Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
No bio...
User ID: 1226
The riots in 2020 were triggered by one guy dying under sketchy circumstances.
This seems like a spectacular failure to grasp the deep, unresolved tension in the US over how law enforcement conducts itself. There were anti-police protests in 2014 under Obama as well. You can't attribute these things to a single police murder.
then make a big deal about fulfilling that promise.
This is not making a big deal out of enforcement. It is ostentatious cruelty (one might even say the cruelty is the point :v).
You've also got things like ICE going after valid visa holders, calling immigrants "invaders", and the DHS declaring intent to "liberate" LA from the socialists.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
No, but I can imagine them claiming an equivalence, being debunked, and then claiming they were directionally correct so it doesn't matter, then repeating the same talking points next week.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
You're right - fortunately, that's a bit more extreme than what I actually said.
No, it's literally what you said: " If the Russians have a mind-control weapon which can capture the President without the US military or IC doing anything about it then they have already won and you may as well just roll out the red carpet for them now.
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"
Now, I think you're probably smart enough that you don't think the Russians have literal mind control, but you unambiguously presented that as the only alternative to the Russia apologist POV being correct, despite there being some very obvious reasonable alternative explanations. Thus: a false a dichotomy between your preferred conclusion and a ridiculous one.
The POTUS is a conspiracy theorist?
There's a laundry list, but the most prominent and undeniable are the Birther conspiracy theory and the 2020 stolen election conspiracy theory.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
None of those other figures are subject to the jurisdiction of blue states.
Trump's major cases are in Federal court or a red state. Why would the Democrats not simply cook up fraudulent Federal charges against their other political adversaries as well?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
Ring me back when they're charged.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
the left has devalued American citizenship
What does that even mean (aside from the obvious white supremacist angle)? Citizenship is not a scarce resource.
I mean a Venezuelan gang member who's here illegally is every bit as American as you, who was born in Western Michigan, so yes, I'm quite aware of that.
What does this mean?
Anchor babies, birthright citizenship, all of that must go.
Opposing birthright citizenship is contrary to the ancient traditions of our people and thus unAmerican. But then, Erik Prince is a Dutch fifth columnist and not to be trusted.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
That would depend on the actual content of their beliefs, since someone calling themselves that could be almost anything from a center left neoliberal to a blue tribe conservative to white supremacist who isn't quite ready to take off the mask.
Statistically, my money is still on conservative in denial.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
People usually call themselves "classical liberals" because they pointedly want to distinguish themselves from social conservatives. What I am saying is that many/most (though not all) such people are just garden variety conservatives who are embarassed by their own socially conservative views and/or the association with other conservatives, so they come up with stories to tell themselves (and others) how the party left them behind or the SJWs forced their hand or something similar, the point of which is say "I am not really a conservative."
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. If your theory predicts a phenomenon and the phenomenon is not observed, that strongly suggests the theory is wrong. In this case, there's a lot of incentive for election security enthusiasts to find voter fraud and they've made considerable effort to do so. The fact that have failed to do strongly suggests their theory doesn't hold water*. In this case, concealing the shenanigans requires counting on the discretion of numerous homeless drug addicts.
By contrast, there are tons and tons of instances of politicians being caught in awkward financial arrangements or grifting off their supporters. In many cases they don't have to bother hiding them because it isn't even illegal.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
And nobody is arguing that this was disrupted.
I am. I'm arguing it. Obama nominated a candidate and McConnell sat on it for a year.
it was the usual escalation that can be traced back to Bork, at the very least
Bork always gets wheeled out as the excuse, but it's total bullshit. Bork was rejected (unusual but far from unprecedented) and replaced with... another Reagan nominee. Who was confirmed. In other words, what we'd expect to happen. If McConnell had specific issues with Garland as a nominee, he should have held a hearing and voiced them. Of course, he didn't, because he didn't have a problem with Merrick Garland. He openly declared he wasn't going to consider any nominee.
You still haven't answered the question. To whom does the stolen seat belong?
The seat doesn't 'belong' to anyone because it's not a piece of property, but by long-standing American political norms it was Obama's prerogative to fill the seat. Word games and playing dumb about idiomatic use of the word 'stole' can't duck the GOP's flagrant breach of trust.
Except it was the Republicans who finally Noticed, and truly defected rather than be played for chumps.
That would imply that the Republicans weren't defecting constantly, when in fact that was pretty the standard playbook since the end of the cold war.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
Is this a standard you apply across the board?
Yes. I might think they don't take their avowed belief seriously (but then, who does?), but if, e.g. there are tens of millions of people saying they think abortion is murder I can probably guess that they actually believe a rough approximation of that rather than somehow coordinating tens of millions of people to lie about their motives.
It might not be their only motive, since social desirability bias encourages people to put their most acceptable justification forward, but we can pretty safely say they're mostly sincere about it.
You'll be hard-pressed to find a single person who's opposed to mass immigration (esp. illegal immigration) who admits that their opposition is based on hatred of foreigners
No, but it's quite easy to find people who will admit that they think immigrants (or particular groups of immigrants) are lazy, dirty, criminal, parasitic, etc... or that they don't consider their lives to have equal value. Holocaust deniers won't generally just say "I hate Jews" and most of them probably don't hold that belief in so many words, but they will then go on to make some very sketchy claims about the character of Jews. And I'll be honest, it's not that hard to find people who will say that they think homosexuality is evil.
Simply put, you don't need a signed statement from someone saying "I self-identify as a racist/homophobe" for that to be a reasonable judgment.
"We don't want to establish a precedent that other states can just ship people they don't want here without our prior consent. If migrants want to come here on their own that's fine, but we don't want the TX government deciding next week that since we're not doing anything about immigrants they can save money on vagrancy or prison facilities as well."
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
Right, so you're free to protest but only in ways that are ineffective
They were only ineffective because the claim was not meritorious.
if you start doing anything similar to what we do we'll treat it like you're assassinating politicians.
One of the Trumpists' most consistent mistakes is that they believe their actions are symmetrical to their rivals.
So why exactly should Trumpists not start assassinating politicians given the incentives you're giving them?
Because their belief that they are being unfairly punished is mistaken. Doing normal democratic politics has a higher payoff than trying to flip the table when they lose. It's clearly not that they can't win elections, considering they just did.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
And the sneering that the Puppies were all racist sexist bigots? That didn't happen either and didn't matter?
Oh, it definitely did. Because a quite a lot of the Puppies were racist, sexist bigots, most prominently Vox Day and his followers. Especially considering that Vox Day was more successful than Correia or Torgersen. If the shoe fits, wear it.
It wasn't the about the not-liking, it was about the vicious backlash to, essentially, two short story nominations.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
27d ago
So what's the deep, unresolved tension surrounding keeping noncitizens in the country?
The competing interests and preferences of nativists, anti-nativists, employers, consumers, etc... combined with a deadlocked political system that effectively leaves immigration policy up to the caprices of executive discretion.
Is there any reason other than "it helps us win elections?"
What is that supposed to mean? Illegal immigrants can't vote, so the "importing voters" theory doesn't hold up so well, and their mere existence alienates the xenophobe vote, so it's hard to call it a winning electoral strategy. Even if you think they're wrong, you should probably take immigration advocates at their word when they offer humanitarian and economic justifications for supporting immigration.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
Yes.
The trouble with the comparison is that communism is dead as a political force. The handful of self-identified communists are sanctimonious LARPers with no aspirations to power, whereas fascist sympathizers keep surfacing in positions of influence inside right-wing populist movements. The right-populists wants to engage in whataboutism so they don't have to talk about their neo-nazi problem, but there just isn't the kind of symmetry they're looking for. There's no equivalent neo-stalinist movement. The closest you get are pro-palestinian activists, who rather famously don't get along with mainstream left-wing politicians.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
I actually have a different issue to raise than my earlier remark: very little of this is new. American business elites have been trying to roll back regulatory oversight, labor laws, and the welfare state since the minute they were created. Certainly the proposition that Musk et al are reacting to being 'ruined' is laughable. Even before he managed to make himself un-elected shadow president, he was one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. Sorry bud, libs hating billionaires isn't new either. All you have to do to get away from them is uninstall twitter.
The only thing new is that the conservative movement has become more reactionary and overtly illiberal.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
That might sound weird, given the murderous pedophile thing, but to me supporters of those theories generally just seem like they are stupid and prone to weird fantasies and LARPs but have always been that way, whereas people who are existentially shattered by Trump seem like they might have been different at one point, but then suddenly Trump appeared in the corner of their reality and traumatically inverted it into some new configuration of dimensions.
This epitomizes general differential expectations of conservatives and liberals. Conservatives are regarded (and to a shocking degree, regard themselves) as lacking in agency to the point of being almost animalistic. When a conservative raves about cities are shitholes full of degenerates and criminals, that's just how they are. FEMA death camps, Birtherism, Jewish Space Lasers, etc... They're dumb, they're ignorant, they can't help themselves and we shouldn't expect anything of them. We practically talk about Trump supporters in anthropological terms with all these fucking Ohio diner ethnographies. It's on the rest of us to manage them.
Liberals, though. They're supposed to be better, smarter, more accountable. Apparently. When they think a guy who says he wants to be a dictator wants to be a dictator, they're supposed to exercise some critical thinking and realize he's not serious, that's just him being bold and masculine. They're not supposed to say West Virginia's a shithole full of drug addicts even though it objectively is. They're supposed to be adults in the room.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
Harris will deliver a mediocre performance that will look positively masterly next to Trump's old man ravings. It will have minimal impact because every aspect of Trump's incapacity is priced in. Practically speaking, Harris can't win, she can only lose.
what do you think the policy strengths/weaknesses will be?
Trump's biggest policy strength is simply that he is the challenger and can thus run on vague promises instead of his actual record. Whenever he talks about specifics, it's embarrassing (but again, priced in - no one expects Trump to know what he's talking about). His biggest vulnerability on that front is that he's surrounded himself with extremist weirdos who have fairly radical ambitions and Trump has a history of being pretty milquetoast with respect to his advisors, so he may suffer if those attacks stick to him. "JD Vance pals around with mask-off authoritarian billionaires" is probably a more fruitful line of attack than "your proposed economic policies are positively Argentinian", even though the latter is more substantive.
Harris' biggest policy strength is that she's not Trump and can thus talk about policy in a way that doesn't threaten to have your brain self-deport through your ear canal. Her biggest policy weakness is that her policy proposals are still very bad and she's not going to get graded on a curve like Trump will be.
5% chance Trump refers to Harris with a racial slur. 50% chance Trump makes some implausibly deniable misogynistic remark.
We can’t be having presidents going to jail all the time like Illinois governors.
Why not?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
Why? As I said, the normie libs continues to exist and, indeed, to dominate. (Though tbh I'd be hard pressed to describe early 2010s gaming communities as socially liberal as opposed to merely disdainful of religious conservatives for being critical of gaming)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
The electoral reality in the US is that many states have a history of very overtly disenfranchising certain kinds of voter. This colors basically everything about electoral reform in the US.
voter ID is a ridiculously low bar that the GOP should be able to hammer home, but the fact that they cant speaks volumes to their weakness/idiocy.
Anyone who deeply cares about mandatory voter ID and is really worried about vote fraud is already a die-hard conservative.
This seems like a willful misreading. Do you think "dominate" means "conquer by force of arms"? Because it's not as if the EU has been putting up vigorous opposition to Russian hegemony absent US spinal prosthetics.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
Why are so many Americans committed to sneering at and impugning the traditions of their warrior class?
White Southerners are not the American warrior class. Enlisting at a somewhat higher rate doesn't overcome the weight of demographics.
To steal a turn of phrase from someone I spoke to several years ago who was probably quoting someone else without attribution, "the truest form of patriotism is a desire to see your countrymen prosper." A political program which constantly castigates your fellows as parasites, regards their welfare with indifference, incites hate against them, or treats them as means to an end is not, in this paradigm, at all patriotic.
I think this is backwards: American conservatives want to define patriotism as equivalent to conservativism. Patriots must be conservative; conservatives cannot be unpatriotic; liberals are unpatriotic by dint of their politics. This is fundamentally unworkable because it is a paradigm that demands ideological submission as price of entry.
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