domain:aporiamagazine.com
anon_
1hr ago
Have you looked at the projected electoral college map after the 2030 census?
Now look at 538 and try to figure out what path a D has to win here? Florida has been well lost (RDS doesn't get enough credit IMO) as has Ohio. So even if the D candidate wins the "blue wall" state and Nevada they still lose!
Of course, a lot can happen in 5 years. GA or NC might start to be in play, but even still, the Dems have to ring up a perfect set of victories with no margin for error. And their bench is not exactly exciting either: Newsom, AOC, Pete. Gretch is a good choice, which is why they probably won't chose her.
crushedoranges
1hr ago
Because taking on sovereign debt is borrowing from your children and incurring a obligation upon generations yet unborn for your personal benefit.
If great men are those who plant trees who will shade those long after they are gone, then the weak man consumes those fruits, and leaves the future to the harsh light of the unforgiving sun.
Goya: Saturn Devours His Son
AnonymousActuary
1hr ago
social security honestly has never seemed to be as big of an issue. Certainly the demographic slowdown is a bit concerning for anything like this, but you can tweak the ages of eligibility and uncap the payroll tax and you have pretty much fixed it.
Medicare/Medicaid/health spending in general....much thornier problem.
thejdizzler
1hr ago
I think it's because Henry II (the first Trastamara) was technically a bastard. Makes it pretty hard to uphold the divine right of kings when you usurped the throne from your half-brother.
anon_
1hr ago
But SGV wasn't really changed. It was empty before. In 1950 there were 20K people. In 2025 there are 2M.
One thing that distinguishes the US from Germany (and others, idiomatically) is that we have the space (physical and liminal) for such growth. We love growth. Filling an empty valley with 2M bustling people isn't displacing anyone that was already there.
If there's anything historically novel it's been the consistent belief in the frontier as ever widening.
anon_
1hr ago
less willing to waste money on patently obviously useless spending like trans operas in Latin America
There are two separate questions here:
- Are trans operas in Latin America a waste (Yes)
- Does zeroing out trans operas in Latin America do anything meaningful to restore fiscal responsibility (No)
And maybe a third
- Should we shut them down anyway (Sure, do it, just don't claim it's gonna help the deficit)
In the first place, it is not obvious to me how implementing "fiscal responsibility" measures actually results in the country being better-off in any meaningful sense. What can be implemented by one government can be overridden by the next government.
In the second place, it does not seem prudent to maintain a commons that others have no interest in maintaining and benefit greatly from depleting.
In the third place, "my country" is a phrase, not a reality. We are well into the "voting on our rights" stage of the split. Large portions of the country are places I will not willingly visit, much less consider moving to. Increased state capacity is not a benefit to me if I believe that state capacity will be used to violate my rights as a human.
Presumably you disagree. How does balancing the budget improve the country's long-term well-being, in concrete terms? Why is securing this long-term well-being solely the responsibility of the Republican party? If one actually lives in a third-world environment, what is the benefit of pretending otherwise?
...I appreciate that I am not exactly breaking new ground here. In my defense, it seems that neither are you, and of the two of us, it seems my position has more of a connection to bedrock reality. You are appealing to ideals. What evidence do you have that these ideals are workable, and that pursuit of them is likely to lead to an improvement of our actual situation? Do you think implementing Fiscal Responsibility will improve Republicans' electoral chances? Do you think Democrats, having won the subsequent elections, will scrupulously maintain those measures?
Scott once described how Conservatives were valuable, because they serve to moderate Progressives' worst impulses and bad ideas, thus smoothing out the road to Progress. To the extent that this role is legibly valuable to at least some progressives, why should Conservatives see it as valuable? We fight you to make your victory over us smoother, yay?
[EDIT] - I'm reminded of an old joke my father taught me once:
Three French convicts are scheduled to be guillotined. At the appointed hour, the first is brought forward to the apparatus. The presiding officer inquires:
"Would you like to face zee blade or zee floor?"
"The blade. I do not fear death."
The man is affixed within the fatal machine, the blade is raised, released, and flies downward, only to jerk to a halt three inches above his neck.
Shocked, the officer releases him from the machine.
"By zee laws of France, zee Guillotine's failure is a sign of divine pardon. You are free to go."
The Guillotine is carefully inspected, the tracks oiled, the blade polished. Then the second victim is brought forward.
"Would you like to face zee blade or zee floor?"
"The blade. One should always act with courage."
Once more the man is locked down, the blade is raised, released, and flies downward- and once more, it jerks to a halt two inches above his neck. Flustered, the officer releases him as well.
"By zee laws of France, zee Guillotine's failure is a sign of divine pardon. You are also are free to go."
The Guillotine is once more inspected, the senior engineer summoned, the machine partially disassembled and every part examined in the minutest detail. The machine is carefully reassembled, the tracks sanded and re-oiled with the most tender care. Several test-runs are performed, and the machine works flawlessly.
Finally, the officer summons forth the third unfortunate.
"Would you like to face zee blade or zee floor?"
"The blade, please."
His neck secure in the stock, the man watches as the blade is raised to the point of release-
"Hang on, I think I see the problem!"
gattsuru
1hr ago
I dunno if there was a single crystalizing incident for TTRPG fandom as a whole, or even for individual forums.
RPGnet has a date that the moderators themselves advertise as turning from "the wild west" to intersectionality uber allies (usually mid-2004/2005ish), but there wasn't some big incident motivating that, just a more formalized ruleset that wasn't even especially biased, outside Darren McLennan, Curt, and a few other moderators having unofficial exceptions.
Same for conventions: things like banning people over pepes and ok symbols are pretty far downstream of everything else at GenCon, just like the White Male Terrorist writeups were downstream of far broader definitions of harassment becoming standardized or the nuTSR thing was very much a reaction to progressive politics becoming cost-of-entry. There's a lot of stuff that was the topic de jour in the early days: D&D's Oriental Adventures controversy in early D&D 4 days (probably 2007-2009ish?), various convention kerfluffles, CthulhuTech controversies...
That said, I'd largely left the fandom except to keep up with Morancy by the worst of it, so I may just have missed some.
HughCaulk
1hr ago
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”
ChickenOverlord
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr ago
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr 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
1hr 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 first as a "bigot" for saying that he didn't want his daughter competing against biological males in sports, and subsequently as a "threat to public health" and "spreading disinformation" for being pro-ivermectin and anti-lockdown. Even a good sizable portion of theMotte including our very own Scott Alexander (in comments since removed) got in on the game.
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 moved on with his life.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr 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
2hr 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
2hr 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
2hr 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
2hr 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
2hr 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
2hr 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.
Parenting win?
My 3yo has a tough life. He's got two older brothers (4, 7) and all the neighbor kids are older. The 3yo is big enough to want to play with them all, but small enough that he's not quite capable of understanding their games or communicating his thoughts. So the neighbor kids end up picking on him a lot, calling him "poop boy", taking his toys, and other misc mischief. Because they're not my kids, I can't do too much to stop the neighbor kids from being jerks. I've managed to convince the older brothers that they have some sort of brotherly-responsibility to stick up for their sibling, but there's also only so much they can do.
The 3yo is tough and violent. He's been stung by bees ~5 times over the past year, and each time he shouts "die bee", grabs the nearest rock, and smashes the bee to death several times before running over to me/mom crying that he needs a band-aid. So he's pretty good at standing up for himself when the big kids are mean by trying to punch them / throw toys / etc. I'm proud of him for sticking up for himself, but we've been trying to work with him on helping him control his violence.
We found a new tool to keep his violence in check this week.
At the beginning of the week, one of the big kids came over and dumped a bucket of water on 3yo's head when he was playing nicely by himself. I had the idea that we could get revenge by using the hose. We setup an ambush for big-neighbor-kid around the corner of the garage, and 3yo got big-kid right in the face at point blank range. The shadenfreude was great. Big-neighbor-kid learned a valuable lesson about why other people don't like getting water dumped on them and not to mess with my 3yo. 3yo now is the only one with permission to use the hose, and everyone talks about how they shouldn't mess with him anymore. 3yo also has a lot more confidence interacting with both the neighbors and his brothers, and there's been much less hitting and throwing of rocks.
Overall I feel good about how this played out, but I have some questions about what this is teaching my kids about violence. I'm a committed pacifist (in the style of the Amish), and I'm trying to raise the kids to also be pacifists. The hose-to-the-face is obviously less violent than throwing rocks: there's no potential for lasting injury, and it's not nearly as "escalatory" since the big-neighbor-kid already used water as a "weapon". But there was still lots of "evil" in 3yo's heart. He clearly wanted revenge and specifically aimed for the big-neighbor-kid's face so as to cause maximum damage.
So the lesson here wasn't perfect, but I do think it was at least "directionally correct". One common failure mode of pacifism is to become a doormat for other people to run over you---basically all objections to pacifism boil down to rejecting this failure mode---and I don't want to instill this failure mode into my children.
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