Getting the media to put its ass on the scale to help you is part of what it means to have an expertly-run campaign. Of course, the media in general leans Democratic, but that shouldn't necessarily be an excuse if you're a political strategist who is getting paid millions of dollars to help the Trump campaign. The Trump campaign strategists have done nothing to grab the narrative away from the Harris campaign ever since she replaced Biden as the Democrats' chosen candidate. It's been several weeks of nothing from them, meanwhile the Harris campaign is full steam ahead. What are the Trump campaign people even doing? What is their strategy?
I think that Trump has a problem in that compared to Harris he just seems old and he has been in people's political attention for nine years straight except for a brief interruption in Biden's first couple of years in office. Trump is still entertaining, but he's no longer the novel maverick, and probably a lot of people are just tired of hearing about him. Harris, on the other hand, is shiny, new, and relatively young for a recent Presidential candidate. There is an element in the voting population that loves shiny and new optics. Bill Clinton playing the sax, Obama flashing his pearly-white grin and talking about hope and change, etc. The Trump campaign hasn't managed to do anything to seize the national narrative away from Harris. I feel like they need to come up with something if they want to win.
Goodguy
10mo ago
Yes, at least as long as the government doesn't become totalitarian and use their guns to commit violence. But as I said in my original post, I'm increasingly having my doubts that our government in the US is seriously deterred by all the public gun ownership from becoming totalitarian, as opposed to having other reasons for not being totalitarian. Not necessarily altruistic reasons, but other reasons at least.
In my opinion, that might be a good thing for what I value. I would much prefer for some other arm of Tumpism to be stopped, not DOGE, since I value cutting government bloat... but at least it's something. My politics is based on the idea of keeping the left and the right stuck in a stalemate so that neither becomes dominant.
Now that Trumpism and the new right in general have given the woke a number of brutal punches and the woke is on the ropes in several ways, Trumpism begins to seem to me like the bigger threat, so now I turn my attention to strategies for doing some damage to Trumpism.
This would not have come about, other than that the left turned out to be weaker than I expected. I thought they would put up more of a fight, and that the stalemate I wanted would naturally come about, but I was wrong. The left has turned out to be a bit of a paper tiger and Trump's people have been running wild, which was never my preferred outcome. I just wanted to stop woke authoritarianism. So now I pivot yet again and, since the left turned out to be weaker than I had expected them to be, I now, despite having no love for the left, find myself wanting to at least prevent them from being crushed, since although I am neither left nor right, unfortunately the left is the only political force in the US with enough numbers to contain the right, just like the right is the only political force in the US with enough numbers to contain the left.
Goodguy
11mo ago
I am not saying that Harris' campaign is necessarily expertly run, but I am surprised by their adroitness. Even though they have much of the media's help, they still have been doing a great job of avoiding making any mistakes. So far the Harris campaign has been a slick, fine-tuned machine that has managed to hide all of her weaknesses and accentuate some of the Republicans' weaknesses.
The media leans Democratic, but that did not stop Trump from getting elected in 2016 and then only narrowly losing in 2020 (and that only after the pandemic). We clearly see that it is possible for a Republican president to get elected even despite the hostile media environment. So I think that Trump campaign strategists who are getting paid millions of dollars should not get to use the Democrats' media domination as an excuse for not doing a better job of marketing Trump's campaign.
Goodguy
6mo ago
I am a pretty moral person. I have a strong moral code. I am generally nice to others. I try to help people. I think that things like murder and rape are fundamentally wrong in an absolute way. And I have absolutely no problem with someone having sex with 100 strangers in an hour. The idea that there would be a moral issue about it strikes me as somewhat absurd.
As for drugs, I would prefer that people not get addicted to them, but there is no moral dimension about it for me.
I don't understand why you think this is such a big deal, given that it is legal for parents to homeschool their children or send them to private school.
Besides, modern technology means that pretty much any kid who wants to see porn, will see porn. Compared to the stuff that a kid can find in 2 seconds on the web, nothing in some LGBTQ book in school can possibly compare. Now of course, that doesn't mean that I'm a fan of having my tax money spent on such educational content. But then, I'm not a fan of having my tax money spent on about 90% of the so-called education system to begin with. Largely because modern techhnology means that pretty much any kid who wants to learn outside of school and has normal cognitive capacity can easily teach themselves.
It's possible. The Secret Service are humans, not superpowered ninjas from a movie. They are good at what they do, but the reality is that there are probably like 30 million people in this country who would happily kill Trump if they could do it and get away with it. The Secret Service has managed to successfully protect Trump for 10 years, through hundreds of outdoor rallies and so on. They're not perfect, so it's rational that they eventually fucked up. One might argue that it's weird that the two assassination attempts that we know of that even came close both happened shortly before the election, but that can be explained by the fact that just before the election is precisely when random lone wolves would be most motivated to try to kill Trump.
It might seem weird that the Secret Service would not do anything in reaction to someone telling them they see a guy on the roof with a gun... but at the end of the day, it's a job for them. We all have bad days on the job when we're tired or whatever. Besides, if I my job was protecting Trump for years and having to stand around in all kinds of weather conditions listening to him ramble for hours, and someone told me that there was a reason to think Trump might be about to get shot, I can easily imagine even as an elite Secret Service operator being like "fuck who cares, I'm tired of all this shit".
Goodguy
5mo ago
I'm very much not "woke", but I disagree with you on a couple of points. First, in my opinion "Denali" sounds much more awesome than "Mount McKinley". "Denali" sounds imposing, almost Himalayan. And "Utqiagvik", although I don't know how to pronounce it, at least looks better on the page than "Barrow". I don't see the benefit of replacing cool, exotic-looking foreign names for such places with Anglo names.
Also, I don't really mind getting rid of using Robert E. Lee's name on anything that is run by the government. I would be annoyed if the government was naming things after a man who fought to keep my ancestors literally enslaved just 160 years ago. Of course there's a slippery slope, because then one can argue we should also stop naming things after Washington and so on... but in any case, I don't think that it's unreasonable for blacks to ask that we stop naming public things after literally Bobby Lee, the top general in the Confederacy, just like it was not unreasonable for Latvians to want to get rid of Lenin statues after the USSR fell apart.
Goodguy
6mo ago
What sort of leftist academic would say that new housing construction is bad? I would think that, almost by definition, if you think that new housing construction is bad than you are not a leftist.
Goodguy
6mo ago
Well, women have a lot of options men don't have, such as merely existing and Meeting Someone who makes any financial concerns go away for them.
Many men also have that option, it's just that, like the women in question, they have to be willing to have sex with women whom they are not very attracted to, or not attracted to at all. One of the most common types of drama stories from low-income communities, for example, is "I pay the bills of this guy I'm fucking and he doesn't even commit to me".
Goodguy
10mo ago
Agreed, but it seems to me that empirical evidence shows that letting people make more of their own economic decisions clearly leads to much better economic outcomes, in general, than centralized economic control. I agreed with that ten years ago and I still agree with it today. To me the evidence for that seems overwhelming. However, when it comes to guns I am not so sure. Is it really the US' gun rights that are a major factor for why it, for example, the US government does not suppress free speech as much as England's government does? Or is it the explanation for that more of a cultural thing?
Also note that I am not advocating for the government to make all decisions for people. My attitude about the 2nd Amendment is more that I no longer believe that it is necessarily the best idea of gun ownership to be available to basically everyone except felons and people who have been proven to be mentally unstable. I think it might be better to revise the 2nd Amendment so that gun ownership is restricted to a significantly smaller subset of the citizenry that it is today. Not along lines of "what politics do they support", but more along the lines of "how likely are these people to be likely to use these guns purely for defense rather than in an attempt to obtain profit". Not necessarily saying that it is realistically possible for any laws to make such delineations well, but I am just trying to explain my current thinking.
Goodguy
1mo ago
Thinking of a lover being with another man in the present or the future distresses me. Thinking of a lover being with another man before I even met her does not affect me in the least bit.
You can't close the borders without restructuring major parts of the economy. As currently constituted, large sectors of the US economy depend on the cheap labor of, effectively, indentured servants from the third world. American consumers are simply not going to want to pay US citizen level wages to fruit pickers and landscapers. Even the most nativist Trump supporters, by and large, buy cheap Chinese products when they go to the store instead of seeking out things made in America, and they hire third world immigrants to do manual labor instead of seeking out American citizens, and it is likely that even if a nativist government forced consumers to buy American, those consumers would become annoyed because their living situation would feel worse for them. It would take major technological progress to replace the role of the third world indentured servants in our economy.
Goodguy
9mo ago
Granted, I've never been a father, but I don't see why it's supposed to be automatically humiliating or horrible in some other way for a father to know that his daughter is having sex with dozens of guys. Seems strange to me. As a father, as long as she's safe while doing it, why should I care? I like promiscuous girls, they're usually more interesting to talk to than non-promiscuous girls, and it's easier to get laid with them. I don't look down on them compared to non-promiscuous girls. It would be hypocritical for me to judge my daughter's promiscuity based on different standards than I use with women whom I want to fuck.
I assume that by Gnon you mean god. But these are extremely bold assertions to make. The idea that there is a god, and that there is such a thing as rights in any sense other than that of a social contract, and that god gives you these rights... all these ideas should be justified by some kind of argument, I think, not just stated blankly. Because certainly not all of us here agree with any of these assertions. I personally agree with you about qualia. I think that in some sense of the word "god", there may be a god. The hard problem of consciousness is real. But I do not believe in a god who grants natural rights, unless by natural rights you mean something more like a striving for those rights that is inherent to being human.
My own opinion is that "rights" are a legal fiction. They are extremely important, but they have no existence outside the context of a society with its particular laws, habits, narratives, and power dynamics.
Goodguy
10mo ago
Both. The two are connected because 2A rights have contributed heavily to making it so that the US is flooded with firearms, some of which are used to commit violent crime.
Goodguy
4mo ago
The way I look at it, Trump is:
- Someone who does a lot more outdoor rallies than most prominent politicians.
- One of the most reviled politicians in US history, among a large subset of the population.
The Secret Service might be good, but they are not perfect. It's not surprising if they just genuinely slipped up after almost 10 years of protecting Trump.
Goodguy
4mo ago
There is no real evidence that "they", as in some deep state group, even tried to kill him once much less 2-5 times. As for the color revolution idea, while I hated the 2020 riots, the notion that they were organized to hurt Trump has never made much sense to me. Realistically, such riots would tend to make as many people more likely to vote for Trump as less likely to vote for him.
Goodguy
5mo ago
If you want to find out how to commit terrorism, an Al-Qaeda instruction manual seems like a pretty good thing to read. If I for some reason wanted to go commit a terrorist act, I might go read one myself, even though ideologically I have almost nothing in common with Islamists and indeed, Islamic fundamentalism repulses me. Similarly, even though I am not a communist, if I wanted to learn how to wage guerilla war, I might go read something that Mao wrote. I've read Ted Kaczynski's manifesto several times even though I am not an anti-technologist.
I don't know about Roof because I haven't read the details, but Breivik and the Christchurch guy explicitly, repeatedly wrote that their motivations were ideological. Is there anything similar for the Southport killer?
Goodguy
8mo ago
Just because one owns an Al Qaeda training manual does not mean that one has been radicalized by Islamists. Al Qaeda knows a lot about terrorism, so if you want to do terrorism it might be a good idea to read their manual even if one's political ideology has nothing to do with Islamism.
Goodguy
1mo ago
makes sense that the revulsion is instinctual; from a biological standpoint women who intentionally seek out sex are malfunctioning since it's very risky for zero benefit.
Evolutionarily speaking there can be lot of benefit to a woman seeking out the best men instead of letting her genes' destiny just entirely depend on male decisions. This does not have to necessarily include seeking out actual sex with many men, but in practice the two will be correlated.
Goodguy
5mo ago
Did he really have to, though? What would have happened to him if he had said no to DEI? This isn't a rhetorical question on my part, by the way.
Discrimination lawsuits against Meta? They could have been fought.
Loss of woke employees? Not that significant for a company that people in general want to work for as much as they want to work for Meta.
Government interference of some kind? Not sure about this one. I can imagine the government forcing companies to add surveillance or censorship, since we have seen both happen, but I don't know if the government would bother to enforce DEI programs.
Angry investors? Also not sure about this one. How many would have cared?
I haven't watched the quite lengthy Rogan Zuck interview, so maybe someone could fill me in.
Goodguy
6mo ago
Sure, for example it's easy to find Nazis who think that Jews aren't actually smarter than non-Jewish whites on average despite the overwhelming evidence for the fact that Jews actually are smarter than non-Jewish whites on average.
That said, I don't think talking about "rote learning" or "in-group preferences" of East Asians is necessarily the same phenomenon. With some commenters, it is, but not with all. There is a real phenomenon to be explained of why it is that East Asians are not more successful than whites despite testing higher on various measures of intelligence. Jews, clearly, are more successful than non-Jewish whites on average, so in their case there is no phenomenon to explain. The idea that standardized tests make East Asians seem smarter than they actually are in the real world seems like a plausible explanation to me. It's not necessarily just some systemic racism theory.
Goodguy
6mo ago
Well, I already said that I think murder and rape are fundamentally wrong in an absolutely way, so certainly those have a moral dimension for me. But promiscuity doesn't.
Also, I'm not trying to argue from authority, I'm just pointing out that I'm not a moral relativist or a nihilist, and I may or may not be a hedonist depending on how you define hedonism, yet I don't see any moral issue with promiscuity.
An easier way to facilitate American homegrown fascism would be to let Trump and conservatives do whatever they want. What would result is not precisely fascism, but it would be close enough for all intents and purposes.
I have argued in the past that Trump does not pose any serious risk of fascism because the rest of society would be able to exert sufficient counter-force to prevent the true right-wing extremists around Trump from getting much done.
I might have been wrong. The left seems to have quietly accepted defeat, and the right is quite energized. The counter-force I expected is, so far, not materializing. And certainly plenty of people around Trump would create a form of fascism if they could.
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