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What I've always found interesting about this sketch is that in a way, Dennis and Arthur believe the same thing: that if you tell a nice story about who should have power and why, that somehow magically makes you legitimate. The difference only being that Arthur thinks powerful mythical imagery is the way to go, whilst Dennis favors verbose tirades about procedural specificity and mandates from the people.
A familiar opposition to anyone familiar with the XXth century. But both are ultimately wrong (and ridiculous), which is my whole point.
It is Mao, Rand, Marx and Hoppe who are right: power comes from violence.
The reason Arthur is king and Dennis is a peasant has nothing to do with how cool either's absurd story is. It's all down to the fact that the former holds the sword and would normally lob the latter's head instead of ineffectually kicking him into being quiet. Which is why, if you remove that essential part of the process it becomes absurd.
Incidentally, if you reverse who holds the sword, you get another funny sketch about someone who thinks in mythical imagery trying to invoke that to deal with an entirely procedural democratic system with violence removed from the situation. Which is to say:
Bimmler: Mr Hitler, Hilter, he says that historically Taunton is a part of Minehead already!
Vibbentrop: He's right, do you know that?
hydroacetylene
46m ago
No, the country music audience likes baseball. Flyover whites and assimilated hispanics go to baseball games all the time.
Baseball is declining, and that's partly because there's too many games for anyone to watch all of them, except for the most hardcore fans ever or those who have some professional reasons(eg local entertainment newscasters). This leads to few people even trying, which makes baseball less lucrative. But ticket sales remain strong so that teams are able to stay above water.
'I want to have a system with minimal political repression, should I pick Stalin's Russia or Obama's US?'
Both have torture and executions. If you are a true opponent of either establishment your fate is almost exactly the same. Misery and death for you and your loved ones.
The answer to this question depends on your own beliefs and how tolerable they are to a a given regime, not how tolerant a regime is, because there is no such thing as a tolerant regime except in the sense that it is secure and unchallenged. Power suffers no competitors. If you are dangerous to the establishment you will be robbed, killed, tortured. No exceptions.
What you're doing here is simply denying moral community to terrorists and other enemies of yourself, a (to a degree) supporter of the establishment. You're fine with some people getting tortured and executed. Because they're not human in the sense you care about.
This is fine. It's nothing special. But if we want to have any sort of reasonable debate about the nature of politics, you have to remove yourself from this ideological frame and consider things from the outside.
I'll gladly embrace the bailey: repression is a key element of every single political regime that has ever existed, including the one you live under right now, and no regime could even exist without it. As for the quantity of the repression, it's a function of how secure the regime is and essentially nothing else.
Dean
52m ago
Sure, it's not trivial to disentangle. I've seen notions aired to the point that if only true free speech/press was reestablished for a year and then fair elections held then Putinism would stand no chance, and somebody like Navalny could win. This seems extremely naive and out-of-touch to me, I'm sure that Putin (or a better anti-Western demagogue) would win.
And again, I'd disagree with your conclusion and your framing. Fortunately the naive position is not my position, and on a historical point Putin's ascent did not base itself on anti-Western demogoguery, which was not particularly potent at the time, but far more of an anti-Russian-internal-factors. While the early 2000s Russian political moment was ending the chaos of the 90s, that chaos was primarily internal in nature and origin (corruption, oligarchic abuse, failures of governance), and Putin didn't run on any particularly anti-Western tenor. Anti-western political themes began in earnest in the later 2000s, well after Putin's ascent, consolidation, and transition to killing dissidents who'd threaten popularity.
Of course there are obvious selection effects too. Also, when the invasion began and hundreds of thousands of Russians most willing to flee did so, they found no particularly warm welcome anywhere they tried to go. Most of them have since returned, and even they grudgingly agree that there is something to the Russophobia that state propaganda doesn't shut up about, having personally experienced it.
You, uh, should probably re-check your migration data, because your impression is very likely to be a propaganda selection effect.
While unbiased sources are certainly hard to find, reporting from last year was generally around the 15% return rate. Even it the return rate was double that, it'd still be very far from most. While there is certainly a national interest / Russian propaganda narrative to create a consensus perception that Russians are returning in mass, to date this has been propaganda to normalize and encourage mass returns, not actually reflective of mass returns. The Russians are still several hundred million in the hole.
I meant before he consolidated power.
So did I. A significant part of Putin's consolidation of power was via his allies- which almost certainly included parts of the Intelligence apparatus if not also organized crime- going after rivals.
The thing is, after the collapse and botched reforms, Western-oriented political forces in Russia have been dead in the water, and the real question was what flavor of dictatorship would take over. The second most likely one was the Communist party back in power.
I disagree with your premise because where you start the look for alternatives is arbitrary.
Since we're discussing historical possibility, this is where it's simple to point out that there was nothing inevitable of the botched reforms and failure of Western-oriented political forces in Russia. We have multiple counter-examples of other Soviet economic and political systems implementing successful reforms and adopting pro-Western orientation. That the Russians did not is a result of a number of policy decisions- some bad decisions of incompetence/corruption, but also some deliberate ones. What these choices resulted in misses the point that these were choices in and of themselves, with alternative choices with alternative outcomes available.
To pick just one field with substantial impacts to Putin's claim to popularity: a significant part of Putin's early-2000s popularity was reigning in the Oligarchs, but the Oligarchs themselves only were able to arise and have the impact they did due to how the Russians chose to handle the de-Sovietization of the economy. Other Soviet-block countries mitigated / avoided the oligarchic problems due to how they approached it as a legal/policy question.
AvocadoPanic
1hr ago
Baby Lasagna was robbed.
gattsuru
1hr ago
I legitimately do not understand why judge's eyes gloss over or even they get angry when it's suggested these people shouldn't be assumed to be the most credible people to ever exist. It's almost comical how much defense counsel has to tip-toe around it until they find essentially a smoking gun.
What's particularly funny is how even defense lawyers get into it. Cfe when themotte's own notice that an FBI agent perjured herself at length during a criminal trial; he was genuinely curious how the FBI agent would weasel out of it (spoiler: easily!), and even entertained the possibility "whether the prosecutors will bother" to bring perjury charges (spoiler: no).
Lazuli
1hr ago
Catch up on all the reading -- email newsletters, articles, notes -- I collected during the week.
Lazuli
1hr ago
Start with 3 and work your way to 5. That'll hold you over until 6 comes out.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2hr ago
I always assumed that putting the Presidential security detail in the Treasury Department (where the Secret Service sat until it was moved into DHS in 2003) was a coup-proofing measure - you wanted the detail to have a totally different reporting line to the military or federal law enforcement. But checking dates suggests that the story might be simpler - the Secret Service took over Presidential security in 1901 (after the McKinley assassination) and the FBI wasn't established until 1908. So at the time they put the detail in the Secret Service, the only civilian alternatives were a new agency, the Marshalls Service, or the Postal Inspectorate. I suspect the Postal Inspectorate would have done a better job.
fishtwanger
2hr ago
Probably an international conspiracy of people who share my musical taste; Croatia was my clear favorite.
The people on that subreddit lean towards "race realism is bullshit and people who believe it are caught in misunderstandings, but they should not be automatically canceled as evil Nazis, they are just cringeworthy, stupid, and lame". With also a rather small subset of people who think that race realism is accurate.
Generally speaking that sub tends to be at least somewhat sympathetic towards anything that mainstream liberals hate.
They are basically economic leftists who think that the culture war is a distraction from economic issues.
They disagree with social conservatism on basically everything except that they have a shared belief with social conservatives that modern leftist attitudes towards sexuality have gone a bit too far in encouraging mental issues and exploitative porn. However, they are strongly pro-LGBT and so on, they just don't think that being LGBT should distract from the fight against billionaires.
They don't think that the far right is strong enough to be worth worrying about, so they are fine with treating the far right jocularly, instead of having the sort of extreme SJW attitude of "even joking about the far-right is platforming them, anything short of calling for a crusade against the far-right is tantamount to platforming them".
epohon
3hr ago
The gossip is that the usual suspects are coordinating in the usual channels to vote for Croatia.
epohon
3hr ago
There is a wide array of female authors providing similar intentions, just look for any quote compilation by a naive MRA. I'll refrain from giving my favorite one, I dislike having my disposable accounts connected.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3hr ago
The new movie Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is absolutely well worth watching, as an entertaining film and a rationalist SF film. I deem it worthy of the franchise name and its classic SF heritage.
One bonus is that you don’t have to have watched the previous reboot trilogy series, they’ve included minimal continuity but honor what they have.
I should put together a list of OIG reports into FBI misconduct over the last couple decades. The reports will regularly find pretty serious misconduct and additionally list facts readers can easily connect as what is very likely some sort of extortion crime and then the report gets put in a cabinet somewhere mostly without any media attention, the agents involved will retire with full benefits, and then we turn the page and forget about it ready to be exasperated with the next FBI accusation against "the bad guys." For example, the OIG report looking into the FBI's handling of multiple victim accusations about USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. Does anyone else find it odd that while this investigation was being slow-walked to the point it wasn't moving at all until a local paper The Indystar broke the story wide-open and lead to public allegations by former gymnasts, the head of the office and likely his underling were working on obtaining post retirement cushy jobs with the US Olympic committee? Odd the head of the office lied to OIG investigators to attempt to cover up their misrepresentations of evidence and witness interviews as well as their attempt to coincidentally seek a job with USA Gymnastics/US Olympic committee. Huh, weird, oh well I guess he gets to retire with full benefits.
This agency is rotten to the core. I legitimately do not understand how it continues to enjoy such high reputation for credibility given the long list of known abuses where no one was meaningfully held accountable. I legitimately do not understand why judge's eyes gloss over or even they get angry when it's suggested these people shouldn't be assumed to be the most credible people to ever exist. It's almost comical how much defense counsel has to tip-toe around it until they find essentially a smoking gun. We turn the page and forget about it, "oh here look, the FBI is going after ____ for ____. He must be a bad guy." Do I think the FBI is above planting and manipulating evidence, lying about it, and ruining lives trying to cover it up? Not only do I think they are willing to do that, there are dozens of cases of it being proven they did just that.
Funny enough, I remember that reddit comment because it made me RES tag gattsuru as just "great." edit: I typed out the above before I looked further down the thread where gattsuru mentioned it.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
3hr ago
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
3hr ago
Help help I'm being 'repressed! https://youtube.com/watch?v=l8ukak8P2vY
quiet_NaN
3hr ago
Repression of dissidents is a feature of every political regime. No exceptions.
The motte: To the degree that this is true, it is so vague that it is useless. It is like saying "every animal can survive outside water", implying (a) for some non-zero time span (b) in microgravity (c) with the correct air pressure.
The bailey: To the degree that it is non-vague, falsifiable it hints at 'repression is a key element in any regime', or 'the amount of repression is similar between regimes' this is false.
If someone asked you 'I want to have a system with minimal political repression, should I pick Stalin's Russia or Obama's US?' and you reply 'Repression is universal, so it does not matter', that is akin to answering 'what would make a good pet for my terrarium, a hamster or a gold fish?' with 'every animal can survive outside the water, so it does not matter'.
2rafa
3hr ago
I’d guess the kind of people who liked baseball (coastal white ethnics) are now the dominant soccer audience in the US. Baseball seems to have completely died in terms of younger audience.
quiet_NaN
4hr ago
A large number of parties making coalitions more difficult in Weimar was at least the excuse the Grundgesetz used to impose a 5% limit on votes. And I think that argument has a bit of a point. I mean, in the 1928 elections in Germany.
Percentage of Reichstag seats:
- Far-Left:
- KPD (Communists): 11%
- Democratic:
- SPD (Social democrats): 31.2%
- Zentrum (Catholics): 12.4%
- DVP (Right liberal): 9.1%
- DDP (Left liberal): 5.1% (but below 5% of the popular vote!)
- BVP (Bavarians): 3.4%
- Far Right:
- DNVP (Monarchists): 14.8%
- NSDAP (Nazis): 2.4%
- Others (some probably also democratic):
- WP (middle class Saxons?): 4.6%
- Smaller parties: 5.7%
Here, the five parties under the heading democratic formed a coalition with had a whopping 61.2% majority. I am not sure why they did it that way. They obviously needed SPD and Zentrum. Perhaps a coalition with the DVP only would have resulted in the them being more vulnerable to threats of the DVP to walk out. Instead with the five party coalition, none of the three junior partners could threaten to break the government by walking out. Or they wanted to share power among the democratic parties to ensure that none of them would profit more by defecting to the anti-democrats. From a modern German perspective, this seems weird. Top politicians generally want to become ministers. Anyone suggesting that a coalition should give up 19% of the minister posts to parties which they don't require to form a majority to be more inclusive towards fellow democratic-minded parties would be laughed out of the room.
Did I have a point to make? Hm... if the Reichstag had a 5% barrier to entry, then 21.2% of the seats would not have gone to smaller parties. But 8.5% of them would just have been shuffled around among the coalition (BVP going to Zentrum, DDP perhaps forming a general liberal party with DVP). At the the ~10% of seats of the Others might have bolstered the ranks of the bigger democratic parties.
For democracy to thrive, you need both a viable coalition of democratic parties and a credible opposition of democratic parties offering another option. If 11% of the seats are taken by people who want to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and some 17% are by people who want to restore the monarchy or establish a Fuehrerstaat, then you are in trouble perhaps not immediately but in the next elections, as people disillusioned with the previous government end decide to vote them out, and will likely turn to the extremist parties.
It is a bit of a catch-22: if the democrats don't form coalitions with the toxic extremist parties, the extremist parties won't get blamed for bad outcomes while the democrats will, and if they form coalitions with them they might just enable a Machtergreifung.
Having ten or percent of the seats occupied by sub-5% small parties which can not form stable coalitions due to scaling issues is making the problem a bit worse, but the main problem is the extremist parties.
practical_romantic
4hr ago
I cannot fucking play it unfortunately, I got it off unlokcedsteam, terrible, terrible frame rate, below 10, so added a bunch of mods and now it won't open. I will just save money and buy it down the line or play something else. PLaying video games now is somehow harder than before.
Talking about gta 4 since even vice city wont work
There are some similarities, but unlike /r/redscarepod rDrama is not left-wing on economics or heavily anti-Israel.
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