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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   33884 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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But I also can't bring myself to really take these people's fears seriously, since I do feel like this chicken little routine happens every time a Republican gets elected (from my limited experience), without the Republicans even doing anything that bad.

Ask them what tangible thing they predict and what concrete plans they have to mitigate it. Worked wonders the last time around when the "Trump (2016) is going to put the gays in camps!" hysteria was all the rage. You can even feign ignorance if that's more up your alley.

To be fair, I did a gentler version of this with my now-ex and she said he was going to repeal Roe and the ACA. I told her there was no way they'd get Roe past the supreme court, and, well, we had insurance through work so the ACA wouldn't hit us. She ended up being fairly accurate...

I mostly just brag about how much money my portfolio is making. Oh? You believed all those economist that said the economy would be devastated if Trump won? Again?!

I'm already up $100,000 on my fairly modest holdings, and it's been less than a week. At the rate we're going I might retire early in 4 years.

Instead of gloating and waging the culture war, please be better and have some empathy for those who have been facing mental health struggles with the outcome of an election that impacts the lives of millions of Americans, especially women and minorities.

For example, I’ve been in a real dark place since Wednesday.

The aftermath of the election exacerbated the situation I was already facing due to this market bull run since 2023, where my leveraged equity ETF allocation has grown far too quickly. My effective leverage ratio is far higher than I would like.

I’ve already exhausted my rebalancing options in tax-advantaged accounts. Selling to further rebalance in non-tax-advantaged accounts would result in substantial realized capital gains that would reduce my accumulated capital losses from 2022 and prior. My net worth to income ratio is such that I’d be unable to make a material dent in this with future income for at least several months. Why don’t I just make more money; am I stupid?

I’ve been buying short-term US treasury ETFs with newly earned income to try and reduce my leverage ratio (buying vanilla unleveraged equity ETFs reduces my leverage ratio too slowly). However, this feelsbadman: I’m earning the risk-free on the treasuries, while paying risk-free plus a presumed spread and a management fee on the leveraged ETFs (which tends to be hefty for leveraged ETFs).

How could Trump-voters do this to me?

I thought the stock market would go down if Trump won, so I was holding my money to buy stock after the election. Now the market is at an all-time high, so I'd feel dumb to buy now. Serves me right for listening to the media, I guess.

My existing portfolio is doing great, though.

I'm KICKING myself that I didn't think to slide more money into $TSLA in the leadup to the election.

It was obvious that a Trump win would benefit Elon directly and bounce Tesla higher. It's up over 40% since the election.

I didn't even do anything different, because I'm not a reactionary investor. I just let everything I normally do ride. Granted, I have significant holdings of BTC, COIN and NVDA, and BTC and COIN seem to be directly benefiting from Trump optimism. But even my safer index funds and blue chip stocks have done fantastic this week.

I had money on Ted Cruz winning, and I otherwise decided to let things ride, which has paid off too thus far.

But I'm also selling off the last of my Crypto holdings for the time being because I STRONGLY suspect the current leap is overoptimistic, and it'll correct by or before January. For reference, I originally bought a (small) position in Bitcoin in 2014.

Ultimately yeah. I avoid reacting to any one event. But there are still times when I wish I had been bolder on certain moves.

It's hard to imagine an administration as hostile to Crypto as the Biden admin with Gary Gensler. Trump could follow through on zero of his promises, and shit canning Gary would still be an enormous boon for crypto.

It still suffers from the problem of not having much you can do with it aside store it for the long term.

And ultimately that's why I'm pulling out, I got other things I want to do with the money.

These are the biggest things I've seen them be afraid about:

  1. women's reproductive health
  2. immigrants getting deported
  3. tariffs messing with the economy, and in some cases their actual jobs
  4. losing health insurance and getting stuck with large bills

"Women's reproductive health" paired with "threat to our democracy" were the core planks of the Harris campaign and she lost on them because they didn't hold up to reality.

Anyone who ranks those two "issues" as their top two is not seriously engaged with reality. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that. They probably function well in a day-to-day sense (hygiene, going to work, performing chores etc.) but their comprehension of American Federal and Constitutional Law, geopolitical realities, cultural currents, and a theory-of-mind for about 70m other Americans is zero.

I see a lot of political campaigning - "messaging" - as starting with a true but boring premise and then stacking a lot of vibes on top of it. Harris' true messaging core was "I am not Trump." This is plainly and obviously correct. But "I'm not the other candidate" isn't actually a campaign strategy, so you have to build something more substantial on top of it - or do you?

The Harris campaign decided to layer vibes-on-vibes. Abortion is now a loser of a topic because American's are (1) Very self-contradictory on how they feel about it and (2) As exit polls showed, American's are able to separate candidate-from-issue in regards to abortion. Trump won Missouri, and Missouri based state abortion protections.

The "threat to our democracy" narrative is a different loser. For those on the fence, it comes across as histrionic, overwrought, and hyperbolic. You can play doom-edited videos of January 6th all you want but the fact of the matter is it's old hat. It also begs the question - if Trump is such a threat to democracy are you, Kamala Harris, advocating for vigilante justice should you lose? Will you actually organize an armed resistance of some sort. No no, of course not. Peaceful transition of power and all that. For your own supports, it creates a sense of mission where the stakes are too high. If I'm a Harris support (haha, it's fun to laugh) and I truly believe the "threat to democracy" line ... how can I even have a conversation with a Trump supporter or someone still deciding?

So, if these are loser issues, why make them platform planks? Because a lot of politics comes down to ingroup / outgroup and it's easy to default to ingroup sloganeering and vibes. Much like the Hillary campaign, 50% of the Harris defeat is on the fact that she ran a dogshit campaign and made the worst VP pick in history (Sarah Palin no longer GOAT'ed). I'm starting to see some stories that Shapiro said no to Harris and not the other way around ("We didn't break up, I dumped you!") but I consider this to be ex post facto spinning.

But then again, I'm probably wrong. Trump's across the board win - Electoral, Popular, house, senate - paired with 95% (approx) of American counties drifting right compared to 2020 really does mean this is a realignment.

It also begs the question - if Trump is such a threat to democracy are you, Kamala Harris, advocating for vigilante justice should you lose? Will you actually organize an armed resistance of some sort. No no, of course not. Peaceful transition of power and all that.

I'm not sure why this begs that question. Thinking that Trump is a threat to democracy as well as that responding to his victory via armed resistance would be an even bigger threat to democracy are both compatible positions to hold.

women's reproductive health

I never understood what people think the mechanism is that connects the re-election of Trump with worse access to abortion than is present in the status quo. These are the only things I can think of:

  • Going after interstate abortion tourism (unlikely that the agencies play ball, but at least that's a realistic fear)
  • Preventing the SCOTUS from being flipped back which ices any plans to conjure a new legal theory of why there is a constitutional right to abortion, actually
  • In the same vein, installing pro-life judges further up the pipeline
  • A federal abortion ban (not going to happen)
  • Blocking efforts to introduce a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion (Dems had decades to try this, they didn't)

To steelman:

  • There's a Biden-era regulation holding EMTALA to cover abortion in emergency room case involving life or health of the mother, and under the supremacy clause, override states that ban abortion under those circumstances. A Trump administration is extremely likely to reduce this in scope to life or serious physical harm of the mother, if not rescind it wholesale.
  • While surgical interventions are almost entirely regulated at the state level, drugs are near-completely dominated by federal law. The Biden-era FDA took an unusually expansive approach toward availability of prescription abortificants (and some contraceptives), allowing levels of telemedicine and other issuance that was previously not accepted. I don't think a Trump admin cares about OTC birth control pills, but I think it both at least attempts to claw back things like the reading that states may not ban a drug that the FDA has permitted or the guidance that refusing to fill a reproductive health prescription is a violation of civil rights law.
  • The Comstock Act is still technically on the books, and while I don't think expansive interpretations focused on speech are likely to be used (and extremely unlikely to survive court scrutiny if used), there are a pretty wide variety of unenforced bits that would be highly sympathetic to bring to bear, and would make a lot of stuff that's illegal-but-you-can-do-it-anyway into hope you like federal prison if you attract the eye of sauron stuff.
  • Medi* funding is an absolute clusterfuck: by law, it's not supposed to support it, excepting a few cases where the spending is instead mandatory, but cash is fungible and there's a lot of places that aren't exactly great about paperwork. That's historically been papered over (largely because then-unsettled Constitutional law was a third rail), but if the Trump DoJ drops the Haim indictment and starts aggressively auditing or courting whistleblowers, even short of actual enforcement it will likely reduce availability as hospitals check their six consistently.
  • Direct defunding of groups like Planned Parenthood isn't possible without a law (and shouldn't be even with one, except the protections of the writs of attainder clause are pretty lackluster), but something like the ACORN path is possible, and there's questions about the extent regulation could create rules that had the same effect without needing a law. Even if new orgs grow in response, they will be disrupted in the meantime.
  • There's a lot of politics that's about building terrain for latter politics. There's a paranoid conspiracy theory about Project 2025 wanting a registry of every woman's pregnancy, but the actual policy proposal is :

Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion. In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion

And this is something that's not that objectionable, but it's also extremely likely to have a number of very unpleasant numbers reported by a government agency.

Great steelman, thanks! I am updating towards some of the panic being less unfounded than I previously thought.

Most people don’t know Jack about constitutional law. Many of them thought Roe was the only thing keeping abortion legal and that it would automatically become illegal everywhere the second it was overturned. They probably think Trump can and will ban abortion with an executive order.

A federal abortion ban (not going to happen)

I agree this almost certainly won't happen now because the margins in the Senate and House probably don't allow for it, but in the world in which Republicans made a more convincing sweep of both chambers it wasn't off the table, surely. Certainly, had a ban reached Trump's desk I doubt he'd have had the guts to defy most of the Republican party by vetoing it.

It really depends on whether Trump or the rest of the GOP is more willing to call the other’s bluff.

When I put it that way, you already know the answer. I suspect Trump would sign a 15 week abortion ban(he opposes late term abortions), but the Republican Party doesn’t defy trump well at all.

You can even feign ignorance if that's more up your alley.

Who's this Donald Trump guy? Wasn't he on the Apprentice or something?

As much as I hate remakes in most cases, I keep imagining a modern take on Back to the Future featuring a Cybertruck and an oblique reference like this to the "Who is the president in 1985?" "Ronald Reagan." "Ronald Reagan? The actor?" gag.

I've often dreaded the inevitable Back to the Future remake/reboot that Hollywood will jump on once the stubborn owners of the franchise die off. I just wonder how they'll manage the whole central plot line involving near-incest and a boy punching out another boy in order to protect a girl and win her heart.

Marty McFly will have to be a woman, likely black and gay/bi. Martina's equivalent-age father from the 90s being sexually aggressive towards her just isn't going to be as funny as the actual male Marty getting sexually assaulted by his equivalent-age mother from the 50s. Changing it to her mother could work for laughs and for the spectacle, but then the central plot being around getting her lesbian/bi/bi-curious mother to pair up with her father would probably not be acceptable to Hollywood.

a modern take on Back to the Future featuring a Cybertruck

"The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with a complete lack of style?"

You know, that actor who played the bad guy in Two Weeks Notice

I thought he was in "Home Alone 2"?

A civil war you say? In Spain?

I unironically think probably the best way to get people to drop the histrionics and making politics their primary identity is to just lead a happy life and flamboyantly feign ignorance of anything political. Oh, I didn't vote. Or, I voted Trump, because Biden banned abortion.

You can't reason people out of something they didn't reason themselves into.

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