SlowBoy
5d ago
But you, as in you the people here, you the people reading this message, are not better than the SJWs in this specific way: you demonize rather than argue.
Why am I expected to argue with this? This is, literally, not an argument.
Your entire post is based on some kind of appeal to emotion, or rhetoric, or whatever, it's a definitional problem, it's probably just bait, because it's actually a very simple idea to anyone who isn't rationalizing-whatever. Just because something is named a felony, or a woman, or low inflation, or whatever doesn't make it so. 12 people voted guilty, OK, mistakes and unjust verdicts don't exist, nothing about this persecution is illegitimate, I'm supposed to, what now? Not vote for Trump because that's moral? Sure, whatever, I'll do whatever you want because the magic words have been invoked. I guess that's what arguing is. I think I'd rather jerk off.
"You, the people here," "we hold Trump accountable," I don't know what you're talking about. "I'm a classic conservative," what does this mean? These are all just empty categories.
SlowBoy
8d ago
What?! If Trump were replaceable, there would be no point in assassinating him.
SlowBoy
9d ago
That's missing the point. No one is denying that you have the free speech right to say you want to kill the president. It's also morally reprehensible. Cowering behind the defense that, it's just a joke man, that's my free speech, man, is retreating. It's pretending that they didn't say what they said.
SlowBoy
9d ago
Sure, it's possible to make a joke about killing the president, and it's even possible for it to be funny, but this is obviously a bad faith justification people are applying after they get criticized for bad taste. There's a big difference between a dark joke comedy sketch and actually admitting out loud that you want the president to be killed.
SlowBoy
9d ago
I'm not saying it's not free speech, I'm saying it's bad stupid and morally reprehensible speech. Falling back on, "it's just a joke," "it's free speech" is the lowest possible justification. Being sarcastic about it doesn't make your defense any stronger.
SlowBoy
9d ago
When they go after Home Depot lady they are going after essentially their own people.
Someone isn't on my side because they work at a Wal-mart.
SlowBoy
9d ago
I have zero evidence that any given person who locker-room-talks "too bad he missed" has had any involvement whatsoever in destroying people's lives over the past 8 years.
Calling for the death of the president was considered unacceptable even before the last 8 years.
SlowBoy
9d ago
Wanting to kill the president is disgusting. It's morally reprehensible. There's not some "both sides" hypocrisy consistency "true free speech" liberal norm where I'm forced to concede that, hey, live and let live man. "I want to kill the president." "That's disgusting." "I'm only joking." "Oh, ok, sounds like free speech."
SlowBoy
9d ago
Trump ideas packaged in a more media and PMC-friendly face would be a political juggernaut, I think.
The whole point of the Trump era is that literally no one else would touch those ideas, because the media meaning-making machine made them anametha. You could not be anti-illegal immigration or anti-NATO or whatever without inherently drawing earth-shattering criticism. This is why no one else tried it. You have to pass through the wall of overwhelming media coverage, hostile donors funding every manner of opposition, prosecution, lawfare, and pushback. Literally no one else would do this.
SlowBoy
10d ago
What happened was even more improbable than assassination, because the bullet missed Trump's head by fractions, famously caught on camera, and then created the conditions for an even more iconic picture, one of the greatest pictures in American history. This is basically extremely impossible, it defies prediction, it's one of the greatest meaning-making moments of American history.
In another sense everything I've written above is extremely exaggerated, because the assassination "doesn't mean anything" and "nothing ever happens". But in some primal monkey caveman grug brain unconscious level (, the only level that really matters) -- Donald Trump was literally just saved by God in front of the entire world. That is incredibly incredibly powerful. It doesn't "mean" anything, there is no mechanism by which having a chunk of his ear blown off translates into better personnel or policy. The direct consequence is that Trump is renominated and probably wins the election. But in a fundamental way the whole global consciousness is different.
Trump is a great historic figure like Caesar or Napoleon. I am not trying to crudely exaggerate. His whole self is now deeply bound up with the age in which we live, his personality strengths and flaws have deep consequences for the future. Trump isn't important because of any specific things he's done (which is really quite a lot of things). But he represents, for better and worse, the deep American spirit. Something was ratified this week. This was basically impossible to anticipate, despite any rational calculations about rhetoric and civil war and violence and likelihoods and odds. And I don't think people will stop talking about this any more than they stopped talking about Napoleon escaping from Elba or Caesar at Alesia.
SlowBoy
11d ago
Obama governed horribly -- Obamacare, IRS political targetting, enshrining disparate impact, fast and furious, Benghazi, ISIS, etc etc
SlowBoy
13d ago
A few months ago I remember people here discussing a Mike Cernovich tweet predicting high odds of a Trump assassination. The overwhelming consensus here was that this was unreasonable and beneath even considering.
SlowBoy
18d ago
Electing a divided government does not guarantee an end of taxation and policies and stuff. Your idea sounds like a kind of vengeful wishful thinking: you want the French right to suffer, so you need an explanation. "The government you hate is more divided and powerless than ever, haha!" ?
SlowBoy
18d ago
A substantial minority of the French threw a far right tantrum in the EU elections and they are going to be punished for it with total government deadlock over the next year at least.
punished with deadlock
Don't threaten me with a good time. Are you sure it's the "far" right throwing a tantrum?
SlowBoy
22d ago
Identity politics didn't meaningfully exist in 2008. He also governed in extremely capricious ways that were more than "fairly center-left technocrat". If you watched any Fox News at all circa 2009, you would have heard over and over again Obama promising to "fundamentally transform the United States of America" in his campaign stump speeches.
Obama personally might not have given a damn about equity as such, but he filled his administration with people who did: Eric Holder, Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice. Eric Holder practically enshrined disparate impact at DOJ, which is just equity by another name. Many of the key inciting incidents that made woke morals blow up -- George Zimmerman, Michael Brown -- were made worse by his administration and his personal actions.
We could go down the list all day.
but frankly I think the Tea Party really did "start it".
The Tea Party started as blowback over Obamacare. It really started as spontaneous protests and town hall meetings where constituents were livid over what Obama and Congress wanted to do with healthcare. Eventually, it got co-opted by Republican officials who made it another part of their vendetta against Obama. But it started with Obamacare, a piece of legislation which made American healthcare more expensive and more complicated, which people understood at the time, and pissed them off. No Obamacare, no Tea Party.
SlowBoy
22d ago
SlowBoy
22d ago
"Republicans might have been right all along, but instead of lingering in that uncomfortable truth, let's consider the ways in which Republicans are still wrong and I am still right."
SlowBoy
23d ago
It wasn't really a real primary since Biden was the incumbent. After Carter was primaried in 1980 (and Ford primaried in 1976) the lesson strategists internalized was that primarying the incumbent leads to a loss in the general. Since then Democrats have shut out primary challengers (more successfully than Republicans have). RFK and Marianne Williamsone were the only two outsiders of any note willing to break this consensus.
However, I think Democratic voters also bear some blame here. 15 million of them turned out for Biden in the primary. They were excited to vote for him! I don't know if they felt like they were closing ranks around Biden, endorsing his performance, or trying to mobilize suplort against Trump. But they endorsed this! Look at Obama's re-nomination versus Biden's: in 2012, Obama got about half as many votes as he did in the contested 2008 primary. Whereas Biden's 2024 primary numbers are very close to his 2020 results. It's not just the party machinery that closed ranks around Biden: voters did too.
SlowBoy
23d ago
The best account of Truman in the run-up to the 1944 convention, and the convention itself, is McCullough's biograohy of Truman. The relevant section here is about 30 pages and is extremely well-written. The gist of it is that Truman ended up in charge of a Senate committee to investigate wasteful spending by military contractors. (This was part maneuvering by Roosevelt, who wanted to avoid the House appointing its own committee which promised to be much more critical of the administration; Truman had politely floated the idea to Roosevelt previously.) The "Truman Commission" proved enormously popular so that, when negotiations began to replace FDR's VP on the 1944 ticket (Henry Wallace, whose radical left proclivities were spooking some), Truman was an acceptable dark horse compromise. It probably helped that Truman was connected to deep political bosses and the Missouri machine in a way that has never been satisfactorily elaborated.
Democratic politicians in 1944 knew what they were doing, and that FDR might not make it. But nobody really considered the gravity of what that meant, or it probably would not have gone to Truman. McCullough's section ends with the great anecdote of reoorters talking to Truman's mother on the news of his nomination, as she predicts that it's all a lot of hogwash and FDR will easily serve out his term.
SlowBoy
23d ago
All three of those cases involved covering up the details from an unknowing public. (Although in Reagan's case there wasn't too much to cover up.) FDR was widely-recognized as being too old to run in 1944, but a great deal of self-willed delusion about how old he really was kept people from thinking about it too hard. (There was also a fairly open process for choosing a new VP that gave a lot of people confidence, Truman had a small national profile but was popular in 1944 for investigating army contractor waste.)
That self-willed delusion about Biden's age just crumbled and could possibly never be restored.
SlowBoy
23d ago
Reagan's senility has been greatly exaggerated with time. It all comes down to a few moments where aides caught him sundowning in private. McConnell, Pelosi and Biden have all had much more serious moments caught on camera, multiple times.
SlowBoy
23d ago
Exhibit 5: A columnist claiming replacing him would be undemocratic.
It would be undemocratic to replace Biden with another candidate. I think it's fine to admit that, I think almost everybody would prefer the "undemocratic" candidate to the "democratic" candidate in middle-stage senility. And, probably, if you were to run the primary today all over again, the voters would pick someone else. The problem is that the apparatchiks might not pick that same someone else.
Trump gets at the issues in a much deeper way than all the policy wonks cynically consumed by statistics and specifics. What do you do about the Ukraine War? It's not hard, you get on the phone with Putin, you stop the war with a phone call, this is literally how that works. You don't need answers to "hard questions," you need the vision to lead and inspire.
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