quiet_NaN
6d ago
I see roughly three levels of response for professionals. You can fail to do your duty. You can do your duty. You can be heroic. I will admit that the lines are not always very clear.
It is easiest to recognize clearly heroic actions. The unarmed street vendor who rushed that Australian beach shooter. The civilian running into a burning house without protective gear to save another.
But there is no clear line separating heroism from doing one's duty. If you abandon your MG nest because the enemy is firing rifles towards your trench line, that might be seen as a dereliction of duty by most -- a soldier who curls up behind cover any time there is lead in the air is not very useful, after all. If you get hit, I would personally consider your duty to man your post discharged, and consider a decision to continue to fire (and likely learn how many more shots it will take to disable you really soon) as going beyond what can be expected. (If I would consider it as 'heroic' depends on the specifics, most warfare conduct being roughly zero sum.)
Of course, different cultures have different expectations there, and some did and do expect people to have a duty to engage in suicide missions.
And in the military, where most state-sponsored gun use tends to take place, a failure to do your duty is generally seen as worthy of criminal punishment. Historically, pretty harsh too, especially when your self-preservation instinct got a lot of the wrong people killed.
I will grant you that cops are not soldiers and we actually require them to have a vast skill set to employ outside of Rambo violence, and that even most militaries today are very reluctant to actually hang someone for cowardice even if they caused deaths on the wrong side (though I would imagine that Ukraine would be a lot more willing to do so than the US in GWB's oversea wars).
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Even given SCOTUS precedent in Castle Rock, "This decision affirmed the controversial principle that state and local government officials have no affirmative duty to protect the public from harm it did not create" (WP), I think there are legal workarounds. My parsing of that sentence is that they have no implied legal duty. You could just add a law to the books that a police officer who fails to stop a victim from getting hurt because he deviates from standard police protocol without sufficient excuse will get punished. We do punish air traffic controllers who fail to prevent planes from colliding (even if they did not set the planes on a collision path), or teachers who fail to report sexual abuse of kids.
Even if the ruling applied more broadly, e.g. that no official could ever be held responsible for stopping a harm they did not create, and any law to such an effect was void (which would severely limit what tasks we could trust officials with, e.g. an EPA chemist might decide to just affirm that all measurements are below thresholds instead of actually running his measurements -- he did not create the harm, after all), I think there would be some workarounds.
A city could only hire cops who are also willing to work as civilian guards concurrently, and give them the obligation to protect people in their capacity as civilian contractors. Or you could try some legal trickery to make them national guards and place them under the UCMJ (or state level equivalent), then issue them a general order to follow standard procedures to keep civilians safe. § 892 is very broad in what punishments you can get, after all.
But also, the fact that there is no affirmative duty for cops to protect you is not in itself very relevant. The relevant question is, when you call 911 to report an intruder in your home, what is the probability that the cops will respond "not now, baseball is on"? Them getting in trouble over failing to act will not resurrect you.
If the probability of a grossly unprofessional response is high, then that is indeed a reason to rely more on self-defense. Just the fact that it would be legal (but still involve professional repercussions, the Uvalde officers will probably not find a PD willing to employ them again) is not particularly relevant.
For example, I do not know if an EMT who decided they can make a quick detour to McDonald's while responding to a medical emergency would face criminal charges. Knowing the answer to that question is not very relevant to the amount of first aid I would want to learn. OTOH, if I knew that ambulances were notoriously unreliable, that would certainly motivate me to learn more first aid and keep more supplies ready.
In the end, it is a numbers game. You have to weigh the probability that you will use a handgun to defend yourself (which is certainly related to the competence of your local PD) against the probability that it is used to kill an innocent, either because your toddler finds it, a tinder date who is a lot crazier than you thought finds it, you use it recklessly while dead drunk, etc. Looking at statistics, gun deaths from accidents and civilian self-defense are actually quite rare, and the likeliest use a non-criminal will find for a gun is suicide. (Which might be an argument for or against gun ownership depending on your other beliefs.)
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Obviously the details are quite different,
Yes they are!
but I have trouble imagining generic bright lines that don't lean heavily on verboten characteristics: "of course the white woman wasn't trying to be a spree killer."
The best place to stop her if she was a spree killer would not have been to stand in front of her vehicle. Ross did only fire after she had hit him (slightly, because she was not aiming her car for him). If she had aimed for him, he would have been under her SUV before he had fired her first shot.
A person sitting in a car, even a bloody SUV, is not a similar level of danger as a armed suspect entering a school. You do not need to rely on protected characteristics to tell the difference. Some suspects are an imminent danger to the public and it is reasonable to require cops to risk their lives to stop them if it decreases the expected value of innocents dying. Some are not.
If Goods had already injured someone with a gunshot, then entered and locked a classroom, and shots had then be heard from the classroom, I certainly would have wanted Ross to breach that classroom and shoot her if she threatens him, not assume that as a liberal middle-class middle-age woman, she was likely only firing blanks from a prop gun and not trying to hurt anyone.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Speaking as a German, I have a relative who became a cop and I am totally fine with that. It is an important job and we need qualified and well-adjusted people for it. I would be much more reluctant to admit to admit having a relative working in marketing or yellow press journalism, actually. (Of course, Germany might have a different police culture than the US. While I did have unfortunate interactions with police, on the whole my experience is that they are generally friendly and competent.)
quiet_NaN
6d ago
But a sane US leader isn't going to attempt to take over Canada
That is very contingent on political factors. Two years ago, I would have said that no sane US leader would try to take Greenland from Denmark, either. These days, the question boils down to how serious one should take Trump's threats and what one thinks of his mental health.
Get rid of NATO, and Canada:US is not totally dissimilar to Ukraine:Russia. In both cases, the smaller country is culturally similar to its bigger neighbor, and most of the people speak the language of their neighbor. A shared land border makes an invasion logistically feasible. The big neighbor outspends the little one by a huge factor (6.5x for RU:UA pre-open-war, 30x for US:CA). Both are non-fundamentalist, industrial nations with low TFRs whose populations are unlikely to engage in asymmetrical warfare against occupiers at a similar rate as the Taliban did, especially if the takeover was done quickly without a lot of bloodshed.
Of course, Canada is much larger than Ukraine, but also more urban. The military advantage of the US is much larger than Russia's, most of their cities are close to the US border (Ottawa is less than 100km from the US, while the distance between Russia and Kiev is about 300km) and I do not see vastly outnumbered Canadian forces turning their cities into Gaza by trying to defend them one block at a time. Nor do I think that their rural population, cut off from critical resources like gasoline and maple syrup would be very willing to forgo their creature comforts to fight a Talibanesque insurgency for a few decades.
Like Greenland, Canada has a lot of lands in the arctic whose resource exploitation will become more feasible due to global warming. Also like Greenland, its northern parts cover relevant ICBM paths towards the US. It also has lots of fresh water which might be crucial for regions of the US due to climate change.
I do not think that Putin was insane to try to enact a regime change in Ukraine (though opting for a long war when his surprise attack failed was obviously a bad call), merely evil. Likewise, if Canada and the US drift apart politically as RU and UA did, I would think it evil but not insane of a US president (or emperor) to try to annex Canada.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
The point would not be to win, it generally rarely is with nuclear war. The point would be to make the victory unappealing to the aggressor.
For example, Putin thought he could enact a quick regime change, install a Russia-friendly oligarch and turn Ukraine in another Belarus. If that had worked, it would have been a big win for him. Today, even if Ukraine surrenders unconditionally tomorrow, it would be a Pyrrhic victory for him, given the stockpiles, lives and funds he has sunk into his war, and the fact that it would take two generations to persuade Ukrainians to see Russians as their countrymen rather than their occupiers.
Again, this does not help you against a madman who does not care about grand strategy, and is willing to lose against China just to show Canada how to behave. But you should generally treat your opponents as sane, even if they provide evidence to the contrary, because it is in their interests to be seen as vindictive madmen.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Hot take: if a parent is unable to spend a child's UBI on the child's needs, we have a fix for that. It is CPS. Anyone who can not be trusted with cash but only food stamps lest their kids starve is patently unqualified to raise kids.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I think that there are plenty of beneficial services which are not self-sustaining. Primary and secondary education. Police (whom we generally prefer to do more useful stuff than running speed traps to increase city revenue). Perhaps sanitation. Maintenance of toll-free roads.
Public transportation is just another one in that list. The real reason we have fares is not because it pays for the service, but simply to keep the homeless out.
Some things are just natural monopolies, and it makes sense for the government to run them. Having three different competing highways or sets of train tracks between SF and LA is obviously not going to happen.
Looking at a city's public transport system in isolation and seeing that it is running at a loss does not tell you anything useful. Public transportation is great for moving people around in dense urban areas. Get rid of it, and people will overwhelm the roads with their cars. You can then either increase tolls until half of them can no longer afford to drive to the city, or simply let people waste hours per day in traffic jams. Either will have big repercussions: rents downtown will rise, rents in the suburbs will go down as they become infeasible for city jobs.
Of course, a city could price public transportation to provide services at cost, at least as long as it was also willing to raise tolls for cars by a similar margin, surge pricing and all. This would likely also rise the prices of coffee (because you need to pay more to staff to cover the increased costs of commuting). Or you might even experiment with leasing particular bus or train lines to competing companies (as long as you avoid the failure mode of a monopoly raising prices as high as the market will bear).
Nothing I said is suggesting that the WMATA is run particularly well. Often taxpayer-funded services are not. If you can't have the market, you can at least have audits. How full are their busses. What is their administrative overhead? (Before or after you established auditing requirements, though?)
quiet_NaN
7d ago
A simple plan like "government check for $1k shows up in your bank account every month" is still a very shaky proposition. The quick math there is something like 220 million working age adults x $1k per month x 12 months = $2.2 trillion per year. This is about 1/3rd of the total federal budget. And this is assuming incredibly minimal overhead. Would that be the case, or would the "Department of American Income" be staffed with, oh, let's say about 13,000 "administrators" who each make between $100k - $125k?
I think one of the main advantages of UBI is that there is far fewer qualifications to check. For most government benefits, you have long, messy, expensive processes to prove that you are actually eligible. UBI would thus cut down on a lot of caseworker load for social security for able-bodied persons. (We would still want extra programs for severely handicapped people, because telling a blind paraplegic to live on the same budget as a healthy person is cruel. But outside of Somali-Americans (among whom the incidence of autism in kids is shockingly high, IIRC), the fraction of people who require additional benefits beyond UBI should be small.)
I get that you are skeptical if it will play out in practice like this. I do not think the caseworkers for unemployment benefits would be very receptive to receiving UBI themselves instead. And between department bosses, the number of employees is often how they measure their dick size, so whoever is in charge of them would also have plenty of incentive to find a point why it is essential to keep every one (or hire even more).
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Actually, it can be illegal. A doctor whose defense is "Yes, so I confused milligrams and micrograms and so injected the patient with 500x the maximum dose, silly me" will end up in jail. So will a civil engineer who miscalculated a bridge because he assumed that a bus would weigh no more than 50kg.
Nor is this limited to academic professions. A truck driver going 80km/h in a 30km/h zone and running over a kid will go to jail. So will a lifeguard at a swimming pool who falls asleep on the job and lets someone drown. (I will grant that both of these examples are of criminal negligence or recklessness.)
My gut feeling is that if 30% of your profession would have made the same mistake (e.g. not tested for a rare disease, not spotted a badly visible tumor in an MRI image, failed to take a life-saving shot or missed that shot), we can not really send you to prison for being subpar and unlucky (unless you were doing something illegal at the time, like going above the speed limit).
OTOH, if 99% of your profession would have made your mistake with a lower frequency than you would, then it is less of a "you got unlucky to get into that situation" or "you got unlucky and made a mistake that anyone might have made with a small probability" and more of a "the victim got unlucky by having someone so incompetent as a professional", and I generally have no problem with punishing people for that. (This is assuming that 1% of the professionals in most professions have a grossly inadequate skill level, which in my experience is a conservative estimate.)
quiet_NaN
7d ago
And how many brigades is Carney raising, 'to build our strength at home'? What about H-bombs, is he making any of those? Long range missiles? Attack drones?
I think there are two or three countries in the world which might invade Canada or parts of it. Obviously the US, China and perhaps Russia.
Oversea invasions are hard logistics-wise, and oversea invasions into the backyard of another superpower who has a self-interest to not let rivals gain a foothold are harder still. (Though relying that the US would follow its strategic interests might be foolish. There is probably a world in which China allies itself with Trump by marrying a kid of some CCP functionary to one of his kids. Still unlikely.)
Before Trump, the US invading Canada or parts of it were not much of a concern for political reasons. Now with Trump openly contemplating actions which might utterly wreck NATO, that has changed, because wrecking NATO would also be a major downside of taking a piece of Canada.
If the US wants to take one of the big Canadian cities near the border, I think an extra brigade or ten will not help Canada much. I like your idea about hydrogen bombs, though. As a bonus, Canada would not even need long range missiles, there are plenty of targets in convenient reach of SRBMs. Hypersonic tech might be useful though. Or just lots of decoys.
The strategy could be: If you invade one of our cities, we will nuke a single city of similar size, thus turning the net outcome negative for you. If you retaliate proportionally, that will be the end of that round of aggression, otherwise we will respond proportionally (up to our stockpile size, naturally).
Of course, having more countries with nuclear weapons makes the world more dangerous. Which is doubtlessly a reason why previous US presidents embraced defensive pacts like NATO, where most members have no need to develop nukes.
And at the current stage, Canada does not need nuclear deterrence. But if you extrapolate between MAGA from a decade ago over MAGA today to estimate MAGA in a decade, you might find that you want to have figured out the Teller-Ulam design and built a stockpile by then. Not that I think Canada is trying at the moment, but optimistically that might change if Trump invades Greenland (or Iceland, by mistake).
quiet_NaN
8d ago
For the most part, this rhymes with "I hope one of the immigrants you love so much rapes your daughter so you will realize how they are". Certainly a vile sentiment, but also not threatening violence, merely condoning.
Of course, referring to the kids as "little fascists" carries for me a strong connotation of "they do not deserve to live", which is an even worse statement than "in the grand utility sum, updating the beliefs of their father weighs more than their lives". Kinda rhymes with "the way that slut dresses, she is asking for it anyhow".
He also previously told her that it would be a good thing if more police officers were shot, because then they’d be more reluctant to shoot others.
TIL. This is actually the most damning of all the scandal in my mind for an AG candidate. Not that he thinks that more cops should get shot, that is merely vile.
But that he seems to think that cops live in a magic happy world where they are detached from gunshot violence, the way the operator of a predator drone might be detached from the reality of explosions, and that therefore getting them more exposure to gunshot violence will increase their empathy and make them more reluctant to rely on firearms.
I may be talking out of my armchair from the other side of the pond, but to me it sounds like this guy is out of his fucking mind. I think that even without any cop getting shot, they likely have far more exposure to gunshot violence than I would wish upon anyone. I would expect that most cops have found themselves rendering first aid to a gunshot victim, trying to stop them from bleeding out from a gut shot while waiting for the EMTs to arrive whose job it is to deal with that particular kind of shit. No cop who shoots someone will do so in the expectation that they will simply de-spawn like in some kid's video game.
While I am sure that there are cops who have shot civilians in cold blood, the central case of an unjustified police shooting to my mind is a traffic stop where the young black suspect suddenly reaches into the glove compartment to get his license, and is shot because a cop thinks he is reaching for a gun. The question if the incidence of this will go up or down if more cops are shot on the job is something which could be answered by any five-year-old.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
... this format is degrading to the discourse, the worst form of strawman, and completely ignores the objections other people are raising.
What people were implying was basically "Jones is not legitimate because he is evil". To which I responded by pointing out that the legitimacy of an AG is not tied to his non-evilness.
Beyond that, we have more than a single joke
The rest does not technically cross the line of threatening to kill someone (though the "little fascists" comes close, but then again the Republicans might not be the ones to cast the first stone wrt dehumanizing language). "I wish your kid died in your arms so that you would learn what it is to lose someone to gun violence" is not a nice sentiment, but it is also markedly different from "I will gun down your kid so you get to experience gun-inflicted grief firsthand".
Two Dem state senators responded to the scandal by claiming that "Jay Jones has demonstrated the character, compassion, and vision that the Office of Attorney General deserves".
You make it sound like they were praising his statements about Gilbert. What they actually said before was:
Like all Virginians, we were deeply disturbed by Jay’s comments and we condemn his words without hesitation. Let us be crystal clear: There is no place for political violence or violent rhetoric in our public discourse, and Jay must take accountability for his actions. But [...]
Again, what did you expect to happen? That they would announce that they were all going to vote for the Republican candidate out of disgust?
Sometimes you may privately think that your party colleague is an asshole and still endorse him publicly.
Presumably, when it became public knowledge that Trump was bragging about groping women in situations of unclear consent and had paid for fucking a porn star while married, the Christian Right was not very thrilled about it. But still, few if any of them endorsed Clinton over it. I think that the sentiment was likely along the lines of "He is certainly a sinful man and a sex pest, but if he gets Roe overturned that will stop a lot more sin."
In both cases, the relevant voters (while probably not thrilled about the scandals either, for the most part) ended up believing that there were bigger things at stake than the scandals.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I would argue that the IRBO only really emerged during the cold war.
America was the world's sole nuclear power for years after the war
Contrary to common belief, nukes are not the "I win" button. Japan's war had gone very badly and they were facing an invasion, getting nuked was simply the last straw. "The killed 100k Russians when they nuked Leningrad, better make peace before they kill another 100k of my poor countrymen" would not have persuaded Stalin out of all people.
If the US could have defeated the USSR by prolonging WW2 for a year or so, I think they would have done so, not for the right of self-determination of anyone but because any fool could see that the USSR would become their rival superpower. But they had just spent a lot of lives and productivity on winning a big war. Telling the Americans "change of plans, you already freed France from the Nazis, no you get to free Poland from the Soviets" would not have been popular, especially if you consider that plenty of intellectuals were leaning communist.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I will grant Mark Carney that his assessment of the IRBO is correct. The US was always the one animal which was more equal than other animals. The difference of international reaction when W did with Iraq what Saddam had tried with Kuwait is pretty obvious.
However, US hegemony in North America, Europe and Asia was heavily reliant on soft power, so that the IRBO was at least a plausible fiction there. Compare and contrast with Empires before. Nobody could say with a straight face that the Roman, British, or Soviet empire was based on respecting the autonomy of nations and the right of self-determination of peoples.
All abstract ideals, like the IRBO or human rights, are what our caps-heavy Pratchett character would label BIG LIES. They never describe exactly what it, but are essential to coordinate on what ought to be for anyone interested in crawling out of 'inadequate' equilibria. Presumably after WW2, what preserved the borders in Western Europe (say between Belgium and the Netherlands) was less a deep respect of the IRBO learned overnight and more the fact that everyone knew that if they tried to make war the US would come down on them like a million pound hammer. Today, the specter of US retribution is not required any more to keep Western Europe in line, the IRBO is firmly alive in our heads. Anyone who proposes that perhaps we should move a border by a few dozen kilometers by just sending a conquering army (a behavior which was totally normal for almost all of the time since humans first settled down) will be treated like they had gone fucking insane. "You want to wreck European trade which has made us more prosperous than we were ever before and instead go back to the old days when significant fractions of whole generations died in ditches just because you don't like the way the border runs? Have you lost your mind?"
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Come on. The form "If you are in a room with ${BADDIE1}, ${BADDIE2} and ${JOKE_SUBJECT}, and you have a gun with two bullets, you would shoot ${JOKE_SUBJECT} twice" is a well known joke template which I have heard first around 2000 or so. Anyone who reads this as "Jones is clearly threatening to unearth Pol Pot and Stalin (or Hitler or whomever) to enact a bizarre situation in which he kills Gilbert with an almost empty handgun" is clearly misreading this on purpose.
You can tell this pretty well from how the recipient of the message reacted. It was not "OMG, Jones has threatened to kill Gilbert, even provided a specific method ("shoot twice"), better get the police involved before he does it." It was "WTF, Jones is joking about killing Gilbert. Cringe, terminally poor taste. Better keep that on file, might come useful later."
Also, going from "he threatened to kill Gilbert (and his family), Gilbert is a political opponent, I am also his political opponent, ergo he wants to kill me" is not following a path of valid logical inference.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Sure, if you want to do it well. My point is that terrorists will likely not care about doing it well. If you already have a 0.5kg bomb with remote detonation, you can simply buy a large quad copter online, then affix it with duct tape. This is insufficient in a competitive environment like Ukraine, but good enough against an unsuspecting target.
Similarly, if I want to build a competitive small arm from the scratch, I could spend a decade and a few 50k$ on CNC machines and might end up with a very shitty Kalashnikov clone firing 3d-printed cartridges with a shitty accuracy (because rifling) and tending to burst the barrel after a few shots without cleaning (because the chemical propellant creates a lot of smoke). However, if you want just something able to propel a projectile at sufficient speed towards an unsuspecting target with a failure probability smaller than 10%, that would be a much smaller project. Buy steel pipe, plug one end, insert black powder, insert projectile, fire with a lighter. Hardly something I would dignify with the word "gunsmithing".
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I doubt the military would go along with any red tribe attempt to subvert the constitution.
My hope would be that the military would not go along with attempts to subvert the constitution by any tribe.
I am sure that the Obama administration picked military leadership leaning blue (or at least these able to cosplay someone caring about DEI) on general principle, just like Bush picked generals leaning red before. But I think neither picked people specifically who would more loyal to their tribe than the constitution. When Clinton lost to Trump, despite a general doomsday mood among the blue SJ people, the outgoing administration did not try to flip the game table. Nor would the military have gone along with it.
Generally, I find that different political attitudes come with different ideas on how to enact their policies. 'At the end of the day, what gets done is what men with guns and a willingness to kill want' (which I have seen expressed here, e.g. arguing against women's franchise) is very much right wing, MAGA. You will find rather few left wing activists cosplaying as a militia in military style outfits, or studying at an officer academy so they can later decolonize the US using tanks.
The SJ left really favors civilian institutions for enforcing their policies. Sure, at the end of the day, the decisions of these institutions are backed up with threat of force (e.g. the police), but that is an implementation detail any anyway their expectation is that it will not come to that. (Arguably, when protesters are hampering ICE, they are relying implicitly on institutions, e.g. due process and civil rights. In a state without these, like North Korea, it would be suicidal to annoy people enforcing the will of the government.)
The short version is that a central example of MAGA playing dirty is Trump sending his supporters to break into Congress and 'stop the steal'. A central example of the Dems playing dirty is them using prosecutorial discretion to engage in lawfare against Trump over real and imagined misconduct.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Meta: you can add a single line break, in quotations or elsewhere, by writing <br/>.
The point being the drone pilot could certainly terrorize his fellow Americans. But does his wife, children and mom also never leave secure facilities?
This points at an ugly truth: the winning side of a protracted war will generally be a side which does not shy away from committing atrocities towards civilians. It is in the government's interest that the civilians are more afraid of them than of the rebels, and in the rebels' interest that they are more afraid of them. Solve for equilibrium and things get very ugly.
On the plus side, I don't think that either side of the US CW has the will to go full Mao on the US population to achieve victory. (Yes, that is a compliment, faint as it may be.)
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Rigging an FPV drone with some explosives and flying it into a target seems hardly rocket science. Few machine gunners or artillerists in WW1 made a career out of providing firepower for the mob, and I don't think this will be very different.
(I will grant you that the hard-won experience building a competitive attack drone which can bypass defenses, is cost-effective and so forth comprises a non-trivial skill set. But at the moment, for attacking soft targets in terrorism, you don't need to worry about defensive drones trying to blow up your drone early.)
I think the reason that the cartels rarely sponsor high profile assassinations in the US is that there is little profit in it for them. They have no hope of cowing other US politicians. At the moment, they are a low-profile enemy in the mind of the US public, probably ranking behind Iran. They do not want to get promoted to "urgent annoying problem". Probably Trump would bomb them, killing primarily innocents, but still cutting into their profits.
The only groups who are thrilled to kick the tiger in the balls to see what it will do next are religious nutjobs like Bin Laden who care little for earthly things like money, power or their own life.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
As I said before:
Nobody remotely sane is believing that Jones will engage in a campaign of murder against Republicans and their children. Not Republicans in general, not Gilbert in particular either. If he had published an op-ed "How to heal the rift in America by having death squads kill Republicans and their offspring" in the NYT, I would concede that he was serious. There is no indication that he contemplates killing anyone with the same sincerity as Trump contemplating an invasion of a NATO ally. My strong prediction is that his office will investigate any homicides of children, no matter who their parents are. Perhaps he will decline to investigate ambiguous, politically charged shootings where self-defense is a plausible claim, just like Pam Bondi declines to investigate the shooting of Good. But if you believe that a random gas station robber will get off the hook by just pointing out that the clerk they shot was actually a kid of a Republican mother and therefore deserved to die, you have lost all connection to reality.
Of the 53% who voted for him, you have perhaps 1% (e.g. lizardman level) who expect him to engage in a purge of Republicans. The other 52% voted for him because they did not actually believe that he would engage in any murders.
I think that there is a tiny but loud minority on either side of the CW who honestly thinks political murder is good idea. Actually, I think the risk is a bit hard to judge.
On the one hand, most of the time, nothing ever happens. On the other hand, widespread murder of civilians, especially women and children, is mostly not an election winner, and the people who might enact such things will not say so openly on the campaign trail.[^1]
If you are claiming that 53% of voters are willingly voting for a candidate who wants to murder you, you are imitating the professional victims who claim the same about Trump voters. "I am Hispanic/LGBTQ*!@#, and it is common knowledge that Trump wants to kill me for that. So all the people who voted for him are fine with me getting killed." It is pathetic when they do it, and it is just as pathetic when you do it.
--
[^1]: The best studied example of people voting for a party who then killed a lot of citizens is probably the rise of the NSDAP. They did not campaign on gassing any Jewish kids. Of the 37% percent who voted for them in free elections in 1932, I don't think all or even most were pro murdering their Jewish neighbors. Perhaps a third of the 1932 NSDAP voters would have been enthusiastic about the Shoa. Another third might have been indifferent. The last third might have been horrified. "When Hitler called them a parasite race, I did not think he was literal. I thought it was just empty words, and at most he would deport the Jews to Madagascar. I only voted for him because I felt he was the only one who could stop a commie takeover / I wanted to teach the other parties a lesson! I thought the police would stop him from murdering anyone!" Of course, they also lacked the lessons learns from the rise of the Nazis.
I think that there are a few different risk factors to consider.
(1) dehumanizing language. This is required, but not sufficient. It will mostly not be unambiguous, "And therefore we should kill all the Jews, including their kids." Instead, it will leave it to the listener to connect the dots or not. "The Jews are a parasite sickening the body of the German nation." If someone says "killing Nazis is good", does he mean "killing right wing extremists who are violently opposed to democracy is good" or "killing anyone who is half of a standard deviation to my right is good"? It gets even more ambiguous if you go towards symbols. A Confederate flag could mean anything from "I want to go back to the days when the only Blacks we suffered to live were slaves" to an apolitical endorsement of the South. Likewise, the motive of a Klansman getting strangled by a Confederate flag could mean anything from "I violently oppose the reintroduction of slavery" to "any white person with a Confederate bumper sticker is an irredeemable racist who should be summarily executed". If someone describes illegal immigrants as rapists and murderers, that could be the rhetoric of someone who plans to round them up and murder them at the earliest convenience, or someone who is mostly interested to bait the left into pearl-clutching about irresponsible language (which is certainly is!).
(2) nonpublic language is not especially relevant, when its interpretation is ambiguous. When someone writes in his diary how he is looking forward to rounding up and shooting all his opponents, that is concerning. If a 'Young' Republican group posts Hitler memes, that does not automatically mean that they want to bring back Auschwitz. If Jay Jones makes a joke about shooting some Republican (plus his kids), that does not mean he plans a Soviet-style purge. (Either still calls into question the suitability for public office of the posters, though.)
(3) Empirically (arguably), traditional movements are less of a danger than revolutionary ones. Traditional conservatives like GWB (bless his black little heart) may invent new American past-times like torturing foreigners, but they can mostly be relied upon to not radically change their society. "Round up all the people from the other party, declare martial law" is an idea foreign to Obama or W, for whom the struggle between R and D has been going on for a long time, but also follows certain rules both sides agree on. Beware of the outsiders who do not respect the mos maiorum. I would also argue that for the most part, Social Justice Progressivism is in fact not very revolutionary, methods-wise. The dominant ideology among 40yo woman rarely is. While there are certainly murderous proponents, I don't think they are coordinating with the big political groups (e.g. the Democrats). (The same feels also true about MAGA). If you get killed while SJP is in power, it is likely by some rioting criminal whom the SJ people did not want to oppose (because he is part of a minority and that would be racist or something) instead of a death squad directly orchestrated by them.
(4) Institutions, especially ones which serve as checks on power. While Trump might dream of getting crowned King of the US and subsequently persecute all of the people who make fun of him for lèse-majesté, the danger of that seems slim because the US has a strong institutional culture against such things. Toothless as Congress is for the most part, even his allies there would not agree to that. And while the SCOTUS is generally very friendly towards Trump, they are also not afraid of unamiously denying his claims on occasion. Likewise, the US military is very democracy-aligned (at least as far as the US is concerned). They have a long streak of not attempting any coups, and I don't see them willing to break that streak. Compare and contrast with the military in Weimar. Voting for Hitler in the US is thus a lot less bad than voting for him in Weimar, because in the US he will be much more constrained in what he can do. (Of course, I recommend neither).
quiet_NaN
9d ago
And that's because, as of this past weekend, the Attorney General of Virginia is Jay Jones. It was common in the last month of the campaign trail for uncomfortable Democrats to rationalize that he could simply step down as soon as he'd won, but that notion of compromise died rapidly as time passed, people learned to stomach it by familiarity, and common knowledge was created that Democrats collectively had no problem with Jones.
I was curious how one does become AG in Virginia, so that we find ourselves in this unfortunate situation. Appointed by some evil corrupt Democratic governor? Or the coastal elites or Illuminati or Jews? Buying the post? Murdering the previous AG?
It turns out that he simply got 53% of the votes.
Now, if you are arguing that America has a systematic problem with voting for sleazebags whose (public knowledge) past statements should utterly disqualify them in the eyes of the voters, I am likely to agree with you there. I am not even going to argue that Jay Jones does not belong in that set.
His texts were strategically leaked after he had won the primaries but before the general election. But that backfired when Virginians decided that they still preferred the Democrat sleazebag to someone more aligned with Trump.
So for the next four years, if any Republican is accused of a crime in the state of Virginia, Jay Jones will be in charge of prosecuting them. Should Republicans accept the legitimacy of a state AG who explicitly and sincerely advocated that they and their children are scum who it is morally obligatory to exterminate in a campaign of revolutionary terrorism?
I know this is confusing language-wise, but both the Democratic and the Republican party have historically been in favor of this concept called "democracy". This means that the legitimacy of an elected official is decided by vote in accordance with the relevant constitutions. If the good citizens of Virginia decide to elect fucking Hannibal Lecter as their AG, that would make Lecter their legitimate AG. It does not make him fit for office, and you are free to believe that he will be the fox guarding the chickens. You are also free to say so as much and as loud as you want, and campaign for him to be impeached over his campaign against vegetarianism or whatever. Urge people under his command to remember that they should refuse any illegal orders of his, especially when extrajudicial killings of citizens are concerned.
I would also challenge your understanding of the adjective "sincerely". A common defense of Trump is "you can not take what he says literally", even when what he says is a carefully crafted statement for public consumption. Nobody remotely sane is believing that Jones will engage in a campaign of murder against Republicans and their children. Not Republicans in general, not Gilbert in particular either. If he had published an op-ed "How to heal the rift in America by having death squads kill Republicans and their offspring" in the NYT, I would concede that he was serious. There is no indication that he contemplates killing anyone with the same sincerity as Trump contemplating an invasion of a NATO ally. My strong prediction is that his office will investigate any homicides of children, no matter who their parents are. Perhaps he will decline to investigate ambiguous, politically charged shootings where self-defense is a plausible claim, just like Pam Bondi declines to investigate the shooting of Good. But if you believe that a random gas station robber will get off the hook by just pointing out that the clerk they shot was actually a kid of a Republican mother and therefore deserved to die, you have lost all connection to reality.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
European countries are American provinces and have been ever since their invasion force hit the Continent the morning of June 6, 1944.
While you are not totally wrong, I think that this is an oversimplification. The deal the US offered in Europe and Asia after WW2 was mutually beneficial, and a lot of countries took you up on it. However, this is based on soft power. You do not own Europe like China owns Tibet.
If you want an analogy, think of the British Commonwealth. Canada is part of it, which means that King Charles is their head of state. But it is (even more than America's NATO) based on soft power. The minute King Charles or Starmer make a hard power move, e.g. try to to take direct control of the Canadian navy or Nunavut, they will learn to their peril that hard power and soft power are different things and Canada can actually function very fine without a British monarch at the top.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
I really don't see how it can be any other way for politicians.
Case in point:
Angela Merkel bringing over ~1.5 million Syrians and Afghans
I was mostly not a fan of Merkel during her 16 years. Before the refugee thing, she did not have any policies she believed in apart from "I should be the chancellor". Spineless, always following the prevailing winds. The people want to get rid of nuclear because Fukoshima? Let's get rid of nuclear.
(Her stance on the refugees was different from that. Apart from the first order effects of letting in a lot of brown people, the fact that she did this while being the head of the CDU also permanently empowered the far-right AfD, a long term effect I personally find far more concerning.)
Of course all politicians have a strong ego, but I do not think hers was pathological. I can not imagine Merkel watching the Tagesschau, noticing that she was not mentioned once, and deciding to do something about it. She knew what she had achieved: starting out as the pastor's daughter (not exactly high society, especially not in East Germany), studying physics, then joining the CDU after the '89 revolution. Starting out as Kohl's Quotenfrau and Quoten-Ossi (affirmative action woman and East-German), she climbed to the top of the CDU (a backstabbing hive of scum and villainy if there ever was one, and certainly not one believing in female empowerment), and managed to keep on top of them (and in power) for an impressive amount of time.
My feeling is that she was quite happy with her achievements, not that she was obsessively comparing herself to her predecessors and found herself wanting because Kohl had one more unification under his belt or Schroeder had more invitations to Moscow or whatever.
To be a bit more blunt, while she was much and viciously ridiculed for being a non-feminine woman, with Merkel I do not get the feeling that she was in politics to compensate for some perceived inadequacy.
I mean, if I was Trump and comparing myself to Obama, I would have plenty to feel inadequate about. Unlike Trump, Obama was not exactly born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Where Trump has a BS from UPenn, Obama has a doctorate from Harvard Law. Obama followed a standard cursus honorum from state legislature to US senate to presidency. Trump basically won the presidency through his willingness to engage in the Birther conspiracy and through being correctly perceived by his proletarian supporters as the candidate who would piss off the establishment the most. It does not matter who your voters are for getting elected president, as each vote counts the same (at least within a district, otherwise it's terribly messy), but for the amount of respect you earn from the upper-middle class for your victory it matters a lot.
Of all the honors Obama received, the Nobel is the one he deserved least, and one of the weakest Nobels awarded. He basically got a Nobel simply for not being George W Bush. Well, Trump always had an additional 15 years of not being GWB on Obama, so it surely stands to reason that he should get a Nobel too, no?
Sadly, Trump severely lacks awareness of how the mind of the Nobel committee works. The way he got into politics is the first point against him. His general style is the second. From his tweets to him renaming the DoD to DoW, he is not even fulfilling European expectations for how a meh US president should behave, never mind the expectations for one deserving the Nobel. At this point, he would have to persuade the Middle East to live in harmony and friendship, negotiate with Russia and China for a treaty which reduces nuclear weapon stockpiles by 90% and be hailed as 'The Peacebringer' by archangels (or equivalent) representing at least three world religions before he had a shot at getting his own instead of a hand-me-down like Goebbels or Infantino's sad participation trophy.
An air traffic controller who fails to stop two planes from colliding will merely have failed to act.
A teacher who keeps his mouth shut about the sexual abuse of a kid merely fails to act.
A doctor who does not render assistance merely fails to act.
A lifeguard who falls asleep and lets a kid drown merely fails to act.
A truck driver who fails to hit the brakes when someone is standing in front of him merely fails to act.
In Germany, we have a general duty to rescue. If on my way home, I see a car crashed into a tree, and decide that I will not miss the start of the Tatort for some stranger, I could go to prison for up to a year for that. I can report that I do not feel very enslaved by that rule.
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