United States Politics Thread 47

[malloc]

it is, yeah. I've heard this idea but if you dig a bit more, you'll find that it's a universally agreed upon principle, i think, that it is unfair if we both steal a car and you get three days in jail whereas i get three years, so yeah, everyone does this afaik, though to different degrees. the law students in my uni did check precedents all the time though.

then again, for the us, it seems less relevant, since i hear a large majority of cases end up in agreements between the prosecution and the defense.

I see then. It still stinks that the supreme court can just destroy an important piece of legislation and give the Republicans an even greater advantage with remarkably little oversight. Whether fairly or not, the antics of this court have definitely tarnished my impression of common law.

[WeepingElf]

Most interesting article I've read all week:

Cory Doctorow: Will Trump hormuz us into the full Gretacene?

Fascinating, and I fully support the name "Gretacene" for the new era. If he's right, it'll cause a fundamental change in the global economy, which gets me wondering: what will the decline of late-stage plutocratic capitalism look like in practice? Obviously not the proletariat taking to the streets and overthrowing the bourgeoisie to bring about the socialist utopia, romantic as that may sound; will we see the billionaires retreating to their hideaways and the rest of the world shrugging their shoulders and getting on with things?

Hmm, that's a big question. As Doctorow points out, the fossil fuel industry is a matter of permanent and increasingly harmful extraction, plus a heavy dose of centralization, and giving power to bad people. Renewables are infrastructure and thus only have to be done once, and can be controlled locally.

Yes, and their local availability in small concentrations makes them hard to centralize, they will therefore perhaps help usher in a transition to a "prosumer economy" and economic democracy - i. e., an economy where the means of production are owned by the people who work with them, either individually or collectively. Note that this is a very different thing than state socialism, where "the people" who nominally own the means of production is actually the state, as in the Soviet Bloc, and the workers own as little as in a capitalist economy.

So that would be a huge shock to plutocracy, but might not be a fatal one. E.g. an all-electric economy wouldn't destroy the AI bros and might even encourage them. At the same time... what happens once companies realize that they don't have to buy Claude, they can run their own AI at 1/10 the cost?

Humanity being what it is, you generally need a huge failure before people abandon a system, like a depression or a war. But the plutocrats and right-wingers seem eager to create one disaster after another, and it's likely to create a tipping point.

Looks like that. The League of Nations and the United Nations were created only after world wars, and the CFC ban was only enacted after scientists had found evidence that the ozone layer was about to collapse, etc. Likewise, it requires a climate crisis and the inflation caused by a war in the Persian Gulf to get away from fossil fuels.

An irony about the whole affair is another thing Trump doesn't understand: what keeps the oil bottled up, and what keeps the oil companies from grabbing oil with gusto, is not the Iranians or the Democrats; it's hard-headed American businesses— insurance companies and banks. Ships won't move without insurance, and banks won't loan money for huge new oil facilities in the current ping-ponging business environment.

And when the banks and insurances realize that they are investing in a Ponzi scheme, they will pull out, and the oil giants tumble. In fact, large insurance companies like Munich Re have been warning about the climate crisis for long - because they have realized that it will become very expensive.

Of course Trump will do his best to immiserate the US and make sure it loses the technology race to China.

Inasmuch as it's possible to provide rational explanations for any of Trump's actions, is it safe to attribute this to stupidity rather than incompetence, or perhaps both?

Let's call it learned stupidity. If you've read Orwell you're familiar with his discussion of the topic re the 1930s British leadership. Or review Mencken's dictum: "It's hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it."

A lot of modern conservatism is simply irritated annoyance at liberalism. Liberals go on and on about climate change, racism, sexism, better health care, etc.; the conservative hates all that talk, so convinces himself that it's all wrong. You're not gonna make a million bucks as a conservative influencer by taking the liberal side on these things.

Trump doesn't personally care about all that, but the third-tier people he surrounds himself with do.

Trump is not particularly smart; in fact, he is a buffoon. Also, he is a coward, as his quick withdrawal from the Iran War shows. He likes to rattle the saber, but when it becomes costly and painful, he pulls back. It is his cowardice which keeps us quite safe from WWIII.

[alice]

Something which, of course, only occurred to me when I switched my computer off: we depend on oil for a lot more things than just petrol; where would we get our plastics from, for example? And I hear a lot about how much essential fertilizer comes from the Middle East; would this trigger a change in the way we handle our sewage?

[WeepingElf]

Something which, of course, only occurred to me when I switched my computer off: we depend on oil for a lot more things than just petrol; where would we get our plastics from, for example? And I hear a lot about how much essential fertilizer comes from the Middle East; would this trigger a change in the way we handle our sewage?

Plastics and other petrochemical products could be replaced by biotechnology, which also has the advantage that the new stuffs are likely to be less damaging to the environment; and fertilizers, well, you say it - use our sewage.

[Lērisama]

Something which, of course, only occurred to me when I switched my computer off: we depend on oil for a lot more things than just petrol; where would we get our plastics from, for example? And I hear a lot about how much essential fertilizer comes from the Middle East; would this trigger a change in the way we handle our sewage?

Plastics and other petrochemical products could be replaced by biotechnology, which also has the advantage that the new stuffs are likely to be less damaging to the environment; and fertilizers, well, you say it - use our sewage.

I'd take almost any sewage treatment option that stops us from constantly leaking it into rivers¹ at this point, but using for good things would be excellent.

¹ Seriously, this is a massive issue over here. Don't let anyone privatise your water system, people.

[malloc]

Virginia Supreme Court throws out redistricting referendum results. It's hard to imagine the Democrats winning the midterms at this point.