domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
24d ago
Lol now TheMotte is getting into trump assassination territory....Should I stop coming here and start watching fox news?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1d ago
What are the odds China moves on Taiwan in the next 12 months?
The Ukraine war seems to be ushering in a major political realignment in the West. Previously staunch pacifists are penning pieces about how they went from left to center-left, as yesterday's liberals become today's neoliberals and tomorrow's neocons. The circle of life turns, I suppose? It certainly seems like wokeness has traveled far enough down the barber pole that my age cohort is starting to lurch rightwards. Noah Smith is writing hawkish piece after hawkish piece claiming we've entered a new cold war, with a new Axis of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea opposing America and NATO & Friends. He linked to this article making the case for a new cold war, and specifically China moving on Taiwan:
in practice. I see three main plausible scenarios:
Pearl Harbor. China combines an invasion of Taiwan with an attack on U.S. installations, at least in Guam, and possibly on Japanese territory as well. The United States, and possibly Japan, are immediately at war with China, with high likelihood of rapid escalation to general war.
Korea 1950. China attacks Taiwan, probably associated with preparations for invasion. Though, as in South Korea in 1950, the U.S. defense commitment is ambiguous, the brazen character of the attack raises the odds of at least U.S. and Japanese intervention, and all prepare for the possibility of escalation to general war.
Indirect control. China implements air and sea border controls to make Taiwan a self-governing administrative region of China. There is no need for a direct attack on Taiwan or any blockade of usual commerce. Without initiating violent action, the Chinese can assert sovereign control over the air and sea borders to Taiwan, establishing customs and immigration controls. This is not the same thing as a blockade. A blockade would instead become one of the possible consequences if the other side violently challenged China’s assertion of indirect control.
Most of the time, the arguments I see putting China's invasion 5-10 years in the future focus on the second scenario and claim China is still lacking amphibious materiel/experience to pull off a D-day tier invasion. I've only rarely seen the third possibility discussed, but it seems much more likely. The recent military exercises to point in this direction.
This is all wildly outside of my lane. What do people think the odds are that China instigates some kind of blockade or customs control over Taiwan in the next 12 months? The bull case:
- The wars in Ukraine and Israel are straining US defense production almost to breaking point already, however, waiting a few years could see China confronted with an America and EU that brought a ton more military production capacity online.
- The election will inevitably (particularly now that Trump is a felon) lead to an enormous amount of chaos between October 2024 and February 2025.
- China's relative advantages must be reaching their zenith, given demographics and the resurgence of neo-industrial policy.
- A demoralized military-class that is increasingly apathetic to foreign policy/wars that don't directly impact Americans.
The bear case:
- Significant domestic malaise following the mess of zero-COVID, the housing crash and relative slowdown of the economy (or does this make it more likely to boost support for the regime?)
- Fear of economic/military retaliation from US, Japan, Australia, Korea?
- Taiwan is a convenient way to whip up nationalism, but would be inconvenient to actually invade and potentially bungle.
- ?? Honestly, I'm having difficulty articulating reasons why China wouldn't make a move soon.
I'm interested in whether people think this is largely driven by Gell-Mann amnesia and I'm being irrationally swayed by an increasingly hawkish media environment/overly focused on domestic US politics, or whether the odds of China invading are much higher than people seem to think (although I could only find a betting market for a hot-invasion).
ControlsFreak
27d ago
Where is the innovation in any other industry over the past decades exactly?
You know, since they brought these in.
Let's go with a simple one - the shale fracking revolution in the oil/gas industry. But nobody is actually going to go counting these things, because no one really has any sort of consistent argument for which sorts of regulations stifle innovation. Again, I totally realize that they do sometimes, in some ways. But what sort of massive innovation is going to be stifled by requiring devices to not have default passwords? Like, surely we can agree on that one. We could at least leave open arguments for other requirements, and I would welcome a wide-ranging debate on them. But if we're stuck with just theoretical arguments, totally disconnected from any specifics, in a way that can't capture basic truths like, "Being forced to not have default passwords is not a significant barrier to innovation," then we're not going to get anywhere.
I complain about having to fill forms, you retort about the justifications for the form existing as if I didn't also have such a concern.
Ok, so you also have a concern about default passwords. What are you going to do about your concern?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
17d ago
The solution is simple. If the state wants women to give up their careers, their education, their financial independence so that they will have and raise children then the state needs to adequately compensate those women for what it is asking them to give up. No state on earth is prepared, or could afford, to do this, which is why functionally all efforts to increase fertility fail.
We might further ask: why can't states do this? The answer here is also simple. Women's work outside the home generates a lot of economic value. The issue at the heart of raising fertility by having women work less is that society will be poorer, which people are generally opposed to.
Why could this work historically? Partially because much more of women's labor was needed inside the home (and so unavailable for work outside the home) and partially because there were actual legal restrictions on the work women (especially married women) could do outside the home.
Armin
6d ago
Two questions about The Motte;
- Is the site growing or stagnant?
- If it is stagnant or decaying in popularity, do we have any tool or method to attract new people?
Communities like this have the problem of attracting fresh meat.
The time when Trump sabotaged immigration restrictions, and the alt-right cheered
I’ve long held that most of politics is overwhelmingly dominated by some combination of 1) direct self-interest, and 2) vibes. Any notions of ideological consistency should be regarded as mere “happy accidents” rather than the norm. In the US, this issue cuts roughly equally across both parties. One particularly stark example happened a few months ago with immigration. In short, Trump sabotaged the most conservative immigration reform bill in a generation for blatantly self-serving reasons. This directly contradicts what many of his more hardline alt-right supporters want, yet instead of punishing him for doing this, they actively cheered him on. They simply like Trump’s vibes far more than they like Biden’s vibes, so they convinced themselves that the bill was akin to “surrender” through extremely strained logic.
This episode is rapidly fading from public memory given that the bill didn’t pass, but it’s such a great encapsulation of vibes-based motivated reasoning that I feel it should be highlighted before it’s forgotten completely.
Illegal immigration so far
The chart here shows migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border. While some slip through the cracks and are not counted, this still gives a good sense of the contours of illegal immigration over the past few presidential administrations.
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Migrant numbers were quite high during the Bush years, with yearly peaks corresponding to agricultural labor needs.
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Obama was quite hawkish on illegal immigration. Numbers were already decreasing from the Bush years, and the economic turmoil from the GFC brought numbers down further. Importantly though, Obama’s enforcement was instrumental in keeping numbers down even as the economy recovered.
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Illegal immigration fell to its lowest point at the beginning of Trump’s term, but rapidly increased after that to meeting, then exceeding the numbers under Obama. Numbers crashed again at the onset of COVID.
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Illegal immigration has exploded after Biden took office.
There are a couple of points worth noting here. The first is that while enforcement has an undeniable impact on illegal immigration numbers, exogenous factors should also be considered. Periods of economic prosperity in the US act as a “pull” for migrants, while recessions do the opposite. Likewise, civil turmoil in immigrant-sending countries can act as a “push” for migrants, while relative stability again does the opposite. That peak in May 2019 under Trump was due in part to a period of turbulence in Northern Triangle countries.
The second point worth noting is that Trump wasn’t really much better than Obama in countering illegal immigration, contrary to popular belief. This point deserves some elaboration.
Trump and Biden’s border policies
During Trump’s 2016 campaign, immigration was frequently at the forefront despite the historical lows of illegal immigrant activity. Upon ascending to the presidency, Trump at least tried to keep his promise. He signed the infamous “Muslim Ban” in his first week, suspending entry for citizens from 7 predominantly Muslim countries from entering the country for 90 days. He would continue with additional policies throughout his presidency, including preventing sanctuary cities from receiving federal grants, phasing out DACA, implementing a zero-tolerance policy and family separation at the border, creating new restrictions for who could apply for asylum, and many others.
The problem with all of these was that they were executive orders. Executive orders require less political capital to implement since they don’t have to go through congress, but they’re far more brittle and subject to legal challenges or revocation when a president of a different party comes to power. Indeed, practically all of Trump’s EO’s on immigration faced stiff legal hurdles. The Muslim Ban was rejected by courts twice, and only a watered down version passed on the third attempt. The family separation policy and restrictions on asylum were similarly watered down heavily. The policies on sanctuary cities and the phaseout of DACA were basically killed entirely.
Another issue with Trump’s implementation is that it was done with little tact. Any sort of reform will encounter pushback, with bigger changes tending to lead to more of a backlash. This can be mollified somewhat by a good PR campaign. Indeed, the ability to push through substantial reforms without angering huge swathes of the country can be seen as one of the key skills of a successful politicians. Trump and his team did not do a very good job of this. Few efforts were made to get buy-in from moderates. Instead, Trump’s modus operandi was typically controversial unilateral action, followed by doubling down with rhetoric like “shithole countries” that may have flattered his base, but was very poorly received among Democrats and independents. Trump had this problem in many more areas than just immigration, as Scott Alexander noted in 2018.
The end result was that while Trump certainly talked up his immigration policies as successes, most of them were little more than PR stunts. Illegal immigration surged substantially every year for the first three years of his presidency and peaked in 2019 at a level far higher than what Obama ever had. Likewise, legal immigration measured by the number of lawful permanent residents added per year was basically the same as during Obama’s presidency, only dipping substantially in 2020 with the onset of COVID. Furthermore, all of the hostile rhetoric Trump used created a backlash that (at least partially) helped propel Biden to the White House in 2020, and ensured he had a clear mandate to roll back Trump’s policies.
And that’s exactly what Biden did. In his first day in office, he axed the majority of Trump’s executive orders with the stroke of a pen. The first 100 days of Biden’s presidency were defined by “undoing Trump” in practically every area, and in terms of immigration that meant less hostility, fewer rules, and a more welcoming attitude. Cracks began to show almost immediately as illegal immigration soared, and then kept soaring month after month. It surpassed Trump’s worst month, and then kept climbing even higher before settling at a rate unseen in at least the past 3 administrations. December 2023 marked the worst month at nearly 250K encounters, with several preceding months having >200K encounters. For reference, Obama’s second term only saw a brief period above 50K encounters before declining to a steady-state of around 30K-40K encounters.
This rapidly became a political liability for Biden. Despite deploying Kamala Harris with her infamous “do not come” speech, illegal immigration kept increasing and Biden seemed helpless to address it, effectively getting himself caught between a rock (giving fodder to Republicans) and a hard place (alienating his base, reneging on promises, etc.). Ominously, things only seemed to be getting worse. Biden tried to use Trump-era COVID restrictions to limit some immigration through Title 42, but COVID couldn’t be used as a justification forever. What’s more, Biden’s actions significantly worsened a loophole in the system through abuse of a particular asylum designation. This article discusses it in detail. To summarize:
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When the DHS encounters an illegal immigrant, it has two options: standard removal, or expedited removal.
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Standard removal requires a court case with lawyers present to give evidence, while expedited removal is a streamlined, unreviewable process meant to reduce the burden on the DHS and the court system.
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Illegal immigrants can indicate they intend to apply for asylum by establishing “credible fear”. While the threshold to asylum is fairly high, the “credible fear” threshold is very low, which at least starts the process towards asylum and thereby prevents use of expedited removal.
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While standard removal is ongoing, the US has 3 options for where to keep them: (1) Parole them out into the US, (2) keep them in ICE detention centers, or (3) kick them back to the country from which they entered from, i.e. Mexico.
Obama did (1), but apparently the loophole wasn’t well-known enough to be a huge issue yet. Trump tried to go after asylum directly, but those efforts mostly fizzled in court. He then tried to do (2), but this caused a huge overcrowding problem as detention centers weren’t built big enough to accommodate the huge influx. After some bad press, he tried to do (3), which sort of worked when courts weren’t throwing spanners into the works, which they did frequently. Biden reverted back to (1), but now it was well-known that you could come to America illegally, utter the magic words “credible fear”, and you’d be let out into the community. Some derisively referred to this as “catch and release”. From this point, some immigrants simply didn’t show up to their court hearing, while others received court dates so far in the future (up to a decade or longer in some cases) that it didn’t matter. This became a vicious cycle, as more immigrants abused this loophole it clogged the courts further and further making the loophole more effective, which further incentivized anyone who wanted to come to the US to give it a try due to this One Crazy Trick ICE Doesn’t Want You To Know About.
The Senate compromise deal
After a few years of spiraling migration problems, it became clear that the center could not hold. Biden capitulated and signaled that he was willing to give concessions to Republicans to get immigration back under control. This willingness coalesced around the same time that an important foreign aid package was being discussed, with some Republicans stretching credulity a bit when they claimed that illegal immigration was functionally indistinguishable from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Thus, the idea of a “compromise” bill was born, where Biden would give in to Republican demands on immigration in order to get his foreign aid passed. This came to the fore in late January and early February of 2024.
You can read the full text of the bill here, but non-lawyers trying to read actual bills written in thick legalese is like trying decipher jabberwocky growls. A much more scrutable summary is available here.
Division A is all about the foreign aid. This chunk would eventually be passed in April in a standalone vote.
Division B is the immigration part. This was primarily negotiated by Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma. Notably, this would have been the first major immigration reform bill (NOT executive order!) passed since Reagan. Everything else since then has been done through unilateral presidential action or the courts. Since this would have had the backing of Congress, its provisions were quite sweeping compared to the piecemeal efforts that came before. It:
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Includes billions of dollars for immigration enforcement, including money for detention centers, 2700 new border agents, asylum case officers to break the vicious cycle, deportation flights, etc. It’s hard to understate how much money this bill would have ladled on to border protections, with the biggest increases going to the usual agencies like ICE and CBP, with smaller chunks going to ones that I wasn’t even aware were part of border enforcement, like FEMA and the US Marshals Service. It also gives case officers a permanent 15% raise over the standard GS schedule of government pay.
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Gives a bit of money to USAID for stanching immigration at its source, in the Northern Triangle countries and elsewhere.
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Restarts and funds building of Trump’s wall, which Biden canceled early in his presidency.
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Modernizes border infrastructure generally, such as adding more sophisticated monitoring equipment and accepting fingerprint cards or biometric submissions for use in immigrant processing. You know, things that would be nice to have given the last major immigration bill is almost 40 years old at this point.
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Raises the threshold on “credible fear” substantially to actually close the loophole. Currently, credible fear is evaluated using the lower “significant possibility” standard.
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Raises the threshold on asylum generally even after they pass the first hurdle, and it funnels as many cases as possible into the expedited removal process.
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Ends “Catch and Release” and formalize the “Remain in Mexico” policy. Those who arrive at ports of entry are placed under government surveillance, while those who arrive between ports of entry are detained outright, with funding provided for new detainment beds.
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Establishes an additional asylum bar if there are reasonable grounds to believe an individual could have internally relocated in their country of origin or country of last habitual residence, in lieu of seeking protection in the United States.
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Creates a Border Emergency Authority, a “break in case of emergency” power if the border became overwhelmed. This requires the DHS to ignore all asylum requests except those that fall under the Convention Against Torture, which has a high bar. It also further streamlined the expulsion process, allowing for immediate deportation in a range of scenarios. There was to be no public notification for this authority to be enacted, so an immigrant arriving would never be sure if it was active or not. This is the closest the US would come to “closing the border” for an extended period of time that wasn’t due to a national emergency like what happened after the JFK assassination or 9/11. To prevent this emergency tool from simply becoming the new normal, the Authority could only be activated if border encounters exceeded 4000 over a 7 day period. Conversely, it also prevents abuse in the other direction, i.e. a president deciding never to activate it, as it would be required if there were 5000 border encounters over a 7 day period. Note that border encounters were far higher than 5000 when the bill was being debated, so Biden would have had no choice on the matter.
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Does NOT include any significant amnesty, even for DREAMers. Almost every serious attempt at reforming immigration had previously settled on the compromise of amnesty for current illegal immigrants in return for enforcement at the border. The most recent major attempt at immigration reform under the Gang of Eight did exactly this. Trump himself acknowledged this political reality in his first State of the Union address in 2018 when he came out in favor of giving amnesty for DREAMers. The fact that this is nowhere to be found in this bill is a significant implicit concession.
There are also a handful of concessions to the Democrats:
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Allows processing and conditional permanent residence for Afghan collaborators.
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Authorizes an additional 50,000 immigrant visas each year for the next five fiscal years.
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Establishes a carveout in some of the rules above for unaccompanied minors, which in 2024 have made up <5% of all encounters.
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The Border Emergency Authority requires a lower limit of 4000 encounters per day as discussed above, so a future Republican president wouldn’t be able to use it as the new normal unless there was an actual emergency. It also sunsets after 3 years unless renewed.
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Republicans likely wanted restrictions on all asylum claims, but Dems kept a carveout for the Convention Against Torture.
Those concessions are really tiny. The last 3 bullet points are just minor restrictions on the new powers that would be in place. Only the first 2 bullet points are concessions in any meaningful sense. Helping Afghans who collaborated with the US is a one-off now that the war is over, and is a good idea since the US doesn’t want to get a reputation of abandoning those who help it. The 50K new legal immigrants a year is time-limited to 5 years, and is much, much less than the status quo of 200k+ illegal immigrants per month that is happening now. Heck, it would have only been 2-3 months worth of illegal immigrants encountered under average Trump or Obama years, so it’s a very small price to pay.
The bill received endorsement from the National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents Border Patrol agents, endorsed the proposal and said it would drop illegal border crossings nationwide. The group in 2020 endorsed in Trump and has been highly critical of Biden’s border policies.
It’s also interesting to compare this bill to the Border Coalition Letter that was submitted to Congress in 2022. This letter was sent on behalf of a bunch of conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, Conservative Partnership Institute, and several that I’ve never heard of, like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the SPLC classifies as a hate group. The letter demanded exclusion of amnesty of any type, creating an Authority to immediately expel illegal immigrants, increase restrictions on asylum, mandate resources for the border wall, increase funding for the CBP and ICE, end the abuse of parole authority. The bill shares a striking resemblance to this letter. Granted, it doesn’t do everything, as there are a few carveouts for stuff like asylum under the Convention Against Torture, and the letter also asks for states to overrule the federal government when it comes to border enforcement (something that Texas has been motioning towards recently). But overall, the bill does the vast majority of what was asked for by some of the most conservative immigration groups in the country.
Trump swoops in
So yeah. Trump blew it all up.
The reason he did this was as obvious as it was cynical: he didn’t want Biden to have a “win” on the issue. He wanted to keep the issue in the news as a liability for Biden so he would have a greater chance at winning in November. He didn’t exactly keep his motivations secret. Nor was this the first border bill that Trump sabotaged. The overturning of Roe v Wade is instructive here, as it was a major “dog catches the car” moment. Republicans loved to campaign on restricting abortion, but when the Supreme Court actually handed them the chance to do so, they quickly realized the costs it would entail. What had once been a rallying cry for conservatives turned into a liability, and now the Democrats have the wind at their back on the issue. Why do the same for immigration by actually enacting favorable policies?
Of course, it’s not helpful to be openly cynical to your supporters, so the official reason that Trump, Gaetz, and many others trotted out to oppose the bill related to the Border Emergency Authority. In essence, they boiled the entire bill down to that upper limit threshold of 5000 illegal immigrants per day. The extra enforcement, the money for border agents, the restarting of the wall construction, the closing of the asylum loophole, the end of Catch and Release? None of that mattered. It was all boiled down to that 5000 number that you’ll see repeated over and over again in Republican criticisms of the bill. What’s worse is that this number is presented as a capitulation to Democrats rather than a ceiling on the use of a draconian new power granted in a heavily conservative bill. It’s presented as if the bill mandates open borders for the first 5000 illegal immigrants every day, and only then begins to enforce some border policies. This is so laughably, bafflingly wrong that it defies belief.
Obviously the bill isn’t perfect. There are legitimate criticisms that could be levied. For instance, Republicans could say that Democrats shouldn’t get any new legal immigration in exchange for fixing the law, even the paltry 50K number that the bill would mandate. But actually analyzing the bill to any serious degree would quickly show how conservative it is, so Republican leaders mischaracterized the bill so heavily that I’d say most reasonable people would classify it as “outright lying”.
In the world of Republican vibes, there’s the idea that conservatives are always the suckers when it comes to immigration. The idea is that Reagan’s bill was supposed to fix the issue, but the Democrats skillfully reneged on their promise. There’s also the idea of the ratchet, that Republicans will compromise with Democrats, and Democrats will get a bunch of concessions but won’t actually fulfill their end of of the bargain, either because the Republicans are RINOs who don’t actually care about limiting immigration, or because the true-believer Republicans are simply outmaneuvered. Then in the next round of dealmaking, more concessions will be given, and on and on it goes until America is overrun with illegals. For example, in the first deal, “illegal aliens” are reclassified as “illegal immigrants”, and amnesty is provided for, say, 3M of them in return for enforcement of the border laws. Then the enforcement doesn’t happen, ten years go by, and another round of negotiations happens. This time “illegal immigrants” is changed to “undocumented persons” and now we need to give amnesty to the first 3M AND the 5M that arrived since then, but in exchange now we’ll totally have enforcement… pinky promise! And then it doesn’t happen again and… you get the picture.
There’s a kernel of truth to that idea, although it’s obviously extremely oversimplified and lacking in nuance. That said, those vibes are powerful enough that compromise is thoroughly delegitimized for the Republican rank-and-file. Trump’s uncompromising vibes in 2016 is a large part of what won him the Republican primary. He sustained those vibes through his presidency with his bombastic executive orders that drove news headlines but did little to fix the underlying issues. Trump used those vibes again to kill this bill, as all he had to do was vaguely point to the 5000 number in the bill, imply that was a concession, and the bill was effectively dead no matter what it actually would have done.
Other concerns with the bill
While the misrepresenting the 5000 number in regards to the Border Emergency Authority was the most frequent criticism by far, there were a couple other, less goofy criticisms that deserve examining.
The first is that Biden already had the tools to solve the border crisis, and therefore this bill wasn’t necessary. This is typically paired with vibey “Republicans cooperate, Democrats defect” arguments that I detailed in the previous section, i.e. that the bill must have been a “trap” of some sort. Vibes aside, there is some degree of truth to this. As we saw earlier in this article, Biden’s policies were indeed principally responsible for the recent explosion in illegal immigration. Probably the clearest remedy would be reimplementing the Remain in Mexico policy that has been shambling along, half dead. Biden attempted to kill this policy early in his presidency, and courts initially agreed he could do so, until they didn’t, so the policy is technically still alive. Reimplementing this would take at least some of the wind out of the vicious cycle in regards to the asylum loophole, although there would still be the omnipresent specter of legal threats, and now Mexico has said it will refuse to cooperate.
The issue with this idea is that even if Biden were to reimplement all of Trump’s executive orders, they still amounted to little more than a bandaid on a bullet hole. Critics of the bill are technically correct in pointing out that there was less blood before Biden ripped off the bandaid, but it’s ludicrous to then assume that the bandaid was all that was ever needed. US immigration law and border enforcement is fundamentally broken in a number of ways, and this bill would have gone a long way in addressing the worst problems. Recall that Trump himself tried to go after asylum laws directly, but his efforts mostly fizzled in the courts.
Another criticism that was sometimes levied is that Republicans should simply hold out for Trump to become president to truly fix immigration. Again, this typically came packaged with vibey concerns that any deal with Democrats must necessarily imply some ratcheting of concessions, and thus the only way to address the issue is unilateral Republican action, headed by a true-believer like Trump. To steelman this idea, the idea that the political capital to solve illegal immigration would evaporate if the issue was successfully mitigated is a sound one. Democrats were only willing to come to the table in the first place due to the extremely tenuous position they found themselves in with the surge of illegal immigration. This bill almost certainly would have solved that surge, which would give Trump less of a mandate to take drastic action if he wins in November.
The most obvious retort to this idea is that Trump is by no means guaranteed to win in November. As of the time of writing, prediction markets give Trump a 47% chance of winning, which we can round up to 50%. This essentially means the Republicans are gambling on a “double or nothing” approach, but even this prospect is unsteady. For starters, how much more could Trump deliver in excess of this bill, even under the best plausible conditions? HR2 is instructive here, which passed the House in 2023 but is not likely to advance any further in the current Congress. As such, it’s essentially a conservative wishlist on immigration. It is indeed stronger than the Senate bill, but it’s not massively stronger. I’d say instead of “double or nothing” it’s more like “10-20% more or nothing”, which has decidedly less of a ring to it. Furthermore, Democratic willingness to capitulate has an expiration date. If the moment isn’t gone already, then it’d definitely be gone when Trump takes office for a second time, which would mean he’d require control of both the House and the Senate to push through a stronger bill. Prediction markets currently give a 74% chance for Republicans to clinch the Senate, which we can round up to 75%, and a 44% chance to win control of the House, which we can again round up to 50%. If results from the races were perfectly independent, simple statistics shows us that Republicans only have <20% chance of achieving a trifecta. Granted, the races almost certainly won’t be uncorrelated with each other, but this still establishes a lower bound of likelihood. In essence, Republicans are gambling at 20-50% odds that they’ll be able to get a bill that’s 10-20% better. Even this is still underselling it, since it would have to go through one major final hurdle: Trump himself. Republicans already had a trifecta from 2017-2019, yet Trump chose not to prioritize immigration other than through flimsy executive orders. Who’s to say he wouldn’t choose to do so again?
The upshot
I’m sure some people will dismiss everything I’ve written here as concern trolling. They’ll assume I’m secretly a Democratic operative who wants to sow discord amongst Republicans. In reality, I’m just someone who actually wants to get immigration under control. Immigration can be a source of strength, but it must be harnessed very carefully to not cause major problems.
This bill represented the most conservative major immigration reform in a generation that actually had a chance at passing, and Donald Trump killed it for purely cynical reasons. This single bill would have done more than every one of Trump’s executive orders put together. Anyone who’s been seriously watching him knows that he’s utterly self-serving, but what was truly revolting was how the anti-immigration wing of the Republican party not only let him get away with it, but actively cheered him on. It’ll likely be totally forgotten too, wrongly dismissed as nothing more than another Democratic trap.
The worst part of the bill was that many of its provisions weren’t permanent. Some parts like closing the asylum loophole were, but the funding for extra agents would eventually run out. Similarly, other provisions like the incoherently reviled Border Emergency Authority were due to sunset in 3, 5, or 10 years. But the correct response would have been for Republicans to reach out at this golden opportunity with both hands and grasp as hard as they could. Then, they should have fought future battles to ensure the provisions were made permanent. Instead, they squandered a period of maximal Democratic vulnerability on the issue, when the Dems were not only willing to give concessions but were actively asking for them.
Illegal immigration has cooled a bit since its apex in December of 2023. In the CBP’s most recent report from March, encounters are down by 45%. This is still massively elevated from where it was before, but it will at least allow Biden to claim he’s on top of the issue. It seems he’s doing this with ad-hoc fixes, like making deals with intermediate countries that are unlikely to really solve much long-term. In killing the bill, Trump has likely undercut one of his attack vectors against Biden somewhat. When pressed in a debate about the issue, Biden can say “I tried to fix it, but you wouldn’t let me”. In the end, few peoples’ minds will be changed, and the most likely outcome no matter who becomes president is that the US continues muddling along with the status quo on immigration, which means more bandaids and can-kicking. In the off chance that an immigration reform bill actually does pass, it will likely be far less conservative than this bill would have been.
I didn't really participate in the Israel-Gaza megathreads while they were live, for the same reason I don't participate in threads about crypto or YIMBYism: it wasn't a topic I knew much about, and I wasn't especially interested in educating myself. As an undergrad I'd attended a pro-Palestine march or two, and harboured some lingering vague, passive, semi-ironic anti-Zionist sentiment as a consequence; I was vaguely aware of the general contours of the history of the Israeli state (Six-Day War, USS Liberty, compulsory military service for men and women); I'd seen Waltz with Bashir many years ago; I recognised the names Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat and PLO; and was under the general impression that a two-state solution would be in everyone's best interests, although I had absolutely no idea what this would look like in practice. While the megathreads were live, the word "Nakba" would have meant nothing to me, and I can't even say with confidence that I knew at the time that Gaza and the West Bank were non-contiguous.
I think my attitude of willing blissful ignorance changed when @ymeskhout posted his article "The Jewish Conspiracy to Change my Mind" and its followup. Like me, he approached the topic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a position of relative ignorance, and after doing some research came away far more sympathetic to the Israelis than the Palestinians.
While Israel-Gaza may not have had much staying power on the Motte as the Current Thing™ (there were only four megathreads posted a week apart), it's been a fairly durable Current Thing™ in the popular discourse, and looks to remain that way for the foreseeable, perhaps at least as long as the Ukraine war did before it. As a result of this, it's hard to avoid encountering new perspectives on the conflict, and I'm finding myself reading countless articles about it every week. Wary of echo chamber dynamics, I'm making a conscious effort to force myself to read articles which are less sympathetic to the Israelis. I've found Freddie deBoer's takes unnecessarily combative and employing some rather queasy Fanon-esque mental gymnastics, but found Sam Kriss's articles on the topic to be some of the best of his I've read. I admire that he's demonstrated an ability to do what so many outspoken anti-Zionists seem unable or unwilling to do: express deep-seated sympathy for the Palestinian cause, up to and including denying the right of the state of Israel to exist, while also acknowledging the shocking brutality of Hamas's combat tactics and condemning them without reservation.
One such Kriss post, "Against the Brave", takes as its thesis that both the Israelis and Palestinians should be ashamed of the horrific, unspeakable cruelties they've inflicted on one another over the decades, and that a shared acknowledgement and a shared shame is the only path towards reconciliation. I noticed that this post was liked by @ymeskhout himself, which got me wondering if, seven months into this conflict, his attitudes have changed since he wrote his "Jewish Conspiracy" posts. More broadly, have any of you changed your minds on any key aspects of the conflict since October 7th? Did any of you think a two-state solution was viable within a generation, but no longer think so (or vice versa)? Has the conflict changed your opinion of Netanyahu, for better or worse?
SSCReader
12d ago
It's interesting because the guy with the rifle was in some sense doing a right wing coded thing. Open carrying a rifle, which in Texas is legal. It's been a left wing talking point that this in and of itself should be considered a threatening act (see Rittenhouse, K). Which means in other circumstances it could quite well have been the case that the right was outraged by the shooting, as open carrying a rifle in and of itself should not be grounds to be seen as threat of violence, that justifies self-defence. In fact if Foster had shot and killed Perry as he was driving a car towards a protest he would have been in the Rittenhouse position! Arguing he brought a rifle to the protest to defend against just such an attack.
Which is why (as with Rittenhouse) the case hinged on whether the rifle was pointed at someone and if this itself constitutes a threat. Only without clear video in this case to show one way or another.
There is a narrative here where Rittenhouse was found not guilty (correctly) because he did not point his gun at someone and therefore was not threatening, and Foster also did not point his gun at someone so was not threatening and was thus murdered by Perry. In that case the left would have a case to argue that they did indeed play by the rules more than the right. Rittenhouse was acquitted. The jury set aside all the political stuff and acquitted him. Perry was found guilty then a political intervention happened. That's how I would contrast the two stories if I were still going to bat for the left in a political sense at least. The left left (hah) it up to the judicial system to decide the right (hah!) outcome, the right refused to do that and blatantly freed a convicted murderer. Might have some bad optics for squishy moderates. But of course plays well with those already convinced. Unlikely to make a difference in Texas, but might have some play if pushed nationally, perhaps.
I suppose to turn the discussion back to you, if you had clear video that Foster did not point his gun at Perry, and was just walking around, would you accept that he like Rittenhouse did not actually threaten someone and thus Perry shooting him was murder?
spring
4d ago
Sachs is making the same fundamental mistake the current administration has made and the next administration will likely make again, which is thinking that the US is in the driver's seat and all it needs to do is turn the wheel to get everyone going in the direction it wants. The war did not start on America's terms and unless it wants to intervene directly, it will not end on America's terms (a position Sachs is not advocating for, as I understand it).
NATO's enlargement was not, as Sachs seems to imagine, a result of an ever expanding American empire, but the manifesting of the strategic needs of the member states. Even if the US could wave it's magic wand and dissolve NATO tomorrow a new Euro-centric bloc would form as a symptom of the same strategic anxiety. Life in the Russkiy Mir is still within living memory of the majority of the former SSR and there is hurry to return to it. The Baltics are preparing for the worst and Poland's military buildup has gone into overdrive. Western Europe, which does not have the misfortune of sharing a border with Russia, has been slower to wake from its stupor.
Meanwhile at the Kremlin there appears to be no desire for a neutral Ukraine either. Putin et al shunned all offramps prior to Feb 2022 and have opined repeatedly that Ukraine is Russia. The Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson have been legally incorporated into Russia. After the sanctions placed on it in response to its seizure of Crimea, Russia made great efforts to reduce its reliance on the west and built up great wealth (which it is now spending to fund the war). Does Mr Sachs imagine that if Biden were to ask nicely that Putin would just pack up and leave?
Sachs is right about one thing though, America does have the means to end the war. Through violence.
EDIT: my club HOR linked turned out to be fake. How embarrassing. This protest movement probably does not have hipster appeal.
In Germany, it's illegal to sing songs that can be considered hate speech or aligned with Nazi ideology.
Several days ago, at a beach club in Northern Germany, a video went viral of a bunch of drunken Germans singing along to dance music track with lyrics that say "Germans for Germany, Foreigners Out" https://youtube.com/watch?v=xZZztdyd0PQ
Authorities have announced criminal investigations in response, though this does not appear to be silencing the hipster youth of Germany from enjoying the song. More recently, this popped up in an "underground" techno broadcast at Club HÖR https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1794390427388588274
Is this an actual hipster event? Yes. They have their origins in illegal parties being done in basements or warehouses where everyone is hurrying to get their dance on before the authorities shut it down. Though they're much more popular now, they have kept the subversive raw industrial space motif.
Isn't this scene aligned with gay and otherwise leftist social mores? Yes. Typically, German techno is LGBTQ-coded and events can feature anything-goes public displays of sexual activity.
Are they just dropping the track because its beat is sick? Absolutely not. The song was originally produced by an incredibly cheesy Italian producer-DJ as a club anthem. In the hipster spaces this is as cringe as it comes. You would have to kill yourself if you dropped this as a place like HÖR. Perhaps the sickening cheesiness of the song is having its sign flipped because the insipid romancey lyrics were replaced with illegal German nationalism?
Hot anti-immigration thoughtcrime breaking out into the subversive mainstream but still fashioning-itself-as-underground techno scene in Germany is an unexpected development, though it did not come without foreshadowing. The "far right" Alternative for Deutschland party (AfD), is apparently now the most popular party among 14-29 year olds.
via Google Translate:
According to a study, adolescents and young adults are more dissatisfied and are turning more towards the AfD than in previous comparative studies. 22 percent of the 14- to 29-year-olds surveyed would vote for the AfD if there were a federal election now. That is more than twice as many as two years ago, according to a representative survey presented on Tuesday for the study "Youth in Germany 2024". In 2022, nine percent voted for the AfD, compared to twelve percent last year.
For most of its life, the AfD party was previously associated with square, middle-aged, clearly uncool xenophobes.
The parallels between this and the alt-right in the US around the early Trump era are noticeable. It appeared that the youth of America was so tired of cringe progressivism that their parents were into that the alt-right acted as a kind of new punk, though in the US the alt-right evaporated fairly quickly after Trump was elected.
In Germany in 2024, aligning with nationalism may be analogous to a kind of new punk that will definitely freak out your parents and set you apart from the older lamer generations. Can this translate into a revolution? As above, being the most popular party among young people in Germany doesn't say much because young people are not the biggest voting bloc, and unlike in the US there are many more political parties.
Still, this is probably going to stump historians of techno for years to come. (Or not! Since my hipster club link is fake. The other one with the preppies is probably real though)
jeroboam
4d ago
Sachs is right about one thing though, America does have the means to end the war. Through violence.
Russia is a nuclear power. Engaging in direct U.S. vs Russia conflict over Ukraine of all places is insane.
Should such a conflict occur, the mean expected deaths would number in the millions easily. The chance of a limited nuclear exchange becomes quite high, and a full nuclear exchange possible.
sliders1234
4d ago
Scott shut this argument down. You can’t just play nuclear blackmail games. Maybe Ukraine is the right place to back down. Maybe it isn’t. That is a complicated question.
The solution to Russia has nukes is not back down anytime they want something. Then the whole world would be ruled by Russia. A thing worse than nuclear war.
The one big issue with not defending Ukraine is it raises a question of who really is under the umbrella of U.S. protection. Any country that thinks they might be outside of the security arrangement would be very interested in being a nuclear state. And as N Korea has proven just about any civilization can get nukes and a missile program. The reason even places like Taiwan do not have nukes despite real risks is because getting nukes would piss off the U.S. and they view security help from the west as more valuable than nukes.
Even places like Georgia would probably buy some nukes and launcher systems as soon as possible. And those type of states do have some political instability which means eventually some people you don’t like are nuclear.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
11d ago
A genuine question I have for the people who don't like immigrants here: In your ideal world what would you have the immigrants who come to the west do when they get here?
I've heard people complain about immigrants drawing welfare when they don't work; I've noted all the complaints about immigrants driving down pay and making the job market more competitive when they work normal people jobs and I've sure as hell seen all the attacks launched upon them when they come and take over the very top of society to rule the natives beneath them.
So my question very simply is: given that immigrants aren't going to stop coming any time soon, what should they be doing that will make them acceptable in your eyes?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
16d ago
Jewish billionaires conspire to change the narrative on the protests. From WaPo. (Archive link)
A group of billionaires and business titans working to shape U.S. public opinion of the war in Gaza privately pressed New York City’s mayor last month to send police to disperse pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, according to communications obtained by The Washington Post.
Business executives including Kind snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, billionaire Len Blavatnik and real estate investor Joseph Sitt held a Zoom video call on April 26 with Mayor Eric Adams (D), about a week after the mayor first sent New York police to Columbia’s campus, a log of chat messages shows. During the call, some attendees discussed making political donations to Adams, as well as how the chat group’s members could pressure Columbia’s president and trustees to permit the mayor to send police to the campus to handle protesters, according to chat messages summarizing the conversation.
Some members also offered to pay for private investigators to assist New York police in handling the protests, the chat log shows — an offer a member of the group reported in the chat that Adams accepted
The messages describing the call with Adams were among thousands logged in a WhatsApp chat among some of the nation’s most prominent business leaders and financiers, including former CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital [..] The chat was initiated by a staffer for billionaire and real estate magnate Barry Sternlicht[…] In an Oct. 12 message, one of the first sent in the group, the staffer posting on behalf of Sternlicht told the others the goal of the group was to “change the narrative”
The chat group formed shortly after the Oct. 7 attack, and its activism has stretched beyond New York, touching the highest levels of the Israeli government, the U.S. business world and elite universities. Titled “Israel Current Events,” the chat eventually expanded to about 100 members, the chat log shows. More than a dozen members of the group appear on Forbes’s annual list of billionaires; others work in real estate, finance and communications
“He’s open to any ideas we have,” chat member Sitt, founder of retail chain Ashley Stewart and the global real estate company Thor Equities, wrote April 27, the day after the group’s Zoom call with Adams. “As you saw he’s ok if we hire private investigators to then have his police force intel team work with them.”
The mayor’s office did not address it directly, instead sharing a statement from deputy mayor Fabien Levy noting that […] “The insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all too familiar antisemitic trope that the Washington Post should be ashamed to ask about, let alone normalize in print.”
One member asked if the group could do anything to pressure Columbia trustees to cooperate with the mayor. In reply, former congressman Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), CEO of the American Jewish Committee, shared a PDF of a letter his organization had sent that day to Columbia President Minouche Shafik calling on her to “shut these protests down.”
Usually I wouldn’t post so much from the body of an article, but there’s a lot of information to unpack here. It appears that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations, as well as the highest levels of media and academia. This comes after Mitt Romney admitted the tik tok ban was influenced by the extent of pro-Palestine content. IMO this is going to be used in American discourse about Jewish power for many years to come. You have Jewish billionaires across industries banding together to manipulate the narrative, influence politicians, and “shut it down” — literally a trope of Jewish power. The influence here is, frankly, incredible: a dozen billionaires alone, conspiring with journalists and academics and advocacy group leaders, talking about using black celebrities to push their narrative and applying “leverage” to university presidents. As Cenk Uygur tweeted (no friend of the alt right), “You can't complain about the trope, if you do the trope”.
I kind of wonder if some of this is even illegal. Not that I am naive enough to believe a charge would occur if it were. They are sitting down in briefings with the Israeli government and discussing how to best push their influence machine. Isn’t this lobbying on behalf of a foreign power?
jeroboam
9d ago
Since no one's posting...
The dollar is done dude. It was nice while it lasted. But I believe that the U.S. dollar's reign as a universal reserve currency has ended. Over time fewer countries will hold U.S. treasuries and do business in U.S. dollars.
But why?
The dollar is a bad investment. How would you feel about holding a currency that is controlled by the government of a foreign country? You'd feel pretty bad if that country is $35 trillion in debt and will need to print trillions more every year to have any hope of even making the interest payments.
China is dumping U.S. treasuries and buying gold instead. It just makes financial sense.
U.S. treasuries are suffering their worst bear market possibly ever. Let's say you bought TLT (a long-term treasury ETF) at its peak in 2020. Today, you'd be down by more than 50% in real terms. What is supposed to be a "safe" investment becomes very unsafe in the presence of inflation.
The long-term picture isn't much better. Since the end of the gold standard in 1971, gold has outperformed U.S. treasuries. Simply buying and holding a lump of rock is better than holding the debt of the U.S. government. And the government was actually in good financial health for most of those years, unlike now.
The U.S. is not a trustworthy partner. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia held about $600 billion in currency and gold reserves. About half of those reserves, $300 billion, were held in the West. After the invasion, those reserves were frozen. Now, they are now likely to be given to Ukraine.
Because of this, there is no reason for a country like China (or any other country for that matter) to store their wealth in the West, or to hold U.S. dollar-denominated assets. It's all conditional on U.S. allegiance.
For most countries, trade with China is more valuable than trade with the U.S. China now dominates most of the world's industries, and the trend continues to point in that direction. Third world countries often have much stronger trade ties with China than they do the U.S. They export natural resources and import Chinese goods. Increasingly, they can do without U.S. goods and services. Do what we say or otherwise you can't have our, um, Microsoft Excel licenses...
As this process strengthens, China will be able to lean on these countries to do business in Yuan, or perhaps in some resource-demoninated currency.
Okay, so the dollar is done. What comes next? Probably nothing major. I don't think that the Yuan will become the reserve currency, or that we'll move back to the gold standard (although global reserves will be held increasingly in gold). But the U.S. dollar will no longer be the uncontested reserve currency. The world will once again be multipolar, with the U.S. just one of multiple competing forces, and not necessarily the strongest one.
In the long run (10+ years) I expect gold to significantly outperform treasuries.
Tomato
13d ago
The premise that “24 year old female virgin” is a rare specimen is in itself pretty interesting.
shale fracking revolution in the oil/gas industry
That is a fair one, but It's also a very good example of just what I'm saying. I was part of the few people on the quite unpopular side of the oil industry here in Europe in the 10s when it was banned, for the same reason I'm on this side of this issue now.
If the UK wants to make such regulations it will reap the same sort of benefits: no toxic chemical pollution or chinese crap botnets, but also no innovation in these respective sectors.
It's a choice.
"Being forced to not have default passwords is not a significant barrier to innovation,"
You can not like that enforcing common sense rules to an industry through state mandates is a barrier to innovation all you want. It's not going to stop being true. The debate is only on the magnitude of the effect.
What are you going to do about your concern?
I don't buy chinese crap that spies on you, I tell people not to buy chinese crap that spies on you and I shame people who do so in my social circles.
Hell, I've spent years of my life writing symbolic execution software used specifically to make edge devices secure, some of which you may be using right now. What have you done?
As I said downthread, as someone in deep red country the conversations I hear have an underlying apprehension of violence that rises by the day including today. I don't believe in their hearts these people want violence, but as the right is the political alignment predicted by having superior-to-average faculties at assessing danger, I think even if only intuitively they understand and greatly fear how swiftly we approach violence as the only way out. Blessed are the meek, blessed are those who know when to draw the sword. If and when it happens, it will be the right and only time.
The thought of this as being what stops Trump is many things, all of them wrong. There's not one person in this country who has decided this is the moment to hop off the fence, "Okay, now I won't vote for the man." Farcical. There will be topical complaining from RINOs, the establishment-GOP will continue searching, as they surely have since 2016, at finding a way to keep him out, and in November Trump will be on the ballot and receive 100 million votes. This conviction completes the ascendance of the man as the idea of the total rejection of the establishment. The establishment understands this, and is thus why they attack him with a wholly unparalleled ferocity; it is exactly the same reason those who land on the turbo-normie-left-side-of-bell-curve-meme support him. They don't have to think and wordswordswords, they viscerally understand power against power.
People try to contextualize what's happening in so many irrelevant details, ignore the minutiae. It has never been about vice, it has never been about ambiguous business dealings, it has never been about brashness, candor and honesty. Politicians as a category are the least ethical humans in this country, why would they care about any of this? It is about a man who refused to kneel when demanded by seated power and has risen to threaten their entire existence. This conviction heralds the imminent arrival of the pivotal figure of American history. It doesn't have to be Trump, but where we are in the reverberations of history is no earlier than the election of Buchanan.
ControlsFreak
27d ago
If the UK wants to make such regulations it will reap the same sort of benefits: no toxic chemical pollution or chinese crap botnets, but also no innovation in these respective sectors.
So, will you then make a prediction along the lines of what I asked for in the OP? Are you predicting that tech companies will pull out of the UK rather than either upgrayyyeding their security practices for the world market or going with a dual product (one version that doesn't make absurdly basic mistakes for the UK market and one that does make those mistakes for the world market)?
The debate is only on the magnitude of the effect.
And I claimed that being forced to not have default passwords will have an incredibly low magnitude effect on innovation. Do you actually disagree with this, or do we agree?
I don't buy chinese crap that spies on you, I tell people not to buy chinese crap that spies on you and I shame people who do so in my social circles.
I do the same, but clearly that is not changing much about the world. Have you succeeded in changing the world through your evangelism?
Hell, I've spent years of my life writing symbolic execution software used specifically to make edge devices secure.
Then I'm sure you will be pleased that this work won't be going to waste by someone shaving a few cents off of the cost of your product by putting a default password on it. Honestly, hearing this, I'm really not sure what your concern is. Is it that your company's "We're Actually Secure" marketing is going to be slightly less effective, now that the floor has been raised? Did you really think that such marketing was really of all that much value in the first place? @The_Nybbler thinks that it's completely a waste and that no one would spend one red cent more for your secure product. Do you think he's wrong?
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
27d ago
So, will you then make a prediction along the lines of what I asked for in the OP?
I can easily commit to saying that no major IoT startup success is likely to be based in the UK any time soon. But that's saying nothing given they're pretty much all American already for many other reasons.
Maybe some guy at Arm will have to add one more form to some pile or something.
I'm really not sure what your concern is
Europe at large is a dying crab bucket that everybody who can make things is leaving because if you try you reap only taxes and lawsuits.
That's my concern. John Galt is my concern.
Do you think he's wrong?
Yes and no. No chinesium lightbulb maker is ever going to bother with formally proving their code is correct because they don't care. But some connected things actually need to be secure so that you don't explode, catch on fire or get robbed.
I find the actually useful non gimmicky applications of IoT are in this latter category, and that for those the customer and the manufacturer usually know better than to cheap out.
To_Mandalay
29d ago
To claim that modern society has devalued motherhood and femininity, or made them low status, is completely backwards. Motherhood and femininity in general have been devalued for as long as patriarchy has existed, so pretty much the whole of human history. I can't think of any human cultures, let alone any of the big-name European and near-eastern ones that the modern west is descended from, which have not considered the female sphere and female pursuits to be intrinsically lesser than that of men.* The "oh, women aren't inferior to men, they just have different strengths/they're made for different roles" line you hear from conservatives nowadays (what Christians call 'complementarianism') is itself an anti-modernist rearguard action. For the great majority of the history of western civilization, philosophers, theologians, and intellectuals, whether Pagan, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or atheist, have been happy to state that actually, women are just strictly inferior to men. It's the reason you occasionally get figures like Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great who are praised for being essentially men in women's bodies, but you never get men praised for being essentially women in men's bodies.
What happened in more resent centuries isn't that motherhood and womanhood were devalued. Motherhood and womanhood were devalued way back in the primordial past, and only recently have women been allowed to escape such devalued roles at scale.
You can't make motherhood 'prestigious' because motherhood has never been prestigious. Closest thing would just be banning women from doing actually prestigious things.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
24d ago
I’m gonna agree here. We haven’t had a situation like this since the civil war — both sides absolutely believe that the nation will be in grave danger if their guy doesn’t win. They’re not going to simply cower in the corner and do nothing when they believe that the country’s future is in the balance. There’s a not insignificant number of people on the left who believe that Trump is Hitler with a bad combover, and likewise a substantial number or people on the right who believe that Biden is a Mao or Stalin. Furthermore, the belief on both sides that the election is being manipulated in various ways creates even more tension as the losers can absolutely believe that the president in question cheated.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
25d ago
It goes almost without saying that, if Trump were elected in 2024, he could have the authority to fire Jack Smith and derail both this case and the documents case in Florida.
Does it, though? Because I, for one, am not sure about that at all. Because, first, does a president have the authority to fire an A.U.S.A like Smith on paper? Second, even if a president does have that power in theory, well, how DC is supposed to work on paper and how it actually works are two distinct things, so is this a power the president has in reality, or merely on some musty old piece of paper nobody who matters cares about? (I here link this marginally relevant Substack piece from our dear @KulakRevolt.)
Third, and perhaps most important, even if a president has such a firing power in general, one could easily argue that in this situation Trump would not, because allowing him to use said otherwise-legitimate authority "to fire Jack Smith and derail both this case and the documents case in Florida" against him would so fatally-undermine basic justice and the rule of law that the very survival of Our Democracy demands the suspension of said authority until the cases are resolved, and that it be incumbent upon all to #Resist any attempt by Trump to remove Smith.
My personal expectation is that none of these things are going to matter — the system is going to find some way to push past all these roadblocks and keep these cases going.
ControlsFreak
27d ago
I can easily commit to saying that no major IoT startup success is likely to be based in the UK any time soon.
Bruce Schnier noted that California had already implemented at least the number one item. Do you think that this is enough to also say that no major IoT startup success is likely to be based in California any time soon?
No chinesium lightbulb maker is ever going to bother with formally proving their code is correct because they don't care.
I don't believe anything in this requirement is aimed at formal code verification methods. I don't think that's a requirement that is on the table anywhere, except for perhaps some niche customers (e.g., military/space). Probably not even at most "critical infrastructure" places that could blow up or whatever.
I mean, honestly, if that's about all you have to say for what results from this, that no chinesium lightbulb maker is going to meet a standard that hasn't been proposed and that some critical application spaces are going to pay for good stuff anyway, that's kind of a nothingburger? Like, abstract senses about Europe (not even the UK) and wild references to John Galt aren't really "concerns" that can be addressed in context of the very specific document that we have in front of us. It really seems like you just don't have any meaningful concern that we can investigate.
Australian boys make spreadsheet of girls attractiveness, national media, federal minister and state premier rush to condemn them. I'm pretty surprised this got any media attention, doesn't it seem trivial? This all happened on some discord server, it's not like they were parading it around. Does anyone think this would happen in their country?
I can't see how 'unrapeable' could possibly be a threat. Saying someone is vulnerable could be a threat, calling someone invulnerable is not... OK it's very rude, suspend the ringleaders - do police need to be involved? There's a certain level of hysteria here, you get the sense that the male principal fears for his job unless he takes this as seriously as humanly possible.
It would be pretty crushing to be labelled unrapeable or 'get out' by your male peers, though I don't see how a counsellor could help.
Context: Australian media and govt have been panicking about male-on-female violence for a few weeks now. We recently had a mass stabbing by a mentally ill man, who targeted mostly women. Accordingly, male on female violence has increased statistically and the government has thrown a lot of money at various NGOs.
Additionally, there has been a lot of concern about Tate corrupting the minds of the youth. So this lets the media hit two talking points at the same time.
A related matter - youtuber argues that ranking women's attractiveness upsets the Byzantine system of female intrasexual competition, where every queen is praised as a 10/10 regardless of ugliness. I found the video pretty decent albeit a few minutes longer than it needed to be. It features the infamous Gorlock the Destroyer claiming to be a 10/10 (sarcastically?), which does make you think. There might be something to it - ranking women by attractiveness seems more dangerous than one might naively imagine.
In the male-dominated patriarchal society of the distant past, accusing men of being bastards or having incorrect lineage was a very serious matter. Legitimacy and preventing cuckoldry was deeply important to men, it informed the whole structure of European politics, inheritance and succession. Perhaps in the emerging future it's female sexual dynamics that will take priority and we'll see more of this kind of thing.
Premier (woman): "This pattern of violence against women — not only does the act of violence have to stop, but these displays of disrespecting women. Like, it's just disgraceful."
Lèse-majesté: an offence or defamation against the dignity of a ruling head of state or of the state itself.
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