MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Very much agreed. The American War of Independence made only minor incremental changes in the domestic institutions of the individual Colonies/States, and apart from a few Loyalists being exiled there was no change in the local elites running those institutions. The Haitian Revolution involved the (sometimes literal) dismemberment of the French local elites running Haiti and their replacement by a new Creole elite, as well as complete reboot of the institutions.
If there is a true American Revolution (and the Founding Fathers thought there was - hence Novo Ordo Saeculorum etc.), it is an ongoing process (similar to the analogous but slower development of Parliamentary Democracy in the UK) of forming new, unprecedentedly democratic and republican institutions which continues through and beyond the signing of the Constitution.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Atlantis is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
Do literary accounts of Atlantean wealth show mass working-class prosperity, or do we just see the elites? This is a serious question.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Separately / concurrently- given that the American Founding Fathers didn't predict the rise of political parties, and had to amend the constitution pretty early for the vice president kerfuffle, I think the 'did not necessarily understand the procedural implication of their own rules' is a fair critique.
If you think that Presidential democracy was a mistake (I do, and the Framers' writings make it clear that they would see it as a mistake in hindsight if they saw what a modern partisan Presidential election looks like) then there is an interesting question of how it happened.
Theory 1 as I see it is that the Presidency was designed knowing that Washington would be elected unopposed as the first President, and would almost certainly remain President as long as he wanted. So even if the Framers had anticipated the rise of political parties, they assumed that national treasures like Washington would generally be available, and that the machinery of the Electoral College would help them beat partisan candidates.
Theory 2 is that the main model for the relationship between the President and Congress available to the Framers was the relationship between King and Parliament in Great Britain, and in the late 18th century that relationship was in an unstable equilibrium - that either the Crown would re-consolidate power and turn Parliament into a rubber-stamp (as Louis XIV did with the French Parlements, and as has happened in most Presidential democracies established on the US model) or Parliament would consolidate power and force the King to appoint a Prime Minister acceptable to the Parliamentary majority (as actually happened).
In both theories the Constitution was no longer working as advertised by 1796 (Adams-Jefferson was a partisan election). Under theory 2 the reason why the US was able to stay in unstable equilibrium as long as it did was the lack of party discipline.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
The narrative "right at the start" was that the near-certain outcome was a quick Russian victory leading to a messy insurgency.
There was a major shift in favour of Ukraine when the Russian blitzkrieg failed, and another one when the Ukrainians started fighting back. The narrative has shifted back in favour of Russia following modest Russian successes on the battlefield.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Alas, I don't think it's possible to easily legalize guns in very very progressive Canada
If we are trying to be accurate here, handguns rather than guns. Long gun regulation in Canada is lax by international standards. The permit to own a shotgun, rimfire rifle, or bolt-action centrefire rifle is shall-issue, and 22% of Canadian adults have one. Relaxing long gun law further is within the Overton window and will probably happen if the Conservatives get a majority - the last time they got in they destroyed the gun registry.
What isn't in the Overton window in Canada is US-style mass handgun ownership, and a long gun is the wrong tool for plinking fentanyl zombies.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
If you want a gun barrel or a nuclear reactor or anything important and high-performance, you want virgin steel.
This is FUD from the legacy steelmakers in the US. In the UK, the speciality steel business (mostly based in Sheffield, as it has been since the Middle Ages, which is why Henry Bessemer moved there to found the modern steel industry) went electric arc first. The blast furnaces at Scunthorpe are fueling a long products mill - i.e. general construction grade steel.
We already have a company making gun barrels and nuclear reactor parts out of recycled steel.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
The 2018 study did, as a matter of experimental design, include jumps from a plane in midflight. But the convenience sample of people willing to participate in an RCT of parachutes just happened to consist 100% of people asked while the plane was on the ground.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
But there aren't many institutions teaching the old ideas either. And the ones that do are mostly Catholic, not core Red.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
White Southerners (including the white Southerners who settled the Mountain West after the Civil War), Appalachian hillbillies, anyone who goes to or pretends to go to a church where those groups dominate, and any non-white or white ethnic who makes a good-faith attempt to assimilate into the traditional culture of the white South or Mountain West. Serious Catholics and Mormons are generally allies of the Red Tribe, but they are not part of it.
My equivalent definition of the Blue Tribe would be New England Yankees, Quakers, pre-Ellis Island era German/Scandinavian immigrants*, descendants of the above who lost religion, and any non-white or white ethnic who makes a good-faith attempt to assimilate into the traditional culture of the Northeast - notably including Conservative/Reform/secular Jews. Unassimilated non-whites are (or were) allies of the Blue Tribe, but not part of it.
* i.e. all Mainline Protestants
Albion's Seed is the definitive book on the origins of the culture war.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
If we are going to assign blame to anyone on the puppy side, I think the problem was Vox Day/Theodore Beale rather than Correia and Torgersen.
Beale is a prime example of why the Red Tribe doesn't produce good cultural products. He first came to my attention for his theology blogging - heresies as interesting as his views on the equal divinity of the Holy Spirit are rare nowadays. The Selenoth books are overly wordy and ultimately I couldn't read them, but they were not written by an idiot. And he has other mid-tier accomplishments in multiple fields (music, video-game development, hardware design etc.) I am happy to call him a genius. But in order to remain relevant, he gradually shifted his blogging output from serious theology and literary criticism to standard-issue midwit Confederate apologia and ultimately to antivax and conspiracy theories. Whatever incentives he was responding to were to be less interesting and less intelligent. Last time I bothered to look into what he was doing, his main project was putting out superhero comics with a crass political message in every panel, which is as unappealing to a normie reader as the left-wing equivalent.
The only one of the Puppies who I found plausibly award-worthy was John C Wright. Correia writes technically competent schlock which plays the same role for his male readership that romance novels do for their female readership. It is valuable work and harder than it looks, and he fully deserves the money he made, but that kind of book has never been supposed to win awards.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
That's bullshit covering for them, because the government actively went after a) anyone who tried to do anything, like the girls' dads, and b) anyone who tried to bring it to public attention.
When we say "the government went after the girls' dads", we are talking about dads who had been kicked out of their daughters' lives for reasons. Sometimes the mundane - there was a messy breakup, Mum got the kids, and Mum doesn't find Dad's continued involvement convenient. Sometime the kids had been taken away because Dad was abusing them too - both Pakistani and white rape gangs preferentially targeted girls in children's homes. But the criminal charge against the fathers was variants on "violating a restraining order" rather than "being a racist".
Pakistani rape gangs did not go after girls with married parents. Even in the UK, the fraction of married fathers whose attitude would be "I'll kill him, go to prison, and expect to have a tolerable time there after the other inmates find out I'm in for murdering a sex offender" is too high to risk. Particularly in the working-class neighbourhoods of Rotherham.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
American left-idiotarians were rather noisily campaigning against Biden in the recent elections on the grounds that he was insufficiently pro-Palestinian.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
The German Grunen are an electorally serious political party that frequently joins coalition governments (occasionally including ones led by the CDU/CSU) - the sort of animal rights extremist who breaks into a politician's home would consider them contemptible sell-outs.
The coalition isn't going to find an agriculture minister who is acceptable to the eco-loonies - because joining a CDU-led government is unacceptable per se. They are probably going to find an agriculture minister who lives in a more defensible location.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
British Steel has announced plans to close its two blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, making Britain the only G7 country unable to manufacture its own steel.
This is technically false - it means that the UK would be the only G7 country unable to manufacture its own pig iron for conversion into steel. And this explains what is going on. Because of our early industrialisation and early deindustrialisation, the UK is the Saudi Arabia of scrap steel.
Mass of available steel decreases very slowly - a bit gets lost to rust, and a bit gets lost to landfill, but most of the steel in a manufactured object or a steel-framed building is available for recycling at the end of its life. The total stock of steel the UK needs is increasing very slowly - the total weight of steel in manufactured goods in the UK has been high for a very long time. (The value-to-weight ratio of manufactured goods continues to increase so a lack of mass growth isn't necessarily a sign of impoverishment) and although I support a big increase in steel-framed building construction, the median voter doesn't. And the rate at which the stock of steel in the UK increases is covered by imports of imbedded steel in manufactured products. So we can meet our domestic needs for steel entirely by recycling scrap in electric arc furnaces.
The physical logic of keeping a blast furnace in the UK is based on us being a net exporter of refined steel products - and in practice those exports had to go to the EU because every country protects its domestic steel industry. So post-Brexit the blast furnaces were on borrowed time - the money for the next needed major renovation was never going to be invested on commercial terms.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
Fair enough. It would be more accurate to say that ultimately FDR got the SCOTUS he wanted in a way that was entirely consistent with the American mos maiorum.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
You don't need LLMs or modern AI to flood the world with slop. Recommender algorithms optimised for engagement metrics were developed at a lower tech level, and are quite sufficient to pull the stinkiest, stickiest, sloppiest slop from the collective hivemind that is the Internet and flood our consciousness with it like Vikings singing loudly about a tinned meat product*. Worse still, recommender algorithms incentivise creators to optimise for the algo and find ways to make the slop even sloppier.
“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of slop, constantly increasing and constantly growing sloppier. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of false novelty, the sensation of effortless pleasure, entirely familiar yet entirely new. If you want a picture of the future, imagine MrBeast eating childrens' brains — forever. ”
* SPAM(r) is, FWIW, culinary slop. I'm not cross with Hormel foods - at the time if you were focussed on low cost and long shelf life you probably couldn't do better.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
By the time Wickard v Filburn was decided there were already 7 FDR-appointed justices on the Court, so the threat to appoint more wasn't necessary. Ultimately FDR got the SCOTUS he wanted the legal way.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
FDR had people arrested for selling goods too cheap
Something he was expressly authorised to do by Congress. NIRA was found unconstitutional by SCOTUS on federalism and nondelegation grounds, not on fundamental rights grounds, after which FDR stopped trying to enforce it. Very bad policy, but a long way from arbitrary detention without trial.
Also, this particular line of argument seems irrelevant until Trump starts running for his 3rd term.
KMC, while posting in favour of Trump, compared him to a King and applauded him for punishing lese-majeste in the way a King would. I think that is a problem. You brought up the comparison to FDR, not me. Although if we are going to run with it, I note that if FDR had put out an official portrait of him crowned and enthroned (something Trump did - on @WhiteHouse and not @RealDonaldTrump so it was official government communication) then even his supporters would have objected. If FDR had announced sanctions against law firms who represented his political opponents (which he did not), his supporters should have objected.
FDR's supporters did object to Japanese internment as soon as it was safe to do so. FDR's supporters did object to Court-packing, which is why it didn't happen.
The MAGA base support administrative detention legal immigrants with the wrong tattoos - in peacetime, which makes this worse than FDR. They support various plans to neuter opposition to the administration through the courts. And when Trump talks about running for a third term, they insist he is joking while selling Trump 2028 T-shirts and putting up Trump 2028 banners at CPAC. Trump is already running for a third term in plain sight, or at least maintaining strategic ambiguity about doing so - the correct response from non-fashy Trump supporters would be "This is stupid and I wish he would stop" not "Yay libs so trolled. Trump 2028 for great lulz!!!"
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
I'm also struggling to charitably respond to the assertion that a center-right no longer exists. The neocons don't get to define the center-right, and disagreeing with them doesn't mean you're "far-right".
Common usage of the term "centre-right" is shorthand for "pro-establishment right". We all know what it is, and I think we both agree that it is currently politically irrelevant in the USA. I agree with you that "far-right" is an unhelpful term, but claiming that Trump is "centre-right" is obfuscatory linguistic prescriptivism. This is particularly obvious in countries with more than two political parties - we can argue about what to call parties like Reform UK/Rassemblement Nationale/AfD (I prefer "right-wing populist") but - again, as a matter of common usage - "centre-right" clearly refers to parties like Conservatives/les Republicains/CDU-CSU.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
The liberals supported the 22nd amendment too. "We should never have another FDR" was not a controversial position once the war was over and the Japanese internment camps stopped feeling like a good idea.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
The correlation between weight and purse is 48%, which seems high enough to confirm the theory that heavier is more prestigious. There is also a mild bias in favour of the "classic" weight classes over the more recently added fine-grained ones, although the difference ($7.1M vs $5.6M) may not be statistically significant depending on the number of fights making up the averages.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
Or at least they won't be looking at top-tier athletes of both sexes in order to make the comparison.
I seem to remember at least one issue of Sports Illustrated each year being widely purchased by men who were not particularly interested in sports, although I agree not everyone depicted therein (whose musculature would, indeed, be looked at in detail) was a top-tier athlete.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
Not necessarily. Even if women were better fighters than men, a nation would still be better off losing 90% of its men than half its women just for the purposes of replacement for future wars. Or similar -- I'm sure someone has done the math on the numbers for a world building scenario if nothing else.
This doesn't apply if you have a strong monogamy norm, which the Christian West does. Even the post-Christian West has a strong norm of monogamy for babymaking relationships. The surplus women in western Europe after WW1 killed off so many young men ended up as childless spinsters, not as fertile sister-wives.
Given that he was imprisoned without trial on his return to El Salvador, he wasn't wrong that he was in sufficient danger to trigger the asylum laws. His claim to be in danger from gangs (indeed, a specific gang that was a rival of MS-13) may also be correct, but in these parts I understand that the hip terminology is "directionally correct", which he certainly was.
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