domain:alexberenson.substack.com
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
I did not, in fact, ask "what are they thinking", or anything analogous to it. I invited moderates who are still invested in the present system to lay out their defense of this newest iteration of the pattern.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
Comments are filtered for posters who have not achieved sufficient cumulative upvotes. This is legacy code baked into the Drama code that this site is built on, and no one knows how or has the time to fix it. When a comment is filtered, it's invisible to regular users but visible to mods, with the only indication being an extra "approve" item on the row of small, greyed-out text at the bottom of each comment. it's very easy to miss when you're reading the new comments stream. We approve good faith comments as soon as we're aware of them, but they're very easy to miss.
erwgv3g34
3hr ago
Only mods can read filtered comments. That's why they don't notice they are filtered.
White people have higher incomes than asians? Or than 'non-whites' as a category, as informed by the vast number of feckless browns? Also who's defining 'white' here? Are we talking about Hajnalis?
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
3hr ago
You asked "what are they thinking?" I answered.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4hr ago
(1) Slightly negative (weird, but not off-putting) (Insert Tim Pool joke here.)
(2) Neutral
(3) Negative (off-putting)
(4) Neutral
(5) Negative (Can't women wear "pasties" so that their nipples don't show through their shirts? If so, failing to wear pasties, so that people can tell you aren't wearing a brassiere, can be interpreted as intentionally being obnoxious. But I'm far from an expert on this topic.)
(6) Negative (is this person insane?)
(7) Negative (very weird)
(8) Neutral
(9) Negative (off-putting)
(10) I'm not qualified to opine on this topic.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4hr ago
It’s true if any system of laws. They aren’t magic formulas like somebody just declares you have free speech and therefore you cannot face legal consequences for speech. It’s always a power game, and if the elites of society want to, they can simply refuse to allow free speech. It’s historically rare that people themselves can force the issue and generally happens when for whatever reason the people have equal power to the elites. In the 18th century, it was because everyone had access to basically military equipment. The British military had muskets and horses, and the colonies had the same technology. In other eras it was because the government was weak or the military sided against the elites. I accept this reality. Unless you’re pretty high up in the hierarchy, or doing something critical to the elite’s success, you pretty much exist at the mercy of the elites and while some systems are more pleasant than others, the grip of power over you always exists.
hanikrummihundursvin
4hr ago
Why can't I read filtered comments? Not directed at you per se.
MachineElfPaladin
4hr ago
You've replied to a filtered comment.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
4hr ago
(dossier updated)
UwU
4hr ago
The denial of cert is likely strategic for the conservative justices. Alito and Thomas will probably strike down the assault weapons bans but the rest (Barrett, Roberts, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh) probably couldn't get a clear 3/4 majority in favor of repealing the bans. Therefore for the ban proponent justices, it's better to deny cert and revisit until the court make-up changes, or at least until the current dissenters change their minds, rather than bringing the issue to a vote today, and have assault weapons bans be upheld.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
4hr ago
The Discourse around Abundance has truly been something to behold. It's hard not to nutpick about this stuff. On the plus side, some politicians really are taking it seriously, not by saying "Abundance!" really loudly, but by trying to refocus on outcomes over process; see Buffy Wicks' permitting reform report; among other things, it's behind some of the CEQA streamlining that's been taken up by the governor.
I agree that running on permitting reform and streamlining and bottlenecks isn't a political winner; voters aren't nerds, if anything, they're the opposite. But voters notice when nothing works, when CAHSR doesn't ever happen, when housing just gets more expensive, when medical costs keep rising, when college is stupidly expensive and even if you don't want to go now everyone's whining that they want you to pay back their loans.
So, the left is very happy to point out that populist red meat sells better than wonkish problem-fixing. But as that essay I linked at the bottom of the original post says, "Criticism is all well and good, but at some point you have to build something." My theory of the 2024 election is (a) everyone hated high prices and blamed the incumbent parties for them, and (b) the Democrats tried to tack to the center, but the disengaged voters who decided the election didn't believe them. Demonstratively yelling about taxing the rich and guillotining the oligarchs isn't going to fix that.
If I may indulge, I note that a "suggested article" linked to from the above is "A Different 'Abundance Agenda': Avoiding Delusions and Diversions", from Robert Jensen, previously famous for other far-left things.
If there is to be a decent human future—perhaps if there is to be any human future—it will be fewer people consuming less energy and creating less stuff.
The text of the article is detailed about "less", but is coyly silent about "fewer". Like many critics, he seems not to have read the book beyond the title, but he does propose an alternative.
Instead of the promise of endless material abundance, which has never been consistent with a truly sustainable future, let’s invest in what we know produces human flourishing—collective activity in community based on shared needs and reduced wants. For me, living in rural New Mexico, that means being one of the older folks who are helping younger folks get a small-scale farm off the ground. It means being an active participant in our local acequia irrigation system. It means staying home instead of vacationing. It means being satisfied with the abundant pleasures of this place and these people without buying much beyond essentials.
A cheap shot suggests itself. ("You know, somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are going to be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.") Horseshoe Theory is real.
But on a serious note, when I see this kind of thing, I hear my ancestors screaming from beneath pails of water and bales of hay and endless subsistence-farming toil, and I wonder to what degree the women of the Hill Country, pre-electrification, would agree with Jensen.
Sometimes these women told me something that was so sad I never forgot it. I heard it many times, but I’ll never forget the first woman who said it to me. She was a very old woman who lived on a very remote and isolated ranch—I had to drive hours just to get out there—up in the Hill Country near Burnet. She said, “Do you see how round-shouldered I am?” Well, indeed, I had noticed, without really seeing the significance, that many of these women, who were in their sixties or seventies, were much more stooped and bent than women, even elderly women, in New York. And she said: “I’m round-shouldered from hauling the water. I was round-shouldered like this well before my time, when I was still a young woman. My back got bent from hauling the water, and it got bent while I was still young.” Another woman said to me, “You know, I swore I would never be bent like my mother, and then I got married, and the first time I had to do the wash I knew I was going to look exactly like her by the time I was middle-aged.”
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
4hr ago
To me, disability means lacking the ability to do something.
the inability to experience emotions
But also, if you’re trying to describe disability in terms of mechanical action rather than experience, both of your first examples are about the inability to experience things most people can experience (inability to experience light, inability to experience sound).
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I don’t really see what you’re describing as a coherent rebuttal.
Tree
4hr ago
The correct liberal answer is that none of those rise to the level of an acknowledgeable offense. Politeness and stoicism requires they be ignored and left uncommented. And I actually like you more if you do 5,6,7 or 10.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
4hr ago
You're being too charitable; consider Sam Seder, who isn't that far to the left, being constitutionally incapable of blaming anything other than corporations and billionaires for high housing costs. This is how you get left-NIMBYs tying themselves into weird knots, like blaming Blackrock (which owns something like 0.1% of single-family homes) or asserting that we don't need more supply, because there are fewer homeless people than vacancies, or because all of those houses are secretly being kept empty by "speculators".
Vaheesan:
Diminishing public power over land use decisions means greater private control, which in turn means more deference to the whims of the market and more discretion for corporate executives and financiers—in short, more oligarchy.
This is the kind of equivocation I was talking about. ("Public power" in this case doesn't mean elected officials doing things, but rather the power of individuals to block the entire process.) When the only tools you have are taxing the rich and breaking up big companies, every problem looks like oligarchs and monopolies.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5hr ago
The denial of cert on L.M. v. Morrison was an incredible betrayal by Barrett (with additional mixed feelings on Gorsuch). This only confirms what many have increasingly feared. Roberts and Kavanaugh have always been establishment stooges so I know it's impossible to expect real constitutionalism from the Court, when push comes to shove, but I had hoped that a Scalia acolyte like Barrett could at least be counted on to get the important cases heard.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
5hr ago
We already do that; around half of California's construction workers are foreign-born, and of those, about half are undocumented. But the cost of living here is so high that you still have to pay a lot for workers, even if they're under-the-table.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
5hr ago
Ideally, it would work like that. And with the Carpenters' union, it has; back in 2023, they broke off from the Building Trades and cut a deal where they'd settle for "prevailing wage" (pay union rates, whether you hire union workers or not) rather than "skilled and trained" (hire only union workers). It raises costs significantly, but it doesn't essentially make the bill a dead letter, which is what the Trades consistently push for.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
5hr ago
I understand that you have a visceral distaste for living in a city, and would rather have a lawn and a driveway and plenty of air between your walls and your neighbors'. These are all nice things! But people also seem to dislike having to drive to get anywhere, to enjoy the economic benefits of agglomeration, and the various other benefits of living in cities.
Ideally, people who like cities can live in cities, and people who like cars and driveways can live in suburbs. But nearly every place in the country is designed for cars and driveways. Maybe a little of the residential land could be set aside for city living? (Because right now, in cities, almost none of it is.)
And we can all agree not to dehumanize the people who want to live differently?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5hr ago
Your description of the situation is so perfectly inverted that there is no point in even attempting to argue the object level. I'll simply note that attempting to use the Constitution in the way you claim people are attempting to use it would be obviously disastrous, and no quicker way to destroy any remaining respect for the document can be imagined.
Definitely not 1; if I’m wearing a hat, it’s almost certainly because my hair looks like shit. The real faux pas would be letting everyone see my bad hair day. 2 is totally fine by me as well.
I’m torn about 3, because on the one hand I recognize that this one will probably be the most popular answer, but on the other hand I sometimes have a pretty bad post-nasal drip; I always endeavor to spit somewhere where people won’t see/hear it and get grossed out, but occasionally that’s unrealistic. Spitting is definitely my most slovenly behavior.
Neither 4 nor 8 is a faux pas as far as I’m concerned, because neither is going to actually make anybody uncomfortable. They just look bad visually, and if someone is trying to look good — which, if he’s wearing a suit or a tie in the first place, he obviously is — he should avoid doing things that detract from that goal.
5, 6, and 7 are obvious [insert whatever is the correct plural of faux pas] to me. 9 is a spectrum, where it depends on what kind of food you’re chewing, how adroit you are at manipulating it in your mouth such that it’s not visible to your interlocutor and doesn’t significantly impact your diction, etc. If it’s a faux pas it’s generally a minor one.
With 10, I would need more context to judge. Maybe it’s just because I haven’t gotten laid in a while and my instincts about the finer points of the etiquette have atrophied.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5hr ago
Interesting, I would expect 10 to have yesses all around. Perhaps I should find more humor in coitus.
sun_the_second
5hr ago
only if it's not a "fashion" hat (so yes for a beanie), yes, yes, no, depends on dress code, yes, yes, no, no, no
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
5hr ago
I'm not a "Rule of Law" proponent by your definition. Don't know if anyone is. Didn't we all hear the old saying about postcolonial Africa "one person, one vote, once?"
What's going on here is that some people want the court to say to the blue tribe "look, Alabama can ban abortion but Maryland can't ban AR-15s. Sorry, it turns out that this document you had no role in drafting and never agreed to happens to protects the rights the red tribe likes but not the rights you like. If you don't like it there's really nothing you can do, since it takes 3/4s of state legislators to amend and you're not going to get that." Would the Blue Tribe respect this status quo? Justices have to ask themselves that.
It's been updated in chat according to the news release. I can't get it working in cherry studio though except through openrouter.
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