2016 was a very different election than 2016- "the Resistance" was driven by a rising tide of the new identarianism that likely peaked in 2020 and has been slowly subsiding. 2024 blew a huge hole in a lot of that identarianisms core conceits and the 2024 election was a very different bird from the 2016 one so the component elements and assumptions are very different. There's a lot more intra-Dem and intra-Left arguing this time around for one thing. It's probably going to be healthy in the mid to long run but it's going to be uncoordinated in the short run.
I see Hanley post on Facebook and follow him on Substack. I'd say he remains very principled and crankily libertarian in the strict original sense which means he's not fond of either of the major parties and, in typical Hanley fashion, saves the lions share of his vitriol for whomever is in power at a given time. So he was utterly scathing on Biden and now is utterly scathing on Trump.
I'm not on Bluesky so I don't know anything about Jason but if he's writing anywhere that isn't twitlike I'd love a link since I've always enjoyed his writing.
Yes, friend of the blog Hanley made a substack directly about how that is exactly what is happening and what Trump and Musk will likely bog down in.
https://jameshanley.substack.com/p/flooding-the-zone-with-lawsuits
In a sane government or a government facing an actual fiscal crisis, benefit cuts to entitlements would be married to spending cuts on right wing shibboleths like defense along with tax increases weighted towards the wealthy and upper middle class which would result in no one being happy and thus everyone ending up accepting it.
Contra your understandable libertarian fantasies if Trump or his Muskrats gets even close to entitlements with these stunts they'll get politically exploded like a toad struck by lightning. Trump is keenly aware of this which is why, when they briefly interrupted Medicare access portals, they promptly backtracked furiously in a frenzy of denials and pledges of fealty to Medicare.
Ah yes, I see your point now, thank you. Yeah, I sort of doubt Musk has a set of replacement plans for various things he might try to axe nor do I think his intention is to try and divert (allegedly) corrupt or grafted funds that Dems aligned groups are (allegedly) enjoying and divert them to their ostensible purpose or to Republican aligned graft groups. Though who knows what exactly he thinks he’s accomplishing crawling around in the organizational bowels of the Federal government. I have my doubts even he knows what he’s trying to accomplish beyond triggering liberals and nosing around where he’s not supposed to be. I don’t doubt he’ll, given enough time, come up with something he’ll want to do with this access and power- if he isn’t evicted by the courts which seems to be an event that’s coming up fast. I’ll also note that I’d take allegations of graft and corruption, coming from this lot, with a Minnesota salt truck sized serving of salt until/unless they file charges and furnish evidence.
I think you're looking at it incorrectly Jay on a basic level.
If Trumps -only- opposition were, say, the Democratic Party, or the Librul(tm) media then this "flood the zone" stuff could plausibly work and what you're describing could apply. This would be doubly true if only the Democratic Party, for instance, could materially oppose Trump. This would be triply true if controlling what "present public discourse" or "what we're talking about now" or even "Vibes" constituted victory. I can also see how you, or I, with us both being individuals who are not directly effected by Trumps myriad attacks and who are interacting with them only by the discourse or the vibe might say “holy cow, Trump is winning so much.” I, personally, equate this to various points in Putins early stage attacks on Ukraine when the Russians launched innumerable assaults from many different directions against many different targets. For a little while everyone was like “holy cow the Ukrainians are gong to get owned.”
This is not, however, the case in reality.
Each relevant impacted individual is both able and is incredibly motivated to respond individually to each of the myriad Trump attacks. Individuals who’re being illegally dismissed or sidelined have absolutely every motivation to file their complaints at court against these unlawful dismissals. Every group who’s having their funding unlawfully suspended or cut off has absolutely every motivation and every ability to push back. The court system across the entire country has a lot of dockets to hear these various cases.
The question, really, is if there’s some fundamental flaw in the legal analysis. That the executive has some obscure procedural right to do this astonishing, unprecedented wave of unilateral changes in government or to sanction these deranged and wild antics? The bet on the Trumpian/republitarian side seems to be that when these cases and appeals cascade up to the Supreme Court that some significant number of those justices will say ‘Ha-HAH! The time has come!” rip off their masks and reverse themselves on decades of conservative case law saying “suck it libs, it was all a ruse!”
It's theoretically plausible that such a thing could happen I suppose but I suspect that it won’t. I mean Thomas will do what he’s paid to do. He’s old, he generally doesn’t seem to give a fish. Alito, might maybe, ramble some circular nonsense and throw in with Trump, maybe. But the rest of the younger conservative justices? I don’t know it seems unlikely that they are entirely and on this subject and for this President willing to throw their entire ideology and reputation on a bonfire.
And all this stuff Trump is blizzarding out is predicated on him somehow, eventually, winning. If he doesn’t then he’ll get driven back in a blizzard of losses, punitive damages and reversals that’ll, in the end, cost the Federal Government more money and him more reputational loss than if he’d never tried it in the first place.
Of course, he could try to say “let the courts enforce their powerless rulings” and flat out do a constitutional crisis but that strikes me as un-Trumpian. When faced with concrete resistance he’s always historically folded. When committing his various venal crimes it’s always a sideways sidle, it always is oblique and full of posterior covering excuses and allusions. Flat out defy the courts and say “I’m King now?” It doesn’t feel like his MO.
So right now it seems to me we’re in the opening salvo of a blizzard of nonsense. “OMG there’re soldiers on motorbikes attacking our entrenched positions at 10,000 points across the line of engagement!” That’s right now. But it seems very possible, maybe even very likely that with a little time and fortitude, when the dust settles, it’ll become. “OMG we blew away all those idiots on motorbikes attacking our entrenched positions and now there’re 120,000 corpses on the flat land in front of us.”
And this is without even considering the possibility that Musk and his little platoon of coder idiots accidentally fiddles with the wrong line of ancient COBOL script and causes something integral, and hard to fix, and central to break and 71 million people suddenly wake up and aren’t receiving their social security checks for a couple of weeks. Or months. And that is the thing that all the republitarians exulting about “cutting the gummint the way them elected squishes would never vote to!” are trying to ignore. If Trump finds himself holding a fork that has the business end stuck into the outlet of social security or medicare? There’ll be an almighty ruckus and the smell of burning hairspray and then a shower of spray tan and that’ll be the end of Trump. And it’ll be red state voters who’ll be baying to hang him from a lamp post. Because owning the libs is one thing but if those gummint hands start grabbin at your disability or your social security check or suddenly meemaw or papaw needs to move in with you because they can’t make rent, well, owning the libs is gonna suddenly be a heck of a lot less important to you.
Sure and if we were arguing about a proposal in Congress or in spending bill negotiations where this was a provision I'd say you're on solid ground but we're talking about an extralegal act of, I don't know, baseless vandalism?
I hear you saying you expect it will be overruled but don't you think it should be overruled?
I haven't, I don't follow the cinema closely, especially since my local one has ensh*ttified badly, and yes I'm aware that makes me a part of the doom loop of cinema but I was never a cinephile so my conscience is clear.
Right, so basically the demented republitarian billionaire running around the apparatus' of the Federal Government trying to close various elements down with just the fig leaf of an executive order at most has nothing at all to do with a backlash to some kind of similar or equivalent actions on the other side. Just that the woke indulgences of the late Obama on era are fourth order drivers of voter discontent with the Dems. I'd say, then, that my objection to Dark stands.
If you want to make a case that the electorate that elected Trump did so on some form of libertarian backlash grounds you can feel free to try. I have my doubts.
I mean, not only has Wicked made bank at the box office it also has banging good music and the remake is shockingly clever and funny in winking at its own past broadway incarnations and the acting is phenomenal.
Emelia Perez... well the music thuds along like a triangular wheel, the writing is meh and, of course, the audiences ain't impressed.
You're asking policy questions, Dark, when the pertinent questions are procedural ones. For decades libertarians have asserted that the executive can't unilaterally make decisions on spending, either spending more or spending less, without cooperation from congress (while on the side inveigling that neither should be allowed to spend at all since the constitution requires Gilded Age degrees of government size). Now it sounds like you're saying that since Trump is proposing to spend less then screw the procedural questions- it's all good. If you can't see how that incredible reversal can't come back to bite the right, especially the libertarian right, something fierce in the near predictable future, well I dunno what to tell you.
Yes, the uncertainty that has come in where once there was certainty is going to be absolutely awful. Businesses are going to need to hedge their bets for long term planning and these are deeply integrated and huge markets we're talking about Trump fishing with.
On “Deficits, Debt, and DOGE”
Agreed entirely which was why I inquired in the first place.
"
I think the only way Iraq is the answer is if they didn't invade in the first place.
On “The USAID Fight Is About Power, Not Spending”
Depressing, another writer lost to twitspace.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025”
2016 was a very different election than 2016- "the Resistance" was driven by a rising tide of the new identarianism that likely peaked in 2020 and has been slowly subsiding. 2024 blew a huge hole in a lot of that identarianisms core conceits and the 2024 election was a very different bird from the 2016 one so the component elements and assumptions are very different. There's a lot more intra-Dem and intra-Left arguing this time around for one thing. It's probably going to be healthy in the mid to long run but it's going to be uncoordinated in the short run.
On “The USAID Fight Is About Power, Not Spending”
I see Hanley post on Facebook and follow him on Substack. I'd say he remains very principled and crankily libertarian in the strict original sense which means he's not fond of either of the major parties and, in typical Hanley fashion, saves the lions share of his vitriol for whomever is in power at a given time. So he was utterly scathing on Biden and now is utterly scathing on Trump.
I'm not on Bluesky so I don't know anything about Jason but if he's writing anywhere that isn't twitlike I'd love a link since I've always enjoyed his writing.
"
I imagine the Trump fatigue is going to be epic in two years. Holy buckets.
"
Hanley remains a "pox on both their houses" libertarian as far as I've seen and trains his venom on whomever is in the White House at a given time.
On “Keynesian Beauty Contests, Schelling Points, and the Omnicause”
Yes, friend of the blog Hanley made a substack directly about how that is exactly what is happening and what Trump and Musk will likely bog down in.
https://jameshanley.substack.com/p/flooding-the-zone-with-lawsuits
"
In a sane government or a government facing an actual fiscal crisis, benefit cuts to entitlements would be married to spending cuts on right wing shibboleths like defense along with tax increases weighted towards the wealthy and upper middle class which would result in no one being happy and thus everyone ending up accepting it.
Contra your understandable libertarian fantasies if Trump or his Muskrats gets even close to entitlements with these stunts they'll get politically exploded like a toad struck by lightning. Trump is keenly aware of this which is why, when they briefly interrupted Medicare access portals, they promptly backtracked furiously in a frenzy of denials and pledges of fealty to Medicare.
"
Ah yes, I see your point now, thank you. Yeah, I sort of doubt Musk has a set of replacement plans for various things he might try to axe nor do I think his intention is to try and divert (allegedly) corrupt or grafted funds that Dems aligned groups are (allegedly) enjoying and divert them to their ostensible purpose or to Republican aligned graft groups. Though who knows what exactly he thinks he’s accomplishing crawling around in the organizational bowels of the Federal government. I have my doubts even he knows what he’s trying to accomplish beyond triggering liberals and nosing around where he’s not supposed to be. I don’t doubt he’ll, given enough time, come up with something he’ll want to do with this access and power- if he isn’t evicted by the courts which seems to be an event that’s coming up fast. I’ll also note that I’d take allegations of graft and corruption, coming from this lot, with a Minnesota salt truck sized serving of salt until/unless they file charges and furnish evidence.
"
Your original post was descriptive, not prescriptive, so I confined my critiques to what I saw as flaws in your description.
"
I think you're looking at it incorrectly Jay on a basic level.
If Trumps -only- opposition were, say, the Democratic Party, or the Librul(tm) media then this "flood the zone" stuff could plausibly work and what you're describing could apply. This would be doubly true if only the Democratic Party, for instance, could materially oppose Trump. This would be triply true if controlling what "present public discourse" or "what we're talking about now" or even "Vibes" constituted victory. I can also see how you, or I, with us both being individuals who are not directly effected by Trumps myriad attacks and who are interacting with them only by the discourse or the vibe might say “holy cow, Trump is winning so much.” I, personally, equate this to various points in Putins early stage attacks on Ukraine when the Russians launched innumerable assaults from many different directions against many different targets. For a little while everyone was like “holy cow the Ukrainians are gong to get owned.”
This is not, however, the case in reality.
Each relevant impacted individual is both able and is incredibly motivated to respond individually to each of the myriad Trump attacks. Individuals who’re being illegally dismissed or sidelined have absolutely every motivation to file their complaints at court against these unlawful dismissals. Every group who’s having their funding unlawfully suspended or cut off has absolutely every motivation and every ability to push back. The court system across the entire country has a lot of dockets to hear these various cases.
The question, really, is if there’s some fundamental flaw in the legal analysis. That the executive has some obscure procedural right to do this astonishing, unprecedented wave of unilateral changes in government or to sanction these deranged and wild antics? The bet on the Trumpian/republitarian side seems to be that when these cases and appeals cascade up to the Supreme Court that some significant number of those justices will say ‘Ha-HAH! The time has come!” rip off their masks and reverse themselves on decades of conservative case law saying “suck it libs, it was all a ruse!”
It's theoretically plausible that such a thing could happen I suppose but I suspect that it won’t. I mean Thomas will do what he’s paid to do. He’s old, he generally doesn’t seem to give a fish. Alito, might maybe, ramble some circular nonsense and throw in with Trump, maybe. But the rest of the younger conservative justices? I don’t know it seems unlikely that they are entirely and on this subject and for this President willing to throw their entire ideology and reputation on a bonfire.
And all this stuff Trump is blizzarding out is predicated on him somehow, eventually, winning. If he doesn’t then he’ll get driven back in a blizzard of losses, punitive damages and reversals that’ll, in the end, cost the Federal Government more money and him more reputational loss than if he’d never tried it in the first place.
Of course, he could try to say “let the courts enforce their powerless rulings” and flat out do a constitutional crisis but that strikes me as un-Trumpian. When faced with concrete resistance he’s always historically folded. When committing his various venal crimes it’s always a sideways sidle, it always is oblique and full of posterior covering excuses and allusions. Flat out defy the courts and say “I’m King now?” It doesn’t feel like his MO.
So right now it seems to me we’re in the opening salvo of a blizzard of nonsense. “OMG there’re soldiers on motorbikes attacking our entrenched positions at 10,000 points across the line of engagement!” That’s right now. But it seems very possible, maybe even very likely that with a little time and fortitude, when the dust settles, it’ll become. “OMG we blew away all those idiots on motorbikes attacking our entrenched positions and now there’re 120,000 corpses on the flat land in front of us.”
And this is without even considering the possibility that Musk and his little platoon of coder idiots accidentally fiddles with the wrong line of ancient COBOL script and causes something integral, and hard to fix, and central to break and 71 million people suddenly wake up and aren’t receiving their social security checks for a couple of weeks. Or months. And that is the thing that all the republitarians exulting about “cutting the gummint the way them elected squishes would never vote to!” are trying to ignore. If Trump finds himself holding a fork that has the business end stuck into the outlet of social security or medicare? There’ll be an almighty ruckus and the smell of burning hairspray and then a shower of spray tan and that’ll be the end of Trump. And it’ll be red state voters who’ll be baying to hang him from a lamp post. Because owning the libs is one thing but if those gummint hands start grabbin at your disability or your social security check or suddenly meemaw or papaw needs to move in with you because they can’t make rent, well, owning the libs is gonna suddenly be a heck of a lot less important to you.
On “Welcome to the Quagmire”
Surprise surprise.
On “The 97th Oscars’ Best Picture Race: As Wide Open As It Gets”
Yeah Dune with all the mystical stuff eliminated just... well it was like a hollowed out eggshell.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/3/2025”
Fair enough.
I'll note that the private market has failed to eliminate HIV so I fail to see why we could expect this program to do so.
"
Sure and if we were arguing about a proposal in Congress or in spending bill negotiations where this was a provision I'd say you're on solid ground but we're talking about an extralegal act of, I don't know, baseless vandalism?
I hear you saying you expect it will be overruled but don't you think it should be overruled?
On “The 97th Oscars’ Best Picture Race: As Wide Open As It Gets”
I haven't, I don't follow the cinema closely, especially since my local one has ensh*ttified badly, and yes I'm aware that makes me a part of the doom loop of cinema but I was never a cinephile so my conscience is clear.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/3/2025”
Right, so basically the demented republitarian billionaire running around the apparatus' of the Federal Government trying to close various elements down with just the fig leaf of an executive order at most has nothing at all to do with a backlash to some kind of similar or equivalent actions on the other side. Just that the woke indulgences of the late Obama on era are fourth order drivers of voter discontent with the Dems. I'd say, then, that my objection to Dark stands.
On “The 97th Oscars’ Best Picture Race: As Wide Open As It Gets”
The academy is up its own posterior about social fads of the current day? I am shocked, shocked!
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/3/2025”
If you want to make a case that the electorate that elected Trump did so on some form of libertarian backlash grounds you can feel free to try. I have my doubts.
On “The 97th Oscars’ Best Picture Race: As Wide Open As It Gets”
I mean, not only has Wicked made bank at the box office it also has banging good music and the remake is shockingly clever and funny in winking at its own past broadway incarnations and the acting is phenomenal.
Emelia Perez... well the music thuds along like a triangular wheel, the writing is meh and, of course, the audiences ain't impressed.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/3/2025”
How do you figure? Have I missed some wave of unilateral and dubiously legal Executive based expansions of government recently?
"
You're asking policy questions, Dark, when the pertinent questions are procedural ones. For decades libertarians have asserted that the executive can't unilaterally make decisions on spending, either spending more or spending less, without cooperation from congress (while on the side inveigling that neither should be allowed to spend at all since the constitution requires Gilded Age degrees of government size). Now it sounds like you're saying that since Trump is proposing to spend less then screw the procedural questions- it's all good. If you can't see how that incredible reversal can't come back to bite the right, especially the libertarian right, something fierce in the near predictable future, well I dunno what to tell you.
"
Thank you
"
Yes, the uncertainty that has come in where once there was certainty is going to be absolutely awful. Businesses are going to need to hedge their bets for long term planning and these are deeply integrated and huge markets we're talking about Trump fishing with.