United States Politics Thread 46

[Emily]

I love how every mention of the objectively true fact that capitalism leads to irrationalities results in mentions of stalin. this is exactly the reason why it's easier to imagine the end of the world than capitalism. stalin was a hundred years ago, or close enough. there are other options than neoliberalism forever [which is where we're headed] and stalin.

Gosh, you almost understand that there are more than two alternatives, and then in the same post it's back to--

capitalism is obviously sometimes an explanation. capitalism is the system that organizes most of social life, you think that doesn't have any effects?

i.e. lol capitalism which is all one system, but don't dare to suggest that the other one holy soviet system has problems.

for someone who is constantly telling people not to put words into other people's mouths, zompist, you consistently excuse yourself from that rule any time someone starts talking about socialism. you will enter into any other discussion in good faith, but as soon as someone to the left of bernie sanders enters the conversation it goes completely out the window. chill the fuck out dude

[zompist]

Housing prices are a problem just about everywhere on this planet. You hear the same stories in New York, Lyon, Paris, even Moscow -- even Beijing and Shanghai if I remember this right.

But less so in Japan, for a simple reason: they build more housing.

People really tie themselves into knots on this one issue, but housing is not an exception to the general rule that when you make more of something it costs less. Japan builds about 6.9 housing units per thousand residents, California just 2.4.

I don't know what the excuse is elsewhere, but in the US the basic reason for limiting housing is that Americans hate density.

[Torco]

The whole reason for the new Democrat enthusiasm for laissez-faire international trade is that it is Economics 101 that costs introduced by tariffs are practically always passed onto consumers. Trump's tariffs will not benefit the average American at all. Also, they are a massive opportunity for graft on Trump's part because of course those who get exceptions to his tariffs are those who do things like donate money to the Republican party and like.

the point of tariffs is not to make every good instantly cheaper. there's three ways of getting your hands on a thing, right? you either make it yourself, buy it domestically [from someone from your country that made it themselves or in their factory or whatever] or import it. the point of punishing imports is making people do the other two things more. "economics 101" is a thing people say to affirm the ostensible superiorirt of the sort of dogmatic market-always-knows-best approach some economists insist on as if it was the postulates of euclid. but it's not: the market is only perfect if you axiomatically stipulate it to be so.

of course, a good program of imports substitutions is a difficult thing to pull off: many countries have tried and failed, so it's likely he will as well... then again, others have succeeded, like japan, and countries that try this mostly fail because the CIA coups them.

(...) giving the US open borders with itself.

almost all countries have open borders with themselves, and almost all countries have seen severe cost of housing increases in the last decades, so... i mean i guess the data fits your hypotheses?

___

I must say I agree with Emily here. like, when have I uncritically defended the soviet union, opposing all criticism of it? what I have done is say things about it that are distinct from "its bad". like you can do with Rome: sure, it was a slave society, but there's interesting things about it besides! like, I explicitly mentioned the chinese system as a good idea, which is distinct from comrade vladimir assign you apartment: it's a normal market, with normal mortgages, it's just there's *policies* that make said market less ruthless than it would otherwise be, and thus housing more accessible. and in the same breath you explicitly reply that i'm failing to realize the merits of any system that is not comrade vladimir. again, the market unregulated tends towards where it tends: you can try to regulate it, or you can find a better system than the market. organs, for example, don't trade on markets -at least, we try to keep them not doing so- and for the most part the system works: people get organs when they need them... but i suppose that's unbearable communism and "economics 101" says they should be traded like any other commodity? yikes!

I don't know what the excuse is elsewhere, but in the US the basic reason for limiting housing is that Americans hate density.

simple! when rich people own both land and the kind of capital needed to build a gorillion houses, they build just enough to keep the price going up and no mroe since, you know, that's what they want: if you build too much you loose money.

[Travis B.]

The whole reason for the new Democrat enthusiasm for laissez-faire international trade is that it is Economics 101 that costs introduced by tariffs are practically always passed onto consumers. Trump's tariffs will not benefit the average American at all. Also, they are a massive opportunity for graft on Trump's part because of course those who get exceptions to his tariffs are those who do things like donate money to the Republican party and like.

the point of tariffs is not to make every good instantly cheaper. there's three ways of getting your hands on a thing, right? you either make it yourself, buy it domestically [from someone from your country that made it themselves or in their factory or whatever] or import it. the point of punishing imports is making people do the other two things more. "economics 101" is a thing people say to affirm the ostensible superiorirt of the sort of dogmatic market-always-knows-best approach some economists insist on as if it was the postulates of euclid. but it's not: the market is only perfect if you axiomatically stipulate it to be so.

of course, a good program of imports substitutions is a difficult thing to pull off: many countries have tried and failed, so it's likely he will as well... then again, others have succeeded, like japan, and countries that try this mostly fail because the CIA coups them.

Do you understand how integrated the US economy is into the global economy? Trying to force import substitution on the US economy would fail disastrously, because so little in the US is made solely in the US, and doing so would require ripping apart every single supply chain top to bottom. There practically is no such thing as being truly "made in USA" at all, so doing what you advocate would require tearing up the entire American economy, in hopes that somehow down the line it will "bring back the jobs" (which it won't, it will just make everything horrifically expensive).

[zompist]

like, when have I uncritically defended the soviet union, opposing all criticism of it? what I have done is say things about it that are distinct from "its bad". like you can do with Rome: sure, it was a slave society, but there's interesting things about it besides!

Sigh. Obviously our rhetorical styles, and previous interactions, get in the way. You like to be extremely abstract and try to be clever about it, and that gets on my nerves. I mean, you write stuff like this— "the fact is, capitalism is absolutely rife with such irrationalities -which the economists call "market failures", but they are in fact the market working precisely as it can be expected a market to function. they just want you to think the default state is market good and the aberration is market bad."... absolute, over-simplified statements, telepathic claims about how The Man operates, sloganeering (capitalists look dumber if you make them say "market good"), not a word indicating that non-market solutions that have been tried also sucked... and when you're called on this, your defense is that oh, you had a more nuanced view all along.

I mean, if you don't actually mean "lol capitalism" and you accept mixed systems, then... it it too hard to say so? As I said, there's a million things you can criticize about current US capitalism, and often what we need is more socialism. But you always lead with the Comintern-style simplication and maybe admit nuances later, and I find that trollish rather than clever.

like, I explicitly mentioned the chinese system as a good idea, which is distinct from comrade vladimir assign you apartment: it's a normal market, with normal mortgages, it's just there's *policies* that make said market less ruthless than it would otherwise be, and thus housing more accessible. and in the same breath you explicitly reply that i'm failing to realize the merits of any system that is not comrade vladimir. again, the market unregulated tends towards where it tends: you can try to regulate it, or you can find a better system than the market.

The Chinese system is capitalist! It's a market economy! Just as a data point, the IMF thinks the public sector in China is 33%... which is less than the US figure, and far less than France. Obviously we can worry that the numbers don't all mean the same thing, but you can't make "the market" into a bad thing when it's American and a good thing when it's Chinese.

(I mean, you can prefer the Chinese system, sure, but the magic elements you see there, regulation and redistribution, exist in every First World nation. And the bad things you find in US capitalism exist in China too. Where do you think the inkjet cartridges you (rightfully) complained about are made?)

organs, for example, don't trade on markets -at least, we try to keep them not doing so- and for the most part the system works: people get organs when they need them... but i suppose that's unbearable communism and "economics 101" says they should be traded like any other commodity? yikes!

like, when have I uncritically defended the market, opposing all criticism of it? what I have done is say things about it that are distinct from "its bad".

[zompist]

of course, a good program of imports substitutions is a difficult thing to pull off: many countries have tried and failed, so it's likely he will as well... then again, others have succeeded, like japan, and countries that try this mostly fail because the CIA coups them.

Do you understand how integrated the US economy is into the global economy? Trying to force import substitution on the US economy would fail disastrously, because so little in the US is made solely in the US, and doing so would require ripping apart every single supply chain top to bottom.

Eh, you're both right here, or both wrong. Historically, every major developed nation has relied on tariffs as part of their development— Britain back in the 1700s, the US in the 1800s, the East Asian countries in the 1900s. The no-tariff idea was pushed by British economists like Ricardo precisely at the moment when Britain didn't need them any more and instead wanted to sell its manufactures worldwide. The US adopted the idea after WWII— again, precisely when it wanted to sell things worldwide.

But a tariff is just a tax, and by itself does nothing. Those East Asian countries did far more to encourage manufacturing than relying on tariffs.

The US manufactures more things than ever, BTW. It's manufacturing employment that's plummeted.

We can't really predict what Trump will do, but if he gets his 10% tariff at all, he'll also try to reduce corporate and rich-person taxes, and probably he'll throw in exceptions for whichever CEOs called him up. None of that is good policy, but it's more complex than just a tax increase.

[sangi39]

but obviously markets also create industries that do no good to anyone other than making rich people richer. a good example of this would be if our imaginary society had like a cultural taboo that trucks that transport cucumbers need to be blessed by a cucumber priest or they will rot: if this society is capitalist, you can damn well believe you're going to have a whole industry around this taboo: a derivatives market on stock in different priest-training companies and whatever the hell: this industry of the cucumber priests moves around a many units of currency every month, that is to say it creates economic activity, and jobs and all the rest of it, even though in reality no good is being created: the cucumbers do not rot if unblessed. maybe there's even police that persecute cucumber smugglers that don't bless their trucks, or even worse, transport them in fridges pulled by donkeys! an unclean animal to be sure, priests agree.

This assumes that a) those in positions of power within existing (religious) institutions can't be bought, and b) those in positions of power withing existing (religious) institutions won't wield that power to change public perception in order to 1) continue that source of income, and 2) retain that position of power

There have, of course, been plenty examples of the religious elite going along with, and outwardly condoning, the actions of people who can "buy" a sense of "moral backing" to their intentions, and no doubt people will continue to do so, so at long as the means to do so exist

[keenir]

The whole reason for the new Democrat enthusiasm for laissez-faire international trade is that it is Economics 101 that costs introduced by tariffs are practically always passed onto consumers. Trump's tariffs will not benefit the average American at all. Also, they are a massive opportunity for graft on Trump's part because of course those who get exceptions to his tariffs are those who do things like donate money to the Republican party and like.

One of the big problems with the tariffs (aside from the well-known problems of raising prices) is that lots of companies have materials stored up, so they essentially have a buffer distancing the declaration of tariffs & when the customers get hit with the higher bills.

The more distance there is, the better Trump et al can go "Look at what those people are doing to make me look bad - my plan was working flawlessly until they did this horrible thing."

[malloc]

One major problem is that Trump and the broader reactionary movement surrounding him have gained enormous support from the American people over the past decade. When he won his first election in 2016, he lost the popular vote and faced significant protests. This time around he won the popular vote by a considerable margin and pretty much everyone has fallen in line rather than protesting. It seems to me that Americans have turned their backs on minority rights, separation of church and state, and so forth. They now look forward to mass deportation, the prohibition of transgender, and Christian theocracy. We need more than lawyers and judges challenging the MAGA agenda in court as some would have it. We now face the arduous task of shifting public opinion in America back toward tolerance and minority rights and against right wing despotism.

[WeepingElf]

I see natural history museums being closed and fossils smuggled abroad to save them from being destroyed by creationist government officials. And that's probably the least atrocious consequence of the Trump dictatorship.

[Emily]

This time around he won the popular vote by a considerable margin

uh, no, he won by (as of 11/28) 1.4%, which is one of the smallest popular vote margins in over a century. the only narrower elections in that time frame were kennedy in 1960 and nixon in 1968 (not counting 2000 and 2016, when the winners actually lost the popular vote), and other than those you have to go back to 1888 to find someone who won a tighter election than trump did in 2024. an overwhelming mandate this was not

and pretty much everyone has fallen in line rather than protesting. It seems to me that Americans have turned their backs on minority rights, separation of church and state, and so forth. They now look forward to mass deportation, the prohibition of transgender, and Christian theocracy. We need more than lawyers and judges challenging the MAGA agenda in court as some would have it. We now face the arduous task of shifting public opinion in America back toward tolerance and minority rights and against right wing despotism.

i don't think this is accurate and i think it gives an overly negative picture of what the actual situation is. first of all, there have been and will continue to be protests: against trump individually, and against the actions that he and his administration are planning to undertake. just as there are protests right now against the actions that the biden administration is taking!

public support for immigration rights, trans rights, and separation of church and state are much higher than you are making them out to be. not to keep harping on this but i really think the tendency in this thread to dismiss non-voters and third-party voters as "supporting trump" is really distorting people's understanding of the actual political situation on the ground (as opposed to the political situation in the halls of power). a lot of people who support immigrants' rights looked at trump, who wants to ramp up mass deportation, and then at biden (who has been deporting immigrants at high rates and who blocked asylum rights) and harris (whose immigration platform was to further militarize the border), and said "fuck this" and stayed home. a lot of people who support trans rights looked at trump, who wants to continue the right-wing assault on trans people, and then at harris, who when asked about her position gave an answer that was essentially "states' rights", and said "fuck this" and stayed home. the same thing happened with palestine, with police brutality, with abortion rights, with any number of issues that people are frustrated with both parties about. i'm not trying to relitigate whether those people should have stayed home, because we've spent months going in circles in this thread about that with no one convincing anyone of anything. but to assume that those people "support" trump and his agenda is clearly false, and using that false assumptions to make statements about the state of the american populace is going to point you in the wrong direction

[CopyrightedName]

I'll add to the above statement by noting that Democrats appear set to gain 2 house seats. It feels like a shellacking, because the effects will be dramatic, but +2 in the House, -4 in the Senate, and a less than 2% popular vote loss is not exactly a resounding repudiation of the Democratic party.

[MacAnDàil]

There I'm not sure I agree with you.

I'm a bit skeptical of the 'screen' things; more generally of the panic surrounding 'screens' in general. I can see the dangers -- but I wish the warnings were more specific. Video games, social media, TV shows, movies e-books, conlanging are all 'screen' activities but besides that don't have much in common.

We can of course distinguish between different kinds of activities also. Generally, screens before bedtime and recreational usage are among those more often cited.

I'm also very skeptical of that story they told about millionaire kids not getting iPads -- what we hear is just rumor and marketing.

Seeveral source"s attest to Steve Jobs refusing iPhones, iPads etc to his own children because he realises the dangers: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/stev ... 93216.html, https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-w ... dia-2017-3 https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellne ... r-AA1mfiPI. The same holds for Bill Gates: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-bil ... ds-2018-1 Snopes rates the claim that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and others limit their children's screen use as true: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tech- ... nts-limit/

(As a father myself, I know how hard it is to go against education panics.. but kids these days are definitely getting less screen time than we did in the 80s and 90s.)

That may well be the average in your experience and that differs from the statistics cited in Faites-les Read (Get Them to Read) by Michel Desmurget, p. 44-7.

As for literacy, or well, comfortable literacy (a nice turn of phrase, that)... people not reading and getting brainwashed by TV instead dates at least to the seventies, as a trope.

Yes, and the proof for it dates back to then also, as Michel Desmurget details in Faites-les Read (Get Them to Read), p. 44-7.

One difference, though, is that content used to more... I don't know? curated, back in the day. You got a lot of bullshit on TVs, but while, say, there was a lot of blatant sexism on TVs, you didn't get highly detailed conspiracy theories of the likes of MGTOW.

Certainly.

[MacAnDàil]

[doublepost]

[MacAnDàil]

To me the whole "screens" thing is a moral panic, first and foremost. And the focus on "screens" in the present seems selective, how was sitting for hours in front of the boob tube decades ago (when they were real live CRT's) really any better? (I remember thinking as a kid back then how gawdawful much of TV was.)

Michel Desmurget authored a book called TV Lobotomie before turning to screens in general in La fabrique du crétin digital so he is clearly not excluding TV. I have not read or even found the first but the latter is incredibly well-documented, one of the most well-docuemented books I have ever read.

[MacAnDàil]

I am very skeptical of any attempt to explain anything that seems to be entirely based on some people's aesthetic objections to things they don't like. Especially when these objections are coming from the Deep Green crowd, which promotes environmentally destructive lifestyles in the name of environmentalism. Call me crazy, but I try to care more about substance than about superficial nonsense. And the substance of a written word is the same on a screen, on paper, on a clay tablet, or drawn into a patch of sand with a stick.

I am likewise sceptical about aesthetic justifications. I am curious about you mean about "environmentally destructive lifestyles in the name of environmentalism". D=To what extent does your definition of deep green include https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Green_Resistance?

Several studies cited by Michel Desmurget in Faites-les lire (Get them to Read), p. 241-54 showing that paper has several intellectual benefits over screens. Also, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr (French translation: L'internet rend-il bête ?) contains information about the importance of the medium for the message also but the copy I consulted is a library I do not currently have with me.

[MacAnDàil]

I'm not sure who you're thinking about when talking about Deep Green -- I can't say I've noticed Greens being particularly bothered by screens; I mean, they can be, but no more and no less than other political orientations. (There's a bit of overlap with free software activism)

Yes.

I suspect by 'screens' people often mean 'social media' -- which to be fair isn't entirely healthy; we all know about X/Twitter, but have you checked Instagram lately? Gods.

Yes, those are partly bad examples, along with TikTok but screens include other things like video games and TV for example too.

[MacAnDàil]

Mainstream media? What's that? There's legacy media and there's new media. Newspapers don't matter anymore. People who engage in the recreational consumption and production of written text often don't realize how many people are not comfortably literate - if you rely on writing to distribute your message, your reach will be limited.

This is more so the case than a few decades ago and a problem brought on by the current overuse of screens encouraged by megacorps hawking them for others to waste time on but they often would not dare put their own children before them.

I do not think this is true. There's no shortage of people in the 40+ age bracket who can't write a grammatical paragraph or sound out an unfamiliar word.

This is possibly also true. Either the reduction began earlier or we never got to shortage of such people. Or they decide not to pay attention in certain circumstances e.g. Facebook.

[Raphael]

I am curious about you mean about "environmentally destructive lifestyles in the name of environmentalism".

I'm mainly thinking of stuff like trying to get people to move to the countryside, where each person, on average, has a bigger environmental impact than in a city apartment.

[MacAnDàil]

I am curious about you mean about "environmentally destructive lifestyles in the name of environmentalism".

I'm mainly thinking of stuff like trying to get people to move to the countryside, where each person, on average, has a bigger environmental impact than in a city apartment.

So neorurals? This article appears to support your idea that rurals on average have higher environmental impact: https://climateadaptationplatform.com/w ... -dwellers/

It also says, based on https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/t ... -emissions: "Consume less from clothes, furnishings, and electronic gadgets. Be a minimalist."

The original source says: "City dwellers consume a lot of carbon indirectly — enough to approach, or even exceed, the carbon footprints of their rural counterparts. We find in cities folks who are early adopters," University of Maine anthropologist Cynthia Isenhour said on The Takeaway. "They are more responsive to ideas about fashion or technological obsolescence. So they do tend to replace things like clothing, furnishings, and electronics more frequently."