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4d ago
I think it may help to distinguish between Europe and the EU in assessing American feelings. Europe seems generally snobbish with weird customs, and most likely to produce our enemies in world wars; they also aren't pulling their end of the bargain in many agreements. Eastern Europe looks like various puppet states. The EU over regulates and views reducing their current tariffs to match ours as a "concession," and are problematic on that front. They also can't control their borders and are kind of hypocritical about their definition of "democracy."
Russia is still the big bad thing that goes bump in the night, and always will be. Protests will always be considered Russia funded. The WW2 alliances were weird ones in a historical context. I can't see Americans turning towards Russia, except to the extent that Russia provides leverage against the Europeans taking Americans for granted.
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15d ago
Because the deadline is likely the marker for what happens "next" - the RIF. The probie list has already started getting marked up
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15d ago
The delay in closing date is actually doing Musk a favor by allowing an extension of time for more workers to accept the offer in the meantime. Only 40k have accepted so far.
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1mo ago
Assimilation is part of the issue, but so are the structural concerns of the location taking on those immigrants. To OP's point, we can't just allow large groups to ignore the laws of the land. Part of what went wrong in Canada is that Indian subcultures are basically carrying out hits against each other for beef back in India, and the government just kind of let it happen
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1mo ago
Dogs have the capacity for harm - peeing in what should be sanitary places to acquire food; biting; barking at certain ethnicities or races if not socialized properly; jumping/knocking people over. It's more so like "why do you have an issue with a bunch of people bringing in guns and handing them to their children while wandering around the store?" Some of the children, I assume, are well trained. Sooner or later, though, a gun's gonna get fired.
People don't train their dogs properly
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2mo ago
So the conspiracy theory I'm currently hearing bounce around is that this is an "I am Sparticus" situation. I'm not advocating this position, but solely sharing for its potential cultural implications.
The theory goes something like this: Luigi, being an engineer with a 3D printer, made himself a copy of the New Jersey fake ID, the gun, and wrote up a manifesto to turn himself, banking on the recent results of the Daniel Penny case to show that the popular support for the UHC shooter ensures jury nullification of the assassination.
They cite to things like the hair line (?) and the fact he had the gun and manifesto on him while chilling in this random McDonald's. Idk. I don't follow the logic.
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2mo ago
2020 uPenn engineering grad with a manifesto, had the same fake id as what was used at the hostel
ETA: goodreads link is no longer accessible lmao
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2mo ago
In kind of "rough order," first the surviving spouse, if no surviving spouse (or if spouse doesn't sue), then the children, if no surviving children, then the parent, if no parents then dependents (not applicable here, dude was homeless...), and then if none of those, the executor/representative of the estate (again, not applicable here). Friend/acquaintance only applies if you qualified as their dependent.
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2mo ago
I find it interesting that the people celebrating the "vigilante justice" of the UHC assassin are the same people upset about the Daniel Penny verdict.
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2mo ago
There's also the reality of the diaspora. There's no way to avoid foreign thought in elections when so many voters live abroad. There would need to be a like mandatory "homecoming" of the diaspora (~9 million Romanians, for instance) before being allowed to vote on anything.
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2mo ago
Is there proof that Georgescu knew that money was being spent on social media campaigns on his behalf and didn't chase down the exact amounts to report it properly? Because tbh it just kind of seems like he didn't think he was gonna win, either.
Do campaign finance statutes include provisions for cancelling elections if money is underreported? Here it's generally fines and such, not undoing the election itself.
Is there any evidence the current ruling party knew about the social media campaigning but didn't do anything about it because Georgescu is a partiless nobody and they thought he would just leech some votes off the far-right party?
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2mo ago
If there was a round of voting left, why not trust voters to Make The Right Decision and vote for the non-TikTok runoff candidate if Georgescu is such an obvious threat to democracy for checks notes foreigners making him trend on social media? Can't all the angry Romanian protestors just vote for Lasconi as the "fix" for this "problem?"
Current President's term ends on Dec. 21, but the next election isn't until March. Current president exceeding his term is a constitutional issue.
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2mo ago
Anthem has walked back their controversial decision to cap anaesthesia coverage. While it's likely just a timing thing, there's a kind of weirdness where it might seem like they walked it back due to the assassination - no one wants to get got. The last thing anyone needs is to seem like assassination works.
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2mo ago
The killer left behind bullet casings, which was at first viewed as “oh, this was an amateur – what kind of professional doesn’t police their brass?” even with the suppressor on the gun. Then it was revealed the three bullet casings each contained a different word: one said deny, one said defend, one said depose. Some speculated it was related to a book titled “Delay, Deny, Defend” about the evils of insurance companies, although the title doesn’t quite add up.
Other speculate the word “Depose” has to do with the recent DOJ probe into Brian Thompson for insider trading.
I was stunned watching many on social media celebrated the murder like they were celebrating the death of a terrorist. UHC is the largest provider of Medicare advantage in the country. We need better insurance, absolutely - but insurance is the only reason many can even afford basic care in the first place. UHC isn't even one of the insurance companies that yesterday decided to stop covering anesthesia in the middle of surgeries if the surgeries took too long (although UHC has the highest percentage of denied claims, in part because of their share of the Medicare advantage market).
If people don't like denials of coverage now, I think they'd hate rationed healthcare under a "Medicare 4 All" system even more; the government-run V.A. shows exactly how bad we are at those kinds of systems. Some coverage and cheaper procedures is better than wait times or tribunal refusals due to resource shortages or determined societal need.
Although I can't expect the people celebrating his death to understand that. Most Americans have a loose grasp, at best, of how health insurance works; I had recently seen an Xcretement with the following sentiment:
A Starbucks worker on the @organizeworkers call saying that working in a union Starbucks in the South could become the only way for some young people to get gender affirming care under Trump has me crying in the club 😭
Which is... bafflingly incorrect. Insurance covering a surgery doesn't suddenly make that surgery legal in whatever state? It's just... not how any of this works, although I don't know why I expected a Starbucks unionization attempt to know any better.
Does the United States have it in us to engage in vigilantism? Will all CEOs, billionaires, etc., start to show up on the chopping block? Is "eating the rich" leaving electoral politics behind and instead taking matters into their own "hands?" Will this change the gun control debate at all? How dystopian are we about to get? Or, like everything else, is this tapping the sign of "nothing ever happens?"
I believe it's the latter; this will get forgotten about quickly. Billionaires et. al. can afford private security, but there's been a recent movement attacking small business owners as the "petit bourgeois," who are less likely to be able to afford that kind of stuff. Those grievances are likely more local, though, and less likely to make the news. Local level "activism" doesn't generate attention, so maybe it's less of a concern. Idk. I don't think Americans have it in us to truly seek a revolution. Even the "Insurrection" would have continued the status quo of the government system, just with a different person at the top.
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2mo ago
Biden just set a precedent of pardoning future crimes.
It's minimal - the pardon was issued during the day Sunday and covered up until Sunday at midnight - and probably accidental; it feels like someone leaked the pardon news so Biden just ripped the bandaid off and pardoned Hunter a day early.
Pardoning for future crimes - however minimal - is still improper. Ex parte Garland states that presidential pardons are only for crimes after the crime's commission. But the Hunter pardon wasn't written to be severable (i.e., if a part is deemed invalid, the whole can still stand). Is Hunter Biden's pardon thus entirely invalid, because the couple of hours of future pardon is "against the rules?"
Or will we as a country accept the pardoning of future crimes moving forward? Can Trump now walk into the Oval Office day one and issue pardons for his entire administration for any federal crimes committed during his tenure? He can point to the Hunter pardon as allowing this kind of power, and he wouldn't necessarily be incorrect.
Social media marked all of this up as jokes - "Hunter can go on a one man purge tonight!!" and "hookers and crack for Hunter tonight!" I haven't seen it floating around legal blogs or anything of the like quite yet, although in the grand scheme of things, a few hours of future immunity isn't that big of a deal.
For the party of "Defending Democracy™️", pardoning crimes not yet committed is not really what they should be going for. The culture war discussion will focus on Biden being a liar yadda yadda, but the scarier part of this is the few hours of future immunity until midnight yesterday remaining unchallenged.
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2mo ago
I'm not 100% that this is pissing all over his legacy, per se.
An interesting "culture war" piece of this is why it was a blanket pardon stretching back to when Hunter first joined Burisma. The "innocent" argument is that even if Biden simply pardoned Hunter for the gun/IRS charges, there would be continued lawfare trying to tie the Bidens to shady backroom dealings in Ukraine.
The less innocent argument - the one that will spawn a thousand conspiracy theories - is that there's a lot of "there" there and Biden is protecting himself, not just his son. And seeing how much rationality gets expensed towards the "innocent" theory will be interesting to watch unfold.
The discussion along party lines have also been eye raising. The three things I've seen from Dems have been "Trump pardoned/will pardon worse!!!", "guess I won't vote for Biden again, hurr hurr" and "wow cons are melting down!!" The three things I've seen from cons are "I'm a father, I get it," "well, Biden lied," and the aforementioned "so... Why ten years?"
There's a reason why exit polls had voters listing Democracy as their #1 issue had those voters breaking 50/50. "Democracy" is not a winning issue for Dems when their messaging on this stuff sucks. The cons are acting more conciliatory about this than they are.
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2mo ago
Random theories about this election I’ve seen discussed so far:
We have left-wing musings that the failure to reach low-propensity voters comes from a “lack” of a left-wing media ecosystem, which makes me scratch my head somewhat, given the disproportionate skew of media to the left. There doesn’t appear to be any introspection or soul-searching here. The issue might not be a lack of left-wing media, but a lack of trust in that media; becoming more online creates a healthy level of skepticism about what we consume, especially as AI becomes more prevalent.
Some pundits are decrying the existence of right-wing echo chambers as corrupting our young men while fleeing to Bluesky and Threads so they don’t have to interact with conservatives. Bluesky “block lists” of conservative voices appeared almost overnight, to overcome the lack of algorithmic protections.
And, of course, everyone’s bringing up their favorite culture war issues as the “reason” why Trump won, but I don’t think it’s that simple. It’s not that factory workers in the rustbelt are transphobic, it’s that factory workers in the rustbelt are tired of someone’s pronouns being given more attention than their grocery bills. Abortion received a ton of support on referendums while their states still went to Trump; is it because we made having children a “women’s issue” instead of an economic one? Telling women they should lie to their husbands who they voted for isn’t a great way to win over men who already feel scorned by today’s society.
I also don’t understand how the party who claim to be championing women and minorities is also the party fighting so hard for mail-in ballots. Secret ballots are a feature of the system, not a bug. Filling out the ballot at your kitchen table makes it really hard to hide it from your husband, or your employer. The weird creepy ads about “people can look up your voting record and won’t date you if you don’t” also don’t help with this, especially when several of these ads didn’t clarify that while whether you voted is public, who you voted for is not. The social stigma of voting Trump is still high, as people get uninvited from Thanksgiving with their own families for leaning conservative.
In the meantime, my guilty pleasure is watching liberal election-denier conspiracy theories. arr “SomethingIsWrong2024” displays a shockingly bad grasp of data analysis, because “all my neighbors had Kamala signs!!” and the like. I feel like I’m in an alternate reality when I see things stated “Vance was a bad pick, no one was excited about him” because I remember the enthusiasm for having someone young and capable on the ticket. Maybe I’m just stuck in my own echo chamber, and don’t realize it; I should do my own introspection.
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2mo ago
I remember the Obama era narratives of the “Coalition of the Ascendent.” If demographics were truly destiny, Republicans wouldn’t touch the Presidency again. Obama’s “resounding” 2012 victory prompted the infamous Republican “Autopsy.”
This narrative ignores the numbers, though. 2012 wasn’t a triumph for Democrats, but a warning – while the Republican candidate had gained just under 1 million more votes than the 2008 Republican candidate, the Democrat had lost a little over 3.5 million voters. While Hillary Clinton eked out a plurality of the popular vote,* this trend continued in 2016: the Republican candidate gained about 2 million more votes than in 2012, while the Democratic candidate lost ~60k votes. A minor number, to be sure, but a trend nonetheless. 2012 wasn’t a victory lap, but instead a demonstration that the “Obama coalition” was a mirage, a flash in the pan – a demonstration that we all missed at the time.
As the 2024 election is mulled over by pundits to see what, exactly, went wrong, I wonder if we are missing similar “warning signs” in trends. The Bernie-Bro-turned-Trump-supporter pipeline a la Joe Rogan could be symptomatic of voters aligning more along an axis of “insiders vs. outsiders” instead of policy preferences, education, age, or race; while there are correlations with each of those things to an “insiders vs. outsiders” axis, none of them are definitive. Are we similarly looking at the 2024 election the wrong way, especially as we make judgment calls while several million votes have yet to be counted?
Some of the most prominent Republicans right now identified as Democrat-aligned during the Obama era (Trump, Vance, Elon, Tulsi; I’d throw RFK in there too but I’m not sure that he views himself as a Republican). Republicans are winning over tech bros and unions, and bleeding college-educated voters. There’s talk about this just being a Trump thing, it’ll go away. It was a big anti-incumbency year, worldwide. The elite will reclaim their rightful place as the only right, correct, egalitarian way forward. Etc.
*Talking heads bicker about how Trump “only” receiving a plurality of the popular vote decreases his significance, even while clinging to Clinton “winning” the popular vote in 2016 despite also receiving a plurality, and not a majority. The semantics are amusing from a culture war perspective – the war on language continues – but ultimately meaningless.
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2mo ago
The Gaetz drama did take the heat off of Hegseth, though, who is now having his own sex allegations circulate.
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2mo ago
Isn't that what specialists are for, though? If you need a guy who knows what to do with a knuckleball, you go to that guy, who specialized in it. But if you're dealing with fastballs and curveballs, then your local guy is good enough.
There's a death of generalists in medicine underlying a lot of this, in part because everyone wants the guy who's good with knuckleballs. But not everyone is going to face a knuckleball, and you don't need to go to the specialist otherwise.
The most recent executive order is little c conservative regarding the law, in that it takes Loper Bright a step further in curtailing unelected legislating by bureaucrats.
It does not put the executive over the legislative or judicial branch, despite fear mongering. Instead, it puts the White House/AG over "independent" agencies. All regulations must be reviewed by the White House/AG's office, and agencies must defer to their interpretation of vague laws.
The judicial branch still has the ability to overturn those interpretations (they actually have more power to overturn those interpretations after the death of Chevron).
The legislative branch can avoid the issue by making more specific laws. This will never happen, because Congress has been fine with passing the buck to the executive branch to avoid reelection fights for a long time now. The legislative branch can also move certain agencies (or agency functions) into the legislative branch. Congress can make ALJs specialty Article III courts, to increase their independence from the President. Congress can move regulation-making functions underneath relevant subcommittees in the legislature, but that would increase their workload in reviewing what agencies are up to. Congress has delegated a lot of power to the executive, and the most recent EO is an example of how that can go sideways. If they didn't want the executive to have the power to interpret vague laws, they should've made less vague laws. The three branches were always supposed to be at war with each other, not casually handing over powers such as the tariff power.
It doesn't really impact what a Democratic president would or would not do - it's logical to think that Democrats, who are a fan of letting "experts" use their expertise, will return decision-making to independent agencies instead of wading through regulations at the Presidential level.
But the hyperbole around all of this is... Weird. If things are so bad, why do people/legacy media feel the need to exaggerate the impact? Idk. The language part of the culture war has always gotten to me.
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