immutable

I don’t know if it’s really taken that long. A lot of politically active Americans have been saying this for going on 40 years now.

The crushing defeat of Mondale in 84 led the party to abandon anything even remotely working class, then Clinton’s “triangulation strategy” in the 90s cemented the Dems as a center / center-right party.

I remember reading articles in 2004 about how the Overton window had shifted so much that Dems were right wing.

The problem with norms are that they are not enforceable and trump and maga showed that you can have all the power if you just don’t follow them.

We can’t pretend like we can go back to a world where good actors will voluntarily follow norms. What is needed is laws with teeth and more importantly punishment for powerful people that break those laws.

The Dems showed during the Biden administration that after 4 years of breaking the law in broad daylight they weren’t going to hold anyone in trumps administration accountable. I don’t hold out a bunch of hope that the same party leadership which continues to signal a business as usual stance is really going to change the next time around.

Most gambling winnings go right back into gambling and are subsequently lost.

I would be surprised if it was “far less” although mathematically it must be strictly less.

I like King of the Hill and I've rewatched it a dozen times.

I think the biggest problem with the show is that Hank Hill’s values are rarely challenged with reasonable alternatives. There are a number of episodes where his foil is a somewhat ridiculous straw man.

And so you end up with Hank Hill who is outwardly conservative in his politics but pretty moderate and liberal in his personal views. But he can’t embrace liberal politics because a couple times a season they will throw out some absurd liberal that is failing to parent correctly or live right and reaffirm the correctness of conservativism.

If republicans acted like Hank Hill I’d have not problem with them, but they think they are Hank Hill while being Cotton.

I have come to believe that there are two anti-social groups of humans that must be controlled for any system to function.

I think you can judge the viability of any governing and economic system by how they control these two anti-social groups.

Group 1, law breakers. Those that don’t follow the rules everyone else agrees to.

Group 2, commons spoilers. Those that can never be satisfied and take and take or waste and waste the resources of the society for personal gain.

Western capitalist society has answers for these two groups.

For group 1 we have a partial answer. If you have a low degree of power the state will beat, imprison, or kill those that break laws. If you have a high degree of power, you are likely able to break most laws with impugnity.

For group 2 we have a partial answer. Capitalism attempts to convert greed into productive ends for society. It’s ok if you can never be satisfied or if you are always trying to figure out some way to gain a little bit more, that’s the profit motive and a side effect is that it will produce more good for the system than bad.

I think both constraints in western capitalism are insufficient and a lot of the structural problems we face are due to these two groups being insufficiently addressed.

Could communism, the collective ownership of the means of production in a stateless society, work? I suspect it wouldn’t have the capacity to sufficiently constrain either group, while we fret about group 1 because a murderer can do a lot of damage to an individual, group 2 tends to be the people that actually destroy societal systems.

Now could collective ownership work with better controls, yes. In fact many human societies work this way, most family units work in this way (very rarely does a father charge their 8 year old for crackers from a pantry, within the household most things are collectively owned)

Smaller communities and intentional communities can function in a communal fashion, often using a mix of rules but more often social norms to prevent these groups from acting out against the societal structures.

Every system is at risk from these two groups, and what you do with them and how you control them determines the contours of your society and how well it will function.

In my ideal world you would provide enough to group 1 that they wouldn’t need to commit crimes to meet their basic needs and they would have fulfilling enough lives that losing access to society would be sufficient deterrent, although for those that truly want to do harm some kind of state violence is likely required, be that prison or reeducation. For group 2 it should be socially unacceptable but also the main role of government to prevent those people from ruining the commons. A billionaire is a much more dangerous threat to societal order than a shoplifter and the majority of the focus should be on preventing people from exploiting the system so that they get a massive pile of wealth and power they can use to corrupt society.

Yea I don’t mean to come across as defeatist, I still vote and vote for the less bad option which is the Dems.

I think the thing that I get frustrated by is when supporters of the Democratic Party complain about voters sitting out as if it’s just some unthinkable outcome.

The reality of America is that there’s a lot of low engagement and low information voters, this shouldn’t be some startling revelation to the Democratic Party leadership.

They continue to pursue a strategy of

1. Beg for money, use that money to beg for more money and run ads to try to influence low engagement and low information voters to vote for them
2. If they lose, blame turnout
3. if they win, well gee golly shucks, a lot of that money is step 1 came from wealthy groups that dont want us to deliver anything tangible. Maybe we can deliver on social issues the wealthy dont mind or highly technocratic bills that while mostly benefitting the wealthy technically do make some goods slightly cheaper so we can say we did something for them.
4. hmm voters aren’t excited, we need to do step 1 even harder now

And after 3 decades of this “third way” strategy we find ourselves with a party that can raise lots of money and lose lots of elections. One that even when they get the levers of powers looks at all the checks they got from the wealthiest to get there and decide that the poor and middle class will just have to keep suffering.

They look at someone like Mamdani in New York being wildly popular by promising and following through on tangible things for people and scoff and go “that could never work outside of New York”

I live in Ohio, I would like the government to solve problems that impact me. I would like my taxes ro translate into services and infrastructure I can enjoy. And I think if the democrats made that a part of their strategy they wouldn’t have to go begging to the wealthiest amongst us for money to run ads to try to turn out the votes. The voters would show up because of the tangible improvements they made.

Trump lost in 2020 because everyone came out and voted against him.

And then Biden sat on his hands, let trump rebuild and the Dems lost in 2024.

The Republican Party is actively dismantling democracy, but the Democratic Party isn't defending it. And then voters who expected something would happen, people would be held accountable, things would get better, we wouldn’t have to live through more horrors, get discouraged.

And then memes come out and tell those discouraged people, “actually you know what, you’re a dumb baby.”

The Democratic Party needs to start delivering things. Actual, tangible things to their voters. Not a CHIPs act, that does some nebulous grab bag of subsidies to Intel, not an ACA that entrenches the power of the insurance companies we all hate. They need to actually make peoples lives better and not have it phase in over 20 years and be easily dismantled by the next Republican congress.

We get told again and again, change takes time. But then the republicans take power and change is instantaneous. New tax code written by and for the ultra wealthy, done. Concentration camps and hundreds of billions for ICE to become a gestapo, done. Worldwide tariffs, sure why not! A war in Iran, well if trump feels like it, all it takes is a tweet.

No sane person should ever vote for a Republican again, but if the Democratic Party would like to know why people don’t care about voting for them, it’s because they don’t deliver anything worth voting for. A decade after their biggest legislation this century, the Affordable Care Act, the average American is cheering for the assassination of a health insurance CEO because their industry is still so reviled. Which is the best indication that it did not fix the problem.

Agreed which is why the only words out of your mouth to a cop should be “I want a lawyer”

she has the feed automatically sent to Anthropic’s Claude to she’s how she did.

Bad. Your date was very concerned about you recording the date without their permission, you broke down shouting, “your triggering me! This is for me! Everything is about me! Me! Me! Me!!!”

The date left shortly thereafter.

Miranda rights only apply if the police are asking you incriminating questions.

If you are being arrested and questioned theres actually never any advantage of demanding to be read your rights, I see a lot of people demanding the police read them their rights.

When the police read you your rights it protects the police not you.

If you are questioned and incriminate yourself there are two possibilities. They did not read you your Miranda rights, in which case almost any lawyer in the country can get that incriminating statement thrown out because you weren’t read your rights. The did read you your Miranda rights, in which case you are fucked, you were informed you didn’t have to answer but incriminated yourself anyways.

It is never in your interest to demand they read you your rights and you should never really be upset if they don’t. Either they don’t have to or they just fucked up to your benefit.

Talk to people.

It sucks, but that’s the actual answer. You talk to the people that could be potential romantic partners. And you actually take an interest in them as a person and if they take an interest in you too, romance sometimes happens.

The hardest part is that if you are lonely and want a romantic partner, it can be hard to follow. Some people, myself included, are introverts that would prefer not to talk to lots of people. Sometimes the goal of obtaining a partner incorrectly becomes primary (either because you are lonesome, or because you think it’s the next step in your life, etc). It is very difficult to talk to someone and take a genuine interest in them and open up about yourself enough for them to take an interest in you when your focus is on obtaining a partner because people can sense that.

Talk to people, genuinely talk and listen and care about them (or realize you aren’t compatible). It sounds simple but it is really quite difficult. If you want to find people to talk to, engage in the world in things you like where potential romantic partners might also show up.

And if it feels weird, talk to more people, but more than talk listen to them. Not sure what to talk about? Ask them about themselves, people love to talk about themselves. Practice more and more talking to people, all kinds of people. Join groups that meet in person and talk to people. Get good at talking to people and the more you talk the more interesting experiences you have and the more interesting experiences you have the more interesting a partner you become and one day one of those people you are talking to is going to feel important and then you tell them that.

And it might work, it might not, they might not feel the same, you might have a couple awkward conversations that go no where. But we are social creatures, we want to talk and connect and be heard, we want to sit together and spend time together and eat together and share in one another.

My life changed for the better the day I realized I was the only one stopping me from experiencing this.

Yoy see critical race theory would help explain the struggles of others, so obviously that’s bad. Now the authors personal struggles, those need to be addressed.

Perfect logical sense