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naraburns  nihil supernum  1mo ago (text post)   27164 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

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One of the jokes I never saw this election (and 2020, 2016) is someone using the "tomorrow belongs to me" clip from Cabaret as a representation of a Trump rally. And with so much Nazi name calling it really looks like a strange omission - it is a catchy song, it is just enough tongue in cheek to pass a just joking bro or to be posted ironically and it has all the needed elements to go viral.

The irony here is that "the morning will come when the world is mine; tomorrow belongs to me" only really needs the first-person singulars changed to plural ("ours"/"us") to become a plausible SJ slogan (at least, in a world without Cabaret).

Literally just heard this done as the closing number on BBC Radio 4's impressionist show Dead Ringers.

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

Matty Y thinks he has the answers for the Democratic Party. It's a pretty good list but it shows an astounding lack of self-awareness: https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1854334397157384421

How many smart people like Matty Y are out there who are Republicans but just haven't realized it yet? Hopefully the Trump administration can build a big tent that includes these people, but I'd also settle for a less insane Democratic party.

Here's Matty's list:

  1. Economic self-interest for the working class includes robust economic growth

  2. Climate change is a reality to manage not a hard limit to obey

  3. The government should prioritize the interests of normal people over those of people who engage in antisocial conduct

  4. We should, in fact, judge people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin

  5. While race is a social construct, biological sex is not

  6. Academics and nonprofit staffers do not occupy a unique position of virtue relative to private sector workers

  7. Politeness is a virtue but obsessive language policing alienates normal people and degrades the quality of thinking

  8. We are equal in the eyes of God, but the American government can and should prioritize the interests of American citizens

  9. Public services must be run in the interests of their users not their providers

Edit: I found another one, this time by the "Liberal Patriot" Ruy Teixeira. When will these people realize that they are essentially Republicans now?

I don’t see how this makes him a republican. There’s plenty of issues that differentiate the two parties, and his point in this case is a set of changes/tweaks that the current party should make. It’s not an exhaustive list of what the democrats should be.

How many smart people like Matty Y are out there who are Republicans but just haven't realized it yet?

He isn't.

Everyone is a "policy wonk" or "class-first leftist" until they have to actually cast off their progressive social beliefs. Then you see how they really prioritize them. See also DeBoer, Freddie.

In addition to prognostications, I'd like to voice my disdain for these postmortems. You can't expect to win every election. Kamala Harris was a good candidate who ran a good campaign. She wasn't a great candidate who ran a great campaign, but that's an unrealistic expectation. She won the states she was supposed to win and lost the battlegrounds by a few points each. Obviously not an ideal outcome, but far from cause to hit the panic button and start realigning your policies. The most annoying thing about these postmortems is that the inevitable conclusion is that the losing party needs to adopt more of the policies of the winning party. The second most annoying thing is that they act like one election is a real crisis point for the Democrats/Republicans and that the party is screwed long-term unless they make the necessary changes.

To the first point, I can offer an easy, lazy counterargument. Most of Biden's 2020 votes didn't go to Trump; Democratic turnout was down in general. The problem wasn't that they lost voters to Trump, but that they lost voters, period. Maybe part of the problem was that she didn't give her base enough reason to turn out? Maybe going full woke would have stirred the far lefties to action? Maybe the problem with black turnout could have been remedied by embracing BLM more? There was some discussion here yesterday about how blacks continued to vote 90% Democrat, despite claims that Trump was winning black men, and there was a post on Reddit today suggesting that the Democrats had a problem in that pandering to black voters turns off Latinos. The problem theories like this is that you don't want to alienate your base. Look at NASCAR. In the early 2000s it was gaining popularity at a breakneck pace. Bill France's though he could stoke this emerging market by introducing rule changes that would make it more palatable to the masses. The strategy massively backfired, as these changes didn't particularly appeal to the public, and most long-time fans hated them. The response was to dick with the rules even more. At this point, America's fastest growing sport has become a confusing mess that only total fanboys like my dad can follow. I'm not trying to suggest that making some changes toward moderation isn't a bad idea, but that there's an argument to be made to the contrary.

To the second point, there's no suggestion that the Democrats are screwed long-term because of one election. They ran an unpopular incumbent and were forced to change horses mid stream. Something could easily happen in the first half of the new administration that leads to a Democratic midterm blowout. Trump's stated economic policies put us at serious risk for inflation, and if that happens, people are going to want a change. Any number of things are possible. Following the 2006 midterms and 2008 Obama landslide, pundits were saying that without major changes, the Republican Party was doomed long-term. Two years later they did exactly nothing and got one of the biggest legislative reversals in history. But then they lost the presidency in 2012, and we were told that they were becoming the party of old white men and they needed to appeal more to minorities to have any chance. Then Trump came along and was massively more anti-immigration than any Republican in recent memory and won the presidency. Maybe if the Democrats had done things a little differently this time they would have won, but maybe not. If they keep losing elections by increasing margins I'll concede that it's time for a change, but we're nowhere near that point.

Kamala Harris was a good candidate who ran a good campaign.

No she was not. She was a horrible candidate. She was universally unlikeable - which has been demonstrated many times before when she tried to get elected. She had no consistent message and vacillated between "All Biden did is also mine" and "I'm going to fix everything" - which looked completely fake. In fact, almost everything about her looked completely fake - from her demeanor to her positions to her personal history. She was unable to coherently speak on policy like politician, and she was unable to speak like a human being to other human beings. She did not attract any audience except one that would vote for an open can of surströmming if it had "D" written on it, and turned away many audiences who traditionally were Dem's strongholds. She pandered hard but it didn't work. She played "I was born in a middle class family" but nobody bought it. She made both workers and billionaires hate her. She got both Jews and Muslims endorsing the other candidate. She went all in on the Hitler thing when it should be obvious it doesn't work anymore. She was a crappy candidate who ran a weak campaign. The Party Machine is powerful, and it held what it could, and provided the money, the resources and the bodies, but turns out the Machine alone can not win, at least not yet. Our Democracy (TM) is not in a self-driving autonomous mode yet. It still needs a popular person at the helm to drive it. And Democrats chose very poorly.

I would argue they chose very poorly when they didn't oust Biden in 2023, but instead waited to the very last days and then were doomed to nominate Harris. If they did the smart thing, they could field a convincing candidate, and a convincing candidate plus the Party Machine could trounce Trump. I am so glad they did what they did instead. I am also so glad they do not seem to understand what happened to them. I wish them many happy returns.

I am also so glad they do not seem to understand what happened to them.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair

Money in elections is such a curse, sometimes.

But for a lot of Democrats, the money is in winning the elections, not losing them. And yet, they are doing everything to avoid understanding why their popularity declines and people turn against them. Even if they are paid by Soros or any other deep pocketed entity - I doubt this entity would pay them for long if it sees they can not produce more power and more wins, and most of the power in the US, luckily, is still gatewayed through voter consent, so pissing off voters is an uniquely bad strategy. Yet, the left insists on it again and again.

In addition to prognostications, I'd like to voice my disdain for these postmortems… Obviously not an ideal outcome, but far from cause to hit the panic button and start realigning your policies.

I think you’re correct, and the reason we get a flood of prognostications is that the prognosticators are not arguing in good faith. They’re arguing because they want jobs. In the same way that (I contend) lawyers and bureaucrats make law and bureaucracy unnecessarily complicated in order to invent jobs for themselves assisting normies trying to navigate their regulations, so too do policy analysts try to make every event constitute a “We need a serious policy reevaluation” moment. They hope the “…therefore, hire me” is inferred by think-tank funders.

It’s hustlers all the way down.

If democrats were forced to pick a 2028 candidate right now, would you advise them to pick her, or someone else?

She's a good candidate in the same way your child's crappy Christmas pageant was a good show.

...bur seriously now. Do we have to be performatively agreeable, here of all places?

She lost to Donald Trump: arguably the weakest and most divisive candidate since the Civil War: and to a degree in which even Hillary Clinton did better. At least she didn't lose the popular vote!

The one thing political candidates need to do - absolutely and without a doubt - is to get elected. She didn't get elected. The prize for getting second place in politics isn't a silver medal: it's being publicly humiliated as a also-ran loser and run out of town tarred and feathered. If Kamala Harris is a good candidate, I hope that the Democrats get many, many more good candidates.

Kamala Harris was a good candidate who ran a good campaign.

This interview was not of a good candidate who ran a good campaign. She was handed a damn multiple choice question with pre-written softball answers, and instead of just picking A over B, she wrote in Potato. If she'd been facing an opponent whose net approval rating doesn't hover around -10 then she would have lost in a landslide.

Though I wouldn't let the Republicans off the hook here either. Do they even have any nationally well-known politicians with a positive net approval rating?

Do they even have any nationally well-known politicians with a positive net approval rating?

Now they do :) I mean, he won the popular vote, isn't it the ultimate approval rating?

Nah; the popular vote is a relative rating rather than absolute. E.g. if I'd been in a swing state I'd have voted for Harris, not because she is a non-awful candidate I approved of, but because she seemed like the less awful of the two. I suspect a lot of Trump voters feel the same way in reverse.

On the other hand, one reason for disapproving of a candidate you'd vote for is that you think their weaknesses will cost your team an election, and if that's the case it's possible that Trump's approval rating is shooting up right now as his more pessimistic voters realize he wasn't too much of a liability this time after all. I'm only seeing one poll post-election so far, and it's still got him at Unfavorable +1 among registered voters, but that's within the margin of error of 0 and it's a big jump from the same pollster's Unfavorable +8 a week or so earlier, so maybe he's actually up in the positive numbers now.

Though I wouldn't let the Republicans off the hook here either. Do they even have any nationally well-known politicians with a positive net approval rating?

It's an interesting question, especially insofar as any politicians have positive net approval ratings. Part of the problem is that a lot of well-liked politicians aren't that well-known (even if they're nationally known to people who pay any attention at all to politics). So, if by positive you mean that a majority of Americans have a favorable view of them, there is exactly one: Arnold Schwartzanegger, who has universal renown and a 59% approval rating, though a lot of this may have to do with his acting career. Number two is Trump, at 42%, also with universal recognition. If you adjust for recognition rate (and assume that those who have heard of the guy are representative of the country as a whole), Tim Scott is around 50% and Adam Kinzinger is at 65%. That's it for Republicans who have at least 50% recognition. While Scott may have a future in the party, Kinzinger's political career is pretty much over.

Just for comparison, I looked at Democrats, too. Jimmy Carter is the most popular at 61% with near-universal recognition. Others in the same boat are Obama at 59% and Harris at 54%. For those with less than Universal recognition we have Bernie Sanders (53% favorability), Liz Warren (52%), AOC (51%), Mayor Pete (54%), Cory Booker (53%), Tim Walz (55%), Gretchen Whitmer (53%), Hakeem Jeffries (56%), Mark Kelly (54%), Beto (51%), Amy Klobuchar (51%), Raphael Warnock (53%), Katie Porter (63%), Tammy Duckworth (55%), Jon Ossoff (58%), Jamie Raskin (55%), Claire McCaskill (55%), Jim Clyburn (51%), Sherrod Brown (52%), and Wes Moore (54%), plus a few others who are irrelevant. Some notable exceptions are Josh Shapiro and John Fetterman, who are all below 50%.

So, if by positive you mean that a majority of Americans have a favorable view of them,

"Net approval" = %approve - %disapprove. "Literally who?" counts zero, as does neutrality.

I've seen it repeatedly stated that Democrats didn't lose votes to Trump but just had lower turnout than 2020, but is there any evidence for this other than what you stated: that Trump got roughly the same number of votes and Democrats got fewer than 2020? Just as a possibility:

2020: Trump: 10 votes / Biden: 10 votes

2024: Trump: 10 votes / Harris: 8 votes

It is possible that the same 10 people voted for Trump and 2 of Biden's voters stayed home for Harris. But it is also possible that 2 of Trump's 2020 voters stayed home and 2 of Biden's voters switched to Trump. How do you distinguish between them?

That's a good point that those are not easy to distinguish. We'll have to wait for the statisticians to get their hands on all of the data (both the precinct-by-precinct results and exit polls) and see what they can come up with. Possibly there may be a way to try to collect some more data by polling, but asking people who they voted for in the past is notoriously unreliable.

The extreme case would be if there were zero votes in cities and all the votes came from rural areas, you could be pretty sure the effect of Democratic voters staying home was a stronger effect than people switching parties. Obviously the effects will be a lot smaller and less obvious than that, and the final vote totals won't even be completed for another couple weeks, so it will take time for people who know what they're looking for to have any kind of educated guess on the matter.

IIRC city turnout was up. I suppose the Democrats in the cities could have stayed home more while the Republicans in the cities turned out more, but it does look like swing voters to a reasonable extent.

Kamala Harris was a good candidate who ran a good campaign.

How so? What, specifically was good about her? What actions did she and her campaign managers take that another candidate would not have? What particular qualities does she possess that another candidate would not have, other than being the incumbent VP?

On Kamala the candidate: She was likeable, i.e. she didn't have the Hilary Clinton problem of coming off as a bitch. She didn't have any major skeletons in her closet. She had a good resume. The downsides were that she had a reputation for being indecisive and carried the burden of a stillborn presidential primary campaign in which she said some things she would end up regretting. These aren't huge, though. All candidates have weaknesses, and she had fewer than most. I'm counting her invisibility during most of her vice-presidential tenure as neutral, because visibility can be a double-edged sword. Had she taken up some initiatives that were important to her but largely uncontroversial, it would have helped, but I don't think she intended on running for president again, so I don't fault her for not doing this.

On the campaign: She had a good ground game. She campaigned relentlessly in places where she needed to, and she didn't take any votes for granted. She didn't lean into unpopular rhetoric. There were no huge gaffes. She iced Trump in the debate, making him look like an incoherent old man. Most of the campaign criticisms she got are understandable, but ultimately unconvincing. She was certainly light on policy, but so was Trump, and it was pretty clear that the election wasn't going to be about policy. There was no reason to throw out bold proposals that might go over like a lead balloon. She didn't do many interviews, but I wrote about this before — the risks of her doing them outweighed the benefits. It's unlikely that anything she says on 60 Minutes is going to move the needle very far in her direction. If she does a good job it's just another boring political interview. If she does a bad job then it's news. No reason to risk it. Rogan's even worse because it's going to go 3 hours, probably veer far off-topic, and will be released unedited. There are a lot of things like this that you can argue she should have done differently, but they all would have been risky and with no certain payoff. She could have done a better job explaining the positions she took in the past and why she repudiated them.

She was likeable, i.e. she didn't have the Hilary Clinton problem of coming off as a bitch. She didn't have any major skeletons in her closet. She had a good resume.

Wow do we watch two different movies. This is a woman who literally started her career through bedding a prominent powerful politician, and performed horribly - by the standards of her own party, which thoroughly criticized her for it when it were still allowed - once she was gifted a position. Who famously jailed parent of sick kids and proudly bragged about it. Who was explicitly and knowingly hired for her demographics and confirmed her ineptness by being unable to achieve literally anything for 4 years. Seriously, I haven't seen any proper answer to the question what she achieved that does not reduce either to demographics or to "she was around when a thing happened". Maybe the skeletons thing is true in a meaning that everybody knew how bad she was, but calling it "good resume" - my goodness. She is on record as the most extremist person in the Senate - and that's not for the lack of competition. And you personally may think about her as charming but it doesn't look like many people who vote agree with you on that...

I don't get it. I can't reconcile "she ran a pretty good campaign" and then several paragraphs later read that her doing interviews was essentially a liability with nothing to gain.

Surely this speaks to big problems that can't be papered over with "hey, she never took a dump on stage!".

I don't get it. I can't reconcile "she ran a pretty good campaign" and then several paragraphs later read that her doing interviews was essentially a liability with nothing to gain.

I don't mean for her in particular but in general, though she was definitely bad at interviews. I just don't think that these sit-down interviews are that important when it comes to a presidential general election campaign. When one thinks of iconic campaign moments one thinks of iconic speeches, debate moments, commercials, etc. I am unaware of any iconic interview. Clinton had one in 1992, but that was during the primary, when exposure trumps everything else, especially for a dark horse like Clinton. In the general the only one I can think of was when Sarah Palin famously told Katie Couric that she reads all the newspapers and that she has foreign policy experience because Alaska is close to Russia. Not exactly what you're looking to get from an interview, though in fairness to the McCain campaign, Palin needed to do one because she was virtually unknown at the time she was tapped. There was also Jimmy Carter's famous Playboy interview, which is widely credited with tanking his support among Evangelicals. The rest of these, as voluminous as they are, seem to be forgotten. If you can think of an exception, I'd love to hear about it.

I just don't think that these sit-down interviews are that important when it comes to a presidential general election campaign.

I would say interviews are like debates: Normally they don't really matter. But if one candidate appears to be unable to handle interviews (not even good interviews, just unable/unwilling to do them) or unable to handle a debate (winning is nice but not necessary, just participating) then that raises massive red flags.

It seems like a basic duty of the job. An applicant for a job who can send and receive emails isn't noteworthy. An applicant who can't though, isn't likely to be hired.

I just don't think that these sit-down interviews are that important when it comes to a presidential general election campaign.

They switched my view. Trump's flagrant interview literally changed my whole opinion of him, and I voted for him and it was my first vote for a republican candidate ever.

Joe Rogan has 18 million subscribers and he did an episode with 3 million views right before the election with Elon musk where he endorsed Trump.

Rogan has higher viewership then all of the mainstream media combined. I think the longform interviews were more watched than the debates.

To think this doesn't move the needle is a little crazy to me. Sure they didn't do crap back in the 1990s but we live in a different world. And Trump moved with the world rather than clinging to old strategies.

Trump's flagrant interview

I didn't watch the interview, as I've been keeping my eyes away from election politics as much as I could for the past 4 years. I'm curious though, what was flagrant about it. And it sounds like you liked that it was flagrant? Why is that?

Also, reply to @Rov_Scam here.

I am unaware of any iconic interview.

That might have been true in the past, but there's been so much change recently. Podcasts are a whole new world, Joe Rogan is a whole new level of long-form interview viewership, and Trump is a candidate ripe for this new world. I wouldn't think it's out of the question that in this particular case, the willingness to do those interviews, in the sort of way Trump would do it, really makes him more relatable in a way that a large portion of the American populace wants to see in a candidate, and it hurt Kamala that she wouldn't put herself on the line in the same way.

This is the full interview: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ry1IjOft95c

What was great about it is that Trump is a New Yorker, and this is a podcast of New Yorkers. I of course knew intellectually that Trump was from New York. But it didn't sink in.

New Yorkers have an aggressive and bombastic style of talking and interacting that often involves lots of interruptions and talking over one another, active ribbing each other, and grandiose exaggerations (that everyone in the conversation knows are exaggerations). Trump is often given too much of a chance to talk. It leads to him ranting and going on weird tangents. This happened quite a bit early on in the Joe Rogan interview he did, and I could not watch more than ten minutes of it. Trump gets accused of being a bully for the ribbing he constantly does. And finally Trump is known as a liar for his constant grandiose claims.

In the flagrant interview Trump is interrupted, he is talked over, and there is ribbing going on constantly, and Trump loves it and thrives in it. Because he is a New Yorker and that is how they talk and interact. He even extends the interview for an extra 30 minutes or so. His ranting is far lessened. His weird tangents are there, but don't dominate the conversation. He is quick on his feet with jokes. There are very few awkward moments.

To be clear, I am not a New Yorker. And their style of interaction can grate on me. I can take it in small drunk doses in person, and can barely stand it at all when sober. For podcast listening it can be real fun, but is often a bit overwhelming. I don't regularly listen to flagrant, but they can have some absolutely laugh out loud banger episodes when I'm in the mood for it.

I just finally feel like I understand Trump, and that is a huge relief. I don't feel like I've ever really understood him in the past, and I don't feel like I've ever understood any other president or presidential candidate in my lifetime (except for Ron Paul).

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Man… talk about two screens.

She was likeable

She’s abrasive, transparently insincere, and has had consistent staff turnover issues for her entire political career. What about any of this is “likeable” to you?

She didn't have any major skeletons in her closet.

Willie Brown.

The downsides were that she had a reputation for being indecisive and carried the burden of a stillborn presidential primary campaign in which she said some things she would end up regretting. These aren't huge, though. All candidates have weaknesses, and she had fewer than most.

She has a long and easily-accessible paper trail of taking very extreme positions, all of which she apparently just counted on journalists not to ask her about. She spent the summer of 2020 going on every program she could in order to raise funds for an organization that bailed out violent rioters and looters. This is not difficult to find! The second anyone confronted her about these things, she was, inexplicably, unprepared.

There were no huge gaffes.

When asked on The View - the most friendly and favorable environment imaginable - whether there was anything she would do differently from (massively unpopular incumbent) Joe Biden, she said that “Nothing comes to mind.” How is this not a catastrophic gaffe? It was the easiest softball question in the world and she couldn’t handle it.

She could have done a better job explaining the positions she took in the past and why she repudiated them.

Yeah, this is an extremely bad problem. And of course the reality is that she didn’t actually repudiate them! She genuinely does believe that “equity” should be the central mission of government. She genuinely does want to create a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants. During her brief tenure in the Senate, she was the farthest-left senator. Why would I believe for a second that she has changed her mind about these things? Her administration’s record speaks for itself.

I am honestly shocked to hear you say that she was “a good candidate.” Leave aside any herculean effort expended by her campaign team to try and drag her across the finish line. She was a lead balloon. A massive albatross around her party’s neck.

abrasive, transparently insincere, and has had consistent staff turnover issues for her entire political career

If those are dealbreakers for you, boy, do I have some bad news for you!

She’s abrasive, transparently insincere, and has had consistent staff turnover issues for her entire political career. What about any of this is “likeable” to you?

You may not like her personally, but some politicians (Hillary Clinton, Liz Warren, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, etc.) have articles written about whether they're likeable enough to be president. People weren't writing articles about Harris's likeability problems.

Willie Brown

How was this exactly a skeleton. She dated the guy 30 years ago. He may have been technically married, but he'd been separated from his wife for a dozen years by that point; the relationship wasn't exactly a secret affair. Her "sleeping her way to the top" consisted of a couple appointments to state commissions nobody's heard of a decade before she ever ran for public office. In any event, it wasn't a big enough deal for the Trump campaign to make an issue of.

When asked on The View - the most friendly and favorable environment imaginable - whether there was anything she would do differently from (massively unpopular incumbent) Joe Biden, she said that “Nothing comes to mind.” How is this not a catastrophic gaffe? It was the easiest softball question in the world and she couldn’t handle it.

This is one of those things that could have gone either way. She could have distanced herself from her boss and repudiated his policies, saying that if she had been in charge she'd have done things differently. However, for her to suggest that Biden was a bad president would have been incredibly disloyal to the man who was more responsible than anyone for putting her in the position she's in. It would make the current administration look more dysfunctional than it already does. That's not a good look when you're running as an incumbent member of that administration. Furthermore, Biden isn't exactly Jimmy Carter. Inflation is down from where it was. The market is up. Unemployment is low. Illegal border crossings are comparable to Trump-era levels. To the outside observer it should look like the Biden administration faced significant challenges and met all of them. If there was any gaffe here, it was the failure to compare this to the Trump administration, which spent three years on easy mode and fell flat on its face as soon as it hit a major crisis (his response to which was largely to deny that a crisis even existed).

The argument here isn't that the Biden administration didn't make mistakes; it most certainly made several big ones. But while honesty may be the best policy when it comes to personal relationships, it's lethal in politics. If you want an example of an actual campaign gaffe, Mondale in 1984 said "Both of us are going to raise your taxes. The difference is that I'll admit it, he won't." Regan didn't end up raising taxes, but four years later Bush famously promised not to raise taxes, but raised them anyway. Bush won his election; Mondale didn't. I'm unaware of any politician in American history who has won reelection after owning the mistakes of his first term. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but if it did it's extraordinarily rare. I have seen plenty of politicians justify obvious mistakes and get rewarded for it.

They wrote articles before the switch about her terrible of a candidate she was including how vapid she was.

People weren't writing articles about Harris's likeability problems.

First of all, they didn't have time. She has been a candidate for about 100 days, and all of those were campaign days where serious objective scrutiny is not welcome at all. Second, writing an article like "experts suspect the ocean is wet" is also not going to make big waves. Read what people spoke of her before she was elevated, and you'll see plenty critique of her likeability.

How was this exactly a skeleton.

How is it not? The fact that she got her political career started by the power of her vagina instantly disqualified her as a candidate in my mind. And yes, I'm someone who could have been convinced to vote for her if not for that. I'm sure I'm not alone. So, if her past behavior turned away potential voters, that qualifies as a skeleton in her closet to me.

What gives you the impression that Willie Brown was responsible for starting her political career? She dated him for about a year in 1994/1995, and she wasn't running for anything until 2003. She got a couple of apointments, but I don't think the Medical Assistance Commission and Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board are exactly known as incubators for top political talent. In any event, she hadn't served on either within five years of beginning her political career. It's also worth keeping in mind the actual dynamics of California politics at the time. By 2003 Willie Brown was viewed as corrupt, and any association with him was toxic. Her prior association with him was seen more as a liability than an asset. Take Willie Brown out of the equation, and there's nothing unusual about someone who's worked as a prosecutor for 13 years winning an election for District Attorney. There's nothing unusual about a District Attorney getting elected Attorney General.

I think the perception is more important than the reality here. The lefts wants to paper over all of her faults right now, but if she had won give it 5, 10, 20 years and their is going to be a big old asterisk on the first female president.

That Scarlett Letter would be tough to manage in the long term.

In fairness to Rov_Scam, Kamala was the top of the ticket for just over 100 days and during that time, the race went from what looked like a sure loss under Biden to a very competitive race. I credit that entirely to the Democratic operation (including the media narrative shapers.) From my view, I would describe Harris as a poor candidate propped up by a very effective party structure.

Trying to answer Kamala's VORC is just a question of how fucked you thought Democrats were the moment Biden dropped out.

If you think Trump was always going to win and is a generationally talented political leader, you might say she didn't do that bad. If you think Trump is a bad candidate, she must be an ever worse candidate.

By my own metrics, she failed to hold the popular vote. That's a major failure for the Dems from a marketing perspective, and represents a bad candidate underperforming expectations.

'Race is a social construct'

I really hate these word-games they play. You can have endless debate over whether Greeks or Bulgarians are white, about mixed-race offspring, about the shifting meaning of Oriental or Asian based on where you are, about the genesis of the term 'white'. So yes, race is a social construct, congratulations.

But we know that blacks are superior runners, whites are superior weightlifters. We know things about sickle-cell anemia, blood type and bone marrow differences between races. We have the basic human quality of knowing that different couples would produce different-looking children. We have the basic human quality of seeing distinctions in a continuous spectrum and assigning words to clusters: races.

We have the basic human quality of appreciating that some races produce good schools, STEM Nobel prizes, powerful armies, well-maintained infrastructure and advanced technology while others don't (I say basic because I mean this is the origin of racism millennia ago, not out of consensus-building). Those continuous differences cause civilizational effects on a large scale. We have the advanced human science of genetics too, providing the causal logic behind the above phenomenon.

Saying race is a social construct is so shameless. It's communicating a specific idea via an easily defensible fact, something so defensible that the mere fact of saying it implies you mean something else entirely. And in this case, what is really being said is that there are no significant biological differences between races (in contrast to biological sex).

"Money is a social construct. It's unfair that he has more wealth than me (there aren't truly legitimate reasons why this might be) - we need to fix this inequality. I need his wealth."

"It's OK to be white. Us whites need not feel ashamed for our ancestors or privileges. There are lots of people who clearly think it isn't OK to be white: they have bad intentions."

The problem I have with social constructions is that virtually everything in society is at some level a social construct. It’s meaningless as a claim. Religion is a social construct and likewise contains legions of subgroups and deviations that make generalizations difficult. And that also isn’t a good reason to say religion is unimportant. Just because Southern Baptists, Anglicans, and Greek Orthodox Christians are all Christians, that doesn’t mean they’re identical or interchangeable in obvious ways.

Further, most of the ideas of what to do (generally deconstruct it) are silly. Just because it’s no longer seen as anything other than a social construct doesn’t mean it doesn’t have something of a force of reality. People are affected by social constructs, gender roles, social norms, and other social conventions because that’s how society actually works. Even if we recognize that we drive on the right side of the road in the USA as “just a social construct” that doesn’t mean that change is desired.

And that also isn’t a good reason to say religion is unimportant. Just because Southern Baptists, Anglicans, and Greek Orthodox Christians are all Christians, that doesn’t mean they’re identical or interchangeable in obvious ways.

The people who use the "social construction" deepity are ironically the people who take the thesis the least seriously.

Imagine if every human disappeared and alien scientists had to puzzle out the purpose of these giant buildings and steel veins that dot the landscape. Why some buildings on a certain coast are built to different specifications, why standards vary across climes.

These things are clearly artificial but no archaeologist or historian worth his salt would start and stop at "people made this, so they just made it up because".

It really is just a blank slateist motte-and-bailey.

The problem I have with social constructions is that virtually everything in society is at some level a social construct.

I once heard this problem neatly solved with the saying "a house is a social construct, but I do rather prefer to live in one"

The steelman of "race is a social construct" is that the usual notion of race doesn't cleave reality at the joints. You say that whites are superior weightlifters (already a dubious claim), but Bulgaria has 13 gold medals in olympic weightlifting and Finland has 1. Yet both Finns and Bulgars are white (don't @ me). The steelman is that the category "white" (or "black" or "Asian") contains a variety of different ethnicities with different characteristics and the way that ethnicities are assorted into broad racial categories is not a fact of nature, it is indeed socially constructed.

It's just a motte-and-bailey, because "race realists" would be quite happy to carve up races further for precision (and do ime) but their opponents have no interest in that task at all.

Admitting that the colloquial definition of "Asian" isn't fit for purpose and maybe we should speak of "East Asians" and so on has never, AFAICT, won someone over to some sort of race realist view. If anything, people just seem to ignore it altogether and go back to attacking the model that has like five races.

The classification based in the idea of notable biological differences itself is the sin.

The steelman of "race is a social construct" is that the usual notion of race doesn't cleave reality at the joints.

Cool, because if that's the steelman, then we can say that the entire notion is false, since it doesn't get better from there.

This is false, it does cleave reality at the joints. You can run a genetic clustering algorithm, and you'll see coherent clusters emerge that correspond to the colloquial understanding of "race". Containing a variety of different subgroups does not blow up a category, and if it does, you just blow up the entire system of biological taxonomy as a whole, as well as each of it's components individually

Okay, let's see the clustering.

I hope it considers that all Mexicans are white (as a federal court did in in re Rodriguez), that people who are half white and a quarter Japanese and a quarter chinese are not white (in re Knight), Syrians are white (in re Najour), Afghans are white (in re Dolla), Armenians are white (in re Halladjian), Indians are white (United States v. Balsara), Syrians are not white (Ex parte Shahid), Indians are not white (In re Sadar Bhagwab Singh), Afghans are not white (In re Feroz Din), Arabs are white (In re Ahmed Hassan) and that arabs are not white (In re Ahmed Hassan).

If it conflicts with the above in some way, it would seem that the term "white" used in ordinary language and society doesn't always conform to what you might see on a multidimensional genetic chart. That you can define "white" in a way to be defensible via the chart doesn't mean that's how it's always or even typically used. Hence, "socially constructed".

If it conflicts with the above in some way, it would seem that the term "white" used in ordinary language

That's not ordinary language, that's a bunch of court cases with goofy rules about precedents.

That you can define "white" in a way to be defensible via the chart doesn't mean that's how it's always or even typically used.

If you ask people to sort ethnic groups by how closely related they are to each other, I'm pretty sure it will match the genetic clustering.

The precedence defense is confusing considering how many of these cases contradict each other.

If you ask people to sort ethnic groups by how closely related they are to each other, I'm pretty sure it will match the genetic clustering.

Your claim is that "white" is an objective category, not that people's perceptions of ethnic group closeness matches reality (which I find highly dubious to begin with, do you think people think of e.g. native Americans as related to Siberians?)

Your claim is that "white" is an objective category, not that people's perceptions of ethnic group closeness matches reality

I'm not sure what you mean by "objective", I only said it's not socially constructed, but let's go with it, I guess. I don't know how you're separating the two. Once you sort groups by similarity, you can draw a rough boundry around them. You can call that category "white" or you can call it "blorgoschmorg" but it will consist mostly of the same people, especially if you ask the sorters to draw boundaries of the same size.

which I find highly dubious to begin with, do you think people think of e.g. native Americans as related to Siberians?

If you put them next to each other, quite possibly so. Especially relative to other groups.

Once you sort groups by similarity, you can draw a rough boundry around them. You can call that category "white" or you can call it "blorgoschmorg" but it will consist mostly of the same people, especially if you ask the sorters to draw boundaries of the same size.

The size of the boundary is exactly what makes it socially constructed.

If you put them next to each other, quite possibly so. Especially relative to other groups.

If you get someone to put two groups close to each other, they'll think of them as close to each other? Is that the claim here?

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This is the game played when calling it socially constructed. Of course there are messy edge cases where the lines get blurry and arbitrary socially constructed rules throw people into one bucket or another. You could play the same game with most other categories like species or colors or flavors and so on, but that doesn't mean that they aren't basically capturing real and useful information and describing somewhat natural categories.

I haven't encountered the notion that Indians are an edge case before.

that doesn't mean that they aren't basically capturing real and useful information and describing somewhat natural categories.

Neither is calling it socially constructed. Colors are a great example - the set of colors in English is totally arbitrary. Some languages have more, some less, some as few as two. There's no natural law that there should be exactly 11 basic color terms as English does. Nevertheless, the English words do convey useful information.

There's no natural law that there should be exactly 11 basic color terms as English does. Nevertheless, the English words do convey useful information.

Yeah, but that's irrelevant. Again ask people to sort colors by similarity, and they'll reach pretty much the same result, regardless of their language and culture.

Are you sure? The phrase that comes to mind is "wine-dark sea". I've seen academics suggest that the notion of blue is a surprisingly modern invention.

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Nobody is saying that the similarity of colors to each other is socially constructed (or at least I've never heard this claim).

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We do well in strongman contests, though, or at least did in the 90s.

Apparently (according to some Instagram posting I found) Finland didn't send a weightlifting team to olympics between 1920-1948, which also represents (apart from 1952 and 1956) the golden era of Finnish Olympics success, with the general medal count beginning its fall to 0 (in the most recent Olympics) after that. Perhaps the strong athletes were just sent to wrestling or some other strong guy sport.

Well, there is currently a ton of people on (Matt's) Twitter feed socially reconstructing Latinos from the category of "non-white" to "white, white adjacent, possibly white supremacists".

One thing I find interesting about this is that if we continue to shave "minorities" off of the "minority" list and add them onto the "white" if they vote a certain way, we will have built a more diverse coalition of "whites" than "minorities." "White" now contains Asians, Whites, and Latinos.

Most Asian American group lean Democrat,with few exceptions (Vietnamese lean Republican), none of them vote R as strongly as whites.

Asians have already been put in the White category for overperforming other minorities (and even whites) in school grades and earnings. Further, I think that they're way more fickle than a lot of other demographics. (East) Asians are much less political than other races until someone messes with their schools. You see this repeatedly in California, where every single initiative to make schools more "equitable" guarantees that Asians vote against it.

White already expanded to take in Italians. It can't get any worse than that.

Who are the big left twitter people besides Matt? I checked Hasan and he's calling for more progressivism - Kamala was centre-right with her 'lethal military' and 'border protection' rhetoric!

I think it is a fair critique that Harris ran to her right. The problem with running to her right was that it was fake. She didn’t assure moderates because she couldn’t explain why she switched on numerous positions (it felt fake). But her left wing was pissed because she ran from them.

I'm not sure about big accounts, I mean stuff of the sort that one can find in the comments and retweets of this tweet, for example. (though admittedly in a lot of cases it's more like "white adjacent" or "think they are white" or so on.)

Most brazilians in the south, along with argentinians and uruguayans, are at least 75% european. I really don't care about getting into the "white club", but acting as if "latinos" make sense as a racial category is where the stupidity begins in the first place. "Castizos", "Mestizos" and "Mulattos" are infinitely better descriptors of the most common "races" in Latin America. In Richard Lynn's study, the average IQ for brazilian castizos was 95, while mulattos/mestizos had 83.

Again, I don't care whether we're considered "white" or not, there's barely any advantage to being considered "white" today other than being blamed for a lot of things, but it frustates me that "latino" is considered like, a real and useful category. It's only useful in the US context where you're often talking about mexicans, puerto ricans and so on which are majoritarily mestizos/mulattos, but as a general descriptor of everyone coming from Latin America it tells as much information about your race as saying you're "american". Can you imagine using "american" as a race category?

Glad to see my pet peeve about American racial categories getting support from an actual Latin American.

What are your predictions for the new 'Hispanic' census label? I expect mestizos to continue using it but I imagine the next generation of castizo children will abandon it for 'white'

In the very long-term, even if Republicans get more strict about immigration, I doubt that they'll be able to completely stop the universal pattern of genetic exchange between neighboring countries. "White" people, as in 100% european, are simply outnumbered in the American continent. Due to interracial marriages "whites" will slowly get some Native American or African DNA in them, I can't imagine even most white nationalists requiring a DNA test to check if your partner has 5 or 10% non-white DNA, and the moment you stop distinguishing between 100% european and 90% european, you'll soon stop differentiating between 90% european and 80% european.

Therefore yeah, I do expect castizos to start being progressively called "white" like the italians or irish were included in the "white" category too over time, and as happened in Latin America itself, however I don't know how long it'll take. Given that there's now a political controversy of latinos voting conservative and being lumped with whites under the banner of "traitors", I think we'll see the change in 1~3 generations, around the time that more whites will have produced offspring with mestizos.

Just what the democrats need, more waffling and apologizing for their beliefs. I guess with a platform this boring and incomprehensible, nobody can be offended.

The big thing Matt Yglesias leaves out of this list that makes him a Democrat is that he wants to expand social welfare programs and raise taxes.

Presumably he's not including parts where he thinks that the Dems are currently correct and should keep doing what they're doing (or where he thinks they should go left).

You know what, I for one am missing the Democrats that just want to expand social welfare programs and raise taxes. I mean, no open borders and putting thousands of migrants into hotels on taxpayer cost, no ban on combustion cars, no government censorship of speech, no taking kids from parents to change their gender, no males in woman sports, no pro-Hamas riots, no banning Jews from campuses, no camps for people who don't vaccinate, no DEI commissariat at every major institution, no calling me Nazi every time I disagree with them? I don't say I would agree with them, but that's certainly something I'd rather have in the opposing party. We could actually have an argument and see whether voters like more taxes in exchange for more services or not, and whatever would be the result, we could keep some respect for each other once we're done. Right now, it's like "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills".

Well, that and his whole "1 billion Americans" thing which would see the U.S. turned into India.

But I think there's still room for common ground here. If the government can be made more efficient, higher taxes would be justified. I think it would be awesome to spend money to build high speed rail like they have in China. The problem is that we spend money and get nothing in return, because our government is full of useless bureaucrats.

Fix the efficiency problem, and taxes become a lot more palatable.

But the strange part is that many of the items in his list undermine the justifications for raised taxes, etc.
If academics and nonprofits don't have a presumption of moral status, how do we justify taking people's money to fund them and using their judgements to rule the people?
If education should be run purely as a service to students and parents, what moral argument is left against school choice?
If "politeness" rules aren't supposed to be a political weapon to stifle debate, how is his preference that "bad left wing ideas should gain power" at the expense of the truth going to be enforced?

It's all self-defeating, and so I suspect a totally performative offering of peace from a position of weakness, with his fingers firmly crossed behind his back.

If academics and nonprofits don't have a presumption of moral status, how do we justify taking people's money to fund them and using their judgements to rule the people?

I mean, in the "fund" case, it's just "having people research this is diffusely positive for society, so funding it from the taxpayer internalises the externality".

Of course, there are departments whose output is negative for society (obvious nonpartisan example: marketing psychology), which that argument suggests should get no grants and should in fact have to pay the government to compensate society for their "pollution". One can question whether internalising this externality is worth the costs of implementing such a scheme, but the "axe funding" part I'm completely sold on.

how is his preference that "bad left wing ideas should gain power" at the expense of the truth

Where did he say this quote? I can't find it.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GXd0TunXoAASp0t?format=jpg one of his more famous quotes, but I forgot he said "wrong" instead of bad. It was a delightful preview of 2020.

That quote has lowered my opinion of him, although he didn't say he wanted it at the expense of the truth.

EDIT: With that said, he appears to have kinda contradicted this since, although AFAICT he hasn't specifically walked it back (besides deleting the Tweet).

I think he started walking it back with "correction: I do not want wrong left wing ideas such as 'Yglesias should be fired from Vox' to gain pow--wait no!"

Most of the worst nonprofits are funded more by wealthy donors than taxes.

True, but I've spent the last four years watching obscene amounts of government money go to them too. Over a quarter of national science grants are now for DEI programs now, for example.

And that's not counting the constant use of nonprofit propaganda as a moral bludgeon, which yglesias himself is often guilty of.

A victory for democracy, a defeat for Our Democracy

Last night was a referendum on Our Democracy. They lost, and democracy won.

Donald Trump isn't popular, and many, if not most, of the people who voted for him did so with many concerns about his character. Kamala Harris has neither character or principles, and was truly an empty pantsuit representing Our Democracy.

The idea of democracy comes from an understanding of human interaction. Corrupt men can become powerful, and power can corrupt men. Groups are subject to groupthink, and institutions can be captured by a committed minority. Men, in groups, become a herd. Since we must have institutions and powerful men, we subjugate them to the ballot. Every man may cast one ballot, in secret and in private, free from external influence of anything other than his conscience and his God.

Last night, fifty percent of us did exactly that. They lied to us (Steele dossier) and censored the truth (Hunter Biden's laptop). They used their institutional power to put a thumb on the scale for their chosen candidate. We cast out the representative of the institutions, we rejected the consensus they tried to build, and put in place a man who will tear down these institutions.

It's democracy in action.

Unfortunately, it's a defeat for Our Democracy. One of my formative memories of 2016 was a video of a young woman angrily screaming "I am educated! I have a college degree!" at a Trump parade. Our Democracy has a competing understanding of human interaction. Men are inherently selfish and misguided animals, and it is the institutions that humanize him. People should be part of a community and a consensus. Those who respond to the consensus should be granted honors (such as degrees) and roles in the institutions, and people should respect these institutions*. If the institutions are responsive to the community, they have the right to shape the consensus.

I find many believers in Our Democracy aren't bothered by the FBI censoring the laptop, the lies they put out, the softball interviews of their candidate and the media and the tech companies putting their thumb on the scale. That's just Our Democracy in action, the institutions are showing their worth by defending us against Trump.

Our job as citizens isn't to follow our reason and our conscience, accountable to none other than our Creator. Our job is to respond to the consensus, and show up on election day to "make our voices heard" and legitimize the consensus through the institution of voting.

The vote might be Democracy, but the vote is just a part of Our Democracy. The institutions and the consensus they shape are part of Our Democracy, and when the leaders do not respect the institutions or the social consensus, they become Not My President. Just because they won the vote doesn't mean they won Our Democracy, and the institutions have the right to oppose the winner on behalf of the consensus.

Expect a lot of Our Democracy in action in the next four years.

  • An AWFL down the street from me has a sign that says "Respect Science". If it needs to be respected or believed, it's not science.

I think that also came out in those ads and texts about "your friends can see whether you dated" or the like "Men, women won't want you unless you're a voter, and she can check" stuff. Our Democracy assumed that anyone engaged in the civic process for the sake of their peers would be on the side of Our Democracy. They could not understand that the social pressure to vote may actually involve the exercise of democracy against Our Democracy.

It's Better to be Lucky than Good

I’m not a practiced Bayesian, and to be honest this is as much as a victory lap as it is a reflection on my priors. Oh lets, be honest. This is mostly a victory lap.

My major election posts in the lead up:

  1. I noted Joe Rogan had solidified his status as a Kingmaker after the Trump interview. This seems to have been born out by Trump’s quick acknowledgment of Rogan’s endorsement and the large shout out by Dana White in Trump’s Victory speech. Even before the interview, I noted Trump going on Rogan was a Big Deal. I realized I was right about the impact when NBC of all things made multiple references to the ‘Joe Rogan Army’ during their election coverage when noting the young male turnout.

  2. After going on Rogan, the McDonalds photo op, and Kamala’s failure to resonate in her campaign, I made a Trump win prediction at 55-60% certainty 10 days before the election.

  3. I quickly noted the Selzer poll was likely bullshit.

Things I got wrong:

  1. I underestimated the impact of the Garbage fiasco. I thought it was just more random flotsam in the election and would probably be quickly forgotten. To be fair I didn’t know Trump’s team would use meme magic to force the MSM to cover Trump speaking from a garbage truck. The nail in the coffin was when he honked the horn (rare footage)

  2. I didn’t post about this, but I did upvote Blackpill posts about Democrat election fraud. I really did expect 3am mystery trucks, election officials putting up paper over the windows and keeping monitors outside, gas/water leaks and restarting the count after monitors had gone home etc etc at about 65-70% certainty. That didn’t eventuate thankfully.

Takeaways:

I’m not an American citizen/resident so I’m not immersed in the election. I am ‘very online’. I rate my election prediction performance as ‘not bad’ for this one, but I put that down to my information diet curation. My major aggregator was actually here at the Motte (with some other centrist non-MSM sources) and I would then go down rabbit holes myself for further research. I leveraged the screening and arguments of this forum to better inform myself, so I consider myself pretty lucky to be here.

One last point is that I’m upgrading my view of betting markets to consider them a credible source. They won’t be my only source, but I’m now taking them seriously. Polymarket got this one right.

I didn’t post about this, but I did upvote Blackpill posts about Democrat election fraud. I really did expect 3am mystery trucks, election officials putting up paper over the windows and keeping monitors outside, gas/water leaks and restarting the count after monitors had gone home etc etc at about 65-70% certainty. That didn’t eventuate thankfully.

Scoping out, an election needs more than to be an accurate, secure accounting of votes; it needs to have the appearance of such. People need to perceive that it is legitimate. It is very dangerous to have systems which allow people to even think that these things are possible. Not even that they're probable, but are even possible. That I could wake up in the morning with enough states undeclared (by two of the three organizations used to resolve Polymarket) to plausibly swing the result is horrific optics. It allows the imagination to run wild. It lets people think that it is at least possible that there are potential people in potential counties who might have a backup plan to pull these sorts of shenanigans, and who are up in the middle of the night, closely monitoring the developments, carefully calculating whether they can make a difference by implementing their backup plan, cautiously waiting until the perfect moment in the wee hours when just enough people have run out of gas and given in to sleep. That I could wake up and even imagine that such a person might have existed and might have finally given up at 4am, realizing that too much would have to happen in too many different states to make a difference, that it would have been sufficiently hard to pull off or sufficiently hard to hide... just that I could imagine this happening is a huge, dangerous fault line.

@jeroboam is absolutely right on this. Florida has solved this problem, and every swing state which hasn't is playing a treacherous game. They report everywhere, all at once, so there is very little ability to calculate how much risk you might need to take to swing the result. They do so extremely quickly, so folks can be relatively confident that there is constant, alert, bipartisan monitoring of everything that happens in that short window. There is very little room for the imagination to run wild. I did not like the vast majority of the flavors of election denial that occurred in 2020, but it is apparently not that hard to preemptively shut all of that shit down in the future. Both sides really ought to be able to agree on this.

That I could wake up in the morning with enough states undeclared (by two of the three organizations used to resolve Polymarket) to plausibly swing the result is horrific optics.

Completely agree with you. This was my greatest fear, should not be possible at all. With more resources and organisation it should not be possible. I wish at the very least that the FEC sent 'flying squads' to the swing states to act as a QRF for any of these bullshit anomalies. As soon as any of this shit pops up on a radar, that counting office gets 20 Feds dropping in to stand over them. There needs to be consequences for even looking like you're trying something funky.

The thing about Florida is that due to the incentives down there, they actually by and large have very competent and well paid people working at the county level.

Unfortunately that's not true in the vast majority of states. For most places the human capital operating the local government offices, even and especially the election offices, is pretty damn low quality.

Can you go into some more detail about what the incentives are in Florida and how they lead to this result? I'd love to learn more.

A few things:

  • Counties in FL get to create charters, essentially being able to pass laws in their own county
  • More positions are elected than others states including tax assessors
  • The independent county commissioners and special districts have a lot more autonomy than in most states
  • Florida has a bunch of retirees and just a lot of money, lol

I think I bundle your first three points under "more local authority", where I presume the argument is that more local authority means more important local elections, meaning better vetted/better quality candidates. I am sympathetic to this. However, it doesn't seem sufficient. My guess is that if one brought more local authority to other states, they might get better quality local officials, but it's not clear that they would actually execute toward this vision. My further guess is that in order to get the amount of uniformity they seem to have, there would have to be significant state-level carrots/sticks.

So, I guess my question is, what is the long pole in the tent? What carrots/sticks did the State of Florida use to get the local officials to execute? If we brought just those carrots/sticks to another state, would local officials just be too incompetent to execute? If we just brought more local authority and got more capable local officials, would they just not all care to execute in a similar fashion? Or are either sufficient? If we had another state use the same carrots/sticks, would the local officials grudgingly get it done? If we brought more local authority and got more capable local officials, would they just execute in a competent distributed fashion? Or do you truly need both, otherwise it's a hopeless cause?

Bernie Sanders put out a statement

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they're right. […]

Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not. In the coming weeks and months those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions. Stay tuned.

Sanders is wrong about a lot of things, but he's not wrong about this: the Left used to be the movement of the working class, or at least aligned with the working class and paying attention to it. Now it mostly moved on to luxury beliefs. I can't believe for a steel mill worker or a tradesman the priority issues would be transgender rights, getting more migrants in and ensuring everybody drives an electric car.

It's worth mentioning that Bernie Sanders is dead wrong about a lot of things.

For one, he says that inflation adjusted earnings for the average worker are down over the last 50 years. But... they're not. When we consider government transfer payments, the average worker actually makes a lot more than they did 50 years ago.

So what does Bernie want? More transfer payments of course. Which he can then continue to ignore as he trots out his entirely false theory of economic history. Communism has been tried. It didn't work then, and it won't work now.

It’s not a transfer payment if the funds are legally declared to not belong to you, but in any case, would you support “transfer payments” if it didn’t affect the efficiency of businesses? In other words, all things being equal and having no bad consequences, Bill Gates winds up with less money and 1000 middle class families have more. If you don’t support that, then how have you calculated the balance of today’s transfer payments, or are you resolutely against the wealthiest paying more in taxes?

It's worth mentioning that Bernie Sanders is dead wrong about a lot of things.

Is he really though?

Hasn't a signifigant portion of the culture war over the last 8 - 12 years been about how the "official numbers" no longer reflect reality? The powers that be assure us that inflation is below 5% and then when asked why a chicken dinner, or a tank of gas, costs twice what it did a year ago they respond with some nonsense about how "vibes" are clouding people's judgment of the "true" economy.

when asked why a chicken dinner, or a tank of gas, costs twice what it did a year ago they respond with some nonsense about how "vibes" are clouding people's judgment of the "true" economy.

Unless inflation statistics are completely falsified, there's simply no way that's actually true. Perhaps people opted for a different chicken dinner than before because they're easily manipulated.

Unless inflation statistics are completely falsified, there's simply no way that's actually true.

That would be the joke wouldn't it? That the "official" number have been manipulated or falsified is kind of the point.

Unless inflation statistics are completely falsified

I believe that's the idea. I have no dog in the fight either way, but it certainly seems like people believe that inflation statistics have been falsified (or are fatally flawed) because their lived experience does not jive with the statistics.

By way of personal anecdote, I do almost all of my grocery shopping at Costco, and have done so for my whole adult life, all the way back to when I was a teenager living at home. For pretty much that entire time, until around 2016, 2 gallons of fat-free milk was priced at $4. I suspect it may have been a 'loss-leader', but $4 for two gallons of skim milk was the standard for years. Around 2016 or so, the price suddenly shot up -- I think it was $4.50 or maybe $5, still quite cheap but compared to the baseline a shocking price hike, especially given the price changed all at once (it had been $4 during my previous Costco trip). There was another price hike in 2020, during the COVID year, and ever since it's been going up and up and up. I know that there have been supply problems for milk, so they discontinued fat-free entirely [EDIT: in my area] except for one specific store, and a month or so back they started selling individual gallons of milk (Costco milk has always come in a 2-pack).

I just came back from my latest Costco run. 2 gallons of 2% milk cost $7.50.

I'm aware that milk is a single commodity, that Costco milk is cheaper than expected, that there have been supply problems for a number of reasons, all that. I am well aware that the plural of anecdote is not data. My point is to contrast the top-level 'this is my experience of inflation' vs. 'this is how the government is reporting inflation'.

In the last decade, according to my personal experience, milk has practically doubled in price -- a near-100% inflation rate.

In the last decade, according to this graph, the price of milk has gone up by about 33% in nominal dollars, but stayed perfectly flat in inflation-adjusted dollars.

It would not surprise me in the slightest to learn that the government has been cooking the books for inflation.

For what its worth my experience mirriors yours. My eldest is 9 years old and i remember that when they first started eating solid food ground beef was something like 3 dollars a pound, today it's closer to 8.

My admittedly imperfect impression is that that the prices of food and gas have more than doubled since 2016. Yet the official line continues to be that inflation is minimal or an illusion.

Is anyone else here old enough to remember the 5 dollar foot-long promotion at Subway? What does a large Itallian BMT cost you today?

Or perhaps they opted for exactly the same chicken dinner.

From that article:

"People here think the reorder is legit. 100% sure a few items on there are causing this huge increase by some 3rd party seller or discontinued item," they explained.

I don't know if this is true nationwide, but where I live Walmart has dramatically raised prices on groceries in the last 4 years. No one considers it the "cheap" place at all anymore. Their general merchandise is still lower than most competitors, also otc meds, health and beauty stuff, some tools and electronics, but not food. Food costs more at Walmart than anywhere else I have access to, excepting gas stations.

And he'll still bend the knee and tell his fans to vote for the neolib shill over the populist candidate that is the only person that has the faintest chance of sticking up for the working class, and he'll do this until they're shoveling dirt over his grave. He'll do this while getting in his Audi R8 and yelling "No Refunds!"

I think the abortion issue turned out to be very interesting this cycle.

Since the rollback of Roe was a fait acompli, all abortion related stuff ended up down ballot (where it belongs, IMO). Dems tried to tie the issue to Trump but I don't think it landed. If the Florida GOP bans it, why should I care in Maryland? What does that have to do with Trump?

I understand the arguments that this affects some women in some places negatively (it also affect some embryos in some places negatively--just sayin') and I would love it if every state had a sensible middle-of-the-road abortion policy. But the fact that we can now run 50 different simulations on what the sensible policy actually should be maybe In a few more generations we can put this issue to rest forever.

I'm not anti-abortion but I was VERY anti abortion as a single voter issue since 1973. For the first time I can remember, it feels like actual progress in our elections happened. All of the air has escaped that particular balloon and I wonder what will be next. I can imagine immigration getting somewhat solved. Any other single-issue voter concerns on the chopping block?

Personally, the Republicans have lost a lot of goodwill from me by acting like the pro-life mission was accomplished with the end of Roe. Oh, you think the issue should be left up to the states? We tried that with slavery, too, it didn't work, and abortion is at least as morally abominable; it's outright Old Testament-style ritual child sacrifice, and it's entrenched in our society as an institution that something like half of the population (or more) equates with freedom, catharsis, and womanhood. There's so much doublethink about it; fetuses are treated as human or nonhuman per current convenience. It fully corrupts the parent/child relationship; every member of our society learns when they grow up that their mother once had the fully legitimized option to have them slaughtered, and depending on her social environment and character she may well have seriously considered it. It's a horror lurking in our collective unconscious which we willfully repress, in much the same way that we repress our own mortality by avoiding the thought of hospitals and old folks' homes, keeping them sterile, out of the way, antimemetic. But the dull suit put on abortion is something more willful and evil; it's Nazi death camp shit, but without a geopolitical crisis to put an end to it. We are ashamed of it as a society and we should be. Roe v Wade was just the Dred Scott v Sandford equivalent; getting rid of it is good but it's a band-aid on a decapitation.

We should avoid civil war if at all possible, but if there was anything to do it over, it would be abortion; if our country was salvageable, Republicans would collectively be courageous enough to run on a platform of hanging abortionists and their biggest enablers and cheerleaders from lampposts, and they would win and implement it. I have no intent to throw my life away pursuing this purge of our society on my own (or with some kind of FBI-bait terror cell); it's hard to say how much of this is personal cowardice and how much is observation that it hasn't worked to fix the issue in the past. But contrarian Confederate apologia aside, there's a reason that we still celebrate John Brown today, even if we wouldn't ourselves have done the same thing if we'd been born in his time, even if it took some legitimate unhingedness on his part to do what he did, and even if his actions ultimately decreased the world's utility instead of increasing it. He was driven crazy by something that should drive people crazy. You should feel sick and guilty for not feeling pushed to action to the same extent he was; we all should. Our country is in a terrible decline which it has thoroughly shown that it deserves, and if we are suddenly and violently annihilated soon by some terrible external calamity like a nuclear war of extermination, which seems likely, we will collectively deserve that as well. Obviously many innocents would die as well, and I would hope to forestall it as long as possible - out of self-interest and concern for the people close to me if nothing else - but if you believe in God, you should be terrified; God's justice is terrible and does not wait forever on matters like this. If you don't believe in God, you should at least feel like you've been living in a version of Nazi Germany that's survived peacefully in a position of dominance over the world for many decades. It's terrible. Our current world is terrible. If it's the best it's ever been it's still terrible.

Paul Hill's body lies a-mouldering in the grave. His soul is marching on.

I think abortion is out of the bag. To revert it, you would have to convince people that pregnancy and childbirth are the inevitable consequences of and the primary reasons for having sex. You'll have as much success convincing people to have less sex as you'll have convincing them to eat less to lose weight. They'll blame lithium, seed oils, PFAS, but will accept only Ozempic and gastric bypasses as legitimate solutions.

There are already multiple normalized things that divorce sex from pregnancy. Condoms, the pill, the morning-after pill, oral sex, anal sex... hell, even pulling out works until it doesn't and reinforces the idea that you can have parenthood-free sex.

People are already willing to make an exception for rape, incest, Down syndrome, etc. If you are working from the "abortion is murder" standpoint, then these exceptions are not defensible. If you are willing to compromise on them, there's no Schelling point for you there.

Something like 24 weeks is probably the best middle ground that can hope to achieve bipartisan support.

It fully corrupts the parent/child relationship; every member of our society learns when they grow up that their mother once had the fully legitimized option to have them slaughtered, and depending on her social environment and character she may well have seriously considered it. It's a horror lurking in our collective unconscious which we willfully repress, in much the same way that we repress our own mortality by avoiding the thought of hospitals and old folks' homes, keeping them sterile, out of the way, antimemetic.

I'm not actually against abortion, but I have to say you're not wrong about this. I do remember being a kid (7-10 age range IIRC) and telling Mum "thanks for not aborting me", and her not being super-reassuring about it (I don't think she seriously considered it, but I'm damned sure that during my adolescence she often wished she had). It's a bit creepy.

I actually remember learning what abortion was in 5th grade and being so repulsed I lectured the teacher who was trying to convince us it was a good thing. (Says something about where I grew up that something like that could happen, thanks Quakers). Not even confusion, just an instant angry threat response: "this is an attack on us kids"

Years later I read that one PKDick story and remembered "oh yeah, this is exactly what it felt like in the moment. Did my beliefs change, or did I just lose that animating perspective?"

The angry threat response and instant friend/enemy distinction is probably the most stable (and valuable) part of my political identity, come to think of it.

Not that I necessarily disbelieve you, but it's funny how this literally sounds like one of those "and then everyone clapped" memes about kids with unusually strong and specific ethical beliefs.

This, and the comments upthread, are quite alien takes to me. Seems pretty ironclad logic that abortion, by definition, cannot be a threat to any kid who's out the womb. Neither was I ever existentially tortured by the idea that local laws allowed my mother that option; it might have helped that she never expressed anything like regret at having me. As for corrupting the parent/child relationship, it wasn't too long ago that "I who begat you shall kill you" was supposed to be the example of highest paternal honor.

Seems pretty ironclad logic that abortion, by definition, cannot be a threat to any kid who's out the womb.

Anything which hinges upon a technical definition is only as ironclad as the inability to change that definition.

I definitely wasn't as young as OP, but I remember getting into a debate with a female substitute teacher in 7th or 8th grade about abortion (and in retrospect it was a wildly inappropriate topic for a substitute teacher to bring up). I had pretty strong convictions early on, though I attribute that to my religious upbringing, my parents, and an interest in history, ethics, and other topics from a fairly young age.

I was dumb enough to not despise neocons until I was in college though.

The angry threat response and instant friend/enemy distinction is probably the most stable (and valuable) part of my political identity, come to think of it.

Am I interpreting you right that you instantly identify people with different politics than you as enemies, and see their policies as threats?

Yes.

people with different politics than you as enemies, and see their policies as threats?

SteveKirk is clearly talking about a specific policy, right?

every member of our society learns when they grow up that their mother once had the fully legitimized option to have them slaughtered

telling Mum "thanks for not aborting me", and her not being super-reassuring about it (I don't think she seriously considered it, but I'm damned sure that during my adolescence she often wished she had). It's a bit creepy.

I actually remember learning what abortion was in 5th grade and being so repulsed ... just an instant angry threat response: "this is an attack on us kids"

The policy in question, is abortion. The 'threat', is the 'threat' of being aborted.

The angry threat response and instant friend/enemy distinction

The directionality is clearly, your policy is a threat to me, and so, I see you as an enemy. Not, your policy is different from mine, so I see you as an enemy, and as such, your policies are threats.

I am honestly flabbergasted, can you include quotes from the rest of SteveKirk's comment and the rest of the comment chain, to help show how you arrived at the interpretation that you arrived at, I can't even imagine how you are parsing these comments to end up where you did.

Thanks for explaining. That makes a lot more sense.

SteveKirk is clearly talking about a specific policy, right?

He was in the first part of his comment. Then the words “my political identity” made me think he was using the last sentence to generalize to his overall perspective on politics, as opposed to keeping it specific to that one topic. The words “stable” and “valuable” further made me think that the emotional response is a core and cherished foundation from which all his other political beliefs are based on.

The 'threat', is the 'threat' of being aborted.

That’s another reason I interpreted it differently. It doesn’t seem to me like the threat of being aborted is still relevant as an adult, so it didn’t come to my mind at all that “angry threat response” might still refer specifically to the feeling he had as a kid, even after all these years.

Then he says the phrase “friend/enemy distinction” — I mean, who’s the friend or enemy in a discussion like this? I can only assume the enemy is the person he disagrees with politically, because it certainly can’t be the person he agrees with. And that fits with “threat” — the threat presumably comes from this enemy person he’s discussing politics with, because where else would he be feeling the threat from?

In short, I started out parsing “The angry threat response” in a generic rather than a specific sense, and I read the rest of the sentence in that sense as well. So it sounded to me like he had this emotional way of responding to the topic of abortion as a kid, and now as an adult he still not only responds to other political issues in that same emotional way, but he considers it to be a core part of how he approaches politics, to the point where he instantly identifies other political participants as either friends or enemies. Which of course sounds ridiculous, so I had to ask.

I can't even imagine how you are parsing these comments to end up where you did.

Hahaha, does that help?

you instantly identify people with different politics than you as enemies

is very different from,

your policy is a threat to me, and so, I see you as an enemy

Failing to see this seems to be the core area of confusion. The assumption in your post, which is 'ridiculous', is that any political difference is threating. The idea that someone who is threatening you politically, could be viewed as an enemy, is far from ridiculous.

The idea that he might generalized the principle from the specific instance, is totally anodyne. It's just his conflict theory origin story.

Years later I read that one PKDick story

Which?

"The Pre-Persons"

"The Pre-Persons"

Thanks, nice catch

Huh, I had no idea Dick was opposed to abortion.

Well, that's one reading.

What's yours?

More comments

I should put more thought and words into the following, and I probably will, but it's the topic here.

I don't want to couch the following too heavily one way or the other. I love women but I don't generally respect them. The most intelligent woman I know, the one I most enjoy talking with, is also the most morally abominable person I know. I've told her that, I call her that directly as I chastise her to do better, she halfheartedly justifies herself, and our conversations move on. I don't know if "right" is something she could consider me since I would question her concept of rightness, but she knows I won't be swayed, and our odd interactions continue. However better I am it's not by much, it's only distance keeping us from sleeping together.

As is loved repeating here, women be, men do. Philosophers have seen this as intrinsic good, so do I, it's God's intent. My aspirations are all in pursuit of a beautiful wife and many children. I don't expect or want her to match me, only match with me. So in a decade people might see her only value as what I saw in her, but everything I did was so she saw value in me. I see this as good, that the whoever whose quote I can't remember and can only poorly paraphrase, this graceful being elevated above the coldness of the world, pursued because it is the way of things for her to be pursued, and that itself is her good value and her virtue.

Loved, honored, but not respected. A man is respected for what he has made himself; a woman is honored for what she is. And that's the mother.

I suspect the majority of women find the idea of pursuing an abortion, not emergency contraception, maybe not abortifacients a few weeks after the specific moment of conception, but decidedly no farther than the first trimester, as morally unfathomable. This is because the argument that a fetus is not a child is ruthlessly cold logic, and most women are not ruthlessly cold beings. They are mothers of man, and no words exist to convince her the baby growing inside her is not human. It is her child.

The delineation of fetus and child is the kind of argument a man makes with other men, and it's still a coinflip. Name a single political matter in our world resolved on the cold logic of women. Welfare, maybe? That's just pragmatism. There isn't one, that's not how women think. They vote for it, why? Consensus, they go with the flow and become the river. Resistant to perturbations and attempts at diverting unless overwhelming, in this they maintain, as is their glorious purpose, so only unquestionable power can overcome, for good and ill. Consensus even when morally offensive? Yes, because she can go in the booth, and amidst whirling thoughts and feelings of consensus and the powerful quiet voice of What if you need one?, even as she would never get one, even as she pulls the lever for it, she still means it absolutely when she tells herself "I will never get one."

Plenty, what, half of the opposition, more? Heed a different consensus and silence the quiet voice and pull against.

But I think there are some, few in total, where the knowledge of these creatures wearing the skin of women would end the debate. Those who crafted rhetoric in the name of women using a method of argumentation that doesn't work on women. How does it persist? Because it works on enough men to keep the debate there, rather than the grand deception. Those creatures don't care that a human is inside them, because they don't like it, they don't want it, and things they don't like are Other and may be killed without thought.

This is the most charity I can give the subject, and what I think is the most charity that can be given. Anything less is the final argument against suffrage.

I’ll be honest in that most people are, in my view mostly consensus driven as far as actual morality goes. Maybe one in a hundred would have something akin to actual morality— as in a code of morals that the person would risk any substantial losses to uphold a moral code. It’s hidden in various ways behind arguments about the definitions of words — in this case fetus vs baby or child, though similar arguments were had in arguments about slavery and the definition of Negro and just how human those Negroes are, or perhaps in the Nazi era there were arguments about how much Jewish ancestry tainted a person as untermensch. The arguments might well sound rational, but the purpose is not to define terms but to define away humanity. Pragmatism often does the same, hiding cruelty behind the line items of a budget. There is always money for more bombs, but rarely for school lunches. We can afford prisons, but paying for schools is not pragmatic enough.

Morality is something we should strive to develop, but in 99% of cases, it is simply to be expected that people will go along with whatever the wider society wants to do. The limits are not some strange scruples that people hold, but thei4 own aesthetic preferences. As long as the nasty business is done in ways that you don’t have to actually watch the deed done let alone do it themselves. Keep it within those bounds and you can get most of the public to be perfectly fine with anything the wider society wants to do. You want to flatten a city, most people are perfectly fine with it, so long as the bombing isn’t on their screens.

I think men and women are more similar than you think, but that some of the women you know are good, and women are always better at this than men, at more easily obfuscating their own cold calculation. Women have always killed unwanted children, often in ways far more brutal, far more immediate, far more visceral than anything (all but a handful of) people in the west do today.

The most intelligent woman I know, the one I most enjoy talking with, is also the most morally abominable person I know.

What makes her abominable? I’m sure she has been awful, but I can’t help thinking that very smart women often don’t fully understand the depth to which a smart man can fall in love with a woman he perceives, at long last, as his intellectual equal. I was never intentionally cruel, but I have caused my share of unintentional hurt, undeserved.

DiscourseMagnus naming Paul Hill resulted in me reading about a number of abortionists who were killed or who people attempted to kill. Garson Romalis was one, a Canadian who interned in Chicago in the 60s. An OBGYN, he saw wards of women suffering from folk remedy abortifacients, by his time rarely dying or at least per Wiki "only about one each month." But the severity of complications from those failed remedies are what he named as his motivation to supporting its legalization and performing abortions. I wonder about the demographics of the ward, of the most common ethnicity of the women he treated and the specific circumstances of each.

I am unsurprised by infanticide in less civilized peoples, and in those peoples who are otherwise civilized but who live in times like war and famine that demand cruelty. That's a switch, that's knowing you're going to die, or your entire family might die, it's the survival response changing the brain. A people murdering children, in your article so many daughters because of whatever marginal social and economic benefits rather than "We're going to die if we don't have a son", well I guess I don't consider them people. And such concerns do not exist in the United States, the majority of abortions performed here are out of convenience. I do think if the purchase and prescribing of emergency contraceptives and antiprogestins shortly after conception are included in the totals, the numbers are to a measure inaccurate, but that's only some, and only if they are.

As for the last, abominable was my echoing Magnus. She isn't violent or criminal but she is deeply immoral, and I think I've now described her enough that her behavior should be clear. I love her as I love all my friends, but the way in which I know her means I would never pursue her for dating and marriage. She doesn't match with me. Where I find her attractive is that she's a tall and thin woman and my sin is desire.

You're probably right, intelligence is probably a hard snare for me even as I say I don't care about it, but knowing her has cultivated in me a cynicism and suspicion that will always persist. So be it.

I suspect the majority of women find the idea of pursuing an abortion, not emergency contraception, maybe not abortifacients a few weeks after the specific moment of conception, but decidedly no farther than the first trimester, as morally unfathomable.

Which is why, if you want to preserve that right most easily, you set the Overton window a step or two beyond that. It takes more work defending scoundrels that way, because the people who tend to seek late-term abortions tend to be, to put it lightly, substandard human beings.

Though it's worth pointing out that if you ban pre-natal abortions, they'll just carry out plausibly deniable post-natal abortions instead ('had a post-partum mental break so bad it killed the kid' or 'baby forgot to breathe and died' are things women are justifiably afraid of, which is why we generally limit our prosecution of a mother's own baby dying to obviously depraved-heart shit like 'gave birth, left the baby in the trash can'). There are limits on what degree baby death is and isn't acceptable to prosecute, the ideal number of cases marked as SIDS that were actually just bog-standard smothering is not zero.

All laws work like this- you protect "hate speech" and all the reasonable people are never worried they're going to get arrested for something more anodyne, like posting dissent on Twitter; protecting ownership of fully-automatic firearms means hunting rifles and handguns aren't meaningfully questionable, and so on. Those who are pro-those-freedoms [in their motte version] correctly and rationally view attacks on the bailey as attacks on the motte, until they get tired of defending the bailey against the disgusting anti-social "celebrate my abortion" people (and the Venn diagram of those people, the "encourage tomboys and effeminate men to castrate themselves" people, and the "queers for a nation/religion famous for killing queers" people has converged into a circle, and it wasn't before).

As is loved repeating here, women be, men do. Philosophers have seen this as intrinsic good, so do I, it's God's intent.

It's funny how God's intent always seems to come with the assumption that man and woman is, and ought, to continue holding and pursuing diametrically opposing interests even after they're past the point in the relationship where that should, at least in theory, no longer be true.

Perhaps the notion that people who enter the mutual "my life is yours" agreement actually intend to align on some details is much too modern for a good Christian relationship to incorporate (since a relationship that a man has with God is naturally 0-100 in terms of the effect the man's status/input/development has on God, and if women are to men in earthly relationships as man is to God in heavenly ones the same effect would naturally be true there).

Then again, if the average marriage was that easy, there probably wouldn't need to be rules about marriages in the first place.

Real poetic and stuff, but too "battles of the sexes" heavy for me to really resonate.

Men and women are different, but they are still ultimately the same species. The variations among our minds can dwarf the average variations of the sexes. The tallest woman is much taller than the average man. The most caring and consensus driven man is much more so than the average woman.

Whichever woman you are talking about might just be a psychopath. They aren't all that rare. I knew at least one maybe two hot women psychopaths in college. Not a moral bone in their body, though a little less dangerous than the three male psychopaths I've known that have to find balance while dealing with a male sex drive.

If anyone wants to make a name for himself as a right-wing policy wonk, coming up a regulatory scheme that makes for legitimate medical exceptions without allowing doctors to give away get-out-of-birth-free cards would be a good place to start.

Creating a system of health courts specializing in medical malpractice would be helpful for implementing smart regulation of abortion.

https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/texas-abortion-ban-medical-board-guidance/

https://www.tmb.state.tx.us/dl/1C5CBA1C-052B-403F-A0D1-FAF22ADD05CB

Red states are concerned and responsive to this issue already. Of course it's much more common for the media to scream about how malpractice cases, or the consequences of a woman's own bad decisions(Amber Nicole Thurman bled through one pad per hour for four days before seeking medical care), are caused by abortion bans.

Gun control is donzo. There will never be meaningful, effective gun control legislation ever again, and what controls exist are probably going away over the next decade or so.

Federal Executive: Trump's first term included him saying "take the guns first, and do due process later" and the ATF continuing to be the ATF.

States and Federal Courts of Appeal: Whatever the fuck they want.

SCOTUS: Issued Bruen, then ignored violations of Bruen.

Even in the absence of new federal gun control statutes, why should we expect gun control to significantly decrease? (With regards to your reply to Hieronymus, "legal gun owners" want to remain, you know, legal, and DIY tech is established FAFO territory controlled by the fuzz, not the populace.)

I am curious to hear your reasons for this. My state seems to be moving dramatically (and for me, quite disappointingly) in the other direction.

Three reasons.

First, DIY tech is constantly improving, and it's already well past the point where guns can in fact be controlled. Gun control is a dead letter simply from a practical perspective. Crime is a major political concern and likely will be for some time, and in that time the Gun Culture will continue killing it on outreach to the youth.

Second, the Gun Culture will not accept new legislation, will not comply with it if passed, and is actively and aggressively eroding the existing laws. The AR15 has been thoroughly normalized. SBRs are completely normalized. Automatic weapons are effectively normalized, both in legal and illegal versions; I'm given to understand that you can 3d-print glock switches for example. What you're going to see is the legal full auto giving cover to the illegal, until outright defiance is completely normalized and any enforcement effort becomes a moot point. I'm hopeful similar things will happen with more significant weapons as well.

Third, technological developments are almost certainly going to moot the whole question within the decade. What people will be worrying about won't be guns.

The last item is a problem though. There is no recognized 2nd amendment right to murder drones, or even anti-murder-drone-drones or drone-jammers. That last will get you an FCC raid worse than any ATF dog-shoot competition.

If things take longer than a few more years to kick off, the 2nd amendment people will be using "bows and arrows against the lightning." The longer you wait the worse it gets, unless you happen to have a high tech weapons lab and global microelectronics manufacturing chain in your compound.

Yes, as if the good ol boys with some AR15s are a match for a wave of a literal million drones mass produced by some obsequious US ally for cheap and imported by the Pentagon.

Elites have been dreaming of technology that would make boots on the ground obsolete since the invention of artillery. Maybe one day it will happen, but hasn't happened yet.

Boots on the ground will never be useless, but they already are useless on their own, rather than as the base of an integrated weapons system.

There will still be human soldiers walking around, but anyone who tries to fight real ones without their own cloud of support weapons will be quickly incinerated.

Yeah, I wondered about gun control. I think gun rights is an issue that will see a lot of movement from non-white voters and women as well.

I never really got the anti-gun stance...like the cat's out of the bag: guns are everywhere and no one is suicidal enough to try and get them back. In this scenario, the person with no firearms or weapons training is basically a sheep waiting to be shorn. Everyone would be far better off with some, even minimal exposure to guns if for no other reason than knowing how to not kill themselves.

Didn't quite a few people here lament that the libs had won the US culture war a couple years ago?

And now they've lost it? What happened?

They haven't lost the war. They've lost a battle. With that said, they've lost a bunch of battles in the past couple of years, so an explanation is still warranted.

The look of things is that the inroads the right has made into the tech world (most notably Elon Musk buying Twitter, but to some degree also alt-tech getting its act together with places like Substack) were critical; it seems that SJ's clean sweep of "first-tier" social media platform censorship was actually at least somewhat load-bearing in keeping the youth loyal (to come back to the US election - the swing among 18-29s was 15% for men and 7% for women, and this despite Jan 6). Apparently, Elon Musk spending ~$100,000,000,000 spearing his white whale ($44b buying Twitter, the rest in losses from Biden's "Fair Game" order) actually hit a vital organ.

SJ is not dead. They still have the education system and a good chunk of company bureaucracies in their pocket, and while Musk may have outlasted Biden, SJ might yet manage to pull off replacing Twitter. They're definitely on the back foot, though; SJ had at first the advantage of surprise and then an aura of inevitability, but they have neither now. And, of course, one must always factor in that most tail risks hit SJ much harder than its adversaries.

When I went into work this morning, the credit team that negotiates with the banks for funding to keep day-to-day operations going had to prove, to Larry Fink's satisfaction, that we were on track to meet DEI goals. That these DEI goals are in blatant violation of laws protecting investors from their wealth managers absconding with their investments in order to further their own political policy objectives, even when this is to the blatant detriment of the investors, is somehow completely irrelevant.

Presumably, sometime after taking the Oath of Office, President Trump will once again - he did this in 2017, remember? - issue an Executive Order clarifying that taking your investor's funds to give sweetheart loans to companies that are adequately woke is, in fact, a violation of investor protection laws designed specifically to stop such actions. And presumably, the Department of Justice will once again laugh this off and and advise the President that "the Executive has passed his Executive Order. Now let us see him enforce it" just as they did back then, until such time as a friendlier administration can take power and issue an Executive Order mandating that such behavior be done.

he did this in 2017, remember? -

Indeed but it was in 2020, so he delayed by N days

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2020-09-28/pdf/2020-21534.pdf

I have germ of a post thats been percolating since this exchange here about how it's dumb to indulge in doomerism that I ought to flesh out along these lines.

But to answer your question about "what happened", the answer is that the fight isnt over until everyone agrees on who won. Reaganism was supposed to have been done-in by the end of the Cold War and the rise of "Progress" and Globalization but, to all appearances, its back baby.

Qui uincit non est uictor nisi uictus fatetur.

I donno. Virtually every organ of culture I used to enjoy has been fully captured and is pushing far left talking points. I don't expect this to change. The best I see in opposition is a few video games being accidentally based by either taking an agnostic stance on modern day political issues, or apparently having feminine women? Actually Talos Principle II just had a normal heteronormative nuclear (robot) family, which was depicted as something wholesome and meaningful, as opposed to a source of existential horror and suffering. But I see no full throated condemnations of globalism, or odes to nationalism. Few works with any awareness of the human condition, or why conserving tradition might actually be wise and prudent. And these are silly things to expect in games granted, but I'm weighing it against the vast bulk of games with pronouns, and body type A/B, and bizarre anachronistic Orange Man Bad monologues or trans rights activist spiels. And I don't see this changing hardly at all. The best a game made by a conservative can pull off is to keep the creators politics a secret, lest the franchise be torn from their grasp and they get ejected from the fandom of their own creation. Like Notch or Scott Cawthon.

Will this change? Uuuuuuuuh. I mean never say never, but I see no signs of it. It's an absolute crushing culture war victory for the left. Pretty much all anyone can hope for is that the industry completely crashes because of all the brain rot and detachment from what audiences really want.

Actually Talos Principle II just had a normal heteronormative nuclear (robot) family, which was depicted as something wholesome and meaningful, as opposed to a source of existential horror and suffering.

Don't forget that the robots were sexless and chose their genders themselves. It was only a 50% chance that the family would be heteronormative.

What if political partisanship and DEI is banned, at risk of being fired and losing all funding or special legal status. It worked somewhat for De Santis with Disney and with the Supreme Court with Universities. This could work in a few ways: DEI for political views, or maybe making journalists be sued for lying, or maybe you can have courts audit internal chats of journalists.

Most organisations would bend the knee if funding/firing is at stake (and it should be). It should also apply to all grant, university, NGO, contracts, etc.

Wasn't this actually a thing during at least part of the Trump administration for government contracts (which Biden reversed, naturally)? I would hope it makes a return.

They have not lost it. But they did spend a ton of social capital on the failed cause of stopping orange man, which I think was a foolish move.

Didn't quite a few people here lament that the libs had won the US culture war a couple years ago?

And now they've lost it? What happened?

I mean, short version, Trump's a lib--at least by the standards of the US culture war circa 1990. He's "meh" on abortion, broadly pro-marijuana, unfaithful to his wives, venal, vain, irreligious, vulgar... the Republican coalition circa William F. Buckley, Jr. was capitalists, anti-communists, and the religious right. Today it's more like "lib-right" capitalists, anti-Wokists, and the working class. Religious conservatives are a bit like black democrats, now: faithful to the party, but insufficient to deliver victories and so never given more than lip service. (Of course, this has resulted in some "blaxit" political defections, just as religious organizations are importing Wokism.)

Buckley's expressed view was that the role of the conservative was to stand athwart history yelling "stop!" But new people are born. Old ones die. Each new generation must decide for itself what received wisdom it will preserve, and what it will discard. But "decide" may be putting it too strongly; each new generation will preserve some wisdom, and discard other, and often very little effort will be put into consciously deciding which will be which. Memes, like genes, get passed along in a variety of ways, and may persist for a variety of reasons.

The cultural revolution of the 1960s-1970s, itself an outgrowth of the liberal progressivism of the early 20th century, made substantial memetic inroads by casting tradition to the wayside. This has historically been a ruinous approach, but thanks to the march of science and technological advancement, "old lore" is not the asset it has been. George W. Bush was probably Buckley's Last Stand. Obama's defeat of Romney (not incidentally, a religious capitalist whose prophecies Obama mocked in his infamous "the 1980s are now calling" comment) was the end of Buckley Republicanism as a going concern. (The rest of that obviously scripted line accuses Romney of trying to bring back the global policies of the 1980s, the social policies of the 1950s, and the economic policies of the 1920s. And Obama manages to make it sound like a bad idea!)

But memes, like genes, don't simply give up. They respond to selection pressure. Much of Buckley Republicanism was salvageable, particularly those bits well-suited to anti-Wokism (through Wokism's own Communist heritage). But the vulnerabilities--like religious devotion--had to be discarded, or at least relegated to vestigial status. Identity politics dominated the 1990s and 2000s, culminating in Obama's primary defeat of the perpetual political bridesmaid, Hillary Clinton. So Republicans adopted identity politics. The white working class had joined Reagan's Republicans in response to increased competition from racial minorities; Trump turned this into a race-blind "big tent" populism. Straight-laced, uptight, moralizing religious busybodies couldn't really survive the onslaught of Internet irreverence, so they were replaced with earthy, vulgar, but masculine men. And so on and so forth.

Like bacteria swapping DNA, the major American political movements clashed, and each was changed by the other. Much of the "lib" agenda circa 1990 is now just... American culture. But much of the "conservative" agenda circa 1990 is, too! So now there are different humans with different tastes and different political priorities, and the pendulum continues its incessant swing. By the time you get the new coalitions really, truly figured out... it'll be time for you to retire and let someone else try the next one.

Religious conservatives are a bit like black democrats, now: faithful to the party, but insufficient to deliver victories and so never given more than lip service.

Religious conservatives do get things out of our partnership with the GOP- notably, protection from cultural progressives, but we get at least half a loaf on abortion, and in red states we often get benefits about schools(based charters, for example).

They haven't lost it. They still control the same institutions as before, except for the actual presidency.

Can't Trump just utter his old catchphrase "you're fired" ?

To answer my own question: not so easily, but they have a plan https://goodauthority.org/news/why-the-president-cant-just-fire-bureaucrats/

Project 2025 actually has a well thought out section on the levels Trump has https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHAPTER-03.pdf

Wokeness — I refuse to use scarequotes as if it's not a real and easily definable ideology — took over all the real institutions of power over the last 30 years, and in a sudden rush in 2020. Major companies without DEI goals, universities that don't act as seminaries for wokeness, and media and information sources that don't assume wokeness as a foundational premise are as rare as hen teeth.

2024 Republicans (who include several anti-woke ideologies under their tent) have seized the political organs. This is because public office is the only part of the American power structure that takes input from the dalit and shudra castes, or to some extent even the vaisyas.

Whether political power will translate to real institutional change is yet to be seen. I predict that unless Trump is willing to be a Red Caesar, that is, to step out of the bounds of his legal constitutional authority and dare anyone to stop him, it will not.

There’s no real end to the culture war. Battles and skirmishes can be won, but war….war never changes.

Those who say the lefts has won are mostly right wingers who spend a lot of time among cultural elites and other high status places and feel totally out of place and like a small minority. It’s easy to feel like you’ve lost when you see so little right wing influence anywhere

No. They’ve still won it. Reports of a pendulum swing are greatly exaggerated.

I don’t think most people voted for Trump as an explicit anti-woke vote. My impression is that the modal voter was voting mainly on the economy, with maybe a smattering of other more “procedural” considerations in play (the assassination attempts, the lawfare, etc). I don’t think wokeness was really on the radar this election cycle for most people.

voting mainly on the economy

AKA people who will either vote D or just go back into their holes next election when Trump fails to do any of the impossible things to the economy that he has promised them. If the Dems learn anything this election its that the key to dealing with rubes isn't to talk down to them or try to convince them of anything but to simply tell lies right to their face.

Just hearing this month old banger:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3BrCvZmSnKA

Was there now proof that they were eating the pets of people that live in Ohio?

Stray cats and dogs are common bushmeat in Haiti. Haitians in Miami in the 80s were nicknamed “the cat eaters” for that very reason. Furthermore, the sacrifice of small animals for voodoo rituals, endemic to Haiti and very common, is well documented.

Why on earth is it strange to think that recent immigrants of little to no education would continue their cultural practices of their homeland until they are properly acculturated?

As far as I’m concerned the burden of proof is on the people saying it’s not happening.

As far as I’m concerned the burden of proof is on the people saying it’s not happening.

That's not how burden of proof works, as it is impossible to prove something isn't happening.

It's possible to prove that no Haitians ate cats at any point between X and Y times; continuous video footage of all Haitians for the entire period would do it.

Hard, yes, but not impossible.

Nah, that still wouldn't work because you can't prove that you captured all Hatians.

Strange how there hasn't been any evidence of it then that I can recall.

Nicknames from 4 decades ago are not evidence.

It can be fun to assert things with no proof, but we shouldn't delude ourselves that it's somehow the more correct approach

But why should we expect to find any proof? The nature of the act tends to leave little evidence, and that evidence is likely not on public display and is probably circumstantial and inconclusive. The people who are in the best position to find any evidence also have very little incentive to do so. Besides, I also believe Haitian immigrants in Ohio are continuing to practice other culinary traditions and habits they have brought with them, but I also have no proof they are not subsisting entirely on Big Macs. So there's that.

In a population in which 90%+ of adults or teenagers are carrying a device in their pockets at all times which enables them to film HD footage at 24 frames per second (at least) on a whim and then immediately share that footage with the entire world - if Haitians in Springfield are doing something untoward with cats or dogs, I would expect at least one video (even a blurry, out-of-focus video taken from a distance) showing that taking place.

Who said I expected anyone to find proof? I don't. What I do expect is that IF people want to make a positive claim, they SHOULD be expected to provide proof for that claim. Or else why should I believe them?

I can assert all manner of things that don't leave behind evidence, and I'm certain you would not believe the vast majority of them based on this specious reasoning

Who said I expected anyone to find proof? I don't. What I do expect is that IF people want to make a positive claim, they SHOULD be expected to provide proof for that claim.

No you shouldn't, but that goes beyond the scope of this thread to address.

Alright then, case closed I suppose!

Common cultural practice over many years isn’t evidence of something?

If I told you that I saw a group of afghans in my town and one of them was wearing a burkha, you would automatically assume I’m lying for clout?

That’s very interesting.

It's more like, you heard tenth-hand that there are people wearing burkas in a town you've never visited, and there's somehow no photos of said burkas.

That's before we even get into questions about the base rate of burka wearing vs dog eating.

Common cultural practice in the US? Nope. Citation needed.

It's common cultural practice for people to cut the hands off of thieves, that also doesn't happen in the US to the same degree it does elsewhere. Terrible line of reasoning that is. What's very interesting is your epistemic standards for believing something.

Multiple, unrelated people at different times all complaining about a well documented and common cultural practice by a foreign group that suddenly emerged in one area in very great numbers?

Yeah, a normal reaction to that is to think there’s probably at least a bit of validity to the claim.

Automatically discounting that as false is evidence of liberal brainworms or motivated reasoning. You think magic dirt is enough to transform the cultural practices of literal hordes of foreign peasants in an instant upon arrival?

How on earth can you believe that? It strikes me as intensely autistic.

Just wanted to register and confirm that when pressed by both netstack and myself, you were unable to provide any evidence at all of what you confidently proclaimed was a "well documented and common cultural practice" in the US. Is this the case?

It's one thing to have the belief that the burden of proof is not on you in order to make your statement. (I still disagree with that stance but it would be slightly more reasonable.) It's quite another to act and proclaim as if something is well-founded, tell others they are autistic or have brainworms for believing differently than you, and then silently slink back and retreat when you cannot provide evidence for it. What would you call that behaviour in your colourful language?

I'm still open if you'd like to provide evidence. We could then have a discussion about . Otherwise, I'll have a hard time believing that you agree with the mission statement of this place to move past shady thinking and be a serious voice to consider.

If you’ll notice my posting history it comes in little bursts. I basically never write very long entries. There’s a reason for it.

That’s because outside of this cute rarefied forum, I don’t have a silly little email job that allows me to get large amount of screen time and pop in here and write big theses with multiple citations. I have a real job in which I work insane hours and it that requires my full attention, and a family with young children.

So I found myself parked on the side of the road trying to find a source in an old x thread that would pass muster to make some random person believe that fresh off the boat immigrants from one of the most backwards countries on earth immediately change their entire way of life and diet the second they pop off the plane due to ‘magic culture’ and ‘magic laws’ which are basically unenforced. And that people in different countries eat different meat, including bushmeat. The absurdity of the situation sank in, and I resumed the important task I had at hand.

Even now at the ass crack of dawn as I write this on my phone, my daughter points to this as she climbs on me over and over again and exclaims “wow! That’s a lot of words!”.

Very politely, I’ll recommend you do a google search. Specifically about cat eating as a cultural practice. If you do it “raw” you’ll be greeted by a tidal wave of screeds of legacy media screaming “hoax” at the top of their lungs you. There’s also a handful of reels & tiktoks from people, some Haitian, saying this is true.

But if you know a bit about search, and can pull articles from say ten years or older, you might be surprised at what you see. The thread on X that I was looking for but unable to find even included a bbc article about which cultures ate cats, but I’m certain the Haitian portion of it was scrubbed after the controversy. They tend to do that.

Anyways, I’ve wasted enough time on this. Good luck in your search to find out that not everywhere is like the USA, I guess.

A single link of evidence would have sufficed, and taken less time to write. It beggars belief that such a well documented and common cultural practice would be so difficult to find evidence for.

Since you keep playing the motte and Bailey game, I'll remind you that you asserted cat eating was going on as common practice IN THE USA. Even what you recommend that I look up to prove YOUR point does not actually prove the point you are trying to make!

You don't have to pretend that you're being polite when you snark to me implying I can't do a search, that I don't have a job and family as real and important and serious as yours, that I'm autistic or have brainstorms.

It is to clear to me, to you, and to anyone else reading this (god help them) that you are not being polite, I'm not being particularly polite, and we don't respect each other very much. Don't insult anyone's intelligence by pretending otherwise.

While I'm giving advice, (since that seems to be what we're doing here) I'd also recommend against engaging up until the point you realize you cannot and only then pulling out the 'I have better and more important things to do' card. You had the time to write everything leading up to this. You either play the card right away or admit that you simply don't want to engage in a battle that points out shortcomings in your thinking.

If you truly refuse to defend the things you say, then I suppose all I can say is good luck with your 'insane hours' and 'family'. May I meet you again elsewhere on this forum and obliterate you again in the marketplace of ideas.

Look, demanding "cite?" can be an obnoxious form of argumentation and you are not required to provide one on demand. People here are very prone to (selectively) demanding links to evidence when they don't believe something, but that is the nature of this forum - you are supposed to proactively provide evidence, especially in proportion to the inflammatory nature of your claims.

But I'm not admonishing you here for failing to provide evidence. I'm admonishing you because your response to someone asking you for evidence was "Well, I do real work, not like you worthless paper-pushers, I'm too busy with my real and valuable life and family to care about what I write here."

And, you know, good for you. Spending time with your daughter is undoubtedly a better use of your time than arguing with Internet randos. But don't jump into an argument with inflammatory claims, and when challenged, play this "I'm too busy and I have a real life" card. That is really obnoxious.

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First, they aren’t unrelated. The Twitter trend has seen to that.

Second, it’s not well-documented. If it were, you could show rates of dog or cat consumption in Haiti rather than just asserting that they’re really high. Dog consumption appears highest in East Asia; I’d be willing to believe that Haiti has flown under the radar, but I have yet to see the evidence.

@cartman and I cannot tell where you got your prior that Haitians are total dog gourmets. If it’s because of voodoo, show me dog sacrifice numbers. If it’s because of an epithet tossed around in the 80s, tell me why you think it’s particularly accurate today. Surely you can do better than repeating “well documented!”

Can you show me any of these people? Where are they? Where is their evidence? You keep saying things as if they're common knowledge that are not at all established. The only woman I have heard of in connection to these rumors recently flatly admitted she repeated them based on what her neighbour heard from someone else with no evidence.

Actually, the normal reaction is to ask for evidence of a baseless claim. I have some crypto to sell you if that's all it takes for you to believe something. My neighbour swears by this coin!!!!

Pets are the most protected class of animals in America. You really think, if there was an epidemic of foreigners devouring cats and dogs from the street, that there would be literally ZERO evidence of this? Rise in missing pets? No videos, incriminating pictures? Despite the droves of people who would be incentivized to catch such behaviour? Don't you think that if they WERE eating pets, they would also be eating other wild animals at much higher rates which WOULD be obvious? Do you have any hard evidence of any of that, other than your favourite unsubstantiated rumours? Please don't bring up the 2 or 3 supposed cases that have already been investigated and debunked, as we can both agree that would be a waste of both our times.

Automatically believing unsubstantiated rumours because they agree with your priors and political pundits is evidence of foolish reasoning and intellect regardless of your political leaning! I'll take brainworms over inability to reason any day!

Even Vance admitted the story was made up! Are you really going to defend his statement longer than he did?

In case you actually don't understand this (hard to believe but hey, you never know!): The dirt isn't magic. The laws and the culture are magic.

'Literal hordes of foreign peasants'. Okay there, calm down, seems like you're getting a bit excited.

Thanks for the diagnosis, I'll be sure to mention it to my doctor. The brainworms too, those sound serious.

Pets are the most protected class of animals in America.

Except us. Choice quote from the IUCN Red List assessment:

Conservation sites identified : Yes, over entire range


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