Despite the "lock her up" rhetoric, Trump didn't actually try to lock Hilary up. That's just off the top of my head. In, I don't remember any anti-Democrat lawfare from his administration, although I'm sure we can dig something up.
Why does your worldview rely so strongly on Trump being vindictive.
He's awful in many ways, but that doesn't seem to be one of them. His nature is impulsive, not cold-blooded.
jeroboam
48m ago
The respectable class of Boomercons have already migrated to the left.
Trump's bombastic style actually appeals quite a bit to young blacks and Hispanics, and the Democrats are having a hard time keeping them onsides. Biden is being forced to defend the black vote, and it's going badly.
Witness Biden's commencement speech at Morehouse yesterday in which students turned their back on him.
What style is going to appeal to young voters? This or... this? Whatever the issues, one of these people has rizz. And the other doesn't.
I have Trump at 60% odds right now, but much higher if he is jailed. Personally, I plan to vote RFK this time around, but would probably go for Trump as a protest vote if he his jailed, despite his obvious awfulness.
jeroboam
1hr ago
When you are weak it is best to avoid antagonizing your enemy.
The worst case scenario is that the bureacracy would just say "no" to Trump's orders, precipitating a constitutional crisis. More likely they'll just slow play his demands until the clock is run out. Then the lawfare against him can begin anew.
The only way he doesn't die in jail is if a Republican is elected in 2028. For that reason, he needs to remain popular with the people which means not triggering a crisis.
I have the following well-worn preference cascade hierarchy
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My rules. In this case, race blindness.
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Your rules, enforced fairly. In this case, all races are treated as protected classes.
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Your rules, enforced unfairly. In this case, white people are uniquely disrespected. Black people, uniquely sanctified. <--- we are here
I prefer 1, then 2, then 3.
jeroboam
5hr ago
My explanation for puzzling CEO behavior.
CEO's don't care about corporate profits or woke politics. What they do care about is status signalling within their elite group. They get more plaudits for woke initiatives than they do for meeting quarterly earnings targets. Therefore, they will purse woke nonsense at the expense of earnings, up to the point where they lose their jobs.
Corporate boards, also caring mostly about intra-elite status games, will give woke-presenting CEOs a long leash before they pull the plug.
However, there is a limiting principle. CEO's with extremely poor performance will lose their job. Being fired is low status so it keeps things from getting too ridiculous.
jeroboam
1d ago
Good summary of the competing narratives.
My take... What's with all the talking points about how it's somehow evil to buy a company and then sell it for parts? Why shouldn't an owner be able to buy a failing restaurant, sell the real estate, and then let the restaurant fail? Or more, accurately, if I buy something I should be able to do what I want with it.
Is Red Lobster such a valuable institution that owners must be forced to prop it up with infusions of capital? You know, for the good of society.
We need more zombie corporations going under, and less hand-wringing when they do. Failing companies failing is the engine of creative destruction, and therefore growth.
jeroboam
5d ago
The California model.
I just got back from a brief trip to California that didn't include the parts where the violent drug zombies live. It was a lovely vacation. California is absolutely beautiful.
Let me introduce the secrets to California's success.
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Be blessed with the most amazing geography and weather anywhere in the U.S. and maybe the world
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Be the center of the world tech and entertainment industries
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Make a deal that baby boomers get to live out their natural lives in splendor and grace while a complete population replacement happens beneath them
As a wealthy tourist, it was all very nice. Whereas the coast of Florida is loaded with aggressive traffic and people, the coast of California is dotted with pleasant beach communities. All the houses cost like $3 million dollars so no one can afford to live there. Despite the best weather and scenery on the planet, the population is going DOWN. People are friendly and nice. The restaurants are full of white retirees, still paying $1000 in annual property tax on their $4 million house they bought for $200,000 in 1981. 95% of the workers are Hispanic. I have no idea where they actually live. But the quality of service was very high and prices were reasonable (at least compared to Seattle).
A quick 5 minute drive from Santa Cruz and you're in a beautiful redwood forest. No houses or people here. Just a beautiful state park with miles of trails. I saw a school group with an earnest white teacher explaining tree rings to a group of about 20 young students. 100% of the students were Hispanic.
People are actually leaving this state, the state that has everything, that was dealt a hand of aces. Productive citizens are taxed at eye-popping rates to prop up the seniors and the underclass. It works for now. It seems kind of similar to what's happening in Europe and where the rest of the U.S. is headed as well.
In any case, I had a wonderful time. I highly recommend California as a tourist destination.
jeroboam
1d ago
This is awesome! I think we've found a new business model for Chuck-E-Cheese.
jeroboam
23hr ago
They try, but they're just so bad at it. Part of it is unavoidable. The U.S. is the world's top oil producer now.
But also, these governments are clown-level incompetent, and are always backstabbing each other to avoid their quotas. In other news, apparently one of the helicopters sent to aid the rescue of the Iranian President has crashed with multiple casualties.
How many other question have solutions to them that aren’t analyzed because the researcher starts with the wrong frame.
Pretty much the entirety of sociology is based on the faulty blank-slate premise.
For example, we see that boys participate in sports at a higher rate than girls. And so we say "how can we increase girls in sports". But that's the wrong framework. In fact, girls sports participation is far too high. Girls and women don't spontaneously play sports. Seriously, have you EVER seen a group of women playing pickup basketball or soccer in the park? I never have. Literally never. (Although sometimes one or two bold women will join the guys).
While girls enjoy being part of a team, they would have a lot more fun participating in something besides sports.
Betcha it trades down on Monday. Punters betting on Middle East chaos have always lost, this time won't be different. The galaxy brain move is to short oil here. It's worked every other time.
(Note: I also subscribe to the conspiracy theory that the oil price is manipulated by Western government actors).
Edit: Oil opened down but is now up 0.19% as of 11:00pm eastern. Middle East news is either neutral or negative for oil prices.
Edit 2: Oil now sharply down after some Fed guy pontificated.
That's interesting. At first glance, I thought "why would Republicans support this law".
It seems like it would be better to get rid of group preferences. The problem is that, even when group preferences are banned, corporations, governments, and universities just go ahead and do them anyway.
Perhaps it's better to simply enshrine Republicans, conservatives, and Christians as new protected classes allowing the possibility of torts (or the threat of torts) to keep people from discriminating against them.
Since we can't stop disparate impact from being used as a cudgel, it's time to arm both sides of the culture war. Universities need to be sued for the fact that less than 5% of professors are Republican.
jeroboam
2d ago
I read the speech and I have to say it almost made me want to convert to Latin Mass Catholicism.
What I was especially drawn to was the image of traditional values winning vs. how I personally tend to wallow in more negative news.
jeroboam
2d ago
I’m not really opposed to colonialism. .... Generally the colonized people (with certain political restrictions) ended up with more freedom.
I agree. Anti-colonialism, as practiced in the real world, is the belief that groups have rights but people do not. That it's better to be a slave under people who look like you, then free under a white person.
jeroboam
17hr ago
Sure, hospitals are different. As always there are specific exceptions to general principles.
There is no need, however, to protect a failing Red Lobster as a cultural institution.
jeroboam
3d ago
You didn't read my comment. Women actually do play pickup sports (in very rare instances). They join men's games as I noted.
But women don't ever play pickup with other women. There are nearly 400,000 girls playing high school basketball in the U.S. right now. There are millions of women who played basketball in high school. And, yet, I have never once witnessed or heard about a group of women going to the park and playing basketball. Never. Not even once.
It's quite remarkable. Women just aren't that interested in sports for their own sake. What they get from athletics is different: team bonding, recognition, feelings of accomplishment, etc.. But they don't love to ball.
jeroboam
2d ago
Having a Bell Hook$ book on your shelf might help you get laid. Actually reading it will not. Reading it and then trying to discuss it with your date is a major libido killer.
Because nobody actually reads that stuff. Shattering the polite fiction that she reads and cares about literature is an autist move.
You: "What's your favorite part of the book?"
Her: "Um... I guess I just like um.. um... "
You: "Oh, I thought you said you liked this author".
System: Emily has unmatched you.
How could you see this and not be reactionary?
Answer: Boomers.
Boomers don't see it because they are the beneficiaries of it.
Imagine a boomer living in Monterrey. Their house is worth $3 million. They pay almost no tax and in fact receive large checks and free health care from the government. Services are high quality because of an army of low-wage immigrants. The town isn't crowded despite its magnificent natural environment. Nothing has been built in 30 years.
There's an eerie lack of children but that's a small price to pay.
It's like when all the old union workers sign a contract to grandfather in their benefits while screwing the new workers. And it's why the Democratic party is now the party of the old, upper middle class whites. The high/low coalition makes the present comfortable for these wealthy boomers while replacing their society wholesale over time.
People who call themselves "punks" enthusiastically sign up to the same stifling speech rules as every HR department in every multinational megacorporation in the western world and excoriate others who deviate.
These punks live in a crab bucket. A person (especially a white person) has little hope of advancement in journalism or academia, where hundreds apply for every job.
Angry about his reduced station at life compared to his grandiose self-perception, the doxxer lashes out at the one group it is still permissible to attack.
For one day at least, the doxxer gets to feel powerful in an otherwise small and wasted life.
jeroboam
5d ago
The party realignment is still in mid-swing. I have faith this narrow Republican majority is largely an artifact. Previous party alignments took decades to play out. For example, Texas elected Democratic governors as late as 1990!
The trend is clear. Democrats are for rich white people and the underclass. Republicans are for the others.
100k is very middle class today. Amongst the posh, Democrats are so utterly dominant its comical. I can't find it on Google (because of course I can't) but someone looked at political donations from every large employer. The majority of donations went to Democrats for every employer except for the NYPD and maybe one other. That's right, even supposedly "right wing" corporations like Exxon had more Democratic donors than Republican ones. Amongst tech companies and universities, Democrats held an edge of something like 10-1.
The elite is all in on the Democratic party. And that is truly new. Back in the day, there were a substantial subset of WASP-y Republicans in the northeast and California. They are utterly gone. I know these people. They vote blue now, no matter who.
Is Elon Musk a failure?
Men stick their necks out because it's in their nature to do so.
If we're going to go full armchair evolutionary biologist, risk-taking makes sense when most men don't reproduce and a few lucky ones have dozens of children. That was our ancestral environment. The risk-taking genes have been tempered from thousands of years of civilization. But they're still there.
jeroboam
3d ago
Currently trading at 2.73 which is up 65% today but down about 98% in the last 12 months. 52 week range 0.04–117.36. Insane.
I wonder what would happen if they let bankrupt companies keep their tickers? Like BBBY was still allowed to trade with literally no assets except the ticker. And their prospectus said something like "We owe creditors 5 billion dollars. If you buy our stock we will issue shares and use them to pay our creditors. This stock has no value". And then people bid it up to crazy heights.
jeroboam
5d ago
Let me be annoying and argue with your steelman case, which I acknowledge you are offering to keep the conversation moving.
Few woke people actually care about appropriation. For example, it's perfectly fine to talk in a silly Italian or British accent. "Its-a bigga pizza pie-a".
But it's actually worse. Woke people don't just appropriate. They want to actively erase non-Anglo cultures. Witness, for example, the use of the term "Latinx". Or the insistence that traditional people abandon their customs and religion to support LGBT ideology.
So why do they pretend to care? Status games. Accusations of "appropriation" are a convenient way to signal higher moral status. If you can get a high-ranking person to grovel before you, you are higher status than them. If you can get a competitor fired for wearing a silly costume, then your chance at the top job just increased. This is why woke status games are most extreme in situations where 100s of people compete for a sinecure such as a college professorship. It's a crab bucket mentality.
Tangentially related...
How much should Trump get even, if he is elected? Either choice he makes seems pretty fraught.
Option 1) Play the bigger man. Pardon himself, obviously, and a few limited other people. Beyond that do nothing. This will prevent a wider conflagration in the culture war. Downside: without a tit-for-tat, the left will be emboldened for much greater tats in the future.
Option 2) Do unto him as he hath done unto me. Pursue corruption investigations against his pursuers (many of whom quite deserve them). Go after voter fraud and ballot harvesting. Turn the executive branch against the left in the same ways it has been turned against the right thus far. Upside: When both sides are armed, the chance for peace is higher than when only one side is armed. Downside: The system will probably resist him, and it could provoke a bigger backlash.
If I were Trump, I'd go with option 1. In reality, I expect him to just do whatever he wakes up feeling like he should do that day with little follow through.
More options
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