GaBeRockKing
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User ID: 3255
So assuming harris loses, how do you guys think the democratic party will realign for 2026 and 2028? (And don't give me terrible, bad faith answers like, "they won't." They demonstrably have been-- sliding in trump's populist direction since at least 2020).
My predictions are that they'll moderate on cultural issues but head in a strongly left-populist direction on economic issues.
So regarding culture war issues, they won't drop abortion as a platform plank, but if trump fails to restrict it nationally the furor over it will just naturally reduce. Regarding gay, transgender, and minority rights, they'll probably just head in a more libertarian direction... continuing to enforce the same consensus culturally, but switching to a stance of resisting rather than promoting government interventions regarding those groups. The big exception will be immigration... Trump is going to take some sort of action against immigrants, and regardless of how effective those actions are, for the sake of his own ego he'll have to claim that they were successful. And regardless of whether he is, since immigration is mostly a perception issue that will naturally reduce its salience for his base. But on the flip side, democrats will be free to blame anything and everything they want on anti-immigration policies. Police violence, economic stagnation, loss in global standing, etcetera. And they'll be in the enviable position of being able to promise rosy outcomes without having to worry about actual policy, as the republicans are now.
Regarding economic issues... If Trump passes tax cuts (highly likely) they will raise the deficit and interest rates. If he passes tariffs (likely, though probably not to the degree he promised) they will raise the CPI. If he passes immigration restrictions/successfully kicks out illegal immigrants (likely), the price of housing will temporarily stall (likely) or fall (unlikely)-- though the effect here is proportional to the economic damage elsewhere, and in particular the rise in the cost of services. The net effect of all this will be to the benefit of, ironically, well-educated urban professionals with the financial resources to buy (or to already have bought) a house in the near term, and to do their electronics shopping in foreign countries. But in turn, poor people-- and especially poor people in locations that already had cheap housing-- will see a reduction in their buying power, without a commensurate increase in their salaries. If trump cuts welfare too that will in particular activate them. So I forsee a muscular resurgence of Bernie-and-Yang type "free gibs" promises tied to calls to tax "the rich" in a more explicitly redistributive framework. That might not sound too different from what the democratic party currently does, but it is-- current democratic policies are more tailored towards rewarding specific interest groups ("forgivable low interest loans for black male business owners" type beat) and feature complex taxation schemes designed by think tanks to extract exactly enough taxes to pay for them (as assessed by said think tank.) But by 2028, I think we'll see more maximalist proposals that start with a target enemy and a round number and elide specific details about distribution. Think, "10% wealth tax on billionaries and everyone gets their fair share!" They'll learn not to promise X thousand dollars per month, or any nerdy-glasses-emoji policy wonkery bullshit... they'll just rely on people thinking, "wow, bilionaires are mega rich, so if we make them even a little less mega rich everyone can be just regular rich!"
GaBeRockKing
8d ago
Always votes for the oldest candidate in the election.
GaBeRockKing
8d ago
I don't believe that men can be women either
That's not an axiomatic belief, it's a derived belief based on your definitions of "man" and "woman," which in turn descend from your beliefs about the duties and privileges a society should afford to members of each sex, which in turn descend from your beliefs about the optimal way to organize society, which in turn descend from... and so on and so forth.
I hate to make this a bravery debate, but that statement doesn't actually convey anything concrete about your beliefs, it just marks you as part of a particular ingroup. If you taboo'd the words 'man,' 'woman,' 'male,' and 'female,' you could actually have a productive discussion with leftists about whether people should be empowerd to advertise their sexual preferences via their mode of dress... about how we should create divisions within sporting leagues to balance inter-competitor fairness, the enjoyment of the audience, the marketability of particular sports... about the minimum physical capabilities we want in our soldiers... and so on.
I doubt you'd change your mind, or the liberal's mind, but "men can't be women" and "everyone is valid" are both equivalently vacuous statements that boil down to, "my view on the ideal distribution of responsibility and privilege is correct."
GaBeRockKing
10d ago
I don't understand why you framed this as a rebuttal to what I'm saying. Was my thesis unclear? In case I need to restate it-- "resist attempts by your ingroup to use language as a status-signalling tool because it will make you all vulnerable to scammers and I will laugh when they take your shit."
GaBeRockKing
10d ago
This is a vibes-based claim rather than a data-based claim, but I genuinely don't think scam rates are comparable across intelligence brackets even after controlling for domain-specific intelligence. When you're smart you end up learning meta-strategies to evaluate fact-based claims like checking your assumptions against known cognitive biases and using formal logic to determine whether claims are contradictory without having to access the actual underlying truth value of either claim. If me and a random joe were presented a list of scammy and non-scammy investment options for... I don't know, undersea mining concerns, or instagram influencer management companies, or whatever, I think I would outperform the random joe on avoiding the scams. I wouldn't be immune, but I'd fall for less of them.
And in turn, even after controlling for intelligence-- I think a random joe trained to ignore signals of ingroup membership would do better at avoiding scams than an equally intelligent random joe left to his native heuristics. There's a valid question of global performance-- heuristics are mostly useful and adaptive. But I think, in the current age of massive, permeable, low-trust, groups, I think most peoples' heuristics are lagging behind what's actually efficient.
Re: ego, it's debatable whether the Dunning-Krueger effect is actually real.. If it is real, then smart people must be less unjustifiably confident than non-smart people. If it's not... well, then we still haven't found any evidence in the reverse direction, so the null hypothesis should be that the level of unjustifiable confidence is the same, and non-smart people don't have any relative advantage. (While also suffering from the other phenomena I talked about in my original post.)
GaBeRockKing
10d ago
Good point! That suggests another axis, actually-- whether politicians needed to look friendlier or more professional. People hated Hillary on a personal level so she needed to look friendlier. Trump needed to look respectable. Vance is a relatively young guy, so the desire for respectability makes sense. Though that theory sort of breaks down for Walz (who's deliberately trying to make himself look like an extra normal midwestern dude) and Biden (who had a lot of "Joe" related nicknames, e.g. "diamond joe," "sleepy joe," but also biden-related nicknames -- "brandon"/"dark brandon.")
GaBeRockKing
10d ago
It always gives me a surge of vindictive glee when someone says something to the effect of, "I hate when outsiders learn to co-opt our language to scam us."* Sucks to suck! Next time learn to receive and transmit factual observations instead of markers of ingroup status!
I'd wager this happens because it's a time-efficient mental heuristic-- you learn that people in your ingroup are unlikely to lie to you because they share the same goals, so when you recieve ingroup-signals you spend less effort discerning truthfulness. Intelligent people need this heuristic less and therefore groups full of high-average-intelligence people have a sort of herd-immunity against this type of scammer. Scammers often try to signal that they're high-intelligence by talking like LLMs trained on smart-people-talk... but that only fools dumb people who've trained themselves to have the separate-but-related heuristic of trusting anything that includes enough technical language. (See: homeopathic remedies, the medbed people, anything "quantum.") To the high-intelligence group, they just look like nuts, cranks, and schizophrenics.
However, implicit understanding of that herd-immunity becomes its own type of heuristic. Which works fine under normal conditions because you need to be smart** to lie to a smart person, and if you're smart you have more alternatives to being a scammer. But there's a particular failure case that I think is especially interesting: when a formerly high-average-intelligence group reduces its selection criteria and lets lower-intelligence people in. High-intelligence people become vectors of information instead of firewalls against it, because their level of laziness when evaluating ingroup claims is no longer adaptive.
I don't have any real conclusion to draw from this... Actually, I suspect I shouldn't draw any conclusions from this, because "the ingroup gets shittier when we let new people in" is exactly the sort of heuristic I suspect I'm already predisposed to have by genetics and culture. It's almost certainly priced in so to speak. So having the mechanistic explanation for the heuristic should actually push me toward being more open to expanding the ingroup-- at least, in cases where I suspect the new members are equal or greater intelligence to the existing ingroup. (Should I be even more in favor of increasing green card caps for technically skilled workers? But then again, I'd guess that I'm predisposed to be biased in favor of that by political affiliation and cultural influences anyways so this might be a wash.)
Though-- if human intelligence actually declined after the invention of agriculture (I'd put a sub-50% probability of this being true, but it would be really interesting if it was) it would imply that we were in a sweet-spot in terms of ingroup formation. If you live in a optimally sized band of primates, there's no need to send ingroup signals because you already have a deep, personal connection to every member of the ingroup. If you live in our current, massively populous, highly-anonymous society, relying on signals of ingroup membership gets you scammed. But for a thousands-of-years-long golden age you could afford to be stupid. Ingroups were both large enough that you could rely on yours to avoid having to think for yourself, and small/impermeable/anti-anonymous enough that scammers weren't a risk.
* See: fake-feminists seducing feminists, trump supporters donating their kids' entire inheritance on accident because of predatory web design practices, LGBT getting suckered into buying rainbow capitalist merchantise, megachurch pastors fleecing their denominations into giving them private jets, etc. (I'm providing politics-related examples of this because they're the most visible, but I'd wager the most common version of this is, "this fast-taking fellow convinced me we'd both be rich but he got away with the money and I was left with the bag.")
** well, you need high fluid intelligence specifically
GaBeRockKing
11d ago
(Meta: why is it that Trump is rarely referred to by first name?)
Politicians tend to get referred to by their catchiest non-ambiguous name.
"Trump" is much less common than "Donald" as a name. "Hillary" is common but "Clinton" becomes ambiguous with bill. "Walz" is less common than "Tim." "Kamala" is less common than "Harris." "Biden" is less common than "Joe." "Vance" and "J.D." are both uncommon, but "Vance" is more iconic. I admit I don't know why we got "obama" instead of "barack.
GaBeRockKing
11d ago
Are sexless 20-somethings with nose rings shitting themselves over having to carry a purely hypothetical baby to term?
Yes. Young women are genuinely terrified about the possibility of being raped and forced to carry the baby to term, or having a hookup and [...], or even just accidentally/intentionally conceiving a baby with their husband and having their life threatened by some malady an abortion could fix. Three of the women in my close circle have of their own volition brought up fears about maternal mortality rates/abortion restriction... Despite the fact that all three were on birth control and additionally one also mentioned that she would personally never get an abortion (though she's pro-choice in general.)
I would say the fear is out of proportion to the actual probability of potential negative events, but that doesn't stop them from genuinely feeling it. It's just what women-centric filter bubbles bring up. It's like how men are irrationally terrified of false rape accusations.
GaBeRockKing
12d ago
I haven't heard about illinois election fraud. I've heard about their machine politics but thought that was the standard "not technically illegal" monopoly tactics.
GaBeRockKing
12d ago
Vance definitely is not normal. I'm voting for kamala (she reminds me of my mom) but I genuinely like the guy. He's exactly the same sort of weird, intellectual, rationalist-adjacent catholic I am. He's exactly the sort of peerson I'd love to talk shit with at one of our local ACX meetups. His very existence makes me less afraid of a trump victory because I know he's a signal that patriots (of the vatican city) are in control.
But by the very fact that I like him, I know him to be weird. Anyone like us is definitionally bizarre-- conservative motte posters and liberal /r/slatestarcodex posters are more like each other than we are like the rest of the population. I don't care about walz, and actively hate trump. That's how I know they're normal. But Vance-- and to a lesser extent Kamala-- aren't.
GaBeRockKing
15d ago
I'll preface this by saying that I don't think statistically significant election fraud has ever happened for the presidential elections. For state elections I don't know. But in the counterfactual, isn't there a stronger incentive for precariously positioned swing state government officials to fix the vote in the hopes that the national party returns the favor through patronage than for a securely positioned official to risk their reputation?
Also, moving past the election security question and more directly addressing the "should we have an ec question"... If we're sticking to per-state voting and giving state governments even more power to shift things their way... Why not just return to the original way of doing things, where state governments selected electors directly? I'm strongly in favor of the popular vote because I don't think states are or should be discrete cultural-economic interests... But if we're going to treat them like they are, I would unironically prefer the old way of doing things because at least it forces people to care about local politics.
GaBeRockKing
15d ago
The amount of ballots you can stuff (or otherwise compromise) is in either case proportional to what turnout "should" be for a given area. But the net effect is smaller if the race is decided by millions of voters versus thousands. Also, in a popular race you have to spread out the vote fixing over more overall states or people can catch your interference by looking for states where turnout is unusually high. Meanwhile in an EC race you can focus your operation on specifically the swing states, which have a built-in explanation for high turnout.
If you don't believe me, just look at the non-illegal "vote-fixing" measures the candidates have been using-- making all sorts of promises narrowly tailored toward swing state voter interests specifically.
GaBeRockKing
15d ago
All the incentives for rigging the vote already exist everywhere-- people want to win local elections too. But in truly national vote small state-level distortions have less effect on the overall total, and natiomal election-fixing rings have to deal with a fact that large secrets aare harder to keep.
GaBeRockKing
16d ago
especially since there is literally a non zero chance couple of hundred votes somewhere in Pennsylvania or the Midwest to swing the election one way or another.
This is one of the many reasons why the electoral college is so profoundly stupid.
GaBeRockKing
16d ago
The incentives faced by legislators at the municipal vs state vs national levels are different, and the incentives faced by blue politicians in a blue state are different than those faced by blue politicians in a red state.
My ideal political alignment is purple-purple-purple (municipal, national, state), but since it's impossible to live in a red city in a blue state I'm happy enough living in a blue city in a red state in a purple nation. I could probably tolerate living in a blue city in a blue state in a red nation. I would soon grow to despise living in a blue city in a red state in a red nation.
GaBeRockKing
17d ago
It looks like we've converged on the question of, "what would actually, practically stop migration." To restate-- criminalize hiring illegal immigrants, and deport any immigrant (legal or illegal) that commits crime a deportable crime*. (E). So if you'll permit me to, I'll address the the larger discussion ("Under what conditions is immigration good? Do we presently exist in those conditions?")
First, I do want to point out that the topline figure you posted (150,000 GBP) applies only to "low-wage" migrants.The article you linked is under a paywall so I can't argue specifics, but I'd wager there's some debate to be had over
- where they're drawing the "low-wage" line and whether that's useful to assess the net effect of immigration
- Whether this figure is useless because it fails to include how the the money saved by hiring an immigrant, and the recursive economic benefits, can also be taxed.
All that being said, I will admit that I'm largely ignorant of British immigration issues. I'm provisionally willing to take your word for its dangers. Instead of trying to convince you that your system is good, I'll try to convince you that the american system is better.
When I said, "immigration is good, as long as it's illegal," I wasn't joking. America's high rates of illegal immigration are an actual strength. Basically all of our legal immigrants are rich enough that we don't have to pay for their welfare, and then illegal immigrants work cheaply, contribute to our economy, don't drain the government purse, and stay terrified of committing crimes and getting deported. Sure, they also have anchor babies, which as you've pointed out would be/are threats to the cultural stability of european nations. But luckily america is blessed with an especially vigorous culture that's only gotten better at assimilating immigrants over time. The fact that the entire midwest is already populated by completely acculturated germans wasn't even our final form! Immigrants become culturally american extremely rapidly.
I understand why low-skill workers and people concerned with the maintenance of specifically white and/or protestant power don't want immigration, even despite the fact that culturally it's a nonissue and economically it's a benefit. And I wouldn't expect the arguments above to sway any of those people. (I have other arguments I could deploy, but they're admittedly much less convincing than the economic-cultural arguments.) But-- correct me if I'm wrong-- I suspect none of those things describe you.
* I'm being intentionally tautological here because it's a bit fiddly defining exactly what "deportable" means. Some crimes are major enough that we want the criminal kept around and punished. Some crimes should sensibly result in the deportation of any criminal that commits them, legal and illegal. Some crimes should be treated differentially-- legal immigrants get punished in-country, illegal immigrants get deported. And the smallest crimes (think, jaywalking) should mostly just result in fines for even illegal immigrants. I'm not a legal theorist so I wouldn't know whether to draw the lines, and thinking about how this could "really" be done probably makes you wary of too-lenient progressives ruining things. But I'd posit that that's more a crime-and-justice issue than an immigration issue... Barring weird edge cases like the nordics, you'll have a hard time finding people who want the justice system to be more lenient specifically against illegal immigrants rather than in general. So this fight boils down to the usual order vs. justice debate rather than any qualms you hold specifically about illegal immigrants.
I don't see why competition with local business is is bad, though admittedly I am a capitalist. That being said, my proposal still makes that effectively impossible. If they're offering services directly, they're employees, and you can sue anyone who hires them. If they're offering services through a company, then they're employees of that company, and you can sue the company. Maybe you're thinking of some loophole that lets companies break hiring laws without any individual in particular being liable, in which case I'd also support closing that on its own merits-- if a company refuses to abide by the civil rights act, somebody should be liable. I suppose illegal immigrants could technically sell items at a markdown vs. local shops... but that basically just covers dropshipping and the sort of handicrafts one person could make without employees. The former immigrants can also do from their home country, and the latter, well, I seriously doubt handicrafts are any major fraction of your local economy. Some people would still hire immigrants anyways, and they wouldn't all move out instantly. I guess they would be taking up local housing in the interim, until their money ran out. But I guarantee my proposal would solve 90%, probably even 99%, of the "problem."
GaBeRockKing
20d ago
Are you european? Our priors might differ due to differences in american vs european immigration patterns. I can't speake for housed but homeless people (e.g., the kind of people I see in shelters) because I don't see them. But all the unhoused people I see seem to be natives, and all the illegal immigrants I've met have been hardworking and gainfully employed.
Also, from my experience being in latin america-- while the quality of social services is lower, I would FAR prefer to be unhoused there than here (assuming my support system has already abandoned me, anyways.) The climate is better, there's much less enforcement against shantytowns, and the police don't hassle you for laying out a blanket and selling random trash on the street. Plus, everything is cheaper so what little money you make goes further.
And in any case, your average unhoused person is constantly breaking low-level laws. There's not much appetite for police enforcement because they won't pay fines and it costs money to keep them in jail, but illegal homeless people could just be deported.
GaBeRockKing
20d ago
You're looking at the real vs play money market. Trump has 60% on sweepcash but only 52% on the play money market. The real money market tracks the other real money markets because people do arbitrage, but the play money market is only partially correlated, either because people believe the real money markts are being manipulated (by the crypto investor or by people hedging bets on other classes of market), or because people who want to bet in the real money market bet against their intended position in an attempt to manipulate their entry price lower.
Like, my point is that Progressives 'win' mainly because they do have narrative control, and that narrative control allows them to actually write the widely believed account of history
"progressives" (and their alternative, "reactionaries") don't really exist. "Progressive" is really just the label used to describe the people with narrative control. If progressives ever lose in a more than temporary fashion, in short order they will be the ones harkening back to an idealized past while the former "reactionaries" will style themselves as the faction pushing ahead towards a glorious future.
"Accelerationists" and "conservatives" actually exist (relative to each other) but they can be anywhere on the political spectrum. It's just, "fast, reckless change" versus "slow, measured" change.
GaBeRockKing
20d ago
You'd have to criminalize renting to illegals, both residential and commercial. And selling property to them too. Setting up a business entity/LLC. They can and do just set up entire mini economies in some areas of cities. You'd have to criminalize so many different things to make moving here unappealing.
And? If murder and theft are bad, then it's completely sensible to criminalize assisting people to murder and thieve. If illegal immigration is bad...
Though regardless, it wouldn't even be necessary. If nobody was willing to hire illegal immigrants, they wouldn't have any money to pay rent, or buy property. If they make a shell and hire themselves... boom, illegal, you get to sue them directly and also deport them. (And also you get to sue anyone who hires such a shell company without doing their due diligence.)
And if someone really wants to come here to spend their own money, not take any local jobs, and not be eligible for welfare... Congratulations! You have a tourist industry.
GaBeRockKing
20d ago
but what happens when they refuse to go?
You're looking at this in completely the wrong way. Immigrants aren't "refusing to go." they're "deciding to stay." Illegal immigrants (unlike refugees) are ineligible for welfare and therefore pulled only by the prospect of relatively well-paying jobs at their destinations. Without those jobs, they don't have a reason to stick around. Yes, there would still be some need for traditional border security work: spot removals of immigrants that turn to crime would still be necessary. But mass deportation would require a draconian expansion of government power to work while at the same time just not being necessary. The vast majority of illegal immigrants would just leave if job opportunities dried up.
You're fixated on deportation as a solution, but deportation is build-the-wall style performative nonsense. It's like trying to catch-and-release house mice. All the incentives remain the same. As long as your trash is open and there's food on your floors, the mice come back. Republican political leaders don't support deportation because they think it'll work, they support it because they know it won't. People angry about immigration vote for them-- and the rich people that own the factories, meat packing plants, industrial farms, and hotels illegal immigrants work in vote for them too.
And besides-- you've heard about the difference between positive and negative rights, no? Turning "freedom from immigration" into a positive right requires government enforcement... and government enforcement requires sufficient political consensus that your enforcement apparatus can't be subverted by money-grubbing contractors or suborned by the opposition (i.e, me). That's why the only effective solution is the bounty system-- turning it into a negative right that citizens can largely enforce themselves by pointing out immigration-friendly businesses that "harmed" them.
Also, before you say something about how I like immigration and therefore am incentivized to propose a bullshit plan that wouldn't actually work, I'd like to point out that I'd take effectively the same approach to fighting climate change, and am in favor of the existing abortion bounty law and also in favor of the SEC whistleblower reward process that works similarly.. Getting citizens to inform on each other works. Imagine if your neighbors could sue you for getting your recycling wrong. You'd be a LOT more invested in separating the glass, paper, and aluminum, right? I'm pro-illegal-immigration, but this is genuinely how I'd try to stop it.
GaBeRockKing
21d ago
I indict the administration of elections at all levels
It sounds like you're assuming that democracy is and has always been a sham. (Or at least, has been a sham since some undeterminable point in the non-recent past.) But if democracy was merely a facade over authoritarianism, then we should expect there to be little difference in how "democratic" and "nondemocratic" states behave-- and little difference in their economic and military outcomes. But a cursory examination of history demonstrates exactly the opposite. If you compare european countries, the wealthy and prosperous ones are correspondingly less authoritarian, and while the authoritarian states pretend at democracy, they're transparently worse at in in various ways. If at some point the US stopped being democratic, we should expect some sort of regression towards an authoritarian mean-- except the US economy is one of the best-performing advanced economies worldwide.
There's still a lot of space for anti-democratic intervention; when it comes to elections "stolen" isn't a checkbox, it's a gradient. But self-evidently, whatever efforts the democrats have been making are on a lower order-of-magnitude scale of effect than the structural anti-democratic interventions of the electoral college and the fixed size of the house of representatives.
It is in the interest of the California Democratic Party to win California elections
Not exactly. The point of forming political parties is to acquire power and resources-- not for the party, but for the individual members of the party. In a competitive environment, yes, it's in the interests of the members to work together to defeat common enemies. But as a group eliminates its competitors, intra-group conflict rises in intensity... and many of those specific factions and people involved see that, toward the tail end, if the group finishes eliminating its competitors-- then suddenly they have no more bargaining power within the group. And all of this happens fractally.
So-- a member of the californian democratic party has incentives to force state elections to be as fair as possible, even at the expense of the CDP, because relative to their own state their greatest enemies are members of their own party.But they want national elections to be tilted as far towards the national democratic party as possible because "california" is one of the biggest factions in the democratic party, and can be confident that they can re-task federal resources toward themselves if only they can eliminate the republican party as a real competitor.
But a member of the Pennsylvania democratic party has exactly the opposite incentives-- they're in a fight for their life locally, but the national status quo (of getting money funneled toward them from the national organization that they can in term hand out through patronage networks to advertisers and campaign staff) heavily benefits them. If the national election was less fair, suddenly they would get a much smaller share of the democratic party's overall bucket of goodies.
And yes, presumably you have people who just want to win their city council seat at any cost... but they in turn rely on staff with unpredictable allegiances. Is that poll worker here because they feel a deep allegiance to the democratic party or to democratic ideals? Do my supporters vote for me because they genuinely like me or because they think I'm the least-worst option? Is any specific person in my hierarchy going to accept orders to fake ballots or are they going to rat me out to the media for a paycheck and (if they're lucky) a book deal?
I won't claim that no malfeasance goes on. But stealing an election and winning an election require a very similar set of skills and resources. Positioning yourself to do the former puts you most of the way toward doing the latter. And considering the existence of explicitly adversarial factions with difficult-to-gauge power and unity, it becomes very risky indeed to try and steal elections in any blatant way. That's why Obama gave up his position to trump in 2016 and why trump gave up his position to biden when he lost in 2020.
oops, yeah lol.
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