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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • It’s silly to talk about a “pundit class”. It’s not like they’re a group with any coherent ideas, much less any sort of persistent group loyalty. They’re just people with opinions and a platform.

    This article tries to make it sound like he’s a really popular candidate and there’s some shady group of kingmakers trying to block him.

    The main reason that people are pushing for him to step aside is that they don’t believe he can beat Trump. It’s not that people were grumpy about a raspy voice. There was already a lot of suspicion that he’s going senile. He got the benefit of the doubt and the debate was his chance to prove the doubters wrong. Instead he confirmed their deepest fears. Since then, he’s provided a steady stream of examples of his diminishing mental capacity.

    A formal cognitive assessment might lay those fears to rest but, at this point, it’s unlikely. For many people, the conclusion is clear; the evidence is in and he forgets what he’s talking about mid-sentence. Many people look at the polling numbers around that just want someone who has a chance of beating Trump.








  • “Worse than expected,” depends largely on the individual and what they were expecting. It comes down to expecting one thing and being disappointed in the outcome.

    People who expected him to be an ally of immigrants are disappointed in his border policies.
    People who expected him to fix Trumps “easy” trade wars are disappointed in his trade policies.
    People who expected him to support labor are disappointed in his ban of the railroad workers strike.
    People who expected him to champion human rights are disappointed in his support of the IDF.

    He may have met your expectations and the expectations of the majority of Democrats. Biden’s 2020 victory depended on several groups who only showed up because they hoped that he would address their specific concerns.



  • It’s hard to draw meaningful conclusions form a single 4 year period. There have been several instances of corruption (and significant externalized costs) in private firms that went on for much longer than 4 years.

    I agree that there is a lot of corruption in government but there’s a long gap between that and no accountability. We see various forms of government accountability on a regular basis; politicians lose elections, they get recalled, and they sometimes even get incarcerated. We also have multiple systems designed to allow any citizen to influence government.

    None of these systems and safeguards are anywhere close to perfect but it must be better than organizations that don’t even have these systems in the first place.


  • What makes governments any more susceptible to corruption than a private organization?

    I’m not actually talking about governments having absolute control. That’s a pretty extreme scenario to jump to from from the question of if it’s better for a private company or a government to control search.

    Right now we think Google is misusing that data. We can’t even get information on it without a leak. The government has a flawed FOIA system but Google has nothing of the sort. The only way we’re protected from corruption at Google (and historically speaking several other large private organization) is when the government steps in and stops them.

    Governments often handle corruption poorly but I can rattle of many cases where governments managed to reduce corruption on their own (ie without requiring a revolution). In many cases the source of that corruption was large private organizations.







  • There is no single reason. It’s the sum of many reasons. They’re too many to list exhaustively but when we see a concrete example the vast majority of people come to the same conclusion on creepy vs appropriate.

    When there isn’t a clear line, trying to define one is misleading. You can always find some couple somewhere on earth with an arbitrarily large age gap where people will agree that it’s the result of informed consent. People then try to make the argument that this justifies all relationships with that age gap even though most relationships don’t have whatever extenuating circumstances made the one example palatable.

    Large age gaps are creepy. Whenever someone has to ask if a particular age gap is also creepy the answer is almost always, “Yes.”