Is The Rock even a democrat? IMO next election we should run Cena/Crews (Terry Crews that is), because they seem vaguely liberal leaning and have very large muscles.
Domestic consequences of the 2024 US presidential election: the quickening
- Thread starter Scotttheking
- Start date
- Status
I don’t know if the brand of liberal democracy is actually toast (note that I’m specifically talking about the brand, because I don’t want to get into a “will Trump actually end democracy” discussion, it is too emotionally fraught and not productive IMO). I think it looks that way to us because we like the Democrats’ version of liberal democracy. I also think we are right and that what the Democrats are pitching is much closer to true liberal democracy.
But Musk, for example, at least makes gestures toward liberal democracy. He calls Twitter the platform of free speech. And I think the manosphere guys that he’s surrounded himself with are basically pitching the idea to young men that they are being held back by non-meritocratic forces (the general idea that affirmative action/dei/woke, whatever, is keeping them out of education and the workforce). This is why attacking affirmative action is a constant thing for them.
The main point of disagreement in the pitches is what a fair liberal market driven meritocracy looks like and who’s win in it.
I don’t think he actually authentically believes in this stuff. But freedom of expression and meritocracy are some of the big ideas of liberalism, right? They have to pitch their reactionary conservative stuff in terms of liberal democracy because the general brand is actually really strong. The monarchists and theocrats know they aren’t able to stand in the spotlight.
Err, wait, what are the rules there? Musk was not actually available, right? I mean at least I assume the VP has to be a valid candidate for president…
I’d assume they are planning on reducing services, right? Or printing more money.
I’m sort of looking around for academic or research type postings in Canada and Europe, half heartedly, not really because I think US democracy is doomed or anything like that, but just because it seems like the systems in those countries are just like… nicer. But I work in a fairly niche mathy-programming field that can be kind of hard to find postings for.Meanwhile, there's a chance that all those researchers emigrate to Europe and Asia, strengthening the tech and research sectors over there. Perhaps Europe will get its own Silicon Valley then...
Something that has really surprised me is how well written and transparent job descriptions from Germany are. It is really hard find stuff in the US, it is like, I have to look through all this crap that is “maybe you do this math thing, but also we might want you to do ML, or maybe we’ll have you do data science.” In Germany I think the engineers must have more input than HR into the job postings or something, they just describe the math/physics/engineering problems. It is refreshing.
Europe is interesting. We claim the US is better for tech because of our low regulations. But transparency is also a virtue.
Thanks for the link. I’ll poke around a bit. I did also find some regular old programming listings in Canada that might be more my speed. Fortran is the magic keyword to find more technical jobs I guess.
Anyway, of course, my specifics are not very interesting to the thread. The main point was to appreciate the transparency, haha.
This sort of makes me wonder—Trump has advisors, they can make strategy, even if he’s more of a vibes guy. If Gaetz is beloved by MAGA, but is in the House (so, he clearly does have a high profile career and is a well-known politician), could nominating him for a doomed AG position be a way for the folks in the MAGA-sphere to get rid of a high profile competitor in the movement?
The next most famous are Noem and Gabbard. Noem… I mean she’s famous because of the backlash of the dog story, which is not so great. Gabbard is sort of in an interesting position because she’s an Indian woman, former democrat. I imagine MAGA could be induced to rally behind her or turn on her pretty easily.
Last edited:
Hmm. Well, if he’s going to abolish the Department of Education, I guess we won’t need to worry about that funding. Although, if he’s going to abolish the FDA, I guess we’ll probably become vaccine skeptics anyway, since we won’t know what’s in the things.
Is this in reference to a particular event or just the sort of overall picks over the last few days?
I don’t think there’s anything contradictory in saying, essentially: if it is a threat to democracy actually treat it like that, and if not then focus on kitchen table issues.
I am extremely confused by Democratic elected officials who campaigned on the threat to democracy talking points and are not currently looking at every single loophole and technicality. Maybe they are, behind the scenes, and we just don’t see it yet? Maybe we never will? I don’t know.
If Trump is as bad as they say, aren’t these folks, like, first in line for politically motivated prosecutions?
Quite a few Democrats voted for those wars, so seems like fair game basically. Of course there’s been a little bit of turnover since then.
I wonder where this leaves him. Seems like there must be “something” extremely compromising in that ethics report, and he no longer has any value at all to the folks who have control over it, right? Unless it’s a mutually assured destruction type situation.
As mentioned, he resigned because there was speculation that Trump would pick him for AG.
Oddly, he didn’t need to resign yet, since a Trump isn’t nominating anybody until he is president.
Coincidentally, there is an ethics investigation into Gaetz, which apparently won’t be released if he isn’t in congress.
We, of course, don’t have any traditional aristocratic class or traditions. But we could still be on the path to that stagnation; we just have to invent an aristocratic class first, right? Musk thinks he’s getting in. I’d put my money on generals, intelligence officers, and particularly violent caterers instead.
I winder if Zuckerberg’s MMA practice will leave him as the last standing legitimate billionaire, hah.
If the majors players could just set the prices for everything, everything would cost infinity dollars, right? I expect prices to rise, but only to the point where it still doesn’t make sense to set up production in the US. Although, there’s some stuff where I really doubt any tariff really has a chance of getting anywhere near that point…
Yeah; hopefully they are all voted out. They are members of a party that ran on “Trump is an authoritarian” but then praised Biden for promising to allow the absurdly telegraphed political prosecution of his son. They either don’t believe the first thing is true, or they don’t believe the second is a big deal.
So they are either liars (who lie about stuff with some pretty significant implications) or they appear to be (I don’t know, I don’t like the use of mental health terms to describe regular human asshole behavior, but I can’t think of anything else) sociopaths.
I don’t think there exists a mechanism to pardon unknown people for unknown crimes.
I mean, I get that you are joking, but this seems to be the only thing that would satisfy some, so I’m taking your joke literally.
He could consider pardoning everybody in the DNC, which I guess would help slow any hypothetical direct anti-democratic use of the legal system (if that’s something people are worried about). But that might put him at a serious risk looking like he’s trying, which is of course bad when Democrats do it.
Last edited:
Maybe it is paranoid, but part of Trump’s pitch is that everybody is just as corrupt as him anyway. So, finding or making up some evidence about the “Biden crime family” could help his reputation.
I mean, assuming he doesn’t manage to find some workaround: Trump is a man not up for reelection, with very few limits on his power, and not much in the way of policy that he actually cares about getting done, right? So it is hard to guess what motivates him. Maybe revenge will be his main focus.
I haven’t really been following it in great detail, but IIRC Nippon Steel has somehow pretty good labor relations, and was going to be hands-off. Now they might get butchered by corporate raiders or bought by US competition instead.
Haha, yeah. The identity politics vibes of having US in the name are getting in the way of having the company actually operate in the US, over the objections of the American, union member workers.
We are a pretty silly country.
Woody’s machine kills fascists. Arlo’s machine rhymes with pickle.
I mean, we definitely deserve this as a country, so go for it if you want.
It is a little bit sad when stuff hits New England/the Northeast, we gave the guy one electoral vote total and we have a lot of connections to Canada. We’ve been here together longer than the US has existed. We share responsibility (edit: that is, New Englanders share responsibility for the joint decisions made by other US-ians, realized “we” could be read to include Canadians there; which was not the intention), but I’m hoping for the day when we can return to normalcy. It’ll be a while though.
IMO it is better to tax things than cut off access. Personally I will try to prefer Canadian replacements whatever the difference is (anyway, Kentucky bourbon whisky sucks. Whisky is supposed to be smoky, not sweet).
Last edited:
I think the main hope is that the “deregulate and cut” branch is stronger than RFK jr and they just toss out the FDA entirely.
Maybe we need half hour instead of hour wide time zones, I think that should keep the clock time from getting too far from natural time, right?
I think there aren’t many posters like that? Maybe one person, who I don’t feel like singling out.
When Biden lost that first debate, I wanted a primary. I still think they could have done it. But the Harris rollout was legitimately well done I think; nobody ran against her and the party quickly converged. Pretty much everybody here was happy with it.
There’s the “surely the leopards won’t eat my face,” and then there’s the “let’s open the door to let the leopards in, despite the fact that we all agree they are going to eat our faces, because I’m angry that the party which is generally not in favor of leopards eating faces hasn’t prevented the leopards from doing so across the entire planet.”
I mean, it is a legitimately confusing situation, when so much political discourse takes place on private platforms with obfuscated algorithms that decide what you are shown. Whose free speech interests are actually at play here? The users aren’t really engaging in free speech, they are engaging in a process of, basically, shooting out ideas and letting Bytedance pick which ones are heard.
Bytedance shouldn’t have any free speech interests, it is a company, not a human, it doesn’t have any rights at all (Citizens United was bullshit).
At no point should an individual lose the ability to take advantage of their rights, as an individual. But decisions and speech shouldn’t be attributable to the groups.
I don’t really want to answer these questions one-by-one because I think we’d be at risk of derailing the thread by going into too much detail.
But in general—I think most of the cases you brought up would work fine as the owner or some individual member of the organization exercising their own free speech rights by saying something. This is different from something like a social media algorithm being interpreted as free speech (not that anyone is defending that idea, I was trying to cover all the bases in my original comment).
It is sort of nice to have organizations that are consistent. The EFF always tries to point in the same direction. Wrapped up in their own dogma? That’s the point of them.
And even when their position is impractical or wrong, it is usually something that is worth presenting and defending just to defend the Overton window.
I don’t think it is automatically sensible or anything, but the details of those protections can make it sensible. Actually, it sucks to compete in the job market against people who have the “advantage” from the employer’s point of view that they need to stay employed to avoid uprooting their lives. Why employ an American? They can quit. It also seems like it would suck as an immigrant to be in the position of needing to stay employed to avoid having your life thrown into chaos. It is a lose-lose.
However, if the protections are good enough that employers have to be nice to immigrants too, then the system can be sensible.
Overall I am in favor of having as open borders as we can, but we should try to make people citizens ASAP (if they want, of course).
Universities are a bit more open than OpenAI or Google. Although I’m not much of a nationalist, I do think the country should try and design things to help the typical citizen here—grabbing all the smart people from all around the world and then letting Google hide them all away just to do something net-negative for society, like design better ad systems, seems like a bad time.
Universities are great for this; bring all the smart people here and get them to do research and teach us stuff.
It could also be nice to have more research labs and institutes; not sure how funding would work, but a place that takes in grants and outputs science for the good of society. Or if Google wants some of their labs to be exempt from the H1B cap, ok, but the output of those labs can only be open-access science. They can direct it toward the topics they Google is interested in, but the output should benefit society as a whole.
STEM graduate is pretty general, right? If they make the requirement specific enough they can find a requirement that isn’t satisfied here. STEM graduate? No, we need programmers. Well really we need JavaScript programmers. Well really, we need React developers. Well really, we need React developers who can juggle.
I wonder if this will be a point where the SC will get a chance to show some independence from Trump/legislative branch Republicans? (I think his justices are bad, but at this point they don’t owe him anything and are “playing the game” as peers to him. Why shouldn’t they flex a bit?)
This seems like the federal government meddling in the states’ right to run their own elections.
How’s this work? I mean, he can order around members of the executive branch, but I guess that doesn’t include all federal employees(?) (is that right?)
Didn’t Biden also say something along the lines of: his last minute pardons for his family members don’t come with any admission of guilt, really? I guess the (actually pretty major) difference is that the people Biden pardoned weren’t ever convicted of anything.
Anyway, the Jan 6 pardon recipients don’t think they did anything wrong and now they aren’t getting any consequences. So what do you think they don’t understand? All is right in the world from their point of view, except that some inconsequential paperwork from an administration they didn’t think was legitimate anyway.
But what does
mean in terms of brass tacks? Are other entities in the federal government required to treat them like they are guilty but have served their sentences or something like that? (I dunno, does that have some impact on getting clearance… or something?)
Like what does it actually mean if they don’t consider the justice system to have any moral weight at all, and so guilt is just a paperwork status? I think the only thing they can all agree on is that the justice system only has moral weight when it agrees with them…
If he actually follows through on the promise to kick out all the migrant workers I guess people will either notice the famine, or the fact that they are now field-hands, right? (Maybe both, since lots of us don’t have any experience in the field so we’ll probably screw it up).
- Status