Sulphur on 26/11/2019 at 05:38

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While I never fully bought into psychohistory as a conceit even as a teenager, if this is a Seldon Crisis, I for one welcome the possibility of a Mule appearing. Though I suppose it could be argued that Trump is, in fact, him.

Renzatic on 26/11/2019 at 06:03

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Yeah, well.

It is weird that most of us here don't regularly espouse our deeply held political conventions. Mostly, we're here to point out that Trump is, in fact, a complete and total dipshit. The closest we get to any actual political discussion here are those rare occasions Slyfoxx puts on his Punisher Skull t-shirt, and bitches about those wily social justice leftists taking away his guns, or when Vae wants to be "ironic."

The funny thing is, on the issue of guns at least, I'd probably side closer with Sly over, say, you or Pyrian. It's a crying shame he's such an obnoxious fucking douche, isn't it? We need more Catbarf up ins.

Sulphur on 26/11/2019 at 06:09

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I don't know, even if you're not overwhelmingly conscious of it, the fact that you're the most consistent poster of the latest developments in this ongoing real-life satire shows how strong your interest is in how stupid things have got. Disparagement is opinion after all, and whether or not you intend to broadcast it, you're one of the louder voices in this thread by sheer dint of quantity.

Not that this is a bad thing - no one really wants to support Trump or this entire farce he's turned government into unless they've got massive character failings themselves.



Heh. Anomalies aren't anomalous if they happen very often. At least in the fiction, they figured out there were problems that had to be dealt with. I'm not so sure about that quality existing in real life any more.

demagogue on 26/11/2019 at 07:19

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I'm of the school that the best discussion is about ideas, the so-so discussion is about events, and the lowest form of discussion is about personalities. (Elanaor Roosevelt's quote, wuzzit?)

I personally really like political debate and wonk stuff (statistics and policies) and tolerate at best the inane horserace and partisan team sport side of politics, and one of the annoying parts of our era is how much the latter has ravaged the former.

I like keeping things to their basics. Best society is capitalist, classic liberal (limits on gov't interference. Einstein's principle, gov't should intervene as much as necessary, market failures, etc, but not any further*), democratic, multicultural pluralist, limited welfare social regulation developed by technocrat experts, democratic legitimacy is important but populism is usually bad news except in the face of serious violations (civil rights movement, early 20th Cent. wage labor). Climate change and rightist populism/statism are the two most major upcoming global threats, and terrorism/migration and global banking/"the 1%", as problems, are at the bottom of the list on bad days. 4 great freedoms: free movement across borders of goods, sevices, people/labor, capital/money (as much border control as necessary, Einstein's principle again).

Uh, center right (or "third way") technocrat globalist liberal consensus at the center of the post WWII multilateral liberal order (UN, WTO, Worldbank, human rights treaties, rule of law, multilateral agreements, etc.) and represented by GHW Bush, both Clintons, Obama, Blair, Clegg, Merkel, and Sarkozy. Never Trump and Remainer are givens. If I have a home party, it'll always be the UK's LibDems, Reps and Dems both approached it under GHW Bush and Bill Clinton in the 90s.

Change my mind.

* Edit: Sorry there's one more important piece to this, which is that there ought to be special attention to protecting human rights and vulnerable populations, and we have to be careful to consider the real world vulnerabilities of the poor and marginalized groups. In my political cartography, the data point for that is when the Social Democrats joined with the Liberals, that brand of "third way", although Clinton's & Blair's brand are in the right direction too. (Keep in mind my understanding of UK politics is caricatures for what I think the US needs, and I might think differently if I lived there.) Oh, one more thing, I think vulnerable groups should get special protection, but I'm not a fan of identity politics. It should be tolerated as free speech, but I'm more on board with the centerist Dems (Obama et al) approach, vulnerable groups that should basic universal human rights protection all humans should get. (A data point on this, In the movie Barry, the young Obama was a fan of the novel Invisible Man, black rights as universal human experience, over the James Baldwin book, probably in the neighborhood of black nationalism and identity politics. But this is getting beyond politics into culture, which is why I think it's better to stay in culture and not radical politics. I just mean to say the identity politics is at the root of populism on both the left (black nationalism et al) and right (MAGA brand white nationalism) don't really speak to me, although I recognize the political influence they have.)

demagogue on 26/11/2019 at 09:56

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Re: that first sentence, those were exactly the kinds of examples I was thinking about in terms of "market failure", things like natural monopolies (electric grid, water lines, interstate highways, prisons, national defense & police), negative externalities (environment, industry safety, public safety generally), and maybe things that can't follow Coase's Law, consumers either don't have power to act collectively or they act predictably irrational towards their own self-interest, so that's health care, consumer protection, a lot of worker exploitation, welfare generally (humans don't functional well unemployed). Markets can be awful at things like that, so there's an easy argument for public regulation. In practice, it's probably going to look like mainstream Democrat proposals for regulations.

The second thing is into structural issues, social cohesion, and the proposed link between high Gini coefficient (high economic inequality) and social problems, I guess populist revolts maybe (I know that's the narrative, but I don't think, e.g., poor whites really revolt and support demagogues like Trump because they want more welfare, which to them reads like more handouts to lazy minorities, although I understand that being poor and aggrieved is part of their frustration). Poverty by itself is a serious problem, so I'd want to strengthen labor markets to pull people out of poverty, which is a problem even aside from inequality per se (though they're linked of course). Inequality generally, once we've got people out of poverty, is a bigger issue that gets politicized and might get hooked onto proposals that might not be targeting actual, concrete socio-economic harms to actual individuals, in the over-simplified way I'm framing things anyway. Inequality is a real problem I'd recognize, but I'd want to focus on actual socio-economic harms on the ground (like campaign finance rules where big businesses can give obscene amounts of money to or project influence over politicians) rather than an abstract idea of "inequality" per se, so let's raise taxes on the rich as if it's a solution in itself, but there's no thought into what that money is actually redistributed into as part of that whole narrative. I haven't thought it all the way through, I'm happy to learn from others on this, and it'd probably take a lot of long discussions to tease things apart for me to understand what we're talking about. So I don't necessarily disagree! Just needs more discussion.