domain:alexepstein.substack.com
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
He's an idealogue who tracks further to the right of most conservatives, essentialy a slightly more credible version of Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor-Greene. He's known for making intentionally provocative statements that his colleagues don't even try to defend, as well as engaging in stupid publicity stunts. After the GOP took the House in 2022, he insinuated that they should put policy-making on hold and focus on investigating and impeaching Democrats they didn't like. He was the ringleader of Kevin McCarthy's ouster as speaker, earning him a lot of enemies in his own party. He's also a sleazeball, having been accused of sexual misconduct, illegal drug use, showing other members of congress nude photos of women he'd slept with, misappropriating campaign funds for personal use, and accepting impermissible gifts. The centerpiece of all of this is a sex trafficking investigation he got roped into. A close associate of his pleaded guilty and while the evidence didn't support an indictment for any of the crimes that were being investigated, it's pretty clear that Gaetz was partying with this guy and paying him for prostitutes. It didn't help that Gaetz was the only member of congress to vote against a sex trafficking bill. He topped it all off by asking Trump for a blanket pardon for any crimes he may have committed.
While he is a barred attorney, his legal career isn't one typically befitting of an Attorney General. The sum total of his legal experience is a few years as a junior associate at a small law firm, where he handles pennyante matters like debt collection, a dispute over a volleyball net, and a stolen boat. He owes his entire political career to his father, a successful Florida politician who bankrolled his first run for office. the only conceivable reason Trump would nominate him for AG are his personal loyalty (he supported Trump from the beginning and hasn't wavered) and his zeal for going after political enemies. Gaetz resigned from the House after being named as AG; the mainstream view is that he was under investigation for numerous ethics violations and used the nomination as cover to avoid the issuance of the report, now that the House Ethics Committee no longer has jurisdiction. It seems unlikely, however, that Gaetz will ever actually be AG. No Democrat will vote for his confirmation, and only 4 Republicans would need to oppose him to block his nomination. Susan Collins of Maine has already suggested that he's unacceptable, and the guy has enough enemies within his own party that it shouldn't be too hard to find three more (Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell are almost certain nos, and one more wouldn't be hard to find). Any confirmation hearing would air all this dirty laundry publicly in a way that hasn't been done yet. To this point, news of his improprieties has been of the continuing story nature where information comes out in dribs and drabs over the course of years. The only people who can tell you all the ins and outs are the kinds of political junkies who follow scandals involving minor figures. Given the increased scrutiny that's already being given, I'd be surprised if this nomination isn't withdrawn before we even get to the confirmation stage.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Anti-Indian sentiment within the Anglosphere seems mostly confined to Canada and the UK
Indians are not a popular ethnicity among blue collar Americans.
TitaniumButterfly
1hr ago
Can we agree to call that debatable?
gattsuru
1hr ago
In addition to a Supreme Court decision overturning Obergfell, revoking federal recognition of gay marriage would also require either overturning in court or revoking at Congress the Respect for Marriage Act, with no credible extant theory for the former, and the latter dependent on either 60 Senators going against gay marriage or 50 Senators willing to nuke the filibuster over it. And neither the Trump admin or any of its affiliates ran against gay marriage, with even the often-nutty Project 2025 avoiding the topic entirely.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Mail-order-brides are just the default for old country types in the USA. It’s not because American women find East Indians unattractive(although in practice they probably do).
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
The people who don’t get that education form equally strong opinions and have an equal lack of knowledge. You simply like their opinions better.
Most people do not, in fact, teach themselves philosophy or statistics from the Internet. Instead they learn directly-relevant job skills plus whatever knowledge floats around their social sphere. The conflict happens when someone tries to privilege their social-sphere knowledge.
“Well, The Science says…”
“This is what they don’t want you to know…”
“Everyone knows that…”
These are standard, intuitive social tactics. They’re also decoupled from reality. Unfortunately, the natural response is similarly decoupled, because it’s way easier to shout “nuh uh!” than to explain law or philosophy or chemistry to amateurs. Especially when the Truth is genuinely still under debate.
I’d like to think that’s why we’re here.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
It might have happened to intra-party disputes between different factions afterwards, but it's definitely not the modal outcome when dealing with Trump.
Well, we are talking about intra-party disputes, that leaves people in the position where after settling who's top dog, they still have to deal with the fact that they're on the same team. Also didn't Vance was oppose him originally and now he's his VP?
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
To put it bluntly, losing a few billion dollars in a divorce is a patently absurd, and extremely harsh outcome, and even if we admit that it doesn't render the guy destitute.
Bezos didn’t lose billions of dollars. It was their money and it was divided in a divorce settlement. Losing a big chunk of the fortune you were able to accumulate because your wife was loyal enough to support you into building a business that turned into the most profitable one in the world is a fair penalty for deciding to cheat on her.
TitaniumButterfly
1hr ago
Jeez, yeah, that's... that's enough internet for today.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
It kinda sound like they got elected on a platform of violating the actual red letter rules and the adults in the room noticed it and are having them impeached?
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
The Ivy League will never run out of applicants.
They do, of course, need a good mix of genuine merit admits/connections admits/diversity admits. That might be slightly harder to manage, but plausibly deniable different rules for different people ain’t that hard to manage.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1hr ago
That sort of thing (tough publicly, cordial privately) happened back in the Reagan years between the two parties, but mostly died after Clinton to my knowledge. It might have happened to intra-party disputes between different factions afterwards, but it's definitely not the modal outcome when dealing with Trump. He's very concerned with personal honor and his obsession with "loyalty" is thinly coded for "does what I want". If any R goes against Trump, he'll privately construe them (in his head, and to his aides) that they're disloyal traitors. Trump has been more obsessed with heresy-purging than actually winning against the Ds. All of this is a recipe for genuine dislike between the actors.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Trump’s state department made a push for decriminalizing homosexuality in other countries, for one example.
Trump is less pro-gay than democrats, and he’s not pro-trans. This does not make him anti-gay.
DTulpa
1hr ago
He's a Republican, he has troll energy, and he has Matt Gaetz's face.
That last one is a little jokey, but I do think that's what tilts it into a furor relative to any average Republican the left hates. He has a supremely punchable face that screams "douchebag", even to me. And I think he even knows it.
mrvanillasky
1hr ago
Indians in the UK vote more conservative than those in the US lol thanks to Pakistanis living next to them.
faceh
1hr ago
But there's a certain kind of boasting/hypernationalism that you can see sometimes online, a certain level of entitlement to other people's money.
I have to be circumspect, but in the course of practicing law, I've run across these types of clients who have a tendency to haggle about prices and rates from the start. And then once you've agreed on prices they will later on try to get discounts or write-offs, oftentimes by pointing out perceived flaws in the work or failures on the customer service side. And on some occasions just try to screw you over directly.
And when you notice that despite these people belonging to a group that is <10% of your clientele, they are like 80% of this specific type of problem client you encounter, it becomes bad enough that you kind of brace for it when you notice certain names associated with a certain ethnicity pop up.
Now, I have had entirely pleasant interactions and dealings with some of them, but adverse interactions are common enough that I can instantly recall the bad ones, and that can definitely feed into a bias.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
Why on Earth would you expect an arbitrary student council to forecast support for Gaza? This is like interviewing homeless men until you find one with no shirt. Is “support” for shirts dying?
For what it’s worth, the articles of impeachment can be found here. They look fine to me. Campaign promises don’t and shouldn’t supersede actual rules.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2hr ago
I constantly see claims that modern elections are 99% about turnout, not convincing swing voters, since politics is too polarized for there to be a significant number of swing voters. Maybe those takes are completely wrong, but it's certainly the received wisdom in any at all mainstream election analysis. Not sure that targeting redditors in particular is useful way to get out the vote of Democratic partisans, but the Democrats definitely believe that winning elections is about getting their own partisans to actually vote and discouraging Republican partisans from voting (e.g., by spreading negative news about Republican candidates). I say Democrats simply because that's the media bubble I'm in; I have no reason to believe the Republicans don't believe the same with the parties flipped.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
2hr ago
No, there's a LOT of Trump suppression too. I live in a suburb in Essex County, NJ, the bluest county in NJ. Yet over 25% of the vote for President went for Trump. A full quarter! Going by yard signs and other publicity, Trump support was more like 1 in 100.
AmericanSaxeCoburgGothic
Happy to be here! Goal is to post the most exclamation points.
2hr ago
I had a professor (native Russian teaching Political Science at a US university) who said that Jefferey Sachs deserved to be crucified in Russia for what he did with advising shock therapy. He also said the Russian leadership shared some blame for believing his policies.
mrvanillasky
2hr ago
Yes they do, all women I met including mixed black ones preferred white guys.
A common theme of ornograhy style acts women indulge in is called raceplay which is non white women wanting racist white guys to act like racist white guys, so /r/raceplay and /r/fuckingfascists
roystgnr
2hr ago
expecting them to never figure it out no matter how many times you lie to them
What's really weird is the ones who have that expectation, not just in a positive sense, but in a normative sense. At least on eX-twitter it seems like there's a significant number of people who believe that, when a candidate has taken a position previously and has since repudiated it weakly or hasn't even repudiated it at all, it's somehow ethically unacceptable for a voter to hold that position against the candidate unless the candidate is currently running on that position. @MaiqTheTrue is correct that it's "Machiavellian" to believe that you should manipulate voters who have the memories of goldfish, but is there a word for the belief that voters are thus morally required to have the memories of goldfish? Maybe this is just a bit of random chaff from the "wishful thinking"/"ought-is" fallacy, where if "X would have made it more likely for my team to win" then that's supposed to be evidence that X is true, at least in a weird sense of "true" that doesn't mean you can use it to infer any other propositions.
"white men in the like 25-45 range" does seem to be the least bad male demographic to be in.
In terms of dating and mating success I bet this is true. But I think the sharp understated problem is that the more success they achieve, the greater their overall risk becomes, too!
That is, white men will likely have more to lose/further to fall from getting me-tooed, divorced, or arrested.
To put it bluntly, losing a few billion dollars in a divorce is a patently absurd, and extremely harsh outcome, and even if we admit that it doesn't render the guy destitute.
And that's what white males, (almost every male, really) is sensitive to. Their success built over years or decades being threatened by picking the wrong woman or running afoul of the wrong social group. Because those are the conditions everyone currently operates under.
And no this isn't a "won't somebody PLEASE think of the Wealthy WASP guys?" post. Its a "if it can happen to them, it can happen to ANYBODY post.
So yes, I'd grant white guys are going to have it better ("less worse"), but they're not escaping the conditions that are plaguing everyone.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2hr ago
For what it's worth, I was raised by Republican parents who listened to Conservative Talk Radio and watched Fox News. Growing up I listened to Michael Medved, Glen Beck, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Rush Limbaugh, and Micheal Savage in the car. I still follow some of these personalities on X. I feel like I am tuned into normie conservative sentiment. And the Normie Conservative Sentiment is that America is a values-based society. Immigration is great if someone is willing to work hard, not take handouts, assimilate, and parent their kids to do the same.
I only see the "Blood and Soil" types in fringe online groups. The vast majority of American conservatives are not like that, and if you think that the "Values-Based" Americanism is losing I don't know what to say. I don't even know where the fight is taking place - YouTube comment sections?
I say this as someone who thinks it will be very sad if France is not majority French people, Italy not majority Italians, etc. In my heart I almost see Europe as a museum and I will be sad to see that go away. But America is multi-racial and I see that as a good thing.
That being said, seeing America as a Values-Based Society requires limited immigration. To explain, let's say that we brought in 300 million immigrants next year from all over the globe. 50% of Americans would be immigrants, 50% would be born in the USA. Let's ignore the economic pressure that would create, housing and job crises, and just focus on culture. If the population of foreign-born Americans was 50%, would we be able to pass along American values and culture?
I asked my siblings this question once and they said, "Of course, why not?" I think they were pretty stupid for thinking so. If American norms and values were so easily acquired and distributed throughout the globe, why would people need to move to America? They could just turn their existing countries into America themselves.
Instead, we find in immigration-heavy states like California that new structures that resemble the bribery, nepotism, and corruption of immigrant's home countries.
Obviously 50% of foreign-born people residing in the United States would be too big a shift for us to properly integrate them into our culture. But what is the correct percentage? Immigrants today account for 14.3% of the U.S. population. I think this is an under-count, because they list only 11 million "unauthorized" immigrants, when other independent studies have found closer to 20 million..
Is 14.3% of foriegn-born people the sweet spot? I don't think so. At times of greatest stability in America, that number was between 5-10%.
What do you think each of their value over replacement spouse is?
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