MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
you may as well give up the entire American project right now
The framers were very clear that the system they were setting up relied on the electors exercising a certain discernment in the choice of President. If mixpap is right about Trump's character, and he is susceptible to low-effort social media campaigns in a way which the vast majority of people who are paying attention and have 90+ IQs are not, then the willingness of the electors to elect a man like that to the highly responsible and sensitive office of President of the United States is a "you may as well give up the entire American project right now" level failure of the system.
there's no hope left, the Russians could hit anyone lower down in the government with the same weapon.
No - the weapon doesn't work close to universally. We know that because Tim Pool and Lauren Southern had to be paid to spout Russian propaganda on Twitter. If Russian social media trolling worked on all MAGA midwits they would have done it for free.
Of course, the alternative hypothesis, that the alternative media and other voices have been correct about the US' pivotal role in starting the Ukraine conflict
I was alive and awake in 2014 and 2022. The troop movements were detectable by satellite - the invasion was definitely coming from Russian-controlled territory and not, say, the United States. The people saying now that the US started it were mostly spending January 2022 insisting that Russia wasn't going to start it, so I don't see why you find them so correct that you would believe them over your lying eyes.
he doesn't actually want the war to continue,
Nobody wants the war to continue. That Trump wants the war to end with a Russian victory is not in doubt - Trump has said it, Lavrov has said it, Trump's opponents have said it. That other people (including sufficiently many Ukrainians to sustain the level of war effort we are seeing) want it to end with a Ukrainian victory is also not in doubt. Russia is not currently open to peace without victory, and Ukraine probably isn't either. The rest of us can either shut up or pick a side. Trump has picked the Russian side, and the rest of us can judge him accordingly.
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
9mo ago
I agree with your points on the merits of "Fort Liberty". "Fort Sherman" or "Fort Burnside" would have been better given both generals won important victories for the USA in the area. But ostentatiously refusing to use the official name of the base is clearly an attempt to dogwhistle something, and the rules of this board require me to charitably assume that what they are dogwhistling is support for the MAGA campaign to retain military bases named after white supremacist traitors, rather than actual support for white supremacism or treason.
In any case, "Troops from nearby Fort Liberty have not been deployed to the relief effort. Does anyone know why not?" is an attempt to "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion." "Fort Bragg or whatever it's been renamed to" (when the correct name is well-known and can be found with thirty seconds' Googling) is what you say if the only audience you care about is the kind of person who cares strongly about naming military bases after white supremacist traitors.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
If my experience of Brexit is any guide,
If my experience of Brexit is any guide, the people who told the necessary lies to get the median voter to believe that the government was their enemy and the system that had delivered decades of peace and prosperity should die in a fire are high on their own supply and it is going to end in avoidable harm to the country, landslide election defeat, and wailing and gnashing of teeth in opposition.
To take an obvious example, if DOGE and its supporters believe what they are saying on social media about how closing down USAID is successfully defunding a vast left-wing conspiracy then their OODA loop doesn't have ground truth in it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
I mean, on other policies, we've already had pro DEI bureaucrats in the military claiming the executive order banning DEI prevents them from teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen. Pete Hegseth then told them to knock it off and keep teaching it. But it created another news cycle of "Oh my god, the Trump administration is trying to erase the Tuskegee Airmen from history!"
Setting up a snitch hotline for employees to inform on each other and warning that non-snitchers will be punished for failing to snitch on their colleagues who are still doing DEI sub rosa is something you only do if you want this kind of panicked overcompliance. Given the racial politics of parts of the US conservative movement, I have no doubt that the kind of person who signs up to be an anti-DEI purge enforcer wants the Tuskegee Airmen removed from the curriculum, and Trump only walked this back when it became clear it was upsetting the normies. There is a reason why a powerful constituency on the right supports having a Fort Bragg but no Fort Arnold despite Benedict Arnold being a better general than Braxton Bragg.
A moderately interesting interview with Eric Trump just dropped in the FT. (Limited-use gift link - the article is paywalled but may also be accessible on a 5/month basis with free registration)
The headline is "Eric Trump opens door to political dynasty." It isn't explicit, but applying bounded distrust it looks like the FT reporter raised the issue and Eric responded mildly positively. It is consistent with the Trump family's general approach of keeping the idea of an illegal 3rd term and/or a dynastic successor in the public eye while maintaining plausible deniability about actually doing it.
I don't find Eric's denials that the family is making money off the Presidency interesting - the Mandy Rice-Davies principle applies. Eric is lying here and the FT makes this clear to a reader who is paying attention while avoiding words like "lie" and "falsely". It is an interesting example of a political reporter trying to write about a lying politician without engaging in either hostile editorialising or "opinions about shape of earth differ" non-journalism.
If I had to guess, Eric is positioning himself, personally for a future move into politics. Over the last few years Eric has been running the Trump Organisation while Don Jr and Barron support their father's political operation. With Barron taller and more talented, but still a long way off 35, Don Jr is the obvious dynastic successor at the moment. But the bit of the interview about a Trump dynasty is explicitly about the idea of Eric and not Don Jr being the politician.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6mo ago
Given what a replacement-level CEO did to Microsoft, Satya Nadella's value-over-replacement is in the low trillions of dollars, not counting the consumer surplus generated by Microsoft products mostly ceasing to suck.
Mature companies with P/E ratios north of 20 (which includes all the US tech megastars) are being priced on the basis that the business will outlive the current leadership. Not Boeinging a successful mature business is extraordinarily valuable, and apparently harder than it looks given that Bill Gates' chosen successor couldn't.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7mo ago
Trump is after all a bog-standard democrat from the 90's,
I don't know why people keep saying this. Even if Trump was a bog-standard Democrat in the 90's, which he wasn't (per Wikipedia he first registered as a Democrat in 2001 after losing the 2000 Reform primary to Pat Buchannan), people can change.
In so far as we can see which substantial policy issues Trump actually cares about beyond "Donald Trump should be President", they appear to be:
- Broad-based tariffs, with other foreign policy goals subordinated to a tariff policy based on perceived US economic interests (rather than using tariffs to reward geopolitical allies and punish enemies, or to contain China specifically).
- Zero illegal immigration, a large cut in legal immigration, and removal of existing illegal immigrants.
- Reducing the US resource commitment to maintaining an international system where the US's allies are free-riding.
Any one of these could have got you anathematized by the 1990's Democratic party, which, if you check the date, was controlled by the Clinton machine. They would also have got you funny looks from Reagan Republicans.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
And the idiotarian left would be marginally more intellectual coherent in doing so than the right are in our timeline given the two sides respective views on lethal self-defence, but still wrong.
Ashli Babbit fucked around and found out. De mortuis nil nisi bonum so I won't say anything else.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7mo ago
That's because the Texas authorities specifically intended (based on both the text of the law and Paxton's jawboning in the Cox case) to make women carry non-viable fetuses until medical confirmation of fetal death - or to term, for non-viable fetuses which don't die until cut off from the placenta.
The issue in the Cox case is that Texas Republicans want Cox to go through several months of pregnancy, an unnecessary C-section, and six figures of medical bills (which Texas Republicans think she should not get help with, because the government fucking you in the ass is just life, but the government taxing me to pay for the lube when it fucks you in the ass is socialism) in order to achieve the spiritual benefits of watching a baby die in an incubator instead of aborting it. SCOTUS in Dobbs correctly ruled that this is within the powers of the State of Texas, but it didn't rule that it was a good idea.
This isn't even a case where rare corner case is acceptable collateral damage in order to prevent the large number of elective abortions. Paxton's intervention was widely praised by the pro-life movement because this is a type of case they care about. (Obviously not enough to support parents of severely disabled children who would be eugenically aborted if that was legal, because socialism again, but enough to ruin lives because it's for the children works on both sides of the aisle).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
Many norms are being broken, but almost never by Trump
Come off it. You can argue that invoking war powers in peacetime is technically legal, but it is definitely unprecedented.
Impounding spending, while not unprecedented, is a clear breach of norms about separation of powers (and the law, assuming that the Impoundment Control Act is constitutional).
Obfuscating the org chart of a powerful office within the EOP, for example by issuing a press release saying that Elon Musk is head of DOGE and then saying in a court filing that it is actually Amy Gleason, is a breach of norms about basic honesty (and possibly also perjury).
On the other hand, district court judges issuing nationwide injunctions against executive policies that appear to be facially illegal is now, unfortunately, entirely normal.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8mo ago
There is a very obvious innocent explanation of the "ballot dump", which was trailed by both sides before the election - as in the Trump campaign was saying "there is going to be a late break to Biden because they are stealing the election", and the Biden campaign was saying "there is going to be a late break to Biden and Trump will wrongly claim that it is evidence of fraud." The root cause is that (unusually) there was a large partisan gap between postal and in person votes, because fear of COVID-19 was a partisan issue.
In states which can't open postal votes early (which includes all the key swing states in 2020), in-person votes are counted faster than postal votes, because the envelope opening, signature verification etc. all take time and have to be done before you can count the ballots. [In states which do open postal votes early, the postal votes are counted faster than in-person votes because after opening but not counting them they are neatly stacked, all right-way-up etc. As a result Texas and Florida both looked competitive in the early stage of the count until the in-person votes started coming in].
In states where in-person votes are counted at precinct level and postal votes are counted at county level (which is most states, but I don't have a list handy), the in-person votes dripple in over the course of hours, whereas the postal votes come in in big lumps - especially when a big metropolitan county like Fulton or Wayne posts a batch of postal votes.
Everyone who was paying attention, including Trump, knew that there would be a late break to Biden in key swing states for these innocent reasons. Trump "knew" (in the legally and morally relevant sense) that the "ballot dump" was not evidence of fraud, even if his supporters didn't.
He also "knew" that the Dominion voting machines lie was false - the version of the story he was running with involved claims about the ownership of Dominion which were contradicted by the public record. (Smartmatic had Venezuelan connections, Dominion didn't).
I don't think that Trump "knew" that the gish gallop of hinkiness that the right-wing internet started putting together within hours of the close of polls would not find enough dodgy ballots to throw the election into question because I don't think anyone knew that at the time. But he did know that it was a gish gallop - that if he wanted to get it adjudicated in the time available (based on his behaviour, I don't think he did) he would need to be clear and focussed about what he was alleging (he wasn't). When Trump tries to take his best evidence of fraud to a sympathetic audience, you get something like that Trump-Raffensperger phonecall. Trump's people are trying as hard as they can to make specific allegations of fraud which Raffensperger can admit or refute (Trump himself is not helping), Raffensperger's people are saying "We already investigated that - there is an innocent explanation that we can show you offline." and Trump is saying "Oh no you didn't."
That isn't what a co-operative fact-finding process looks like, or even an adverserial one conducted in good faith. I have worked for unethical bosses (Fortunately, not for much longer than the duration of a contractual notice period), and Trump's end of that call sounds like a boss trying to get a subordinate who is slow on the update to falsify documents. "NASA needs to know that the O-ring is clean." "But I checked, and it's burnt half-way through." "Who do you believe, the boss or your lying eyes." "Excuse me?" "I need you to be a team player." etc.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
23d ago
Just so I understand, are you saying that the Democratic Party of the United States is a criminal organisation which is sufficiently dangerous compared to, say, the Black Panthers or the Mafia that the US Department of Homeland Security (or Stasi, to use the original German) needs to break precedent and introduce the first secret police force in the history of the United States?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
A major part of Trump's appeal is that he synthesizes a bullying affect with a sense of righteous victimization.
Hence "Woke Right". To reclaim an old anti-semitic jibe, the woke/MAGA cries out in pain as she/he strikes you.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
You can't take the temperature on a site that shows you an algorithmically-curated selection of what is being posted. It just tells you what Musk wants you to see, either for (his) business or (his) pleasure.
The problem is that the sequence of mouth noises "freeze peach" has acquired a secondary meaning - when very online people - on either side of the US culture war - hear the noises, they don't point to the concepts traditionally associated with "free speech" (i.e. the ability to say what you want without fear of punishment by people more powerful than you), they point to the anti-establishment wing of the Red side of the US culture war.
More speech is banned on Musk's Twitter than Dorsey's Twitter. (Trivially, because most Twitter censorship is done by non-US governments, and DorseyTwitter consistently resisted foreign censors to the best of its ability whereas Musk rolls over if he finds the government in question friendly.) Musk bans people who annoy him whimsically, most often nominally based on an incredibly-broad "doxxing" policy which covers almost any dissemination of accurate information about an identifiable individual and is selectively enforced. Elon Musk has also threatened, and boasted about his limited success in, lawfare-to-the-death against his critics to punish publication of accurate information about the way he runs X that he considers biased or misleading - this is the least speech-that-is-free thing you can do as a private citizen, but it is very freeze peach because punishing people for calling out anti-establishment-right speakers makes it easier for the anti-establishment right to speak. So when Musk talks about being a "free speech absolutist" despite having multiple outstanding SLAPPs in the federal courts, calling for the reversal of Sullivan, tweeting threats of prosecution against his critics etc, the very online right hear "freeze peach absolutely," agree, and cheer, the very online left hear "freeze peach absolutely," agree, and boo, the few remaining principled liberals hear a censorious asshat claiming to support free speech and try to call out the hypocrisy, and the darkly cynical raise eyebrows and say "this is your brain on ketamine."
If you treat Vance as talking about speech-that-is-free to a European audience, then his comments were mostly false if taken literally, directionally correct but exaggerated if taken seriously-but-not-literally, and bizarre if treated as an attempt to achieve some kind of political goal of US foreign policy*. Everyone in Europe who is sufficiently interested in politics to pay attention to a speech by the US VP already understands the free speech situation in Europe better than Vance does, so the only people who didn't respond by thinking "what a tool" are the ones who live in an anti-establishment right-wing social media filter bubble. Even people like me who think that Europe does have a free speech problem can see that a tendentious intervention by a senior official of an increasingly hostile (based both on the rest of the speech and on Trump admin policy towards the EU) foreign government is going to be counterproductive.
If you treat Vance as talking about freeze peach to the global-but-mostly-American audience of partisans in the US culture war, then everything makes sense including Margaret Brennan's response. It's megaphone diplomacy of a type that often backfires, but that's the way Trump has rolled since before 2016 and it's what his domestic supporters expect. Trump's America does want to see more freeze peach in Europe, whether or not this is actually in the US national interest. Freeze peach (in the sense of differential tolerance of right-wing speech that tests the boundaries of permissible rhetoric vs actual incitement) was one of the tools the Nazis used to take power in Germany, although not the most important.
I was initially concerned by this story because most of the coverage I saw didn't make clear who said the dumb stuff about Germany, and I assumed from the attention the whole thing was getting that it was a German official. That would be worrying. But it is some MSM pretty face with no reason to matter beyond her parents being able to afford out-of-State fees at UVA. Vance talks like a right-wing blowhard when a Bush-era Republican would at least try to be diplomatic. Margaret Brennan's response makes clear she is as dumb as Rachael Maddow. Bear shits in woods. The Pope coming out as Catholic would be more newsworthy.
* Notably, the reaction to Vance's speech has increased the chances of European leaders effectively sabotaging Trump's policy of appeasing Putin in Ukraine from none to slim.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
(and Trump is not a doddering susceptible who does whatever his last conversation told him)
Trump is 78, was showing visible signs of mild cognitive decline on the campaign trail, and was a notoriously low-detail President in his first term despite being younger. Personnel is policy to a greater extent than usual. (That said, Michael Waltz as NSA is more likely to be deciding who gets attacked than the SecDef - power under a low-detail President leaks to the EOP and not the cabinet).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7mo ago
Are you a measles virus or something? From a human perspective, RFK is visibly malevolent in a very obvious way.
Before he got on the Trump train, RFK devoted a significant part of his activism to discouraging parents from vaccinating their children against measles based on false claims that vaccines cause autism. His activism caused a measles outbreak in Samoa with 83 deaths.
If we measure malevolence by the degree by which the harm-to-victim exceeds the benefit-to-wrongdoer, killing kids for social media klout is the worst.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8mo ago
Voters aren't obliged to get the joke. In so far as the punching up/punching down framework is helpful, a platform speaker at a Presidential campaign rally attacking a group of voters is always punching down and always fucking up.
Trump hired an edgy comedian to introduce his rally. Said comedian insulted Puerto Ricans. Biden (probably misspeaking) turned the insult around on Trump supporters. Trump decided to treat this as the worst thing ever. Doubling down on a row when both parties screwed up and were rude, but your side was racist as well, is stupid.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8mo ago
I think this is positive information about the big picture of election security in PA. The reason why pro-establishment people on both sides of the aisle have a low prior on "the 2020 election was stolen" is that we think that stealing enough votes to flip the result (80,000 votes in PA) would involve committing a ridiculously obvious crime that would be caught given the existence of a clear victim with the resources and motivation to kick up a fuss. This allows you to run modus tollens:
- An organised attempt to fraudulently flip 80,000 votes would be easy to catch if it happened.
- Despite no lack of trying, neither the Trump campaign nor local Republicans found any organised attempts to fraudulently flip a large number of votes
- Ergo there was not an organised attempt to fraudulently flip enough votes to flip the results.
It turns out that fraudulently registering 1500 voters (60% of the 2500 registrations in the suspicious batch - the others appear to be genuine) is a crime that is easy to catch. This is additional evidence for the premise that an attempt to steal 80,000 votes would be easy to catch.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11mo ago
Non-citizen voting is a crime that would be easy to catch if it was happening on a large scale, that Republican governors and secretaries of state have the tools and an incentive to catch, and which nevertheless you don't see large numbers of people getting caught for.
There have been a few serious attempts to investigate non-citizen voting, and they generally catch a low-double figure number of illegal votes per state.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Being as right-wing as Farage publicly will destroy your life
Farage has, fairly obviously, not had his life destroyed. He makes more money in his Saturday job as a TV talking head than the average professional makes in a 50-hour week.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
If the government can round you up in the middle of the night and ship you off to a foreign prison before a court has a chance to hear your case, you do not, in fact, have any of those rights. The arrangement between the US and El Salvador isn't functionally a deportation - it is a prisoner transfer. The 4th and 5th amendments are fairly obviously implicated. Conditions in Salvadorean jails are bad enough that the 8th amendment is being violated if prisoners are held there on behalf of the US (as Bukele has claimed). Bukele has also said that he wants to cover most of the costs of running the prisons with forced labour, which is a 13th amendment violation as applied to people who haven't been convicted of a crime.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
but aren't a lot of honest left-of-center people REALLY embarrassed about how huge portions of the movement are being revealed as government funded astroturf?
Musk has told enough lies about what DOGE have found (most notoriously, claiming that Politico Pro subscriptions were grants funding left-wing coverage on politico.com) that honest left-of-centre people have tuned him out as a lying liar. More broadly, his decision to use MAGA Twitter as his main tool for disseminating information about DOGE means that he has put himself into the MAGA Twitter bozo bin from the point of view of leftists, centrists, and Fox News watching conservatives. If someone accuses me of being the second gunman behind the grassy knoll, molesting babies in the basement of a pizza parlour with no basement, and petty corruption, I am not going to be embarrassed by the petty corruption allegations even if they are true.
The legal argument here is snark, but the underlying point is serious. Musk has now successfully defended two lawsuits (over "pedo guy" and "funding secured") on the basis that he is a notorious shitposter, everyone knows he doesn't fact-check his tweets, and only a moron in a hurry would believe anything based on a Musk tweet. Nobody who isn't in the tank for Musk is going to be embarrassed based on a Musk tweet without receipts, and the receipts DOGE have provided have been laughably inaccurate.
Or, to cut the crap, the US goal is a quick Ukrainian surrender and Russian victory. This will get the dead bodies off Trump's TV set. (There will still be dead bodies as Russia genocides the Ukrainian population of the territory they occupy, but the Russians won't allow the media to report on them).
If that is a US goal (or even if it isn't), they won't get it. A core Russian war aim is to turn Ukraine into a client state. Belarus doesn't work as a buffer between Russia and Poland, and a Putin-controlled Ukraine won't work either for the same reason. A neutral buffer state (pre-WW1 Belgium is the classic example) works because both sides understand that violating it's neutrality is kicking off the big one. Trump is committed to the idea that Russian violations of future-Ukraine's neutrality should not be a casus belli for the US.
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