GaBeRockKing
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User ID: 3255
GaBeRockKing
21d ago
What is the steelman for the establishment being unable to steal elections?
The fact that they didn't in 2016. (Unless you believe trump and hillary were secretly on the same side.)
The establishment must be at least one of: {unwilling, unable}.
And anyways, every political faction is fractally composed of sub-factions feuding over electoral legitimacy. Ideological alliances can put aside power-grubbing for the common good, but if you're going to assume cynicism in the first place, history has endless examples of the aristocracy fighting against central tyrants because they'd rather do the tyrranizing themselves. If you give your king too much legitimacy he doesn't need to delegate to you anymore. Rigging swing state elections would benefit national parties, but destroy the outsize power and influence of the local parties.
GaBeRockKing
21d ago
There's probably no need to enact sweeping cultural changes to solve a problem that will soon be fixed or moot with technology. Hyperspecialize your kid if you want to, but we're already looking into pluripotent adult-derived stem cells and how to induce neuroplasticity with antidepressants. We'll be able to learn implicit skills like children at any age, while using ai and the internet as a source of arbitrary amounts of high-level insight. (Most of that insight will be bullshit, but massive redundant parallelism covereth many sins.)
GaBeRockKing
21d ago
It's scientifically engineered to be addictive, not good. There's a difference. McDonalds food near-universally tastes like salty cardboard. And it's that very addictiveness that makes it bad for you-- modern food is terrible not merely on some "heart disease % per gram" scale, but because its hyperpalatable nature goads your lizard brain into eating way too much of it.
And ironically it's not reasonably priced-- unless you're talking about the coffee specifically, maybe. McDonalds prices aare comparable to much better restaurants unless i go through the rigamarole of getting the app and buying their deals. And since time and not-being-advertised to both have value, on net McDonalds is a bad deal.
GaBeRockKing
22d ago
So, what's the path for DJT to 20x its revenue without any increase in operating cost?
Corruption. There are any number of ways a US president can use their office to make a corporation wealthy and powrrful. And-- it's also potentially a way to launder money into DJT's pocket. Much more efficient than the usual book deal/speaker fee shenanigans.
I predict that most serious presidential candiates, from this point on, will have suspiciously well-performing stock.
GaBeRockKing
22d ago
McDonalds IS trashy though. Literally bugman food.
I mean-- okay-- I grab 40 nuggets sometimes and devour them like a starving caveman introduced to high fructose corn syrup. But also I literally drink soylent so I think I know what I'm talking about here.
It is actually a scandal that a member of the elite should publicly prefer such garbage, low rent food. It would be fine if he just liked it, but it should be a dirty secret instead a publicity stunt.
GaBeRockKing
23d ago
Interesting. Though-- it looks like the big takeaway from that post (assuming it's true) is actually rather the opposite of the standard "dumber people breed more" line. Rather, it implies that the cultural value we've placed on phenotypic intelligence has increased to the point where convergence on intelligent behaviors is reducing the fitness of being genetically predisposed towards intelligence-- everyone trying to act smart makes it less efficient to actually be smart.
I say this because the other thing this paper points out as declining is a genetic predisposition towards being thin and tall, despite the fact that our culture obviously favors and provides reproductive success to people who embody those things. That would be in line with non-genetic causes of height and thinness (i.e., enough money and leisure time to be healthy and fashionable) becoming decisive over genetic causes (and therefore tradeoffs, like heart disease chances for height or digestive issues for thinness)
GaBeRockKing
24d ago
She gambled on the tech market going up, and also supported a lot of pro-tech-company legislation. I don't think pelosi is special, but that's definitely a conflict of interest. Politicians should be forced to put their assets in a trust like carter did, or better yet liquidate most of wha they own and dump all their money into an index fund.
GaBeRockKing
24d ago
Neocons jettisoned... Vance
Using a strict definition of neoconservative, Vance isn't. But he's exactly the kind of person who would have been a neocon during their era. It's why I actually kind of like him on a personal level, even though hypothetically I'd still vote in walz over him for president. Don't confuse paternalism for populism.
GaBeRockKing
24d ago
The current default is a reduction of IQ from generation to generation
Proof? The flynn effect strongly suggests otherwise.
GaBeRockKing
27d ago
I'm not saying personal antipathy didn't play a role, but that same news article provides a list of other arguments. "Mean tweets" is just the attention-grabbing headline-- the meat of the dispute is a bog-standard environmental/bureaucratic power struggle.
“I do believe that the Space Force has failed to establish that SpaceX is a part of the federal government, part of our defense,” said Commissioner Dayna Bochco.
Things came to a head in August when commissioners unloaded on DOD for resisting their recommendations for reducing the impacts of the launches — which disturb wildlife like threatened snowy plovers as well as people, who often have to evacuate nearby Jalama Beach.
Commissioner Justin Cummings voted to approve the plan but said he was still uncomfortable about a lack of data on the effects of launches and that he shared concerns about SpaceX’s classification as a military contractor.
GaBeRockKing
27d ago
I think I need to urbanism-pill you.
Suburban vigour is essentially illusory. The per-capita cost of providing infrastructure and services is higher in suburban and rural areas, which makes annexing suburbs fundamentally a drag on urban economies. New, fashionable suburbs often look well-run-- providing a good balance of services to taxes, but that's often a product of debt-financed ponzi schemes.
And-- car-centric infrastructure (highways, parking lots) designed to serve suburbs have turned out to be dramatically negative for cities.
What you say here:
As a result the outlying areas will view the city politics as corrupt, dysfunctional, machine politics until those kinds of voices are represented.
... may accurately reflect the perception of these outlying areas, but does capture the truth. Because what you say here:
These are all well run... areas. Those populations would have a moderating and improving impact on City politics.
Is definitely wrong. These areas appear well run, but that's a consequence of an unusually beneficial status quo. It's a consequence of-- and I hate to use this term-- "white supremacy." No, seriously. Politicians during the era of suburbanization and white flight prioritized structuring their cities to benefit their ingroup-- which turned out to be the white people living in the suburbs, rather than the black people living in the inner cities. Those people are gone now, but infrastructure lasts for a long time, and second-order effects last for even longer. You can still see the traces of roman city planning in modern european city centers. Their roads have disappeared but their grid patterns have not.
The reason businesses are dependent on commuters is because commuter-friendly infrastructure made it feasible for people to move outside the cities in the first place. That's not an argument for cities continuing to cater to commuters, it's an argument for cities incentivising people to move into the city limits, boosting the city's tax base, economy, and political power all at once.
And-- at least in the cities where NIMBY's don't hold sway-- we're seeing exactly that happen. The 15 minute city concept is infuriating for suburbanites, and it should be. But as an urbanite, I'm very pleased at all the new apartment complexes with integrated shops on their bottom floors, the traffic calming measures, the expansion of public transit, the proliferation of parking meters, and so on and so forth. And all those things are happening despite the fact that I live in a very red state.
So wrapping around to your original point-- that non-urbanites don't trust cities... well, I won't say they're wrong to do so. But their reasons for mistrusting cities are the wrong ones entirely.
GaBeRockKing
28d ago
You can, but only if your side has a principled, self-interested commitment to truth as an asymmetric weapon married to a genuine, shared concern for the mutual welfare of its adherents.
So in short, it's impossible for any group larger than Dunbar's number and also impossible for most of the groups smaller than it.
GaBeRockKing
28d ago
as it makes almost every decision made at least potentially political.
It's darkly hilarious to see this complaint because it's such a horseshoe moment. The rightwing has fully embraced the idea that the person is political-- along with all the annoying drawbacks thereof. It's like a carcinization of politics... every ideology descends inevitably identitarian marxist populism, including the ones that hate all three of those things.
GaBeRockKing
28d ago
Most violence happens within the ingroup. 54.3 percent or people murdered were killed by someone they knew. The same doesn't exactly hold for assassinations, but there's a trend of assassins having more in common with their targets than their targets' political enemies. Charles J. Guiteau was definitely on Garfield's "side." Lee Harvey Oswald was closer politically to Kennedy than Nixon. John Hinckley Jr was nonpolitical, but at the same time had been attempting to become an entertainer.
And given how the US presidency works-- with the designated survivor being the vice president-- this really makes perfect sense. If you hate the president, replacing him with a vice president you also hate that meanwhile becomes much more radically against you is a terrible idea. But showing "your side" that they shouldn't risk betraying your cause/better go even further in your direction makes more sense.
With all that being said, I wouldn't blame specifically trump for the assassination attempts since it's not like his rhetoric exists in a vacuum. But it's not like we're not seeing equivalent forms of radicalism in the democratic base. See: BLM, pro-palestine protestors sabotaging their own side. Trump's base just happens to be more male, more armed, and therefore more violent.
GaBeRockKing
28d ago
I think that's a direct restatement of what DirtyWaterHotDog said. Was that your intention, or were you trying to argue with him?
GaBeRockKing
28d ago
I respect the self-consistency here. Guns AND drugs-- no dividing them! Either people have a right to hurt themselves or they don't. Though like the nanny-state liberal I am, I want pigouvian taxes on both guns and drugs. The average citizen should be able to afford LSD and an M82, but pistols and wrapping papers should be way more expensive.
GaBeRockKing
28d ago
Until we get annexation of metropolitan areas it's just going to be like this.
If you're advocating for this policy on the basis of culture-war reasons, prepare to be dissapointed. If you're advocating for this policy on the basis of being part of a non-urbanite interest group, prepare to be very dissapointed. In the short run you'd probably stand to benefit, which is why I as an urbanite would oppose you. But in the long run I think I'd get the last laugh.
The ultimate redpill is that none of this culture war stuff actually matters. It's all just cynical economic interest groups. The republicans are the rural party, the democrats are the urban party, and that's been true since they were called "Federalists" and "Democratic-republicans." And, historically, integrating provincial/national and metropolitan governments tends to benefit urbanites, not rurals. Consider the likely results of removing the electoral college as being illustrative. Or look at paris/france, rome/rome, vienna/austria, moscow/russia, etc.
Some states are disproportionately rural/suburban and to have their power balanced between multiple cities. In those cases, it's actually feasible for a rural/suburban coalition to partially dominate the urban areas. See: the missouri state government's control over Kansas City's police force. But that's ultimately a fragile equilibrium given anticipated climate-change driven migration from heavily urbanized coastal areas plus the new ideological YIMBY trend towards densification. Our future is destined to be more urban, not less-- even actual degrowth would hollow out suburbs and rural areas first. (See: what's happening in Japan.) Any effective attempt to oppress urbanites will just motivate people to move to rural/suburban areas and mold them in their image.
Ironically a republican success on immigration would only boost this trend. More homogenous cultures accommodate denser living-- the reverse of what caused the original white flight/suburbanization. It doesn't actually matter what that culture ultimately ends up being. Democrats would adapt to serve it, and then turn around to put their boots on ruralite necks.
GaBeRockKing
28d ago
Yes, but for a non-repeatable event it’s also very easy for a pollster to say they were right.
I respect the thrust of this argument in general, but Nate Silver specifically came the closest to predicting Trump's victory out of the major pollsters. Most pollsters just look at the headline probabilities but fail to properly take conditional probabilities into account. They looked at poll after poll and did the fairly standard "average everything, find the STDEV, there's your confidence interval, 99% clinton victory." What made Nate Silver special is that his model accurately identified the sorts of universes in which trump was likely to win by finding out the ways in which various poll results and errors were correlated. That allowed him to more accurately assess the possibility of a systematic underpolling based off of purely statistical guesswork-- he didn't need to understand why the polls could have been (and ultimately were) biased for clinton, he just had to set up his model so it spit out that possibility on its own.
Based on the reality we live in, it's probably true that even Nate's estimate was wrong-- that it wasn't rolling a 5+ on the six-sided election day dice that gave trump the win, but that underlying factors put trump's win probability somewhere north of 50%. Given the data available though, Nate was the most effective poll-aggregator available.
Prediction markets are like a super-nate. Aside from each individual user having having access to all the same tools nate did (and the retrospective + incentive to use them), every vote on every market is a sort of poll, and all the people playing arbitrage force the markets to take into account conditional probabilities. They're still not going to be "right," all the time-- they're not even necessarily going to outperform your average pundit. But as a casual observer without inside knowledge, following the markets is a dominant strategy over basing your worldview on any particular pundit or basket of pundits. It's like the "always buy SPY" investment advice. Rare people, in rare cases, can consistently outperform the betting markets. But without some very convincing reasons, you shouldn't assume you're one of them.
GaBeRockKing
29d ago
Thank you for these informative and interesting links. I'd wager that the starlink decision specifically has more to do with elon musk's behavior re: threatening to cut service to ukraine (and other related ukranian-russian war shenanigans) but will otherwise concede the point.
GaBeRockKing
29d ago
Sure, then you treat people you fear and despise with respect, impartiality, and professionalism
What actual evidence do you have of a government official doing otherwise to elon musk? What actual evidence do you have that they did so because of "mean tweets." What actual evidence do you have that their behavior is either common to the point of ubiquity or present at the highest levels of government? (I don't care what some random state senator or city councilmember said unless there are a lot of likeminded people saying the same thing.)
And-- why do you think elon musk is somehow especially and irrationally persecuted?
GaBeRockKing
29d ago
Sorry, no, it’s the fact the tweets are too “mean” now. Our elites simply cannot abide it.
This is an uncharitable strawman. Actually, it's two uncharitable strawmen. First, of the people who hate Elon musk, you're defining the Elites as only tthe people who hate him because of stuff he's done on twitter. Secondly, you're asserting that they are most motivated by-- what-- a purely emotional reaction to the content he propagates? I'm honestly having trouble not strawmanning your argument because you refuse to clearly state what you think these people are complaining about and why it's bad. You're using the negative connotations of "scare quotes" to avoid actually having to state your claim.
And anyways-- people absolutely hated and continue to hate Zuckerberg. And he's definitely been the subject of a lot of lawsuits. The difference in the quantity of hate is merely proportional to,
- The greater ideological difference between Elon and his userbase vs. Zuck and his userbase
- The more visible and proactive measures Elon has taken to promote his ideology (see: being not only a CEO of twitter, but also a very prominent right-wing influencer on it)
GaBeRockKing
29d ago
You insist on viewing this from a moral perspective, but I'm speaking from a consequentialist one. "War" is a rational choice if and only if the expected value of starting a war is higher than the opportunity cost. And given the massive costs of war, the only way for your EV to be positive is if you are SURE you will win. War is the extension of politics through other means. And in that same vein, politics are an extension of war through other means. If you exist in an equilibrium where you can win a war if and only if you can win a political conflict, it only makes sense to start a war if you already have an overwhelming political advantage. And given the scenario in question here is Trump losing an election while he's already president, it's clear he lacks that overwhelming political advantage. Either his grasp on the levers of power is so weak as to allow a palace coup, or his grasp on the population is so weak as to guarantee a loss in a civil war, or both.
Refusing to certify an election is exactly isomorphic to claiming, "I'm going to stay in power because my faction would win a civil war." The specific details-- whether the election was actually stolen, whether you have convincing evidence of that, the actual vote totals, etc-- matter only insofar as they make your claim more or less believable to the other party. If your claim to power is sufficiently believable, you might get lucky with your opponents backing down. All the logic about the EV of starting a civil war applies to them too.
But self-evidently, Pence did not have convincing evidence of election theft, and did not have an expectation of winning a civil war. It would have been stupid for him to refuse to certify the election, and it would have been just as stupid for JD vance to refuse to certify the election.
GaBeRockKing
29d ago
Basically. Hating powerful people that promote an ideology you don't like is common (and rational) cross-culturally. See also: republicans hating the soros brothers, reddit right-wingers hating Ellen Pao, everyone hating on Zuckerburg at various points for various reasons, etc.
GaBeRockKing
30d ago
He should have refused to certify the election
Unless you actually and truly believe the election was stolen, and you can prove it (to the satisfaction of the voters, not the courts), that would have been a preposterously stupid plan. Remember: democracy is just a proxy for civil war. Parties prefer to use the proxy when things are close, even if they lose despite in theory posessing a military advantage. (See: republicans not declaring war despite the fact that they control a majority of fighting-age men, and democrats not declaring war despite controlling a majority of the total population.) But the instant you click that "defect" button, your opponents do too. Unless your evidence is so convincing the majority of the other party will tuck their tails between their legs and admit malfeasance, refusing to certify an election is exactly equivalent to starting a civil war. Which would be a truly stupid thing to do, unless you control such a proportion of the population that you can expect total victory.
Criminalize hiring illegal immigrants.
I'm pro-immigration (especially if it's illegal, since that means we don't need to pay for their welfare.) But that's legitimately the policy I would propose if somehow I was in charge and republicans offered to completely capitulate on climate change if I found a way to put illegal immigration near-zero.
You wouldn't even need to spend government funds to enforce it. Just copy that abortion bounty law-- let people sue anyone they point to that can't prove they only hired people with work authorization.
Without the "pull" factor of jobs, economic migrants just wouldn't come here.
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