HaroldWilson
11d ago
Not a single woke activist judge ever told Biden he must stop welcoming 13 million illegals into our country.
Not sure I understand the logic. Obviously it's easier for the courts to stop you doing something than to stop you doing nothing.
HaroldWilson
11d ago
I think the problem is just elite (or aspirant-upper-middle-class) overproduction. Gen Z'ers could actually have a material life better than their past equivalents by working a menial or unskilled job, the problem is that such a high proportion of the youth would find that insultingly low-status. That's not to assign blame, the decline of towns and cultural messaging has produced this state of affairs, but it's also worth noting that the internet makes discontent more visible and self-sustaining.
HaroldWilson
12d ago
Sure, but these practical problems are actually utterly irrelevant to the question of who is a woman. Trans women are women but shouldn't be allowed in female changing rooms is a perfectly coherent position. So the teacher or whoever doesn't need to take a position on the nature of womanhood at all.
HaroldWilson
12d ago
Yes but I don't think the author of that article would subscribe to the initial assumption that the reason some defend trans-inclusive schemes is because they are 'entirely disconnected from reality'.
HaroldWilson
12d ago
The problem though, especially on a forum as partisan as this one, is that things descend very quickly into Bulverism, and more time is spent psychoanalysing your opponents than engaging with them.
HaroldWilson
12d ago
and the inability to write definitions of ‘woman’ that are both meaningful and trans-inclusive is the reason why.
This is itself a position. When I said 'scheme' I didn't mean a literal definition of woman, I mean a more expansive view of language as a series of context-dependent games. 'Female' and 'adult' themselves have context dependent clusters of meanings, and are not 0/1 binaries. Efforts to nail it down are always doomed.
HaroldWilson
12d ago
Well personally I think the whole question is a little silly - a la Wittgenstein, policing the boundaries of words is a context-dependent exercise, a language game which is usually directed at some other end. When we say 'woman', sometimes we're gesturing at features which don't include trans women - ability to bear children, say - and sometimes we're gesturing at features that do - norms of personal presentation, for instance.
That is to say, I don't think there's any reason to suggest that it is the criteria of one game in particular that should be held up as the final and definite boundary to 'woman' in the abstract.
HaroldWilson
12d ago
Is the economy good?
This takes the cake for the biggest load of nonsense I have ever read. It blusters a lot with only a few actual points made in defence of the notion that government economic statistics failed to capture true economic conditions post-Covid, all of which are very silly indeed.
My colleagues and I have modeled an alternative indicator, one that excludes many of the items that only the well-off tend to purchase — and tend to have more stable prices over time — and focuses on the measurements of prices charged for basic necessities, the goods and services that lower- and middle-income families typically can’t avoid. Here again, the results reveal how the challenges facing those with more modest incomes are obscured by the numbers. Our alternative indicator reveals that, since 2001, the cost of living for Americans with modest incomes has risen 35 percent faster than the CPI. Put another way: The resources required simply to maintain the same working-class lifestyle over the last two decades have risen much more dramatically than we’ve been led to believe.
In the first place I am disinclined to give this any credence because their calculations are very opaque. Even if you got to their website the 'data' section and 'white paper' for their 'True Living Cost' don't seem to give their actual weights or the changes in weightings (other that impressionistic statements like saying that 'luxuries' have been deweighted). However, even if I could trust their numbers it doesn't at all resolve the 'vibecession' question because based on TLC the Trump years were ones of economic decline too. However, the economic discourse in those years was uniformly positive. So what gives?
If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate.
Aside from the fairly preposterous gambit of saying that we can count some people in full-time employment as unemployed if their wage is too low (words have meanings, if you want to talk about wages then just do, don't crowbar it in to unemployment figures). More importantly though, what you will see again is that his 'true' unemployment figure tracks exactly the common U-3 figure over the years. So again it's totally worthless in explaining post-Covid dissatisfaction because the post-Covid 'true' rate was actually the lowest it has ever been since his data series starts in the 90s.
Here, the aggregate measure of GDP has hidden the reality that a more modest societal split has grown into an economic chasm. Since 2013, Americans with bachelor’s or more advanced degrees have, in the aggregate, seen their material well-being improve — by the Federal Reserve’s estimate, an additional tenth of adults have risen to comfort. Those without high school degrees, by contrast, have seen no real improvement. And geographic disparities have widened along similar lines, with places ranging from San Francisco to Boston seeing big jumps in income and prosperity, but places ranging from Youngstown, Ohio, to Port Arthur, Texas, falling further behind. The crucial point, even before digging into the nuances, is clear: America’s GDP has grown, and yet we remain largely blind to these disparities.
This is insultingly dishonest. Why does he say 'since 2013' in an article about the post-Covid economy? Because the trend doesn't hold true - after over a decade of sharply rising inequality, the 2021-23 period was actually saw bottom quintile income rise as a proportion of top quintile income.
This article is utterly irrelevant to post-Covid economic perceptions. What is might prove, if one believes the statistics, is that Americans ought to have been pessimistic about the economy throughout the 90s, 2000s and 2010s as well as post-Covid. But they frequently weren't. It still doesn't answer the question of why Americans get specifically upset in the post-Covid period.
What is a woman?
Couldn't resist just dwelling on this for a second too. Now, obviously no-one has to buy into avant-garde views of gender/sex, but to be simply unable to entertain the plausibility of a scheme of gender which includes trans women among women betrays a quite remarkable lack of intellectual imagination, and, frankly, intelligence.
This is talk radio 'why are my enemies all so thick' slop. Take it elsewhere.
HaroldWilson
13d ago
The more likely explanation is they are optimizing for time spent on X
Fine, but wasn't Elon's whole motivation for buying X to improve or level in some way the social media information space? With which the link de-boosting works at total cross-purposes.
HaroldWilson
26d ago
I love the attempt to actually contain spending
There is no attempt to contain spending. The savings from DOGE/'efficiency' are trivial and will be destroyed and then some by the inevitable Republican budget-busting tax cut.
HaroldWilson
26d ago
I hate Putin, so I'm perfectly OK with all of you dying to achieve this goal
This is highly uncharitable. It's not just about hating Putin, the point is that the worse the war is for Russia the greater deterrent it stands as against wars of aggression. And of course it's not as if the US is forcing Ukraine to fight, just furnishing them some weapons to do so.
HaroldWilson
27d ago
not running an uncalled for and unbecoming smear campaign against Romney
I think this is a little silly. Without wishing to start the endless and pointless 'who started it' conversations, the idea that the Romney 'smear' campaign was some turning point in the breakdown of partisan relations is I think not very likely. After all Republicans ran their own set of vituperative ads in the 2012, including 'small business owners' getting faux-outraged at the stupid 'you didn't build that' (mis-)quotation and that work/welfare ad making a bare-faced lie about welfare reform. At least Bain actually did close that factory in that Obama ad.
I don't think there was ever a realistic off-ramp from where America is now, but it isn't that bad, all things considered. At least Senators don't beat each other near to death these days. Trump is pretty unique and when he sees out his term of dies I think the populist right probably loses its momentum and things start to cool down again, especially when it becomes apparent that all he will have achieved is some tax cuts which outweigh by a factor of a zillion any savings from cutting 'bureaucracy'.
HaroldWilson
27d ago
Libya and Syria
These were pretty marginal 'interventions'. In the case of Libya it was a no-fly zone and some sporadic airstrikes, and for all Hillary bloviated I doubt that the outcome of the Libyan Civil War would have been any less disastrous if the West did nothing except maybe Gaddafi kills a few more rebels on his way out. Post-Gaddafi the West has done almost nothing. While there has been slightly more involvement in Syria, this has been mostly fighting ISIS and didn't really start until the civil war was well underway - again, it's hardly as if absent US action Assad would have regained control over Syria. Occasionally airstriking an airfield hardly changed the course of the war. Objectively, in terms of actual action taken by the West, Kosovo and Sierra Leone were far more 'major' interventions and were successes.
Iraq was obviously a total disaster, but it was preceded by totally disastrous non-interventions and some successful interventions - this is precisely the point I'm making about over-learning lessons - not every intervention is another Iraq.
After all, Ukraine or most other contemporary foreign policy problems are not analogous in any meaningful way to Iraq or Afghanistan. The west should take some lessons from those two disasters, but the ghosts of the past can't dictate foreign policy forever.
HaroldWilson
27d ago
And every time a simple moral fairy tale that tries to copy WW2 narratives was used to justify the destruction of various countries. It is actually the moral and better path for this kind of agenda to stop.
I'm no neocon, but successful interventions are easily forgotten, botched ones never area. How many lives did intervention save in Sierra Leone? In Kosovo? Operation Barkhane (until Mali kicked them out)? How many might have been saved if the West have been more active in Rwanda or Bosnia?
Foreign policy decisions seem to often suffer from the lessons of over-learning from the past. True, this does indeed mean that not every dictator is a Hitler. But equally not every plausible intervention is another Iraq.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
Or mexican cartells, or CHAZ?
These aren't analogous because the US doesn't recognise them as sovereign states - they have no state for which to act in an official capacity, and are therefore just regular criminals in a way invading soldiers are not.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
quite sensible that someone refused entry is also refused jurisdiction
Well we know this isn't true because illegal immigrants are still often prosecuted for other non-immigration crimes in ordinary American courts. POWs are subject to a distinct legal regime, and are in that sense at the very least not fully subject to the same jurisdiction as ordinary persons in the United States. Think of when Lincoln reclassified confederate sailors from criminal pirates to POWs - they were no longer tried and sentenced in US civilian courts, because in some very important sense they were not subject to the jurisdiction of civilian American law insofar as they were acting as part of an opposing navy - and not even one that Lincoln considered the navy of a legitimate foreign state! If an illegal immigrant started attempting to capture ships in US waters, they would very much be prosecuted for piracy.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
coming to a country where the people do not want you there?
Who are the people? Realistically, the vast majority of skilled migrants to the US are going to be living in areas where most of their neighbours are pro-immigration.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
Why does it need to be an EO?
Is it your position that the President can make law by vague implication? That Musk has the full authority of the Presidency vested within him and his department when he does things like this because Trump likes him? I mean Trump appointed Patel too. How do we know he is not also acting with the authority of the President when he told his staff to ignore the email?
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
Fair enough, though that's generally at odds with what I've experienced.
Even in this case though I don't think Musk is firmly established as being more Trump's Lieutenant than any of his Cabinet appointees. What powers he has actually been vested with and how they interact with department heads seems pretty unclear, so it's pretty understandable that the latter don't want to set the precedent that Musk can now take decisions for them or act over their heads. I have to imagine that in your or anyone else's workplace that if anyone was doing anything on this scale they would never do it without at least consulting/warning the heads of department. If someone working with (but not actually on the instruction of) the CEO sent an email to everyone in finance saying 'send me X information on your productivity or I might sack you' without even informing the CFO (or COO or whoever) the latter would usually be justifiably furious.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
That expectation doesn't exist in the private sector
This is total bullshit. Your line manager and probably anyone above you within your department in most cases has access to everything you do, but outside your department this is not the case at all. Internal firewalls exist in many companies for many, many departments, especially where legal, compliance, auditing, HR or similar issues are concerned.
If Alphabet wants to import all of Waymo's email comms for training Gemini, they have that right.
They do, but the way this would presumably happen is that someone at Gemini would ask someone above them at Alphabet if this was possible, this senior manager would then decide and then they would inform someone senior at Waymo that they should co-operate with Gemini and send them X tranche of data, and this would get passed back down the chain of command to whoever actually would do the work of facilitating the use of the data. What would absolutely not happen is that someone senior at Gemini would just email a low-level data manager at Waymo saying 'please send us all your email comms'.
The point of this is that Trump might have the right to request any piece of data from within the government, but Musk/DOGE are not automatically vested with his powers simply because they were appointed/created by him. Kash Patel (for example) does not answer to Musk, he answers to Trump. If there is to be a request for information on what all his employees do, then it has to go up the chain to Trump and down again to the FBI.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
Can you elaborate?
An individual cannot always see the full implications of sharing particular pieces of information and unlikely to be aware of the full complexities of laws governing not only information the government wishes to keep confidential but also things like privacy laws. Private employers very often have blanket rules against sharing information (even internally) too, especially if you are in any field relating to things like law/compliance/audit/HR, this isn't some case of bloat peculiar to the bureaucracy, and it's for much the same reason. It's not their information to give out, it's their department's.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
This is a total non-sequitur, I was merely responding to the characterisation from the above comment.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
for almost a third of their working lives to pay the salaries of these people
This is flatly wrong. Less than half of federal spending goes on salaries, and among this by far the largest group of employees is the military.
Rules like 'never discuss what you do with those outside the department' are obviously necessary in many agencies, if you want to call that red tape then fine, seems like a pretty important piece of tape. Obviously it would be a terrible precedent in such agencies to say 'actually you can discuss your work if you, as an individual employee, decide on a random ad hoc basis that its probably fine this time'. In most cases a reasonably discrete summary probably does exist, but it plainly can't be up to individual employees when and how they get to share information about what they do in cases where discretion is important.
I'm not sure this is so much 'believing false things' as 'being unable to intuit the scale of numbers'. In both these cases these numbers are nothing more than shorthand for 'lots'. They haven't deliberately discarded lower or higher numbers, just plumped for something that seems like lots. It's like when there was that poll suggesting that the average American thought 10% of the country was trans and 20% Asian or whatever it was. People aren't 'believing' that figure is true in the sense that they actively don't believe in possible lower figures, they just know it's more than zero and grasp at some likely sounding round number.
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