Random Politics Thread

[Virtual ghost]

Florida redistricting map has fallen.

 

[ceecee]

lol

Musk puts Twitter buy 'on hold,' casting doubt on $44B deal

Elon Musk has put his plan to buy Twitter on temporary hold, raising fresh doubts about whether he’ll proceed with the $44 billion acquisition.

apnews.com

 

[Kephalos]

An advantage of democracy as a form of government is that it allows for stability, since countries where the government is against the wishes of the majority are usually unstable, especially if the government is not providing prosperity on some level for its citizens, which I believe a Republican regime is unlikely to do since it is not something they seem terribly interested in (at least not as much as re-litigating the struggles of the 60s).

It depends on what you mean by stability. I suppose you have heard about "Condorcet cycles": the kind of stability you are talking about refers only to the fact that in democratic/constitutional governments, there is a clear succession principle that imposes regularity to democratic political life, but it says absolutely nothing about the stability of policy (which is crucial), the quality of policy, or stability in the quality of policy.

America’s Coming Age of Instability: "Rather than autocracy, the United States appears headed toward endemic regime instability."
The Political Thought of Neo-Liberalism. Carl J. Friedrich.
James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock on the Weaknesses of Majority Voting: A Triptych. Julien Grandjean.

 

[Virtual ghost]

Florida redistricting map has fallen.

And it is restored for now.

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

 

[Kingu Kurimuzon]

 

[Virtual ghost]

Youtube has thrown this at me and it is kinda interesting self-reflection.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

So exciting about John Fetterman! Pat Toomey is a Bloomberg-backed Susan Collins style "moderate" POS and I'm glad he's not running. Fetterman has a real blue collar earthiness to him that is so interesting. I definitely think it puts Pennsylvania very much in play. Oz is the more challenging opponent, I think, but I think he's got a shot at defeating him. But I love that voters have to choose between a blue-collar salt of the Earth guy and a reality TV personality. That's different and interesting to watch.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Also, I remember during primary season when I got banned from the Bloomberg subreddit for pointing out that Bloomberg helped Republicans get control of the Senate. Fun times!

Most of those accounts were deleted, they were definitely paid staffers.

 

[The Cat]

Pro life party? Weird.

 

[Totenkindly]

Sen. Paul (R-KY) calls for the Supreme Court to use a lie detector test to find who leaked the overturning Roe opinion.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) called for the Supreme Court to use a lie detector test to identify the person behind the leaked Roe v Wade draft. While talking to Fox News from Capitol Hill, Paul said that the 12 judges should be brought in and asked under oath with the lie detector test about who...

www.yahoo.com

United States v. Scheffer: A U.S. Supreme Court Ruling on Polygraph Testing

523 U.S. 303 (1998)

sgp.fas.org

 

[The Cat]

 

[ceecee]

Good. Last thing anyone needs is The Patriot Act 2.0 which is what this is.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/05/the-liberal-obsession-with-disinformation-is-not-helping.html

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Good. Last thing anyone needs is The Patriot Act 2.0 which is what this is.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/05/the-liberal-obsession-with-disinformation-is-not-helping.html

This is key:

Obviously, I sympathize with Jankowicz. No doubt she faced an astronomical volume of right-wing nastiness, dishonest attacks on her reputation, and genuinely disturbing threats. I’m sure the administration could have done more to insulate her from the backlash. But other than that, I don’t see how a fully operational Disinformation Governance Board could have prevented this outcome — except via the very means conservatives (mistakenly?) feared it would possess. If, as Lorenz is careful to note, “neither the board nor Jankowicz had any power or ability to declare what is true or false, or compel Internet providers, social-media platforms or public schools to take action against certain types of speech,” then how would it have prevented right-wingers from tweeting terrible, dishonest things about Jankowicz? Lorenz’s reporting seems to arrive at a Catch-22: The right’s campaign to depict Jankowicz as a government censor amounts to “disinformation” only if she and the DHS were indeed helpless to stop it.

And this is the very important part that people never seem to think about.

Would Jankowicz’s office have been empowered to counter “disinformation” coming from her own department? Or only from those criticizing it? And what would its remit have been under the next Republican presidency? As one conservative writer put it, “It’s not clear to me that Democrats have fully reckoned with the non-negligible possibility that Donald Trump is in charge of the new Disinformation Governance Board in two years.”

And finally...

“Disinformation” was the liberal Establishment’s traumatic reaction to the psychic wound of 2016. It provided an answer that evaded the question altogether, protecting them from the agony of self-reflection. It wasn’t that the country was riven by profound antinomies and resentments born of material realities that would need to be navigated by new kinds of politics. No, the problem was that large swaths of the country had been duped, brainwashed by nefarious forces both foreign and domestic. And if only the best minds, the most credentialed experts, could be given new authority to regulate the flow of “fake news,” the scales would fall from the eyes of the people and they would re-embrace the old order they had been tricked into despising.

This is essentially the way the obsession with disinformation always seemed to me.

 

[The Cat]

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Ad Hominem and Ad Nausea I've noticed a lot.

A very good point about "appeal to authority"; I hadn't considered endorsements in that way.

The part about "woke" scaremongering is good, as well.

I also love the "inevitable victory" stuff.

 

[The Cat]

How to radicalize a "normie"

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Wait why is it restricted? I haven't watched the video but I know it was popular in some online left spaces.

 

[The Cat]

Wait why is it restricted? I haven't watched the video but I know it was popular in some online left spaces.

Why indeed...
The alt-right playbook is one of those things everyone should watch....this video goes into detail about how the alt-right infiltrates communities, off line its what guys like Greg Locke are doing. But this video is before that guy took off, so this deals mostly with how the alt right uses "community" to radicalize people. The rest of the videos are worth watching too, if for no other reason than you'll recognize the tactics they try to use on you...Vēritās līberābit vōs

These tactics are a big part of why shit is so crazy rn. fascism is on the rise again and it must be countered.