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The Mandate of Heaven is just important non-state people(Elon musk, Cardinal Dolan, Harold Daggett) going out of their way to praise the legitimacy of the government.
Ok, but supermarkets are not dodging rent seeking from farm suppliers- thats the wrong step in the chain. My guess is there’s a bunch of rent seeking in the processing/middleman stage too. And further I’d assume the bulk of the rent seeking in the supermarket side is mostly contractors that the supermarket cant easily replace.
One take is that Mamdani's able to massage a lot of traditionally idpol issues as anti-Trumpist or under legalisms, and thus been able to avoid explicit proposals by having the whole thrust of his lunchbucket politics also imply them.
((eg, "affordable housing" doesn't mean housing people can afford; it means a ton of Section 8.))
Another, more cynical one, is Darwin's old "it was never about being gay". Idpol doesn't care, specifically, about gay rights, or African-Americans, or Hispanics, or even about winning their votes. It cares about the cause of the day, with no more honest motivation than it being the cause of the day. And Mamdani's tongue-bathing Hamas anti-Zionism is the cause of the day among the upper-class demographics he needed to win the primary.
There's some silver lining on that cloud, in the sense that the Idpol cause of the day can swap out on a minute's notice. But it's not gonna.
The real question comes down to if Cuomo runs against Adams as an independent- I think Adams has a decent chance if he does not.
Do Democrats want more extreme left candidates? Are socialists ready for the big time? Was this Cuomo's unique weaknesses?
In New York City? Probably. In broader America? No.
Mark Robinson is the kind of candidate who could throw a safe election, yes.
Ideally the democrats can have their version of joe rogan.
I realize your whole post was sarcastic, but I'm reminded of something someone said here a week or two ago: Joe Rogan was the Democrats' Joe Rogan, they drove him and people like him away.
That said I'd love to see the dems put major support behind Hasan, the backfire would be hilarious and it would probably give Roach King Asmongold a year's worth of content from that alone.
Honestly I'm surprised the left hasn't tried to figure out Asmongold 's popularity with young men. He's a midwit at best on his good days, but his takes come across to audiences as "common sense" (regardless of if they actually are). He just has a disarming way of talking and presenting himself, and I think that's something shrieking feminist harpies are constitutionally incapable of.
Fixing or at least freezing the decline of the economy for young men without advanced education is the “stop digging” part by at least making the economic landscape not maximally hostile to family formation.
Do the Republicans have a credible plan for that? I haven't seen one. (No, tariffs aren't going to do that)
If you’re able to get housing costs to stop rising or even fall, do the same with the asset bubble
The good news is housing costs are set to turn around for demographic reasons. The Silents and older boomers are already dying.
and put upward pressure on the lowest quintile or two of wages by creating a tight labor market
Creating a tight labor market drives up inflation and erases the gains.
That doesn't follow whatsoever. It presupposes that we're always capable of evaluating deep consequences, which is plainly not the case. It also presupposes a ton of wisdom on the part of the person being persuaded.
Suppose the damage only becomes clear generations later? I'm thinking here of the sexual revolution e.g.
Inability to convince someone that an act is damaging has no bearing on whether it is.
But instead, you seem to want some specific predictions of specific mechanisms that are headline-style events.
Headline-style events are probably the most effective way to shift public consensus, and were in the slavery example we keep going back to, but not a requirement. In the case of:
It just so happens to be that we don't see a world where the lack of slavery is causing all sorts of real world problems for individuals and societies.
Society doesn't seem to be paying attention to the claimed harms, and/or aren't attributing the problems in society to single parenthood. At least not to any statistically relevant degree. What would make them start now? That's why I mentioned "A point at which society realizes the status quo is unsustainable and agrees to a specific fix?"
FC's argument is actually a good example of what I was asking for, just missing which politician or group would have the interest and influence to push for something like surgeon general's warnings on porn. If Trump pushed for it he'd have a decent shot of passing legislation, but he doesn't strike me as interested in the least. And there seems to be a huge popularity gap between Trump and, well, just about anyone in the Republican Party.
Yes - porn is a cross-cutting issue. The anti-porn faction consists of Blue sex-negative feminists and Red religious conservatives. The pro-porn faction consists of Red libertarians and Blue sex-positive feminists (and the pornographers). Both sex-negative and sex-positive feminists can get published in so-called peer-reviewed journalists, although the sex-positive feminists are currently winning the intra-left political battle.
Perceived crime rates change much faster than actual crime rates.
Then who makes money from the food industry.
When margins are low but volume is high you can still make good money. But in a commodity market, economic forces will generally push average profit margin to $0, so it's not surprising that margins are usually low and sometimes negative.
Where are you getting this? I’ve seen zero conservatives squarely blaming men for not getting married.
Low employment rate by itself doesn’t actually achieve much in terms of upward economic mobility for working class young men, which I do believe has a serious effect on family formation.
For that you need to end the wage stagnation / decline as it relates to the biggest expenses for young people dating, forming relationships and attempting to start a family; housing costs.
Not sure how sarcastic you are being, but considering that the last iteration of this was the fat beardy guy who claims to eat carburetors for breakfast, I'm not sure "democrat Joe Rogan" will be something they can pull off this cycle...
Agreed, although the old adage comes to mind; “When you’re in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging.”
Fixing or at least freezing the decline of the economy for young men without advanced education is the “stop digging” part by at least making the economic landscape not maximally hostile to family formation.
If you’re able to get housing costs to stop rising or even fall, do the same with the asset bubble, and put upward pressure on the lowest quintile or two of wages by creating a tight labor market, and you’re in for a good start.
Deportations, crackdowns on illegal immigration, a robust industrial policy, Reindustrialization, tariffs on China, checking the power of the academy, renegotiating trade deals, all this gestures in the direction of not celebrating open hostility to young working class men.
I live in a deep blue state and I can tell you personally that the accumulated effects of standard deep blue policy preferences on my life has decreased the amount of children I will have had in my life by at least one. And I’m one of the lucky ones; intelligent, healthy, strong, no criminal record, no significant addictions, came from an intact family.
Good rule of thumb is that whenever you look in any complex system in the USA of lately usually you have shitload of rent seeking and not capitalism.
Why should these be opposed to each other?
Let me then ask you straightforwardly: do you object to being characterised as anti-semitic? Do you disagree with the statement "SecureSignals hates Jews"?
I don't accept your definition of "anti-semitism". "Anti-semitic" is an emotionally-loaded slur intended to denounce and pathologize any criticism of Jewish identity, religion, or culture whether it's rational or irrational, true or false.
So when Gentiles, like me, engage in radical criticism of Jewish behavior and identity that's "anti-Semitic," which makes the criticism intrinsically irrational according to the popular understanding. But there's no similar term for when Jews in Academia or Hollywood engage in radical criticism of Gentile racial identity, culture, and religion.
For example, my criticism of the very broad pattern of behavior of Jews in academia and popular culture engaging in criticism of White identity while also strongly denouncing any criticism of Jewish identity is a rational and true argument. This pattern of behavior is seen across the political spectrum, from secular Communists like Ignatiev, to Conservative religious Jews like Ben Shaprio, to politically heterodox/rationalist-adjacent like @2rafa. They all oppose White identitarianism and support Jewish identitarianism, meaning this pattern of behavior cannot be reduced to communist vs capitalist, liberal vs postmodern, secular vs religious, because this pattern of behavior dominates the entire spectrum of those other categories.
Conservative talk show host Mark Levin, who has been cartoonishly pro-war on the Iran question and extremely vitriolic towards everyone opposed to war with Iran, accused a White man on twitter of having antisemitism in his family's DNA. What's the word for that? If I accused Levin of having subversion in his family's DNA (someone in the Twitter replies did that), that would be "anti-semitic."
Anti-Semitism can be rational or irrational, true or false. All it requires is engaging in criticism of Jewish behavior, culture, and identity, and there's no word for when Jews do the same to Gentile race, religion, or culture. And I do those things, so I accept the label, although I don't accept that label denotes irrationality- that's just a vain attempt to pathologize rational criticism as being crazy-talk. What people call "anti-Semitism" is a rational response to this behavior of Jews in American politics and culture spending decades undermining white racial identity and political interests while strongly promoting Jewish identity and political interests, and especially the geopolitical interests of the state of Israel. Look at this clip of Greenblatt from the ADL:
What I'm focused on is how the fringes like the woke right, the TuckerCarlson, Steve Bannon... have been fermenting antisemitism. Blaming this war on the Jews, on the Zionist, on the Neo-cons.
You really don't think there's a "there" there?
I also don't accept "you hate the Jews" that's just a proto-woke slur also intended to intrinsically attach irrationality to a critical perspective of Jewish behavior and identity. I don't hate Jews, I don't remember who said something along the lines of "when Jews are great they're amazing and when they're bad they're really terrible." That's been my own experience with Jews personally, and I do have an adversarial-level respect for what I see myself as opposing. I see them as political and cultural opposition in how they behave politically and culturally, it's not an irrational hatred although this statement is not going to stop you or anyone else from accusing me of that. Which is why I don't respond to it, those accusations very conveniently derail from the arguments I'm making (by design), so if you just get bogged down in trying to convince everyone you aren't a neo-Nazi or you don't want to kill all the Jews you are just operating within the same consensus that I reject.
Race and IQ is far more suppressed than anti-porn, and yet the studies keep getting published.
Maybe the anti-porn side can't find it because it isn't there.
In my experience a lot of young men would actually like to get married
Yes, and they too would be alienated by the tradcon message that puts 100% of the blame for the decline in marriage on men.
They rely on cheap dopamine fixes and are stuck in perpetual adolescence because of structural problems in the economy and the education system
The unemployment rate is close to zero.
I wrote here:
It just so happens to be that we don't see a world where the lack of slavery is causing all sorts of real world problems for individuals and societies. Plus all the good moral arguments and everything. Funny that, both those factors cut the other way for the instant question.
Perhaps see also this chain of comments by @FCfromSSC. He focused on porn in the last comment, but also:
...Conservative Christians no longer need to argue what might happen if the other side gets their way, but rather what has happened, and what results the other side is accountable for. Christians can now operate as a genuine counter-culture, offering a cogent critique of the conditions we are all living in every minute of every day. We can offer meaningful answers to the myriad discontents created by our present society, and through those answers coordinate the systematic withdrawal from and dismantling of that society.
But instead, you seem to want some specific predictions of specific mechanisms that are headline-style events. Things like:
If I wanted to argue that America could become communist, maybe I predict that AOC will finally wrest control of the rudderless Democratic Party.
These are kind of silly. "I predict that [POLITICIAN] will ascend and promote [THING]." Like, okay? Swap someone/something in there. I'm again not particularly interested in playing that silly game.
In 2025 no one is getting a struggle session for DND.
Sure they are; the struggle sessions are just run by the left now.
Unfortunately Republicans have no solution to the problem of marriage. Neither party does, because the Overton Window only contains solutions that don't work.
I only did this once. Been trying not to tempt fate.
But I expect that going in and losing quickly would piss me off and make me want to plunk down more money to "win it back" so I don't have to accept the unpleasant sensation of admitting "defeat."
Since that is about how I felt when I took losses during my brief day-trading phase.
This meant that if one side was a belligerent in a conflict, the other side abstained from officially sending troops as well.
I think the mutually-agreed, informal rule in the Cold War was (after Korea, where both sides violated it for no net gain) that you don't attack the other superpower's client directly, only with your own client. So the US could send troops to defend South Vietnam, but not to attack North Vietnam. (And the USSR couldn't directly participate in North Vietnamese attacks on South Vietnam, but they didn't need to because they had a much better proxy). And the US couldn't invade Cuba with regular forces, which they otherwise clearly wanted to do, given that they did the Bay of Pigs.
This idea is not very aristocratic, it’s thoroughly rooted in middle class democracy. Even in the Middle Ages towns were governed by property holder suffrage electing officials and defended by militias of property holders. The aristocrats were for the countryside.
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