gorge
7d ago
I read And the Band Played On.. a few years ago. The author was a mainstream journalist at the SF Chronicle, was gay, and eventually died of AIDS himself, so he has no reason to be biased against the gay community. What I took from the book is that for the first few years nobody wanted to talk about AIDS. The conservatives thought it was a gay disease that did not affect them, the liberals, the NY Times journalists, did not want to highlight the fact that there was a disease that mostly seemed to arise from men having sex with each other. Gay activists also fought screening men-who-have-sex-with-men from blood donations because they didn't want gays stigmatized.
If you read carefully, it seems like Reagan's main "culpability" was that his priority was to get control of the budget, and his people already thought NIH had a huge budget, and they should just use that budget to research AIDS rather than allocate new money. So really the most you can say about Reagan's guilt is: "Reagan's culpability was that he didn't know that a bureaucracy spontaneously reallocating money within itself to address the highest need disease is not something that actually happens, so either Congress and the President dedicate new money for the disease, or no research gets funded for it." It's funny how no one ever criticizes the NIH for not just immediately reorganizing their funding priorities to address AIDS ...
gorge
9d ago
I have considered switching to Medishare and they would be much cheaper -- https://www.medishare.com The catch is you have to be part of some sort of Christian parish, you need the sign-off of your minister, and have to agree to live a Christian lifestyle (no sex out of marriage, no abusing drugs or alcohol). The second catch is there is no contractual guarantee that they will cover your bills, it's basically on their honor and reputation. The third catch is that they do not have deals with a lot of providers, so you have to self-pay as uninsured and then they will reimburse up to Medicare negotiated rates. They have higher deductible plans, and save money because they don't cover "sin" diseases (eg STD's), drunk-driving accidents, certain pre-existing conditions, etc. I have one friend who likes them, but I do not know anyone who has really tested them with some super expensive treatment.
gorge
16d ago
but please point me at a paragraph in the Big Book of Constitutional Democracy (or wherever the “theory of actual democracy” described; and no, US Constitution is not that) where it is laid out that President should not just have his finger in every pie (department, bureau and office),
"The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. "
Congress's power: "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills." "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time."
So Congress raises the money, puts it in the treasury, and gives the executive branch authorization to spend it. It never says the executive has to spend it. And "executive power" means the ability to hire and fire, to give orders, to fire people if they don't follow those orders, to suspend payments if a department is squandering the money, to audit the books etc. That is what the executive in any organization does.
It sounds like you think the President is vestigal organ that shouldn't exist. In your view, Congress establishes civil service rules that controls personnel and management of an agency, Congress controls the budget, the President has no power whatsoever. And indeed, that's how the government actually has been running the past 70 years, but that's not how the Constitution was designed. In reality, I think the Constitution was intentionally or unintentionally flexible about which branch of government is Supreme. But Congress and the bureaucracy lost the mandate of heaven, and Trump and Elon are attempting to acquire it.
DOGE has less accountability than USAID.
DOGE is Obama's U.S. digital service renamed, it is authorized to help make all government departments more efficient, and it reports directly to the Chief of Staff who reports to the President. Additionally, the DOGE team members embedded in agencies report to that agency head. Read here: https://x.com/RenzTom/status/1887038876000079945
gorge
17d ago
So on the one hand, USAID is described as an independent nonpolitical agency and should not be subsumed into Rubio's State Department.
Note that the entire concept of an "independent" agency does not make sense under Constitutional theory or a theory of actual democracy. If it's "independent" ... who then holds it accountable to the public (democratic) interest? How does this foot with the "full executive power" clause that puts executive power under the President's chain-of-command.
"You can't actually demonstrate how Kristol is getting the money from USAID because it is all put in one big pot and laundered" is not exactly making the argument for USAID or Bill Kristol.
Why does USAID need to fund grants by sending them through the Rockefeller Philanthropic Advisors? If an organization is deliberately obfuscating its funding flows, the burden of proof is on that organization to prove that it is all on the up-and-up. Legally, when USAID gives money to the Rockefeller Foundation, it is legally the Rockefeller Philanthropic Advisors money. Maybe USAID tells them to use that money only for a certain specific groups that does not include Bill Kristol. Maybe not. Maybe there are all kinds of hidden favors and log rolling and kickbacks in how Rockefeller Advisors disperses their funds. The public cannot audit the Rockefeller Foundation, so all we have is the official legal flows, which is that USAID gives money to the Rockefeller Advisors and Rockefeller Advisors gives some money to Bill Kristol. If you want to conclude otherwise the burden-of-proof is on Rockefeller Philanthropic Advisors to completely open up its books.
gorge
21d ago
He only got to do that because more people pressed Trump button. That's the central point, if more people had pressed Harris button, Trump wouldn't get to hire or appoint anybody. Yarvin is as turgid and obnoxious to read as usual, but "moral energy" is conveniently unquantifiable.
Yeah, but the American people pressing the button for "right-wing strong man" (as opposed to generic Republican who fakes being CEO of America) is exactly what Yarvin proposed as his solution 15 years ago:
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/03/true-election-practical-option-for-real/
it's also a massive L for many reactionary theory of politics which have proven so popular in what can broadly be called the "dissident right."
As a long-time Moldbug/Yarvin reader, this is a surreal take.
What Moldbug wrote back from 2008 to 2012 was that the Republican party was fake opposition, that Republican presidents were basically pretending to be a CEO while in fact all hiring and firing is done by civil service laws, broader ideology is set by the Cathedral, and the Republican president impact is minimal. The steering wheel was not connected to the rudder.
Moldbug's proposed solution was to use the internet to route traditional mainstream media power, and hold a "true election" where a majority elects a president who promises to exercise the full executive authority of the Presidency, as FDR and Lincoln did, and to cut through or ignore the strata of civil service rules, administrative state rules, to re-attach the steering wheel to the rudder, etc. etc. in order to break the oligarchical Cathedral/administrative state.
A lot of men on the right read Moldbug, did route around the Cathedral, did do a hostile takeover of the Republican party, and are now at least starting to attempt what he proposed. I'm still worried that they are going to declare victory way too soon and it will all go off half-cocked. But it is a promising start. The Trump administration has yet to go full-Yarvin, and to the extent they hold back I think they are more likely to ultimately fail.
In 1972, the Cathedral could slander and smear a president and the normal Republican would believe the Cathedral over the president. In 2024, this is not the case. In part this is because of the Internet, in part because the Cathedral itself has hemorrhaged talent and dropped kayfabe -- but also in part because Yarvin himself exposed the Cathedral for what it was.
It's like Yarvin said, "Ah, I diagnosed your problem, it is far more fatal than people think, and the cures other people are selling will not work on it. However, I think I may have a treatment that just might work ..." And the person then tries the treatment and starts feeling better, and someone else says, "Ah, Yarvin said you would die of this disease, but you are feeling better, he is discredited!"
In fairness to your view, though, Moldbug and the neoreactionaries have written a lot of stuff and have gone back and forth on what might actually work, what will be allowed, etc, as is to be expected in any longrun and wide-ranging conversation. Yarvin has waffled and said that maybe the medicine won't work, maybe you need a different medicine, etc. With regards to the 2024 election, there was a lot of disagreement in the dissident right about whether the Cathedral would be strong and unified enough to find or manufacture enough votes to overcome its deep unpopularity. Yarvin himself said he did not know. Yarvin also just emailed an apology for underestimating Trump 47 and over-estimating the strength of the Cathedral in 2024.
But overall, to see this as a massive L for reactionaries is ridiculous. What we are seeing is actually the fruition of 17 years of intellectual trench-work and public persuasion.
ADDENDUM:
Moldbug's diagnosis was that we don't live in a two-party system, we live in a system where the Republicans or the "right" are basically fake opposition. They are allowed to win small victories every now, in part to make their opposition look real, and in part to fix obvious problems of too much leftism, but they are never allowed to win on existential questions and in general the country moves to thee steps to the left for every step to the right. It's unclear if Trumps actions will amount to a full regime change and rightward shift on existential questions -- or if it will actually be a re-invorgation of the two-party system just as people were catching on to the fact that the Republicans were fake opposition. IN this scenario, there will be some right-ward shift on the craziest of the left-wing stuff from the past ten years, but the Cathedral will remain in-tact and the country will continue to move to the left after Trump leaves, and very little about our system will have fundamentally been altered or fixed by Trump.
Thus, Moldbug's analysis was and is correct, and as long as the Trumpist-right follows is prescribed treatment plan, they can defeat the Cathedral and cure the country. But if they go off the treatment plan and don't actually bother to follow through in enforcing these executive orders and in firing workers and taking control of the budget and defunding the NGO/academia/non-profit complex, etc, then all Trump will have done is to reboot the fake two-party system with a more exciting season of TV.
gorge
1mo ago
It's disappointing, especially after Vance said they wouldn't pardon violent offenders.
Were the violent offenders pardoned or commuted to time-served? I see a list of 14 people who only got a commutation, not a pardon. If the latter, this would match how Democrats are typically treated, I remember seeing a case of a Democratic client group attacking the police in NYC and they only got a year in prison.
gorge
1mo ago
The January 6th rioters should be treated the same as the summer of 2020 race rioters were treated by the Democrats. For the 2020 rioters, virtually no rioters were prosecuted or punished for merely being there, in fact, they got rewarded with civil lawsuit settlements! Rioters who committed property crimes generally got diversion, and the rioters who actually committed assault against the cops appear to have gotten about a year in prison. AFAICT, no one got in trouble for organizing any of the riots or egging them on from afar.
Ideally, the 2020 rioters should have been more harshly treated. But they weren't, so there is no reason for Republicans to accept harsher treatment of their own team.
Pardoning the non-violent offenders for January 6th and commuting the most violent ones to time-served basically just matches how the Democrat rioters were treated. Actually not quite -- the January 6th people need to sue the DoJ and then the DoJ can settle with them in court for millions of dollars. That will match how the Democrat rioters were treated.
gorge
1mo ago
I believe you, I'm just saying your own personal testimony is the right evidence to cite. There is no need to cite a fictional TV show made decades later as evidence for your claim.
gorge
1mo ago
You can see it in shows like Stranger Things which represent them in their natural state in the 1980s.
You can use fiction as a reference for a culture was like in a certain time ... but only fiction created during that time AND if you know something about the agenda of the creators, the pressures that went into making the show, the constraints and demands of the medium, etc. Usually the way you use fiction to learn about a culture at a certain time, is by looking at what the creators inserted as background that they expected the audience to be familiar with, and what kind of message they thought their audience would be receptive to hearing. So the Cosby show doesn't tell you what a default black family is like. It tells you that the audience was receptive to a story about the default black family being like that. And it tells you something about what the typical American family was like, or what it aspired to be like.
Preliminary:
- Right now I prefer the term "gender & race communism" to "wokeness." And as such "wokeness" did not start in the 2010s or in the 19080s as Paul Graham posits, but was a growing trend the entire last two hundred years.
- In the Anglo-American sphere, it has tended to grow, not in a straight line, but in a saw-tooth pattern -- three steps to the left, one to the right. During the 1960s and early 70s we went three steps to the left on race communism, then there was a bit of a movement rightward during the 1990s. We went another three steps to the left from 2012 to 2021, and now there is a bit of a movement back to the right. However, we are still a long way to returning to the status quo of 2010.
it didn't really lead to any concrete changes beyond hand-wavey gestures that in hindsight look more to have been done for purposes of public perception than to make any real changes.
Nuts.
- The curriculum of the school system in the major US city where I live is a near total wreck. Up through eighth grade, they basically don't teach a single classic American text, they don't teach anything that would inspire a white American boy (and frankly the curriculum probably isn't that inspiring to the people of color it is supposed to represent). Even the unit on space exploration -- uses Hidden Figures as the main text -- the school is flat-out teaching "misinformation." The magnet schools that were previously a great option for the better students have been greatly harmed by the post-2020 equity craze that lead to a change in admission rules. The administrators talking about these changes explicitly said that these changes were a result of making equity and anti-racism a central focus of their mission.
- The police were told to stand-down, a huge crime wave ensued, and urban public safety in the major cities has not come close to returning to 2000s levels, far less 1950s levels (Don't talk to me about crime rates -- due to police capacity and risk homeostasis, crime rates don't actually measure changes in public safety in the medium-term -- you have to look at how people's behaviors have changed).
And if you say, "this is mainly a problem of the blue cities" -- well, I don't accept "just move to the reservation the suburb bro" as a cost-less mitigation. "Just give up on your ability to hold on to the central nodes and your ability to coordinate easily." The cities becoming less habitable for white, family-oriented, traditional families is a huge defeat.
- The demographics of our elite colleges were greatly changed as a result of equity focused changes in admissions. This matters a lot for the future leadership of our country.
- The nature of campus social life and dating has fundamentally changed, partly because of Title IX investigations and metoo, but of course, also for many other reasons.
- The demographics of the entire country changed because it became racist and xenophobic to do any border control which produced bad optics or "violated human rights"
- The replacement of merit-based hiring with DEI hiring has not been rolled back, our institutions are continuing to crumble as a result. We do have people claiming they saw explicit anti-white-male discrimination in hiring at companies like Google and Intel and I think it has something to do with the stagnation and decline of those companies.
- Cross-dressers went from being a joke, to something that will get you fired and ostracized if you don't play along with their false beliefs. School systems now teach multiple genders and you are a bad person if you don't acknowledge someone's chosen gender. Code-of-conducts across an enormous number of projects, conferences, and other institutions, now ban "misgendering" someone. Mandatory denial of reality across many institutions of society is an enormous concrete change.
gorge
2mo ago
When I listen to clips like these from Diane Ehrensaft or Johanna Olson-Kennedy I absolutely get a sense that The Adversary is in the room.
gorge
2mo ago
But there's my point. The right wing "hates" that stuff, but they would not send their son to therapy (or I guess, Bible camp) and remove their access to a phone/all media if they caught them watching those.
If I thought my child was actually being influenced by trans-influencers, there is no limit to the drastic action I might take, and many on my side feel the same way. Ideally, I would be able to get them off of it just by explaining how dumb and wrong the influencers are, but if that was not enough, and I had to remove them from a peer and school and institutional situation that really had the tentacles wrapped around my child, God grant me the courage to do any action necessary, including selling my house and moving to a different state.
gorge
2mo ago
Sometimes I think back to my own childhood watching G.I. Joe and Transformers, wondering if there were sneaky bit of propaganda snuck into them.
You could certainly make a case that the jinogist and glorification of war that was common in all media from 1900 to 2005 or so, was it's own egregore that was interested in propagandizing your sons and feeding them into the meat grinder. Is a media diet of the Union Jack which results in your son volunteering charging a machine gun in World War I actually all that much worse than a media diet of something that risks turning your son gay or trans? It seems there are always powers and principalities who wish to chew up, use, and discard your children for their own purposes -- defending against these is the difficult and never-ending job of a parent.
I hope to be able to teach my own sons the proper balance between having a healthy desire for cultivating manly valor, but also not jumping to volunteer for stupid wars for stupid and evil leaders.
gorge
2mo ago
But the bottom line is: Isn’t it kind of convenient that my moral inclinations and my opinions of the practical difficulties of implementing a ban line up so well for different activities?
Eh, I think a teenage daughter becoming a party girl, a slut, or even a fornicator is bad, but I think figuring out how to ban it is a very difficult problem. I think the optimal strategy is to control the peer group years ahead of time by selecting locations and activities -- but that itself is very difficult, because there are few communities that are aligned on these kind of values any more.
There’s a significant attitude of “Teens are going to engage in risky behaviors no matter what, your punishments and restrictions will have zero deterrent effect, and the best course of action is some kind of harm reduction.”
It's wild to me that according to the hive-mind, the only thing you should teach your child about sex is 1) the importance of proper consent and 2) birth control. There is never anything on /r/parenting about teaching your the importance of discerning proper character of the person to have sex with; nor anything about teaching your child how long to wait or under what circumstances to have sex (waiting for love, waiting for marriage, etc.). The idea that "consent" is the all-important thing, and marriage or even "love" doesn't matter at all seems like a complete shift from the Zeitgeist 30 years ago. I mean, 30 years ago was a pretty loose time, but at least there was a debate about the proper time to have sex, now it is just assumed that parents should not give any guidance about it.
gorge
2mo ago
It's interesting that everyone here is ignoring the sex of the child in question.
Teen drinking is universal outside the US, near-universal in the US, and lindy. "
Teenage drinking is lindy for teenage boys ... but not for unmarried, unchaperoned girls.
gorge
3mo ago
It wouldn't be a favor to Harris, she would get all this press attention and have to smile for the press in order to get an absolutely empty gesture right after suffering an all-timer humiliating defeat. If Biden did it, the smart move for Harris would be to resign herself and pass the honor of first woman president to Nancy Pelosi.
gorge
3mo ago
We need more than that. She needs to be officially sworn in, get her portrait on the wall, be listed in the history books, etc.
gorge
3mo ago
It would be chef's kiss if he could resign and make Kamala the first woman president. From my point of view, this would be great because it removes "make history and elect the first woman president" as a talking point in future elections. From Biden's view, it would have the appearance of making history and being magnanimous while in effect being an absolute humiliation and revenge.
gorge
3mo ago
I will never forgive Gorsuch for Bostock.
The conservative court picks, definitely slow down woke, that's the advantage of not having a woke/establishment president. But they don't actually reverse previous woke and fix the country. They don't even stop woke movement entirely, again, Bostock.
Looks like in 1981 NIH had $3.5 billion in total, $1 billion for National Cancer Institute and $228 million for NIAID, $527 million for Heart Lung Blood Institute, $331 million for general health. Is the budget further itemized within those agencies? Seems like they could have used any of these budgets. Saying they were doing a cancer investigation wouldn't have even been a stretch as incidences of kaposi sarcoma was one of the primary early symptoms that got the whole investigation started.
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