hotspur

Yeah this is just… fuck.

Looked it up. It was called The Kansas experiment

I need to refresh myself on the details, but I’m reminded of Sam Brownback getting to enact the entire republican playbook in Kansas at the state scale, and it had fairly awful consequences for the state and everyone in it if I recall correctly. This feels similar, except at a way more threatening and potentially permanent scope.

Edit: corrected Arizona to Kansas.

He’s gonna try and make Powell own the recession huh?

Maaaan you beat me to it, same image popped into my head when I read this. But prior to nihilist arrival, that whole vibe is pretty appealing.

Always a treat to get a glimpse of one of these. They really do look prehistoric with that huge crest. And the amount of noise they can make when they are drilling trees is impressive also.

This is what my wife keeps saying, with certainty. I thought it was weird at first, but then I remember that he had that protective order specifically because of the strong threat of violence to him if he was deported back… to the country they sent him to.

I am hoping it’s not the case, and that this is just them wanting to avoid having to back down, but it really wouldn’t have been a big blow to them to bring one person back.

The source of this study is highly suspect.

Yeah i always regret interacting with Lemmy only via my phone, I feel like it limits how well I’m going to be able to express/ articulate, but in any case I appreciated how you framed it—was useful to improve / expand my thinking on it.

Yeah I think this why I’m always sorta weirded out by rabid behavior from centrists. There’s a tacit subconscious understanding somewhere that tells me they don’t have significant beliefs, so how could they be so invested? But this and some of the other replies make a good case for why this might be so; they’re fighting for control and the maintenance of status, and any change, whether forward or backwards, must necessarily represent, by virtue of their constructed reality, a diminishment of their power and status.

Always a pleasure to see concepts well-explained. Thanks for this, much more precise than whatever stumbling articulation I was trying to get to haha.

Yeah ok your point about “there’s no liberal manifesto” neatly describes what I think I was trying to articulate. Which is, I understand more extreme behaviors from left and right—they’re farther from the cultural setpoint, and the farther you are from where you think you should be, the sorta stronger your rhetoric and convictions need to be in order to have a hope of moving things closer to a world you want. But for the liberal it’s basically just I mostly support the status quo (with small incremental changes to social issues at home!), and because of that, anything that’s not roughly the status quo represents a threat immediately.

Also I wonder in some cases, if it actually requires more mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance to maintain a pure liberal viewpoint, than to reside in the right or left. At least when you’re on either side of the spectrum, you have clear thoughts about how you disagree with the present and the direction things need to move, but if you are a status quo enjoyer, you have to somehow discount and explain away internally any thing that is ugly or not working, which is how we saw tons of these liberals urging us to tolerate an actual genocide in favor of preventing a hypothetically worse future genocide under Trump. And certainly, Trump will most likely be as bad or worse for Palestinians, but it was just shocking to see people claiming to hold progressive tendencies accepting what happened to Palestinians over the last year + of the Biden regime.

Clearly there were no actual red lines in terms of what actions were acceptable to undertake, instead it was: no matter how horrible our actions are, they are at least going to be slightly better than the opposition.

Yes, in most of the ones I’ve seen, they’re just pissed Hexbear exists it seems. Most of them also have no interest in discussion, they seem to only want internet community for mirroring their convictions.

Yeah that’s probably true. Like a core of right wing, covered in a candy coated performative virtue signaling shell. But definitely ok with a little genocide, as long as it’s their guy, and he’s “distraught” about it.

The frequency of “HEXBEARS BAD, plz defederate” posts I’ve seen from some of the libbier instances has been higher the last week or two.

Amusingly most of them, once you review their post history to see what the unpleasant interaction they had was, seem to just be weird blue maga trolls. I still don’t get the concept of centrist trolls, like it just doesn’t compute.

Silver lining, all the defed posts reminded me that I don’t have to suffer having .world in my feed thanks to instance blocking.

Yeah exactly. They’ve got a lot of bad ideas, but they are reliable about it. It’s better than the pure grifters that seem to make up the rest of politics at least, you can at least know what they’re gonna be on about, and why.

Yeah ok makes sense. It’s a form of govt interference in the all-powerful market.

Apparently, according to the AEI (the fact that they are lambasting this is notable in itself, but perhaps libertarians are constitutionally against tariffs, I don’t pay a lot of attention to them) even the equation they used has incorrect variables, relying on retail price instead of import price for the calculations, which is obviously incorrect, since that would conflate US markup as something the originating exporter was doing as a tariff. In any case, they’re saying the tariff calc delivers values 4x higher than they should be using this particular calculation. If it was correct, most tariffs wouldn’t be higher than the 10% floor the admin specified.

Oh wow yeah I didn’t realize they were that expensive. But tbh I just knew them because my parents bought some stuff for their house back in the early 2000s. It’s really gonna be wild to see the price jumps on stuff if the tariffs actually stick around though.

They sell faux-historical home goods and light fixtures, etc. not exactly Fortune 500 I don’t think, but definitely a company that does a lot of importing.