MadMonzer
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User ID: 896
The published plan was that the plane would be transferred to the Trump Presidential library (i.e. a non-profit controlled by Trump personally) once the new VC-25B Air Force Ones from Boeing were finally ready. I'm not sure what happens if the VC-25Bs are not ready until after Trump leaves office.
A second-hand 747 is not that big compared to Trump's net worth, but it is an order of magnitude bigger than your standard American corruption scandal. In addition, Qatar reads to midwits as an unfriendly, Iran-aligned country, which makes the scandal worse than taking a similarly-sized gift from a private-sector entity or a friendly country.
MadMonzer
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4d ago
Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale in 1985, which was before attitudes to Islam were a Thing in Western politics. (The first big West vs Islam controversy was about the Satanic Verses which was published in 1988).
Even after the Rushdie fatwa, most of the people who take seriously the idea Islam is evil and oppresses women are the same people (i.e. mainstream leftwing feminists like Atwood, but also aggressive atheists like Dawkins) who think that Christianity is evil and oppresses women. The idea that Muslims are a protected group with more oppression points than women is mostly a post-911 thing.
So back in 1985, the way to bet is that
- The Handmaid's Tale was a satire of Christian and Muslim fundamentalism
- Both Atwood and her readers were mostly thinking about Christianity because it was more salient at the time.
MadMonzer
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4d ago
That's the point I'm making. Rey's backstory is just bad writing, not woke. But the response to people complaining about it was to attack them as sexist.
MadMonzer
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5d ago
One of the problems with trying to run on a low-salience 80-20 issue where you are on the right side is that disagreeing with voters about the salience of an issue is, itself, behaviour that marks you out as out of touch. The only reason Trump got away with it in 2024 was that so many left-aligned groups were helping him make the issue salient.
The classic example in the UK was our relationship with the EU. From the 1990s through to the Brexit referendum in 2016, closer integration of the UK into the EU was spectacularly unpopular, but every time the Tories tried to run a Eurosceptic campaign the median voter punished them for "banging on about Europe" instead of talking about the issues voters cared about.
MadMonzer
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5d ago
In a US culture war context, my brain wants to associate it with a magazine and the one annual issue of that magazine that was worth "reading".
MadMonzer
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5d ago
The point isn't to prevent demagoguery, the goal is to prevent winner take all scenarios, which are a bigger-than-usual danger in a historically even Congress. Normally one party dominates so it's not inherently crippling. It forces compromise in that situation.
The problem is that the power Congress gives up by being dysfunctional doesn't disappear - in practice it ends up being fought over by the President and the courts. Turning the Presidency into the elective monarchy that Hamilton wanted and the other framers definitely didn't creates an even bigger winner-takes-all effect.
MadMonzer
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5d ago
Interesting. UK media (whether sympathetic to the thing or hostile to the thing) consistently portrays coastal California as the spiritual home of the thing that makes the Blue tribe Blue. Actually you can probably drop "coastal" from that description - I know the Central Valley exists because I drove up it, but I doubt most Brits do.
If "the West" includes western-aligned Asian countries, then 5nm chips.
If "the West" just means the US and western Europe, then a Boeing jet with Rolls-Royce or Safran engines, or an Airbus jet with GE or Pratt & Whitney engines. (Although I notice that the newest variants of the A350 and 777 have only same-side-of-Pond engine options - Rolls-Royce for the A350 and GE for the 777).
MadMonzer
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5d ago
Given the existence of Hilary Clinton and Marjorie Taylor Green, the meaning of "harpy" is a matter of partisan controversy in a way which makes it inappropriate to include in a literacy test for voters.
MadMonzer
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5d ago
Most of that was championed by, or at least tangentially aligned with, left-leaning ideology. Budgets in Europe are not collapsing because we spend so much on making the best AI data centers, space programs, powerful militaries, automated factories or whatever other Promethean thing one could dream of, but because something like 20% to 30% of all economic activity must be fed into the retiree-healthcare-migrant-welfare-NGO complex.
Gibmedats for the old are bipartisan almost everywhere - there have been centre-right parties which don't support them, but they get vote out quickly. One of the game-changers in 2016 was that Trump said he wouldn't cut Social Security and that he visibly relished the hatred of the SS-cutting wing of his own party.
The big expansions in working-age welfare since 1980 were not left-wing either. I am most familiar with the UK, where the first means-tested benefit for people (primarily but not exclusively single mothers) in low-paid work was introduced by Heath and made permanent by Thatcher. And the drift towards expanded eligibility for disability benefits also begins under Thatcher (conventional wisdom is that it was deliberate in order to massage headline unemployment numbers down) and continues under governments of both parties.
MadMonzer
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5d ago
It may have above replacement birth rates,
It doesn't, unless you carve out high-fertility religious sub-populations - and as far as I can see the only such group who are both fiscally and demographically sustainable are Mormons. No state has statewide fertility above replacement - the red states are just dying out more slowly than the blue ones.
MadMonzer
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5d ago
"coalition of the hegemony" vs a "coalition of the dissenters", with the parties essentially switching sides at some point during the 70s and 80s.
The flip is later than that. Obama is the first Democratic President to successfully run as head of the "coalition of the hegemony" and Trump is the first Republican to run as head of the "coalition of the dissenters".
MadMonzer
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5d ago
If voters thought that immaculate inflation (prices and incomes both rising at roughly the same speed) was a good outcome, then the economic vibes in both 2024 and 2026 would not have been as ugly as they were - this is the "why do voters believe their lying eyes and not the BLS statistics?" issue that both Harris and Trump came unstuck on. CW is that voters consider rising wages to be a result of their hard work and rising prices to be the result of government failure, rather than understanding that they are two sides of the same coin.
In addition, voters act as if they believe in the conspiracy theory that inflation statistics are rigged such that the beta of measured CPI on real inflation is noticeably less than one. If this was true, then immaculate inflation really would decrease the standard of living of the critical voter bloc whose main source of income is a CPI-linked pension.
MadMonzer
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5d ago
Falling wages tends to crash the economy (both because employers and employees empirically prefer layoffs to negotiated wage cuts and because it causes people to default on their mortgages). Stagnant wages in aggregate can do that too, because if wages are stagnant in aggregate they are falling for half the population. So the economy runs smoothest with nominal wages growing at several percent a year.
If the economy was growing fast enough, you could have 4% nominal wage growth with falling prices. But in practice the economy doesn't grow that fast, so a certain amount of inflation is something you wouldn't want to avoid.
Poor supply side performance will inevitably reduce real wage growth, so with a monetary regime that aims at constant low inflation the causality between low nominal wage growth and economic stagnation goes both ways. But you can have a stable near-full-employment economy with stagnant growth if you are willing to tolerate enough inflation.
MadMonzer
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5d ago
I think the GOP losing California was a delayed result of the Southern Strategy - not in the sense that the Southern Strategy was racist and California is not, but in the sense that coastal California and Dixie are permanent hereditary enemies on culture war grounds such that bringing southerners into the coalition would eventually drive Californians out.
I note that being from California was an asset for Nixon and Reagan, but conventional wisdom is that being from California was a disadvantage for Harris.
"We are on the side of normal Americans, whereas the Democrats are a rainbow coalition of un-American freaks and weirdos" has been the GOP's best message since before GOP was a right-wing party. "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" was Blaine's description of Grover Cleveland's coalition in 1884. (That time the message didn't take.) Despite the best efforts of occasional unity Dems like JFK or 1st-term Obama (FDR talked like a unity Dem but his practical approach to politics in the New Deal era was a machine politician running a rainbow coalition), the Dems let the GOP get away with this because being a rainbow coalition is part of the Democratic Party's institutional DNA even more so than being left-wing.
The only unifying message that the Democrats are comfortable running on is "Throw the GOP bums out", and even then they want to say "Throw the GOP bums out for the sake of women, minorities, union workers, disabled people..." Needles to say, that was a winning message this year.
MadMonzer
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5d ago
It reminds me about an old SSC post about the politics of his readership. It was mostly Bay Area bugman leftists for the obvious reasons, but among the right-wing minority there were a lot of (self-identified) libertarians, enough neoreactionaries to be worth making them a line item in the report, a significant number of people who wrote screeds about their unique political views in the free-text box, and precisely zero mainstream red tribe conservatives. My impression is that the founding stock of the Motte is that eclectic "grey tribe" libertarian-leaning right-wing minority of the original SSC readership.
@JeSuisCharlie correctly senses that this is not a red tribe forum, and concludes that it must secretly be a leftist one. I suspect he would feel the same way on a European monarchist forum or suchlike.
MadMonzer
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5d ago
For a contemporary version, consider this Substack which excerpts the author's paywalled article in New Statesman, the main left-wing political magazine in the UK. The basic these is that the UK has been excessively focussed on low consumer prices (unspoken, except for housing) when we should have been thinking about industrial policy and resilience. But the core beef of the political movement that New Statesman readers are part of is about middle-class living standards.
Both right-populists and left-populists are telling a story where manufacturing is special such that prioritising reshoring manufacturing over middle-class living standards will nevertheless produce higher middle-class living standards.
MadMonzer
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5d ago
Based on what gets upvoted and downvoted, I suspect there are a lot of lurkers and occasional posters who have conventional MAGA political views. I agree that you are one of a very small number of normie Republicans among the regular posters.
"Most of the posters on this forum would be sorted as auth-left in the context of some other more libertarian forum" says more about the culture of that other forum than the culture here - David Brin had a (no longer online as far as I'm aware) meme of this where the Nolan chart had a tiny triangle of "Libertarian" in the lib-right corner with 95% of the chart labelled "Dirty fucking Commie". The actual auth-left (relative to the median voter) have mostly sorted out - unless you think that MAGA counts as an auth-left movement based on Trump's unwillingness to cut unsustainable entitlement spending.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
5d ago
The Talafreako meme is Republicans being high on their own supply. A good candidate is one who reads as a more charismatic version of a normie to swing voters, which he does. Actual normies don't run for statewide office, and if they did they wouldn't be able to act normal in the freakish situations political campaigns put candidates in.
MadMonzer
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5d ago
Bonus nitpick, but if you're willing to implement explicit ethnonationalism, religious exclusion on top seems a bit redundant - unless you also really hate Albanians/only hate Orthodox Jews for some reason.
"White" as a political category is closer to "non-Black and culturally Christian" than it is to "member of the Caucasian family of ethnic groups". Nobody thinks that Arabs and Turks (who are no swarthier than white Sicilians) are politically white, and most white nationalists are not fond of Jews either. Which religion we don't believe in is fundamental to who the ingroup is.
Albanians are unwanted immigrants in western Europe based on their religion and criminality in spite of their skin colour, and this is not controversial among European ethno-nationalists.
Most European ethnonationalists are ethnonationalists of a specific European ethnicity (French, German, Scottish etc.) The superordinate identity that covered all Europe was Christendom, not whiteness - "white nationalism" was an American thing about justifying slavery and later outgrouping ADOS blacks. Pan-European Christian nationalists have been confused about whether Christian Africa is outgroup since the days of medieval Abyssinia and Prester John.
MadMonzer
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5d ago
B.1. These could be signs that progressive liberal politics really do need a blue tsunami to win any office.
B.2. Or this is particularly prescient of Bernie, as progressive as possible yet still win.
The blueness of the territory matters more than the national environment. AOC didn't need a blue wave to win in a deep blue NYC House district, she just needed to win the primary. "Leftist candidates can't win statewide, even in blue states" used to be conventional wisdom, on the basis that no state is that blue on a statewide basis. And that conventional wisdom is in trouble. MA-Sen was always winnable from the left. MI and MN are both coming through with large enough margins that they would still have been winnable with Bernie's candidates in a more normal "bad midterms for the President's party" environment.
So I think this is smart politics from Bernie.
MadMonzer
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6d ago
I disagree with this, but here's a thought experiment: Suppose that (1) the Israelis were offered a deal - total peace but they had to withdraw to the 1948 line and uproot J & S settlers just like they did with settlers in Gaza; and (2) somehow it was a credible offer. Would they take it? Obviously the answer is "yes" given that they accepted much worse deals in the past. So unless you believe that at some point the Israeli mentality fundamentally changed, it seems pretty clear that the saying still holds.
The whole point I am making is that religious Zionist parties (excluding Likud, which has always had a religious Zionist faction which has become more significant over time) went from 9 Knesset seats in 1992 (when the Rabin government that did Oslo was elected) to 19 in 2026 (if you allocate half of B'Yachad's seats to Naftali Bennet), due to a change in Israeli demographics. Religious Zionists would definitely reject the hypothetical deal you discuss, and Netanyahu built his political career based on opposition to the "worse deals in the past" that Israel accepted, so I suspect most Likudniks would as well. (Netanyahu is one of the Israeli right-wingers who deliberately allowed Hamas to build up its position in Gaza because a stronger Hamas makes a two-state solution less likely, at the cost of a few dead and maimed Israelis).
Actual deflation would be good for working-class pensioners because most (SS, public-sector or union) pension indexation is upward-only, and the main losers from the resulting recession would be people who lose jobs, and rich pensioners whose main source of income is investment returns. Add in workers who are close to retirement and have recession proof jobs, and it is possible that although deflation would be a disaster, a majority of people who actually vote would vote for it eyes open. See this blog post claiming this already happened in the Great Recession after the 2008 crisis.
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