MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
When you strike at the King, you must kill him.
The whole point of America is that the President is not a King. The whole problem here is that Trump is acting like one.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
Part of what happened is that Ukraine did not, in fact, start it. This is not a disputed fact. Trump is just lying.
"Donald Trump today announced that Incanto was a notorious paedophile and had been taken into custody" and "Donald Trump today falsely accused Incanto of being a notorious paedophile and took him into custody" are very different stories. You should respond to them differently. If a newspaper is able to distinguish between them in its reporting, it should.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
Calling "Ukraine", the self-chosen English language name of a sovereign state "the Ukraine", an obsolete toponym for an ill-defined region of Tsarist Russia, is a tell. In this case it is also a factual error - "the Ukraine" has never been an independent state, and didn't become one in 1991. If you want to spread Kremlin talking points on a forum where the average IQ is north of 115 then you should, as they say round here, git gud.
It is also, of course, relevant that Ukraine had not actually violated its purported obligations of neutrality at the time Putin invaded.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
You would also need a butler to supervise the assistants - managing staff is a job in itself.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
Canada didn't capitulate. They reannounced the same $1.3 billion border security package they already announced in December, allowing Trump to declare victory.
Trump got the same deal by going full psycho that he already got by speaking quietly and carrying a big stick, except that some of the backchat from the noise he was making cost his pal Elon a $100 million Ontario government contract.
On a scale of kayfabe where SpaceX is 0 and WWE is 100, the Canada/Mexico tariff rows have been about 80, and the Colombia row north of 90.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6mo ago
Both Vote Leave (Cummings, with Johnson as figurehead) and Leave.EU (Farage) made blaming the EU for specifically Muslim immigration a crucial part of their message. Cummings continues to insist (plausibly, given how close things were) that the Brexit referendum could not have been won without the "Turkey is joining the EU and then millions of Turks will come to the UK" lie. Cummings was also quite frank (on his blog during the period where he was out of UK politics) that "Get rid of the Eastern Europeans", while popular with core Brexit supporters, would have been a losing message with swing voters.
The debate between "near-zero immigration" and "continued mass migration but managed competently in the interests of the existing population" (at least in the UK, described as a "Canadian or Australian-style points system") is an intra-right one, not a battle for the median voter. From the point of view of the median voter, the immigration issue is closer to "nobody is illegal open borders extremists should be kicked out of the Overton window yesterday".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10mo ago
I think you have to be careful with some of the early Cold War material because the McCarthy era anti-communists were anti-communist in much the same way that modern anti-racists are anti-racist - while they did oppose communism, they were far more interested in using it as a stick to beat their domestic political opponents with than actually defeating it.
In particular, the Canadair advert makes far more sense if you read it as using the spectre of communism to oppose secular education (which was a live political issue in several Canadian provinces at the time) rather than using the spectre of secular education to oppose communism. The same could be said about propaganda linking Communism to a wide range of centre-left causes including civil rights, unions, feminism, and water flouridation.
During the Cold War, "Communism is the ideology of the people who are pointing nukes at us and invading our allies" was probably the best argument against it from a normie perspective. In the early Cold War UK, "Remember the Nazi-Soviet Pact" was also a powerful argument. This was particularly important because "We were the people who opposed fascism first and most consistently, including through being the base of the Resistance" was the best argument made for Communism by the western European Communist parties post-WW2.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Ukraine as a people definitely can't survive Russian victory - Putin has made clear that he considers Ukrainians to be misguided Russians who need to be forcibly shown which country they actually belong to, and is implementing this policy in Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Ignoring the "Europe is doomed because they are not following my preferred policy" style of arguments, the big ones are:
- The fertility crisis among the productive classes in Europe is worse than the US (but not as bad as first-world Asia)
- Europe is not self-sufficient in food or energy
- The places in Europe you can go to escape the NIMBY cities are much less attractive than Texas.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
As I said, a substantial minority of Trump supporters are straightforwardly malignant. "I don't care any more, I just want to watch the world burn so other people suffer as much as I did" is a perfectly comprehensible response to imagined (or even real) oppression, although not a creditable one, or a platform anyone could win an election on if they were clear about what they were doing.
I do not think "the Western proletariat" is a unitary actor, or that they support right-populist parties by supermajority. To the extent that the views of working-class Trump supporters are visible, they voted for Trump in 2024 to get cheaper eggs, not $20/hr non-union assembly line jobs.
In any case, tariffs are a tool and not a policy. The signals about what policy Trump is trying to achieve with tariffs are, to be polite, confused, but looking at the administration's policies in the round, I do not see any evidence at all for "bring back the type of union manufacturing jobs the 1950's economy was built on". I do not see much evidence for "bring back manufacturing" - we know what a manufacturing-focussed industrial policy looks like and how it uses tariffs because most countries have been pursuing one most of the time from the Age of Exploration through to the Bretton Woods Era. Critically, the tariffs vary by product type (with the highest tariffs on manufactured consumer goods) much more than by country of origin.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
I do not think Musk could have done what he did at Tesla and SpaceX if he was not orientated towards objective reality. Clearly there was a lot of fake-it-till-you-make-it puffery, particularly at Tesla, but it mostly involved over-optimistic projections, and Musk didn't make obviously false statements about the present.
It is possible Musk at DOGE is still orientated towards reality, but he has taken up lying on an industrial scale. But most people who successfully make a Big Lie part of their public persona end up high on their own supply.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
I think conservatives are pretty unanimous that FDR was a problem for America.
I think liberals agreed, and continue to agree, that nobody should have as much power as FDR did. The standard pro-FDR view is that only reason why FDR was not more of a problem for America (the left agrees that he engaged in at least one egregious abuse of power - the internment of Japanese-Americans) was that he was a man of exceptional virtue in a way that you can't afford to rely on. There were two major bipartisan changes to the system post-FDR intended to stop anyone having that much power ever again - the APA and the 22nd amendment.
FDR's contemporaries thought, correctly, that running for a third term was a breach of the mos maiorum. The only reason historians forgive him for it is that he went on to be an effective wartime leader.
FDR died in office at 63. I do not think the alternative history where he lives to 75 works out well for American democracy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8mo ago
The reason why the Puerto Rico as trash island gaffe may be cutting through in a way which the average "Republican says something vaguely racist" or "Democrat insults the rustbelt" story doesn't is that it isn't just an attack on the outgroup. The much bigger issue is that it may be, and can be spun as, a mask-off moment about who the outgroup is.
The big positive message of the MSG rally, and in my view the Trump campaign more generally, is "Real America is uniting behind Trump to crush the external enemy (illegal immigrants and an unspecified subset of undesirable legal immigrants) and the internal enemy ("far-left lunatics", which has a deliberately ambiguous meaning but appears to include the Democratic politicians letting the external enemy in). To make this work, Trump has to define "Real America" broadly enough to have enough votes. And, at the margin, the key groups that the Trump campaign have successfully included in their idea of "Real America" in a way previous identarian-right movements failed to do are black men with otherwise-conservative views and well-assimilated Hispanics. And the big threat to that outreach is the not-unreasonable fear among well-assimilated Hispanics that Trump's coalition don't see them as Real Americans, even as Trump himself insists that they are. If Musk or Vance or some other sufficiently prominent Trump supporter said "Actually, Puerto Ricans aren't real Americans" and didn't get slapped down then Trump would be toast.
Apart from Hinchcliffe, every other speaker who does a funny bit is clowning on MAGA's outgroup (mostly named Democratic politicians, but also California, flag burners, art fags etc). And that is what you expect at a unity rally. There is a time and a place for equal-opportunity clown-on-everyone comedy, but right after prayers and the national anthem isn't it - and in any case from reading the transcript of Hinchcliffe's bit, the nearest thing to an ingroup roast is where he suggests his own mother might have joined in the pet-eating in Ohio. There are, for the obvious good reasons, no jokes about inbred West Virginians, SSDI cheats, or fat divorced middle-aged men, and I do not think the audience would have laughed at them if there had been. It certainly looks like Hinchcliffe was put on the agenda to clown on the outgroup - probably a poor choice (and definitely a poor choice in hindsight) because his MO as a comedian is to go after everyone.
So when Hinchcliffe calls Puerto Rico a trash island and the audience laughs (from listening to the video, my guess is that a lot of them don't, but Hinchcliffe treats the half-laugh as a slow audience to warm up rather than a joke that went down badly, which does the Democrats' work for them spinning it), the message sent is "MAGA considers Puerto Ricans to be the kind of people it is okay to clown on straight after the national anthem at a unity rally." And that message is not consistent with the appeal to assimilated Hispanics that Trump has, to date, been making successfully. "Trump hates Puerto Ricans" is spin, but it is true that Hinchcliffe and the rally attendees who laughed at him think Puerto Ricans are their outgroup, that the Trump campaign chose Hinchcliffe to speak straight after the national anthem, and that Trump is sending flacks to deflect blame for what Hinchcliffe said rather than using his bully pulpit to say how much he loves Puerto Ricans.
Is any of this going to affect the election? Probably not, because nothing seems to be affecting the election - from outside it feels like everyone made their mind up within 2 weeks of Biden pulling out, and we are just waiting to see which side in a 50-50 nation has the better GOTV operation. But "Republicans think Puerto Rico is trash" is news in a way which "Biden thinks Republicans are trash" is not, so if anything is going to affect the election at this late stage, Hinchcliffe's gaffe is a candidate.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9mo ago
- He's guilty.
- The prosecution was inexcusably sloppy, given that this was a capital case. Why was there no inculpatory forensic evidence? There is no reason for the prosecutor's DNA to turn up on the murder weapon, even though it isn't exculpatory. This guy isn't some kind of sophisticated super-criminal who can cover his traces leaving no evidence, and in any case he broke in expecting to commit burglary, not capital murder.
- The US has a tradition of "punishing" prosecutorial doofusery by letting guilty criminals go rather than, say, getting the marshall to paddle the delinquent prosecutor in open Court. This case seems close to the margin where the prosecutors have forfeited the right to keep their conviction, despite the guy being guilty.
- The SCOUTS doctrine about race-based striking of jurors is incoherent and unenforceable. England abolished juror strikes (we still allow challenge for cause, but its vanishingly rare) and it didn't do any harm.
American should put as much effort into getting capital cases right first time as you do into the interminable post-conviction litigation.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
geographical indicators
The geographical indicator row is not primarily a protectionist one - the EU is demanding that other countries protect geographical names so that (for example) American winemakers can't call their Champagne-style sparkling wines "Champagne" in the US domestic market. The GI row is analogous to IP rows which end up as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
All successful civilizations controlled female sexuality heavily,
CisHajnal Europe (from about 1000 AD) less than most*, and we are the most successful civilisation by far. The socially optimal amount of male control over female sexuality may well be higher than what we have now, but it is lower than what arises by default in the vast majority of societies.
One of the sources of confusion here is that people misunderstand the 1950's social model as a free-market outcome. Women working outside the home was and is fundamental to modernity (the first factory jobs were pink-collar) and the societies that better accommodated it outcompeted the ones that did not - notably on the battlefield in the World Wars. The 1950's housewife - i.e. the idea that respectable working class married women should not work outside the home - is a result of post-war America (and post-war Europe once it had repaired the war damage) deciding that is both rich enough relative to historical expectations and egalitarian enough to prioritise leisure over wealth accumulation. The whole point of the social model was to give each respectable family access to 40 hours a week of paid work at above-market wages, but not the ability to get ahead by working harder than that. Because if families can compete for social status by sending mum to work, empirically they will. Famously, this is what drove Elizabeth Warren to anti-feminist heresy in The Two Income Trap.
* Hoe-based agriculture produces the least patriarchal societies, plow-based agriculture produces more patriarchal societies, and animal herding produces even more patriarchal societies. Hunter-gatherer societies are all over the place. Premodern cisHajnal Europe is comfortably the least patriarchal plow-based society.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
Last time out, Trump surrendered to the Taliban. He should probably have hired the French to give his successor surrendering lessons, because Biden badly botched the implementation of the surrender agreement.
I am going to withhold judgement on whether this makes the United States a super-hegemon.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
We never actually cared about tge genocide except as propaganda.
WW2 = good wasn't about the Holocaust at the time - we didn't know about the Holocaust at the time the key wartime propaganda was being made (Casablanca is still a great movie, but at a technical level so was Triumph of the Will). It was about Hitler being a madman bent on world domination through aggressive war. The Nuremberg verdict (at a time when we mostly did know about the Holocaust) explicitly said that the most serious charge against the Nazis was starting WW2. In terms of the human cost of Hitlerism, this was mindbendingly obvious to anyone who was around at the time - the Holocausted Jews::War Dead ratio is an order of magnitude, even before you consider the wounded and the economic cost of the war.
At some point towards the end of the 20th century the alliance between the US Jewish and Black lobbies convinced the English-speaking world that the main crime of Hitler was racism with aggressive war and mass murder as aggravating factors. Nobody who lived through WW2 thought this.
Putin = Hitler and, before that, Saddam = Hitler are a return to an older and more accurate version of the Mustache Man Bad narrative (You occasionally saw Galtieri = Hitler in the UK for the same reason around the time of the Falklands war) - that countries trying to expand their borders by wars of aggression are in effect hostis humani generis. This idea goes back to the aftermath of WW1 - modern warfare turns out to be so destructive that an uncontroversial part of the post-war settlement is an explicit agreement among the Great Powers to repudiate aggressive war as a tool of policy. The Senate Republicans object to the implementation of that principle through the League of Nations, but they don't object to the principle and the Coolidge administration pushes a separate treaty enshrining the principle in international law. Post-WW1 democratic Germany also enthusiastically embraces the idea. And Hitler proves it right by starting off invading Poland and going on to commit all the crimes. The USA didn't care about genocide in Eastern Europe. But the policy-making elites on both sides of the aisle did care about a grand-scale repudiation of the post-WW1 consensus against aggressive war. And, at least after the fact, the American electorate agreed.
My thoughts on war are: it has to benefit us in some way, it has to be probable that us getting involved will mean achieving the results that benefit us. To me this is simply a saner way to think about going to war. If it’s not going to create stability in the region...
Hitler, Saddam and Putin all waged aggressive wars with the primary purpose of territorial expansion, backed by vague claims of right that don't recognise a relevant limiting principle. This is the most serious possible destabilisation - it's total war with everything at stake. The last time a Great Power embraced aggressive war as a policy tool, it ended up with cities nuked. Putin is even more explicit than 1939-Hitler that his aims are genocidal (in the technical sense that he wants to erase the idea of Ukrainian nationhood, not that he necessarily wants to exterminate the pre-war population of Ukraine).
The claim that the USA has no stake in Ukraine is the claim that the USA has no stake in the post-WW2 international order continuing to exist. There are people in Trumpworld who do think this - if I take the rambling about Canada/Panama/Greenland seriously-but-not-literally, Trump is saying that the USA is better off in a law of the jungle world where you are free to use aggressive war or the threat thereof as a tool of policy in your sphere of influence and Putin is free to do the same in his. The fact that the movement advocating this calls itself "America First" and is bankrolled by an anti-semitic auto-industry billionaire is too chef's kiss for words.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10mo ago
It makes the land generally inhospitable to tyrants.
The practical outcome of the US government being afraid of its armed citizenry wasn't a bulwark against tyranny, it was the enabling of Jim Crow (which, for the avoidance of doubt, was tyrannical oppression from the point of view of its black victims). During WW2, the Feds acquired a large standing army sufficient that the government was no longer afraid of its armed citizenry, the American people elected the man who embodied the values of that army to the Presidency, and the South folded in short order.
Given
- the semi-official status that the Dunning school of history had in the South
- the relationship between 60's and 70's movement conservatism and Southern resistance to civil rights
- the fact that the Cincinnati Coup was led by Southerners (one of whom was probably a racist murderer)
we can be reasonably confident that the modern 2nd amendment movement centred around a politically-active NRA loosely aligned with movement conservatism was founded by people who thought that gun culture was good because it enabled Jim Crow, not in spite of it. The viewpoint that the 1st Klan and the Redeemers were justified resistance to tyranny, that Jim Crow was the liberty the 2nd amendment existed to protect, and that the Feds imposing civil rights on the white South was a tyrannical usurpation, was entirely mainstream in right-wing circles in those days.
The problem of political violence does not have a technical solution - there is no substitute for civic virtue. A government that has the technical capability to protect you from warlords has the technical ability to oppress you if it chooses to. And an (organised or unorganised) militia which has the technical capability to protect you from a tyrannical government has the technical ability to overthrow a non-tyrannical government and take up warlordism* on you if it chooses to. Empirically, warlordism is worse for the people who have to live under it than tyranny. The American approach of setting up the nation-in-arms as a counterveiling power to the armed forces of the democratic state has failed - the worst incident of democratic backsliding in American history was imposed on the democratic state violently by a section of the nation-in-arms. The approach to the same problem taken by the French Revolution was to set up a conscript army in such a way that the nation-in-arms is the armed forces of the democratic state. That approach failed fast and spectacularly in France, though it seems to have worked very well in Switzerland. It remains as central to the democratic mythos of Continental Europe as the 2nd amendment and the Minutemen are to the democratic mythos of Red America.
* I am happy to make the mildly tongue-in-cheek claim that the actually existing form of government in the South between the withdrawal of Federal troops in the 1870's and the establishment of functioning Jim Crow state governments in the 1880's and 1890's was warlordism, but defending it would take more space that one Mottepost.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
15d ago
Are autoandrophiles even a thing? Blanchard was sceptical.
Heck, now the option of identifying as non-binary is more salient, FtMs are barely a thing for autoandrophiles to be a sub-thing of.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
though in latter years the focus transitioned from historical reconstruction to maximizing tournament-effectiveness.
Interesting - I would have assumed that the historical masters had refined their styles to be close to optimum given the weapons available. Does tournament-effective differ from historical because modern fencers have better techniques than the historical masters, or because there is something artificial about modern tournaments which mean that historical combat-optimised techniques are not tournament-optimal?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
The Court doesn't need to decide hypothetical cases (and, indeed, is prohibited from doing so by Article III of the Constitution). The Court has to decide the instant case, where the prisoners are being held by El Salvador on the instructions and at the expense of the United States.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
The liberals supported the 22nd amendment too. "We should never have another FDR" was not a controversial position once the war was over and the Japanese internment camps stopped feeling like a good idea.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
It all seems like a very shallow dispute.
The core dispute here - is a determination by the President that an "invasion" exists under the Enemy Aliens Act justiciable - is not shallow. It is as fundamental as constitutional disputes get. Either legal immigrants enjoy the rights that the Constitution grants to "persons" (as opposed to "citizens of the United States") or they do not. And if the administration's interpretation of the Enemy Aliens Act is correct, then they don't - because the President has the right to grab any non-citizen they want and ship them off to a foreign prison without meaningful judicial review.
Ignoring the merits for a moment (and you shouldn't - it is probably the most important constitutional case since the War on Terror), the procedural issues are not shallow. The problem of cases of national significance being heard by forum-shopped district court judges has been getting worse for a long time and has hurt both sides (nothing being done to Trump is fundamentally different from what Judge Kacsmaryk did to Biden), and probably requires Congressional action to fix - a process for enjoining facially illegal executive policies is necessary, and right now that process is to file suit in any district court with jurisdiction. If district courts just stop hearing this type of case then there are a whole load of illegal or unconstitutional policies that can't be litigated. (Including, among others, the Biden student loan scheme - these issues are profoundly bipartisan). And the procedural moves taken by the administration are utterly outrageous to the point where a private litigant who tried it would go to jail without passing Go - the administration moved the subject matter of litigation out of the jurisdiction while the hearing was going on in the courtroom and the government lawyer claimed not to know what was going on.
So the issues we have at stake are:
- Do legal immigrants (including green card holders - if there is an legal "invasion" then they are exempted from the Tren de Aragua proclamation as a matter of grace and not obligation on the part of the administration) have rights, like at all?
- What is the procedure for judicial review of an executive policy which may be facially illegal and cannot or should not be litigated piecemeal by individual litigants with standing?
- Can the administration circumvent court processes (including habeas corpus) by flying detainees out of the country to a foreign prison before the judge has time to finalise an order?
You take a sentence I posted out of context (I go on to point out that bullshit is a better framework for this type of statement than lies), and respond with a bunch of barely-parseable word salad that looks like (and is, when finally parsed) an allegation of dishonesty, and you accuse me of lying like a lawyer?
Trump said that immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats. As a result of him saying this, some of his target audience of low-information swing voters now believe that immigrants in Ohio are eating dogs and cats, and are therefore more likely to cast an anti-immigration vote at the election in November. Generating this change in belief was a major purpose of making the statement. Given background that motteposters know and the debate audience probably didn't, the fact that Trump said "dogs" and not "cats" may reveal interesting information about his thought processes that I hope to elaborate on in a later effortpost.
I am making the conjunction of the above claims, with the intention that they be taken seriously and literally. If you disagree with me about the facts, the spirit of this board is that you should identify the claim you disagree with rather than spewing insinuations.
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