Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
I don’t know any wokes IRL. I have no idea if they’re generally like this.
I do, and in my (small-sample) experience the woke tends to scale with general neuroticism and social dysfunction. The people I know who have their lives together, even when they have very, very progressive object-level beliefs don't behave in stereotypical "woke" ways or create nearly as much drama (though they are much more likely to indulge the drama of others).
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
It inexplicably describes Greene as a "medical professional".
Lawyers use templates. Sometimes they don't proofread well enough or strip out all of the stuff from previous versions.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
And while I'm not sure if administrative law judges are "constitutional" I'm pretty sure that having no judges at all isn't going to do anything to preserve my constitutional rights.
You're missing the whole Article III branch. ALJs are executive employees.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
Yes, it's called "democracy." Vox populi, vox dei. Or something.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
Two wrongs doesn't make a right, buddy.
Actually they do; tit-for-tat-with-forgiveness is a pretty great strategy for incentivizing everyone to behave.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
That reduces his incentives to rig the election for a successor
Each state runs its own elections.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
The president doesn't have to enforce laws he doesn't want to
In practice this happens, but it really shouldn't - the President is constitutionally-charged with "faithfully" executing the law. The weaponization of enforcement discretion into a presidential pocket veto is a particularly nasty bit of constitutional hardball that's developed recently.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
This executive order shifts power from the conservative to the-- as you call it-- "dynamic" aspect of the government. And conservatives are happy about this? What?
Consider that your theoretical understanding of the role of the various branches is not fully capturing the conservative critique of modern government. The executive already was asserting dynamic authority to make huge policy changes expressly against the will of Congress - e.g. massive expansion of the sweep of "civil rights" legislation, Obama and Biden's policies on immigration, and Biden on COVID policy and student loans - but only when it aligned with certain types of left/progressive priorities. Conservative attempts to push back on these innovations were blocked by recalcitrant and occasionally-outright-insubordinate bureaucracy, creating a one-way ratchet effect. The most recent generation of conservatives have abandoned "traditional" constitutional order for fighting fire with fire and trying to enable conservative executives to act in ways that previously only left executives could.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
The Legislature is meant to be the conservative aspect of the government.
The legislature was meant to be the popular aspect of government. The Senate was supposed to be more deliberative, but there's nothing in, e.g. the Federalist Papers iirc that takes this view.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
how is it possible for the executive, through an executive order, to expand the scope of executive power?
Because the executive is not always exercising the full scope of his powers to their fullest extent at all times, and the constitution and laws are not all-encompassing rulesets. If and when the President tries to do something new, we have to figure out whether that's OK or not.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
How seriously should we take this reproach?
If it comes out of Trump's mouth, it has been pulled straight from his ass, or may as well have been. There's very little coherence in the fine specifics of what he says. He doesn't exercise lawyerly-fine tuning of his language, which is what we've grown to expect from politicians (mostly because most of them are or were lawyers), and it's a bad mistake to operate as if he does. At most, look for a directional valence of the remark - here, "I'm willing to badmouth Ukraine because I'm trying to get the Russians to give me things I want - ending the overt war in Ukraine."
Supah_Schmendrick
4d ago
Are you sure? Which side is antifa on? Which side were Sacco & Vanzetti on? What side are the IWW and the student movements of the 60's and 70's on?
Supah_Schmendrick
4d ago
The major communist parties of Europe weren't American-funded. Europe has a quite a strong revolutionary-left tendency on its own, completely independent of and long-pre-existing Soros/GAE-bux.
Supah_Schmendrick
4d ago
Yes, but those monarchs are just basically tourist attractions or ceremonial figureheads to lend legitimacy to the government of the day. And those established churches are usually more liberal than our American unitarians. Lastly, the "blasphemy" laws in practice seem mostly to result in Koran-burners getting harsher sentences than some violent criminals, while doing nothing to protect, e.g., Christian anti-abortion protesters. Hard for American conservatives to really be all that in support of any of that substantively, regardless of the label it's all wrapped up in.
Supah_Schmendrick
4d ago
These are the views of one blue-state reactionary, but I don't particularly like Russia any; I have sympathy for the crappy history they've been dealt, but their current government doesn't spark any joy. The food and drink is pretty good at the emigre restaurants here in LA, even if they're all probably money laundering for something. Plus there's lots of adorable old emigre bakeries and groceries with slightly sketchy but usually delicious dumplings in the freezer if you go to the right part of WeHo. If anything, they're fargroup.
Western Europe, on the other hand, was in-group but recently has been making a pretty serious bid to be outgroup with the way they can't stop freeriding on defense, shooting themselves in the foot over really basic speech and energy issues, confusing institutional inertia for "democracy" itself, and still finding ways to be all snooty and trying to claim the moral high ground from a position of abject weakness. They just seem to be acting completely contemptibly.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
I think "free speech culture" in the context of the 1850's - a far more legitimately democratic (in the sense that actual political and physical power was exercised directly by the demos upon and against itself rather than via an elected/appointed expert/governing class) is something of a category error. The people who mailed Preston Brooks canes in encouragement of his beating of Charles Sumner on the Senate floor were exercising speech just as much as Lovejoy was. So was Cassius Clay in his antislavery advocacy. So was Thomas Wentworth Higginson and the other Secret Six fundraising for John Brown. People clearly were not deterred from expressing their political views.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
And yet that was at the height of print culture, when every town and village worthy of the name had at least one circular paper and most cities had four. I notice that your explanation isn't accurately predicting the historical results.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Adams wasn't strategically obstructing immigration enforcement as a backstop against corruption investigations; the entire political infrastructure of the dominant party in his state demanded the city and state nullify federal immigration law, and Adams is agreeing to buck them in exchange for non-prosecution. A much less worrying state of affairs; much more akin to a mob underling agreeing to flip on his bosses and undercover the organization's money-laundering operation.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
What the hell are you talking about?
Our idiot mayor (promoted far above her competence because of her race and gender) decided to be in Ghana even after she was warned that conditions were going to be particularly dangerous for fires.
The deputy mayor - also a part of the same ethnic political machine - was out of the picture because he is being raided by the FBI for allegedly calling bomb threats in to City Hall.
The third in line - the City Council President who only got the gig after the previous President went down for allegedly racist comments about the same ethnic mafia - was too busy cutting off public comment and oversight over City Council meetings and didn't do anything either.
In previous fire seasons, fire-engines were forward-positioned in the hilly areas to respond quickly to reports of small brushfires before they could spread and get out of control. Efforts were made to clear fire access roads up into the hills and cut away excess brush. DBS inspections were made of properties with notably overgrown brush and fines assessed if the landlords did not engage in required clearance. Etc. Etc. None of this was done, and the fire department itself dedicated to issues of gender and sexual diversity rather than actual fire-fighting effectiveness.
To say nothing of how decades of one-party liberal rule have led to a situation where our municipal water infrastructure is ancient and creaky - unable to deliver the volume of water needed in a true crisis - the DWP has become a byword for corruption instead of competence, and we still have the same number of fire stations as we did when the city had half the residents.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Yes. I think such sentiments are ugly in anyone's mouth, but I also don't think they merit firing.
Of course, back in the days when the U.S. was a real democracy, they merited tarring and feathering, or having the offending printer's press thrown into the local river. But I agree, burning is a bit much.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Revolutions are cool. They have happened in every country. Many countries are better after the fact.
Most countries are made worse by their revolutions. Even the U.S. revolution led to mass emigration of many of the best and brightest, as well as substantial inter-communal violence. And we got lucky that our Revolutionaries set ups something comparatively benign; we could have gotten Bolsheviks, Levellers, Chavistas, Maoists, Taiping-tier religious totalitarians, Bonapartists (who, for all his genius, wound up killing millions from his incessant warmongering, and shoved France from being the pinnacle of Europe into an early demographic transition which broke its power to this day), etc. etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
I wanted the woke to be defeated by classical liberals
The problem is that "classical liberalism" has very little positive substance to it in most formulations; it's usually articulated as something of a meta-philosophy about open competition between ideological groups (free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, equality before the law, etc.). It has very little to say about what the actual positive vision society should be working towards is. Hence its fundamental discomfort with the actual exercise of power necessary to rip out the institutional kudzu the woke has implanted into the liberal's precious "impartial institutions."
My biggest mistake, I think, was to extremely overestimate libs and the left. I really thought they would manage to blunt Trumpism's worst impulses and there would be a sort of stalemate like there was during Trump's first term.
The problem is that there is no institutional check on the left when it gets into power (eg all the nonsense the Biden Administration got up to, as documented ably by Rufo and many others) so the only actual check there can be is the one originally contemplated by the Founders - the full exercise of political power by a successive administration elected to reverse the initiatives of the last.
In fact, the checking of one aggressive force (wokism) by an equally and oppositely-aggressive one (Trumpism) is precisely the balancing of powers and passions contemplated by Madison and the federalists. It's just been so long since we had anything even resembling an equal fight between progressive and conservative forces in the country's institutions that actual open conflict looks like a radical coup.
Supah_Schmendrick
11d ago
Indeed, hence the focus on the "very clear in terms of expectations and bright-line rules"
Supah_Schmendrick
11d ago
On it's face I think that if we don't care about federal education policy and allow states to just educate as they please, there should be practically no issue with destroying the entire department.
Then what does the fact that there is a lot of people who are really quite invested in the department not being destroyed tell you?
I read that as talking about the desirability that the members of the senate don't turn over as frequently as those of the house.
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