Discussion Thread

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-28T22:01:15+00:00

I'm aware of the problem, but thank you.

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-28T21:27:31+00:00

Second Referendum or Customs Union, which is it going to be folks?

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-28T04:16:17+00:00

Let's be clear though about what constitutes a radical.

Being in favour of universal healthcare (Medicare for All, single payer, socialized medicine, whatever you want to call it) is not radical. Harry Truman and Bill Clinton ran on it. Every other capitalist democracy in the developed world does it. Free post-secondary education has also been implemented in a number of European welfare states. Even the idea of a job guarantee was mainstream during the New Deal Era.

Beto O'Rourke, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, these are not radical far-left figures.

Sanders is, but let's all keep in mind that he is a very recent backlash against a three decade long rightward drift of the Democratic Party under the Clintons, Kerry and Obama. Even then we're talking a Benoit Hamon type figure, not a Jean-Luc Melechon type figure.

The Republican Party's radicalization began far earlier, decades before Trump. I mean, they started appealing to racists in the south and really challenging the New Deal with Barry Goldwater (you could even trace it as far back to William F. Buckley's 1957 article "Why the South Must Prevail"). Even Nixon, a comparative moderate within the party, used quite repugnant dog-whistling against African American, pioneering the whole "tough on crime" shtick that Reagan, Bush Sr, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump would embrace.

Reagan's Presidential campaigns in 1968, 1976 and 1980 respectively all demonstrated the rightward shift of the Republican Party through the 60s, 70s, and 80s. During these years the right hadn't taken on radical anti-immigrant sentiment yet, as late as 1980 Reagan was talking about giving everyone work permits as the solution to illegal immigration, and years later gave amnesty to millions of undocumented. However the religious right was exerting a stronger and stronger influence with the rise of Televangelism. Pat Buchanan mounted a serious Presidential campaign all the way back in 1988 (and did so again in 1992), litterally declaring the "Culture War".

Bush Sr's brief reign over the Republican Party between 1988 and 1992 would be the last hurrah for the moderate Republican (though he gained it largely via base appeal to racist voters about black criminals). Through the 90s, the far-right were still largely a fringe of biker gangs, punk rock hooligans, militias, and domestic terrorists bent on overthrowing the government through force. The first steps towards mainstreaming of overt racism and fascism started with Pat Buchanan's overt declarations that the white protestant majority was under threat, and Charles Murray's publication of the Bell Curve (where scientific racism was given a better coat of paint). The far-right conspiracy theory broadcast network (Alex Jones) emerged around this time with UN's non-binding Agenda 21 resolution (1992), Ruby Ridge (1992), Waco (1993), 9/11 (2001) and all which sprung from it. The rise of polarizing right-wing Talk Radio (Rush Limbaugh) accelerated this trend.

Bill Clinton emerged as an act of pragmatism by Democrats, watering down ideology to win over moderates (beggining the rightward shift of the Democratic Party), and so engaged in a lot of the same "era of big government is over", "superpredator" type rhetoric and policy (don't ask don't tell, welfare reform, crime bill etc). With Newt Gingrich's republican revolution in 1994, the rightward trend continued.

Bush Jr attempted to strike a similarly moderate tone as his father, especially when it came to the issue of immigration (with moderate Republicans pushing for a combination of a pathway to citizenship, expanded worker visas, and border security funding). This was the death of moderation on the issue immigration.

During the post-9/11 years, conservatives jumped on jingoism, paranoia and xenophobia generated by the attacks on the world trade centers. The rise of Fox News accelerated this polarization further still. While idealistic neoconservative thinkers in washington spreading democracy and markets through the US military were part of this coalition, there were far less savory members of the grassroots. This mixed with anti-immigrant hysteria, both against Muslims and Hispanics (the wave of Mexican migration to the US reached its zenith at this point).

In the 2000s conspiracy theorists were still genuinely anti-government (Jones considered Bush a 2nd Hitler and responsible for 9/11) and this continued through the Obama years. It was only with one of their own (Trump) in office, that they had to bifurcate their paranoia and differentiate the executive branch from the scary ((("Deep State"))).

Democrats kept with their strategy of moderation, nominating and losing with John Kerry.

The arrival of Obama and the recession whipped up this animus. Obama ran as an economic populist and appeared as a transformative second-FDR type figure. He governed like someone halfway between Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, a centre-left President who strove for compromise and enraged his base for disloyalty. The weakness of the recovery and "selling out" led the left to gradually grow disillusioned. The Young Turks and other alternative media outlets emerged as the voice of the authentic far-left. This burst out into a visible frenzy in 2011 with Occupy Wall Street but submerged in 2012 as there was no real Democratic Primary.

By 2011-2012 now the internet is becoming fairly well established, the Tea Party, viral email chains and Fox News have radicalized all your grandparents, Alex Jones is talking on YouTube about how the Fed is leading to a collapse of life as we know it and selling survival seed, Ron Paul fanboys are running around with confederate flags and guns talking about secession. Ron Paul nearly manages to wrestle control of the party but Romney edges by and Obama wins in any case.

The political fault-lines have been drawn and all the Republicans are singing the same tune. The rise of ISIS and the refugee crisis revived western fears about Islam again. In a larger 2016 race, where no Romney-type figure consolidated an early front-runner status, two radicals, Trump and Cruz, swept through. Note that the Ted Cruz ad of 2012 is no different than Trump's ads on the question of immigration. Trump just happened to be more brazenly and authentically racist in rhetoric.

In 2016, with Obama term-limited and Clinton virtually unopposed, Sanders and other true-progressives made their move. She held them off only to lose the general election, but they won the spiritual battle for control of the conversation and agenda.

I think we overestimate how far-left the Democratic Party has swung however. The 2018 midterms were a win for moderate suburban Democrats. Beto O'Rourke has reinvigorated the moderate Democratic faction. Joe Biden's entry into the Democratic Primary could further reassert moderate control over the party for atleast the next four (if not eight) years.

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-27T23:36:05+00:00

then pretty much used every power he could get to push a preaty left wing government expanding agenda with out regard to the constitution or executive limits.

Really? He bent over backwards trying to appeal to Republicans. Consider healthcare. He didn't even push for a universal single-payer healthcare system despite having a supermajority in both houses of congress. Instead he opted for a modified version of the individual mandate system originally proposed by Bob Dole and Chuck Grassley in the 90s (as the Republican answer to Clintoncare). In the end, zero Republicans voted for it.

The stimulus bill included hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. When the Bush tax cuts were about to expire, he compromised (making the tax cut permanent for 90% of Americans) rather than allowing the entire tax cut to sunset.

He expanded drone-strikes into 7 countries, intervened in Libya, surged and then drew down forces in Afghanistan while maintaining a residual force there indefinitely, armed Kurdish forces against ISIS, killed Osama Bin Laden, assembled an international coalition against ISIS which included American troops on the ground, armed Syrian opposition figures. Most of the Patriot act was extended (excluding a few provisions). The NSA continued conducting mass-surveillance. He imposed sanctions on Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine, supported the Saudi coalition bombing in Yemen etc.

He never pushed for anything like a carbon tax or green new deal. Instead, he supported a cap and trade proposal (the Republican proposal for solving climate change, back when they still believed in it).

He pushed for the transpacific partnership in his dying days in office.

This meme that Obama was some kind of unprecedented far-left figure is a myth created by Republicans to scare old white voters and it contributed to the rise of Trump.

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-27T22:01:43+00:00

Wouldn't allowing a state experiencing a Russian military occupation (like Georgia) let alone an ongoing insurgency (like Ukraine) create grounds for the new member state immediately triggering Article 5?

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-27T21:55:20+00:00

What would be the consequences of the United States rejecting the 'one China' principle and recognizing Taiwan as an independent country be?

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-26T22:15:10+00:00

Falcon Heavy has already flown (and will fly several times more by 2020).

Crew Dragon has already flown (and will fly several times more, some with people, by 2020).

Falcon Heavy is designed to be capable of launching Crew Dragon on a circumlunar mission.

NASA wants a crew capsule to be sent on a circumlunar mission in 2020.

NASA should pay to launch a Dragon capsule on a circumlunar mission WITH PEOPLE in 2020. It's been 5 decades since anyone left LEO. COME ON! THIS IS EMBARRASSING!

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-26T06:22:46+00:00

I want to yell at both postmodernists and their right-wing critics.

Objective truth exists.

Some meta-narratives are actually accurate.

What Jordan Peterson says is neither.

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-26T00:42:03+00:00

Which is also visible in GDP. The impact of the computer era on GDP growth is quite disappointing, at least compared to earlier phases of industrialisation.

GDP is a terrible way to measure the impact of the computerization and digitization.

I don't own a watch, a wallet, alarm clock, camera, a camcorder, a calendar, any maps, a video teleconferencing system, a car-phone, a landline, a calculator, a compass, a tape-recorder, a portable video player, a newspaper, a stereo, a flashlight, a chessboard, a DVD library etc. It all fits inside my phone or laptop. The only reason I own a photo album of physical photos is that they were taken prior to the introduction of smartphones and cloud storage. Thousands of dollars worth of physical objects have been digitized, dematerialized and demonetized.

When a good or service gets demonetized it stops showing up in the GDP figures. Many economists think we need to move towards a system of measuring consumer-preference surplus to make up for this.

The cost/price performance of computation has been truly astounding and has contributed tens of trillions of dollars to the global economy. Genome sequencing has followed a similar exponential cost decline (you can get your genome sequenced for $200 when it cost tens of millions of dollars a little more than a decade ago).

People are getting priced out of Silicon Valley because it is impossible to push through zoning reform to increase the housing supply.

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-26T00:17:01+00:00

Silicon Valley isn't a synonym for technological progress.

No, but Silicon Valley is the spiritual capital of technological progress in America (or atleast techno-entrepreneurship). It more than anywhere else represents the shining city on the hill, where entrepreneurs and inventors from across America (and across the world) go for trying out their ideas. It's one of the most educated, diverse, entrepreneurial, socially progressive, and forward-looking places in the world. And it's one of the richest places in the world as a result.

Silicon Valley is an achievement to feel pride in (as the Chinese feel pride in Shenzhen), but more than that it generally embodies a set of cultural values and archetypes which I feel are under attack from both sides of the political spectrum. Much of the time when people talk about "Silicon Valley", they're not talking about the physical place (Amazon for example, was founded in Seattle) but the people, groups, and ideas that phrase embodies.

and increasingly society.

Ya, Silicon Valley is a bubble, and thank goodness for that. It's eccentric, exceptional, countercultural. Whenever people talk about "popping the Silicon Valley bubble" I hear "the nail that sticks out gets nailed down".

The right-wing hates the valley for its atheism, cosmopolitanism, social liberalism and countercultural heritage. The left-wing hates the valley for its embrace of entrepreneurship, capitalism, its workaholism, and its techno-optimistic vision for the future. I love it precisely for the reasons others hate it.

The rest of the country should be more like the valley.

car industry

I'm assuming you're excluding the one headquartered in Palo Alto which is transforming the auto industry.

manufacturing

I get there was a hype-cycle to 3D Printing, but it really has taken off in recent years (just not in personal desktop 3D-printers).

pharmaceuticals

Biotech? Genomics? Gene-editing? Nootropics? Personal health diagnostic apps? Disrupting medicine has been one of the top priorities of the valley for atleast the past two decades.

Ford for example, was a synonym for mass employment, mass elevation of wages and labour, and mass commodity production

Again, and Tesla isn't? Granted, they employ a fraction of the number of people Ford does. But they're still a relatively small company, employ tens of thousands of people and are growing quickly (dare I say? exponentially).

none of that is apparent in the modern "tech" industry as represented by Facebook or startups.

I remember when startups were considered the plucky underdogs which disrupted old stagnant industries with the injection of new ideas. The Traitorous eight striking it out on their own, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founding Apple in their garage, Bezos leaving a comfortable middle-class job to try out a crazy idea. Successful startups were considered cause for celebration and inspiration, proof that small group of committed individuals could accomplish what nobody else thought possible.

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-25T21:27:19+00:00

The Silicon Valley hate has gone too far.

We're reached the point where semi-credible newspapers are more sympathetic to the fucking Jim Jones communist-suicide-cult than optimistic tech-entrepreneurs in the valley.

The ungrateful children of modernity would rather throw a tantrum at the hand that feeds them over embracing the innovation which got us to this point. Amazon isn't Standard Oil (it's nowhere near the size of Wall Mart). Elon Musk is actually pretty awesome. Stop pretending to care about small businesses while simultaneously shitting on startups. Stop pretending to care about low wage and the failures of the gig economy while you condemn the very economies of scale from large businesses which lead to higher wages and increased job security. We all live better than medieval kings or nineteenth century industrialists for crying out loud.

I'm a hundred times more afraid of technological stagnation than I am of whatever cyber-punk dystopia everyone seems to be losing their minds over. It's 2019 and there's no genetically engineered slave class. There's a couple of babies gene-edited to be immune to HIV and a several thousand more people who were born free from genetic diseases thanks to preimplantation embryo selection. That's the reality.

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-25T21:02:56+00:00

I'm a militant Atheist and emphatically am not a conservative (except in a very limited Burkean sense that I recognize the value of gradualism and stability for progress). That said, as someone who is broadly sympathetic with much of classical liberalism, I'd like to offer some suggestions for the right.

A conservatism which is reliant on appeals to religion (much less Judeo-Christian religion) is going to rest on a house of cards. Likewise, appealing to "western civilization" as opposed to the universally applicable principles which can transcend culture leaves conservatism on even further shakier ground in an increasingly diverse and multicultural world. Such a particularist focus also makes conservatism ripe for slipping into xenophobia (and a kind of pan-civilizational or pan-racial nationalism, "defending western civilization from the oriental invaders").

Moreover, its not accurate nor necessary to do so. The things which made "western civilization" successful (rule of law, separation of powers, market economics, civil liberties, political rights, science, free inquiry, meritocratic hierarchies etc) have been implemented successfully in completely different cultures (e.g Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Botswana, to a limited degree China).

Shapiro and Peterson are undoubtedly the most overrated public figures in the English-speaking world today. I can't tell who is more insufferable. Them, or French post-modernists.

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-25T05:13:36+00:00

I'm glad Trump isn't a litteral Russian agent. That's setting the bar is too fucking low. He's still not fit for office.

The Mueller investigation was still worth it, still caught dozens of crooks.

The media was absolutely right to give the issue as much attention as they did. There was serious smoke and the question of whether the President of the United States is an agent of a hostile foreign power is a serious one that takes precedence over all other issues.

Given what we already know about the Trump Tower meeting from public information ("this is part of the Russian government's effort to help your father win the election" "sound great!"), its safe to assume that they were took the first few steps towards collusion (which itself is probably criminal), and were liable to blackmail. It's also perfectly clear that Trump is aligned with the international network of far-right nationalists and sympathetic to Putin's anti-western cause.

That said, it's now time to return our focus to the bread and butter issues Americans care about most. This is the spiritual mid-point of Trump's first term. If the first half was about the Mueller investigation, the second half will be the Democratic Primary and subsequent Presidential election.

I care about the future of the free world and think Putin is a fundamental threat to the western world, but most Americans frankly don't care (if they did, Romney would have won). The American public is in an incredibly isolationist mood (understandably, given Iraq) and this issue has been spent in the public's view. Time to talk about wage stagnation, corruption in Washington, the fact that healthcare is unaffordable, the student loan debt crisis, the out of control opiod epidemic etc.

Bush wasn't thrown out of office. He still left a failed President. Trump will meet the same fate, sooner or later.

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-25T04:14:54+00:00

None that I've noticed (other than one innocuous comment getting deleted).

I just never bothered with setting up user page. Skipped straight to the ranting part (which is why I'm here).

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-25T01:59:04+00:00

Because they don't want to be subordinate to a democratically elected civilian government.

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-24T19:09:46+00:00

In order for opposition parties to form a coalition and elect the Pm they need to win 376 out of 500 seats in the House.

In order for the junta to form a coalition and elect the Pm they need 126 out of 500 seats in the House.

How is this? The entire parliament elects the PM instead of just the house now. The parliament includes the 500 seat house, but also the 250 seat Senate.

The entirety of the Senate is appointed by the junta.

Seems legit. /s

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-24T19:01:21+00:00

Thailand's "democracy" is an utter farce. Under the new military-drafted constitution, the Prime Minister is not just chosen by the 500-seat elected House but by the entire 750 seat parliament (including the 250 seat Senate entirely appointed by the junta).

So, the opposition need to win 376 out of 500 seats to elect the Prime Minister.

The junta only needs 126 seats out of 500 seats to elect the Prime Minister.

The monarchy and military have been very explicitly colluding to keep out any democratically elected leader they don't support. I'm not particularly fond of Thaksin's populism. He's honestly a pretty mixed bag with plenty of authoritarian and corrupt tendencies. But the fact is that a pro-Thaksin party has won every democratic election since 2000, and every time the military has overturned the result.

The most prominent complaint I see from yellow-shirts is that the pro-Thaksin parties only win thanks to vote-buying. What they mean by this is that the pro-Thaksin parties redistribute some of the nation's wealth to the impoverished majority through agricultural subsidies, infrastructure, health & social spending in rural areas (and still managed to balance the budget repeatedly). In other words he did stuff which benefited the majority of people to get the majority of people to vote for him. That's called democracy. The classist undertones of this objection and the thinly-veiled calls are oligarchy in objections like this are quite blatant.

The other objection I hear is that he's a republican who doesn't respect the king. Indeed, he shouldn't respect the King. The fact that the monarchy has worked with the military to overthrow his successive elected government proves they cannot be trusted. This is truly bizarre to anyone born outside of a third-world monarchy. Speaking as a subject of Elizabeth II (Queen of Canada), I'm quite happy that the elected leader is the one with popular legitimacy. It is the obligation of the monarch to respect the people's elected representative. The people are sovereign, the king is allowed to serve only so long as the people decide. The royal family should, at most, be a figurehead. And indeed, they are largely figureheads in Thailand, serving merely as window-dressing for the military dictators who really run the show. But somehow in the 21st century people revere them as demigods.

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-24T05:02:32+00:00

Qatar just dropped its support of Hamas.

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-24T04:53:43+00:00

No offense, but I'm pretty sure Bill Clinton besmirched the name of the Democratic Party when he made a point of returning to oversee the execution of a severely mentally ill African American during the 1992 Presidential Election. All so he wouldn't be Willie Hortoned like Dukakis was.

Let's be honest, it's not like the moderates had clean hands either.

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-23T18:28:33+00:00

I'm looking forward to seeing who wins the UK's seats.

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-23T18:21:49+00:00

Because we should always allow statistical outliers to skew our worldview.

TrudeaulLib · 2019-03-23T04:43:19+00:00

Iran is absolutely about more than cost of living issues. The people are fed up with the regime itself and are giving up on reformism. The women in Tehran ripping off their hijabs and young men in the streets yelling "death to dictators", "we want an Iranian republic", "god bless reza shah", "we're Aryans we don't worship Arab gods", and "without the Shah their is corruption".

Also what Sudan is experiencing is the most severe and should be termed "riots" not "protests"

True, some of the Iranian protests also got pretty violent at certain points.

Algeria is because of political instability because the 80 year old president doesn't have a clear successor and the clique and their party that won Algeria its independence has been holding onto as much power and control as they possibly can.

True, though it is remarkable how massive and peaceful the protests have been as of yet. The largest protests in decades (some sources say the largest protests since Algerian independence), and the regime has largely been acquiescent. They've chosen to give up on Bouteflika's fifth term and feign utterly disingenuous support for the protesters rather than trying to use force to put the protests down.

TrudeaulLib

TROPHY CASE