concessions that harm the host Nation, it's valuable to understand that as parasitism, in order to properly understand the nature of the threat, even if it's not constructive to call anyone a parasite.
If it is sustainable over generations then no, if not then yes. This isn't a difficult question and it's clear that OP talks about the latter.
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I guess it depends how much of a "decoupler" you are. Are you going to change your policy preferences based on two anecdotes about unsympathetic beneficiaries?
If anything I am now more aggressively wedded to my general policy preferences (Read: Anti-Federalism, reduction of FedGov Spending to whatever is needed to maintain national defense and a Judicial system, and throwing all welfare programs back to the state level).
How that shakes out in terms of what policies I expect to see passed is a little difference.
Isn't that federalism? I thought that the federalist policy position was the one that wants to maximize power reserved to the confederated states.
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Nothing you say is wrong on its face. Bill and Shelley are boomers milking the system in all the legal ways they were told they could. Oscar and his wife are a young dumb couple who, as you noted, are far from the worse Caleb has had on his show. They're only making the culture war rounds because they're illegals. They're also young enough that it's hard to declare they are going to be lifetime parasites--at least Oscar is working!
I can't get too worked up about them after watching all those bodycam and parole hearing videos I mentioned. The people who are really a "parasitical" class are not boomers crying that their health insurance is going up or a DREAMER couple who will probably declare bankruptcy. It's the people who will never be gainfully employed, will probably spend most of their lives on the street or in prison, and prey on society in much more literal ways than making your insurance premiums go up.
Insurance sucks and seems to be unfixable, yup. But how dare government workers collect pensions and how dare old people demand expensive medical care? These aren't the worst parasites out there.
Government has always been a cow to be milked, and under the old patronage systems the corruption was far worse. How many bailouts has the government shoveled money into to rescue failing businesses and failing industries? How much money did we spend on Afghanistan over 20+ years to achieve literally fuck-all in the end? We could also talk about Iraq, and Ukraine, and Israel, and Argentina, all can be plausibly defended as providing some value to American interests, but fuck that's a lot of money we're giving to non-Americans.
You may or may not have seen the latest trend in ragebait: all the (mostly black) people screaming on TikTok about how their EBT is about to get cut off if the government shutdown doesn't end. The comments are the usual: noticing how many expensive braids and fake nails and tattoos and the like these people wear, asking why Single Mom of 6 does not have a father in the picture, etc. Lots of nutpicking with juicy videos from welfare defenders openly telling poor people to steal from Walmart, single moms haughtily declaring they "don't want to work," etc. Numbers thrown around like $4000-$6000/month in welfare (which I seriously doubt).
These stories are understandably infuriating. They make for very easy ragebait to amp up working Americans who see a bunch of lazy, shiftless people getting fat on their tax dollars. I won't lie and say I would not enjoy seeing some of these "parasites" get made to work or go hungry as much as any Randian.
But ultimately I think you are being manipulated to hate the easily hateable. If you are really concerned about the government spigot and all the parasites bleeding the beast... well, like I said, there's much bigger bleeding to rage at.
Notably, the old patronage systems often built large things of considerable value. The people being robbed by them often saw significant, tangible improvements in their standard of living as an offset. Can we build a Golden Gate bridge today? Can we build a national highway system? This is a legitimate question, I do not claim to know the answer. I'm worried about what the answer might be, though.
I think you are correct that actual criminals are a much more serious problem than mere fiscal-net-extractors. But as you note, insurance sucks and seems to be unfixable, and a lot of other things do too, and it's not as though the existence of a worse thing makes less worse things better. It is also, quite notably, not like the crime is actually being handled either.
Most of my life, I've operated off the assumption that even if these systems, both the fiscal handouts and the crime, are very wasteful but we're rich and we can probably afford it. The world I see around me seems a lot less rich now. Maybe this is the algorythm feeding me rage-bait, but it's not looking stellar for my actual family's finances either.
Can we build a Golden Gate Bridge today? Can we still go to the Moon?
We have the money. We have the technology. In theory, we still have the know-how.
But we don't have the will. It's graft all the way down.
I think about Robert Moses sometimes (never miss an opportunity to boost Robert Caro). Motherfucker was a petty, vengeful, tyrannical and (in his own way) corrupt bastard. Anti-democratic and considered public monies his to spend and control. But he got shit done. Arguably in terrible ways sometimes. Lots of people have opinions about how New York could have been done better. But he got it done.
No one can get shit done today. After all the bluster and owning the wokes, do you think Trump is actually going to get anything done? Make America Great Again?
I think sometimes about movies like Independence Day or Armageddon. You've got a literal world -ending threat, so surely under those circumstances, we'd all get our shit together and act like competent adults... at least for a little while, right?
I don't believe that anymore. We'd be so cooked, as the kids say.
We probably are anyway.
laughs nervously in covid
Yeah I'm with you. I'm not saying that was anything close to world ending (it obviously wasn't, as we are here), but it strongly indicated how such a threat would go down. We would bicker and squabble about what was the right thing to do until it was too late.
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This is what bugs me, though.
Its sort of easy for me to accept that there will ALWAYS be an underclass that we can only ever 'contain' and 'placate,' never fully integrate into society regardless of how much we spend. Accept that its a fixed cost and move on.
But then you see ostensibly functional people happily tearing off chunks for themselves, and the scope of the problem starts to seem larger, where the justifications for the behavior are more elaborate, and the political costs of intervening are much steeper.
Yeah, but I bring these up because they're not easily hateable. And yet I still find myself wanting to label them with the 'parasite' moniker because there's me, over here doing just about everything 'right' and getting rewarded with a portion of what I genuinely earned, with the potential for more to be taken later (one hopes not!), and then there's these guys, guiltlessly sucking up resources and clearly expecting no resistance or problems, and just generally living their life with much less stress than I.
A similar source of ragebait that you see on Caleb's channel: "disabled" veterans who are clearly very functional but have managed to find a sympathetic doctor who declares they have service-related injuries which mean they now get a check for life. Even if they never saw combat. Even if they were never in a combat-facing role. Are you man enough to call out veterans for welfare-queen behavior?
Likewise, I run into it in my professional life, "Retired" cops from New York, Chicago, other big cities, who qualify for Pensions from their home state (and pull certain tactics to maximize the payout), then move down to Florida (see my point about lack of income tax) to 'retire' while pulling part time gigs with local PDs for extra cash. Its one hell of a payout and there's clearly a known strategy for maximizing return on 'investment,' and who the hell would argue our brave boys in blue don't 'deserve' this special treatment? Not I.
Oh, firemen too.
We are culturally tuned to treat these 'heroes' with deference. Ignoring the fact that these jobs have gotten MUCH safer over the decades, and much cushier, and basically impossible to fire bad actors from said jobs.
Yep, my point when I stated "I've KNOWN how bad the Government money faucet was for the past 15 years." My political 'awakening' was tied up in realizing how much money was burned bailing out failed banks and pursuing pointless military debacles. Very impersonal, abstract harms.
There's a bit more emotional valence when you can see the face of the person soaking up the wealth, even if its a comparatively trivial amount.
This reminds me of the (imo excellent) argument against student loan forgiveness. It's been stated here, but I've also seen it in other venues (my cousin was patiently trying to lay it out for people on FB for a while, God bless him for his patience). Johnny chose to skip college or go a far more affordable route for college, sacrificing four years of having fun partying with his peers, but gained the reward of not having student loan debt. Jimmy went to a nice school for four years and has a good time, but has to pay back those student loans the rest of his life. Except now Jimmy wants to get his loans bailed out at everyone's expense (including Johnny!), so he would get his short term reward and also Johnny's long term reward, without having to sacrifice anything. This is a terrible social policy to have, because the Johnnies of the world will (rightly) conclude that they are chumps for doing the right thing, and more and more people will mooch off the system until it all comes crashing down eventually.
Similarly, people like you (rightly) feel like chumps for working hard to get ahead when we refuse to let people face the consequences of their bad decisions. I'm not saying you should join them, because I believe virtuous conduct to be intrinsically valuable, but neither could I really find it in my heart to be mad at you if you did join them. It's a raw deal, doing everything right and watching as those who didn't bother still get away with it.
In fairness, I think that isn't necessarily a prerequisite for time in the service to fuck you up in some way. One of my teammates at work was in the army, and has talked about how even just being on watch for the base can mess with your head because of the stress it causes to be hyper-alert like that. Then there's stuff like hearing damage from doing firearms training without ear protection (my understanding from him is that was a thing, which makes sense because in actual combat you don't have time to put in ear plugs so you have to experience it beforehand in a controlled situation), etc. I'm not saying the guys you are talking about deserve the benefits they are getting, because I don't watch the show and I am willing to assume from your description that they don't deserve the benefits. Just pointing out that not serving in combat shouldn't necessarily be a prerequisite here, as there can be legitimate claims even outside that situation.
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This (and the pension double dipping thing) are super crazy. I know of multiple people who are mid 30s, work full time as engineers or accountants, and pull in 30k extra income a year because of military disability benefits.
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Half a loaf? You're quite the optimist that you think you're getting to keep half. I think it more likely that we're going to get the Boxer retirement plan.
Your overall post reminded me of the TW post about the "chump effect." I thought the term was coined by him, but apparently it was the City Journal article he links to.
Stories like the two you pointed out make me feel like quite the chump, as I do most days when I think about these things. I didn't have undergrad debt because I busted my ass in a hard science to maintain grades for my scholarships at a state school. I paid off my law school loans (what a mega-chump move). I drive a 15-year-old paid-off truck. I go to work every day to defend people who are mostly guilty and generally ungrateful. I'm earning a pension, but at best it'll be 60% of the payout that Boomers and Xers are getting from it (thanks to various reforms to keep the system solvent that only took effect long after their benefits were locked in), and that's if I can stick it for another 20 years. So give me that chump jacket, I've earned it.
Same, same, and same. Although its a 13-year-old Honda, and I haven't finished paying them off, its only a matter of time.
That said I can be 'proud' that I beat out the early stage of DEI-based admissions to actually secure a law school slot in a highly-ranked school and then (eventually) find a decent job.
Its only been in recent years I've realized how much of the deck was actually stacked against me and how much better off I'd probably be if:
A) The system was actually as meritocratic as I believed
or
B) I just said "fuck it" and cut the corners and cheated as much I could get away with.
I don't believe in Karma, although I do believe "what goes around comes around," so I expect I'll come out of things alright. I didn't become the 'type of person' who cheats and cuts corners, so I won't be subjected to the various failure modes that cheating and cutting corners are prone to.
But there's no avoiding the fact that the political system is still functionally designed to redistribute rewards of good behavior and high performance no matter how well you follow the rules, which makes one much less inclined to follow the rules.
Isn't that just karma? Maybe I misunderstand the term, I'm not well versed in Eastern religious thought.
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"I prefer the hands-on touch you only get with hired goons."
or
"'Abstinence for abundance' is like 'fighting for peace'"
--
There's a Harper's article making the rounds, and before I link it, I'll let you know what it's about lest anyone click through to a level of detail they'd rather not get. It's about an online subculture ("gooners") who not only watch pornography, but veritably worship it: reveling in how addicted they are to it, often communally. If you want much, much, much more detail than that, here's the link.
I'm not here to dig into any lurid details, myself. (The biggest thought that comes to mind is how, though Abrahamic proscriptions against pornography usually fall under "thou shalt not commit adultery," this behavior seems to be edging
[ahem]its way under the prohibition against worshiping images, as that seems more literally what's happening.) I'm not so much interested in meta-voyeuristically gawking at the porn-viewers--Instead I am here to point a finger at Ezra Klein.
Now, the author of the Harper's article (who is not Ezra) muses at the end on what brought about this porn-obssession subculture in terms of the pull-factors of modern technology. Is this not just another example of algorithm-driven addiction? Are we not all gooners these days? But he only briefly touches upon push-factors driving people away from the healthy alternatives he laments, such as:
And that evokes this article of Ezra Klein's. Pull-quote:
Well, here we are.
And is this not better, from that point of view? Aren't we better off, from the perspective of preventing rape, for each could-be rapist neutralized somehow? Doesn't each man taken off the street and holed up in a cave, never to be met in real life again, give women less to fear? I doubt it. For one, it's not the right kind of neutralization: male sexuality being indulged in any way at all (much less this extremely) without supervision always keeps the fear alive that it might one day burst its banks and turn into real rape. For two, the hoped-for outcome was clearly to scare men into being appropriately respectful of consent while still being willing. Unfortunately, there turned out to be a path of lesser resistance.
All this leads to the question of What Is To Be Done. To venture a very safe prediction, I predict that, if self-proclaimed decent human beings have their shot at fixing this gender-relations mess, they'll use the only method they know for such problems: turning some weapon against male behavior. (It's a patriarchal world, after all, which means that women are suffering more than they deserve and men are suffering less, so it would be unjust to use anything other than the carrot on women and anything other than the stick on men.) Blocking off this path-of-least-resistance to try to herd them back where they're wanted. Of course, that could very well just open up a new path-of-least-resistance other than what they want, and who knows what new horrors that will unleash.
If I had to make some suggestion - and this is always harder than making some complaint - all I would say is that perhaps some tactic other than inflicting fear or shame or pain might be called for at some point. (It is also probably a bad idea to use such tactics if they disproportionally work on the conscientious, like threats of long-term consequences always do. Discouraging the conscientious from sex and reproduction will have bad consequences, evolutionarily.)
--
For a topic like this, I know that disclaimers are necessary:
Do I think that Ezra Klein or other feminists are primarily or even substantially responsible for a subculture of porn addicts? No, but the force they apply does push in that direction.
Am I recommending "men being allowed to rape" as being better than this or that social ill? No! But the thinking that supposes that that's the only alternative is going to be increasingly destructive.
Do I think that "gooning" as a subculture or practice has any redeeming qualities that should spare it from destruction? No, but rather: I think, for the would-be destroyers' own sake, and the sake of what they're trying to preserve, that they might not want to be so destruction-minded.
Do I think that "Spishak" motives can't really have anything to do with conscientiousness/neurosis, because anybody who'd engage in such disgusting practices can't possibly have any possibly-sympathetic motives, and so he must be lying? I do think it's possible that such feelings are real, though I of course know nothing more about the individual in question.
Do I think it's fair to hold that article against Ezra Klein's modern agenda of technocratic growth-seeking, even though 2014 was an eternity ago in the culture wars? Well- I admit I do.
Do I think that I've throat-cleared enough here? Of course not! Do I think that it's possible to throat-clear enough here? Of course not!
I tend to think that this is more or less inevitable, and Ezra Klein and feminists have essentially no responsibility for this. Even if there were no feminists and we were living in a tradwife paradise, the problem is that what a real relationship offers is pretty-well static. The woman available to the average man is a 5/10 and while gyms, plastic surgery and cosmetics have perhaps improved the sex-appeal of a 5/10 somewhat over the past hundred years, there is only so much you can do. Meanwhile technology is pushing the pleasure of porn to ever-greater heights. At some point in the future (if we aren't there already) AI VR porn, fleshlights and sex bots will so-surpass the thrill of real sex so dramatically it will be hard to deny. Even the most attractive woman on earth doesn't come with a literal motor in her pussy.
Everyone surely has some tipping point where the appeal of tech-assisted masturbation outweighs the appeal of real-life sex and any attendant social status. For men that are more anxious, have access solely to less attractive women or are more socially isolated and less affected by shaming their intersection point will come earlier. In a sense these men are just the canaries in the coal-mine, but as long as the technology continues to improve, it will come for all of us one day.
I think this is a real social problem beyond just porn and sex, tech-assisted super-stimuli generally. As I said, the offerings of real life relationships and activities are mostly static while the offerings of virtual ones are growing daily. Real life friendships vs AI chatbots/twitch streamers, video game achievements vs career achievements, pets (both virtual and real) vs children.
I wonder if the transhumanists will ever make that sort of thing happen. It kinda stands to reason, one would think - if you are gonna enhance your body why not get genitals that are super pleasurable for you and your partner?
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I think that the real trouble with fear and shame is not that it doesn't work in principle but that it can't be effectively wielded today.
Just imagine the amount of shaming and bullying that the 1950s guys would've been deploying against this stuff, against even the tamer /d/ threads. Metric tonnes of shaming! And that largely worked. But shaming is not something modern society is actually good at anymore. Huge resources are thrown into shaming racists yet there are a lot of racists around. Nobody cares so much anymore. In the 70's and 80's, shaming didn't stop gays from buggering eachother anonymously in bathhouses, making a human petri dish for diseases that would then kill so many of them (and others besides). If you read the infamous Salo thread, you can see the attitude of the scientists and doctors, how limpwristed and weak they felt in the face of an obvious public health emergency, like they'd be like 'please stop having sex and killing all these people' and then gays would bitch and complain that closing their sex/drugs bathhouses was like the Holocaust: 'Today the baths; tomorrow the ovens'. Ironically the would-be shamers felt more ashamed for even trying to shame than the ones who ought to be ashamed. As far as I know, the gays decisively won, Reagan is considered somehow at fault for HIV/AIDs and they continue on doing their thing now with expensive state-funded Prep drugs to hold off the consequences.
(rather confronting but since we're on the topic of confronting material) https://web.archive.org/web/20200618004225/https://salo-forum.com/index.php?threads/patient-zero-and-the-early-days-of-hiv-aids.3167/
And I see the same thing here. The Harpers journalist staring in at these people feels way more ashamed than the actual men involved. Total mismatch in willpower and determination.
Trying to use shame in the modern Western world today is extremely difficult.
To achieve success, you have to make a 'normal relationship' more cost-efficient than 'gooning'. Odds of success? Realistically, nil. What new relationship technologies have been developed in the last 100 years? No-fault divorce is scarcely even technology so much as relationship-sabotage.
Whereas in the techno-sexual sphere there are endless innovations! Television! Internet browsing! Photoshop! Livestreaming! Japanese weirdness! VR! AI waifus and chatbots!
If one side in a conflict is innovating while the other remains static, the former is sure to win. Even if the latter has all the good-coded stuff like 'having a normal one' and 'the power of love', then that only affects timelines, not the end result.
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I have to ask, what's the problem here? To society, a problem is only a problem if it's a problem for women. Women still get their stud guys who will fuck them, and their nice guys who will marry them - not every man in the world will become neutered at all ages, there will still be outliers. No one cares enough about men, especially not... INCELS <gasp!> to want to change this situation in any way. There's far more then enough men around to ensure the human population keeps going and even if we have a bit of an Idiocracy effect, I'm sure it's mostly self correcting.
No there aren't. South Koreans will be an endangered species by 2100 if the 100% gynocentric sexual culture continues.
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Steve Bannon is back in another interview asserting that Trump will get a 3rd term. Like previous times where he's said this, he doesn't really go into too much detail, besides saying they have a plan and they're working on it. I get this is Bannon's schtick lately and he's a political operative and so maybe this is just something he bangs on to rile up the base, but for fun, I want to consider here what the actual plan could be.
Bannon does give away more here than I've seen in other interviews where this has been brought up. I'm going to focus on 2 statements that I think start to give the plan away. When the interviewer says the 22nd Amendment makes it clear that Trump cannot have another term because he's on his 2nd term already:
To me, this is a point in favor of the theory that's been floated around already that their plan relies on some very literal reading of the 22nd Amendment.
Key word: elected. Fairly straightforward, and again, not anything that hasn't been brought up before. Trump runs as some other GOP candidate's VP, they win, and that candidate immediately steps down, making Trump president despite not having been "elected to the office of the President". He's been elected twice, but the 22nd says nothing of being President more than twice. The usual objection to this is that the 12th Amendment prevents this by barring someone who is ineligible for the presidency to be VP, but you can also play word games with this. If you interpret the 12th Amendment's "constitutionally ineligible to the office of President" to just mean "doesn't meet the requirements laid out by Article II", then Trump is still eligible to be President. He's just ineligible to be elected.
But isn't this against the spirit of the 22nd Amendment? Bannon:
It's one thing for Trump to lose the election and then try to still hang on for a 3rd term. But it's another if--given he's able to get on the ballot as VP for 2028, which I think he probably could in enough states--he and his Presidential candidate do actually win. Then the messaging becomes much easier. But how can Bannon be sure enough that the American people will elect Trump in this manner? Simply rig the election. Many say this is too difficult because you'd have to rig so many individual elections, and the states control elections, and if it's easy then why don't we see evidence of it being done in the past, etc. I'll admit this is probably the weakest part of the plan. But if you step back and say, "What steps would be required for this to be doable, and are they doing them?" then there are definitely signs. Dominion was recently bought by a Republican operative, and Trump's people are already signaling they want to mandate election rules for states in time for the midterms in 2026. A Trump DHS appointee who will be in charge of election infrastructure told all 50 states at a recent meeting that they
Even if they can't pull off mandating election rules at the federal level, Trump may have enough state legislatures in the bag that they might just take enabling actions "independently" of any top-down federal enforcement.
Also, you know, he could just actually win legitimately, that's completely possible with the state the Democrats are in right now.
So yeah, this isn't really anything genius. Win the election or rig it so that you do + creatively interpret the 22nd and 12th Amendments. Some quick responses to possible objections:
Lower courts yes, SCOTUS I'm 50/50 on. There are smart people who know the legal world far better than I do who are certain that even the current SCOTUS would rule 9-0 against Trump on this, so maybe. But smart people have been wrong about many matters involving Trump, and SCOTUS has disappointed me before. I don't care that "such-and-such legal scholars have written X about the interpretation of the 22nd/12th Amendment" because at the end of the day it's just SCOTUS that matters. I've seen a theory that SCOTUS has been forgiving to Trump in recent rulings because they know this day is coming, so they want to build up credibility with him for when they inevitably have to rule against him on this. That just seems far too giga-brained for me.
I never really bought the claims that "2020 was the most secure election in history" even though I don't think it was rigged. I just think if someone really tried, they could. Voting machines are repeatedly shown to have security flaws, and I don't think that all the swing counties that matter will use paper ballots and do risk-limiting audits to verify the results.
Maybe, although by 2028 Hegseth may be able to fire enough people and appoint loyalists in their place to make this a non-issue. Someone with deeper knowledge of the US military can comment here. I don't take the "swearing an oath to the Constitution, not the President" thing too seriously, because while I think it may hold at the top, I don't think it holds all the way down the chain of command, and that's what matters if it comes to having to forcibly remove Trump from the Oval Office. However the Courts rule also plays into this, if it can be framed that this whole thing actually isn't violating the Constitution.
Congress continues to abdicate its powers in favor of letting the executive do whatever they want (both parties) and I don't see this changing anytime soon. The only defectors from the GOP we see right now are MTG and Rand Paul. Trump is still going strong despite his age, and I think the people in the MAGA-sphere surrounding him have sunk too much into it to do anything other than milk it until he dies in office. I've completely given up hope that anybody in the White House or Congress will take a principled stance on this. Democrats will continue to be very concerned and maybe organize a No Kings march to no effect.
It's dumb and sad and shameful that Bannon is spouting this shit... but perhaps also shortsighted that the writers of the 22nd amendment solely used "elected," rather "elected... or hold office," spreading this question across three amendments that now need to be read together, still not entirely answering the question. Then again, this level of bad-faith interpretation was completely taboo, Before Trump. I'd hope SCOTUS would rule 9-0 "pfft, no - fuck off," but perhaps it's an Originalist-Textualist schism in the making and I just don't know it...
Edit: we-have-Claude-at-home weighed in: "After careful review, I found no definitive 21st-century scholarly endorsement of the multiple-term-via-succession interpretation from top-tier legal scholars or federal judges."
I think you underestimate the power of the emanations of penumbras. Or to put it another way, I am not kidding around when I say that the Constitution is dead. I do not believe it is capable of protecting me in any meaningful way from any number of bad things. Why should I expend effort to see it afford protections to those who are not me and not particularly like me either? I invite those to cleave to the document to continue sacrificing value in its name. I choose otherwise.
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The number of moving parts on this are insane. Even if you could technically do this, there’s huge problems of coordination, defection, etc. that you can’t get rid of.
If the guy actually elected refuses to step down what plausible mechanism does anyone have to force him to go along? I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that a contract specifying that person X is to run for president in place of Trump who can not be elected and step down is likely to be unenforceable. So Marco Rubio runs for president saying he’s going to resign and Trump will be the real president. He doesn’t. What’s the next move?
You also have the related issue of convincing Trump voters that this scheme is the real deal, that Trump will actually be the President and that the other guy is a ringer. That might not work. There’s only the Mel Carnahan senate race where that actually worked and people voted en mass for a candidate they didn’t want to win (he was dead at the time) and even then there was a bit of pushback because the GOP thought this was illegal. And the democrat voters had no assurances of exactly who would fill that seat. Democrats will absolutely push back on a candidate who is running on being a ringer. They would almost certainly sue, they might try to not certify the results, or have alternate slates.
Rigging elections is hard just because so much is happening in local precincts. Even if you have control over the dominion systems, not everyone votes by machine. If you have the machines down, then 2000 votes show up by voting machines, you have a problem. Even having the numbers right, you have to match the exit poll numbers (which you won’t have, as they’re taken after voting begins. You have to be pretty close to the poll’s already released, at least close enough that the media looking at the numbers buy the election results as plausible. You have to pay attention to down ballot races and issues as a wide discrepancy between the numbers for president and the numbers for senators, representatives, ballot issues etc. would raise eyebrows. You also have to have the final numbers seem random enough that statisticians are okay with the results.
I don’t think anything like this is plausible, but watching someone try to do it and fail would be pretty wild.
All true, and that doesn't even begin to touch the strategic issues. I don't think the GOP is going to clear the field for Vance or any other candidate, which means a competitive primary, which in turn means that some candidate would have to run as Trump's stooge, which might in and of itself cost that candidate the primary. Or Trump could run Don Jr. or someone as a crypto-stooge, but if they aren't clearing the primary for Vance there's no way in hell Vance or any other credible candidate would step aside so Don Jr. can run as a stand-in. And even if the GOP was on board with the whole scheme, it's still a huge risk. Once Trump is named as the vice presidential nominee, the whole eligibility thing is going to overshadow anything else about the election. There will also be a wave of litigation in every state to keep him off the ballot. What happens if this litigation is successful? If the entire selling point is "Trump will still be president", will voters be willing to back a stooge replacement on his own? If the outcome is that he isn't on the ballot in Pennsylvania but is everywhere else, do you find a replacement? What if the Supreme Court rules him ineligible at the worst possible moment? What if the GOP goes along with the scheme and Trump stays on the ballot in all states, but voters are so disgusted with the GOP that he loses in a landslide and the Democrats win large majorities in both houses? And sitting Republicans are primaried out next go around because of it?
There's been a lot of discussion on here in the past about why Trump always seems to outperform his poll numbers, and the most popular explanation is a "shy Tory" effect, but I think it has more to do with what I call the "Trump Constant". One of the big stories about Trump when he first entered politics was his appeal to disaffected people who normally wouldn't vote. Since they're on the margins of political discourse they don't participate in polls and they don't vote in elections unless Trump is involved, though they will vote Republican down ballot if asked to. These are the people who started flying Trump 2028 flags in January and don't really give a shit about the Constitution, or decorum, or any of the other things that Trump seems to have a disregard for.
I don't mean to toot my own horn, because this idea hadn't crystalized yet at the time, but I more or less predicted Ron Desantis's downfall when he was the toast of the "smart set" of the Republican party and of a lot of people on this board. If you remember, in early 2022 Trump's viability going forward was in question after the election nonsense and January 6, and Desantis was trying to portray himself as the future of the party. But there were still a ton of people doing MAGA. He was trying to walk a tightrope where he'd keep his distance from Trump without openly criticizing him. At the time I argued that this would only work if Trump declined to seek reelection, but that he painted himself into a corner because his unwillingness to cozy up to Trump and his image at a fighter meant that he couldn't just not run and yield the nomination. But if he ran he couldn't directly criticize Trump either, and I predicted that his campaign would turn into an incoherent mess, which is exactly what happened.
But when I made this argument to bona-fide Republicans, they dismissed it, and kept pushing the Desantis line. If the "Trump Constant" had been a theory at the time, the media and everyone else wouldn't have been so bullish on Trump, because it would have been clear that Jesus Christ himself wouldn't get the same boost Trump got, especially in a primary. He was so far ahead at the outset that he didn't even bother to debate, and he was so untouchable that none of his opponents save Christie would even dare criticize him. It was the stupidest primary election in history. The theory also explains why the GOP underperformed in 2022; by that time pollsters were making adjustments to account for the "shy Tory" effect or whatever, but they misapplied it since Trump wasn't on the ballot. Normal polling would have predicted the modest GOP pickups. It explains why Conor Lamb ended up beating "Trump before Trump" Rick Saccone (nice guy; I voted for him when he represented my district in the state house) in a District that was Trump +18. It explains why polling in 2016 and 2020 was so awful.
And it explains all this third term nonsense. Trump is convinced that the "Trump Constant" represents the majority of voters. In the past, Trump has convinced the GOP to go along with ideas that would have seemed unthinkable a few months prior. And thus far, he's proven that there are no political consequences for doing so. So it stands to reason that he might be willing to give this a try. But he has to remember that he's not invincible. He's never won as an incumbent, and for all the upheaval of 2020, it was nowhere near the level it would be if he was blatantly trying to circumvent the constitution to retain his hold on power. People in the GOP who would say that this is a bridge too far may ultimately backtrack if this nonsense becomes a reality, but Trump's only holds the office based on a margin of a few points in a few states. It doesn't take much for things to tip back in the other direction, and if he loses he will be done for good, and there's no way he is making a comeback at 86. I don't think he'll seriously pursue a third term, but I wouldn't entirely be surprised if he did.
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Who could you even find would agree to this nonsense scheme? Who is going to become president and just be like lol I'm stepping down?
And I don't think there's any way such a ticket could even win the primary. Whoever is on the ticket is going to have to do debates and whatever, and you think he can just say lol maga I'm gonna step down and make Trump president?
I think the OP os largely posting nonsense but if you wanted someone you’d probably pick family to lower the risk (eg Don Jr)
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Well, last election there was only one presidential debate. The norm prior to that was three. Maybe in 2027 we won't have any.
There were two debates.
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The norm also had been to have a President who can figure out where to walk and where to sit without cue cards written IN BIG FRIENDLY LETTERS and his handlers literally leading him by hand. But all the norms went out of the window with Biden. Hopefully whoever will be the candidate next time, at least they would be able to walk and talk independently.
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That's a cute trick, but I don't believe any cute trick like that would work. I voted for Trump twice, and haven't regretted it (at least so far), and I wouldn't vote for such shenanigans. I am pretty sure I am not alone. As a mental game of "how Trump could stay the President forever" it is interesting to play with, but as a realistic scenario it's just not. And to be honest, if the Republican Party's best play is to rely on Trump alone until he literally dies, the party is dead already and needs to be replaced. I sincerely hope it's not that bad.
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I can't take Bannon saying this to mean anything or indicate anything serious. He's just talking out of his ass from a position of no authority. Furthermore, Trump will be way too old to run next time. Furthermore, if they actually tried to run a strategy like this for any length of time, as opposed to just talking about it, that would push every centrist like me, who doesn't take anything Trump says about himself seriously nor takes anything Trump's detractors say about him seriously, into a realization that Trump is in fact a threat to American democracy. It would prove every leftist correct, that Trump is the worst thing ever, a wannabe dictator, the whole thing. Then Trump would lose in the biggest landslide ever.
Strongly disagree. I think there's probably very few people who aren't already convinced of this that would then become convinced by him trying a 3rd term. He already tried to hang on to power after an election whose results he disagreed with via very legally dubious means. I don't get the reasoning that sees the fake electors plot and concludes "Yeah, now that he attempted that and faced no consequences, won reelection, and has a Supreme Court ruling now saying he can't face any criminal liability for his actions as President, he probably won't try anything like it again".
I've only voted for Trump harder each time he came up on the ballot, but I'm not going to vote for him again. I'm happy with what he's done so far but it will be the time for him to pass the buck on to someone else. There's no way I'm supporting a trump for life ticket.
Why not? Why pass up an opportunity to keep blue tribe under the heel of your boot? “My rules > your rules fairly > your rules unfairly…”?
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I certainly would react as @haroldbkny describes. I have argued for 8ish years that Trump is not actually a big deal and people are freaking out over nothing. I thought the Jan 6 riot was a complete nothingburger and I think the "insurrection" talk is coming from a place of fearmongering rather than any actual basis in Trump's actions. If he tried to actually run for a third term, that will show that the left has been right about him the entire time, and he actually is a threat to democratic government in this country. I'll vote for literally anyone the Democrats run against him.
What's your opinion of FDR?
I hate him, though not for the fact that he ran for four terms if that's why you ask. That was legal at the time, so whatever (I am not one who believes that custom should be given serious weight like that). I hate him because he wiped his ass with the constitution and largely destroyed the original vision for this country by centralizing so much power within the federal government, power that it constitutionally could not (and still cannot) have. Only extremely disingenuous motivated reading of the commerce clause (with Wickard v Filburn being the prime example) allowed it, and everything he did under that aegis should be walked back. That won't happen of course, because a strong federal government is actually pretty popular with the masses.
But yeah, in short I think FDR was one of the worst presidents the US ever had.
I agree, but the general consensus does not impress.
I actually think Trump running again would be an extremely bad idea for a number of practical reasons. But more and more, I'm flatly unwilling to engage in the pretense that there's some civic foundation that future norm violations are supposed to be undermining, that even a single stone of those foundations still rests upon another. This perspective doesn't necessarily resolve in endorsement of further violations, but if I'm going to oppose them, I'm going to oppose them for real reasons, not fake ones.
Yeah, I know people rate FDR highly. It's one of the things that lowers my level of hope for this nation: that a president can make his entire policy platform to do blatantly unconstitutional stuff, thoroughly destroy the original social contract on which the nation was founded, and be rated as one of the greatest leaders in the country's history (rather than as one of its greatest villains) as a result. George Lucas was a little on the nose with the Star Wars line "So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause", but he also was basically correct imo. When freedom is taken away from a people, it is popular to do so (until it's gone too far and then it's too late to stop it, let alone reverse it).
I'm not saying that Trump is committing the first serious norm violations in our country's history. He isn't. We have been steadily eroding those norms for a century. But I am saying "two wrongs don't make a right", and I'm going to fight Trump just as hard on constitutional principles as I would've fought FDR back in the day had I been alive. Not that it means much, of course - Trump doesn't even know I exist, much less care what I think. But to the extent I can do something if he goes down that road (i.e vote against him, rather than for someone I would prefer), I will.
Do you believe that "Constitutional Principles" protect you or anything you care about now, or will at any point in the forseeable future? Do you perceive your position to be one of enlightened self-interest, or is it more a terminal values thing?
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Personally, back in '37 I thought he was a Supreme Court packing Bolshevik.
Seriously though, I couldn't possibly know what I would have thought at the time. He wasn't going against the Constitution, but rather a very strong precedent. He had some serious arguments for why he might need to break that precedent. And I know he had his detractors, but I'm sure he did not have half the country saying every day since he put his name on the ballot in 1932 that any day now he was going to try to become the dictator of America.
I meant more your present retrospective. I've been told my whole life by the authorities that he's a solid contender for best president of all time, only marginally edged out by Lincoln.
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I am a centrist and while Jan 6 didn’t bother me, this would. I interpret Jan 6 as mere bluster that nobody (including his supporters) took seriously. If he actually became president for a third term this would cause me to admit that the left was actually correct about the seriousness of Trump’s antidemocratic tendencies.
The American meltdown over Jan 6 was hilarious.
Century of toppling foreign governments, some of which were democratically elected by their people? I sleep
A bunch of Gen X wander around a government building for a few hours, largely make fools of themselves, and then nothing happens? Literally worst thing to happen to America since 9/11 / pearl harbor / the civil war.
I am convinced that the outrage in Congress was a reaction to the immense shame they all felt for blowing the chance of a lifetime: whoever went out and confronted the mob and pulled a calm, collected "have you no shame, have you no decency" response would've been elected President in 2024. Instead, they all ran away, and that knowledge will burn them forever.
I think it's truly the most banal of explanations - all those other riots, those didn't put them at risk. They saw the burning but the burning was for other people. But this one? Oh god that impacts me! Add a media class that identifies as part of the same DC elite that was terrified, and then you get the push.
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I think there are a lot of people even just in this forum who would disagree with you about what centrists would and would not take seriously, and I'm speaking as one of those centrists.
I think Trump crossing the well established and easy to understand bright line in the sand that has existed in spirit since 228 years ago, and in law since 74 years ago would be far more of a damning behavior than the 2020 election craziness. It ultimately likely comes down to the plausible deniability of Trump's actions, whether it could be seen in any light as (yet again) something that was potentially taken out of context, just his enemies ganging up on him to make it seem like he's doing something worse then he is. Seeing language on Wikipedia claiming he "devised a scheme" doesn't do much to convince me of the neutrality of the sources reporting on it.
I consider myself pretty much a centrist. I don't like the left and I don't like the right. And I think Trump's actions during the 2020 election are inexcusable and, if not legally, then morally, disqualifying for holding the office of President. That was basically the line in the sand for me and my registered Republican family members who voted for him the first time around. They didn't vote for him again (as far as I know), and they might have if it weren't for 2020. So I do think I have at least some knowledge of what centrists think.
This seems overly uncharitable to me. Of course we can never truly know, but say he had done what the Wikipedia article says. What language would you expect or want them to use? "Devising a scheme" is just straightforwardly what one would call that.
"crafted a plan"
to be frank, there are many ways to more neutrally describe someone communicating with a group of people to come up with a plan to accomplish something
that you cannot even think of a way to describe such a thing without the negative connotation demonstrates what wikipedia is being accused of (which you're apparently blind to)
Let's assume the 2020 election was illegally stolen. What should Trump have done?
What he initially did: make his case in court, where he had the opportunity to show evidence of vote tampering or other forms of fraud significant enough to change the outcome of the election. It was his right to do that, and it's good that we allow it in our justice system. After he lost all these cases, he should have conceded and let it be. Instead he continued to pursue hanging onto the office via other means with much less legal justification behind them.
The contingent/alternative electors were appointed before he lost all of those court cases and their appeals. If they had not been, they would have missed the deadline for appointing electors and he would have lost even if the courts ruled in a way that would make him the winner. If you think court cases should have the power to affect the outcome even after that deadline, that implies support for appointing the "fake electors" (or for the more extreme measure of trying to outright ignore the deadlines and appoint them after the fact).
There's a reason Gore's lawyers were considering doing the same thing in 2000 before the Supreme Court rendered it moot. The whole complaint about the "fake electors" seems to me like something people ended up focusing on because it was easier to use as a pretext for prosecution of him and the electors themselves, because the thing he actually did wrong (be a conspiracy theorist who falsely believed the election was stolen) isn't illegal.
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Okay, so if the courts refused to look at evidence, and even refuse to put a statutorily required hearing to see that evidence onto the court schedule (e.g., in the case of the Georgia election contest), then still he should do nothing else?
He should just allow the illegal election be stolen and allow the criminals who stole it to gain power and wreak further havoc on the country?
Using the process explicitly defined in the Constitution of the United States to contest electoral counts from states who unconstitutionally and illegally conducted their elections resulting in fraudulent outcomes does have plenty of legal justification behind them.
I don't believe the fake electors plan falls inside of that explicitly defined process. The memos and testimony we have now show:
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Very well, you may be a centrist, I may have misjudged the validity of your centrist card. You're just a different one from me. But I still stand by the fact that many people in the forum may agree with me but not you. The vice versa may also be true.
I just also want to put out there that I do specifically know people who claim to be centrists but always align on the leftist position. I'm guessing they do this to try to gain cred with people like me. I can't say if you are that or not, because I haven't seen your track record.
Sorry, but I just absolutely disagree with you here. Never ever use the phrase "devise a scheme" unless they're Snidely Whiplash. For reporting on real world events you say he "planned to" or "was alleged to" or about a hundred other obviously neutral ways. Let actions speak for themselves on neutral sources. "Devise a scheme" is loaded loaded language.
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Is Bannon actually in the authority position for this to mean much? Like hail Trump, hail victory. Bring on the red caesar, it would be very good for my ingroup. But Bannon could well be a loudmouth, and in fact seems to generally be a loudmouth. I would put higher odds on Vance taking the throne by assassination after the midterms than on Trump actually doing this- I dunno, could be wrong. But he's just really old to try to make your long term dictator, and the people that would need to cooperate in it have to know this.
Would it? Do you anticipate your country being ran better in the long run once this happens? Sure it'll be a nice sugar high, but what happens once it's 10 years from now and the rot and corruption that always (always) sets in once groups are established? Especially in cases where the usual checks and balances to prevent anyone from getting too comfortable or destructive?
Will your in group be doing well when your country's bureaucracy runs even worse than it does now, business investment (with knock on effects on the equity market) is more hesitant due to the increased risk from crony capitalism, and the USA has lost its mandate of
heavenleader of the free world and the associated advantages like preferential trade deals and the world reserve currency?Leaving aside the assertion that democrats would do any better of a job running the country(and Biden definitely did not- we can probably take him as a generic democrat due to his senility giving outsized power to the staffers), there is no right wing authoritarian regime which can be in power without taking care of conservative Catholics.
Don't think I ever said this?
My assertion is that an administration who creatively interprets the constitution to give itself more power would do a worse job than the status quo.
Doesn't matter. Your life gets worse when the overall economy gets worse due to shitty leadership and capital flight, no matter how much the administration loves Catholics.
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Run better than what? If the alternative is Joe Biden's people, or Kamala Harris, or Zohran Mandami, or Gavin Newsom, then yes.
A crony capitalist quasi-autocratic (maybe we need a less inflammatory word that "autocratic" but my point is more "no longer a very democratic form of government that has even less pretense to listen to its citizens or be run well for fear of losing elections") is in no way going to run better than the USA currently.
We know this because the USA is still ran better, today, than the vast majority of counties on Earth. And it is very definitely ran better than the currently crony capitalist quasi-autocratic countries that exist right now.
Also again, what about when the shoe is on the other foot? What if Trump rips a third term, then the American people are so deeply upset with it that they not only elect Kamala Harris (lmao), but they elect her for 12 years straight using the same trick? Would you accept 12 years of Kamalapocalypse in exchange for an extra Trump term? Because that's implicitly an outcome here.
If your response is "well we'd simply ensure the Democrats never win again by cementing red-tribe rule forever" I again direct you to my question of "do you seriously actually think places like Assad Syria or El Salvador are ran better than California?". Governments that no longer need to worry about securing votes go off the rails really fucking fast, every time.
We're talking about Trump getting a third term, not a "crony capitalist quasi-autocratic" government; that's just a bunch of noise that gets thrown at Trump, and it doesn't even make sense alongside one of the other things thrown at him, which is "populist".
Why would they be so upset, when they voted for Trump (or someone they knew would yield to him) for that third term?
Right, but a third term is in flagrant disregard to the democratic principles the country was built around. So presumably if you're willing to torch constitutional articles in the pursuit of more power, that won't be the only roadblock in the pursuit of more power.
This administration also has a rapidly growing resume of moves to increase its power despite rules or norms that say "no you can't". So this isn't even a conjecture it's just the continuation of an existing pattern of behavior.
I actually chose the words "crony capitalist quasi-autocratic" somewhat carefully, although I'm open to "autocratic" being the wrong word. They have a clear streak of being crony capitalists (TikTok deal, Merger approvals, Intel stake, Nvidia bullshit, etc). And doing that always, always results in shitter outcomes than letting the free market work. It also results in playing favorites and trading political and business favors back and forth.
The quasi-autocratic is again, because if you start undermining the fundamental principles of a democratic government to increase your political power, I really don't know what to call that.
Don't get too caught up in my lazy hypothetical. The thesis there is if you're okay with your team bending rules to increase its power, but there's a credible chance the other team will have a chance to bend those rules as well eventually, you are implicitly accepting that the other team gets to do it as well.
Unless of course you're only fine with your team bending the rules if they also simultaneously destroy the other team completely, in which case "quasi-autocratic" is only wrong because "autocratic" is better lol
LOL. No, no it isn't. The two-term limit was just a tradition up until FDR broke it. And the backlash for that is he got a FOURTH term as well. And a Democrat was his successor. And law or norm, it is anti-democratic.
This amounts to a Gish Gallop. The TikTok deal was the result of a bill passed during the Biden administration. Not sure which merger approval you mean, but the idea that there was any cronyism involved in the Nexstar approval was just speculation. Neither the Intel stake nor the Nvidia bullshit are "crony capitalism"; they're attempts at industrial policy. Trump didn't put his buddies on the board or anything; it's the US government that got a stake.
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With whom does one submit a ticket to get an action or interaction with the government registered as recognizably, fully-legibly "in flagrant disregard to the democratic principles this country was built on", such that one can then make such appeals here? It seems a very useful imprimatur to have in one's back-pocket when disagreements arise. Note that I am not even necessarily disagreeing with you that Trump running for a third term should be labeled such! The problem is that if others are going to ignore my judgements on what constitutes "flagrant disregard to the democratic principles this country was built on", I am not clear on why I not ignore their judgements in return.
Reciprocity is the basis for most human relationships. There are some that can operate without it: husband and wife, parent and child, brothers, sisters and true friends. But you are not my wife, my parent or my child, nor a brother or a sister, nor a friend. Outside such bonds, even the Rightful Caliph could do no better then advocate coordinating meanness.
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51% of the popular vote (for one given election) does not translate to "the entirety of American voters", as you surely understand. You're talking as if "a Democrat getting elected after a Republican" is something that has never happened in the history of U.S.A. After all, if the American people liked the Republican so much they elected him, why ever would they change their mind?
Or do you mean to say that if Trump gets the third term, that'll be the end of the Democrat party?
I'm saying if Trump gets a third term, there is no particular reason to believe "the American people" will be "deeply upset" with it. Sure, a Democrat could win afterwards, but that could happen if J.D. Vance won or even if a Democrat won in 2028. If Trump gets a third term it will because he is extremely popular -- popular enough that a majority of voters were not only willing to vote for him but also willing to overlook the irregularities it took to get there. It won't be deeply upsetting to the American people; they'll have basically given the middle finger to the term limit already.
As it happens, I don't think this will happen. I do not believe Trump will actually try to run again and if he does I believe he will lose. But if he does and wins, there will not be popular backlash to him doing so.
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Bannon's a shock jock who lasted less than six months in the Trump administration. Trump called him "Sloppy Steve". He says crazy shit because it gets him an audience.
As for Trump trying to play sneaky tricks with the Constitution to get a third term, this ignores the elephant in the room: the MAGA base. A double-digit % of Trump voters would go along with it, I'd think, out of hatred/fear of the Dems, QAnon-style theories, and personal loyalty, sure. But, contra what it looks like to some incurious people in blue bubbles, Trump supporters aren't mindless sheeple blindly following the cult leader. They're following a leader, because they believe that in the big picture their leader wants what they want and fights for it, and what they want is for America to get back to being a great country because that's normal for America and what America should be. If nothing else, those sort of shenanigans are too complex to appeal to anybody but political obsessives, they inherently turn off normal people. "Red Caesar" is a fantasy of blue tribe right-wingers; it's not even on Joe MAGA's radar.
In my view it's precisely because this would be complex that Trump supporters would be fine with it. Anyone opposed could be cast as a lame nerd quibbling over boring legal language.
a. ) I don't think this is incompatible with him trying to get a 3rd term? If he's fighting for them, why would they want him to stop? Bannon basically says as much in the interview I linked. They have a vision, the base likes the vision, and they need at least 4 more years after this term to complete it.
b.) Many, many things Trump does inherently turn off normal people, and it hasn't seemed to matter much.
I'd be fine with it for the exact same reason I've never heard a Democrat get all high dudgeon at the suggestion that Michelle Obama run when everyone and their dog knows who would actually be executive.
Leaders I like having power is a good thing, actually.
But if progressives and "centrists" want to cite the Constitution about it, then they have a half-century edifice of utilitarian jurisprudence to exorcise before they get to be taken seriously in those concerns.
More realistically, I'm 99.9% sure that nothing like this is going to happen. Trump is not the dictator that idiots think he is. He does not value hard power for it's own sake, or he would have gone into politics 50 years earlier.
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a) Because a movement can have a successor to the leader who carries on fighting for the same principles. There are diehards who won't accept that anyone else is the Real Deal, but they're a tiny fraction, oddballs like Bannon on the fringe of MAGA. It doesn't preclude Trump trying to get a third term, but makes it unnecessary, and a huge chunk of his base will feel that way. It also means Trump can step down without his movement dying and him and his family imprisoned/dead.
b) A large portion of Trump voters are, by definition, normal people. Certainly more normal than anyone posting here. Maybe they don't have your norms, but they're clearly not turned off by his media antics all that much (I do think there's probably a notable divide in opinion between the Trump voters who love his antics and those who like him but wish he'd tone it down a bit, but it's just an opinion).
Red tribe normies mostly do not like Trump's personal behavior, but they have a strong divide between 'I wish he'd stop tweeting' and 'I like it, he tells it like it is'. The latter group is a minority, but not a small one, and it is very very male.
Yeah, I thought about including something like "he tells it like it is" in parentheses there. I also hear a bit of ambivalence from some red tribe normies, a sort of "well, I can't personally agree with his conduct (but, well, it's working?)"
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I would include a third constituency - those who find his antics juvenile, appalling and unbecoming of the Presidency, but who dislike/distrust the Democrats more.
Oh, sure, probably should have said "supporters" instead of "voters" for that reason.
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So, on the one hand, this just strikes me as bizarre wishful thinking or rallying the troops ahead of some pretty important off season elections. Are we even sure Trump is going to be in good enough health to serve out this term? I mean, he's looking better than Biden did, but he's still old, and sometimes people really go off a cliff. His "weave" is nowhere near where it was in the 2016 election.
On the other hand, despite supporting many of his policies, and not even being particularly bothered at the prospect of a 3rd Trump term so he can finish remaking the institutions and the culture in his image, I believed many of the arguments that the system of checks and balances would restrain Trump. So while being personally for tariffs, and mass deportations, and slamming the border shut, I could make with a straight face the arguments necessary to moderates that their worst fears would not materialize. "The system" would restrain Trump in a way it utterly failed to restrain the lawless Biden administration. Now much to my glee, "the system" has failed in many ways to check Trump, but it also means, maybe, juuuuuust maybe, it fails to restrain him in this way too. So it's a bit harder for me to make that argument in all sincerity.
So I donno. I'm not against Red Caesar. Just don't get my hopes up.
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Trump is too old for this to be serious. I don’t understand what sort of play Bannon is making, maybe just trying to get himself back in the news if nothing else.
It's bizarre to advocate for an 80 year old man with three and a half grown sons to run for a third term. If Trump were a monarch, any reasonable monarchist would be advocating for him to abdicate and retire in favor of one of his children.
Back when ruling monarchs were a thing, abdicating in your old age was the exception and not the rule - remember that the King was anointed by God. If the King and heir were aligned, then the heir gradually took over more responsibility as the King declined. If the King and heir were opposed, then you got Biden-style scenarios where the King's courtiers tried to conceal the decline to prevent authority leaking to the heir and his courtiers.
[Old age abdication was common for Japanese Emperors, but they were never ruling monarchs]
Sure but that's not modernity. Life and healthspans were different, expectations of the ruler were different. Were King Donald a modern king and I a modern monarchist, I would advocate for his abdication, or at least for stepping back in favor of the heir. Fwiw, I think Charles should do the same, you don't want to end up with a long run of men who wait a lifetime to be king. I'm not sure monarchy really works without early and violent deaths intervening on occasion, you wind up with gerontocracy.
We see this very pattern in our best example of a ruling monarch today, King Salman of Saudi Arabia who has largely abdicated in favor of MBS. Salman recognized the danger of the Saudi throne being passed from aged brother to aged brother, a gerontocracy where crown princes died of old age, and skipped over many heads to get MBS next in line and passed him power to get things moving.
Given Donald's age, he should be putting one of his two and half grown sons on the ballot. Absent that, I think even mooting running Donald is evidence that MAGA, or at least some interpretations of MAGA, is a lot more fragile than it may appear.
But critically, Salman is still King and MBS is Crown Prince, Prime Minister and de facto regent. That is the point I was making - ruling Kings who are aligned with their heirs hand over power gradually but don't actually abdicate due to old age and infirmity. Voluntary abdication due to old age is a feature of 21st century constitutional monarchs.
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I would respect the King for doing this, though as a general principle I think you need to wait long enough for them to be a reasonably known quantity. Certainly not younger than maybe 35. If the throne had been passed to Prince Harry ten years ago, you could have had the entire monarchy being led around by the nose to please a Californian socialite with a grudge.
Would it even be legally possible for Charles to abdicate without legal changes in each of the countries that claims him as head of state? I remember reading that the abdication of Edward required Parliament to write it into law and that law to become law in Australia, Canada, etc. Even given Charles's shaky popularity and Williams's solid popularity, I can't see that being an easy process especially with how independent all the various countries have become legally.
British monarchs have definitely abdicated before, even in the twentieth century.
Only once, since the days when they were "abdicating" under force of arms.
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The Commonwealth doesn’t have any legal say on the matter AFAIK. There’s always the issue of whether they would accept William or demand that another country’s leader gets to be head of the Commonwealth, but that’s a separate matter.
My impression is that Charles is generally quite well-liked, at least in Africa, since he cares a lot about commonwealth and he’s quite internationalist. William is probably something of an unknown quantity.
The Commonwealth doesn't get legal say, but the Commonwealth realms absolutely do.
Currently, Charles is King of the United Kingdom, King of Canada, King of Australia, King of Barbados, et cetera. Each of those offices is legally a separate office, governed by law in each of those separate countries, so any abdication would require a statute law passed in each of those countries. (There're several like Papua New Guinea where it wouldn't, but several more where it would.) Similarly, any change to the royal succession would require a law in each of those countries.
That's rather difficult, so I don't expect it'll happen unless it's very much needed.
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I think much more likely would be a second Edward VIII situation. Maybe marrying a divorcée is not such a big scandal today, but Meghan would be totally unacceptable as queen consort. If, in this scenario, William is the younger brother and married to Kate, he would be seen as more suitable and pressure would be put on Harry to either give up Meghan or abdicate.
Also possible.
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Prince Harry the heir is different man that Prince Harry the spare. He never married Meghan Markle, he married a black American divorcee specifically to avoid being compared to his brother.
William, by contrast, is certainly ready to be king. He's had 20 years of adulthood to prepare! And it would be great for the UK! The last time they had a monarch that young was 1968! Shake the cobwebs off and dance!
Sure, I would happily cheer for King William V!
Prince Harry the heir I wonder about. I think his constitution is just a bit tricky innately - I kind of assume that somebody who lets themselves be led around like that has a sort-of innate weakness of spirit that will manifest in one way or another. Maybe he would have been a slave to popularity, or in thrall to certain courtiers, or who knows, but I don't think he would have been a good king even if he hadn't been the spare.
It's just hard to separate the role from the psychology of the man where the difference is so stark. Decades ago Harry was known for his impulsiveness, his wildness, for his refusal to be led around by anyone.
But this is a philosophy of personality question. I don't think personalities exist absent context. The starting quarterback and the backup quarterback on the high school football team have different personalities, but the backup is only the backup because of the existence of the starter.
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Sort of? AFAIK it was considered a big thing when Emperor Akihito abdicated in 2019 (since the emperor is also anointed by God, or possibly is a god, I forget) and nobody had done it for 200 years. I'd be interested to hear more background on this.
I am not an expert, but under the Shogunate the (non-ruling) Emperors normally abdicated after about a decade. The official reason was that the religious duties of the Emperor were so tedious that it was unreasonable to expect someone to do the job for life, the actual reason was presumably to prevent the Emperor becoming a threat to the Shogun. Following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Emperor officially became a ruling Emperor again (in fact it was a UK-style constitutional monarchy and the elected Prime Minister held more real power than the Emperor) and the abdications stopped.
That’s very interesting, thanks for explaining.
I always wanted to try studying Japanese history in the original, without preconceptions, but my la gauge ability didn’t really develop fast enough to make that viable, so I’m more ignorant than I’d like to be.
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Japanese emperors in a certain period would abdicate to gain more power, and the current ruling Emperor would be just a puppet.
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Making any sort of play for a Trump 3rd team would open the door for Obama to throw his hat as well, and nostalgia+vibes would almost certainly grant him a victory, so this would not be on the interest of the right (especially as Obama is still young for a politician, only being 67 years old at 2028)
I notice that Obama has been more visible lately, and him and Trump are sniping at each other more than usual. I think it’s being considered as a back up plan in case this actually happens.
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Trump, partly driven by the jokes Obama made at his expense during the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner, ends up becoming president. Obama, spurred by efforts to enable Trump to serve a third term, returns to office himself. It's like poetry, sort of. They rhyme.
One of my favorite things about Trump is his ongoing refusal to go to the dinner. It's delightfully petty, but I also think it's good policy, that being so buddy-buddy with the press (like Obama was) actually is a bad thing for the office.
Not to mention good for the press.
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If the Trump camp telegraph this way ahead of time, maybe. The Democratic Party machinery would have to spin up a whole campaign around Obama, assuming he even wants to do it, and assuming the Democrats actually want to play into further cementing that precedent. I see a scenario where Trump somehow gets a favorable ruling in 2027 and Democrats hold off on running a 3rd term candidate so that in the event they do win, they can work to cement the law to really make the spirit of the 22nd Amendment an unambiguous thing without looking like they're pulling up the ladder behind them.
Another possibility is the Democrats don't see this coming, Trump brute forces it with some help from favorable state legislatures to get on the ballot, wins, and then the SCOTUS ruling in his favor comes through post-2028 when he's already secured the presidency. Then the Democrats have the option to run Obama for 2032, but that's too far out to really reason about. Who knows what happens if we get to that point.
Hillary III (or IV, depending if we count the 2012 second term of Obama as being what stymied her trying again then) - this time for sure! 🤣 In 2028 she would be a sprightly eighty years old, mature enough for the job!
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Remember a person named Kamala Harris? They'd do the same thing. They'd just declare it's the current thing now, and significant percentage of their base is trained to embrace the current thing immediately on declaration. Except that Obama is much more visible and prominent figure that can stand on his own and hold the audience (at least if the teleprompter is not malfunctioning) and has people who are genuinely like him, not because the Party told them so. So it'd be very easy to do this if they'd need to. Of all the obstacles, this is the least one, they've done it before.
Unlike Republicans of course, who have never once changed their opinion on supporting Ukraine, or the efficacy of the free market, or the efficacy of free trade, or how small government should be, or if state owned enterprises are good, or anything else in the last ~9 months.
There's still discussion among the Republicans on Ukraine. Some think we should do more, some think we should do less. It had been like that before the election, it had been after the election, it is now, it will be in the future. It's not like today all Republicans put up Ukrainian flags on Twitter, and tomorrow every single one forgets about it and puts up Hamas flags or whatever instead. There's also disagreement between libertarian wing - which supports free trade - and populist wing - which is more skeptical about it. I don't think there's a lot of disagreement about cutting the government, though again populist wing wants much more government intervention than the libertarian wing. So yes, there are different wings among the Republicans, and I am sure some Republicans may, on occasion, change their minds and move from one wing to a different one. That's normal too. What's appears to me less normal is when almost the whole party starts in unison (sometimes literally using the same words, there were many examples) discussing the same topic in the same way, only to drop it and switch to another one immediately. Nobody cared for any renovations in the White House ever, and suddenly starting a couple of days ago it's a sacred symbol of the nation where one can't move a nail without being literally Hitler. And in a month nobody would remember it, moving on to the next current thing. It works like that.
You could literally just take your comment, replace "Republican" with "Democrat", and it would be true
You say the Republicans don't literally all move as one, sure. Neither do the Democrats. You'll always find exceptions, congratulations. You can find them for Dems too.
https://globalaffairs.org/research/public-opinion-survey/dramatic-rise-republican-support-ukraine
This article shows 20%+ swings in opinion in a very small timeframe, which satisfies the "significant percentage of their base is trained to embrace the current thing immediately on declaration" that I quoted.
I don't even disagree, the Dems also do this bullshit. I hate both groups, you're fucking morons, please pull your collective heads out of your collective asses and wake up to the fact that China is eating your fucking lunch and western society has become so sclerotic and myopic it can barely meet the needs of its people.
I miss when Western society was the pinnacle of human civilization, and not an ouroboros of rent seekers cannibalizing itself for short term returns at the cost of long term prosperity.
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What is even supposed to be the upside of this idea for Trump himself?
Not getting thrown in jail for the numerous crimes you committed (either real ones, or the ones they will pin on you, like those sexual assault and felony fraud convictions)?
This was juat a way to prevent him from running. They won't do it if he doesn't run to start with.
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JD Vance will not prosecute Trump.
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Being President is more fun than being a very rich political has-been?
I'm not actually sure that's true. I mean the power, yes, but Trump had been able to execute significant amount of power even not being the President. And maybe having quarter of the power and zero responsibility would suit him fine too.
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Maybe this is why he's the president, and I'm just a pleb, but surely, when you're pushing 80 and already have 2 terms behind you, you might want to just chill and hang out with the grandkids?
I 100% agree with you, that is what I would do
But the kind of person who has the conviction, determination and drive to become the president of the USA is also not the kind of person to kick up their feet and cruise control.
I constantly wonder why Elon Musk does anything he's been doing, he seems pretty unhappy and stressed out a lot? If I was worth 100s of billions I'd be living full time on a tropical paradise island that I built into some kind of funhouse compound and I'd have my friends and family rotate in and out to keep me company. Maybe spice it up by going on international trips every other month. I'd be SO MUCH happier than Elon if I had his money.
But Elon is Elon because of that drive. He wouldn't be worth 100s of billions if he didn't have it.
I see it with "retired" successful consultants who then just keep working semi-privately. Their millionaires, why are you still doing this shit? Because they have insane drive and the insane drive is also why they're millionaires. If they could fuck off and relax, they wouldn't have been the massively successful consultants they were/are.
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He can chill with the grandkids while living in the White House, shutting down large parts of the country for "security" when he turns up to play golf, and hearing "Hail to the Chief" when he rocks up at a public event while Susie Wiles and Steven Miller run the country. Given who Trump is, I think he would find this more fun than chilling with the grandkids as a private citizen.
Some people say this has already happened.
Well, if you actually believe any of this, my offer to bet about him running for a third term is still open.
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Presumably the same as whatever the upside was for him running for his 2nd term?
I think what he was getting from his second term was revenge / general "up your's" against the people who messed up his first term. Right now he is being treated as a more or less normal president, so I don't see a reason for him to double-down on spite. Maybe if he actually had a clear and specific vision for the future of the country, I could imagine him desperately clinging on to power to ensure it's correctly implemented. The problem is that:
a) He does not strike me as the kind of man who would have such a vision
b) Even if he was, the safest way to get this sort of thing done is to groom an heir to pass the torch to, and JD Vance is a pretty good candidate for that, and he has a whole bunch of kids and other relatives.
c) If for whatever reason there is no acceptable heir, the only way these sorts of gambits work out, is when you have popular support north of 80%, and I'm pretty sure he knows it.
The same reason Caesar crossed the Rubicon: Survival.
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It looks like the Tea app has been pulled from the Apple store. The linked article has a strong bias supporting the existance of this app, but was it a good idea to have this app?
This app is/was, if you ask someone in the blue tribe about it, a safety app to keep women safe. If you ask someone in the red tribe about the app, they will say that men were not allowed to use the app, that the app was used to spread slander about men which the men were not allowed to see, much less respond to (often times female friends of a guy being slandered would let him know what’s going on).
As a lot of readers here probably know, earlier this summer, pictures of some Tea app users were leaked online causing those pictures to be widely shared, including in a torrent file. Someone even briefly had a web app up where people could rate pictures of Tea app users. The blue tribe thought it was a violation of privacy to do that; the red tribe responded by saying that the entire purpose of the Tea app was to violate the privacy of men.
The app was only available in the US; while it was arguably legal there, they didn’t even try to make it available in Europe, where it probably would not had been legal because Europe has much stronger data privacy laws than the US.
For myself, having had a close friend who was slandered in a similar Facebook group, I can not be neutral about this app being pulled from the Apple store: It harmed a lot of men, innocent men in many cases, and the world, in my opinion, is a better place when we don’t let men be slandered this way.
So i've never quite understood how this app works. how do they verify that the users are women? And how do they stop people from just spamming bad reviews all over the place? Putting aside all the ethical and legal issues, i can't believe it ever worked at all.
You have to send in a photo of your driver's license, which made the leaks all the most awful/embarrassing/hilarious because of how atrociously ugly a lot of the users were. Here's a competitive ranking site someone made with the leaked photos: https://teaspill.games/
The bottom 50 on the leaderboards are uhhh, something
The bottom 50 on the leaderboards would of course be ugly... but 35-50 in the top 50 had a few surprising faces mixed in there...
They're easy targets for schadenfreude, but I'm still sad there wasn't a more creative use of their leaked profiles. Ranking them based on appearance? Why not roasting them in haiku? If ever a time called for being the bigger man - seriously!
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It seems like it would be trivially easy to either edit your ID pic to change "F" to "M", or borrow a friend's ID for that pic.
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They required women to submit photo ID. The geo-tagged ID photos was the important part of what leaked because it allowed men to see the faces and weight of the women being judgmental.
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People yearn for a social credit score.
There is, obviously, legitimate demand to know about the person you're dating. These women are going about it badly. I have no doubt that the Tea app is neuroticism, immature drama dynamics, and ridiculous wokescold signaling on a good day. But they don't have a better option- even if the Tea app is probably worse than nothing.
People want elders, community figures, authorities to tell them about those they come in contact with. Our brains are built for 150 person farming villages with a median age of 12, where your grandma knows everything about the young man you're talking to, because there's like, three of them. Young women try to recreate that on their own and don't do as well as their grandmothers.
The two halves of that statement are in logical contradiction, unless you're saying that "nothing" is not an option (which it obviously is).
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Yeah, as per your second paragraph, I yearn for social circles to shrink enough to be more amenable to Dunbar's number so we largely don't NEED a social credit score to maintain a generally stable order.
I understand this is infeasible in the current era, but why do the technological solutions inevitably end up creating more problems than they're worth? (I already know the answer: monetization and the principal-agent problem)
Being more direct, I think most people WANT there to be an information asymmetry between themselves and the people they interact with. But they want that asymmetry to favor themselves and so they want to know all the dirty details about their counterparty while revealing only the most flattering info about themselves.
And that's just not how it really works. They create the Tea App to help women gain the upper hand, but to limit it to women they require those women to disclose valuable information about themselves, and that information is susceptible to leakage as well.
And of course there's no mechanism for assessing the truth or quality of the information that they collect anyway, so relying on the honesty of strangers (who they also know nothing about) to avoid polluting the epistemic environment. Ironically they would need some kind of reputation system to make their own reputation system trustworthy.
The current approach to the internet where most companies try to silo the user data they collect from outside discovery, with the occasional massive breach revealing everything at once, seems to be less preferable than one where most information is open and discoverable with a Google search, and thus there's a little more parity between everyone since they can all see what's out there without jumping through that many hoops.
Stuff you really want to be kept private can be kept in the groupchat or one-on-one setting.
That does not seem to be working so well lately.
Tell me about it.
At least in that case though you can find out who the defector is.
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They do have a better option, though: dating through people known to friends, family members, and organizations they're a part of. Still far more options than at the shtetl.
The issue with that is that dating apps give access to "higher quality" men, and women prefer all the other negatives than not having that access.
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This kind of thing makes me realize that I lived through the best part of the internet. Or at least the best part of one version of the internet. We're living in a dark age or a transitional age, but clearly the worst of times.
There was a time when a teenager could post on Facebook under your real name with no consequences, because there were no adults there. My high school debate team legitimately had a question as to whether posts on Facebook could, not should but could, be considered by colleges when making admissions decisions. You posted under your real government name, dirty jokes and bitching about teachers and gossip, and no one ever did a thing to you. There was a time when girls on Snapchat would just send out pictures of their tits to everyone they knew, with a quippy caption like "Merry Christmas ya filthy animals;" a tradition whose origin I never understood but the action of which I enjoyed. /r/GoneWild used to be understood to be entirely amateurs doing it purely for attention, just like the Girls Gone Wild series was understood to provide nothing but a T Shirt to the girls. And of course none of this would ever really come back to bite those girls in real life, no one was putting in any effort to connect the act to real life.
There was a time when you could just hit on girls on Facebook. If you had a few mutual friends, she'd accept your friend request and chat with you on the assumption you were cool. Just being on Facebook made you cool for a while, I was in high school the years you needed to be invited by a friend, who must at that time have been in college. It was like those stories about whaling ships landing on islands where giant sea turtles could be plucked off the beach and cooked, with no natural defenses from a lack of experience of predators.
And there was a time when it was super easy to lie on the internet. Most dating apps didn't connect to "real name" social media as a default until Tinder, and reverse image search was in its infancy, if you were in a different geographic location than where you lived or just in a sufficiently dense market there was no practical way to connect a profile under a fake name to your real life identity. Hell, for a few years girlfriends routinely fell for the "someone made a fake profile of me" line!
Now everything you do is on a tightrope. One mistake and you're doomed. Everything is public and everything is connected. You can't assume that anything you say is private unless it's encrypted, on a false name with elaborate efforts to obscure your identity behind false details, and even then you might get got if you aren't careful.
It used to be that the internet could never hurt you. Now it seems that it can only hurt you
Dan Savage used to predict that we would reach a point where such a critical mass of people had engaged in sexting that the scandal would no longer attach, because everyone had done it, so we couldn't disqualify politicians for dick pics because everyone had one. We seem to have reached that critical mass for everyone having some internet controversy, but rather than lightening the consequences we've harshened them. I would say that such a system would have no future, that it must change, but then we see things like the drinking age, where the vast majority of people drink before 21 but we just keep punishing kids for no reason. Our society is capable of punishing people at random for a long, long time.
I totally forgot about this. I'm a bit younger than you and caught the tail end of this. It was pretty sweet. I was too awkward to close, but I had decent success a few times with this.
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Right, but this is why people started demanding that everything be public and making awful apps like Tea. The time before banking regulations used to be great for speculators but it was terrible for everyone else, which is why we now have banking regulations. "You used to be able to get away with anything" is usually going to be said in the past sense because the majority of people do not see this as a positive. It's no different from the glory days of Soho, 1960s mixed-sex accommodation, or Sodom. These things don't last because they aren't good for the majority of people.
But most people haven't done it, and they think that the people sending dick pics are animals.
Partly because it's not actually everyone, but also because they're different controversies. Mr. "I once shagged my dog" is not going to be any more approving of "I think Hitler made a lot of good points", and vice versa.
I guess this goes to your next point, but participating on theMotte is so much worse than showing hole, so everyone here is well into metaphorical dick pic territory.
We all have something embarrassing we've said online, yet we persist in being shocked when people have done embarrassing things online. The vast majority of men use porn at least monthly, I doubt that more than a small percentage of them would be happy to have that search history spread abroad.
In economics, people keep trying to collapse things down into a single monetary dimension and get annoyed when it doesn't work well. Yes, you can sort-of do this: e.g. how much money would I need to offer to get you to eat a dog turd, for example. But then you find out people agree that it's silly to spend more than 10m to save a child's life from cancer (so child's life is worth 10m max), but they wouldn't accept 20m to shoot a child (so child's life worth greater than 20m??? wat do).
So part of this is that I 100% can't see dick pics and posting on the Motte as being equivalently bad, even if they receive the same social opprobrium on net. I am reasonably proud of my Motte posting, and have positive feelings towards most others who post on the Motte; those feelings are reversed for those who send dick pics, which it would never occur to me to day. Meanwhile I am moderately ashamed of my search history and can see myself as part of the rather awkward Band of Brothers on that issue.
Secondarily, I think also just that we excessively-online degens are projecting too much onto others. I think that the majority still don't actually post much or at all online (social media stats are largely around messaging services like WhatsApp) and so genuinely aren't afraid of having their standards turned against them.
This is blowing my mind.
I think part of it is that shooting them is a direct action you must take, whereas the cancer absolves some of the "ethical responsibility"
I guess the immediate counter is "assume that the 10m treatment will cure them perfectly and permanently with 0% chance of remission"
I agree that 10 million is probably a bit much to spend, but I also would not accept 20 million to shoot a child.
I'm not sure how to reconcile this.
It probably matters that you are receiving the 20m and could not possibly be giving the 10m. (Unless you actually have that much, in which case, apologies for assuming.)
It also probably matters that deontology is an excellent representation of how humans reason about truly heinous acts, and that to act is greatly different than to not act. Hence cowardice (short of desertion) and treason both being rewarded with a rope, excepting that in the latter case it gets tied in a loop first.
I would strongly trust those moral intuitions.
It also matters that a person who is in position to exchange 10m for one child's life is often in position to exchange that same 10m for multiple children's lives.
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Right? There’s a mess of heuristics going on under the hood.
For example, many people see a strong moral difference between ‘doing X’ and ‘not preventing X’ as you say.
Then we seem to see a distinction made between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ values. People can relatively easily trade off profane dilemmas like ‘I could finish up my uber job for the day, or I could take another few passengers and earn enough to have a nice burger on the way back home’. But then they point-blank refuse to trade off ‘sacred’ values like not shooting children against any ‘profane’ sum of money.
And of course different people seem to have different sets of heuristics. Some people just don’t seem to see any moral difference between action and inaction, for example, and then those with and without the heuristic get baffled or angry when they try to debate each other.
Did you ever come across Jonathon Haidt’s moral foundations theory from 2010ish? His book was called “The Righteous Mind” and it goes into his research trying to identify the different moral foundations that people seem to use (harm, caring, purity, etc.) and the fact that different people seem to use different sets.
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In economics there's a concept called willingness to pay and willingness to accept that comes up occasionally. It arises because people are limited by their budget, and psychology but there's no upper limit on what one can accept.
It's similar to bid and ask prices in most markets, but when certain goods come up the spread can get massive indeed.
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Most people aren't afraid of standards being turned against them only if they haven't thought about it all that hard, or they already exist at such a tenuous level of socioeconomic acceptance that they can't get much lower on the scale anyway. But we're no longer in August, it's the Eternal September baby, and at this point everyone has done something bad online. It might be a group chat where they tell nigger or jew or Arab jokes, or one where they fantasize about killing their boss or joke about filing a fake lawsuit against him for sexual harassment. But it exists, for the vast majority of people.
Understand that there are millions of people whose feelings on that are reversed. When baseball players are caught making offensive jokes they apologize, then their nudes leak they demand an apology from the world.
I apologize if you're the one guy who never says anything widely considered offensive here, but that would make you to theMotte what a guy whose "dick pic" is in an anatomy textbook would be to dick pics.
I do, and intellectually I could be argued into some kind of non-aggression pact on pragmatic grounds. But you seemed to me to be expressing confusion or annoyance that people don’t instinctively feel sympathy / offer clemency for someone who has something embarrassing leak online, and this is my explanation as to why.
For the sake of clarity, I don’t feel particularly strongly about sending dick pics to people who are reasonably likely to enjoy getting them. My understanding is that there are a considerable number of recipients who don’t, however. More, I am someone who has a chip on my shoulder from following all the rules re: girls and not getting anywhere for it, and I get very irritated by the idea that the golden age of the internet involved horny lying chads strip-mining a generation of girls and ruining it for the rest of us.
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Bingo. The 'Golden Age of the Internet' was the golden age specifically because it was self-selecting and gatekept behind one really big fucking gate.
And every time that gate became easier to hop over, things got worse and worse.
The internet is fine. The real issue is that the majority of people are fucking retarded, and so that's what everything gets marketed to.
I'm curious what you'd peg as the "Golden Age" here, because complaints about the Internet going downhill have been evergreen since the endless September of 1994 began.
I'm not sure where I'd put the peak generally: in a few ways it's actually better than back then, if you're looking for scientific papers (open access at least exists as a concept) or niche hobby groups. The small-town "trust" feel does seem gone --- that analogy aligns with my "closing of the
WesternCyber Frontier" narrative I've wanted to try putting to long-form words some time.I keep meaning to dig up the source but in some famous treatise on Unix (the original manual?) written I think before Endless September, there was a chapter on Usenet, which spends a long time kvetching about the constant flame wars, schisms, and dogpiling.
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Yeah, no. Aziz Ansari didn't shag a dog, and Maya Forstater didn't praise Hitler, and I know that you know that. I know we all wish we lived back in the times when everything was sane, but let's be honest about what time it is.
Er, no, I was just making those up to point out that there are entirely different categories of scandals and people who do 'Forbidden Thing Category A' may have lots of patience for other 'A' enjoyers whilst advocating zero tolerance for 'Forbidden Thing Category B'.
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When thinking about this issues, I always try to find some old time equivalent and how would it go. For instance in the past would it be legal to make an advertisement in local news that next Tuesday there will be a meeting in a local club where anybody can discuss John Smith on the photo? Then you will have 20 people attending, drinking beer and talking shit about John. Is this something that you would consider as libel and prosecute local newspaper who printed such an advert? What if the advert was just printed paper that some person threw into mailboxes of the neighborhood? Is it some sort of punishable activity?
Now I understand that there is a difference in scale between digital and paper media, but I am still quite perplexed how quickly people bow to authoritarian powers if it is related to internet. For instance privacy of correspondence is a human right under article 12 of UN declaration of human rights. But apparently email and chat communication is arbitrarily not part of it. The same here - talking shit about somebody with friends in a pub is absolutely something that is normal human experience for millennia. But suddenly talking shit on the internet is some sort of punishable evil?
There is something that rubs me the wrong way, mostly that normalizing these heavy handed approaches may quickly turn from digital world to meat world.
The right to privacy of correspondence (article 12 UNHDR, article 8 ECHR, 4th amendment US Constitution) is a right against third-party snoopers including the government - not a right against the recipient forwarding the correspondence without permission. (Some countries protect confidential correspondence from unauthorised forwarding in specific, limited circumstances, but it was never the right protected by human rights codes)
Even in that sense, it has largely been lost, but I don't think that is because internet, I think it is because statists said "But muh terrorism" after 9-11 and normies didn't realise what they were giving up.
Seeing how badly most of EU wants to pass Chat Control, that right is deeply unpopular with the elites and soon to be abolished.
Your conversation isn't private when it's being automatically analysed for 'CSAM' by a complex technological system that's probably also soon going to do sentiment analysis and checking for disinformation.
How is text CSAM a big deal I'm never going to understand but then, I don't have to.
Such shitheads. If the wanted to protect kids, they could just mandate that children must use chat-controlled apps, and anyone else is free to use something else. But of course, it's about narrative control, not protecting children.
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In the "are we dating the same guy" case the old time equivalent is that enough people know each other, and talk to each other often enough, that someone will see your Jack out at a bar across town with some girl who isn't you and if they don't tell you they'll tell someone who will tell someone who will tell you.
Or in the case of "Tom's a serial date rapist," the old time equivalent is that you heard a rumor that Tom and Susie were parking up at the lookout and no one quite knows what happened but Susie missed school the next day and they stopped talking so it must have been something bad, because Susie was wearing Tommy's class ring all the time and she stopped right away.
The way you achieve something like this today is by trying to build a dense community around yourself, have lots of friends, talk to them a lot, and date only other people from within that community who also have lots of friends they talk to a lot.
There's also the problem of enough women being dumb enough to date guys who are waving an entire Chinese National Day display of red flags, but staunchly refuse to believe guy is gong to beat the crap out of them or that it's just his crazy, jealous, obsessed ex going around bad-mouthing poor innocent guy (I remember reading an account of a court case where a guy was credibly accused and convicted of being abusive to his ex, and his current girlfriend turned up to be a character witness for him. If you're at a trial for your snuggle-bunny beating the crap out of his last girl friend, what the hell are you doing?)
So there probably is a good opening for "am I dating Mr/Ms Crazy or Mr/Ms Cheater?" website to check out "I met this guy/gal online and I have some doubts, am I over-reacting?" but we can't have nice things because this is the modern Internet. (Yeah, women are crazy violent stalkers too).
Presumably, believing that she's lying or crazy.
I feel like I usually see "he's perfect and would never do that to me" +/- "except for that one/fortieth time" in the early stages with later stages being even more awful than that.
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"Are We Dating the Same Guy?"?
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On one hand, it seems trivially fine that private spaces where only a subset of people are allowed should exist, and while I'm sympathetic to the privacy argument, it could have been resolved with a (somewhat purposedly) cumbersome and opaque process that would be able to split between genuine interest in maintaining privacy and mere curiosity.
But the west as a whole has decided that men-only clubs are not ok, so I don't see a principled argument that would make
okay.
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Currently available in the German Google Play store, along with at least half a dozen copycats. Most of the latter are aimed at men, one is unisex.
Are you sure? It shows up as unavailable in Switzerland.
/images/17613563751171446.webp
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Is it possible to actually use it in Europe, though?
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If European law was ever actually enforced, the entire continent would grind to a halt.
They enjoy selectively enforcing it to fine American tech companies billions. I consider that obvious parasitism. They can't compete with American tech, but they can siphon off value and assert that they are the regulatory leader of something they are incapable of making themselves. They're already proudly stating they will be the global regulatory leader for AI also. I'm sure the American and Chinese researchers are thrilled.
"Can't compete with American tech like Facebook".
Russia has Facebook. It's not difficult tech. Europeans, being a conquered and occupied population didn't have the balls to be like China and Russia and bar foreign social networks.
Sure, you can rather trivially copy American social media and phone apps. I've been to China a number of times and they did just that. American apps are banned. Equivalent Chinese apps are available for download if you have a Chinese mainland phone number and bank account.
There are European search engines. They collectively enjoy single digit percentage of European searches while American search engines take the other nearly 100%. Someday there will be commonly used American AI and EU regulators leeching a bit of value from them in the form of fines. There will be some combination of none or deeply unpopular European AI that approximately no one would voluntarily use as an alternative to American tech.
Chinese had the right approach. There's nothing to gain by allowing someone else to run social networks with the participation of your citizens. Europeans allowed it because they act like thralls of Americans, and that's because that's what they are.
They'd have to really commit to it. It takes one click to turn on a VPN with an exit node in the US. There'd have to be a Great European Firewall.
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If the EU passes a law regulating all their leading models, but there isn't a leading model there to hear it, did they pass a law?
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The linked article specifically states that the app is still available in Google Play, implying that it was available there from the beginning, presumably in the EU as well. I think this is relevant to the context. And just to add to your post, the article also makes it rather clear that the app facilitated the sharing of the personal data of biological men and also boys below 18 without their permission and without repercussions. On a different note, I'm sort of curious what mechanism the app used to block MtF transsexuals from use.
The Tea app is/was only available in the US (quote: “the US-based Tea Dating Advice app, which is only available in America”). While still available on Android, removing it from the Apple store greatly reduces its spread because of network effects.
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Gossip can be good - it allows people to avoid bad actors, and creates incentives for bad actors to improve. It can also be used maliciously.
Empirically, the ability to share gossip efficiently about businesses using sites like Yelp is net positive for humanity. There is a broad consensus in professional workplaces that the ability of employers and employees to share gossip about each other is net-positive for the same reasons, and that the requirement to do so with plausible deniability to avoid being sued is annoying.
Assuming the existence of something like modern dating, my gut feeling is that the same is true when women share gossip efficiently about men they date - both around safety issues (modern dating allows for a lot of dangerous wrongdoing which is de facto impossible for either the law or local elites* to adjudicate, so gossip is the only way for women to protect themselves) and quality issues (people I know who spent time in highly promiscuous social circles agree that the women in those circles spread gossip about men's bedroom performance, and the people who were happy in such social circles thought that the results were net-positive for Yelp-like reasons).
On the other hand, I would assume that the type of woman who uses an app like Tea is strongly negatively selected for being the sort of person whose opinion about men should be ignored, especially by women who actually like dating men. I am 90% certain that the gossip spread on Tea specifically is net-negative.
It all seems to come round to the fact that people marriageable people who want to get married do so, leaving a dating pool which is much lower-trust than the surrounding society. I don't see how you have a modern dating pool which isn't lousy with bad actors, including both the kind you need gossip to protect yourself from and the kind who spread malicious gossip.
I would oppose banning Tea on privacy grounds. In general, I think that laws and social norms are far too protective of the privacy of non-sensitive data (like photos of Tea users) and, almost as a corollary, under-protective of actually sensitive data, and other things being equal I wouldn't punish or shame people for sharing the photos. OTOH I have some sympathy for the idea that people who signal-boost hacked data absent a strong public interest are bad people because they create an incentive for hackers.
* Including things like the trust and safety team on a dating app, or a party host deciding who to drop from an invite list.
The data wasn't "hacked" so much as "left on a public facing website". Not so much as a password protecting it. They left their dirty laundry in the street and 4chan had a giggle looking at it.
Don't be so sure, boomer attorneys have tried to claim hitting right click inspect element was hacking/ unauthorized access of a computer system/data
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Maybe not Yelp specifically. They've been accused of effectively extorting small businesses, by asking them to pay for advertisements, and manipulating their reviews if they decline. The business owners sued and lost in the 9th Circuit, but (albeit from my brief skimming) the ruling doesn't deny review manipulation is happening, just says it's not illegal.
Businesses themselves manipulate reviews (for example, offering gift cards to customers for good reviews, also reporting bad reviews for inaccuracies), and unmanipulated reviews aren't reliable either because people are biased. Despite that, I still think (at least on forums where people are skeptical) that reviews are better indicators of quality than nothing. I also can't think of any regulation to prevent these kinds of sites from manipulating reviews without massive downsides, since review manipulation done right is practically impossible to prove. A more likely solution is that eventually most people stop trusting sites without transparent moderation, and stop trusting reviews without evidence or proof they are made by a real, credible person.
However, the idea that review sites are blackmailing small businesses for good reviews, and/or promoting big businesses more because they can pay more; especially because this could be contributing to why small businesses get less customers now than before (although overt advertising is probably a bigger factor); means that these sites may not be a net positive.
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Interesting you bring up Yelp. Another posted has already addressed that someone’s personal life is a very different kettle of fish than a business which is open to the public.
But, besides that, there are some key differences between Yelp and the Tea app:
If Tea stayed around, it would eventually monetize by allowing men to pay to take down negative reviews, just like Yelp.
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Can you please clarify what you mean here please?
There's a crucial difference though. Personal matters are personal matters, whereas business is business. Human individuals aren't shops or companies.
This is applicable to many issues.
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Grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky died at the age of 29 after an apparently weird stream (https://youtube.com/watch?v=mzo3JHvg-iw). There has even been a Tyler Cowen 'Straussian post' that may been in reference to his passing where Tyler references negative social contagion (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/10/why-live-how-suicide-becomes-an-epidemic.html). This follows an ongoing controversy where former world champion Vladimir Kramnik has either inferred or accused Naroditsky of cheating in online chess. There is no doubt that Naroditsky is a very strong chess player. He has strong over the board results where it would be difficult to cheat and also recently beat Anna Cramling blindfolded in a bullet match where he gave her time odds. (https://youtube.com/watch?v=rmLDo3SKUo8). Anna Cramling is not a top player but she is still very strong and I think this is vivid proof for non-chess people that Daniel is a strong chess player.
Kramnik has been inferring or accusing people of cheating based on their online performances in chess.com titled Tuesday events where there are cash prizes or their other games on chess.com where they have made large win streaks. In chess there is a big problem with online cheating because for strong players access to a computer evaluation of the position after their opponent had made a move would be a large advantage according to Magnus Carlson (https://youtube.com/watch?v=VcbHmHHwlUQ&t=345) and it would be very difficult for an anti-cheat system to detect this. Maybe it would be possible to correlate move time with change in evaluation to try and detect such a cheat but I suspect it would be a very noisy signal. But strong players have chosen more greedy approaches to cheating where they will play moves supplied directly from a computer engine and chess.com have some statistical methods where they are able to detect this cheating and have banned FIDE titled players for this.
There has been an outpouring of support for Daniel because he is well liked in the chess community because of the education content he puts out on youtube and his wholesome persona. Also, people feel that Kramnik's allegations against him and other people in chess have been unfounded. This includes allegations against GM David Navara (https://lichess.org/@/RealDavidNavara/blog/because-we-care/fauAwr9r) who claimed in a blog post he had suicidal thoughts due to Kramniks attacks.
Kramnik's allegations against Naroditsky also included a 'speed run' match where Naroditsky played weaker opponents on chess.com to produce educational content. In this episode Naroditsky opened a computer engine to start evaluating the game before it had ended while his opponent was stalling (https://youtube.com/watch?v=mzo3JHvg-iw). Daniel left this comment in the video explaining the situation:
Chess.com where these games were played has made some effort to legitimise speedrun accounts. Normally, such a thing would be considered a fair play violation due to smurfing but chess.com has an official way to register a speedrun account and anyone who is queued against a speedrun account would have their rating points refunded. Potentially, chess.com could have gone further and made queuing into speedrun accounts an opt-out preference and made it clearer what fairplay rules speedrun accounts could violate. For example, I'm currently enjoying a series on the sicilian dragon from a GM but when the opponent makes a mistake the GM will ask the live stream audience what is the move to take advantage of the mistake. This makes a lot of sense from a teaching point of view but is a technical violation of the chess.com fairplay rules that bars outside assistance.
Kramnik is now claiming he has contacted the Charlotte police department with new information about Daniels death (https://x.com/VBkramnik/status/1981257207917187291)
I'm not sure what information Kramnik has shared but there seems to be a conspiracy pushed by Kramnik aligned people that there is some kind of 'chess mafia'. I assume this is based around chess.com, the Charolette chess center and a bunch of popular streamers that work with chess.com. Previously, there was a character called 'ChessBae' that was able to use money and chess.com connections in order to exert influence on chess streamers (https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/oios3j/chess_the_rise_and_fall_of_chessbae_the/) so it is not completely far fetched. However, Kramnik has a history of coming up short when it comes to his accusations so based on past performance Naroditsky death will probably turn out to be unsuspicious.
My guess is that a lot of streamers are cheating. The pro players have to train for hours a day, manage competition and then stream for hours. While IQ is a primary requirement for becoming a chess pro, mental stamina is essential for success. Streaming requires working on regular hours even if one is tired or not in the mood. While streaming, the viewers want fast decisions and the streamer is supposed to quickly find brilliant moves and analyzes on the fly.
Cheating on streams is probably less about improving play and probably more about mentally offloading the streamer.
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Not sure how I hear about this now, three days after the fact. I'm saddened. His streams were great. He posted a new video recently. His videos are some of the best, and when I watched chess events, I loved hearing him paired with Robert Hess. Something about the two of them was perfect for me.
It seems like overdose is the presumed cause of death, and the speculation is intentional or accidental.
Very sad.
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Knowing nothing about chess and nothing about the characters involved, I'm going to say that if this guy killed himself because of cheating accusations then he was probably cheating. Of course, reading this post I'm not actually sure if the cheating accusations had anything to do with his death.
This is part of the tragedy of the situation. It's easy to have such an impression, but knowing at least some of the details, it just seems like lives were needlessly ruined.
The problem with Kramnik's cheating allegations is that they are based entirely on his own subjective evaluation, and Danya is not the only one he has accused. His knowledge of statistics is farcically bad. His internal evaluation seems to be: at my peak was I better than them at classical, if yes then I should be destroying them in online blitz. The problem is that even though classical and online blitz are highly correlated, they do not have a correlation of 1. Blitz and classical are slightly different skill sets, and this is magnified online vs OTB. Imagine your boomer uncle trying to navigate a web-app with his worn out 20 year old Circuit City mouse and complaining the app is broken every time he miss-clicks. That's what it's like watching Kramnik playing online. For example, chess.com allows you to pre-move to minimize the time spent on your turn. Kramnik for some reason refuses to use this feature, then also complains that his opponents are moving with super-human speed. No your opponents are not cheating, you just don't understand how the platform works. Unfortunately, his accusations no matter how baseless come from the voice of a former World Champion. He could have been known as a great champion that helped train the next generation, instead he just looks like an angry old man who can't accept that he has declined and can't keep up anymore.
On the Danya side, the various rumors make it seem like an overdose was more likely than suicide. Either way, I don't think the incentives necessarily indicate cheating. While very good Danya didn't really make his living playing chess he made his living as a chess influencer. In particular, an influencer known for his wholesomeness. As that type of influencer your profession and self-identity revolve around how your are perceived. It seem from his last stream that despite the fact that many of the top chess names privately supported his innocence, and his fans remained loyal, the trolls were weighing heavily on him.
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Professional chess and the people who follow it is a pretty small world. Being publicly accused like this and having your reputation continuously dragged through the mud with no real way to outright refute the claims (it's impossible to prove that you didn't cheat) is absolutely something that could destroy someone emotionally.
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The accuser is a legendary player—one of Daniel’s childhood heroes. I can see how being villainized by someone you’ve spent your whole life trying to impress could lead someone into a downward spiral.
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Also it's not like cheating's some absolute thing.
Dude could be an incredible chess player + also cheated to win one of the cash pool tournaments on top of that one time.
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Best of luck to Kramnik in his search for the real killer.
One of the interesting undercurrents in all this is the culture gap between the Russian players and the American players (Kramnik of course is Russian, and Naroditsky despite his name is American). Kramnik's name has been mud in the West ever since he started making unfounded and unhinged accusations of cheating a few years ago, but in Russia he has a lot more cultural capital to burn. Russian GM Ian Nepomniachtchi is the only other top player I know of to even imply that there is anything suspicious about Naroditsky.
Postscript - I never understood the appeal of Anna Cramling, but seeing her in side profile in the video you linked made it click.
You promised far more than she could deliver, but on the other hand, you got me to click on the link, so touché.
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Awesome write-up.
I watched some of Danya’s videos a long time ago and was struck by his verbal intelligence. His speech was filled with brilliancies; he would deploy a phrase from a 19th century chess book the way Magnus would deploy its tactics. He was fun to watch just for his way of talking. But I remember thinking at the time that his mind was wasted on chess.
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