quiet_NaN
6hr ago
Yes, none of these scares truly go away, there are still people worried that Harry Potter might be satanic, but they are just a fringe group now.
Per the community note, that twitter poster is full of shit wrt the Steam screenshot.
He is certainly also full of shit when he claims that video games translate to real world skills. At most, playing shooters can help you overcome the inhibition of shooting at a person, perhaps. But it will not turn you into an competent rifleman any more than playing street fighter will turn you into a MMA champion or watching a lot of porn will turn you into some sex god.
By contrast, what does actually turn people into competent shooters is exposure to guns, either culturally (like Robinson was) or through military service. I would rather have some guy who spend 10k hours playing call of duty taking shots at me than someone who spend 100 hours at a gun range.
quiet_NaN
10hr ago
My argument was that in most of situations, if people want to get the covid vaccine or not is a private choice between them and their risk appetite, same as smoking or driving a motorcycle.
The difference between covid patients and lung cancer patients is that covid patients are not poisson distributed and a wave of infections can easily overwhelm the medical system.
In situations where the medical system is overwhelmed, we need some triage procedure to prioritize patients. Using the QALY gains from the intervention seems like the obvious choice here. Obviously this makes a big difference. If a 50yo with severe covid has a 50% higher survival chance with O2 than without, that is decades of QALYs.
However, in health care emergencies, I find it fair to prioritize people who were not complicit in causing the health care emergency. If ten patients come into the ER after a highway accident, and you know for a fact that five of them were involved in an illegal street race which caused the accident, then I would think it fair to operate on the other traffic victims first, all other things being equal. (Typically, you do not know such information reliably, which is why we do not have policies for that.)
Outside of healthcare emergencies, everyone should receive care, of course, no matter how stupid and complicit they were in causing their health care problem. Smokers get lung cancer treatments, anti-vaxxers get ICU beds and so on.
My policy proposal is a lot less paternalistic and impactful than vaccination mandates. Most of the triage situations I heard about were from before vaccines became widespread. It would be also compatible with free market solutions like some anti-vaxxers voluntarily paying a private ICU facility a premium to keep a fraction of a bed to compensate for their higher risk of overwhelming the medical system.
This is very different to my approach to other vaccines where the immunized do not spread the disease, and being unvaccinated means, in the more extreme cases, that you are actively playing for team Nurgle.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
The problem is that MAGA offers no credible alternative. If they had a trans-skeptic secretary of health who would cut down woke excesses back to the level of empiricism, that would be one thing.
Instead they have someone whose whole point was to bring in the votes of the anti-vaxxers and a president who joins him in announcing their big medical discoveries.
I mean, sure, if one believes that the medical priesthood is made up out of charlatans who talk about make-believe concepts like proteins, p-values, PCR or the like, then there is no problem in replacing them with different charlatans who can make just as convincing a show of knowing the secret language of the priesthood.
The gleefulness with which they they resorted to coercive methods to force people to vaccinate during COVID is a great example.
I will grant you this. For a lot of vaccines, the social benefit is that the immunized can no longer transmit the infection. Not so for COVID. So the main public health effect is not present.
A fair solution, in my opinion, would have been to announce that vaccination would be entirely voluntary, but that in triage situations, the willfully unvaccinated would simply get a penalty in their QALY-based score. Say divide their expected QALY gain from interventions by a factor of two, so that you might be indifferent between putting a 40yo unvaccinated patient or a 60yo vaccinated patient on oxygen.
This has good precedent: we already allow people to engage in a lot of dangerous activities such as smoking, drinking, or base jumping, which frequently kills them. The idea is that everyone has their own risk appetite, and as long as they just kill themselves we should generally let adults do what they want. Only when they endanger others is when we should restrict their behavior.
So if someone decides to gain immunity to COVID the natural way instead of getting microchipped by Bill Gates, let them. Just don't let them take a spot in the ICU from someone who followed the recommended vaccination schedule if spots are limited, send them home with a bucket of Ivermectin or something.
Sadly, our society is utterly incapable of discussing care prioritization in triage situations at all. The closest we get to it is probably taking current alcohol abuse into account when deciding who gets a new liver first.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Conservatives are the ones having kids and so are the more concerned now about what they're putting into their kids bodies.
I could just as well turn this around. "If conservative women have three kids, that is is enough redundancy that they do not need to bother with measles vaccines."
In the real world, almost all parents want what is best for their kids, they just disagree about the facts.
the breakdown in classroom behavior, increase of violent outbreaks,
Is this actually a thing or is it yet another moral panic, like the superpredator scare, the D&D satanism scare, the rock music scare, the violent video game scare and so on?
and having a medical reason to pin it on is useful.
Sure, but why not go for some timeless classic like "autism is caused by demonic possession", instead of badmouthing paracetamol?
quiet_NaN
1d ago
The heuristic I use that strongly indicates that society is bent to the left is the ration of self-identified Marxist/communist professors vs Nazi professor. Communists have practically infinitely more power and influence in this country than Nazi.
That feels like comparing the number of followers of Odin to the number of followers of Jupiter in the US, and concluding that society is clearly leaning Norse.
If communists were in charge of US economic policy, I promise you would notice.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Politics is about group interest, not ideas.
What a weird thing to say. It feels deeply reductionist. It sounds like a straw-man atheist saying "religions are hostile memes infecting the population which stabilize social hierarchies, sometimes they call their gods Huitzilopochtli and sometimes Jesus, but in the end it is all the same".
Nobody is denying that group interests are a useful lens to look at politics. Cut subsidiaries for farmers, and the farmers will vote against you. Or take people voting along ethnic lines in Iraq after Bush ousted Saddam.
The problem is that there is plenty of behavior unexplained using the group interest lens. Why does the white college-educated woman care about an unemployed black man getting shot by the police? Why do grown adults care about the abortion of fetuses which are not family, for the most part? Why were so many intellectuals Marxists?
War is famously the continuation of politics with other means. And sure, some wars can be adequately explained by group interests. Two knights feuding might indeed be just a zero sum power struggle between two groups. But to frame the US war of independence as simply a group conflict between the colonies and England while ignoring all the ideological differences seems overly simplistic.
Human life today in the Western world is a lot less shitty than it was in Sparta. Part of that is technological progress. But a lot of it is also ideological progress, e.g. the long term aggregate result of politics.
People sometimes do what is good for them and their in-group. But they also have beliefs, religious or otherwise, and sometimes these beliefs guide their actions. Ignoring them will severely limit your predictive powers of human behavior.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I agree that sometimes, scientific findings announced at a press conference can be true. When I watched the announcement of gravity waves being discovered, I did not go into "well, they did not publish in a peer reviewed journal yet, so they are obviously full of shit".
Of course, my priors for LIGO discovering gravity waves were decent, and quite a few respected scientists were staking their reputation on that announcement.
By contrast, my priors for RFK telling his underlings "perhaps look into evil chemicals as a possible cause for autism" and them just finding The Cause (TM) after all these years because previously nobody had thought to look into exposure to drugs as a risk factor seem slim indeed. Nor does he have a scientific reputation to put on stake, I think the median medical scientist is likely of the opinion that he is a quack who has no clue about medicine and it is hard to go further down from there.
I mean, I can obviously not rule out that they found a minor risk factor which explains 5% of the autism cases, after all, the dumbest person in the world saying the sky is blue does not make the sky green, but I am very bearish on the findings living up to their sensationalist claims.
I really hope that there will not be another pandemic while RFK is in office, so that the damage he does is limited to moving NIH funding from projects mentioning trans-isomers in the application to his wild goose chases.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that with the woke cancellations it was mostly twitter mobs pressuring private companies. By contrast, with Kimmel it was directly the head of the FCC applying the pressure, not MAGAs cancelling their Disney+ to make them fire Kimmel.
So this is not tit-for-tat, but (tit+1)-for-tat. Expect the next D president to apply an FCC commissioner who will try to revoke the license of Fox News at the slightest provocation, and spend tons of public funds to ruin them in the legal system if they do not comply.
More generally, moral constraints, refraining to go tit-for-tat for some things, can serve as a foundation of a positive identity. If the other tribe puts your tribes kids on the BBQ whenever they catch them, but your tribe holds a principled objection against cannibalism even if it puts them at a disadvantage, that would cause me to like your tribe.
Whenever Trump does something bad, like being corrupt af, cancelling people and so on, the main response I get from his defenders here is that this is just tit-for-tat for the evils of the other side. It is about as convincing as hearing someone loudly complain about the child-eating monsters of the other tribe while munching a baby's leg.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Argument 4: Sometimes refusing to engage in hypocrisy is self-defeating. The classic example is violence. We can all agree life would be better if everyone swore off violence categorically. The only problem with doing so is that refusing to engage in violence of any kind leaves you vulnerable to those with less scruples.
In most cases, using defensive violence is not hypocrisy, because there is a clear moral difference between violence of aggression and violence of self-defense (though things can get murky in practice, sometimes). For example, Ukraine is not hypocritical by both complaining about getting invaded by Russia while also invading parts of Russia in retaliation.
I think that there are some actions where tit-for-tat is fine, and some where it would still be horribly wrong.
For example, "their military is trying to incapacitate our military personnel, mostly by killing them" is something which can be answered in kind. By contrast, "their military is rounding up and shooting our kids" is very much not a reason to respond in kind. (Which category "they are nuking our cities" belongs to is difficult.)
In politics, things are even murkier, partly because there is no single entity making all the strategic decisions. Ideally, political competition should be about genuine differences in terminal values. If you are willing to sacrifice any values you hold on the altar of victory, the race to the bottom will result in a meaningless competition of almost identical parties.
One terminal value I feel strongly about is genuinely trying to make world models more accurate. Unlike slander, Sarin, doxxing, rhetoric, assassination, cancellation, which work equally well for any side, this is intrinsically an asymmetric weapon:
Logical debate has one advantage over narrative, rhetoric, and violence: it’s an asymmetric weapon. That is, it’s a weapon which is stronger in the hands of the good guys than in the hands of the bad guys. In ideal conditions (which may or may not ever happen in real life) – the kind of conditions where everyone is charitable and intelligent and wise – the good guys will be able to present stronger evidence, cite more experts, and invoke more compelling moral principles. The whole point of logic is that, when done right, it can only prove things that are true.
Cancellations are incompatible with truth-seeking. (So are assassinations, but the median supporter on either side does not support them. Small mercies.) I think that a lot of the differences between the blue and the grey tribe from the SSC era come down to that.
And as far as truth-seeking is concerned, MAGA is not an improvement over the wokes. While wokes have long twisted the truth hard to their ends and engaged in groupthink, Trump is completely detached from simulacrum level one. He will make whatever sounds he thinks will help him best to secure his power, if they happen to sound like a statement about the world that is completely incidental.
When I look at woke, I see an evil monster which had started out with some virtues but long been turned evil by its lack of other essential virtues. At some distant point in the past that creature had some minor redeeming qualities. When I look at MAGA, it seems like someone had taken all the vices of the woke monster, doubled down on some of them, then inverted its surface level beliefs. But fighting a particular evil by being just as evil is still evil.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
The crux would be if the total utility with the intervention would be higher than without the intervention.
This depends on a lot of things. How bad the fascism would get, there is a difference between Franco and Hitler. How effective the murder would be in disrupting the fascist organization. (Part of coup-proofing your organization is that you do not have an obvious second-in-command who will just take over for you.) How the normalization of assassinations will affect politics long-term.
Of course, unless you are a time traveler going back to 1930 to kill Hitler, there is a lot of epistemic uncertainty about what your intervention will do, precisely, so it might be worth it to err on the side of caution.
For the US, I do not see MAGA approaching the point of no return. They might gerrymander a bit more to gain a few more seats in the mid-terms, but they will not effectively outlaw the Democratic party. As long as MAGA can be defeated at the ballot box, going for the cartridge box instead it total bonkers.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
In my world model, there is a wagon fort mentality in the respectable medical community. They know that the crazies will eventually get their hands on every paper they write and thus try to proactively avoid anything which can be used as an argument-as-soldier by the anti-vaxxers.
This is of course bad for truth-seeking. It will also erode what little trust there is between the anti-vaxxers and the medical establishment. It is a bit of a catch-22: research and publish without bias and your papers will be quoted prominently by a crazy influencer with millions of views, or have some bias and get accused of hiding The Truth from an unsuspecting public.
Personally, I trust the medical establishment to eventually find the correct answer, even if hampered by these considerations. But yes, I would price in that papers which show genuine problems with specific vaccines are probably less published than they would be in Dath Ilan.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
The general problem here is that parenting attitude is a massive confounder. It is not like the study authors had randomly flipped coins to decide which kids would get vaccines and which ones would get saline solution instead.
There is a certain type of helicopter parent who will drag their kids to the doctor whenever it is coughing. Their kids will generally get all the recommended vaccines, but also get any diagnosis under the sun that might be vaguely applicable. If little Timmy is late (e.g. 90ths percentile) learning to speak, he will get diagnosed with a Speech Disorder, Development Disorder and ADHD. For autoimmune diseases, I think that it is much more likely that the unvaccinated kids are allowed to play in the dirt where they get exposed to pathogens. Generally, anti-vaxxers are probably more rural, e.g. somewhat closer to the ancestral environment, which might have all kinds of neurological benefits for brain development.
These two effects (diagnostic bias, systematic lifestyle differences) seem enough to explain the observed factor 6 in relative risk.
From a mathematics perspective, the table on page 17 looks a bit shoddy. If they have 8 cases of "Brain Dysfunction" in group A and none in group B, that seems to be the kind of thing you could calculate a p-value for (e.g. "What is the probability that given there is no effect, the result will be more skewed by random chance"). They do not. But then again, this may be a general shoddiness of medical research.
theory from RFK
I would not dignify anything he says with the word "theory". "Narrative" might be the better word.
At the risk of going all Bulverist on the authors, I think that his health department creates a huge demand for studies which show how dangerous vaccines are. Any professional who is willing to go on a p-fishing trip in publicly available data to bolster his narrative can possibly hope to be hired in his department.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Across the board most Americans, even smart ones, regularly misestimate the sums involved in politics.
Sure, during the 2018 election, candidates, parties, PACs, and outsiders combined spent about $5 billion – $2.5 billion on Democrats, $2 billion on Republicans, and $0.5 billion on third parties. And although that sounds like a lot of money to you or me, on the national scale, it’s puny. The US almond industry earns $12 billion per year. Americans spent about 2.5x as much on almonds as on candidates last year.
For bribery specifically, I think that there might be a selection effect where illegal bribes are mostly the ones where people forgo the trappings of legality. If you want to bribe an official for 20M$, giving them a suitcase full of cash is a terrible way to go about it. Instead, you just hire them as a consultant for 2M$ a year after their public career ends -- the famous revolving door. The quid pro quo part of that is just as illegal, but also much harder to prove, and the ex-official can actually use the money without having to launder it first.
By contrast, for 10k$ that is too much overhead. You do not need to launder it, just spend it on coke or whatever.
Of course, the risk-reward ratio is much more favorable for bigger bribes. But people are not entirely rational. Bribes on the 10k$-100k$ level may seem "not a big deal" to the official unless they get caught.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
And the police let them do it, because their local, state and federal government wanted them to do it, because Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it.
On the federal level, the one in charge at the time was a guy called Trump. I am not sure why he did not mobilize the national guard at that time, would have made a lot more sense IMO than mobilizing them now to help with ICE efforts in cities which voted against him. Of course the Dems would have tried to stop that, just to make him look bad.
On a local and state level, I think most Democrat officials were walking a fine line. Making Trump look bad was great. Making themselves look bad because their town got looted was bad, but making themselves look bad because the cops shot another black guy would also have been bad. In the end, some decided that letting people riot and murder each other was preferable to their town making national news because a cop shot a black person.
Cynically, I think if the rioters had decided to loot in the suburbs, the Dems would have been more likely to send the cops.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Kimmel spread an obvious lie.
Are you referring to the following?
We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it
After the evidence published on the 16th, claiming that the shooter was MAGA would be at least a fringe view. One might claim that everyone from the FBI and state prosecution is blatantly partisan and obviously trying to blame the murder on the left, but that would leave the question how the FBI fabricated a MtF boyfriend. So personally, I think that the official narrative -- the killer acting to 'fight LGBT hate' is probably correct.
Still, the Kimmel episode was aired on the 15th, when none of these chat quotes were public (afaik).
And then you have the FCC statement:
[...] FCC Chairman Brendan Carr appeared on Benny Johnson’s podcast and blasted Kimmel’s remark, calling it “some of the sickest conduct possible.”
So Kimmel was either spinning the truth very hard or outright lying. Bad, but mostly SOP -- Trump himself does the same whenever he opens his mouth. If Carr thinks that this is the "sickest conduct possible", he must live a very sheltered life indeed -- free from social media, for one thing. One wonders if he has ever watched Fox News. In short, his statement is as much of a lie as Kimmel's is.
I think that the right is reasonably upset by the social media celebrations of the murders by the far left. Kimmel was not guilty of that at all, he was just someone the FCC could cancel who had interacted with the topic in a way which did not please Trump, and was already on the cancel list, so he got got.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Oh, I had no problem with your overall point, it was just that your phrasing in that sentence irked me. I agree that criminalizing all sorts of cat-calling is silly.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Deuteronomy 22
My interpretation is that having sex with a woman who is betrothed or married to another is primarily seen as a crime against the husband. If the woman is found to be an accomplice, she is killed, if not, she is seen as an innocent bystander. The fields rule reads more like in dubio pro reo than believe women to me.
In the moment when the act is witnessed, she has the right under biblical law to claim to that witness that the man is raping her, at which point he will be sentenced to death.
There is some dispute about what behavior is covered by 22:28, with WP (which is likely leaning woke, especially given the lemma of the article in question) citing a Rabbi Moses Maimonides who clarifies that 28-28 definitely mean rape, I have not followed the sources to see if this is a true representation of modern scholarship.
Of interest is also Deuteronomy 20 and 21, which regulate the legal status and rights of female civilians captured in wartime. Spoiler alert: they have precious few rights -- mostly you can just not sell them into slavery after trying to make them your legitimate wife.
I do not think that the bible mentions gay rape very much, presumably the standard of 22:23-27 could be transferred to male victims, but I do not know if that case has ever been made to avoid getting stoned as a male victim.
Your point with regard to male marital rape equivalents is well taken. Just because being the median woman in the ancient world would have sucked, that does not mean that being the median man in the ancient world would not have sucked too. Oppression is not zero sum, the fact that women were generally oppressed did not mean that being a guy was great, because the rigid social expectations which resulted in the oppression of women also constrained most men.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
A nation that [...] prosecutes numerous historically attested heterosexual norms
A short brainstorming session comes up with the following norms which will be actively prosecuted:
- Polygyny. Only 'prosecuted' in the way that being gay was before the advent of gay marriage: if you can convince 5 women to join your harem, nobody will drag you to prison over it. However, you do not get any legal recognition of your relationships. As someone who thinks that marriage should entirely be implemented using contract law, this would be easily fixable, the main bottleneck here seems to be the Christian right.
- Age of consent. Used to be, you could marry your daughter at menarche to some older man for political reasons who would then proceed to take her virginity with or without her cooperation. But it made the snowflake liberals all upset and we implemented the current AoC norms. While I think that we went a bit overboard, I also think the change was directionally correct.
- Bodily autonomy. For most of history, individual rights were not a thing. The norms around sex revolved around the head of household controlling whom a woman could have sex with. If a woman was enthusiastic about a sex act mattered generally little -- from the perspective of the father, seducing his daughter was just as infringing on his honor as violently raping her, so often there was no legal differentiation. On the flip side, once society had decided that a man was allowed to have sex with a woman, they did not care about the particulars around consent. While I am generally in favor of kinky BDSM sex, I think granting another person the right to rape you as much as they want (which was the law of the land until fairly recently) is probably a step to far even if done explicitly.
- Incest. Never widespread for 1st degree relatives, more like a kink of royalty and the like. I will grant you that one, even though current laws are typically not specifically against heterosexual incest.
In short, "historically attested heterosexual norms" is the weakest possible defense short of "attested in the fiction of de Sade". If someone wants to legalize having sex slaves being raised in a brothel, (first catering to pedophiles, I would guess) before being bred to get more whores (with male infants being killed at birth), guess what, that is a "historically attested heterosexual norm".
And I do not think that the law has it in especially for the heterosexuals, either. There are plenty of attested homosexual norms around boy-fucking which are just as outlawed.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
The US has a long history of supplying arms to enemies-of-enemies to attempt to achieve its strategic aims, but that's not really a central example of terrorism. A central example of terrorism is when you murder lots of people for no reason at all except to sow terror among a civilian population.
The word which you are describing is terror. Terror is a weapon which can be wielded by the state, opposition groups down to a couple of crazies.
The US has certainly supported many perpetrators of terror in the cold war for geostrategic reasons. But they were generally states or rival groups to the people in control of the state. This is because supporting tiny groups of crazies is rarely conductive to their geostrategic aims.
Generally, these people supported by the US do not seem to seek shelter in the US, though. All the governments-in-exile based in the US listed on WP sounded somewhat tame.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
What I found really disgusting were the imgur posts openly celebrating the assassination.
Now, I am not someone who thinks that every human life is sacred. I will celebrate if Trump finally croaks from natural causes, and I would not take any inconveniences to save Trump's life. But if someone were to shoot him (whose death would matter per se, in a way in which shooting a random MAGA proponent I had never heard of before will not matter), that would be quite bad in a lot of different ways, from normalizing political violence to turning him into a martyr.
Trump will not be defeated by murdering his supporters, nor would the cost be worth that.
I was not very upset about the killing of the United Healthcare CEO because I did not consider it to be a step on the slippery slope any more than any non-political murder is. Running a company which sometimes makes decisions which people feel (rightly or wrongly) are ruining their lives comes with certain risks, and even if one health insurance executive was shot every month there seems to be little danger of it spiraling out of control.
By contrast, Kirk was a clear political murder. Any effect the guy may have had as a human will be overshadowed by orders of magnitude by the effects he will have as a murder victim and MAGA martyr. If such a killing happened once a month, things would spiral out of control.
And the idiots who claim that he now became a part of the gun violence he had previously called an acceptable price for the 2A are missing the point. That would be an excellent point to make if he had been randomly gunned down during a routine school shooting. But he was not, he was very deliberately targeted for his political activism. If he had argued that assassinations were a legitimate form of political debate, that would have been mentioned in every other imgur post, so I guess he did not. (Apparently, he called for people to bail out the Pelosi attacker, which seems cringeworthy poor taste to me, but is still different from calling for her to be murdered.)
quiet_NaN
13d ago
- Before the end of the year, will it be possible that the total number of cis people murdered by trans people in the US will exceed the converse? It seems an eminent possibility. Will we then be permitted to discuss openly the role that trans identification seems to play in political radicalisation?
Anything is possible. But you are starting from three cases and making up a concept of a reality of 350M.
Furthermore, even a significant correlation would not mean a causation. For example, I would expect that white anti-vaxers are more prone to violence than the general white population, simply because being an anti-vaxer is a more common belief among the poorer classes, and for reasons of either nature or nurture, these are statistically more prone to violence. Of course, some anti-vaxers may specifically commit violence motivated from these beliefs, but most of their violence will be for unrelated reasons.
Likewise, I think it is possible that a trans identity is more appealing to people who are generally less neurotypical, and that this includes some disorder groups (such as psychotic disorders) which are (possibly) correlated with higher likelihood of violence.
A straightforward "normal people become trans, and then become more prone to violence" seems less likely (except that FtM on T might probably catch up to cis men).
quiet_NaN
13d ago
I was fairly skeptical of that line of argumentation.
I think that not outing yourself in the profile is fine. But when you plan a date, you might also want to specify what your naughty bits are. Waiting for them to discover that once they take of your underpants seems impolite. And also dangerous, I think there have been some cases of MtF getting killed when their (Muslim culture) date realized that they were making out with a dick-having person.
I think that sometimes, the very same qualities which make someone a good vice president also make someone a lackluster president.
I think Biden is the only vice president who was elected president since the Bush senior in 1988. Al Gore lost. Cheney was not on the ticket. (Clinton was not vice but very much part of the Obama administration, and lost.) Biden won (with 4 years in between). Harris lost.
As a vice president, you want someone who is content to play second fiddle and does not want to outshine you. Someone who is no threat to you in the next primaries, should they decide to compete for the top spot.
You do not want someone as charismatic as Obama, or as narcissist as Trump. Instead, you might simply pick someone who will assure voters whose demographic groups the president does not share. For example, Pence was a good running mate for Trump because he assured more traditional R voters that the administration would not go completely crazy, and that there would be a person who was both a grown-up and a Christian in the room. Likewise, Harris was a good pick because she signaled that while Biden was very old, very white and very male, the Democrats still valued younger, female and non-white voters.
If Trump dies, I do not think there is any obvious candidate to inherit the MAGA kingdom. From Trump's perspective, that is sensible -- a designated successor is always a coup risk.
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