EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
Unless you have some wildly compelling evidence otherwise, most of what I've seen indicates that those born in the US, raised in the US, even to immigrant parents tend to vote at least in broad strokes similar to their peers, and don't follow their parent's preferences to any abnormal degree. Certainly it's hard to imagine an 18-year-old voting Democrat for the sole reason they are eternally and perpetually grateful for their parents being allowed into the country by Democrats 18+ years earlier... that's just not how people vote.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
Again, the process to actually obtain votes is
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apply to be made legal (X million)
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be made legal (1986: 90% accepted)
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apply for and be given citizenship (1986 cohort: about a third by 15 years, up to half over lifetime, probably much less immediately)
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register to vote
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actually vote (I think I misplaced this in my original, oops, this is combined with 4; overall turnout for eligible adults is 66% but some sources say naturalized citizens might vote more, others claim less. Might have to dig up where I got that original source.)
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have more of the new voters vote D than R (if so, how much?) (OP laid out how many, but last major election it was +33% D)
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was the net gain, if present, larger than the margin of victory?
You only actually get an effect when you reach the last step. You're acting like you can just skip from 1 to 7 and poof, permanent Democratic hegemony! Some of those steps take years, and many math-wise aren't nearly as strong as you might imply. Going backwards, to assemble, say, 20,000 votes, enough to swing a very close swing state, you'd need (20,000) / (33% current Hispanic net +D margin) / (66% of citizens who vote) / (33% who became an actual citizen) / (90% who applied for legal status) = about 310,000 applicants needed. Of course IRL this would lag as the naturalization process usually takes a bit.
So sure, overall plausible in a swing state. Georgia apparently has about 340,000 per that source, so right there on the line, though 2020 was a real squeaker and not that common. Most swing states don't have millions of immigrants, either, and there are plenty of non-swing states too to talk about. That's important when talking about Senate control -- remember, a permanent Democratic electoral stranglehold like Elon posted about would require at least a 2/3rds margin in the Senate, in all practical likelihood. And again, you need the Senate in the first place to even pass legislation giving this pathway to citizenship.
Even in the unlikely event that Democrats took control of the Senate (quite unlikely this cycle, Montana is toast) and House and Presidency and actually pass a bill to do a change like this...
Senate appointments rotate on a staggered basis only a third at a time rotating two years apart, so at least one cycle if not many more would take place before these new voters even showed up! Boy were the Founders smart. That's long enough for public opinion, if merited, to swing against Democrats for making an allegedly naked partisan power grab, more than offsetting any gained votes, it seems to me in that scenario. And even if you pass all those gauntlets, I'd pose the final question: didn't the process work anyways? As a country we're allowed to set our laws including citizenship, though of course the history of what that means and naturalization in general is actually a matter of some great debate, I will grant you.
No, does not go without saying, because it's wrong.
Iran did not declare war. An Israeli political party leader (and reserve general) said it was like a declaration of war. There's a very big difference there. Not that the Israeli rhetoric isn't worth noting, but this is a MASSIVE difference. One requires a formal process and is initiated by the declarer, but the other is just words from someone prominent, but who isn't in the actual administration.
Furthermore, Iran has done this once before, I think a few months ago when Israel made a strike in Iran proper. That's not to say they aren't flirting with war, but we aren't there right now. Only difference is Iran didn't give warning this time, but similar to before, no major impact on Israel directly.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
But honestly, even my very-fit parents for example still ended up springing for e-bikes, because... have you ridden one? The feeling is at least that you still get a workout (with lower assistance settings) but without a lot of the misery. They are wonderful (in everything but the price) Now, I'm well aware that in some sense, misery is a sign that exercise is working, and is not a "bug", but anyone who has biked a steep hill will tell you that they might wish that specific part of the ride would disappear. And lo and behold, with e-bikes, it has! Plus, the lower effort might be at least partially offset, or surpassed, if an e-bike gets you to ride more often than you otherwise would.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
And at least in theory this type of person, it must be said, might still end up contributing quite a lot. A very significant number of big tech players in the early internet era got their start as phone phreakers, scamming the phone companies in a sort of similar way.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
Truth be told, their pricing reflects the extra "shrink", so you actually are indirectly paying for other people stealing due to their corresponding margins that they choose. It's been a while since I worked there, but I'd hazard a guess that they increase margins by about 2-3% to offset increased theft.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
Counterpoint: I have always felt and continue to feel that the top leadership can't actually do much that's useful in the immediate aftermath. Right? It's the type of thing that reliably happens somewhere at some point in the US every. single. year. Without fail! Most people whose job it is to help, are helping, and I don't really think that someone with very little background in disaster relief is going to be much help, and in fact might just hurt responses by doing the equivalent of C-suite meddling.
A governor can probably do something useful, but the President? Their job is mostly in the aftermath: if they can pass a recovery bill, and if so how much $?
So I am seeing people like Elon Musk repeat stuff (tweet here) about Democrats deliberately offering some sort of citizenship-for-votes scheme. Laying aside that there are other reasons besides nefarious ones to want to give legal status at least (not even necessarily citizenship) to people who have lived here in some cases for decades, he had a pretty specific claim, that the 1986 amnesty law flipped California blue effectively forever.
But I don't think the math works out? Anyone want to check this?
~2.7 mil made legal from 1986 law seems to be the common estimate. Here claims 1.6 million applied in California. This report says that 90% were approved. But critically, just because you're made legal doesn't mean you can vote! The same report said that as of 2001, only a third had naturalized. Generally speaking, only half of immigrants ever fully naturalize. That means in the 15 years after the amnesty, only in the ballpark of 500-700k voters were likely added to California rolls. Here we can see that Latinos in general do skew Democratic, but the gap varies by year, anywhere from an 9 to 52% gap. Is that enough to make a difference? In 1996, with that biggest gap, that would be 250k-350k (very ballpark) swing votes, but the margin of victory was at the lowest around 350k in 1988 (about 250k at most according to the gap that year, but I think this was far too soon for the naturalization numbers to swell even that large, since the process takes a few years even for legal residents). Every other election had a gap of well over a million votes! So if you go on and match up the years and the Hispanic vote gap, the effect is even less, often dramatically less: 2004 we see 9% or about 60 thousand votes of delta, versus a margin of victory of around 1.25 million votes, so a very small fraction.
So even the poster child of amnesty doesn't seem to fit with the narrative. Okay, sure, fine, when you drill down to more local elections, not just presidential ones, it can make a difference. But overall, California's blue-ness seems to only be very slightly due to the amnesty bill. If I were a fact-checker, I think I'd say "mostly false" -- the math VERY plainly does NOT work, and doesn't fit with history, but there might be some nugget of plausibility buried. I think you can still, despite these clear factual falsehoods, in good faith make an argument that granting citizenship is a bald-faced political power grab, but I think there are other, stronger explanations. In this sense, the general ideas behind "great replacement theory" might hold some water on the cultural side, but in terms of the actual mechanisms of governance, consider me quite underwhelmed.
Note that the same could not be said for DC statehood -- that's something that in my opinion couldn't possibly be less nakedly partisan and also wildly unconstitutional. I bring it up here as a sort of rough proxy or prior for the general claim about power grabs being real/something to be worried about. When it came up in 2021, 37 senators co-sponsored the legislation. Allowing for some good faith there too (no taxation without representation?), I'd say you can conclude that maybe half of all politicians are willing to make such a power grab? But there's a reason 37 senators is not enough to pass a bill. Once you reach the neighborhood of 45, the difficulty goes up exponentially, so beware accidentally "intuitively" weighting support by the simple number of cosponsors. So again, this seems to suggest that there's a lot more going on than vote-buying.
So the whole idea is far from wild fancy, but the way it's being made, and the framing seems plain partisan warfare. And remember, demographics is NOT destiny! Hispanic voters aren't even necessarily permanent, locked-in Democratic voters, only a few tweaks to the Republican party (which almost happened in 2004ish) would make the platform appeal to plenty of them. For all the noise about how you can "buy votes" via specific, targeted policies, I don't see much anecdotal evidence of that being the case. For example, would-be student loan aid recipients I know don't seem to weight it all that heavily in their decision of who and how to vote -- other things overshadow it by a lot. Polling data suggests the same is broadly true of Hispanics, even if they were to receive generous amnesty. See for example one reason why no one talks about Puerto Rico being admitted as a state: besides the fact that Puerto Ricans somewhat don't want it, neither big party is actually convinced they would in fact be the ones to get the votes. It's a wild-card they don't want to deal with.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
If a party wants to listen and understand what their constituents want, they would be holding open forums across the country where people can get together and actively listen and respond to each other's ideas. I see very little of that going on.
Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Many if not most all politicians do in fact hold open forums on a regular basis. You have a very high chance that even in a district that’s an easy pickup/single party, that there exists a chance for you to meet and ask approximately one question to the candidate directly per event. Multiple events, if you really keep your ear to the ground. The caveat is that you need to make at least some attempt to follow socials and/or sign up via email to hear about these.
Your vote probably doesn’t matter, but you know what does? Your “memetic vote”. If you are vocal about your opposition or reluctance to voting, you actually do have a measurable deterrent effect on the people around you voting. And vice versa!
Additionally, you’d be surprised at how many politicians, even national ones, tend to go off of vibe checks. That means they are actually fairly vulnerable to pressure campaigns, in the sense that if you get for example even a dozen people to phone them directly about an issue, they usually both pay at least a little attention as well as assume (rightly or wrongly) that the phone calls represent the tip of the iceberg. So yes, calling your representative’s office also has a small but real effect.
Finally, we live in a big country. Americans often forget how big. National voting trends dominate attention but the simple fact is there are millions and millions and millions of voters, so expecting to have a major personal impact simply isn’t realistic. Local, local, local! Your chances of having a direct conversation with candidates for a city level position approach 100% if you try.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
Personally I think I’ve arrived at, somewhat more charitably than the norm, I guess, that Trump’s advisors told him he needed a certain amount of votes to win the election, based on their forecast of turnout. He fixated on this to an unusual degree. Of course turnout was higher than expected, and so the votes to win was higher than expected, but he hit the old metric and I think felt entitled to win based on that. He couldn’t emotionally reconcile the dissonance. So he was hyper receptive to any and all theories that would confirm his gut feeling, and distrust of the media only amplified this (and of course he had a few too many yes-men around). At some point in the last few years I’m sure intellectually he finally realized this incongruity, but as a TV guy knows that the underdog, mistreated, but secretly a winner narrative is decently powerful. So he’s currently playing it up, but originally I think this was an honest but plainly flagrantly wrong belief.
As to Russia and many foreign policy issues, frankly I still, years later, really don’t have a good mental model for why Trump does anything that he does. The closest I can come is that he just flies by the seat of his pants on literally every decision.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
No, not quite. The typical playbook is you launch into a message-tested spiel that’s related to the question, but often not a direct answer, hammer it from a particular angle for a little bit, and trot out a fact/statistic or two (occasionally name check an average Joe) as some sort of evidence. Maybe with some attack lines if appropriate.
Note that in almost no case would traditional debate wisdom indicate that you discuss more than 2 topics in any given answer. It dilutes the message. Traditional debate wisdom in wrong in several cases, but not in that respect! At times Trump touched on perhaps 5 different issues in a single answer. It’s rambling, plain and simple.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
The quality and prosperity of a country is not always strongly correlated with the drive/quality/cultural traits/etc of its people. Historical quirks come in to play too. Studying the history of Haiti is fairly illuminating.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
Lived in Miami for a few years, including in Little Haiti for over 6 months, so I think I'm above-average qualified to talk about Haitians at least.
Haitians, culturally, are... fine. There's a lot to say about them that I could go on about and most generalizations are going to be at least a little reductionist, so there's that disclaimer. They don't party quite as hard as the Dominicans by a long shot, but they are generally above-median openness, which I consider a virtue. Of course, they tend to get along with better with white people than other immigrants, with that said (and Dominicans in particular, that's a complicated and tough relationship). The education level is genuinely lacking, and it's pretty prevalent -- most Haitians grew up speaking Haitian-Creole which only got a written version to match maybe two decades ago IIRC, so schooling when present was in French, so you get really a strong rich-poor divide, with most being poor (partly as a result of frankly some long-lasting hostile foreign wealth extraction, partly the language thing, partly very poor self-governance and partly of course some terrible economic/natural disaster luck). There's a small handful of comparably wealthier older-generation Haitians around, similar situation to Cubans, but not a ton. They as a culture tend to love old people, generally, so many Haitians find themselves in the (large) retirement/medical complex in Florida, lots of friendly Haitian ladies there I've met. There's a germ of truth in bits about unfaithfulness and generally chaotic family relations being the norm but I'm not sure how far to take it.
Must say though! Local folk magic including yes voodoo but mostly the variant "santeria" is still alive and well overall, and that includes things like the occasional chicken sacrifice. However, you're in the States, very little chance people are actually eating cats and dogs and pets. I could theoretically see a priest eating a ritually sacrificed chicken (that was a thing in the Old Testament too) but beyond that I don't really think so. I consider this kind of prevalent superstition a negative thing, but at least some percentage of it is a cultural divide (but another part is, well, I AM actually a relatively devout Christian and on a personal level I consider aspects of santeria to be somewhat legitimately Satanist, but that's neither here nor there).
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
I think another dimension of this is many people seem to have somehow, magically forgotten that it’s not only okay but ideal to treat kids differently based on their age. I had a very frustrating conversation recently about how or if we should be talking to kids about the “bad” parts of history, and it was kind of shocking to realize that they didn’t realize that for example a 5th grader is physiologically incapable of the same complexity of thought as a teenager or an adult. That echoes over to discipline where they also don’t realize that again, a child’s brain is both highly plastic as well as not yet mature in a deep and fundamental way. Being strict and firm are not the same things… and yes, shoving a phone in front of your kid and going “they entertain themselves, how great!” is terrible for development.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
However you have completely and utterly failed to demonstrate your main point:
But generally speaking society expects men to take on tasks entailing similar levels of discomfort (military service?) and for much longer durations than asked of pregnant women, in the end.
Unless you have anything else to introduce, this statement is just as absurd and plainly false as before.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
Trump is pretty good at debates, but he is a little less spry at off the cuff comments as he’s aged. The debate is going to be both highly unpredictable as well as highly consequential. And honestly, helpful for voters!
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
That made me laugh way more than it should have. Nice link/funny caption!
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
I think they are talking about a messaging sense, popular perception, not an actual assertion.
It’s undoubtably true that the popular perception of Trump resonates with the criticism even if you think it’s unfair. Remember, the audience here is the base, but the message is one that’s being workshopped for swing voters, who like a few of Trump’s policies and actions but by and large feel that way in spite of Trump’s occasional unprofessionalism, not because of it.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
I agree she’s done a good job so far with the fashion and impressions. It’s a good start for Democrats.
The biggest current threat to the Harris campaign is navigating release of actual policies in such a way so as to avoid creating a media firestorm, slip up, or criticism, but it also needs to happen before the debate or else she will get torn apart. I’m sure some political operators would be tempted to coast by on vibes, but the smart ones know that even though people are a bit dumb, they aren’t that dumb. The attack line that KamalaHarris.com doesn’t have a single policy in it is a good one. Their time frame for doing so is about 3 weeks, maybe 4. Any longer and you won’t be ready for crunch time when people start tuning in.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
At risk of going off topic, I think the treatment of Islam has more to do with projection than fear or enforced groupthink. While I’m not really a “right side of history” person and I think the idea is dumb, I do think that Islam is on a similar trajectory as Christianity in the sense that for a while similar images would produce violence - but that was a few hundred years ago perhaps. So eventually there will be more tolerance and less radical extremism, but a lot of people in the West think they are already there or have somehow hoped it into existence.
I’m not totally confident however because there are some quirks of Islam that make it unique. Not only the Sunni-Shia split but also the nature of religious thought and organization as well as things like a ban on artistic representation. It still shocks me that Islamic countries basically didn’t even have theatre which most every other culture does have in some form!
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
I like the thought you’ve started but I don’t think you’ve really thought it through - or else have a deeply skewed and inaccurate view of where women are on the scale and the underlying distribution.
What you describe has an entire math background. For example, it’s highly related to logistic regression and analysis of classification/cutoff rules. Basically any time you make a cutoff, you produce a square with false positives, false negatives, etc. Analysis of whether this array of outcomes, mathematically fixed based on the underlying distribution as well as the cutoff point itself (you can also slide the cutoff point around a little bit in numerical contexts but gender spectrum stuff aside we can’t here) relies on some sort of subjective judgement about if the trade off is acceptable or not (or, considering alternative trade offs). In this context, a false positive might be “we took away the vote when really it would have been fine”, you get the idea. When your only choice of cutoff is “you are a man or woman” the numbers don’t produce anything other than a horror story for accuracy. That’s just the math of the situation. When your cutoff is numeric like age, you can actually produce a set of outcomes that are morally acceptable and practically feasible.
All this to say that again, unless you have some deeply disturbed and unrealistic idea about the actual distribution of eg female neuroticism, or simply don’t care about unnecessarily disenfranchising half the population, this idea is completely untenable. Especially if we consider the right to some degree of say in governance to be a human right of thinking people, which I do.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
I am reminded a bit of that one Spike Lee movie where Chicago women said they’d strike from having sex with men until they stopped killing each other with guns. Never actually watched the movie and have no idea what a 4channer would think about it but did want to mention that yeah, the idea of gender relations and withholding crossing with politics isn’t exclusively a right wing thing.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
It’s also probably true that a significant majority of loud young conservatives are men, and loud young liberals are women, but groups analogous to the “silent majority” are silent for a reason.
I am reminded for example of a recent poll on X/Twitter about presidential preference Elon posted which Trump won handily. This tells you quite a lot about Twitter users that follow and engage with Elon’s posts and not much about the United States’ actual voting population, which people in the comments crowing about “sample size” seem to have completely missed.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
I mean the whole thing is built on several flimsy houses of cards, but one I’d like to highlight specifically is a latent assumption that you can have a violent uprising with no other ill effects, perhaps comparable to an election. This could not be more false. The way the modern world currently works is that massive violent campaigns are quite often strongly net-negative for everyone. They have a long lasting negative impact on not just stability (tautological as it may be) but also economic prosperity and the medium term ability to self-govern effectively. And probably more. And no one is actually (so far) actually doing so poorly that this would be a good trade. Instead, the social contract and notion of a nation of rules and laws is a mutually beneficial one in a classic political science sense as well as a literal and practical sense.
I'm interested in "failure mode of all democracies" -- do you really think this, and what evidence are you using? Because sure, I can think of a fair few countries where democracy went poorly, but I'm not sure I'd jump to "democracy always fails in this manner" or similar argument "all democratic failures happen in this manner" or even "all countries that get too multiethnic and are democracies fail this way" and the similar prediction that "all democracies are doomed to eventual failure". Not quite sure which angle exactly you're describing.
If anything, I think that the two-party system, for all its incredible and well-documented failings, actually serves as a pretty good insulation from what I think you're talking about. Since both parties have an incentive to change their policies (often incrementally, but the base pressures are there) in order to win, or regain an edge, this means that a multi-ethnic state cannot rely on simple alliances between ethnic groups, but must in some sense compete for them, and trade groups once in a while too. Don't think we'd get very far broaching replacement theory per se in this context, but more wondering about the proposed mechanism and evidence side of things. Even assuming deliberate importation of votes is happening and intentional (which I obviously above dispute), for the sake of argument here, you can't do so indefinitely. I just don't think it usually makes sense numerically, without being washed out by backlash. For example, we can plainly see that even Kamala has had to harden her border policies. That's in direct response to discontent. Might she be lying? Sure. But the discontent is real and might even cost her an election, which I count as evidence for my above contention.
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