MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
18d ago
I’ve always been suspicious of the narrative of “alienating the base” for the democrats (AKA not being woke or economically left enough), simply because most of those positions are not held by that many people. The number of people out of nearly 400 million who would not put up with Kamala’s rather tepid support of Israel is probably not that big. Likewise, the number of people turned off because her economic plans were too moderate seems fairly small. Especially since the only viable alternative is a guy who’s basically running on “take everything the liberals like and destroy it as hard as we possibly can”. The Trump answer to all of the positions these people are left of her on Trump is radically on the right on. Trump is not shy about supporting Israel — he wants Israel to “finish the job (presumably of blowing up Gaza)”. Trumps plan for student loans is “make the student pay back the loans”. Trumps plan for the environment is “let’s pull out of all the agreements, drill baby drill, and deregulate so it’s easier to pollute without consequences”. There just isn’t a way to punish the dems on this when the alternative is “not only get literally nothing you actually want, but lose things you have now.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
18d ago
I mean, I think that would produce partisan politics into it. If I’m in a blue state, I want to detect Red fraud because it reduces my party’s power in the federal government. If I’m in a red state, I want to detect Blue fraud. So you can do that by putting a thumb on the scale based on the kinds of fraud that Reds or Blues are likely to do. Reds might be prone to voter intimidation, so you make very strong rules aimed at preventing that. Blues might stuff ballot boxes or have illegals vote or whatever, so make a rule about that. But you don’t care about your own tribe’s fraud so you either ignore the problem or make it easier.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
18d ago
It turns out that that autopsy was wrong though. Personally I think it was a complete lack of doing anything while claiming to be against it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
18d ago
Did she not read the job description of a politician? Public speaking is at least 2/3 of the job description.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
19d ago
For me personally, I’d want to see significant statistical anomalies— over or under performance, precincts in which apparently every single person voted for Kamala. Places where more people voted than live in the district. Stuff like that. I think the statistics will be much more likely to show the fraud than anything else.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
19d ago
I think if anything that would be worse. As it stands now, I’d minimally double the terms of most offices. The trouble we have now is due to short terms. The house barely gets settled in and knowing where the bathrooms are before it’s time to run for office. And this kind of short term means that they really don’t have to do anything concrete to fix problems. Worse, if you can make it looks like you’ve fixed something but the consequences of your bad fix don’t show up within two years, you’ll be gone before the negatives hit. Even four years for president is pretty short. By the time the economic impact of your policies hit the mainstream, you’ll be packing up to move out.
The second thing is that really, the short terms mean politics is taking up an extraordinary amount of the collective bandwidth of the public imagination. Every two years we’re choosing new leaders, and that means 6+ months every two years of constant speculation, political ads, push polling, and punditry aimed at convincing the public to vote in a given way. Worse, because fear and anger are the most effective means of inducing people to care about politics, we spend those six months learning to hate those who disagree with us politically. You hate abortion? You’re killing women, you sexist. Oh, you’re pro abortion? Baby killer! And so on, through every major issue. This tends to create tensions between people that shouldn’t exist. And the wounds caused by this short cycle never completely heal.
In my opinion, politics, ideally would be such a minor part of life that they really don’t matter. The general public is not served by a system so broken that it’s near top of mind what a political figure said or did today or any other day. It’s not supposed to be that important, and frankly, if the government worked properly, you wouldn’t have to constantly baby sit it and change its nappies.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
19d ago
That’s how elections run here. It’s basically divided by districts carefully chosen to maximize the power of the party that runs the state, then you have the electoral college on top. It’s set up so that 3 states basically pick the president.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
19d ago
2024 is going to be “The Year Politics Went Full Retard” for me. It’s just a level of crazy that I would not believe if it had been pitched as the new season of a political drama. A candidate is nearly thrown off the ballot in CO? The same guy convicted of several felonies? And then his opponent is revealed to be unfit for office on live television? Then the same candidate gets shot. Then the opposition candidate drops out and is replaced without a vote. Then the protests at the DNC over Israel. Another Trump assassination. Like WTF? The crazy around 2024 is insane. And of course the discourse itself — debates around transitions for middle school kids, why FEMA is slowing down aid in hurricane zones, some people are convinced of weather manipulation (which I did not have on my bingo card), claims of election fraud, it’s just wild. And frankly exhausting tbh.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
19d ago
What puts me off of UAPs and the idea that “they have proof” is just how little physical evidence of life, not intelligent life, just plain ordinary life, exists. The best the Pro-UAP can do is a plausible fossilized bacteria sample found on Mars. They have no ships, megastructures, signals, planets with obvious life-signs. It doesn’t surprise me that people into UAPs are into non physical phenomena as they need some plausible way to explain how these things exist without leaving physical proof.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
19d ago
I’m expecting precisely nobody to accept the results. Baked in. One side believes the election was stolen, both believe the election is being stolen now (they differ on methods and direction, but in both cases, it’s against them). One side believes the other is Nazis. The other side believes that the others are communists.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
19d ago
Acceptable to the NPR listeners would be my definition. The idea being that left leaning outlets work to put entertainers and podcasters and news outlets into a heretical works pile where they lose advertising and support and get relegated to right leaning channels and advertising for support. Liberals generally shun such media so it hurts them to be branded as « not mainstream credible « .
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
20d ago
I think either group is going to be a problem. However, some states have been calling up NG (https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/02/us/washington-oregon-nevada-national-guard-election/index.html) especially it appears in Blue states. This seems rather telling, because it seems like the elites are expecting unrest in Blue areas not red ones. This makes me suspect that they’re anticipating a Red win, as that’s what would cause trouble in Blue areas. The Proud boys aren’t going to Portland. But Antifa goes there all the time.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
20d ago
I’m not surprised in the least. I’m not sure if it’s evolutionary psychology, but I tend to find that women have perfected the game of weaponizing the system against other people. In this case, it’s animal laws, but it could be technical violations of any rules to force other people to give them what they want. I’ve always somewhat assumed that it goes down to avenues of actual power. Men have access to physical strength, technical knowledge, and the actual levers of power. Women have limited access perhaps to the levers o& power. Not as much as people think, because they are rarely the main decision makers on projects, in business, or in government. So the best way for the median woman to get her way is to basically get a man to wield actual power for her.
Puritanical rule enforcement is a part of that. It’s a way to create new offenses women can use to shame people into giving them what they want.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
20d ago
I think it has some use if you’re in a position to be doing long term planning either because the campaign is promising things that will help or harm your group, or because the change in regulations promised will affect a business project. If Trump is going to end a subsidy for solar panels then maybe the fact that he’s way up in the polling would change how you do business. Or maybe you’re trans and worried about your rights in your home state. Or you’re gay and looking to adopt. There are some people who for various reasons need to plan based on who wins in 2024.
For the vast majority of people, the winner of any election will only affect you on the margins. It’s just human history. Unless a regime was specifically looking to harm a group of people, for the most part, life goes on with very little change. If you woke up tomorrow and you were under a Maoist dictatorship, unless you owned a big corporation or challenged the regime in some way, you could live very comfortably. The basics of life don’t change that much. There will still be jobs, schools, sporting events, and people will still get drunk on weekends.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
21d ago
I think it depends on the group of smart people and what their domain of knowledge actually is. My observation is that smart people tend to vastly overestimate their ability to understand things not in their own domain. They think the6 can tell if someone is scamming them in another area but often they’re just as vulnerable as anyone else.
Part of this is the way society works. Everyone specializes in one or two areas, and outside of those areas you really don’t have much more base knowledge than the average person. This makes it much easier to sell a scientist on a financial scam. Not because the guy is stupid, but because he doesn’t know much about finance and doesn’t spend a great deal of time thinking about it. Or maybe it’s home repairs where a roofer can come into a neighborhood full of lawyers after a big storm and make bank by scamming the lawyers on repairs they don’t need and cheap materials that don’t last.
The other part is plain ego. Smart people have been praised for their intelligence for a long time. Everybody since their third grade teacher has probably told them how smart they are. Add in the success they get in their domain, and you believe it. They’re smart and can figure it out. And they actually are much more vulnerable simply because their ego won’t let them notice that something is off. In fact I would consider this an advantage for the less intelligent. They know how much they don’t understand about stuff they didn’t understand at school.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
21d ago
What about doing things like what Sports betting does with pro sports. If you could form teams and try to bet on their performance in the election, I think it would be a way to get more money in. And the money put in could be used as push polling because if you can change the odds, then I mean you can change the outcome of the actual election.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
21d ago
It would be odd for that result to show in polls, however I think it could be correct simply because everyone is measuring the exact same data. They should be getting results within the error margin of the correct answer. And the reason I tend to buy a dead heat is that Americans are highly polarized on almost every topic. Abortion, Israel, Ukraine, the economy, education, culture, etc. all are by now completely coded blue or red. There’s very littLe left to persuade in the middle. It’s all about the base. That should be producing a very tight race.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
21d ago
I’ve always thought that “at least he isn’t X” as a particularly good long term strategy. It marginally works when neither candidate is exciting their base well, and the Not-X candidate is at least a competent seeming middle of the road person who will do nothing more than keep going down the path. But if not, then it’s really more of a choice between X but he’s doing thing people like, or Not-X and incompetent.
There’s really nothing in the Kamala campaign that’s telling us she wants to do anything as president. When she makes her campaign stops, she’s talking about how scary and weird the other guys are. Well, after the concert anyway. But after nearly ten years of “he’s terrible, horrible, they’re evil” and him doing very little of evil, terrible, horrible things, it’s not landing anymore. Outside of the breathless true believers, nobody thinks Trump is evil. And now that this is gone, what’s left to scare people to the polls to vote Kamala? They don’t hate her, but what is there, besides the rapidly failing “Orange Man Bad” meme is there to get people to actually choose to stand in line for an hour for Kamala?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
22d ago
I’m sort of disagreeing here. The point of a debate forum is to debate in good faith. And quite often political debates are capable of being good faith debates.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
22d ago
That’s not the value of lived experience in narratives. The value of having fought in a war (Hemingway for example) is that he understands the way war is in the real world and can thus create characters who feel like they’re fighting a war instead of characters that think and act like people who make movies think people in wars behave. Or if you want to write about life in a black ghetto, it’s going to feel more real if written by someone with at least some idea, even second hand, of what that life is actually like. There’s a phrase in philosophy that I think captures the idea. It is like something to be a person in any situation you come up with. It’s like something to be poor, or Palestinian, or a cop, or a soldier. And stories become much better is the author at least has some idea of what those things are actually like, rather than going off TV/movie tropes, or stereotypical ideas, or other sources with no real connection to the thing being described. It’s a fidelity issue. A copy of a copy of a copy eventually looks nothing like the original.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
22d ago
Crises, especially ones with a large risk of death tend to drive evolution. Who got to survive after a collapse? Smart people with a higher time preference survived because they were the ones prepared to survive the collapse and to rebuild afterwards. The ones who die are the ones who are dumb and therefore do stupid things to kill themselves, are unable to plan ahead, and lack a solid work ethic.
Now the reverse is true of High Civilization like Greece and Rome. We say it ourselves — good times make weak men. The Greeks and Romans used slaves for everything and had a pretty decent welfare state in Rome itself. The chief problem for Rome was a large class of unemployed in Rome who had to be entertained. In such a city, one could live a comfortable life and never have to break a sweat doing anything productive. And so if you were lazy, stupid, and uninterested in working or getting educated, not a problem. And so while those people die quickly in a collapse, they didn’t really suffer all that much in Rome. So those types would definitely lower the IQ of classic civilization.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
23d ago
No, because I noticed the same. The people making films today all come from the PMC for the most part and know no other lifestyle. It’s also just that in the 1950s society was much more economically integrated in the sense that the emerging PMC was very likely to grow up in neighborhoods and attend schools with the working class. Most of the generation that marched off to college after the war (or sent their kids to college) grew up working factory, sales, or skilled labor jobs or at least knew people who did. Modern elites are much less likely to have any significant contact with blue collar types, less likely to have served in the military, etc. so what they know about war, blue collar work, small towns, religion, and so on, come through narrative fiction.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
23d ago
I think honestly it’s one of the things I like about the modern era that’s most bizarre about the current crop of elite. Not only do these guys speak an odd dialect of lawyer, but they’re fantastically uneducated about how anything is actually done or made. And it is off putting to average people because they don’t hide behind statistics and spreadsheets. They do things, make things, and watch or play games.
It’s like if I had a bookie describe the last game of the World Series, and then a plumber from Brooklyn. They’d both be describing the same events but only one guy would have described a baseball game. The other guy is describing a graph describing the baseball game. And I think that’s actually why the elites running the systems cannot fix things. The old deep knowledge of the processes their graphs and lawyered language describe is gone. They’ve never done any of that kind of work, nor, increasingly do they even know anyone who does that work. Without knowing how the game of baseball actually is played, without knowing what is going on on the field, moneyball simply doesn’t work.
And I think this is what people are reacting to. Trump at least comes across as the guy who actually understands baseball instead of baseball statistics. They have plenty of real life experience of working with idiots who only see the world through screens. Those people might be educated, as in having attended a lot of very expensive colleges and having a couple of $100K sheepskins on the wall. But talk to anyone in the trenches of any operation and it’s pretty universal that the spreadsheet jockeys often make arbitrary decisions that make their job harder to impossible. The general problem for a lot of ground level managers is to make it look like they’re following the new, stupid procedures dictated by a spreadsheet jockey, while still getting productive work actually done. They’re used to idiots who talk like Harris, and they know her practical knowledge of the stuff she has policies for is precisely as bad as the local regional manager o& their corporate masters— she looks at graphs and knows the graphs go up if you do a thing.
I’m not sure that it’s a communication problem at all. The problem for the elites is that the culturally coded language they use bespeaks of their ignorance. Nobody takes them seriously because not only do they mistake their maps as territory, but it’s often the case that the6 have no idea there’s a real territory out there being impacted. We can just make fossil fuels a thing of the past, without using nuclear. Just look at my graph.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
23d ago
It depends on the jurisdiction. In some places, these shop owners do try to get people prosecuted, do cooperate, and it turns out that the state is much less concerned about putting the guy in jail and thus they see the effort as a waste of time. It’s an odd situation. They’re kind of stuck, not only because of the costs, but the risks that they can count on other people to care about. If they testify and press charges, do the next group of lawless thugs come in and shoot potential witnesses? Are they or their children going to be targeted because snitches get stitches? And if they need the cops are the cops going to bother to show?
See the situation in lawless areas is because of years of neglect and distrust in which the criminals tend to get away with it. The only solution to my mind is to create a system, even if extremely flawed (inquisition is far from ideal) in which you can hope to put enough of the gang members in jail to lower the crime rate and have people willing to participate. If I lived in a place controlled by gangs, I’m not cooperating simply because of the two, the cops are the weak ones, and they can’t or won’t protect me.
I agree with this. What Trump did was more bring the issue into the open. Woke itself is fairly weak outside of whatever got snuck into HR. That’s why it got so loud when Trump started challenges to it. Once the stuff was open, people rejected it and the Woke couldn’t really stop it. They could only make a lot of noise in an attempt to appear powerful.
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