Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Of saying "retard" but yeah.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Sure, every figure gets insulting nicknames, but I personally have yet to run into anybody who will literally not say the word "Trump", even if they prefer those (and I think "that man", said with appropriate venom, manages to be a lot more cutting...)
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
A lot of people at the time really, really hated FDR and did see him as a would-be tyrant. Obviously less than half the country given that he kept winning elections, but he wasn't uncontroversial. I've yet to meet anyone who refuses to ever even utter Trump's name, whereas my great-grandfather supposedly referred to FDR only as "that man" until his dying day.
Yeah, I thought about including something like "he tells it like it is" in parentheses there. I also hear a bit of ambivalence from some red tribe normies, a sort of "well, I can't personally agree with his conduct (but, well, it's working?)"
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Oh, sure, probably should have said "supporters" instead of "voters" for that reason.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
a) Because a movement can have a successor to the leader who carries on fighting for the same principles. There are diehards who won't accept that anyone else is the Real Deal, but they're a tiny fraction, oddballs like Bannon on the fringe of MAGA. It doesn't preclude Trump trying to get a third term, but makes it unnecessary, and a huge chunk of his base will feel that way. It also means Trump can step down without his movement dying and him and his family imprisoned/dead.
b) A large portion of Trump voters are, by definition, normal people. Certainly more normal than anyone posting here. Maybe they don't have your norms, but they're clearly not turned off by his media antics all that much (I do think there's probably a notable divide in opinion between the Trump voters who love his antics and those who like him but wish he'd tone it down a bit, but it's just an opinion).
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Bannon's a shock jock who lasted less than six months in the Trump administration. Trump called him "Sloppy Steve". He says crazy shit because it gets him an audience.
As for Trump trying to play sneaky tricks with the Constitution to get a third term, this ignores the elephant in the room: the MAGA base. A double-digit % of Trump voters would go along with it, I'd think, out of hatred/fear of the Dems, QAnon-style theories, and personal loyalty, sure. But, contra what it looks like to some incurious people in blue bubbles, Trump supporters aren't mindless sheeple blindly following the cult leader. They're following a leader, because they believe that in the big picture their leader wants what they want and fights for it, and what they want is for America to get back to being a great country because that's normal for America and what America should be. If nothing else, those sort of shenanigans are too complex to appeal to anybody but political obsessives, they inherently turn off normal people. "Red Caesar" is a fantasy of blue tribe right-wingers; it's not even on Joe MAGA's radar.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Maybe Ahmari's ideal is some sort of Catholic integralist regime, but he has no plausible way to get there
Yes, I have no love lost for David French, and I can see why everyone was happy to see the debate as a total rejection of Frenchism, but this is why Ahmari is also not the way (if his regular temper tantrums on twitter didn't make it obvious). Integralism attracts a lot of smart zeal-of-the-convert Catholics that the Right can theoretically use, but it's a bad fit with coalition politics. Integralists generally seem to think that everyone else in their coalition is stupid, only they know the single Truth of the Catholic Church, and they're just manipulating the useful idiots until they can take power and rule by Papal ukase. There is plenty of room in MAGA for aristopopulism, but not for would-be theocrats whose sectarian commitments are fundamentally different from that of the American founding and the majority of American Christian populists. Nor is there room for such thinly-veiled sneerers - not of the Hananian type and not of the Ahmari type, as we can see from his career, always searching for the nonexistent base that would support his integralism and currently ending up at "multiracial working class socialism but based" with the Compact crew (I do know and like some of the Compact team and feel bad for them having to defend Ahmari's twitter meltdowns). What also keeps integralism limited is that it's all converts - Ahmari is a convert, Vermeule is a convert - and tends to ride the coattails of the work of cradle Catholics without actually grokking their relationship to Church and State. You mention Patrick Deenen: cradle, not convert, and produces ideas that are compatible with both Catholicism and a wider populism rather than treating the latter as a vehicle for the former (also a trained Straussian, which matters). To give another example, Angelo Codevilla was born in a town in Italy so Italian that "Voghera housewife" is used there in the sense that "John Q. Public" is here, and his work powerfully argued (RIP) for a natural-law conservatism which is not only entirely compatible with big-tent Trumpian populism but which synergizes with it and is advanced by it. Christian conservatives should forget egotistical Frenchism/Ahmarism/Dreherism and learn to work with populists to advance natural law on earth, not dream of manipulating populists to reach their Super Special Perfect Commu Christian Regime That Has Never Been Tried.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Yeah, the thing is, angloid legal bureaucracy is a bunch of magic words, and saying any of the magic words can either save you or doom you. The human stuff is in between, but both "residential" and "work"shop were probably the wrong incantations. Lawyers are a fae court, and that amplifies down to the guys who kind of vaguely hear their instructions seventh-hand.
Surprised it's got that bad in London so quickly. Earlier this week was drizzly and vaguely chill, but par for the course for the season. Good luck and, look, if you need the strong stuff to kill that infection, nobody who haint a doctor can tell any of youse' lot's writings apart.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
I can't speak to the particulars of your situation with Inkhaven, but from my experience watching CBP reality TV shows (not by choice, a travel buddy loved to put them on), generally they assume that anything that sounds remotely like working probably is work and you therefore need a work visa and [DENIED]. A regular tourist visa to meet up with some people you know should be fine, though schlepping down to London is a real pain. Condolences and good luck.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Despite the sarcasm, as someone who agreed with your initial post, that bit of background adds a ton of weight to it and makes your point a lot more meaningful.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Yeah the solid core is really important - mine shrunk to two of us, hence trying to return to the "group" aspect. My guys in the group are all great but pretty hard to get onboard regularly. The really impossible thing is coordinating time zones, if it wasn't for that we'd have a great core, but as it is you're basically forced to choose between Californians and Euros.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
There's an underground but strong pro-Nazi current in Croatian nationalism just like there is in Ukraine, because of their anti-Serbia/USSR history. Even back in the 90s the Serbian side of the war were calling them fascists/ustase (see the famous Serbia Strong song).
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Glad to hear your philosophy reading group is going well! They're not easy to run, currently working on rescheduling mine (we went too deep into Deleuze and scared most of the members off).
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
I'm happy to give Thomas his ultra-purist position, but as a non-Christian sympathizer of Byzantine caesaropapism, also worth noting that Constantine is personally responsible for a couple little things like the Nicene Creed. Without a secular power to put its foot down, the Church has historically tended to splinter into a nest of feuding heresies.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
Not sure exactly what you mean, but yeah, it would be silly to say "God Save St. George" - he's already saved, he's a saint! - but kings do need saving, in both senses.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
Yeah this is Scott's "cultural dark matter" (though, for the specific point about grittier/sexier not being more popular, within broadcast TV we can just look at the comparative success of the incredibly successful Law & Order vs the even-longer-running Law & Order SVU). But HBO shows get elites talking, move the culture, inspire the next generation of creatives. Popularity with the audience that reads, writes, podcasts, etc. does matter more than the dark matter - particularly in politics, because they're the ones who decide if millions of voters get to see what Trump says on the escalator or if it's brushed off as a nothingburger. Trump is able to grab the negative attention of elites with conspicuous transgression, and then use that to get his brand across to dark-matter voters who respond positively to his heel performance.
Bartender_Venator
6d ago
This is said tongue-in-cheek, but: Trump's Congress passed Right to Try, over the objections of Democrats and 'bioethicists', which he trumpets on the campaign trail, and his close aide Natalie Harp follows him because she believes Right to Try saved her life. His administration, both in the moment of crisis and with the ground prepared by long-term Trump appointees, also pushed through regulatory barriers to approve the vaccine which ended a global plague.
As for spiritual wisdom:
I try and tell myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. If you tell yourself it doesn’t matter, like you do shows, you do this, you do that and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. That’s how I handle stress.
I'm being a little cute. I don't think there's anything that's going to get me into heaven. I think I'm not maybe heaven-bound, I may be in heaven right now as we fly on Air Force One. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to make heaven, but I've made life a lot better for a lot of people. I want to try and get to heaven if possible, I’m hearing I’m not doing well.
The bar for Constantine is lower than the bar for Christ, and as far as Christian rulers go Trump is at least above the bar of, say, having his son poisoned and his wife boiled alive.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
This kind of gets at what's really happening here. It's not that Trump is particularly crass or offensive by the standards of the media, it's that (usually older) people are shocked to see the boundary between media figure and elected office-holder broken. But it was always going to happen - Tony Blair and (to some extent) Clinton were perhaps the first to really get that, but they, and Obama, still played the expected role for the cameras. Trump goes off-script for the script of the mass-media presidency, but in a totally unsurprising way, the same way that reality tv is more popular than equivalent scripted tv, the same way HBO shows are more popular than the broadcast ones that can't show tits and guts and incest. Once politics truly began operating by the logic of distributed mass media (as opposed to, for instance, the movie-star presidency of Ronald Reagan), it just waited for a Trump to complete the process. McLuhan is chuckling in his grave.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
That's the list of Stuff I Lose as well. You know what the common thread is with all those items? They're things you don't carry in your pockets every day, just when you're out and about. Life gives us very good instincts to take care of phone/wallet/keys - in fact, when I travel, it often takes me a day or two to get over not having my regular keys in my pocket. This is the other thing about passports, they're easy to lose because you're not used to carrying them.
I mean it in the sense of "getting your ID stolen from your room is too rare to every worry about." The only time I or anyone I know has had something stolen from a locked hotel room was a dodgy hotel in rural Turkey where some girls with us had their cash disappear from their purses left in the room. Stealing stuff from hotel rooms is vanishingly rare, and even then I would think the thieves would generally try to be subtle rather than taking stuff that ensures you'll make a scene. I do sometimes slip my ID and a credit card out of my phone case into my pocket in very dodgy areas, so that if I get mugged I can hand over my phone/wallet and still be fine - as you say, criminals really don't care about your ID, we're long past the days when passports were valuable targets because you could cut them up and stick another picture in.
P.S. I'll take the chance to recommend Ferenc Karinthy's Metropole to anyone reading this thread who finds these sort of travel/identity scenarios tantalizing to consider.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
While I believe it's not technically legally valid, I keep both my drivers' license and my old state ID card from the last state I lived in on me. For international borders, they will give you a lot of shit, but I know firsthand the US has a database they can just look you up in and let you through without your passport, the hard part is getting on the plane without it (was very possible to do if you are a dual citizen, ESTA makes that less likely). You can also (anecdotal evidence, do not rely on) still fly without a Real ID, they just take you aside and, again, give you a lot of shit while they establish your identity.
But cjet is correct, your best strategy in those circumstances is social proof, looking like a respectable citizen and being able to talk your way into things. Find a helpful person and ask to get connected to the authorities - walk into a random hotel and ask the front desk, find a branch of your bank, ask a corner store for directions, etc. Harder if you're in suburbia but you gotta do what you gotta do.
Losing your passport if you don't need it immediately is a bit of bureaucracy but not a big deal. You have to file a new application and wait a bit. The main issue is if you need to do international travel in that time, in which case you'll have to do some shenanigans to go in person to a passport office. I would never travel without my passport even within the US, but yeah leave it in the hotel room (I don't recommend the safe, you are infinitely more likely to forget you put something in a hotel safe and leave without it than to have housekeeping break in and steal your passport).
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
My understanding is that while Sicilian culture was highly Arabicized compared to the rest of Christendom, Frederick II was not much more notably Arabicized (or Byzantinized) than his predecessors on the Sicilian throne. Roger II, for instance, Frederick's grandfather, spoke Arabic, employed Arab scholars, and even wore a coronation robe using Arabic writing and the Muslim calendar - but he also spoke Greek, employed Byzantine scholars, and adopted Byzantine customs he liked. By the time of Frederick's life, Sicily had been a melting pot for over a hundred years, and many Arabs had melted in there, but that doesn't mean they were the dominant element, just an unusual one (the Crusader States, of course, had many Arabs, but their leaders were generally far less cultured and intellectual than Sicily's). What Frederick really brought to Sicily that was new was his Latinizing, Classicizing impulse, the desire to restore the Roman law of the Roman Empire that he inherited from his other grandfather, Frederick Barbarossa, and while the intellectual life of his administration owed much to the Arabo-Byzantine influences on Sicily, his political program and specific policies would be much more in a Classicizing, proto-Renaissance mode. Essentially, he added the missing element to the melting pot to turn Sicily from a prosperous and uniquely cultured regional power to a base for truly imperial ambitions.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
I'm in the Balkans right now and trying to load the site when Americans get up to post during their morning coffee shit is, well, messy and unsatisfying.
"JD! Veto the motion!! JD!!"
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