DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
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User ID: 460
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
In New Mexico, it’s the Hispanic and Catholic populace who haven’t twigged to the “moral party switch” and remain in the Democrats’ pocket, plus the super-progressive Santa Fe/Taos area and metropolitan white-liberal Albuquerque. Think Austin.
We’re about 60/40 blue, but our legislature obviously and deliberately gerrymanded our representatives to be all blue. (Florida countered this by gerrymandering red, and there are dozens of similar stories around the country, but I live here, I’m allowed to be salty.)
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
Do you know any papers describing the state of the art in the latter? My access is basically what my city library pays for access to.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
“The boy who cried wolf” was listened to, at first: “The farmers would all come running only to find out that what the boy said was not true. Then one day there really was a wolf but when the boy shouted, they didn't believe him and no one came to his aid.”
By contrast, Trump’s 2020 claims were poo-poohed by the people who said there really is no reason to believe wolves might ever come near, and the boy is a danger for spreading these false reports with no evidence. Then they did a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
that was about the time when I noticed, in the modern era, an end to our civic-minded Schoolhouse Rock version of American politics where Republicans and Democrats could still grill together.
Rush Limbaugh came to prominence by imbuing his show with the concept that the Democrats were not just eroding the bedrock of America, but using civility itself as a mask to hide their deeds in plain sight.
Thus, we right-wingers were to investigate any calls for civility as if they were cover for nefarious deeds being planned. Trump took this to the next level in his Tweets from 2012 onward. And here we are.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
This also gives a blank check to any nefarious enemies of democracy who oppose Trump to pull every dirty trick they can. After all, if the media is set up to whitewash any Trumpian accusations of fraud, now’s their last chance to make ballot printers go brrrr.
The other question is, what happens if Trump wins? Will his enemies’ allegations of fraud be treated as beyond the pale as if he’d made them? Or will they be investigated, be brought with standing before a court, go through the discovery phase, and be adjudicated with possible consequences for election, in the ways the 2020 vote never was?
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
Yes, for non-trivial composite integers. (The powers of two are trivially composite to this algorithm.)
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
I’ve got my new method of factoring working as a damn elegant Python function. Time to turn it into a science paper. A co-worker made a remark and I realized I’ve also created a division table.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
Reddit etymologists explain why a fascist is a faggot with an axe: https://old.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/9wt6w2/fascistfaggot_a_common_root/
Interestingly, a “faggot” is also the name for a meat dumpling made of various meats, possibly cognate to the fajita dish: “bundle”.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
What erosion of democracy do you believe Donald Trump, avatar of your outgroup, to want?
Steelmanning voting concepts, I have observed that my fellow Americans either want:
- zero fraudulent ballots cast at the cost of stringent and sometimes onerous requirements that may result in fewer legitimate ballots being counted, or
- zero legitimate voters prevented from having their ballots cast and counted, even if that may result in a few illegitimate votes being included in the count.
Accordingly, I refuse to countenance the strawman of “Republicans just want to suppress the legitimate vote” without the flip strawman, “Democrats just want to stuff the ballot box.”
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
There's certainly a gish-gallop to choose from. The clearest meta-evidence that these are nonsense is that nearly everyone I've debated with has chosen a different set of claims to really dig deep into.
It seems to me that if each claim in that extensive list has an advocate diving deep into it, yet still convinced, that’s meta-evidence that more than one scheme might have been used. Instead of a single silver Biden bullet, perhaps it makes sense to look for a spray of silver shotgun pellets.
As for neutral sources on the validity of the claims, the moment any reputable news source even hints that they think a single Trump-positive election fraud claim has enough merit to consider possibly investigating, their editor will forever be branded a MAGA Republican in the bag for Trump. This is how political tribes work, and how they capture without explicit conspiracy: likemindedness, singularity of purpose.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
Samaritan’s Purse is one I’ve known about for a while and in crises actually donate to. Their max admin take is 10%, and there’d be hue and cry in the churches if it were mismanaged. They’re already mobilized for the area.
It’s run by Billy Graham III, the famous evangelist’s son, and the organization has been criticized for requiring volunteers to sign a controversial Statement of Faith which disavows homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Nevertheless, they’re committed to helping everyone they can on a given charity project, regardless of demographic or creed. They also have two helicopters, so they’re ready for the washed-out roads of Appalachia.
I’ll put my non-tax money where my mouth is and donate $50 right after I post this reply.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
I’ll agree to that as soon as advocates for these people return the unadorned word “immigrant” to its rightful place as a synonym of “naturalized citizen”.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
More generally, what does the term "illegal immigrant" refer to?
He’s using it not as a legal term but as a meta description. Arnold Kling outlined in The Three Languages of Politics that most political language is not for convincing opponents but rather for rallying those on the edge of the tribe, reminding them of why they’re in the tribe:
- Progressives stand against oppression/repression.
- Libertarians stand against coercion/aggression.
- Conservatives stand against barbarism/sabotage.
In this case, Vance is describing the meta-category of people who find a way to systematically skirt the usual requirements for citizenship or residency, naming it for the central case while describing an edge case. Anything which looks like a back-channel or backdoor into the US for a steady flow of non-Americans is in this big-tent category. It smells like sabotage, a subversion of the Congressionally-passed immigration and naturalization processes by which people from other nations become legal citizens with full privileges.
For some in this category, it looks like claiming asylum, getting their deportation hearing deferred a year, getting some money from the US taxpayer, and then never showing up.
For others, it’s seeking refuge because their home country is crappy, if not specifically in a state of emergency. For the conspiratorial mindset, this is the time to check intelligence operations in that country and see if the deep state did something like assassinate a head of country to get refugees to flow to America.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
It really has. In summer 2005, DC’s Batman Begins and Marvel’s Fantastic Four were released.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
In contrast, and as an antidote, to the hostile brutalism shown here, I recommend the brutalist works of Antoine Predock of Albuquerque, NM, deceased earlier this year. When Ayn Rand praises the subtle lines of modernist buildings for uplifting the human spirit, it’s his buildings I think of. In particular, three public works and a private clinic:
- 1971 – University of New Mexico Law School building (Google Maps street view link) (but not the recent addition by another firm, which is all anyone puts pictures of on the web, very frustrating)
- 1979 – Albuquerque Museum, New Mexico
- 1982 – Rio Grande Nature Center, New Mexico, a gorgeous concrete interior with amazing passive lighting and a duck-blind exterior to avoid disturbing the wintering waterfowl.
- 1985 - New Mexico Heart Clinic, a building for healing.
His signature is the pour-holes in the concrete. Once you see them, you can't help but look for them in all of Predock's works.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
Having seen B4C without knowing Michael Moore back in the day, I’d agree with how the vibe/humor of this film is a rough analogue.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
Regarding the fictions you described, I think you’ve rediscovered a dynamic that Ayn Rand and C.S. Lewis observed from different perspectives:
- The trope of “the wisdom of the collective versus the evil of the individual”, a necessary prelude to a society readied for Communism.
- Treating evil as an illness to be cured, a behavior to be modified, or some other analogue of a possessing demon to be cast out, instead of a choice to be argued out of.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
Userbase and moderation, yes. The_Donald branched out to be a multi-subreddit diaspora site, with KotakuInAction and the QAnon sub migrating there… along with genuine Nazis, genuine white supremacists, etc.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
I’ve noted elsewhere the incredible coincidence that Maxwell’s father was the man ostensibly responsible for privatizing science journals, and reddit wunderkind programmer Aaron Swartz killed himself awaiting trial for trying to pirate all of JSTOR. I appear to be the only person who thinks this could be the seed of a conspiracy theory that /u/AaronSw was “convinced” to kill himself by /u/maxwellhill.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
“I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.” - Gen. Ripper
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
· Edited 2mo ago
I don’t know of any atheists out there saying a Mormon state is the end-goal of American Christianity, which is what would garner the equivalent response, “The Church of Mormon is a conspiracy theory.”
It would be easy, actually, to point out how the LDS church is a major driver of conservative culture, trying to match the Roman Catholic Church in cultural power through new media (Angel Studios, Glenn Beck, The Blaze, etc.). Now, build up a conspiracy theory of a group of influential and wealthy Mormons trying to bring about the White Horse Prophecy. Then check the funding of conservative candidates and PACs by Mormons, and you’ll see “evidence” for the theory everywhere you look. Easily disproved, of course, but now you’ve got the mind-worm whispering to you every time you see a Mormon involved in the culture war. (It works because of the successful othering of Mormons since their beginning, the American equivalent of the perpetually-othered Ashkenazi Jews of Europe complete with pogroms.)
But all that aside, the reason “Cultural Marxism” is denied is because most people have no clue what actual Cultural Marxism was/is. The progressive movement’s economic policy wing is rolling along on the momentum of bog-standard envy-driven collectivism, same as it ever was, grabbing and using new terminology by opportunity, not by design.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
“Might work” only in the limited scope that reply chain was talking about. There are innumerable reasons for private citizens to remain armed, as you’ve enumerated with excellence.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
As long as the magical wish could also prevent any government agent from having a successful shooting of an innocent, that might work. Of course, it would also lead to police just “firing” into crowds and whoever’s not “innocent” gets shot. All sorts of dystopia come into play there.
I’d call it a switcheroo joke, a species of paraprosdokian phrase. There may be a more precise technical term, but even Bing’s GPT-4 believes it to be the latter, citing a stand-up comedy site.EDIT: Found it. It’s a bait-and-switch joke. Cognitohazard: here’s a list of them on TVTropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BaitAndSwitchComparison
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