Ahhhhh wait a minute.

Stop the show.

I accidentally read Jon's last post exactly backwards.

I read this too fast and put a "not" after the first word. You can see how I took that to be rather cutting.

Sorry for the confusion, take the post of mine before last to exist in an alternate universe where Jon actually is a big meanie....

I don't take anything seriously.

Regarding our earlier exchange, yes, I agree that we were not explaining ourselves well.

I think I misunderstood your statement about "computing heritage" to imply that other countries haven't enjoyed academic success in computing, when really you were (in a less vulgar way) suggesting that you'd like to be near where Google was founded.

And when I was saying that, well, there's been academic success in computing in a lot of places, and what really sets the US apart in computing is the fact that a bunch of successful companies were founded there, I can easily see how you might have misinterpreted it as an attempt to minimize the US's contribution to the field.

All I can really say is, yeah, if what you want is to be near Stanford, you obviously aren't going to get that anywhere else in the world. But if you just want access to "where CS happens", you can get that anywhere.

This thread is kind of weird, would you guys agree with me on that?

Downvote and move on

Sorry guys I turned it into a bloody trainwreck. Let me now read Jon's reply to my redacted retort for kicks, I guess.

Back in the real world, Trump's poll numbers continue to nosedive.

Thanks for humoring me, this is clear and I agree with it. I could expand on where I was coming from a bit but I think it was a minor discussion and I don't want to digress too much.

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As a coda to the confusion I propagated here today, I would totally be down with Wookie defacing my account with the appropriate deprecating custom title.

No, Trump became president by galvanizing the Trump base around hatred for Mexican immigrants and foreign imports, and then by rallying the Republican party around the fact that he wasn't Hillary and would say snarky stupid things about Hillary.

It's a mistake to think of the GOP as a party. They are a coalition. The only thing they really have in common is that they are against the democrats. They have too many conflicting areas of interest to craft a unified party platform.

• Christian right
• Traditionalists
• Business right
• Libertarians
• Anti-communists
• Pro-interventionists

...with some overlap.

Trump's supporters were mostly drawn from traditionalists. He doesn't really have anything to offer the rest.

You really expect the current events thread to not get weird? 30% of the world's population has decided that reality is too inconvenient to believe in anymore. ****'s getting abstract, bro.

Here's hoping Comey drops some bombs in a few days here.

He's testifying in a few days? That should be interesting. Or maybe it won't be, we'll see.



It's been a pretty good ride so far.

Things will get even more interesting if "it won't be".

lol 30%

Damn. And I thought I was going to be able to be sarcastic and hyperbolic without having to note it. Oh well.

(Which is to say: Reid, you're not off the hook!)



Not really. The Republican Party in general defines itself culturally on an ethos of individual self-reliance, an ideological commitment to the importance of a limited federal government, and a belief in the efficiency of free markets. True, the party's base is a coalition, and some of the fault lines between the groups that compose it are ideological; libertarians and can disagree with interventionists about foreign policy, for instance (just as liberal interventions disagree with pacifists in the Democratic Party). But there's also a coherent message that has broad appeal across the Republican party's various constitutive groups.

If anything, the Democrats have a murkier message than the Republicans. Sure, Democratic rhetoric can occasionally nod to using government to collectively address social issues. But aside from that, do the Democrats really have a consistent ideology from which they derive policy goals, as the Republicans do?

Not so much. Sure, Democrats want a more robust healthcare system, and talk about equality. But Republicans talk about equality too.

Actually, it's perhaps the Democratic view that is largely defined as a rejection of the Republican view on limited government. (And let's not forget that a recent Democratic president gave into the Republican position, when he famously announced that the era of big government is over.)

Traditionalists might have historically toed the line, but I don't think they actually want a "limited federal government", nor do they believe in the efficiency of free markets. By all accounts they want an extremely powerful and invasive government with the power to roll the world back to the 1940s. They're the outlier, but they're also the strongest single bloc.


Democrats always seemed like the Canadian Liberals, super duper corporate welfare neoliberals with bread-and-circuses social issues bolted on. About as likely to endorse alternative or redistributative economic policies as the Republicans are. And I don't think the people who vote Democrat are simply reactionary, but responding in the only rational way to a complete ****ing paucity of choice.

Let me just say that this bears out with what I've observed on /pol/. For as long as I can remember, the intellectual libertarian critique of conservatism was that they really didn't want small government as they claimed, but wanted to invade your bedroom, etc. But if we go to the other extreme of self-described traditionalists, we have virulently anti-libertarian types who are not just in favor of big government, but manifest it in downright hate toward libertarians, e.g., posting things on 4chan about how Austrian economists are all Jews, etc.

To the extent that they latch onto valid critiques of neoliberalism much like Sanders in their critique of "minarchism", it's easy to see how they can build a coalition almost out of nothing just by rallying against PC culture and calling liberals cucks (which is mostly a term that addresses the "open border" policies of free market champions). Even better if economic conditions create more bored angry people to waste their time spreading these kind of memes.

What's interesting is that they seem to be self-aware of the historical similarities of their position with outright Nazism--to the extent that anonymnity and annoyance at PC culture has given people who have no real reason to be outright racists or white supremacists (except maybe for being edgy)--has allowed them to outright own the charge of being "literally Hitler", to the point where the charge of being a Nazi becomes a meme that they can dismiss because they've already embraced it in a sort of post-modern abuse of assumptions.

The best part of that is how much many of them love Jordan Peterson who hates post modernism.

So, anyone expecting anything interesting from the Comey hearing? I have a feeling it's gonna be one big series of "I can't comment on that" and Republicans asking anything to avoid talking about Russian election interference.

I think he will answer every question with a quote from Beowulf.

Not the West Saxon epic, the 1999 film starring Christopher Lambert.

I totally agree that that's who Democratic politicians are, for the most part, and it's what they do. No doubt. But one need look no further than the 2016 Democratic primaries to see that it's not a message that they run on, or a message that appeals to the Democratic base across the coalition. The Democrats are divided ideologically between an identify-left and an economic-left, and the identify-left is very self-consciously a coalition of diverse groups. What's the unifying message -- or the unifying anything -- that binds all voters to the Democratic, despite their differences? It's the party you vote for if you can be bothered to engage in electoral politics in the United States, and you're on the left. That's hardly party unity. And, as we saw in 2016, the Democrats had just as many difficulties crafting a "unified party platform" (to quote Obi) at their national convention as the Republicans did.



I didn't say anything about Democratic voters being reactionary. I was talking about the formation of the party's messaging, as a way to indicate that the Democratic party is just as diffuse and just as much a coalition as the Republican one. As you point out, the Democrats embrace a neoliberal economic policy that's similar to the Republican party. Why is that? Because since Reagan, the Republican party has set the terms of the debate. The massive federal programs and high taxes from the heyday of the Democratic Party from FDR to LBJ are over, and Democrats now know that their party was once was based on such a platform, and they sometimes gesture towards it as a golden age, but the Reagan revolution has made it politically unfeasible.

Reid! Where are you?! Off writing exams?! Come back! Russian intelligence hacked voting machines after all! And the Intercept broke the story! lol

https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/top-secret-nsa-report-details-russian-hacking-effort-days-before-2016-election/

Oh, I see. Yes, that sounds reasonable to me.



I really don't think the Democrats embrace neoliberalism because it's untenable to be anything else. I think they're neoliberals because of graft. Neoliberalism is anti-labor fundamentalism and the Democrats went in whole hog knowing that it would seriously injure major segments of their voter base.

The NSA caught the person who leaked the documents!

Using printer microdots. See? I'm not crazy. Your printer really is spying on you.

Edit: http://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-reality-winner.html

Never print anything you don't want to come back to you.

Looks like Glenn Greenwald needs to hit the books and read about how to protect his sources and get this whole redacting thing right.

Somebody should release a tool that processes documents to remove said fingerprints.

I can see why she printed the document and then scanned it. Intuitively it seems like a plausable way of avoiding detection, but then again, not really? Since even if she redacted the fingerprint the NSA still knows which printer completed the print job from their internal records.

Yeah, I definitely suspect that political donors played a large role in pushing Democrats towards their current economic agenda, and that its one of the key forces that keeps them there now. But I think there's also a political -- or a popular -- component that led them to it.

Think of the soul searching that the Democrats have done after this last election. Before election day, Dems thought that the demographic future of the US is a multi-racial majority, and therefore the Republicans were complete fools for doubling-down on building an all white coalition rather than reaching out to minorities. Now that the Democrats have lost, the central problem they're contending with is: how do we win over the white working class? It's really an amazing flip-flop.

I wasn't really around in '92, so I can only argue by analogy. But after Reagan's crushing victories in 80 and 84, and after a 3rd term of Republican leadership under Bush 41, imagine the kind of soul searching Democrats must have done, thinking up ways to reposition themselves to flip Reagan and Bush 41 voters. Despite the fact that the Dems very consciously moved away from the economic left and towards the economic center (a center which had moved to the right during the 80s), Clinton still only won with around 40% of the popular vote in '92. The electorate remembered stagflation/the failed economic policies of the 1970s, and definitely thought they were better off within the post-Reagan paradigm.

The Democrats' initial adoption of a neoliberal economic agenda is a product of the party's recent history. But I agree that the popularity of that agenda among the Democratic base can't explain why it's still their economic policy (i.e., it's because of the donors and the leverage they have over Democratic politicians, which I'd include as a reason why any other economic policy is politically unfeasible).

I saw that. Basically what Russia did is tantamount to an act of war, and if we had a president it would warrant a serious response.

Also life is hell, I'm stuck writing a paper, revising an old one in the final stretch of publication, learning Galois theory properly and measure theory, and writing an essay on pig holocaust for general ed bull****. And I've taken some contract software work so I've been diddling in VBA. Then once this hell is over i have a qual to prepare for in a half summer from quarter-semester transition, which covers more content than the grad sequence here so after moving cross country I'll be learning new algebra and doing that hell.

So I haven't been reading the news too much.

I'll add: being one of two undergrads in a square mile who can write properly-formatted LaTeX that.. compiles.. and doing group projects leads to fun.

Kaczynski was right.

Sounds mathy.

Not sure what exactly you mean by "traditionalists", but if you mean by that the stereotypical Trump voter, it's notable that in '92 and '96 election they didn't toe the line. They voted for Perot in large enough numbers to contribute to the GOP's loss.

Oh I wish. Had only Teddy's brain been spared from been ****ed by MK Ultra and stuck to being the youngest ever full professor of Mathematics at the University of California....

FWIW, this is the term which someone I know IRL uses to describe his political affiliation, whenever the situation calls for more dignity than would be permitted than more private situations, in which case he prefers simply to spout TRP and alt right memes.

TRP?