MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Nobody saved enough money in a blue-collar job to buy enough land to support a profitable farm - which by 1900 was quite a lot of land - smallholder poverty was a pretty universal phenonenon. Where there was an open frontier, the land was given away free. I know this is fictional evidence, but the whole plot of Of Mice and Men depends on the fact that Lenny and George's dream of saving up to buy land suddenly goes from being unrealistic to being realistic when they befriend a guy with a personal injury settlement (who could not use the cash to buy land himself, because his injury would prevent him from farming it).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
If we are comparing the life of an upper class Londoner with servants on the eve of WW1 to the life of a middle class Londoner shortly before the Internet, we are of course ignoring the biggest improvement of the 2nd half of the twentieth century (labour saving home appliances). But I think @BahRamYou is right that if money was no object you could enjoy a pretty modern lifestyle in Edwardian London. (And that Edwardian London is close to the first time and place that you could do so). The big things that you absolutely couldn't do (apart from electronic media) were fast travel (no aeroplanes, trains and cars ran at about half the speed they do now), certain types of fresh food (downstream of fast travel), and antibiotics. The doctor who did house calls was arguably more likely to kill you than save you in 1910.
Also there was no way of avoiding the air pollution if you regularly had to be in central London for business.
We have to pay out the nose for a trip to Broadway to get that kind of experience.
West End shows are a lot cheaper. Nosebleed seats start at £25 and top price tickets are generally around £100.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
With a high-end home bean-to-cup coffee machine, my marginal cost of decent espresso is about 40p per shot:
- Coffee beans 25p
- Machine consumables 5p (descaler, cleaning tablets, water filters)
- Machine major maintenance 10p (a £250 brewing unit replacement every few thousand cups)
- Electricity and water <1p
We pay 95p per imperial (20oz) pint to have milk home-delivered, so a half-pint glass of milk costs us slightly more than an espresso shot, but the milk in a late still costs less than the coffee. You could halve the cost of milk by buying in bulk at the supermarket, but then drinking proper espresso coffee is a premium experience as well.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Something similar is included in each IKEA bookshelf.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
This is a serious post and deserves a serious response, which I don't have time to write tonight. But one thing I will say right now is that I put the disclaimer "Assuming the secondary sources about The Civil War are roughly correct" in for a reason. The movie you are discussing bares no resemblance to the one discussed by Wikipedia and the most updooted reviews on IMDB. I would not be that surprised if I have been misled by wokestupid propaganda on IMDB, and not surprised at all in the case of Wikipedia.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
I will read the full linked set of Substacks because I am fascinated by elite formation and think it is an underrated factor in the success or failure of societies, but some quick comments from a British perspective - I live in the UK on the fringes of the "traditional-elite" upper and upper-middle class culture that is our equivalent of the culture Bama Rush is part of.
- The underlying dynamic of Bama recruiting out-of-state students who can't get into Vanderbilt any more definitely exists. Most Oxbridge rejects go to other academically elite universities that are almost but not quite as selective (UCL, LSE, Imperial, Warwick for maths, etc.) but there is a group of universities (Bristol, Durham, Exeter, St Andrew's) which have a reputation for attracting the kind of student who was looking forward to the social aspects of Oxbridge but didn't meet the academic standards. As late as 2000, Bristol was actively recruiting Oxbridge rejects. In the current year, all these universities insist that they aren't, but I don't believe them.
- The level of "hooray Henryism" (our equivalent of fratty behaviour) at Bristol/Exeter/St Andrew's is noticeably higher than Oxbridge, where most of the students are genuine bookworms. This is less true of Durham, possibly because Durham was historically a mining town and the threat of being beaten up by locals moderates behaviour.
- Selective-membership elite social clubs exist at Oxbridge, but are very much on the downlow. Doing that kind of thing as publicly as US Greek life violates the first rule of British traditional-elite culture which is that those who matter don't mind and those who mind don't matter.
- Everything is confounded by the impact of Harry Potter fandom. Someone who enthusiastically participates in academic-social traditions like formal dining in the College Hall might be trad, or they might just be a Potterhead. For Americans who are not aware of this, Harry Potter is inspired by a tradition of English boarding school stories whose memes probably trace back to the Billy Bunter stories in the cheap early 20th century boy's papers (see this critical appraisal by Orwell) and which had ceased to be written unironically around the time Enid Blyton died in 1968. The traditions of these boarding schools were themselves based on university traditions, and in any case JK Rowling was Scottish, and therefore more familiar with ancient universities than with English boarding schools, so Hogwarts looks more like an Oxbridge College than like a real Public (i.e. posh private) School.
On the central question of "What is the sexual morality of Bama Rush?" I see three things going on.
- This is, at least publically, traditional-elite sexual morality. Marriage market value is determined by coming from a good family, being hot, and being socially adept (roughly in that order). Young traditional-elite women are socialised to think about marriage market value to the exclusion of sexual market value or labour market value. Jane Austen would understand, to the point where "Elizabeth Bennet rushes Bama" is a crossover fic I would consider reading. Anyone want to take the over on what % of these girls will outearn their husbands in 20 years' time? A sorority preserves its prestige over time by recruiting high MMV girls, policing their behaviour to maintain their MMV, and encouraging them to marry future bankers and captains of industry of the type who will bankroll their wives' alumnae donations (i.e. guys from top frats).
- The hypocrisy is exactly the sort of thing that Dalrock used to talk about on his blog, and which leads to the standard Blue joke about Red Tribers marrying early and often have a point. Dalrock's thesis was that American meritocratic elites had a sexual morality where sex and marriage were separated - when seeking sex you do whatever it takes to compete for attention from the top 20% SMV guys, but when seeking marriage you should be as practical as a Jane Austen character. In this model both tribes have the same sexual morality, but the Blue Tribe are more honest about what they are doing.
- There are strong vibes of high-status sorority sisters (upperclasswomen, chapter officers, big-name legacies) pimping out lower-status girls (underclasswomen, girls from lower-middle-class families) at their own sororities to the frats in order to build useful social connections.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
I find it compelling that the constitution mandates state legislatures decide how to run elections and the executives in many states abrogated that power unto themselves as part of a Covid emergency action.
This is a great law geeks' question. The key issue is the interpretation of the Constitutional text "as the legislature thereof may direct" (which appears in the Constitution in reference to both House elections and selection of Presidential electors). The conventional view is that this has the same meaning as "as the laws thereof may direct" - i.e. that state election laws are ordinary state laws which can be amended or abrogated in all the usual ways set out in a state constitution including gubernatorial veto, judicial review by state supreme courts, amendment by initiative and referendum and (relevant here) temporary override in an emergency properly declared by the Governor. The strong form of the conventional view is (consistently with most in-state state-law cases) there is no federal remedy in an election case unless a federal law or the federal Constitution has been violated (as happened in Bush v. Gore.
The alternative view, referred to by law geeks as the "Independent State Legislature" theory, is that "as the legislature thereof may direct" is a delegation of federal authority to the two (or one in Nebraska) houses of the State legislature that is independent of their normal legislative power stemming from the state constitution. In this view state election laws are actually delegated federal laws, amending them by initiative or abrogating them by state-court judicial review violates the federal Constitution, and it is the job of federal courts to ensure that they are followed to the letter.
As a matter of original public meaning, the conventional view is obviously correct. Gubernatorial vetoes of state election laws were routine in the founding era, and a number of states entrenched their election laws by amending their state constitutions.
In terms of how it fared at SCOTUS, the ISL theory loses 4-3 in Bush v. Gore (Rehnquist, Thomas and Scalia join a concurrence saying that ISL required a de novo review of the Florida Supreme Court's interpretation of Florida election law, the four liberals reject it, Kennedy and O'Connor don't reach the issue). A weak version of ISL loses 5-4 in a 2015 Arizona redistricting case with Scalia, Thomas and Alito joining a Roberts dissent. Roberts distinguishes between "normal" limits on state legislatures like gubernatorial vetoes and state court judicial review and a scheme like the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission where a state amends its constitution to remove an aspect of election law from the regular legislative process altogether.
So as of 2020 the ISL theory is potentially winning, in the sense that conservative justices have tended to endorse it, and it hasn't been rejected yet by a majority-conservative court. But as a matter of law - of original public meaning of the Constitutional text, SCOTUS precedent, and long-standing practice - it is borderline-frivolous. Texas v. Pennsylvania (the last-ditch 2020 election lawsuit in which Eastman was heavily involved, designed to invoke original SCOTUS jurisdiction) was based on ISL, and SCOTUS denied it 7-2 on standing grounds (with no justices reaching the merits).
We finally see a cleanish ISL case with Moore vs Harper in 2021. The case concerns a North Carolina gerrymander, which the NC Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional on state constitutional equal protection grounds. The strong version of ISL loses 6-2 (most people report it as 6-3, but Alito dissented on mootness and didn't join the substantive part of the dissent), with the Roberts majority implying and the Kav concurrence making explicit that they do not endorse the strong form of the conventional view - the federal courts can intervene to correct an incorrect state court decision in a state-law elections case in a way in which they can't in, say, a state-law tort case.
So where does that leave the Eastman theory that the 2020 election was invalid because of improper use of emergency powers to allow easier postal voting during the pandemic? Well it puts it back to the states. "Is this use of gubernatorial emergency powers valid as a matter of the state constitution?" is exactly the sort of question state supreme courts exist to resolve. Unfortunately, some of the key swing state supreme courts punted. The one I am familiar with is Pennsylvania, where the state courts ordered the potentially invalid postal votes to be segregated, and then mooted the case when there weren't enough of them to affect the result. But had SCOTUS reached the merits Texas v. Pennsylvania, it would presumably have ruled in favour of Pennsylvania on the grounds that the appropriate remedy was in state court.
But critically, the Eastman theory wasn't the argument Trump was actually making in November and December 2020. Trump was alleging (including in all his legal filings except Texas v. Pennsylvania) that there was outcome-determining fraud, not that there was a technical procedural irregularity. If we take Trump seriously (whether or not we take him literally), we should evaluate his core claims on their merits, not replace them with different claims that are stronger. If I had been responsible for Trump's post-election litigation strategy, I would have focussed on filing ISL-based claims in a timely and procedurally regular way (in federal district Court, with the filing fee paid). But that isn't the strategy the Trump campaign used.
Incidentally, because the Pennsylvania state law question was never formally resolved, Project 2025 suggests that a Trump DOJ should force the issue by bringing criminal prosecutions against election officials on the basis that they allowed invalid votes to be cast in violation of (DOJ's interpretation of) state law, thereby violating the civil rights of the voters whose unquestionably valid votes were diluted. This is less legally outrageous than it sounds, but the incentives created would be a disaster for American democracy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
There's an effortpost to be made on how the Iron Dome is, from a geopolitical standpoint, the most counterproductive technology of the past few decades.
I would be interested to see that. My read is that (at least from a US or NATO perspective) the Iron Dome is hugely effective in preventing an accidental hot war between Israel and Iran.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The Louisiana Purchase would probably look quite different if we were still a British subject. Does that put a damper on any industrial snowball? No doubt Napoleon still does Napoleonic things, so I expect we end up with it eventually, unless Britain springs for a separate colony.
Assuming that the French Revolution and ensuing Anglo-French wars happen on schedule, North America is a theatre in the same way it was in all the previous Anglo-French wars. The War of 1812 equivalent in that timeline is a "British" invasion of Louisiana (presumably with local troops led by Jackson and a modicum of Royal Naval support). Given that the UK and allies win the Napoleonic wars, I suspect British North America incorporates the Louisiana Purchase by conquest.
But the biggest question about a "No American War of Independence" timeline is how the French Revolution is affected. As @ToaKraka points out below, the natural assumption from a US-centric perspective is that with the radical ideas of e.g. Thomas Paine discredited and the French spending less money helping the Americans, the French Revolution doesn't happen. And essentially everything in non-US political history is downstream of the French Revolution - and possibly more American history than you think is too given that the main "real issue" in the First Party System was which side the new US should take in the Napoleonic Wars. I could defend the proposition that no French Revolution means no drive to universal white male suffrage in the US. But this depends on whether we are in a timeline where the Americans were defeated or one where a deal was done - if the Galloway plan happens then Thomas Paine is a prominent British statesman by 1789 and proto-democratic Whiggery is the dominant politics of the British Empire.
But from a non-US-centric perspective, the US as of 1776 is too small to determine the fate of France. Something like the Anglo-French War of 1778 happens roughly on schedule because the British and the French have unfinished business, and the British can still run the bill up until the French cry uncle. (The British cope for losing the American War of Independence is that we took a tactical drop in what we wrongly believed was the least important theatre of a three-ocean war against France - the larger Anglo-French war was a true World War).
If I do an alt-history timeline, it would be one where Cecil Rhodes makes a miraculous recovery from his chronic disease, returns to the UK triumphant after his victories in Africa, and enters UK politics as a Liberal Imperialist. He was born in 1853 so you can easily have him in the cabinet through WW1 and alive as an elder statesman into WW2. I agree with you that the "successful Galloway plan" timeline would be a lot of fun too.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
For calibration purposes: In your view, is Ken Burns a supporter of white supremacism and/or treason?
Assuming the secondary sources about The Civil War are roughly correct, Ken Burns was a useful idiot of Shelby Foote. Burns was not a historian, and was not aware that the Dunning School history he had learned in high school was largely bogus. So when Foote basically recounts the high school history Burns is familiar with added military detail and colour, Burns doesn't feel the need to consult a second historian. I think both Burns and Foote would have preferred to make a film that treated the Civil War as a series of battles between two groups of martially virtuous men with no underlying political causes, but obviously you can't do that and have it make sense.
Shelby Foote was unambiguously a supporter of treason (he said in 1997, "I would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were similar.") but was probably not a white supremacist - I think an argument whether a Nathan Bedford Forrest fanboi who nevertheless supported Civil Rights is a white supremacist or not would quickly degenerate into a futile argument about the meaning of words.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Cecil Rhodes favoured reforming the British Empire to be a federation of equals with all parts of the Empire represented in the Imperial Parliament. (Rhodes' views on how this incorporated non-whites are a matter of dispute.) He spent a lot of money promoting constitutional Irish nationalism and Home Rule, hoping that an internally self-governing Ireland within the Empire would be a proof of concept. He thought that a future generation of American leadership heavy with Rhodes scholars could be persuaded to join this reformed British Empire voluntarily. In a world where Rhodes' plan happens and the Anglosphere is a loose federation including the US by 1930,
- The structure of the federation would be designed to prevent one member being hegemonic
- Relative power of the constituents would be such that the US would be primus inter pares rather than a hegemon in any case
- My read is that Rhodes believed that the various Anglosphere countries were sufficiently similar that the kind of competition which makes "hegemony" a useful concept would not be relevant - for example (not from Rhodes), if the Imperial Parliament broke down into a Tory/Dixiecrat faction, a Liberal/Republican faction and a Labour/New Deal Democrat faction then which part of the federation was "hegemon" wasn't relevant because politics would be ideological, not sectional.
- In any case, given that his political career was almost entirely in South African "colonial" politics and he made no attempt to get seriously involved with Westminster politics beyond his Irish scheme, I don't think Rhodes cared about his bit of the Anglosphere being dominant - he cared about the Anglo-Saxon master race being dominant over the lesser breeds without the law.
Various reform schemes of a kind that would have appealed to Rhodes were proposed during the lead-up to the American Revolution, of which the one that came closest to being adopted was Galloway's Plan. Supporters included Benjamin Franklin on the American side and Edmund Burke and Pitt the Elder on the British side - i.e. it wasn't a fringe position. If something like this had been done, then eventually the American colonies would have become the tail that wags the dog. But the same provisos apply with the added bonus that sectional divisions among the American colonies mean that there isn't a united "America" competing against Britain for "hegemony" at all.
And of course something what did happen with the development of Dominion status is that the Dominions gradually became de facto independent while remaining close friends and allies of the UK. I think this is proof of concept that something similar could have happened to British North America a century earlier, meaning that the "special relationship" was baked in from day one rather than being forged in the fire of WW2. The Commonwealth is exactly the sort of thing that Rhodes would have approved of, although he would obviously prefer it to be more significant to its members that it is.
Even in our timeline, where Britain and the US are separate countries without the kind of close ties that the UK retained with the former Dominions, the attempt by the British to resist American hegemony was pretty nugatory. British naval supremacy begins with a battle (Quiberon Bay in reality, but Trafalgar per schoolboy history) but it is significant that it doesn't end with one.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
And there is a reason why the British armed forces do not name bases after him, and in general monuments to him in the United Kingdom are discreet and found in places associated with his family.
FWIW I am with Cecil Rhodes on this point - the American Revolution was an avoidable mistake on the part of the British, and had it been avoided we would have seen earlier and more complete Anglosphere supremacy, which would have been a net benefit for humanity.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
I agree with your points on the merits of "Fort Liberty". "Fort Sherman" or "Fort Burnside" would have been better given both generals won important victories for the USA in the area. But ostentatiously refusing to use the official name of the base is clearly an attempt to dogwhistle something, and the rules of this board require me to charitably assume that what they are dogwhistling is support for the MAGA campaign to retain military bases named after white supremacist traitors, rather than actual support for white supremacism or treason.
In any case, "Troops from nearby Fort Liberty have not been deployed to the relief effort. Does anyone know why not?" is an attempt to "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion." "Fort Bragg or whatever it's been renamed to" (when the correct name is well-known and can be found with thirty seconds' Googling) is what you say if the only audience you care about is the kind of person who cares strongly about naming military bases after white supremacist traitors.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Very huge issue if true.
The fact that 100% of the anons promoting this meme insist on misnaming Fort Liberty in honour of a slaveholding traitor strongly suggests that it is partisan bullshit. Unless you favour calling it Fort Bragg in honour of Braxton Bragg's noteworthy contribution to the Union victory in the Civil War, which I suppose would kind of make sense.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
I don't think that you fundamentally understand the challenges in front of the Eastern bloc and USSR. If the Soviet Union had figured out how to make a washing machine, color tv and a car as cheap, affordable and abundant as the west, we would have been communist.
This. The Soviet Union fell because the Brezhnev generation of CPSU leadership (Andropov and Chernenko were not significantly younger than Brezhnev) was not able to recruit and develop a next generation of leaders who believed in the system to the extent that they were willing to fight to maintain it. (I don't know how long Gorbachev could have stayed in power if he was willing to be as brutal as Brezhnev, but ultimately the reason why the Soviet Union fell was that he didn't try, and Yeltsin, who was the other pre-eminent CPSU leader of his generation, actively sabotaged it when someone else did (in the 1991 coup).
And the secret weapon, the mind control ray that turned Yeltsin into the double agent who would end the Cold War with a crushing NATO victory, was a supermarket.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
In high-trust societies with usual first-world levels of state capacity, any disease with a safe and effective vaccine will be eliminated. The return of measles in the US and UK is visible evidence of falling social trust in exactly the same way that locked cabinets in stores are.
The thing that is unusual about smallpox (and, hopefully, polio) is that we committed the required resources to vaccinate everyone even in hard-to-reach parts of the third world.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
British jihadis are Sunni. Hezbollah is Shia. They hate each other more than they hate the west, but not as much as they hate Israel.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Anyone who is going to be voting in 2028 already has a green card, unless they are married to a US Citizen (meaning a 3-year rather than a 5-year qualifying period) and their naturalisation happens unusually quickly.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
ruling with an iron fist is a sure way to a long reign,
You can still be crushed by your own iron fist if it mutinies. This normally looks like a military coup (see Roman Emperors passim ad nauseam) but the Russian Revolution (February and October) is also an example.
Maintaining political control of the military is a hard problem. The reason why democracy overperformed in the 19th century and dramatically won the 20th century is that maintaining political control of the type of military needed for industrial age warfare without neutering it turns out to be easier under democracy that other forms of government. This is also the tl;dr of Why Arabs Lose Wars - Arab armies are designed to be incapable of staging military coups, not to be capable of defeating Israel.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
You might as well say that Hitler could have held along for longer if he just 'cracked down harder.
Hitler was beaten by the Allies, not by domestic opposition. He absolutely could have held on longer if he hadn't declared war on the Soviet Union and United State. There was no western plan to invade the Soviet Union if it weakened to the point where an invasion might succeed.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Foreign debit cards need to pick the "credit" option to get cash out of US ATMs.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
No. They are somewhere between Mexico and Thailand in GDP per capita, whether you use nominal or PPP.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
It's arguable. Taiwan has been executing slightly less than one person a year lately. Japan averages about three a year if you don't count the Aum Shinriyko sarin plotters - although they appear to be passing more death sentences than that given that Wikipedia says they have a backlog built up of 107 inmates on death row.
"Indictable offences known to the police" rose about 40x from the Edwardian period to the 1990s crime peak after adjusting for population. (The 100x is a mistake due to trying to read a horizontal line near zero on a small graph).
The question of how much this is an increase in real crime, how much of it is the creation of new indicatable offences (particularly ones relating to drugs), and how much is increased reporting is hugely controversial. But it is fair to say that crime in the 1990s was at least 10x Edwardian levels, and probably more.
Violent and property crime is now (as determined by victim surveys with consistent methodology) at around a quarter of 1990's levels. The graph used by the neoreactionaries cuts the data off in 2000 for a reason. [This crime drop is consistent with the lived experience of anyone who grew up in the 1990s - it isn't a case of rigged statistics]
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