Highly recommend Peter Wilson’s _Heart of Europe_ for the long history of the Holy Roman Empire without which you can’t really understand Austria-Hungary.
"It’s not like pragmatism has completely vanished from the face of the earth, but rank-and-file Democrats have gotten a lot more sincerely progressive and a lot less tolerant of letting elected officials cook."
Maybe the reason for that is that the "pragmatis[ts]" convinced the primary electorate to "let[] [Kamala Harris] cook" by campaigning with Liz Cheney (and implicitly promising to pointlessly bomb even more Middle Eastern countries) and create "the most lethal military" which then proceeded to lose every single swing state. It the "pragmatists" and "centrists" want to win primary elections, maybe they should focus on being more electable to primary voters.
I've always thought it would be nice if gun laws were: unlimited access to all firearms that existed prior to the year 1800. It makes it real easy to see what is or isn't a legal firearm.
I live in an RV, so the threshold for food causing a potentially offensive and lingering odor is rather low. Essentially all forms of fish, seafood, and beans can do it, along with anything fermented in any way. Even sauteed spinach or pulled chicken can do it under the right circumstances. What I cook depends significantly on the weather letting me open windows, whether we have enough electricity to run all the fans and air purifiers, and how long I have the rig to myself.
Astute take on asssault weapons. They kill roughly 450 people a year, as opposed tp 25K that will perish from handguns. While not personally a gun owner, my neighborhood is full of legal responsible gun owners, both Dem and Rep, often with gun rooms, rather than just gun safes, all locked up like Ft. Knox.
One explains the focus on assault weapons as akin to living on the Pacific Ocean, with a swimming pool. After your child successfully completes swim lessons, you forbade them for ever entering the backyard pool, but encourage them to swim in the Ocean, anytime the mood strikes.
A retired gun enthusiast, he insists Dems refuse to take on handguns seriously, becasue the problem is largely urban, while rifle type weapons are overwhelmingly found in suburban and rural areas that vote Rep.
Mandatory gun enhancements, which cannot be plea bargained away and lengthen prison sentences by years, if a gun is used in the commission of a crime, would probably actually lower gun deaths far more, than just adding ever more regualtion.
Regarding gun regulation, I find the focus on assault weapons disturbing because it seems more motivated by active hostility to the preference of fellow citizens to own these guns than by an attempt to balance the interests of people who want to own guns against the risks to the rest of society.
I'm a supporter of gun control but focusing on assault weapons creates the impression that the *point* is denying our fellow citizens their toys and hobbies not that it is an unfortunate necessity to keep other safe.
In terms of both usefulness for crime and actual risks, assault weapons aren't even close to as dangerous as handguns. They account for a minimal fraction of gun deaths and even if they were banned there is no reason to think those deaths wouldn't occur using handguns. Even most mass shootings happen at ranges where a handgun would be as or more effective.
So in terms of balancing personal liberties, and just the fact that some people love guns versus danger to other assault rifles are the very worst trade off. You save the fewest lives per unit of unhappiness inflicted on gun rights types.
And sure, I personally find the whole gun culture thing cringe and bad but ultimately living together is about treating the preferences of fellow citizens with respect. And sure sometimes we have to make choices to balance interests of some citizens against others and I absolutely believe we need to do this with gun regulation but when it feels like we aren't regarding the loss of something important to our fellow citizens as a genuine cost something is wrong. And with gun control that means focusing on practical rules to reduce deaths (which is all going to be about handguns) not sending messages that we find certain subcultures to be bad.
There is an easy way that both groups of traders can be correct and the polls still correct -- the war in Iran has had a huge effect on enthusiasm but that doesn't really show up in polls. As the country gets more and more polarized getting people to say they are going to vote for the other side becomes more and more unlikely -- it feels like betrayal and people don't want to have to admit to their friends they voted for the other side.
So what happens when people feel disappointed by a president isn't that they vote against them but they do just decide not to bother to vote for them. I'm unsure whether you would expect this to show up in questions about how likely you are to vote.
---
As an aside, this is one of the reasons I object to mandatory voting. The fact that you aren't sufficiently motivated to bother to vote for someone while others are motivated enough to vote against is important.
I just noticed that on the ChatGPT-generated map, Krakow appears *twice,* once in Galicia (historically accurate) and once in what seems to be Russia? Do better, ChatGPT!
(And that’s not even getting into what the heck is going on with the coastlines. The “Baltilca Sea” is immediately north of Prague? Wut?)
Try potted fish, they're less offensively pungent than tinned. Even though I love that smell and would be happy to have my kitchen perpetually scented with, say, catfish. Similarly, there are places besides General Amazod to shop for books that do not have this problem! The good news about book purchases becoming rarer is that I can afford to be more selective where I acquire them, and patronize places whose UX doesn't make me want to sign up for Beutlerian jihad.
An interesting question: once we implement AirTags On Guns, does this make it easier or harder to get a CCW license in highly gun-hostile places like SF? Cause it's not my home I feel potentially threatened in here, it's going through Ain't Nothing Tender About It district, or encounters on the train platform, or similar in public. Now I don't personally own a firearm (precisely because it's so proscribed here, including socially, in isolation I think they're kinda fascinating), but I have heard through backchannels that there's a not-small number of otherwise law-abiding citizens in SF and similar places who simply choose to illegally conceal, because it's so hard to do so legally. What happens to this equilibrium if it does get easier? Or if there's significant legal/financial pressure to trade in switchblades and old zipguns for bayonets and new trackable M1s?
Re: “what the Democratic faithful mostly wants,” this is where I’m increasingly aligned to Lee Drutman’s view that we need multi-party democracy, and functional centrist parties, more than anything else.
It seems that, in the age of algorithmic anger-tainement, the extremists *will* be represented in our government. As long as we have our current party system that means we’re doomed to an increasingly vacant center.
wrt "This is just a tremendous disservice to human culture relative to an equilibrium in which a person who searches for history books is directed toward the standard works on the subject." asking Gemini, Chatbot gives much better recommendations than Amazon, e.g. https://gemini.google.com/share/aac01faa0c1e
I was struck by how unself-aware Matt seems to be about how his politics are, like everyone else, based on ideology in his blackpilled answer. When your entire schtick is you have to win elections to enact policy and then ignore that moderates who can keep the base are not winning primaries, you aren’t thinking about it holistically.
Dreaming about moderates who will win the general when they can’t win primaries is not being pragmatic anymore than gambling on somebody who can only win primaries. I’d love SN to put more focus on how to address progressive concerns that clearly animate much of the party while also appealing to the broader electorate (and also stop pretending Kamala lost because of her politics instead of the economy).
Trump has all that Trump baggage and that resonated with a lot of people. He won an election with a bad economy voters associated with the incumbents when incumbents were loosing across the globe. Matt Y himself noted the uphill battle any Dem faced before the election. With a strong economy, Harris wins. Trump would loose this fall no matter how he moderated his ICE position because of the economy.
Also, Kamala didn’t run on trans issues. Trump will make up whatever he wants and the Dems can’t do shit about that. If you play his game, you’ve already lost
"Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners” the ad’s narrator said before it cut to a clip of Harris speaking to someone in front of a backdrop promoting the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund.
“Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access,” Harris said in the clip."
If you’re fixated on that, that’s all you see. Kamala could have had any trans message in the world and still lost. Fun fact, every politician has positions that win and lose marginal votes. And if the economy were better, we could have seen if enough voters cared about that to matter to the outcome. But we didn’t have a that election, more will we have it in ‘26 or ‘28.
As well, my point was wouldn’t matter if it was true or not. Trump would have made up something and people who cared enough to prioritize that issue would have voted for him regardless of the truth of it because he’s so obviously the person to vote for if you want to penalize people different than you for being different
Are you new here? Matt's done a bunch of posts about how The Groups on the left pressure candidates to take wildly unpopular positions and the electoral consequences of that behavior.
Are you new here and missed when, before the election, Matt talked about how Kamala was likely to lose because of fundamentals? Matt’s whole groups thing is centrist wishium that the groups don’t actually represent their membership and aren’t responsive to what the people who volunteer for and donate to campaigns want. It is not pragmatic to lose primaries to win the general. If you’re a good politician, you figure out how to appeal to the base and the general electorate. It’s the job.
The Iran war will become more unpopular without fuel prices going much higher.
1) People will be less forgiving after 7 months than they are after 1.
2) Prices of other goods will go up if oil prices remain where they are now for an extended period.
3) The memetic development of public opinion, mixed with the increase in political interest this summer, will cause people’s views on the war and Trump’s accomplishments to crystallize, and the result will be a focus on how he has failed to put America first.
Both the oil traders and the political forecasters are correct.
I've been reading through the gun ideas, and a lot of them boil down to two options:
1. Force gun owners to do more work with legal consequences if they don't.
2. Using tracing mechanisms so that if a gun kills someone, we know exactly which gun it was or where the ammo came from or whatever.
Forcing gun owners to do more work is hardly going to be popular with gun owners. It's not like they want their guns to be stolen, or they want kids to find a gun they left lying around and shoot someone. They don't want that at all! But a lot of people are bad judges of risk and don't want to go the extra mile and expense to double-safeguard against something that probably won't happen even if they're careless and don't try very hard.
I guess drunk driving is an obvious parallel, but nobody is forced to keep their car keys in a special sobriety safe that they can only open if they're sober. (Well, some people convicted of drunk driving have something like that I guess, but it's not the default.) The point is that if you don't want to drink and drive, you as an individual can not drink and drive the same way a gun owner can just not shoot someone.
The tracing mechanisms are interesting, but is the problem with solving murders really that the police can't figure out who did it? I get the impression that nearly any murder could be solved if the police could put unlimited resources into it, and unsolved murders (much less unsolved non-fatal shootings) are usually about not having enough time to track down the guy they already know probably did it.
Highly recommend Peter Wilson’s _Heart of Europe_ for the long history of the Holy Roman Empire without which you can’t really understand Austria-Hungary.
"It’s not like pragmatism has completely vanished from the face of the earth, but rank-and-file Democrats have gotten a lot more sincerely progressive and a lot less tolerant of letting elected officials cook."
Maybe the reason for that is that the "pragmatis[ts]" convinced the primary electorate to "let[] [Kamala Harris] cook" by campaigning with Liz Cheney (and implicitly promising to pointlessly bomb even more Middle Eastern countries) and create "the most lethal military" which then proceeded to lose every single swing state. It the "pragmatists" and "centrists" want to win primary elections, maybe they should focus on being more electable to primary voters.
I've always thought it would be nice if gun laws were: unlimited access to all firearms that existed prior to the year 1800. It makes it real easy to see what is or isn't a legal firearm.
You can actually freely purchase any firearm manufactured prior to 1897 just like you would a loaf of bread.
“Trump back[ing] down” may have little to do with the Gulf being opened back up.
I live in an RV, so the threshold for food causing a potentially offensive and lingering odor is rather low. Essentially all forms of fish, seafood, and beans can do it, along with anything fermented in any way. Even sauteed spinach or pulled chicken can do it under the right circumstances. What I cook depends significantly on the weather letting me open windows, whether we have enough electricity to run all the fans and air purifiers, and how long I have the rig to myself.
Astute take on asssault weapons. They kill roughly 450 people a year, as opposed tp 25K that will perish from handguns. While not personally a gun owner, my neighborhood is full of legal responsible gun owners, both Dem and Rep, often with gun rooms, rather than just gun safes, all locked up like Ft. Knox.
One explains the focus on assault weapons as akin to living on the Pacific Ocean, with a swimming pool. After your child successfully completes swim lessons, you forbade them for ever entering the backyard pool, but encourage them to swim in the Ocean, anytime the mood strikes.
A retired gun enthusiast, he insists Dems refuse to take on handguns seriously, becasue the problem is largely urban, while rifle type weapons are overwhelmingly found in suburban and rural areas that vote Rep.
Mandatory gun enhancements, which cannot be plea bargained away and lengthen prison sentences by years, if a gun is used in the commission of a crime, would probably actually lower gun deaths far more, than just adding ever more regualtion.
Regarding gun regulation, I find the focus on assault weapons disturbing because it seems more motivated by active hostility to the preference of fellow citizens to own these guns than by an attempt to balance the interests of people who want to own guns against the risks to the rest of society.
I'm a supporter of gun control but focusing on assault weapons creates the impression that the *point* is denying our fellow citizens their toys and hobbies not that it is an unfortunate necessity to keep other safe.
In terms of both usefulness for crime and actual risks, assault weapons aren't even close to as dangerous as handguns. They account for a minimal fraction of gun deaths and even if they were banned there is no reason to think those deaths wouldn't occur using handguns. Even most mass shootings happen at ranges where a handgun would be as or more effective.
So in terms of balancing personal liberties, and just the fact that some people love guns versus danger to other assault rifles are the very worst trade off. You save the fewest lives per unit of unhappiness inflicted on gun rights types.
And sure, I personally find the whole gun culture thing cringe and bad but ultimately living together is about treating the preferences of fellow citizens with respect. And sure sometimes we have to make choices to balance interests of some citizens against others and I absolutely believe we need to do this with gun regulation but when it feels like we aren't regarding the loss of something important to our fellow citizens as a genuine cost something is wrong. And with gun control that means focusing on practical rules to reduce deaths (which is all going to be about handguns) not sending messages that we find certain subcultures to be bad.
There is an easy way that both groups of traders can be correct and the polls still correct -- the war in Iran has had a huge effect on enthusiasm but that doesn't really show up in polls. As the country gets more and more polarized getting people to say they are going to vote for the other side becomes more and more unlikely -- it feels like betrayal and people don't want to have to admit to their friends they voted for the other side.
So what happens when people feel disappointed by a president isn't that they vote against them but they do just decide not to bother to vote for them. I'm unsure whether you would expect this to show up in questions about how likely you are to vote.
---
As an aside, this is one of the reasons I object to mandatory voting. The fact that you aren't sufficiently motivated to bother to vote for someone while others are motivated enough to vote against is important.
I just noticed that on the ChatGPT-generated map, Krakow appears *twice,* once in Galicia (historically accurate) and once in what seems to be Russia? Do better, ChatGPT!
(And that’s not even getting into what the heck is going on with the coastlines. The “Baltilca Sea” is immediately north of Prague? Wut?)
Try potted fish, they're less offensively pungent than tinned. Even though I love that smell and would be happy to have my kitchen perpetually scented with, say, catfish. Similarly, there are places besides General Amazod to shop for books that do not have this problem! The good news about book purchases becoming rarer is that I can afford to be more selective where I acquire them, and patronize places whose UX doesn't make me want to sign up for Beutlerian jihad.
An interesting question: once we implement AirTags On Guns, does this make it easier or harder to get a CCW license in highly gun-hostile places like SF? Cause it's not my home I feel potentially threatened in here, it's going through Ain't Nothing Tender About It district, or encounters on the train platform, or similar in public. Now I don't personally own a firearm (precisely because it's so proscribed here, including socially, in isolation I think they're kinda fascinating), but I have heard through backchannels that there's a not-small number of otherwise law-abiding citizens in SF and similar places who simply choose to illegally conceal, because it's so hard to do so legally. What happens to this equilibrium if it does get easier? Or if there's significant legal/financial pressure to trade in switchblades and old zipguns for bayonets and new trackable M1s?
Re: “what the Democratic faithful mostly wants,” this is where I’m increasingly aligned to Lee Drutman’s view that we need multi-party democracy, and functional centrist parties, more than anything else.
It seems that, in the age of algorithmic anger-tainement, the extremists *will* be represented in our government. As long as we have our current party system that means we’re doomed to an increasingly vacant center.
Or maybe centrists are losing elections because their views just aren't THAAD popular with as many actual voters as they imagine
wrt "This is just a tremendous disservice to human culture relative to an equilibrium in which a person who searches for history books is directed toward the standard works on the subject." asking Gemini, Chatbot gives much better recommendations than Amazon, e.g. https://gemini.google.com/share/aac01faa0c1e
I was struck by how unself-aware Matt seems to be about how his politics are, like everyone else, based on ideology in his blackpilled answer. When your entire schtick is you have to win elections to enact policy and then ignore that moderates who can keep the base are not winning primaries, you aren’t thinking about it holistically.
Dreaming about moderates who will win the general when they can’t win primaries is not being pragmatic anymore than gambling on somebody who can only win primaries. I’d love SN to put more focus on how to address progressive concerns that clearly animate much of the party while also appealing to the broader electorate (and also stop pretending Kamala lost because of her politics instead of the economy).
Trump has all that Trump baggage and that resonated with a lot of people. He won an election with a bad economy voters associated with the incumbents when incumbents were loosing across the globe. Matt Y himself noted the uphill battle any Dem faced before the election. With a strong economy, Harris wins. Trump would loose this fall no matter how he moderated his ICE position because of the economy.
Also, Kamala didn’t run on trans issues. Trump will make up whatever he wants and the Dems can’t do shit about that. If you play his game, you’ve already lost
But Trump didn't make this one up:
"Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners” the ad’s narrator said before it cut to a clip of Harris speaking to someone in front of a backdrop promoting the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund.
“Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access,” Harris said in the clip."
If you’re fixated on that, that’s all you see. Kamala could have had any trans message in the world and still lost. Fun fact, every politician has positions that win and lose marginal votes. And if the economy were better, we could have seen if enough voters cared about that to matter to the outcome. But we didn’t have a that election, more will we have it in ‘26 or ‘28.
As well, my point was wouldn’t matter if it was true or not. Trump would have made up something and people who cared enough to prioritize that issue would have voted for him regardless of the truth of it because he’s so obviously the person to vote for if you want to penalize people different than you for being different
Are you new here? Matt's done a bunch of posts about how The Groups on the left pressure candidates to take wildly unpopular positions and the electoral consequences of that behavior.
Are you new here and missed when, before the election, Matt talked about how Kamala was likely to lose because of fundamentals? Matt’s whole groups thing is centrist wishium that the groups don’t actually represent their membership and aren’t responsive to what the people who volunteer for and donate to campaigns want. It is not pragmatic to lose primaries to win the general. If you’re a good politician, you figure out how to appeal to the base and the general electorate. It’s the job.
How's that working out for ya?
"pretending Kamala lost because of her politics"
She is for they/them. Trump is for you. That resonated with a lot of people.
I remember the whole year thinking surely he could never win again, and when I saw that ad, I thought, “oh shit.”
The Iran war will become more unpopular without fuel prices going much higher.
1) People will be less forgiving after 7 months than they are after 1.
2) Prices of other goods will go up if oil prices remain where they are now for an extended period.
3) The memetic development of public opinion, mixed with the increase in political interest this summer, will cause people’s views on the war and Trump’s accomplishments to crystallize, and the result will be a focus on how he has failed to put America first.
Both the oil traders and the political forecasters are correct.
I've been reading through the gun ideas, and a lot of them boil down to two options:
1. Force gun owners to do more work with legal consequences if they don't.
2. Using tracing mechanisms so that if a gun kills someone, we know exactly which gun it was or where the ammo came from or whatever.
Forcing gun owners to do more work is hardly going to be popular with gun owners. It's not like they want their guns to be stolen, or they want kids to find a gun they left lying around and shoot someone. They don't want that at all! But a lot of people are bad judges of risk and don't want to go the extra mile and expense to double-safeguard against something that probably won't happen even if they're careless and don't try very hard.
I guess drunk driving is an obvious parallel, but nobody is forced to keep their car keys in a special sobriety safe that they can only open if they're sober. (Well, some people convicted of drunk driving have something like that I guess, but it's not the default.) The point is that if you don't want to drink and drive, you as an individual can not drink and drive the same way a gun owner can just not shoot someone.
The tracing mechanisms are interesting, but is the problem with solving murders really that the police can't figure out who did it? I get the impression that nearly any murder could be solved if the police could put unlimited resources into it, and unsolved murders (much less unsolved non-fatal shootings) are usually about not having enough time to track down the guy they already know probably did it.
Thank you for your response! I was really just asking around in the comment section but appreciate you taking up the question.