MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9hr ago
This is consistent with my theory, which is that an increasingly large number of young MAGA conservatives (including potential Ramaswamy campaign staffers) think that almost all rape allegations are false, and therefore the relevant decision-maker assumed that Acton's rape allegations were false without checking to see how plausible they were.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9hr ago
Here's a guy who's presidentail campaign was a super strained argument that he was an even bigger Trump ally than Trump himself
I don't think Vivek was running with a plan to beat Trump. Candidates had to declare in 2023 when it wasn't clear if Trump would be on the primary ballot or if he would have a disqualifying medical or legal issue, and I think Vivek was always running in the "only if Trump turns out not to be available" lane.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
10hr ago
I mostly agree with you, but I think Vance could manage to lose to Harris if he really wanted to.
Something about modern politics means that both parties would far rather talk to the most toxic subset of their respective bases than the median voter. Harris tried and failed to resist the temptation repeatedly. Vance's current role in the MAGA project doesn't require him to even try to resist the temptation. He should be able to change things up for a general election campaign, but watch this space.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
10hr ago
Empirically and in the US context, I would say the performance of Texas and California state governments is the best case for high property taxes (and correspondingly low income and sales taxes - the difference in tax mix between states is bigger than the difference in overall levels of taxation).
Again empirically, low property taxes encourage smart people to take up real estate investment (or land speculation, as Georgists call it - you are investing in location, location and location) at the expense of relatively more productive activities, and voters and the local politicians they elect to focus on increasing house prices rather than improving opportunities in the real economy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
11hr ago
Econ 101 says that roughly 100% of property tax on improvements should be passed on in market rents, and roughly 0% of property tax on land. Econ 201 says that the actual pass-through is even less than that because the owners of houses built under a low-improvement-tax regime eat a loss.
My understanding of the empirical work on this question is that the theory is right for prices advertised to new tenants, but landlords and good long-term tenants generally renew leases with below-market rent increases, and that the size of the "loyalty discount" is lower when landlord costs (including property taxes) are rising. My personal experience as a market-rate tenant in my 20's is consistent with this.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
11hr ago
Florida has a Prop 13-like system, though somewhat less crazy. Homestead assessment increases are capped at the lower of inflation or 3%, and the instant ballot proposition would lower the cap on non-homestead assessment increases from 10% to 5%. Given that land values tend to rise roughly in line with nominal GDP and improvement values tend to rise roughly in line with replacement costs, and construction inflation is somewhat faster than general inflation (because Baumol), the homestead cap is going to bind and the 5% general cap is likely to bind.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
11hr ago
I don't know enough about the US context to comment. In the UK, it would have been men who were "situationally gay" in all-boys boarding schools or the Navy. But it doesn't matter - the point is that the number of men who have sex with men has not increased materially as a result of changing cultural norms since 1960, this is evidence that you the culture doesn't determine men's sexuality, only the language used to describe it - in other words that you can't "gay" men by cultural osmosis, only get men who are already gay or gayish to self-identify that way.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
11hr ago
From a traditional Christian conservative perspective or a public health perspective, the problem is sodomy, not gay self-identification. If all changing cultural norms does is causes men having sex with men to stop self-identifying as gay, you haven't really achieved anything.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
11hr ago
I don't think we disagree.
Last data I saw was that half of straight 18-34yo women in Britain were "unwilling" to date a bisexual man. Presumably some significant percentage of the remainder are at the "bisexuality is a negative, just not an utter disqualifier" level.
And that is part of why there has been minimal increase in bisexual identification among men who date women. I hope no citation is needed for the claim that men are much less squicked by female bisexuality than vice versa. The increase in bisexual identification I pointed to was among women who date men.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
18hr ago
I haven't seen a good time series for men who have sex with men, but going back as far as Kinsey we know that the number of men who have had sex with another man is higher than the number of men who self-identify as gay or bi. There is a reason why early AIDS researchers used the term "men who have sex with men" and not "gay or bi men".
The people who tried to replicate Kinsey's work found that about 6% of men have had sex with another man. (Kinsey got a much higher number which is almost certainly bogus). A good modern meta-analysis gets about the same number.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
18hr ago
Although it is as rare as you point out, "gay or otherwise non-gender-coforming teen with conservative Christian parents" is probably the most common case in today's America of someone being oppressed based on identity-group membership in a Narrative-compliant way. Anti-black racism still exists, but has been driven to the margins. Patriarchal subcultures which actually oppress women are on the way out. And the Smollett affair proved that the demand for violent homophobia targetting adults exceeds the supply.
If you are a shitlib schoolteacher in a suburban district in a deep red state, you still have the same 1-2 actually gay/lesbian kids per class that you always did, they are more likely than not to get a hostile response from their parents, and you can credibly expect that affected kids from other classes are going to come to you because they don't want to talk about this to a red-normie teacher.
I suspect the typical shitlib high school teacher in a red state does, in fact, meet several kids per career who have a catastrophic breakdown in their relationship with their parents over this issue. Back in the day, these kids would have stayed in the closet.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
With the rise of gay identifying it’s obvious people can be gayed.
The rise in LGB self-identification is driven women who only date men identifying as bisexual. They haven't been gayed, they are claiming an oppressed identity for clout. The much smaller risk in gay male self-ID is entirely consistent with less closeting over time.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
If Florida works like most states, taxing jurisdictions work out how much they want to raise, and then convert it into a millage rate. My gut feeling is that the null hypothesis should be that the total amount of property tax will stay the same and the millage rate will increase to compensate for the reduced base - not that millage rates will stay constant and spending be cut.
That would make the amendment a cleanish transfer from businesses, landlords and owners of expensive homes to owners of cheap homes - which you would expect to be popular. That said, supporters and opponents of the amendment seem to be campaigning as if it is a tax cut.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Agreed - My MIL maintained a fully functional kitchen garden on about half of her 1 acre lot (she had no interest in keeping animals), so I have seen it done.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Someone working in one of those fields (apart from mining) is presumably working in a small town, and they don't want 40 acres. They probably want to live in town, and if they prefer an ersatz homesteader lifestyle, they want 2-3 acres for a kitchen garden and a chicken run because they aren't going to be doing any serious farming.
The typical small town has 1-2000 families, so at 40 acres per family it is going to take up 100 square miles - i.e. some people are going to have a 5 mile daily commute on farm tracks.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The problem is that 40 acres isn't enough to support a family at a respectable working class standard of living by agriculture alone (homesteads were 160 acres, and homesteaders had a much lower standard of living than the 21st century respectable working class), so someone on a 40 acre plot is commuting into town for work (or has a truly fully remote job, but there are not many of those and they will be the first to be replaced by AI). And there are not that many 40 acre plots within tolerable commuting distance of jobs.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Cajun French is generally easier to understand for metropolitan French speakers than Quebecois, because Cajun, like most creole languages, uses no inflections(yes, some inflections are written, but they are in the half of the French word which isn't pronounced).
Most inflections in Metropolitan French are silent too, except for the important ones which indicate verb tense.
It isn't a new thing, although greater access by dumb post-Christian women to Muslim men means it is happening more often. At a celebrity level, the most famous example was the failed marriage of Jemima Goldsmith (daughter of Sir James Goldsmith, who needs no introduction to British Motteposters and is probably best-known to US Motteposters as the inspiration for Gordon Gecko's rival Larry Wildman in the OG Wall Street movie) to Pakistani cricketer-politician Imran Khan.
Enough American women were marrying Saudis back in the 1990's that the State Department felt the need to publish some politically incorrect advice about why this was a bad idea - now unpublished, but the text is available here
France did have a baby boom and they had an even larger 1945-75 economic miracle than the US did (partially driven by catch-up growth from a lower pre-war base). The French call it the Trente Glorieuses.
The 1968 riots and the resulting far-left mythos of students as the revolutionary vanguard was an international phenomenon (though not global - there were no riots in the UK for example) - France was worse hit than the US, and the French 1968 riots really were student-led. Silent Generation professors like Foucault who supported the riots became major figures in gloabl Boomer leftism, and a bunch of American boomer lefties did summer or year-abroad programmes at the Sorbonne. So I think there is a connection between French and American boomerism, at least as regards the self-indulgent lefty politics and sexual deviance.
I don't know to what extent the non-leftist aspects of Boomerism are the same in France and America.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
The bank he was fined a half a billion dollars for defrauding said they were happy with the business they did and would do it again.
Trump only has to give personal guarantees on commercial mortgages (the lies he was fined for mostly relate to his personal real estate holdings) in the first place because the banks don't trust Trump not to screw them over in bankruptcy court. The vast majority of commercial mortgages are non-recourse, and accordingly the banks don't usually care about the personal net worth of the developer.
Writing a normal non-recourse commercial mortgage on a Trump building is sufficiently widely known to be a bad idea that there was a joke about it in Sex and the City.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
The problem with using "Art of the Deal" to understand Trump's approach to dealmaking is that it doesn't cover the most interesting and important aspect of it, which is how he rats out of the deals after he makes them.
The surprising thing about Trump is that most of the people who have done substantial amounts of business with him, in a wide range of capacities and over multiple decades and four very different careers*, say that he is dishonest, that his dishonesty hurt them personally, and that other people should shun him. And yet somehow he keeps finding new marks willing to do business with him. "Art of the Deal" is a book about how he takes the sucker, and the interesting and difficult bit of running cons at scale is how you manage the flow of new suckers into the game and the flow of angry suckers out of it.
* GC in his father's org, real estate developer in his own right, reality TV star and politician. I acknowledge that he was spectacularly successful in three of his careers - my problem with the man is his base character, not his lack of ability.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Knowing nothing else besides his degree, best guess would be that he's smarter than average,
Having a bachelor's degree at all shows that - it remains the case even in younger cohorts post HE expansion that most people don't complete one. Having a bachelor's degree from a 50th percentile university suggests ~80th percentile in whatever combination of g and conscientiousness that academia is measuring. Slightly higher if you are a white/Asian American or privately educated Brit who is on the wrong end of affirmative action.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
I live south of the river. Down here them's fighting words. Get your ponce arse back to Hatfield and the North or I'll set the Bushwhackers on you.
That seems off, because there are certain provocations (see 9-11 and Afghanistan) which would make all patriotic Americans support a war against Iran. The relevant comparison is "Are you categorically opposed to wars against far-off countries which are no more obnoxious than early-2020s Iran?" A lot of Americans are categorically opposed to what they consider wars of choice, not all of them leftie pacifists.
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