quiet_NaN
14hr ago
The Oath Clause (Article VI, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution) states: "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; ..."
Attorney Generals in all 50 states whether corrupt or not, must be made to enforce this law. This law removes the likes of Bernie Sanders, AOC, Ilhan Omar, El Sayed and any others of their ilk from office and should have prevented all DSA candidates from even running.
Who was the guy who incited a mob again to storm the capitol to interrupt the certification of an election conducted according to that very constitution? Was it Sayed or Sanders again?
Also, if you want to have a constitution which protects you against socialism, my advise is that you campaign for an amendment. The Takings clause, "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." does not say that the government is not allowed to socialize your steel mill. Or you simply amass a larger majority and get rid of the relevant part of 5A, which is also perfectly legal.
It is totally legal to run on a platform to socialize all the means of production. If you try to pass the laws, it would be likely that the courts have a different idea on what "just compensation" entails than what you had earmarked for the buyout. But even that would not make you a traitor to the constitution. It happens quite frequently that the SCOTUS tells an administration "that thing you were trying to do does not work like that due to constitutional reasons". For the most part, that in itself is the fix, you do not generally get branded a traitor for trying to do something which is ruled unconstitutional.
quiet_NaN
14hr ago
That is classist as fuck. I have a PhD and I regularly rely on browser spell checkers to get words such as sycophant spelled right. (I am also not a native speaker, nor an American, but that is besides the point.) I would probably have gotten hypotenuse wrong (it has a th in German and with other words like cathode the spelling stays the same while the pronounciation diverges).
I might as well say "If you do not know what Black Lotus, Beholder, the Red Wedding or Force Choke refer to you should not be voting" to define my arbitrary bubble, or refer to fancy french dinner terms instead.
Spelling correctly is even worse an ability, it is as obsolete as the ability to divide large integers with a pen. Sure, a lack of ability to spell pedestrian or calculate 216/8 might be indicative of some serious gaps in one's education, but it is not per se damning.
The thing I would prefer in voters is if they had good world models. This is a bit harder to quantify that just your class boundary, though. There is also the question if having bad world models in some domains (e.g. believing in astrology) is actually correlated with having bad world models relevant to politics (unless you select your candidates directly be their zodiac sign, in which case I would definitely prefer you refrained from voting).
quiet_NaN
20hr ago
The Trump admin and the GOP may have managed to turn a once in a couple generation opportunity to fix major structural problems in the United States into the worst political loss since at least the 1974 election a month after Nixon's resignation over the Watergate Coup, but have you considered the worst scumbags around, Republican political consultants like Susie Wiles, Chris Lacivita, and James Blair, got generational wealth sucking MAGA dry?
I think the title for "worst scumbag Republican who caused the midterm losses" is hotly contested. Too bad there is not a Nobel for that.
Trump won two years ago not because he was a particularly strong candidate -- he was anything but -- but because the Dems messed up completely. While I do not deny that he is (was?) very popular with his base, he is very much not some golden boy. Sure, he won a majority of electoral college votes against Clinton, likely his greatest political achievement for the GOP. Then he lost against sleepy Joe, who is basically "what if Obama was white, a few decades older and less charismatic?" as the incumbent because he had spent his presidency on Twitter. His personally greatest political success was doubtlessly getting nominated by the GOP for a third time due to his cult. Winning the election was then mostly a matter of being more lucid than Biden, any Republican candidate of the last two decades could probably have pulled that off.
Trump is in politics to bolster his ego and his net worth, the worst swamp dweller DC has seen in decades. The ego thing sometimes works to the advantage of his base because he is aware that doing things popular with his base (like rounding up and deporting suspected illegals) will make him popular, and he likes to be popular. However, it is not very reliable in that regard, because often it comes with an inflated sense of his own capabilities. He will embark on plenty of foolish quests like his tariffs or his little war with Iran because he genuinely believes that his is much more capable than any president who came before him, and will not update when things will blow up in his face, because his ego can not bear admitting he was wrong.
As the grifter-in-chief, he obviously attracts other grifters. Can't expect a Boomer to build his shitcoin on his own, after all. And I don't think his ego can stand around being anyone who is not a terminal sycophant. "Mr president, I think your cognitive abilities are quite good considering your age and lack of educational attainment" is not the kind of feedback he would take well. It is obvious from his tweets that he has nobody who has the influence to tell him "don't write this, it makes you look delusional (e.g. thinking he might win a Nobel) or like a comic book villain (e.g. threatening to wipe out the Persian civilization)".
Complaining about the Wormtongue types who compete in ass-kissery to be able to manipulate him to their own advantage is like complaining that the stripper you fell in love with is only interested in your money. It is sad but not entirely unexpected.
I am not an Obama fanboy, I merely consider him an ok president. But my mental model of his administration is that there was a lot more room for honest disagreement with him. This allowed him to retain (perhaps even mildly autistic) policy wonks who are actually good at their job rather than a gaggle of sociopaths and fellow narcissists.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Ok, you got me. One degree of separation to the EMB of the 1970s. Now kindly explain to me why I should give more than zero fucks about the EMB in 1970. If we start shunning everyone supporting someone whom the US will designate a terrorist a few decades later, we will have a lot of shunning to do. There are further steps required to go from EMB@1970 to "indisputably evil".
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Implying that Israel is trying to take Gaza as if it's a game of Risk is just silly.
I did not mean to imply that. I do not consider their actions in Gaza to be a war of expansion, it seems more like a punitive expedition.
However, the Netanyahu government has clearly encouraged Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including through military force, while also driving out the native Palestinians.
Probably within a month Israel could take over each neighboring country if it wanted to.
I doubt it. They could assassinate the leaders of their neighbors and turn their cities into Gaza, but so far they have been unable to even occupy the population of Gaza, even though that would likely be effective at breaking Hamas control. (I mean, when the Allies reached Munich, they did not encircle it with a wall and starve it, hoping that the population would eventually get tired of the Nazis. They took and occupied the city, which allowed them to fight pockets of resistance a lot more selectively than through airstrikes.)
The population of the Cairo metro area alone is 10x the population of Gaza, and more than 2x the population of Israel. Bibi might be able to glass Cairo, but while his colleagues in the neighboring states might share his lack of concern for dead Arabs, their populations do not. At the moment this does not matter, because the populations get no say in the policy, but their power has seem brittle at times, "Israel has killed a few millions of our Muslim brothers and sisters in Cairo and we will write a sternly worded letter in response" might be a policy which will get regimes toppled. And while I am sure that the IDF is much more effective per capita than their Muslim neighbors, Egypt and the Arabian peninsula have a combined population of more than 200M, having Israel come out on top of that conflict without direct support from the US is possible (it kinda happened before), but I would not call it a foregone conclusion.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
As an utilitarian, I would compare the total death tolls rather than the average. Someone who murders 10% of a population of 10M is even more evil than someone who murders 10% of a population of 1M, in my view.
I will totally grant you that 70k vs 230k is merely a factor of three, so "half an order of magnitude", not "orders of magnitude", and I have edited my post to reflect that.
I guess an Israeli apologist might say that comparing Gaza to Ukraine is an apple to orange comparison in any case, because the Gaza war is simply punitive in character rather than a territorial expansion, and the apples-to-apples comparison would be their Lebensraum project in the West Bank vs the Ukraine war. (Ok, perhaps they might not use exactly that phrasing.)
To which a Russian apologist might reply that this comparison is unfair because unlike the Palestinians, the Ukrainians are fighting back (with Western support) rather than quietly being ethnically cleansed, obviously suppressing an enemy armed with NATO tech will be bloodier than suppressing an enemy armed (partly) with stone slings.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Ads on the internet are still a thing? Seems like I should watch more youtube or something.
I agree that using targeted ads is not inherently more evil than using untargeted ads, the rare case where you get outed for some interest aside.
For me, the evil is in the gathering of the data itself. Most people have stuff about them which they would prefer not to be stored in some unregulated database. From how they look naked over their kinks and weird hobbies to misdemeanors. In past ages discovering someone's secrets was time-consuming and expensive. Sure, you could hire a private detective to tail him for weeks, and perhaps you might learn about his lover or commie affiliations or whatever. Today these barriers are getting lower by the day.
Even if you are the rare person who has never done anything to blemish their reputation, the next question would be if you would trust the algorithms and corporations making decisions about you (do you get the job, or the loan, etc) to have robust epistemic standards about the quality of their data? After all, it does not help you at all that you have no idea what a porn hub would be if the drone making a decision about your application believes some junk data some snake oil merchant sold him which says that you visit that site five times a day. And very likely you will simply be denied without ever learning that the reason you got denied is that you were wrongly listed in some private database as a furry enthusiast.
For any net-negative social behavior, there are always different options how to deal with it. Sometimes, technical solutions are simple and preferable. We know we can not trust governments with not snooping in our data, so we have messenger apps like Signal which presumably keep our texts from them. Other times, a technical solution would be too expensive. For example, humans are generally quite vulnerable to small arms fire. Rather than going grocery shopping in body armor, we have decided that it might be a good idea to deter people from shooting at others by inventing criminal norms about "murder" and "assault".
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think that logically, it is probable that God does exist, so I am not an atheist. In particular my favorite argument is the argument from causation. There must be an uncaused cause; this can be identified with God.
This is certainly an argument for something, but not an argument for a vaguely Christian god in particular.
Suppose that I concede that the primary reason God might have for creating the Sol system is humanity, rather than dolphins or the rings of Saturn or ASI or mold. Our observable universe contains about 10 to the power of 24 stars, and from what we can tell intelligent life is not very common. If God has created the universe it looks like they have also taken care not to allow any other intelligent life to thrive in our neighborhood, so if they care about us they have probably placed us in our own sandbox universe, just like we might prefer to cultivate some bacteria in some otherwise sterile petri dish. On priors, if I assume that God has created the universe with any one particular solar system in mind, the odds are 1:1e24 against us being the reason for it.
Of course, it is likewise a very far inference step from "the creator created the universe for humans" to "he is an intelligent entity which feels empathy for humans". Nor is it clear that he is on top of the creator hierarchy. Even we have the ability to simulate minds. We might just be the homework assignment of a homework assignment of the beings the first cause genuinely cares about.
Then biggest argument against God being a Christian God is from the theodicy problem in particular. Presumably, creating a universe which evolved hominids which would eventually keep the Sabbath and stone sodomites took a lot of fine-tuning on God's part, either from setting the starting conditions just right or by actively messing with creation (like the Bible asserts he does all the time). And yet that same loving God could not be bothered to mess with plant biology a bit to ensure that genes for oxaloacetase would not spread, thereby preventing most kidney stones? Creation seems mostly indifferent to our plights and joys, it seems reasonable to conclude that this is due to the creator is indifferent.
As one of the critics of US support of the Israeli government you mentioned, I will admit that the direct military support is just the tip of the iceberg. Argumentatively, it is convenient to point to the tip to argue for the existence of the iceberg, because that part is rather hard to dispute while the parts below the water line are less obvious.
I think US support for Israel takes many different forms, among them the direct military aid, preferential access to US weapon systems, the US using diplomatic pressure to intervene on Israels behalf with third countries, liberally using terrorist designations to cut their enemies from the global finance system, direct military interventions on their behalf, use of their UNSC veto to block resolutions against them, disincentivizing individuals and third countries from boycotting them economically, sanctioning the ICC, use of military means to defend them in case of attack.
I believe that there could be an Israel worth defending, one which is genuinely pursuing a two-state solution with the moderate Palestinians, demolishes the illegal settlements in Area C and whose military operates with Western thresholds for civilian casualties rather than Russian ones. However, this is not the Israel which the majority of their electorate prefers, clearly.
Israel is unfortunately not the only militarist-expansionist country in the world, Russia is clearly worse in scale by orders of magnitude. But with Russia, the free world is doing its best to exert economic pressure to dissuade them from violating the norms of international law, with Israel, the free world is enabling them.
What I would prefer to see is the US-Israeli relationship sink to the same level as the US-Uzbek relationship. If they refrain from any atrocities for a while, I am fine with selling them the same military tech the US would sell other non-aligned states in the region. If they do not, they should get sanctions. Make it clear that any beef they have with their Muslim subjugated populations or neighbors is their own beef, not a Western one -- though there are doubtless very good reasons for Westerners to have a separate beef with countries like Iran or Saudi Arabia over their human right records.
AIPAC forgoing the direct military aid is clearly damage control. Scott Alexander has argued persuasively that AIPAC is very effective as a lobby organization. I have no doubt that as long as they control Congress, they will remain very effective in continuing to enable the Israeli government's current expansionist agenda. The fix seems to be to make their brand so toxic that it becomes net negative for candidates to receive funding from them.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
"We will stop providing weapons and intelligence to Israel, full stop" is a much greater threat, because Israel has no strategic depth. It can make its own missile interceptors, but it can't make enough of them and sooner or later a missile will get through and hit the interceptor factory.
The other problem Israel faces is that it is a tiny country. While I have no doubt that their military tech is top notch, they simply do not have the resources to develop a cutting edge fighter jet, a portfolio of tanks, ships, spy satellites, and other weapon platforms. So far, they have a qualitative advantage over their neighbors in that the country which accounts for a third of the global military spending gives them preferential access to their tech.
Having to develop everything in-house instead would effectively cut their R&D budget (assuming it follows the total military expenditures) by a factor of 20.
And then there is the fact that currently, the US would obviously go to war to defend Israel, and indeed participates in intercepting missiles aimed at them while not intercepting any of the missiles shot by them. Most other countries do not start shit with neighbors multiple times their size. Ukraine did not regularly assassinate Russian nuclear scientists. Kuwait did invade any neighbors to drive back proxy forces lobbing missiles at them. Mongolia is not starving any ghettos full of Han Chinese.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
The first impression is he’s some sort of Muslim Brotherhood type.
Are we playing five degrees of separation here? I have not seen credible claims that he is personally a member. His mother was reportedly active in the Egyptian MB (EMB, henceforth) in the 1970s, and reportedly he defended a friend who was imprisoned for funding the EMB in 2021.
Now, to be frank, I think the goal of the EMB -- making Egypt more Islamic -- is a shitty idea, for pretty much the same reasons why I hold that trying to make the Western world more Christian is a shitty idea. Still, their idea of accomplishing this seems to be through competing in the marketplace of ideas and getting elected, and this is a meta-strategy I generally like. The EMB was briefly in power in 2013, and sure some of the stuff they did (like declaring themselves beyond the courts) seems shady as hell. In any case, things went as they usually do and a military coup saw them disposed from power and outlawed.
Reading between the lines of my Claude conversation, I would think of them like Erdogan in Turkey -- certainly not gold-star democrats, but also not Daesh. My baseline expectation for political movements in the ME is just not very high, most governments there are Problematic in one way or another. On the other side of the Red Sea, there are plenty of polities which are at least as theocratic as anything the EMB envisions while also making zero pretense to democracy. From where I stand, it is not immediately obvious that a military dictatorship is preferable to some democratic rule by an elected religious-leaning party.
The other problem with the EMB is that the Palestine chapter of the MB is Hamas, whose evilness I will not dispute. Trump alleges that the EMB has helped Hamas with recruiting. So far, I have seen little evidence why I should give this claim more credit than the claims his administration makes about the causes of autism. I mean, it is not exactly secret who besides Iran was funding Hamas. The reason why the EMB is designated a terrorist organization an Qatar is not seems simply because the former was in no position to gift president Trump a new airplane.
So the story in total is something like "Abdul El-Sayed -> has a mother who was/is in the -> Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood -> whose members have allegedly aided -> Hamas." Clearly that makes him more dangerous than Osama bin Laden.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I'm sympathetic to Jonah Goldberg's argument in this podcast, that is, that El-Sayed wants the Democrats to be a straightforward anti-Israel party.
To be fair, at the moment the Democrats, like the Republicans, are a straightforward pro-Israel party. Most state governors would probably be thrilled to get half the per-capita resources from the USG the US spends on propping up Israel even without the ability to also drag the US into wars for their benefits. Most US states might even spend a smaller fraction of comparable federal resources on killing people.
We know how it looks if the US is 'anti-$COUNTRY'. They find themselves internationally isolated, their nuclear facilities get bombed, their leaders get assassinated or kidnapped, their military (and sometimes educational) facilities get annihilated, their civilian infrastructure destroyed, Trump calls them bad names on Twitter.
For Israel, that is currently far outside of the Overton window, which is a good thing, because most of these tactics are net-negative for global utility no matter who is on the receiving end.
What is reasonable is unfriendly neutrality. "We think your government is doing bad things, thus we might do some trading with you but will not sell you weapons or go out of our way to protect your interests." If Israel can persuade Gulf monarchies to shoot down incoming missiles for them, good for them, otherwise, bombing the shit out of each other seems to be a quaint ME custom which us Westerners can simply not get, it would be disrespectful to their religions interfere on one side or another.
But he is, I think, basically a middle-class western Muslim who attributes a disproportionate level of importance of Israel, and it has become organising for his thoughts in a way that it is not for other people.
The problem is that Israel and AIPAC clearly have an outsized effect on US politics. If someone told me that the Uzbek or Peruvians were largely responsible for US foreign policy, they would have a hard time providing evidence for that. With Israel, the claim that they do not have a higher influence than Uzbekistan on US policy is plainly absurd.
The real failure mode is that people over-update on the evidence, and it becomes a lens through which all of the world is perceived. If you have just learned about the Van-der-Waals force and are excited about it, you might start to attribute all sorts of effects to it which are vaguely explainable by it but are in actuality unrelated to it. Similar things happen with all sorts of lenses: you can probably discover something worthwhile about international politics by looking at it from the perspective of gender relations, but if you are unable to take off the gender lenses, you will be blind to a zillion explanations which have nothing to do with gender.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
While I think the world gets a bit better every time a founder of some evil tech company goes up in a fireball, karmaic retribution is simply not reliable or selective enough to rely upon, and we should instead use well-scaling social tech (e.g. legislative and judicial) to align corporations.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Seems like nothing burger to me. You can probably get my identity by putting it into a LLM and tracing for linguistic patterns.
This seems to be completely orthogonal to the tech described here? This one is not about doxxing smut authors, it is about doxxing smut readers. Most website UIs do not feature enough navigation elements using natural language to make IDing individuals based on their language use feasible.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
This is the price that we pay for freedom. Nothing like this would be possible in Europe under the GDPR.
As a German, I am happy to give up my god-given right to collect any data of my neighbor if in turn it constrains others (realistically big tech) from tracking me.
(My real pet peeve with the GDPR is that unsolicited consent requests are terrible UX, and the sane default would be to tell websites that they have to use HTTP headers instead which the user can once configure in their browser. Oh, and IP addresses being personal data is also a bit silly. A sane compromise would be that you can keep your logfiles, but are not allowed to do data mining based on IP addresses.)
Generally, I am fine with conceptions of rights evolving alongside with tech, and privacy/data protection is one such right. I guess the US conception of rights is that because the founding fathers did not envision the tech to send messages into peoples brains, if the tech gets developed everyone has the natural right to spam other people with ads in their sleep. But at least you don't have to house soldiers!
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I will grant you that there are even some actually democratic states where this is the case. The CSU has ruled Bavaria since the current iteration of Germany. It probably helped that their economic policy was generally sound, so there was no economic pressure to replace them.
Still, I think in general it is better to be part of a 60% winning coalition than an 80% one. You already had a solid majority with 60%, but now you need to spend a quarter of your political capital on their stupid pet cause instead of your great cause.
I think this applies generally to coalition-building -- if you plan a bank heist, you do not want to bring along extra accomplices who do not increase the probability of success.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
While I am pro-choice, I feel that Roe v Wade was something of an original sin for the SCOTUS in the last century. "Legislated from the bench" is not a minor flaw you can overcome if your cause is just righteous enough. I am sure it seemed like an amazing hack at the time, bypassing the consensus of the governed entirely and doing the right thing, but most people who make a Faustian bargain come to regret it eventually.
The saner approach would have been a federal law backed by the commerce clause. Sure it would have taken decades, been subject to attempts to revert or constrain it, and sure, you would have had to torture the commerce clause into shape to make it regulate abortions-as-a-commercial-service, but quite frankly the commerce clause has been tortured far worse in other decisions.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
It will lead to a permanent one party state.
No, it will not. Demographics and attitudes have changed before. For example, around 1861, the (Southern) Democratic Party was openly pro slavery, and a few years later that was simply no longer a majority-winning proposition, thus the Republican party ruled in perpetuity.
Not. Instead, what happened was that the Southern Democrats went from pro-slavery to merely horribly racist, which still won them elections. As attitudes changed, so changed the parties, because any party which does not try to be palatable to the median voter will generally not win elections (depending on gerrymendering, obviously).
If your model is e.g. that the Democrats will invite in zillions of Muslim third-worlders to bolster their rank, I would predict that at some point the woke leadership would clash with the immigrants over LGBT and women's rights, for example. For a Republican, campaigning on "should minors be allowed to get puberty blockers against the religious objections of their parents" would be an easy win.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
To be fair, there were also informal norms about judicial appointments and under what circumstances it was proper to block them in the Senate, but during the Bush years these norms started to break down and since then both parties have been happily ridding themselves of century-old norms to win the political fight of the day. The remaining survivor so far is the blue slip (effectively giving senators veto powers over appointments to their home state), but I am confident that is only a matter of time.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Or is it mainly, like, if they win the presidency in 2028 that things are gonna be bad?
Why would it be bad?
I mean, I do not dispute that there are generally election outcomes which are bad, even capital-B Bad. Hamas winning the 2006 elections in Gaza comes to mind. Nor is it the case that US elections can not be bad or even Bad for people. I for one would not tell people killed in this or that airstrike by Obama or Trump that their outcome is not bad. Or more centrally some kid in the global south who previously benefited from some cheap health interventions courtesy of USAID.
But my impression is that for the median US citizen (as well as for most citizens of the Western world, thankfully), the outcome of a US election is rarely good or bad but seems mostly meh. Sometimes you get abortion bans (which can be circumvented through going to another state, ideally permanently if you care about that kind of thing), or Obamacare, or more DEI or less DEI or an Iran deal or Iran bombed or a federal minimum wage or a relaxation of environmental standards or deported immigrants or whatever. Perhaps a few more kids die of measles or get prescribed puberty blockers. The price of gas might move up or down, some large bodies of water might change their official name.
What Trump's policy which you consider a resounding success would be threatened by the Dems taking over Congress? They could certainly put a stop to his tariffs, thus costing every American whatever check he had promised them again. They could put a stop to his Iran adventure, but that was well within the expected outcomes from the start. They might get rid of all the cuts on social services from his Big Beautiful Bill scheduled to take place after the mid-terms, but if the GOP had been serious about cutting expenses why did they postpone these?
Or do you think that this time the woke Democrats are finally getting around to establishing Sharia law and making gayness mandatory? Or abolishing private property?
The strongest argument I can think of would be that due to the rise of AISI, we are not living in normal, boring times but in a pivotal time for the future of our light cone. For example, the USG ASI alignment strategy seems to be that their president is very smart and thus can not possibly get outwitted by a rogue ASI. Under this premise, I agree that the US electorate picking someone who is less of a genius than Donald Trump might indeed spell disaster for mankind. Fortunately, I consider the premise so implausible on the face of it that I will not lose sleep over it.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Valid nitpick.
Also, Potato, potato.
For practical purposes of non-fantasy economic systems beyond Dunbar's number, it makes no difference if they are owned collectively by the population or by the state. If I am digging holes in my back garden under the mistaken impression that there is gold to be found, I can insist all day long that this is just the exploratory phase and the proper gold mine will come once the assay is done, in practice I will end up with garden with a lot of holes in it (which will come handy for the mass graves though, to stretch my metaphor a bit).
I also think Marx was intentionally vague on these letter steps after the necessary but distasteful dictatorship of the proletariat. After all, our minds are toiling under the yoke of capitalism and class struggles, so we can not even hope to grasp the heights to which the human spirit could soar without these fetters. (All horseshit, obviously.)
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Not to my knowledge. I think the FPTP voting system of the US makes for some pretty bizarre coalitions on both sides.
I do believe that the Republicans dominate around the "math with numbers in it is fake math for fake jobs" demographics (at least among the Whites), but will happily concede that this is just a part of the GOP coalition. There is the religious right, libertarians, rurals, blue-collar workers, billionaires, foreign policy hawks, anti-vaxxers, etc.
And the Democrats are the party of the urbanites, PMC, LGBT, racial minorities, wokes, college-educated, recent immigrants, etc. I am sure that some of these groups are on average less intelligent than some of the Republican demographics.
Nor do I believe that putting the stupid front and center has always been a GOP thing. In my mind, GWB, the leader of the free world under whose tenure various torture prisons of different levels of avowal were established was evil in a way Trump has so far failed to match, but despite countless memes to the contrary I do not believe that W was stupid himself or putting most of his focus on the stupid demographic.
However, I do believe that the MAGA version of the GOP is putting the stupid as their base demographic. This was Trump's appeal from the first primary. He is obviously less Christian than even I am. He is not rural, or had any foreign policy stance, or political convictions such as libertarianism. No, his appeal was that the political establishment cried "Anyone but that buffoon" any time he was mentioned. He was the kid who managed to grab attention by taking a dump in the swimming pool. Any other candidate would have been done for when the "grab them by the pussy" thing got leaked. But him it hardly hurt because it was so on brand, nobody was under any illusions that he was not a sex pest. The more the establishment (both the parts which went to Epstein's island with him and the others) whined about how absolutely unacceptable this behavior was in a candidate, the greater his appeal.
In his first administration, his effect was mitigated because he was surrounded by normal Republicans and career bureaucrats, though he did go through quite some personnel. This time, it is no longer just him. Hegseth or RFK Jr seem to be his equal in being outrage bait rather than having any qualifications. In retrospect, I think Trump missed out on the obvious pick for education secretary, which is a field in which his performance of triggering the establishment has been lacking. Tucker Carlson appearing with Trump on stage announcing that henceforth, federal funding would be denied to any schools which teach "fake letter math" would have done to math teachers what RFK did to epidemiologists.
I can't comment on the long term effects of replacing all the policy wonks with guys whose main qualification is that the establishment goes "anyone but him". Perhaps his tariffs will bring the US to prosperity far beyond anything I can imagine. Perhaps Hegseth's testosterone-boosted warriors will outperform the somber, inclusive professionals of previous administrations on the battlefield. Perhaps RFK Jr will cure autism. More centrally, perhaps "nothing ever happens" will continue to hold.
Personally, I am still hoping that the Americans will learn that voting the pool-shitter class president is great for disgust-maxxing your teacher, but comes with some downsides which will only gradually reveal themselves during his tenure.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
The right-wing government didn't ignore that, they changed the rules so that their new appointments were valid. The court then recognized these new appointments as valid.
Did Poland not get into trouble with the EU over that? If president Newsom appoints 20 new justices to the SCOTUS in 2029, and then the SCOTUS decides 20-9 that he totally had the authority to do that, some constitutional scholars might have reservations about that ruling.
Now, it is of course possible that the EU is full of leftist bureaucrats who whine about the rule of law whenever an EU-skeptical government does anything. But this is not my general impression. Nor do I expect them to be particularly partisan, "Tusk gets to do whatever he wants because we like him" seems unlikely.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Communism is a political and economic system under which the means of production are under state ownership rather than private property. In the contemporary US, this is very much a minority position, I recon that the fraction of voters who want to abolish private businesses is about as large as the fraction which yearns for the reintroduction of feudalism -- both should poll about the Lizardman's constant.
Basically, when the left wants to regulate something about corporations, the right will surely cry "Communism". Not that the right is generally a very good champion of laissez-faire capitalism. There is a broad consensus that businesses need regulation, though there is disagreement on the amount and the particulars.
Mostly, the control the government has over corporations is not by virtue of ownership but because existing regulations have enough leeway in them that its agencies could just adopt a regulatory interpretation which will destroy their business model.
The Aryanization of TikTok last year is one such example of the power the state has over businesses. My understanding is that it was a bipartisan effort. Congress had decided that having the lion's share of short form videos rotting the brains of kids under control of the Chinese was a national security risk. So they passed a law to remedy that, and because Trump was in charge he managed to have have one of his allies take control of it, thereby ensuring that Red Chinese propaganda will not reach the impressionable minds of future generations.
On the third, the Democrats won big time thanks to Trump, but they were not the only ones whom Trump helped to victory. More so than even with the Dems, the ones I am talking about are a group I have serious reservations about but whom I nevertheless root for in their conflict against Trump.
I am talking about Iran, of course.
Now, for all my faults, I am not a friend of the Iranian regime. They have an atrocious human rights record, and if the Iranian people can kick them out, I will be very happy for them. (They also sponsor murderous terrorist groups abroad, but let him whose government has never sponsored murderous terrorists cast the first stone.)
But I am a big fan of the international rule based order. This means that I want to see war of aggression fail, preferably fail spectacularly. This is why I am also rooting for Ukraine, for example. With Trump's and Bibi's Iranian adventure, there is no debate whose side is the aggressor. So obviously I would prefer for the US to get an expensive, humiliating defeat to reinforce the idea that wars of aggression do not pay off.
The goals of the Iranian regime are pretty aligned to mine in this. They are fighting a defensive war, they want to maintain as much of the status quo (their infrastructure being intact and their soldiers alive) as they can. But they arguably also want to establish a precedent that attacking them is a bad move.
However, their military capabilities are not up for bombing their enemy leadership, military or schools to try for a regime change (not that this worked for Trump either). So they did what was rational for them and suspended the freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz (thereby likewise violating international law). The Commander in Chief of the US military might be impervious to missiles, but he is very much vulnerable to the whims of his electorate, who are in turn vulnerable to economic pressure.
One of their war goals was "establish that attacking Iran is a presidency-ending mistake". I will admit that we are not quite there yet. But their labors have borne fruits, and now we have a regime change in Texas. Saddam Hussein would have given a hand for that.
Another thing Iran has accomplished is driving a wedge between the US and Israel. For most of my life, most Westerners did not have very strong feelings about Israel. Then Hamas (through their unmatched barbarism) incited them into leveling Gaza, killing 70k Palestinians (mostly likely non-combatants) in the process. We have all seen the before-and-after aerial photos, and some of us (me included) started to find that we actually gave a fuck. Then Netanyahu tricked the gullible Trump (who had already proven his usefulness by bombing IRGC officers in his first term) into spending a few dozen billions on bombing Iran, a move which helps Israel a lot more than it helps Americans.
Now, it is not like AIPAC does not have a majority in Congress anymore or anything, but the mere threat of people voting against their candidates is already constraining what they can do. Hence the decision of Trump and Netanyahu to get rid of the military aid (or at least be a bit more discreet about it). In the very least, it seems safe to say that no future US president will be roped into military action by Israel without carefully considering 'but what if this backfires domestically?'
Obviously Iran has not won yet, but I think the midterms were the most significant development in the conflict. It is a clear sign that the US is not willing to bear the expenses of the war indefinitely. Nor have any other countries been very enthusiastic about defending the freedom of navigation with their navies.
Now, ideally, the US would just pay reparations to Iran and Iran would allow innocent passage again, but realistically that is not going to happen. Still, I do think the US is going to tire of escorting tankers before Iran tires of attacking them, so in the long term we will either allow them to charge tolls or cut some other deal with them.
More options
Context Copy link