Signifyin(g)Monkey

There will likely be a lot less people in place who will tell him "No, you can't do that." If you read what Mattis, Barr, Tillerson, Priebus, Scaramucci and others who were his advisors during his first administration, you'll see that he really wanted to do way crazier shit than he actually did (!!!) during his term, but was more or less told no by people who understand how the government of a large liberal democracy works. Next time around, those people probably won't be there. It'll be anti-institutionalist authoritarians staffing the administration, and everyone else is just going to have to watch Rome burn.

I would still argue that said neighborhoods were out of bounds before—it’s just that the zero interest rates were concealing their unaffordability. i.e., housing has been getting continually less affordable since ‘08, and the American middle class has been getting hollowed out as a result—but low interest rates made it so that it didn’t notice. Now the veil’s been lifted and it’s understandably pissed off. It’s worth noting that the historical average for interest rates is a little under 6%. I’d say if a huge amount of housing is unaffordable to huge swathes of the middle class at that rate, it means the middle class is in bad shape—and that kind of long-term decline in standing doesn’t happen in 4 years. It’s the kind of thing that takes at least two decades, I.e. a generation or so. But I realize it’s a take not everyone’s going to agree with.

I'm gonna come out and say it: I think we are in the midst of an AI hype-wave that will probably implode in 1990s tech-bubble fashion, albeit likely at a smaller, less horrible scale. I'm seeing tons of companies popping up that are offering nothing more than thin wrappers written around Chat GPT, and billing them as game-changing innovations; and I'm seeing investors tossing money their way with reckless abandon. Not sustainable IMO. Fortunately, I think once the hype wave implodes, what survives it will be the truly innovative, game-changing stuff. [*clears throat and prepares to shout into the wilderness*] Either way, we need to start revising IP law like yesterday to make the coming AI-driven economy sustainable!

point one: I realize people don’t think like this—which is part of the problem here—but maybe you can, so I’m going to ask you: Can you name one country that is doing better? Because I can’t. The US has the lowest inflation in the G20, and a historically tight labor market. What country’s post-pandemic economic performance is the U.S. falling short of? Point two: Again, people don’t think this way, but it’s worth saying: their lives were getting worse before—they just didn’t realize it. Take housing—people say “I can’t afford a house now, but I could a few years ago.” This is false. If you can’t afford a house at anything other than zero interest rates, you can’t afford a house. An interest rate of zero is not historically normal. If ‘normal’ interest rates put housing out of reach for most Americans, then housing is just straight unaffordable. The zero interest rates were just concealing it. Same with inflation. If your income hasn’t risen enough for you to handle a little inflation, then you haven’t been getting paid enough. The abnormally quiescent inflation since ‘08 has just been hiding the trend. What I see is basically a very strong economy that is coinciding with a general awakening of the population to the fact that the middle class has been brutalized since ‘08. Basically, this economy is as good as it gets in this world. But people are realizing that even a strong economy now can’t paper over the damage that’s been done to them, and they are being forced to confront the fact that they are not as wealthy as they thought they were—and that pisses them off, and gets conflated with the current performance of the economy. Even though the two are separate (if related) issues.

The fact that this whole subject isn’t talked about much at all is one of the many things that totally convinced me our media ecosystem is truly broken. Every single time I’ve caught a comment to the effect of “the January 6 thing is way overblown, it was just a riot” and have had the opportunity to slip in the question “What are your thoughts on the fake electors scheme?” I invariably get “The what now?” as a response. Then again, it was only a plot to overthrow the government by a former president, right? You can’t expect people to keep up with every little thing.

Registered at IGN in 2002, was a serial lurker forever until around the time of the D1P Great Migration. I just had my 40th… Holy fuck, I’m a grumpy old man. If you’re one of those early-to-mid-2000s-born whippersnappers, you better get off my lawn.

Also, ‘Breaking: Substack Nate Silver Writes Something I Agree With’ I know this was touched on in an earlier thread, but I really don’t know why this isn’t issue #1 for Senate Democrats. The election is far from a shoe-in, and losing one more seat means progressive legislation will be fought tooth-and-nail by the rationalizations of an Uber-conservative Supreme Court for decades. The only other road out of Purgatory short of the nuclear (and probably ultimately counterproductive) option of packing the court is to start talking about term limits for Supreme Court judges. Which would probably be unconstitutional—but would probably have to be struck down by the court before its unconstitutional effects could be curtailed. At which point the problematic judges would be gone, if the gambit works fast enough. As an institutionalist I wouldn’t like that method, but unfortunately Pandora’s box is open and we all know that’s how the game is played now anyway. And it might be (slightly) less end-of-days than a court-packing scheme.

I don’t think you can really make any assumptions about anything in this election, more so than usual. We haven’t had a former president square off against an incumbent since the 19th century; we have more people telling pollsters that they dislike both candidates than we have ever had since we’ve been keeping track; and our media environment is so fragmented that no one can agree on wtf is going on. We had an insurrection at the capitol every moment of which was broadcast on the news, yet half the country believes it didn’t happen. We have a man running for president who was found guilty of sexual assault, with a charge for rape that a judge pronounced to be ‘substantially true’, yet half the country doesn’t even acknowledge it, and claims they’d consider voting for him. Unemployment is historically low and economic and wage growth is stronger than its been in decades yet when polled 4 months ago six in ten Americans say they think the economy is in recession. We are seeing a complete breakdown of the information ecosystem that allows voters to understand what’s going on in the world beyond their immediate environment, and a historic collapse of the civic norms that are the guardrails of democracy. We are not a republic of rational politics anymore, so rational assumptions are no longer a surefire guide to what our future looks like, especially in the matter of elections.

I thought the prosecutors here and in the other cases had a policy of not proceeding with prosecutions against candidates for office after a certain ‘point of no return’ late in the election season, and the gambit was to stall until that date? Maybe it’s just in the Georgia case, I can’t remember.

Trump’s own lawyers are (successfully) violating his right to a speedy trial lol Trump’s hush money trial was set to begin Monday. Here’s what’s happening instead | CNN Politics AMP.CNN.COM Judge Juan Merchan is holding a pre-trial hearing Monday to discuss the discovery issues that led to the delay of the trial on charges brought by the Manhattan district attorney related...

The House GOP just gave Biden’s campaign a huge gift WWW.VOX.COM Roughly 80 percent of House Republicans just lined up behind a plan to cut Social Security and ban all abortions. Memo to Biden and the Dems: blare it from the rooftops Hopefully this will help bring the “but mah groceries” voting bloc to their senses. Although IMO he still needs to remind everyone that Bibi is Hamas’ best friend, and make peace talks a condition of any further aid, if he truly wants to save us from The Orange One come November.

I remember doing some calculations for funsies circa 2010 or so that led me to conclude that plowing your savings into high-value whiskey at that time would net you a better 30-year return than 30-year treasuries or gold. (the luxury stuff actually appreciates pretty reliably) Granted, you'd need to store it safely and not drink too much of it and all that fine print. Yes, I drank a lot of bourbon in my 20s.

Beshear maybe, Newsom has a bunch of skeletons in his closet from the lockdown era and the mantle of California doesn’t appeal to swing voters in Middle America the way it did in the age of Reagan. The problem is timing—Biden would have had to step down, and then giving Harris the shaft would probably tank the black vote. Win or lose, we need some new blood after the 2024 elections, though. Provided Trump doesn’t manage to rig all the elections after that, should he get back into office.

Just occurred to me that I wanted to post this article, not only to illustrate that the de facto suspension of democracy is certainly a distinct possibility even in an ‘advanced’ Western country, but in case anyone ever encounters another poster—here or elsewhere—minimizing the threat of Trump, and needs a good article that outlines an example of someone like him succeeding in their anti-democratic campaigns, in a place not named ‘Russia’. Also an interesting read even if you already know a little bit about Orban. How Viktor Orbán Wins | Journal of Democracy WWW.JOURNALOFDEMOCRACY.ORG The case of Hungary shows how autocrats can rig elections legally, using legislative majorities to change the law and neutralize the opposition at every turn, no matter what...

If you posit that impeachment has become just another campaign strategy, then it makes perfect sense. Republican voters by and large will not care whether the impeachment succeeds or fails, they will assume Biden's guilt regardless and feel energized; and swing voters are so buffeted by competing sources of information portraying entirely different realities that they won't know what to think, and just go with the prevailing anti-establishment political sentiment and say "Yeah I don't know the details but they're all corrupt so he probably did something naughty." I wouldn't be surprised to see the impeachment process become a recurring staple of campaign season.

So, in other election news: my advice to anyone who thinks polling isn't a totally broken science and has some knowledge of historical precedents in polling trends is...avert your eyes, unless the prospect of living under Orbanian soft fascism and the hellscape of Project 2025 gives you the warm fuzzies. Because right now many of the most recent post-SOTU polls that are dropping show Biden's approval rating at an all-time low--even as views of the economy are improving--and Trump ahead in Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Yes, there's close to seven months to go; yes, they are a snapshot of public opinion right now, and not communiques from Delphi predicting the future; yes, people might not be paying attention yet. But no incumbent in the poll era has ever come back from deficits like this, and neither Biden nor Trump are unknown quantities, so a major makeover is a taller order than it would be were they fresh faces. So, if you're trying to brew up some copium with polling data, seek other means, because the ingredients at your disposal are pretty terrible. You've got things like "maybe the coming election will break with historical precedent", "maybe polling is a defunct way to measure public opinion", "hey the midterms worked out better than we thought". But "hey Biden's gonna poll well because he's running against a convicted rapist who's also guilty of fraud who also tried to overturn the results of a presidential election and also has a publicly available plan to create a right-wing authoritarian state" is not a viable ingredient at the moment--it's just a reason to feel like an alien in your own country. Because when polled about half of the country says "Hey that rapist doesn't sound so bad, maybe he'll make my groceries less expensive."

Yeah that's more or less my take, too. I don't think it will stop people from registering concern with his age in polls, but it'll reassure the average voter that he's not senile. It also did a good job of making overtures to all the party factions and voter blocs he's going to need to turn out. There was a little bit for both the centrist and the progressive wings of the party, he leaned into women's issues, and he at least acknowledged the concerns about the conflict in Gaza and backed a two-state solution to bring democrats split on that issue back into the fold. I think the best hope we have is that we'll see more of this from him, and that Trump will engage in his usual lunacy, so that over the course of the final leg of the campaign swing voters will ultimately be convinced that it's a better idea to vote for the boring-but-not-crazy grandpa over the completely insane grandpa.

I do too, but only incidentally, as with every other head; the essential blame I place on the heart that’s pumping blood to all of them.

Not so much cool with it as resigned to the fact that there’s nothing we can really do about it at this point, except probably make it worse. Regardless, I would argue that you’re perhaps overlooking a key dynamic here, which is that Hamas is an accomplice to the IDF in this genocide. They and Bibi (and various other enabling parties, like the U.S.) are interconnected parts of the same genocidal system. The genocide ends when the system gets reformed, and fundamentally both Hamas and the Israeli political and military establishment must play an equal part in that. I just don’t think blaming one head on the hydra more than another for the hydra’s depredations is the right way to think about the beast’s behavior. But I realize it’s not the most popular take.

Don't suppose you've all heard about Ezra Klein's brilliant idea? Biden steps down before the Democratic convention, and the party picks a 'better' nominee. Points for originality, but I'm not sure it would work out like he wants it to.

You forgot Hamas. Let's not be coy here--there is no belligerent party in this conflict that is not being shitty. Israel has no self-restraint, the US is enabling them, and Hamas is trying to maximize the casualty count for recruiting purposes. (after having provoked Israel in the first place with their own murderous rampage) I really wish the US would just wash its hands of the whole damn conflict and leave the region to self-fund its fruitless genocidal circular firing squad, but, ya know, geopolitics and the MIC...

I think the case against the realpolitik "They're gonna do it to us anyway so we might as well do it to them" argument rests less on the idea that 'playing by the rules' will prevent Republicans from trying to pull 'dirty tricks' than on the idea that it will radicalize the party (and thence its 'dirty tricks) a bit less. Or at least a bit slower. (IMO, in the current news environment, it's going to continue to radicalize regardless, the question is how quickly and at what scale) The problem is you're playing a game of escalation against an opponent who has way less scruples than you. Trying to out-escalate them won't work when there are lines they are willing to cross that you aren't. You can't win a shouting match with your crazy schizophrenic uncle--you have to try and just pacify him instead, so that he'll still be insane, but not insane enough to fly into a blind rage and beat you to death. And I just feel like this quickly gets us into batshit crazy territory like every red state passing laws that bar anyone who supports a women's choice to have an abortion from being on their primary ballot, making it functionally impossible for the Dems to win an election, or something along those lines. Stuff that risks pushing us into some kind of Bosnian War-type situation. (To be clear, though, yes, I'd say he's probably guilty of insurrection)

Waiting for the sequel, where Alabama can sue you for violating their ‘unborn child safety’ laws, even though you don’t live in Alabama.

I know this could go in a sports-related forum, but this is a pretty big deal in terms of some key political issues, including to what extent college athletics should pay its players, whether it can really continue to call itself ‘college’ athletics at all, and the general ethical quandaries of mixing big money sports with academic institutions given Americans’ perceptions about rising college costs. Plus my football team is about to become even more irrelevant and I’m already getting ready to miss ‘the good old days’. Federal judge blocks NCAA from enforcing NIL rules THEATHLETIC.COM The ruling leaves the NCAA's NIL rules in flux until the end of the lawsuit brought against the organization by Tennessee and Virginia.

This type of thing was going to happen eventually—moral panics targeting marginalized groups always have to rack up body counts before people on the fence realize just how dumb they’re being. The question is how many people will get burned at the stake before Salem —erm, I mean America—wakes the fuck up. Most important lesson in ‘chud solidarity 101’: if you say it, it’s true, as long as it supports chudworld, because what chud is actually going to take the time to figure out you’re lying—or care, for that matter?