I really want to see Scott on Steve Hilton, I think the only person who has got bored of being a senior British politician and decided to build a profile in America and run for office. A kind of political Russel Brand.
You should read what Steve Hilton's former boss David Cameron had to say about him in his memoirs:
Steve Hilton's ideas continued to be one part brilliant to several parts bonkers. However, his relationship with people in government wasn't working. He was no longer excused as a free spirit when he was late for meetings - he was seen as someone who had disregard for others. His antagonistic style was no longer helping him advance his cause - it had started to hurt it. And the relationship between the two of us became strained, too. Steve is a real ideologue in a way I'm not. He thought I was losing my radical zeal and falling for the trappings of prime minister. But I knew that to be a successful radical you have to play the game. And he wasn't interested in playing the game, just tipping it over and throwing the pieces all over the floor.
I got curious and checked out their website at https://www.capitoltimesmedia.com , and that Shields cover is currently their "Free download" issue. And in that pdf, as of right now (2026-05-19), the cover has the "challenges the sytem" version, but at page 9 they have a thumbnail reproduction of that same cover with "challanges the sytem". So even within their own published pdfs, it's inconsistent.
Also, the entire "issue" is the Shields interview (no other articles), it really does begin with "UNFIRLTERD", many (most?) images are AI-generated slop, and the entire thing is just incredibly low-quality overall. For instance p20 is straight-up an accidental duplicate of p19. So the reason why the blatant typos move around seems to simply be an extreme lack of care from the editor of Capitol Times Magazine, Anil Anwar (who puts a full-page photo of himself at page 5).
I find myself oddly fascinated by that sort of stuff. We live in an incredible era, where anyone with a computer can just produce this sort of thing if they have the will to do it. It has the look and feel of a "real magazine", the kind that used to take entire professional teams to do! Incredible power at our collective fingertips!
It's just that the contents are entirely hot garbage to anyone taking a couple minutes to actually look at it, and this awesome creative potential is apparently used by Capitol Times Magazine editor Anil Anwar entirely to stoke one particular person's ego, one "issue" at a time. I can't quite decide how I feel about this.
When somebody is in that line of work, the question isn't "am I paid enough to spell-check," it's "will I be paid any less if I don't." Given how much of that pay was up front and non-refundable, the answer is easy.
Axually!!!!1! when the Talmud was written in Iraq there were lots of Christians in Persian Mesopotamia. Even when the persian Sasanian kings, who were Zoroastrian, occasionally persecuted Christians, they focused on those with religious ties with the Romans and sometimes even protected christian heretics.
One of these protected Christian heresies was the Church of the East, or the Nestorians, who after the Islamic conquest spread East along the silk road and eventually became influential in Mongolia. Genghis Khan was in in his youth a protégé of a christian khan so he married his youngest son with his niece, a nestorian christian woman. Among their issue was Kublai Khan of Marco Polo fame.
Pretty sure that such a guy should just change his name to Moe Chris Jeb Sky
>Sarah Smith
Plausibly this women should still change her name to John Smith, in a local election where most voters see only the name and nothing else. Keep Sarah as a middle name. Once you win, go by J. Sarah Smith.
So if the Book of Enoch guy gets elected, do we (well you, I'm not in California...) have a first amendment issue or not? I can't work out whether it should count as a religious text, since I don't think any religion regards it as such.
The Ethiopian Orthodox have the book of Enoch.. they are fascinating..they have additional books on top of the apocrypha. Although their version of the book of Maccabees is different from the Roman Catholic version.
Wikipedia says the Ethiopian Jewish community Beta Israel, Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church consider it canon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Enoch
I looked at his website in detail. No where he has a dedicated page explaining about the book of Enoch other than to download it and share it. I am not sure why. Based on his identity of origin, his educations with five degrees which is impressive and being a veteran, I say he knows something that he doesn’t want to tell us. May be giving us a clue or something. Other than that, I kind of like his policies.
Wait wait wait, there's a California Democrat who's against Atheistic Marxism? How did that happen? Did he enter the wrong door at the "Select Your Party Day"?
I have to admit, I have some admiration for the guy whose platform is "put politicians in jail". Well okay, he says "corrupt government representatives", but a gal can dream!
"On the opposite side of the aisle is Duane Terrence Loynes Jr, a recent Loyola University graduate who fell in with a bad crowd - by which I mean Catholic philosophers."
*shakes head sadly* Ah, the Jesuits. It's always the Jesuits, isn't it?
> I have to admit, I have some admiration for the guy whose platform is "put politicians in jail"
I have said that I thought the most entertaining outcome of the lawsuits surrounding Trump in the run-up to his re-election would be if he won office while incarcerated, and then had SCOTUS rule that he couldn't pardon himself, and he also couldn't trust his VP to pardon him if he resigned, so he just governed the country from behind bars.
While this article is remarkably thorough, it still leaves some questions unanswered. Namely, is "Tree ARMY" a pro-Ent policy? Or does it imply forcibly drafting Ents to enforce border security? I look forward to a followup post addressing this topic in detail.
>Every election year, somebody thinks: most voters are low-information voters. And low-information voters are only going to see your name and party on the ballot. Your party is what it is - you can’t be the Democratic nominee without winning the Democratic primary. But your name is negotiable. Change your name to something inspiring and patriotic, and you can ride a tsunami of low-information-voter support all the way to the Governor’s mansion.
>Every election year, low-information voters see a handful of candidates with names like LovesAmerica Smith or HonestyAndTransparency Johnson, think “Oh, yeah, it’s the weirdos who try the the thing where you change your name”, and skim right past them.
I'm reminded of Byron (Low Tax) Looper, who eventually switched tactics to exploiting a loophole in election law (NB: Looper was actually his birth name!).
(At the time, Tennessee law didn't allow candidate replacements after 30 days before the election, and also didn't allow a candidate who became invalid to remain on the ballot and be replaced by his party after the election. So Looper shot his opponent less than 30 days before the election in order to win by default. Fortunately, he was arrested, and the outrage got his opponent's widow elected as a write-in.)
He lost the lactose-intolerant vote when he said, "This is the whey." But his lawyer scored big points when he said, "If for OJ you vote, you won't get force-choked."
This is supposedly a post on the California gubernatorial race, but around the 55th paragraph Alexander gets distracted and starts discussing Talmudic Jesus legends.
>Fittingly, Ms. Buhler’s website is a sort of socialist resume, listing all the capitalism she’s protested during each three-month period:
This felt surprisingly unfair, especially directed at a specific young person by name. The image you post seems to be almost entirely pointed at government malfeasance rather than capitalism and concerned primarily with human rights rather than socialism.
Maybe there's some other website you saw but didn't post where she said 'and of course all of this government malfeasance and all of these human rights violations are solely the fault of capitalism, and the only way to solve them is socialism' or something. But if so you didn't read that into the record here, and what you did read into the record is such a mismatch to your characterization of it that it feels like you just wanted to make a cheap joke at this young woman's expense.
I love this blog in part for your usual charity and kindness, I have to say I was a little shocked by this. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something in your intent here, but it was jarring.
I was using "socialist" to mean a certain flavor of far-left often associated with the DSA. I'm not incredibly attached to this, so I've edited the post, but I also don't get how you object to it so strongly.
I guess I interpreted the contrast in the phrase 'socialist resume, listing all the capitalism she’s protested' as implying a strict anti-capitalist and more radically Marxist economic approach, since it feels like it is framing things in terms of a central conflict between Socialism and Capitalism.
Now that you explain what you intended, I can see that as a milder and fairer reading, it's just not what I first thought when I read that sentence.
I think my strong reaction has to do with worrying that even if the public-goods type of mild European socialism has a lot of supporters, the radical Marxist anti-capitalist type of Socialism has a lot of attackers and contempt and strife around it, and I can see being associated with that in a famous public forum bringing a young woman a lot of negative virulent attention or closing career doors.
Again that's not a problem if people interpret what you are saying in the more moderate way you intended, but I interpreted it in the more radical way, and I was afraid others would too, to bad consequences. I am maybe over-sensitive to this possibility due to past negative experiences, but it worried me a bit.
Sorry if I veered too close to assigning motive here, I suspected I could be misunderstanding your intent but I should have probably made that the first sentence in my post rather than the last.
It is mean for a big account to find a random person and make fun of her political views. It is okay to make fun of people who are running for Governor, whatever their age.
I agree with that as a general rule but I'm not sure it's a rule with zero exceptions. I support a general taboo of 'don't bring the entire internet down on college kids doing stupid things, doing stupid things and learning from your mistakes is what college is for.'
If you are allowed to run for governor before you are allowed to buy alcohol, it implies that the category of 'running for governor' can include people we legally consider not full adults capable of responsible adult choices. In those rare corner cases I think it's right to be a little more cautious and provide those people some of the same protections you would in other circumstances.
Which is to say, utilitarianism doesn't say 'this consequence is larger than that consequence, so I'll ignore the smaller one entirely'. You always add everything up together.
It's not really college, it the age that is typical of college. Yeah, other young folk can be expected to make stupid mistakes, and should also be treated tolerantly (which isn't the same as exculpated).
College, in particular, is expected to be a relatively low risk environment. It would be better is those who didn't go to college also had a low risk environment to learn in.
That one becomes an adult at 21 is STUPID!!!. It's a gradual process. For that matter, I think that even at 28 I was still making some blatantly stupid choices. (Well, I still do, but now I think I usually quickly recognize them.) And for that matter, not all people mature at the same rate. In many ways I was slower than most.
The problem is designing "safe spaces for learning" that both actually encourage desirable learning and don't really damage society. College is expected to require subsidy by one's family, but we really can't do that for all of society.
I generally disagree with this line of thought. We have an age of majority. It suffices. Everyone does dumb things and matures past that one line for a very, very long time, if you aren't looking back on things you did last year with a groan you're failing to continue growing. Also, the drinking age being 21 was more about MADD in the 80s and 90s pushing it as a concentrated effort to lessen deaths, and the only reason the age is not even higher/alcohol wasn't abolished completely is the rest of society wouldn't stand for it - it helps society a lot when you take a lot of drunk drivers off the road, the more the better, but the people will revolt if they can't get their drink on. So using the drinking age as comparison doesn't support the point that much when really, it was about pushing it as high as the electorate would stand for.
Anyway. At a certain point, and that point is 18 for much of the western world, you are responsible for your own actions and the consequences thereof, regardless of how close you are to reaching whatever your full potential is. I'm not saying she should be unkindly mocked or blasted (nor do I think Scott's words qualify as such), but I don't think someone deserves grace *beyond* that of any other person, just by virtue of being... twenty-something?
Of course there are horrible things that shouldn't happen to anyone just because they are a public figure, but does anyway (stalking etc) - but that shouldn't be happening to anyone however young or old. The age doesn't have a bearing on whether people should be doing it or not. We give very old people with dementia extra grace because they are literally losing their mind to a disease - young people simply do not have an equivalent cognitive impairment, as far as I know.
"I think my strong reaction has to do with worrying that even if the public-goods type of mild European socialism has a lot of supporters, the radical Marxist anti-capitalist type of Socialism has a lot of attackers and contempt and strife around it, and I can see being associated with that in a famous public forum bringing a young woman a lot of negative virulent attention or closing career doors."
Is college Marxism really so surprising, in an American context? Ms. Buhler sounds like the type of 'ambitious for a political career' that I'd expect to act as she has done; running for governor is very confident, but I think this is more about getting her name out there. These types do start their climb up the ladder in college, often getting elected to students' union governance, joining student activist bodies, junior political party of party of choice, and so on. After college they often wangle an internship or other job in the office of a local representative.
After having the corners knocked off, she'll either soften into general liberalism/left of centre and try to get a foothold in the Democratic party (maybe via the DSA), or harden into the extreme leftist infighting over Marxist-Leninist versus Trotskyite versus myriad other splinters.
In the Irish context, an example would be Ivana Bacik (or indeed several other Labour politicians such as Ruairi Quinn who, in his college days, was so radical he picked up the nickname Ho Chi Quinn but was very comfortably middle-middle to upper-middle class, and fitted nicely into Labour when it pivoted to chasing the middle-class vote*):
"Ivana Catherine Bacik is an Irish politician who has been the leader of the Labour Party since 24 March 2022 and a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dublin Bay South constituency since winning a by-election on 9 July 2021. Bacik previously served as leader of the Labour Party in the Seanad from 2011 to 2021, and a Senator for the Dublin University constituency from 2007 to 2021. She previously served as deputy leader of the Seanad from 2011 to 2016.
...Bacik resigned as president of Trinity College Dublin Students' Union in 1990, after breaking the mandate from the Union membership regarding voting for candidates at a Union of Students in Ireland conference.
...Bacik's policies have been described as liberal and social democratic; In 2022, Bacik described herself as a "socialist, a social democrat and as centre-left. That means that I stand for constructive politics, of seeking to deliver change by going into government".
*Apparently in America "middle-class" is used for "upper working-class/lower middle-class" and not just "middle-class", which used to puzzle me when I read or heard American politicians going on about how they were middle-class, like Kamala Harris in the last campaign. Well of course you're middle-class, your parents were university academics? No, she was trying to convey to the voters that she had blue-collar roots and wasn't some snooty type from privilege.
Ms. Buhler is why I'm very doubtful all the petitions etc. that people call for actually do anything. When some issue bubbles up, you get the online messaging around "ring or write your congresscritter!" but I think a ton of these kinds of communications must land on their desks every week, and that there is some poor intern saddled with answering the phones and replying to the letters with the form answer "Congressperson O'Looney is very interested in hearing from you about this vital topic, thank you for bringing it to their attention" while the Congressperson remains in happy ignorance of the VITAL EXERCISE OF DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE POWER calling for action about shrimp, capitalism, socialism, and the other 112 issues people get hot under the collar about.
A signature on a petition counts for very little, A phone call to your congressman's office asking to speak with the staffer who handles [Issue X] counts much, much more. Or maybe a physical letter; email much less so.
Is another possible explanation for the small-local-business media getters something something free publicity networking help the business?
Does running for office put you in touch with the local officials who grant your business licenses, is media around the governor's race subsidized and prioritized in ways that make it cheaper and more effective than adverting your business as a business directly, etc.
Small correction: the Jesus in that story is called Yeshu haNotzri (ישו הנוצרי) whereas someone who is a Nazarite(vowed against wine and impurity and cutting hair) would be called HaNazir(הנזיר). Christians are called נוצרים Notzrim (Nazarenes) in Hebrew.
Also the story in Sanhedrein with Jesus getting sentenced to death on Passover does have at least one apostle in common with the Christian story, Mattai seems like it matches Matthew and in a different story Rabbi Eliezer encounters a Christian heretic named Jacob=James.
Finally, in tractate Shabbat 116, at least one verse from the new testament is directly quoted "I am not coming to subtract or add to the Law of Moses" (
אנא לא למיפחת מן אורייתא דמשה אתיתי [ולא] לאוספי על אורייתא דמשה אתיתי) from the book of Matthew and possibly another paraphrased quote from galatians, so the Rabbis knew some things about Christians.
That's true, but it's also true that the Notzri epithet doesn't appear in all manuscripts and it's unclear if it was originally there and removed by someone trying to hide that it's about Jesus, or if it was originally absent and added by someone trying to make it look like it's about Jesus.
The Shabbat 116 story is funny because it's the one clear reference of Christianity in the Talmud, but it doesn't mention Jesus or Yeshu at all. The quote (which is similar to, but not a direct quote of the corresponding verse in Matthew) is attributed to the Avon Gilyon, a pun of evangelion which means sinful manuscript. The story takes place in Israel and involves Rabban Gamliel (the younger one) and his sister. Also, the story is in Aramaic when most sources about Gamliel are in Hebrew, probably indicating a later date.
Someone commented here saying they don’t think any religion recognizes the text and I was about to do an “um actually…” when I thought to myself “wait, I wonder if the guy is Ethiopian.”
Ok but why say Abyssinia and not Ethiopia? Lots of possibilities but here I should note that one of the few religions to treat the Book of Enoch as canonical is the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, also known as the Abyssinian Church.
So here’s my hypothesis: the entire campaign is a front to convert as many people to Ethiopian Orthodoxy. You get a real-enough looking campaign website that everyone can agree with (“aw look he hates both parties, I hate both parties too”) and then once you get to the link to share, boom, you are now sharing the Book of Enoch with your friends and family and wondering why every other Christian denomination is suppressing this marvelous text.
Wow THE Deiseach replied to my post. Have been reading Scott’s blog(s) for a decade, but only just started commenting (was too young to be fighting on the internet during the Slate Star days). I remember scrolling down for your comments to get the Magisterium’s perspective on things haha. Full circle.
2 generations of Alexandrian TradCaths: Scott is really going to have to switch teams now
Thank you for the compliment (er, it *was* a compliment?) I feel like a lurking cryptid that has been exposed in the beam of a flashlight here - the Deiseach scuttles back into the undergrowth when directly encountered, retreating until the opportunity to snark and grumble presents itself more favourably! 😁
Interesting take. A friend shared this site with me because of the book. Now here I am engaging politics and the book of Enoch. Still his background is interesting. I am talking about his education level and military?
I don’t think that is the case. The website has lots of policies and things he would like to implement if elected. Those are serious policies. May be we are not asking the right question? What does the book have anything to do with politics?
Couple of years ago in a municipal election near me one of those one-issue guys with a one-man party actually got elected. His one issue was that that the municipality had sold some land at below price to some developers, which he believed to be a corrupt deal. His only issue was getting the internal documents related to the sale published.
His one man, one issue party won two seats on the council.
I am also interested the very least. Why put the link so obscure? You can’t even see it and you can easily miss it. My first thought was he put it by mistake. Then I saw his background, military, his studies and symbols he used. This is not random. David Wilcock RIP talked about it in details. I don’t have the links but you can find it somewhere in the archives.
Fantastic! This is the strongest "endorsement" the American Solidarity Party has received in a long time! (I kid, but I really would like to see a new third party in the "communitarian" quadrant get some traction. Libertarians have had their time in the sun!) For those who would never consider voting for such a party, consider whether you'd rather the conservative opposition be more of the current crop of Republicans, or folks who support living wages, environmental conservation, and abolishing the death penalty.
Also, it's always fun to get a view into how incredibly diverse the population really is...
The problem is with the current voting system, only votes for the most probably two candidates are reasonable. Ranked choice has it's problems, but it solves that one.
sad to see the way AI images and prose are eating up native human unhinged imagination! Just think of all the wacky posters and campaign prose we would've had in years past. The preponderance of em-dashes, "not just X, but Y", and omnipresent GPT image gen posters are disappointingly uniform. At this point we should just have Claude/GPT as a candidate outright.
One does wonder about OpenAI's anti-sycophancy measures, however, given some of the content listed herein. I would expect the Louis Barraicua poster to have generated some meaningful pushback from GPT, considering this is the exact sort of "reality-hopping interdimensional hero" stuff which caused them so many problems with 4o-abetted delusions but apparently not?
well, all you really have to do (if a delusional individual) is just keep pushing and the chatbot will eventually come around again.
as for the influence on campaign material - yes, I too prefer the human wacky prose. the sheer increased quantity of campaigners makes me wonder if AI just made it much easier for people to get in the game, and quite a few of these people wouldn't have run without its, shall we say, support. i'd be interested in learning if there are similar increases in how many people are running for office across the world
Error: Domenico Camplisson (no photo provided) is the Provisional Knight of Malta. The person whose photo you display is Jeff Culbreath, the person before Camplisson in the committee list.
The American Solidarity Party is actually pretty great, I used to vote for them back when the stakes were lower and hope to see the day the stakes are low enough again for me to do so.
Basically pro-life democrats (economically at least), which is a not a huge political base, but it's not thier fault not many people seem to care about valuing and helping people both before and after they're born :)
>valuing and helping people both before and after they're born
The question isn't about whether it's good to help people," it's whether unwilling people should be forced to support those who cannot or will not support themselves. The criticism of conservatives that they're hypocritical for opposing welfare while supporting abortion banning is valid, they should act in accordance with their values and oppose both. I've written about this:
Exactly, the criticism of conservatives is valid. ASP passes your hypocrisy criticism by supporting welfare both before and after birth. Just lands on the opposite side of both from you
Also slander, since this imputes inconsistency to valid disagreement -- all the more in that the thing disagreed with is not the thing claimed to be inconsistent.
Exactly why is the duty of people to, rather than give to the poor themselves, hand over money to the government to be defrauded on the pretext that it's being given to the poor?
Yes, fraud is bad. I'm glad Biden's DOJ was able to find and prosecute it :)
One doesn't really influence the other. If the government stopped helping the poor and middle and upper class people got 5% more money in thier pockets, how much would that really increase thier donations?
That wasn't sarcasm. Biden's DoJ did investigate and indict the people committing the fraud back in 2022. I was just smiling because it was a poke to point out that this was prosecuted under Biden, even though Trump tries to take credit for it. Fwiw, Trump has made it a point to pardon people committing giant health care fraud schemes
The same way he is illegally blowing up supposed drug boats in the carribean while pardoning one of the biggest drug importers ever (400 tons of cocaine to the US!)
Societies define duties? It works better that way? There are a lot of potential answer to the question. And if you think ethics are intrinsic, not constructed, you have a lot of of explaining to do.
You are not society. You do not get to define a duty to be defrauded to benefit the evil on the pretext of helping the poor -- and you certainly do not get to declare that it is better than that the evil commit fraud than that the poor be helped.
Hence, your comment is a non-sequitur. And your claim about ethics is an additional nonsequitur.
Alexander, you've written about why the poor and low-class should be aborted out of existence. You haven't written about "welfare for all eternally" and you certainly have not written about "as many babies as you like and welfare to support them", contra what you are intimating here with 'conservatives are hypocritical for opposing welfare and supporting bans on abortion'.
How do you know that all conservatives have values about abortion that are "well if you're on welfare you should be sterilised but failing that, if you do breed, abort the spawn before it's born"? You can't shout "hypocrisy" if people do in fact believe babies should be allowed to live.
The issue is that pro-lifers want to assert that abortion bans are not dysgenic, then withdraw into the motte of moralistic statements like "babies should be allowed to live" when challenged.
There's always the option of banning 𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘺 abortions. Society is still dysgenic even with legal abortion as long as the more productive populations refuse to reproduce above replacement rate.
I like Alexander's soft impeachment that my real objections are about eugenics and not, you know, baby murder. I'm only retreating to the motte, apparently?
You have to understand that not everyone shares your unconditional valuation of life. I still think Alexander's still failing to see the bigger picture, though. There are ways to get rid of people without triggering people's sentimentalities. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say.
I'm just shocked you missed the joke that jumped out at me while reading the voter guide. You even placed the candidate under "Nominative Determinism":
If Duane Terrence Loynes Jr., who is campaigning on a pledge to regulate women's bodies, won... he'd be "Governor Loynes"
"campaigning on a pledge to regulate women's bodies"
Don't make me lament my non-Californian status so I can't vote for him!
Honestly, the amount of "you don't support no-limits abortion? so you want to lock women up and rape them in a state of continuous pregnancy don't you, you monster!" that gets slopped around when someone expresses even the smallest quibbles about maybe some term limits on the procedure makes me roll my eyes.
I'm not totally sure they meant it as a pejorative. I read it as strengthening the connection by explicitly referencing bodies before referring to loins.
I'm gun-shy because over-exposed to the types of hysteria online about enslaving women etc. when any kind of pro-life attitudes are expressed, so phrases like "regulate women's bodies" make me very twitchy.
your straw man of the straw man only serves to (imo) worsen your point, because nobody actually says that. even in the most hysterical (heh) cases the idea of literal kidnapping rape doesn't come into play because, well, whether someone could or couldn't get an abortion at a doctor's office is pretty moot when they're being locked in a basement.
most of the time it goes: look at all these horrible cases in real life that happened when various people couldn't get abortions because of existing rules, that was pretty bad, abortion is not as bad, we'd rather have the downsides of freely available abortions than the downsides of not having them. and then an argument about which downsides are worse can ensue.
Yes, it's an absolutely magical turn of phrase. More pithy version of the meme with the guy who listed Yale and Harvard on his LinkedIn education section (as "applied to").
What is going on in that Scott Shields magazine cover? "The Man who Challanges the Sytem: A Deep Unfirlterd Conversation on Power, Ideology, and Future" (plus at least two other typos on the cover). "UNFIRLTERD"? Really?
I looked into that in a comment a bit earlier, since I was curious. You can ctrl-F "Thelo" to find that earlier comment of mine, but short version: the "Capitol Times Magazine" seems to be an incredibly low-quality slop thing that only exists as a vanity thing to prop up someone's ego, one "issue" at a time. The pdf is freely available right now and It's just completely full of that sort of thing.
Among the smart people I know whose politics are similar to mine and Scott's, the favored candidate is San Jose mayor Matt Mahan, who's been particularly good on housing. It's not clear if he can win, though; he has a lot less name recognition than the other credible Democrats.
Mahan might have a shot if we had RCV for governor. Instead we have this stupid top two jungle primary thing, in which he sadly has next to no chance. See also: Nithya Raman in LA. Abolishing the jungle primary should be a major structural reform priority for CA.
While she would probably have been a nightmare to have as a client, I sympathize on a few points with this Alicia Lapp lady and her family court crusade. If we take those reforms as a reflection of her case history, sounds like her baby-daddy was a loser who hooked up with a felon and took custody due to whatever instability was then afflicting her. Then of course the baby-daddy and ex-con druggie loser probably made no *reportable* income, so as she became a normie lady working normie jobs she would've found herself paying child support.
I've always found it bizarre that for an intact couple there is very little interference in the matter of how you care for your child beyond a minimum standard, but in a couple that is split up there is a legal presumption that X% of the couple's total income would have gone to child care expenses and this is what child support is based on. If the Cosby Show's Huxtable family got divorced, is Theo suddenly entitled to a brand new convertible and to buy all his clothes at Nordstrom's just because his parents are a doctor and lawyer? Nobody would tell the parents they were obligated to spoil a child while they're together, but as soon as they split it's the state's business for some reason?
I also agree with her about the app for communication. In my crimlaw days I constantly dealt with split parents who had restraining orders and sometimes criminal bond conditions concerning communication, and the court nearly always was forced to carve an exception to those orders for communications "involving the child", because the same judge doesn't have the authority over the criminal case as the one who has the domestic case wherefrom the logistics required by joint custody are mandated. This was often a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, I saw numerous text messages of the type "I'm stuck on a job, you gotta get Billy at 3, I'm sure you're just laying around f--king that dopehead [racial slur]". There are in fact apps available to do this, and in some cases our judge would order all communications to go through them, it's a legitimately good idea to require that in non-amicable splits.
As for the evidentiary issues, her problem here is one of admissibility vs credibility/weight. It is of course not hearsay to say "I saw her being verbally abusive to little Billy", that's a matter of whether the judge credits it, and judges are usually good at discounting allegations by highly motivated parties such as parents in a custody dispute. The existence of a police report may lend corroboration to the allegation if the cop did any direct investigation, but of course if all the cop did was write down the allegations and it went nowhere, then it would be the *report* that was hearsay. But I must agree with her about psych evals, outside a few narrow contexts these have no business in a courtroom unless the person who performed the eval is present and testifying. In fact her argument to allow them if it was part of a criminal proceeding is more than I'd grant. A psych diagnosis is so extremely prejudicial and easily misunderstood (or deliberately exaggerated) by attorneys that additional care needs to be taken with these. I once had to get pretrial orders just to keep an opposing attorney from using psychiatric diagnosis terminology due to how prejudicial the name of an alleged condition was to my case in the absence of the doctor being there to explain the relative triviality of the criteria. Scott presumably knows more about this given his business, but it would seem to create a horrible disincentive to seek help or to cooperate with a court-ordered evaluation if the fact of having done so could pop up in a later proceeding.
"The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients. The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia."
The Ukrainian military did serve its purpose of preventing the Russian Army from ending its independence. Had it not resisted at all it would have been accurate to say the purpose was to look good in parades and enrich military contractors.
Of course. It is possible to state the purpose of a system. That is not the same as "any statement of something a system does must be its purpose". Not unless you're redefining the word "purpose" to the point of uselessness.
Huh, really appreciate the insight here. I have little to add, just one front of which I'd be curious to hear elaboration.
> "Nobody would tell the parents they were obligated to spoil a child while they're together, but as soon as they split it's the state's business for some reason?"
Your point strikes me as sound on the surface, but I'd still like to explore it a bit. Is there some merit as a heuristic here? How many people deliberately avoid spoiling their children, raising them with identical access to goods/services as a family with twice the income usually-would? Since if you shrugged and said "hey they might've split up because he wanted to raise his child as an austere monk and she objected" that'd be an excuse for someone to minimally support a child they otherwise would've as they're caught up in an attempt to spite the other parent and make themselves more appealing as a primary/sole custodian to the child in a subjective way.
Basically, I wonder if it's rare enough for people to deliberately under-spoil a child that assuming they would've at a baseline and any claims to the contrary are an excuse is broadly sound, if not necessarily just in a strict legal way.
I just looked up California's formula, and it does appear to be non-linear with regard to parents' income. It starts out by calculating the parents' combined "disposable" income (roughly, take-home pay) and determining a percentage of that to be the assumed child care costs. That percentage starts at 16.5%, ramps up to 25% for middle incomes ($5-10k/month), and declines toward a minimum of 12% for very high incomes. It's set up so the total dollar amount goes up monotonically, I think, but the percentage of income peaks and then declines.
You know a lot more about this than I do, I just sort of look at this and say "if they gave sole custody to the broke-ass dad and his felon girlfriend, she must have been a horrible mom". Is this unfair?
I realize it's a bit like saying "he's in prison, so he's probably a criminal" which feels unfair but is honestly usually correct.
Oh, I understand and mostly agree with the claim. I'm just being silly by making a tangential reference to the Count of Monte Cristo, where (at least in the movie; I haven't read the book yet) the warden of Chateau d'If cheerfully accepts the protagonist's claims of innocence and responds that his prison is full of innocent people because Chateau d'If is where they send the prisoners they're ashamed of.
Well we have to fill in some blanks to make sense of it and I'm assuming that she probably bent but didn't entirely break the truth, as that is the typical mode of re-telling this particular grievance. It's possible that this guy was in criminal activity and had some money off-the-books to hire a lawyer that she didn't, and with clever maneuvering he got a better outcome. Not my top guess, but possible.
What's more likely is that she was undergoing a time of crisis and had some kind of affliction or addiction and the court genuinely had to place the kid with dad for immediate safety, this I don't question too much. But thereafter, the system is set up to snowball in the direction of the status quo, the longer the kid is with one parent the balance turns heavier in favor of stability. Mothers were always far more likely to age out of problematic behavior than fathers, but suppose maybe they both reformed. Once they both cleaned up their acts it might have been a joint custody situation if determined at the later time as a matter of first impression, but now that there's a history with one party, the other party has to seek a *modification* which is a very different matter with a higher standard. The "best interests of the child" always predominate, but to reach that point there is a threshold inquiry as to whether there are substantially changed circumstances, usually with some list of things that qualify as such.
This interpretation jives with her wanting a presumption of 50/50 joint physical custody, although that reform would not actually get her what she wants, she probably would need reform to the modification threshold or frequency in which you can request one. The stock presumption across most states, at least when I was in law school, was for joint legal custody but NOT for joint physical custody, as joint physical custody was deemed to be often hard on the child. So I don't think this presumption is very reasonable, but I do think other reforms could make this kind of scenario more fair (at the cost of more judicial resources, however.)
> "Mothers were always far more likely to age out of problematic behavior than fathers"
Any recommended reading or keywords to search for here? Sounds like something interesting to learn more about. Certainly sounds plausible on the surface, but I am curious how significant the effect is and how the rate for mothers vs fathers compares to the baseline rate between female vs male non-parents, as well as if it notably varies by "problematic behavior."
Is it viable to? I know little of this as a non-lawyer non-parent. On the surface it feels like "make sure child support ACTUALLY SUPPORTS CHILDREN" would be such an obvious no-brainer goal that everyone would have at least some level of assurances it'd happen if it was practical to get them. But at a minimum you could always simply claim that everything bought for the child is with child support money, and anything purchased for yourself is with your own money, and also that anything that benefits "the household" is for the child's benefit...
But I might just be having a failure of imagination here and a bunch of other states (whether American or of the "nation-" variety) have already figured out how to do this.
I assumed there would be sufficiently extreme cases like that, but wouldn't that fall under abuse regardless of the parent's income source? If the parent had suffered a non-debilitating accident and had settlement money trickling in and their child was sleeping naked on the floor that'd also be a big problem.
Although it would probably be reasonable to nevertheless have it be extra-illegal to do it with child support money, since you're both abusing the child AND defrauding money allocated/provided by the state/other parent.
"you can’t be the Democratic nominee without winning the -D/e/m/o/c/r/a/t/i/c- *jungle* primary."
California has one primary, and the top two winners get to actually run. This was set up to exclude the Republicans.
But this year you will find leftists saying it's a bad idea. It appears that this year, the crop of Democrats is so large that they are afraid that it will exclude the Democrats by splitting the vote. They might end up with two Republican candidates.
Newson is threatening a "break the glass" strategy that he won't reveal.
So --
"More or less the same as the top-tier Democrats, minus the chance of winning."
Right. It's highly unlikely that a Republican will win the California governorship this year, but in roughly the same sense that it was highly unlikely that Donald Trump would win the Presidency in 2016. Back then, there was a perfectly obvious way for the Republican party to avoid being taken over by the Trumpists: pick any Republican not named Trump or Bush, say "we're going with this guy", and get everyone else to knock it off already. Here and now, there's an obvious way for the Democratic party to avoid losing their God-given right to a California supertrifecta: Pick any Democrat at all, heck, pick any *two* Democrats at all, and get everyone else to knock it off already.
But in 2016, the Republicans weren't willing to do that until it was too late. And even then it took a fair bit of luck for Trump to win, but 20/80 luck, not 1/99 luck. Here and now, the Democrats still haven't really tried to coalesce, and maybe they'll figure it out until it's too late, and even if they don't the odds are still in their favor.
But not to the point where the Republicans "have no chance of winning".
Based on the articles I've read, that is half of the "break the glass" plan. Newsom seems to be trying to put together a group of high-profile California Democrats to pick someone and get behind them as the unofficial nominee.
The other half sounds like the California Democratic Party is also trying to encourage Republican primary voters to consolidate on Hilton, by sending out mailers and stuff that "attack" Hilton in terms that are calculated to make him sound good to conservatives.
Interesting how many of these people seem to be writing and talking in GPTisms. The combination of mild narcissism and a sycophantic entourage has been the cause of many California gubernatorial campaigns, so it almost blends in.
I wonder if we would call this "AI psychosis", if it weren't for the existing diagnostic category of "candidate for California governor"...
Perhaps this can be the general case encompassing what is colloquially known as "AI psychosis": a chatbot-driven instance of the ever-shifting plague that is CGCS (California Gubernatorial Candidate Syndrome).
It used to be you needed to be Keir Starmer or somebody like that to have an entourage of party sycophants encouraging you on despite the clear disinterest of the actual voters. Thanks to LLMs, you too can have your own personal sycophant.
RE: Nominative Determinists - There was a judge in suburban Chicago that changed his name from Phillip Spiwak to Shannon O'Malley both to capitalize on local pro-Irish bias and general pro-woman bias.
- Lord Buckethead, or similar, who will be wearing some sort of costume, and will have a joke manifesto whose subtext is that by voting for them you can express your contempt for the serious candidate. E.g. 150 voters would rather their MP be some guy in a Darth Vader costume than Kier Starmer.
- George Galloway. I think he’d say he wasn’t a communist, but to explain to Americans: imagine a candidate who is actually a Communist. Not a vanilla Democrat that you accuse of being a Communist, but an *actual* Communist. While the previous type of candidate was joking, it would unfortunately appear that George Galloway is not doing it as a bit.
Our Lord Buckethead is Vermin Supreme. We don't see him in California elections, since he lives in Massachusetts, but he usually runs for President. He's usually seen sporting a long, grey beard and mismatched clothes that vaguely resemble wizard robes, complete with an inverted wellington boot he wears in place of a hat. He runs on joke platforms with similar energy to what I've heard of Lord Buckethead.
In place of George Galloway, we used to have Lyndon LaRouche. I think he started out as a Marxist, but gradually drifted towards a mixed bag of conspiracy theories and built a weird cult-like political organization around himself. He ran for President every election cycle between 1976 and 2004. He died of old age a few years ago, and his organization seemed to stop attracting much attention some time before that.
Lord Buckethead has it much better because due to the UK parliamentary system, the future PM has to win their actual parliament seat, and if lord buckethead runs in the same district he gets to go onstage with them
California had a combination of both one time, when Dead Kennedys lead singer Jello Biafra ran for San Francisco mayor under his stage name. Perhaps more of an anarcho-communist but still about as communist as Galloway, in the same old-timey way that has aged into something that younger leftists don't recognize any longer.
Do not neglect the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, faithful participant in virtually every British by-election (you may find it easier to remember its Welsh name, Plaid Swyddogol yr Anghenfilaidd Ddihirod Gwallgof). Founded, according to Wikipedia, "in 1982 by the musician David Sutch, also known as Screaming Lord Sutch, 3rd Earl of Harrow, or simply Lord Sutch".
The party's manifesto for the Runcorn & Helsby election of 2025 included such intriguing proposals as "We will reduce hospital waiting lists by using a smaller font" and "Once in Government, we will replace the Foreign Secretary with a British one."
The American Communist Party manages to be the same kind of candidate, down to the faction split between the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front. (Cf. _Life of Brian_)
In the case of George Galloway, iirc, the inevitable party split was when Respect splintered into followers of George Galloway vs the Socialist Workers Party.
To be fair, I'd totally vote for the imaginary-numbers guy. That sounds better than our current CA budget. Really, it couldn't hurt. Maybe he can use those imaginary dollars to finally complete the high-speed rail, by tunneling it through the orthogonal dimension !
Does anyone know what is going on with the candidates who get on the ballot and then do nothing with it? No website, no statements for the official voters' guides.
Like, did they just get high one night and submit the $4,400 application fee and then forget all about it?
Compared to the ones described here who are actually campaigning, "got high, paid the $4400 application fee, and forgot all about it" seems rather sensible, to be honest.
If nothing else it's probably an indication they have too much money, neither sensible naysayers nor enough support in their life to make them go through with it, and are therefore ripe targets for investment scams.
A missed opportunity to show him wearing the uniform! They have a couple:
1. Full Dress Uniform
The Order of Malta’s full dress uniform is historically significant and emphasizes its status as a sovereign entity.
Jacket:
A red, double-breasted coat with a high, closed French collar and outward-turned lapels.
Details: It features heavy gold epaulets, a sword belt with a ceremonial sword, and white gloves.
Colors: Lapel and collar colors vary; Bailiffs of Honor and Devotion have white, while other knights have black, often adorned with gold embroidery depending on rank.
During humanitarian missions and pilgrimages (such as the annual trip to Lourdes), members wear practical work uniforms for comfort and visibility.
Attire: Consists of black tactical/work shirts or jackets, black trousers, and optionally a military-style beret featuring a red Order of Malta insignia.
But it seems there was controversy of which I was unaware! Pope Francis dissolved the leadership and a new constitution, taking away the requirement for nobility, was imposed!
"Pope Francis on Saturday dissolved the leadership of the Knights of Malta, the global Catholic religious order and humanitarian group, and installed a provisional government ahead of the election of a new Grand Master.
...The group, whose formal name is Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, was founded in Jerusalem nearly 1,000 years ago to provide medical aid for pilgrims in the Holy Land.
It now has a multi-million dollar budget, 13,500 members, 95,000 volunteers and 52,000 medical staff running refugee camps, drug treatment centres, disaster relief programs and clinics around the world.
The order has been very active in helping Ukrainian refugees and war victims.
It has no real territory apart from a palace and offices in Rome and a fort in Malta, but is recognised as a sovereign entity with its own passports and licence plates.
It has diplomatic relations with 110 states and permanent observer status at the United Nations, allowing to act as a neutral party in relief efforts in war zones.
...Under the previous constitution, the top Knights and the Grand Master were required to have noble lineage, something reformers said excluded nearly everyone except Europeans from serving in top roles."
"And low-information voters are only going to see your name and party on the ballot. Your party is what it is - you can’t be the Democratic nominee without winning the Democratic primary. But your name is negotiable. "
I am mildly surprised no one seems to have renamed himself Democrat.
I was very touched by the micronations bit because I also was a bit of a hobbyist in that regard when I was like 14 years old and had mostly forgotten about it. But for the record, it’s “avada kedavra” (which is itself an Aramaic derivation roughly meaning “do like I said”)
The best use of the phrase "hotly contested title" in a SSC/ACX essay is a hotly contested title, but my vote goes to the opening line of "The Categories Were Made For Man".
Clearly didn't pay enough for the Legendary Service Package, which includes basic SpAG services. But maybe they were trying to model the article after his own campaign communications'...rustic vernacular. Overall this was still an amusing read despite needing to generalize heavily; I hope future gubernatorial elections will keep the roster to a manageable level, so as to ensure valuable satirist jobs.
Oh, and congratulations on making the Top Doctors of 2026 list!
"On the other hand, Thunder Parlay provides no explanation. Did his parents name him Thunder? Is it a nickname? Did he do it for the snazzy thunderbolt logo?"
It's a childhood nickname which he legally adopted back when he moved to California to attend university. News article from 2008 where he is mostly profiled as appreciating the fine and free food Google provided:
"The oldest of five children, Parley grew up in a coupon-clipping household in Windsor Locks, Conn., where he did cost-per-ounce calculations in his head to help his mom, Gail, get more for less on grocery shopping expeditions. He says his mom and her father, Elzidor “Al” Miner, greatly influenced his early culinary inclinations. Both used to cook for all nine family members who lived together under one roof.
Parley excelled in middle-school home economics class and cooked his own meals at the amusement park where he worked after school. In high school, friends started calling him Thunder. He legally adopted the name while attending Pepperdine University, where he majored in computer science and math. When he wasn’t at the keyboard, he relished playing drinking games while watching “Iron Chef” on the Food Channel."
We can but guess what his original name was, if Grandpa was Elzidor.
As for changing one's name to get on the ballot, the late Seán Dublin Bay Loftus was an Irish example:
"At the 1973 general election, Loftus stood for election to the Dáil in the Dublin North-Central constituency as a Christian Democrat on the issue of Dublin Bay. Because the party was too small to be registered under the Electoral Act 1963, meaning Loftus would be listed as 'Non-Party', he changed his name by deed poll to "Seán D. Christian Democrat Dublin Bay Loftus" in order that his political affiliation and campaign issue would appear on the ballot paper.[
...In the following years Loftus changed his name by deed poll several times more, to "Seán Dublin Bay Loftus", "Seán Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus" (as part of a campaign to press the Irish Government to make a territorial claim to the Rockall islet 424 kilometres (263 mi) off the coast of County Donegal) and "Seán Alderman Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus", among others. It was under this last name that he was elected to the 22nd Dáil for the Dublin North-East constituency at the 1981 general election."
The bit I have to take issue with is the idea that "Jeshua the Nazarene", famous blasphemer, in a text written by ~third century Jews, has only a 60% chance of being Jesus. Nazareth was a tiny town.
My minority "no more 'Every X'/'Bay Area House Party' variants ever again" request doesn't apply to this one. Probably because you said "Types of Candidate" rather than "Every Candidate". Surely that must be it.
I look forward to your ballot, and I encourage you to endorse Patrick Wolff for Insurance Commissioner, as not only is he the candidate most likely to allow the appropriate pricing of risk, he also stars in this charming ad for his campaign.
I joined the American Solidarity Party for a year, after being invited by a friend who portrayed it as the political home for church going, pro-life but also anti-war/death penalty, nerdy Tolkien and Lewis readers. And it was that.
But after that year I found myself moving away due to the strong Catholic influence (I had the sense that some members, given the opportunity, would axe the Constitution and declare the Pope King of America...which is unappealing to me as another 13th gen WASP). Also the membership skewed toward men who worked in academia, NGOs, and government. There was an event focused on how to support organized labor, and 99% of the ideas were about helping teachers. I love teachers, but I found myself wondering if I was the only person who knew folks in manufacturing or services.
Surely someone has commented by now about the multiple apparent typos on the Scott Shields cover - is the publisher doing that intentionally to catch people who lift their covers, à la paper towns?? “Challenge the sytem”, bungled “unfiltered.” So strange
> I regularly get spam saying that I’ve been identified as a Top Doctor Of 2026 and if I merely pay the $3,000 processing fee I can have my Top Doctor Plaque and my page in the Top Doctors Profile Book; it’s the same type of scam.
Wait, you have the opportunity to become a "Top Doc" from the banner ads?! Would you be provided with a One Weird Trick, or do you have to supply your own?
I voted for Hilton even though Mahan was my first choice. Yes, Hilton probably stands no chance in the general, but I really did not find a meaningful difference between Beccera and Steyer. I would rather have a Hilton - top Democrat General election than a Beccera - Steyer one.
Just throwing this out there: it feels like the default rationalist-sphere position on politics is to support Democrats. But aren't Republican candidates just going to implement generally better policies (e.g. anti-regulation, anti-DEI, anti-soft on crime) on average these days, notwithstanding the descent of the GOP into low-IQ conspiracism? Like, if you find Ezra Klein's Abundance argument persuasive, don't red states just do a better job of this than blue states? See Richard Hanania's writings for more on this.
I'm culturally closer to Democrats (in terms of education/psychological profile I mean, not in terms of my views on culture war issues) and I have zero doubt that the future of the Republican Party is detestable Groyperism. But I think that the current GOP, at both the state and federal levels, tends to implement better policies than the Democrats. So why not discard lingering tribal affiliation with the Democrats as the smart/virtuous party and vote for Republicans?
I assume this is a legacy thing + regional bias. If you’re a high-IQ professional you’ve probably been battered with casual assumptions of Democrats for most of your life, and not many people manage your approach of being culturally in that circle while rejecting its politics. It’s doable at my age (mid-40s) but I doubt anyone under 35 can dance that line as much as those kids loudly disclaim the ability to have cross-political friendships.
On top of this, the older elements of the movement evolved out of the late 2000s internet atheism when GOP=Bush=evangelicals who hate science and reason. You also had many years of them treating global warming as an existential problem, and while that’s faded now for a variety of good and bad reasons it’s still part of the identity. Add it up and the GOP is hard to consider seriously for them. Even when the GOP candidate might get more of their desired policy changes through, it would be offset from their POV by a few important things going backwards.
You have a pair of embarrassing anti-rational movements in the mid-2010s, social justice and Trumpism, and the result of these combined is the Abundance Dem. Social justice was intellectually embarrassing so Dems who knew better worked to keep a reasonable policy-centered agenda alive, restraining the worst impulses of activists. Trumpism was socially embarrassing, to maintain respectability you had to put actual distance between yourself and Trump which became increasingly hard as most conservative media and the party apparatus was brought in line, so some number of these just crossed over and became Abundance Dems. I’d like to hope it’d be better with Trump gone in a few years, but it’s unclear. Needless to say, the whole looney-tunes Nick Fuentes wing is just as socially embarassing, they sound like a bunch of 3rd world villagers spouting off about how the witches stole their penis, and I’m baffled at how any conservative-aligned faction would side so fervently with uncivilized anti-Western Muslims against the civilized pro-Western state of Israel. I’m hoping some of the more reasonable prejudices come back into play and beat that tendency out of the right, making it safe for educated people again.
Well the current GOP has slashed foreign aid, which probably killed quite a lot of people. They started a particularly ill considered and pointless war in the middle east. Oh and they are blatantly anti-renewables and pro coal. Ill considered tariffs. ICE brutality. An anti-vaxer in charge of the nations healthcare.
> (e.g. anti-regulation, anti-DEI, anti-soft on crime)
You can name the places where one party is screwing up, and say that the other party will do better on those issues. This may well be true. The other party will screw up in different ways on different issues.
>Well the current GOP has slashed foreign aid, which probably killed quite a lot of people.
Why's that bad? Competing for US charity is form of resource curse and isn't good for the world. Giving money to the third world is like feeding animals in the wild, it just winds up being bad for everyone involved.
The resource curse most strongly applies in situations where the general populace isn't involved.
Like if a country has lots of gold, it's possible for the government to mine and sell the gold, and run an army and fund the leaders palace, all while ignoring and abusing the peasantry.
If government aid is reducing lead poisoning or iodine deficiency or malaria, then this doesn't directly hand the government a blank check. It means the population is healthier. Which makes it easier to build an economy that does involve the common people.
> Giving money to the third world is like feeding animals in the wild, it just winds up being bad for everyone involved.
I'm not totally convinced this is true with wild animals. I really don't think it is true for third world humans. Reality is complicated, and it's hard to be sure of indirect effects. Still the direct effects look good.
In my world model, these countries are likely to become richer and industrialized, they just need a little help.
>these countries are likely to become richer and industrialized, they just need a little help.
Yet that hasn't happened in over 60 years of USAID. Not even a little.
Read "Dead Aid" by Dambisa Moyo. She was an Oxford-trained economist from Zambia who argued persuasively that foreign aid did little but undermine institutional stability in sub-Saharan Africa. "Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world.”
Right now these are still in the hopeless crank candidate territory, but I think it's a pretty straightforward extrapolation from current trends to predict that these exact same anti-Semitic memes ("Jesus and the Talmud," "9/11 false flag," "USS Liberty," etc.) will eventually be repeated by competitive candidates for state and federal office. Probably by Republican candidates, but quite possibly by some Democratic candidates as well (see e.g. Ana Kasparian's happy merchant impression).
Literally all of these memes have been around for decades, and they've been steadily gaining purchase with the rise and transformation of the Internet. In the 1990s, you had to subscribe to obscure newsletters and order obscure books to learn them. In the 2000s, they were on obscure blogs. In the 2010s, they were on 4chan's politics board and migrated to marginal parts of alt-right twitter. In the 2020s, they're now doing huge numbers in the center of Twitter.
My model is simple: the world of ideas is a leading indicator for the world of politics. An ideology first becomes popular with an intellectual vanguard, then is memed into popularity with the masses, then is relevant to politics. So e.g. abolitionist newspapers prefigured abolitionist politics, and the Mont Pelerin Society prefigured neoliberalism. Likewise, I think it's hard to oversell how decisively anti-Semitism has been winning the war of ideas (or "ideas") among young conservatives in particular.
Ironically, the fact that the country's Jewish population utterly failed to prevent such ideas from spreading contradicts the conspiracies that they hold any real power. Ultimately though, it really doesn't matter if they're an actual threat or not, the antisemites just want potential social liabilities out of the picture.
If all it takes is one man to change the narrative, what are they even doing? They've failed to even get the left on their side. They never amounted to anything more than a minority interest group, with everyone turning against them the moment their existence became inconvenient.
As a species, we were served well with the rapid spread of ideas - literal memes, Dawkins-style - and that persists today well beyond any one group's control. With so many groups at odds, by your accounting, who does 'hold any real power'? It's like five hundred people trying to steer the raging bull of public sentiment in all different directions, while every cell in the bull itself is also struggling to do different things. Whatever way it ends up, whoever wants to claim victory, it's much chancier than people might want to admit. The spooky thing is how *little* control secret tiny conspiracies actually have.
None of the top Dem candidates are very inspiring, but you overlook how cool it is that they’re trying to out-YIMBY each other! All the major NIMBYs dropped out
Alicia Olivia Lapp sounds based as hell, but I'm concerned about how many college degrees she will need to get in order to solve any other issues facing Californians.
Speaking of very personal issues involving Wells Fargo ...
The gay guy across the street twice called in bomb threats that he had rigged his house to explode, which had the LAPD evacuate my entire block at dawn each time. (Note: I am asleep at dawn.)
Why? So news helicopters would fly out and telecast to all of Los Angeles that that he had painted "Wells Fargo Stole My Money" on his roof.
But here's the thing. I suspect maybe they did steal his money.
He never seemed crazy before, until he suddenly had no money and just a giant chip on his shoulder about Wells Fargo.
Me falta el registro Mexicano y es posible que oí algo mal. Corríganme si hay errores!
Rafaga Records, the record label mentioned in the song, does seem to exist, at least as a channel that posts (I presume AI generated) songs by Rafael Hernandez. It would seem he's been experimenting with Suno for at least 3 years.
The author is not to be confused with Rafael Hernández Marín, the Puerto Rican songwriter/composer who died in 1965.
The song is pretty catchy. I'd give it a solid 7/10! Bonus points if he hires a live Mariachi band to play it for a campaign event :)
With regard to the "Top Doctors Profile Book" -- I'm a bit of a genealogy buff, and was able to find information about one of my ancestors based on their inclusion in a book of this general type, something like this:
So, perhaps the charitable interpretation of these companies is that they are offering an obituary service, except you get to write it for yourself, while you're still alive (possibly valuable if you don't trust relatives to get details right). But if you're scattering information about yourself on the internet anyways, you might find this unnecessary.
Poor old Scott Shields (fourth clown down from the top) has not only forked out a no doubt substantial sum in order to feature grandly on the cover of a magazine so obscure that only its mother has ever heard of it, he's also clearly been conned by a publisher so skinned, he can't even afford a spell checker!
Admire, amongst other gems, "Marxism and It's Political Machine" and "The California Democrat That Exposes The Truth" - but inevitably, it's the cover title which takes the cake: THE MAN WHO CHALLENGES THE SYTEM!
Agreed. And the scamming publisher should probably be done for senior abuse, if not for fraud or fraudulent advertising - but consumer protection and anti-scam legislation is being deliberately eroded just about everywhere these days, with enthusiastic support from above...
"In the same way, I think it might be fun for a certain sort of person to campaign for governor. You can put on a suit and pose in front of a desk with a flag - just like the real politicians. You can go on tours, kiss babies - just like the real politicians. You can put up a Five-Step Plan To End Homelessness - etc."
There is always the terrifying possibility of some sort of "Mouse that Roared" outcome, where you actually win.
an interesting thing to note is that Dawit Kellel is a rather Ethiopian-sounding name, and the plurality religion in Ethiopia is the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, a unique branch of Oriental Orthodoxy whose biblical canon, larger than any other, actually includes the Book of Enoch (alongside the Book of Jubilees, and three Books of Meqabyan which you might suspect are variations on the Books of Maccabees but which are only tangentially related)!
> You might expect the “share this website” link to go to his campaign page or a plea for donations. Wrong! It goes to the full text of the Book of Enoch
Imagine your writing up your campaign, and doing some light reading on the side. Surely it would be easy enough to copy and paste the wrong URL. Especially if you are tired and distracted.
.” I regularly get spam saying that I’ve been identified as a Top Doctor Of 2026 and if I merely pay the $3,000 processing fee I can have my Top Doctor Plaque and my page in the Top Doctors Profile Book; it’s the same type of scam."
I once got an email inviting me to an African-American high achievers society. Wrong on all three counts.
"Decertify the police" is somehow even more pathetic a slogan than "defund the police". But at least she didn't suggest boiling them in semen. Not that this would work - you'd coagulate all the albumen, then the resulting disgusting solid mass would be set on fire rather than boiling. Yum!
Only quibble is that Thunder Parley (which looks like the spelling in the image?) does not strike me as all that unusual of a name, at least by California standards.
Thunder *Parlay* with an A would be more interesting, especially if he promised to fund his campaign promises via a massive parlay wager on the Oklahoma City Thunder and himself.
How long before a candidate books a long shot bet on themselves on Polymarket and promises to share the winnings with their voters? 🤔
I ran for Mayor of Newark in 2002. I was the only registered libertarian living within the city limits and the party convinced me to get the signatures and run. I was 22 at the time so I thought it would be fun. I lost to Corey Booker but I got 24 votes! Which importantly didn’t even include me because I had moved out of Newark between qualifying to be on the ballot and Election Day.
I'm a little bothered by both "All of this government is to some extent corrupt and as such cannot police itself" and "Some of this government is corrupt, and those that aren't corrupt within it lack the will or motivation to make un-corrupting it a loud, effective priority" being presented as clearly foolish/wrong stances to take.
The mayor of LA has recently been in the news for not keeping track of 800 million US dollars in a way that looks a lot like corruption (Family members were hired for big contracts without disclosure, etc.). She's going to win again, nobody is going to be prosecuted, and this kind of thing *should* be evidence that there's either enough collusion or enough of a lack of will to fix nearly-a-billion-dollar problems that something might, possibly, need to be done about it.
I think if there's some clear reason why a bunch of obvious waste and fraud can't be dealt with, this changes for me, and it's possible there is. But at the least it makes it seem like "Ha, this guy is noticing all the fraud and waste, everyone knows that's a constant that can't possibly be reduced" stance isn't as complete as it should be.
Insurance regulation, especially of homeowners’ insurance, is a major issue in California at the moment. My guess is that the combination of a high salience issue where the status quo is quite obviously broken means lots of people feel like they would be able to “Fix It”. I know that I feel that way!
Okay, that makes sense. I know that there has been a problem with some insurance companies leaving the state or no longer issuing homeowner policies. It just seemed like a very unglamorous job. The kind that they would make fun of on Parks and Rec or Veep.
Since nobody's mentioned Barack D. Obama Shaw: there's something very funny about being so inspired by the Obama moment that you change your name in his honor, and then somehow get the middle initial wrong!
I would love to see a follow-up examining whether our political system attracts the mentally unwell and what sort of theoretical political system would attract the best possible candidates. My uninformed opinion is that big media contests are catnip for narcissists and that some kind of farm system that has candidates prove themselves at a local level first would be an improvement.
US style primary elections are rare. In most countries, the party chooses it's nominees (and the requirements for who counts as a party member vary, but they are stricter than just anyone registering). Because of this, US parties are internally fractured, and driven by specific personalities. Whereas parties in other countries tend to be more ideologically consistent but the individual politician's identities don't matter as much, apart from the party leadership.
"The Top-Tier Republicans: They all have cowboy hats and flag pins. They all pose on horseback at their ranch."
What an odd framing. There are only two top-tier Republican candidates in the race, and one of them doesn't have a cowboy hat or flag pin or pose on horseback.
And not only *not* a cowboy, but a Hungarian-Brit credited for making the UK's Conservative party more progressive, for better or worse (obviously worse).
Reading a completely unhinged antisemitic screed, burrowing down into one claim to go on a 7 paragraph aside about Talmudic history might be the most Scott Alexander thing ever, and I love it.
I really want to see Scott on Steve Hilton, I think the only person who has got bored of being a senior British politician and decided to build a profile in America and run for office. A kind of political Russel Brand.
Hilton was so weird in the UK that the political sitcom The Thick Of It created a character based on him.
You should read what Steve Hilton's former boss David Cameron had to say about him in his memoirs:
Steve Hilton's ideas continued to be one part brilliant to several parts bonkers. However, his relationship with people in government wasn't working. He was no longer excused as a free spirit when he was late for meetings - he was seen as someone who had disregard for others. His antagonistic style was no longer helping him advance his cause - it had started to hurt it. And the relationship between the two of us became strained, too. Steve is a real ideologue in a way I'm not. He thought I was losing my radical zeal and falling for the trappings of prime minister. But I knew that to be a successful radical you have to play the game. And he wasn't interested in playing the game, just tipping it over and throwing the pieces all over the floor.
If Hilton believed Cameron had "radical zeal" in the first place, then more fool him.
That was hardly the least, or least harmful, of Cameron's many gaffes. The 2016 referendum on Brexit was the most destructive by far...
The Enoch guy called him a Zionist. Now, that is new. What does he know that we don’t?
Probably a great deal! 😁
It would be very, very funny if a Brit managed to get elected as governor of California, particularly in light of the "no kings" protest movement.
You kicked them out the better part of three hundred years ago, but now they're back!
You know it is a great post when you can't tell if 0% or 100% of it is fiction.
Yes! had the very same thought
I don't live in California, but it's safe to say that the Tree Army person gets my hypothetical vote.
The Tree Army certainly has some effective policies for environmental cleanup!
I dunno. If the trees take over, the new ruling class will be leaving their trash *everywhere*
"Leaving." Har!
I suppose you could take it up with a branch office, although I hear their bark is worse than their bite.
Ok so I have an idea:
Great idea!
I feel like all of Scott's readers have had that idea at one point or another; pretty sure it's never gonna happen
...what's going on with that Scott Shields cover? The version in the link has different misspellings on it.
... wow, you're right.
I got curious and checked out their website at https://www.capitoltimesmedia.com , and that Shields cover is currently their "Free download" issue. And in that pdf, as of right now (2026-05-19), the cover has the "challenges the sytem" version, but at page 9 they have a thumbnail reproduction of that same cover with "challanges the sytem". So even within their own published pdfs, it's inconsistent.
Also, the entire "issue" is the Shields interview (no other articles), it really does begin with "UNFIRLTERD", many (most?) images are AI-generated slop, and the entire thing is just incredibly low-quality overall. For instance p20 is straight-up an accidental duplicate of p19. So the reason why the blatant typos move around seems to simply be an extreme lack of care from the editor of Capitol Times Magazine, Anil Anwar (who puts a full-page photo of himself at page 5).
I find myself oddly fascinated by that sort of stuff. We live in an incredible era, where anyone with a computer can just produce this sort of thing if they have the will to do it. It has the look and feel of a "real magazine", the kind that used to take entire professional teams to do! Incredible power at our collective fingertips!
It's just that the contents are entirely hot garbage to anyone taking a couple minutes to actually look at it, and this awesome creative potential is apparently used by Capitol Times Magazine editor Anil Anwar entirely to stoke one particular person's ego, one "issue" at a time. I can't quite decide how I feel about this.
(I'll rehost that specific issue at https://thelo.ca/Capitol%20Times%20Issue%2035.pdf for a bit, for curiosity's sake.)
I'd like to imagine it's steganography. I mean, surely they charged enough to proofread it once?
When somebody is in that line of work, the question isn't "am I paid enough to spell-check," it's "will I be paid any less if I don't." Given how much of that pay was up front and non-refundable, the answer is easy.
Proofreading is a lost art nowadays.
Congratulations! You have officially wasted this Alabama native's morning with your hilarious post.
Axually!!!!1! when the Talmud was written in Iraq there were lots of Christians in Persian Mesopotamia. Even when the persian Sasanian kings, who were Zoroastrian, occasionally persecuted Christians, they focused on those with religious ties with the Romans and sometimes even protected christian heretics.
One of these protected Christian heresies was the Church of the East, or the Nestorians, who after the Islamic conquest spread East along the silk road and eventually became influential in Mongolia. Genghis Khan was in in his youth a protégé of a christian khan so he married his youngest son with his niece, a nestorian christian woman. Among their issue was Kublai Khan of Marco Polo fame.
IIRC the heresy that Nestorians were accused of may have been a strawman of their actual beliefs which were/are less heretical.
Many such cases
Alicia Olivia Lapp is also an AI native, right?
I await the argument that these people are actually wackier than the top-tier politicians.
They don't have a team of frankly even weirder people to hide their wackiness though. Which is the role of political flunkies.
>Mohammed Kryzscyzbski
Pretty sure that such a guy should just change his name to Moe Chris Jeb Sky
>Sarah Smith
Plausibly this women should still change her name to John Smith, in a local election where most voters see only the name and nothing else. Keep Sarah as a middle name. Once you win, go by J. Sarah Smith.
If you swap that and go by Sarah J. Smith, that should get you the Whovian vote, which has got to be worth *something*.
So if the Book of Enoch guy gets elected, do we (well you, I'm not in California...) have a first amendment issue or not? I can't work out whether it should count as a religious text, since I don't think any religion regards it as such.
Beta Israel and a couple african oriental orthodox churches consider Enoch canonical, technically
The Ethiopian Orthodox have the book of Enoch.. they are fascinating..they have additional books on top of the apocrypha. Although their version of the book of Maccabees is different from the Roman Catholic version.
Wikipedia says the Ethiopian Jewish community Beta Israel, Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church consider it canon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Enoch
I looked at his website in detail. No where he has a dedicated page explaining about the book of Enoch other than to download it and share it. I am not sure why. Based on his identity of origin, his educations with five degrees which is impressive and being a veteran, I say he knows something that he doesn’t want to tell us. May be giving us a clue or something. Other than that, I kind of like his policies.
The plot thickens. The story of the nephillim is blocked in Australia! What do they not want us to know?!
It may be connected to the ancestry of those sent to Australia...
Wait wait wait, there's a California Democrat who's against Atheistic Marxism? How did that happen? Did he enter the wrong door at the "Select Your Party Day"?
I have to admit, I have some admiration for the guy whose platform is "put politicians in jail". Well okay, he says "corrupt government representatives", but a gal can dream!
"On the opposite side of the aisle is Duane Terrence Loynes Jr, a recent Loyola University graduate who fell in with a bad crowd - by which I mean Catholic philosophers."
*shakes head sadly* Ah, the Jesuits. It's always the Jesuits, isn't it?
> I have to admit, I have some admiration for the guy whose platform is "put politicians in jail"
I have said that I thought the most entertaining outcome of the lawsuits surrounding Trump in the run-up to his re-election would be if he won office while incarcerated, and then had SCOTUS rule that he couldn't pardon himself, and he also couldn't trust his VP to pardon him if he resigned, so he just governed the country from behind bars.
Shades of Terry Pratchett
"We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they're elected, don't you?"
"Why?"
"It saves time."
While this article is remarkably thorough, it still leaves some questions unanswered. Namely, is "Tree ARMY" a pro-Ent policy? Or does it imply forcibly drafting Ents to enforce border security? I look forward to a followup post addressing this topic in detail.
That was my first thought as well. The “Tree ARMY” policy was somehow left unexplained.
If so, she has my endorcement
Tree ARMY is my main takeaway - I must know more.
>Every election year, somebody thinks: most voters are low-information voters. And low-information voters are only going to see your name and party on the ballot. Your party is what it is - you can’t be the Democratic nominee without winning the Democratic primary. But your name is negotiable. Change your name to something inspiring and patriotic, and you can ride a tsunami of low-information-voter support all the way to the Governor’s mansion.
>Every election year, low-information voters see a handful of candidates with names like LovesAmerica Smith or HonestyAndTransparency Johnson, think “Oh, yeah, it’s the weirdos who try the the thing where you change your name”, and skim right past them.
I'm reminded of Byron (Low Tax) Looper, who eventually switched tactics to exploiting a loophole in election law (NB: Looper was actually his birth name!).
(At the time, Tennessee law didn't allow candidate replacements after 30 days before the election, and also didn't allow a candidate who became invalid to remain on the ballot and be replaced by his party after the election. So Looper shot his opponent less than 30 days before the election in order to win by default. Fortunately, he was arrested, and the outrage got his opponent's widow elected as a write-in.)
I propose to start more political commentary with "[Politician]'s platform/delusional system is..."
Delusional platform FTW!
Monty Python has you covered:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVI5ZOT5QEM
At this point, I wonder if some have started to run for California governor in a bid to get Scott to write about them.
Do you remember where you were when that whole O.J. Fett thing went down, with the TIE fighters slowly following him in his white ford bronco?
He lost the lactose-intolerant vote when he said, "This is the whey." But his lawyer scored big points when he said, "If for OJ you vote, you won't get force-choked."
That would be the Original Jango?
This is supposedly a post on the California gubernatorial race, but around the 55th paragraph Alexander gets distracted and starts discussing Talmudic Jesus legends.
Which provided a refreshing interlude, IMHO.
Tbf that in itself is extremely Talmudic, although the Talmud would get distracted in paragraph 5.
That's when I started to suspect he might be making the whole thing up. Which in no way made me want to stop reading.
Which is entirely appropriate.
>Fittingly, Ms. Buhler’s website is a sort of socialist resume, listing all the capitalism she’s protested during each three-month period:
This felt surprisingly unfair, especially directed at a specific young person by name. The image you post seems to be almost entirely pointed at government malfeasance rather than capitalism and concerned primarily with human rights rather than socialism.
Maybe there's some other website you saw but didn't post where she said 'and of course all of this government malfeasance and all of these human rights violations are solely the fault of capitalism, and the only way to solve them is socialism' or something. But if so you didn't read that into the record here, and what you did read into the record is such a mismatch to your characterization of it that it feels like you just wanted to make a cheap joke at this young woman's expense.
I love this blog in part for your usual charity and kindness, I have to say I was a little shocked by this. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something in your intent here, but it was jarring.
I was using "socialist" to mean a certain flavor of far-left often associated with the DSA. I'm not incredibly attached to this, so I've edited the post, but I also don't get how you object to it so strongly.
I guess I interpreted the contrast in the phrase 'socialist resume, listing all the capitalism she’s protested' as implying a strict anti-capitalist and more radically Marxist economic approach, since it feels like it is framing things in terms of a central conflict between Socialism and Capitalism.
Now that you explain what you intended, I can see that as a milder and fairer reading, it's just not what I first thought when I read that sentence.
I think my strong reaction has to do with worrying that even if the public-goods type of mild European socialism has a lot of supporters, the radical Marxist anti-capitalist type of Socialism has a lot of attackers and contempt and strife around it, and I can see being associated with that in a famous public forum bringing a young woman a lot of negative virulent attention or closing career doors.
Again that's not a problem if people interpret what you are saying in the more moderate way you intended, but I interpreted it in the more radical way, and I was afraid others would too, to bad consequences. I am maybe over-sensitive to this possibility due to past negative experiences, but it worried me a bit.
Sorry if I veered too close to assigning motive here, I suspected I could be misunderstanding your intent but I should have probably made that the first sentence in my post rather than the last.
It is mean for a big account to find a random person and make fun of her political views. It is okay to make fun of people who are running for Governor, whatever their age.
I agree with that as a general rule but I'm not sure it's a rule with zero exceptions. I support a general taboo of 'don't bring the entire internet down on college kids doing stupid things, doing stupid things and learning from your mistakes is what college is for.'
If you are allowed to run for governor before you are allowed to buy alcohol, it implies that the category of 'running for governor' can include people we legally consider not full adults capable of responsible adult choices. In those rare corner cases I think it's right to be a little more cautious and provide those people some of the same protections you would in other circumstances.
Which is to say, utilitarianism doesn't say 'this consequence is larger than that consequence, so I'll ignore the smaller one entirely'. You always add everything up together.
If college were for stupid things and learning from your mistakes, we would send the dumbest kids there. The smartest kids wouldn't need it.
I'd rather say that the smart kids are the ones who are *able* to learn from their dumb mistakes and the dumb kids would just keep making them.
It's not really college, it the age that is typical of college. Yeah, other young folk can be expected to make stupid mistakes, and should also be treated tolerantly (which isn't the same as exculpated).
College, in particular, is expected to be a relatively low risk environment. It would be better is those who didn't go to college also had a low risk environment to learn in.
That one becomes an adult at 21 is STUPID!!!. It's a gradual process. For that matter, I think that even at 28 I was still making some blatantly stupid choices. (Well, I still do, but now I think I usually quickly recognize them.) And for that matter, not all people mature at the same rate. In many ways I was slower than most.
The problem is designing "safe spaces for learning" that both actually encourage desirable learning and don't really damage society. College is expected to require subsidy by one's family, but we really can't do that for all of society.
Only smart people learn from their mistakes.
I don't think there's any conduct in this context that would be acceptable towards an older person but not an 18-20yo college student.
I generally disagree with this line of thought. We have an age of majority. It suffices. Everyone does dumb things and matures past that one line for a very, very long time, if you aren't looking back on things you did last year with a groan you're failing to continue growing. Also, the drinking age being 21 was more about MADD in the 80s and 90s pushing it as a concentrated effort to lessen deaths, and the only reason the age is not even higher/alcohol wasn't abolished completely is the rest of society wouldn't stand for it - it helps society a lot when you take a lot of drunk drivers off the road, the more the better, but the people will revolt if they can't get their drink on. So using the drinking age as comparison doesn't support the point that much when really, it was about pushing it as high as the electorate would stand for.
Anyway. At a certain point, and that point is 18 for much of the western world, you are responsible for your own actions and the consequences thereof, regardless of how close you are to reaching whatever your full potential is. I'm not saying she should be unkindly mocked or blasted (nor do I think Scott's words qualify as such), but I don't think someone deserves grace *beyond* that of any other person, just by virtue of being... twenty-something?
Of course there are horrible things that shouldn't happen to anyone just because they are a public figure, but does anyway (stalking etc) - but that shouldn't be happening to anyone however young or old. The age doesn't have a bearing on whether people should be doing it or not. We give very old people with dementia extra grace because they are literally losing their mind to a disease - young people simply do not have an equivalent cognitive impairment, as far as I know.
"I think my strong reaction has to do with worrying that even if the public-goods type of mild European socialism has a lot of supporters, the radical Marxist anti-capitalist type of Socialism has a lot of attackers and contempt and strife around it, and I can see being associated with that in a famous public forum bringing a young woman a lot of negative virulent attention or closing career doors."
Is college Marxism really so surprising, in an American context? Ms. Buhler sounds like the type of 'ambitious for a political career' that I'd expect to act as she has done; running for governor is very confident, but I think this is more about getting her name out there. These types do start their climb up the ladder in college, often getting elected to students' union governance, joining student activist bodies, junior political party of party of choice, and so on. After college they often wangle an internship or other job in the office of a local representative.
After having the corners knocked off, she'll either soften into general liberalism/left of centre and try to get a foothold in the Democratic party (maybe via the DSA), or harden into the extreme leftist infighting over Marxist-Leninist versus Trotskyite versus myriad other splinters.
In the Irish context, an example would be Ivana Bacik (or indeed several other Labour politicians such as Ruairi Quinn who, in his college days, was so radical he picked up the nickname Ho Chi Quinn but was very comfortably middle-middle to upper-middle class, and fitted nicely into Labour when it pivoted to chasing the middle-class vote*):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivana_Bacik
"Ivana Catherine Bacik is an Irish politician who has been the leader of the Labour Party since 24 March 2022 and a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dublin Bay South constituency since winning a by-election on 9 July 2021. Bacik previously served as leader of the Labour Party in the Seanad from 2011 to 2021, and a Senator for the Dublin University constituency from 2007 to 2021. She previously served as deputy leader of the Seanad from 2011 to 2016.
...Bacik resigned as president of Trinity College Dublin Students' Union in 1990, after breaking the mandate from the Union membership regarding voting for candidates at a Union of Students in Ireland conference.
...Bacik's policies have been described as liberal and social democratic; In 2022, Bacik described herself as a "socialist, a social democrat and as centre-left. That means that I stand for constructive politics, of seeking to deliver change by going into government".
*Apparently in America "middle-class" is used for "upper working-class/lower middle-class" and not just "middle-class", which used to puzzle me when I read or heard American politicians going on about how they were middle-class, like Kamala Harris in the last campaign. Well of course you're middle-class, your parents were university academics? No, she was trying to convey to the voters that she had blue-collar roots and wasn't some snooty type from privilege.
Ms. Buhler is why I'm very doubtful all the petitions etc. that people call for actually do anything. When some issue bubbles up, you get the online messaging around "ring or write your congresscritter!" but I think a ton of these kinds of communications must land on their desks every week, and that there is some poor intern saddled with answering the phones and replying to the letters with the form answer "Congressperson O'Looney is very interested in hearing from you about this vital topic, thank you for bringing it to their attention" while the Congressperson remains in happy ignorance of the VITAL EXERCISE OF DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE POWER calling for action about shrimp, capitalism, socialism, and the other 112 issues people get hot under the collar about.
That includes AI.
It's not the message, it's the number of signatures. The more of them there are, the more seriously they are taken.
A signature on a petition counts for very little, A phone call to your congressman's office asking to speak with the staffer who handles [Issue X] counts much, much more. Or maybe a physical letter; email much less so.
I believe that is true.
Is another possible explanation for the small-local-business media getters something something free publicity networking help the business?
Does running for office put you in touch with the local officials who grant your business licenses, is media around the governor's race subsidized and prioritized in ways that make it cheaper and more effective than adverting your business as a business directly, etc.
Small correction: the Jesus in that story is called Yeshu haNotzri (ישו הנוצרי) whereas someone who is a Nazarite(vowed against wine and impurity and cutting hair) would be called HaNazir(הנזיר). Christians are called נוצרים Notzrim (Nazarenes) in Hebrew.
Also the story in Sanhedrein with Jesus getting sentenced to death on Passover does have at least one apostle in common with the Christian story, Mattai seems like it matches Matthew and in a different story Rabbi Eliezer encounters a Christian heretic named Jacob=James.
Finally, in tractate Shabbat 116, at least one verse from the new testament is directly quoted "I am not coming to subtract or add to the Law of Moses" (
אנא לא למיפחת מן אורייתא דמשה אתיתי [ולא] לאוספי על אורייתא דמשה אתיתי) from the book of Matthew and possibly another paraphrased quote from galatians, so the Rabbis knew some things about Christians.
Thanks, fixed.
That's true, but it's also true that the Notzri epithet doesn't appear in all manuscripts and it's unclear if it was originally there and removed by someone trying to hide that it's about Jesus, or if it was originally absent and added by someone trying to make it look like it's about Jesus.
The Shabbat 116 story is funny because it's the one clear reference of Christianity in the Talmud, but it doesn't mention Jesus or Yeshu at all. The quote (which is similar to, but not a direct quote of the corresponding verse in Matthew) is attributed to the Avon Gilyon, a pun of evangelion which means sinful manuscript. The story takes place in Israel and involves Rabban Gamliel (the younger one) and his sister. Also, the story is in Aramaic when most sources about Gamliel are in Hebrew, probably indicating a later date.
Think I figured out the Book of Enoch thing.
Someone commented here saying they don’t think any religion recognizes the text and I was about to do an “um actually…” when I thought to myself “wait, I wonder if the guy is Ethiopian.”
Go to the website and sure enough “born and raised in Abyssinia.” https://share.google/tdXprLmk6AW4z43rd
Ok but why say Abyssinia and not Ethiopia? Lots of possibilities but here I should note that one of the few religions to treat the Book of Enoch as canonical is the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, also known as the Abyssinian Church.
So here’s my hypothesis: the entire campaign is a front to convert as many people to Ethiopian Orthodoxy. You get a real-enough looking campaign website that everyone can agree with (“aw look he hates both parties, I hate both parties too”) and then once you get to the link to share, boom, you are now sharing the Book of Enoch with your friends and family and wondering why every other Christian denomination is suppressing this marvelous text.
That hypothesis seems actually quite plausible.
"when I thought to myself “wait, I wonder if the guy is Ethiopian.”
Oooh, now I'm interested! Oriental Orthodox and trad Roman Catholic candidates alliance when? 😁
Granted, non-Chalcedon compliant is a problem, but surely there is a workaround!
Wow THE Deiseach replied to my post. Have been reading Scott’s blog(s) for a decade, but only just started commenting (was too young to be fighting on the internet during the Slate Star days). I remember scrolling down for your comments to get the Magisterium’s perspective on things haha. Full circle.
2 generations of Alexandrian TradCaths: Scott is really going to have to switch teams now
Thank you for the compliment (er, it *was* a compliment?) I feel like a lurking cryptid that has been exposed in the beam of a flashlight here - the Deiseach scuttles back into the undergrowth when directly encountered, retreating until the opportunity to snark and grumble presents itself more favourably! 😁
I'm mildly curious to know if you have a mating call.
Observations of such have not yet been made. However, there is a no-mating call! "G'way! G'way!" 😁
Huh. For me, eye contact has the same effect...
Interesting take. A friend shared this site with me because of the book. Now here I am engaging politics and the book of Enoch. Still his background is interesting. I am talking about his education level and military?
I don’t think that is the case. The website has lots of policies and things he would like to implement if elected. Those are serious policies. May be we are not asking the right question? What does the book have anything to do with politics?
Couple of years ago in a municipal election near me one of those one-issue guys with a one-man party actually got elected. His one issue was that that the municipality had sold some land at below price to some developers, which he believed to be a corrupt deal. His only issue was getting the internal documents related to the sale published.
His one man, one issue party won two seats on the council.
A month later he died.
Do you have names?
Not sure if I can post links?
Chris Segerius. Municipality of Enkhuizen in 2022.
https://www.nhnieuws.nl/nieuws/303022/enkhuizer-politiek-reageert-geschrokken-op-plotseling-overlijden-raadslid-chris-segerius
There is a translate button which is gives a translation that is bad with idoms.
At 78 it's at least plausible that he died of natural causes. Interesting story nonetheless.
Who was the other seat?
Nobody, apparently in such cases the remaining votes get divided among the other parties.
Holy shit, finally my long-yearned-for Book of Enoch candidate has arrived!
I am also interested the very least. Why put the link so obscure? You can’t even see it and you can easily miss it. My first thought was he put it by mistake. Then I saw his background, military, his studies and symbols he used. This is not random. David Wilcock RIP talked about it in details. I don’t have the links but you can find it somewhere in the archives.
Fantastic! This is the strongest "endorsement" the American Solidarity Party has received in a long time! (I kid, but I really would like to see a new third party in the "communitarian" quadrant get some traction. Libertarians have had their time in the sun!) For those who would never consider voting for such a party, consider whether you'd rather the conservative opposition be more of the current crop of Republicans, or folks who support living wages, environmental conservation, and abolishing the death penalty.
Also, it's always fun to get a view into how incredibly diverse the population really is...
The problem is with the current voting system, only votes for the most probably two candidates are reasonable. Ranked choice has it's problems, but it solves that one.
From California shall come our salvation or our destruction.
I think it's Avada Kedavra (from Avada Kevadra)
sad to see the way AI images and prose are eating up native human unhinged imagination! Just think of all the wacky posters and campaign prose we would've had in years past. The preponderance of em-dashes, "not just X, but Y", and omnipresent GPT image gen posters are disappointingly uniform. At this point we should just have Claude/GPT as a candidate outright.
One does wonder about OpenAI's anti-sycophancy measures, however, given some of the content listed herein. I would expect the Louis Barraicua poster to have generated some meaningful pushback from GPT, considering this is the exact sort of "reality-hopping interdimensional hero" stuff which caused them so many problems with 4o-abetted delusions but apparently not?
well, all you really have to do (if a delusional individual) is just keep pushing and the chatbot will eventually come around again.
as for the influence on campaign material - yes, I too prefer the human wacky prose. the sheer increased quantity of campaigners makes me wonder if AI just made it much easier for people to get in the game, and quite a few of these people wouldn't have run without its, shall we say, support. i'd be interested in learning if there are similar increases in how many people are running for office across the world
Error: Domenico Camplisson (no photo provided) is the Provisional Knight of Malta. The person whose photo you display is Jeff Culbreath, the person before Camplisson in the committee list.
Yeah, Culbreath is a full officer of the KoM and will be outraged at his demotion
The American Solidarity Party is actually pretty great, I used to vote for them back when the stakes were lower and hope to see the day the stakes are low enough again for me to do so.
Basically pro-life democrats (economically at least), which is a not a huge political base, but it's not thier fault not many people seem to care about valuing and helping people both before and after they're born :)
>valuing and helping people both before and after they're born
The question isn't about whether it's good to help people," it's whether unwilling people should be forced to support those who cannot or will not support themselves. The criticism of conservatives that they're hypocritical for opposing welfare while supporting abortion banning is valid, they should act in accordance with their values and oppose both. I've written about this:
https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/why-abortion-prohibition-is-dysgenic
Exactly, the criticism of conservatives is valid. ASP passes your hypocrisy criticism by supporting welfare both before and after birth. Just lands on the opposite side of both from you
Nonsense. There's lots of ways to provide for the poor. It's slander to say that anyone has the duty to support a particular one.
Th a depends on whether or not people have a duty to be consistent.
And off to non-sequitur.
Also slander, since this imputes inconsistency to valid disagreement -- all the more in that the thing disagreed with is not the thing claimed to be inconsistent.
*looks at the fraud in Minnesota*
Exactly why is the duty of people to, rather than give to the poor themselves, hand over money to the government to be defrauded on the pretext that it's being given to the poor?
Yes, fraud is bad. I'm glad Biden's DOJ was able to find and prosecute it :)
One doesn't really influence the other. If the government stopped helping the poor and middle and upper class people got 5% more money in thier pockets, how much would that really increase thier donations?
Smirking at the way the DOJ under Biden let it pass only underscores that it doesn't matter. More would get to the poor
That wasn't sarcasm. Biden's DoJ did investigate and indict the people committing the fraud back in 2022. I was just smiling because it was a poke to point out that this was prosecuted under Biden, even though Trump tries to take credit for it. Fwiw, Trump has made it a point to pardon people committing giant health care fraud schemes
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+health+care+fraud+pardon&oq=trump+health+care+fraud+pardon&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDY2MjJqMGo3qAIUsAIB8QXOyapimOepLPEFzsmqYpjnqSw&client=ms-android-att-us-rvc3&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
The same way he is illegally blowing up supposed drug boats in the carribean while pardoning one of the biggest drug importers ever (400 tons of cocaine to the US!)
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+drug+trafficker+pardon&client=ms-android-att-us-rvc3&hs=7Ra&sca_esv=6634c8d69ba31c13&sxsrf=ANbL-n43gZq1A9-Ea3qcjATKYB2_XWb-jg%3A1779222858340&ei=SskMaty5FP7cptQPu9-5qAE&biw=360&bih=641&oq=trump+drug+trafficker+pardon&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIhx0cnVtcCBkcnVnIHRyYWZmaWNrZXIgcGFyZG9uSJFiUMkUWNtbcAJ4AZABAZgBjQWgAd4sqgEKMC4yOS41LjUtMbgBA8gBAPgBAZgCFKACvRXCAgoQABiwAxjWBBhHwgIGEAAYCBgewgILEAAYgAQYhgMYigXCAggQABiABBiiBMICBhAAGAcYHsICCBAAGAcYCBgewgIKEAAYBxgIGAoYHsICChAAGIAEGLEDGA3CAgcQABiABBgNwgIOEAAYgAQYkQIYsQMYigXCAgsQABiABBiRAhiKBcICBRAAGIAEwgIIEAAYgAQYsQPCAgsQABgHGMcDGAgYHsICBhAAGAUYHsICCxAAGMcDGAgYDRgemAMAiAYBkAYIkgcGMi4xNi4yoAf3rgGyBwYwLjE2LjK4B6UVwgcIMC4zLjE1LjLIB2uACAA&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp#lfId=ChxjMe
You were smirking because you were pretending that Biden's DOJ's prosecuting anyone at all was anything like what Trump is uncovering.
How many billions did Biden's DOJ uncover?
Societies define duties? It works better that way? There are a lot of potential answer to the question. And if you think ethics are intrinsic, not constructed, you have a lot of of explaining to do.
You are not society. You do not get to define a duty to be defrauded to benefit the evil on the pretext of helping the poor -- and you certainly do not get to declare that it is better than that the evil commit fraud than that the poor be helped.
Hence, your comment is a non-sequitur. And your claim about ethics is an additional nonsequitur.
>You are not society. You do not get to define a duty to be defrauded to benefit the evil on the pretext of helping the poor
I never said it was down to me.
then you shouldn't have invoked society as if it backed up your claim.
Forget it man, it’s Chinatown.
Alexander, you've written about why the poor and low-class should be aborted out of existence. You haven't written about "welfare for all eternally" and you certainly have not written about "as many babies as you like and welfare to support them", contra what you are intimating here with 'conservatives are hypocritical for opposing welfare and supporting bans on abortion'.
How do you know that all conservatives have values about abortion that are "well if you're on welfare you should be sterilised but failing that, if you do breed, abort the spawn before it's born"? You can't shout "hypocrisy" if people do in fact believe babies should be allowed to live.
The issue is that pro-lifers want to assert that abortion bans are not dysgenic, then withdraw into the motte of moralistic statements like "babies should be allowed to live" when challenged.
There's always the option of banning 𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘺 abortions. Society is still dysgenic even with legal abortion as long as the more productive populations refuse to reproduce above replacement rate.
I like Alexander's soft impeachment that my real objections are about eugenics and not, you know, baby murder. I'm only retreating to the motte, apparently?
You have to understand that not everyone shares your unconditional valuation of life. I still think Alexander's still failing to see the bigger picture, though. There are ways to get rid of people without triggering people's sentimentalities. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say.
Nah your real objections are religion.
Shock horror, Alexander, Irish Catholic not eugenicist! 😁
God bless you, man, and I mean that sincerely: you made me laugh this morning when I read your reply.
You still haven't addressed any of my arguments about abortion bans being dysgenic.
Or they just don't care about the dysgenic thing.
I'm just shocked you missed the joke that jumped out at me while reading the voter guide. You even placed the candidate under "Nominative Determinism":
If Duane Terrence Loynes Jr., who is campaigning on a pledge to regulate women's bodies, won... he'd be "Governor Loynes"
"campaigning on a pledge to regulate women's bodies"
Don't make me lament my non-Californian status so I can't vote for him!
Honestly, the amount of "you don't support no-limits abortion? so you want to lock women up and rape them in a state of continuous pregnancy don't you, you monster!" that gets slopped around when someone expresses even the smallest quibbles about maybe some term limits on the procedure makes me roll my eyes.
I'm not totally sure they meant it as a pejorative. I read it as strengthening the connection by explicitly referencing bodies before referring to loins.
I'm gun-shy because over-exposed to the types of hysteria online about enslaving women etc. when any kind of pro-life attitudes are expressed, so phrases like "regulate women's bodies" make me very twitchy.
your straw man of the straw man only serves to (imo) worsen your point, because nobody actually says that. even in the most hysterical (heh) cases the idea of literal kidnapping rape doesn't come into play because, well, whether someone could or couldn't get an abortion at a doctor's office is pretty moot when they're being locked in a basement.
most of the time it goes: look at all these horrible cases in real life that happened when various people couldn't get abortions because of existing rules, that was pretty bad, abortion is not as bad, we'd rather have the downsides of freely available abortions than the downsides of not having them. and then an argument about which downsides are worse can ensue.
"...two-term California gubernatorial candidate in 2014 and 2018"
That is priceless.
Yes, it's an absolutely magical turn of phrase. More pithy version of the meme with the guy who listed Yale and Harvard on his LinkedIn education section (as "applied to").
What is going on in that Scott Shields magazine cover? "The Man who Challanges the Sytem: A Deep Unfirlterd Conversation on Power, Ideology, and Future" (plus at least two other typos on the cover). "UNFIRLTERD"? Really?
I looked into that in a comment a bit earlier, since I was curious. You can ctrl-F "Thelo" to find that earlier comment of mine, but short version: the "Capitol Times Magazine" seems to be an incredibly low-quality slop thing that only exists as a vanity thing to prop up someone's ego, one "issue" at a time. The pdf is freely available right now and It's just completely full of that sort of thing.
At least it's not an appeal to the US Supreme Court that misspells both Virginia and Senator.
It describes him as a "gubernatorial governor candidate" too! I love it.
Re Scott Shields' magazine profile: what's a "sytem"?
Hilarious. You simply couldn't make this stuff up.
Purely theoretical question: is there a candidate one can vote for and not be ashamed of the fact?
Among the smart people I know whose politics are similar to mine and Scott's, the favored candidate is San Jose mayor Matt Mahan, who's been particularly good on housing. It's not clear if he can win, though; he has a lot less name recognition than the other credible Democrats.
Mahan might have a shot if we had RCV for governor. Instead we have this stupid top two jungle primary thing, in which he sadly has next to no chance. See also: Nithya Raman in LA. Abolishing the jungle primary should be a major structural reform priority for CA.
After reading this, all of it, I’m ready to admit that democracy was a mistake all along.
That's not justified by this. These are folks running, not folks who have been voted for.
But, yeah, democracy is a lousy system. Tell me what a better one is.
My comment was meant to be ironic. Indeed, democracy is the best system we Homo sapiens have thought of. And yet….
The biggest mistake except for all the others that have been made.
"Democracy is the very worst of all political systems, except for all the others"
Well, someone had to say it.
While she would probably have been a nightmare to have as a client, I sympathize on a few points with this Alicia Lapp lady and her family court crusade. If we take those reforms as a reflection of her case history, sounds like her baby-daddy was a loser who hooked up with a felon and took custody due to whatever instability was then afflicting her. Then of course the baby-daddy and ex-con druggie loser probably made no *reportable* income, so as she became a normie lady working normie jobs she would've found herself paying child support.
I've always found it bizarre that for an intact couple there is very little interference in the matter of how you care for your child beyond a minimum standard, but in a couple that is split up there is a legal presumption that X% of the couple's total income would have gone to child care expenses and this is what child support is based on. If the Cosby Show's Huxtable family got divorced, is Theo suddenly entitled to a brand new convertible and to buy all his clothes at Nordstrom's just because his parents are a doctor and lawyer? Nobody would tell the parents they were obligated to spoil a child while they're together, but as soon as they split it's the state's business for some reason?
I also agree with her about the app for communication. In my crimlaw days I constantly dealt with split parents who had restraining orders and sometimes criminal bond conditions concerning communication, and the court nearly always was forced to carve an exception to those orders for communications "involving the child", because the same judge doesn't have the authority over the criminal case as the one who has the domestic case wherefrom the logistics required by joint custody are mandated. This was often a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, I saw numerous text messages of the type "I'm stuck on a job, you gotta get Billy at 3, I'm sure you're just laying around f--king that dopehead [racial slur]". There are in fact apps available to do this, and in some cases our judge would order all communications to go through them, it's a legitimately good idea to require that in non-amicable splits.
As for the evidentiary issues, her problem here is one of admissibility vs credibility/weight. It is of course not hearsay to say "I saw her being verbally abusive to little Billy", that's a matter of whether the judge credits it, and judges are usually good at discounting allegations by highly motivated parties such as parents in a custody dispute. The existence of a police report may lend corroboration to the allegation if the cop did any direct investigation, but of course if all the cop did was write down the allegations and it went nowhere, then it would be the *report* that was hearsay. But I must agree with her about psych evals, outside a few narrow contexts these have no business in a courtroom unless the person who performed the eval is present and testifying. In fact her argument to allow them if it was part of a criminal proceeding is more than I'd grant. A psych diagnosis is so extremely prejudicial and easily misunderstood (or deliberately exaggerated) by attorneys that additional care needs to be taken with these. I once had to get pretrial orders just to keep an opposing attorney from using psychiatric diagnosis terminology due to how prejudicial the name of an alleged condition was to my case in the absence of the doctor being there to explain the relative triviality of the criteria. Scott presumably knows more about this given his business, but it would seem to create a horrible disincentive to seek help or to cooperate with a court-ordered evaluation if the fact of having done so could pop up in a later proceeding.
People say that purpose of child support isn't to redistribute money from one parent to the other. That kind of thing is why we have POSIWID:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does
Except as Scott established last year, POS is very clearly not WID. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of
"The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients. The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia."
The Ukrainian military did serve its purpose of preventing the Russian Army from ending its independence. Had it not resisted at all it would have been accurate to say the purpose was to look good in parades and enrich military contractors.
Of course. It is possible to state the purpose of a system. That is not the same as "any statement of something a system does must be its purpose". Not unless you're redefining the word "purpose" to the point of uselessness.
Huh, really appreciate the insight here. I have little to add, just one front of which I'd be curious to hear elaboration.
> "Nobody would tell the parents they were obligated to spoil a child while they're together, but as soon as they split it's the state's business for some reason?"
Your point strikes me as sound on the surface, but I'd still like to explore it a bit. Is there some merit as a heuristic here? How many people deliberately avoid spoiling their children, raising them with identical access to goods/services as a family with twice the income usually-would? Since if you shrugged and said "hey they might've split up because he wanted to raise his child as an austere monk and she objected" that'd be an excuse for someone to minimally support a child they otherwise would've as they're caught up in an attempt to spite the other parent and make themselves more appealing as a primary/sole custodian to the child in a subjective way.
Basically, I wonder if it's rare enough for people to deliberately under-spoil a child that assuming they would've at a baseline and any claims to the contrary are an excuse is broadly sound, if not necessarily just in a strict legal way.
I just looked up California's formula, and it does appear to be non-linear with regard to parents' income. It starts out by calculating the parents' combined "disposable" income (roughly, take-home pay) and determining a percentage of that to be the assumed child care costs. That percentage starts at 16.5%, ramps up to 25% for middle incomes ($5-10k/month), and declines toward a minimum of 12% for very high incomes. It's set up so the total dollar amount goes up monotonically, I think, but the percentage of income peaks and then declines.
You know a lot more about this than I do, I just sort of look at this and say "if they gave sole custody to the broke-ass dad and his felon girlfriend, she must have been a horrible mom". Is this unfair?
I realize it's a bit like saying "he's in prison, so he's probably a criminal" which feels unfair but is honestly usually correct.
Not unfair at all. It's quite hard to put a person in prison if they're not criminals (or at least rule breakers).
The imprisoned non-criminals go to Chateau d'If.
I think the claim is that that's a rare event. It may be correct. There are reasons to be dubious, but they aren't strong.
Oh, I understand and mostly agree with the claim. I'm just being silly by making a tangential reference to the Count of Monte Cristo, where (at least in the movie; I haven't read the book yet) the warden of Chateau d'If cheerfully accepts the protagonist's claims of innocence and responds that his prison is full of innocent people because Chateau d'If is where they send the prisoners they're ashamed of.
You should read the book. That sounds like the Jim Caviezel movie, which is very different.
Well we have to fill in some blanks to make sense of it and I'm assuming that she probably bent but didn't entirely break the truth, as that is the typical mode of re-telling this particular grievance. It's possible that this guy was in criminal activity and had some money off-the-books to hire a lawyer that she didn't, and with clever maneuvering he got a better outcome. Not my top guess, but possible.
What's more likely is that she was undergoing a time of crisis and had some kind of affliction or addiction and the court genuinely had to place the kid with dad for immediate safety, this I don't question too much. But thereafter, the system is set up to snowball in the direction of the status quo, the longer the kid is with one parent the balance turns heavier in favor of stability. Mothers were always far more likely to age out of problematic behavior than fathers, but suppose maybe they both reformed. Once they both cleaned up their acts it might have been a joint custody situation if determined at the later time as a matter of first impression, but now that there's a history with one party, the other party has to seek a *modification* which is a very different matter with a higher standard. The "best interests of the child" always predominate, but to reach that point there is a threshold inquiry as to whether there are substantially changed circumstances, usually with some list of things that qualify as such.
This interpretation jives with her wanting a presumption of 50/50 joint physical custody, although that reform would not actually get her what she wants, she probably would need reform to the modification threshold or frequency in which you can request one. The stock presumption across most states, at least when I was in law school, was for joint legal custody but NOT for joint physical custody, as joint physical custody was deemed to be often hard on the child. So I don't think this presumption is very reasonable, but I do think other reforms could make this kind of scenario more fair (at the cost of more judicial resources, however.)
> "Mothers were always far more likely to age out of problematic behavior than fathers"
Any recommended reading or keywords to search for here? Sounds like something interesting to learn more about. Certainly sounds plausible on the surface, but I am curious how significant the effect is and how the rate for mothers vs fathers compares to the baseline rate between female vs male non-parents, as well as if it notably varies by "problematic behavior."
What's worse is that the custodial parent has no legal constraints on how to spend child support.
Is it viable to? I know little of this as a non-lawyer non-parent. On the surface it feels like "make sure child support ACTUALLY SUPPORTS CHILDREN" would be such an obvious no-brainer goal that everyone would have at least some level of assurances it'd happen if it was practical to get them. But at a minimum you could always simply claim that everything bought for the child is with child support money, and anything purchased for yourself is with your own money, and also that anything that benefits "the household" is for the child's benefit...
But I might just be having a failure of imagination here and a bunch of other states (whether American or of the "nation-" variety) have already figured out how to do this.
There have been cases where the amount the custodial parent spent on the child was FAR below the value of the child support.
As in, refuse to buy the child a bed or clothes and tell the child it was because the father wasn't paying.
I assumed there would be sufficiently extreme cases like that, but wouldn't that fall under abuse regardless of the parent's income source? If the parent had suffered a non-debilitating accident and had settlement money trickling in and their child was sleeping naked on the floor that'd also be a big problem.
Although it would probably be reasonable to nevertheless have it be extra-illegal to do it with child support money, since you're both abusing the child AND defrauding money allocated/provided by the state/other parent.
The children still had existing clothes.
"you can’t be the Democratic nominee without winning the -D/e/m/o/c/r/a/t/i/c- *jungle* primary."
California has one primary, and the top two winners get to actually run. This was set up to exclude the Republicans.
But this year you will find leftists saying it's a bad idea. It appears that this year, the crop of Democrats is so large that they are afraid that it will exclude the Democrats by splitting the vote. They might end up with two Republican candidates.
Newson is threatening a "break the glass" strategy that he won't reveal.
So --
"More or less the same as the top-tier Democrats, minus the chance of winning."
Apparently not.
Right. It's highly unlikely that a Republican will win the California governorship this year, but in roughly the same sense that it was highly unlikely that Donald Trump would win the Presidency in 2016. Back then, there was a perfectly obvious way for the Republican party to avoid being taken over by the Trumpists: pick any Republican not named Trump or Bush, say "we're going with this guy", and get everyone else to knock it off already. Here and now, there's an obvious way for the Democratic party to avoid losing their God-given right to a California supertrifecta: Pick any Democrat at all, heck, pick any *two* Democrats at all, and get everyone else to knock it off already.
But in 2016, the Republicans weren't willing to do that until it was too late. And even then it took a fair bit of luck for Trump to win, but 20/80 luck, not 1/99 luck. Here and now, the Democrats still haven't really tried to coalesce, and maybe they'll figure it out until it's too late, and even if they don't the odds are still in their favor.
But not to the point where the Republicans "have no chance of winning".
Based on the articles I've read, that is half of the "break the glass" plan. Newsom seems to be trying to put together a group of high-profile California Democrats to pick someone and get behind them as the unofficial nominee.
The other half sounds like the California Democratic Party is also trying to encourage Republican primary voters to consolidate on Hilton, by sending out mailers and stuff that "attack" Hilton in terms that are calculated to make him sound good to conservatives.
Interesting how many of these people seem to be writing and talking in GPTisms. The combination of mild narcissism and a sycophantic entourage has been the cause of many California gubernatorial campaigns, so it almost blends in.
I wonder if we would call this "AI psychosis", if it weren't for the existing diagnostic category of "candidate for California governor"...
Perhaps this can be the general case encompassing what is colloquially known as "AI psychosis": a chatbot-driven instance of the ever-shifting plague that is CGCS (California Gubernatorial Candidate Syndrome).
It used to be you needed to be Keir Starmer or somebody like that to have an entourage of party sycophants encouraging you on despite the clear disinterest of the actual voters. Thanks to LLMs, you too can have your own personal sycophant.
We should get Kier to run for California governor omg
Surely the Californian left would enjoy voting for the Labour party. It's got a "u" after the "o" and everything! So European and sophisticated!
"You can't spell Labour without 'You'."
RE: Nominative Determinists - There was a judge in suburban Chicago that changed his name from Phillip Spiwak to Shannon O'Malley both to capitalize on local pro-Irish bias and general pro-woman bias.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/illinois-judge-candidate-insists-he-s-o-malley-critics-call-n845651
"The Talmud’s various Yeshus and Jesuses are probably vague mixes of several figures spanning hundreds of years ... smushed together"
I believe that Charlie Chaplin's "Tramp" character will be smushed together with Donald Trump, yielding President Orange Tramp as meme/cartoon.
That was great!
British elections tend to have…
- Lord Buckethead, or similar, who will be wearing some sort of costume, and will have a joke manifesto whose subtext is that by voting for them you can express your contempt for the serious candidate. E.g. 150 voters would rather their MP be some guy in a Darth Vader costume than Kier Starmer.
- George Galloway. I think he’d say he wasn’t a communist, but to explain to Americans: imagine a candidate who is actually a Communist. Not a vanilla Democrat that you accuse of being a Communist, but an *actual* Communist. While the previous type of candidate was joking, it would unfortunately appear that George Galloway is not doing it as a bit.
Our Lord Buckethead is Vermin Supreme. We don't see him in California elections, since he lives in Massachusetts, but he usually runs for President. He's usually seen sporting a long, grey beard and mismatched clothes that vaguely resemble wizard robes, complete with an inverted wellington boot he wears in place of a hat. He runs on joke platforms with similar energy to what I've heard of Lord Buckethead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermin_Supreme
In place of George Galloway, we used to have Lyndon LaRouche. I think he started out as a Marxist, but gradually drifted towards a mixed bag of conspiracy theories and built a weird cult-like political organization around himself. He ran for President every election cycle between 1976 and 2004. He died of old age a few years ago, and his organization seemed to stop attracting much attention some time before that.
Lord Buckethead has it much better because due to the UK parliamentary system, the future PM has to win their actual parliament seat, and if lord buckethead runs in the same district he gets to go onstage with them
California had a combination of both one time, when Dead Kennedys lead singer Jello Biafra ran for San Francisco mayor under his stage name. Perhaps more of an anarcho-communist but still about as communist as Galloway, in the same old-timey way that has aged into something that younger leftists don't recognize any longer.
Do not neglect the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, faithful participant in virtually every British by-election (you may find it easier to remember its Welsh name, Plaid Swyddogol yr Anghenfilaidd Ddihirod Gwallgof). Founded, according to Wikipedia, "in 1982 by the musician David Sutch, also known as Screaming Lord Sutch, 3rd Earl of Harrow, or simply Lord Sutch".
The party's manifesto for the Runcorn & Helsby election of 2025 included such intriguing proposals as "We will reduce hospital waiting lists by using a smaller font" and "Once in Government, we will replace the Foreign Secretary with a British one."
To explain it to Americans, he's a lot like Jackson Hinkle.
The American Communist Party manages to be the same kind of candidate, down to the faction split between the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front. (Cf. _Life of Brian_)
In the case of George Galloway, iirc, the inevitable party split was when Respect splintered into followers of George Galloway vs the Socialist Workers Party.
To be fair, I'd totally vote for the imaginary-numbers guy. That sounds better than our current CA budget. Really, it couldn't hurt. Maybe he can use those imaginary dollars to finally complete the high-speed rail, by tunneling it through the orthogonal dimension !
Any dissenters can be easily dispatched with Program Omega. https://jimmy-and-the-pulsating-mass.fandom.com/wiki/Imaginary_Numbers
The HSR named Mobius.
Does anyone know what is going on with the candidates who get on the ballot and then do nothing with it? No website, no statements for the official voters' guides.
Like, did they just get high one night and submit the $4,400 application fee and then forget all about it?
Compared to the ones described here who are actually campaigning, "got high, paid the $4400 application fee, and forgot all about it" seems rather sensible, to be honest.
Maybe I'll vote for one of them.
If nothing else it's probably an indication they have too much money, neither sensible naysayers nor enough support in their life to make them go through with it, and are therefore ripe targets for investment scams.
This is the best thing I've read all year
Correction: the guy with the pipe is not a provisional knight of Malta. That's the next person who doesn't have a photo.
Thanks, fixed.
A missed opportunity to show him wearing the uniform! They have a couple:
1. Full Dress Uniform
The Order of Malta’s full dress uniform is historically significant and emphasizes its status as a sovereign entity.
Jacket:
A red, double-breasted coat with a high, closed French collar and outward-turned lapels.
Details: It features heavy gold epaulets, a sword belt with a ceremonial sword, and white gloves.
Colors: Lapel and collar colors vary; Bailiffs of Honor and Devotion have white, while other knights have black, often adorned with gold embroidery depending on rank.
As seen here:
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15050717
2. Church Robes
During religious functions, knights and dames wear traditional ceremonial vestments.
Robes:
A long black church robe or cape that features the prominent, white eight-pointed Maltese cross on the shoulder.
Accessories:
Large, ornate crosses are worn on the chest for special pontifical masses.
See here (Spectator magazine only mad that British Anglicanism not this cool):
https://spectator.com/article/the-knights-of-malta-must-understand-that-they-are-a-religious-order-not-a-country/
3. Service and Hospitaller Uniforms
During humanitarian missions and pilgrimages (such as the annual trip to Lourdes), members wear practical work uniforms for comfort and visibility.
Attire: Consists of black tactical/work shirts or jackets, black trousers, and optionally a military-style beret featuring a red Order of Malta insignia.
https://lesothoembassy.orderofmalta.int/
But it seems there was controversy of which I was unaware! Pope Francis dissolved the leadership and a new constitution, taking away the requirement for nobility, was imposed!
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/pope-dissolves-knights-malta-leadership-issues-new-constitution-2022-09-03/
"Pope Francis on Saturday dissolved the leadership of the Knights of Malta, the global Catholic religious order and humanitarian group, and installed a provisional government ahead of the election of a new Grand Master.
...The group, whose formal name is Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, was founded in Jerusalem nearly 1,000 years ago to provide medical aid for pilgrims in the Holy Land.
It now has a multi-million dollar budget, 13,500 members, 95,000 volunteers and 52,000 medical staff running refugee camps, drug treatment centres, disaster relief programs and clinics around the world.
The order has been very active in helping Ukrainian refugees and war victims.
It has no real territory apart from a palace and offices in Rome and a fort in Malta, but is recognised as a sovereign entity with its own passports and licence plates.
It has diplomatic relations with 110 states and permanent observer status at the United Nations, allowing to act as a neutral party in relief efforts in war zones.
...Under the previous constitution, the top Knights and the Grand Master were required to have noble lineage, something reformers said excluded nearly everyone except Europeans from serving in top roles."
Personally, I'd prefer about 70% of these candidates to whoever is going to win.
It seems Lapp wound up abducting her children following the messy custody battle: https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-4371800/amp/Mom-run-kidnapping-two-daughters.html
It would be interesting to see the attack ads made for these different candidates, were they to actually get to the general election
"And low-information voters are only going to see your name and party on the ballot. Your party is what it is - you can’t be the Democratic nominee without winning the Democratic primary. But your name is negotiable. "
I am mildly surprised no one seems to have renamed himself Democrat.
I was very touched by the micronations bit because I also was a bit of a hobbyist in that regard when I was like 14 years old and had mostly forgotten about it. But for the record, it’s “avada kedavra” (which is itself an Aramaic derivation roughly meaning “do like I said”)
What country were you in? (probably we didn't overlap, but it would be funny if we did)
The best use of the phrase "hotly contested title" in a SSC/ACX essay is a hotly contested title, but my vote goes to the opening line of "The Categories Were Made For Man".
>Atheist Marxism And It's Political Machine
Clearly didn't pay enough for the Legendary Service Package, which includes basic SpAG services. But maybe they were trying to model the article after his own campaign communications'...rustic vernacular. Overall this was still an amusing read despite needing to generalize heavily; I hope future gubernatorial elections will keep the roster to a manageable level, so as to ensure valuable satirist jobs.
Oh, and congratulations on making the Top Doctors of 2026 list!
"On the other hand, Thunder Parlay provides no explanation. Did his parents name him Thunder? Is it a nickname? Did he do it for the snazzy thunderbolt logo?"
It's a childhood nickname which he legally adopted back when he moved to California to attend university. News article from 2008 where he is mostly profiled as appreciating the fine and free food Google provided:
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-thunder14jan14-story.html
"The oldest of five children, Parley grew up in a coupon-clipping household in Windsor Locks, Conn., where he did cost-per-ounce calculations in his head to help his mom, Gail, get more for less on grocery shopping expeditions. He says his mom and her father, Elzidor “Al” Miner, greatly influenced his early culinary inclinations. Both used to cook for all nine family members who lived together under one roof.
Parley excelled in middle-school home economics class and cooked his own meals at the amusement park where he worked after school. In high school, friends started calling him Thunder. He legally adopted the name while attending Pepperdine University, where he majored in computer science and math. When he wasn’t at the keyboard, he relished playing drinking games while watching “Iron Chef” on the Food Channel."
We can but guess what his original name was, if Grandpa was Elzidor.
As for changing one's name to get on the ballot, the late Seán Dublin Bay Loftus was an Irish example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Se%C3%A1n_Dublin_Bay_Rockall_Loftus
"At the 1973 general election, Loftus stood for election to the Dáil in the Dublin North-Central constituency as a Christian Democrat on the issue of Dublin Bay. Because the party was too small to be registered under the Electoral Act 1963, meaning Loftus would be listed as 'Non-Party', he changed his name by deed poll to "Seán D. Christian Democrat Dublin Bay Loftus" in order that his political affiliation and campaign issue would appear on the ballot paper.[
...In the following years Loftus changed his name by deed poll several times more, to "Seán Dublin Bay Loftus", "Seán Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus" (as part of a campaign to press the Irish Government to make a territorial claim to the Rockall islet 424 kilometres (263 mi) off the coast of County Donegal) and "Seán Alderman Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus", among others. It was under this last name that he was elected to the 22nd Dáil for the Dublin North-East constituency at the 1981 general election."
When is book review contest deadline? What time today?
I am assuming it Anywhere on Earth time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anywhere_on_Earth
The bit I have to take issue with is the idea that "Jeshua the Nazarene", famous blasphemer, in a text written by ~third century Jews, has only a 60% chance of being Jesus. Nazareth was a tiny town.
My minority "no more 'Every X'/'Bay Area House Party' variants ever again" request doesn't apply to this one. Probably because you said "Types of Candidate" rather than "Every Candidate". Surely that must be it.
Fun fact I learned about Grundmann: You can just call him on his office number on the ballot sheet and he will generally pick up.
Don’t abuse this, obviously, and don’t tell him your name if it’s obviously Jewish. Oops.
I want to say I thoroughly enjoyed the humor in this post.
I look forward to your ballot, and I encourage you to endorse Patrick Wolff for Insurance Commissioner, as not only is he the candidate most likely to allow the appropriate pricing of risk, he also stars in this charming ad for his campaign.
https://youtu.be/bZIrpKmpph4
I enjoyed this article, thanks!
I joined the American Solidarity Party for a year, after being invited by a friend who portrayed it as the political home for church going, pro-life but also anti-war/death penalty, nerdy Tolkien and Lewis readers. And it was that.
But after that year I found myself moving away due to the strong Catholic influence (I had the sense that some members, given the opportunity, would axe the Constitution and declare the Pope King of America...which is unappealing to me as another 13th gen WASP). Also the membership skewed toward men who worked in academia, NGOs, and government. There was an event focused on how to support organized labor, and 99% of the ideas were about helping teachers. I love teachers, but I found myself wondering if I was the only person who knew folks in manufacturing or services.
Still better than the average 3rd party though.
Interesting to hear your perspective. Where there are pro death penalty people there as well?
I'm sure there were some, but probably not the norm.
Gotcha. Just curious. I think that will become a relevant divide in the future as it becomes personalism vs more traditional Thomism
Where else would you get to read the word "danegeld"? Absolutely nowhere. I love this blog!
Surely someone has commented by now about the multiple apparent typos on the Scott Shields cover - is the publisher doing that intentionally to catch people who lift their covers, à la paper towns?? “Challenge the sytem”, bungled “unfiltered.” So strange
> I regularly get spam saying that I’ve been identified as a Top Doctor Of 2026 and if I merely pay the $3,000 processing fee I can have my Top Doctor Plaque and my page in the Top Doctors Profile Book; it’s the same type of scam.
Wait, you have the opportunity to become a "Top Doc" from the banner ads?! Would you be provided with a One Weird Trick, or do you have to supply your own?
Chad Bianco looks exactly like Kris Kristofferson playing Sheriff Charlie Wade in Lone Star (1996).
https://i.postimg.cc/qqKLt6Xq/image.png
This does not make me want to vote for him.
I voted for Hilton even though Mahan was my first choice. Yes, Hilton probably stands no chance in the general, but I really did not find a meaningful difference between Beccera and Steyer. I would rather have a Hilton - top Democrat General election than a Beccera - Steyer one.
Just throwing this out there: it feels like the default rationalist-sphere position on politics is to support Democrats. But aren't Republican candidates just going to implement generally better policies (e.g. anti-regulation, anti-DEI, anti-soft on crime) on average these days, notwithstanding the descent of the GOP into low-IQ conspiracism? Like, if you find Ezra Klein's Abundance argument persuasive, don't red states just do a better job of this than blue states? See Richard Hanania's writings for more on this.
I'm culturally closer to Democrats (in terms of education/psychological profile I mean, not in terms of my views on culture war issues) and I have zero doubt that the future of the Republican Party is detestable Groyperism. But I think that the current GOP, at both the state and federal levels, tends to implement better policies than the Democrats. So why not discard lingering tribal affiliation with the Democrats as the smart/virtuous party and vote for Republicans?
I assume this is a legacy thing + regional bias. If you’re a high-IQ professional you’ve probably been battered with casual assumptions of Democrats for most of your life, and not many people manage your approach of being culturally in that circle while rejecting its politics. It’s doable at my age (mid-40s) but I doubt anyone under 35 can dance that line as much as those kids loudly disclaim the ability to have cross-political friendships.
On top of this, the older elements of the movement evolved out of the late 2000s internet atheism when GOP=Bush=evangelicals who hate science and reason. You also had many years of them treating global warming as an existential problem, and while that’s faded now for a variety of good and bad reasons it’s still part of the identity. Add it up and the GOP is hard to consider seriously for them. Even when the GOP candidate might get more of their desired policy changes through, it would be offset from their POV by a few important things going backwards.
You have a pair of embarrassing anti-rational movements in the mid-2010s, social justice and Trumpism, and the result of these combined is the Abundance Dem. Social justice was intellectually embarrassing so Dems who knew better worked to keep a reasonable policy-centered agenda alive, restraining the worst impulses of activists. Trumpism was socially embarrassing, to maintain respectability you had to put actual distance between yourself and Trump which became increasingly hard as most conservative media and the party apparatus was brought in line, so some number of these just crossed over and became Abundance Dems. I’d like to hope it’d be better with Trump gone in a few years, but it’s unclear. Needless to say, the whole looney-tunes Nick Fuentes wing is just as socially embarassing, they sound like a bunch of 3rd world villagers spouting off about how the witches stole their penis, and I’m baffled at how any conservative-aligned faction would side so fervently with uncivilized anti-Western Muslims against the civilized pro-Western state of Israel. I’m hoping some of the more reasonable prejudices come back into play and beat that tendency out of the right, making it safe for educated people again.
Well the current GOP has slashed foreign aid, which probably killed quite a lot of people. They started a particularly ill considered and pointless war in the middle east. Oh and they are blatantly anti-renewables and pro coal. Ill considered tariffs. ICE brutality. An anti-vaxer in charge of the nations healthcare.
> (e.g. anti-regulation, anti-DEI, anti-soft on crime)
You can name the places where one party is screwing up, and say that the other party will do better on those issues. This may well be true. The other party will screw up in different ways on different issues.
>Well the current GOP has slashed foreign aid, which probably killed quite a lot of people.
Why's that bad? Competing for US charity is form of resource curse and isn't good for the world. Giving money to the third world is like feeding animals in the wild, it just winds up being bad for everyone involved.
The resource curse most strongly applies in situations where the general populace isn't involved.
Like if a country has lots of gold, it's possible for the government to mine and sell the gold, and run an army and fund the leaders palace, all while ignoring and abusing the peasantry.
If government aid is reducing lead poisoning or iodine deficiency or malaria, then this doesn't directly hand the government a blank check. It means the population is healthier. Which makes it easier to build an economy that does involve the common people.
> Giving money to the third world is like feeding animals in the wild, it just winds up being bad for everyone involved.
I'm not totally convinced this is true with wild animals. I really don't think it is true for third world humans. Reality is complicated, and it's hard to be sure of indirect effects. Still the direct effects look good.
In my world model, these countries are likely to become richer and industrialized, they just need a little help.
>these countries are likely to become richer and industrialized, they just need a little help.
Yet that hasn't happened in over 60 years of USAID. Not even a little.
Read "Dead Aid" by Dambisa Moyo. She was an Oxford-trained economist from Zambia who argued persuasively that foreign aid did little but undermine institutional stability in sub-Saharan Africa. "Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world.”
So, to my understanding, the aid was suddenly cut off. This caused HIV medicines to suddenly dry up, and quite a few people to die of HIV.
This strongly indicates that the aid was doing something useful before it was cut off.
> Yet that hasn't happened in over 60 years of USAID. Not even a little.
According to this graph, the US has been giving foreign aid to Egypt since 1990.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_aid#/media/File:United_States_foreign_aid.webp
And according to this graph, Egyption GDP per capita has doubled in that time period.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?tab=line&country=~EGY
This isn't proof. Egypt could have gotten richer for other reasons. But it is at least consistent with the aid working.
The book "Dead aid" sounds like a heavily biased source.
>anti-Semitic ravings candidates
Right now these are still in the hopeless crank candidate territory, but I think it's a pretty straightforward extrapolation from current trends to predict that these exact same anti-Semitic memes ("Jesus and the Talmud," "9/11 false flag," "USS Liberty," etc.) will eventually be repeated by competitive candidates for state and federal office. Probably by Republican candidates, but quite possibly by some Democratic candidates as well (see e.g. Ana Kasparian's happy merchant impression).
Literally all of these memes have been around for decades, and they've been steadily gaining purchase with the rise and transformation of the Internet. In the 1990s, you had to subscribe to obscure newsletters and order obscure books to learn them. In the 2000s, they were on obscure blogs. In the 2010s, they were on 4chan's politics board and migrated to marginal parts of alt-right twitter. In the 2020s, they're now doing huge numbers in the center of Twitter.
My model is simple: the world of ideas is a leading indicator for the world of politics. An ideology first becomes popular with an intellectual vanguard, then is memed into popularity with the masses, then is relevant to politics. So e.g. abolitionist newspapers prefigured abolitionist politics, and the Mont Pelerin Society prefigured neoliberalism. Likewise, I think it's hard to oversell how decisively anti-Semitism has been winning the war of ideas (or "ideas") among young conservatives in particular.
Ironically, the fact that the country's Jewish population utterly failed to prevent such ideas from spreading contradicts the conspiracies that they hold any real power. Ultimately though, it really doesn't matter if they're an actual threat or not, the antisemites just want potential social liabilities out of the picture.
If all it takes is one man to change the narrative, what are they even doing? They've failed to even get the left on their side. They never amounted to anything more than a minority interest group, with everyone turning against them the moment their existence became inconvenient.
As a species, we were served well with the rapid spread of ideas - literal memes, Dawkins-style - and that persists today well beyond any one group's control. With so many groups at odds, by your accounting, who does 'hold any real power'? It's like five hundred people trying to steer the raging bull of public sentiment in all different directions, while every cell in the bull itself is also struggling to do different things. Whatever way it ends up, whoever wants to claim victory, it's much chancier than people might want to admit. The spooky thing is how *little* control secret tiny conspiracies actually have.
Biggest surprise to me is the Loyola a Jesuit school still has Catholics there lol
Alicia Olivia Lapp was my favorite.
"This campaign is raising a lot of questions already answered by the campaign."
None of the top Dem candidates are very inspiring, but you overlook how cool it is that they’re trying to out-YIMBY each other! All the major NIMBYs dropped out
https://jeremyl.substack.com/p/12-thoughts-on-the-ca-governor-housing?r=74nn5&utm_medium=ios
I enjoyed the phrase 2 term candidate. Takes a lot of dedication to spend the whole term campaigning
Alicia Olivia Lapp sounds based as hell, but I'm concerned about how many college degrees she will need to get in order to solve any other issues facing Californians.
Speaking of very personal issues involving Wells Fargo ...
The gay guy across the street twice called in bomb threats that he had rigged his house to explode, which had the LAPD evacuate my entire block at dawn each time. (Note: I am asleep at dawn.)
Why? So news helicopters would fly out and telecast to all of Los Angeles that that he had painted "Wells Fargo Stole My Money" on his roof.
But here's the thing. I suspect maybe they did steal his money.
He never seemed crazy before, until he suddenly had no money and just a giant chip on his shoulder about Wells Fargo.
Then he should call a lawyer, not the LAPD.
Just like Alex Schaefer. I really do enjoy his paintings, though.
"Two term gubernatorial candidate" is a phenomenal resume item. I didn't know you actually served a term as a candidate.
Two hundred clowns ran for governor
Two hundred clowns thought they'd win
All of them popped out of one tiny Volkswagen,
filed their papers, and crowded back in
The debate, it ran for a day and a half
And that's just the quotable quotes
They delivered the ballot by forklift and pallet
And the winner got fifty-one votes
---
The song is "The Mock in Democracy", by Roy Zimmerman, written in honor of the California gubernatorial recall election of 2003.
Interestingly, Roy Zimmerman maintains a website ( https://www.royzimmerman.com/ ) with a list of his music, and this song is nowhere to be found.
California Governor 2026
by Rafael Hernandez
(verse 1)
I'm a brave fighter (lit. cockfighter)
and I'm your candidate
I'm risking it all for you
in 2026
I'm a brave fighter
I got it from my father
In you is my pride, my national pride
(chorus 1)
I'm your candidate
for governor
we'll win the campaign in 2026
I want to be your governor
governor of California
I'll fight for your families
and fulfil my promises
I will not fail you
(verse 2)
I'm a brave fighter
I come well prepared
I'll fight for justice
for justice and peace
I come from afar(??)
your brave fighter
Rafael Hernandez
For your governor
The time will be yours
and for everyone in California
With Rafael Hernandez
in 2026
(chorus 2)
I'll be your governor
Governor of California
I'll fight for justice and peace
I'll be your governor
With you, we'll win
The time will be yours in 2026
I'll be your governor
in 2026
(repeat first verse)
(repeat first chorus)
Me falta el registro Mexicano y es posible que oí algo mal. Corríganme si hay errores!
Rafaga Records, the record label mentioned in the song, does seem to exist, at least as a channel that posts (I presume AI generated) songs by Rafael Hernandez. It would seem he's been experimenting with Suno for at least 3 years.
The author is not to be confused with Rafael Hernández Marín, the Puerto Rican songwriter/composer who died in 1965.
The song is pretty catchy. I'd give it a solid 7/10! Bonus points if he hires a live Mariachi band to play it for a campaign event :)
With regard to the "Top Doctors Profile Book" -- I'm a bit of a genealogy buff, and was able to find information about one of my ancestors based on their inclusion in a book of this general type, something like this:
https://archive.org/details/centuryandhalfof03bouc/page/n537/mode/2up
So, perhaps the charitable interpretation of these companies is that they are offering an obituary service, except you get to write it for yourself, while you're still alive (possibly valuable if you don't trust relatives to get details right). But if you're scattering information about yourself on the internet anyways, you might find this unnecessary.
Poor old Scott Shields (fourth clown down from the top) has not only forked out a no doubt substantial sum in order to feature grandly on the cover of a magazine so obscure that only its mother has ever heard of it, he's also clearly been conned by a publisher so skinned, he can't even afford a spell checker!
Admire, amongst other gems, "Marxism and It's Political Machine" and "The California Democrat That Exposes The Truth" - but inevitably, it's the cover title which takes the cake: THE MAN WHO CHALLENGES THE SYTEM!
It's pretty remarkable how bad it is. I mean it's so bad it's impressive. They don't even bother to use AI. Now that's oldschool scamming.
And that's the fixed version; the link to Scott's site above the photo uses a different version that says "Challanges".
I feel really bad for Shields; he should probably have in-home care. His brain is in a state that scammers feed upon.
Agreed. And the scamming publisher should probably be done for senior abuse, if not for fraud or fraudulent advertising - but consumer protection and anti-scam legislation is being deliberately eroded just about everywhere these days, with enthusiastic support from above...
"In the same way, I think it might be fun for a certain sort of person to campaign for governor. You can put on a suit and pose in front of a desk with a flag - just like the real politicians. You can go on tours, kiss babies - just like the real politicians. You can put up a Five-Step Plan To End Homelessness - etc."
There is always the terrifying possibility of some sort of "Mouse that Roared" outcome, where you actually win.
"The sytem"
"Capitol Times" isn't even trying.
an interesting thing to note is that Dawit Kellel is a rather Ethiopian-sounding name, and the plurality religion in Ethiopia is the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, a unique branch of Oriental Orthodoxy whose biblical canon, larger than any other, actually includes the Book of Enoch (alongside the Book of Jubilees, and three Books of Meqabyan which you might suspect are variations on the Books of Maccabees but which are only tangentially related)!
> You might expect the “share this website” link to go to his campaign page or a plea for donations. Wrong! It goes to the full text of the Book of Enoch
Imagine your writing up your campaign, and doing some light reading on the side. Surely it would be easy enough to copy and paste the wrong URL. Especially if you are tired and distracted.
I think it is a hint.
.” I regularly get spam saying that I’ve been identified as a Top Doctor Of 2026 and if I merely pay the $3,000 processing fee I can have my Top Doctor Plaque and my page in the Top Doctors Profile Book; it’s the same type of scam."
I once got an email inviting me to an African-American high achievers society. Wrong on all three counts.
"Decertify the police" is somehow even more pathetic a slogan than "defund the police". But at least she didn't suggest boiling them in semen. Not that this would work - you'd coagulate all the albumen, then the resulting disgusting solid mass would be set on fire rather than boiling. Yum!
Love this so much.
Only quibble is that Thunder Parley (which looks like the spelling in the image?) does not strike me as all that unusual of a name, at least by California standards.
Thunder *Parlay* with an A would be more interesting, especially if he promised to fund his campaign promises via a massive parlay wager on the Oklahoma City Thunder and himself.
How long before a candidate books a long shot bet on themselves on Polymarket and promises to share the winnings with their voters? 🤔
I ran for Mayor of Newark in 2002. I was the only registered libertarian living within the city limits and the party convinced me to get the signatures and run. I was 22 at the time so I thought it would be fun. I lost to Corey Booker but I got 24 votes! Which importantly didn’t even include me because I had moved out of Newark between qualifying to be on the ballot and Election Day.
I'm a little bothered by both "All of this government is to some extent corrupt and as such cannot police itself" and "Some of this government is corrupt, and those that aren't corrupt within it lack the will or motivation to make un-corrupting it a loud, effective priority" being presented as clearly foolish/wrong stances to take.
The mayor of LA has recently been in the news for not keeping track of 800 million US dollars in a way that looks a lot like corruption (Family members were hired for big contracts without disclosure, etc.). She's going to win again, nobody is going to be prosecuted, and this kind of thing *should* be evidence that there's either enough collusion or enough of a lack of will to fix nearly-a-billion-dollar problems that something might, possibly, need to be done about it.
I think if there's some clear reason why a bunch of obvious waste and fraud can't be dealt with, this changes for me, and it's possible there is. But at the least it makes it seem like "Ha, this guy is noticing all the fraud and waste, everyone knows that's a constant that can't possibly be reduced" stance isn't as complete as it should be.
Forget the governor's race, I want to know why so many people are running for insurance commissioner!
Insurance regulation, especially of homeowners’ insurance, is a major issue in California at the moment. My guess is that the combination of a high salience issue where the status quo is quite obviously broken means lots of people feel like they would be able to “Fix It”. I know that I feel that way!
Okay, that makes sense. I know that there has been a problem with some insurance companies leaving the state or no longer issuing homeowner policies. It just seemed like a very unglamorous job. The kind that they would make fun of on Parks and Rec or Veep.
Since nobody's mentioned Barack D. Obama Shaw: there's something very funny about being so inspired by the Obama moment that you change your name in his honor, and then somehow get the middle initial wrong!
I would love to see a follow-up examining whether our political system attracts the mentally unwell and what sort of theoretical political system would attract the best possible candidates. My uninformed opinion is that big media contests are catnip for narcissists and that some kind of farm system that has candidates prove themselves at a local level first would be an improvement.
US style primary elections are rare. In most countries, the party chooses it's nominees (and the requirements for who counts as a party member vary, but they are stricter than just anyone registering). Because of this, US parties are internally fractured, and driven by specific personalities. Whereas parties in other countries tend to be more ideologically consistent but the individual politician's identities don't matter as much, apart from the party leadership.
"The Top-Tier Republicans: They all have cowboy hats and flag pins. They all pose on horseback at their ranch."
What an odd framing. There are only two top-tier Republican candidates in the race, and one of them doesn't have a cowboy hat or flag pin or pose on horseback.
And not only *not* a cowboy, but a Hungarian-Brit credited for making the UK's Conservative party more progressive, for better or worse (obviously worse).
Huh?
Reading a completely unhinged antisemitic screed, burrowing down into one claim to go on a 7 paragraph aside about Talmudic history might be the most Scott Alexander thing ever, and I love it.