domain:ymeskhout.substack.com
ABigGuy4U
1hr ago
I doubt anyone young liberal and ambitious who goes through the modern educational apparatus (especially at the high levels) is going to come out the other side as a middle of the road neo-liberal. The factory that produces that model doesn’t exist anymore.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
Main query: Are the blackbagging tactics of ICE a necessary evil, a dangerous overstep, or some nuanced in-between?
It's stupid theatrics. A lazy google shows they've deported approx. 200,000 people in six months, at approx. $17,000ish a pop.
If we assume 12 million illegal immigrants (range I saw was 11-13), that's a cool 30 years at the current rate with a cost of $200.6 billion (not including 30 years of inflation). You could obviously hire more people to speed it up, and maybe that would result in the same (or lower) per deportation cost from economies of scale, etc. Although as you picked the low hanging fruit immigrants, the remaining ones would probably get savvier so unlikely but whatever.
Instead, you could crack down massively on American business owners who I'd like to remind the crowd, GIVE THE IMMIGRANTS MONEY EVERY WEEK IN EXCHANGE FOR LABOR, ALLOWING THEM TO STAY IN YOUR COUNTRY. I truly don't understand how everyone hates immigrants and not also the traitorous Americans who enable them??
Just implement e-verify, it's that easy. Crack down HARD on a few businesses who you catch skirting this (you can even do it in California to whip up the base) and the illegal immigrants will deport themselves once they run out of money and can't get a new job. You could even set up free busses back to Mexico or something.
Once you show businesses you're not fucking around they'll wise up quick. Or even better, their debt and equity financiers will do it for you. Every bank credit risk department is going to start looking really closely at your hiring practices if you want a loan for your farm, because they don't want to risk you going bankrupt when Uncle Sam eviscerates your business for hiring illegal immigrants. There's also way less businesses than illegals, and they're all registered with multiple government bodies, so this is less legwork too.
The fact they're cracking down on a relative handful of illegal immigrants instead of the much higher leverage option of the people who give them money should tell you what the priorities are here. Illegal immigrants are responding to their incentives, which are "come to America, get a job, make way more than you did at home". So take away the job...
If they were serious about this, they'd make everyone use the solution they already invented, e-verify.
I'm not saying you don't need ICE, there will be people who won't leave. But if you don't fix the system of incentives that makes them come here you're not actually serious.
See also, Trump literally said they weren't going to enforce it for farm and hotel labour. "We're super serious about illegal immigration guys but shucks the hotel lobbyists made some great points..." Farms at least feed people, but hotels? Lmao, they're just not serious people.
Shirayuki
1hr ago
I do have fears of tail-risks involving medical episodes that could be fixed by just having someone to call an ambulance or tell me I've lost it
You can always consider getting a roommate or checking yourself early into some sort of supervision program.
I've heard this sentiment a few times, but realistically 50, 60 years is a long time; plenty of happily married couples end up with someone dying and the other being forced to go it alone, the kids end up apathetic/abusive/fuck ups etc.
I'll grant that having a family does give you better odds of mitigating these tail risks compared to being permanently single, but I've seen enough elderly end up alone and abused even with a big family to know that it's no guarantee.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1hr ago
Yeah, I knew asking Jiro to be arsed to write more than two sentences was a pretty monumental ask. You shouldn't be so pessimistic though! Hope springs eternal and all that.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
Of course. That of the British. You take some locals with legitimacy, give them just enough weapons to rule the place and enjoy the plunder.
The US has been down that road before in Iran specifically too. But their guy started to reneg on the plunder and they thought they could switch him out by breaking everything, and instead created an enemy for decades.
Next time just replace the guy with his son or something.
Hadad
1hr ago
There's absolutely nothing extreme about supporting brutalizing rioters, especially ones rioting in support of criminals. This is an extremely mainstream right-wing preference. All lives splatter, Antifa getting beat, etc., etc -- there's no love lost for agents of entropy. It'd take quite the bubble to think otherwise.
HighResolutionSleep
1hr ago
Men who were elected mostly by women. Who want gibs.
This "women never do anything" perspective is one of the major pillars holding the status quo in place.
Shirayuki
1hr ago
The main problem I have with blackpilled monk types (and this post is pretty archetypal blackpill despite claiming otherwise) is that it can work while you're younger but it has an expiration date
Yes, to some extent this is true; I'm coming at this from a place of relative financial privilege, am not looking to divest all my worldly possessions anytime soon and the risk calculus probably does change if you're flat out completely broke.
Yet at the end of the day, everyone and everything has an expiration date, doesn't it? You can justify working arbitrarily hard for the sake of security, but if you get a terminal cancer diagnosis or you swallow a bee no amount of grinding at work or worrying about it would have helped very much.
It's mostly a question of risk tolerance; there's plenty of guys on the Bogleheads forums that won't retire until they have 100x annual expenses which is frankly silly, there's plenty of guys who regret being workaholics on their death beds, and plenty of guys with significantly higher risk tolerance than either you or I who are happy to carpe diem and forget about retirement altogether.
My P(life is similar enough until I die so that retirement funds remain relevant) is probably higher than the rationalists or the collapseniks, but how high is my
P(life is similar enough until I die so that retirement funds remain relevant) * P (I run into a problem where I need more money and the state won't provide) * P(working harder would actually result in me having the money I need)?
Not sure about that one.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
Pushback is fine. Address the lack of light and not your personal feelings about the poster.
LateMechanic
2hr ago
Hence the panic, because deplatforming just looks desperate and villainous. So it comes down to a bet about what is truly more popular/populist, for whether you'd want to signal boost it or not. And I'd suppose that it's actually pretty likely that a majority of people watching minneapolis and LA protestors trying to impede ICE/FBI/DHS might be fantasizing about an even more aggressive response by the cops like OP. It's at least pretty popular among young normie dudes.
If you're saying that @Hadad's confessed opinion in detailed written motte-form is probably so extreme that it would turn people off, I still wouldn't bet on that.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2hr ago
And if you do immigration policy based on what aesthetically looks good to right-wing voters, you get ICE!
Spending maximum money for minimum results, but the clips on TV go hard
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
2hr ago
It has far fewer ethnic divisions, but the political diversity in dissidents to the mullahs is so great that any successful decapitation would either need to be followed by an autocrat with US backing or civil war.
ccc
2hr ago
They have all three branches of government and a favorable supreme court. Trump owns the party and can make all the senators and congressmen fall in line. It would be so easy to pass legislation to massively increase state capacity for audits, deportations, expedited court hearings, etc. Well, it would be easy, if the administration had any competency to work with.
But the purpose of this presidency is impotent lashing out at perceived enemies. It's all theatre and grievance politics. There's no intention of executing proper statecraft, of actually doing things. The best you can hope for is wonton destruction. That's what you get when you elect a conman.
So in one sense, no, it isn't necessary -- if they were comptent. But given they aren't, it's the only option they have.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2hr ago
Missing Petes - Where are the 30-something liberals?
This write-up was prompted by Zohran Mamdani’s rising popularity in the NYC mayoral race.
Pre-2016, American politics was run by boomers. As the youngest boomer, Obama was expected to pass the baton to the next generation of Democrats. Alas, geriatrics returned with a vengeance, and Gen-X tapped out for good.
Of the dominant American political groups, I'm most sympathetic to neo-libs with a YIMBY flavor. Therefore, I’ve kept an eye out for Millennial newcomers who fit into this mold. 'Left of center with accommodations for changing times' is a tried and tested formula for fresh Democrats. It started off great. Tulsi and Pete had respectable presidential runs for their age.
Then began the woke revolution and the COVID crisis. During this period, I expected radicals to be ascendant, and they were. Progressive Millennial faces were introduced through 'The Squad,' prison abolitionists, and protest movement leaders. All positioned in opposition to the neo-lib incumbents, all terrible policymakers. Thankfully, the progressives haven’t won anything at the national level just yet.
Their mortal enemies, the Boomer neo-libs (Kamala, Biden, Blinken, Pelosi), ran the nation for four years. Most of it was in a post-woke era where the nation was shifting to the right. Yet, we saw no new neo-lib faces during that time. At both the national and local levels, less-progressive democrats like Tulsi and Ann Davidson were pushed out despite their popularity, as proven by their rise in the Republican camp.
Train-man Pete is the obvious exception. But where are the other Petes? If boomer Democrats dislike AOC’s allies, why haven’t they groomed any young leaders of their own? Have boomers reinforced the stereotype by once more pulling up the ladder behind them?
I ask rhetorically, of course. The answer is yes. Boomers crushed the political prospects of an entire generation behind them. Millennials weren't going to have it any easier. The sheer greed of 80-year-old geriatrics is embarrassing. No policy goals left to pursue, just a legacy of corruption and unmet promises.
I dislike Zohran. Among my fellow Indians, he is what we call a 'chutiya' (hard to translate; the closest synonym would be wanker). Yet, I feel dirty saying anything positive about Cuomo. Do the two options have to be a corrupt neo-lib boomer versus a Millennial wanker? As the boomers die off, who will take their place in Democratic power structures? Because from my perspective, all the young leaders are socialist wankers.
So I ask again: Where are the other Petes?
You do realize that by moderating @Chrisprattalpharaptr while defending @Hadad from push-back you are saying that want more posters like @Hadad (who by your own admission is going for heat over light) and fewer posters like @Chrisprattalpharaptr.
In short you are choosing to incentivise heat over light.
Shirayuki
2hr ago
This kind of reads like a troll post from a new account, but I guess I'll bite.
I've probably been on 250 dates, had sex with 125 women, been in some serious relationships
I hang out with her and her ballet friends. They're top 1% in terms of looks and talent
It's true for the ballerinas and its true for the SF tech girlies and the PE girls and the McKinsey girls and the HR ladies too
If this is all true you're clearly on the very right end of the bell-curve in terms of sexual success and social milieu, it's like a multi-millionaire heir asking why people complain about housing affordability when they were gifted three on their birthday.
I like women, in fact I love women. I love going on dates with them, I love hanging out with them, I love flirting with them, I love hooking up with them, I love dating them
I suppose I can't really relate personally, in the sense that my libido is quite low and I don't have a lot of interest in casual dating or sex.
The median man probably does, in the sense they would mostly like to be Chad and Casanova who can fuck a lot of hot women, but obviously this is out of reach for the vast majority of men even if they work as hard as possible.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2hr ago
Whaaa....? My head just exploded.
ETA: Is she possibly looking for some sort of frothed milk beverage with espresso in it? Because that's the only way I can make sense of those two sentences together.
Ar'kendrythist handles power scaling better in the first few books, where there's not merely charged conflict but the protagonist being a pretty severe underdog. Even well after that, there's always a bigger fish until (arguably) the back half of the last book, and that's the point where the protagonist dying stops mattering and what the villain could do to everybody else becomes more important.
While it's still a little obnoxiously progressive-in-the-inevitability sense even by my standards, that works out pretty well for keeping the tension high; what fixing a wasteland of slavery and infighting even looks like is a more interesting question than who's power is more maximum and can blow up a city (though that happens a lot too). The author's also willing to kick out legs under the protagonist often enough that even some situations where it seems like they should be certain to win, a problem will show up and whatever the heroes built collapse. Never quite to the point of being unfair, though it gets a little close at times.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2hr ago
Happy to, conditional on:
- You bothering to write more than lazy, snarky, single sentence replies to minimize the asymmetry of effort between us.
- Define outgroup.
- Define good faith.
whom you depict as passive victims in your narrative
I don't consider myself as a passive victim but it's undeniably true that people as a group are passive victims. Just look at weight loss; everyone knows that eating healthy food in small portions will mean you lose weight, and yet the efficacy of prescribing diet and exercise as a health intervention rounds down to 0%, and almost all people need Ozempic before they actually lose any weight.
Even if you and all the NEETs lived in that world, what's the point of getting married? Of having children, raising them well, working to feed yourself? Why do you bother to call your elderly parents?
Because marrying her makes my life better and allows me to make hers better, isn't that what love is?
Because having children and raising them well makes my life better and I can give them a good life, isn't that what love is?
Because treating my parents well and being loved in return makes my life better, isn't that what love is?
I don't mean to say that we should all be trad rvturners, the idea is silly, and I'm well aware that there was a lot of misery hidden in pre-modernity, and that not all trad marriages were idyllic and happy. I simply mean to say that in the past, working hard, getting hitched, and doing my best to make it work pretty directly correlated with my own incentives, in a way that it's not at all clear whether it does now.
you find something larger than your own ego and physical pleasure to live for
You may call me a cynical bastard for saying this, but if the incentives don't line up for me, saying that I should stop caring about my own ego and pleasure to care about someone else's just sounds like they're trying to figure out the best way to exploit me.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2hr ago
It's true, although if Asmongold hops on the stage at the RNC and says "The more pain and terror inflicted in the process, the greater the psychic wound sustained on the collective consciousness of these illegals and all others interested in following them, the better" to thunderous applause then is deplatforming really the answer to our problems?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2hr ago
So no I don't think that the other side of immigration is doing anything in good faith.
As evidence that your outgroup is acting in bad faith, you bring up legislation from 40 years ago. 2/3rds of those voters are probably dead, while the majority of voters today (myself included) weren't alive or were far too young to vote for your compromise. Your imagined voter who supported amnesty in the 80s knowing that we'd be in the situation we are today as part of some dastardly bad-faith plan to bring in more illegal immigrants is nonexistent.
"But Chris!" you say, scurrying back to your bailey, "I didn't mean voters today are acting in bad faith because of legislation from 40 years ago, I'm saying they push compromises in bad faith knowing that they're meaningless and we'll be back where we started 40 years from now! How could you not parse that from my two sentence effortpost that I worked on meticulously to avoid any ambiguity?"
To which I say, you aren't offering any evidence that these compromises are offered in bad faith, you're pretending to read the minds of your outgroup and ascribe the worst possible impulses to them. I believe that the majority of Americans support a middle path, flanked by people like the one I replied to and open borders folks. Biden, the media, and a majority of voters all knew the administration had a problem with immigration leading up to the election which is why they tried to craft a compromise to address it. You won't get a mea culpa, but it was pretty obvious throughout the summer that the status quo was unsustainable.
Shirayuki
2hr ago
convincing rationalist answer for why people should quit or not use destructive drugs
No rationalist or hedonist of even middling intelligence would ever recommend doing destructive drugs unless on your deathbed.
The downsides are obviously much worse than the upsides, drugs will break your body and mind trying to chase the dragon, and you'll likely ruin all your relationships and die early.
I don't think there is a rationalist reason not to be selfish and NEET
Well, that's the point of this post, isn't it? If being selfish and NEET is what society incentivizes, then eventually that's what you'll get. I have a deep respect for the faithful, but clearly religion is no longer a scalable solution for society at large.
Perhaps in a hundred years all us atheists will be dead and we'll be back to Christianity and Islam battling it out for dominance of the planet.
Sounds like a still not happy to, then.
Good faith doesn't require such petty sneers.
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