That was 30 seconds of Twitter spread out over the course of five minutes.

http://torontosun.com/news/provincial/peterson-launches-defamation-suit-against-wilfrid-laurier-university

So after making a career of calling leftists Stalinists/Maoists, Jordan Peterson loses his mind over a Hitler comparison and decides to sue.

I mean, he's not wrong. Casting your opponent as being Hitler is stupid, but can you maybe take your own medicine and stop comparing left-wing activists to totalitarian regimes as well?

No takes on this recent round of civility being topical?

lmao jon Jordan is your most prominent intellectual

Yours is Donald Trump.

More people know about Marshall McLuhan than Jordan Peterson. Maybe?

Um, excuse me, but how can you call Marshall McLuhan prominent if I’ve never heard a loud racist quote him to justify how racist and unemployable they are?

Obviously Lauren Southern is Canada’s most prominent intellectual. She’s in Russia right now recording state propaganda. Putin doesn’t throw money at just anybody you know, we’re talking about a Trump or an NRA level of right wing super genius here. Jordan Peterson has to sue universities to make his money.

Edit: Although his Kermit the Frog impression is much better than Southern’s, ya gotta give him that.

Lauren Southern seems pretty smart. She completed two years of college

Maybe we should tariff Canadian intellectuals

Agreed but only because of countervailing tariffs against USA “think” tanks.

Agreed. Now let's get rid of tariffs on the productive economy.

https://www.sciencealert.com/extreme-stress-during-childhood-stunts-a-crucial-type-of-learning-for-years-afterwards

hmmmm

I dunno. Gave y’all learned how to vote and think yet? Or do the layoffs have to continue?

😜💦💦🍆

they don't effect me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'll call up the Trump states & warn them

Mexicans are criminals! Because we maintain emotional and psychological abuse against them in key development years!

Tariffs on Chinese goods, foreign steel, aluminum, building materials — yes they absolutely do affect you. It’s your consumption Trump is gambling with, not the pocket change of poor Fox viewers in fly over states. You might not be employed by a company that’s gonna burn to the ground because of this, but everything you buy is gonna get more expensive.

And Trump states are all a bunch of leech welfare queens, too. You’ll be paying for that as well.

It's quite interesting, though clearly not surprising, to observe that it's Clarence Thomas, the private property extremist, who is the one standing up for the common citizen and against the tyrannical government in the case of civil forfeiture laws.

[quote=The New York Times]
WASHINGTON — Tyson Timbs would like his Land Rover back.

The State of Indiana took it, using a law that lets it seize vehicles used to transport illegal drugs. Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the Constitution has anything to say about such civil forfeiture laws, which allow states and localities to take and keep private property used to commit crimes.

Mr. Timbs bought the Land Rover after his father died. The life insurance money amounted to around $73,000, and he spent $42,000 of it on the vehicle. He blew most of the rest on drugs.

“Unfortunately, I had a whole bunch of money, which isn’t a good idea for a drug addict to have,” Mr. Timbs recalled the other day. “I used a lot, and eventually the money ran out. It was an addict’s life.”

Mr. Timbs’s habit started with an opioid addiction and progressed to heroin. He used his Land Rover to get drugs and, on at least two occasions, to sell them. The buyers were undercover police officers.

Mr. Timbs pleaded guilty to one of the drug sales, in which $225 had changed hands, and he was sentenced to a year of house arrest followed by five years of probation. He also agreed to pay an array of fees and fines adding up to about $1,200.

But Indiana wanted more. Using the civil forfeiture law, it took the Land Rover.

Mr. Timbs, 37, has put his life back together, but it has not been easy. “I have to go to meetings, to counseling, to probation appointments,” he said, making clear that he was not complaining.

“They want you to get a job,” he said. “It’s hard to do without a vehicle. Plus, I was a felon, which makes it even harder to find a job.”

He found work as a machinist in a factory some 40 minutes from his home in Marion, Ind., where he lives with his aunt. He borrows her car to get to work, and he feels guilty about that.

“She has to take a bus back and forth to her kidney dialysis appointments,” he said.

“This system — where police can seize property with limited judicial oversight and retain it for their own use — has led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses,” he wrote, citing excellent reporting from The Washington Post and The New Yorker.

The burdens of civil forfeiture fall disproportionately on the poor, said Wesley P. Hottot, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice, which represents Mr. Timbs.

“Tyson’s case illustrates how civil forfeiture makes it harder for people who have made mistakes to correct those mistakes and re-enter society,” Mr. Hottot said. “It shouldn’t take the United States Supreme Court to make clear that you don’t take everything from a person who’s facing the kinds of challenges Tyson is.”

Mr. Timbs won the early rounds in Indiana’s lawsuit seeking to take his vehicle, based on the Eighth Amendment, which says that “excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

Judge Jeffrey D. Todd, of the Grant County Superior Court, said the amendment’s second clause — the one barring “excessive fines” — protected Mr. Timbs. The Land Rover, the judge wrote, was worth about four times the maximum fine Mr. Timbs could have been ordered to pay, which was $10,000. It was also worth more than 30 times the fines that were actually imposed.

“The amount of the forfeiture sought is excessive and is grossly disproportional to the gravity of the defendant’s offense,” Judge Todd wrote.

An appeals court agreed. In dissent, Judge Michael P. Barnes wrote that civil forfeiture laws can be abused but that Mr. Timbs should lose the vehicle.

“I am keenly aware of the overreach some law enforcement agencies have exercised in some of these cases,” Judge Barnes wrote. “Entire family farms are sometimes forfeited based on one family member’s conduct, or exorbitant amounts of money are seized. However, it seems to me that one who deals heroin, and there is no doubt from the record we are talking about a dealer, must and should suffer the legal consequences to which he exposes himself.”

The Indiana Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Timbs, on interesting grounds. It said the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of excessive fines did not apply to ones imposed by states.

This is, surprisingly, an open question. The Bill of Rights originally restricted the power of only the federal government, but the Supreme Court has ruled that most of its protections apply to the states under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, one of the post-Civil War amendments.

But there are a few exceptions, and the Supreme Court has been inconsistent about where it stands on the excessive fines clause. Mr. Timbs’s case is poised to resolve the question. It will be argued in the fall.

In the meantime, Mr. Timbs sometimes lapses into frustration and bitterness.

“I don’t deserve this,” he said. “Nobody does. It’s an unnecessary stressor. I struggle with more than addiction. I struggle with anxiety and depression. I don’t feel like much of a man, because I don’t have a vehicle.”
[/quote]

Yo they gonna seize Purdue Pharma’s cars and buildings too, or is this more of a “while poor/black” kind of law?

“I am keenly aware of the overreach some law enforcement agencies have exercised in some of these cases,” Judge Barnes wrote. “Entire family farms are sometimes forfeited based on one family member’s conduct, or exorbitant amounts of money are seized. However, it seems to me that one who deals heroin, and there is no doubt from the record we are talking about a dealer, must and should suffer the legal consequences to which he exposes himself.”

Dude dealt 200 dollars worth, he ain't exactly a kingpin. **** this judge.

bUt PhArMaCy CoMpAnIeS aRe GoOd

What do you guys think is the problem in the US right now? What's the issue that Trump and everything else is a symptom of?

I realize now I probably would have had an answer to that question two years ago or even a year ago. But it's getting more difficult to maintain any sense of perspective, getting pulled into the non-stop hysteria of the daily media cycles.

Selective enforcement.

That's very pithy. That accounts for many of the issues of accountability that has caused faith in institutions to plummet, and also some of the more culture-oriented social movements such as MeToo or BLM. It encapsulates privilege discourse, anti-capitalist discourse, and also much of what's said on the right about elites, the right's anxieties about immigration (which often are expressed in terms of concerns that immigrants get better access to social services than "native" US citizens), etc.

In some ways, though, to say that selective enforcement is the issue isn't to say much more than that the problem is that people think the system is rigged against them. (Or, that it's not merely the perception of it being rigged, but the fact that it is actually rigged.)

An alternative would be decreasing marginal returns on complexity but I don’t think it’s true. The US’s problems are primarily social, not a resource crunch.

I don't know if I can pin every problem on one specific thing causally, but I can list a few:

Propaganda. Americans are basically the most successfully propagandized country in the world. I think when many people think of propaganda, they think Nazi or Soviet posters. That's a naive representation of it, and a misleading one. Propaganda today is much more subtle. Until very recently, most Americans held the perception that our media (and I don't mean just news, here) was free and honest. What we have now is even worse, though, because now everybody's suspicions about the news we are told are redirected into conspiracy theories. This is where I find Manufacturing Consent to be a book of critical importance, even if it's outdated, but it makes clear how "free and open" media can function structurally much different than "free and open" suggests. The manufacture of consent lines up with why so many political opinions are bimodal, which I hinted at in an above post, bimodal distributions typically mean there is external forcing on a dataset. Specifically, most people's political opinions are very much not organic, and there's a massive amount of confused, misleading rhetoric going around all of the time about these things, which is partly why I'm cynical towards your attempts to listen to conservatives.

Corruption of politics by the business class. I couldn't find a video clip of it, but there's a part in The Sopranos where Carmela is reading the newspaper about a decision in Italy, where "influence peddling" is considered an "honored Italian tradition" or something like that. Basically it was just a justification of corruption by claiming it was a time-honored Italian tradition. I love it, because, well, that's how people involved in corrupt activities always feel: my corruption isn't a problem, it's the corruption of the other guy which is. And basically, the **** some people get away with in America is basically corruption, I can't think of another word for it. Which ties into what Jon`C said, basically selective enforcement of laws, or in some cases a complete lack of enforcement of laws, in ways which consistently benefit certain parties. Walmart is this country's largest private employer; no amount of research into Walmart suggests anything other than they systemically get away with violating the law in regards to labor rights. With how the legal system in America works, individuals (especially the sort who will seek employment at Walmart) have almost no recourse to fight legally against a wide variety of labor violations. Then you have the revolving door between corporations and regulatory agencies, I mean, who honestly followed the Ajit Pai/FCC thing and didn't conclude it was blatantly corrupt?

Tying these two together, the second is justified by massive use of the first. People are lied to about the effects corporations have on our political landscape. And then, when people are informed, they are told it's hopeless to try and fix any of it.

Like, wrt Walmart, the completely systemic violation of labor rights, which goes back decades, is bad enough that they should have been hit with massive punitive fines. I mean they should be paying many billions of dollars for the sheer volume and seriousness of their violations. They basically get away with it. And this kind of stuff effects the country deeply.

Corruption is effectively Francis Fukuyama's answer to the question. He doesn't use the word (he uses the word Neo-patrimonialism), but corruption is what he effectively means: it is not a free marketplace governed by laws backed by the power of the government that determines who economic (but also political and social) winners and losers are, but, rather, personal relations that exist between those who hold government power and their clients in the private sector.

Fukuyama's view is part of a larger theory about the development and decline of the modern state. I like it (it appeals to the Hegelian in me).

I know I harp on the "is Trumpism racial anxiety or is it economic anxiety" debate too much, but I think the crippling flaw of the racial anxiety argument is that it can't account for the international nature of most populist discontent. I suppose I'm inclined to not find convincing any explanation that doesn't have at least some international component. It actually began to become prominent in Europe a few years before it did in the US (UKIP seemed to be gaining international prominence, for example, in the very beginning of the 2010s).

Why does it have to be one or the other? Couldn't a predominant economic anxiety with an additional, less widespread or less relevant demographic anxiety be at play in the US?

Yeah, for sure. The only reason why I brought up the racial anxiety/economic anxiety debate is because it's an example of an interpretation of the rise of populism that is based on looking exclusively at America's domestic politics. I'm straw-maning right now, but there are some people who make the argument that the reason why we have Trump is because racists didn't like that we had a black president, and the sight of seeing him on TV all the time drove them to vote -- almost dialectically -- for a raving out-of-control racist. Some who make the racial anxiety argument can treat the rise of Trump as if it can be explained solely by in terms of recidivism, as a resurgence of forces that have always been latent in the country's national ethos, and every now and then boil up, as if the problem is America's inability to transcend and escape it's own particular legacy of racism, stretching back to chattel slavery, the civil war and segregation. In other words, such people argue that Trump's election is solely a product of America's domestic politics.

That last post was pretty unclear. I'm not taking a position on that debate right now. Let me restate what I was trying to get across: a lot of people seem to think you can explain what America's problems are by looking at its domestic politics exclusively. I think that, given the fact that Trump is only an American version of an international phenomenon, any argument that tries to explain the problem solely by appealing to domestic issues is inadequate, because the international dimension here can't be ignored. Any explanation for Trump's rise has to recognize Trump as an American manifestation of international populist discontent.

What’s the r squared of national Trumpistry vs Newscorp consumption?

This almost directly contradicts what I said, inasmuch as it primarily focuses on American history and its domestic politics. But it does seem as if something that stretches back to the founding of the US is skepticism about the federal government and the consolidation of power that it entailed. Right? The anti-Federalists feared that the establishment of a strong federal government would replace the tyranny of the English monarch that they had just deposed with a tyranny of republican rule from a federal government with a strong executive located in some distant corner of the country. Much of the sectionalism in the United States over the course of its history, and much of the politics of people who live outside of the eastern seaboard, seems rooted ultimately in suspicion of consolidated power of the federal government as an arbitrary imposition on the liberty of smaller communities.

It's interesting, though, that criticism of the EU is pretty similar. Just replace DC with Brussels and you have Euro-skepticism.

What's the r squared of anti-federalism and market penetration of Rupert Murdoch properties critical of that federation?

People have anxieties, and some of them are legit, yes. White middle class Americans feel their lives are getting worse. There's reality there. Wages have stagnated, decent jobs are harder to find, everything is more expensive.

For me, though, whether or not people have legit anxiety seems apart from the point politically. What seems most relevant is how people choose to contextualize these anxieties, what they blame, and their solutions. The prime difference between Trump supporters and not is that Trump supporters contextualize various anxieties, such as increased health care costs and the opioid epidemic, as racial ones, Mexicans getting "free health care" and MS-13. They see "declining morals" as responsible for the increase in single mothers, and contextualizing "declining morals" as black men kneeling for the anthem. Listening to my father, the solution for the drug crisis is to start executing Mexican drug dealers. This is how Trumpists view the world. They take real problems and reformulate them in ways that target other demographics.

The primary causes, of course, aren't these things, it's the natural progression of our business culture. But Trumpists also recontextualize business problems in other ways. Basically, when white people do stuff that contradicts their worldview, well then those white people must be democrats, who are basically as bad as Mexicans.

Recently I started rewatching Breaking Bad. It's an interesting show to watch post Trump. The main subtext of the show is: a disenfranchised white man, angry that he failed in American business culture, decides to use his vastly superior manufacturing skills to systemically dominate Mexican production in a region of the United States. Now I don't think the show is particularly pro-Trump in it's views, but the zeitgeist captured there foretells the Trump phenomenon in a way.

You've got two voices in today's media. One is an angry, crazy old man screaming about how bad everything is because of the immigrants and regulations and democracy. The other is a soft, patronizing voice explaining in exhaustive and technical detail how the only real problem we have anymore is that privileged white men think they have problems.

Yes, this is a caricature, but it's not much of one.

It's about economics. It's not about economic anxiety, it's about economics - bona fide economic outcomes. People aren't worried about getting ****ed, they are getting ****ed. People don't understand exactly how or why they're getting ****ed, which is why they listen to the only voice that's speaking to them - and they believe what that voice is saying because they have no other option. That's how the economic problems of the in-group petite bourgeoisie transform into rants about non-issues like demographic change, violent crime on a downtrend, and big government that somehow keeps getting bigger every time you vote against it.

Meanwhile, all the contra voice has to say about this is "capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than blah blah blah", which is, obviously, of course, why US median real household incomes have fallen over the past year despite capitalism being better than ever.

Also, if you follow the_donald, I know it's hard because.. ew.., but you should if you want to know how Trumpists think. They have a "Violent Left" tag, which exists to help assist in conjuring up the myth that there's a preponderance of violence coming from the left.

I searched "bank" to see what their takes would be on various banking issues, and I'm coming up empty on anything of substance.. I don't think the typical Trump supporter follows such things.