zataomm
3d ago
This may be the week I finally have to admit I don't understand a large portion of anti-Trump sentiment, at least as it manifests on Twitter. For me, the last straw was the reaction to the Washington Post's decision to not endorse a candidate for president, despite the fact that any reader who is paying attention at all knows that the editorial board endorses Harris, a fact reflected throughout basically all of their election coverage, and I am comfortable saying that the publication of an endorsement would literally have persuaded 0 voters to change their vote.
zataomm
3d ago
Absolutely incredible finish. Commanders avoided a very tough-luck loss by handing the Bears one instead.
zataomm
17d ago
I guarantee this never happened.
I don't know, there are a lot of people in the world who say a lot of things. This sounds like a really weird thing to say so maybe in context it made more sense? I tend to believe it, I just don't think it actually matters, doubt there was any animus behind it, and overall think that hypersensitivity to microagressions tends to make racial relations worse.
David French's current views overall are garbage, though.
zataomm
28d ago
(I wrote the linked comment)
That's fair. The Democrats' repeated insistence on referring to "Trump's Project 2025" is so transparently ridiculous, It makes me want to post the Jesse Pinkman, "he can't keep getting away with it," GIF. It somehow causes me great despair that the Democrats found this phrase which sounds ominous, and for that reason alone will keep on saying it, despite the fact that anyone who stops to think about what they know about Trump would find it wildly implausible. It just seems so cynical to me.
That's what I was trying to express, but I agree that it's better to not fill the forum with sarcastic comments
zataomm
28d ago
I just find the whole Project 2025 association so absurd because I actually followed the Democrats' advice and "google[d] Project 2025", which led me to the discovery of the project's 922-page book. And to claim that Donald Trump, of all people, actually read this book, well... is there any person in America who could believe it? As Loquat says in his comment, people invent all kinds of fantastical stories about Trump, but the idea that he would read a book? You've got to be kidding.
zataomm
29d ago
But surely we can agree Trump's thinking has been influenced by his careful study of the 922-page publication from the Heritage Foundation describing Project 2025, and/or the back-and-forth discussions he engaged in with its authors on policy matters prior to its being released.
zataomm
29d ago
Yes, it seems like every case I have seen as demonstrating the effects of overturning Roe v. Wade has been misrepresented in some way. Inspired by your comment, I looked up the Amanda Zurawski case that Walz cited in the debate. In their ruling on Zurawski v. Texas, the Texas supreme court wrote:
As our Court recently held, the law does not require that a woman’s death be imminent or that she first suffer physical impairment.2 Rather, Texas law permits a physician to address the risk that a life-threatening condition poses before a woman suffers the consequences of that risk. A physician who tells a patient, “Your life is threatened by a complication that has arisen during your pregnancy, and you may die, or there is a serious risk you will suffer substantial physical impairment unless an abortion is performed,” and in the same breath states “but the law won’t allow me to provide an abortion in these circumstances” is simply wrong in that legal assessment.
So the current rhetoric coming from Democrats on abortion is certainly very misleading, with Kamala Harris claiming that women need to be in the middle of bleeding to death in parking lots in order for doctors to provide treatment. In very general terms, it's fair to say that if there were no abortion laws at all, then doctors would not even theoreticallly have to worry about being prosecuted for breaking those laws. But in every single abortion case I have seen cited as an example of the disastrous consequences of Dobbs, doctors either were grossly negligent (Amber Thurman), or at best, believed that the law restricted them in ways that, properly interpreted, they were not restricted at all.
I definitely want the law to be clear, but I have this sneaking suspicion that a lot of the supposed "misunderstandings" about what the law prohibits are driven by opposition to the law.
zataomm
29d ago
précipitâtes
Hey, we’re talking about New York magazine here. Get back over to the New Yorker with your weird orthography
zataomm
1mo ago
ProPublica has published their promised follow-up story describing the other death related to the Georgia abortion ban, and as you may have expected, the connection is even more tenuous than in the story you critiqued here.
zataomm
1mo ago
Her first pill was taken July 20, so according to Google she should have taken the misoprostol by about July 22.
According to the article, the first pill was taken on August 13th, at the clinic in North Carolina, after the missed appointment for the surgical procedure. She went into the hospital on August 18th.
zataomm
1mo ago
Thanks, this seems like an important insight. You could say that the economic value of land just isn't as high relative to labor as it was before, say, 1800. The American "empire" receives economic value from favorable laws in foreign countries: Apple can set up factories in China, the Gap can have its factories in Bangladesh, without the government of the United States actually needing to be in charge of the day-to-day business of government in those countries. And as the economy has become more complicated, it does seem like "workers + incentives" is a cheaper and ultimately more profitable technique than "slaves + force" for extracting value from labor. This seems like a new development, so I'm surprised to hear that it was already in Adam Smith. I guess the modern economy is older than I thought.
zataomm
1mo ago
I don’t know how you can look at that and think “America.”
Because I think America/NATO actually achieved what Germany (according to its modern defenders) was trying to achieve, peace through unquestioned dominance on the continent of Europe. America doesn't view itself as aggressively expansionist, even as NATO expands, because its military actually is so dominant that it seems only natural that other countries should want to join our military alliance. So America is definitely not like Germany if the comparison is "young upstart power with something to prove", but America does seem similar to Germany in its view of a peaceful world order, i.e. everyone should just do what we want.
But hey, I'm just getting into this stuff for the first time, my curiosity having been sparked by the much-maligned Twitter. Maybe there is no analogy to be made, but I appreciate getting informed pushback from people who know a lot more about this than I do!
zataomm
1mo ago
I'm sure this meta-argument is not original to me, but I'd say that morality is just how humans are wired, so if you want to achieve an outcome that involves getting a lot of people to do something (e.g. vote), it makes sense to appeal to their moral intuitions. Since I want to achieve libertarian outcomes, I'd rather libertarians spend time and energy convincing each other that they should vote, "because voting is the right thing to do," rather than engaging in these kinds of exercises about how voting is a waste of time.
The standard libertarian rejoinder to "well, what if everyone thought that way?" is that your voting doesn't cause anyone else to vote, so why bother? But that's not really true, since humans are social animals, and when all your friends and the people you admire are doing something, you naturally want to do it as well. If all the cool kids are voting, you want to vote like them! You could do cost/benefit analysis to figure out whether voting is really worth it, but you're never going to win an election by doing that.
zataomm
1mo ago
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Pat Buchanan is writing as a moralist ideologue, not a historian.
Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. You're definitely correct that he downplays the role of German aggression or treats it as a background inevitability in his narrative of the leadup to WW1.
zataomm
1mo ago
I hadn't heard of the "Cult of the Offensive" before. Something I've often wondered about lately is how the world went from a system where winning territory by military conquest was just the way things were done, to our current system where the idea that one country would invade its neighbor for such base motives as gaining territory is viewed as scandalous. But maybe it makes sense for our morals to change in this way, as we adapt to the reality that defense is easier than offense.
Very interesting. If you have time, can you elaborate on what Germany was doing to destabilize the continent and/or prevent its re-stabilization? In the book Buchanan claims that Germany would have been largely content with a tranquil European continent but minimal colonial presence, so their only real goal was a navy large enough that England would fear getting involved in a conflict with Germany and Germany wouldn't be cut off via English control of its sea routes to the wider world.
zataomm
1mo ago
Thanks a lot for this detailed reply! I am only vaguely aware of any of this stuff. Can you recommend a good book on WW1 to learn more?
Honestly my impression as I start to learn about this topic is the opposite of this. It it looking like Britain (today Russia) really screwed things up. I get why they did it and saw it as their interest to oppose Germany, but everybody would have been better off just letting Germany (today America) win to establish pax Germana on the European continent.
But yeah, I guess I am trying to look for something deeper than "Putin is an insane tyrant" as the reason for Russia's current behavior. Do you really oppose even that minimal amount of respect and context applied to the current conflict?
zataomm
1mo ago
Based on what I'm reading in the book, Britain was the early power with the largest degree of choice about whether to get involved. They weren't directly threatened by Germany, but decided that opposing Germany would put them in a better strategic position with respect to dominating the seas and maintaining their empire. So British involvement was responsible for prolonging the conflict and turning it into a "World War". So I think Britain's position as a key figure pursuing its long-term strategy makes it a fair comparison to Russia of today.
zataomm
1mo ago
Anybody want to talk about World War I? This is culture war in the sense that the culture war led me here, and its application definitely seems to fall along tribal lines, even though this is all ancient history.
So on a recommendation on Twitter from MartyrMade, I've started reading Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War so I can figure out who the real villain was in WWII. But I guess we can't get there without discussing WWI, so that's where the book begins. A fundamental cause of the war, according to the author, is that Germany and England had conflicting views of security. In general, England's policy was to play European powers off each other, always supporting the second-strongest power against the strongest power to ensure that no one country would dominate the continent and thus be in a position to challenge Britain. In the early 1900s, that meant supporting France in opposition to Germany. Germany's idea of peace, on the other hand, was precisely to dominate and unify the continent under German rule, thus ensuring that they would have no problems on the continent.
As an uninformed person, I am struck by a similarity in current politices with America and Russia. It seems that America finds itself in the same position as Germany before WWI, seeking to unify as many countries as possible under NATO, effectively ensuring that America's vision dominates world politics. On the other hand, Russia's best available strategy is to weaken America wherever possible, by supporting America's most troublesome enemies, e.g. Iran.
The point of all this is I'm wondering whether there is any way to achieve Trump's goal in the Ukraine war, which is for "people to stop dying". America being dominant means they can't really allow Russia to challenge their world order by taking over Ukraine and stopping NATO expansion. But if Russia is going to be able to exert its will at all in the world, they can't really allow Ukraine to become just another part of the Western bloc.
Still, Trump says he'll solve the issue and the war will be over within 24 hours of becoming president. What do you think his plan is?
zataomm
1mo ago
I basically had the same initial reaction and Hill was certainly being a jerk. Rolling his very tinted windows up while the police were talking to him would definitely make anyone nervous. But having looked at the ProtectAndServe thread on the matter, I’ve come around the general consensus that the police escalated the situation way more than they should have. They really did not need to take him to the ground forcibly after he opened the car door. Tyreek Hill’s bad behavior led to bad behavior on the part of the police. Many such cases.
zataomm
1mo ago
Getting upset at Trump's lies is like getting upset at Gillette after discovering that there, in fact, might be something better a man can get
Love this analogy. I definitely feel the same way. I find Biden‘s lies, which have an air of supposed respectability about them, much more offensive than Trump’s lies, even when Trump’s are more blatant.
zataomm
2mo ago
Viscerallly I kind of get it, but legally, what is the difference between this and my web browser, which doesn’t restrict me from typing “Nintendo, Disney, and Coca Cola are run by pedophiles”? I try not to be too much of a libertarian autist, but I have a hard time not seeing this as a tool which can be misused like any other.
zataomm
3mo ago
Link to the Axios community-noted tweet: https://x.com/axios/status/1816078350659494130
At least I am consistent because I hated the Puerto Rico thing and I hate this. I hate it even in a “well, these are the rules the Democrats made so now we’re just making them honor those rules” sense. It’s all so stupid. Biden can’t speak coherently. He showed that in the debate. That’s why he’s not running for president. It’s also disgusting because people can’t even pretend that they themselves are upset. They’re just trying to convince stupid people that they should be upset.
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