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Water_drop_001 by José Manuel Suárez Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License

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Episode Transcript

Hey there, I'm Scott, and this is Tangents.

It's been at least a week since I did one of these.

I warned last time, it's gonna be infrequent,

at least for the foreseeable future,
just because I'm saying it my mom and sister's place,
and just getting time to myself and space
and all of this to have a chance to do this.

It's a little more challenging now than it has been.

But still wanted to make one,

and this one, I'm calling 0.
00003%.

And I'm calling it that for a reason, specifically,

because it is a ridiculously, ridiculously small number.

And that is basically,

you know, when you look at the population of the United States,
340 million people.

And then you consider, I mean, let's be fair.

We'll say, okay, the registered voters in the United States,

there are something like 210 million people.

And if you wanna limit yourself even further to Democrats,

49 million people, something like that.

I'm ballparkier, but basically.

And the thing that I really want people to understand,

then I guess you have to consider,
the constitution does put some constraints
on who can be president.

So not just anyone can be president,

there's an age requirement,
and you have to be an air quotes natural born citizen.

When you take all those things into account,

there are still at the very least tens of millions of people
in the United States who could be president.

And when I say it could be president,

I mean, tens of millions of registered Democrats.

Like, I'm not even just talking about people in general,

who, if you look at that,
it's into the hundreds of millions of people.

It could be president.

And yet we're told, time and again,

and increasingly so, and more ridiculously so,
that we have to pick this one person.

And we can't, in any way, undermine that person,

we can't contradict them, we can't say,
this is not the best thing about you,
this is not maybe, maybe you should be better,
maybe I don't personally like the fact
that in the 1970s, I'm gonna pick on Biden here
just because he's done.

But in the 1970s, dude said,

you didn't want his kids growing up at a racial jungle, right?
He got drummed out of the 1988 Democratic primary
for over the top over plagiarism.

And he has a very long history of this incidentally.

It goes back to his undergrad,

there's a lot of stuff where it looks like
he plagiarized large passages in things that he turned in,
in law school, he made claims also about
where he was in class, like what it standing was.

He was really like, mid-middling at best,

but he kind of implied that, you know,
I got all these degrees and I was way at the head of my class
and I thought, bunch of fucking bullshit,
bunch of fucking bullshit.

And the thing that I think you have to understand

and I think it's important to really point out
is just like Trump, this is a old, middle,
yeah, I'm trying to call him, middle.

Old mid, white dude, who is racist

and I understand, you're like, oh, he's not a racist,
he was, he was the vice president under,
he was uncle drone, you know, dude's fucking racist.

To this day, racist, I don't mean that you have to go back

into the 70s to find his racism, he's fucking racist.

But never mind that now, he fucked over and needed a hill

and gave us clearance Thomas, you know.

He is instrumental, proudly instrumental,

in passage of the crime bill,
which oddly enough, just like Harris,
he made a bunch of his political career,
a bunch of his bones on putting mostly black men
arresting them, imprisoning them,
stripping them of civil rights, stripping them
of the right to vote.

And thanks to the 13th of men's little asterisk,

insulating them, literally fucking insulating them.

This is genocide Joe, before he was genocide Joe, by the way,

before he was the nominee in 2020.

And it's just fucking ridiculous

that people, like, just decided, you have to vote for him,
you have to, but before he was the fucking nominee,
you can't point out how much of a fucking piece of shit
he is, before he was the fucking nominee.

And the reason that I'm talking about this now,

you get, like, fast forward to 20, 20, 40.

And we didn't have a primary,

and we should have had a fucking primary.

Biden himself said that he was gonna be a one-termer,

should have allowed it, instead,
he's, like, clenching on the handles of power,
the reins of power, didn't wanna let go.

And he only finally let Harris go, after,

it was so obvious he was going to lose.

He was, you know, that the polling was not looking good for him.

He was, at this point, genocide Joe.

He was nuclear, it was toxic.

He also spent four years downplaying the pandemic,

which is still ongoing, pretending, you know, Trump said,
in his first term, if we just stop testing for it,
it'll magically go away.

But he didn't stop testing.

You know who stopped testing?

Fucking genocide job, fucking eugenics job.

Biden thought that his wife, Dr.

Jill,
and I say, Dr.
Cercastically, not because,
you know, obviously, if a woman has a PhD
or in her case, a EDD, Dr.
of Education,
by all means you have earned the right
to call yourself Dr.

And I'm very hesitant in,

I'm very hesitant in taking that away
from any person, especially a woman,
because, you know, there's a lot of misogyny
is kind of like deeply ingrained in our society,
just as much as racism and ableism.

So in that sense, but the problem is,

when you're speaking in a medical context,
if you call yourself a fucking doctor,
people think you're a fucking doctor.

I mean, I'm not just my speculating on this,

what'd be goldberg thought that she should be the attorney general,
or not the attorney general, the surgeon general.

I'm my eyes are rolling back, sorry.

But thought that she should be the fucking surgeon general.

So it's not that it's not confusing.

It's absolutely confusing that she calls herself doctor.

And she's sitting there giving a speech,

I mean, I mean, picking on specific things,
but this is a pattern.

Give a speech takes off her mask and she's like,

doesn't the air just smell sweeter without a mask?
Which incidentally, again, prior to this,
I thought that at least some people actually understood
when you're in a fucking airborne pandemic,
wearing a respirator, or at least wearing some kind of a face covering,
but especially wearing a respirator is helpful.

It's good, it's useful.

Waring one is an imperfect layer of protection.

Vaccines, you'll find very few people

who are more pro-vaccine than I am.

I've had basically every other than,

I haven't had the updated Govid one,
because I can't fucking afford it.

And I've had flu yet, no, the season.

Again, because I can't fucking afford it,

the flu is like 60 bucks, and the COVID one is like,
almost 200 bucks.

And yeah, it's a lot of money.

I don't have health insurance and at the moment,

I don't have a lot of surplus by what you're meeting really in.

But I've had pretty much every vaccine

that I'm eligible for.

And I would have other ones that I'm not eligible for,

if I was eligible for it.

And part of it was, I did some travel.

I was thinking about going places.

I mean, I still went places that have endemic things

that are not great, but I was thinking about going maybe
to like, sub-Saharan Africa places where there are a lot
of a lot of the endemic diseases
that probably would be real wise to be vaccinated against.

I had yellow fever.

I had, well, I'm not meant to be able to go through the list,

but I've had a lot of fucking vaccines.

And I would take more vaccines are magical.

They're great, they're fantastic.

But the thing is vaccines are not magical shields

that perfectly protect anyone.

The point of a vaccine way that they work

is that they are an imperfect layer of protection
that when you put them in concert with other mitigations,
which really means comprehensive public health,
surveillance, testing isolation when you had outbreaks,
this kind of stuff, you combine all of these things,
you layer the Swiss cheese,
and you get pretty good protection.

You get herd immunity, you get enough people vaccinated,

you have enough of these other mitigations.

And instead of things being able to propagate through society,

they just, there's a lot.

And that's how you protect everyone.

That's how you protect all of us by all of us doing stuff.

And even though they might not work perfectly,

with all of these layers of Swiss cheese,
with all of these things together,
you get enough of them and you basically,
instead of having one person infecting more than one person,
so you have an amplification and exponential growth.

Instead of that, you have exponential decay,

things puzzle out.

It's not a complicated thing.

Like I can explain that stuff and Swiss cheese

literally to a kindergarten, probably a preschool,
but certainly a kindergarten,
and certainly somebody with the most basic bit of math.

And yet, these fucking people sat there and acted like,

vaccine, they're get vaccinated.

Now you can take off your fucking mask.

We don't have to actually do anything else.

We can stop surveillance, we can fuck with the maps.

This is another thing that he did that I fucking hate.

Fucked with the maps, changed the,

and this sounds like conspiracy theory stuff I understand.

Although I can treat pictures of it.

I have another episode on it,

I'm not going to go into depth on it,
but he changed the coloring on maps,
or rather his CDC director,
but basically, his best.

Change the coloring on maps, change the metrics

to make things look better.

And then really stopped testing and stopped reporting

and shut down a lot of the mitigations that we did have.

And this kind of stuff got us to the point

where basically people had this idea,
you get vaccinated now, you're not going to get sick.

But that turns out to be bullshit.

And when you help people something like that,

that turns out to be bullshit, and then we knew was bullshit,
what ends up happening is people now
start looking at all vaccines, including those vaccines,
and thinking, well, those vaccines don't actually work.

Because they don't, they don't work.

Nothing works the way that they were pretending that they did.

The only thing that would work as they're pretending vaccines

did is basically if you were wearing
like a full-on BSL4 suit, you know,
you're wearing a proper fucking respirator,
you know, separate air supply, and just an impermeable suit,
like, you know, like outbreak kind of suit.

Other than that, nothing is perfect.

And when you tell people, you have this perfect thing,

people say, oh, you know, John got sick.

He was vaccinated, he said, so that's it.

I guess vaccines don't work.

I guess all vaccine, and this fed in,

do the already growing anti-vex sentiment,
fed into the anti-vex relationship.

And it got us to the point where now we have things

like the fucking measles coming back.

We have things like, we're losing herd immunity.

We're losing, you know, and it's just physically horrible.

I don't want to get deeply into that.

This is not what I want to talk about this episode,

but that's, it's wild how bad it is.

And again, we were told, head to vote for him.

And then he finally thought that he was going to lose.

And even when he saw he was going to lose,

didn't want to withdraw.

And it took Nancy fucking Pelosi,

who is not a person that I'm a fan of,
and I would not give her much credit
for anything other than, I mean, she's good at manipulating stuff
and she's good at, she's definitely technically good
at being the speaker of the house,
the majority leader of all of this kind of stuff.

I'll give her that, but I don't like her.

I'm not a fan of hers.

I don't think she's a good person.

She saw that Biden was going to lose.

She saw how much he saw.

And she pushed him out.

And then, you know, unfortunately,

he finally did this.

And he finally threw Harris over the glass cliff

at the last minute in a time where she wasn't, you know,
and I will say, like, I know there are a lot of people
who say, oh, we could have, she couldn't possibly win
because she didn't have enough time.

She had plenty of time.

She had plenty of time.

He did do this when he saw that he was going to lose

and it was, you know, she was against the odds,
but she could have easily won.

The problem is she sat there and we're told, again,

with no fucking primary, you have to vote for her.

You can't criticize her for anything.

Meanwhile, I'm watching kids get burned alive

in front of this screaming mother.

I'm watching, you know, like a little girl's body

blown up and dangling from a fucking wall.

And I'm hearing her talking about joy, how she's feeling joy,

and I'm speaking, and people going into the Democratic
convention, walking past people who are reading the names
of kids who've been murdered by bombs and bullets
from our fucking country, defended by our country
and our ambassadors to the UN, blocking vetoing resolutions.

And people are just walking by and laughing

and sticking their fingers in their ears and going,
la, la, la, la, la, yeah.

That stuff is seared into my mind

and it fucking has ruined your party for me.

I mean, I don't think there's any recovering, honestly,

for me, for that.

I would, I'm not, I can't imagine ever voting for a Republican,

but I could imagine the Republican party getting redeemed
more easily in my mind than the Democrats.

And I'm not saying that because I think that the Republicans

are going to be redeemable or get redeemed,
I'm just saying that that's how fucking far gone
the domestic rats are for me.

That's how, I'm just, I'm done.

I'm fucking done with your party.

And this was before this reason thing,

which is what I want to talk about today,
which is, yeah, it, like it's before I get to this,
but I just wanted to say like the US population,
the number of people who could be president, it's so large.

It's not like there's one person

who's just the anointed by God individual
who has to be the candidate.

You have so many fucking people to select from.

The primary is supposed to be a time

where you weed out shitty people
and where you find the best people
and where you test ideas.

And also, I mean, as we saw in like 2020,

you have people who kind of push each other a little bit.

You have, you know, it wasn't just that Bernie was pushing

for a form of universal healthcare,
which incidentally I think wasn't, you know,
given my drillers, we would be working towards
the National Health Service, you know, actual like,
not the current one, but what it was originally,
where you actually have university medical school covered,
you have things like, we've, we actually have,
you know, doctors paid for by the state,
medical, you know, it's not just medical insurance.

It's the providers are paid for.

Yeah, and which is not to say you can't have

extra insurance on top of that, but everyone gets that.

Everyone gets good health care.

And also, well, if I was doing that,

medical school is massively expanded.

Probably do some stuff where you have,

we have this problem.

My sister is a doctor, she does a lot of lobbying for this.

But there's a problem with like nurse practitioners

and nurse anesthetists trying to push into anesthesiologist roles.

And what I would do, instead of just fighting them,

is take these people and send them to fucking medical school.

Send them to, you know, maybe make an accelerated program,

but have them get a medical doctorate,
have them go to some kind of residency,
expand the residency programs,
and then get them to be actually doctors.

And then you don't have the situation where doctors

are too expensive and rare.

And so they have the need that, you know,

the private equity who are doing healthcare
and only care about money.

End up hiring people who are not qualified

and who are going to get people killed.

You don't do that.

So the thing that,

the thing that, sorry, I just got a message,
I got distracted.

The thing that I wanted to actually talk about today,

now that I'm 17 minutes in, this is a chronic problem.

I have, if you're just catching this now,

understand this is who I am,
this is where I come from, but if you understand
where I, I got another message and, you know,
who did my, I need to turn off messages
when I record these, or I should go back,
but I'm not going to go back because,
yeah, there's only forward.

Seriously though, the thing I wanted to talk about today

is this motherfucking asphalt candidate,
and I can't, I use the term candidate
incidentally very loosely,
because I want to say he's going for Senate against
the Collins and Maine, and she's, she's fucking terrible.

She's one of these people,

like in some, in some ways,
I would say that Collins is actually worse than Mitch.

Not that Mitch is, obviously also Mitch

is kind of well past his prime, but Mitch is obviously,
like ontologically evil, just terrible person.

But she, Collins, sits there and pretends to be kind of okay,

and just consistently does the Lucy
in the football thing, looks like she's
going to make the right call, looks like she's
going to go against her party,
and then she does, at the last minute,
you know, like pulls it out and doesn't do it.

He's terrible, she's fucking horrible.

She doesn't need to be replaced,

have to, absolutely.

The next thing that I wanted to talk about though is,

there's this candidate there,
and again, getting to this candidate thing,
is he actually the candidate?
Well, no, because in order to, like first off,
their actual primary election in Maine is,
I think, the second of June.

So that's a little ways away.

As I'm recording this, it's predated,

24th of October.

It's the second of June, I think.

I'm trying to see if, yeah,

I'm just confirming that I'm reading a right thing.

Second of June, so more than six months away,

and they can't start collecting signatures,
just to get ballot access for that primary
until the first of January, 2026.

Again, it is October, 2025 right now.

There's November, there's December,

there's two months before you can even start
collecting signatures just to get ballot access.

This guy has raised a lot of money.

He's got a name for himself,

which also incidentally fucking annoys me,
because he is, I'm not even gonna get to the next part yet,
but I want to say he is a guy who decided
after 9-11 to join the US military.

I have friends who are veterans,

I'm not trying to say like everybody who's a veteran,
is a fucking horrible person.

But I am saying, going out of your way

to join the military and murder fucking brown people,
it's pretty bad.

And the people that I know who are veterans,

they went in, they've got suckered in by a recruiter
when they were like 18 or something.

Didn't see a lot of paths forward.

Took that, got in, did their time, got the fuck out,

and they regretted it, and they regretted it ever since,
and they've tried to make up for it
and they've talked to the people about,
like how this is not a good thing.

And how you're mortgaging your body for this

and all of this other stuff.

But this guy got in there,

and then he became a fucking mercenary for,
you stayed longer than he had to,
became a mercenary for fucking black water,
which, that could be, that just is fucking disqualifying.

I don't care about anything else.

I'm not ever gonna vote,

I probably won't vote for a Democrat again.

I don't know.

I'm not completely rolling it up,

it's hard to imagine,
but I'm definitely not gonna vote for somebody
who is a veteran.

I'm definitely not gonna vote for somebody,

unless they've been a long time repentant.

Like I have a friend, Viven,

I'm not to pick out people in particular,
but I have a friend, and he's a veteran,
but he went through, and he's like,
this is fucked up,
he's been working in the right direction.

I actually have a bunch of friends now

that I almost regretful that I mentioned his name.

But I have a bunch of other friends that are veterans,

and they're very vocal about it,
and they're very much work on making things better.

This guy in Maine,

you know, all his terrible stuff, all his horrible stuff.

And then you think about the thing

that came up recently, the reason I'm talking about him
is he had a tattoo.

And I have tattoos, there's nothing wrong with having tattoos.

He got a tattoo, and some people are like,

oh, it's just a skull in crossbones.

No, it's a fucking, I'm gonna fuck up the name,

but I think it's called the Totencom.

And this is basically, literally just means

like skull and crossbones in German,
but what it actually means, if you go through,
is, and the particular one that he had,
is a Nazi logo.

And, you know, is it obvious not to logo?

It's something that I have associated a long time ago,
like I don't remember when I first recognized it or first saw it,
but it's one of those things like asphastica,
where I've just known, as long as I can remember,
that was a Nazi symbol, and again,
it's so ingrained in associated with Nazis
that I don't remember when I first learned about that.

He had this, and he had it for like 20 years.

And the dude is like in his 40s now.

He's not like a 28-year-old guy.

He's in his fucking 40s.

He's had this thing for 20 years,

and certainly, it is just beyond him plausible,
that he didn't know what it was when he got it.

The claim is that it was flash, and they just got,

I find it extremely, extremely unlikely.

Especially the guy, you know, he was a shit poster.

He was probably on the chance, like four-chand kind of stuff.

I would bet he knew when he got it.

I would bet he thought it was Ig in cool,

and all those kind of stuff.

Whether he's an actual overt Nazi or not,

which I find dubious, I think, I would not rule it up.

I don't know that he's not a neo-na Nazi.

Yeah, I find it very,

is at least neo-na Nazi adjacent,
that's the best case scenario.

It'd be very best interpretation of all of this,

is like he just didn't know, and he was so in curious.

He had it for fucking 20 years,

and never did anything about it.

Nobody ever told him about it for 20 years, really?

Nobody ever said, like, you know, dude,
maybe that's like it.

No, I just don't buy it.

I don't fucking buy it.

And the only time he finally, like he finally covered it up.

He covered it up with stuff that's also,

I'm not like, there's certain dog whistle stuff.

I think I made one of these on dog whistles

if I haven't, I'll have to make one.

But there are dog whistles,

these are things that look fairly innocuous,
but to the people in the people that you're targeting,
they say something.

And they're really nice, big, well nice,

and a horrible way for people in this area,
because they let you do stuff that is plausibly denialable,
and that even kind of goes over most people's heads.

I think a lot of people know, like 88 is the 8th letter

of the US or the alphabet, which is NH.

So 88, H, H, what do you think H, H stands for

in the context of Nazis?
Yeah, so they use that.

They have the 19th letter of, I think it's the 19th.

Yeah, the 19th letter of the alphabet is an S.

And so you have 19 19, which incidentally he also has a tattoo,

that says 19 19, the claim is that it's something else
that's completely innocuous.

But to me, I'd say you have one overly Nazi tattoo.

And then you have another one that's at least

due to some suspect.

And there are a lot of people with a lot of tattoos.

I know people covered in tattoos.

They don't have anything that's even adjacent to this.

I find it like you've exhausted your benefit of a doubt

with the first one.

And so anyway, I saw people claiming,

oh, they didn't know, they didn't know.

Well, he did get it covered up, again,

with, this is the thing I wanted to say.

I don't get to the thing I was starting to say.

You got it covered up, with something that is also

kind of a dog whistle, with some stuff that,
it's not necessarily, like it's not overtly,
it's not like the level of 88 or 1919,
but it's on the cost of it.

It's stuff where you look at it and you're kind of like,

this is pretty, pretty sauce.

This is pretty like, especially given the context,

I don't know that it's better.

He did that after there was this massive outcry,

after 20 years of having this thing.

And it's like, oh, well, I've covered it up, so it's fine.

It's not fucking fine, it's not fucking fine.

And it just irritates the shit out of me,

that in the state of Maine,
and I want to see if I've got these things here, yeah,
there are, I think, 1.
4 million people in Maine,
out of those, there are something like,
370,000 registered Democrats,
and something like two thirds of them
are over the age, I think 30 is the requirement
in the constitution for being a senator.

So something like two thirds of them

are eligible to be senators.

That means you've got easily into the hundreds of thousands

of people in Maine, who could be a fucking senator,
and who could be a Democratic senator.

And you're picking this one guy, this one guy,

and this one is actually, I think, 0.
003% of the population
or something like that, I don't remember the exact number.

But it's of that order, maybe even an order of magnitude less

than that.

You're acting like this one guy is the only fucking guy

that could possibly be Collins,
the only guy who you could possibly have is your nominee.

Again, they can't even collect a single signature

to get ballot access to run in the primary
until January, two months from now.

It's ridiculous, it's fucking ridiculous.

And then you put this in the context of,

there are Democrats who, you know,
they have this whole vote blue no matter who thing.

There are Democrats who will not vote for Mombani,

who have been speaking out against him.

He is the duly elected Democratic nominee in New York City.

He is the guy who is on the ballot as a mayoral candidate.

He's not a guy who is even in the primary.

He's certainly not a guy who hasn't even

collected a fucking signature.

He's the candidate.

If people who are sitting there saying,

like, oh, he's not really a Democrat,
we're not going to vote for him.

Vote for this sex pest guy who got a lot of old people killed

and didn't, it just is a horrible person who should have,
honestly, should have just been flushed out into the ocean
and never heard from again, along with so many other people.

And he's running against this guy.

It's ridiculous.

And he got Democrats like anti this guy,

again, who is the nominee.

And the same people, the same fucking people

are sitting there falling over themselves
to talk about how important it is
that we continue to support this guy and how you know,
everybody has some youthful indiscretions
and oh, maybe he didn't know about the Nazi tattoo
and the significance of all this stuff.

And he's like fucking bullshit, fucking bullshit.

And again, again, again, even if it was true,

even if he didn't know, which again, I don't buy,
even if he didn't have it on himself or fucking decades
and didn't think to do anything about it for decades,
which again, I don't buy, even if all of that stuff,
you completely ignore that.

The blackwater thing, you're done, you're fucking done.

And if you worked on, if you were a blackwater contractor

20 years ago and you spent the time since then talking
about how horrible blackwater is, maybe we could talk.

I still think, again, you have hundreds of thousands

of people who are eligible, we have the ability,
we have some room, we have some capacity,
the pick somebody who's not problematic,
give some capacity, the pick somebody who's not
fucking terrible.

And you're gonna do this.

And then also, like I saw somebody say,

we have a socialist that has a Nazi or a suspect
of a Nazi tattoo and so we're gonna flush them out.

No, he's not a fucking socialist.

He's not a, it's kind of weird

actually how people are inferring
that he's a democratic socialist.

And again, I'm significantly left of DSA,

I'm not a huge fan of DSA,
but it's just ridiculous that people are calling him
to this.

Now he did say, I guess in a deleted Reddit post

that he was a communist, which I know for some people
sounds bad, to me that would actually be an advantage,
although the Nazi thing and the blackwater thing
completely ruined it, I think he was an edgy guy,
like an edgy lord kind of guy, and he just said shit,
which includes like getting a Nazi tattoo,
which includes saying you're a communist.

I don't think he ever actually said all cops are bastards,

although they are, but he definitely said,
like cops are bastards, all of them or something like this,
something like that, again, deleted.

Again, another thing that I would like,

but he's disabouted that.

He's since then said, he's not a communist,

he's not a bunch of articles you can easily find,
said he's not a socialist, that he's not a communist.

So, let's be clear about who he is.

He's a fucking blackwater contractor, military guy,

who had the judgment that thought, you know, like,
oh, I'm gonna get a Nazi tattoo,
I'm gonna have it for 20 years.

That's the guy, that's your fucking guy.

This is the guy that you have to have to have.

You can't have somebody else.

There are other people by the way running in that election.

Plenty of people could win, plenty of people

who are better than Collins,
they just whole idea that you have to pick people,
this is, I was spoken that length about too,
but this whole idea that you have to pick people
who are just intrinsically terrible,
you have to pick people who are Nazi adjacent,
you have to pick people who are, like, going back to Harris.

I'm trying to deliberately not to pick too much

on her, I'd much rather pick on mid-white dudes,
but, yeah, to pick on Harris a little bit.

She ran as, maybe not openly transphobic,

but she definitely said, you know, I'll follow the law,
given the fact that she's an attorney
who has taken, I'm sure, legal ethics
and a bunch of other things, and there was that,
just because the thing is legal,
does not mean it's ethical, and not the same thing.

But following the law, in the case of states

where they have anti-trans laws,
means you're following anti-trans laws.

That makes you anti-trans.

At least, tacitly, she was pretty overtly anti-immigrant.

This is another thing that actually fucking pissed me off.

I think it was, it was either yesterday

or maybe it was today and pretty sure it was yesterday, though.

They came popular today and they came down today.

Bernie fucking Sanders, who, again, like,

I, Bernie got me into politics, got me to do a lot
of door knocking and hauling and messaging
and all those kind of stuff, I think he's done.

I've lost the things that I liked about him, I kind of lost.

But Bernie fucking Sanders said, Trump is better

at defending the border and that we need strong borders
and I'll ask you, fuck you, fuck you, I need it's just wild.

Borders are arbitrary lines drawn by people,

bars on the earth.

I flew down by the Mexican border once

and took some pictures or my friend,
I didn't take the pictures.

My friend who I was flying took the pictures.

And you just see this line going across the desert.

And there's nothing that makes that line there.

Anything, you know, like the belongs there,

it's just people decided to put this arbitrary fucking line there.

And that line determines, you know, like,

what side of it you're born on determines
a lot of shit about your life,
it determines what rights you have,
it determines what you can do,
where you can work, all kinds of shit like this.

It's ridiculous.

And then I see people, like, this is one of these things

very much like this idea that when you have a felony,
conviction you should be disenfranchised,
which is completely ridiculous and obscene,
that you should never ever give the state a legal way
to disenfranchise people,
because it gives people, it gives the state
an incentive to disenfranchise certain people, right?
It's an obvious thing.

There should be, whether you're convicted of a felony or not,

you should be allowed to vote in jail and in prison.

Remember, jail also is for people

who probably haven't been convicted,
there are people who have been charged,
but they're being held, not necessarily convicted,
and then prison would be for people who have been convicted
of something, but there should be polls in prison.

You should never be disenfranchised.

You should be able to vote.

You should also, your counted in the census

in the areas where the prisons are,
you should be able to vote there.

You should absolutely be able to.

You should have that right.

But people will defend this idea of disenfranchising people,

as though it was a thing that was natural and makes sense.

People defend this idea of like,

whoa, let's not get crazy here.

I'm sorry for the ableless language.

It's English fucking sucks with this,

and I'm working on it, but it's very hard to avoid.

But let's not get wild and ridiculous.

Let's, like borders where you totally need.

No, you know, you don't fucking need borders.

And maybe you have borders in some nominal sense,

but I can go to fucking, I can work in California,
I can work at Arizona, I can work in Oregon,
there are borders between those places,
but I don't need a fucking passport
to go from one to the next.

I don't need the papers to work in one

when I'm from the other.

You could just do that.

You could easily just do that.

If, you know, I'm currently working

on getting Spanish citizenship, and if I do,
I could live and work not only in Spain,
but in France, or in Belgium, or any place in the EU,
you go to Italy, you could, that's how it should fucking be.

It should be like that for basically the entire world.

You should certainly be able to go,

you're born in the US, you should be able to work in Mexico,
you should be able to work in Cuba,
you should be able to work in Australia,
or in New Zealand, or Japan,
and it should be reciprocal,
like people from those countries can just come over.

And, yeah, you have it set up

so that you pay taxes and you get the rights of citizens
and all those kind of stuff.

And also, incidentally, you should be able to vote wherever you live,

whether you're a citizen or not.

This is a thing that used to be the case in the US long ago,

but somehow people have been convinced that,
you know, you have to be, not just a natural born citizen,
but you have to be like, you have to put all these boxes around it.

You can't have these, it's wild and ridiculous

to have to not have borders.

I can't even imagine not having a border.

That's the level of propaganda, the level of ignorance,

the level of just thoughtlessness,
because a lot of it is also thoughtlessness.

It's just, you have never considered these things.

And you're just taking things the way they are

and as you're used to them,
and considering those to be the way they have to be
and the way they always should be.

And you're considering that, you know, like,

oh, well, people in prison can be enslaved.

The 13th Amendment banned slavery,

except for in prison,
except as a punishment for crime.

Which, of course, just like disenfranchising people,

gives you an incentive to criminalize certain people.

It gives you an incentive to make things,

to give people, to get people into the system,
to make them slaves to enslave people.

It gives you an incentive to disenfranchise people.

You don't vote in.

Yeah, and this is another thing like you talk to people,

and it's like, oh, imagine if a convicted murderer
was able to vote, what the fuck are they gonna do?
What the, like, seriously, what do you think one person's vote?
This is like the cost benefit analysis you should be doing.

Imagine the worst possible person in the world.

The worst, most evil malicious person in the world.

They have one vote.

And you have an election, like a presidential election,

and the vote is decided by millions of people.

That one person's vote, you're going to say,

it's worth taking away the rights of everyone
who has a felony conviction to vote,
just because that one person's one tiny drop in the ocean vote
is somehow so bad, it's somehow so terrible to give them,
it's like fucking think about what you're saying,
fucking think about it.

Why is it so essential that you have a border at all?

Honestly, it doesn't make any sense.

It's something that I just wish people would think about.

And anyway, the mom donny thing also, I talk about this.

I talk a lot about how vote blue no matter who

and the lesser of two evils and all this kind of stuff
is all bullshit, and you should have fucking standards.

And having the standard that, you know,

I'm not gonna vote for a fucking Nazi.

I'm not gonna vote for somebody who even looks like a fucking Nazi,

and who might be a Nazi or is not a Nazi adjacent,
or who even has a fucking Nazi tattoo
or had a recently had a Nazi tattoo that, you know,
like maybe he didn't know about it.

Like they're, okay, he's disqualified

because he didn't fucking know.

He's disqualified because he knew

and didn't do anything about it.

He's disqualified because he got it in the first place.

He's disqualified because he was a black quarter,

contractor, you know, like he's disqualified
for like a dozen reasons, at least.

And also like, you know, and don't even get me started

and you don't need people that look like me being in office.

We got plenty of other people.

Maybe, maybe, maybe,

cis-hept white dudes that are made as fuck,
don't need to be in fucking office.

Don't need to be running for office.

Maybe we should support other people.

Yeah.

And I'm not saying that that means that no one like me

can ever run for office again.

I've run for office personally.

I might do it again, although I'm not sure anyone.

I know it would be, I would do the job,

but I would not want the job.

But I'm not saying I wouldn't do it.

But there are lots of other people who probably should be

ahead in the line.

There are lots of other people who have been underrepresented,

who have been systematically disadvantaged
and marginalized.

They should probably get a little bit of a head out.

They're heads up a little bit of a leg up,

especially again, when you're talking about
in one state hundreds of thousands of people we could pick from.

You could pick somebody who's not him.

You could easily do that,

the longest before anyone collects the first signature.

And yeah.

But again, going to Mumbai, he is pro-cop.

Pretty openly pro-cop.

I'm not.

I don't like that.

He has a lot of other things that he said

that I find a little bit problematic.

But I will say this, if I was in New York City,

and I was voting, I did absolutely the fuck vote for that guy.

Absolutely.

It would not be even a question.

I'm not going to vote for somebody who supports genocide.

I'm not going to vote for a person who looks

neo-Nazi adjacent at least.

But I'll vote for somebody who aligns with me on a lot of things.

And maybe has some things that I'm a little dubious about.

I didn't even vote for AOC.

And I find AOC, I used to love her.

I used to think she was amazing.

And now I find her a little problematic, pretty problematic.

But if I was there, if I was a constituent,

one of hers, and it's between her and someone who's not better,
I would pick her, I would pick her, I would vote for.

Those are the lesser of two evils kinds of calculations you can do.

Those are the lesser of two, like, you know,

the lamus to the limit to the end,
the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Those are the kinds of calculations I will do.

I'm not going to vote for fucking genocide.

I'm not going to do it.

And the thing that annoys me also is I keep seeing people saying,

well, oh, you know, Democrats have this thing
where any tiny little infraction is just, fuck you, that's not true.

It's like saying me too completely, like went overboard.

It did not, it did not.

People, like, hardly fucking Weinstein was out,

was a crowd of people around him at a comedy club,
months before going to prison.

And people knew exactly, like, it wasn't like it was a mystery.

You know, some woman who was a comedian there spoke out about it

and she got ejected.

She got ejected.

This is, like, you know, this idea that the bar is too high,

the bar is in fucking hell.

The bar isn't fucking, like, you have these people who will vote

for genocide don't think that genocide is disqualifying.

They don't think that being a neo-Nazi is disqualifying.

And they do think that being, like, actually,

kind of a democratic socialist, like,
Mamdanie, that's disqualifying.

You know, that somehow is horrible.

It's just, it's just, it's just, it's just fucking annoying.

And I'm here to tell you, if you had standards, if you had

standards, you'd have candidates who could actually
fucking win.

Like, if you didn't just go for the fucking genocide candidates

who are the Nazi candidates, you'd have candidates who would
be better and who could fucking win.

But also, like, I could vote for the, like, maybe I'd think

about voting for them if you picked better people.

Like, again, like, I mean, if I was in New York City,

I would vote for Mamdanie.

And borrowing, like, some new information that I don't know about,

easily, easily.

And I would advocate that you probably do it, too.

Barring, again, like, maybe something horrible comes out of them.

But I can't imagine.

I can't imagine.

And it's just, it's so annoying that people sit there

and they talk about this.

Like, you have tens of millions of people who could be

in these offices.

And somehow, you have to pick somebody who, and again,

like, when you look at Harris, when you look at Biden,
when you look at Hillary, when you look at,
and I'm even going to say Obama, I did.

Obama, when you ran, seems much better.

But even when you ran, if you picked a random person,

how do the population, completely at random?
You know, close your eyes, picked somebody randomly.

Almost certainly, you'd pick somebody better.

Almost certainly, you would get somebody

who was not as shitty as this guy.

Like, and when you start going to, like, Harris,

or fucking genocide, Joe, crime bill, Joe,
Jim Crow, Joe, the, these are people, or Trump,
who is the mirror image incidentally,
again, of Biden, racist, old white dude,
who have fucked up massively in their lives, many times,
never faced any consequences for it.

And they just keep falling upwards.

Both of them got to be president.

Both of them are the perfect avatars

for the United States, the second republic.

They are.

This is another thing also, like, I've been obsessed

with recently.

I'm not saying that the republic is over,

but kind of looks, kind of looks a little,
yeah, maybe, a little bit, maybe.

I mean, just here.

But you look at that, and you're like, okay,

the United States is 250 years old.

And one of the longest lasting democracies

in blood mobile, has a lot of obvious intrinsic flaws
in the system.

First off, it should be, like, having a presidency,

pretty bad, prime minister is much better.

Having votes with no confidence,

having things where you have to organize a government,
having things like proportional representation,
much, much, much better than any of this stuff we do.

And increasingly, also, you know,

I think this is part of the problem
with all of the stuff that I'm talking about,
but I think sort of is the way to go.

Fertition is this random selection of people,

like, you have to be careful about it.

You want to do stuff, like, say, okay, you have to opt in

and then you have this, the people that opt in,
we have some way, maybe, of removing people of their bad.

Although you probably have, like, one person per,

this is kind of arbitrary.

Something like one person per 100,000,

end up being the, so you have a massively bigger,
so equivalent to the house, one person per 100,000,
or so, get randomly selected, become the representatives.

And then they make all of these decisions.

And probably what you would do is you have that,

like, staggered, have to be, like, a four or six-year term.

Two years of that, you're, like, an apprentice.

We probably voting, but you're sitting there

and you're, like, shadowing somebody who's already been there,
learning stuff and all of this.

And then the next two or three years,

you're teaching somebody.

And you've probably, probably have some things like,

while you're there, you don't have to use money.

You, you're basically, in fact, you're forbidden.

I'm not, I don't think you should be allowed to use money.

I think while you're there, you probably,

you have a uniform, you can, you can opt out of this
if you want to, by the way, but you have a little tunic.

All your meals are provided for you.

You can get good food.

All your health care is provided for you.

You can get good health care.

But you're not, you're not going on expensive trips.

You're not going to luxury dinners.

You're not getting people to buy you expensive gifts

or any of those kind of stuff.

And also, you probably are not getting it

for at least five, 10, 15 years afterwards.

In fact, given my drill,

there's you probably have this thing where it's like,
if you get this, it's like winning the lottery.

You're going to be taking care of the rest of your life.

You're going to get a nice comfortable house.

You're going to get a nice comfortable pension

that you'll have the rest of your life.

Everything will be covered.

But you're not allowed to have any assets.

And when I say assets, like you can have your toothbrush,

you can have your computer, you can have little stuff.

But you can't have massive expensive things.

You can't have five vacation homes.

You can't have billions of dollars, certainly not even

millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars.

You're just, you're done.

And they don't worry about the details.

But something like this, I think would be a lot better.

And the reason I think it would be better

is like, I used to be very pro approval voting.

And approval voting is the system where it's basically like,

you have all the candidates and you vote either,
I approve of this person or not.

It's like, in some sense, it's like ranked choice

because you're picking the ones that you like
and the ones that you don't.

But ranked choice, you're picking the order.

And here you're explicitly not picking the order.

And I understand like people want to have the order

and all of this kind of stuff.

Turns out, having the order doesn't really add anything.

It doesn't let you get around errors and possibility.

There are a bunch of things in social choice theory.

I'm kind of assuming that you know, but obviously probably don't.

There are a bunch of things in social choice theory,

which basically prove or are able to be proven
that you essentially can't have a good voting system
for collective decisions.

And unless you have two options, ARB.

As soon as you get three in there,

there are all these problems that are made immediately arise.

But what you can do is kind of get okay,ish.

And again, approval voting, better than ranked choice voting,

easier to implement, easier to understand.

You either vote for against people or in option.

And then you pick the one that has the most votes.

You still, unfortunately, it's still subject

to things like strategic voting.

Again, it's not perfect.

But it's a much more democratic system.

And I'm pretty sure actually compatible

with the Arizona Constitution
and probably a lot of other state constitutions.

You could make the change with legislation

rather than a Constitutional Amendment.

I'll probably want to do a Constitutional Amendment

to make it better.

But independent of that, all of that stuff,

even if you had a perfect system,
even if you had a magical system where you could make
the absolutely best collective decision possible.

And we're going to pick the person everybody likes the most.

And not accidentally pick somebody terrible.

The problem is it's still popular already contest.

It's still something that rewards people

for being known, for being cool,
and for being like having a vibe to them,
having a rap and a slimeball face,
having the stuff that knew some and Buttigieg.

And frankly, Biden thrived from then this guy,

this fucking main guy.

These are all people who are terrible

who are like several standard deviations
from the norm of being terrible.

And yet they're the ones that are in the running area,

the ones that are in people's minds,
they're the ones that people will fight each other over.

They're the people that will be defended,

tooth and nail by people who really barely pay attention,
but they like that, you know,
I just like the way he makes me feel.

You know, like, what the fuck is wrong with you people?

And then they also think that they're going to win
something that they have a better chance,
based on nothing, based not on statistics or,
you know, evidence or anything like that.

But they think because they like them,

because they find them appealing,
somehow magically that means something, and it does not.

But anyway, I personally am really on this sortation train.

Now, I think it eliminates any of the popularity,

it gives you a representative government,
it gives you something where it's actually democratic.

And it gives you something where you don't have things like,

picking some state that just because of arbitrary lines
that you've drawn on the sand,
some state gets more power than another state.

You don't have to do that, you can get rid of it.

And it also, also, if you do that,

and have a system where you're, for example,
able to, I don't know, pick either by sortation
or you could have an election out of those people,
have them pick someone like a prime minister,
have them have a thing where they have to form a government,
do it with proportional representation,
would be kind of cool, like you could have everybody say,
you know, like I'm, and again, you could do this by sortation.

You say, I am aligned with this group in this group,

and this group, and not these, and then you have the candidates,
and they say they represent this group,
you know, the group actually has to prove them.

But they're in the pool for that group,

and now you could proportionally pick people.

I don't think that you'd want to complicated that much.

I would personally just pick people at random completely,

but either way, you'll get a statistical representation.

You do that, and then you've got something

where you completely eliminate career politicians,
you completely eliminate the advantage of having wealth
and connections, you completely eliminate the advantage
of having name or a new nation, or any of this kind of stuff.

And you have so many people that now, you know,

it's not like, it is just not a thing
where you can easily target a few people.

You can just grease the wheels on a few people.

If you want to really change things,

and you've got thousands of people in the house,
it's a little bit more of a challenge, you know?
Anyway, I just like the situation that we're in
where people are so convinced of all this shit,
and where they're making defenses,
for again, people like this fucking main Nazi.

I just, I don't like it, I don't get it,

I don't fucking, you know?
It has got me to the point where I aside from just thinking
that the second republic probably should be over,
it's not just that it is kind of over,
whether you want it to be or not.

But again, 250 years, it's a long run, lots of flaws

in the system, we've seen these,
France and less than the same time
is that their fifth republic already, five,
and they were, I think in the 60s.

So even less time, they were to five, were to number two.

You got the articles of consideration

and you got the current constitution.

Maybe, maybe, do another one.

Maybe, even, you know, like, do another one,

and then you're probably gonna fuck it up
the first time or two.

Do another one and plan on 10, 20 years down the line,

doing another one still.

You know, just do a pay-to-one regret,

do it a couple times, figure it out.

And, you know, although I will say,

in order to actually have this work,
you probably, unfortunately, need
a much more educated population than, you know,
I might currently have.

So like, if we let people make a constitution now

and people don't know the philosophy of law,
people don't know the history of,
like the theory of justice or anything like this,
you might end up with some bad stuff,
but it almost couldn't be worse, honestly.

And if you did it well, I think it could be better,

especially if you were picky about,
so, you figure out good ways of finding
the right people though.

To make the thing, maybe it's probably not bad.

And if you did it just, again, by chance,

probably still wouldn't be that bad,
but anyway, I just, I think you're, you know,
the little turkey bump thing is popped out.

I think for, I think you're ready to do the next thing.

I think it's ready to, to go someplace else.

And definitely, like this popularity contest,

self is done.

This stuff that, you have people who are terrible,

who keep getting into these offices,
it is just like, how do you not see
that this is not what we need to be doing?
How do you not see that we need to fucking improve the stuff?
And this is also incidentally part of the reason
why people found Trump appealing,
because, again, Trump is fucking horrible,
but he's at least different.

And now, different now horrible way,

but people are just desperate for change
and they know that things are fucking, you know,
just they suck.

And so they saw something that was different.

Are they grasping at that?

And they also saw Obama promising, hope and change,
and then not delivering on it
and becoming the reporter and chief,
the guy that was drowning a bunch of kids,
all this kind of shit, not a great thing.

They saw Bernie come up and then get

tanned down by the fucking party
in favor of genocide, Joe, you know?
That's what we got.

You can understand why people might,

not like this is something,
they might think that maybe we should do something else.

Maybe maybe, let's try this.

I would like to get out of the current regime

and maybe we try something else.

Maybe we find something better, you know,

or you could just keep going down this path
I never get anywhere and just, you know,
perpetually circle the drain.

I don't like that idea, I think you should do something else.

But I don't know, I don't really know other

than just the way things are,
are not good, they need to change.

And all of the shit is just crap that people made up.

Like, you know, the founders were not people that came down

from heaven, they were like 20 year olds
who were rich and highly privileged.

And, you know, like, you look at that situation,

like, any or also, like, you can see how many ways
and just I feel like I'm doing a lot of likes,
but you could see so many different ways
that these people stalked
and the things that they put in their system
stalked, they have checks and balances kind of,
but the checks and balances obviously don't work,
they have things that are like the enforcement
and I'm using a lot of likes, it's a problem.

We're gonna, but the enforcement, there's an off.

The enforcement is nothing.

It's essentially based on vibes.

It's based on, like, the idea that people will do the right thing,

which is ridiculous, and shouldn't be the case.

Another thing that's interesting

that I think should have been a giant red flag a long time ago
is, for example, this idea, there's an home,
this idea that the Supreme Court gets to pick and choose
what laws are constitutional.

There was nothing in the constitution that decided that.

There was nothing, it was just a right

that they judicial review is something that they just asserted
that they had and made up, because there was a hole
and somebody needed to do something, and so they did it.

That's a sign that your fucking constitution sucks.

The fact that you have a 13th amendment

that bands slavery within Astros
is a sign that your fucking constitution sucks.

And then, the fact that you have freedom of speech

that allows for people to just lie brazenly
and do all kinds of horrible things
that turns money into speech and all of this stuff.

It sucks, it's fucking sucks.

You need to change that thing.

You need to rewrite it, you need to think about it a lot.

And you probably need not to have the people

who have been trying to rewrite it for a very long time.

It's not a good thing in terrible ways.

The federalists and all these people have been working on this.

When they've wanted this constitutional convention

for a long time, probably don't want them doing it.

You probably want to think about it.

You probably want to be ready for it.

It's one of the reasons why it's super important

to have people in the state legislatures who are good
and why, honestly, it's one of the reasons that I ran,
because I'm very well aware of this being a thing
that they've been trying to do.

And if they ever succeed, you have a bunch of state legislatures

that are run by Republicans.

If they get the right-and-new constitution, that's pretty bad.

That's not the thing that you want.

So maybe you should work on that.

Maybe it's a thing to improve.

And this idea that somehow the institutions

as they exist have to exist and always existed,
250 years is nothing.

It's nothing at all.

It's too long to have stuck with that.

I mean, imagine that you wrote software 250 years ago.

How shitty it would be.

And especially if that was the first pass

at software like that, you would not want stuff running
on that anymore.

You probably have to rewrite it.

Even if you sat there and you're like,

well, okay, it was in cobalt and it was in the 80s.

Even then at a certain point, you'll end up being forced

to rewrite it, because you're scheduling system
just won't be able to take the capacity or something will
happen and something breaks.

And now we have to change it.

We have to, something is broken.

You have to change it.

You should have recognized this a long time ago.

And as always, the best time to plan the tree was 10 years ago,

the second best time is now.

I think with that, I'm not gonna keep,

I'm not gonna keep rambling,
but I think that's a good place to stop.

As ever, thank you for listening and excited.

再见

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smenor/tangentsBy Scott Menor, PhD