JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
Formerly "SandwichWarrior" and "The Upright Man", may or may not be feral, is most certainly quixotic.
User ID: 4009
If our measure of "competence" is the ability to use policy to effect desired changes, I don't see how you can arrive at the conclusion that Obama was competent and that Trump is not.
It seems to me that your complaints about Trump boil down to aesthetics over effectiveness. Trump and to a lesser extent Rubio are arguably two of the most effective and transformative US politicians recent memory. When was the last time a "small-government republican" to actually took meaningful steps to reduce the size and scope of the federal government? When was the last time a president of either party took meaningful steps to reduce illegal immigration, or crackdown on benefits fraud? Excluding Trump, I feel like we'd have to go back to before the Towers fell.
Pretty much all of the complaints I'm seeing in this thread have this whiff of a career line officer complaining about how unfair it is that the insurgents are utilizing guerilla tactics against him instead of lining up to be killed like "proper soldiers".
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
Are you able to define "competent" in this context?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
Are you under the impression that I am a California Democrat?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
I don't know if Trump has any deeply held beliefs about Iran, but Vance, Rubio and Hegseth certainly do, and I get the impression that Rubio and Hegseth in particular are less concerned with what is "popular" than what they see as "right".
Inflation is up
First off I want to go on the record and say that I think it sucks that you're getting downvoted.
That said, in reply to your post I don't think those disagreements from the 90s and early 2000s ever really went away so much as they were "put on hold" for a bit in the wake of 9/11 and that media fragmentation is largely the media's own fault. I think that they are the ones who chose to chase their incentives off a cliff, and that NBC and CBS could've learned a lot from the likes of Michael Jordan and Dolly Parton.
Regarding pundits, Jeffries, Mamdani, and Piker have all appeared together and both Mamdani, and Piker have both endorsed killing as a legitimate political tactic and the killing of Charlie Kirk in particular. Yes, Mamdani has since apologized for and deleted his prior statements but pretty much everyone on the right suspects this is "Taqiyya" rather than a sincere change of heart. Meanwhile Jeffries as leader of the house democrats has been one of the the more vocal proponents of #Resistance and the lawfare against Trump as well as flatly stating that when the Democrats regain power they intend to use the powers of the state to make life hell for Trump and any who supported him.
Maybe it's hyperbole maybe it's not, but to me it sure as shit sounds like Jeffries' intends to "to hurt the outgroup as much as possible" should he get the opportunity, and if you were Trump or a Trump voter would you bet your livelihood on staying in his good graces?
Maybe I'll continue my broader point in a new thread.
I look forward to reading that.
These are all fair points.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
If you have ground truth information, you don't need prediction.
I agree and yet I have seen 6tjk Opt-out (and for a moment as it appeared you) argue otherwise. The question was a bit of High Energy Particle Ethics intended to cut through all the hedging and the bullshit to get at what you truly believe.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
And "in the nicest possible way" you seem to be tying yourself in knots to avoid answering the question.
It's only a "gotcha" if you think you might be in the wrong.
The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.
- Deuteronomy 24:16
You want to talk about "shitholes"? Louisiana is over 30% black and still manages to have a higher GDP per Capita than most of Europe.
You say you're "anti-immigration of bad genetic fits."
I am both anti-immigration and pro-deportation of anyone who isn't going to join me in standing for the national anthem at a baseball game.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
I didn't say anything about a "brown majority" and even if I did it would be a mere hypothetical. The America I want wasn't built and created on the basis of being "88% white" the America I want was built was built and created on the basis of being 88% Christian.
I am in fact a real person with some functional ability (however limited) I can both be racists and anti-communists at the same time
For sure, but if you were forced to choose between being racist and being anti-communist which would it be?
But just for fun If I had to choose someone from my race or someone with the right beliefs whose Haitian I am choosing my race. Bill Ackman’s daughter says she learned to love communism at Harvard. We can fix her and we can fix her children. So I’ll take that person everyday.
Well given what I just asked I appreciate you having the courage to put that on the record but in case it wasn't already obvious, I am taking the opposite track, if given the choice between a capitalist country with a substantial black and brown population and a communist country with an almost exclusively White and Asian population I am choosing the former without hesitation.
Harvard Delenda Est
That question presupposes that a) those two things are orthogonal,
Are you trying to suggest that a "white man" would never wish death upon another "white man"? If I "pressupose" i do so with ample reason. Nor do I believe that you can extract more accurate answers to the latter queries from the color of one's skin thai I can from context clues like how someone speaks, how they dress, and to what God or gods they pray too.
So as with Opt-Out I pose the question again, do you really believe that I should care more about who's someone father is than whether that person shares my interests?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
You're wrong.
It is in fact "an either/or" because when push comes to shove a person can only have one top priority.
So I pose the question again, do you really believe that I should care more about who's someone father is than whether that person shares my interests?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
But as far as DNA is essentially Code then people who share DNA are likely to behave in the same way and if the fathers program does murder it is likely Sons code will do murder. Etc.
I pose to you the same question I've posed to 6tjk, hanikrummihundursvin and a few others on this forum.
Do you believe that I should care about who's someone father is more than I should care whether that person shares my interests or wants me dead?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
I don't think MagicalKittycat's paraphrase is supported by the text of the opinion.
This is par for the course with them.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
Their model of the world is that the left and the right have irreconcilable differences, liberalism and tolerance is a failure, and American society is disintegrating as partisanship increases and everyone's goal becomes to hurt the outgroup as much as possible.
Is their model necessarily wrong? It seems trivially true to me that the left and right have increasingly divergent views on basic foundational questions like the existence of free will and what constitutes "basic human dignity" or "a legitimate authority". Disagreements on which the Covid lockdowns and "Summer of Love" threw into stark relief by rendering such disagreement immediately relevant to millions of peoples' livelihoods.
I don't think you (or anyone else here on theMotte for that matter) really grasps just how much damage was done to the social fabric in those 3 months between March and June of 2020 and how the memory of those three months is coloring current relations.
You shouldn't. You should look at where FC groups DSA members running competitive primaries with political violence. This fails to support his thesis in two ways - firstly, that strain of leftism struggling against the centrist core has been there at least since 2008 and is not indicative of violence increasing in 2026, and secondly that it perfectly mirrors populist movements on the right like the Tea-Party and MAGA trying to primary the establishment from the extremes. Presenting this as some new, dangerous phenomenon is ludicrous.
You are misunderstanding the concern, the DSA is not the new phenomenon. Violent radicals seeking to install themselves as the heads of an intellectual vanguard class are as old as leftism itself. The worrying new phenomenon is that wishing death on one's political opponents seems to be increasingly inside the Overton Window. Characters like Hakeem Jeffries, Zohran Mamdani, and Hasan Piker are not some wacky fringe, they're who both "moderate" democrats and the anti-populist right seem to be rallying behind.
As for potential for Civil War, I think the US literally dodged a bullet in Butler PA.
I don't know if it would have triggered a war on it's own but I'd put the odds at something like 1 in 3 which is far higher than I'd like. A lot would depend on what happens next, knowing what we know now about the US Secret Service's performance on the day I think there would be a broad consensus on the right that the "Deep State" had purposefully allowed the shot to occur. As I recall the democrats did not loose the 2008 election, in such a situation i think it would take a deft hand on the part of President Harris to avoid a serious constitutional crisis and I wouldn't be surprised to see a repeat of OKC or three.
Regarding why Charlie's killing didn't set things off, two big reasons spring to mind. The first is that Charlie wouldn't want that. Second is we had a President and AG who could believably claim that they were committed to bringing his killer to justice.
I may not be as "Blackpilled" as FacelessCraven but I do think you are being a bit unfair to them here when examples like "the mass unrest after Trump was elected in 2016". "Boston marathon bomber", and "The Congressional Baseball shooting" would seem to support their position rather than refute it.
Recall that Tsarnaev got the teen heart-throb treatment from MSNBC and Rolling Stone, Hodgkinson had a list of the House Freedom Caucus members in his pocket when he died, and that during the "unrest" surrounding Trump's election businesses weren't boarding up their windows because they were worried about Trump voters might do might do but rather their opposition would.
I will set aside the bit where you implied that the mere existence of the Tea-Party and MAGA are affronts to civilization of similar moral weight to a mass shooting. Something about Arson Murder and Jaywalking.
Here is what I think is happening. I think that Democrats and Republicans have a fundamentally different relationship with violence and very different ideas about when/where it is appropriate. The former views violence as a thermostat that can be dialed up an down to suit the situation, where the latter views it more as a switch or circuit breaker. I think this leads a lot of Democrats to mistake reluctance to engage in certain tactics for a lack of capacity, and I think that a lot of the consternation surrounding incidents like Kenosha, Jan 6th, and the ICE raids on Minneapolis, has stemmed from Democrats who had convinced themselves that the right would never "punch back" having that belief falsified.
Here is what I think is likely to happen. I think that if current trends continue, calls for violence against Jews, Christians, Transphobes, suspected Trump voters, and other "undesirables" will become an increasingly normal part of living in a Democrat controlled state or municipality. Actual violence will also become increasingly normal but get dismissed as a nothingburger or simply "the price of doing business". Eventually one of these perfectly ordinary incidents will cross a line or go viral in some way, and all the rhetoric here on theMotte will be about how everyone is overacting the switch will have been flipped, the circuit breaker popped.
I have argued previously that it wasn't the caning of Charles Sumpter that set the United States on the path to civil war but rather the reaction to it, and I see something like that happening here. The threat to the union is not that in a country of 350 million people he have a handful of mentally ill whack-jobs. The true threat to the union is that there seems to be a sizeable portion of those 350 million people who want the whack-jobs to succeed.
As someone who is an active participant in their state GOP I was aware of him as the head of TPUSA and occasional guest on various programs, and a feel a bit sad to confess that I had kind of dismissed him as just another talking head/pac-man to be managed.
I didn't become aware of his popularity and wider body of work, until after his death. Specifically I found out that had been shot via a text message from a family member who has never been particularly political, and was surprised that said family member even knew who he was.
And in that light, Mr. Tracey here is creating an opening in the shield wall and basically trying to convince men to grant the requested concessions... under the guise of a cry for civility/respectability. Or so I read it.
I have this idea for a post kicking around in my head about the difference between being "friendly" vs being "polite" and why calls for civility are often bullshit.
Long story short I grew up in an environment that put a high premium on manners and civility and I spent several years in an abusive relationship in part because my ex would always be appealing to empathy, civility, duty etc... and I would find it difficult to refuse. The key take-away ended up being a recognition at some point that they were doing that reddit atheist meme about how "this argument would never work on me, but maybe if I use it on you you'll do what I want".
I don't think "load-bearing" is quite the right word, but at the same time I don't think our resident norms-enjoying Democrats and anti-MAGA Republicans truly appreciate just how popular he was and how badly their reactions to his killing (be that open celebration of it, attempts to downplay it, or Norm McDonald-esque worries about potential blowback) played outside their liberal technocratic bubble.
Growing up my Grandad had a shelf in his study that was just packed with old paperbacks that included a lot of the original Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ian Fleming books. I devoured that stuff as a teenager, and as an enjoyer of both the books and the movies I would say that one of the core differences between "Book Bond" and "Movie Bond" is that the human cost of violence is much more of a central theme in the books than it is in the movies. Book bond is quippy but it's much more "gallows humor" than "oh my aren't we having fun".
As far as actors are concerned, Connery is iconic for good reason but I think Craig in Casino Royale is the clear winner in terms of being a faithful adaptation of Fleming's character with Timothy Dalton as runner up.
Aside from concessions made for the change in time period/setting, 2006's Casino Royale is an honest adaptation of the novel with a lot of scenes like Meeting Vesper on the Train Scene and Stairwell Fight (along with it's immediate prelude and aftermath) lifted beat-for-beat from the book. Meanwhile, while neither of Dalton's outings as Bond are direct adaptations of a Fleming story, I do feel like they captured "the vibe" of Fleming's stories.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
Sean Davis?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
If it is the right thing to do there should be no music to face.
And this is where where David Friedman and Victor Davis Hanson would tell you that there is always music to face.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
This is just self-sabotaging. If vigilante justice is the right thing to do, then it is also right that the vigilante not be punished for it.
I disagree. I think that it is possible for an act to be both "necessary" and "evil", and that an act being "justified" or "understandable" does not necessarily make it "good".
Do they?
Assuming that the situation in California is representative, something like 40% of all care givers that receive government funding are PO boxes with no physical address, how do we know that they are taking care of anyone at all, much less multiple someones?
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