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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31434 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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It's over for me.

We pretended that senile rambling old man was a president for four years and now the country is more divided than ever. I am ashamed of how I have treated people while I have been under the influence of that horrible man who helped break this country.

I say helped break because he didn't do it alone. Every person who covered for him, who made excuses for him, who refused to see that there was an old man with no control over himself (he was leaking constantly, he couldn't keep a secret. He couldn't keep a secret.) has some share of responsibility in this.

This is a serious situation that we let get out of control. And we need to be united, and I wish I had been able to admit that Trump was a divider sooner.

  • -78

As far as I know, nothing in my life has ever been seriously changed by any of the last few presidents. If I was not paying attention to politics between 2008-2016, I could easily have assumed that a Republican was president. Likewise, if I was not paying attention to politics between 2016-2020, I could easily have assumed that some Democrat was in office. Likewise, if I was not paying attention to politics now I could easily believe that a Republican was president.

There are of course people whose lives do get significantly affected by who the president is, but I do not think that I am one of them and I am not sure that there are really very many of them in America. Presidents have more of an impact on foreigners through their decisions about the geopolitical and military leadership of the American empire and about immigration policy enforcement.

Iraqis and Mexicans have reason to care who the US president is. But for American citizens, is the impact really that much? Presidents are just all slightly different flavors of rich bullshitters who do not have much power to impact domestic politics anyway. I care more about who wins the presidency because of how it will impact foreigners than I do about how it will impact Americans because who wins the presidency might determine the lives and deaths of tends of thousands of foreigners, but it will likely do little to impact Americans much one way or the other.

As for the country being divided, why should I care?

I know that you are trolling but it is an interesting topic anyway.

This has been my position for a while, but I sometimes find it hard to support, like, I can't always rebuff arguments about supreme court, executive orders, etc. They do sorta matter, but it isn't apparent until some time has passed. For instance it took a decade for the effects of Clintonian repeal of Glass-Steagall, the creation of DHS, or Obama's NDAA2012 to become apparent. What seems to be the case, to me, is that the combined effect of the past 40 years of presidential politics is an increase in elitism and consolidation of power and wealth. There's a problem with the brain, not with a particular hemisphere.

I think that unless you’re in an upper middle to upper class situation or economically depending on someone who is, almost all national politics are irrelevant. They just don’t impact the working class that much (with the exception of culture wars perhaps) and could likely be entirely ignored without much change day to day. The list of things that have been passed and repealed, wars we’ve started and won or lost or got bored with, and so one in my life is pretty darn long. And for the most part, other than entertainment, there’s not much reason for getting into the details of politics above the state level.

Probably right. I’m curious if a competent administration was in placed that gutted the CDC would covid nonsense have metastasized?

I don't think institutions had much to do with it.We had no CDC-equivalent in Australia and we weren't exactly covid doves.

There are of course people whose lives do get significantly affected by who the president is, but I do not think that I am one of them and I am not sure that there are really very many of them in America.

There are 10000 more births in Texas after Roe v Wade got struck down. I was about to make an effortpost about how minor this Handmaiden Tale event actually turned out in reality. You can figure out the earthshattering events in retrospect so in a way it doesn't matter who is in power because more or less it is business as usual. And US system is designed to have enormous inertia.

For context, there were 51,606 abortions in Texas in 2021.

The 10k statistic applies to the last 9 months of 2022 — extrapolate that to a year and it’s 13.3k. So (theoretically anyway) 26% of the fetuses that would have been aborted are being born instead.

The others are presumably either being aborted out-of-state, aborted in-state (iirc you can still get an abortion within 6 weeks of conception), or not occurring due to the use of other forms of birth control.

iirc you can still get an abortion within 6 weeks of conception

No, you cannot. Texas law had a 6 week abortion ban from September 2021 until July 2022, and subsequently enacted a total ban on abortions except those medically necessary to save the mother’s life. Getting an abortion for a woman living in Texas requires 2-3 days and thousands of dollars(either airfare to New Mexico or gas to Kansas, cost of the abortion, and a hotel room), and no doubt some do anyways, but a lot of these abortions that weren’t replaced with births are probably the morning after pill in effect.

To which demographics do those extra 10k births belong?

They’re probably majority Hispanic, because most women of childbearing age in Texas are. Of course blacks are probably overrepresented because this is one of those things where they usually are, but Texas isn’t black enough for them to be a majority.

This is just the result of ongoing momentum. Most projects do not come to real life fruition for 5-10 years, so if a President starts a policy the day he comes into office, you might start to notice impacts at the end of his first term, and if it takes him until year two to start the project you'll barely notice it until the end of his second. If, as has been the case for many projects since Reagan, a single party/faction/project fails to capture the presidency for two terms and a successor then before the impacts of a project won't come to fruition until supporters of the other party/faction/project come into power, mitigating or preventing those impacts from occurring.

What you're seeing as stasis, it doesn't matter if the Republicans or the Democrats are in office, is the experience of sitting just above high tide and saying it doesn't matter if the tide comes in or out. You'd know fast if the tide kept coming, if the waters kept rising. There is a lot of activity, but never happened.

So one doesn't really notice a lifetime that runs Bush I -- Clinton -- Bush II -- Obama -- Trump -- Biden; but a very different world if it went Bush I -- Dole -- Bush II -- McCain -- JEB!; or if it went Clinton -- Gore -- Obama -- Clinton II. Trump doesn't really fit either way.

The conflict and the chaos produces the stasis.

I’d be kind of curious how much the initiatives you mentioned actually change things and how we’d distinguish the government initiatives from ordinary market changes or social changes that would happen either way and just happen to coincide with X years after Y initiative. I have a personal hypothesis that of the three, political organization is the least powerful. Economic innovation, new technology, and new social norms seem to have just as much if not more power to make things happen. I think most of the success of gay marriage had less to do with anything the government actually did and more to do with social changes that changed how people thought about the issue than anything the government did. New technology probably has more to do with improvements over the last five or ten years than any the President or congress did. New business innovations or new products change your life a lot as well.

The things that a president does impact you, but not because the president does something and affects you immediately. It takes time for things to trickle down. The president can make a law which tells government agencies to do X. Five years later you employer has different policies than it otherwise have, in order to meet X. Another year later you're fired because of the indirect effect X has on how the company works.

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