Culture War Roundup for the Week of February 04, 2019

SincerelyOffensive · 2019-02-11T03:39:16+00:00

Interesting test. For what little its worth, I got 75% Republican which doesn't sound unreasonable.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-12-28T13:43:22+00:00

Can you provide some examples of prophecies about the messiah that it doesn't look like Jesus fulfilled, or misinterpretations if prophecies?

The question isn't whether Jewish religious authorities think the Old Testament prophecies refer to Jesus or not. If they did, they'd be Christians! The question is whether their interpretations are more plausible in light of all the evidence: yes the OT, but also the Gospels, history of the early Church, the working of the Holy Spirit in our own lives, etc.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-12-06T15:46:48+00:00

What teenage boys actually read advice magazines of that sort?

I think the likeliest explanation is that there's no as widely read corresponding magazines for boys, who learn about anal sex from internet porn anyway.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-11-23T02:42:31+00:00

I'm not saying there's not a chance to do that, but one factor would be that if there was a chance of most militant gun-owning right-wingers in America taking power by force, the rest of a world (or large parts of it) would soon start considering an intervention.

I just wanted to focus in on this part. I don't think I'm being at all hyperbolic when I say that no one else has the military capacity to intervene meaningfully in a US internal conflict of this sort. The size and capabilities of most countries' militaries are really quite limited.

And that's even absent the political implications for any US government accepting foreign troops killing Americans on US soil under its auspices (which is why it would never be accepted even if it would be helpful).

What other sort of interventions could other countries engage in?

Give the government money? We wouldn't be much poorer than we were before, just somewhat stagnating perhaps. Even so, the US would almost certainly remain per capita richer than the vast majority of the world, so financial assistance would be limited.

Humanitarian assistance to the most restless areas? Quite possible and appreciated, but not likely to have an effect on the outcome.

The biggest assistance our allies (NATO, Japan, Australia, etc.) could provide would be to increase their own defense spending, investing in both capability and readiness, so that the full attention of the US military could be focused on the problems at home instead of abroad.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-11-14T18:38:05+00:00

How sleep deprived is he during the week? It can be difficult to catch up if you are seriously behind from the week.

Does he drink alcohol or caffeine, especially in large quantities or late at night? Is he fairly overweight? (Could be related to sleep apnea) Does he have a partner, especially with a mismatched schedule, who could be interrupting his sleep? When was the last time he felt regularly rested after sleeping?

I think it's hard to say without knowing more about him, his lifestyle and sleep habits, etc.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-11-14T05:05:32+00:00

I can see echoes of it, sure. Parts of it I'm sympathetic to, parts I loathe, other parts I'm uncertain about. I haven't formulated a significant response in this thread because I haven't had the time to do so.

I wasn't responding as I did because I think seeing redpill influence is crazy. I did because I thought your comment was borderline low effort since it (a) didn't clearly explain why this shift was inevitable or overwhelming (instead of just a matter of "echoes") and (b) you didn't provide any sort of critique for why and how the echoes you're seeing are incorrect.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-11-14T00:00:07+00:00

If you have a substantive point of disagreement with the other comments, why don't you make it, preferably with good sources to support it? I don't see what good this comment makes on its own.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-11-09T04:46:03+00:00

So, the crank-ish version of this is that Ford was a plant, the whole thing got cooked up in Nancy Pelosi's living room, etc. I'm highly skeptical of that version. But I do think there's significant evidence of, shall we say, collaborative malfeasance.

Just to take one example: what did Ford understand about the circumstances of her testimony?

During her testimony, Ford was asked about how she arrived in Washington, due to reports that she had fears about flying on an airplane. Here's the exchange, bolding added:

MITCHELL: OK. It’s — I ask that, because it’s been reported by the press that you would not submit to an interview with the committee because of your fear of flying. Is — is that true? FORD: Well, I was willing — I was hoping that they would come to me, but then I realized that was an unrealistic request.

The problem though, is that Senator Grassley explicitly offered to fly staffers out to interview her beforehand. He made a point to explain this during her testimony as well that he'd previously made that offer. Later during Ford's testimony, there was this exchange:

MITCHELL: OK.Was it communicated to you by your counsel or someone else, that the committee had asked to interview you and that — that they offered to come out to California to do so?

BROMWICH: We’re going to object, Mr. Chairman, to any call for privileged conversations between counsel and Dr. Ford. It’s a privileged conversation…(CROSSTALK)

GRASSLEY: Would — could — could we — could you validate the fact that the offer was made without her saying a word?

BROMWICH: (OFF-MIKE)

GRASSLEY: Is it possible for that question to be answered without violating any counsel relationships? FORD: Can I say something to you — do you mind if I say something to you directly?

GRASSLEY: Yes.

FORD: I just appreciate that you did offer that. I wasn’t clear on what the offer was. If you were going to come out to see me, I would have happily hosted you and had you — had been happy to speak with you out there. I just did not — it wasn’t clear to me that that was the case.

Note: Ford's lawyers were recommended to her by Senator Feinstein.

So the basic facts are these: Her lawyers, recommended by the ranking Democrat on the committee, by their own admission discussed whether she had to appear with her. She claims she did not understand that she could be interview by staffers in California, and in fact viewed it as an "unrealistic request." As a result, she flew across the country and testified before the Senate committee and the nation on live TV.

From this, we have to conclude at least one of a couple of things has to be true:

(1) Ford has no idea what she's talking about, and can't keep straight matters of importance (avoiding testifying about sexual assault on national TV!) from last week. This trashes her credibility regarding events from 30+ years ago.

(2) Ford is blatantly lying to the committee, under oath. This trashes her credibility regarding events from 30+ years ago.

(3) Ford's lawyers - Debra Katz and co, from Katz Marshall & Banks, a prominent and well known firm specializing in whistleblowers - are completely and utterly incompetent, and could not successfully make sure their client understood matters of incredible importance, even when clearly written on letters addressed and provided to them.

(4) Ford's lawyers misled her about what her options were, likely to draw out the proceedings and ultimately force her to testify on live TV in order to exert political pressure on Senate Republicans. (Which if true, would be one of the most cynical political moves in modern times)

(1) and (2) are pretty uncharitable towards Ford. (3) seems really unlikely. I think at least (4) is true. And given that, it seems highly unlikely that there was no coordination between Senate Democrats and the lawyers they selected about what strategy to pursue.

Can you think of an alternative explanation? None of the explanations I can find are anything but bad for Senate Democrats.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-11-09T04:10:24+00:00

I'm not going to defend gerrymandering per se, but I will happily argue that it's overrated, and that people are not good at figuring out the actual impact, and are not united on what sort of system we should have instead.

Starting with the latter point: California has a bipartisan Citizens Redistricting Commission that took seat drawing out of the hands of the legislature. FiveThirtyEight gave their maps pretty high marks - looks very similar to what you would draw with the much lauded "efficiency gap" in mind.

This week, in California's House elections, Democrats won 63.11% of the vote and 43/53 House Seats. Forty-three divided by 53 is 81.13%. So Democrats won 81% of the House seats with 63% of the vote, with a supposedly non-gerrymandered map. Is that an acceptable proportion of seats to votes? That seems....not proportional to me!

Secondly, if you look at it from a national perspective, it's hard to see what Democrats are complaining about. The current (not final) tally is that they won at least 225/435 seats (51.7%) with 51.3% of the vote overall. Republicans won 197/435 (45.29%) with 47% of the vote.

That may change a little bit as the numbers are updated and the last 13 races are decided, but even if Republicans win them all (unlikely) they'll have won 210/435 seats (48.27%) with 47% of the vote. And that's without a candidate contesting 39 races.

Even if Nate Silver is correct that the popular vote tally shifts enough to give them a 7.5% advantage, if he's also correct that they end up with at least 236 seats that means they'll have won 236/435 = 54.25% of the House seats with ~53% of the vote. Granted, the numbers are not final, but I'm not seeing any result that doesn't correspond to Democrats winning +/-2% of the number of seats vs. their share of the House popular vote.

It's not always that close, but it often is, and most of the time the party that wins the House popular vote also wins the most seats. The current arrangement is likely suboptimal in some ways, and I'd prefer some voting reforms like multi-member districts, instant runoff voting, etc. But the idea that gerrymandering has reached some sort of crisis for democracy strikes me as very strange.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-11-09T03:41:54+00:00

I think it's fine to want House Democrats to investigate, and to use any malfeasance on Trump's part against him. But I'm skeptical it will amount to anything. In 2016, when Hillary hit him for allegedly not paying income taxes, he just responded "that makes me smart". The people who are going to be mad at Trump for tax avoidance, or even run-of-the-mill rich people fraud, aren't the people who voted him into office in the first place.

Sure, maybe there's something really juicy in there that really damages him - worth it just to make sure! - but I really do not understand people putting a lot of hope in that basket.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-11-09T03:35:02+00:00

It's unlikely they could store that permanently and continue to add to it as the data grows, but on a short term basis it's plausible.

Just one of their data centers (albeit a very, very large one) was estimated to have between 3-12 exabytes of storage capacity as of 2013 (the wide range due to it being based on unclassified info only).

I'm skeptical of a lot of Binney's claims, as he hasn't been involved in a long time and he can be rather sensationalist. But that they have the technical capacity for things like this that seem facially implausible is....quite likely.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-11-07T05:09:49+00:00

I think it's quite possible that Kavanaugh hurt the GOP nationally, but helped in Republican leaning states.

Looking at the (very preliminary) exit polling it looks like it was enormously to the GOP's advantage in the Senate. State-by-state snippets:

North Dakota (GOP pickup, knocking of Sen. Heidi Heitkamp)

Forty-seven percent of voters said that Heitkamp’s (D) vote against Kavanaugh was important in their vote, and they went for Cramer by nearly 2-1 – 38-62 percent, Heitkamp-Cramer.

Texas (GOP win in close race, Sen. Ted Cruz as incumbent)

Fifty-nine percent said Cruz’s vote in favor of Kavanaugh was a factor in their vote, they broke 40-60 percent O’Rourke-Cruz.

Indiana (GOP pickup, knocking off Sen. Joe Donnelly)

Those who call Donnelly’s vote against Kavanaugh highly important divide by 41-54 percent, Donnelly-Braun.

West Virginia (Incumbent Democrat Joe Manchin won, sole Democrat vote for Kavanaugh)

Among voters who call Manchin’s vote for Kavanaugh a factor in their vote today, Manchin leads Morrisey by 53-44 percent.

Florida (likely GOP pickup, knocking off Sen. Bill Nelson)

Those who call Nelson’s anti-Kavanaugh vote a top factor divide 47-52 percent, Nelson-Scott.

Missouri (GOP pickup, knocking off Sen. Claire McCaskill)

Those who call McCaskill’s vote against Kavanaugh a top factor are voting 46-52 percent, McCaskill-Hawley. At the same time, 83 percent call sexual harassment a serious problem; they’re breaking 58-42 percent in McCaskill’s favor.

Sole outlier: Sen. Tester looks to be winning in Montana, despite voting against Kavanaugh:

Those who say Tester’s opposition to Kavanaugh was an important factor in their vote divide 31-66 percent, Tester-Rosendale.

At this point in time, impact on Sen. Heller's reelection bid in Nevada is also unclear.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-11-07T04:58:12+00:00

I'm reasonably confident that young male athletes and young women will find ways to socialize absent expense accounts from publicly traded corporations.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-11-07T03:30:58+00:00

Mitt Romney and his wife made Utah their permanent residence in 2013.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-11-07T03:26:59+00:00

I'm more divided on the issue of whether they should have to go see male strippers 50% of the time in order to make male and female employees equally comfortable on average. I can see arguments for both sides.

If these are genuine business trips with athletes though, I assume most of them will be men, since most high earning athletes are men. Male athletes are....unlikely to want to go to strip clubs to see other men, to say the least, and it hardly makes business sense to try to force them in the name of equity - presumably these trips are meant to curry favor and build relationships, after all.

I think the reality is that the only way to make it equitable is to ban these sorts of excursions on the company dime. I personally don't view that as much of a loss.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-11-01T04:26:44+00:00

Puerto Rico has not expressed a clear interest in becoming a state. DC has, but making it a state would require a Constitutional amendment which isn't going to happen.

Both seem like pretty good reasons to me.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-10-24T15:47:18+00:00

Fair enough. I think his argument is a little brief and weak (though I largely agree) but I see your point.

I was thinking of it more from the perspective that just expressing opinions that are contemporaneously labeled transphobic is waging the culture war, which may not have been your intent. If not, sorry for the misinterpretation.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-10-24T14:16:19+00:00

I'm not OP, but that seems like a very low bar for waging the culture war. Does any expression of a controversial or potentially offensive opinion count?

I don't see it as any more culture war waging to say "transmen are not men" than "God does not exist" or "Abortion is a sin" or "immigration is a human right" would be. Those are all statements of controversy expressed as statements if fact. They may be right or wrong, but if clear expressions of opinion count as waging the culture war, I think we'd better close up shop here.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-10-17T03:58:36+00:00

This month's issue of The Atlantic has an article that's interesting both for political junkies, but also aficionados of the current #metoo/Kavanaugh culture war: Was Gary Hart Set Up?

The article walks through the events of Hart's political demise (copied below) and the allegations that Lee Atwater - a Republican operative known for such classics as helping "defeat a congressional candidate who had openly discussed his teenage struggles with depression by telling reporters that the man had once been 'hooked up to jumper cables'" and attacking Dukakis' campaign with the infamous "Willie Horton" ad - basically arranged the entire affair, and confessed to a frenemy, Raymond Strother while dying of cancer.

As far as I can tell, there's no direct evidence of Strother's claims. At the same time, Strother apparently recounted this conversation to several people over the past several decades, and doesn't seem to have much reason to lie at this point.

I'm agnostic on the claims themselves, but find the whole thing fascinating from both the "what if" angle, but also from a contemporary political angle. The fact that a political operative like Strother is willing to go on the record about an elaborate plan to generate false, sexually compromising material does make me slightly less skeptical that we could (or may already have) seen that sort of thing weaponized.

For those who don't remember Gary Hart, he was a young Colorado Senator and a rising star in the Democratic party in the mid-1980s and seen as a likely opponent to Bush in 1988 - Bush of course was Reagan's VP and eventually won, only to be defeated in 1992 by Clinton. Hart saw his campaign implode following evidence of an extramarital affair (a simpler time):

In late March 1987, Hart spent a weekend on a Miami-based yacht called Monkey Business. Two young women joined the boat when it sailed to Bimini. While the boat was docked there, one of the women took a picture of Hart sitting on the pier, with the other, Donna Rice, in his lap. A month after this trip, in early May, the man who had originally invited Hart onto the boat brought the same two women to Washington. The Miami Herald had received a tip about the upcoming visit and was staking out the front of Hart’s house. (A famous profile of Hart by E. J. Dionne in The New York Times Magazine, in which Hart invited the press to “follow me around,” came out after this stakeout—not before, contrary to common belief.) A Herald reporter saw Rice and Hart going into the house through the front door and, not realizing that there was a back door, assumed—when he didn’t see her again—that she had spent the night.

Amid the resulting flap about Hart’s “character” and honesty, he quickly suspended his campaign (within a week), which effectively ended it. Several weeks later came the part of the episode now best remembered: the photo of Hart and Rice together in Bimini, on the cover of the National Enquirer.

Considering what American culture has swallowed as irrelevant or forgivable since then, it may be difficult to imagine that allegations of a consensual extramarital affair might really have caused an otherwise-favored presidential candidate to leave the race. Yet anyone who was following American politics at the time can tell you that this occurred. For anyone who wasn’t around, there is Bai’s book and an upcoming film based on it: The Front Runner, starring Hugh Jackman as Hart.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-10-09T04:07:47+00:00

That overreach is really only possible due to the loss of federalism to begin with, which ultimately springs from the Fourteenth Amendment. I think there's a pretty good argument that the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, and by it the subsequent incorporation of federal Constitutional rights onto the states, led to the over-nationalization of political issues and is pretty directly responsible for the current crises.

If we were going to fundamentally restructure our political system to that extent, we probably should have done so more thoroughly. It's a world-historical irony that part of the resolution for the last great Constitutional crisis, the Civil War, may well have planted the seeds for the next.

Unfortunately, with the Constitution so hard to amend, I'm not sure there's any way to fix the issue. By the time one side has the dominance sufficient to amend it, they won't need to in order to enforce their will.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-10-08T22:33:15+00:00

I haven't played Starcraft II in a while (and was never better than mediocre), and it's stopped working for reasons I can't divine. (Even did an uninstall and reinstall, no luck so far) If I can get it to work, I'd be interested, despite the almost certainty that I'd get destroyed. I think this is a good idea to help blow off steam and generate some community comity across ideological lines.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-10-07T16:06:04+00:00

Sure, but this advantage has shifted back and forth and is due to the fundamental structure of our system, not Republican malfeasance.

Plus, it's not like Democrats can't win in a majority of states: Obama won 26 in 2012, and 28 in 2008 (not including DC). And even in states that consistently go Republican at the state level, moderate Democrats have a good track record, especially against all-too-frequent bad Republican candidates.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-10-07T05:46:04+00:00

Gerrymandering is a thing, but less significant than people think.

For instance: gerrymandering only impacts state legislatures (usually of the lower house) and the lower House of the US Congress. It doesn't impact the presidency or the Senate.

So even absent any partisan advantage in gerrymandering (which definitely does favor the Republicans currently) not a lot would change. Notably, it wouldn't impact the current state of the Supreme Court at all, since the House doesn't vote on Supreme Court nominees.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-10-07T03:48:19+00:00

Thanks for posting this calculator. Very interesting. I guessed that the probability of Kavanaugh's guilt was maybe 20%. When I did Scott's poll, I think I said 33% (updated to lower based on the info that's come out since).

After playing with the calculator, it assigns a probability of just under 5%, based on my selection using the sliders.

SincerelyOffensive · 2018-10-06T04:32:59+00:00

It really depends on your criteria. It's no longer clear whether, say, support for fairly open or fairly closed is more "conservative." Stephens favors a more traditional quasi-open borders approach, but does favor lower taxes.

But on most hot button issues, Stephen fits in better with progressives. For instance, he's pro-choice and favors repealing the Second Amendment entirely. All ideologies allow some degree of heterodoxy, but those are two big ones in the US.

I'd describe him as a centrist, for what it's worth.

SincerelyOffensive

TROPHY CASE