The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
Abortion opponents believe there are two relevant bodies involved there, as they will gladly tell you if you present this weaksauce gotcha to them.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
It explains both grudging support -- in those who feel the politicians they support following their values is very important -- and enthusiastic support -- in those who do not. Negative VORP on issues is obviously something they do not believe (certainly I do not).
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2hr ago
No, they don't. Those who support legal abortion on "bodily autonomy" grounds don't assign any meaning to "bodily autonomy" outside the cause of abortion. Not to forced vaccination, not to drug use, not to anything. "Bodily autonomy" is not a general principal, it is a soldier assigned to that specific front and no other.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2hr ago
The Iran war is a risk, but as long as Trump doesn't lose or get into a nasty quagmire, he can get wiggle out of that one too.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2hr ago
A better question is what is it about Trump that makes so many of his supporters abandon their supposed values (Christian morality, patriotism, etc...) to not only excuse but effusively support him in a way that utterly surpasses normal partisan affiliation.
Policies they like, or at least they can live with, compared to those of the other guy.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2hr ago
I have only weak evidence against that -- that Indians in Canada aren't direct substitutes for Indians in the US (even when they're the same people). Maybe the dirt really is magic.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9hr ago
An immigrant moving to your country can either work in the global market, in which case there is more money and resources flowing into your local area. Or they can work in the local market, in which case they are slightly lowering the cost of living for you. If they stay where they are they can still compete with you on the global market, its just that none of the money/resources is flowing to your area.
This is a nice theory but in the software industry, it turned out it just isn't so. Indians in India simply cannot compete as well as Indians in the US, and even Indians in Canada are somewhat inferior. Not so inferior that you can't use them at all, but enough that an H-1B engineer is a direct substitute for a US-born engineer whereas an Indian engineer in Bangalore is not.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9hr ago
NIMBYs and the right aren't the same -- in suburban area, lots of NIMBYs are on the left. And the left doesn't say "don't build new units/homes", they say "build only affordable multi-family housing with no parking". The right (even most NIMBYs) would be fine with greenfield development of market-rate single family homes, but the left has been smart-growth, anti-sprawl, New Urban for a long time and has completely taken over planning decisions, so we get this. Slow recovery from the 2008 crash, some excitement from COVID, and but then capped at a historically low level. The right opposes subsidized housing, though they can't do anything about it, but subsidized housing doesn't help the people who are complaining.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9hr ago
To be fair, if it's the right cult you might have a shot. (but so will everyone else)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Consider rent control: (some) leftists think it improves affordable housing availability. (Most) rightists think it does the opposite. Leftists and rightists may place different amounts of value on the availability of affordable housing (and do, to a limited extent, though I don't most rightists are actually opposed in principle), but is that core to the disagreement? If a leftist could be convinced that rent control actually harms their terminal goals (as a good chunk have), then the question is resolved with no value shift.
The core of the disagreement is that those on the right believe the landlord owns the property and the tenant rents it, whereas those on the left basically feel the tenants own the property and the landlord is an employee who maintains it for them. This is typically covered up by a lot of verbiage, but the rhetoric from the left is sometimes quite clear on this point.
There's a lot more: rightists think that housing-first homeless assistance programs don't work, that safe injection sites increase overdose deaths, that gay couples are much more likely to abuse their (adopted) kids, that racial achievement gaps in education can't be solved by shoveling money at inner city schools.
And leftists don't care if any of that is true, they want them anyway. That's the conflict-theory explanation, anyway.
I think a reasonable person on either side of the isle, were they convinced of the other side's claims of fact, might switch sides on any of these issues.
The conflict theorist would say no, would point to evidence, and would point to faked evidence of the opposite from the other side. If the other side is willing to falsify their claims of fact, those claims of fact are not the reason for the belief. In fact, I (a conflict theorist) suggest that a good deal of the reproducibility crisis is caused by researchers using their scientific know-how not to find the truth, but to produce "evidence" for political reasons.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
His coalition is going to fall apart.
That's what they said when he went after the Gold Star family. And on many other occasions, I believe. I predict ol' Donny's going to wiggle his way out of this one effortlessly.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Your analysis applies to political power far more than it does to wealth.
It's rather silly when applied to Rowling, who basically got rich by selling 7 books to every kid in the free world, then even richer through the movies. Not much less "problematic" than that.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Just that the current richest people are clearly too rich and powerful for the good of society.
The current richest people created many of the good things in society. On the Internet, you kill Google and anything else that could become big, and at best you end up with a world with a lot of Altavistas and Yahoos. Kill Amazon and anything else big, and you have a whole lot of relatively crappy e-commerce sites (which still exist, mostly for things that aren't sold on Amazon; they're usually not great). Electric cars remain impractical curiosities; space is confined to NASA and Arianespace. You also kill a lot of other things; some you wouldn't like, and some you likely would. Useful speech recognition and high-quality synthesis. Cloud computing. AI.
Currently the richest people in America are tech people. But go back a few decades or a century and you wipe out more. Retail giants. Railroads. Oil refining and retailing. Electric generation and distribution. The banking system financing all this -- like 'em or not, they're necessary. The richest people living now are why we're living with a 21st century standard of living instead of a 20th; some the richest people at any given time were responsible for similar advancements. Cut off the potential rewards, you also cut off the advancements.
Fundamentally, money and power go hand in hand, so having ultra wealthy individuals in practice means that power becomes centralized within an increasingly smaller circle. Worse, the longer this goes on, the harder breaking up the circle becomes, as power is transferred through wealth from the people to the rich.
The people never had the power in the first place. Power in the US is obtained by those who have political ability; the wealthy can purchase some of this but the agents they purchase are by nature often treacherous. Eliminating the wealthy leaves the ambitions of the politically savvy unrestrained by anything.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
I want a grand unified theory of mind change that simultaneously explains all of these historical effects and simultaneously makes predictions about the future.
"Cthulhu always swims left"
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
There's a sequence of tweets showing how Bernie Sanders's rhetoric changed... he started complaining about "millionaires and billionaries", then when he became a millionaire he dropped that part. Elizabeth Warren, too, sets her proposals above her own substantial (~10M) net worth.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
You're basically asking for a magic wand to give you the upsides of what you want without the downsides. It does not exist.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
There needs to be some way to reconcile a difference in moral values.
There is. Violence. Might doesn't make right, but might determines whose right prevails in practice.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Furthermore I would argue that at the end of the day plumbers janitors and morticians are more essential to maintaining a "first world" quality of life than anyone working in software or finance.
Maintaining on the day to day, perhaps. But building it... that's required finance since before the US was a nation, and software is ubiquitous nowadays. To be fair, a 1950s American standard of living might still be "first world", and you could advance it quite a bit without software. But hate 'em or not, you still need the financiers.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
What do they actually want?
More of what others have. Preferably all of it.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Nuclear blackmail also doesn't work the way the author thinks it does. Why doesn't North Korea say "Give us $100b and lift all sanctions or we nuke South Korea and Japan"?
Because they're afraid the US would say "Go ahead, make my day". If South Korea was making the decision they might well pay it. Israel, to Iran, is in the position of South Korea.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
OK, but if you're going to do a steelman, it's best not to include things that are false (like the top 1% being so rich that an additional million or billion wouldn't make a difference)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Again I disagree that this is going badly for the US, and actually think it might strengthen our overall geo-political position
Strengthens our relationship with the Arab states, weakened it with England, France, and Italy (Germany seems to be in "Keep calm and allow overflights" mode, so maybe no change there), broke it with Spain. However, since England and France appear to be utterly useless (Starmer is announcing a "summit to advance work on a coordinated, independent, multinational plan to safeguard international shipping when the conflict ends"; how not-the-bee!), it might be a reasonable trade.
The US position here is that if the straights are going to be "closed" than they are closed to everyone.
Just the opposite; they're closed only to ships visiting Iranian ports, and Iranian mines (if there indeed were any) are being cleared.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
If I were sitting in a bar and an attractive woman sat down next to me and introduced herself, I would prefer to be able to say that I am a tech lead at Google than tell her I am the CEO of OMW, Inc.
Naa, tech leads (who can be almost any level) are a dime a dozen; if the woman's actually approaching she's thinking you're Senior Staff or better, and will be moving on otherwise.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Most people who use language try to transport meaning rather than just fill the silence.
I think most people are just trying to manipulate other people with mouth noises rather than transport meaning.
Do you think Trump tries to transport meaning with language?
Yes, but he is also trying to manipulate other people. But the likely meaning can often be teased out with effort; for instance, I was able to predict the actual meaning of his threat to close the Strait.
Do you think that Trump was willing to follow through with his threat to end the Iranian civilization?
No. He would have done something, but not anything like that; no advantage in it for him.
Or do you think he was bluffing? If so, do you think Iran bought his bluff?
It was not bluffing like poker, but chest-beating like primitive primate displays. It appears to have partially worked, getting them to the table but not getting them to yield on key points.
Or take the Greenland debacle. Trump could have achieved the same outcome, i.e. learning that Denmark is unwilling to sell Greenland to him entirely through diplomatic channels without it ever making the news.
I can't know his inner thoughts, but I would suspect Trump thought (incorrectly) that Denmark would be more willing to sell Greenland if he made it public.
They tended to be nipped in the bud through state action.
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