Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
Agreed. IIRC, 300 meters (more than 300 yards) is part of the standard military marksmanship table in NATO countries, and that can be with iron sights, let alone scopes.
As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw.
'Nowadays?'
How long, per chance, do you believe this state of affairs has held before it didn't? Years? Decades? 'They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work' was the joke of an entire economic system of the 20th century, so we're probably looking at centuries.
Did the hiring managers of feudal Europe five hundred years ago think their serf pool as highly competent, honest, diligent people devoid of alcohol addiction or other serious flaws? Chinese mandarins? Byzantine administers? Illiterate tribal chiefs the world over?
I mean the term purely descriptively; it's how the business of government happens.
You used the word pejoratively; it would not make sense as a moral argument justification if it were used in the purely descriptive sense that you now claim.
This involves a threat, either explicit or implicit, of physical violence if they don't comply. That's just how it works.
This line of argument has no limiting factor, and can apply as much to any interaction.
This internet interaction has an implicit possiblity of violence if certain boundaries are not obliged, since you could always turn to internet sleuths or hackers and seek to harm me if I annoyed you enough, or vice versa. Anyone weaker than you could infer an implicit threat of physical violence if they disagreed with you. Even people not weaker than you, but less interested in a topic, could take the firmness of your position as an implicit threat.
Fortunately, actual violence does not work that way, and neither do sound moral arguments resort to categorical pejorative redefinitions.
Dean
Flairless
4d ago
I'm annoyed by the "imported" framing. Biden didn't wake up one day and go out of his way to coax ten million people into coming to the US.
He rather did, and then continued doing it for years.
The Biden administration conducted a number of policy changes upon taking over from the trump administration, changes intended to increase the retention rate of migrants and well communicated to migration-related interolutors. These were changes to a status quo, done deliberately and systemically, with predictable and openly desired results by involved elements of the Biden administration. Biden made multiple domestic legal efforts to broaden the inflow potential, spending non-trivial political capital, to shift the status quo into a more publicly receptive position.
These ten million people wanted to come, and Biden's government elected to not use violence to stop them.
Unless one wants to redefine the term violence, enforcement of migration laws is not violence.
These people want to come, therefore what right have we to infringe on their freedom by stopping them? How could any amount of missing paperwork justify bringing lethal force to bear against a human being? That's the impulse, and it is a fundamentally moral, compassionate one.
Compassion without consideration of the consequence and harms imposed onto others is not compassion.
Rather than compassion, the Democratic stance on migration is much more accurately characterized as a luxury belief, a performative display undertaken only so long as it does not become onus. This was most notably when the Texas migrant bussing began, and then Democrats began panicking at the fiscal burdens of accepting and housing a fraction of the migrants that they'd been in Texas and elsewhere for years.
Self-righteousness and punting the costs onto the outgroup may be a fundamental impulse, but it is not particularly moral.
Yes, but really no.
The democrats want to fight, and if shutting down the government counts then it's getting what they want by definition. However, a lot of the democratic party has reversed the causality on the nature of the government programs they want to keep open. Those programs are not preserved if the government shuts down; rather, a government shut down obligates those programs being closed. Moreover, existing law gives the executive significant leeway in determing who is deemed an essential person and who is not, with non-essential persons basically being sent home and thus unabled to execute any desired programs. These may be what you'll think of as executive orders, but Congress is the root of those authorities.
At best, the democrats can try to take enough other programs that the Republicans care about hostage to coerce the Republicans to protecting / restoring the programs the democrats care about. However, this is a relative pain tolerance issue, and, well...
Well, at least the Democrats can claim to be fighting if the Republican trifecta passes stopgap bills.
Dean
Flairless
4d ago
Klein is making a cope argument. It may be cope because the Democratic decision is driven by internal politics and he's trying to justify it, but the conclusion does not follow from the premise.
If Trump is an authoritarian because he is using largely established executive powers to reshape (and reduce) the executive branch and remove Democratic-favored official from the executive branch, it becomes more, not less, important to pass a budget. This is because the spending laws are where Congress gives the legal stipulations for what Trump can, and cannot, do with money from Congress, and can/cannot do to the agencies receiving money from Congress. Most of what DOGE was able to do with regards to agencies like, say, USAID, was precisely because Congress had never passed a bill inserting language stipulating a size / appointment process / etc. Because there was no Congressionally-dictated form of the created-by-the-executive-not-by-law agencies, what was made by the executive could be unmade by the executive. In turn, when Congress has given stricter stipulations for things in its power to, this has been the legal basis by which the more enduring court orders have managed to be upheld by.
If / when Klein's shutdown argument comes to pass, Trump gains, more power over removing select officials and ending disfavored programs, not less, because the government shutdown is- by definition- a result of Congress not authorizing the government to spend as much money on people, places, and things not already covered in other legislation. Moreover, Congress has already legislated who has the legal authority to prioritize closures, dismissals, cancellations, and so on in case of a shutdown... and that person is the executive. DOGE showed its limits relatively early in how much authority it had over direct employee terminations (which is to say- basically none in legally-structured agencies), but the Executive has a lot more freedom in choosing which parts of the government to turn off first, and longest, during a shutdown.
Where this time is different- and where the Democrats are setting up for an own-goal as far as preserving the institutions they want preserved goes- is that Trump can basically use a government shutdown as a legal basis for broader scale agency suspensions of contracts / efforts / etc. in ways he couldn't/didn't during the supplementary period. DOGE showed its limits on direct manning by having basically no actual authority over other departments or legally-obligated programs. In a shutdown, the executive gets to formally categorize members of departments by their judged level of essentialness. Non-essential people go home, and don't get paychecks, and keep not getting paychecks until either the shutdown is over, or they quit and get another job.
The parts of the US government most resilient to the effects of a shutdown due to how the legislations are structured are also the parts the Republicans are most comfortable with. The parts of the US government most affected by a shutdown are the parts the Democrat party cares most about.
The main way the Democrats have to keep those programs around is to make their continuation a matter of law. Legally obligating the government to shut it down is the same vibes-based thinking that droves most of the list of the last paragraph of alleged abuses that are largely not.
Dean
Flairless
4d ago
But this wasn't the first place this happened. There really is something odd going on with reddit where a lot of subs end up degenerating into snark subs critical of the central figure.
Hm? It's a relatively common phenomenum in video game forums. Pretty typical tipping point culture.
Most fan groups have some fan distribution includes some balance of positive fans and disgruntled fans who more or less stay because being disgruntled becomes their hobby. Positive fans grow tired / bored with the content, while disgruntled fans grow larger as more people become disgrunted / have no where else to hang. Eventually, disgruntled fans hit a tipping poing towards becoming a decisive plurality as their toxicity starts to actively drive away positive fans, leaving a greater preponderance of disgruntled fans, making the forum a relatively toxic mess.
Not really.
Antman wasn't a particularly woke movie per see, but it was a more comedy-action movie that aligned with woke tropes for its own reasons.
Antman is first and foremost a comedy-action series in the broader MCU. This is/ was suitable / appropriate in part because the character's power set allows for distinct / unique setups, like this memorable high-stakes fight on a train(set). The core power set of size changing but keeping the pre-size 'strength' means that the choreography involves a lot of exagerated scale differences and motions, which makes better for comedy than goofy action.
The thing is, because Antman (Scott Lang) is a comedic movie protagonist, he's, well, a comedic male lead. Which, yes, is a bit awkward, goofy, makes mistakes, and so on. And this does pattern-match with the woke-tropes of belittling the male leads. Scott is often the butt of the joke, in a series where most of the cast is the butt of various jokes even in serious contexts.
For example- the opening context of the origin movie is Scott Lang, is getting out of jail as a convicted criminal. Part of his call to adventure / instigating context is that he needs money to pay child support to his beloved daughter, who lives with his divorced wife and her new husband (who happens to be a cop). Scott wants to be on the straight and narrow, but his criminal past makes that hard. So one of the early gags is him- a highly qualified engineer- failing to be able to keep an icecream job. This is tragic, but is played for laughs, even as it sets him up for the dabbling into a functional heist plot. The plot of the movie is functionally that Scott is hired by the inventor of the shrink tech precisely because he is an ex-con in order to do one more crime, which is to steal shrink tech from a dangerous corporate former partner of the inventor.
The main counterpart to Scott on the protagonist cast is the Pym family, a duo. There is Professor Hank Pym, who invented the shrink tech and has hired Scott to keep it from being used by the evil mastermind, who was his former protege. Then there is Hope Pym, Hank's daughter who is estranged with her father but reluctantly working with him because she discovered the evil villain's evil plan after she helped the evil mastermind oust Hank from his own company..
Hope can / does pattern match to the woke female protagonist tropes. She is an exceptionally competent woman, both in terms of positional authority- she outmaneuvered her own father and is doing so against the villain- and in technology- she knows her father's tech and can use elements of it far better than Scott at first- and even in martial arts- where she's the more skilled, especially for the tech.
Hope is set up as the clear 'natural' user of the tech, but this is a Antman movie titled Antman, and so comedic lead clutz is the one who has to be trained to be a hero by the reluctant, more capable woman.
But while Hope Pym does have a bit of the 'women aren't allowed to be weak' woke-ishness, and a resting bitch face, and seems to hate men, there's actually more to it on a character level. Rather, Hope's could-be-mistaken-for-woke relationship issues with men come down to the fact that she has a justified grievance / issue with the three main men of the plot for valid character reasons. The evil man is evil. Her relationship with her father is estranged because her father had a critical role in getting her mother killed, which changed their relationship, and now her father is bypassing her for the key role in the heist by trusting Scott with the suit-tech that her father's whole character is about not trusting others with. And finally, the relationship with Scott is because he's a thief (who's first encounter is stealing the shrink tech suit from their family), who is less comptent than her (not having her familiarity with the tech), who her father seems to trust more than her.
Moreover, as Hope learns new things, her relationships with the men in her life changes, or is subject to change, with her being the one to learn and change more than then. Hope shows an emotional response and sympathy when she realizes that the evil vaillain's evilness may in part be a side effect of her father's shrink tech particle, making him a victim of her family. Her relationship with her father begins to heal when her father finally shares the context of her mother's death, which is that the shrink tech failed and made her lost forever. And her relationship with Scott starts to change not only when she realizes Scott's motive of doing this for his daughter, but when Scott is the one to point out that the reason Scott is being trusted with the suit is that Scott is the expendible one if there's another incident like with her mother.
Hope, in other words, has a bit of character development when she learns new things, rather than being the one to change others by informing them.
But also- and more importantly back at the meta-structural level- Hope is the straight woman of the comedy cast. She and her father both, mostly, but Hank Pym is more dry/acerbic humor in his own right, and the rest of the cast feeds into the over-the-top comedic archetypes. So while Hope is a feminist-worthy hyper-competent character frustrated with the nonsense around her, that is not least because she is the foil for the comedic nonsense going around her in the plot.
So, even if it's woke-compatible, it works on its own merits. Still cheesy / Marvel quippy / not everyone's jam, but not forced solely for the sake of itself either.
If anything- and this is only a post if someone actually wants fanfic-worthy idea crafting- I maintain the Antman series of movies could have been improved if it leaned into LGBT themes more, and had Antman- Scott Lang- be a gay man.
Dean
Flairless
5d ago
The flip side is that positions of power than can persecuted often draw a disproportionate share of the power-hungry and the sociopaths, and those are not the sort of archetypes I would believe only persecute the deserving (though they will happily do that).
Dean
Flairless
5d ago
The sentiment behind "there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos" goes back to at least 1890.
...there were yellow stripes in the middle of the roads in the 1890s?
Dean
Flairless
5d ago
The August 2021 airstrike was also the sort of the story that would have broken out soon after due to exceptional international visibility in Afghanistan, including substantial foreign media coverage. The NYT did not break the story as much as shape it's unfolding.
There are substantial differences between shaping an emerging media event, and instigating a media event yourself. When dealing with people attempting to shape discussion, what matters most is typically what they are trying to emphasize / lead the audience to and how. When dealing with instigated discussions, another distinct additional need is 'why now?'
You're lying.
You are grammatically confused.
The statement you quoted is referring to the RSP, in the section of the Euromaidan protest area they were associated with, not the police and the government area of control.
The court case establishes that a substantial amount of people were shot from the areas not under control of police.
The court case also establishes that the RSP person of interest, suspected of leading the RSP shooting from areas not under control of the police, has been accused of- though not proven to be in an Ukrainian court of law- having been secretly under the control of the Ministry of the Interior.
Shooting from areas not under the control of the police is what is implied by an accusation that shooters were presenting themselves as protestors, from positions within the protestor areas of control, having been serving a nominal role for the protestors within the protestor area for some time, until directed into action by the Ministry of the Interior to conduct a terror attack for anti-protestor purposes.
There is no requirement that the executors of a false flag terrorist attack in service of the government have to walk outside of the protestor area of control, to the government area of control, before they begin shooting.
It's unreasonable to assume people who see nothing wrong with celebrating the Ukrainian WW2 nationalist resistance among whose deeds was killing 100,000 Polish civilians are obviously not going to be squeamish about making martyrs out of a few protesters. During this court case, surviving protesters testified they were shot at by other protestors. In fact, it's probably easier to find nationalist fanatics in Ukraine than to recruit genuine sociopaths who would willingly shoot civilians from abroad unless you hired some freelancers from Mexico or Colombia.
Thank you for identifying nationalism as a motive you consider acceptable for shooting the protestors. I will even agree with you that it would likely have been easier for the Ministry of Interior to find fanatics in Ukraine, even if the nationalistic fanatics for a MOI-conspiracy would probably be nationalists more associating national interest with Russia than the Europeans. This is a motive compatible with the allegations of that elements of a far-right movement were secretly responsive to the Ukrainian security state aligned with Russia and opposed to geopolitical alignment with the decadent euro-liberals.
The translated excerpts show that these people started shooting at police from 5:30 am and managed to make them retreat. And the court also states that at least 10 people were shot by them. I mean, they were even shooting at foreign journalists. They were clearly pretty nuts.
The translated excerpts also show what these people were doing in the days before that 5:30 AM shootings, which is what you quoted was referring to and what you appear to be trying to frame a rebuttal to.
The court case noted they haven't proven there was a conspiracy to carry out this mass murder and violent protest, not that it didn't happen.
That is rather the heart of the point. The other part of the point is that these same words, word for word, apply to both conspiracies, as does the data of the court case.
The court documents you yourself pointed to as evidence of your framing do not prove, disprove, or try to address one false flag conspiracy theory over the other. The contents of the document are just as compatible with the anti-Euromaidan narrative false flag conspiracy theory (that the RSP were protestors unaffiliated with the government, and wanted the government to be attributed as responsible in the chaos) as the yare with the other pro-Euromaidan narrative false flag conspiracy theory (that the RSP were protestors who were secretly affiliated with the government, who wanted the protestors to be attributed as responsible in the chaos).
The court documents do not provide distinguishing evidence. It does not provide differentiation between long-standing competing hypothesis. They raise data on how a false-flag attack was carried out, not why a false flag was carried out or in whose service.
Dean
Flairless
8d ago
But whatever-- there's no point in fighting about who started it.
If there wasn't a point of who started it, you wouldn't have made the claim that was a proof of a lack of care of norms. That you are retreating from defending it is less an indication that there is no point, and more that it was a indefensible bailey you are retreating to your motte from once challenged.
It may have been a disposable soldier of an argument, but it was still a soldier you were happy to have fighting for your framing.
Okay. No_one posted their case, and it was not the one I was originally thinking of but one I am aware of.
This is one of the case which Ivan Katchanovski likes to cite as proving his Euromaidan-culpability false-flag thesis that he's spend his last decade publishing on. His inclination to refer to parts of it is directly correlated to how the contents support his thesis that the government was falsely accused for shooting protestors. For example, Katchanovski likes to gloss over section seven, and particularly the Court's scope exclusions that begin on page 13 noting-
- all instructions about the alleged commission of criminal acts by other persons named in both indictments, who were not charged and whose guilt was not proven in a legal manner and was not established by a guilty verdict of the court, in particular, aimed at the commission of a terrorist attack combined with mass murders, to stop and violent dispersal of protest actions, planning, preparation, giving and execution of criminal orders, instructions and commissions for this purpose;
Aka, any action not found guilty in a Ukrainian court of law is excluded from the verdict.
Which, in a steelman, is defensible in the judicial process, but not necessarily in a truth-seeking process where whether something happened as opposed to whether it was proven in a court of law. Particularly when the court of law approach might be complicated by things such as known evidence destruction or defection of key witnesses / perpetrators to a country outside of the court's jurisdiction, like Russia.
As such, Ivan Katchanovski is inclined to ignore, not comment on, or push past the court record's acknowledgement of an unproven-but-not-disproven, but highly relevant claim, of-
- as an unproven reference to receiving in the period from February 18 to 20, 2014 PERSON_376 a task from the leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to prepare for the commission of a terrorist attack and mass intentional murders, giving his consent to perform such a task personally and by organizing its execution by RSP fighters;
- as an unproven reference to receipt in the period from 08 h. 30 min. until 9 a.m. 00 min. On February 20, 2014, PERSON_376 was charged with a criminal order by the RSP forces, who were on the street. Instytutska, to carry out intentional murders in a generally dangerous way of the maximum possible unspecified circle of activists with the aim of intimidating them in order to completely stop the protests, as well as the fact of prior coordination with the commander of the PMOP of the tactics of actions of the RSP fighters for this purpose, a reference to the execution by PERSON_31 of the specified order when he , started on February 20, 2014 at approximately 8:00 a.m. 50 min. coordinate the withdrawal of units and special vehicles;
- as an unproven indication that all the accused in the period of February 18, 19 and until 08:00 a.m. 30 min. On February 20, 2014, in fulfillment of a clearly criminal order, they exceeded their authority and official powers, participated in the commission of a terrorist attack, committed the intentional murders of two or more persons, attempted such murders, or prepared for such actions;
- as an unproven reference to the purpose of giving PERSON_376 a clearly criminal order on the morning of February 20, 2014 to the subordinate fighters of the RSP specifically to commit a terrorist act.
I.e., an alleged- but never proven and thus disregarded for this court's purposes- core thesis of the 'government false flag' theory.
Now, Person_376 is not one of the person-descriptors identified in no_one's document. But, in short, the RSP were one of the armed elements in the Maidan Protestors, who were generally in the back / the deterrence for the police to charge and clear the square by force. Their existence / presence is about as old as Euromaidan itself. One of the sniper attacks on the morning of 20 Feb came from a building they had a heavy presence in, which is what this court case is about, which is also old news.
The anti-Euromaidan propaganda narrative is that these RSP key actors were Euromaidan provocateurs / foreign agents (of western powers) who staged in waiting for orders to conduct a false flag attack against Euromaidan protestors to blame the Yanukovych government and escalate the situation, with the intent to bring about the consequence the collapse of Ukrainian government as ended up happening.
The pro-Euromaidan propaganda narrative is that these RSP key actors were Ministry of Interior provacateurs / agents who were staged in waiting for orders to conduct a false flag attack against Euromaidan protestors to blame the protestors and escalate the situation, with the intent of suppressing the protests as part of the broader Ministry of Interior crackdown buildup, but which had the unintended consequence of collapsing the Ukrainian government as ended up happening.
Both pro- and anti-Euromaidan narratives are largely in agreement that the RSP key actors at the center of this case were staged false flag elements waiting for orders to conduct a false flag attack against Euromaidan protestors to escalate the situation, with the consequence of collapsing the Ukrainian government as ended up happening.
The difference in whose false-flag agents they were, and the intended result of the orders.
The court case doesn't take a position on this distinction, but Ivan Katchanovski likes to insinuate it does, and he is one of the main Reputable Scholars (TM) for the Euromaidan Is To Blame propaganda narrative.
If this is the case I am thinking of, it doesn't actually attribute the maidan sniper who was behind the protestor lines to the right sector, but rather places the sniper in a building they (and a lot of other people, iirc) were in (and out of) regularly. Which is not new-news, and has been a part of both* false-flag-sniper theories for some time.
*As both police and protestors were reported shot by snipers during the 20 February violence the tipped Euromaidan crisis into its resolution, both the pro-Euromaidan and anti-Euromaidan narratives have their own variation of 'the other side used a false flag sniper to shoot their own side and the other in order to make them feel the victim and escalate the crisis to its tipping point.' This has included the long-known point that one of the sniper firing points was from a building on the protestor side, which Ukrainian forensics verfied shot into the protestors facing the security forces from the rear.
The pro-Euromaidan theory is that the shooter was part of a covert government sniper to shoot both protestors and some police to force and legitimize the government crackdown the SBU had been advocating and setting groundwork for. The anti-Euromaidan theory is that it was a protestor-aligned provacateur, and while they agree that it was to escalate the crisis, this line of argument over time has increasingly downplayed / ignored the shooting of the police as well, which was the initially the line of argument 'proving' it was protestor snipers and that police were just protecting themselves.
(As I said- both attributions more or less agree that a false-flag sniper attack to shoot both sides was planned and conducted to escalate the crisis. Few argue that both sides coincidentally carried out their sniper plans on the same day.)
The building's primary relevance to either argument is as an argument to incredulity of if a government covert effort could get into a protestor building, and then escape in the chaos of the escalating violence outside. Pro-Euromaidan narratives don't find that unreasonable, and anti-Euromaidan narratives view it as so unreasonable that protestor-provacateur is the only remaining option. It tends to be the same sort of incredulity argument that maintains to this day that the Americans bombed the Nord Stream pipeline.
I had a larger post discussing some of the context of the 20 Feb snipers and post-Maidan propaganda dynamics, but then I realized there was a chance he was speaking of another court case I wasn't thinking of.
Dean
Flairless
9d ago
Bernie would not have won regardless of what the DNC did.
Sure, though whether his wing would have won the nomination is besides the point to whether his wing would have won a stronger and more prominent place in the administration that followed. But there's losing a fair contest, and there's losing a rigged contest, and there's losing a contest the managers swear is fair but then get exposed for rigging. @FirmWeird recalls some additional shenanigans I'd forgotten of exposed DNC issues.
The issue isn't mitigated because 'well, the Bernie wing wouldn't have won the nomination anyway.' That's a results-focused paradigm that only cares about the winner. A large part of the point of democratic contests is to persuade the losers of the election of the legitimacy of their defeat, so that they can work together afterwards. A betrayal of trust that doesn't actually change the results is just as bad for the people it disillusions as a betrayal that does change the results, the only difference is the degree or number of people it disillusions.
Whether Sanders would have built momentum after a better super Tuesday is a fair question. But it was a question that could not be answered because of deliberate efforts to prevent it from being asked.
And preventing it from being asked had tangible and visible effects on the trajectory of the Democratic Party, upto and including how rather than increase the leverage and influence of the economic-left/populist wing of the Party (the Bernie wing), the Biden consolidation then led to Biden compromising with the culture-left wing of the party, such as on DEI and trans-issues. This included manning decisions such as his promise to have a woman as his vice president, which followed progressive stack logic which led to Harris, who was a disaster.
I'm not making a claim that if everyone else had stayed in but Warren dipped out for the good of the populist-left then Bernie Sanders might have become Vice President. But the nature of a proportional representation system is that the people with the bigger proportions of the voter base get more influence in forming the next government, and if you want a coalition of people bought into the premise, conspiracies that their efforts are being conspired against don't exactly lead to inter-party trust, and do lead to the sort of inter-party conflict that followed.
Dean
Flairless
9d ago
Probably one of the worst short-term political play decisions in modern American politics on the part of the Democrats and their allies in the media.
Romney was, and probably will be remembered as, the last major Respectability candidates of the early 21st century Republican party. He was a compromise candidate who was about the best possible synthesis of red tribe considerations and blue tribe value, a Republican who was willing to accept the legitimacy in part of blue tribe framings, and cared about their opinions. He wasn't a perfect candidate for the Republican base, but a man that- outside of a specific election cycle- had a generally consistent reputation as virtuous, even if you disagreed. It was about as close to a synthesis of red tribe and blue tribe as you could hope for, even down to sincerely practicing affirmative action and having an adopted african-american grandson.
The character assassination of Mitt Romney- among which Democratic Senate Majority Harry Reid later defended with "We won, didn't we?"- was probably what I'd point to as the breaking moment where the Republican base revolt that became the Trump-MAGA movement began.
MAGA was in part a revolt against the Republican elite, including significant disatisfaction against Romney for not fighting back. The Republican party's commissioned autopsy that argued the party needed to move decisively to the left made that revolt worse. But almost as importantly the Obama '12 campaign discredited the argument by Republican centrists/moderates, and media commentators more generally, that what the red tribe needed to be treated with respect was to present a respectable candidate.
Romney was the candidate, and was still slandered and jeered. Virtue- and especially virtue as recognized by the media establishment that joined in the jeering- wouldn't be recognized when during an election cycle. And if virtue would not be recognized, nor would it be sufficient to win even if not recognizeed, then appeals to virtue were going to lose support compared to appeals to fight back.
Which, of course, Trump was happy to do... but Trump wouldn't have won without a disillusioned Republican base that no longer responded to appeals to respectability like Romney was willing to.
Dean
Flairless
9d ago
If that song lives in my head from now on whenever I hear JFK, I'm blaming you.
Not in the way it did, but easily in a recognizably similar way.
The Arab Spring revealed systemic issues that were underway well before 9-11, and which would have remained primed for violent escalation even without the American invasion of Iraq. People like to focus on how ISIS had an Iraq power base, but are less inclined to note the series of uprisings against the Assad dynasty or Saddam regime, or how the fruitseller in Tunisia who figuratively and literally lit the match was responding to bog-standard petty tyrants common across the region. Names and places would have changed, but the Middle East would still be a tinder box primed to start major- or even larger- humanitarian crisis. Iraq-Iran alone could light Syria in a different way, if an fruit-seller riot spreading to Iraq led to crackdown on the Shia majority when the Iranian paramilitary capability is already present across the region.
In turn, nothing about the Arab Spring divergences would have really changed the African inflows, or the Russian incentive to use humanitarian border rushes via Belarus, or so on. Deviations might change election cycles, but not fundamental drivers.
Dean
Flairless
9d ago
Ah, but he was sexy and had lots of sex. Women wanted him, and men wanted to be him.
Dean
Flairless
10d ago
The impression I got from the 2016 and 2020 primaries was that he lost because he wasn't popular enough with Democratic primary voters to win a national race
During the 2020 Democratic primaries, Bernie was positioned to pull a 'biggest minority in a divided field' win in the Super Tuesday primaries, where he was outpolling most competitors. This was after a strong early showing in contests, where to date Biden had been underperforming. This biggest-of-a-divided-field was notably the way Donald Trump started building momentum in the early 2016 Republican primary, where he never won a majority. The momentum-value of the primary win is what provided the growth opportunity in attention, endorsements, and so on that ultimately allowed Trump to win in 2016.
In 2020, things might have been different for Bernie since he was posed to do well on Super Tuesday, but do very poorly in later conferences where Biden had strong alliances with the southern black political machine Democratic parties. The Bernie party wing's bet was that they could leverage the momentum in early wins to build endurance and carry the campaign past this predictable barrier, where it might then open back up to a more even primary split once it went to more progressive regions.
The reason this didn't happen wasn't because Bernie's popularity dived, but because nearly all the major Democratic candidates at the time pulled out of the race and endorsed Biden, rather than split the field. Biden didn't get more popular as much as he had less competition for the centrist party vote, and so was able to win these early contests, and then cement victory with the Southern wing conferences, and thus cement the win. This was widely seen at the time as the Democratic establishment, which is to say Obama wing of the party that dominated at the time, pulling strings and applying pressure to the candidates who dropped out in favor of Obama's former VP.
Where the ass fuckery charge comes in is not only the Party establishment coordination in stage-managing the primary pool to shape primary outcomes, but also/especially the caveat of 'most' people pulling out. One of the main candidates who did not pull out at the time was the only one who was splitting Bernie's vote more than Biden's vote. Elizabeth Warren was also running on the progressive/left-wing track, despite herself having no chance to beat Biden either. This was likewise thought to be a quid-pro-quo of sorts between Warren and Biden, with Warren's network getting plenty of key postings in the administration. Had the left united behind Bernie, who was far less of a party man than Warren, it would have been the Bernie wing getting such posting potential during negotiations.
Combined, this was broadly seen as a two-part betrayal by the Bernie-left. It was a broader DNC betrayal of the Obama wing picking favorites to maintain its primacy in the party rather than letting voters pick via the nominal primary purpose, but it was also a betrayal by the more party-institutionalist Warren-left, who sabotaged a bigger left momentum in favor of selling out for postings and influence.
I'd submit an underlying root of the fear Trump inspires for many people is the fear of a lack of control.
This isn't a claim about what those people would claim as their cause of fear. This is more of a claim about a distinction between an artifact-level expression of something, which might have its own rational, and the underlying cultural dynamic that underpins such an expression. In the same way that people don't feel the monsters in horror movies as much as they fear the [primal fear of being hunted], where the monster is merely the artifact to express the underlying fear, people fear the sense of a [lack of control] more than actual policies they don't like.
It's not exactly a novel premise that the fear of losing control is associated with a variety of disorders that generally amount to various expressions of stress, anxiety, and (bad) attempts to compensate. Generalized anxiety disorder is characterized by a consistent state of worry, anxiety, and catastrophizing worst-case scenarios. Obsessive compulsive disorder is generally linked to constant intrusive thoughts and the corresponding efforts to mitigate them. Panic disorder goes with the fear of having another panic attack, and 'control' is re-asserted by trying to avoid the triggers that might lead to another panic attack... even though the existing psychological reference of overcoming trauma suggests that avoiding triggers can make issues worse.
Now, there are separate arguments/posts that could be made about whether [current society] dynamics make these sort of things worse. Whether dominant domestic political propaganda narratives by less-than-non-partisan mass media over the last decades might have accidentally encouraged anxieties, catastrophizing, or so on. Whether COVID pandemic policies and lockdown advocacy, which became partisan-coded in the US, might have had unintended consequences for the psychological health of large parts of the population. We've certainly had good effort posts by Motte posters in the past of how social contagion dynamics have shaped or propagated various cultural obsessions, and pathologies, associated with the worst of various culture war elements. Those arguments exist, but they aren't the argument here.
The argument here is that the fear of a loss of control is not just a real fear, but an underlying theme of a lot of fears, and that Trump rides that line in how he breaks people's world views of how the world works, and the sense of control it provides.
This part gets into the overlap of politics and psychology, which can come uncomfortably close to pathologizing your opponents, so please bear with me as I try to make more general points.
One of the individual human psychological needs is a sense of agency / autonomy, which require a degree of control. This is a pretty consistent theme research about how higher employee sense of autonomy correlates with job satisfaction, the esteem stage of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and the commercial applications/implications of player agency in video game design. Control is not the same thing as agency or even security, but they are overlapping dynamics. What it boils down to is simple: people don't like feeling helpless, and one of the aspects of being helpless is not having the power to control your context. It's the difference between having to stay put and take abuse, or being able to choose to walk away.
One of the less obvious aspects of this desire for a sense of control is that it does not have to be directly exercised by the individual, but can be 'outsourced' to other people or even other things. This is a function of what we call trust. A child does not need to be strong enough on their own to face the scary thing, but can cry for their parent, whose presence is reassuring despite the child's own agency not increasing. You can feel safer having a drink in public if you can trust that a friend, or even just a taxi driver, will get you home safer. Note this also can work in the inverse- whether you feel safe or uneasy in a neighborhood can come down to social trust.
Where this starts to interface with politics is the now often-underrecognized dynamic between citizens and chosen leaders who represent. This used to be much more explicit in the Roman patria system, which was a cornerstone of roman society and politics alike. Patria was a patron-client relationship in which reciprocal obligations linked the patron and the client, with client's support/subservience being in return for the patron representing their interests in issues ranging from legal courts to career prospects and so on. A key dynamic of this relationship, however, is that while it could be inherited, it could also be changed- the client who was not served by their patron could, in theory, shift to another patron. The reciprocal obligations of patria are long gone, and the premise is often downplayed or reframed in service of egalitarian cultural biases of western democracies, but you can see it in campaigns where candidate vows to fight for you on X issue. This is an appeal for outsourcing your sense of control to your chosen leader. You may not have the agency, but the politician does, and so a [sense of control] can still be maintained.
What is less obvious about this less-obvious political extension outsourcing the sense of control is that it can also extend to hostile actors.
There is plenty of research associating a conspiratorial mindset with a sense of control, which has a long and diverse history of exaggerating the influence and efforts of hated outgroups to frame them as far more powerful than they actually are. This has expressions in things like the joke about the Jew who reads the Nazi news paper to feel good about how powerful they are, but it also has less comical expressions in exaggerating elements of truth into absurdities. To pick an American-salient example, Russia certainly does spy on the US, and Russian troll farms do try to escalate the culture war, but it is more misleading than informative to claim that the Russians are the cause of American political polarization. Sometimes these are done for purposes of cynical deflection- it's easier for the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party to blame Russian interference for losing the 2016 election than Clinton's long history of doing Clinton-like things- but sometimes these sort of explanations go back to the psychological need for a sense of control even when it's clear you aren't the one with it.
Step back to the field of antisemitic conspiracies. This is a very old genre, and occasionally it gets very absurd. There is, for example, a reoccurring minor news story in the arab middle east of birds being detained (arrested, if you will) in rural areas on suspicion of being Israeli spies. While it is true that the Israelis have considerable espionage capabilities- that grain of truth referenced before- to date there is no reporting I am aware of that has ever validated the conspiracy as opposed to the far more mundane explanation. Israeli universities in Israel tag wild animals as part of research, and then release, and then the birds go where they will across the reason, carrying those tags. There is no reason for the birds to be in that particular country where it is detained.
One one hand, this conspiracy is silly. On the other, if we step back to the [sense of control] framing, it makes a fair deal more sense. The arabs in the broader levant are not exactly known for being high agency societies. Many are in uncontested monarchies or functional military dictatorships that are uncontested because of very established, and often very brutal, security apparatus that stamp on the sort of agency that goes against the state. Nor are they exactly in patria relationships with leaders who do have that sort of agency. There are certainly patronage relationships, but if the Arabs had the sort of regional agency and control they wanted, Israel wouldn't exist. They are people without direct or even delegated agency.
In this context, the [Israeli bird] is a demonstration of a lack of control. Despite their inability to impose upon the state of Israel, here is an artifact from Israel that is able to intrude upon them. They did not know it in advance. They were not able to stop it from occurring. And, well, everyone knows what the Israelis can get up to if they want. The [Israeli bird] could be such a thing. It's presence is a demonstration of helplessness and threat.
Except... by being an Israeli spy bird, a sense of control is being re-imposed via framing paradigm. The bird is not an aimless or chaotic event of chance, but an agent. That agent implies agency on the part of its jewish masters. One may not know the insidious jewish plan, but there can still be a plan. One may hate the control of the perfidious jew, but malign Jewish influence means that someone has some control over things. Even if control is held by a hated outgroup, it still validates the sense that there is control. It's just a contest/conflict of who has control, and how to wrest control back.
This is not a novel or Arab-specific issue. The conflict over the nature of the locus of control of society is a very longstanding paradigm conflict. Our departed Hlynka would occasionally write in his inferential difference series about how it manifested in the western enlightenment as part of the philosophical difference of enlightenment thinkers. The distinction between whether the loci of control of society is fundamentally internal or external, deriving from one's self or subject to imposition from outside context which could be controlled. This has longer arguments about how the [post-enlightenment left] tends towards the external locus of control theory which asserts you can control broader context, and the [post-enlightenment right] leans more towards an internal locus of control because you cannot control outside context, but that's non-central to this.
What I want to go back to is that other political conspiracy, and Trump specifically.
I made a point earlier that the Russian interference narrative could be cynically boosted as a means of blame deflection. Clinton and her wing of the party would rather attack her enemies / blame the Russians / hurt Trump than concede that she was a bad candidate. But cynical deflection isn't the only dynamic in play- it can also go back to the point of 'hostile control is better than no control.'
If Trump is an enemy of the nation, after all, by conspiring with Russia- something that the Democratic party convinced about half of Americans about- then control may have been usurped, but it fundamentally still exists and can be regained. Hence the resistance, the mass organized protests of the mostly peaceful variety, and of course The Secret History Of the Shadow Campaign That Saved The 2020 Election. The later was an actual conspiracy- or prospiracy if you will- of government officials, party officials, media interests, protest organizers, NGOs, activists, and more to coordinate efforts to change laws, manage protests, shape media coverage and all the other efforts done to Fortify Democracy and Save the Election. This very classic 'sense of control' mentality, and neatly aligns with the sort of world view that might sincerely believe that Trump conspired with Russia.
By contrast, if Trump did not conspire with Russia- if he literally came down that escalator and then proceeded to demolish a number of nation-dominating political dynasties who people felt had been in control- or nearly in control- for the better part of a quarter century, winning primarily because of how hated the party and political leaders were... and because no one operating within the rules could stop him... even as the Trump administration was an endless cycle of chaos and turnovers and a lack of organizational discipline...
Well, that's a victory of a lack of control.
But- for a time- the sense of control was restored. The election was Fortified. Covid was Locked Down. The Adults were Back in Charge. Trump was impeached (again), in court (again), and more reliable sense-of-control allies were being propped up in the Republican party. Liz Cheney was being set up to try and re-establish control of the Republican Party, so nothing like Trump could happen again, and the experienced hand of Biden meant the US was back in control.
And then everything stopped being under control, and Trump came back and smashed the 2024 election beyond a shadow of a doubt, and the sense of control was loss even more than it was with Trump 2016.
And if there's something people fear in general, it's a lack of control.
Dean
Flairless
11d ago
Dean:
"Male audiences might not want modern Hollywood female lead character because Hollywood writers often insinuate the woman of the show doesn't [want] them in her life."
Oomph. I'm glad that post resonated with someone, but shamed I had such a bad gap in the opening statement. Shamed!
(I fixed it.)
I can accept a great deal of your premise, but given how much anti-German propaganda in both wars was used to get the Americans into the conflicts, years after the wars had started and many of the greatest battlefield calamities and sovereignty violations had already occurred (on all sides), I'd say it's a bit of a stretch to say it was the American propaganda specifically that shaped the anti-German sentiment among Europeans. Certainly the French and the Russians needed no American inspiration, and the German violent-left had its own interwar ascendance (that was crushed, but still a rising).
If the propaganda claim aperture were widened to the allies in general, fellow Europeans they might be, I'd have no objection. Or even the British in particular, given their anglosphere influence through the language of the Americans, that might work in a stretch. But American propaganda being the decisive influencer of European views of Germany?
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