curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
What happens if one or both of them don't
Yeah, most Biden-alternative discussion is premised on Biden choosing to back out, since he controls the delegates. There's a general sense there's a solid chance this happens.
Does the Democrat party actually have good options to replace them without their cooperation
Delegates could, in theory, reject Biden, the delegates are only obligated to "in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them". This seems difficult and unlikely though.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I strongly disagree, actually! I think a non-Biden/Harris/Newsom nominee is around 50% to win. Both Biden and Trump are historically unpopular presidential candidates, they poll terribly, both in approvals and in poll questions like 'are they fit to / too old to run'. I don't think the short period of time between now and the election is an issue, in part because American election seasons are just so much longer than other countries. There are a lot of options (Shapiro? Beshear? warnock?). Whitmer and co tie with biden in head-to-head polls, but I think that's mostly name recognition, once everyone's seen their face and the energy of a young candidate charismatic enough to be popular in their own state they should surge.
but how will the bureaucratic weirdness that would be necessary to do this affect the voters' confidence in the Democrat ticket
I don't really buy this. People are voting against Biden and Trump more than they're voting for them, and a young and confident voice saying all the right things will pick up a lot of votes, I think. "They're both too old" is an extremely common position, and I think that'll dominate any concerns about someone who wins a second "primary".
How much of a mess might Biden and/or Harris make on the way out
In terms of accusations / insults, past Dem nomination fights were bloody but that didn't really spill over into the general. And we're still months out, elections take around a month in some nations. In terms of throwing up procedural / legal issues, I doubt that's too big of an issue.
Not to mention the optics of kneecapping the female POC with the progressive wing.
I think it's a much bigger problem with the progressive wing of the elites than it is with the voters. Could just go Whitmer w/ black VP or something.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I think they're pointed out as physical symptoms of aging. You can see some of it by watching his TV appearances, he often seems to blink much less than he should and his eyes often seem a bit narrow and scrunched.
I'll still give Biden some personal credit for the Afghanistan withdrawal though.
Kamala seems most likely, for legal-fundraising reasons
I think this is wrong and misses why people support Harris, it's not exactly a tactical decision. Money isn't as important as people think for presidential elections - voters are voting for, above all, a party and a candidate, it's the face they'll see and the voice they'll hear. And Dem donors will still have piles of money available for any non-Harris candidate. Harris is, in my opinion, not a good candidate. She's not popular, with an approval rating virtually equivalent to biden's 37% (although biden's disapprove is 6 higher). She was received poorly in the 2020 primary. I don't feel the charisma whe nwatching her. The clips of her going viral on social media are of her making statements that are ironically endearing for their strangeness, greatest hits compiled here, and I'm not sure this'll translate to excitement among swing voters. In head to head polls she doesn't do much better than Biden, and though none of the governor alternatives do better either Harris has less of a name recognition gap to make up for. And she's burdened with the Biden brand - inflation, the age issues, and a cloud of malaise generally. I don't think money can make up for this! The recent Republican local races demonstrate the importance of candidate quality over anything else.
Even ignoring that, though, I think the campaign finance issues are overstated. The articles claiming this supports harris say things like:
The campaign could also give it all to the Democratic National Committee, but even with the DNC, there are rules governing coordinating with candidates that curb how freely the committee can spend. “That’s not necessarily as effective as a campaign spending money itself,” Noble said.
UPDATE: There is a possibility that the campaign committee funds could be transferred to the Democratic National Committee. But the DNC could then only give up to $5,000 directly to a candidate. It could use the funds on behalf of the candidate, but again the coordination and ad rate questions come up. And it is possible that Kamala Harris would have to comply with a transfer of those funds in that manner, in a scenario where she was just passed over for the top of the ticket.
Sure, "coordination costs" and "ad rate questions" mean it's "not necessarily as effective" as if Harris gets the money directly. It's not ideal. That language is a bit wishy-washy though. And using it to justify "practically speaking, Biden and Harris are really the only two choices available at this late stage of the campaign" seems to overstep.
And reviewing the language in those articles
That hasn’t stopped the endless fantasy league scenarios from those who see no avenue for Biden to defeat Donald Trump in November. ... This is a tremendous insult to Kamala Harris, who Biden himself handpicked as his second in command.
And it is possible that Kamala Harris would have to comply with a transfer of those funds in that manner, in a scenario where she was just passed over for the top of the ticket
One gets the sense that the desire for nominee Harris doesn't come entirely from pragmatism. She's the First Black Woman Vice President, and denying her the nomination SHE deserves is an insult. I get the same feeling from other pro-Harris arguments - "voters will be outraged that you passed over the Black Woman VP". Someone will be outraged, sure, but is it really voters, or is it the author? I taste notes of RBG's and Sotomayor's potential retirements here. It's not just that though, speculating, I think a novel and complicated plan like 'hold mini-primaries' is difficult to believe in, and feels dangerous in, in an environment with a weak 'party' where power is very decentralized and depends on networks of relationships. "The CEO will just declare it's time for primaries and pick someone good to run them" isn't the kind of thing that happens, but "she's my guy so I'll support her" and "looks like the consensus is moving towards her so i'm moving there too" is something that happens a lot. It's not an environment that cultivates the agency of individuals or the group.
A Matthew Yglesias post, "VP selections aren’t taken seriously enough" (of course with Matt, there's a framing making it look like he isn't picking on Harris), touches on all of these issues.
All the wrong reasons
The Herndon profile in particular is really clear on two things:
Biden was facing a lot of pressure from various inside party actors to select a Black woman, which in practice meant Harris.
Despite this, nobody was telling Biden that selecting Harris had significant electoral benefits. There was no polling or data or demographic analysis that suggested this “you should pick a Black woman” vibe was correct.
Here’s how Herndon describes the final showdown between Harris and Gretchen Whitmer:
After Whitmer impressed Biden during an in-person meeting in the veepstakes’ final stages, one question rose to the top: Could two white Democrats win?
Campaign research said yes — Biden could win with any of the four. Klain argued for Harris specifically. Obama played the role of sounding board, weighing the pros and cons of Biden’s options rather than backing anyone, including Harris, according to a person familiar with the conversation. But Harris was the only candidate who had the full complement of qualifications: She had won statewide, was a familiar name with voters because of her presidential run and enjoyed a personal connection with the Biden family, having been a close working partner of Biden’s son, Beau, when he served as attorney general of Delaware.
And she was Black, meaning the announcement would be met with enthusiasm rather than controversy. On Aug. 11, the day the campaign announced Harris as the running mate, it raised $26 million in 24 hours.
None of this is wrong, exactly. But note that in his telling, there is not a point in the process where Biden stops and thinks “who will be the best candidate in 2028?” or “if I die, who will be the best person to take over?” But note that even leaving Biden’s age out of it, the base rate for presidential death or resignation is nearly one in five!
Instead the decisive characteristic was that Harris would generate more enthusiasm.
And here I do think I should be clear about what I think this meant in practice: Picking Harris minimized short-term complaining. Plenty of people would have been thrilled with Whitmer and plenty of people were not thrilled with Harris. But as a rare person who criticized the Harris selection at the time, I know that given the atmosphere prevailing in the summer of 2020, that made me a kind of un-fun skunk at the party. By contrast, Harris proponents would have felt empowered to complain about a Whitmer selection. And to be clear, in Harris’ defense, she really is a properly qualified choice. The discourse around her has gotten so mean you’d think this was the greatest debacle in VP selection history when it’s not even close.
The problem is that this kind of fuzzy, short-term thinking is extremely common.
Again, the core absurdity of Democrats’ current Old President problem is that if you go back to the 2008 coverage of the Obama/Biden ticket, he was picked precisely because he was too old:
The choice by Mr. Obama in some ways mirrors the choice by Mr. Bush of Dick Cheney as his running mate in 2000; at his age, it appears unlikely that Mr. Biden would be in a position to run for president should Mr. Obama win and serve two terms. Shorn of any remaining ambition to run for president on his own, he could find himself in a less complex political relationship with Mr. Obama than most vice presidents have with their presidents.
Oops!
Yes, indeed, Matthew. Oops. Oops all around.
But, of course, there are many worse screwups than this. If you go back to the fateful election of 1840, the Whigs put John Tyler on the ticket because he didn’t like Andrew Johnson without checking to see if Tyler was on board with Whig policies. William Henry Harrison died after 40 days in office, Tyler became president, and it turned out that — oops! — he did not agree with those policies
In the scheme of things, Harris is actually a totally fine choice. She is in line with the party mainstream on policy and ideology and is of appropriate age to take over, which sounds like a low bar to pass but is actually impressive in comparative terms.
Framing!
I believe that in part because I continue to think there is a pretty obvious way for her to get her mojo back. The basic reality is that Americans of all kinds put a good deal of stock into the personal identity of our political figures. And progressive Americans put even more stock into it than average Americans.
By the same token, there are certain things that Harris as a Black woman “can” say that Joe Biden as a white man “can’t” say — i.e., things that are moderate-coded about race and gender matters.
Sure. If she does this and wins the mini-primary with that, more power to her.
More Matt, "Kamala Harris should try to be really popular ... In spite of all!":
Perhaps the worst-kept secret in Washington is that tons of Democrats are terrified of the prospect of Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic Party presidential nominee at some point in the future.
Indeed, it’s such a poorly kept secret that it’s barely even a secret. For example, even though officially Biden has not announced a reelection bid — and given his age, this is formally an open question — absolutely everyone wants him to run again. But the terror is that he might not, or even if he does, he might not make it all the way through eight years. But beyond the possibility that Biden would die or step down, if he serves through 2028, it seems overwhelmingly likely that she’d win a primary.
Why are people scared? Well, mostly because her approval rating lags stubbornly behind Biden’s.
Personally, I am not that scared of her current approval numbers. What scares me instead is the reaction that you hear from the Harrisverse to these worries, which is mostly to accuse critics of sexism or to attribute her political problems to sexism. Indeed, just typing this paragraph I can feel the people getting ready to yell at me on Twitter. But my point isn’t to deny that sexism is real (it clearly is) or that it’s felt by women in politics (it clearly is) but that this kind of fatalism is paralyzing and politically deadly. There are women in politics who are popular and successful at winning tough races, and they didn’t do it by making sexism vanish from the planet earth any more than Barack Obama and Raphael Warnock ended racism.
Powerful framing. I do kinda enjoy reading matt's subtle contortions.
To give the dems some credit, there's been a lot of talk about nominating someone other than Harris and miniprimaries, it could even happen.
(matt's source for obama biden age isn't great, but other reporting linked from here confirms it)
The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden
The president’s mental decline was like a dark family secret for many elite supporters.
By Olivia Nuzzi
Just read the whole article. If not, the best parts:
Obsessive efforts to control Biden were not a new phenomenon. But whereas in the last campaign, the incredible stagecraft surrounding even the smallest Biden event — speaking to a few people at a union hall in rural Iowa, say, or in a barn in New Hampshire — seemed to be about avoiding the so-called gaffes that had become for him inevitable, the stagecraft of the 2024 campaign seems now to be about something else. The worry is not that Biden will say something overly candid, or say something he didn’t mean to say, but that he will communicate through his appearance that he is not really there.
...
In January, I began hearing similar stories from Democratic officials, activists, and donors. All people who supported the president and were working to help reelect him to a second term in office. Following encounters with the president, they had arrived at the same concern: Could he really do this for another four years? Could he even make it to Election Day?
When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that. Their disclosures often followed innocent questions: Have you seen the president lately? How does he seem? Often, they would answer with only silence, their eyes widening cartoonishly, their heads shaking back and forth. Or with disapproving sounds. “Phhhhwwwaahhh.” “Uggghhhhhhhhh.” “Bbbwwhhheeuuw.” Or with a simple, “Not good! Not good!” Or with an accusatory question of their own: “Have you seen him?!”
Who was actually in charge? Nobody knew. But surely someone was in charge? And surely there must be a plan, since surely this situation could not endure? I heard these questions posed at cocktail parties on the coasts but also at MAGA rallies in Middle America. There emerged a comical overlap between the beliefs of the nation’s most elite liberal Biden supporters and the beliefs of the most rabid and conspiratorial supporters of former President Trump. Resistance or QAnon, they shared a grand theory of America in 2024: There has to be a secret group of high-level government leaders who control Biden and who will soon set into motion their plan to replace Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. Nothing else made sense. They were in full agreement.
...
[April 2024] The first person I saw upon entering the subterranean space was the First Lady...
In the basement, I smiled and said hello. She looked back at me with a confused, panicked expression. It was as if she had just received horrible news and was about to run out of the room and into some kind of a family emergency. “Uh, hi,” she said. Then she glanced over to her right. Oh …
I had not seen the president up close in some time. I had skipped this season’s holiday parties, and, preoccupied with covering Trump’s legal and political dramas, I hadn’t been showing up at his White House. Unlike Trump, he wasn’t very accessible to the press, anyway. Why bother? Biden had done few interviews. He wasn’t prone to interrupting his schedule with a surprise media circus in the Oval Office. He kept a tight circle of the same close advisers who had been advising him for more than 30 years, so unlike with his predecessor, you didn’t need to hang around in West Wing hallways to figure out who was speaking to him. It was all pretty locked down and predictable in terms of the reality you could access as a member of the press with a White House hard pass.
I followed the First Lady’s gaze and found the president. Now I understood her panicked expression.
Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth. This was true even in 2020. His face had then an uncanny valley quality that injectable aficionados call “low trust” — if only by millimeters, his cosmetically altered proportions knocked his overall facial harmony into the realm of the improbable. His thin skin, long a figurative problem and now a literal one, was pulled tightly over cheeks that seemed to vary month to month in volume. Under artificial light and in the sunshine, he took on an unnatural gleam. He looked, well, inflated. His eyes were half-shut or open very wide. They appeared darker than they once had, his pupils dilated. He did not blink at regular intervals. The White House often did not engage when questioned about the president’s stare, which sometimes raised alarm on social media when documented in official videos produced by the White House. The administration was above conspiratorial chitchat that entertained seriously scenarios in which the president was suffering from a shocking decline most Americans were not seeing. If the president was being portrayed that way, it was by his political enemies on the right, who promoted through what the press office termed “cheap fakes” a caricature of an addled creature unfit to serve. They would not dignify those people, or people doing the bidding of those people, with a response.
My heart stopped as I extended my hand to greet the president. I tried to make eye contact, but it was like his eyes, though open, were not on. His face had a waxy quality. He smiled. It was a sweet smile. It made me sad in a way I can’t fully convey. I always thought — and I wrote — that he was a decent man. If ambition was his only sin, and it seemed to be, he had committed no sin at all by the standards of most politicians I had covered. He took my hand in his, and I was startled by how it felt. Not cold but cool. The basement was so warm that people were sweating and complaining that they were sweating. This was a silly black-tie affair. I said “hello.” His sweet smile stayed frozen. He spoke very slowly and in a very soft voice. “And what’s your name?” he asked.
Exiting the room after the photo, the group of reporters — not instigated by me, I should note — made guesses about how dead he appeared to be, percentage wise. “Forty percent?” one of them asked.
“It was a bad night.” That’s the spin from the White House and its allies about Thursday’s debate. But when I watched the president amble stiffly across the stage, my first thought was: He doesn’t look so bad. For months, everything I had heard, plus some of what I had seen, led me to brace for something much more dire.
As context, Nuzzi's writing was critical of Biden's age in 2020, and Biden people have had a grudge against her ever since.
And from a tweet, when asked why she's reporting this now and not earlier:
I work on most of my stories for months. This piece is about a conspiracy of silence that made people reluctant to talk. I’ve been chasing down what I heard since January. That’s how long reporting takes. Debate changed people’s calculations about how candid they would be, and even then not on the record.
Not a great look, and especially bad to only publish it now. All that work covering it up, and it accomplished nothing for the Democratic Party, just significantly increased the chance of Trump winning. Few could put together the bravery to speak out about the age issues of the eighty year old, despite this being The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetime v3. Sadly, no competent elites in smoke-filled rooms pulling the strings. At best Ezra Klein with a column and podcast or two saying maybe we should replace him.
I think my earlier comment that this was a surprisingly bad Biden debate performance was true, and that this wasn't a problem for him in 2020 (and Nuzzi agrees), but I was definitely underestimating his decline.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I do not believe that this is an entirely rarefied position to have held going into the June 27 debate. Even my famously dumb Twitter followers, of all political stripes, managed to produce the following result in April of 2020 when asked about the matter (70% voted senile total)
This doesn't make the point Eigen thinks it makes. Biden was not senile in 2020! Compare his 2020 debates to his 2024 debate. In 2020 down due to age, sure, but not senile. And there were many reports during the first half of his presidency that was capably acting as the president. I think understanding and predicting is just difficult, and it's easy to blame other peoples' mistakes on bias when you're making the same mistake inverted. No incentives or experience exist that prepares most people for accurate predictions about politics, and both Biden and Trump's staff are strongly incentivized to mislead you, and just as reversed stupidity isn't intelligence, the truth isn't halfway in between both sides' propaganda!
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
There's been a lot of reporting over the past few days on what Biden and his team and donors and congress are thinking, people in the house calling for him to drop out, and polls continue to coming out clarifying what voters think of Biden's performance. Just today
Dozens of Democratic lawmakers are considering signing a letter demanding President Joe Biden withdraw from the race, a senior party official said, as panic mounts that he’ll cost them control of Congress. Biden is rapidly losing the support of Democratic lawmakers and candidates concerned the 81-year-old’s continued candidacy would lead to a Republican sweep of Washington and an unchecked Donald Trump presidency.
So information is leaking, but it's public information leaking via the media
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
PredictIt is a terrible source of information because the position limits mean dumb retail traders set the probability, but polymarket's odds are like 45% (biden drops out) so not much better.
I've mentioned before how he's used the SPR to keep gas prices down, knowing that simple things like that matter a lot.
Can we really attribute that to Biden, did he come up with that or drive the implementation? I think it makes more sense to credit Employ America or staff for that, with Biden approving it. Whereas something like the Afghanistan withdrawal can significantly be credited to Biden.
It seems like the choice is entirely in Biden's hands, and his inner circle and family, those who'd have the most influence, appear to be supporting him so far. There's some level of opposition from his party that'd force him to pull out, but I agree it's not enough so far.
Biden will be interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on ABC this Friday we'll see if that goes better than the debate. Since the debate he's spokento the press - and to his congressional and governor dem allies - surprisingly little.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
EDIT: I realize that I forgot to clearly make my point: if you’re in a position to do things that other people think are bad, and you state “hey, we’re gonna do those things that you think are bad”, then you shouldn’t be surprised when people take you seriously. And those people would be right to wonder whether you’re just joking or going “haha, only serious”.
You'd have a point if the chair of the texas DNC put out this video. But it's a choir. It's a bunch of random people singing. The Texas Lutheran Choir singing a song about how kids should go to christian schools isn't a threat to democracy either.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Doesn't he only need the loyalty of a few people in the military? Why would the whole military have to be in on it?
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Biden is old, his speech and stance and movement shows it much more than Trump does, and it's basically negligent for democrats to not replace him, or have already replaced him. With that said - Biden did not sound anywhere this bad a few months* ago, or a few weeks ago. If he had, "we" would have noticed when reporters asked Biden a few questions , like we noticed in the first minutes of the debate. Yes, he's mostly repeating prepared remarks in those videos, but he was doing plenty of that during the debate, and he was not any better while doing so. I believe claims that he was sick, and that fucked up his voice and otherwise degraded his performance, being sick often does really lower one's capabilities. It's still objectively bad that he's old enough being sick brings him down here, but this is not a median Biden performance.
* - this is the source of the 'president of mexico, sisi' quote. But people fuck up important words sometimes. I did so twice today. One of the CNN hosts did so too.
Again he should still pull out, but people are swinging too far with the crowd on their assessments of the facts.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
A joke's supposed to be funny
Okay to be more clear I have made jokes like that and worse hundreds of times, as far as offensive jokes go it's one of the mainstays. Homosexuals reproduce by... I can understand not having that taste in humor, but it's simply a joke.
But seeing as children are stupid and impressionable, what then are we to think of 'sex education' aimed at preteens
Retread of past discussions, but, like, have you used the internet and interacted with teenagers? They watch a lot of porn. A few years ago I was organizing some video game thing and we banned several minors because they just kept posting porn, and screenshots of them dming each other weird porn. I do not think sex ed is a notable place where kids learn about weird sex stuff, I think they basically all learn it on the internet and from their friends. This may be bad, but it doesn't have much to do with sex ed, which in turn isn't directly connected to the original thesis about LGBT online communities and toaster intercourse
One of the weirder things out there I found while looking into body positivity-I was incredulous- is that there's is a seemingly huge website that rewards pretty women for being fat and showing it off or getting even fatter
Yeah, feeders, it's terrifying. There's a lot of ridiculous things. People who cut their penises off as a fetish, nullos. Self-harm fetishes. Anal prolapse!
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Have you contemplated the idea he is speaking to normies in normie speak because normies have been conditioned to reflexively bristle when hearing 'fascism' ?
... I guess but this fully collapses all moral distinctions about 'lying' or 'being factually correct' into a friend/enemy binary, which one could do, but I prefer higher standards than that? And anyway the people who RT his tweets so that I see them are definitely not normies, they are smart enough to know better. Same for this place. Like you do have a point, but Devon's tweet was posted here, we're smarter than this, it's not like it's a republican tv ad
Gay Men's Choir That Sang 'We're Coming for Your Children'
This was a joke. They were explicitly and intentionally mocking the concept of conservatives saying that. It is simply unreasonable to attribute that to genuine desire to brainwash your children. I and many others here have said worse on the site we copied the code for this one from or in private.
Sex interest based online communites .. are kinda getting a little out of control. There are certain things that probably shouldn't be promoted because they're not good for individuals or society. I mean, how do you feel about 'stupid sluts club' ? Cool ? Maybe, if you're not into monogamy. What about a place that sexualizes smoking? Or drug use..
No I think it's reasonable to find cnc vacuum bed hypno piss play concerning. But the point of the post was to explain the general obsession with being a pride moth LGBT ally. That's just a different thing, it has different causes, they can't be explained with a gesture at some other somewhat related bad thing.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Devon's tweets are terrible. Even for a conclusion his audience already believes, the arguments appear to just be made up. And unfortunately he's very talented at making things up, as the popularity of his book shows. Take this lovely tweet:
"Fascism is when boring normie dullards make it illegal to be weird, then kill all the bright, creative, and interesting people out of knee-jerk tribalism and fear."
That is bad! It's not fascism, though. Fascism was not normie. It was very weird. It attracted some of the best artists and intellectuals. You write sentences like this when your motivation is "I want to OWN my twitter enemies", and not "I want to understand fascism, the political ideology".
The same thing applies to this thread. There just nothing there beneath a series of insults. Reading it literally, the toaster-fucker problem's blamed on the internet. So the internet existing is a necessary condition for today's LGBT weirdness, because it's necessary for social status games to cycle into irrationality. But irrational social fads are not at all new, and the LGBT thing is less intense and insane than some past ones, such as disputes between or within religious sects over abstruse religious doctrine. Even the LGBT movement was as weird in the past, with many activists also pushing to remove the age of consent. And since excessive competition over status signals has always been a human tendency, does this theory actually explain anything? There are clearly patterns to 'wokeness' - historically oppressed minority sexualities, minority races, etc - and this theory doesn't tell us why the bureaucratic caste would become obsessed with those instead of another of the ten thousand niche internet communities.
And in the toaster-fucking group, the axis of prestige aligns with fucking toasters. So first they compete to see who can fuck the most toasters. Then, when that is saturated, they one up each other by being most open with the general public about their toaster fucking ways.
Sure, this has happened in the online gay community, like it has in the online fishing community and online retro video game community. This is part of why the online gay community is so weird. We wanted to explain why the 'bureaucratic caste' is so pro-gay, though.
Then they move on to bragging about how they sneak into other people's kitchens and fuck their toasters, too, and swap tips for how to introduce kids to the joys of toaster-fucking.
This is a well written snipe, but if we unpack the analogy it's not really true, we're ignoring the differences between different "they"s. The person from the previous quote, say a gay dude who competes to get the most likes on photos of him tied up while getting fucked by two other guys, is not actually 'swapping tips for how to introduce kids to the joys of toaster-fucking'. He's referencing trans kids there, but trans evangelism to trans kids happens because of (probably false) beliefs like - trans kids are being repressed by society - introducing them to the idea will help them be their true selves and prevent suicide - etc. This memeplex, and the fact that it perpetuates itself, isn't explained by 'toaster-fucking'.
Pretty soon normal people, who ten years before would shrugged and said "that's weird", are now sick of toaster-fucker flags everywhere and their kids being told to fuck toasters by sickos, and now they're going to burn every toaster-fucker flag they see, and Florida just passed a law requiring you to be 21 years old with proof of ID to buy a toaster. And Utah has banned toasters altogether and the Mormons have stopped even eating toast, bagels, waffles, or any other heated bread product.
This is clearly implying a general anti-gay backlash, but as other comments point out this isn't happening! The minor decreases in LGBT-support for gen z are within the margins of error.
Because a few toaster-fuckers get beaten with fence posts by people sick of hearing about toaster-fucking, and other people, who didn't see or hear the toaster-fuckers' prior behavior, say "holy shit, toaster fuckers really are oppressed". And they decide to become "toaster-fucker allies", despite the fact that they haven't the slightest real interest in fucking any toasters themselves.
... And then the premise here isn't true, so the conclusion isn't either. There's no huge anti-gay backlash, hate crimes are decreasing, and yet allyship goes way up! If the number of people who are strongly anti-gay is much smaller than it was before the internet existed, it doesn't make sense to attribute causation to "toaster-fucking" for this. There are real explanations here, ones that depend on the particulars of LGBT ideas and "oppression", but this isn't it.
This is what "go outside and touch grass" really means. It doesn't mean that plants magically cure insanity, it means go encounter randomly selected people who have nothing to do with you other than geographic proximity. The purpose of this is to remember what normal people are like, and what normalcy is.
And then, atop this collapsing foundation, the solution: "be normal". But we can trivially observe this doesn't work - the whole phenomena to be explained is that many people, otherwise normal people, are strangely enthused about being LGBT allies, and this happened despite being in contact with many other normal people. Or does he mean that it's the "toaster-fuckers" who need to be normal - that they need to stop posting about their sex lives online, and then a few years later suburban moms will stop putting up LGBT flags? Really?
The whole thing doesn't work. The picture it's painting is a disconnected series of vibes.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Now we discuss the makeup and actions of the SCOTUS, BORING
Maybe it's that we've (not just TheMotte - the ratsphere, the 'dissident right', the internet at large) have picked all of the intellectual low-hanging fruit, and only more specific, complicated things are left? I find SCOTUS discussion interesting and read all of it, though I don't have much to contribute.
That might also contribute to the feeling of wasted time - all the discourse happened, and what changed?
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
Activity does seem to be declining, with 750 comments on the last CWR. Any idea why? This is, at least to me, the only place online that has good generalist discussion other than the posts (not comments though) of some substacks.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
That's not trading examples, I found that by looking for the exact comment you're referring to. Cjet's original post about race blindness, The Case For Ignoring Race, got 18 upvotes and 5 downvotes, which is a perfectly normal ratio. The most downvoted comment related to race blindness on his page has a net karma of ... -3, and it's in response to a 38 upvotes comment with the following:
As far as I'm concerned, the policy of acknowledging both race and additional information you have about a person is strictly superior to doing the same but ignoring race. I'd be more concerned if a black doctor was treating me since I know about how much AA they receive, I'd be less concerned if the doctor publicized his SAT score or had other objective markers for performance like a specialization in a field where his race counts for nothing (I doubt that's the case in the US, but I could be wrong). This is where AA in general taints by association, said doctor could absolutely be someone who managed to get in without not so subtle nudges, but since they usually lack a way to prove it, they're automatically discounted in the eyes of a rational agent with no additional information.
This is just ... not ... "people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as". This is "we should judge people on their merit, or our best estimate of their merit, and that merit is correlated with race is an objective fact about the world".
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I find it amazing that someone who's been here for a long time and is clearly pretty smart can end up with these interpretations of themotte's viewpoints, reading the same words I have but interpreting them so differently, lol.
From the post you linked about someone being downvoted for advocating colorblindness, I upvoted this reply:
As far as I'm concerned, the policy of acknowledging both race and additional information you have about a person is strictly superior to doing the same but ignoring race. I'd be more concerned if a black doctor was treating me since I know about how much AA they receive, I'd be less concerned if the doctor publicized his SAT score or had other objective markers for performance like a specialization in a field where his race counts for nothing (I doubt that's the case in the US, but I could be wrong). This is where AA in general taints by association, said doctor could absolutely be someone who managed to get in without not so subtle nudges, but since they usually lack a way to prove it, they're automatically discounted in the eyes of a rational agent with no additional information.
This is ... not speaking against meritocracy. If you have a way to measure someone's merit, use it, If not, because it's being suppressed, then use race as bayesian evidence. The replies to the post are evidence against, not for, your claim that a lot of mottizens believe 'people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as'.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Posts like these are why I still come back here, thanks for writing this.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
This is not the kind of discussion we're looking for here. I agree with you on the facts but you should go to reddit or twitter if you want to post stuff like this.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Biden is worse than four years ago, and just his age should, in theory, be enough to disqualify him (along with Trump), this is someone we're giving command of the military, they need to have top-tier judgement. But ... you should go watch an hour-long uncut interview with Biden on youtube. He's clearly not senile. He is slow, he makes more mistakes while talking, and most of all the way he moves his body is incredibly rigid and strange and creates an infirm affect. But he can engage in complicated arguments. You're basing your view of Biden on the worst clips selected from hundreds of hours of video tapes. If a camera was watching me 8 hours a day for the last 6 months, there'd probably be at least one ten-second clip fitting for inclusion in a biden senility compilation
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
This is a common sentiment, and it's just not true, and I wish I could bet my entire net worth against it. There are a billion english speakers, a majority of them use the internet. Half of them are below average IQ, 10% of them are in various senses mentally ill, and very few of them have political beliefs that are by our standards reasonable or sane. Russian troll farms exist, but every example we know of only produced terrible tweets across small accounts, it's a crazy leap to assume that a significant fraction of pseudonymous discourse are troll farms.
It's also easy to find people IRL who believe things like what's in the OP. For instance, how do you think the anti-israel protests at universities will post on this topic?
Oh I thought I linked to a subsection, it's very good generally but the section about IQ is misleading imo http://gusevlab.org/projects/hsq/#h.u5i4y14hya4j
This is a good demonstration of how the science genuinely is complicated though, all it takes is the wrong starting point or a bit of motivated reasoning for someone very capable to take the wrong position (even if sasha is right, it's still true bc there are smart people on the other side), and it's part of why I put more weight on holistic observation than data here
I don't think this is exactly a pendulum swinging back. I think if an assassination attempt against Trump had happened in 2020, people'd still be fired for saying it should've happened. 'killing the president is bad' is a very strong political norm that is fairly independent of anti-racism or rape c. If the attempt had been on Biden instead (which might've been possible, the shooter searched for both trump and biden and trump had a rally near his home), we'd see something similar.
I think framing this as striking back against the left's cancel culture power, fighting fire with fire, is confused for that reason among others. This isn't training a muscle you can use to cancel trans activists or anti-white DEI racists. Nor will punishing random cashiers for saying things like this make it less likely popular progressive twitter users will say things you dislike. Cancelling a popular twitter user or celebrity is very different from cancelling a random old woman. It kinda feels like PUSHING BACK, it sorta feels like the same sort of thing as cancelling a beloved actor or tech CEO, but it really isn't
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