domain:web.law.duke.edu
hydroacetylene
1m ago
Of course it's not evenhanded. There are figures like Ross Douthat who criticize both sides- and they do not have TDS.
faceh
8m ago
Yep.
This is also what the "Deep State" represents, and why liberals can regard the concept with fondness. The thought that there's a whole passel of administrators with specific 'expertise' (lol) in certain governmental functions who are able to act independently of the actual elected Executive is comforting to them. It means the government will putter along on a particular course even if there's a raving lunatic at the helm, they know when to ignore him, when to humor him, and when to take steps to reign him in. It represents the inversion of the hierarchy as it is supposed to exist (i.e. President is the plenary ruler of the executive branch itself) while diffusing responsibility enough that nobody needs to be punished for any given mistake. You all know my thoughts on that.
No leaders needed, just the abstract forces of 'good people' making decisions en masse without being beholden to the fickle, stupid electorate.
Vague guess is that Clinton was the apotheosis of this mindset. She would (intentionally) make very few actual decisions, but would be happy as a figurehead of the ship of state, and would get credit for good things that happen and could generally avoid blame if bad things happened (Goddamn, I STILL remember the Benghazi hearings, she really pretended like her position as SoS did NOT make her accountable for people dying on her watch). They did it with Biden but... well, you need your figurehead to at least look like he's in charge for it to work.
Their honest mistake WAS turning that machinery into a tool for directly resisting Trump 1. That made it way more legible and marked it as an enemy. Whoops.
hydroacetylene
25m ago
People love the king. For unlimited loyalty, declare yourself supreme leader.
Be that as it may, the literal only cuts that would make a difference would have to be to entitlements. Slice the defense budget to ZERO and it wouldn't actually fix the issue.
And reducing entitlements is the political equivalent of navigating a field of nuclear landmines.
And for this same reason, raising taxes would directly imply taking money from productive sectors of the economy to give to the nonproductive sectors. Which is not exactly a formula for growth.
So if you think Trump is not doing enough, please, PLEASE specify exactly which programs he should start making drastic cuts to, and then go and explain to the voters who will see their benefits reduced why this is important and necessary and they SHOULDN'T revolt at the ballot box.
Or, alternatively, explain to the various taxpayers why THEY should be on the hook for programs they generally don't receive a direct benefit from.
Simple problem to solve, I'm sure.
(Incidentally, I suspect that part of the plan RE: Tariffs is to help spread around the tax burden in a way that most Americans won't see as a direct extraction from their wallet, so as to avoid the outrage that would come with congress passing an actual income tax hike)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
27m ago
The US can survive with a different form of government.
I know a lot of people — including plenty on the Right — who would deny it, because they'd argue that the United States is its form of government. "Proposition nation" and all that. America is the Constitution; America is the ideals of the Founding Fathers. Wherever those ideals exist, there is America. Whoever believes in those ideals, they are the American People. If maintaining "all procedures and checks and balances" means economic collapse, so be it. If it means entire replacing the "legacy" population with a newly imported one, so be it. If the system of government is at odds with the people living under it, then too bad for the people. The Constitution cannot fail, it can only be failed. "America" the ideal is perfect (some even argue the Founders were divinely-inspired when they wrote the Constitution).
I'm informed by experts that the ponies in MLP are late teens to early 20s. Having never watched any of it seen only a single episode over a decade ago, I really can't speak to the moral messages or role models in the show.
I'm not sure what kids these days are watching so I can't create a table as comprehensive as yours, and I didn't watch too many cartoons as a teenager. But I do seem to remember watching e.g. Teen Titans as a kid and, besides saddling me with a lifelong appreciation for dark haired women, I have a sense that the show had uplifting moral messages, though after all these years of course I don't remember a single plot point.
Imaginary_Knowledge
28m ago
very deep breath
Adopting an exasperated, superior attitude when trying to address pointed and persistent historical inconsistencies isn't doing orthodox historiography any favors.
- But I said it once and I'll say it thrice: why the fuck would you care? "Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews" is not a claim that anyone can dispute with a straight face
Some people care about the truth for its own sake. Insisting that people accept untruths unquestionably offends them even when these untruths are directionally correct. Civilization depends on these people.
Suppose one of these people believes you when you say Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews. He investigates the matter just as he would, say, 19th century British rolling stock or Pokemon exegesis. He discovers something that appears inconsistent. He asks about it. And then, unlike in his entire previous experience, he finds his questions generate neither indifference nor answers, but hostility and outright censorship. He comes to understand this subject is a third rail.
What you don't appreciate is that this person doesn't then back down and go back to obsessing over trains. He seeks understand why this subject is a third rail. He finds Irving. He finds internet witch dens. And he comes to understand, rightly or wrongly, that the entire narrative is bullshit.
Is that the outcome you want? Shutting down investigations into "well, how many actually died in the gas chambers?" out of a paranoid sense of a need to exert narrative control makes the whole narrative unravel.
That's where we are now. A lot of people doubt not only the six million figure and the gas chambers but the whole fucking story, and it's the fault of people who used every dirty wordcel trick in the book to prevent truth seekers doing their thing.
And you know what? That's a damn shame in the case the holocaust narrative is mostly correct, because it plays directly into the hands of its perpetrators. Good job.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
34m ago
Personally I think what terrifies a certain class of people about Trump is just that he seems actually interested in wielding power, and has, I dunno, 'agentic' behavior when he does it.
I've talked multiple times over on Tumblr — particularly this longer post about how modern liberalism (or at least the strain typified by Michael Munger in the interview linked at that post) is about opposition to exactly that. To quote Munger:
Liberalism is the actual belief that no one should be in charge… Even I, if I have the chance to be in charge, I should say no, no one should be in charge. Because anyone who’s in charge, it’s like the Ring of Sauron; it will turn you, and it will make you evil.
And as I put it in my post:
…so much of the West has so thoroughly internalized this distrust of human authority that they can no longer even conceive the idea of a good leader, and are deathly afraid of taking charge of anyone or anything — a deep terror of responsibility, of exercising leadership.
And I'd argue it's why so many opponents of Trump, right and left, struggle to find any vocabulary to describe why people follow Trump beyond "cult of personality" — because they've so internalized Weberian rationalization and this liberal view that they can't really even recognize actual human leadership as anything but some kind of pathology.
ControlsFreak
36m ago
Small request from a scientific coder, not a web page coder. In dark mode, the visible change when I upvote a comment is basically imperceptible to me. (I don't think I'm color blind.) Can you whip up what I need to adjust it?
Totalitarianit
37m ago
Yeah, I guess you kind of did, and to your point I also see their concerns.
Trump gives anti-Trumpers reasonable cause for concern, but it reminds me of the tit-for-tat discussion that happened here last week. Trump and his crew are probably overreaching, and there is also counter culture that supports it. In that regard, there is plenty of reasonable criticism going on. It just comes from a camp who have unintentionally shown their ass when it comes to their inability to see outside of their own ideology.
If the exercise was to come up with steelman arguments without the "yeah, but the otherside..." then I failed and that's my bad. I will say that, within their moral framework, it's easy to see where people are coming from with their concerns and why it is so significant to them.
faceh
40m ago
Counter-argument to that is the U.S. has weathered a good number of major crises over the years without drastically changing its system of government, or at least, not permanently doing so. Civil War was obviously very bad, but things recovered and the nation got stronger over the next 50 years.
I'd agree that stuff like Wickard v. Filburn and the 19th Amendment were certain inflection points. Honestly, though, I don't think political crises are what will kill the current setup, it'll have to be something larger, and probably external in nature.
Perhaps the question is whether, if the crisis becomes deep enough, the appropriate people will actually decide to invoke the tools that the Constitution has built in or, as you suggest, chuck out procedures and checks and balances to save the Republic, even at the cost of the Republic.
aqouta
46m ago
The US won't be able to solve its debt crisis if all procedures and checks and balances have to be followed.
Ok but Trump is not addressing the debt crisis, he's giving tax breaks that far exceed any cuts and hamstrining our industries with hare brained tariff schemes while demonstrating no understand of economics whatsoever. The old ways made us the richest nation earth has ever seen. I certainly favor some reforms, and even some stuff the Trump admin has done, but if your overriding concern is the budget then Trump is not using his smashing of norms to actually address that.
The Trump administration's actions are 100% unlawful. Yet, Intel did it anyway. Unlawful actions can create a lot of short term pain for a company such that they may decide it is better to eat the cost than press their claims. That does not mean the action was lawful.
Re: lawlessness. Who is the plaintiff here? Intel took the deal. There's some presumed upside for having the government truly in your corner now as a stakeholder. The funds were authorized. Taxpayers presumably got more for it as well. They got equity. The executive had some authority to administer the deal.
Who is going to sue over it? What does it look like? This is an example of Trump just doing things that violate norms but might not be that illegal.
Keeping this brief, to hopefully avoid straying into culture war territory:
There's a family my wife and I are acquainted with. This family has had a long history of behavior problems with their kids; the second-youngest male kid, approaching the tweens, has been having a lot of temper tantrums, screaming at and shaking his siblings, including his much younger sibling, and so on. It seems very likely that this is a behavioral problem, not a biologically-rooted issue, since he has these problems exclusively at home and not, say, at school. The parents are fairly Blue, and have been employing therapy/psychological professionals as part of their response to their kids' behavioral issues, so they did so once this behavior began manifesting.
A couple weeks ago, during a dinner catch-up, we learned that the counselor they were seeing for this particular kid's issues had prescribed him an antipsychotic which they had been administering to him on a regular basis.
I am not a psychologist, but the subject comes up a fair bit in the rationalist community. My understanding is that antipsychotics have extremely serious side effects, to the point that we as a society would never have considered approving them for conditions that were not as severely dangerous and debilitating as actual psychosis. My understanding is that the kid in question definately does not have any form of actual psychosis, only a fairly bad temper control problem. I expressed concern at the time, the parents looked into it more than they had previously, were horrified at what they found, and are now no longer administering the antipsychotics... which means the kid only got a regular dose for something like several months straight.
My question, to those with more knowledge and experience of the mental health profession and its tools and practices: is this as bad as it seems to me, and how much of an outlier should I consider this incident? Is this happening very surprising, or kinda what one would expect? My impression is that the counseler got their kid on an entirely-inappropriate and very dangerous medication with essentially zero concern for the kid's well-being, and having made no effort to inform the parents of the full array of risks; apparently they warned that it might cause sexual dysfunction, and then downplayed this concern because the kid hasn't really started puberty yet; the parents report that after looking into it more fully, one of the side effects to prolonged use is brain damage.
hydroacetylene
59m ago
The Republican Party is full of people who 100% know they’re next in a Trump-base backed campaign of repression. Republican politicians will not go along with that to save their own skins.
A prominent example of an issue thé Republican base refused to back Trump over was the Covid vaccine. It is possible.
Until the 2020 election, Trump's opponents were mostly crying wolf. His first administration was a shit show, but besides putting a few migrant kids into cages, he mostly harmed the reputation of the US.
His election denial changed that. The idea that the vote is generally fair and sacred was previously a universal of US politics. Sure, candidates would sometimes quibble over individual districts with irregularities and might need the SCOTUS to resolve their differences, but at least once a verdict was in, the losing side would accept the result and concede. Trump was the first candidate whose ego could not admit defeat, and his party mostly backed him in his lies. J6 showed that he was not committed to a peaceful transfer of power.
Of course, the Democrats reacted with a lot of lawsuits. Some with merit, some pure lawfare. In his 2nd administration, Trump seems completely free of traditional political advice, instead relying on his clique of yes-men to implement his personal ideas. Previous administrations had the decency to do corruption under a mantle of plausible deniability. With Trump it is ubiquitous and brazen.
While I am reluctant to defend the woke mob, I will also notice that government can do a lot of things that most social movements can not do at scale. The BLM riots happened because local governments were willing to turn a blind eye to rioting rather than employ police violence. So the government should at least get half-credit for them. But a bunch of criminals looting is small fries compared to the kind of damage the federal government can do.
Saying that you are less worried about government because it has checks and balances is like saying that you are less worried about nuclear weapons than you are about knives because nukes need a code to activate them while knives let anyone stab people. Sure, the median crazy killer will murder more people with a knife than a nuke, but if the safety mechanism fails the nuke-wielding crazy will be able to do orders of magnitude more damage.
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