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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   32622 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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There has been another attempted assassination of Donald Trump, this time at a rally at the Trump International golf course. The shooter, armed with an AK-74, fled after a brief exchange of gunfire with the Secret Service. Donald Trump is unharmed, and there appear to be no casualties.

Morbid question: If a presidential candidate is killed (or dies) prior to the election, who stands in his place?

Edit: or her place? (I write this only for grammatical balance)

I answered this a few months ago, so here's the copy/paste of that comment. Since that time the GOP has updated the rules on the link I provided, but the rule appears to be the same:

Per the rules of the Dems and the GOP it appears that the Democrats will have a meeting of the national committee, and the new nominee will be selected by a majority vote of the committee, one person, one vote. The Republicans will do the same, but members representing each state will receive the same amount of votes their state had during the convention. The replacement will be selected by a majority vote.

In neither case is it a rule that the Vice Presidential nominee will automatically assume the Presidential nomination.

The rules that govern balloting aren't at all uniform. I suppose you could have a gentleman's understanding that electors would just vote for the replacement even if the ballot could not be altered. But then the electors might expose themselves to liability under faithless elector laws. Some states don't merely punish faithless electors, they automatically cancel their votes and replace them with an alternate.

Yeah, this is a surprisingly complicated question because each state has different laws and it's never really been tested before. The parties can of course "nominate" whoever they want, but in most states the ballots have already been "locked in" and won't change. For example, RFK is going to stay on the ballot in some states, but not others, even though he dropped out and wants to be removed. Doubly complicated because, like you mentioned, you're not technically voting for the candidate themselves, but for electors pledge to them.

I think in practice it would just go to the vice president, because that's kind of their main job. But I would expect to see a lawsuit with some bickering over vague, archaic rules, and maybe get the Supreme Court involved like they did in Bush v Gore. Because, apparently, the Supreme Court is really the Supreme source of all authority in this ridiculous country.

To be fair, the entire point of the supreme court is to adjudicate edge cases like this. They are a lot closer to their intended purpose when they're making up rules to get a faithful procedural outcome than when they're the last word on popular moral debates that ought to be negotiated by Congress.

JD Vance would be the presumptive insert, unless one of his kids wants the job, but I don't think there are firm rules should the GOP decide it wanted otherwise.

We saw the same thing with DNC for Joe's political death. They weren't required to pick Kamala, but they did, largely because doing otherwise would be inconvenient.

Consider that the GOP would have additional pressure towards a Trump legacy pick because they would face the risk of appearing to be involved in the assassination.

It looks like this guy served in the Ukrainian military.

What should I, an American citizen, make of that? A presidential candidate is trying to end their war, and one of their soldiers shows up here to try and kill him?

What in the hell?

The establishment lied wildly about Vietnam. The lies about Iraq were next level inventing WMD in Iraq. They lied about Jessica Lynch, abu ghraib, the UN weapons inspectors and long list of other things.

In Afghanistan they claimed that the 120 000 000 000 dollars wasted on the Afghan national army created an army of 300 000. After a decade of claiming this they changed the narrative in a week admitting that they had basically fabricated this military. Unfortunately, they hadn't fabricated all the spent money.

The Ukraine war has to be the war in modern history with the least investigative journalism. There is basically only narrative and press releases from think tanks being published in the media. In 2003 Bagdhad Bob was interviewed on American TV. In this war, nobody would ever dream of bringing a Russian general on TV for an interview.

It is going to be interesting to see the reaction when the lies start falling apart and the true believers find out their war was roughly as fake all the previous ones.

Baghdad Bob was a meme, not a general or a person who would have been interviewed due to his particular importance.

Sergey Lavrov, for instance, has been interviewed by Western media countless times.

In this war, nobody would ever dream of bringing a Russian general on TV for an interview.

Uhhh

(Oops, looks like I can't tell one Slav from another. Never mind)

Well tbf the distinction between Ukrainian and Russian ethnicity is also a media fabrication and Syrskyi was born in Russia and his family all lives in Russia.

It appears the Ukrainians would disagree strongly with you on that.

Besides, I don’t see how the morality of the war is any different even if they are the same ethnicity. Would Colombia be justified in invading Venezuela?

Oleksandr Syrskyi

Is a Ukrainian general

This one is not Russian. What's your point?

The biggest lie of all was that Ukraine could give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for protection by the West. They fell for the gun control argument. Keep your guns.

They didn't have nuclear weapons, the USSR had weapons that were stored there. It's like if Turkey left NATO and refused to give back the nukes the US keeps there. They wouldn't have the codes to actually use them and would have to reverse engineer new bombs.

Anyone that gives up their WMD's gets punished (see Libya, Iraq etc). Think of the incentives that sends to states like Syria, Iran and North Korea.

The most frustrating part of having a even a barely decent understanding of history is having to constantly deal with people claiming that this time it's different and we must upend all norms to deal with a novel evil which is always made up to be unprecedented.

Don't you worry, they'll sweep this under the rug like all the other ones and continue basking in incompetence like nothing happened.

Even if Putin annexed all of Ukraine you'd find some people to spin this as a win because it unites Europe or something. Western elites are immune from accountability.

The most frustrating part of having a even a barely decent understanding of history is having to constantly deal with people claiming that this time it's different and we must upend all norms to deal with a novel evil which is always made up to be unprecedented.

Amusingly, having watched various sides discussing the Ukraine Conflict for so long, this applies to so many perspective and positions on it that I'd have no idea what position on the conflict this is supposed to be without checking someone's past posting history.

Is the 'this time it's different' mean to refer to the people who are aghast at a war which is the third continuation war of a decade? The credulity given to claims of nuclear thresholds at odds with decades of practice and saber-rattling? The multi-year sustainment of imminent collapse narratives? Are the novel threats justifying upending norms supposed to refer to the Russian imperalists, the Ukrainian nazis, the dreaded American/Western influence? And this is without the issues that come from barely decent understandings of history often also routinely carrying about deliberate misunderstandings that make it into pop history.

It almost certainly wasn't intended to be as omnidirectional as it was, but I thank you none the less.

It's intended at Western elites, but I'll stand by it omnidirectionaly.

I hate how unserious it all is.

What would a “serious” attitude look like to you? In other words, what would you expect of western elites instead?

Which is why I thank you.

(Which was what I meant to write instead of 'think you', so embarrassment on me.)

I mean things like that only work until they don’t. The sheer incompetence of the western elites is on display. The entire plan, as far as I can tell is “Ukraine is the good guy here. We arm them to the teeth, let them do whatever they want, and hope they win before something bad happens.” It’s not working, and worse, we’re putting ourselves in an extremely weak position by doing so, and for little strategic gain. Ukraine doesn’t have much beyond farmland. It’s not Taiwan with a big chip manufacturer base. And we’re depleting weapons and risking nuclear exchange to save Kansas.

Calling it now, there will be a terror attack on US soil by Ukrainian aligned elements bitter about the US abandoning them by 2034 (40% chance). (Not counting this one)

Mostly justified, quite frankly, unless they pick civilian non-elite target.

So far Ukrainian and Ukrainian inspired terrorism has: attempted to assassinate a US presidential nominee, attempted and nearly assassinated a European Prime Minister, blown up a major piece of German infrastructure causing serious damage to their economy.

From a strategic point of view they've been more successful than any recent anti western terrorist group other than al-qaeda via 9/11. Since ISIS never really got close to people in power or major infrastructure. They've also managed to get more free military gear from the west than al-qaeda.

The perverse incentives globalism and empire creates makes for some bizarre politics.

edit: oh they also keep a 180k person list of enemies of the state with personal info of Ukrainian enemies which includes westerners like Elon Musk, Viktor Orban, Roger Waters, Roy Jones Jr, and Berlusconi.

oh they also keep a 180k person list of enemies of the state with personal info of Ukrainian enemies which includes westerners like Elon Musk

The man who's absolutely critical to their war effort through Starlink and could trivially sabotage all of it?

Quite an outrageous claim.

So far Ukrainian and Ukrainian inspired terrorism has: attempted to assassinate a US presidential nominee, attempted and nearly assassinated a European Prime Minister, blown up a major piece of German infrastructure causing serious damage to their economy.

Also: lied about Russia shooting a missile into a Poland in a very obvious attempt to grow their war into WW3 by dragging NATO into it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_missile_explosion_in_Poland?useskin=vector

(It was a Ukrainian missile)

Also: lied about Russia shooting a missile into a Poland in a very obvious attempt to grow their war into WW3 by dragging NATO into it

Or, more likely, a very obvious attempt to avoid taking the blame themselves.

I thought he was just a NAFO guy, a hanger-on looking to help Ukraine but not actually associated with it officially, (though he was in an ad for Azov at Mariupol?) Definitely a sketchy person with these seeming Afghanistan-Ukraine connections. And all the other stuff he's been doing, running around with machineguns and punching rapists: https://x.com/718Tv/status/1835491672857137620

I can't believe I'm saying this, but if there was ever a would be assassin that could be a CIA asset it sure wouldn't be hard to convince me this guy is

Bit late now but looks like I was wrong, Blumenthal says he fought in Ukraine and even wrote a schizo rant about it: https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1835552460481478829

I hope the CIA hires people who can write out a full gramatical sentence though, the competence crisis is really severe if this is the kind of people they get.

The obvious joke is that this is the CIA op whilst the previous one was the FBI one, and inter-service communication is as good as it usually is.

Does Trump have a dog for the ATF entry into this contest to shoot? Maybe we can work in the DHS somehow?

If ATF gets involved trying to kill Trump, they'll probably wing Harris. If she had a pet they'd get that, but they don't.

2 months ago:

Warning about Ryan Routh: he is not, and never has been, associated with the International Legion or the Ukrainian Armed Forces at all. He is not, & never has been, a legion recruiter. He is misrepresenting himself and lying to many people.

Though it does seems he was in Ukraine at some point

Wild claims on his twitter seem consistent with him being a high-agency crazy:

#pnhhaiti I have thousands of Afghan solders that wish to serve for the Haiti national police at cheap wages. 1000 with passports ready to fly.

I mean no offense here but some random “they them” with 700 followers and a rainbow flag in their name doesn’t seem like an official spokesthem for the Ukrainian military[1]. Here’s another equally uncredible person saying the opposite: https://x.com/raheemkassam/status/1835440928074736007

Also your first link had like 10 different redirects and popups and stuff. Here is just a direct link: https://x.com/v8mile/status/1804097069876916506

[1]: what I mean is that this person seems focused on some sort of gender crusade. An equivalent would be linking me to a page dedicated to the San Francisco 49ers football team, but that wants to talk authoritatively on Iranian nuclear policy.

Here's a couple other people who had anything to say about him before today (you have to manually click "Search" unfortunately), all on the /r/volunteersforukraine subreddit. As a cautious heuristic I'd consider any random person who had anything at all to say about him before today to be more credible than any random person who has anything at all to say about him after today.

Bonus from that search: here's a reddit account of his that nobody else seems to have found yet.

He was also in a NYT article in March 2023

The thing about western volunteers in Ukraine, which is a scene I've looked into before, is that anybody can just show up and do and claim whatever, it's all incredibly ad-hoc, and it massively disproportionately attracts high-agency crazy people.

I linked xcancel because it's currently a functioning way to read twitter without an account, it's a straightforward mirror of twitter. I've never encountered popups on it, though it has a single layer of bot check redirect thing that kicks in on new visits or every few hours of use.

Bonus from that search: here's a reddit account of his that nobody else seems to have found yet.

lmao, "TaiwanForiegnLegion?" So he wasn't just a (attempted) Ukraine volunteer, he also wanted to volunteer for Taiwan? And then he goes off on his own to shoot Trump?

Yeah. "attracts high-agency crazy people" indeed.

But hey, give him credit for "taking heroic responsibility" like a good rationalist. (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R4f4RdGBdZsPzyJYk/a-discussion-of-heroic-responsibility)

edit: he has a website too! https://taiwanforeignlegion.com/. And it's really crazy, just a giant block of text with no paragraphs.

If you had asked me beforehand which special interest would be most likely to produce radicals who try to kill Trump, I would not have guessed Ukraine. Trying to make sense of it in hindsight, maybe the fact that volunteers for Ukraine tend to be violence-oriented boosts their likelihood of committing violence.

Trump has been pretty vocal about ending the war. I’d go as far as saying it’s one of his main talking points.

Frankly I’m surprised there hasn’t been more of this.

Trump has been pretty vocal about ending the war. I’d go as far as saying it’s one of his main talking points.

If you ignore most of what he or his campaign says, I suppose. It certainly doesn't make his platform, or his campaign website, or most of his speeches, and when more distant campaign associates raise end-the-war proposals, they often come with caveats like 'and if Russia doesn't agree to what we think is reasonable, big increases in Ukraine aid.'

Trump has repeatedly said that, if elected, he will negotiate an end to the war before he even takes office.

Presumably what this means is telling Ukraine they get no more assistance until they agree to a truce.

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Jesus Christ. I hope they find the guy soon.

AK-47, though. As far as I know, -74s are a lot less common in the U.S.

Edit: I just clicked a WaPo link for “more information” and it expanded one sentence into two. Apparently the only substance on that website was some sort of livestream statement by the FBI. That kind of webpage should be a crime.

AK-47

Gun nerds are saying SKS

SKS

The photos are not super clear, but it does appear to be a sporterized SKS with a scope and modified to take generic AK magazines. This kind of rifle is actually a sort of meme gun in the firearms enthusiast community, though not as much now as in the past.

Gun nerd time: there are actually very few AK-47s in the US and they tend to be collectors items that sell for obscene amounts of money for a few reasons. First, very few were actually made. The gun most people are referring to as an "AK-47" is usually an AKM or an AK-74, all of which belong to the AK family/pattern of rifle. Actual AK 47s were made in 3 generations in the early 50s, were expensive to make due to using block milling operations, and very few made it into the US before the '68 ban on imports. A trophy weapon brought back into the US before the '68 ban sold at auction last year for over $250k.

Before the fall of the USSR, there were very few imported AK pattern guns that had the legal modifications to make them semi-auto only and thus legal for import. Then after the USSR fell, we had the 90s assault weapon ban. You do see some monstrosities from this era around, but they are undesirable for collectors. Wide availability of US legal, semi auto only, AK pattern rifles only start after the expiration of the (absurd) 90s assault weapons ban. The ammo was also hard to find.

But the SKS has always been available as its only ever been a semi auto gun with an internal 10 round magazine, satisfying the legal requirements of even the most hostile states like California. They do look superficially similar to an AK pattern rifle (the mechanical action is different) though, so with some creativity and modifications you can dress one up in the costume of an AK well enough to continue to fool people who don't know much about fire arms right up to the present day.

edit - here's a photo of basic models of the two rifles, SKS on the left. https://i0.wp.com/coldboremiracle.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/JAW01066.jpg

Republican congressional baseball team shooter also had an SKS. Also failed to kill anyone.

It's a fine rifle, SKS owners just aren't sending their best.

Rifle is fine?

Why you want rail for Kalashnikov? Is not good enough as procured from Izhevsk Mechanical Works? You think needs improvement? Then maybe you find job with army of Russia! You have drinks with Mikhail Kalashnikov, trade story of many weapons designed and details of school for engineering!

Or maybe you not do this. Probably is because you never design weapon in whole life. You look at fine Russian rifle, think it need crazy shit stick on all sides of weapon. You have disease of American capitalist, change thing that is fine for no reason except to look different from comrade. You put cheap flashlight of Chinese slave factory on one side, you put bad scope of American middle west on other side, you put front pistol grip on bottom so you are like American movie guy John Rambo. Maybe you put sex dildo on top to fuck yourself in asshole for making shameful travesty of rifle of Mikhail Kalashnikov, no?

Rifle is fine. You fuck it, it only get heavy and you still no hit largest side of barn. Go to firing range, practice with many magazine of cartridge. Then you not need dumb shit put on side of rifle.

(Mods plz no ban this isn't even the active thread anymore)

Thank you. This warms my heart.

I'm just delighted to see the classics are still appreciated.

I've shot an SKS a couple times. It is indeed a fine rifle. The stripper clips can be tricky if you are not used to them.

The SKS is the ultimate successor to the Winchester 94- all the same fundamental limitations, same form factor/overall size, same power of cartridge (.30-30 is far weaker than its case size would otherwise suggest).

The AK kind of fits that description too, but only in the sense that it technically has a Win 94 compatibility mode (the Saiga rifles being the best example) rather than having been designed solely with that mode in mind.

Yeah 7.62x39 is not at all a well designed round. They took the old 7.62x54R and shortened the case length until it was small enough. No design process or attempt to optimize for performance. You end up with a moderate sized round with low recoil and poor ballistic performance. They could have instead made a deadlier higher-velocity flatter-shooting round. But they didn't want to.

To leap to the defense of the SKS: it is light, not too long and low recoil. I have a Korean War M1 and that thing is heavy and the ammo is enormous in comparison. Keeping size and weight in mind, I'd want the SKS.

But strange these two would-be murderers didn't bring any modern magazine fed rifle.

More comments

There are very fine rifles on both sides

My initial reaction is: this is fucking insane.

Most people just shrugged as far as I can tell.

Not sure how I’m feeling about my country with the slide of the last decade and now this.

NBC's Lester Holt: "Today's apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail. Mr. Trump, his running mate JD Vance continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants" in Springfield, Ohio, resulting in bomb threats.

This just hits so hard to me. I want Trump to win (even though he's a terrible person) because I want these people to lose so much.

It doesn't surprise me so much after the 'Trump falls on stage at rally' headlines a couple of months ago.

That was my initial reaction to the first attempt.

I was then horrified at the lack of interest and muted reactions on the left.

I then recognized the lack of interest as analogous to the lack of interest and muted reactions by republicans after a school shooting.

Both sides are disgusting.

Why are you making such a comparison?

Because both events involve guns being used in ways we don't want guns to be used?

School shootings aren't normally politically driven. Assassination attempts targeting politicians always are.

Which is precisely why assassinations are less horrifying?

Careful selection of "politically driven" rather than "politically motivated." July 13th doesn't seem to have an agenda aligned with either of the political sides.

Another reason for the comparison: they both have the same direct solution.

That was my initial reaction to the first attempt.

I was then horrified at the lack of interest and muted reactions on the left.

I then recognized the lack of interest as analogous to the lack of interest and muted reactions by republicans after a school shooting.

what exactly am I supposed to do about either of those things? I'm not in the secret service and I'm not a cop. I'm just a regular guy. there's nothing I, personally, can do to stop these things.

Usually when people get worked up they mean "we as a society should change things to stop it." meaning, ban guns. Well, even if I agreed with that, I'm still just one voter, so I can't actually ban guns.

So what it really means is "I want you to spend all your time posting political memes on social media and being a nervous wreck." Well, been there and done that. It's a waste of time.

I think it's healthy that more people are starting to realize you can read about these things in the news and then just... move on with our lives. The news media wants us to obsess over these things, but there's no good reason we should.

I mean, I think this is just par for the course. The entire system is starting to collapse and as such nearly catastrophic systems failures are normal. We’re used to crime, drugs, shitty roads school shooters, random spree shooters, and a dozen other things that would shock people if they visited from 1950 or before. I mean or swan song is so bad at this point that we had congressional hearings about UFOs and the reaction was fairly muted. At this point, Mr. Spock could land on the White House lawn and most people would have muted reactions. We’re used to things being completely messed up.

The entire system is starting to collapse and as such nearly catastrophic systems failures are normal.

You've had assassination attempts on Presidents and much worse violence than this before back in the 60's and 70s and it did not lead to the system collapsing. And the economy was worse then as well. Maybe it is different now, but it's certainly something the US has been through before.

Yeah, we had assassination attempts, but we didn’t have two nearly successful attempts on the same political figure within two months of each other. That’s pretty unusual. And especially as by the second time, the SS had intelligence and knew that there was an Iranian plot to get Trump. They still can’t get their act together.

Actually... Ford had two almost successful attempts against him 17 days apart in 1975. One missed, the other forgot to chamber a round. Both women, which is doubly unusual. And in the former case it wasn't even the Secret Service who pushed the gun away so it missed, a bystander had to intervene!

Its unusual, but its not unheard of. And Ford was President then, not just a candidate. Unfortunately high profile attempts can spawn further attempts and perfectly securing spaces like golf courses and rallies is hard.

I'd agree with this, but also note that two of the main things that has changed since the 60s and 70s is the nature of how we know of eachother in an information sense, and for Americans in particular a collapse in shared trust in systems.

On the information front, something that's changed for everyone is the rise of social media. For all the worries of disinformation or misinformation or foreign interference, one of the other negatives of it is that it truly does allow people to see and hear what others may think of them- and that it's often both vocal and vitriolic disapproval. In the 60s and 70s, when countries had only a handful of centralized media presenters at a national level of visibility, the centralized news would tend to be... maybe not consensus based, but rarely radicalized, and radical-fringe views would be more limited to local media that simply couldn't be conveyed across a country in real time. People who might have had heated political fights in person were functionally physically separated in the information sphere. With the rise of the internet and social media, people in political segment A can absolutely know the loathing/mockery/opposition/subversion of their fellow citizens in segment B, often aided by the highly public organized acts of meanness that comes with such partisanship. The toxicity or violent might have been worse in the 60's and 70's, but the information flow and prevalence was much 'better' (in the sense of being less immediate and pervasive). In the 70s, if you didn't want to be bothered by news and views from other parts of the country, you could change the channel- now you can't open up most social media platforms without an algorithmic push of some variation of a sneer club / outrage bait of how bad-stupid-evil your outgroup citizens are... or, if you dare to be heterodox and observe another tribe, how bad-stupid-evil your ingroup is.

Combine that with a collapse of trust in shared systems- from religious to governmental to even informational- and even if the individual behaviors are 'better' than in the 60's/70's, you're working from a worse position in terms of social coping mechanisms to deal with the issues that are there.

I know this is a typical argument from dissident righties that world is a failing state and everything is collapsing, but conservatively, the world is a better place for approximately 70% of the world's population. Even using a purely American perspective, the median American city is still wealthier and for instance, has less crime than broad swathes of the 70's and 80's. Yes, if you truly think the fact there are more non-white people and that non-straight people of all sorts are open about it is truly a disastrous thing, OK, but this happened to Gerald Ford in '76.

less crime than broad swathes of the 70's and 80's

I see what you did there . From the OP:

We’re used to crime, drugs, shitty roads school shooters, random spree shooters, and a dozen other things that would shock people if they visited from 1950 or before.

The unprecedented crime wave of 1967-94 (roughly) was the consequence of policies (the "Great Society" etc.) enacted by entrenched political forces that are still in a hegemonic position today.

Also, "70%"? Where does that figure come from? Who are the other 30%?

there are more non-white people and that non-straight people of all sorts are open about it

My I ask why you're spinning the whole issue like this? The OP didn't make any such references anywhere.

When I told my wife (checking phone in between commercials) she said “you’ve got to be kidding.” It seems less shocking but more “this is sad”

The loss of institutional prestige in the SS has some downstream effects. Most notably, every crackpot in the country now knows (whether true or not) that the service is not protecting Trump, or is wildly incompetent. I would expect political assassination attempts in general to rise for a while, as nobody is scared of the talent on display from that particular agency. The myth of the secret service terminators stopped more guns than the actual service ever did.

Now? The first marginally competent goon to rock up is gonna have a field day, but apparently today is not that day.

Cops at the press conference are saying the guy was spotted (or his gun barrel was spotted) by a secret service officer. Basically praising him.

Will a second assassination attempt give Trump a bump in the polls? The first one didn't. I'm curious to see how this plays out.

The problem for Trump is neither of these been have been obvious Democrat's. From what I can tell, Ford didn't get any huge approval bump from his two attempts from weirdos like Squeaky Fromme and even for Hinckley, the reason Reagan got sympathy is he dealt with it with good humor and sympathy for people like Brady who got killed.

From what's been revealed, this guy is a weirdo swing voter who voted for Trump in 2016, went to Bernie & Tulsi in 2020, is pro-Ukraine, but anti-vax, and is was trying for a Haley/Vivek ticket. That's not a political ideology you can stick on Democrat's.

Plus, there is the small matter that the moment voters outside of the 40-45% Republican hard limit listen to Trump, they like him less.

This guy is a huge Dem. He is all in on Ukraine and has lots of posts saying that Kamala should go visit the people who got shot at the Trump rally to one-up him.

It appears much more correct to say he was an anti-Trump republican.

Huge Dem's aren't Vivek fanboys. He's only a 'huge Dem' by the standards that anybody who isn't 100% for Trump a 'huge Dem.' He's like many, many people, a weirdo with ping-pong political opinions and obvious mental issues.

It seems like his political donations were pretty heavy act blue

If state media can memory hole that photo of Trump bleeding from his ear while fist pumping with an American flag in the background in only a week than this will be deleted from mainstream memory within 24 hours. Assuming it even makes it beyond local news coverage.

There's no hella epic based video, so this one won't even energize the base. Maybe if there's a manifesto or something

Press conference happening now: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2W1Yi_Np64U

some live thoughts:

  • They found the vehicle because an eyewitness got the plate of the shooter (how TF is there not a least 1 drone orbiting wherever Trump is literally at all times??)

  • Guy is in custody and alive

  • Witnessed ID'd the guy

  • In the bushes where the guy was was an AK with a scope, a gopro, and ceramic plates.

  • SS spotted the guy before Tump was actually near him and engaged him first.

how TF is there not a least 1 drone orbiting wherever Trump is literally at all times??

I would go mad if I had to listen to a drone buzzing above me 24x7. Trump, presumably, would too.

No reason to have a SS agent run down to the store and buy a DJI to buzz around at 100'. Just get a domestic MIC prototype and fly it higher.

Having any drones in the air makes it quite difficult to detect if a hostile drone is in the air I suppose.

This was the stated reason on the podcast I listened to, perhaps Cleared Hot, that featured an ex Secret Service agent discussing the first Trump assassination attempt.

Wow. Kudos to SS

Are you guys keeping up with this "ABC Whistleblower" story? Earlier in the week there were "reports" that someone would be filing an affadavit regarding ABC News's conduct during the debate. Fast forward to today, and we have the alleged affadavit. The source seems to be "Black Insurrectionist--I FOLLOW BACK TRUE PATRIOTS @DocNetyoutube" on X.

This is obvious bullshit right? The names are conveniently redacted. To throw another monkey wrench into it, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted this morning that the whistleblower was killed in a car crash, before quickly backtracking (on the car crash, not on the whistleblower).

Is it going to be like this for the next two months until the election? Will it ever end? Do I just need to stop paying attention to internet bullshit? Will the inevitable defamation suits bring things back into equilibrium?

It's nonsense, anyway - if Kamala was told the questions in advance, she didn't do anything with that information, all she did was give weird scripted answers that barely engaged with the subject while Trump exploded.

While yes she gave weird scripted answers, that is better than her 2019 performance of being totally unprepared and rambling. Im sure she practiced (what else would she have been doing? not talking to press that is for sure), but its a plausible accusation. It happened before with Hillary. The moderators were clearly on Kamala's side. And its something fairly easily to do.

She prepared, but she prepared a bunch of talking points that were mostly unconnected to the questions. If she knew what the questions were, wouldn't her responses have been more relevant?

Because actual answers would inform the public that she is to the left of their loony neighbor that everyone laughs about when he starts waxing poetic about Chavez at the block party after his 2nd Mike's hard.

I didn't watch the whole debate, were there any questions that weren't obviously coming? I didn't feel like there were any looks that Trump wouldn't have drilled.

The Obamacare question was fairly out of left field. The rest were mostly obvious. But order and framing are important.

Smells like bullshit to me. Thinking of a way it could be real...

A real, Trump supporting ABC employee of 10+ years exists. Some or most of the things described actually happened the way they are described. Employee doesn't want to go public because he would like to keep his job? One way or another ABC employee meets Random Bullshit Twitter Guy. Random Bullshit Twitter Guy (RBTG) has no real experience in anything other than Random Bullshit Twittering, so he comes up with the affidavit + notarized letter to speaker idea without any attachment to Trump campaign. This is the best he can come up with, the debate happens, and he slow rolls the facts to maximize his good boy points.

Grammatical errors, capitalization, and formatting aside, stuff like this paragraph reads more like bad campaign messaging than it does a whistleblower that is reporting due to his/her integrity.

"No questions concerning her brother-in-law, Tony West, who faces allegations of embezzling billions of dollars in taxpayer funds and who may be involved in her administration if elected."

The exposition makes sure the audience (us, the public, not congressmen) knows who Tony West is. Perhaps he could have received input from some Trump campaign staff while crafting this testimony? He is an avid partisan and not just a concerned whistleblower?

But, uh, yeah. Fox News should be blasting the hell out of this story if it is even partially verifiable. The guy who got the scoop should be cashing in on the lucrative nature of this story beyond farming a few Twitter followers. He should be doing interviews right now. That Fox News is not doing so should suggest they fear another defamation suit. Which should suggest it's not a verifiable story, or at least has not yet been verified.

Will it ever end?

No.

Do I just need to stop paying attention to internet bullshit?

Yes.

Will the inevitable defamation suits bring things back into equilibrium?

No.

The fact that it's an affidavit is suspicious in and of itself, as the right has, in recent years, acted as though anything in an affidavit must be The Truth (see all of the Sidney Powell affidavits). The most common use of affidavits is in litigation. If I want to depose someone, standard practice is to execute an affidavit that gives an outline of their testimony and the points I want to make. I'll submit that to opposing counsel, and if they have no objections, the affidavit will be admitted in lieu of the deposition. In this case, they're simply a tool for greater efficiency. Even if opposing counsel always wants a deposition (so they don't waive their right to cross examine), they're still useful in at least we have a concise outline of the major points counsel is trying to make.

They have other uses, mostly in property law where someone will execute an affidavit as to the property's history or something like that to make it easier for title researchers to get a picture of the land in the absence of formal recorded documents. Again, they're a tool, but since they aren't deeds, etc., they aren't dispositive and can be challenged in court.

I don't know what purpose an affidavit like this serves. Is there pending litigation? Even still, affidavits only attest to facts, not opinions. ABC is allowed to be biased. It may be a political scandal but there's no legal cause of action here. Even if this is completely legitimate I don't see the purpose for it; it's not like Trump can sue ABC for being biased. And even if they could, and this guy was their star witness, I wouldn't execute the affidavit like this. It draws conclusions rather than simply state facts. I doubt this is real, because no lawyer would draft this.

Re: affidavits, it could be some sort of (ineffectual, agreed) attempt to counteract the 'claims with no evidence' tendency in the MSM? Eyewitness claims (of course) are evidence, but take a look at the coverage around Rufo's eyewitness who took a video of some people grilling cats, confirmed that cats were on the grill, etc -- yeah this would certainly be 'evidence' in any court of law, but not if you ask ABC or whatnot.

So maybe they think that putting the thing in writing and getting a notary to stamp it will somehow make their enemies treat it more seriously? One step away from sovereign citizen stuff, but what can you do?

Whatever happened to MeToo? In 2017 it seemed unstoppable and like it was going to really change quite a bit of the social dynamics between the genders. It’s since gone very quiet, has there been any more major celebrities or persons getting MeToo’d? The last person i remember getting destroyed is Cuomo.

It feels like there’s been basically zilch since then, although I could be wrong. Is this because men are finally treating women like sexless persons deserving of respect or is it merely that it was a passing fad?

Whatever happened to MeToo? In 2017 it seemed unstoppable and like it was going to really change quite a bit of the social dynamics between the genders. It’s since gone very quiet.

A combination of two factors i think, at least part of it comes down to what @Crowstep said about outrage being exhausting but i think the bigger factor is that it was intended to be a weapon to be weilded against Trump (see the whole "grab 'em by the pussy" thing) but once democrats and media execs realized that the people most vulnerable to metoo were democrats and media execs it was quietly shelved.

like it was going to really change quite a bit of the social dynamics between the genders.

It totally did this. Insane rape/sexual harassment scaremongering is one of the main features driving young women so far left. Pundits would prefer to either rant about the female nature or general wokeness instead of addressing the overactive fearmongering about sexual harassment.

Really? Young women have leaned further left since women’s lib, if not earlier.

Not like they do today, they haven’t. Polls show that young women started becoming dramatically more liberal around ten years ago, and only now are the numbers starting to show a return to normal (but who knows if this is a temporary blip or the start of a long-term trend). Googling “women becoming more liberal” will pull up plenty of articles and graphs discussing this phenomenon, though I’m pretty sure it’s been discussed here as well.

Polls show that young women started becoming dramatically more liberal around ten years ago

2013-14 was the heydey of whatever that wave of feminism was. It's when Scott wrote his most hard-hitting anti-feminist posts, the ones he's been coasting on ever since. Feminism was the first movement of the Great Awokening, followed shortly by Black Lives Matter, and the legalization of same-sex marriage and resulting ascendant LGBT movement.

If I were going to write a book about wokeness, and were a conservative grifter, I'd call it "The Second Term of Obama." This sounds vaguely ominous and gestures subtly at "The Second Coming," appealing to the "Obama is the antichrist" people who presaged the "Trump is Hitler" people. But I really do think something very bad happened in Obama's second term, progressives lost hope after they elected a Black Man to the White House and the color of the building didn't change.

(Well, not permanently.)

I can't escape also the possibility that the civil service under Obama just poked the bear. Things like the Dear Colleague letter did a lot to institutionally support major planks of grassroots feminism. Obergefell came down in 2015. And then when Trayvon Martin died and Obama cried on national TV...

It was just an era where the left got very angry, and the right got even angrier. And what do you know, we got a very angry, very unappealing-to-feminists president after that, and everything skyrocketed from there.

It won…

On thing going against it is that the victims just aren’t that sympathetic to normal Americans. Most of these people are elites with more money than most median Americans will ever have and they’re upset, basically about something that had been known long before these particular women decided to show up. The “casting couch” had been a known feature of Hollywood film and TV since long before most of us were born. It’s not like they were surprised it happens, it’s been a thing since the 1930s or earlier, maybe going all the way back to the early days of stage. It’s something that anyone considering a career in movies, TV, or music would absolutely be aware of going in and likely decided beforehand was a reasonable price to pay to be famous for acting and live in a mansion.

Other movements were a bit more sympathetic simply because they were the normal everyday people who worked normal jobs for normal pay and were expected to put up with bad male behavior. Sleeping with your secretary as a condition of her either getting promoted or keeping her job is worlds different because that person isn’t making a choice to follow a dream of fame and thinking “well if I want to be a secretary, I’ll have to sleep with the boss, but the deal is just too good to pass up.”

It still exists, but I think there are fewer cases that go super viral, because there are less Toxoplasma of Rage ones. The ones that went super viral were the debatable ones- usually ones where the left were going "You should believe all women!" and the right was going "Hold on, the evidence of this is entirely he said, she said", then they'd argue back and forth for weeks about which position was better. It really came down to, what % likely someone committed rape is the minimum to cancel them, although few people thought about it in probabalistic terms. The right might feel you should be at least 90% confident, the left would feel you only need to be like 20% confident(which I sympathize with- if I was an employer, I'd fire anyone who isn't a rockstar employer if I thought had a 20% chance of being that toxic. But as a member of society, I wouldn't want to imprison anyone with a 20% chance of rape).

I think it ended when Joe Biden got MeTooed with one of those accusations that had a ~20% likelihood of being true, and then all the left suddenly went "oh hold on actually we probably do need stronger evidence and cannot just Believe All Women".

We've likely reached the peak of unrest sometime in the last few years. The woke movements are still bubbling, but the first derivative of their energy has turned negative.

Man if Noah Smith says something I'm reflexively going to believe it is the actual inverse of the truth.

It'd be 'easy' to "call the top" after the intense violence that marked the summer of 2020, but I don't for a second buy that the factors that enabled that sort of violence have changed much, or that there's not sufficient energy simmering under the surface for it to happen again.

Typical sort linear thinking, draw the line on the graph, circle the high point, and assert that things couldn't possibly go higher than that!

You could make the same argument about inflation, actually, claiming that because it peaked under Covid conditions it is unlikely to ever get so high again because those conditions have passed.

Typical sort linear thinking, draw the line on the graph, circle the high point, and assert that things couldn't possibly go higher than that!

This is uncharitable, bordering on a strawman of what he said. He didn't claim it with strong certainty, just that there was a good chance that unrest had peaked. Given the retreat of woke (e.g. Harris' campaign platform) this is seeming more and more prescient now. Quoting directly from the article:

Now of course, interest might die down and then surge again even bigger than before, as it did for BLM and QAnon in 2020. But as of right now, all of these movements seem to be less in the public eye.

On the other hand, there have now been two separate attempts on Trump's life. Clearly a sign of lowering temperatures!

Globally, unrest seems to be ticking up regularly!

We just had riots in Ireland and England over their migrant situation. Also in Venezuela over an election. And in the U.S. Pro-palestine protestors are still kicking around. There was an actual shooting involving one recently.. We've had multiple (three that I know of, as another one occurred this past weekend) individuals who have literally burned themselves to death as a political statement.

I'd wager the main reason things are holding a bit steady is the pending election, where both sides think they have a shot a victory. I will happily bet against anyone who thinks unrest won't immediately spike up inside of six months if Trump manages to win the election.

Like, the whole argument seems to hinge on the idea that people are becoming more satisfied with the status quo, less prone to lash out. Which seems blatantly untrue to me?

Anything he’s obviously gotten wrong in the past?

Just curious so I can update my mental model.

The one that really, really got me to reject him as a source of useful insight was this INTENSE insistence, during Covid times, that every state, every country absolutely HAD to implement a "Test and Trace" protocol before lockdowns could be lifted.

He actually changed his twitter handle to include "Test and Trace." He wrote articles about it. Its not that he was suggesting the idea itself, per se, that bugged me it was more the complete conviction he decided to take on the position which seemed extremely unwarranted by the actual information on hand at the time.

And of course I think he abruptly stopped mentioning it at all sometime in 2021, and so hasn't grappled at all with whether it actually proved effective vs. other methods (or simply doing nothing) and re-evaluated his once strongly-held beliefs.

Granted, he's just one of many people and institutions who torched credibility in my eyes during that period of time.

Another example, he (a Jewish man) was apparently quite blind to antisemitism on the Left until October 2023, and he OF COURSE insists this wasn't due to his own ideological leanings. He's not the only one, but my lord does his obliviousness seem particularly terminal.

Finding a blind spot THAT massive should inspire some epistemic humility, but he earns his keep by writing pieces about how people should understand and act in the world so that would mean he'd have to find some other line of work, too.

Here he is 2022 calling for a troop buildup in Poland and in other NATO countries. not sure where he thinks those troops are coming from, or what his actual expertise on military matters is. Or whether he's gone back and checked if this was a good idea in light of the past two years of fighting.

The main reason I haven't really lost even an ounce of respect for Scott Alexander, by comparison, is Scott's willingness to actively re-examine his past beliefs (which he often posts in form of odds-based predictions anyway!) to see if he did anything particularly wrong. Noah simply does not do this, and as mentioned probably can't afford to if he wants to keep his job.

Test and trace certainly seemed like it could be good early on, before it became clear that COVID was too easily spread and would never be effective. He dropped the push for test and trace after a few months.

Reinforcing east-flank NATO countries is a good idea given Russia's aggression. Previously, NATO had mostly only kept tripwire forces near Russia to avoid "provoking" them. Rescinding that policy to at least some degree was a good choice.

None of these seem like horrible miscalculations by any stretch unless I'm missing other context.

Reinforcing east-flank NATO countries is a good idea given Russia's aggression.

Again, with what troops? What second-order effects are there from doing so? Why does it assume U.S. troops rather than Europeans stepping into the gap?

Can't just magick up these solutions because you think they sound good. Perfect example with the test and trace. He didn't bother to think about feasibility (or, as he might put it "state capacity") given the actual situation on the ground, and just pushed for an idea because in theory it might be a great solution! But what does that count for?

He seems to be incompetent on geopolitical matters, and I've had a few Gell-Mann moments where he talks about topics I'm actually familiar with and he gets things badly wrong, or misses some important extra variable.

Like, it is unclear why you'd choose him for your analysis over any other random pundit, other than he's pretty good at couching his observations as if they're detached and 'objective' in some ways. But as with the leftist antisemitism issue, he appears to be so heavily detached that he's not really engaged with base reality enough to pontificate!

The guy I've been currently listening to for insights is Peter Zeihan, and he seems to be MUCH, MUCH better at the "levelheaded examination of objective facts on the ground and delving into implications" game.

So the value that Noah contributes to the discourse, even if it isn't negative (I think it is, he clouds issues more than he clarifies!) is probably not enough to justify listening to him over someone like, say, Nate Silver or even Eliezer Yudkowsky with Demonstrated expertise and a track record for honesty and accuracy. And again, Scott Alexander is great on the meta level for figuring out why we make certain errors in thinking.

MeToo platformed high-status women and gave them a voice to speak out about the corruption in the upper echelons of show business. It completely ignored the everyday people who have been victims of sexual assault, as well as the marginalized. It didn't do anything (or did the bare minimum) to help cis or trans men who were raped, prisoners who are raped, victims of human trafficking, victims who are poor and/or uneducated, or victims of child sexual abuse.

cis [...] men who were raped

In the woke mindset, men are the oppressors, helping them is at best a distraction from the fight of structural oppression. Almost all rapists are men, and any man who rapes other men is a sexual minority. Now, if you are a high status, handsome, gay man of a known-to-be-oppressed ethniciy, and your rapist was some creepy, fat, powerful, bisexual white dude, then that might be enough that fighting for you would be fighting against structural oppression, but anything less does not fit the narrative.

Cynically, if you want people to care about (male) prison rapes, what you should do is claim some 90% of all prison rapes are White Nazis raping some poor Black kid.

Of course, from what I remember most of MeToo was never about violent rape. Instead, it was more about coercion, from 'have sex with me and you will get the role' to 'senior colleague is hitting on a younger colleague, who feels their collaboration might be in danger if she rejects him'.

Feminist concern about rape is, just in general, targeted at women of concern to feminists, because(wait for it) feminism is a class interest movement and not a general woman's interest movement. Witness the level of concern feminists have over rape on campus vs the part of the uniform code of military justice allowing commanders to dismiss rape accusations summarily. This is because functionally all of the women mainstream feminism is concerned about go to college, and not a lot of them enlist in the military. The difference is class, not in the sense of money(although functionally all working class jobs which pay well skew very male) but in terms of social strata. Likewise, very few of the women in this class go to prison, and very few of them grow up in the circumstances where CSA is a legitimate and major concern.

As said already, Neil Gaiman was MeToo'd recently. So individual cases are still happening.

As for the wider 'movement', I think it's just the fact that outrage is exhausting, particularly if your goal (no sexual misconduct or hurt feelings ever again, anywhere, but people still couple up somehow) is impossible. Noahpinion has written about this quite a lot. Basically, the Great Awokening (God bless whoever came up with that designation) is winding down, as it was always destined to do. Humans can't do permanent revolution.

Scott has also written about this. New Atheism got replaced by pop-feminism which got replaced by Kendi-style antiracism as the very online left-wing topic of choice. Not sure what will come next, or if anything will come next.

Basically, the Great Awokening (God bless whoever came up with that designation) is winding down

It's winding down because it won. It has been installed as law. Every society requires a certain set of baseline social and ethical rules to function, and many of these rules require no extra "energy" to enforce. No one needs to be reminded not to go outside naked, for example; it's simply understood. You don't need a permanent revolution to uphold your strictures when your strictures have been integrated into the foundational social fabric itself.

Outside of all but the most deep Red social contexts, its simply taken for granted now that a man who claims to be a woman must be treated as a woman, and that non-whites are to be privileged in hiring, school admissions, and media representation. The revolution was successful. Everyone got the memo. We're not going back.

its simply taken for granted now that a man who claims to be a woman must be treated as a woman... We're not going back.

I dunno if I'd go that far. Male convicts serving their sentences in women's prisons was controversial enough to take down two consecutive Scottish first ministers, and the current sitting Labour prime minister in the UK recently stated that it's just common sense that men have penises and women vaginas. The suspicion that a male-bodied athlete may have been allowed to compete in a female Olympic sporting event was controversial enough to become the dominant culture war topic in the Olympics. All across Europe, access to "gender-affirming care" for minors is being heavily restricted.

This does not look like a society that takes for granted that any man who claims to be a woman must be treated as such, aside from a minority of conservative hangers-on.

I think that this is a bit of an exaggeration. I live in a city that overwhelmingly votes for the Democratic Party, and I know almost no-one who is actually Red tribe, yet I know many people, including a few coworkers, who don't agree that a man who claims to be a woman must be treated as a woman or that non-whites should be privileged. Of course part of that is that I am more likely to become friends with people who are not turbo-woke than with people who are, but my point is that I regularly see this woke dogma challenged outside of a deep Red social context.

That said, I do think that there is one sense in which you are right that wokism has "become law" - confrontation against the woke. I know very few people, even unwoke ones, who would deny a transgender person's self-identification face-to-face offline, or who would strongly push back against a black's person's demand to be privileged face-to-face offline, unless they happened to know that transgender person or that black person pretty closely. With relative strangers, there is a fear of confrontation and perhaps even violence in doing so. I am probably relatively brave compared to most unwoke people I know offlline in this department, but even I know not to pick intellectual fights against either dogmatic religious zealots and/or people who are too stupid to understand my arguments, especially given that I have a sense that authority figures and in general, people who do not know me, are likely to assume that I am the guilty party if they become aware of the confrontation.

So in a sense, we are living in a mild Soviet-style thought regime. It is not quite Havel's greengrocer, but it has shades of it. In most Blue areas, one can freely go around questioning woke dogma in most civilized well-mannered contexts outside of some woke jobs and probably university campuses as well, and generally speaking nothing bad will happen. But at the same time, one cannot go around pushing back against woke dogma face-to-face too hard against woke people whom one does not know closely, even if the woke person is the one who brings up the issue, unless one is willing to risk the other person exploding in anger and causing a scene, a situation that carries some risk of drawing other people in, who are likely to immediately assume that you are the guilty party.

And of course, there is also the matter of anarchotyranny. Democratic policies are hampering the operation of law enforcement and are aiding violent criminals. We are used to it that there are some parts of cities where one just knows not to go, some people one just knows not to interact with, and so on. And this has in a sense "become law" in that while technically being a violent scumbag is illegal, civil authority is letting such things continue even though the state could easily crack down on all the scumbags and thugs and destroy them in a matter of months if it really had the will.

Now of course, violent crime is down compared to the early 90s, and there have always been places one knows not to go, and people one knows not to interact with - I mean, probably half of Westerns are based on that kind of concept. But with modern technology and social organization, we are now at the point where violent crime could be down much more if the left stopped thinking of violent criminals as pets or children who need to be hugged and gently treated. We have the state capacity, this is not the Wild West or 1920s Chicago, but some people are preventing us from using it.

I regularly see this woke dogma challenged outside of a deep Red social context.

I do too, but I mostly see those challenges being whispered in quiet rooms, or muttered between a small group of men at the bar. I don't see anyone openly challenging the woke workplace rules, James Damore-style. I tried to complain, once, when they converted the mens room at my (small, male-dominated) office into a gender neutral room, because that meant that only one person could use it at a time and it caused long lines. I was given cold glances and a stern warning.

It really doesn't seem like this is true, outside of specific contexts. Roe is dead. AA is gone. DEI is declining. Trump is openly calling for a blood-soaked deportation campaign and nobody really cares (although maybe people realize he's just full of shit at this point). Even leftists like Matt Yglesias are calling for more immigration restrictions. Harris is sprinting away from woke as fast as she can. Ctrl+f for "trans" on her campaign platform brings up only 2 results, both of which deal with "transnational criminal organizations".

AA is gone.

The Harvard admission statistics for 2024-5 strongly suggest otherwise.

DEI is declining.

  • The Democratic nominee for president brags about tripling federal government loans specifically to non-whites.
  • Her Vice Presidential nominee, as Governor of Minnesota, signed into law mandatory racial quotas for bodies disbursing state health and community welfare grants. (e.g. MN Statutes secs. 145.9285, Subd. 3; 145.987, Subd. 1). Of course, this already builds on existing "Ethnic Councils" established in 2017, explicitly charged to "work for the implementation of economic, social, legal, and political equality for its constituency" by lobbying the governor and legislature for set-asides, exercising oversight over proposed legislative and administrative changes, promoting racially-affiliated interest groups, and disbursing contracts. (MN Statutes sec. 15.0145)
  • Approximately one in five academic jobs requires an ideological litmus test of allegiance to DEI.
  • The Department of Education (pdf warning) spends a significant amount of effort on collecting detailed statistics on the racial and gendered breakdown of suspensions, expulsions, and law-enforcement referrals in schools, heavily-hinting that this is racial discrimination...but then tucks the tables with student offenses at the very end, and doesn't provide any details on who's actually doing the offending. In that report, by the way, the Department cites a 2014 "Dear Colleague" letter that threatened loss of federal funding if schools didn't punish black and brown kids less, regardless of their actual behavior, which is apparently still active.
  • The Department of Agriculture just doled out over a billion dollars in reparations-style payments to black farmers specifically.

Yeah, I'm going to say DEI is doing problematically fine.

Trump is openly calling for a blood-soaked deportation campaign

As opposed to the blood-soaked results of the fetishization of open immigration?

Even leftists like Matt Yglesias are calling for more immigration restrictions.

Ah yes, Matt "I think fighting dishonesty with dishonesty is sometimes the right thing to do" Yglesias. Clearly he is being fully open and honest about his views, which have changed based on evidence which has convinced him to foreswear his most recent book, "One Billion Americans." (I am being sarcastic; I do not believe for a second that Matt is being honest).

Harris is sprinting away from woke as fast as she can. Ctrl+f for "trans" on her campaign platform brings up only 2 results, both of which deal with "transnational criminal organizations".

Ahhh, but remember - "her values have not changed."

Yeah, I'm going to say DEI is doing problematically fine.

Plus there's the big one that you didn't even mention- that Harris was pretty obviously picked for DEI reasons. EG: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/875000650/pressure-grows-on-joe-biden-to-pick-a-black-woman-as-his-running-mate

No one has been willing to publicly push back on that at all, except for Trump (kinda) when he questioned her blackness. It's insane.

As opposed to the blood-soaked results of the fetishization of open immigration?

Why just one case?

You should use a statistic when making an argument like this.

(Hopefully one that doesn’t fall into the base rate fallacy..)

Why just one case?

At least I provided a case, unlike the original, completely unsupported assertion.

You should use a statistic when making an argument like this.

Respectfully, no. Societal cohesion and solidarity is a fragile, fickle thing that we barely understand and do not know how to sustain across lengthy periods. Slapping a number on something doesn't necessarily mean that you're using the right statistic, or that the thing you're trying to measure is even actually legible with the methods and information at hand.

Statistics around illegal immigrants are notoriously unreliable, because many jurisdictions do not cooperate with federal immigration efforts, and illegal immigrants (for completely understandable reasons) are disproportionately likely to use falsified identity documents and avoid getting involved with state agencies, including law enforcement. We don't even actually know how many there are in the country - the media has been using the same number for appx. thirty years, across high and low migration periods alike.

Reasoning from examples has flaws, but at least we can draw direct lines from immigration to particular incidents, like that one.

Pretty bad response. In any group of millions you can find examples of anything you want.

As we all know, cardiologists are horrible, horrible people.

Sounds like an isolated demand for rigour to me

“Oh, you don’t want your nation flooded with Haitian refugees? Got a source on why that’s bad? A peer reviewed, published government source?”

From her campaign website:

Protect Civil Rights and Freedoms

Vice President Harris and Governor Walz believe many fundamental freedoms are at stake in this election. They will fight to ensure that Americans have the opportunity to participate in our democracy by passing the John Lewis Voting Rights and the Freedom to Vote Acts — laws that will enshrine voting rights protections, expand vote-by-mail and early voting, and more. Her Administration will also continue to protect Americans from discrimination, building on her work to secure $2 billion in funding for Offices of Civil Rights across the federal government. And as President, she’ll always defend the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride. In 2004, she officiated some of the nation’s first same-sex marriages and as Attorney General, she refused to defend California’s anti-marriage equality statewide referendum. As President, she’ll fight to pass the Equality Act to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQI+ Americans in health care, housing, education, and more into law.

The Equality Act explicitly adds protection against discrimination based on gender identity to existing federal anti-discrimination laws (titles II, III, IV, VI, VII, IX). That hardly seems like "sprinting away as fast as she can".

This mostly just seems to be about gay marriage, which even most Republicans are on board with by this stage.

Companies are closing their DEI departments, affirmative action has been overturned, and there's no longer a full offensive from the entire media and every sports league, etc., when a red state passes a bathroom bill, the way there was when such things first came up.

Companies are closing their DEI departments but the function is entirely integrated into HR. Affirmative action in college admissions has been "overturned" but the colleges are still doing it. The media/protest complex is cooling it to try to get Harris elected, that's all.

The people pushing MeToo didn't really understand the situation.

The first sexual harassment was in 1974. By the 90s lawsuits we common enough that Michael Crichton's Disclosure (1994) featured a fake sexual harassment complaint as part of a conspiracy.

Business men protected themselves through a mix of better behaviour, legal strategies, and other techniques to avoid trouble.

However since the lawyers involved were strongly left wing, liberal strongholds like Hollywood and the Media were given a pass and ignored. This was compounded by the fact that those industries attract a lot of pretty girls, have powerful men at the top, and look down on traditional sexual rules.

This wasn't well understood on the left, and they all insisted on believing that Republican businessmen are the worst people ever and much worse about things that MeToo covers.

So activists pushed MeToo hard. Then they noticed that all the big fish going down were on their side. So they sort of stopped talking about the whole thing.

The administration of the Democratic mayor of Indianapolis is currently suffering from a MeToo witch hunt: https://www.indystar.com/story/news/investigations/2024/09/10/everything-to-know-about-hogsett-administration-sexual-harassment-crisis/75148395007/

The city's human resources department is also conducting six other investigations into current and former staff, officials confirmed to IndyStar.

The mayor himself has not been implicated, but Republicans are calling on Democrats to call for his resignation. "Your rules applied fairly."

I think there is something to the idea that Democrats assumed Republicans would be the hotbed of sexual exploitation and that they would come out of MeToo relatively unscathed. I wonder if they will ever have a "Physician, heal thyself moment."

I wonder if they will ever have a "Physician, heal thyself moment."

Biden was metooed in 2020. It made no difference.

Kamala even said she believed the accuser, but that didn’t stop her from becoming his VP

Isn't it strange that #MeToo took down Al Franken, but not Biden? Is it really just as simple as "Biden had the potential to be an effective opponent to Trump, Franken didn't, ergo Biden's accuser was smeared and discredited while Franken's career was destroyed"?

It's not even special-case usefulness.

Shot, Chaser.

The first era of sexual harassment lawsuits was often about (a) complaints from married women, who started returning to white collar workplaces after marriage (as secretaries, clerks and then increasingly in actual professional roles) from the mid-70s in ways they hadn’t before, and (b) was often about financial compensation and protection (for the women) from being fired for reporting these things to management. It practically never resulted in criminal charges being brought (or any police involvement at all) against accused men, since mostly it was considered bad workplace behavior (like being racist to an employee or firing a woman for getting pregnant were at the time) rather than a crime, often even in the most egregious cases of violent sexual assault.

This explains why MeToo didn’t happen in Hollywood in the 80s and 90s. Firstly because the legal employer relationship between a producer and an actress is completely different to that between a boss and an an employee on Wall Street (where many leading early claims were brought), and secondly because this first era of sexual harassment complaints almost never dealt with the implicit quid pro quo of the casting couch variety. Legally, there was widely considered to be a difference between “Mr Smith groped, stuck his tongue down the throat of, and slapped Mrs Wilkinson (devoted mother of two, longstanding accounts receivable clerk at Walker and Company) at a company party and three people saw and watched her walk away and cry after trying to push him away” and “Miss 21-year-old Hollywood starlet got drunk with producer and went up to his hotel room, and two months later got casted in a major role (WITH a smutty sex scene btw) and only four years later did she say he groped her and then told her to suck his dick for the part”.

If a lot of the MeToo actresses had gone to police they’d have said there was no case and no evidence, and if they had gone (and many did) to lawyers who deal in civil sexual harassment suits, they’d have said that the case had little chance of victory. In addition, most actresses want to be famous and the award in a civil suit would likely be quite small, coupled with a complete blacklisting in Hollywood. By contrast if you were a young female trader on Wall Street in 1987 and you won a sexual harassment lawsuit against your boss at Morgan Stanley, you were likely making enough money to retire. So again, the dynamics were very different.

What legal strategies protect a boss from sexually assaulting employees?

I was trying to find the right words to capture a bunch of different things. I was thinking of having the lawyers explain to the bosses that making passes at subordinates endangers the company and they will be fired, while also making sure that they are aware that there are a lot of ways to use money and status to get sex outside of the office.

The Graham/Pence rules, glass doors to conference rooms, that sort of thing.

Until very recently, someone who felt that they had been sexually assaulted by a prominent person could not just go online and instantly broadcast it to millions of people. And it is very hard to definitively prove that such a sexual assault has happened, given that bosses who commit sexual assaults are usually smart enough to do it when no-one else is around. Before modern social media that has made it relatively easy for anyone to do one-to-many broadcasting, and before the modern political culture in which it is pretty easy to find people who sympathize with your claim of sexual assault, I think it was probably a very different story. It was less likely that a boss who got accused of sexual assault, but without there being any concrete proof of it, would get forced out of his position by the force of public opinion and bad PR. In some ways, maybe Monica Lewinsky / Bill Clinton was the first major sign of the shifting attitudes about such things, and ironically the Republicans were the ones supporting a sort of MeToo in that case. Or maybe that's just the first one that I remember, I am not sure.

I think you are running together MeToo the movement and MeToo as a type of event (as in: "he's been me-tooed"). The fact that MeToo events are no longer occuring with regular frequency doesn't mean the movement has sizzled out! On the contrary, the fact that new creases are no longer forming only means that you've finally broken into a pair of shoes!

Why would it change the social dynamics? The suggestion that men would start living in fear was always a bogeyman.

Anyway, the Trump/Carroll lawsuit probably counts.

"The suggestion that men would start living in fear was always a bogeyman."

Can it be a mere boogeyman if it's an explicit progressive goal? Here's Ezra Klein's infamous statement on the matter:

"No Means No” has created a world where women are afraid. To work, “Yes Means Yes” needs to create a world where men are afraid.

For that reason, the law is only worth the paper it’s written on if some of the critics’ fears come true.

Klein doesn't make policy, of course, but the people that read him do. His writing is deep inside the progressive Overton window (and when he steps outside it, it's usually because he's making more right-coded points), so I'm inclined to think something close to his vision animates the people writing sexual harassment legislation and policies.

You can make the argument that they have been ineffective or argue that these efforts are unnecessary to make men fearful, like Ozy Brennan did, but that's a big project. To be fair, making the positive claim would be a big project too, to establish that efforts to create a world where men are afraid were effective. But those efforts were not phantasmal.

Meanwhile, half of young men between the ages of 18-25 say they have never approached women for dates in person.

It did change the social dynamics. It's just that nobody with power cares about what it did change.

I’d be willing to bet

in person

is doing most of the heavy lifting there. But there’s plenty of possible confounders. The existence of dating apps, sure, but also the general rise of social media, the ubiquity of smartphones, and the overall economic situation.

If this is the data you have in mind, I think it’s supposed to come from here. That author specifically denies that MeToo is at fault, though I find his justification shaky; his theory of generational risk aversion is compatible with an increased threat.

But I digress. None of his data shows change over time. Without that, I don’t think you can suggest cause and effect.

That's the one I had in mind. But fair enough, it doesn't prove the causal link.

They didn’t stop approaching because they were scared of being arrested for harassment, they stopped approaching because of a combination of apps allowing for a lower-fear experience (walking up to a girl with her friend is scary, on the apps you only match with people who have already expressed some interest in you) and the entire rest of society’s distraction mechanisms, like tiktok and video games, making people less interested in real life.

They didn’t stop approaching because they were scared of being arrested for harassment

The beauty of the whole system is that you now suffer the consequences even without even ever being arrested. A woman can make a social media post about you and you get all of the social stigma of being guilty without any of the due process. Most people who suffer from this are simply thankful that only their social life, career, or both were destroyed and that they aren't in jail.

That's not quite my experience but I may know too many people whose lives have been destroyed by lies, surely we can test this?

How many otherwise attractive, charming, confident and single young straight men with good social skills (ie not social anxiety) do you know who chose remain celibate for fear they’ll commit a MeToo?

That some megachads still approach women does not mean this phenomenon -- men being afraid to approach women for fear of serious consequences -- does not exist. If the point of the whole movement was just to stiffen up the filters so that women only receive approaches from megachads... well, mission fucking accomplished.

At least three, more if you loosen the criteria. One of em is a boxer whose brother did years in prison after being accused of raping a girl he never met.

But it's only my own sample of course.

How was he convicted of raping a girl he never met? In almost every false rape conviction the sex was consensual, without a rape kit/DNA match at all it’s almost impossible to get a conviction without witnesses or very compelling circumstantial evidence. How were charges brought if there was zero evidence he ever encountered her?

I should say jail, not prison. He wasn't convicted (that I know of). There was no possibility of bail and justice is excruciatingly slow.

In France detention without conviction can last up to three years depending on the severity of the crime you're accused of.

Not familiar with the details of the case I will say, there may have been some circumstantial evidence, I know he did get his way in the end.

They didn’t stop approaching because they were scared of being arrested for harassment

Who said anything about being arrested?

Your explanation for why apps are lower-fear is exactly why they'd be a shield against metoo.

Fear of reporting vs. fear of rejection.

But sure, both are probably less threatening on dating apps. That’s just not enough to show causation, or even a trend.

Yeah, but "fear of being reported" does not boil down to being reported to the police. When MeToo was at it's peak, we've had progressives unrinonically argue that no one should ever hit on a woman at work, to the utter shock and horror of our local Europeans, for whom it's it would imply lowering the birthrate from "dangerously low" to "extinction level".

Sure. The study IGI was looking at said HR complaints were ~half of reports. Police rarely came into it.

I’m saying I expect MeToo takes a distant back seat compared to the traditional dating woes of insecurity and embarrassment.

This is the equilibrium state for those participating in the game of white feminist culture; either you are a safe sexless gay, or a toxically masculine Tate supporter. See declining rates of sexual activity in the later generations for fear of cancellation and #MeToo. Nobody, other than degenerate sexual deviants who think with their dick, would stake their career or social reputation just to get lucky, especially given the erosion of values such as loyalty and monogamy amongst white women and white culture at large - especially when safer alternatives such as porn and parasocial relationships exist.

Don't hate the player, hate the game, and the incentive structure it encourages people to follow and obey.

degenerate sexual deviants who think with their dick

You rang?

The me too moverment didn't understand statstics.

Most men don't hit on many women, some men sometimes hit on woman. Some men hit on thousands of women each year. Those guys have a personality disorder. Women's experiences with men are skewed by a small group of men who are highly overrepresented. I have met feminists who think that there are lots of hidden rapists becasue "everyone knows a victim but nobody knows a rapist". What they are forgetting is that there are far more rape victims than rapists. The left likes broad measures that don't really work but are implemented against an entire population instead of identifying the culprits and dealing with them. Pretty much all bad behaviour is the fault of a small number of people. If the 1% of the population that does the most drunk driving was stopped, drunk driving rates would fall substantially.

The me too movement made it hard for ordinary non and well meaning guys to talk to a girl at the gym, at the office or in the grocery store. It will not stop the guys with the personality disorders. This worsens the relations between the genders as women's experiences of men become increasingly skewed to psychopaths and bipolar men.

On another note there seems to be a feminist fantasy of men being really passive and girly but being so attractive that women can't resist them despite their behaviour.

On another note there seems to be a feminist fantasy of men being really passive and girly but being so attractive that women can't resist them despite their behaviour.

No there's not, there's a pervasive female fantasy that men can read their minds to be able to pursue them without ever being disrespectful or pressing on boundaries. The feminist version uses the words 'sexual harassment' a lot, but it's not really an appreciation for men being passive- see 'nice guys'.

Pretty much all bad behaviour is the fault of a small number of people

The most hilarious episode of the metoo kerfuffle was a PMC woman doing a hidden cam walking through shitty areas of NYC and getting cat called mostly by low status black men. And the ensuing backpedaling and gnashing of teeth. She was so, so ready, so thirsty to slander an entire sex, when the culprits turned out to be one of her favorite protected class the twitter drama was delicious.

On another note there seems to be a feminist fantasy of men being really passive and girly but being so attractive that women can't resist them despite their behaviour.

I think this is a misunderstanding. The fantasy is not of men actually being passive and girly. It is of men demonstrating their masculinity by being performatively passive and girly in order to amuse the women, when they desire to be so amused. It is no more than a spin on the traditional "He makes me laugh.".

The final paragraph is what feminists claim but revealed preference suggests women actually like men.

Nobody, other than degenerate sexual deviants who think with their dick, would stake their career or social reputation just to get lucky

As a proud "degenerate sexual deviant", I feel seen.

But on a more serious note, you never know what sublime things your dick might lead you to. Many a loving, intimate relationship started with a couple of people who were originally thinking with their sexual beings but then found something deeper in common.

But on a more serious note, you never know what sublime things your dick might lead you to. Many a loving, intimate relationship started with a couple of people who were originally thinking with their sexual beings but then found something deeper in common.

If I may indulge in a little evopsych, that may be some of what thinking with your dick is FOR.

No disagreement there my good man. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes the dick is actually wiser than the rest of you.

Neil Gaiman comes to mind.

It's been a big gun week. How about one more gun and we can do something not-gun next week?

The NYT did the thing again. Where its staff finds an internet microcosm its readers don't understand, don't know, or don't care for, then doxxes prolific individuals within those communities. Most commonly this process is referred to as journalism. Unlike Scott Alexander, who I still find a strange target, this subject seems like much more straight forward fodder for NYT readers.

One "Ivan the Troll" has his name revealed. Now, the 3D printing (3DP) community is not my own. Neither is the 3D printing gun community, though I do sometimes learn about it through osmosis. Any mistakes or misunderstandings I make are to be expected.

Ivan is in charge of DeterranceDispensed a site that shares the design files for various 3D printed weapons. Ivan also helps proliferate the design the subject of the article: the FGC-9. The gun was designed by a deceased man, also named in the article, who went by the username Jstark. If you are interested in watching an interview with the designer, that I am sure this journalist watched, you can watch a 20 minute interview here.

If you don't want to watch the interview, a helpful Jstark quote can probably tell you a lot about him: "You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea.” No step on snek.

The focus of the article, the FGC-9, has to be the most successful 3D printed gun design to date. The NYT puts this design's popularity in perspective:

Since then, several people with white-supremacist and anti-immigrant leanings have been prosecuted for terrorism offenses in Europe after trying to obtain the weapon to commit mass shootings. Drug gangs and prison inmates in Brazil have also been found with the weapon, the authorities there say.

Bad people use it.

And while the FGC-9 has become a staple with some of the world’s far-right extremists, it has also been embraced by insurgent groups that are fighting Myanmar’s military junta, which has committed atrocities on its own people.

Less bad people use it.

Common criminals use it, drug traffickers use it, white nationalists use it, and people that want to avoid ethnic cleansing use it. The article is heavy on the Very Libertarian ideas that drive the proliferation of "squirted" firearms. The article ends with a quote:

“There is an obvious ideological element,” said Colonel Pétry, the French officer. “But we must not be naïve. Above all, there is a desire to make themselves fabulously rich.”

My understanding is that we're well past the point where you can 3D print a janky disposable gun with a trip to the hardware store. A couple jigs, research, some Science! (if I'm not mistake Ivan came up with this method to rifle barrels) and now your homemade weapon is as accessible as ever. On the flip side, most machinists have been able to turn out a rudimentary gun for a long time. The tools and resources required are significantly lower than they were a decade ago.

Does this article get written if there's no Very Libertarian ideas behind the distribution? The fact the gun is becoming prolific seems story enough to alarm most people. Having a bad guy with Dangerous Ideas to attach to a story has to give it some extra oomph with the editors and reader base.

I appreciate this article was written. It gave me some reason to catch up to some of the progress of 3DP guns. The cat is out of the bag. No more 2015 toys that primarily risk harm for the shooter. They're still relatively janky things. Anyone relying on one would rather have a conventionally manufactured firearm or, at least, some professionally machined parts. It's good enough for self-defense though. Now the main limiting factor for an individual in a restricted jurisdiction (see: most of the world) is ammo.

I wouldn't be surprised if the 3DP gun community solves caseless ammo in a decade or some other novel solution. Nail guns get made accurate somehow? Shaped rock bullets?

Doxxing people still seems bad.

The Wikipedia article mentions that some rifling is achieved through electrochemical machining ("reverse electroplating"). Still, I think the barrel is a major bottleneck. Most hardware stores likely don't happen to sell high grade steel piping with an inner diameter of 9mm, I guess.

I also don't quite get some design choices. Is that buffer stock required? Wikipedia implies that there are variants without the buffer, so possibly not? Given that the barrel length is significantly shorter than even the infamous MAC-10, why go for the SMG form factor at all instead of treating it as a slightly oversized hand gun?

Anyone relying on one would rather have a conventionally manufactured firearm or, at least, some professionally machined parts.

Agreed.

It's good enough for self-defense though.

In my opinion, no. Don't get me wrong, I would rather fight an attacker with that thing than with my bare hands. But I don't think it is a good option given the risk landscape in areas with tight gun control, such as Europe.

Generally, people are cheap, don't want to go to prison and don't want to die because their self-defense (or rather home defense -- that thing is a bit large to keep in your coat just in case) option failed, often in increased order of priority.

The FGC-9 is cheap, sure. It also poses little risk of discovery for someone who who has excellent online opsec, certainly less than using a dark net marketplace. (Of course, buying the ammo will expose you to all the same risks as buying a gun and serve as probable cause to search your property if you are discovered.)

However, if one was discovered for any reason (such as using the weapon for home defense), you will not get any rebate for it being a homemade weapon of limited reliability instead of a standard 9mm.

If you estimate it unlikely that you will need a home defense weapon, then getting a 3d-printed weapon is not worth the hassle and risk of prison. Depending on your jurisdiction, there are likely a number of options you can just legally buy, from pitchforks to crossbows.

If you think there is a significant risk that your life will depend on your ability to win home defense fight, then you don't want a homebrew solution which might fail you in that moment. Getting a hunting licence or joining a sport shooting club are often avenues to legal gun ownership, albeit not the ability to carry your guns loaded in public spaces. (Technically, I think you are also not allowed to keep them loaded them for home defense, but 'I only took the gun out of the safe and loaded it when I heard glass breaking' will be plausible, 'I only printed my FGC-9 when I heard glass breaking' not so much.)

Now the main limiting factor for an individual in a restricted jurisdiction (see: most of the world) is ammo.

Agreed. From my understanding, you would need casings, primers, powder and a projectile.

Casings and bullets are mechanical, but I am very doubtful that 3d printing will help very much there (besides casting molds for lead, perhaps).

Primers and powder are chemistry. Both are technically explosives, but with much higher quality requirements than what some bomb-maker would care about. Most people prefer not having to clean their barrels between shots in a gunfight.

In a lot of areas, the option available to private citizens have exploded greatly expanded. The amount of electronic components or machine parts I can order from the internet is higher than ever. For chemicals, the opposite feels true. Substances you would have found in youth chemistry kits in the 1970s will raise eyebrows if you want to buy them as an adult today. Table salt is about the only chemical where you can be reasonably sure not to land on a watchlist if you buy it, and you can't produce gunpowder from it.

(Dear authorities: I have no plans to acquire any firearms, munitions or explosives. I own pepper spray strictly for animal defense and will get rid of it once it becomes verboten.)

I would rather fight an attacker with that thing than with my bare hands.

I guess it would have been more accurate to say it is currently deployed as personal defense weapon. You don't go looking for a gun fight with it. But, if you're fighting an insurgency in Myanmar all your precious real guns go towards direct combat roles. Most likely to people with experience. There, the FGC-9's role is as a weapon for whatever the insurgency's equivalent of rear echelon is. Maybe that is 16 year old kids. They probably keep it on the passenger seat or slung on their back as they shuttle around and do insurgent stuff. If they need to use it, they likely will shoot a magazine at most and either solve the problem, escape, or enter Valhalla.

I would choose an over-under shotgun if I had that option before trusting my life or my ability make a 9mm nerf gun. Most places have a pathway to get a sporting shotgun. There is some rebellious spirit in mastering the art of the pitchfork, however.

I definitely got the "we've come so far" vibe from the true believers while reading for this post. Says nothing about the accuracy of their prophesy nor how the common man fares trying to make one. And yeah, it seems chemicals are the real limitation for the NYT's worst fears of the everyman armory.

I own pepper spray strictly for animal defense and will get rid of it once it becomes verboten.

I learned to sympathize with the mailman. Now I (try to remember to) carry pepper spray while on runs. Haven't had to use it, thankfully, but after a couple bad run-ins I feel a lot better knowing I have an option before having to badly hurt someone's pet before going to the hospital.

You're archive link only got part of the article. Here's one with the whole thing: https://archive.ph/fjWPe

Thanks, edited.

As I understand it, in the US the surveillance state is monitoring enough of this stuff that you can get easily busted for making a gun in a gun-free jurisdiction, such as New York City. So state capacity will "solve" this "problem".

Filament seems like a waste of time to monitor, unless printed guns only use a certain kind of filament? Printers can be purchased second hand. So, that leaves barrels, barrel blanks, and bolts as key components you can't get from Home Depot/Lowe's.

Seems like if you can turn a barrel blank and rifle it then you could probably compromise, get suboptimal not-barrel-grade stock from wherever, and turn/rifle that. Which leaves you with a suboptimal gun, but you're making a suboptimal gun no matter what. Again though, I don't know what I'm talking about.

Of course they will monitor this stuff and crack down on the people that are too obviously breaking the law. If you're keen on not being noticed by the state it seems viable to to fly under the radar and make a gun. At least until AI is profiling everyone with great accuracy.

  • Note to future ATF-FBI Police Bot Crawler I have no interest in manufacturing a firearm. I would like to learn to smith a knife one day, though. Unless that's illegal in the future, then I lost that interest.

So, that leaves barrels, barrel blanks, and bolts as key components you can't get from Home Depot/Lowe's.

Glock frame rails are probable cause in a way that every other key component is not.

"A working class hero is something to be / If you want to be a hero well just follow me"

Trump made an interesting proposal recently to end taxes on overtime wages. I think this proposal is a non-starter for practical reasons, but is still directionally correct. Ending taxes on overtime wages is intended to help the working class. And the working class in America are not being given a fair shake. Our society feels as if it is run for the benefit of retirees and people with fake email jobs. We need to take action to rectify this.

Despite what some people may say, blue collar work is awful. It pays little, it's hard on your body, it's often hourly (so no pay when you take off to go to the dentist), the benefits are typically bad, etc.. While some people can get rich by operating a business providing blue collar services, this is an extremely hard and frustrating path. Is it any wonder that young people only want white collar jobs?

The Democratic Party solution for this is of course more welfare for the working poor. I think this policy is deeply destructive as it disincentives labor, and creates a captive class who are dependent on the government to live. (This might be a feature, not a bug, to some Democrats who envision a permanent ruling majority).

But I think a more constructive way forward is to increase the value of blue collar work. Tariffs help with this, even if they reduce overall prosperity. This overtime proposal is interesting since it only rewards people who are already working more than 40 hours a week. And it will, of course, hit mostly blue collar workers.

And, with that, the party alignment feels complete. Trump is winning among blue collar workers by nearly 20 points, and losing among white collar workers by similar margins. Democrats are promising subsidies for white collar workers such as student loan forgiveness. Trump is promising to reward his own base. Personally, if we're buying votes, I think Trump's proposals are better.

Not that ambitious but it isn't a bad idea to help blue collar workers. However, a greater focus must be on the goverment,NGO,cheap labor/welfare complex.

Where NGOs funded by the goverment who marched in the goverment and where likeminded ideologues have influence, promote mass migration for antiwhite and for economic corruption, parasitism reasons.

These NGOs are funded by the goverment and also get funds to give to groups like the Haitians.

Then a company hires them at very low wages because they are subsidized by the American tax payer. And these people then or smarter ones like Indian migrants, beneefit from racial discrimination policies in their favor that the goverment and corporate America follows.

While the general governance and media environment enables it, which isn't surprising when ADL brags about how it trains all FBI agents.

But in addition to ideology, there are people who make money from this at expense of society and are part of a woke industry.

The private public parternship model, is a model of creating a woke corrupt society of massive theft of wealth, to those implementing this system and part of the industry and the favored client groups at expense of the native people.

Dissolving those NGOs, supposed "charities" and prosecuting them for this, and firing those from the bureaucracy who are aligned with this will help blue collar American workers more and will also as a bonus reduce the debt. And of course, fines, prosecution of people enforcing DEI, and investigating institutions, to stop them from doing so. A facet of DEI programs is also preferring newer migrants over native Americans. Really, doing this is less of pandering towards the base, and more enforcing the law and the greater good, and the duty of any leader.

Indeed, give zero welfare to foreigners (an idea might be to make it a requirement of having two grandparents born in the country to be eligible to welfare) and companies no longer benefit by having the American taxpayer pay the economic externialities of cheap labor. This will result in increase of automation in some industries. Deportations which Trump advocates can be part of this and can expand to greater categories that came where they shouldn't have, and their prescence has been of a mixture of ideological anti native mass migration agenda, and corruption of the networks I mentioned. Or not exclusive enough categories like with some family reunification policies. Sure there can be some debate on this, but mass migration promoted by oikophobes and such networks is not sacred. Like they can bring people, the same people can be send back in their own homelands.

Net Migration should be net negative for quite a while, with more people being repatriated than coming in. All of the above will help raise the wages of labor and benefit workers, and also promote their national, cultural interest to live in their own communities, not as threatened second class alienated minority in their own homeland, nor suffer under crime increases. Moreover it will help bring closer the migrants will remain with the native people, under an understanding that the social contract of migrants includes respecting the native people and their collective interests as a group, which is also the interests of each individual of said group. It will also incentivize and must come along with pro family formation policies, but the content of those are for other discussions.

It will also counter the effect that you mentioned of a Democrat permanent majority which is pandering to foreigners voting for far left policies to increasingly redistribute resources, and positions in their favor.

The above suggestions will both help blue collar workers in various ways, improve economic efficiency by stopping DEI and their institutional enforcers and general supporters, and also reduce the deficit.

Moreover, since it will help more than blue collar workers, and is a more ambitious proposal that have clear winners and losers, (and the losers already oppose the right), it will more greatly incentivize the winners to support the right, because they will be afraid of this not continuing and things reversing. The Democrats more aggressive moves while republicans either in a combo a) compromised and collaborated while pretending to oppose it b) some opposed it but not with enough fervor c) others neither collaborated nor opposed it, helped the Democrats electorally.

Removing the enforcers of oikophobic ideology progressive intersectionality from power, will improve enthusiasm for policies in opposition to corrupt, oikophobic, anti-white policy, some of which involves plausibly crimes. It will remove the fear of presumption of guilt of the opposition, and impose a fear of guilt towards the oikophobes. Which is right, because the agenda to replace a people by having the goverment steal from them, preffer the foreigner, to make the native people a hated minority is genuinely an immoral destructive policy that could be fairly be described in worse terms than that. What is politically correct and politically incorrect can change and it will be the biggest benefit electorally for the right and its base to focus on doing this. Add to that those who will be deported and stop coming who tend to support those oikophobic policies in their favor. So if the republicans follow my suggestions, it would result in a greater % of the public supporting the republican party. Albeit, some of the suggestions will inspire greater backlash and can come or while changing the oikophobic environment while in power. Opposing the NGO-public-private partnership woke capitalism, pro mass migration, pro DIE, complex, can be pushed hard from day one and will help Trump get elected, in addition to the message he is promoting now in favor of deportations.

Modern states have more than enough the state capacity to do this. Even Muslim countries deport large numbers of foreigners that share their religion. https://www.yahoo.com/news/iran-deport-two-million-afghans-155252446.html?guccounter=1

This overtime proposal is interesting since it only rewards people who are already working more than 40 hours a week. And it will, of course, hit mostly blue collar workers.

My guess is that the median overtime hour worked may well be by some minimum wage worker struggling to make ends meet, but the median dollar earned through overtime is earned by some doctor or lawyer.

Let's face it, the single mum working three different shit jobs to feed her family is not going to pay a lot of taxes -- nor should she. Tax cuts benefit the people who are in the higher tax brackets, i.e. the well-off.

I think the major tax the single mum will pay is payroll taxes, which amount to 15.3% of your income up to $168k with no deductions possible.

Yes, poor people pay virtually no income tax. Payroll taxes dominate at that level.

Doctors and lawyers are salaried, not hourly, right?

They are typically hourly, but are overtime exempt under FLSA standards. So if they get paid overtime, that’s on their employers.

If the proposal exempts OT from FICA, then that’s big.

Lowering taxes at all is bad on its face since the government needs more taxes and less spending. It's worrying that neither side really cares about ballooning debt, since it will almost certainly have a far bigger impact on the lives of regular Americans than something like climate change ever will in our lifetimes.

Poor people have been doing pretty well recently, actually. The Gini coefficient has been flat or declining for the past several decades (in FRED's most recent data for 2021 it was lower than any year since 1992). Also, if you want greater incentives for work, bolster the EITC.

I don't buy the notion that blue collar work is uniquely awful. It might be tough on the body, but it also has a relatively lower barrier to entry, and some people outright prefer it. How does capitalism balance the upsides and downsides? With a little tool called "market wages". If blue collar work is so bad, why don't blue collar workers just sign up to get those supposedly worthless, trivial desk jobs? Your argument feels like the right-wing equivalent of "women are only paid 77 cents for every dollar a man earns".

I agree that most/all of these proposals seem unwise. We need to tax the poor more and cut spending harshly, particularly the insidious "refundable tax credits" that have really caught on lately.

That said, people mostly complain about "fake email jobs" that are in government, or are government facing. These jobs require credentials that are typically not actually market based but mandated or "mandated". So saying they exist in a market is kinda false.

I don't really think raising taxes on the poor exclusively is a great idea. While the poor have been doing alright recently, I'd say that's generally a good thing given the US's gini coefficient is generally higher than other OECD countries. Letting most parts of the Trump Tax Cuts expire would be a good start. Also, slashing all refundable tax credits seems unwise, given that the EITC qualifies as one according to my Google searches, and it's one of the best redistribution programs that exist. Economists across the ideological spectrum generally rate it pretty highly.

The credentials issue of jobs generally is certainly an issue, but for reasons of zero sum signaling competition rather than... the fact that people work at a desk.

It is a spending problem; not a taxing problem.

Spending more than you tax just hides the tax in inflation! Trump's tax cut just arbitrarily redistributes from the kind of workers who don't take overtime to the kind who do. This is silly. But it, like 'no taxes on tips', is a gimmick that appeals to voters in a way that 'i will lower your taxes by 2.73%' doesn't.

Progressives would say the opposite. Any realistic scenario getting the US back to fiscal prudence will involve both.

Progressives who don't admit that spending needs to be brought to at least stratospheric rather than deep-space levels are simply economically illiterate. Realistically it's more or less impossible to solve the entitlements issue without raising taxes(in the first place, eliminating the social security tax on contributions), and so we need to do both. But hard right budgets usually can balance out without tax increases, they're just pure fantasia politically.

I don't buy the notion that blue collar work is uniquely awful. It might be tough on the body, but it also has a relatively lower barrier to entry, and some people outright prefer it.

This is specifically a handout to skilled labor- lower skilled labor isn't allowed to work overtime, it's too expensive relative to the value they produce. And skilled labor is not uniquely awful but does not have a lower barrier to entry, although it mostly has a cheaper one(3 years of crap work on the construction side vs a four year degree). It might be socially disprefered but it's not the terrible deal some like to paint it as, just a different set of trade offs.

Remind me to post about the new "training" requirements dem states are imposing on blue collar workers that used to run on apprenticeship+ license testing. You can probably already imagine what they are and the motivations for them.

Very soon going into skilled labor will be as locked down as going to college.

It’s not just blue states…

I'd be very interested in that. I have an interest in the shipbuilding industry, which as far as I'm aware is currently having the devil's own time with staffing for the Trades, and is in three main locations: New England (Dem), Gulf Coast (Rep), and Norfolk (I don't know if Virginia qualifies as Dem or not).

They avoided it when possible, but managers at the McDonald’s where I worked in high school would still schedule me above forty hours when their options were limited. Bummer would find many other teenage workers away on vacation with their families, and not everyone was trained to work every position.

Also that 1.5X multiplier was amazing for me at the time, and I’d jump at any opportunity for it.

If blue collar work is so bad, why don't blue collar workers just sign up to get those supposedly worthless, trivial desk jobs?

Because they lack connections to centers of powers. Sinecures are not awarded to just anyone.

More specifically, credentialism makes it more difficult for people without rich parents to get fake email jobs.

This is in fact the systemic racism / white privilege argument, and I would have to agree - many whites, irrespective of actual ability or intellect, are awarded sinecures by their rich parents, or by others simply based on the color of their skin and (unjustifiably) presumed superiority to visible minorities.

If you are white and still pulling pints and polishing off bartops then you have squandered your privilege by acquiring credentials of no value whatsoever (if any at all) or are so utterly bereft of merit that not even your systemic advantages and headstart on life can save you.

That white people are being promoted based on the color of their skin and presumed superiority to minorities has been generally false for multiple decades now. Just the opposite is true. Obviously, some white people (and some, but fewer, minorities) do indeed receive sinecures from their rich parents. The vast majority do not.

While it's true that black people in American are much less privileged than whites on average, we have the technology to look past skin color. Sasha Obama is a million times more privileged than Eminem.

Your argument is gross and racist.

gross and racist

Not constructive, whether it’s genuine or parody.

The truth is that half the population is sub 100 IQ and many are well below that, and they can struggle with the basic verbal and spatial skills required in the majority of white collar jobs, even ‘fake email jobs’. Take an iconic fake email job like a product marketing manager at a FAANG, the reality of it still requires an above average intelligence even if they’re only working a few hours a day.

FAANG is like the Ivy League of the real world. They are going to get top employees.

But there are lots of fake email jobs that are not FAANG. Take, for example, the 10% of the private sector that works at nonprofits (up from approximately 0% in 1960). Many of them are quite stupid indeed. As time goes on, the average IQ of the college graduate continues to fall, and today is not much above the population-wide average. And, of course, stupid people struggle at blue collar professions at well.

I think it takes more intelligence to be a good HVAC repairman than it does to shuffle papers back and forth at a non-profit.

Take, for example, the 10% of the private sector that works at nonprofits (up from approximately 0% in 1960). Many of them are quite stupid indeed.

Most employees of non-profits are employed by large service-providing non-profits with the largest single group being universities and university hospital systems. I don't think that academics and healthcare workers are "quite stupid indeed". The annoying wowzer subset of nonprofits is a lot less than 10% of employees.

I think it takes more intelligence to be a good HVAC repairman than it does to shuffle papers back and forth at a non-profit.

This might be true(I have no idea how smart you have to be to do non-profit work), but you don't have to be a good HVAC repairman to make a living. You don't, in point of fact, have to be a good HVAC repairman to make near the top of compensation for HVAC techs- many 'techs' are more realistically sales guys who are paid ~$20/hr plus 10% commission on all equipment sold to the customer through leads they generate, and HVAC companies commonly charge 400%+ markup on new systems. Installers make $15-$20/hr and get hired right out of the probation office, so it's an extremely profitable racket all around.

The key to a residential AC guy making his boat payment is, counterintuitively, to not fix very many air conditioners.

Because they lack connections to centers of powers.

This strains credulity when juxtaposed with reality. I got a desk job with no connections, as did most of my friends + acquaintances in my graduating class.

credentialism makes it more difficult for people without rich parents to get fake email jobs.

I'm slightly more sympathetic to this argument, but still find it unconvincing. State schools aren't that expensive especially to genuinely poor individuals who can apply for all kinds of scholarships. There's also online options that are very cheap, e.g. I'm finishing up a masters in CS that only cost about $6K total, of which I paid around $1k

This strains credulity when juxtaposed with reality.

A better way of saying this would be simply "I disagree".

I've dug ditches and worked in finance. This isn't the issue. Credentialism isn't what is stopping diggers from working fake email jobs.

Credentialism isn't what is stopping diggers from working fake email jobs.

IMO "fake email jobs" is a bit of a Russell's conjugation: "I have an important role keeping [industry] moving, you work remote as a middle-manager, and that guy over there has a fake email job." Not to say that all such jobs are useful, but I'd bet there'd be a fair bit of disagreement about whether any specific role qualified. People often don't have good visibility into what other departments are doing, and I'd bet nobody considers their job this way, but absolutely does sneer at, say, the accounting department ("it's all just a spreadsheet anyway") or purchasing.

This overtime proposal is interesting since it only rewards people who are already working more than 40 hours a week.

Policies like this always take too static/naive of a world view. You imagine how people currently behave, and This rewards people who are "working" more than 40 hours a week after all of the employers and employees update their behavior to exploit the new system. Instead of offering a 40 hour week at $20 an hour, companies can offer $10 an hour for 40 hours and then with 10 $30/hour "overtime hours" of make-work to make up the difference. Maybe they'll have people be "on call" so it counts as overtime but doesn't actually add work.

And then the salaried people will all want to be "hourly" so they can get two thirds of their pay count as "overtime". Your $80k/yr Secretary and your $300k/yr chief engineer are going to become hourly employees whose total yearly pay just happens to coincidentally always adds up to approximately $80k and $300k respectively, but technically half of it is overtime. A lot of the more highly paid people already work more than 40 hours per week anyway, so it wouldn't be too hard for the business to fudge the values around and count their pay as overtime. And for the people who don't, again I'm sure the business could just make make-work for them to technically count as overtime, while shuffling the numbers around to keep their total pay the same, or even less, since if the employee is paying less taxes their effective pay is higher even at a lower nominal value. And that's why the companies would go through the effort of doing this. Why pay $60k for an employee when you can pay $50k to one who gets to evade taxes via loopholes?

I get the sentiment of wanting to pay blue collar workers more in a way that doesn't enable welfare leeches. But this isn't the way to do it without some serious modifications to fix the incentive structure.

What's wrong with any of these incentives either politically or in the absolute? It rewards Trump's friends and punishes his ennemies by transferring ressources away from state administration managers and into individual lower class people's hands.

It's good politics at it's most obvious. Raises up your voting base, sounds good at a glance (everybody likes lower taxes) and doesn't cost you much because everyone in the race is running on deficit spending.

Hell you can even spin this as equalizing worker relations. In the world of mostly overtime, you can strike without striking by just doing the minimum your contract requires.

What's wrong with any of these incentives either politically or in the absolute? It rewards Trump's friends and punishes his ennemies by transferring ressources away from state administration managers and into individual lower class people's hands.

Yes, in the sense that it is a creative tax cut, for eventually, just about everyone. Unfortunately we don't really need tax cuts until we get spending cuts or inflation will continue.

The problem with that is that we haven’t had a significant spending cut in the modern era. Unless we get a real balanced budget amendment to the constitution (which won’t happen) budgets won’t go down. So then there can’t be tax cuts, basically ever, because the state is going to need every penny.

My point is that this will reward upper class people more than lower class people. The correlation between "overtime hours worked" and "lower class people" has no reason to persist under the paradigm. Upper class people have more leverage to negotiate with their employers for overtime shenanigans, more institutional savvy and networking to figure out that this is a loophole that exists and is worth exploiting, and higher tax brackets that make it more profitable to avoid. John Manager who is a pencil pusher earning $200k/yr working 60 hour per week is going to benefit from this, while Billy Bob who struggles to get by working 20 hours each at three different part time jobs gets nothing, because none will hire him full time and have to pay benefits. This is a regressive tax relief, and then the government has less tax revenue and either has to raise taxes elsewhere to make up the difference, or cut spending. And if you were going to do that you'd be better off with a flat income tax reduction across the board, or if you still want to cater to working class then a tax reduction to lower income tiers.

This is probably good politics because it superficially sounds like it helps working class people, because a lot of them work overtime right now and their bosses are salaried. Lots of things sound good if you only look at immediate. first order effects and ignore long term second order effects. Printing free money to hand out as stimulus during Covid while all the supply chains shut down superficially sounds like it would help too, and yet here we are.

Overtime is not really optional in the US labor market.

You’re acting like individual income tax avoidance is a bad thing? Just like Trump’s proposed tax incentive on tips, this too would benefit blue-collar and service sector workers. Maybe we should be advocating policies that place a greater proportional tax burden on those who society caters to already: corporations and white-collar PMCs?

This isn’t the first time that politics has created tax incentives for employers based on hours worked, either. Remember that the Affordable Care Act’s large employer mandate kicks in for “full-time” employees who work 30 or more hours per week? Take this with a huge grain of bias, but the Cato Institute in 2023 found that there was a minor effect in reducing FTEs due to the employer mandate.:

[w]e estimated that the ACA increased low-hours, involuntary parttime employment by 2–3 percentage points, or 500,000 to 1 million workers, in retail, accommodations, and food services—the sectors where employers are most likely to reduce hours if they choose to circumvent the mandate.

Maybe we should be advocating policies that place a greater proportional tax burden on those who society caters to already: corporations and white-collar PMCs?

There's already a much easier way to do this: Increase marginal rates on higher earners. This comes with the added benefit of actually increasing government revenue and not decreasing it.

Maybe we should be advocating policies that place a greater proportional tax burden on those who society caters to already: corporations and white-collar PMCs?

Here in the real world, white-collar PMCs are already shouldering an absolutely massive share of the tax burden. The top 10% make about 50% of the income and pay about 70% of the taxes; the top 25% make about 70% of the income and pay about 85% of the taxes.

"The only tax analyzed here is the federal individual income tax, which is responsible for more than 25 percent of the nation’s taxes paid (at all levels of government). Federal income taxes are much more progressive than federal payroll taxes, which are responsible for about 20 percent of all taxes paid (at all levels of government) and are more progressive than most state and local taxes."

Yes, and? It's Federal Income Tax we're talking about here. Including payroll taxes makes it less progressive but the upper 25% is STILL paying the lion's share. State and local taxes are irrelevant.

Trump is winning among blue collar workers by nearly 20 points,

That's quite a stark contrast from the traditional Democrat playbook. IIRC Obama always polled well with blue-collar workers.

Our society feels as if it is run for the benefit of retirees and people with fake email jobs.

Hi, I'm one of those people with a fake email job (software engineering.) You do understand that offices could easily shift to paying their employees hourly, right? I already track hours. CEOs work a massive amount of "overtime" too. Who's going to tell them that golfing with their business partners isn't a business meeting? They can just shift their stock compensation to income instead. "No taxes on overtime time" alone or in conjunction with "no taxes on tips" is effectively just a massive, widespread reduction on income taxes for everyone who's not a public servant.

If your goal is to destroy the public sector, balloon the deficit, and justify cuts to every type of welfare-- well, I admire the elegance of your murder weapon. But at least be honest about it. This isn't a proposal to "help blue collar workers." It's a proposal to kill medicare, social security, and medicaid all at the same time.

And for the record, I 100% believe Kamala Harris is going to end up saying something similar, just like she copied trump's homework on the "no taxes on overtime" thing. The only difference is, she'll also impose punitive wealth taxes and maybe a VAT to continue funding our existing welfare state. It's a truly no-win scenario.

I'm one of those people with a fake email job (software engineering.)

Nah, you're making things. That so doesn't count.

You may not have the slightest idea how far the depths of pointlessness can go. I have witnessed entire departments, nay, entire building floors, paid to pass around information that was completely useless to anybody.

And that's the best case scenario, some people's job is actually to actively make everybody else less productive. As sometimes required by law.

If you're actually producing anything concrete that isn't just emails and meetings where no decision that affects the bottom line is taken, you are far, far away from what the essence of the fake email job. Self doubt about the purpose of what you're doing notwithstanding.

Passing around information is what software engineers do. And more importantly, I'm under no impression that the value of my work is correlated to how long I work is correlated to how much I get paid. And yet it would be trivial accounting-wise to turn me into an hourly instead of salaried worker, and the same is true for the rest of the bullshit-email-job cadre. The business doesn't even need to pay me any more money on net; in fact they could pay me less and it would still be worth it looking at total post-tax compensation.

This kind of job is hard to fit in an hourly scheme, though. Do I go submit my time card with the random times I spent solving problems in my head while showering, walking my dog, etc.?

And if so, how do we prevent trivially easy abuses?

Maybe lawyers can provide an example? ChatGPT tells me they don’t typically bill for time spent purely in thought, but rather only for time spent drafting briefs, meeting clients, etc.

But for software engineers the time spent actually writing code is typically dwarfed by the time spent deciding what you actually need to write. This is how you can have an immensely productive hunt and peck typist on staff. WPM is not the bottleneck.

We bill for time thinking.

This kind of job is hard to fit in an hourly scheme, though. Do I go submit my time card with the random times I spent solving problems in my head while showering, walking my dog, etc.?

This is a solved problem. If you're getting paid hourly and there's no good way to discriminate non-work time from work-time you just claim as much time as you think your bosses and a court of law would let you get away with because that's what you're incentivized to do. If they can't accurately correlate your level of output to your hours worked that's a them problem.

And if so, how do we prevent trivially easy abuses?

You don't. Abuse is the point. There's no possible way to segregate between "legitimate" hourly work and "illegitimate" hourly work without massively expanding the regulatory state... which of course would lead to regulatory capture that would favor all the people favored by the current system anyways.

"No tax on overtime" is transparently the sort of populist bullshit that succeeds as messaging but is is totally unworkable as a policy proposal. It's a way for trump to tell blue-collar workers that he's their guy without having to actually promise workable policy. When he tries to pass this and it fails his base will blame congress instead of him, and then content themselves despite a complete lack of further advancement. Just like his "build the wall" spiel.

I have known a few white collar engineering types who have told me they're paid (well) hourly. I assume it's just a bookkeeping thing, but I believe they may have been in states that mandate overtime hourly pay anyway. I don't think it'd take a huge incentive to make that more universal.

Reducing taxes on blue collar work doesn't increase it's value, though it does reduce its price. The working of the market should result in wages falling as a result, though various distortions like minimum wage and required time-and-a-half may change that. Sans gaming, the undesirable consequence I'd be most sure of is that hiring fewer employees and working them longer would become even more popular than it already is, both among employees (the ones still working) and employers.

If this proposal were to pass (and I give it a big fat zero chance), gaming would of course be extreme. Give me a contract that guarantees me 41 hours a week and pays me almost all the money in the 41st hour please.

Both Harris's proposals and Trump's are absolutely terrible this time around. Tariffs are bad, tax-free tips are stupid, and this tax-free overtime idea would be be a horror show of distortion and revenue loss if passed, which it won't be. On the other side, Harris's increased tax proposals and unrealized gains tax are terrible and have a better chance of being passed. Price controls are even worse and perhaps like Nixon she could do them by executive order. So Harris is still worse but Trump is closing that gap.

The sorts of people who are paid hourly are, in aggregate, not good enough at math to accept the system being gamed for their benefit. A few CEO's and accountants figuring out how to game it is probably a minor effect, mostly on tax revenue.

No its probably huge because it would also affect payroll tax, which the company pays right upfront. Companies not figuring it out would be giving up a 6-12% margin on costs. Thats bankruptcy level uncompetitiveness in almost every industry.

The sort of people who are paid a salary, and the sort of people who pay salaries, are in aggregate good enough at math to game the system for their own benefit by switching to hourly pay.

gaming would of course be extreme. Give me a contract that guarantees me 41 hours a week and pays me almost all the money in the 41st hour please.

I don't think there would be any more gaming than on any other tax change of that sort. Claiming to not be paid for the first 40 hours is convoluted, and besides, lawmakers aren't total morons and usually close such simple holes in the laws they write.

Don't you have such tax exemptions for night work, sunday work, overtime work in the US? They are very common in Europe - Sarkozy passed one (winning campaign slogan: "work more to earn more"). So did Hitler, and it held up.

Economically, the argument’s pretty straightforward. Why favour the hard-worker over the smart-worker? You can’t really entice workers to be more productive, but you can entice them to work more. So this is better for GDP.

Politically, people think it’s fairer to be rewarded for conscentiousness than intelligence. You could sell it as industrial policy, onshoring. You need more people in factories doing dumb stuff for long hours if you want to compete with china.

Don't you have such tax exemptions for night work, sunday work, overtime work in the US?

No. The night exemption seems especially bizarre to me. Why should income earned at night be any less taxed than income earned during the day?

For my father's long-time job the differentials were 2x for Saturday work and 3x for Sunday or holiday work. In my previous federal government job (~30 years ago) there was a shift differential of 10% for second (16:00-00:00) or third (00:00-08:00) shifts. I worked second shift which was quite acceptable for a young single guy.

At one point post-war euros were struggling to encourage 2nd shift factory work. Maybe it's a holdover from that.

Edit: and not-post-war too, re. Hitler. I remember hearing a lot of German factories were running one shift even during the war. Admittedly probably half due to material shortages and supply chain problems, but they could have been doing some extra labour substitution.

Yeah, it does seem like this overtime suggestion is pretty stupid all around.

In regards to tariffs, why do you think they are bad? Yes, in theory, the United States should have a comparative advantage in something. But when we look at the staggering trade deficit, it seems like this isn't really true. We get goods from China, we give them money, they buy assets. China develops and the US falls further behind. Our "comparative advantage" is debt.

Free trade has destroyed the American blue collar worker and the Rust Belt. The idea that we can compensate for these losses via tax redistribution and job training has been proven false. When we look at the industrial policy of the last 30 years, do we really say "yes, more of this please"?

I'd be willing to accept less prosperity for more social stability and supply chain robustness.

We get goods from China, we give them money, they buy assets. China develops and the US falls further behind. Our "comparative advantage" is debt.

Maybe I'm economically naive, but I think the goods we get from them have utility, and make us better. All they get from the deal is dollars.

Chinese manufacturing is eating the world. Do we want to have a domestic steel industry? Because China makes 12x as much steel as the United States. How about cars? China makes 3x as many.

Rinse and repeat for almost every single manufactured thing. There lead only grows with each passing year.

At first, we built things in China because they were cheap. Now we build them in China because we lack the ability to do it domestically.

I'd say they also get factories and expertise.

We get goods from China, we give them money which they use to buy assets. China develops and the US falls further behind. Our "comparative advantage" is debt.

China's got a long way to go before the US could be "behind".

Free trade has destroyed the American blue collar worker and the Rust Belt.

Wage and price regulations, environmental regulations, and general wealth, have destroyed the Rust Belt. If factory workers elsewhere are making $15/day and yours are making $15/hr, and shipping is cheap, you can't compete at factory work. Blocking that off with tariffs makes everyone (possibly excepting the factory workers who would have lost their jobs) poorer.

The idea that we can compensate for these losses via tax redistribution and job training has been proven false. When we look at the industrial policy of the last 30 years, do we really say "yes, more of this please"?

You can't separate industrial policy from the rest of the economy. Would you rather have had the 1970s forever?

Blocking that off with tariffs makes everyone (possibly excepting the factory workers who would have lost their jobs) poorer.

But low Gini coefficients usually make places nicer to live in them. So it also should be included in the calculation. As an IT - my experience has shown me so far that optimizing for a single variable is rarely the wisest thing to do.

But low Gini coefficients usually make places nicer to live in them.

I don't believe that.

I think it's the other way around. High Gini index countries are all shitholes (or city states with distorted demographics), but low Gini index countries can be the best first world countries, regular second world countries or countries destroyed by a war.

Harris's increased tax proposals and unrealized gains tax are terrible

Why?

Tyler Cowen really, really hates unrealized gains taxes

He isn't always right, but on this topic he imo makes a lot of good arguments.

In a nutshell, they require massive periodic selloffs of stocks to pay for, which will have tons of second order effects. That in addition to the fact that the government already pulls in enough tax money to piss down the drain/burn in a giant fire, it doesn't need more.

In a nutshell, they require massive periodic selloffs of stocks to pay for, which will have tons of second order effects

I would love to learn more about this. Happy to read a link if you don't feel like explaining.

That in addition to the fact that the government already pulls in enough tax money to piss down the drain/burn in a giant fire, it doesn't need more.

My understanding is that the purpose of the proposal is to target the tax strategy of

  1. Use tax-loss harvesting and borrowing to never realize any capital gains.
  2. Die and use the step-up basis to not pay any capital gains.
  3. Repeat each generation.

It seems good to me to target a tax strategy used exclusively by the wealthy to achieve payment of ~0 taxes. It seems to me that, regardless of you political leanings (i.e. if this was paired with an equally regressive tax cut to not affect redistribution) closing this loophole makes sense. Is Harris' way the best way? I don't really think so, but it seems to do more to counter this massive loophole than all past presidents combined.

Why on earth would anyone believe that the way to attack a strategy that relies on a very specific step up basis policy was to invent an entirely new type of tax? This makes no sense at all. End the step up basis, I'm on board, why would you keep the strategy working and but then add another tax on top instead of actually fixing it?

If Trump suggested eliminating that deduction, I would support that and say taxing unrealized gains is dumb. Alas, that is not the choice I am faced with.

Taxing unrealized gains is dumb regardless of what other actions are taken. One does not depend on the other.

If you are rich enough to use that strategy, you still are paying the full 40% on most of your estate. That more than makes up for not paying the lower capital gains tax.

You don't really have to be that rich to use this strategy: just borrow against your investments instead of selling them.

Your interest rate will not be particularly favorable unless the bank is confident that even if the stock significantly devalues you will still pay them back.

There is a reason that this "strategy" is mostly just a speculative law review article and like 1 example. No one complaining about bie borrow die has ever demonstrated that its actually being used to any large extent.

I would love to learn more about this. Happy to read a link if you don't feel like explaining.

https://x.com/RyanHanley_Com/status/1826286357892784269

Tax loss harvesting isn't "avoiding" paying capital gains any more than deducting expenses "avoids" paying tax on profits.

If one of your stocks goes from $10 to $20 and the other from $20 to $10, you haven't actually made any gains for the governemt to tax

Little slips like this convince me the whole thing is an excuse for seizing all assets that aren't owned by blackrock or NGOs.

I keep saying it: somebody is going to have to pay for the black holes that are state budgets because interest on debt is reaching critical levels.

Since all the value is piling into investments to avoid inflation, now governments are trying to seize those investments. Property taxes and seizure of government backed pension schemes have both been floated already.

property taxes... have been floated already.

I have bad news for you...

I meant wealth taxes, my ESL ass keeps tripping over taxation jargon somehow.

somebody is going to have to pay for the black holes that are state budgets

State budgets, in the administration department, are generally themselves welfare schemes. People who benefit from that will never vote for a party that promises to put the brakes on that, which is why the Democrats are the interest party of those people. They have to be.

Will public employees' voting power to make sure they keep receiving those benefits outrank the voting power of the old (though young men are increasingly catching on) to not pay them? Well, stay tuned...

Usually, in cases like these, the two interest groups put their heads together to do something both stupid and evil, and this is called compromise.

This compromise is likely to be inflation.

I agree. Tax loss harvesting is valid in isolation.

ETA: To clarify: the problem is how it is used in conjunction with the next step.

Little slips like this convince me

Little slips? You are merely misinterpreting me.

If one of your stocks goes from $10 to $20 and the other from $20 to $10, you haven't actually made any gains for the governemt to tax

From the pro-tax perspective, if you make $10 on one stock you should be taxed on it; if you lose $10 on another stock, too bad so sad. Why would they give up the tax on the first stock just because you lost money on some unrelated stock?

Because we have an income tax; not a takings

It's already the rule that gains in certain categories can't be offset against losses in other categories. I have no doubt making it so each and every financial instrument one owned had to be treated separately is the kind of thing people who like taxes would put in place.

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If you wanted to target buy-borrow-die, you can just eliminate the step-up basis. Much simpler and less distortionary than unrealized gains taxes.

It would be more focused to target buy-borrow-die by expanding the definition of realization to include using the asset as collateral for a loan. Buy for $100, take out loan for $90 secured on asset, no tax liability. Notice that the asset is now more valuable. Convince lender that the increase in value is durable. Take out another $90 loan secured on the asset. Now you have realized $180 so a $80 gain becomes taxable, and you have money (the loan) to pay it without having to sell the asset.

I agree, but the step-up-basis loophole has existed for decades and nobody has succeeded at killing it. At what point is it reasonable to be open to alternatives?

ETA: I love "buy-borrow-die" lol, gonna have to steal that.

And taxing unrealized gains has also been avoided since 1913.

Yes? If either candidate suggested removing the step up loophole, I’d favor that over taxing unrealized gains. Neither has

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Buy, borrow, die doesn't seem to actually be enough of a problem as to make unrealized gains taxes a reasonable alternative.

The Democratic Party solution for this is of course more welfare for the working poor

Traditionally, one of the most promising ways to support the working poor has been to expand the EITC. This essentially increases the hourly pay for the working poor. Clinton, Obama, and Biden all did this. Bush and Trump were more equivocal, doing some expansionary things with it and some contractionary things.

It's ironic that you ignore this, because downthread you even admit that

But yes for practical reasons [Trump's proposal] won’t work

If Trump wanted to give the working poor money without increasing welfare (which reduces incentive to work), he would literally just expand EITC. This would be much easier politically and it actually works.

Who. Whom.

The trust fund baby who has a fake email job at a non-profit can get the EITC. The blue collar worker might not because they didn't do the forms right. Democrats, of course, want to maximize interaction with the system. Everyone gets a handout! But you need to work through the system to get it.

Simply not being taxed works better for real people.

Uh, blue collar workers have absolutely no difficulty accessing EITC if they're here legally. They may not understand the why but they do understand the how to get the money.

You think blue collar workers don't know how to get the EITC, but your outgroup does? Are there no tax preparation services where you live?

I am a high income white collar worker. I hire an accountant.

But yes, I believe that blue collar workers are often bad at doing taxes and miss out on significant advantages.

nationally about 80% of people eligible for the EITC receive it.

https://www.eitc.irs.gov/eitc-central/participation-rate-by-state/eitc-participation-rate-by-states

I rest my case. Those are really bad numbers.

80% success rate is pretty good. It's pretty obviously not limited to trust fund babies.

The point was that EITC is not limited to hardworking proles but is available to everyone, including people with fake email jobs. The people with fake email jobs will be exceptionally good at claiming the credit. This is what they are built for. That is what they do.

The dude fixing your sink... not so much.

In any case, we're deep in the weeds now. I don't think Trump's proposal is a good one. I never claimed it was.

But blue collar people are getting the shaft and have been for a long time. We need fewer forms. We need fewer rewards for people who fill out forms. We need ways to reward people that don't involve a bureaucrat processing a form, then taking from Peter to pay Paul.

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think this includes people who just didn't file at all

The participation rate shown in the table is the percentage of eligible taxpayers who receive an EITC payment (Number receiving an EITC payment/Number eligible for EITC). The rate is calculated from linking individuals in the American Community Survey (ACS) collected by the Census Bureau to their tax records provided by the IRS on EITC payments and participation. Specifically, the number eligible for EITC is determined by a model using income and demographic information from the ACS, and the number receiving an EITC payment is determined from IRS tax records.

I can assure you the EIC is not missed out on.

Apparently, 20% of the time it is.

https://www.eitc.irs.gov/eitc-central/participation-rate-by-state/eitc-participation-rate-by-states

Mea culpa.

tax preparation services

That has got to be one of the most obviously made up sinecures in the whole world. Making the tax system so complicated normal people require experts to file returns is one of these routinely insane things Americans somehow shrug off, along with imperial units and their medical insurance system.

I do not understand you.

Trump proposes a new part of the tax system that will require more information to be entered into your tax return: overtime pay. The Democrats want to expand an existing tax provision, that is is already used by tens of millions of people. You complain that that is maximizing interaction with the system.

Trump proposes something that gives the working poor more money, even though you admit downthread you have no idea how well targeted this is and that it wouldn't work in reality. Nevertheless, this proves Trump values the working poor. The Democrats propose a policy that is much more realistic, both politically and literally, and is obviously targeted at the working poor. Now, its "Everyone gets a handout".

Your bias is so strong it is distorting inverting you view of reality.

Edit: Didn't add anything, but significantly reorganized the comment to be point-by-point rather than blocked.

On your W-2 they would just create a new box that says untaxed OT earnings. When you go on turbo tax, it will ask what number is in box 15. You input that. Pretty simple.

EITC has the problem that it can reduce wages. In contrast this proposal only increases the benefit for working OT; not the baseline wage. So might be harder for the employer to capture the benefit of the tax break.

I agree. My point is the EITC requires no extra box, so it's absurd to paint the latter as "maximizing interaction with the system" without tarring the former with that allegation.

I don’t think either has a big interaction with the system. But there is a point that this is targeted a bit more to help blue workers / less to help poor white collar worker and is harder to accrue the benefit to the corporation.

I agree neither has a large impact. The point of that section is that its absurd @jeroboam to complain that EITC is bad, because it increases interaction with the system when the proposal he was lauding increases it by even more (though admittedly still a small amount). The fact he does do this demonstrates his absurd level of bias.

Re the distinction between blue-collar workers and poor white collar workers, I don't personally see why the government should care either

  • much more about hourly-workers more than equally-paid salaried workers
  • much more about blue-collared workers than equally-paid white-collared workers

Note: equally paid is essential here, because the EITC is based on pay, not employment type. So, if the goal is to target low-income workers, the EITC is obviously superior to any overtime pay shenanigans.

For conservatives, let me give you some examples employees who are typically salaried: soldiers, restaurant managers, police, firefighters, teachers.

Finally, I am sympathetic to the idea that we shouldn't discourage work. Work typically provides important meaning to people's lives in a variety of ways (social contact, sense of contributing to society, sense of self-sufficiency, etc)

However, I find the idea that we should actively encourage overtime work extremely distasteful. I think the bulk of evidence suggests that if everyone were to work an extra hour of overtime, we'd end up consuming a little more, and we'd all less happy as a result, because we ultimately compare our earning/consumption to our peers. I think overtime provides minimal extra "meaning".

I wasn’t making a policy point about comparing blue collar to white collar but a political point.

The only policy point I would make is that I frequently find low paid white collar jobs anti productive (eg activist type jobs).

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If you want me to defend this "policy suggestion", I'm not going to. I never even tried to. My attempt was to make a larger point about party alignment between working class/blue collar and the leisure class/white collar.

ETA: He blocked me just before I posted this comment.

He seems to have a problem with blocking. He blocked me for just trying to understand what he was saying. It's a shame, because I like a lot of his perspectives, but at the rate he's going, he's going to end up just talking to himself here, wondering where everyone else has gone.

Of the OT-eligible workers who are making substantial bank from overtime, how many of them are actually Trump voters? Genuine question: of the couple people I personally know who make $50k+ in OT, they are all people working for the city. (Though I suppose many in that situation are cops and firefighters, who probably break a different way than most public sector workers.)

Basically all of them. The entire construction industry, police, firefighters.... really the main exception is nurses, and those are less blue than commonly believed. Lower working class people usually don't get overtime, their hours are capped at 38 or whatever to avoid paying it.

Now obviously upper management will game the system by changing their compensation structure, but who cares, the government's gonna go bankrupt regardless, it's more a matter of who gets a handout first.

That would be pretty much the entire hourly construction workforce actually. In that industry, abundant overtime hours is a selling point.

This overtime proposal is interesting since it only rewards people who are already working more than 40 hours a week. And it will, of course, hit mostly blue collar workers.

Do you have any evidence that blue-collar workers work OT more often than white-collar workers? My white-collar job offers a ton of opportunities for OT, which a number of employees eagerly jump on. We have some employees working nearly 50 hours a week, voluntarily, because they like making more money.

I think it's less blue-collar vs white-collar and more waged vs salaried. And the professions that are most aligned against Trump are disproportionately salaried (I think?) My guess is that there's a big split in voting patterns between salaried and non-salaried workers, perhaps even more than white-collar vs blue-collar.

Do you have any evidence that blue-collar workers work OT more often than white-collar workers?

I don’t. It was simply my assumption. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

But yes for practical reasons this won’t work. You wouldn’t want Microsoft to convert to hourly so their software devs can earn 200/hr tax free.

I think, like most of Trumps things, he is pointing at something real but the policy details are lacking. It’s a creative attempt to find a way to reward the blue collar worker.


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