Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
Beyond that, democracy itself is being exposed.
Another way of saying this is that it's reverting to the historical mean in terms of sophistication and rhetoric.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
Or, maybe, the other similar experiences that those two countries have gone through over the last hundred years, plus the common christian heritage for roughly a millennium before that, outweigh the last generation or two's habits when it comes to organized religion.
Supah_Schmendrick
4d ago
That just moves the pressure up a meta level for determinations to be made about what is "valid." The same arguments will be made about sick children, sick spouses, sick family members, &c. And of course things will be fabricated at a higher level than they are caught, and enforcement will be weak.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
It's easier to undermine a policy when the whole point of the policy is to favor some companies/sectors more than others, vs. just setting-and-forgetting a tariff rate. I admit that tariffs are also vulnerable to manipulation, but subsidies are in another universe.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
This is where I start wearing my "don't blame me; I supported DeSantis" shirt.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
There is no policy from the Biden administration that even comes close to the destructive idiocy of these tariffs,
The high inflation caused by the runaway government money-printing destroyed a helluva lot of wealth. The decision to throw the border open resulted in quite a lot of harm. Just to name two.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Hardly; the Senate's revealed preference was for Cory Booker to stroke his own ego for 25 hours straight.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Okay, but how effective do you think the House will be at policing this boundary? Which House majority will go from "having the votes to pass a bill" to "not having the votes to pass a bill" because a member gave an invalid proxy? No, the pressure to just slippery-slope all the way down to the "proxies can be given at each member's discretion" will be extremely strong.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
I disagree. Subsidies give you (the protecting government) more control over whatever it is you're trying to accomplish.
This assumes that the government is able to actually exercise that control and not get undermined by lobbying efforts.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
At its best, democracy works by providing feedback to leaders. Government adopts an irrational policy, the market has a reaction, and officials hopefully take that information into account.
This sentence isn't even wrong.
"At its best, [government based on the principle that sovereignty is vested in the people and wielded by periodic plebiscites or representative elections] works by providing feedback to leaders."
No, it works by either, in its representative form, selecting leaders from among a pool of candidates, or in its direct form by allowing the masses to select policies themselves. I think Hanania might mean "market liberalism" or possibly "modern political polling" or even "modern rapid-communication technologies."
"Government adopts an irrational [NB: according to whom, and on what time scale?] policy, the market [stock? futures? bonds? currency? commodities? CPI?] has a reaction, and officials take that information into account."
This really feels closer to divination than any serious theory of political economy.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
Of course rules are arbitrary, but when they are set they are predictable and so they can be anticipated and responded to by other actors.
Maybe sometimes, but practically-speaking this is not true; the public-facing "rule" may be constant, but a significant amount of finagling and variability still goes hon behind the scenes through gerrymandered definitions of exceptions or predicate data, or selective enforcement.
You can't get around the "need good and honest people in government" problem.
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
A rule isn't a check against arbitrariness; it just moves the fight one meta-level up, to defining and massaging the inputs that go into the rule's equation.
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
Tariffs and trade deficits are the one thing he's been banging on about consistently since the 1980s. Seems pretty inevitable that he was going to try something to do with them.
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
I swear to god if we get Chuck Schumer waving a bill over his head and yelling about throwing the TEA into Boston Harbor, or the Potomac, or yass kween spill the TEA, sis-ing, I'm becoming a monk in the desert.
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
But anyone back then who was doing it purely because they enjoyed it was psychopathic by my standards.
Yes, and I'm sure you and I are pathologically weak and squeamish by theirs. Great, now there's mutual excommunications on both sides and still nothing other than everyone's own entirely subjective ipse dixit to say who's allegedly "objective."
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
But wait, you said that "only genuine psychopaths" would question these ideas. Are you claiming that just about everyone was psychopathic back then?
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
I think you've assumed that I think that critical theory is the only type of academic history?
I don't know what you think; I gave a proposed definition for how to determine whether academic history is "woke" or not.
It's part of this "overcorrection" that I see that whenever a historical figure is pointed out as being not worthy of our praise, it must be "woke".
The "overcorrection" isn't happening in the academy; it's happening in public, who as I'm sure you know by and large don't really do actual history. Instead, pop history is a sort of secular cultural catechesis and mythopoetics; pulling together a narrative for the in-group to anchor its sense of identity to, and affirming the moral worth of that narrative.
I find actual "good" history to be incredibly boring. It's basically translating and regurgitating primary texts
The really good ones manage to piece together narratives from those primary documents. Like, no-one ever accused Ferdinand Braudel of being compulsively readible, but he manages to take all the grain prices and trader's manifests and censuses of windmills and meld all of it into fascinating insights into every day life in historical Europe. Biography can be similar, getting you in the subject's head and humanizing them across the centuries and gulfs of cultural differences.
(Tangential hot take: give Italian Americans their own holiday worthy of their community's cultural spirit, and Columbus will disappear.)
Agreed, but it needs to be a catholic too.
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
For example, all else being equal, it is more moral to not torture people for fun than it is to torture people for fun. This was as true 2000 years ago as it is now.
Would an aztec have agreed? Would a mongol? An Iroquois? Any random european who went to a public breaking on the wheel?
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
I've noticed a tendency in pop history to equate "doing something notable" with "being someone good", whereas within academic history, historians are much better about maintaining an objective distance from the figure being studied. I think it's pretty telling that this objective distancing is often labeled "wokeness", but that's a digression.
The difference is, "woke" history is "whig" history - trying to read back present day moral notions and fashions back into the past as if they were objective (they're not). Actual good history doesn't sugarcoat the past; it immerses you in it so you can understand the actual norms and mores of the time and thus figure out for yourself who was being a giant piece of shit given the society they were in.
It's like trying to have a conversation across a language barrier. Woke history assumes that the phonemes " /ˈnɪɡə(ɹ)/" are always and forever a fighting-words-tier slur, because they are in standard contemporary American english...but doesn't bother to figure out whether or not the person they're talking to in fact speaking chinese or korean.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
The old-time political history that is common knowledge is like the old-time architecture that's still around; it's survived a hidden but powerful selection pressure for the stuff people want to look at and keep around, plus a loss of contextual knowledge about what was deemed quality at the time and what was common or rejected. All the old dross gets torn down and forgotten, and what's left gets a positive sheen on it because it's so different in appearance from the commonplace habits and styles of the present day.
Supah_Schmendrick
14d ago
The Fuhrerprinzip is a right-wing idea, after all.
Yeah, but there are plenty of left-wing ideas that rhyme. Lenin's "vanguard party" establishing a "dictatorship of the proletariat" is a contemporary example, with Lenin, Stalin, and Mao's cults of personality rivalling or surpassing Hitler's own.
Supah_Schmendrick
16d ago
They've been shouting "death to Israel" for a while too; elite colleges being anti-zionist and "anti-colonial" isn't some new development.
Moreover, the anti-white attitudes haven't recently coalesced into the types of encampments, campus takeovers, and outright militancy that the recent Gaza demonstrations have. Do you really think that the folks in the Trump administration would have refused to go after Columbia if it had "just" been anti-white or anti-Christian encampments and campus takeovers? They're pulling funding from schools for permitting single transgender athletes to compete outside their biological sex; I'm pretty sure they'd jump at the chance to take any plausible reason to strike at the universities.
Supah_Schmendrick
17d ago
The overt, propaganda use of a text can be significantly distinct from its artistic merits (eg: Triumph of the Will, which is both noisome NSDAP propaganda and beautifully shot)
Supah_Schmendrick
19d ago
(and this baseball fan finds T-20 cricket immense fun)
No, "democracy" is the idea that power vests in the expressed will the people, and frankly the only politics that most people know anything about is presidential politics. With apologies to Madison, the house is not the body closest to the needs and desires of the people, because most people can't name their representative and few people vote in those elections when there isn't a presidential race to goose interest and drag lower offices along on its coattails.
The Demos, whether for cultural, material, techological, or irrational reasons has decided to place its trust in an elected hetmanate occupying the office of the President, imbuing the occupant with totemistic responsibility for just about everything, regardless of his formal ability to cause or prevent the events in question. This has been done with the connivance and acquiescence of the legislative branches, who voluntarily have surrendered most of their actual power to the executive, and have contented themselves with insider trading and playing wannabe-cable-news pundit on CSPAN.
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