domain:anarchonomicon.substack.com
non_radical_centrist
7hr ago
I think progressives? I browsed the eurovision subreddit and saw some Croatia memes and didn't really get it, although it makes sense in the context that they're being chosen as a semi-random country to make sure Israel doesn't win
slothlikesamwise
Subway Wizard 🔮
7hr ago
... When has that ever worked like that?
BahRamYou
8hr ago
We do have the Miss America Pageant, but very few people really care about that anymore. I think with modern communications and moving around, there just isn't as much jingoism between US states anymore.
We might be more interested in an intra-North America competition. Doing it between countries really amps up the jingoism, like the Olympics and World Cup. It would be fun to see the US go up against Cuba in a song contest. Not sure how you'd make it fair, though...
_malcontent_
9hr ago
If the spreadsheet has the data, and it was just hidden, then she didn’t perjure herself by saying she handed over all the data.
AvocadoPanic
9hr ago
Was the Jedward coverage unique out of recent eurovision coverage?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10hr ago
I always see these reading threads and think y'all read such heavy stuff. I read for fun. Not a serious book in sight.
Not to be too cynical, and I'm sure people here do routinely read some dense texts, but there's definitely an incentive here to selectively post about things that make you look smart. I'm sure the majority of people read their pulpy scifi and trashy fantasy alongside The Rise and Fall but just don't discuss it.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
10hr ago
· Edited 10hr ago
Browsing through a certain interaction I had... some think Trump winning is already a fascist regime taking power, and some think that civil war is inevitable anyway.
You're more right than I thought, but the amount of people I've encountered saying outright that couping Trump would be the right thing to do is still not zero, and as I said this is very much a case of the unilateralist's curse.
KingOfTheBailey
10hr ago
I remember online chatter about the possibility of a new R President being the Worst Thing Ever being near-constant, all the way back to Bush Jr.'s second round.
Goodguy
11hr ago
There are some similarities, but unlike /r/redscarepod rDrama is not left-wing on economics or heavily anti-Israel.
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 ineffectually invoke that to deal with an entirely procedural democratic system. 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
11hr 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.
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 and management of the state-owned enterprises. Other Soviet-block countries mitigated / avoided the oligarchic problems due to how they approached it as a legal/policy question.
AvocadoPanic
11hr ago
Baby Lasagna was robbed.
gattsuru
12hr 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
12hr ago
Catch up on all the reading -- email newsletters, articles, notes -- I collected during the week.
Lazuli
12hr ago
Start with 3 and work your way to 5. That'll hold you over until 6 comes out.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12hr 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
13hr 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
13hr ago
The gossip is that the usual suspects are coordinating in the usual channels to vote for Croatia.
I think the odds of an established power trying to take out Trump is quite low. The odds of a deranged person along the lines of Wilkes Booth or Oswald or any of the other people who've killed American president, much higher, although today security for Presidents is vastly higher and could probably foil most threats. But I'd still put more than 0% chance odds that Trump will be assasinated. Although I doubt having an insane VP would significantly lower his assassination odds, I don't think any would-be assassin is rationally weighing the merits to the nation.
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