Skibboleth
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
9mo ago
I'm not sure if you intended this question as a joke or some sort of "gotcha" but the obvious answer is Donald Trump.
I guess it was a "gotcha" insofar as it was extremely predictable that you'd say Trump despite the absurdity of that claim. "Tear the rotten edifice down" is not and cannot in any meaningful sense be a center-right ethos because the core principle of the center-right is that the status quo are basically fine. Trumpists are shouting that things are emphatically not fine - that the Federal government is hopelessly corrupt, the Democrats are stealing elections, the Mexicans are invading, the trans are corrupting the youth, globalists are stealing our jobs, etc... and that radical action is needed to fix it.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
I'm not complaining that conservatives are too conservative (at least not in this context); I'm offering a theory for why conservatives are really bad at playing the role of counterculture. Your garden-variety normiecon does not have the mindset to be an effective counterculture member. They're too uncomfortable with disorder and nonconformity. The types that do suffer from being intolerably crankish - the type of person who thinks a pop star dating a football player is a Pentagon (?) op.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
Who of actual political relevance would you describe as center right?
Skibboleth
9mo ago
better organized in terms of transportation, porta-poties, trash pick-up etc
See, this is the crux of it. Even if this was true (of which I am skeptical), none of this is relevant. The goal of a protest is not to stand around politely, then leave with your trash in an orderly fashion. It is either to be such a colossal nuisance that you can get concessions for stopping or to build sympathy for your political movement by baiting the police into kicking the shit out you. Conservative protestors occasionally try to cargo cult left-wing protest tactics, but tend to be either too docile (zero impact) or too aggressive (generate negative sentiment).
Skibboleth
9mo ago
Just, what the fuck guys? Can’t we just be the normal ones? It shouldn’t be hard by comparison. But instead we’re attacking normality. We’re doing goofball shit.
The world is turned upside down: conservatives and liberals are extremely confused because they are accustomed to and expect to be setting and rebelling against norms respectively. Obviously, this is far more discomforting for conservatives than liberals. They lack the mindset, the institutional capability, and the practical knowledge to be good counterculture rebels. (This, incidentally, is a major reason why conservative protests are usually incompetent). The coalition members with the most energy for this kind of politics are the people you least want to hand the microphone.
Normies are the natural constituency of the center-right - the sort of people who think "life's good, don't rock the boat too hard". Swifties are generally weapons-grade normies and the female equivalent of grillo-centrists. Yeah, they're "feminists", but it's an extremely anodyne feminism whose practical beliefs are probably mostly shared by a lot of conservative women (e.g. I have a hard time imagining what my mother or her sisters would say if their husbands suggested they shouldn't have careers). The problem for the American right is that the center-right is dead and the Republican party is (or is at least perceived to be) dominated by reactionary populists and religious conservatives. Not only does this coalition want to rock the boat, many of them are saying the boat is rotten and needs to burned down and replaced.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
That is a fully general argument for never letting anyone into the country, ever (also unfalsifiable, since when you don't turn up any foreign agents you can just say they're really sneaky) Far more people enter the country legally every year, and some of them are definitely spies. If Russia or China want to send an agent into the US, they can just... put them on a plane. Give them a bullshit job at the embassy (or just overstay a tourist visa). Being "undocumented" isn't a feature for a spy. It's a hindrance.
Imagining myself as an adversary of the United States, I could covertly send unarmed soldiers across the open border, have them obtain weapons on the other side, and then attack.
Teeth of the Tiger was not Clancy's finest work.
I mean, seriously, why? Going to stage an attack on a military base with a few dozen guys using civilian smalls arms? A terrorist attack to put yourself in the top spot on America's shitlist?
Skibboleth
9mo ago
Skibboleth
9mo ago
The Romans never would have let millions of migrants enter their territory and use their resources.
...they did.
In any event, it's not really clear why we should consider the Romans a model for behavior.
So often a debate does come down to the definition of a word.
"Invasion" rhetoric is classic Motte-and-Bailey equivocation. Nativists want to borrow the alarming connotations of the word to hype up support for radical measures, then, when their critics point out that there's a slight difference between people making dodgy asylum claims and an armed force sacking El Paso, fall back on "invasion has other meanings". If Latinos are "invading" like Japanese tourists, the claim becomes a lot less exciting.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
This is because most people don't understand formal reasoning. Proposition A being unproven doesn't mean Not A is assumed to be true. The "default" is agnosticism. This is a little more complicated in practice because most of the things people are arguing are not brand new subjects, so there's probably preexisting evidence which would skew our conclusions one way or the other if we could agree on what it means.
No scientifically relevant change has taken place
A considerable amount of research has taken place; however, that is mostly irrelevant to internet debates on immigration since those debates are overwhelmingly normative, with a couple of ablative empirical arguments for when you don't want to lead with your normative objection.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
if the federal doesn’t already have people in position to assassinate Abbott they are beyond a joke.
They almost certainly don't. I'm sure someone's gamed out the "rebellious governor", but not seriously. The plan, such as it would be, probably doesn't amount to much more than send in feds to arrest Abbott. Probably to cheers and applause.
But I want to emphasize: this whole quasi-secession scenario people are salivating over because they're bored and crave death is incredibly unlikely. The overwhelmingly probably outcome is that Abbott does, in fact, back down. His "win" is that he gets to say "I tried, but the tyrannical Biden administration stopped me."
Skibboleth
9mo ago
Push come to shove we'll bomb every oil pipe and free Europe from that addiction.
We can't even agree to aid the people who are currently in a hot war with Russia. Until that happens, the idea that we're going to comprehensively destroy European energy infrastructure is a touch laughable.
Even if true, it kind of runs counter to the Trump is NBD narrative.
Again, an economy about equal to Italy
If Italy could figure out a way to leverage boutique luxury goods into military and political power they could make a play for regional hegemon as well.
This seems like a willful misreading. Do you think "dominate" means "conquer by force of arms"? Because it's not as if the EU has been putting up vigorous opposition to Russian hegemony absent US spinal prosthetics.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
who predict or expect a foreign policy crisis if trump wins , but always fail to articulate what this entails
I can't ascribe this to anything other than not paying attention:
(for just one example I dug up in 20 seconds)
Maybe you agree with these prognostications, maybe you don't. Saying that Trump's critics can't or haven't articulated their positions is just confusing.
I guess they have to keep toeing the 'orange man bad' line even though he was not that bad
"'Orange Man Bad' is the 'Buy index funds' of political commentary.". If historically left-of-center political commentators who have spent the past 8 years criticizing Trump and his policies continue to do so, odds are pretty good that they actually believe it.
If anything, the sudden flurry of "Oh, Trump wasn't that bad"-type statements from figures who previously criticized him reeks of groveling and bet-hedging. Jamie Dimon doesn't have to worry that Biden is going to punish him for making critical statements. Likewise for his many critics within the party who have 'come around'.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
It's ridiculous, but it's also like 40 years old and has been litigated in the state supreme court already.
Skibboleth
9mo ago
Arguments for and against homeschooling resolve, I think, into fully general arguments about to what degree parents should be able to raise their own children as they see fit.
I don't really think that's true except in the vaguest sense. An argument about the effectiveness of homeschooling could theoretically be deflected by saying "it's my prerogative to not educated my children*", but very few homeschooling advocates are making that argument as opposed to arguing that homeschooling leads to superior outcomes. Arguments about outcomes in turn focus on the validity and interpretation of data.
*FWIW, existing laws on homeschooling suggest the existing consensus is "no, it isn't". Arguments about parental rights vs child's interests tend to turn on conclusions about outcomes rather than vice versa.
(I will also note that my point about unschooling was not whether or not it was good or bad relative to public schooling but that it was certainly not equivalent to handing a child a tablet with internet access and telling them to figure it out themselves; homeschooled children are usually more closely instructed than their traditional classroom peers)
Unless my memory fails me, unschooling is, despite the name, a form of homeschooling; the children have more control over subject matter, but it still assumes there's someone taking responsibility for teaching them (including necessarily ancillary skills).
Even though almost everyone in the West now has a machine capable of streaming much of the world's knowledge to them in an instant, they act as if it is the 19th century and public schooling is necessary to save masses of illiterate farm kids who live tens of miles away from the nearest library from ignorance.
How many kids do you think would teach themselves math via the internet? Or how to read?
If you want to argue that there's a more efficient and/or effective method of delivering universal education than the status quo, I'm quite willing to believe that. I do not find it plausible that internet-based autodidacticism is one of them.
Nobody wants to live in a world where the clownshow that is Congress has to deal with the technical detail of bank capital adequacy or aviation safety, and very few people want to live in a world where those things are not regulated at all.
Perhaps not, but many people think they do.
(Perhaps it would be better to say, that there aren't many people amongst the general population who want that, but there are probably a lot of local and business elites who would be happy to do away with federal oversight within their domain)
Skibboleth
9mo ago
Skibboleth
9mo ago
Edit: sorry, fat-fingered the submit button. Still working on this.
You can delete the post, finish composition, and then undelete it.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
The first time CBP mows down a family of six, public support would evaporate in an instant (though the odds of such a policy ever making it to implementation are basically zero, since it would be comically unpopular and probably unconstitutional to boot).
Or would start openly acting like proper invaders
How many people do you think will continue buying "invader" rhetoric when the bodies of children are being paraded around on every media outlet in the world?
the people who pull the strings in the federal government seem to be okay with defacto open borders.
Easy: the US does not have de facto open borders. "De facto open borders" is a mood expression of nativists who don't like current state of immigration enforcement. If we actually had de facto open borders, immigration would be unfathomably higher.
The people who "pull the strings" are wedged because there's no magic solutions to the material factors driving Latino migration. Nobody wants to spend the exorbitant sums it would require to actually physically secure the southern border. Nobody is willing to countenance just shooting them. Unfucking Latin America to the point where you don't have tens of millions of people who'd rather be an illegal or quasi-legal day laborer in a country where half the people hate them than stay where they are is a nontrivial exercise, and there isn't much support for that either (try and sell the guy who wants to deport all the Mexicans on spending trillions of dollars failing to develop Latin America). On top of that, the US is like most developed countries in that it has an aging native population that demands increasingly high standards of post-retirement living at the same time the retiree-worker ratio is getting worse, so it also just needs immigrant labor.
New York and other cities are howling about migrants being bussed into their communities, but so far seem reluctant to change their sanctuary city policies.
NY and other blue states already absorb the majority of immigrants, including illegal immigrants and asylum seekers. The central objection remains that the migrant bussing project is done in a maximally disruptive and uncooperative way.
But it's worth pointing out that drug addicts don't move to West Virginia, they move AWAY from West Virginia.
Drug addicts mostly don't move anywhere. I've never seen any evidence that bears out the idea that there's a significant mobile homeless population migrating towards the most accommodating locales. As near as I can tell, it's the opposite: homeless addicts (and homeless generally) are overwhelmingly in the locality where they became homeless, and where they aren't they're usually near-ish.
we'd have to build a LOT of housing to solve our problems.
True.
There are approximate 1,500,000 new housing starts in the US per year. If we take your estimated cost per unit of 350k (tbh I think this is high, but this is all ROM so it's not going to radically change the picture), we're already spending ~$525b/year. $5T over ten years. Hitting the 20% you suggested entails doubling that. Don't get me wrong, that's a lot of money, but an extra $5T over years for a country with the wealth of the US is not some inconceivable sum. Especially considering that most of it would be coming from the private sector rather than the government. (I also note that it is probably overkill - housing shortages are highly concentrated. WV doesn't need to increase its housing stock at all, CA needs to increase it a lot)
I'd also note that marginal shifts do matter. If the average rent goes down by $200, that suggests low end rent is also going down. It may not be a radical, sweeping improvement, but there will be people who can afford housing who couldn't before or who move from precarious to... less precarious. If building housing is unworkable than that is in effect saying the problem is unsolvable. Solving the opioid crisis is a worthy political goal, but it won't do much for homelessness.
I'd have to see if that's even true anymore with the huge increase in overdose rates in places like Washington.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mortality/drug_poisoning.htm
Even if it's equalized in the intervening time, it doesn't alter the underlying point that the relationship between drug ODs and homelessness rates are not strongly correlated. A hypothetical scenario where WA and WV have the same OD rate but WA has four times the homelessness rate does not suggest drugs are driving homelessness. On the other hand, the median home price in Charleston is $150k, in Seattle it's $800k.
Does this actually matter to anyone? Religion as practiced by most adherents is a loose collection of rituals and superstitions that serves chiefly as a tribal identifier; to the extent that such people follow their own religious doctrines, they tend to pick and choose what already fits their values while selectively ignoring anything that doesn't. This is why, for example, you can have an explicitly pacifist faith that decries the accumulation of wealth serve as the official religion for a bunch of bling-obsessed warrior aristocrats without everyone's head exploding or decamping to a better aligned belief system.
In the last iteration of the thread, someone articulated the point that right now Christianity is very heavily right-coded and enjoys a fairly poor reputation with young people (not unrelated). These commercials seem best understood as attempts to challenge both of those perceptions. It may not be true to some platonic ideal of Christian theology, but you can say that about most Actually Existing Christianity (it's only relatively recently that they mostly chileld.
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