domain:youtu.be
ChickenOverlord
1d ago
You're only looking federally (and even then I'd say the GOP still has a slight edge because they're less willing to waste money on patently obviously useless spending like trans operas in Latin America etc.). But at the state and local levels, the GOP is clearly the party of fiscal responsibility, as can be seen by comparing debt levels (absolute and per capita) between various strongly blue vs strongly red states and cities.
doglatine
1d ago
Behold the thirdworldification of American politics. “If we make the country better off, our political opponents will probably benefit more from it than us, so better for us to continue looting and pillaging from our common legacy until the country dies.” The reason you balance the budget is because you actually care about your country and its long-term well-being.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1d ago
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
I remember people expressing existential concerns about the party that last lost an election for at least a few decades now. It's never quite materialized as-promised, but your intra-party gang fight model does sound familiar from 2008, 2020, and maybe 2004 and 2016. Being the opposition is easy: governing is harder.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1d ago
America, by contrast, is attempting something unprecedented in history: to maintain national coherence while undergoing massive demographic transformation without any clear cultural center holding it all together. How much change can a country absorb before it becomes something else entirely? And does that change matter? It’s not that immigrants are bad or incapable. That’s not the point. The point is that America is trying to do something historically novel: become a post-ethnic, post-historical nation that binds together people with radically different origins, languages, and values using only a kind of civic glue—and lately, even that glue seems to be dissolving.
Laughs in European.
On that one, it appears I was wrong right out of the gate, but I'm waiting to see the actual fallout. The whole thing seems deeply fishy for a number of reasons, but what will clear it up will be subsequent events. If either or both of them dedicate significant resources to striking at each other, then that will confirm that the breach is serious in nature, and that will bode extremely ill for my faction. In that case, I'd side with Trump over Elon, but reluctantly; more generally, this would be evidence that our leadership is fundamentally dysfunctional, and I would expect that to manifest in other ways in relatively short order.
What updates beyond this would you recommend? Where do you expect the thinly-veiled minecraft references to be directed?
I feel like framing this as "Trump won him over" glosses over the Democrats own culpability in this matter.
As other have observed. The Left had a Joe Rogan up until about 2021, his name was Joe Rogan. Then the entire Democratic party establishment and maintream media spent two whole years trying to get him deplatformed and arrested as a "bigot" for saying that he didn't want his daughter competing against biological males in sports, as a "threat to public health" for being pro-ivermectin and anti-lockdown, and for "spreading disinformation" in general. Even a good sizable portion of theMotte including our very own Scott Alexander have gotten in on the game by describing his platforming of alternative views as "dangerous" and "irresponsible".
The message was sent loudly and repeatedly that there was no place for people like Joe (or his listeners) in rational and polite society, and that message was recieved.
It seems to me that the Democratic party as an institution is at that stage in the Lana-cycle where they've divorced the schlubby dad podcast (JRE), are now dating an edgy podcast of haircolor (CumTown), and are low-key mad that instead of going to peices, schlubby-dad found a new woman political party and has moved on with his life.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
The Republican party is generally claimed to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Note the term "claimed" here; I do not think the record of Republican governance proves this claim at all well, but nonetheless the default expectation seems persistent. When I was younger, this was certainly a selling-point of the party to me, and I voted for Bush II in the hope that he'd get government spending under control. Then 9/11 happened, and he wasted trillions wandering our military through the middle east.
Now the debt is very bad, and people are once more raising the banner of Fiscal Responsibility. Is it in Republicans' interest to enforce "fiscal responsibility", and if so, how? If we were to seriously cut spending and raise taxes, as people claim the fiscal situation demands, this would almost certainly cost us the next election. In the best possible case that I can see, we would be expending our political power to create stable economic conditions for our opponents to then rule. The more likely case would be us expending our political power to ameliorate spending that our opponents increase to gain power for themselves, resulting in a much shakier economy and our complete political irrelevance.
Why not offer the Fiscal Responsibility mantel to the Democrats? The economy is very complicated after all, and they are at this point clearly the party of Expert Opinion: who better to determine and implement the hard-nosed measures necessary to right our economic vessel? When I was younger, the obvious rejoinder would have been that they would do a bad job of it and disaster would result, but it seems to me that we have not done all that much better, and disaster seems likely in any case. If disaster cannot be meaningfully avoided, then why expend limited resources demanded by a serious political conflict on an unfixable resource-sink of a problem? What's the actual plan, here?
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
I think people are becoming increasingly aware that the Democratic Party might actually cease to exist as a going concern, and that from here on out all power struggles are going to be inter-factional ones within the Republican Party. So you’re seeing a higher willingness within the party to have these intense gang fights over policy direction. That’s also what’s causing the whole “woke right” squabble.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
The question comes down to: can a country stay the same [...].
Let's just stop you right there chief.
No.
Same people, different people, doesn't matter: the future is going to be different.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1d ago
It'll probably prompt Rightists to make thinly veiled comments, if it keeps going. About minecraft.
You often talk about worldview, predictions, updating, etc. Do you have an update to your worldview based on this thread?
Shrike
1d ago
We don't have to speculate, though, we know that's very literally an 80/20 issue in favor continuing to fund social welfare programs.
TheDemonRazgriz
1d ago
Do we know for sure that the recent Liverpool one was an “attack”? Is there a known or accused motive? I admittedly have not paid much attention to the story but my first impression when it happened was that he might’ve just been very drunk.
Hieronymus
1d ago
Seventy year olds are fully capable of caring about the generations to come. Indeed, financially secure seventy year olds (which presumably describes the elderly in the political class) are among those best suited to think in generational terms. If they don't, that's a deep cultural problem, and electing younger folks may mitigate it but will not solve it.
Ioper
1d ago
all major spending was Medicare, Medicaid and defense
There is also the biggest budget post by far: social security.
Grant_us_eyes
1d ago
The wonders of Hoe_math. The gift that keeps on giving.
2rafa
1d ago
I don’t think this feud is about immigration.
Musk was pro-H1B, and Miller is opposed, but this bill has no impact on H1B immigration and both Miller and Musk are opposed to illegal and low skill immigration. There are, of course, Republicans who support those things (those with big ag constituencies, construction and meat processing donors etc), but it’s not at the heart of this conflict.
The core of it is Musk has libertarian or classical liberal beliefs about the deficit, while Donald Trump doesn’t care about it at all. Trump has always borrowed as much as he could and thought about how to pay it back later. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t, but he somehow always made it. Donald Trump’s entire career is a lesson in not worrying about going deep into debt. He is not about to start caring deeply now. DOGE was fun for a while, but as Musk quickly realized that almost all major spending was Medicare, Medicaid and defense (which Trump’s political instincts tell him, correctly, that he can’t cut) they were always going to be at loggerheads.
Miller is solely focused on immigration and therefore needs the bill to pass to give him more money and therefore more options re the border, but the reality for him is that congress needs to act to really change the immigration situation long term barring a curveball like SCOTUS allowing the president to end birthright citizenship or some kind of actual mass deportation apparatus capable of locating, detaining and deporting 3.5m+ illegal migrants per year spinning up magically in the next few months - neither of which will happen.
In the end, possible AGI weirdness aside, this will probably end with a fiscal and therefore political crisis of great magnitude followed by ‘emergency, temporary’ tax rises and medicare/medicaid cuts some time in the near to medium term future.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
1d ago
Darker than Black had a fine dub. Seconding Cowboy Bebop.
birb_cromble
1d ago
So feel free to assume it was .22 caliber and make jokes accordingly.
In all seriousness, skulls are incredibly tough. I remember a slaughtering day when I was young where my great uncle put an entire cylinder of .357 rounds into a hog's head before he went down. The first couple of shots knocked it to the ground, but he got up and just kind of shook it off.
When we skinned the head, you could actually see two of the rounds embedded in the bone.
Human skulls aren't as robust as pig skulls, but you'd be surprised at the beatings they can take.
Throwaway05
1d ago
I also think that there is a significant subset of men that are BPD and misdiagnosed for various reasons, one of which seems blindingly obvious to me, but only on the BPD side
Sometimes I get so frustrated with clinicians, just because this dude is male and violent does not mean APD, listen to the rest of the situation yo.
yofuckreddit
1d ago
I disagree. All of his promises have turned out to be untrue. Someone with a reasonable understanding of all the problem sets he's worked on knows them.
You're correct that the level of each broken promise is different. What I'm saying is that nobody should have believed him. The electorate doesn't matter - they also believe that we can keep welfare and have lower taxes. They're too stupid to consider.
The administration has no such excuse. Arjin has it right - this blow up is garden variety power struggle and interpersonal dislike, it's not related to underperformance.
And there's hypocrisy in Elon demanding performance from Trump on the budget when he could not deliver. I think that leaves a bad taste in the Trump camp's mouth. But it also seems like he didn't even really try. Elon took major risks - Trump has played it very safe.
HughCaulk
1d ago
I understand and mostly agree with what you’re saying in the first part, but blaming it on immigration in the second is a non sequitur. It seems like a multi-faceted problem and likely more of a “good times make weak men, weak men make…” more than anything else.
Also, when your country is run by 70+ year olds, all decisions are short-termist by definition. A 30 year cares about the future, a 70 year old is gonna be dead in the future!!
Everyone has their complaint and diagnosis tho. For libertarians it’s the switch off a gold standard #WhatHappenedIn1971. For progressives it’s the wealth gap and not enough gibs tearing apart the social fabric. For you, it’s brown skins ruining the inner city and tekkin jerbs.
Realistically, it’s a polycrisis and probably just what happens when an empire ages. Get a plan B and get out if things get too bad!
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1d ago
You’re eliding two very important questions:
- Which Americans are getting replaced?
- Which immigrants are replacing them?
For example, in Los Angeles, Latinos have totally replaced blacks in many neighborhoods. This process has not simply been a matter of numbers; there have been many instances of actual racial violence, in which Latino gangs have intimidated blacks into moving away. As David Cole has extensively documented, this has been an overwhelmingly positive development for the city. Even foreigners who speak broken English are, on the whole, preferable — in terms of their crime rates, their effect on civic life, their contributions to the economy — to native English-speaking black Americans.
Are Mexicans the population group I would ideally prefer to take over those parts of LA? No. Obviously I’d prefer a million white Danes, or a million Japanese. I don’t personally want to live in a heavily Mexican neighborhood and listen to awful Mexican music at 2 in the morning. But the Mexicans are undeniably a step up from what was there before, even though they were undoubtedly a foreign population replacing a “heritage American” ethnic group. The fact that blacks have some ineffable historical “claim” to be a long-standing part of the fabric of American culture is of very little importance compared to all of the observable material aspects of day-to-day life.
Similarly, if a million Vietnamese immigrants streamed into West Virginia and displaced the native hillbilly whites, West Virginia would be a better place to live for anyone who remained. There would be a short-term culture shock, as those immigrants’ English fluency would be low, their customs unfamiliar, etc. But within one generation, educational outcomes in the state would likely skyrocket as a result of the introduction of a conscientious and academically-diligent population, in comparison to the “founding stock” who had been there before.
Now, obviously, the outcome would be different if instead of a million Vietnamese it was a million Afghans. Appalachian white trash are a quite dysfunctional population, but they’re still way better than Afghanistan. (I am speaking, of course, in term of population averages; there are, of course, plenty of Appalachians who are good Americans, and plenty of Afghans who are good people.) I’d even rather live among ghetto blacks than among Afghans. Speaking about “replacement migration” as a pure negative is misguided.
Now, this is all separate from the question of whether or not it’s legitimate for elected political representatives to consciously think and act this way about their own people. It’s all well and good for me, a private citizen, to opine about how my black fellow citizens should get run out of town by Japanese foreigners. But if I had actual power to effect these changes, wouldn’t I owe some debt of care to the current constituents over which I serve? Can a purely elitist technocratic government, shorn of any sense of obligation to the people it rules (however imperfect and suboptimal those people may be) truly be said to have any legitimate mandate?
Ultimately that is the great political question of our time. To what degree is populism (however attenuated) simply a mandatory obligation of a government? How much do the elites owe to the least functional, least successful elements of their own society? (And how much can they realistically get away with, if they decide not to take the desires of their constituents into account, before it all comes crashing down?)
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Keep hoping I'll get to tinker a day or two past Tuesday, but at some point I have to cut the losses. A state that might persist well into July, let's see.
How have you been doing @Southkraut?
Talking to the boomer/elderly people I know, the thing that outrages them the most is either when their stock portfolio goes down rapidly, or any talk of cuts to social security/medicare.
Those doesn’t really seem like benefits to the younger generation who needs to pay for gibs, besides the obvious “when you’re my age, you’re gonna need some good healthcare”
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