TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
8mo ago
Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses? Trump himself has a big personal incentive to say the election is "rigged" if he loses no matter what. It redirects the conversation from analyzing the defeat ("how could we do better"), which will inevitably shine a light on Trump's shortfalls, to one where the basic facts of reality are debated instead. The obvious example is the 2020 election. Lesser known was that Trump did the same thing in 2016 when he lost the Iowa primary to Ted Cruz. Now it seems he's preparing to do the same in 2024.
Many Republicans are more than willing to go along with this, mostly due to either negative partisanship or living in a bubble ("everyone I knew was voting for Trump, then the other guy won? Something doesn't smell right!"). If the pain of defeat stings, why not just be a sore loser instead? I've debated many people who thought the 2020 election was rigged, and inevitably it goes down one of three rabbitholes:
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Vibes-based arguments that are short on substance, but long on vague nihilism that "something was off". Nearly 70% of Republicans think 2020 was stolen in some way, yet most are normies who don't spend a lot of time trying to form a set of coherent opinions, so the fallback of "something was off" serves as a way to affirm their tribal loyalty without expending much effort.
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Motte-and-bailey to Trump's claims by ignoring everything Trump himself says, and instead going after some vague institutional flaw without providing any evidence to how it actually impacted 2020. For instance, while mail-in ballots are a nice convenience for many, there are valid concerns to a lack of oversight in how people fill out their ballots. People can be subjected to peer pressure, either from their family or even from their landlord or another authority figure to fill out their ballot a certain way. However, no election is going to 100% perfect, and just because someone can point out a flaw doesn't mean the entire thing should be thrown out. In a similar vein, Democrats have (rightly) pointed out that gerrymandering can cause skewed results in House elections, yet I doubt many Republicans would say that means results would need to be nullified especially if Democrats had just lost. These things are something to discuss and reform for future elections.
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People who do buy at least some of the object-level claims that Trump or Giuliani has advanced about 2020 being stolen. There's certainly a gish-gallop to choose from. The clearest meta-evidence that these are nonsense is that nearly everyone I've debated with has chosen a different set of claims to really dig deep into. For most political issues, parties tend to organically rally around a few specific examples that have the best evidence or emotional valence. The fact that this hasn't happened for Trump's claims is indicative that none of them are really that good, and they rely more on the reader being unfamiliar with them to try to spin a biased story. One example occurred a few weeks ago on this site, one user claimed the clearest examples were Forex markets (which were subsequently ignored), Ruby Freeman, and the Cyber Ninja's Audit. I was only vaguely aware of these, so I did a quick Google search and found a barrage of stories eviscerating the Ruby Freeman and Cyber Ninja narratives. I then asked for the response, preferably with whatever relatively neutral sources he could find, since I was sure he'd claim the sources I had Googled were all hopelessly biased. But this proved too high a bar to clear for him, and so the conversation went nowhere. Maybe there's a chance that some really compelling evidence exists out there that would easily prove at least some of the major allegations correct, but at this point I doubt it.
At this point it seems like the idea that elections are rigged is functionally unfalsifiable. The big question on the Republican side now would be whether to claim the elections were rigged even if Trump DOES win. The stock explanation would be that the Dems are rigging it so they have +20% more votes than they normally would, so a relatively close election means Trump actually won by a huge margin. On the other hand, saying the election was rigged at all could diminish Trump's win no matter what, and it's not hard to imagine Trump claiming "this was the most legitimate election in the history of our country" if he manages to come out on top.
MAGA experienced a wave of euphoria from Trump's election until about around the time of the trade disputes. They felt like they were on top of the world, and that nothing could stop them. They notched a few wins against wokeness, but their major victory was in the realm of vibes.
It's increasingly seeming like those days are over. Scott Sumner's article details who's up and who's down over the past few weeks:
Who's Up:
-Neoliberals
-The experts
-TDSers
-The elite media
-Chinese and Canadian liberals
-Deficit hawks
-Principled conservative free speech advocates
-Integrity hawks
-Rules hawks
-Critics of bullying
Who's Down:
-Mercantilists
-The populists
-Anti-anti-trumpers
-Fox News
-Non-US nationalists
-Deficit doves
-Unprincipled conservative free speech advocates
-Issues people
-Autocracy advocates
-American exceptionalists
Edit for more opinions per moderator request: I agree with this article that the vibes have definitely shifted, as it's been clear in my (adversarial) conversations with MAGA that the mood has changed from combative (pre-election) to triumphalism (post election until a few weeks ago) and then back to combative with a hint of disillusionment (today). Any opposition movement is going to have principled believers and cynics, e.g. people who think we should have free speech as a general rule and people who only claim to like free speech but really want to censor their opponents when they come into power. Winning means these splits that could be swept under the rug get blown out into the open, and the pendulum starts swinging back the other direction. Hopefully we don't swing back to crazy wokeness, but I'd pretty much take any alternative at this point. A decade ago I would never have seen myself cheering for The Experts or The Media, but I've seen the alternative now, and it's just so much worse.
Scott has an excellent new article that'll likely enrage at least a few people here: Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
Last week, the Libs of Tiktok successfully cancelled a random lady from Home Depot who called for the assassination of Trump. This prompted a lot of triumphalism from the right: "the time is finally here, now WE get to be the cancellers" they seemed to cheer.
There was a discussion on the Motte, and while there were some voices calling for restraint, many commenters demanded blood from the left. The real question was how much blood should be taken, with most responses landing somewhere between "massive" and "infinity". Some quotes include
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From the same post as the above, "I don't give one flying fuck that these people are now getting served their own dog food."
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"My heart has been turned to stone. No mercy, not before victory."
Scott's article gives 9 reasons why cheering for blood like this might not be the best strategy. They include:
- Nobody Learns Anything Useful From Being Persecuted
- This Isn’t Tit For Tat, It’s The Nth Round Of A Historical Dialectic
- You’re Not Debating Whether To Become Like Woke People, You’re Already Like Woke People
- Nobody Is Ever Both-Sides-ist Enough
- Most Cancellations Are Friendly Fire
- Cancellation Is The Enemy Of Competence
- No, Seriously, This Is A Terrible Decision
- Don’t Go Mad With Power Until You Actually Get The Power
- There’s Probably Other Options
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
I covered this in my earlier post. Yes, the flood that happened under Biden was his fault, although it didn't seem deliberate. It seemed like he wanted to roll back Trump's immigration vibes in nebulous ways, but they way they (Biden or his handlers) effectuated that had unintended consequences that were functionally open-borders via loophole. I know a lot of conservatives on this site take the approach of "never attribute to incompetence that which can plausibly be explained by malice if it involves the outgroup", but the Dem response to immigration afterwards sure made it seem like they knew they fucked up and had dropped a grenade at their feet that they never intended.
Coalitions in the US are large and amorphous, so both your points 1 AND 2 can be correct for different Dems, and they occasionally rotate turns at the wheel depending on who wins elections or who has dementia.
Better immigration laws are needed because the US system is fundamentally broken in ways that only Congress can fix. Executive orders can help (or hurt), but they're just bandaids on a bullethole. You can try mangling interpretations of laws created decades ago and hope the courts don't notice, but they have the annoying habit of saying "hey bro, you can't just ignore Congress" and striking things down. In the status quo, the best conservatives can hope for is Obama-era levels of immigration. At worst, they can expect open borders with next to no recourse. Changing the laws on the books could significantly help that.
About a year ago I made a post (with motte discussion here) about an immigration reform bill that would have handed Republicans a major victory on the issue with the most conservative comprehensive reform in a generation. Dems would have agreed to the bill since Biden's whoopsie defacto-open-borders made the issue a huge liability for them. Trump tanked it for purely cynical reasons, and the discussion hinged on whether the legislation was somehow a "trap" since Dems were agreeing to it, and whether Republicans should risk getting nothing if they lost in 2024. I contended that Republicans should take the deal and then maybe do additional legislation that was even more stringent if they won, that way they'd have something even if they lost, which was about at a 50% chance on betting markets at the time. But MAGA and Trump won out, going all-in on the double-or-nothing strategy.
In a sense that bet paid off, since Trump won and got a trifecta! There's just one little problem: he's not actually trying to pass any comprehensive enduring immigration legislation. There was the Laken Riley act, but it's quite small in scope. Overall, it's back to his first term tactics of mangling the interpretation of laws through executive orders, and hoping the courts don't stop him. It's likely to be about as successful as it was in his first term. Why do it this way? Why not just ask Congress to give you the powers to do what you want so you don't have to gamble on the courts? Matt Yglesias has a potential explanation in his mailbag post
I think this is pretty easily explained as the intersection of the filibuster, Trump’s authoritarian temperament, and Republican Party domination of the Supreme Court.
We saw progressive versions of this kind of thinking in things like The American Prospect Day One Agenda from 2019 or the late-Obama effort at dramatic climate (Clean Power Plan) and immigration (DAPA) policy via executive branch rule making. But Democrats get much less leash from the judiciary than Republican do, because the Supreme Court is very conservative. We never got to see what the universe in which Biden halts all new oil and gas leasing on federal land looks like, because he just lost in court.
At the same time, Biden genuinely did not have the Trump-like aspiration to be a plebiscitary dictator. When he lost in court, he mostly folded and moved on. If anything, his administration was happy to be able to tell the Sierra Club that he tried and then reap the economic benefits of record oil and gas production. Biden really enjoyed legislative dealmaking, was very good at getting bipartisan bills like CHIPS and IIJA done, spent decades in the US Senate, and was frequently the Obama administration’s “closer” on the Hill. There’s a reason Frank Foer’s admiring biography of Biden is titled “The Last Politician.”
To Biden, shooting the shit with other elected officials and striking bargains was the peak.
Trump, despite the art of the deal bluster, has never shown any interest in legislative dealmaking. At no point during either of his terms has he attempted to engage with Democrats on passing some kind of immigration bill. He spiked the bipartisan border security bill from the Biden era, and has never gone back and said something like, “If we tweak these three provisions, I’m okay with it.” It’s just not of interest to him — he wants power. And the broader conservative movement has become weirdly deferential to that, both because it’s a bit of a personality cult and also because the filibuster has acculturated everyone to thinking of this as being the way the government ought to work.
A bunch of people have asked me whether the 2024 election outcome doesn’t make me glad that Democrats didn’t scrap the filibuster. But honestly, I feel the exact opposite. I would be much more comfortable with a world in which the answer to the question “Why don’t you just get Congress to change the law?” wasn’t just “Well, Democrats will filibuster if I try.”
So MAGA as a political movement has a better chance to change immigration than Republicans have probably ever had, and they're pissing it away with Trump cultism. They'll try to hide behind excuses like the filibuster, which could be ended with 50 votes in the Senate, and Republicans have 53 right now. Alternatively they'll try to hide behind political nihilism and say that passing laws doesn't matter since Dems could just ignore anything they pass -- this is wrong because the laws could help Trump (or other Republicans in the future) do things while there's a friendly president in power, and they could do a variety of things to try to force the Dem's hand when out of power like writing hard "shall" mandates in laws, giving Republican governors or even private citizens the standing to sue for non-enforcement, attach automatic penalties like sequestration-style clawbacks if removal numbers fall below some statutory floor, add 287(g) agreements with states giving local officers INA arrest authority, create independent enforcement boards, etc. None of these are silver bullets obviously since Dems would always be free to repeal any such laws (there are no permanent solutions in a Democracy, just ask Southern Slavers how the Gag Rule went), but that would cost them political capital or otherwise force them to try gambling with the courts if they tried to circumvent things by executive fiat.
But doing any of this would require telling Trump he needs to actually do specific things, and potentially punish him in some way if he fails to enact an ideological agenda he (vaguely) promised. That's very unlikely to happen.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
I don't agree with this at all. Populists have hallucinated that there's massive amounts of corruption already going on, but in reality Trump is taking it to a new level of magnitude and blatantness.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
Agreed. This forum's meta treatment of Christianity is very goofy. You can call trans people delusional and nothing will happen. You can call people in favor of covid lockdowns delusional and nothing will happen. You can even call people you're arguing against delusional as an ad-hominem and nothing will happen. But call religious people delusional and you should absolutely expect to get warned/banned.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
5mo ago
This is the only sane take. The people claiming this is like a prisoner's dilemma are crazy, given that the prisoner's dilemma involves some level of personal gain (or at least losing less) for playing. Here, it's just pure negative. Nobody here gained from Biden's pardons, nor did they gain by the J6 pardons.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
8mo ago
Pardon everybody who was involved in “January 6th”
Drop all the lawsuits against Trump.
If somebody actually committed a crime, why should they get automatic clemency? It's like a BLM supporter saying "there will never be racial reconciliation unless you pardon everyone for everything that happened during the BLM riots."
ENCOURAGE as many audits and court cases (with discovery power, that are not dismissed on “standing”) as they want.
Actual, televised court cases for any of the grievances republicans have wrt to “January 6th”.
Televised, with discovery power, and “you are held in contempt” power to investigate the 2020 election, the origins of Covid, and the vaccine.
Would these do anything? If they get their day in court, the default outcome would be for them to... still fail on their merits. What happens then? Republicans will then just say the courts are still biased.
The deportation LARPing events are stupid wastes of political capital meant to appease fools like Catturd that want to watch a few dozen immigrants be manhandled by armored goonsquads on Twitter and Fox News. This is the type of crap that made Dems freak out when they won the presidency and do defacto open borders via loophole. With the current bent now the public will have even more reasons to associate any enforcement of immigration laws with authoritarianism. It's just a dumb, unforced error by Republicans who are listening to their sectarian cheerleaders instead of trying to be strategic with their approach.
If MAGA actually wanted to deal with immigration, they'd first take the R trifecta and pass comprehensive immigration reform like the old Lankford bill, but an even tougher version. Close the loopholes and make it harder for Dem presidents to not enforce the law. Have more of their executive orders get shredded in the courts like DAPA did during Obama's tenure, and like a lot of Trump's EOs always do. This at least does something to prevent the problem from getting worse, and is the lowest rung on the totem pole in terms of political capital required.
Then, if Republicans want to remove the illegals already here, go after the employers that hire them. Break the incentive structure that acts as a magnet to illegal immigrants in the first place. This will cause economic pain and will take a lot more political capital, but is better than hurling immigrants out one-by-one. Note that I don't really think this is actually a good idea, at least for throwing out the entire illegal population as there are a lot of jobs Americans genuinely don't want to do for illegal-tier prices. I'd go after some of the legal immigrants instead, mainly the H1B scourge that's drenched in fraud and that's actually hurting the employment prospects of Americans for good jobs.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
Hard agree with Scott here: MAGA's refusal to try to rein in Trump when he does something silly is not a fluke, it's an essential part of the cult of personality that MAGA has become. The fact that the usual suspects are working backwards trying to justify it from nearly any angle (many of which are mutually conflicting, but they broadly don't bother trying to rationalize their defenses) should update the priors of anyone who thought MAGA was an ideological movement rather than a cult built around aggrandizing the whims of a single capricious man.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
Huh? How snail-brained are 22-34% of these voters? Why would you care if he gets convicted?
The fact you'd say this is a pretty emblematic of how crazy the US (and this site) have become. This might seem like a hot take, but people generally don't want their leaders to be convicted felons.
Well, maybe that would have held more true back before trust in institutions collapsed. Those 22-34% are the last vestiges of that era. The thought is that anyone can lob an accusation, but a conviction carries more weight. Yes, most people understand that prosecutors would generally only bring cases that have a good chance of winning, but they can still fudge around the edges.
Nowadays, Trump could probably murder someone on live TV and a majority of the Republican voters would say he didn't do it. That's basically what the election loss denialism came down to. Why let evidence get in the way of vibes and dunking on the outgroup!
On the use of anecdotes and “lived experiences” to contradict statistical data.
Say for the sake of argument that you’re arguing with a left-leaning individual (let’s call him “Ezra”) on the issue of police bias. You both agree the police has a least a little bit of bias when it deals with blacks, but you disagree on the root cause. Ezra contends this is due to structural racism, i.e. that laws are created in such a way such that blacks will always bear the brunt of their enforcement. He further contends that local police departments are often willing to hire white men with questionable backgrounds in terms of making racist remarks. This inherent racism exacerbates issues of uneven enforcement, and in the worst cases can lead to racist white police officers killing unarmed black men. While you agree that black men are arrested at disproportionate rates, you claim the reason for this is more simple. Black men get arrested for more crimes because… black men commit more crimes. You cite FBI crime statistics to back this up. In response, Ezra says that the FBI data you cited is nonsense that doesn’t match up with reality, but rather is cooked up by racist data officials putting their thumbs on the scales to justify the terrible actions of the criminal justice system on a nationwide basis. After all, Ezra knows quite a few black people himself, and none of them have committed any crimes! And while none of them have been arrested, a few of them have told him stories of run-ins with the police where they were practically treated as “guilty before proven innocent”. In short, Ezra’s lived experiences (along with those of people he knows) contradicts your data while buttressing his own arguments.
Do you think Ezra’s lived experiences are a valid rebuttal here?
Yesterday I made a post on the partisan differences in economic outlook. The three main points were that 1) the US economy is doing fairly well, 2) Republicans think the economy is doing absolutely terribly, much worse than Democrats think, and 3) that most of this perception difference is because Biden, a Democrat, currently occupies the White House. I initially thought I was going to get highly technical arguments quibbling over the exact measurement of data. Economic data is highly complex, and as such, reasonable people will always be able to disagree about precisely how to measure things like unemployment, GDP, inflation, etc. It’s not particularly hard to cherrypick a few reasonable-sound alternatives that would tilt measurements one way or the other. For instance, how much of housing costs should be calculated in the inflation of consumption prices? Rent can be seen as pretty much pure consumption, but homes that are purchased also have an investment aspect to them. As such, the current inflation calculations use “owners’ equivalent rent” to account for this. Most economists think this is overall the better way to calculate inflation on this particular measure, but again, reasonable people could disagree, and getting a few of them on record saying “the current measurements are faulty” is an easy way to throw doubt on data. While I did get a few of these types of comments (example 1 , example 2), they weren’t the majority of the responses by a long shot.
Instead I got plenty of arguments about “lived experiences” which people claimed as disproving the data I cited. These weren’t quite to the level of “Chicken costs $5 more at my local supermarket, therefore all economists are liars with fraudulent data”… but it wasn’t that far off.
Don’t believe me? Here’s 9 examples:
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WhiningCoil says inflation numbers are “literally impossible to square with the lived experience” of housing costs going up, or the prices of staple foods doubling.
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haroldbkny says inflation has been unprecedented in all his “life experience”, and he hasn’t seen the wages of anyone he knows growing to match it.
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Walterodim says it’s “incredibly obvious” that people have “personally experienced much sharper increases in prices” than officials claim, and that officials must be “cooking the books”.
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JTarrou says his personal standard of living went down, and that he’s paying “a third higher to double on most normal expenses (energy, groceries, etc.), and as such my national metrics smell of “statistical bullshit”and that “economic metrics are bullshit statistical lies”.
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JTarrou further claims that economics is staffed by people who “all drank the same koolaid”, and that while anecdote is small data, it’s the only data he’s sure “isn’t horseshit”
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HlynkaCG says he “has receipts” and linked to a 2 year old post where his local price of cheap meat went from $5/lb to $6.75 (a 35% increase) whereas the national meat price index at the time had only gone up by 9.5% over that period.
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SlowBoy says recent economic events have been like “receiving Biden’s twelve inches”, and that the data are all gamed by lying government officials.
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No_one implies people are waking up to statistical lies by linking to a Tweet of someone who went to their local grocery story where the cost of meat has jumped from $10 to $16.
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freemcflurry says he makes more money than he used to, but “things just feel shitty”; the prices of chicken breast as his local grocery store doubled from $2/lb to $4/lb, and there are now masses of homeless people in his city walking around “like zombies with festering sores all over their skin.”
To be clear, a few of these above examples don’t say that their anecdotes prove economists are lying, and are instead using their personal experiences to say how economic conditions feel worse, although they were typically at least ambiguous on whether they trusted their own experiences over economic data at the national level. On the other hand, there were some who were quite unequivocal that economic data is fabricated in whole or in part since the things economists say don’t match with how the economy seems in their personal lives.
Going back to the example of bias in policing that I mentioned earlier, I’d say that the vast majority of people on this forum would say that you can’t really use “lived experiences” to contradict data. Anecdotes aren’t worthless, as they can give you insight into peoples’ perceptions, or how the consequences of data can be uneven and apply more to some locations than others. But at the end of the day, you can’t just handwave things like FBI crime statistics just because you know some people that contradict the data. As such, it feels like a rather blatant double standard to reject “lived experiences” when it comes to things like racism, only to turn around and accept them when it comes to the economy.
The cop-out argument from here is to point at the people preparing the data and say that they’re the ones at fault. The argument would go something like this: “My outgroup (the “elites”, the “leftists”, the “professional managerial class”, the “cathedral”, or whatever) are preparing most of the data. Data that disagrees with my worldview (like the current economic outlook) is wrong and cooked up by my outgroup to fraudulently lie to my face about reality. On the other hand, data that does agree with my worldview (like FBI crime statistics) is extra legitimate because my outgroup is probably still cooking the data, so the fact that it says what it does at all is crazy. If anything, the “real” data would probably be even more stark!”
This type of argument sounds a lot like the controversy around “unskewing” poll results. Back in 2012, Dean Chambers gathered a fairly substantial following on the Right by claiming polls showing Obama ahead were wrong due to liberal media bias. He posted “corrected” polls that almost monotonically showed Romney ahead. He would eventually get his comeuppance on election day when Obama won handily. A similar scenario played out in 2016 when many of the more left-leaning media establishment accused Nate Silver of “unskewing” poll results in favor of Trump. Reporters don’t typically have the statistical training to understand the intricacies of concepts like “correlated errors”, so all they saw was an election nerd trying to make headlines by scaring Democrats into thinking the election was closer than it really was. They too were eventually forced to eat their words when Trump won.
While issues of polling bias can be resolved by elections, the same can’t be said of bias in our examples of racism and the economy, at least not as cleanly. If someone wants to believe their anecdotes that disproportionate black arrests are entirely due to structural racism, they can just go on believing that for as long as they want. There’s no equivalent to an election-loss shock to force them to come to terms. The same is true of economic outlooks. Obviously this is shoddy thinking.
The better alternative is to use other economic data to make a point. If you think unemployment numbers don’t show the true extent of the problem, for instance, you can cite things like the prime age working ratio if you think people are discouraged from looking for work. Having tedious debates on the precise definitions of economic indicators is infinitely better than retreating to philosophical solipsism by claiming economic data is broadly illegitimate. Economic rates of change tend to be exponential year over year, so if large scale fraud is really happening then it’s hard to hide for very long. There would almost always be other data you can point to in order to make a case, even if it’s something as simple as using night light data to estimate economic output. Refusing to do even something like this is akin to sealing yourself in an unfalsifiable echo chamber where you have carte blanche to disregard anything that disagrees with your worldview.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
What corruption were the past few Democratic administrations engaged in that exceeded the level of magnitude and blatantness that Trump is now engaged in? Even if you can list examples, why is your response to imply that makes Republicans immune from criticism now, rather than asserting that both parties deserve criticism when they're doing bad things?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
I covered that in my post that I linked. The notion that the bill was "open borders up to 5000 migrants per day" was just egregiously false.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
8mo ago
I don't think so. I've argued in the past that Republicans think the economy is far worse than it actually is, that real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) wages are up, etc. but I've never denied inflation was actually happening.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
Just because the outgroup is spamming untrue attacks doesn't abrogate responsibility for one side. I'm reading through Original Sin right now, and the fact that Republicans constantly made incorrect attacks against Biden and Democrats more broadly was a big part of why the Dems ignored Biden's mental decline -- they could treat it as just another desperate attempt to smear Biden in the long gish gallop that was always going on. To them, the "Biden is senile" line could be treated as just another "Obama was born in Kenya" or "Joe is pocketing bribes from Hunter" line. If the Dems had a responsibility to actually report Biden's decline (and they absolutely did, IMO), then Republicans have a responsibility to clean up their side too, no matter what the other side is saying or how untrustworthy they are.
I'm not claiming one scandal was worse than the other (MAGA will always claim anything Biden and co. did was infinitely worse than what Trump is doing), I'm demonstrating the principle.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
7mo ago
Your anger at health insurance companies is misplaced. If the profit motive is the problem, a public option is a solution, but American voters (especially right-leaning ones) have been pretty emphatic about refusing it.
Companies have to deny some claims or else premiums would have to rise for everyone. UHC's profit margins are actually far lower than e.g. Apple's.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
People should be critical of every US politician to the extent that they actually engage in corruption. Tons of Republicans made accusations that Joe Biden was receiving huge kickbacks with Hunter as an intermediary, but that was mostly false in regards to Joe actually getting any money. I did criticize Joe for pardoning his son though. The problem here is that the two parties are not equal in corruption, at least for now. It's plausible that Dems will become worse in the future and use Trump's current actions as justification for their own awfulness. I'll criticize that if it occurs.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
5mo ago
The median sentence for participating in Trump's attempted self-coup was 60 days. I looked through a few of the longer sentences and they seemed justified given the violence that had taken place. I don't consider BLM leniency to be an excuse because I also would have liked for the book to be thrown at those protestors as well.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
The Georgia incident wasn't a water main break, it was a leaking toilet. Nobody was instructed to leave the ballot counting area. No ballots were impacted. This has been documented already.
OK, if you want to quibble about what "had their day in court" means, sure, my statement would be more accurate if it read as "were addressed by the courts" (before being dropped/denied/withdrawn).
I'd then turn around and say you're rewriting history by implying these cases didn't get a similar legal treatment to any other lawsuit.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1yr ago
That Christianity gets treated with the kid gloves here is a blatant double-standard. The modding happens because the Christians don't even bother trying to defend their superstitions since they know they'll get trounced, so instead they fight with oversensitive interpretations of the rules (declaring anodyne statements to be "unnecessarily antagonistic", "bad faith", stuff like that).
Nobody wants this place to become either a platform for evangelizing or /r/atheism.
This forum should be open grounds to challenge any view.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
Russia already had multiple NATO states on its border, and the war added Finland which Russia pretty much shrugged at. Ukraine has somewhat more advantageous terrain if NATO wanted a ground invasion to Moscow, but there's long been zero appetite for that AND Russia has the ultimate deterrent in the form of a huge nuclear arsenal. The major reasons Russia actually invaded are:
- Putin hates democracy because it shows his people what life could look like if they didn't exist in a kleptocratic dictatorship. It's the same reason why he screwed over Armenia when they democratized a bit, and why he went after Georgia. There's a reason Russian leadership seethes so much over Poland too, given that it's a shining example of how much better the West is than the Warsaw Pact (i.e. the former Russian sphere of influence). Ukraine was threatening to become that, but even closer to home. Dictators are always thinking of ways to coup-proof their regimes, and getting rid of pesky alternative political systems on the borders is one option.
- Putin has amateurish views of "The Russian People" and thinks Ukrainians are misguided mini-Russians who need to be shown who's the big brother here.
- He thought he could get away with it easily, and once he made an effort it would look foolish if he had to run home with his tail between his legs, so he constantly doubled down.
Taiwan is a similar problem for China. The direct threat on the border part is an element of the equation, but it's far from the whole story. Taiwan is a democracy full of Han Chinese that shows what life could be like without the CCP. Hong Kong was crushed for similar reasons. It also occupies a special place in the political myth that is the Century of Humiliation, a victimization narrative similar to what the Treaty of Versailles did for Weimar Germany, i.e. it's a fairly mundane piece of history dressed up to be this hugely unjust violation that must be corrected if China is ever to stand tall.
I think this forum should disable/remove the downvote button. It's a legacy holdover from Reddit but it really doesn't fit the theme of the motte. Downvoting increases the intensity of heat while doing little for light. Humans are hard-wired to care about the popularity of their ideas, even people very low on the agreeableness spectrum (which I'm sure accounts for the majority of posters here). People who are routinely downvoted are much less likely to post, intensifying the echo chamber effect.
If a post breaks the rules, reporting it is still the best solution.
If a post is just using bad logic, it's much better to refute that logic with a response than to downvote. There's nothing I find quite as aggravating as making (what I think is) a good point, only to be downvoted with no responses. This doesn't happen nearly as often on this forum as it does on Reddit, but it's still a nuisance when it does occur.
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