kky
2d ago
But it’s sadly not mainstream. (Also, IMO, pure TFR is not enough. You’d have to calculate things like the reproduction of various social and economic classes, weighted heavily towards the middle, and raw investment into maintenance and long-term infrastructure that can be used by future generations. Overbuilding networking in the dotcom boom would write out positive, while shuttering the steel mills would be negative. I guess you’d probably want multiple metrics to capture a place like China which is dramatically overbuilding at the same time as its TFR is cratering.)
kky
2d ago
What a strange thing to say. Didn’t I answer “no” there?
If you’re looking for an opportunity to be offended, then I can’t really help you.
kky
3d ago
It probably matters that you are receiving the 20m and could not possibly be giving the 10m. (Unless you actually have that much, in which case, apologies for assuming.)
It also probably matters that deontology is an excellent representation of how humans reason about truly heinous acts, and that to act is greatly different than to not act. Hence cowardice (short of desertion) and treason both being rewarded with a rope, excepting that in the latter case it gets tied in a loop first.
I would strongly trust those moral intuitions.
kky
3d ago
This appeared in my history, so I've probably linked it here before, but as far as interesting old blog posts about welfare go...
I'll quote the pieces I think most relevant in response to your post, but I encourage reading the whole thing.
There is a significant misconception of what "disability" means, and I'm not going to say what you think I might. Dr. Balt, and I'll wager most people, think Keisha is probably able to work. However, the issue isn't whether she can work, but whether any employer would be willing to take a chance on her ability to work. Would you hire Keisha to run your office? Do billing? In the spacious comfort of an internet comment you might hire a woman like Keisha to work at a hypothetically inefficient McDonalds, but in practice, are you willing to tolerate "3-4 absences a month due to illness?" McDonalds neither, which is why the SSI application form asks that exact question.
As long as they-- and the inmates and the etc-- are munching on food stamps, weed, and Xboxes, nearly illiterate but keeping their nonsense within their neighborhoods, the rest of us can go on with our lives.
Say your father raped you repeatedly for a decade. Hold on, slow down, it gets worse: now you're 40, and he shows up asking you for $2400 because, and I quote, "you have a responsibility to take care of me." There he is in your living room, eyeballing the nice things in your home. If it is a fact that you will inevitably give him the money, is it easier to for you to pair it with your venom or your sympathy? Though it's enraging, there is a perverse pleasure in giving that bastard the money. It tells you that you showed him that you are better than him.
If you've gotten through the above, superior thoughts, I'll scratch out a few of my own down here.
As far as I can see it, welfare is the summation of a few factors:
- The eternal need to provide somehow for the unfortunate, the unmotivated, and the unwise. This truly does go all the way back. If people are left to their own devices, most of them will attempt to relax and reproduce as much as possible. Something must be taken away if they are to have a surplus for when they truly need it. Separate post, sometime, but I suspect this is the reason behind most forms of government.
- Globalism, industrialism, and economic deracination, which makes it easier to support idle workers off of the productivity of others.
- Liberal egalitarianism and the elites' sharp retreat from noblesse oblige, removing the old-school frameworks for compelling labor and moral betterment. Again, separate post sometime.
The result is a bunch of policies that address pressing first-order concerns, but have some pretty nasty second- and third-order consequences that are extremely difficult to talk about while retaining sympathy for the people involved.
Can welfare continue to exist in its current form? Not forever, sure, but forever is a long time. How long can it last? Until the rubber hits the road, which is probably keyed off of the sharp population declines in our near future more than anything. There's a reasonable argument to be made that Europe (to a greater extent) and the US (to a lesser extent) are currently getting choked out by welfare. But that's somewhat besides the point. The reality is twofold: first, that welfare will continue until the affected nations are more or less forced into a New Deal of sorts, because those benefiting from welfare planned their lives around receiving it and aren't remotely prepared for the consequences of not having it; and second, that it is much, much better to not be on welfare than to be on welfare. Look at your two examples. The first couple have their future at the mercy of regular politics - their future is not under their control, and if Idaho should ever become unable to pay their pensions, they will be in unbelievably deep trouble. The second are in wild amounts of debt and are going to be barely scraping by, eternally. Their (presumable) food stamps are a pittance compared to how they've decided to sell themselves into slavery for the benefit of the banks. Either their consumption will sharply dry up once their income equals their debt payments, or they declare bankruptcy and lose everything and will never have a house again. Is either case remotely enviable? (Also, I'm pretty sure that way more of your money is going to cases like the first one, and barely anything is going to the second one. Social Security and Medicare together are about 33% of the budget, and only around 5% goes to food stamps, child tax credits, etc. The second couple is more outrageous from a morality point of view, but the first is vastly more expensive.)
Couple of things you mentioned that stood out to me.
And finally. No dependents. Its not like they've got mouths to feed and kids to raise. Every dollar they spend here on is solely on themselves, and contributes 'nothing' to the future productivity of the country.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that standard economic measures like GDP are flawed insofar as they only capture production and not reproduction, when it's pretty clear that the latter means a lot more in the long term. So if everyone's just looking at GDP for a vibe check on how the economy is doing, they get the totally wrong perspective and miss the steamroller coming down the road.
This raises a question: are 'we' really supporting this entire apparatus on the efforts of some small and possibly shrinking minority of our actual population? Without getting too Randian, what's the ratio of productive/unproductive left now?
For America specifically, the source of this support is not so much "the productive" as "the debt." For 2024 the debt (1.9T) is comparable in size to Social Security (1.5T). So there are people buying US bonds on the principle that the government will pay them back before it has to raise taxes. That is bound to stop at some point in the near-ish future (order of decades, not years). When it does, either the welfare will stop or taxes will go up, or probably both. This is the "New Deal" territory I was talking about earlier. Who knows what exactly will happen here? Easy to make predictions, but reality has a habit of surprising you.
kky
4d ago
I think French is basically right.
Andrews is making one of those famous totalizing theories of history, which invariably take a single phenomenon affecting a single place and time and attempt to make it into a completely general theory of cause and effect. A good analogy would be Marxism.
Totalizing theories fail because the actual material of history is far, far richer and denser than any monocausal theory can provide for (outside of extremely limited forms - think “crop failures drive starvation”). Right now, America specifically is under a great number of pressures, including: an aging population, immigration, the arrogance born of global superiority, gutted industries, old and new racial tensions, the rise of left and then right wokism, the intergenerational humiliations of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, and yes, the monumental rise of women into the public sphere and corresponding retreat in men’s public influence. Each one of these is going to have its own effects and pressures, and to select one as the Cause of Causes is misguided or even benighted.
What I think Andrews is mostly describing is a sharpened tribalistic trend in the public sphere. Calls for ingroup violence are responded to more generously, as points of difference or even decorum are sufficient for a breach. At the same time, objective measures of advantage are taken less seriously, along with other dispassionate perspectives. Overt efforts towards creating entirely new value, or at least taking from the actual Other, are devalued compared to squabbling over internal resources.
But this happens over all places and times, and if I were to offer a theory, is probably more closely related to where people can expect the greatest return on investment for their efforts. While Rome had easy access to the Mediterranean and rich France, she expanded; when she reached the borders of the Sahara, the Atlantic, the Levant, and the Rhine, she turned inward and began warring over what she already had. This is not a complete analysis, but I think it’s a strong gearspring in this particular mechanism. In contrast, ONLY in the modern West have women penetrated the public sphere to such a degree. If there were consequences to this, we should expect to see unique ones, not regurgitations from every struggling power. And indeed, on the family and interpersonal level, we do see massive changes in gender relations. But interestingly, I don’t think those replicate directly to the civilizational level. The problems we are having were experienced by the men of yesteryear. Late Athens is, as always, an apt comparison.
I’m coming at this from a fairly sympathetic perspective. I think there are major problems with how America operates right now, I personally dislike how it feels to operate in a feminized institution, I think the legislative defenses of women have by and large exceeded their period of use now that women are paramount in many areas… and yet I find her overall piece to be lacking. It’s like she’s got cause and effect backwards.
Let me give an analogy. We all know that universities became dramatically more leftist over the past sixty or so years - I think that’s fairly established and supportable. But why? The simple reason is that more conservative individuals did not see the universities as worth fighting over. I know I didn’t. They don’t pay enough, you don’t get enough respect… so I went into industry, and I think that’s where most similar people went too. So the universities were ceded to people who wanted them for reasons nothing to do with wealth or status.
I think the women in industry question is similar. In the areas where women are most dominant, or increasingly dominant, one reason is that they want the job for reasons other than what men want, and are willing to effectively undercut men on that principle. As they do so, the costs for men to enter that industry go up and the rewards go down, so they hit a tipping point and become much more female. If a field were to become more profitable but also more demanding, we’d see a reverse effect where men flood in and squeeze the women - who frequently want more flexibility in their work and don’t like demanding and stressful positions - out. And I think this is happening to some degree in fields like nursing. It’s basically gender roles painted over industrial culture. So what does it mean that, say, being a judge or a lawyer or a Congressman is decreasingly attractive to men, such that they’d push through whatever feminine culture to be one anyway?
So, contra Andrews, my basic thesis is that the basic facts of gendering make some careers more suitable for men than women than vice versa, and that this tends to lead to dramatic differences in sex ratio and subculture, but that the larger cultural differences are separate from this phenomenon. Certainly there is some effect from civil rights legislation, but it’s not the whole story. If you took all the women out, I suspect the men that remain would act, by Andrews’ lights, like a bunch of girls.
kky
4d ago
This is an incredible non-sequitor. The people that the defendant had to fear weren’t the police, but rather the jury. Bring stats on opinions on a jury of one’s peers if you please, but the police themselves were not a danger to this man. And if you distrust juries, then suggest alternatives. Note that the final alternative is relying on justice through violence itself.
This argument fails on the basis of basic logic and on the basis of simple second-order consequences. I’m not remotely compelled by it, and surprised to see it here. Is this some kind of psyop to make the phenomenon of the underclass distrusting the police seem even less compelling? I see you’ve succeeded in getting people downthread talking about it. Otherwise, I’m just baffled.
kky
30d ago
I’m dismissing their physical abilities.
I’m surprised you quoted XX when XXI is pretty clearly what he’s referencing.
kky
1mo ago
One of my little hobbies is examining historical evidence and trying to make a reasonable guess at the truth of things. I thought an example of such might be fun enough for people here, so here you are.
Bret Devereaux writes of Roman weavers:
That said, while the production of clothing was an essential task, it was not a well-remunerated task. Regular weavers – not specialized in rare or fine fabrics – are some of the least well paid individuals in Diocletian’s Price Edict, paid just 12-16 denarii per day (20-40 for those working high quality linen, 25-40 for those working on silk), compared to 25 denarii per day for an unskilled farm laborers, mule drivers, shepherds and 50 or more for skilled artisans working wood, stone or metal (Carpenters: 50; mosaic workers, 60, wall painters (fresco, one assumes): 75, shipwrights, 50-60, blacksmith or baker, 50, etc.).
First, the reason this passage drew my attention: that an at least partially skilled laborer could draw half the wage of a farmhand does not pass the smell test. Why would such individuals not simply up and leave? The farms await with their great bounties. Such a discrepancy demands explanation. Bret attempts one, but his is that capital ownership was much more important in the labor-rich premodern environment, and that therefore the earnings of weavers could be driven down. This explains nothing of the discrepancy between weavers and presumably equally disenfranchised hired hands. So what could account for this?
First, background on Diocletian’s edict. Normally we think of price controls as a minimum cost or wage for this and that, typically as a socialist dictator’s ploy to stay popular. Diocletian was setting a maximum to try and halt inflation. So in each of these, we should consider: given an environment where labor is in a relative position of strength, Diocletian forbids the worker demanding a wage beyond a certain amount. If labor is not strong, and currency is not too greatly debased, then we should expect actual prices to stay lower than these marks, or else for wages to float beyond them on the gray market.
In the edict itself, however, low-grade weavers were not paid by the day, but rather by the pound. This is likely what is generating Bret’s estimate range here, as it’s hard to know exactly how much a weaver can weave. But there’s another confounder here, which is that the edict does not specify the quality of the weaver, but rather the quality of the wool, which is coarse. Wool’s weight per yard is not fixed, but varies on the thickness of the thread - so a weaver using coarse thread is simply going to be producing more pounds per yard and per unit of labor than one using fine thread. Flax is finer than wool, and presumably is going to be priced higher per pound.
And since our estimates on historical productivity are at best sketchy, we really can’t rely on our figures here. Modern estimates are typically given by historical reenactors. Not to put too fine a point on it, these are amateurs and historians who are bookish and unlikely to be either driven or particularly skilled with their hands. Premoderns, on the other hand, were going to eat or starve based on their productivity, and starvation was not so very far away. They would be working hard (perhaps 12h/d instead of 8 max), and with no end to practice, and likely with more dexterity than book learning. We should expect their productivity to be substantially greater than our contemporaries. And, given that we know Diocletian was trying to set reasonable price caps to halt inflation, we can assume that he was working off of estimates to keep the overall income of these similar workers in line. The farmhand shares wages with a water carrier and a mule driver. The equivalent for the wool weaver would be the day-wage linen weaver, who made 20d. That should actually make us strongly suspect that a weaver of coarse wool fabric was making a pound and a third, or a yard and change, of cloth a day, rather than making much less money. (Also interesting: women make much less a day, down to 12d. Was this because women worked slower, because they were expected to work part-time alongside childcare, or because they were understood to be exceptionally vulnerable without a working man and therefore easy to exploit? The wage gap persists.)
Lastly, a couple considerations on the nature of the work. Farmhands are presumably not sharecroppers, but rather hired help during the backbreaking and urgent plowing and harvest seasons. They would not be needed the rest of the year. In contrast, given that thread does not spoil like food, a weaving workshop can operate year-round and would likely prefer to so distribute the work in order to fully utilize workspace and looms. So our farmhand is hired for a few weeks of brutal but reasonably paid work, while our weaver is steadily employed throughout the year. Even though the farmhand likely picks up additional work to cover the gaps, the needed rest after these periods means he is all but certain to average below his sticker price. How much lower is a hard estimate, but 20% of the time out of work is sufficient to bring his wage down to the linen-weaver. And we have to assume that Diocletian was completely aware of this fact.
So, in summary: looking at the actual numbers and the actual purpose of the edict, alongside some reasonable assumptions about the comparable nature of the work and our own limited ability to produce, yields a plausible interpretation of the evidence where the astonishing anomaly of Bret’s assertion that weavers were paid like women (on its own an anomaly) vanishes. And this is a technique, for what it’s worth, that Bret has used himself for things like military equipment weight, so I think he most likely is just less familiar with this field and took someone else’s uncited estimate as gospel instead of examining the strange details like he would for military matters.
If something doesn’t make sense on the roughest estimates, that’s almost always because one premise or another is false or misunderstood. This mutation of syllogistic reasoning holds quite broadly.
kky
1mo ago
I guess you got me, I'm actually a Russian shill paid to stir shit on a Congolese fish filleting forum?
That’s not what I mean to imply.
I have an acquaintance with family in South Africa. Things there are legitimately quite bad. I would not travel there - and yet, I don’t feel nearly so strongly about things which happen there as things in the US, even if they’re more severe. That’s because I don’t live there. My day to day is not affected by it, and does not affect it.
On the other hand, I live in the US, and take things much more seriously here.
You joke but for a Very Online chud like me, the proverbial firing squads have been here for quite a while already, that's why I'm on the fucking Motte.
That’s a very fair point. I don’t necessarily recommend living life on the internet, but understanding that moralizing is not going to affect your day-to-day, I understand why this is a big deal for you. This was a very internet killing, and as such happened in your back yard, and now you have to deal with the consequences. Thanks for explaining it.
Quite frequently, when people care very strongly about something that has little direct relation to them, it’s because it’s a symbol for something that does relate to them. I wasn’t sure whether this was happening for you, but it sounds like it isn’t.
Taking the high road is how we got here.
Tactically, I disagree, it was the right-wing retreat from academia that precipitated these problems. The left wanted to kick the right out, and the right let that happen long enough that an unacceptable proportion of the youth got educated in an echo chamber. That meant the online flame wars in early Tumblr days were a losing cause, since social media companies were hiring the lefties and not the righties. But that’s showbiz.
kky
1mo ago
You don’t even live in the US, right? Or am I forgetting? Why is this element of domestic politics hitting you so hard? I can understand the emotion from people who live here, but I’m a little surprised by your take.
Yeah, no duh it sucks what happened to him. But nobody cares about lock-out-tag-out until some poor Mexican gets filleted. Very often the only way things change is through truly horrifying consequences. I’m not suggesting you shrug about an assassination. It’s normal, human to be rattled by it. But it’s right to control your response, to think about what did and did not happen, what it does and doesn’t mean for you. A lot of people are reading this as “Comradx Queeria is preparing the firing squads.” I don’t think that’s right. I think a lot of malicious idiots on the left were getting excused for their language - sanewashing - for much longer than they had any right to, and finally enough truly insane people are coming out of the woodwork that the normies are shook. I know I am. But this place in particular does not need more doomposting. To my lefty friends and family, I’ve been saying this is important, language matters. Here. I say to take it in stride. The consistency? Lowering the temperature. Even if that might be upsetting.
kky
1mo ago
What do you mean? I answered you pretty clearly, I think. If Freddie is being consistent, his view would match mine, but he’s a bipolar Marxist and I frankly can’t promise anything of him. The essay in question was quite good, though, and I wanted to highlight the central message I found in it.
Your turn. Want to explain yourself?
kky
1mo ago
Dunno 100% for Freddie, but you can have my word for it now, if you’d like.
If a psycho shoots any prominent lefty figure it does not, in itself, reflect poorly on right wingers or Trump. If they celebrate the death, that celebration reflects poorly on them. That’s it. The right wingers are justified in continuing to believe in gun rights and the Great Replacement or whatever else.
That’s pretty easy for me to say, of course, given that I’m not particularly left or right. But if it’s consolation, I really do believe it.
kky
1mo ago
I suggest reworking your parallel here - in the first case, an active external system should have locked the guy away. In the second, a set of ideas should have inspired a lost young man differently. Why should we have not locked him up instead? Or relied on friendly pluralism to convince a madman to not stab a stranger? It’s hard to reconcile the analogy.
kky
1mo ago
Alright, but my unaddressed point is - does anything matter then, in a concrete sense?
Yes, of course - not killing anyone would matter quite a lot, most of all to the family of the deceased.
Don’t get me wrong. The uncontrolled rhetoric coming out of the left has done a lot to further chaos, and responding to that as chaos to be suppressed is a reasonable choice. But I think Freddie is right that the ideology of violence is not spurred by leftism qua leftism, it’s spurred by a desire for violence. This desire itself creates and justifies the ideology. If you want to quell the ideology, then your real port of call must be to handle the desire for violence.
I’m sure you see it on this forum. There are people whose select purpose is baying for the blood of the other, and I suspect some of them are just interested in blood itself. There are also those who resist the impulse, but! as one can clearly see, the radical and chaotic act spurs their sentiments towards chaos. There is some danger of a “leftist” copycat killer, but do not discount Chadwick Westfallen deciding that this tat needs a tit. And then people on this forum will say: but think of all the people killed in BLM, it’s an isolated demand for rigor… and this is chaos speaking through them. The response is what feeds chaos, the strange attractor. Or, for another example, a black man died in police custody under questionable circumstances, and instead of individual justice and a reform towards order, a lot of people went out burning things. Their response fed chaos. But this time, it looks to be different.
In my humble opinion, the actual response to this event is about as good as you’re gonna get. They caught the killer and he’s got a good chance of frying for it. Some chaos-infected dipshits on Twitter tried to cheer him on and are getting punished for it. Establishment left mouthpieces are having to show message discipline for the first time in years. The system is tamping down on these excesses. It is curbing the feedback loop. There is still the problem of young people without meaning, and this will continue for some time, probably until the demographic collapse starts leveling. But so long as support for this killer remains beyond acceptable public discourse, the worst is held off.
That’s why I think Freddie is overall right about this. There is a cycle feeding chaos, and it is visible, and the specific agents and purposes do not matter as much as whether the act itself incites people to respond in kind. The urges driving the chaos have little to do with sides and are about chaos itself. The correct way to respond to these events is without reference to sides, and to prefer to oppose chaos itself. The killer was wrong. The people supporting him are wrong. The people opposing the killer’s “side” are right insofar as they demand that people should not support chaos, and wrong insofar as they demand vengeance upon people who did not praise the killing. It really is as simple as that.
kky
1mo ago
and not a single thing would change, not even the choice of target.
That’s not the claim. The claim is that the choice of target doesn’t matter.
I think the confusion here is down to thinking about this in terms of sides, like Charlie Kirk dying was a victory for the left against the right, which can be excused given there are a lot of braindead leftists acting like it on social media. Freddie’s point is that the winning side is chaos itself, and that this would be true even if it had been Mr. Based Hyperborean ventilating a Young Democrats outreach lady.
I’ve been using analogies to the Third Republic lately, so I’ll keep on a roll. Leading up to the catastrophe of the Battle of France, the left (commies) and right (crowncucks) were in a state of near war. But every act they took against one another didn’t solidify their control, it tore the country apart. And in the wreckage, neither of them were left in power. That privilege was reserved to Hitler.
I hope that makes the argument clear.
I think this is a misreading of a fairly subtle piece. Freddie may be a Marxist, but he ain’t stupid.
The point of this essay is that the so-called political motivations lie beneath the real motivation, which is a self-contained urge towards meaning that has otherwise been thwarted. Being frustrated in an ordinary search for meaning, the young men attempt to summon it through violence. The way they want us to see it is: they believed so strongly in X that they were willing to resort to violence. The real ordering is: they could only believe in belief on the basis of violence. Violence, with its hard reality, supplements the unreal world in which these young men live.
His parallel to anarchists, the propaganda of the deed, is apt. The point there was violence - to prove violence was possible, to encourage others towards violence. The purpose was to harm. Everything other than hurting fell away. It was pretty nasty.
Ideology is a sleight of hand. Look, I’m doing this for a reason, I’m committed… but the only commitment seems to have been to violence. What else did this kid do? It’s like Uncle Ted. Only thing he did was live in a cabin. Then he wanted to mail people bombs, so he wrote a manifesto so he’d have a reason. Why not set up a Thoreauean intentional living community? Make it make sense.
Freddie is saying: take it from me, I know lunatics. They give you reasons and words words words, but the cause was festering inside them the whole time, they just found something to latch onto. Don’t trust them to know why, and don’t trust them to tell you.
EDIT: Adding a little clarity.
Let’s say you ask a paranoid schizo who’s behind everything that happens. He’s gonna tell you: the Jews, duh. But let’s say that same schizo is Chinese. Jews aren’t a big thing over there. He doesn’t have a ready-made ideology to latch onto. So when you ask him who’s behind it all, does he say nobody, it’s a very complex multi-agent system? Non, monsieur. He’s got an answer ready-made. The reason he thinks it’s the Jews specifically would be antisemitism. But the reason he thinks it’s someone is the schizophrenia.
Freddie says that Tyler Robinson is the schizo in this analogy, and that there’s something in the water driving people crazy this way. Stamping out the Jew-hatred isn't gonna unpoison our well.
kky
1mo ago
If Freddie is right, then successfully eliminating every trace of the shooter’s supposed ideology would be a temporary fix at best. The problem is that there is a force (his “strange attractor”) unmooring young men and making them more prone to violence, and that absent one ideology they will find another.
This is a fairly concrete objection to focusing on political rhetoric in favor of understanding the cycle of chaos that he posits as the real driving force here.
kky
1mo ago
The alternative slate of electors are not "unfamiliar people" anymore than the state-certified slate of electors are "unfamiliar people."
The description here is meant to evoke a plausible description of how the coup would be executed without being disrupted in the moment. In reality, it was disrupted in the moment, so explaining experientially what it would be like for the Congressmen on the ground matters. It’s not a contrast between this elector and that fake elector.
This has been done many times throughout US history. Trump's plan wasn't to simply accept the alternative slate of electors, it was to refuse to count the electors from some states and demand a debate and/or inquiry and if this failed to produce the required number of electoral college electors then the election would be thrown to the House, something which as been done multiple times in US history.
I think, in order for this statement to be supportable, you need two detailed examples. Then we can argue whether this was or was not comparable. But as it stands this is a bare assertion.
Why do you think the same comment would be wrong to have been written from the other perspective here? Eastman's plan wasn't to "undo the results of the election," it was contesting the results of the election.
Contrast the Bush-Gore kerfuffle. Immediately after the election, Florida law and Gore demanded a recount, which was immediately performed. Gore contested that result to the Supreme Court, which was decided in December. By the time that electoral certification rolled around the affair had been decided. Trump also submitted lawsuits, but these were rejected quite early. The Supreme Court was not willing to listen to him. So, by the time Jan 6 came about, the affair had been decided.
What Eastman proposed to do was not a method of contesting results. The results were already contested, and contesting them had failed. He was proposing to replace the results.
The analogy here would be if Gore had tried to declare that he was actually President and that the Supreme Court case was decided unjustly. Could you explain, without reference to facts of the election (because facts are the subject being contested in court here, and Gore and Trump lost in court), on a procedural basis, why Gore’s hypothetical rejection here would be invalid while Trump’s would be valid? Or if both are valid, what are the necessary and just steps that would then be taken to fix things and get a President in the two weeks leading up to the inauguration? Or do we not get a new President at all?
Not really. Much like each string of events you wargamed, one doesn't necessarily lead to the other. At each of these stages, the escalation can fail for a variety of reasons, much like Trump simply stopping and going home to Florida.
Absolutely true. I’m assuming that a successful coup on Jan 6 emboldens Trump and makes him fear for his safety if he tries getting off the metaphorical tiger. If he seriously attempts to hold onto power, however, it’s extremely doubtful to me that Biden just accepts it (because this legitimizes every future attempt in the same vein) and then you wind up with men with guns trying to decide which authority to listen to. The nice version of this is that they all pick one side or the other, and the nasty version is that they split roughly down the middle.
Notably, Harris did not even attempt to contest the 2024 election, and most of the same “election stealing” was in place from the last time. With all due respect, I don’t have much patience for the claim that the election was stolen. It is extraordinarily shady and motivated reasoning. I understand that the event must have been very upsetting, but the truth has higher standards. So forgive me for not really engaging with that half of your post. I just don’t see anything there to talk about.
kky
1mo ago
Lol Gaullist propaganda. The British, Americans and Soviets won it and the British and Americans graciously allowed de Gaulle to take some of the credit in order to ensure an anti-communist government in post-war France.
What do you mean? He organized military and paramilitary resistance to German forces and successfully negotiated with key allies to achieve his main war goals. What you’re expressing here is an astonishingly naive view on war: that it only “counts” if it’s all on the backs of your own troops. The reality of war is that the winner wins. Nothing else matters, although losers love to find excuses. Napoleon is a great example of a loser here - spent a lot of time making excuses in his last exile. Weygand too, from the safety of a country that other men liberated. I recommend against taking the perspective of losers.
And there is no vote on-screen, and canon material consistently describes the declaration of the Empire as a proclamation, not the result of a vote.
I don’t remember that detail from the film, but it has been many years. If that’s so, it’s so, and the comparison to Caesar would be more appropriate. (I’d hold that Napoleon in particular is a bad comparison. The representatives were deliberating over whether to declare him an outlaw when he came back with men with guns and dispersed them permanently.)
kky
1mo ago
Sure.
Jan 6, a group of protesters gathers around the Capitol, some breaking in. They are under the impression they are demanding a recount and an investigation into fraud. Inside, a group of Trump loyalists inform the frightened Congressmen that they are demanding a corrected record, and there is no telling what they might do. A set of unfamiliar people, claiming to be electors, arrive and announce an alternative slate for Trump. Dissent is quashed by law enforcement, which says the situation is “dangerous” and that loud debate may draw attention. Pence walks in, and announces that in accordance with the text of the Constitution, he can verify electors. He verifies the new one. The people present do not know what to do, and do not oppose this move. Pence declares Trump as the continuing President.
Jan 7. News of this event comes out. America is immediately divided. Trump claims that he is President. Biden claims he won the election, and is now the president. Congressional Democrats move to invalidate the Jan 6 decision. Trump loyalists in Congress oppose the move strongly. Most Republicans aren’t sure what to do, and try to delay. A few days later, the first protests are organized and start. After nightfall they quickly descend into riots. MAGA counterprotests immediately follow. Mayors attempt to control the worst of it with riot police, but they increasingly struggle to control the crowds and opt to let the two sides have it out. News channels blast opposing viewpoints, and one-up each other in extreme language. Despite all this, things are eerily silent, and nothing really changes leading up to inauguration.
Jan 20. Trump arranges an inauguration in Washington DC. He deploys the National Guard around it. Biden, citing concerns for safety, withdraws to NYC and holds his inauguration there. Congressional Democrats go with him.
Jan 21. Biden, as President, orders the National Guard to defend him as he moves into the White House and displaces the pretender. Trump countermands that order. Both demand that the other be arrested. Some Guardsmen agree to support each side, and the civil war begins. What happens next depends on chance and individual conscience and is beyond predicting.
I hope I’ve made my point. The natural result of the plot was two people declaring their formal status as President at the same time. The moment one of them tries to exercise his executive authority you have a civil war. This is not particularly imaginative; this is what happens in history, over and over again, whenever you have a succession crisis that isn’t nipped in the bud. In reality, Trump backed down and the crisis ended. That was lucky. We were not guaranteed luck.
kky
1mo ago
a country that had just lost a war
This is the excuse that the defeatists gave in the moment, but in fact they had not lost the war, and de Gaulle went on to win it. Had he the advantage of the French fleet and a loyal army evacuated to North Africa (which the Germans could not touch, in accordance with what their generals were writing at the time and in retrospect), one can only imagine the process being smoother. The armistice question was also up in the air for longer than you suggest.
George Lucas was probably thinking of a combination of Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler.
None of these were known as kindly old men in whom the country could trust in trying times and who was willing and eagerly voted excessive powers by a legislative body feeling lost and ineffective, which is Lucas’ text here. The first (whichever you choose) won a civil war and set terms. The second leveraged a generalcy into a coup. The third used a popular movement of angry young men to quell opposition and gain legitimacy. None were voted in by a deceived parliament thinking it was a jolly good thing too. On the other hand, Petain is actually a good parallel to the literal text. I suggest the Wikipedia analysis, insofar as it ignores the words, is misguided.
kky
1mo ago
Yeah, I think it’s mostly about what makes for better TV. A riot from people who you can allege are trying to hang the Speaker is immediate, visceral, you don’t need to know much to enjoy it. A plan to file paperwork wrong, deliberately, is comparatively lame. Could paperwork be that important?
It reminds me of that scene from the old Star Wars movie where everyone is voting away their rights in favor of an emperor. Or, if you prefer, the actual event I think it was based on, which was really two events: the selection of Marshal Petain as the head of an interim French government to negotiate capitulation with Hitler, and the subsequent vote to give him unlimited constitutional powers. The first was rather popular, as everyone thought well of Petain, and the second was forced through with the assistance of ruffians shouting down from the galleries and thuggish ministers physically blocking a floor debate. George Lucas preferred the first scene over the second, for some reason. Really makes you think, huh.
The point we disagree upon, I believe, is this: whether security can be guaranteed on anything beyond one’s own self (and, of course, the divine providence we are all obliged to depend on).
Let’s separate these two cases. The second is a simple one of self-imposed debt slavery. The man is working. The first is one where they have worked, but a great amount of their security is explicitly dependent on government largesse.
If Trump 2 has demonstrated nothing else, it’s that government largesse is far from guaranteed. It can be removed as political winds change, and possession being nine tenths of the law, is much harder to keep your hands on over personal holdings. One’s ownership, one’s capacity to work, one’s personal relationships are far more secure than anything coming from the government. The people on the dole are like that lady from Streetcar, always depending on the kindness of strangers. To dispel any subtlety to this point, she didn’t have to work, but she sure as hell got raped.
Another small point. The husband of the first couple is a civil engineer. He alone should have been capable of pulling approximately six figures yearly across his career, probably a little less because it’s Idaho. If he went into private industry instead of civil engineering he probably could have gotten a reasonable amount more. Add on the wife’s salary, adjust for stock market growth, and they could have been dramatically richer if they’d bought index funds starting in the 90s, when they were 30. Why is that hypothetical other couple not up for our ire? Their money has to be coming from somewhere, right? And they sure aren’t working for it. Why is it morally wrong to defer spending on your income in hopes of a future relaxed payday if and only if you’re investing that particular future into the government?
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