TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
9d ago
Genuinely trying to understand your points here.
For 1, how is this grossly exaggerated or substantially false?
For 2, is there some relevance here? This seems like the generic laundry list of sneers right-populists use against the media, for which I agree with Scott and Hanania. I can agree with limited claims that the media will often spin and misrepresent. But the media brought receipts. They have screenshots, and from what I can tell, nobody's really saying the screenshots are faked.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
9d ago
Elite Human Capital. Hanania has written some posts about it, and has a full book coming at some point. He's the type of person who could have started an anonymous substack and had it do reasonably well. He could come on to a place like this and hold his own in a discussion. If e.g. Trump tried to do either of those things, he'd fail pretty miserably.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
9d ago
They should either be deported to 1) their country of origin, 2) a country they transited through, or 3) anywhere the US government wants, if the person consents. A Honduran who jumped the Southern border ought to be able to be dumped back in Mexico. But I wouldn't want e.g. a British person who arrived by plane and who overstayed their visa to be dumped in Mexico.
For the record, the current stance of Catturd and the Trump administration is that this entire thing is a "hoax". Although what "hoax" means here is unclear -- the direct statement occurred in regards to whether the leaks were "war plans" or "attack plans", with the latter wording being perceived as a huge admission of guilt from the media by the Trump defenders. "Hoax" could also simply mean "thing I don't like"... so who knows?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
9d ago
It's blowing up sufficiently that somebody might get fired over it. One of the big unwritten rules of the Trump administration is "don't cause bad headlines on cable news", and while I haven't watched Fox specifically, the fact that I keep seeing this all over the news sites I watch on day 2 is indicative that it's something that Trump could get pissed over. Mike Walz's ass could be on the line, and Hegseth and even Vance could be in hot water to some degree. That's a pretty significant level of disruption for a scandal in the Trump admin.
I'm sure we'll probably have forgotten about this in a month, though.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
9d ago
I wouldn't blame you for wanting more, as I've never heard retail to be a particularly wonderful sector to work in. There's probably a lot of that vague existential dread that you're "missing out" in some way when you've worked a job you don't want to for decades.
I don't know what sector you're applying to, but I'd be open to further conversation if you want tips applying to places, or for a second person to look over the resume you're sending. For the record, I work tech in a smallish DC financial lobbying firm.
No pressure to take me up on it or anything.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
9d ago
This was a good read.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
10d ago
Applying for jobs is bad, but not that bad. When I was applying for my first real jobs in 2017-2018, I had about a 10% conversion rate to first-round interviews. Even if you have 1/10th of the level I had, you should still get several interviews per thousand applications, and that's pretty conservative. If you're not even managing that, there's a good chance there's something fundamentally wrong with the way you apply.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
10d ago
Vance is smart and EHC, and it's likely that he understands Trump is a total buffoon who needs to be shepherded to reasonable goals. His reaction to Trump back in 2016 was his genuine opinion. Eventually he decided that sucking up to Trump was better to gain power, but he still sees Trump as an idiot.
I think Trump is really just governing based on raw emotional energy
Correct. Always has been. There is no plan, only vibes. This is what the American people demanded.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
10d ago
Is this really a big deal? I mean, by a competent administration it would certainly be, but this is well within the bounds of buffoonishness we've come to expect from Trump and those he employs. I'd say the long-term damage Trump has done to US foreign policy is a far greater issue, although I suppose R's can squint and say "that is helping us, actually, it's 4D-chess" for all that, while accidentally inviting reporters to your classified meeting is more plainly indefensible.
Still, this is really blowing up in ways I didn't expect. Even Hillary has been risen from the dead to opine on it.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
I don't think we'll ever see eye-to-eye on the previous bill, but at this point it doesn't matter. That bill is dead, but Republicans have a trifecta, so there's no reason not to get a real bill done now. There will likely be no better time to pass a bill in possibly decades than the present moment, and it would significantly ease a lot of the issues the courts had with EO's and practical enforcement.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
Oh, that's right, you were seemingly the one person on the entire forum that agreed with me back then. Thanks for that, by the way. It was nice to not feel like I was going completely insane.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15d ago
In my post 9 months ago I agreed with the notion that Biden was fundamentally at fault for the surge of immigration, and that he could have reduced it significantly with powers he already had. This was borne out when illegal immigration numbers plummeted towards the (very) end of Biden's presidency. That said, immigration is still fundamentally broken in a lot of ways that only the Legislature can fix. From my post:
The issue with this idea is that even if Biden were to reimplement all of Trump’s executive orders, they still amounted to little more than a bandaid on a bullet hole. Critics of the bill are technically correct in pointing out that there was less blood before Biden ripped off the bandaid, but it’s ludicrous to then assume that the bandaid was all that was ever needed. US immigration law and border enforcement is fundamentally broken in a number of ways, and this bill would have gone a long way in addressing the worst problems. Recall that Trump himself tried to go after asylum laws directly, but his efforts mostly fizzled in the courts.
The fact no Republicans voted for the bill after Trump told them not to is just an indication that R congressmen are utterly beholden to Trump. Remember that Lankford, a Republican immigration hawk, was the chief architect of the bill in the first place.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
Funny, the Democrats explicitly wanted to pass a very conservative immigration bill last year before Trump sabotaged it for cynical reasons.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
I really don't see why employers would see that as a big problem. Filtering out junk is not expensive or hard. ATS exists, and this is one of the tasks HR uses to justify its existence. Big companies like being able to grab talent from all over the world.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
A lot of the current immigration debate is wondering what increasingly exotic interpretations of statutes can be made to sneak immigration reform through the backdoor without the Judicial system interfering. But this only needs to happen because the statutes the Legislative passed decades ago say specific things. Why not just pass a new bill? I wrote a post (copied to substack here) that detailed the Republican sabotage of the compromise immigration reform bill back in 2024, and a lot of the discussion was predicated on Trump winning a trifecta in November. I thought that was excessively risky... but they won! Why not do what they said now!?! Stop with the judicial cloak-and-dagger, and pass some freaking immigration reform!
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
It's really only dysfunctional for employees, who have to spend the effort applying to dozens or hundreds of jobs filled with broken interfaces and astrology quizzes. For employers everything's working fairly well, or at least it's not materially worse than it's ever been. It costs next to nothing for them to filter out more candidates, especially if the process is partially automated.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16d ago
Somethings gotta give. Regulation, or something.
Why do you say this? I mean, I wish it would, but why do you think someone is coming to save us?
There's certainly been low unemployment for the most part, but that's not the issue (though it could exacerbate things if unemployment spiked). It's the fact that the internet has made applying for things (jobs, dating, schools) so much easier, which led to a proliferation of applications. But applications are mostly a zero-sum game, so employers, schools, etc. have responded by ratcheting up expectations.
This could theoretically be solved if the government cracked down on the most abusive practices (like ghosting after a formal job offer) and instituted a well-designed tax to counteract application spam, but that would probably be as unpopular as congestion pricing, so I doubt it would pass in our populist-addled age.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
17d ago
From college to dating to jobs, no one in history has been rejected more than Gen Z
This is an interesting article about the trend of mass-applications that has become increasingly normalized across many areas of life. If you've applied for a job in the past decade or so, you'll know that the signal:noise ratio is very bad, and as such you're kind of expected to mass-apply to dozens or hundreds of jobs. Each job will get bombarded with something like 1000 applicants in the first few days, and while many of those applicants will be junk, there will probably be at least a few dozen high-quality candidates that you're competing with. This has led to companies becoming extremely picky. In my specific area of tech, its led to an expectation that you need to do dozens of hours of "leetcode", which are little toy problems that are ostensibly used to make sure you actually know how to program, but which actually do a terrible job at this because real programmers will usually be somewhat bad at these, while people who grind leetcode but know little else can do quite well. There's also a further expectation that you might be asked to do other ridiculous feats like have 8+ rounds of interviews for an entry-level position, and you might be ghosted at any point in this process, even after you've interviewed with real people. Heck, you might even be ghosted after you've received and accepted a formal job offer, then if you show up to work the company will just lie and say they have no idea who you are. While there's theoretically some recourse by suing for promissory estoppel, it's almost never worth the effort so it rarely happens. The accepted answer is "that's just part of the game now, swallow your pride and move on".
Dating, and to some extent college applications are also like this. Young people live in a world where they constantly have doors slammed in their face. While I think a little bit of rejection can be good to build resilience, I doubt humans are psychologically well-equipped to handle the barrage of rejection that's become commonplace. Getting rejected hurts even if it's just a small annoyance from not receiving a response. It makes you feel like you're being treated like garbage a little bit, which would almost certainly prompt some amount of nihilism after a while. It might also lead to some amount of risk aversion. I myself simply refuse to deal with online dating at all, which has dramatically limited my romantic options. But if dying alone is the price required to remove this nonsense from at least one aspect of my life, that's a deal I'd gladly take.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
23d ago
I don't know what's happened to Russian nuke numbers in the short term (i.e. since Ukraine), but they've reneged on arms talks which indicates they'll almost certainly build a lot more once the war is over. So I guess I could have been technically incorrect when I was talking about Russia having increased stockpiles already, they've just signaled they want to in the medium-long term.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
23d ago
Who said you have to have "utilon maximization as a terminal value"? This is a basic element of any societal critique. "Here's what's bad... and here's a better alternative". Without the better alternative you can often just make a bad thing worse, like how the right has spiralled into being the party of Catturd.
Part-time youtubers are literally better than the mainstream media.
Random content creators are so much worse than say the NYT. The worst youtubers or substackers or whatever are so, so much more awful than the worst NYT columnists in terms of bias and adherence to truth. The best content creators can be about on par with the best NYT has to offer when it comes to op-eds and analysis, but they have big blind spots when it comes to reporting original facts in many places.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
23d ago
You can maybe squint and see Russia's Crimea adventure in 2014 as being somewhat similar to Yugoslavia, with having a simmering civil war and all. But their 2022 invasion was in no way similar since they went after the entire country, not just the parts that were in a civil conflict.
Plus there's the big difference that Russia was seeking to annex the land directly to itself in both cases. This might seem like goalpost-moving from my previous response, but it was more an issue of me not properly articulating in the first place.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
23d ago
The US certainly sparked some prolif itself with foreign policy (mostly Iraq + Afghanistan, Libya was more of a European-led conflict). But on net, the US has been the biggest leader of antiprolif by far. Very few middle powers had nukes under American unipolarity, but that's almost certainly going to change over the coming decades.
This post is mostly correct, but feels like it's 6 years old. This was definitely going on during High Woke during Trump 45, but it's become less prevalent now. It's still occurring in a few areas, but D's have largely understood they've shot themselves in the foot and are backpedaling.
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