Shakes
2d ago
I am in favor of voiding elections if credible suspicions of election interference are raised by trustworthy sources. Are you implying they made an inaccurate assessment of the situation?
You’re in favor of handing ultimate power to whatever constitutes “trustworthy sources”. I don’t even know what that looks like. Probably bureaucrats in the security state. Everything important to know will ultimately be classified. Call that system whatever you like. Doesn’t sound like democracy to me.
Democracy is ultimately a goal to strive towards, but
See, I won’t mind if you don’t especially value democracy. You’re a socialist, or a utilitarian, or an adherent of scientism, or whatever. You don’t believe in democracy as such, you just admire democracy if it can take you where you’re going. That’s fine, Erdogan famously said democracy was like a bus and he’d get off at his stop. Japanese nationalists and German bureaucrats alike have no problem admitting this is how they feel.
I would certainly consider it justified for a minority to impede their efforts,
Just remember that we invented democracy as an alternative to war. And that’s what you’re eventually going to get if there is no democratic way to deport migrants who will inevitably need to be deported.
Shakes
2d ago
Woke social policies are not popular. The Democrats under Biden let in tens of millions of illegal immigrants after allowing a crisis at the border, and refuse to own up to it. The Democratic party brand is tarnished with the idea of trans kids, health care for illegal immigrants, lax policing and crime, homeless junkies in public parks, Israel-Palestine divisions, DEI racial and sexual discrimination against whites and young men, and above all their refusal to debate any of these preferences openly. The Party lives in such a bubble that they could not do anything about Joe Biden until his debate performance was so obviously senile that he had to be replaced, which could not even be admitted in public. Which was followed by Kamala Harris, a mediocre candidate everybody disliked who was promoted to VP solely because of her sex and race, which could also not be openly discussed by Democrats anywhere.
Realistically, at the same time, Democrats could have lots of popular successes on other issues. Trans kids are not popular but a mild trans toleration is more in line with American tastes than a trans crackdown. Same with immigration, and guns. Democrats who could convincingly project moderate positions on these social issues -- that are not assumed to be covers for more extreme positions -- would be popular. This would give Democrats lots of room to push their economic agenda, which is broadly popular. Democrats could have healthcare, tariffs, and infrastructure. This is basically what someone like Josh Shapiro did. A national platform along these lines would probably be very successful. In fact, I think if Democrats had adopted something like this all along they would never have lost to Trump in the first place.
Well, it's your choice. But I have correctly identified that you have two options: on woke you can back down or double down. That's what the public dislikes about Democrats the most. That's the most salient issue Democrats could change. It's not the other policies that need working, voters don't like woke. At best you can offer them other policies that make the poison pill go down sweeter. Which requires that whatever Republicans do is worse to voters than woke. Well, maybe it will happen that way. But it's not much of a choice. Double down and hope that Republicans screw up. Good luck!
Shakes
2d ago
If more legalistic methods had been applied to suppress disinformation from social media sources and the papers were held liable for misinforming the public, this trend could have been “strangled in the crib”, so to speak.
So you're in favor of eliminating the first amendment and freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
a solution can certainly be reached to resolve the issue. If you look at the 2024 Romanian presidential election for instance, the results which favoured a right-wing populistic party was annulled after irregularities were discovered which had shown clear interference from outsider forces to bring an anti-Atlanticist candidate into power.
So you're in favor of voiding elections if forces in the security state allege that they are invalid.
The preoccupation with calling the actions of constitutional governments “anti-democratic” is well understood as a tactic used by forces hostile to democracy
Ok, you can continue to call yourself democratic while suppressing the press and election results you consider anti-democratic. But that's not what most people understand those words to mean.
By the terms most people understand, you are suppressing democratic freedoms to entrench a regime you are calling Democratic. In this scheme Democracy isn't about freedom of the press or free and open elections, but about moderate liberal and conservative parties sharing a monopoly on power. I take it that parties such as Restore and AfD (which represent significant sizes of the electorate) are a priori not democratic. Maybe because they promote mass deportation. Democracy is about never allowing parties that support mass deportation to come to power. Elections are secondary.
Ok, you can invent whatever definitions you want. But most voters are wise to this trick by now and you are not going to get much traction here by advancing it.
Shakes
3d ago
Why not? It's too soon to really predict confidently but: she polls extremely well among the base, has a national profile few other Dems can match, is already integrated the party elite and can fundraise / network / cut deals etc., she's demographically correct in a party still hesitant to challenge DEI orthodoxies, and she has made indications she's interested in running. She's probably the front-runner.
Gavin Newsom is probably the closest real competitor he has issues that can't be papered over with his bad impression of Trump on twitter. An outcome just as likely is somebody we aren't really thinking about yet going on a barn burner. That's how we got Bill Clinton and Obama.
Shakes
3d ago
Democrats face a few short-to-medium-term political problems if they can't correct course:
- 2030 redistricting will take away electoral votes and districts from blue states, especially if Republicans are in control and able to exclude illegal immigrants from the Census.
- The gerrymandering wars will probably lose Democrats net seats (Republicans have more juice to squeeze than Democrats do, especially after Callais)
- The gerrymandering wars could fracture the Democratic coalition as majority-minority seats have to be dismantled for Democrats to gerrymander to Republicans in-kind (this will decimate the Congressional Black Caucus)
- Federal workers, NGOs, and other Democrat client groups are currently waiting out the Republican administration. They could survive four years of Trump, but not eight-to-twelve years if Vance or another Republican is elected President and the patronage spigot remains turned off. Likewise, many blue cities seem to be budgeting on the assumption that a Democratic Presidency will save them some day. (Chicago could be screwed.)
Winning the midterms is not enough to solve these problems. Control of the House would give Democrats the power to open investigations into Trump officials and start waging more of an active war against the administration. But it doesn't solve any of these deeper problems. (And who knows, the Trump admin could win any war over public opinion: Democrats are still unpopular.)
So they need to win the Presidency.
One way for Democrats to win is to half-repudiate peak woke. Admit some things went too far, stop talking about censorship and trans rights, pivot to healthcare and industrial policy, loudly promise not to let in thirty million illegal immigrants, quietly promise to be lefter than Trump. Voters might not trust this pitch, but they could be convinced if Democrats really did learn their lesson. Voters could be sold "let's be nicer to illegal immigrants" if it really isn't a workaround for open borders.
Another way for Democrats to win is to do the same thing over again and expect a different result. Everything is fine, identity politics, DEI, trans kids, amnesty, Democratic policies have always been correct about everything and there are no trade-offs for anything.
Enter Harris.
Kamala Harris represents, more than anything else, the fantasy that Democrats didn't do anything wrong. If Kamala wins the Presidency, one can imagine the world without Trump. Kamala was fated to win all along, Trump's win was just a moment in time, Trump has finally aged out of office, everything Republicans did in the interim was a temporary fate, Trump can finally be defeated. Kamala is the good timeline. If anyone else wins, it implicitly acknowledges that Trump did win after all, the Democratic party has had to change and accommodate itself (even if as opposition). And Harris was supposed to win. It's nice to imagine that Democrats were right all along. The only problems with 2024 were some technical quibbles about where to best spend the ad money and that whole thing with only having three months to run her campaign.
The problem is that Kamala remains a bad candidate. She was always a bad candidate. Everybody, left and right, acknowledged that she was a bad candidate right up until the moment Biden conceded and Democrats suddenly all discovered at the same time that Kamalalala was a great candidate all along -- and a black woman no less!
Outside of the Democratic bubble though, Kamala remains a bad candidate. She's a weak speaker. She endorsed unpopular hard left positions and never walked them back, except to explain that she's a moderate now. She's not especially smart and has no special grasp of the issues. She doesn't have a special vision for the country or a special relationship with the voters. She's a weak campaigner and a weak politician. She has all of Hillary Clinton's vices and none of her virtues. And she's a black woman, which means that under the social rules of DEI she cannot be criticized on any of these terms.
Well, Democrats could run her again and they could win. Maybe they get lucky, maybe 2024 was just unlucky. But it doesn't speak well of their chances if they can't have hard and honest conversations like "Kamala Harris is a bad candidate and the only reason we have her is DEI decorum that made Biden pick her as a VP". Because voters really don't like this stuff. And then the victory plan has to be that voters just dislike whatever Republicans are offering more.
So Jon Favreau has to fight for open access to things like the 2024 autopsy. Because that's how you start talking about whether Kamala Harris is really the best candidate for Democrats to win in 2028.
Ultimately, I'm skeptical it will be anybody but Harris. The fantasy she exercises that Trump can be banished to marginalia of history is powerful for Democrats. Elite Democrats still run the party on more or less the same terms they did in 2016 and 2020 and 2024 and can be negotiated with to put their thumbs on the scale. And neither high nor low is convinced they ever did anything wrong. (Try asking any of them if it was wrong to support Biden in 2024 -- they'll refuse to concede the point and will immediately attack Trump over his age instead. I've never gotten a different answer.)
Shakes
3d ago
Race relations in the South are pretty good, they're about as good as they are anywhere in the country, which ranks with the best in the world.
Mainly, they do it because it works. Blacks exercise inordinate power in the Democratic party, and probably will into the immediate future even as their relative power is eroded by immigration. Republicans are mostly too scared to actually campaign for Blacks -- Trump's appearances at say the National Association of Black Journalists was so remarkable because it was so unusual. Moreover, the Democratic Party offers Black voters visible patronage and money and public works that Republicans mostly don't want to give. And if that isn't sufficient explanation, it probably is the case that urban city political machines harvest black voters to vote at rates and percentages higher than what they might otherwise naturally produce.
Shakes
3d ago
It's close enough to Arlington Cemetery and it's serviced by metro. And I'd be in favor of spreading out the tourist monuments a little: the Mall is running out of space for building new monuments.
Would all be fine if we could develop more civilian infrastructure around DC's Monumental Core: restaurants and shops, apartments and office buildings, etc. If you want to get something near Arlington Cemetery you're rather hosed.
Shakes
4d ago
You can get arrested in Britain for "hate speech" and hundreds of people do every year and the position of mainstream liberals was that we should have laws just like that. Look, just admit you're in favor of cancel culture, that's a much more consistent position to hold. Just admit that you're fine with the government monitoring twitter so they can throttle accounts they don't like. You can't actually coherently claim that "mass censorship is when fact checked" so it's no big deal and then also claim to somehow be against it.
should the Dem congress get to kick down the door to twitter and install sensitivity cops on every corner?
This is what actually happened. Dems on the Hill held hearings excoriating tech CEOs for not censoring more. Officials in the State Department had working relationships with social media companies to censor content they didn't like. The files were all released by Elon when he bought twitter. The case went up to SCOTUS and John Roberts ruled that it isn't illegal because the State Department has a 1st Amendment right to tell twitter to ban things.
You can be for it or against it. It's real and it happened.
Cancel culture was fake, it was conservatives getting a taste of their own bullshit for the first time after 600 years
See, you're not even against cancel culture, you're essentially arguing in favor of it. I don't actually need to provide a citation for every instance of cancel culture in the world: You are arguing on a forum that was created because reddit would no longer allow us to have these conversations on their platform. You are literally participating on a platform that exists as a consequence of the forces you deny exist. Your position is inherently ridiculous.
Shakes
4d ago
The WHCA is a private organization, and there is no reason to assume they would break long running tradition hosting at the Hilton to do it at the ballroom. It's not like the president is required to attend either, Trump himself has skipped almost all of them. What guarantee would they even have there then that the space wouldn't be reneged if they upset the president or have participants barred from access due to critical coverage? It turns a private event that invites the government to an event controlled indirectly by the government.
Once the President makes an appearance it effectively becomes a public event. (I mean, it is already a public event, just not a "public" event.)
If the President elects not to go, they can continue hosting the WHCD at the Hilton as before.
If the President elects to go, I predict with strong confidence that journalists will be tripping over themselves to go to the White House Ballroom. Virtually all principled opposition to the Ballroom will evaporate for whoever is privileged enough to be one of the cool, the elite, the select few. It's Washington
Shakes
4d ago
The parkway is my favorite drive "in the city" but sometimes I wonder what a waterfront we could have if it weren't filled with highways.
Shakes
4d ago
The location is decent because there's nothing there currently. It's a big ugly gaping hole with a very poorly-designed traffic circle around it. (If you don't know what you're doing it's very easy to accidentally be forced to cross the bridge from Virginia to DC, or to accidentally be forced to miss that very crossing.)
What I mean is, it's a giant void and someone was going to fill it eventually.
Shakes
4d ago
It's becoming increasingly difficult to do anything in Congress. My read in DC is that politics on the Hill is becoming more rarified and elite exactly as politics in general becomes more vulgar and populist. The Congressmen and their staffers know they're doing important work, the fact that regular Americans don't know only proves how clueless we all are. The important work being mostly drafting bills that will never go anywhere, but at least they tried, what are you doing?
In that context it becomes more attractive to do everything through executive action. You run the risk of getting shut down, but that looks like better odds than the risk that Congress will do anything. And if you create the opportunity from the White House, Congress can always sign-off later.
It still has decent odds of paying off in this case. This case will probably eventually be thrown out at least for lack of standing (the plaintiff is a pedestrian who claims the new building will ruin her passive aesthetic enjoyment of the city). Maybe they'll come up with more cases. But now that the East Wing is gone it's easier to ask for Congress to bless the Ballroom than it would have been if Trump had asked for it nicely in the first place. In that case it'd probably still be in Committee.
In the long-run this also doesn't play in Congress' favor. Ok, the Ballroom polls poorly with the general public. But the lesson smart ambitious hopeful future staffers and politicians are internalizing is, "Executive Power is the only way to do anything, Congress won't do anything, Judges can't."
Shakes
4d ago
(so long as no anti-democratic tendencies or hate speech is spread, as hate speech is not free speech)
If a political position becomes popular enough to merit democratic political representation, but the political system declares that that position is a priori illegitimate and anti-democratic, there are only two options:
- Suppress that position, thereby introducing anti-democratic tendencies into the political process
- Tolerate that position, thereby introducing anti-democratic tendencies into the political process
That's all
Scott Adams had a quip similar to this with Democrats and Trump: You successfully convinced the public that Trump is Hitler. Hitler won. Now what?
In this case it's especially damaging because the "anti-democratic" position that nobody is allowed to express except for AFD and Restore and other such parties is that migrants should be deported and European countries should stay demographically European. You basically can't keep a lid on that. "Democracy can't allow mass deportations." Two guesses what happens next
Shakes
5d ago
It's the other way around. Cancel culture was about a lot more than private citizens / liberals "making people feel bad". Among other incidents:
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Chicago citizens were fired from their jobs for making the OK hand signal, because progressives hallucinated that this was a White Supremacist hand signal because of 4chan
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Mass censorship campaigns on social media platforms which included government officials emailing i.e. twitter and asking for accounts to be throttled / banned. (In the case of the pandemic specifically, many of the things that would get one censored turned out to be true.)
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Academics and university speakers protested for having opinions unacceptable to liberals: this created a really perverse political culture on universities which culminated in e.g. corporations imposing mass DEI policies in the wake of George Floyd because nobody could say out loud that it's illegal to not hire white people because of their race.
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Google broke a wonderful search engine that materially contributed to the benefit of all humanity because sometimes when you search the news you can find things that liberals think aren't true.
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The host of The Bachelor was fired because he posted comments in defense of a contestant who attended an event at a plantation. The Dr. Seuss company stopped printing several of his books because they contain language progressives now consider unacceptable. James Watson was canceled and dishonored to the point that he had to sell his Nobel because he believes that race and IQ are real.
Cancel culture was real and progressives would have prescribed people out of existence if they had the power to. They clearly tried to many times. Instead of letting them we created a parallel society where they can't do that, which is now mainstream. You are choosing to participate in a forum that abides by these norms, and not by the cancel culture norms progressives tried to ensconce.
Shakes
5d ago
I'm willing to treat Mark Halperin as serious for the sake of argument and your reaction to him as same. But it's also possible he's wrong. There are hundreds of influencers with different takes. How am I supposed to know who actually has a piece of the truth? It's not like I actually know much about the difference between real security and security theater.
Shakes
5d ago
Despite the heat of 1876 Hayes was ultimately accepted because the memory of the Civil War was too near for everybody to go to war. I guess it’s an open question. But I would take the other side of that bet
Shakes
5d ago
If Trump is assassinated nothing will happen. Rather, his successor — so JD in this timeline — gets extraordinary political capital to do all sorts of things. Crackdown on antifa, economic free hand, maybe an immigration bill. It all depends on the mix of JD’s temperament (stronger than most suppose) and the GOP’s temperament (weaker than you’re thinking).
But most of what a Trump successor could do is priced in. There would be an extraordinary moment followed by a return to politics as usual. That’s all.
Trump is not politics as usual. Trump is unusual. When he’s dead that tendency will go away. Whatever state he leaves us in is the trajectory we’re likely to follow for some time. An assassination would just give JD Vance a last gasp put some finishing touches on the hot iron shape before it cools into place.
There won’t be civil war. If there are riots they will fizzle out. If MAGA rises to the occasion it will be within the political process. If libs rise up they will playact as revolutionaries and then fizzle out into the political process. That’s all
Shakes
5d ago
Idk, I hear all these people claiming all sorts of things about security and I don’t see whether it means anything. This influencer says security is blah blah blah, this influencer says that it’s actually yadda yadda, they know what exactly? Somebody I’ve never heard of before says something I have no ability to evaluate. Oh he’s an insider. Or pretending to be one. Must be serious.
I’m not sure what good security is supposed to look like. The guy with the gun got caught N layers before reaching the president. But actually it should have been N + 1 layers. Sure I guess. I can believe that. This says something important about society.
The number of people who really know what they’re talking about is probably at least three orders of magnitude smaller than what social media gives me access to.
I’m sure that some of those people are in the White House right now. And they’re making decisions. Maybe they’ll decide security was too lax and needs to be tightened. Maybe they’ll decide it was fine but we need some more theater. Maybe they’ll decide it doesn’t matter and we can take the headlines and build our ballroom and go. I don’t know. I guess I trust whatever Trump wants to do. He knows better than I do.
And it’s always possible that they keep security the same and something happens in the future, but not because anything is wrong with security but because it’s impossible to prevent everything. And it’s always possible we increase useless security theater and nothing happens because of sheer dumb luck and we say, wow, the security theater really worked. I admit I couldn’t tell the difference. I’m not sure most of these Washington “Insiders” can either.
Shakes
9d ago
Way to undermine your "smart geopolitically sophisticated Trump voter" posture.
Not a very good way to open a post by the way, I’m not really interested in the rest of what you have to say, it’s like that Joker quip in the Dark Knight you’re not supposed to start with the head otherwise the victim can’t feel the torture from the neck down.
Moreover, it's a relatively routine continuation of partnerships between the US and Indonesia
Well I’ve been assured that Donald Trump is uniquely destructive to American prestige and other countries can no longer treat negotiations with America as routine. Guess we agree?
A year ago, 72.2% of surveyed Indonesians answered "China" (this was done right before the Liberation Day tariffs, where ASEAN in general and Indonesia in particular got fucked hard, and had to do a demeaning deal). Now it's 80.1%*
A minute ago you were mocking my pretensions to understand anything about geopolitics and now you’re arguing about the implications of an Indonesian poll.
You have to realize that you're living in a MAGA information bubble where things get reported selectively and strategically
You really don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Trust me when I say the vast majority of MAGAworld I interface with is extremely skeptical of the war and there is no MAGAworld info bubble one-party state. (I wish there were!)
The problem with surrendering to Iranian terms – or indeed, just ignoring Iran and leaving – is that this discredits the entire American Empire project, it is an admission of weakness following foolishness. You've already discredited the Empire a great deal with extracting THAAD missiles from Korea and freezing paid-for supplies to Europe, that's an unfalsifiable demonstration that you cannot currently sustain a high-intensity war against a peer adversary. But there's the cope that if Iran is vanquished or forced to accept some tolerable terms (which allow the US or Israel to repeat the aggression after replenishing the stockpiles, that is), the US will salvage its global standing. It's false, but just giving up will, of course, genuinely be worse. The longer this goes, the greater is the cost of cutting losses, and the greater the incentive to "see it through to the end". So you're simply stuck. It's not an enviable position to have.
I think this is delusional. Nobody serious is prognosticating American collapse over bean-counting questions like moving a few THAAD missile systems. Frankly you can’t even count the beans because everything is classified and obfuscated by the fog of war. But I guarantee that outside of Twitter OSint third worldist groupchats nobody serious is watching the American military put Iran through its paces and concluding America is weak. What we observe, actually, from Latin America to Oceania to the Middle East to Asia is everyone scrambling to become more closely attached to American power.
Shakes
9d ago
Iran’s negotiators believe Trump is a liar who can’t be negotiated with which is why they were… negotiating with him?
You see my point right? I don’t actually care what they’re saying on Twitter because their actions show that there is a faction within Iran ready to surrender. (Or was, let’s see how the rumors from this week shake out.)
Moreover, Trump says negotiations are proceeding. And he’s postponing Bridge and Power Plant Day. So I guess that means, again, that someone in Iran trusts Trump enough to sit down and talk. And if we want to make this a game of he-said-he-said between Donald Trump and the Iranian Regime, I’ll take Trump’s word over theirs. I know how polarizing Trump is for a lot of people, but if you want to argue that the Iranian regime is more reliable than Trump I’ll still call that TDS.
Shakes
9d ago
You're literally just regurgitating propaganda headlines, in this case "primitive Russians can't make drones and depend on Iranian industry".
This style of argument would be a lot more productive and interesting if you didn’t make what I said artificially dumb
Shakes
9d ago
I guess I don't necessarily disagree, but I think there's a significant difference between the American navy having the ability to take Malacca if it wanted to, and being explicitly allowed as part of a partnership in concert with Jakarta. Among other points, I think this goes against the idea floating around that American prestige is down and foreign countries know better than to negotiate with Donald Trump. And in the same way America controls Hormuz more now than it did before, America controls Malacca more than it did before. (There was theoretically nothing stopping China from making that same alliance, right?)
That said I basically agree with the bulk of what you've written here. And I think all this is bullish for America's success with the Iran and America's growing power in the world generally.
Shakes
9d ago
And? If the US inflicts a lot of harm on Iran an Iran inflicts a little bit of harm on the US, that looks like a bad outcome for both the US and Iran. War is a negative-sum game, and "neither side gets a good result" is a possible outcome, indeed probably the default outcome.
This is the problem in the analysis. Maybe this is worth exploring.
The potential benefit to America winning this war is huge. We defeat an ancient enemy that has killed American soldiers for fifty years. We create a new order in the Middle East that turns a black hole of money and blood into an oasis of energy and peace. America acquires a dominant controlling position over global energy markets. We control the major global choke points of shipping. America eliminates the artificially cheap source of oil China was using to industrialize at our expense. America eliminates a major provider of arms to Russia. America remakes the entire global order and neutralizes one of our most intransigent foes.
The return on investment here is immeasurable. It almost can’t be measured in money because it is the thing on which money itself has value. America will be in the most dominant global position it has ever been, a new apogee of power.
If you run the Expected Value calculations here, Iran would have to impose tremendous costs on America for this to not be worth it. Collapse of the empire level costs. Thousands of soldiers dead, navies destroyed, American tech revealed as a pipe dream scam, territory lost.
People are talking as if this is happening, but mostly all Iran is able to do is bottleneck the strait and disrupt the supply of oil. This is already being solved. The part that can’t be replaced is so far being digested by global markets.
I’m somewhat aware that as I make this case I sound sycophantic as if denying the costs of war and I suspect this is why may deny my analysis. What I am saying is that in the big picture these costs are rounding errors. Iran is not hitting America where it hurts and probably can’t. Maybe planes shot down and bases attacked are high costs to pay but in the broader context the operation has been extremely successful.
It might not look this way read from European headlines about the chaos Trump is causing and kvetching about oil being a dollar higher than it was before. But overall Trump is playing for all the marbles and has every reason to keep going
She didn’t repudiate or apologize for any of her older woke positions. She simply stopped talking about them.
Democrats under Biden let in tens of millions of illegal immigrants. What further right policy? Campaign promises? After implementing very left wing policies why would voters immediately accept that Democrats are going to reverse course?
If Kamala had won, do you think we’d have fewer immigrants coming in? Trump stopped the border crisis, do you think Kamala would have done anything similar? Supported Remain in Mexico? Deporting immigrants? Restricting asylum claims?
Where did you get this premise from? It’s not to be found in anything I’ve argued.
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