stuckinbathroom
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User ID: 903
stuckinbathroom
21hr ago
Eh, technically true, but Manhattan in particular was more populous and much more dense in the first half of the 20th century. Not that anyone really wants to go back to that level of housing quality, though.
stuckinbathroom
1d ago
… except that in Chesterton’s original fence analogy, the naive reformer did not know for what purpose the fence was originally built. In this case, we do know, to some extent: we in the US have a bastardized mélange of rationales with the Prussian model of education as the basal substrate, plus a healthy dose of American civic religion, daycare services for working parents, and concessions to public sector unions and the DEI commissariat on top.
There is much truth to the Big Yud quote above, about how modern schooling isn’t optimized for any of the usually-stated goals (viz. the production of manual laborers, well-informed and civic-minded voters, intelligent and conformist office drones). But this is because the system has been pulled in different and mutually-incompatible directions over the years as the fortunes of the various interest groups involved have waxed and waned.
Returning to your point: Chesterton himself was OK with fence-removal in some cases, provided that the original purpose of the fence was known, as indeed it is. And moreover, we have decades of experience now with tearing down this particular fence in gradual, incremental, localized ways (viz. homeschooling, unschooling, and certain private or charter schools), which incidentally is exactly how Chesterton would advise us to begin the process of doing away with the fence.
stuckinbathroom
1d ago
Russian dominance in the space-race, I guess?
One would think the prospect of Chinese dominance in the AGI race would be the present-day equivalent, but, well, gestures broadly at everything
stuckinbathroom
4d ago
I was like, what the fuck is an izzat?
My thoughts exactly; “The fuck izzat?” if you will
stuckinbathroom
7d ago
Schilling fence
I assume this was meant to be some combination of Schelling point and Chesterton’s fence; otherwise I’m not sure what the pre-Euro currency of Austria has to do with fences.
stuckinbathroom
13d ago
Diversity laundering?
stuckinbathroom
14d ago
If enough employers started using the "physics degree" strategy (and were allowed to use this approach)
Why wouldn’t employers be allowed to use this approach?
If the concern is “disparate impact”, that could apply even now, for employers using “any bachelor’s degree” rather than specifically “physics degree”—though I grant that the impact gets more disparate, as it were, as the IQ filter gets stronger.
I suppose employers are caught between the Scylla of needing to hire high IQ candidates and the Charybdis of needing to keep the filter as plausibly-not-disparate-impact-causing enough to avoid the baleful Eye of Title VII
stuckinbathroom
16d ago
What do you mean, you've seen this? It's brand new!
stuckinbathroom
21d ago
I don’t deny that TPTB have policy levers to Goodhart metrics like nominal GDP—for instance the classic Keynesian “pay workers to dig ditches and then fill them up again”—but this particular one doesn’t seem especially plausible, unless the government bails out the creditors, in which case the situation you are describing is just stimulus checks with extra steps.
On some level, it must be the case that the expected present value of credit card payments (adjusted for default risk) is positive, or else credit card companies wouldn’t be able to raise money (relevant xkcd)
Now, it’s entirely possible that everyone is wrong about these expected value calculations and in fact the rate of default is (or will be) so high that the credit issuers will lose money—in other words, that we are in a consumer credit bubble. If you really think so, then post stock portfolio or gtfo. Less snarkily, what’s your explanation for why, of the big bubbles of late 20th and 21st century history, none of them were primarily about consumer credit card debt?
stuckinbathroom
22d ago
Is this inevitable, the narcissism of small differences? Or is it just Trump not being a very principled man?
In part, it’s something like the narcissism of small differences, but more specifically it’s the nature of coalitions and the big-tent two party system.
When out of power (or at risk of losing power), the optimal move is to rally around a unifying platform or candidate who can both rally the base and bring in independent/non-aligned voters. Typically this involves sweeping major differences in ideology, policy, and values under the rug for the sake of winning the next election. Strange bedfellows and all that.
When in power, the optimal move is to fight and horse-trade for your niche, sectional interests, in the hopes that the aforementioned bedfellows just don’t care as much as you do, or are willing to compromise for something else in return.
The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.
stuckinbathroom
28d ago
A lie can get halfway round el mundo before the truth can get its pantalones on
stuckinbathroom
30d ago
Like free bus services.
Actually I think this is the one promise he is most likely to keep. Have you seen how common fare evasion is in NYC? The reality is that we already have free buses—some people just don’t know it yet.
stuckinbathroom
30d ago
I agree that Mamdani is likely to make NYC worse, and I share your skepticism that “the worse, the better” (for R prospects) will apply here, not only because one single mayor—especially one with zero experience managing large organizations—can’t change much in a short time, but also because, paraphrasing Adam Smith, “There is much ruin in New York City”. The city has too much going for it for its biggest tax paypigers (major financial institutions) to seriously consider the idea of picking up stakes and relocating to, say, Miami, at least in the short term. In the long term, I can definitely see a slow decline as businesses get strangled out of existence by onerous D policies. But that will happen much too slowly for the voting public to even notice, let alone pin the blame on a specific mayor or party.
It will be interesting to see whether those New York City Jews who swore they would leave for Florida if Mamdani got elected will make good on their promised exodus [heh]. My money is on “no”, in the main: their loyalty is to leftism first and foremost and to Judaism a distant second, so the prospect of living in a state where anyone could be carrying a handgun and where abortion is illegal after 6 weeks is anathema, no matter how philosemitic the state government.
And lastly, if I were a NYC resident, I would vote for literally anyone but Cuomo: his bungling of the pandemic (first with the nursing home massacres, then by riding roughshod over civil liberties to cover it up) is absolutely unforgivable.
stuckinbathroom
30d ago
The Republicans might MDS their way into creating enough political will to change the Constitution to allow someone naturalized into US citizenship to become POTUS for the sake of Mamdani.
I’m old enough to remember when people thought the Republicans might do this so that their own guy (Schwarzenegger) could run for president.
stuckinbathroom
30d ago
To add to your list: affirmative action was banned by ballot proposition in the 1990s, and a spectacularly-failed attempt was made to repeal it via another proposition in 2020—just after the Summer of Floyd, no less!
stuckinbathroom
30d ago
When it comes to hoe scaring, he has has pieces with names like This is How We Stop the Festering Disease Called OnlyFans. so there is that
While this would scare actual literal hoes, I don’t think it would play too badly with the sort of normie marginally-right-of-center women to whom the phrase “don’t scare the hoes” is intended to refer.
The rest of your point still stands.
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
T. Roosevelt spoke of this.
As did his arch-rival Woodrow Wilson, who famously said: “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets the chance.”
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Arabs won't coalesce on their own, they need to be oppressed by somebody or they'll fight amongst themselves
Hell, most of the time they’ll fight amongst themselves even when they are being oppressed by an outsider, hence why the Ottomans and later the British were able to play “divide and conquer” in the region for so long.
I’m no expert on the Middle East either, but it sure seems to me that shared animosity towards Israel counts for surprisingly little over there: despite the ruling elite of Turkey and Iran being rabidly anti-Israel, the two countries consistently refuse to cooperate and regularly back opposing factions in, e.g., the Syrian conflict. Similarly for Saudi Arabia against Iran, Saudi against the Houthis, and to a lesser extent Qatar and the Gulf Arabs competing against their fellow Arabs for Trump-senpai to notice them.
Honestly I suspect that with the exception of the Houthis and the Iranian hardliners, the anti-Israel sentiment is largely just political theater, a cheap way for a mostly-apathetic elite to shore up support with the masses and to burnish their “pious, God-fearing Muslim” credentials while continuing to suck from the teat of US foreign aid and (in the case of Turkey) NATO membership.
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Indeed, his eponymous complaint caused quite the stir when it was first published
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
and the OP often can be extended indefinitely based on various factors
Gives a whole new meaning to the old “surely OP will deliver” skeleton meme
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Maybe everything is going according to how Darth Trump has foreseen.
Just according to keikaku*
*Translator’s note: keikaku means plan
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Just so, Lorenz would tell you the sky was water if it helped her political faction.
The Lorenz transformation, if you will
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Nothing about what happens if the electors choose an ineligible candidate.
I mean, literally by definition, the electors cannot choose an ineligible candidate: ineligible means “not able to be chosen”
If you’re asking “What happens if the electors do the thing they are specifically prohibited from doing?”, I don’t really know what to tell you. For starters, the electors would be in violation of the supreme law of the land and thus should be held criminally liable and prosecuted accordingly; but would they be? Big picture, the whole point of the Constitution is to explicitly lay down the limits of the federal government’s powers, including, in this case, the powers of the electors—but at the end of the day, the Constitution is only as good as the people’s collective agreement to abide by it.
Asking the Constitution itself to contain answers to questions of the form “What happens when people ignore the Constitution in [specific way]?” is a bit like asking a board game rule book to include rules on what happens when the players ignore the rules: if you’re ignoring the rules, then you’re simply not playing the game, and if you’re not playing the game, why would you even care what the rule book has to say?
The obvious direct analogue would be a similarly-irrelevant appeal to the inerrancy of $OPPRESSED_MINORITY_CULTURE, in which trans and other gender identities are always considered unconditionally heckin valid
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