cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
1yr ago
invaded by an angry mob
They were invaded by the 2nd politest mob of the covid era. Politest goes to the canadian trucker convoy.
There was only a single death from violence, and it was a protestor shot by security. I think all the other deaths were via heart attack, including the one security guard that people originally claim was attacked with a fire extinguisher.
Nothing was burned down. No one was run over by a car. There were no large scale medieval weapons fights. The "mob" dispersed when asked to.
There were a few groups of FBI informants that roped in a few retards to plan on doing more stuff. They got caught and heavily prosecuted, the same way every other group like this has been caught and prosecuted. The racial makeup and supposed "motivations" of the retards has changed, but the FBI playbook hasn't.
I normally don't care to comment on Trump stuff, but I don't like the massive gaslighting that it feels like we all went through during 2020.
During the summer of 2020 there were massive riots in the streets. Cars, police stations, and businesses burned to the ground and looted. Large physical confrontations in the streets. People out at the wrong time being beaten to death by mobs. It was helpfully pointed out the time that the protestors themselves didn't carry out these beatings or killings. I'm sure the victims of the violence felt much better in their afterlives knowing that their deaths were only tangentially caused by the lawlessness that the protests created.
The health authorities that had insisted on everyone being locked down and not going outside to even mingle within parks also wrote a blank check to these protestors. They were no longer "super spreader" events, but some weird health carve out where protesting police violence somehow made you immune to spreading covid.
That was the context of the January 6th protest. Some people broke some windows and busted down a door, and then a bunch of others just calmly walked through the capital building like they were on tour and took silly photos like it was a fairground. Meanwhile every news station in the country breathlessly talked about the "violence" of the January 6th protest. The same news stations that were talking about the "peaceful" protests that same summer as buildings burned in the background of the newscast.
"They interrupted an important government function" - someone, hopefully not you
No, they interrupted a ceremony of the state religion. The presidential level of politics isn't a place of law and order, its a place of feelings, perception, and group consensus. At most it caused the equivalent of a rain delay, and it was all still done within a day. There was no plausible way that delaying the ceremonies on January 6th would have impacted who was president for the 2020-2024 term. Even if the ceremony had somehow never happened, Biden would still have become president. Because most of the US government acknowledged him as such.
The January 6th incident has caused the media to invent this weird perception that our government is one delayed ceremony away from being overthrown. As if every top leader in the country is a rules following robot, where if the proper procedures aren't exactly followed then they'll just collapse in a heap and stop functioning. We are supposed to believe this despite mountains of evidence to the contrary ... the explicit rules of the constitution have been broken many times, and the typical reaction, if there is any at all, is a collective shrug.
cjet79
1yr ago
I had a very different experience working the India portion of tech company a few years back. Our company was considered an outlier though, and many other companies were often asking us "how do you get the India office to work so well for you".
From what I know, the secrets of success were actually very straightforward, but doing them is difficult.
The history:
The company started with a standard "outsourcing" by hiring a company in India to provide them with support workers. They quickly ran into quality issues. Anytime they found a good worker or support staff through this company, that worker would then go on to get a better job elsewhere. And the intermediary company often just made it difficult to keep using the same support staff.
The company decided this wasn't sustainable and didn't make sense. They opened up their own office in India, sent over a trusted Indian executive, and tasked that exec with building a functioning India office. A decade later those efforts seemed clearly successful. Their own stated reasons for success:
- A focus on hiring and retaining good talent. India has a large labor pool. Even if US immigration has a good filtering mechanism, its still going to leave plenty of conscientious and smart Indians back in India. Find those people, pay them well, and try to keep them.
- Mirrored offices. Meaning that the India office has a full company structure equalish to the main US office. Finance, HR, Legal, Support, Development, Sales, etc. There is something intangible about having access to the full support system of a corporate environment. Companies in the US have a specific structure often because that structure works and produces good results. It seems a little insane to think you can reproduce that success in another country by gutting the entire support structure.
- Inter office travel and connections. The executives in both America and India made it a point to have regular visits to the other office. Also managers and even low level workers could make the trip too. They created an infrastructure to support inter office travel, and it was low marginal cost to let low level employees use that same infrastructure. So I got to take a trip to the India office just 2 years into my career as a software developer. I had a driver, an apartment, a maid, a cook, and a phone all given to me. A 6 week trip, I was paid a per-diem, and given free meals, and given PTO for the travel hours. The real value from the company's perspective is that I stopped disliking my Indian coworkers as much. I understood more of the frictions they had interacting with the US office, and I found better ways to work around it.
They have a world-class support team at that company. American customers would call in and ask to speak to the India support team members sometimes. They had talented developers that managed to get visas through us and then go on to work at a FAANG company. They had quality engineers in India that were respected bloggers and thought leaders on quality engineering.
I feel like I'm selling an ad about the company. They talked this stuff up while I was there, but it was my first job and I just thought 'whatever, gotta talk yourself up, right?'. But no, it took me some more life experience to realize they were actually impressive and unique.
Its possible to have a good company in India, but I think there is going to be a real problem if you are just doing it as a random cost saving measure and not putting much thought into how it should be done.
cjet79
5mo ago
DO NOT POST AI CONTENT
We've only said this sporadically in the past. I'm talking to the other moderators and maybe we will have it added as a rule under the "content" section. Or maybe I'm wrong and all the other mods like AI content (highly doubt that).
We all know how to go and use an AI. If you want to have a discussion with AI themotte is basically just a bad intermediary. No one is here to have discussions with AIs. Thus posting AI content is in no one's interest.
You can of course consult AIs on your own time, and maybe they can be used as a sort of sanity or quick polling check.
cjet79
3mo ago
This is one of the topics that really broke my trust with the medical 'experts', along with the covid stuff.
There are some basic common sense things to know about medicine and if someone is going to make a claim contradicting it they need to have a lot of evidence and some damn good explanations.
The idea that halting a major development milestone would be harmless breaks every bit of common sense about child health. The idea that infection with a sickness does not grant any kind of immunity is also insane.
cjet79
11mo ago
Often times after reading one of Scott's greatest hits I would just sit staring at a comment box. How do I tell them that this is amazing? Everything I write just tastes like ash compared to what I just read.
I'll be plain and up front about it. This was an amazing piece. Super well researched. On a topic I greatly cared about. And a great ending that had me whoop out loud.
I've tried writing about David before, but it often just ended in frustration. I knew about him before the Scott thing blew up because he had posted descriptions of my modding decisions that seemed completely wrong. He would write up the descriptions on rational wiki (I'm still quoted on there). I quickly learned that was basically his own personal fiefdom. I've ended up taking the approach suggested by your parting words. David seems to be living in a personal hell of his own making. I will let him continue to live there, and I will try not to let him drag me down into it with him.
The fact that he was not stripped of admin powers after the Scott incident has eroded all of my trust in wikipedia. It is just another battleground in the culture war. A battleground that was mostly won because one side didn't even realize a battle was taking place.
cjet79
2yr ago
I work for an organization that uses shutterstock. That is absolutely a tradeoff worth taking. We use a dozen or so images a day, so spending 1 minute on an image instead of 10 minutes changes it from a part time job, to just a small additional task. The person's salary that gathers these images is in a mediumish salary range. But it would still be worth it to us if we were paying this person minimum wage.
Shutterstock only needs to save an hour of time of a minimum wage employee once a month to be worth it. It saves us thousands of dollars, its easily worth it. Until someone creates a giant library of free AI art with clear image rights then shutterstock will continue to be worth it.
The good retellings
My earliest memory of a story retelling was that of Chex Quest. A Doom clone made for kids. With the cereal brand "Chex" replacing most of the blood, demons, and foul language with cereal motifs. Looking back on things it seems like a joke, how the hell did that thing even exist? I know there is a legit story behind the game, but I honestly don't want to read it. It is more fascinating to imagine how such a game could be created.
There is definitely something very cute and sweet about retelling adult themed stories for kids. I chuckle every time my young daughters belt out the lyrics to "Rich men north of richmond", and instead of saying "Your dollar ain't shit" they say "your doll er aint chic". That wasn't a reinterpretation I suggest or pushed on them, just what they seemed to have heard.
I also find cleverly disguised adult themes in children's media rather entertaining. The jokes in pixar movies that go over the heads of every kid, but they still laugh as they see their parents suddenly entertained and laughing along with the cartoon.
The Bad Retellings
There is however a hamfisted political messaging that sometimes gets shoved into stories. I find it bad, even when I agree with the message. I'm libertarian, and many of my fellow travelers treat Ayn Rand's books as holy text. I've instead always been highly turned off by some of her books. The short ones like Anthem were great. The long 60 page diatribe in one of the other ones is just ... gross.
The best political literature always seems to be written by the opposition (these are vague recollections, some or all of them might be wrong):
- Starship Troopers, a defense of a Fascist military dicatorship, written by Heinlein, who was closer to a libertarian by most accounts.
- Shakespear's plays nominally supported the king and monarchy of England, but other have pointed out the subtle and sometimes not so subtle critiques.
- Anthem, Ayn Rand's best book IMO, basically just assumed the communists had won, and depicted the shit society that would result.
- Terry Pratchett's discworld. I assume Sir Terry Pratchett didn't believe in the efficacy of a dictatorship run by a psychopathic assassin, but damn did he make that system look good.
- Bioshock. From what I remember of developer commentary they are generally pretty average liberal sentiments. They actually wrote a great libertarianish character. I think in the followups they continued to write some great politicalish commentary.
- Animal Farm, where the communist author turned off everyone from communism.
- Ender's Game, where the Catholic religious author has a religious awakening in the character that goes off to speak at funerals. While the secular psychopath older brother ends up ruling the world.
I've written a bit of fiction on my own before, and I kinda get it. I felt I was at my best when a story just came to me from the muses. I let it flow onto the page, and it took me in unexpected directions. I was at my worst when I had some ideas of how things SHOULD work, and I tried to shove them in and make a point.
Some stories written in the modern day just feel like all those authorial instincts and all the inspiration from the muse just got shoved to the side. They had a point to make dammit, and they weren't gonna let a good story get in the way of making the point. Sigh whatever, they ignore the muses at their own peril. No one will like or care about their stories in the future. Some idiot genius that learns to listen to those whispers of the muse will beat them 9 times out of 10 in the long run.
Harry Potter Legacy, the ugly storytelling
I recently beat Harry Potter legacy. Lots of good story telling in most of it. But it had a low point. A trans bartender. There was a disconnect between the face I was seeing and the voice I was hearing. I thought maybe it was some kind of audio mistake at first. Why did this female looking character sound like a dude with a throat problem? Ah, they had to hamfistedly clear it up later, "I use to be wizard, [other character] still recognized me after i became a witch".
Look, this is a freaking magic world. Polyjuice potions can completely imitate someone else, voice included. So whatever magic she/he figured out to change their appearance couldn't also target their voice? Seems dumb.
Also it had the traditional problem that once came with female superheros. They can do no wrong, and they are strong and powerful. She is the only one to stand up to a powerful evil wizard and the evil wizard just ... backs down and lets it go. Unlike every other time that particular evil wizard has encountered a problem. I'm sorry, what? A bar owner is a powerful and scary enough wizard to scare away one of the main villains of the game, while the entire Hogwarts staff, and government of magical England is just kind of an afterthought that the evil wizard isn't worried about at all?
Dumb. The scene should have been rewritten. Trans person shouldn't have confronted evil wizard, they should have hid the player character, and shamelessly lied to evil wizard. After the evil wizard leaves, trans person should have suggested the player character lay low. That would be in line with the behavior of someone that spent most of their life hiding a deep dark secret, and then decided that their highest calling in a magic world was to own a bar. The wasted story and unrealized character growth disgusts me far more than the hamfisted "trans people are great" political messaging.
cjet79
2yr ago
I'm not a fan of large social engineering projects, and wasn't one of the people advocating for fertility stuff.
The problem will eventually work itself out. The higher fertility places and cultures will become more dominant. It will just happen on timelines that are too long for people to care about. Probably at least two or three generations 40-60 years.
The scenario you bring up reminded me of something ... people like to start by fixing problems at a societal level. They want the federal government to just step in and wave a magic wand to fix things. But if you are forced to actually solve a problem, this is a backwards way of thinking about things. Instead of thinking at the national level, people should be thinking at the personal and local level. "What would make me have more kids?" and then "What would make my close family and neighbors have more kids?"
Me and my wife have good jobs so I don't really find myself money constrained when thinking about having more kids. We are actively trying to have more kids right now. (which will be number three, but earlier in my life I thought about having four kids, and now I don't think I can do it). I feel kid constrained because of time, stress, and space constraints. The two kids I do have I feel like they require a ton of effort, it feels impossible to just get everything done that needs to get done. The time spent hanging out with my kids is often one of the best times to get a bunch of important tasks done.
I tend to feel more stressed, because there is a local expectation of closely watching your kid. There is a playground right behind my house. I'd be able to see my kids from my house if they went to this playground. I think my parents might have just let me wander off and go play at the playground when I was my kids age, but I feel like if I did that for my kids it would be frowned upon.
Our house is a decent size, but we'd like to expand it if we were having more kids. We can't expand it due to regulatory constraints. We might be able to get around these regulatory constraints, but it will take time and stress (areas where I already feel resource constrained).
When I look around at my family and neighbors, the main additional constraint is medical (some of them have trouble having kids).
Its not that money isn't a true constraint for anyone, its just kinda lower on the list. And maybe if we had enough money some of the other constraints could be handled. I've considered hiring a personal assistant to deal with more of my life problems, but my wife hates that idea.
For me, and maybe some of my family and neighbors, we would be having more kids if the following things happened:
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Reduced local regulatory constraints on housing expansion.
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More communal child care opportunities. (things like birthday parties are great, my kids can get in some social time, and so can I). Its a pain for someone to host these, but everyone else usually enjoys coming along.
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More relaxed social attitudes, aka allow free range kids.
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Less bullshit bureaucratic things I have to deal with. Car stuff, taxes, and recently the city changed all our street addresses (cuz the old ones were racist or something). Those are annoyances that I wouldn't choose to deal with. But there are also things I choose to deal with that feel like they are made more difficult because of regulatory crap. I am trying to become a wedding officiant for my sister's wedding, trying to get banquet license for a recreational event, trying to setup doctors appointments for myself, trying to apply to some private schools for my daughters, etc. This is just the current stuff that is on my mind, but it feels like I've had a list of things just as long for the last few years even though I keep knocking things off the list every month.
The last one is the real kicker for me. Each one thing is usually no big deal on its own, but there are these constant bureaucratic bullshit things added on top of them that make each item take longer. And the kind of impulse people have that says "the federal government should do a thing to solve some societal issue" is exactly why I think that list of bureaucratic bullshit keeps growing. Everyone always thinks their one issue is so important, and they always think that any minor costs imposed by imposing their top down solution are very minimal. But the shit adds up. I can only imagine the nightmare that a national kids registry might choose to impose. How long before they start tying your kid benefits to other crap they care about. Oh, you can't get your child tax credit unless they have x doctor visits a year, because we need to actually make sure your kid is being taken care of. Submit the reports made by your daycare, or the child visitation officer who comes to inspect your home.
If there is one big societal problem that I want the federal government to fix then it is this one: people having the desire to fix big societal problems all at once via the federal government. I want a federal agency that makes it their goal to determine how much time the average American spends on bureaucracy, and when that number gets too high they have the power to go around axing bureaucratic requirements at other agencies. You think your issue is so important? Too bad, we are gutting your "save everyone at once at the federal level" program that requires hours of every American's time.
That is my little pipe dream. Just writing this should have been a stress reliever. But I feel more stressed now, I could have spent these moments of coffee fueled productivity to slog through another government form. And now I am one day closer to multiple deadlines hanging over my head.
cjet79
8mo ago
I felt this way in 2016 and 2020.
I'm libertarian and have never really liked the main two parties.
Trump has oddly grown on me. It might just be my serial contrariasm. The constant hate thrown his way has made me more skeptical of all criticism about him. If they were willing to lie about him being a Russian spy than what else are they saying that is a lie?
His actual governing record was not bad from my perspective. No new wars, a slate of justices that flipped the court, and a government that was mostly focused on fights I didn't care about.
cjet79
1yr ago
Government Programs Should Have Legible Budgets
This kind of rule may come across as obvious, pointless, or doomed depending on your perspective.
There is an impulse among many to see a problem in society and turn to government for a solution. I strongly disagree with this impulse. But I also think that these people and myself could come to terms on some shared "rules of engagement".
To start we should agree on some basic things:
- There is an unlimited number of things people might want to "fix" about our society, but a limited amount of resources to spend fixing such things.
- There should be a way to determine how many resources we want to spend fixing a particular problem.
- Paying to fix the problems should be done in a fair and above board way. (i.e. reverse lotteries where you randomly get fucked over are bad).
There are many devils in the little details, but what these three basic things suggest is that there should be: A set way of collecting taxes. A budget using those taxes that pays out to various social causes. The determination of that budget can be debated upon in some agreed way (maybe by electing representatives to a 'congress'). And that all social programs must go through this set of procedures.
To address the criticisms:
"This is pointless we already do things this way."
Sometimes governments do it this way, sometimes they don't.
The Americans with Disabilities Act does not follow these rules. Private individuals are given the ability to sue other private individuals to provide accommodations for them. The threat of getting sued also encourages a lot of preemptive work on the part of companies. How much does all of this suing and preemptive work cost? No one knows. How much will it cost you to provide for people with disabilities? Maybe a standard amount. Maybe you'll be one of the unlucky ones that gets sued in a new novel interpretation of the law and you'll win a reverse lottery.
How much do you think it is worth it to help disabled people in this country? It seems like a valid political question, but right now the American Government is basically on a blind autopilot path. It cannot know how much is spent. It cannot control how much is spent. And it cannot work out more lucrative and appealing deals for edge cases.
A little while ago (maybe a decade) some university (maybe MIT) decided to put all of their classes online for digital consumption, for free. Sometime later they were forced to take down the entire archive, because they were not subtitled, and a deaf person could not access them. The deaf person wanted them all subtitled. Subtitling a free online resource would have been too expensive and not worth it. So they were instead just removed for everyone. This is the kind of problem that a competent government middleman can solve:
[In the alternative universe where the ADA creates a government middleman agency for solving disability issues.] Each deaf person is allotted $5,000 a year to solve for their disability. They can choose to spend this on hearing implants, or on paying towards having some work transcribed. If enough deaf people want a thing transcribed it gets done. No business owner or non-profit is suddenly held hostage. No single person or entity is stuck paying enormous costs. Things aren't removed from public consumption just because a disabled person can't access it. We know how much is spent on deaf people per year. Medical companies that want to solve or fix a disability have a clear customer market for potential solutions.
This is doomed people would rather have the costs hidden and less obvious.
As I said above, sometimes the government does follow the good set of rules. I'd consider an agency like NASA a good example. The American people give some vague indications of how important they think space science and exploration is to their elected representatives. Those elected representatives can talk with the scientists, engineers, and managers at NASA to determine if maybe there are some important research projects that the general public doesn't know about but might want if they did know about it. NASA's budget is paid through taxes and is a clear line item on the federal budget. For the last two decades NASA has been about 0.5% of the federal budget. Which sounds vaguely correct to me in proportion to how much Americans care about funding Space related stuff.
The cynical reason why I believe that programs have hidden or "laundered" costs is that I don't believe voters would be actually willing to fund them if the true costs were obvious. If a party has a temporary political victory the best the best way to leverage it is through hidden and laundered costs. Pass a medicare act that doesn't really change the rules until you are out of office. Pass a civil rights act with murky enforcement that can be slowly ratcheted up every year.
Despite politicians doing this pretty often, I don't think it is what voters actually want. There is a huge amount of frustration from people over these sorts of policies. Hanania's book the Origins of Woke kind of blew up one of these issues recently. But they are all going to become problems, because when you remove the funding control from government there is no funding control. There is no countervailing force to push down the costs of these various programs. And the only way to get rid of them is often just destroy them altogether. So while people might have supported the ADA if it was 1% of the budget, they might start getting pissed at the program when it balloons up to 10% of the budget and a bunch of reverse lottery sob stories start showing up in the news. And suddenly instead of 10% or even 1% of the budget, you get 0% for your cause and no one trusts you with a 1% allotment cuz they will all remember the horror days of 10%. I don't know how likely a full reversal to 0% is for any of these policies. But that seems to be whats on the table as far as alternatives go.
There is also an ongoing legal weakness to many of these policies. Now that the supreme court is mostly conservative it could start invalidating different laundered cost schemes that have been liberal policy staples for decades. Affirmative action has taken a hit. Paid housing for the homeless might get hit next.
Conclusion
In general I think we should be suspicious of any public program that tries to hide its costs, or launder those costs onto private actors. Anything that expands the scope of things that one individual can sue another for is laundering costs. If you want a social program done or accomplished, you need to be willing to raise taxes and pay for it. If voters can't stomach raising taxes to pay for a particular social program, then too bad! Nothing is free. Start comparing the costs and fighting for them in the agreed upon battlefield.
The comment below is reposted from here.
I understand people think I'm a troll, but I'm not, just lazy by this forums standards I guess. If I were to describe my politics, I'm a reluctant liberal.
I want to genuinely engage with this forum on topics like this without being seen as a bad faith actor, but I really am not smart enough to offer rebuttals like others here. I just know white nationalism is wrong but I'd like to see other smarter people here provide arguments for why.
I reposted this comment to spur discussion. I'm not a white nationalist, but I'm also not smart enough to offer a rebuttal and I'd like users here, who are a lot smarter, to point out blind spots in white nationalist arguments. The comment in question presents white nationalism as benign and free association as harmless, but that strikes me as wrong. My engagement with places like American Renaissance, which is probably on the lighter side of white nationalism, suggests that white nationalists base their beliefs on a kind of crude, visceral hatred of non-whites, especially black people.
Why do discussions of white nationalism always feel the need to explicitly mention rejecting violence? It implies this is the drive that animates them, a hatred of strangers. Literal xenophobia, which conjures up images of racial superiority or a drive to subjugate others.
Most white nationalists view themselves as reluctant realists. They are in most cases pattern recognizers, not the racist stereotypes the Left love to promote. They look at mixed societies and conclude different people with different evolutionary paths have inherited different physical and mental traits. This makes living together difficult for all parties.
Some of those traits mesh well with European societies (the high IQs and restraint of East Asians), and some do not (ethnicities with significantly poorer self control and shorter time horizons). As multicultural societies mature we observe these traits are persistent. Third generation Chinese are still restrained and clever; other groups can live in Western nations for centuries and continue to behave like their distant cousins on another continent no matter what we do with education and quotas.
Whites also look at examples of what a diverse population endures, from Brazil and America to natural experiments in artificially reversing emergent power structures. In Rhodesia and South Africa a tiny number of whites ran systems for a black-majority nation, with all the apartheid and related phenomenon most find distasteful. Even the king of the Zulus laments what blacks have wrought in South Africa, although this cannot be reported in the Western press. His comments about the Bantu are actively ignored and are more explicitly racist than anything whites ever say.
Much "white nationalism" is based on one simple observation - they are coming here; we are not going there. It is their job to assimilate not our job to agonize over the failure of them to do so.
Even more important, when the imperial era came to an end those who were there left when asked. India, the African nations and others cleared out their Europeans. Jamaica was handed over wholesale to the former slaves. The Haitians acquired their country in a manner more violent than even the liberals claim whites to be today. In modern terms all these nations rejected multiculturalism which they viewed as unnatural.
We are being held to standards no one else cares about and that even seeps in to articles like this, with the need to reassure everyone else our concerns about losing our cultures and territory are seen as an aberration. We have to guard against those questioning the status quo and explicitly reassure people violence must be rejected which plants a seed that curiosity about this subject is dangerous.
Finally, white nationalists look at the cultural tropes in the nations people are leaving to come to our nations. Pakistan and Arab countries do not tolerate foreigners emigrating to their countries. Pakistan have just expelled 1.7m Afghans, most Sunni muslims with similar social mores to Pakistanis, because they are "prone to criminality and terrorism." No hand wringing, no agonizing over "Pakistani nationalism." They couldn't assimilate despite Pakistan's best efforts so they were sent packing.
Nobody in Pakistan emphasizes only a tiny proportion of Afghans misbehave. Some of them do and the Pakistanis refuse to expend resources filtering through their population to find the bad ones. They had their chance and the safety of the natives trumps everything.
I get the need to be neutral, to be decent. But a big drive for people seeking out the data and the hard facts is this constant framing of homogeneity as being unusual or distasteful despite the fact 90 percent of the world's population views it as normal.
Believing the blank slate mantra and then observing something quite different is hard to make sense of. In primitive societies we would see something like the violent xenophobe reaction Western nations worry about. In European societies we see the opposite, with people very reluctantly concluding this may be going wrong. Lets find out, lets test, lets look around and see where culture mixing has actually worked and try that. Then we discover it doesn't seem to work anywhere. Even worse we find out almost no one thinks it makes sense. China is for the Chinese and India is for the Indians.
We all know the use of white nationalism is a euphemism for white supremacist or violent thugs who hate people that look different. The need to remind us of this potential for violence retards the genuine discussions we desperately need to try to make this all work or to abandon it completely.
User jewdefender has been banned. Discussing with other mods right now.
A few of us have high certainty that they are a troll of some sort. We just haven't been willing to ban, because it is not 100% certainty.
But they are also single issue posting and copy and pasted a comment from elsewhere to originally pass off as their own writing.
Edit: mod consensus is that this will stay as a permaban
Edit2: adding comment quote for posterity
cjet79
1yr ago
Their funding is very confusing.
They get very little direct money from the government. But they license out their content to a bunch of small and tiny radio stations that wouldn't exist at all without government money and grants.
So whenever the topic of funding comes up they get sort of talk out of both sides of their mouth . They'll say "we are mostly supported by donations", but then also say that if you cut government funding they'd have to drastically reduce their programming.
I suppose they could both be true if the donations are mostly for a few very popular radio programs.
cjet79
2mo ago
Scott's post begs the question though: what does he think reform of the institutions looks like? I think what we are seeing is what we should have expected.
Governing institutions in a democracy cannot survive by being only trusted by one political party.
What will it take to restore most Republican's trust? Either gutting those institutions entirely, or reforming them with punitive measures until they seem cowed and fully cooperative.
Thatcher and Reagan in the 80s are some of the more recent examples of this phenomenon.
The left isn't capable of reforming institutions, just like the right isn't capable of reigning in their strong-men (and women). They need each other to play those roles. And obviously if you identify more with one side than the other you don't like having to be the side that reigns in the other. My side's honest mistakes and forgiveable excesses, are the other sides willful maliciousness and unforgivable escalations.
I recently spoke with my mother who has worked on cancer research contracts with NIH. She is a lifelong moderate Democrat (pro choice). She had spoken in fearful tones about Trump and Doge. But recently when Doge began taking an axe to medical programs she sounded pretty happy. Apparently they cut some kind of dog cancer research program that my mom always thought was dumb (there is some joke in there about DOGE's meme name sake, but I'm too lazy to find it). Her words were basically that they cut the things she would have cut.
I live in the northern Virginia area. I know many people who work in government. The common refrain is that "yes they definitely needed to trim the fat and slim down government, but this just seems crazy the way they are doing it". But there was an opportunity to trim the fat during the Biden administration and they didn't take it. They were too busy starting dog cancer research programs. So maybe this is the only way you cut things, with a side of bad ideas from a strongman willing to do it.
cjet79
6mo ago
One disagreement I'm having with both sides in this debate is how they conceive of the labor market. The market is fixed from an individual perspective in the short-term, but flexible at the market level and in the longterm, and policy makers should keep the latter things in mind. But our supposed policy makers are only thinking and speaking from an individual perspective.
@Rov_Scam has a good summary below that points out that the disagreement is partly around a management vs employee understanding.
From the short term perspective of both an employer and an employee the labor market is mostly fixed. There are a set number of roles that need to be filled and a set number of jobs that can be found.
The problem is that in the long term the labor market is absolutely not fixed. It is very flexible. Lots of personal money and well-being, and lots of corporate money is on the line to eke as much efficiency out of the labor market as possible.
If conditions change way too quickly (like they often do when the Fed YoYos its monetary policy, or when you have big external shocks like covid) there is going to be a lot of pain and suffering in the transition. Workers are likely to suffer the brunt of this pain. It simply takes longer to train and reskill then it takes to fire someone that no longer makes monetary sense for the business. There are levers that the federal government has to lessen those burdens. They could make training expenses tax deductible. They could lower employer contributions to social security during economic shocks (though this would require the discipline to lower them once again during economic booms).
But stopping this transition from happening altogether is not a good thing. A flexible labor market is the goose that lays the golden egg in America. If you want a Western world economy with low labor market flexibility then Europe is the go to example. And I think a few decades ago when the split really became apparent and obvious it looked way better to live in Europe. But now, after a percentage point or two of higher growth in the US has had its time to work the magic, the European bargain doesn't look that great. They are about 20% poorer than the US on a per capita basis, and the labor problems became severe enough that they had to start importing large number of migrants to do the shit work. Europe raised a welfare loving underclass, and they got it good and hard. Their migrant crisis is made far worse by the fact that portions of their economy would be collapsing if not for that immigration.
Work vs Ceremony
American society, for better or worse, tends to intermix what a "job" is supposed to be. There are two definitions:
- A job is work to be done. Getting the work done provides something valuable to people. Its valuable enough to other people, that they will pay you money to do it. Pay is determined by the work done.
- A job is a ceremonial position designating your social status in society. It is to be rewarded to good people, or people you like. Yes there are some activities associated with the job that must be done by the job holder, but they aren't super important. Pay is determined by the social importance of the position, or people holding the position.
One of the major complaints about DEI in the workplace is that it turns every job into a ceremonial position, and that is just not a sustainable practice for a profit oriented company. Nearly all government jobs are ceremonial positions. Notice that all nearly all requests that teachers, firefighters, police officers, etc get paid more is because they do important things, and that we shouldn't let person doing important thing be poor. It is rarely suggested that these positions should get paid more, because they will do more work.
If you get deep enough in the bowels of the federal government and its myriad of agencies, you'll realize just about all of those jobs are ceremonial, and they contract out when actual work needs to get done. Which is why there is an absolute army of federal contractors and federal contracting businesses. It is very common for the federal government to attach ceremonial job type requirements to these contracts. They want veterans, women, or minority owned businesses to serve the contracts.
I think the "job as a ceremonial position" is a toxic idea for an individual to hold. It stagnates your skills, and makes you focus not on what you are adding to the world and to the economy, but on your personal characteristics that are often immutable.
cjet79
7mo ago
On cabinet picks. I have a conception of what a cabinet should be for Trump, and his picks don't surprise me because they line up with that conception, even if I don't have the specifics and the details down. I keep seeing news stories or people posting here that think he has cabinet picks that don't make sense, but some of those specific cabinet picks make the most sense to me.
My conception of Trump is that he picks opinionated and individually competent people to head up things. He wants them to have opinions that may not be the same as his. If they work for him and with him he will support them in their goals at a higher level. If they work against him or his directives he will fire them. How the people under him get along with each other is largely inconsequential to Trump.
Trump does not have strong ideological beliefs, but he does have strong social beliefs. By social beliefs I mean he finds friends, allies, employees, bosses, enemies, etc to be very important distinctions. He plays Tit For Tat strategy almost religiously. He would never put a political/social non-ally in his cabinet. But he doesn't care too much if you conform on some ideological spectrum. Trump is after all a bog-standard democrat from the 90's, and he just won as a republican presidential candidate.
Contrast this with Obama who was willing to make ideological or party based cabinet nominations like Hillary Clinton, even though she was absolutely not an ally of his. Or Joe Biden who picked Kamala as his VP even though I don't think anyone has ever claimed they are allies or friends.
I think you can see Trump's cabinet picks best by looking at his history with John Bolton, who was his National Security Advisor, and was ultimately fired by Trump. Bolton has been on a tour lately saying that Trump's cabinet picks can be summed up as requiring "fealty" to Trump. I think Bolton is a dirtbag, but he is correct here. But it shows a reason to like Trump, not dislike him. The president is the elected position. He is temporary King. Cabinet people are meant to serve the King and enact his will. If they don't they can be fired and replaced. No one ever elected John Bolton to National Security Adviser. Its a little crazy that Bolton thinks its ok to be picked for a specific cabinet position to advise the president, and then the correct course of action is to betray that person and work against them.
cjet79
1yr ago
Hated Ancestors
I am part of a family heritage organization. This particular family has been in the US for a little over 400 years. The organization's main responsibilities are maintaining a few old grave sites, and serving as a bit of a repository of information for people going on genealogical hunts. I am possibly going to be joining the board of this organization in the future.
Anyways, these ancestors of mine owned slaves, and quite a few of them fought and died on the losing side of the American Civil War. I feel mostly apathy about this. I did not know these people, I didn't even know anyone who knew them. Any "wealth" they had from slavery was never passed down, they all went heavily bankrupt in the 1870s (they were all lending each other money, and someone made a poor investment so they all went down together when debt collectors came in). I don't feel any need to defend their actions, or to attack them to prove to myself I would not have acted similarly in their circumstances. Its just a fact that sits out there and is kind of interesting, but has no bearing on me personally.
I was aware that my view on this might be different than others, but it was confirmed the other day. We received this email to our general inbox (information in brackets is anonymized from original email):
Began my morning looking to purchase land in [Southern US State] and I came across the [Surname] name while viewing a property in [Small Town, Southern US State].
As I further traveled down this rabbit hole, from the time, ‘A man from [European Country]’ entered America, natives chased away, privileged education, owning slaves, and building up the economic community to owning many properties across [Southern US State] and possibly the United States.
I read a section on your website, how to gather and reserve information about the enslaved in a PowerPoint. I opened a next page showing all of the different owned properties from A to Z, assuming to be left as a legacy to your descendants.
This research was very daunting to my spirit albeit it being a part of history, your history, which at the same level very interesting. This information also showed how ‘others’ had their history swayed and influenced by your family’s history.
If it were not for the slaves… If it were not for the Natives… If the [Surname] never entered America… This country, your family…what would have happened to its inhabitants?
Doubt if I’d buy that piece of land in [Small Town, Southern US State] for fear of the ancestor’s spirits, Native and African slaves wandering around looking for descendants in 2024 to be released from their bondage and inequities thrashed upon them for wealth by its oppressors.
Purpose of this email was to express my personal feelings towards the [Surname] descendants and how sad it is that when Americans say privilege, we only need to read history of those before us.
~Forgive my sentence structures. My [Community College] English instructor always reminded me to work better at my writing skills. Education.
Thank you for your time.
In most cases I'd be happy to toss this email in the trashbin of my mind. This lady disliking me because of my ancestors isn't really a big deal. Someone lost a property sale somewhere, also not me and also not a big deal. But I do share one thing with this lady that constantly frustrates and annoys me: A Government. It would be nice to be a in a world where I could fully dismiss this kind of thing from my life. But if they vote and too many people that share their opinion vote ... well I'm sure they will find inventive ways to make their feelings towards us a more solid thing. I don't know where this leaves us. I'm certainly not going to respond to this lady's email.
It would be wrong to leave you all with the impression that this is a normal interaction. My mother has been doing genealogical research lately, including some compiling of the slaves names. She has made friends with a man in the state who was trying to research his ancestors. The man had hit a wall and couldn't find out more until my mom published the slave research.
I'll answer questions about my ancestors, but I will generally try to avoid doxxing myself, even if I'm not highly concerned with that outcome.
cjet79
1yr ago
I went to George Mason Econ, still live nearby, and had lots of interactions with various parts of the university over the years.
The common online reputation of George Mason is basically totally wrong. People see it as a libertarian bastion of economic and legal research. That is basically just a portion of the economics college and the graduate law department. Its a tiny minority of the university. A very online and very prominent minority that most people know about, but if you are actually on campus or working there its very different. The density of libertarian students was pretty awesome when I went there, but it is still only like 5-10% of them. The Campus Democrats and even Campus Republican organizations were still much larger.
Most of the university is your traditional state school. If anything, its a little more diverse than most state schools, because of where it is located. The Language department is still mostly as crazy as any other school. But instead of having to go anywhere to protest things, they just step next door and make trouble for conservative or libertarian econ speakers that they don't like.
The Econ department and Law departments mostly survive because they have semi-independent funding form the rest of the university. There have been multiple attempts by other departments and the university in general to impose certain hiring restrictions, or to cut off those parts of the university. Those attempts have all failed, but they were still made. The "UnKoch my campus" organization has been in an ongoing battle with GMU Econ for over a decade at this point.
So basically it is entirely unsurprising that GMU would introduce some kind of woke required course. Or it is as surprising as any random State School introducing this sort of thing.
cjet79
1yr ago
Wikipedia will soon eat its own in a purity spiral.
People always remember that the left takes over organizations, but they forget what happens afterwards. They become the victims of their own successful take over. The information isn't as good. The place isn't as fun. A group of people that live off of being victims must find an oppressor.
Scott Alexander already had to go through a minor version of this with the NYT article. The article talked to an admin of wikipedia that had things to say about Scott Alexander, the NYT repeated those allegations, that wikipedia admin then went and edited the article about Scott to effectively cite himself saying things about Scott.
They barely turned it over when this bullshit became known within the wiki community. And the admin that did it? No punishments, no loss of admin status, not even a slap on the wrist as far as I know.
Scott is a heterodox leftist for the online world. But he is still very much a leftist in the real world compared to real voters. He is to the left of about 90-99% of the country on most issues.
They'll keep purging until it starts falling apart, and then they'll beg for and likely receive government funding to stay afloat.
cjet79
8mo ago
This isn't really the right place for this kind of thing. We are a discussion forum, not a place for organizing political action.
If you want to discuss that website, or discuss who you prefer for president, or discuss why we need approval voting all those are fine.
cjet79
6mo ago
I mean it's a bit discordant.
It's like hearing
"The barbarians are in the gates, the Muslims, Pakistanis, and Indians are part of a gross rape ideology and we've let them in the country. They are of course supported by the worst group of all, the Scottish Protestants."
It stops sounding like a coherent set of problems, and more like just someone angry and ranting about all the people they don't like. As a piece of rhetoric it's bad because it makes whatever legitimate issues you have with the first set of groups sound less convincing.
cjet79
8mo ago
I think they exercise the veto power prior to Trump doing anything, and they exercised it without any serious consequences. There were generals lying to Trump about troop levels in foreign countries, and not only were they not court marshaled for insubordination they were lauded for their efforts. And I'd be pretty happy to with generals that were willing to stand up and defy orders like "shoot american civilians" but they used their "backbone" to defy the president by continuing to wage wars abroad that the president and voters did not want.
I agree that there is a good use case for a veto among the bureaucracy and state agents. But they basically demonstrated the worst level of judgement in exercising it pre-emptively, used it for dumb things, and then suffered no consequences. Theoretically good, but in practice it was awful.
cjet79
1yr ago
If I lived in the 1700s, I would probably be a libertarian. Technology hadn't advancad as far, and resources were more scarce, so if almost everyone didn't work hard for long hours, then everyone would starve, and a capitalist economy seems like a decent enough way to incentivize that.
I'm glad that we can agree incentives are necessary to some degree. I think I'd disagree on the amount of free floating wealth that is actually available today.
It's difficult for me to say that today. Take my previous job for example. I have to work 40-50 hours per week just to not be homeless, while my boss's boss has to work, on average, about 1 hour per week. He's not particularly intelligent or productive; the only reason he doesn't have to work as much as I do is that he was born rich and I wasn't. He didn't gain this wealth through hard work or taking risks, he gained it because his father was wealthy, who gained it because his father was weathy, who gained it because one of his ancestors found a silver mine under his property by accendent. I don't believe that he has a right to have double the free time that I do for the rest of his life while I don't just because he's from a weathly family.
I think wealth inheritance often appears unfair when viewed from the children's generation, but fair when viewed from the parents generation. The inevitability of it also becomes obvious when viewed from the parents generation. If you survive to your old age and have a bunch of kids you love, and you are rich and well off, wouldn't you want to spend some of that money to make the people you love more comfortable? To have someone else then come in and say "no, thats not fair that your kid gets a nice life, they must work and suffer like everyone else". I might feel like "why did I bother to earn all that wealth then?". Preventing generational wealth transfers seems largely impossible without just completely destroying the concept of private wealth. I can't tell if you are fine with destroying the concept of private wealth, if you are then I'd like some idea of who is supposed to own things instead. And by ownerhsip I mean final or majority say in how an asset is used.
Additionally, our company turns a substantial profit. I receive a very small proportion of that profit, and he receives 10 times that, despite the fact that his individual productivity is drastically lower than mine.
Does your boss have an ownership stake? He is being paid for that investment money, not for his productivity.
Think of it this way, there are three things you can do with wealth:
- Consume it. Food / vacation / travel / experiences / etc.
- Preserve it. Keep something that tends to hold its value over long time periods. Previous metal / art / land / etc.
- Invest it. Create a business that generates more wealth.
Ultimately most people want to consume wealth. Even preserving it is just is a way to delay consumption. Consuming wealth is also the least risky thing to do. You've done the thing, its over, its gone. It is rare that anyone can steal your past consumption of wealth. Preserving it for later consumption carries some risk. Someone might steal your stuff, or the thing you were holding lost its value for some reason. Maybe too many people were using it to store wealth, and not enough were actually valuing the thing being stored (these are called asset bubbles).
The most risky thing they can do is invest it. There is always a chance that a business will fail, or just that it will fail to return a bunch of profits. You might as well have consumed the wealth rather than investing it.
This is why there is a price to capital, and why you pay the investors. The more investors there are, the less you have to pay them. The more likely the investors are to lose their money, the more you have to pay them.
I don't believe that he has a right to more of the profits than I do, when I am more productive than he is.
I'm assuming your boss has some form of ownership stake. He is getting paid for that ownership stake, and the risks associated.
The irony is that the main thing preventing workers from just cutting out the middle man and refusing to give the owners their cut is that the state would side with the owners of the means of production, violently if necessary.
No, there is actually nothing preventing the workers from owning the business. This is fully legal in the US, and quite a few socialists I have spoken to love to point out various examples of worker owned cooperatives. You are not allowed to steal something you didn't create. This goes back to what I discussed earlier, the various owners of the company chose to invest rather than consuming the wealth. Had they known their investment would just get stolen, obviously they would have just consumed it instead. This is both an implicit and explicit (legally codified) relationship that business owners have in most countries. The government says "we will not just steal all of your investment" and the currently wealthy people either believe them and invest, or they don't believe them and just consume or preserve their wealth. You basically want to reneg on that agreement and change the terms in a way that benefits yourself at their expense.
I could, in theory, quit and go to a different job, but that, in all likelihood, would be exactly the same situation. I could start my own competing business, but I would be unlikely to ever be able to compete with my former employer, as they own the means of production, and have an economy of scale, and I would never be able to afford that.
There are lots of rich people. They don't all get along, or even like each other. If you are short on capital there are such things as loans and investment. If your current company is also underpaying workers then you could eat their lunch by offering wage increases to their employees and stealing their talent. Very few businesses are permanently entrenched in the US, and many that are have done so through government edicts and support. There is a huge amount of turnover in the S&P 500 decade to decade.
If starting a business and potentially losing lots of money to your competitors sounds scary and risky, then realize that is what your current company's investors already went through. That is why they are earning outsized profits. Its a survivor bias. You meet the rich gamblers in Vegas because they can afford to stay around, all the poor sops who lost it all are dead or gone. By definition you work at the business that made it. Not at the business that failed. I obviously have no clue how much risk is involved, you haven't told me anything about the industry. What I do know is that there are rarely million dollar bills lying around on the sidewalk. The business you work in is likely within normal parameters for returns on risk, capital investment returns, and share of money paid to labor.
Also, the rise of technology has led the average worker's productivity to skyrocket over the last few decades. Logically, this should lead to them being able to work drastically fewer hours for the same pay, but in reality, the average work week is the same it was 40 years ago, and average pay is about the same with respect to inflation. As automation gets better and better, it should ideally lead to a society where we have to work less and less, and have more free time, but this is not the case for most people. Since our system is set up such that most people can only support themselves by working 40-50 hours per week, automation becomes a threat to out jobs rather than a benefit, because our system only gives people value insofar as they benefit the people who own the means of production.
My career has generally been one where I work less and get paid roughly the same amount. I'm in web programming. I know its not the same for everyone. But I've also known plenty of people that don't work in the type of industries where productivity is drastically increasing.
There is also another thing to consider. I've talked so far about investors/owners in a business. You've talked about the workers. But we haven't talked much about the consumers. They exist and they have their own set of options. The price of the vast majority of goods and services have gone down over the last few decades. The huge exceptions to this are healthcare, education, and housing. They are each all their own massive topic, so I won't be getting into them.
Personally, I believe the (usually local, sometimes state/province, and occasionally federal) government should control many industries, and private industry should be limited to industries that are difficult to put an objective value on, like entertainment. The purpose of this would be to ensure that workers should receive the value of their labor with minimal amounts given to management. Anyone should be able to start a government-owned businesses to allow some choices for consumers while still guaranteeing workers the value of their labor.
I think in practice you'd find a lot of industries have degrees of subjective value involved. Communist countries have routinely run into these problems. What do you tell the iron nail factory to produce, and how do you know they are doing a good job? There was one point where they were judged based on how many nails they produced, so there were many tiny nails produced and not enough large ones. Then the metric was changed to weight of nails produced, and they just produced very large heavy nails. And nails as a product have been around for millenia they are one of the simplest products.
And do you not think management does anything? Have you never had a lazy co-worker who doesn't get much done? If you haven't then you've had amazing management and you should be singing their praises. More likely, you've had a lazy co-worker, and you were annoyed with management for not firing this person. But firing people is very unpleasant. Are you willing to punish a lazy worker that isn't doing their part? And if 'management' has the power to fire people, how do you know they won't just fire the people they dislike, rather than the unproductive ones?
Usually the answer to all of these questions is that you have to tie management's incentives to team productivity. So that if there is a lazy or unproductive worker the manager suffers from having that worker on the team. If all the people on the team are great then it should look like management is not doing anything. Management is sort of like the IT industry of economic systems. Everyone notices when they are doing badly, and everyone complains they are doing nothing when things run smoothly.
Additionally, I believe that the state should ensure that all their citizens receive the essentials, including a place to live, electric/water/internet, safe transportation around their town/city, and high-protein food.
I am not highly against a welfare state. I just don't think we are really at the point to provide it. At best we can provide it to a small minority of people. Possibly most people that live in a first world nation. I would rather see us continue on the wealth creation process until welfare is affordable to everyone in the world, not just those born in the correct country. Welfare states tend to want to close their borders to foreigners, and one of the best welfare programs that exists is capitalism. It is unrivaled at raising the living standard for large groups of people. You yourself admitted it was great to have capitalism in the 18th century, but I'd like to point out that most of the world doesn't have much better living standards than what was available in 18th century Britain.
The engine of capitalism is chugging along and doing great things. And it pulled you and those around you out of poverty, and now you want to turn it off because the engine is loud and annoying. But there are lots of other people still waiting to be pulled out. I think it would be wrong to shut it off now. Once the poorest in the world can complain that they have to work 40 hours a week just to afford their home, food, and entertainment I might be willing to discuss shutting off the engine.
cjet79
3mo ago
Third kid arrived on Friday, little baby goblin. Slowly starting to look more like a baby girl instead. Still cute and makes my heart flutter holding her.
Just came home from the hospital. Babys two older sisters love and adore her already.
I'm doing my part to be above replacement rate for population growth.
cjet79
1yr ago
I recently saw an item in my newfeed about The American Exchange Project:
To connect our divided country, the American Exchange Project sends high school seniors on a free, week-long trip to a hometown very different from their own.
There was some positive feedback in the news article I read. I found it a bit surprising just how much the rural/urban divide has grown. I've often lived between the two areas with my schools often having kids living in high density housing along with kids raising barn animals. My parents preferred living rurally, but still had to live close to cities to find jobs.
I've been on two exchange programs myself. One as a middle/high schooler going to Europe with Student Ambassadors (a now dead org). And the second as more of a work exchange trip going to the company's India office. There is something undeniably effective about just having very different people sit down and talk/interact with each other in a non-violent setting. Not that I really disliked either set of people before visiting them, but I felt I definitely understood them better afterwards. There are coincidences of living, and the things you see living in an area. They just sorta seep into your conscious. My young middle school self noticed that Europe generally did not give a crap about topless women. Tits galore on billboards and beaches in Spain. Europe was also pretty open with alcohol, and the 15 year old in the German family I stayed with openly told her parents about the drinking party she was going to. They had to remind her that I wasn't allowed to go, and American drinking ages had to be explained. Bunch of things I noticed in India as well, main one was just the sheer volume of people.
Had a shower thought today about how some people (like Joe Rogan) thought Covid would bring us closer together as we worked to solve and fight a collective problems. I think we maybe mostly agree that did not happen. I'm starting to think that covid was the opposite kind of problem we need. To get that kind of problem solving, humanity coming together juice, I think more people need to be offline, meeting in person, and ignoring things happening too far away from them.
Staring at the sun today. Watching the eclipse today, reminded me about solar flares. I'd predict that a widespread solar flare that knocked out communication networks would probably leave us all a little happier than Covid. It would probably be very bad for some people, but we'd know less about those people.
Scott Alexander endorses basically anyone but Trump
The main points:
I went back and read Scott's 2016 anyone but Trump election endorsement.
The main points:
I would maybe suggest in the future that these posts are counter-productive. The most recent one moved my needle more in favor of Trump. I can't believe I'm considering voting for a major party candidate (I've voted libertarian the few times I've bothered to actually show up). Going back and reading the old anti-endorsement was even worse. With hindsight answering the criticisms:
I really feel like there is some gell-mann amnesia going on with Scott. He reads these horrid stories about Trump. With the details sensationalized in the worst possible way. And he accepts them as fact. Meanwhile the New York Times threatens to dox him so they can run a hit piece article on him that they sourced from a weirdo on wikipedia with a knack for rules-lawyering.
He talks about how Trumps norms violations are loud and unsubtle. While the democrats only subtly and slowly violate norms. But this is a framing that has been shoved down our throats by the media. Every minor violation of Trump's is blown out of proportion, and every major violation of the democrats is minimized and not talked about. How is it not a massive norms violation to spend 3 years investigating and accusing a sitting president of Treason based on a campaign dosier that was almost entirely made up by his opposition? And the people doing this knew it all along. I don't think democrats or liberal leaning people seem to realize how much the Russia Hoax thing has utterly fucked their credibility on everything. Especially after the Hunter Biden laptop story came out, and it turned out that the intelligence agencies helped them cover up exactly what they had been accusing Trump of doing.
This is supposed to be a government system where one side wins, implements their things, becomes a little too unpopular for going too far, and then the other side wins and get to do their thing for a little while. They switch back and forth. We all learned in 2016 that no, this is not actually how it operates. There is actually a hidden veto by the bureaucracy and the deep state. If they don't like the president they can decide not to let him do his thing. People are righteously pissed off about that, and many of them would happily see that bureaucracy and deep state dismantled if it meant they never get to use their veto again. And one way to test if they still have the veto power, and one way to give someone an incentive to fix it, is to keep electing presidents that we know they will "veto".
Trump is a vote for restoring norms. For restoring the ability of democracy and the vote to actually pick a direction for the country, rather than have that direction dictated by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. I dislike Trump on most of his policies, but it wouldn't be a vote for his policies. Its a vote for voting on policies.
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