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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29193 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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Is there a youth backlash brewing against LGBT?

I came up out of the subway the other day, and nearly my entire field of view was filled by a massive glowing screen full of flapping pride flags, wall-to-wall and six feet tall. It was a project by some charity or other claiming that "hate crimes" (or victimization, or incidents, or whatever they measure) jump by 60% during pride month. I've been so burned out by the sight of that flag everywhere that the only reaction I can muster is "maybe stop being so obnoxious about it then?" From the POSIWID perspective, one could consider the purpose of pride month to be to spike hostility against LGBT people, so why do it?

A long tweet from sci-fi author Devon Eriksen claims that pride month is downstream of the "toaster fucker" problem, in reference to an ancient greentext. Condensed: the internet brings together people with bizarre niche interests (what he calls "toaster fuckers" — he claims it's meant to be a general term but he's clearly writing about the LGBT theater of the CW). A supportive online community stops these people from leaving the toaster in the kitchen and adjusting to the normal world around them, and instead these online groups metastasize, eventually spilling over into the wider world: intra-group status competitions start with "who can fuck the most toasters", lead to "'toaster-fucker pride' bumper stickers" and then "bragging about how they sneak into other people's kitchens and fuck their toasters, too" and "swapping tips for how to introduce kids to the joys of toaster-fucking."

I think I agree with some of that description but not all of it, and may write it up in another thread if I get time, but it's not so important for this post. I need it as context for the bit that I think is more accurate: the normies getting fed up with all the toaster-fucking, the backlash, and the response (lightly edited to concatenate multiple small tweets, but no words changed):

Pretty soon normal people, who ten years before would shrugged and said "that's weird", are now sick of toaster-fucker flags everywhere and their kids being told to fuck toasters by sickos, and now they're going to burn every toaster-fucker flag they see, and Florida just passed a law requiring you to be 21 years old with proof of ID to buy a toaster. And Utah has banned toasters altogether and the Mormons have stopped even eating toast, bagels, waffles, or any other heated bread product.

But it doesn't stop there, either. Because a few toaster-fuckers get beaten with fence posts by people sick of hearing about toaster-fucking, and other people, who didn't see or hear the toaster-fuckers' prior behavior, say "holy shit, toaster fuckers really are oppressed". And they decide to become "toaster-fucker allies", despite the fact that they haven't the slightest real interest in fucking any toasters themselves.

I think this explains the split in normie opinion pretty well: red states have had more than enough and that's led into the various legal battles that Devon alludes to, school choice advocacy, campaigns to replace progressive school boards, etc. I don't think I've seen "beaten with fenceposts"-level backlash (I figure it would pop up here if it was an issue), but even the memory of such events in the semi-recent past could explain normie "I want to be a good person so I'll call myself an ally"-ism. Compare the number of "racist hate crime" hoaxes over the past few years, to the point where "the demand for racism exceeds its supply" has become a dark joke among cynical online commentators. I don't think I've seen LGBT activists fabricate incidents (certainly none as badly as Jussie Smollett did), but it seems useful for a group to have opposition to keep its supporters energized ("our work is not yet done!") and I could definitely see obnoxious pride month displays as accidentally serving this function.

Onto youth. A recent tweet by a newish Twitter account, America_2100, claims a drop in support for LGBT over the past few years (2022–2023: US-wide: -7 points; Republicans: -15 points, to a 10-year low of 41%; Democrats: -6 points; "young people": -8 points). In particular, they claim Gen Z's support for gay marriage dropped by 11 points between 2021 and 2023, which is double the time span of the other stats but could indicate an ongoing decline in support. Unfortunately the tweet doesn't source the surveys it refers to beyond saying that it came from PRRI and I don't have hard data beyond a couple of anecdotes. Lime, a scooter rental company, made a pride-flag crosswalk in Washington a 'walk-the-scooter' zone after several teenagers were arrested for leaving skid marks on it. I saw a recent comment on a gaming subreddit (sorry, I can't find it), in response to yet another pride-month-themed mod, saying something like "don't be discouraged! 50% upvotes for a pride mod is pretty good these days". But when I interact with university students, the discourse is still very pro-LGBT: they talking about being excited for pride events, etc.

So, questions for the floor:

  • Do you see a "vibe shift" around attitudes towards LGBT, and if so, is it generational?
  • Have you seen any discussion on the progressive side around changing strategy?

Here’s the thing. The original pride flag had a very important role and actually did do its job very well! The current flag, as well as the old rainbow flag in current year, no longer has such a specific purpose and thus is rudderless and even harmful.

The original goal was about gay marriage and gay and lesbian recognition. A significant portion of the population have these orientations, and the broad public didn’t realize how widespread it was. Furthermore, the winning strategy in the gay marriage fight was fighting an abstract opposition to homosexuality with real-people stories. If you became aware of someone you personally knew being gay, you were much more likely to listen to the “love is love” stuff and be sympathetic, as these people were in many cases supremely “normal”. Pride flags then had a legitimate case for visibility leading directly to opinion change.

This is no longer the case. The forefront of the LGBTQIA++ movement resides primarily in a small population segment, a very tiny one. Awareness campaigns are this no longer productive, because if only 1-2% (being generous) of the population fits in the TQIA++ category, compared to say 15% in the LGB category, you no longer have the same benefits of “oh I know someone personally like that”. Thus the presence and prominence of the flag serves no practical purpose.

A significant portion of the population have these orientations, and the broad public didn’t realize how widespread it was.

Well, no.

It's pretty much always been 3-5%. The recent uptick has been because people get social status for calling themselves bi while never, ever actually engaging in bisexual behavior.

But the propaganda has worked

And this is exactly why the PMC is so insidious - it takes its preferred hyperminority positions, signal amplifies them to the moon, and then targets as immoral "literal hitlers!" anyone who doesn't pledge histrionic fealty to the issue.

Don't forget questioning and queer as allowing weirdos with innocent fetishes to be considered members instead of allies.

Sapiosexuals and demisexuals and aromantics all consider themselves within the LGBT+ umbrella, so they get easy entry.

The lack of internal accountability means sexual abuses in the community that are happening face disincentives to report out of concerns that the community will be discredited means the abused just retreat instead of holding the abusers accountable.

The most obvious are trannies preying on children, especially girls. Most of the community is pretty ugly so perverts focus their attention on young girls seeking an identity, and since these girls don't speak up, the ++ continue unrestricted. I have unfortunately observed a steady supply of young boys eager to pimp themselves out for rich sugar daddies flush with money and drugs, and none of my male friends who were active on grindr as teens show any regrets in their adult life.

With the lack of whistleblowers and a nebulous definition of the community, the entire circus is likely to continue growing, even if public disapproval from rebellious teens grows.

I have unfortunately observed a steady supply of young boys eager to pimp themselves out for rich sugar daddies flush with money and drugs, and none of my male friends who were active on grindr as teens show any regrets in their adult life.

AFAIK, this was common among gay men back in the days when it was illegal. John Maynard Keynes, for example, had a thing for very young men/older boys. I think the hope was that this would go away if homosexuality was normalised.

hope was that this would go away if homosexuality was normalised

What was the mechanism to accomplish this?

It's like hoping for less crime if we stop arresting and prosecuting criminals.

I think the idea was that pederastic men REALLY wanted to have egalitarian relationships with men their own age, but couldn't under the conditions prior to legalisation, and would switch if these egalitarian relationships were possible.

I guess some have, sort of. Pairs of pederastic and pedophilic men can now abuse their victims together. Sometimes they even adopt their victims.

Asserting that homosexuals = pedophiles really requires evidence, not just asserting it because you really super believe it.

On the one hand, it's been months since your last ban. On the other hand, you now have a lot of warnings and bans stacked up and you've already been told that you're running out of warnings, and low effort shitting like this is pretty much all you do.

I'm giving you a 3-day ban and telling you knock it off with the naked culture warring.

More comments

There were five commonly proposed mechanisms :

  • Normalization of homosexuality could make it possible to discuss abusive homosexual relationships without admitting to illegal or taboo interests as part of the complaint. The extreme case is something like Dahmer, where police literally handed an underage victim to a serial killer (though Dahmer lived in Wisconsin, where adult homosexuality was legal at the time, he'd been booted from bathhouses for drugging people and the police in question had largely been driven to a policy of not asking questions). But a lot of stuff well below that level should have gone through the courts, and was instead handled through whisper networks that were plainly not up to the task, because the victims or witnesses could have faced liability or stigma.
  • The separation from Actual Abuser and just homosexual would have made the stigma on the former more significant. Most of the documented stuff from Keynes involved people over the age of consent or who were plain adults and just younger than him, with the more serious allegations looking to be misunderstandings by more recent readers of the common terms of the time. Contrast Gajdusek or Breen's clear and known abuse of young children. But in the lingo of the day and even into the early 1990s, most public discussion (even in gay spheres!) would not distinguish the two fields, leaving far less pressure on the marginal bad actor to behave better.
  • There was a common failure mode where an outed (or afraid-of-being-outed) teenager would flee or be kicked out from their normal community, and find that a combination of personal interests and business discrimination and native contacts would lead them to crash with various unrelated gay adults, often for pretty lengthy periods of time. Sometimes these were full-blown group houses, more often they were just rooming with friends-of-friends-of-friends, whatever. Sexual relationships in these conditions would be prone to abuse even without the age disparity, but it also meant they were people who had perfectly healthy (and above-age-of-consent-the-entire-time) relationships that looked really skuzzy from Traditional Perspectives. Cleaning this process out would both reduce temptation for marginal bad actors, and more critically also remove an avenue of normalization.
  • Demographics are (and were) a bitch. For a heterosexual person, there's about one het member of the opposite sex in a five-block age range of your age for every thirty people. For a gay person before the Internet, that number was probably closer to 1:600 or 1:2400, depending on who's numbers you trust. And given the covert nature of efforts, gay men were limited in how they could go looking. While some approaches were able to concentrate all possible sexual partners, sometimes even into one room, in practice the real answer required looking very wide in one way or another, and opening that age bracket was often the only available choice. Young adults in particular have particular problems with complying with the standard rule for hets, both because of the more narrow slices and because those present were far less likely to be able to be out, be mobile, and be trying to match publicly. ((And the AIDs crisis blew up a large slice, too.))
  • For... mechanical reasons that straight people aren't going to want to hear about, there's a lot of more awkward stuff that can happen between two gay virgins than two heterosexual ones, barring pregnancy. And while that's a very big 'except', it at least involves months before the emergency room visit. Various downstream knowledge and pragmatic matters made 'gay mentor' a thing, and while a majority were genuinely in the 'leave a pamphlet and pretend the question never came up' side, it left a massive space for abuse among people who by definition would not be able to readily recognize abuses. Increased information availability in public spaces, the growth of sex toys as an available industry, and more one-to-many discussions of gay sex mechanics, all did genuinely reduce that.

A lot of this was predicated on most abusers selecting their victims by opportunity or mild preference, rather than strong preference or as obligate parts of their sexuality, and that wasn't always true. And there remain awkward edge cases that neither the gay community (nor society as a whole thinking about the het versions!) really want to handle as rules rather than on a case-by-case basis.

But it wasn't wrong, either, nor clearly wrong at the time.

A lot of that still sounds like hope.

What was the mechanism to accomplish this?

The substitution effect (for drugs), but in reverse: you're giving up your ability to have gayness be illegal so that gay children aren't instantly arrested for that crime should they blow the whistle.

Of course, you could always pass laws to avoid that (i.e. "gay sex isn't illegal so long as you're under AoC, as after that you're expected to know it's wrong")- and we already do this for lots of crimes. But if you're starting from 'legalizing gayness as end goal' you're obviously not going to take that approach.

The lack of internal accountability means sexual abuses in the community that are happening face disincentives to report out of concerns that the community will be discredited means the abused just retreat instead of holding the abusers accountable.

A tactical assessment that is unimpeachably correct. Everyone knows what happened to the Scouts and the Church, and because sexual abuse allegations are a superweapon, it's not going to save the LGBT if the culture shifts.

especially girls

All child gay/trans icons are biologically male, and the "straight male sexuality should be stamped out" is all coming from straight women, not "trannies" (there are so few of them that it wouldn't matter if none of them were sex pests, they're just useful examples). As such, until some internal or external circumstance forces moderation of that tendency, the entire circus will continue growing.

because sexual abuse allegations are a superweapon, it's not going to save the LGBT if the culture shifts.

Sexual abuse allegations are a superweapon in the same way that racism accusations are a superweapon. You can't actually use them against anyone; you can use them against people lower on the oppression scale.

I think "If the culture shifts" means in that world that gays, trannies, or whoever we are talking about, are no longer on the oppression scale

the oppression scale

Mean Girls 101: the more popular you are, the further beyond accountability you are, and vice versa.

Mean Girls 102: popularity is a zero-sum game.

Mean Girls 103: because you'll die by that sword regardless of whether or not you live by it, taking it up is the only rational option.

I am actually thinking of Jessica Yaniv and all the other pedophiles that claimed to be trans all while trying to gain access or actually perving on little girls. Its not straight male sexuality, its trans preferences and bigots should be ashamed of questioning the intention of trannies.

For me the fairly obvious point is that most modern trannies don't fucking bother to pass. They shotgun some clown makeup on and wear a dress, but put zero effort into waxing, dieting or otherwise trying to be women. If they actually looked like submissive and breedable femboys they'd get more acceptance, but modern western trannies are just ugly fatties claiming unverifiable special privilege.

but modern western trannies are just ugly fatties claiming unverifiable special privilege

Something they have in common with their enablers.

its trans preferences and bigots should be ashamed of questioning the intention of trannies

In the same way, it's female preferences and bigots should be ashamed of questioning the intention of women (room temperature for the last 40 years).
They're the same picture, it's just a lot more in your face because that's what it looks like when that privilege is extended to cover specific types of biological men. They're fargroup to straight women because they've torn their manhood off (literally or symbolically), so they don't have to worry about them trying anything (which is occasionally, per your examples, not entirely how it works in practice) and doing things like destroying women's sports and introducing men into women's prisons is not an issue to them because the consequences of doing so will only be borne by "lesser" women.

If they actually looked like submissive and breedable femboys they'd get more acceptance

Which is why the femboys that actually do this (and pass as a consequence) tend to be inherently opposed to the womanly way of asserting transgender status (i.e. by claiming it and doing nothing else).

Okay, you’ve got 3 posts in the mod queue about how much your outgroup sucks. Progressives this, trannies that.

I’m going to ask you to back off a bit. You can make your points without signaling disgust quite so hard.

Oops! I wonder what other number I was thinking of. I think the point still stands though. If we say .5% trans and 4% gay that’s an order of magnitude difference. Numbers seem to vary a good amount based on survey though.

The original goal was about gay marriage and gay and lesbian recognition.

Are you sure about the former? Because I've read multiple arguments from gay-supporting liberals that this was specifically not the case. Their narrative is that the talking point that homosexual men are just normal, average people like anyone else who want nothing else but to live as average people in faithful marriages and be accepted as such was manufactured by gay rights activists in the '90s for normie consumption and as a pure PR move. It's not something most homosexual men even agree on.

Related: Douglas Murray (a gay conservative) once pointed out, when criticising the concept of an "LGBT community", that there is no more unnatural an alliance than between gay men and asexuals.

Presumably the alliance there is not being societally forced into heterosexual relationships. But, lol.

That is very near to the issue. The LGBTQAYCFRIO7CGAEIROFHTAGN+ community is defined by their common enemy.

There exists, existed, or is believed to exist, an ideology devoted to the proposition that the only correct way to live is one person-born-with-penis-presenting-as-male, one person-born-with-vulva-presenting-as-female, in an exclusive relationship, having standard coitus.

Hence gays, lesbians, bisexuals/pansexuals, asexuals, the transgender, the gender non-conforming, the polyamorous, and those who engage in unorthodox carnal practises, form a natural alliance (The enemy of my enemy....).

Well, regardless of what the wider movement thought and thinks, I personally think that the normie approach worked. I don’t really think flamboyant attention-seeking style (so to speak) changed any minds. Whereas the “we are just people too” approach seemed to win over a lot of people both secular and even religious. The flag was an attempt to avoid being memory holed and overlooked, and got people used to seeing gay rights as something normal and not something fringe. So not exactly the same as the pure PR approach sure, but the efforts I think were complementary.

There is no anti-gay backlash, because it was never about the gays. It was always about social status.

As was written in the scriptures, Right is the New Left.

Gay flags everywhere did not originate with the gays, it originated with PMC young adults using the gay flag as a way to gain status over their older rivals. A young PMC woman would ostentatiously support gays, showing she was more empathetic, and thus higher status, than her mom or her boss. This was a costly signal to send, as gays gave older people the ick.

By the early 2000s, as gays were unquestioningly accepted in PMC culture, the signaling moved to the lumpen-PMC. They aped the mannerisms of the upper-PMC, as a way to show they were PMC. A gay flag and a degree from a third tier school was their way of signalling they had transcended their suburb. The upper-PMC, meanwhile, moved to trans, as a way to signal they weren't backwards, behind-the-times lumpen-PMC

Now the lumpen-PMC is all into trans, and the young and well-off PMC I know are sheepishly and ironically supportive of trans. Being too loudly into inclusion is now a marker of being that worst of all things, a social climber.

We're now at a moment where loudly supporting LGBT causes isn't a way to thumb your nose at your fat middle-aged lumpen-PMC teacher - it's the ideology of your fat middle-aged lumpen-PMC teacher. Gen Z Believes Wokeism Is Only For Ugly People. Young women don't want to be seen as frumpy, and young men are inherently oppositional.

I'm guilty of this myself. I'm about as supportive of LGBT people as you can get without actually sucking a dick, but I'm very quiet about it, because I just don't want to be, or be associated with "those people" - the fat, half-head-shaved, mask-wearing, purple-haired screechers.

I'm sorry, gays.

I agree for the most part, though I think an under-considered part of this is that LGBT and other Woke phenomena are now official dogma meaning that not only is it useless as a signifier of status, but that it’s something that everyone is more or less required to believe in public. There’s no place where one can really be openly and explicitly anti-LGBT in polite society. If you’re not pro LGBT everything, and you tell people this in the workplace, you’re going to have to clean out your desk. If you say it in school, you’re going to have a chat with the school counselor trying to get to the bottom of your bigotry. If you say it online, you’re getting reported to either your workplace or your school.

But the thing is, that all of this performative behavior the requirement to not only not be against it, but be for it makes the opposite an act of rebellion against The Man. The model isn’t anything politically motivated, it’s the same thing that drove kids to liking weird bands, or take up smoking, or dress funny or get piercings. In the 1990s, liking rap was not because white suburban kids discovered spoken word poetry set to music was cool. It was cool because it got a huge and often negative reaction from the adults. They liked rap precisely because Mom and Dad and all the adults hated it and would yell at them about it. Kids took up smoking and vaping less because they like it and more because it would annoy and frighten the adults. One of the great draws of this is of course that such reactions prove that you’re independent and not controlled by the adults. A kid like that, one that rebelliously refuses to bend the knee to what the adults think of them especially in the teenage world (although somewhat in college as well) is one that everyone else thinks is cool.

I think that youth rebellion is somewhat astroturfed.

Most kids are conformist. Maybe some small percentage will truly rebel, but the overwhelming majority will only rebel in allowed ways. That's why LGBT among teenagers took off in the 2010s and not the 1990s. By that time, LGBT had become an allowed method of rebellion, much like gangster rap was in the 1990s.

We're not about to see a kids rebel by being performatively right-wing. It's not allowed. Teenagers find other harmless ways to annoy their elders, like brain rot memes.

Which isn't to say that LGBT will remain cool now that it is official state dogma. It won't. But rebellion against it will not be tolerated either.

We're not about to see a kids rebel by being performatively right-wing

Aren't most of the 'Active Clubs' young men? I don't think I'd describe them as performative.

You appear to have cut off my quote to invert what I said which was this:

We're not about to see a kids rebel by being performatively right-wing.

I was not my intention to invert your meaning but to rebutt it by providing a counter example. I've updated the quoted text to avoid confusion.

I'd say the idea of teenage rebellion as a social reality originates from the era of capitalism when teenagers appeared on the consumer market as a separate target audience. It was no coincidence that the thing all outlets of teenage rebellion had in common was and is their profitability.

"The revolutionaries are on CBS [Records]" - 1968

I think that youth rebellion is somewhat astroturfed.

In other words, culture wars, like regular wars, are fought by the old with the young as merely collateral damage.

I agree that direct rebellion to LGBT won't be tolerate. You won't suddenly see a resurgence in kids calling the dork loser in class a faggot.

But I think ostentatious differentiation will always be there. The original punk rock aesthetic was all about LOUD self-distinction. Unnatural hair dye, spikes and other metal ... thingys ... on clothes, dramatic makeup. You couldn't not be seen because everything was arranged to catch the eye.

So how do you loudly self-differentiate when the PanGenderDemiQuarks have taken over the library?

Retro inspired hyper-normie gender roles. It's not the weird TradWife meme, it's a kind of Volume-Up-To-11 1980s masculinity. To me, it kind of complements a lot of the Instragram Face, cosmetic conscious women online who, despite their large followings on a silicon valley platform, probably have pretty right-coded beliefs about gender and gender roles.

and young men are inherently oppositional.

I don't think this is true. Young men want to establish themselves as full grown men(tm), and in our culture that means having a badass attitude, or so they think. But IME convincing young men to listen to their authority figures and they'll grow up is not actually that hard- you have to listen to them and convincingly walk the talk you give.

You also need to have convincingly masculine authority figures for them to emulate. In post-Boomer western culture, the institutions that should be pointing to exemplars of pro-social masculinity as authority figures for young men to emulate are instead pointing to outlaws and women.

masculinity as authority figures for young men

Isn't this why Andrew Tate and Daniel Bilzerian experience the popularity they have? They fill the vacuum of non-converged masculine authority figures, despite their apparent low quality.

Were you thinking of Audie Murphy types as pro-social masculinity? Do you have any examples?

I was more thinking of Average Centrist Dad as an achievable example of pro-social masculinity - if you think that you need to be Audie Murphy to be a real man then you may have been huffing too much feminist propaganda about how husbands and fathers aren't masculine because women can do that to.

Average Centrist Dad as an achievable example of pro-social masculinity

Shouldn't this be the minimum standard? I was thinking of something more aspirational.

Gay flags everywhere did not originate with the gays, it originated with PMC young adults using the gay flag as a way to gain status over their older rivals. A young PMC woman would ostentatiously support gays, showing she was more empathetic, and thus higher status, than her mom or her boss. This was a costly signal to send, as gays gave older people the ick.

That might be some of it. But part of it was a lot simpler than that- it was just a way for gay men to easily meet so they could hook up. This was especially important in the pre-grindr days, but even now they seem to like having a summer-long outdoor sex party.

Unfortunately, that means the rest of us having to endure all outdoor public places turning into a summer-long gay sex party, but whatdya gonna do.

outdoor public places turning into a summer-long gay sex party, but whatdya gonna do

https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2024/06/19/three-gay-men-hunted-in-phoenix-park-by-six-men-with-knives-in-shocking-incident/

It's possible that in this incident from last week the purported 'victims' were just walking at night in an area known for public sex between men, when they encounterd an armed homophobic gang. There are other scenarios that seem more likely.

well, that does sound horrific. I am sorry that it happened, and I hope that my stupid comment was not read as encouraging that sort of menacing behaviour.

No I didn't read your comment as promoting menacing.

Our societies used to have solutions to the outdoor gay sex party problem. Buggery was illegal in many jurisdictions. Even after it was decriminalized public sex in parks or toilets was still criminal and there was a stigma still to participating in homosexual activities.

Now that buggery isn't a crime in the west. The stigma on homosex is largely gone, in the west. Policing and prosecuting public sex acts is virtually non-existent in the west, people are left to solve their own problems. In some areas I suspect this would look like armed neighborhood watch groups rousting those they suspect are up to public buggery.

I'm not sure this encounter rises to horrific.

How do you limit or reduce undesirable behavior by a determined cohort if it's not prosecuted or stigmatized? Vigilante groups have been a traditional answer.

Being too loudly into inclusion is now a marker of being that worst of all things, a social climber.

Or in other words, we can see that conspicuous consumption applies to social capital as well.

because I just don't want to be, or be associated with "those people"

The thing that bothers me the most is that it's no longer possible to talk intelligently about it. The Newspeak perpetrated by "those people" has damaged the discourse and prevented progress in ways that are as trivially true as DR3, which is why I don't get along with them.

What is DR3 ?

Urban dictionary doesn't know nor does wikipedia.

"Dems R (the) Real Racists." It can mean a few different things, but usually making fun of conservatives who take liberal arguments at face value and smugly call out perceived hypocrisy, accomplishing nothing except legitimizing the liberal frame.
You know "ha, dumb libs banned high school algebra for Racial Equity, guess they're the real racists for thinking blacks can't do math! Vote Republican for true Racial Equity Praxis!"

fat

Hey, some of us fatties have reasonable opinions about things and a civilized demeanor!

(said with tongue firmly in cheek)

Out-and-out homophobia/sexually-motivated violence tends to not get too much coverage in specific incidents since it's perpetrated by certain cultures that are otherwise lionized by progressive actions. 'There were 50 Trans murders this year' looks shocking and something to be addressed, whilst '95% of those were ladyboy prostitutes running afoul of pimps and gay-panic Johns' is something that'll keep individual incidents off the headlines

Aren't Trans- of both kinds- murdered at lower rates than the general population, nevermind the severely mentally ill streetwalker whose underclass clients think themselves the victim of false advertising population(which is statistically what most of these murders are- and having been around underclass males, they a) are willing to frequent prostitutes and b) would react with violence to the revelation of a prostitute they'd picked up having male parts).

It was briefly mentioned in the 2020 democratic primaries that most trans murders are sex workers, then I believe it got memory holed when it was revealed the murderers were largely homophobic black clients. It was useful to highlight trans black sex workers being murdered, then the murderers turned out to not be white men and the news was buried.

I would gently posit that the murder rate for trans is somewhat obscured by the number of trans people being absolutely impossible to discern. Self ID and no accountability means this is a mutable category with depressed tomboys and cross dressing AGPs in the same category.

It was useful to highlight trans black sex workers being murdered, then the murderers turned out to not be white men and the news was buried.

Common Coulter’s Law W.

See also #StopAsianHate in the US or supposed disappearing indigenous women in Canada.

An occasional but recurring source of seethe and controversy in spaces like Reddit is to what extent Persons of Sex Work are in the right to deny their services to black men.

Most sex workers are actually somewhat racist and unpleasant because they tend to be bad with money and keep trying to squeeze regulars. Its quite common for escorts to state preferences openly, and it is unacceptable to normies that said preferences tend to be no blacks/arabs/indians, for varying reasons stemming largely from fraud and stealthing. European freelancers on backpage used to complain about those clients constantly, and then I think it got memory holed.

In the end normies really wish their chosen pets would all get along with each other, and can't be bothered to actually talk to blacks or muslims to see what they think of lgbt or women. Maintaining the fiction is the responsibility of reality, and denying the lived experience of sex workers is more acceptable than any notion of skin color being indicative of threat. We still don't see any liberal reckoning about Pulse nightclub or Rotherham, and at this point the aggressors know they have a ripe and defenseless population rich for the taking.

In the end normies really wish their chosen pets would all get along with each other, and can't be bothered to actually talk to blacks or muslims to see what they think of lgbt or women.

So there was this time a long time ago when I was sort of interested in Sam Harris’ podcast and kept checking it out. One time he had Bill Maher on as a guest rather predictably, who, to his credit, wasn’t holding back. One argument he made about liberal/centrist normies is that one reason why talking points on the threat of Islamism and other negative consequences of Muslim immigration don’t resonate with them at all is that usually the only Muslims the typical suburban middle-class liberal White woman ever interacts with are those two funny and exotic Arab guys at the office that she’s sympathetic to already. That’s the only point of reference she has. Needless to say, those two swarthy guys know the score and will make sure never to offend her pro-gay/trans sensibilities. (Also, we know that ‘multiculturalism’ to this White demographic doesn’t usually mean more than funny clothes, exotic restaurants and that one coffee shop your female coworkers will tell you about.)

#StopAsianHate

That was particularly farcical. It's a shame that most satirists in the US are left-wing:

He said he wanted the Asian American community to know it had the support of African Americans. The two groups should be united against white supremacy, he said.

“The major problem in this country is white supremacy, and their culture,” he said.

https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/national-international/black-and-asian-americans-stand-together-against-hate-crimes/2780762/

"We should be struggling against the common enemy!"

"... The Judean People's Front?!"

Cultural confusion can also be a factor. Remember a case in Australia where a Transwoman was assaulted by a Tinder hookup, but it turned out the Tinder hookup had only been in the country from his native Pakistan for a couple weeks and seemingly had no cultural awareness of Trans being a thing/how to pick up on it from the profile.

I don’t recall it off the top of my head, but such a case could also be described as lack of cultural antibodies or lack of genre savviness.

There are a statistically significant number of rap songs from the eighties and nineties which talk about hooking up with a girl who turns out to be a guy. This phenomenon was mentioned on Cracked back in the day.

Probably most famously in DMX's "Where the Hood at" which straight up talks about murdering gay and trans black men:

Last I heard, y'all niggas was havin' sex (uh) with the same sex (woo) I show no love (yeah) to homo thugs (nah) Empty out, reload, and throw more slugs (boom) How you gonna explain fuckin' a man? Even if we squash the beef, I ain't touchin' your hand (aight?) I don't fuck with chumps (yeah) For those that been to jail, that's the cat with the Kool-Aid on his lips and pumps (uh)

I would gently posit that the murder rate for trans is somewhat obscured by the number of trans people being absolutely impossible to discern.

Sure, but even if the trans murder rate was double what we currently believe it to be (i.e. for every trans person who got murdered and who was correctly identified as such by the police, there was one additional murder victim who was inaccurately characterised as cisgender), the trans murder rate would still be lower than the cis male murder rate. Check my maths.

Also, if a male person gets murdered and that person dressed in a conventionally male fashion, never sought treatment for gender dysphoria, never requested that anyone address them using a female name or pronouns, and gave no outward indication of being anything other than a cis man - I find it hard to understand how one could posit that such a murder was motivated by transphobia on the part of the perpetrator.

Haven't checked recently, but I've seen different figures - either similar, or less.

I suspect reports that it's substantially less than the average are underreporting, while reports that it's around the average are probably more accurate. I'd wager it's 2x the baseline or less. I don't believe the reports of a "trans genocide" in terms of literal murders. Arguing that prohibition of medical services constitutes a major psychological risk factor would be the more fruitful line of inquiry if someone were trying to put together a case.

This is the motte-and-bailey that is "trans genocide". They want us to think that the genocide is transphobes murdering trans people, and are able to point to a non-zero number of murders which fit that pattern. But the actual motte is that failing to give trans people everything they want is genociding them by driving them to suicide.

Last I checked these things counted as killing trans, kids or otherwise:

  • anything making kids sad because it made them think about suicide
  • no access to puberty blockers from 10 onwards, because growing into an adolescent natal body kills the trans kid within
  • denying trannies access to protected spaces, because it serves as a visible reminder of their existence being invalidated
  • any language/literature saying natal women/men are in any way different from their trans equivalent, like actual measurements of muscle output post estrogen/test
  • any language implying the existence of female/male coded biology, like cervix or breastfeeding or prostate cancer.

I am 100% sure I missed more examples of this absurdity, but there is no need to belabor the point.

Honestly after a certain point I get the sense that the trannies just want to turn the screws on the cis to put cis in their place. Trannies don't actually want to be weightlifters or cyclists save for the ego stokers, trannies just want to fuck women who can't say no. The visible threat is obviously AGP transwomen acting disingenuously, but the expansive language has captured a shitload of confused angry teen girls convinced their lives would be better if they were boys. Normie PMC bullied into supporting an extensive definition of trans mental health causes for the benefit of degenerate transwomen end up generating a corpus of stupid teenagers getting permanent damage to their bodies and psyches. More and more kids seem to be aware of this discrepancy and revealed preferences point to where the kids really are going - everyone is fucking instathots or smoothskinned gymchads, and no amount of stunning and brave laudatory praise on ugly fatties or short butches is actually giving egotistical fetishists the validation they demand.

But the actual motte is that failing to give trans people everything they want is genociding them by driving them to suicide.

My impression was that the genocide claim is mostly based on the argument that not affirming trans people's gender is supposedly denying their existence, which in some way is equivalent to wanting them dead, or whatever.

Aren't Trans- of both kinds- murdered at lower rates than the general population

In the west, trans people are murdered at a lower rate than cis males.

In 2022 from a population of 1.6 million trans people in the US, there were 41 murders, broken down into 37 trans women and 4 trans men - 2.56 murders/100k of population.

In 2022 (the last year for which data on the victims' sex are known), there were 12,747 male murder victims in the US, from a population of 166.6 million. If we assume that that figure includes the 37 murders in the paragraph above, that comes down to 12,710. That works out at 7.63 murders/100k of population.

Anyone who tells you there's an epidemic of violence against trans people in the US is misinformed or lying.

What about compared to cis women?

3,653 female murder victims in 2022, from a population of 168 million. If we assume that figure includes the four trans men mentioned in comment above, there were 3,649 cis female murder victims in 2022, working out at 2.17 murders/100k of population.

To summarize:

  • An American cis man is just under three times more likely to be murdered than an American trans person.
  • An American trans person is about 20% more likely to be murdered than an American cis woman.
  • An American trans woman (5.39 murders/100k) is nearly nine times more likely to be murdered than an American trans man (0.61 murders/100k).*

Or in the form of ranking in descending order of risk of murder:

  1. Cis man (7.63/100k)
  2. Trans woman (5.39/100k)
  3. Cis woman (2.17/100k)
  4. Trans man (0.61/100k)

I have little reason to doubt that the hysterical caterwauling about how trans people of colour** are more likely to be murdered than white trans people is empirically true. I assume that in the trans community, murder rates by race/ethnicity follow the same trends as in the general population, for much the same reasons.

*The report from the Williams Institute says that "Of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming." - annoying that they can't just list sex somewhere to make my job easier. I assumed that the GNC people were fifty-fifty male and female (which is obviously an assumption on my part) and calculated the murder rates accordingly, under the assumption that the population of "trans women" includes all males who identify as trans or GNC. Thus, 37 murders from a population of 686,100 adult trans/GNC males = 5.39/100k.

**Excluding Asians, as these activists tend to do

I feel like the big vibe shift has been the change from pride being about advancing gay rights issues to becoming a marketing term for mega corps to push product.

My cities pride festival had corp sponsorship on the level of the NFL. It also wasn’t clear there was a push for any political stances, just a generic “pride” branding and “love is love” messaging.

My cynical stance is American white women are generally more progressive and also one of the most important consumer demographics. By attaching themselves to “Pride” companies can market themselves to this demographic and virtue signal.

At this point it feels like "Pride" never ends. I know I'm getting old, but every time June rolls around the wife and I have this feeling of "Didn't they just do pride?" Because businesses keep Pride stuff up 365 days a year. Pride shit comes out shoe-horned into Christmas and Easter. It just never fucking ends, it's just especially obnoxious in June when the public kink displays begin.

I used to be annoyed that Christmas "begins" in November. I fought the good fight that the tree doesn't go up until at least after Thanksgiving. But that's got nothing on Pride.

In my hometown, which is by no means a conservative place, there was Pride stuff out and about for a week, it was really visible for the day of the march, (the Pride week here was already at the start of June), and after that it's only the same individual restaurants and bars that always have rainbow flags on window that have them. Much more understated than in, say, 2019.

Pride in-person feels more subdued, but online feels only slightly less present. There’s still pride banners all over websites. But in person I’ve seen very few rainbow flags.

I dunno, seems more subdued online as well. Orgs that had a pride logo for an entire month now do it for a week, if that.

Sony just announced its partnership with "immigration equality", promoting "justice and equality" for aids-ridden gay immigrants through lawsuits and lobbying.

Every company is still doing the "are you sure this will help us sell more $product?" "$product?" skit.

On the plus side I can feel fully vindicated making fun of my friend for having a Gaystation instead of an N64. Never stopped ribbing him about the time he forgot to say "no homo" after sex.

Gaystation instead of an N64

There'll be 64 stripes on the flag before long.

Well then it's a good thing my uncle works at Nintendo, he gave me a Nintendo 65. No you can't see it, I loaned it to my girlfriend who lives in Canada and is totally real.

Sony just announced its partnership with "immigration equality", promoting "justice and equality" for aids-ridden gay immigrants through lawsuits and lobbying.

Huh. 24 hours ago; not a joke.

To be precise, though, Immigration Equality is only "the nation's leading LGBTQ immigrant rights organization", so Sony is currently just focusing on immigration restrictions in the USA (where immigration leads to a mere 750K new naturalized citizens each year, and where Sony has a full 16K employees), and presumably there will be a small delay before efforts expand to less urgent places like Japan (a solid 10K naturalizations per year, but only 55K Sony employees).

Ironically, I'm actually on Sony's side here (the liberal and libertarian in me are happy with most immigration, and the conservative in me still thinks the solution to AIDS is just "hey, remember monogamy?") ... yet I can't help but wonder if any top Sony execs will really be suggesting that this additional kindness and awareness of other people's problems should also be extended to Japan (42 out of 10,493 annual asylum applications approved in Wikipedia's most recent data), or whether such a possibility would have them concerned about their precious fingers.

The closest "current thing flag" house to me took down their Ukrainian flag to replace it with some black power one in Feb, and have now replaced that with a "stars and rainbow stripes" flag. A positively patriotic rejoinder to the row of intersex-progress-pride+Hamas flags on the opposite side of the road.

The idea that the culture war is cooling down is insane. The gunshots we hear are just getting less frequent right now because the left are running out of their current victims, and haven't picked the next batch to march into the woods yet.

Justifiably paranoid take: the guys saying "it's safe to stop hiding in the bushes, come out now!" are luring out the next victims.

The left has already picked the next batch of sacred cows, it’s just rather muted since the security organs object to the fact that most of the new herd are on international terrorism lists and violently opposed to US interests.

it feels like "Pride" never ends.

"I want to get off Mr Bones Wild Pride!"

I was telling my girlfriend about Scott's post "Gay Rites are Civil Rites" the other day, an article I thought was very insightful but also very parochial. In San Francisco, the Pride parade has been fully "assimilated" such that it's nothing more than a generic expression of civic pride, wholly divorced from its roots as a celebration of aberrant sexuality, fulfilling precisely the same social function that a 4th of July march fulfils in a Red city (or fulfilled 20 years ago). But obviously that description isn't true everywhere, and there are plenty of places in the world where organising or attending a Pride parade would result in funny looks, or even a visit from the police.

Exactly. Feels similar to Christmas where the general celebration has nothing to do with Christianity (aside from church specific events).

LGBT refers to an activist coalition, not a community (there is a gay community, and a largely separate lesbian community which rather famously does not, in fact, include straight guys who self-identify as lesbians). If said activist coalition has shifted from LGB issues to T issues (and it has) and LGB is more popular than T (which it is) then that would be sufficient to make "LGBT" as a dangling signifier less popular.

there is a gay community, and a lesbian community which rather famously does not, in fact, include straight guys who self-identify as lesbians.

I can't say I managed to find a way to verify this, but the word on the street is that the lesbian community has been decimated, largely because they failed to not include straight guys who self-identify as lesbians.

failed to include or failed to not include, this is confusing.

The latter. Failed to exclude, to make it clearer.

It's all anecdotal, but there's a demographic bitter lesbians, bemoaning the decline of the lesbian scene, because they couldn't keep trans women out. They could if they wanted to, of course - gay guys had no issues keeping trans men out - but despite all the talk of gender nonconformity, seems like even outliers tend to be closer to the behavioral average of their respective group, than to the other.

As a counterpoint there's also talk of lesbians going trans themselves, I think Katie Herzog had a whole spiel about that.

They could if they wanted to, of course - gay guys had no issues keeping trans men out

To be fair I don't think it's a similar category of problem, in the same way trans men trying to get into male prisons doesn't cause the same concern as trans women in female prisons.

From the anecdotes I've heard about it, it seems that the primary problem is other women (or female persons who identify as not-women) who embrace the new trans religion and therefore consider it fundamentally immoral to try to maintain a penis-free lesbian scene.

I think being a biological female in, say, a men’s locker room is just unpleasant enough to resolve itself very fast.

As a counterpoint there's also talk of lesbians going trans themselves

I mean, it seems to me a butch lesbian could become a transman just by switching which side the buttons on her flannel shirts are on.

In my experience, it tends to be trans women who go down the purely social transition route. I've encountered plenty of male people who put on a dress or makeup and demand that people call them "Lilith", but express no interest in medical transition (hell, I've met a handful of "Liliths" who don't even go to the trouble of swapping out their wardrobe or shaving their beard). For trans men, it tends to be a "go hard or go home" thing, wherein they don't bother to identify as such unless they're (at a minimum) taking testosterone - I don't recall ever encountering a self-identified trans man who was wearing makeup, six-inch heels and a pushup bra. Female people who want to maintain their femininity but still gain oppression points tend to just call themselves non-binary.

This is why I'm relatively convinced that LGB and T belong together, because the most obvious examples are mismatched-brain things. You can see it in some gay men if you see a couple of them; it's very obvious that one of them has a "female" brain and one of them doesn't (the former may or may not have a lisp, but the latter won't).

Of course, this is all hidden by the discourse and the letters, and it also tends to run into being really insulting to tomboys and tomgirls which are only described by "must have received the wrong brain" in action, but not in thought (or perhaps, if privately in thought, they're reasonable enough to keep it to themselves). But I haven't found a better way to describe this effect.

That’s my assumption as well, as in the past, even as recently as 15-20 years ago, the T was by far the least important part of that whole equation and the whole thing has completely flip flopped.

If you ask people about the constituent parts of the activist alliance individually I wouldn’t be surprised if support for LGB issues isn’t as strong as ever, but the T has just required a whole set of things that most people find too arduous or absurd.

I’d agree that the G part has lost quite some idpol points in recent years.

In relative terms to the T part, and even in absolute terms.

After all, a large chunk of out-of-the-closet gays are white men. And gay white men are the white men of gay people.

I'll caveat at the start that I'm really not convinced on the underlying question. Not just in the obvious way that I (and a lot of other people) became furries at a time where you had to go pretty far out of your way to get exposed to the furry fandom, and where "cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow [x]" was impossible and discouraged even inside the fandom.

That "in the [x]-fucking group, the axis of prestige aligns with fucking [x]" is pretty wrong. Furries know of people with a ton of art commissions, or who had the most 'fun' at a conventions (though even there, no one's going out of their way to claim partial responsibility for putting 'ranch' on a certain pizza, you don't want to know). But you can be a High Profile Furry by organizing, by creating media, hell just by having a decent voice when playing weird online games; many big-name furs aren't convention-room-party goers, some don't even do adult stuff in media format (or only began doing so long after their rise in popularity).

Status derives from status and its games, for better or worse.

Okay, on the more immediate question of a vibe shift:

  • I think a lot of the poll variances in the recent short term (to the extent they actually exist), largely reflect changes in what people perceive as the question being asked. Just as poll questions in the 1980s weren't really about gay marriage, even if some people were starting to think about it, polls in 2010 were overwhelmingly perceived as about gay marriage even if other matters were starting to percolate. And while I think social conservatives overstate some of the matters -- kids just don't care about Drag Queen Story Hour, unless they're stuck listening to it -- there's both a ton of reversion to mean and a lot of more controversial topics at easy grasp, today.

  • This is a place where there's obvious an Official Correct Answer, and there has been for the better part of a decade (eg, most teenagers' lifespans as political animals), and that impacts answers and views in a variety of complex ways. While social conservatives focus, not unreasonably, on how this encourages agreement with that Official Correct Answer, it also results in matters where respondents presume questions from authorities are either tests or presumed within the window of that Official Correct Answer, or where people will show what looks like resistance where 'resistance' is only incidentally touching on these matters.

  • It's... difficult to get a real grip on ground level politics for students, especially if you're someone who does play by the 'keep it at home' rules. I deal with more students than most adults, and I'd still be really hesistent to extrapolate from the few times students have brought this topic up in public.

  • There's some awareness that something's going wonky among the progressive parts of the world, but most of that's perceived as a 'Last Gasp Of <Insert Today's Demographic Boogey Man>', or perhaps young leftists not knowing 'What We're All Fighting'. Even the true versions of this stuff aren't really things the progressive movement is willing to actually handle rather than confront, and they're not that often true, so I'm not sure how much to take from it.

Furry fandom is benign. If your children get involved in furry fandom, the worst that can happen is that they get mixed up in inverting Laplace Transforms. Yes, there is Yiff, and Bad Dragon, but humans are obsessed with sex; human social life is equally obsessed with sex outside of furry fandom. Keeping them out of the fandom provides zero protection.

One example of the fandom keeping it sane is Fox Dad with its gentle self-mockery reminding everyfur not to take it too far. And notice that fursuits are removable. What frightens parents about transgenderism is that it encourages changes that are permanent. Or take a moment (or an hour and a half) to enjoy the Anthrocon 2023 fursuit parade which is taking place inside the convention center. I'm tempted to argue that there is no backlash because the fursuits are so cute, but I'm missing the point. It is inside the convention center not in the street! The normies are not going to reject something that they never see. Furry fandom doesn't have a toaster fucker problem because it is really just Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit.

I must strenously and vigorously disagree with this assertion and state that this is not true. There is a reason that even a kissless, touchless virgin robot considers a furry to be a lower stratum on the freak totem pole. And have done so, for the past twenty years, and indeed back in the primordial internet where people lingered on Usenet, and before that BBSs.

Furries are everything that conspiracy theorists allege about the illuminati: weirdly connected, absurdly wealthy sexual deviants who have secret societies which have sex parties on the regular.

OTOH it also goes to show what the conspiracy theorists get wrong about it all: furries don't do all this weird stuff to create control networks for nefarious global guidance projects etc. but because it's fun and gets their rocks off.

Por qué no los dos?

Furry fandom is benign.

Midwest FurFest had to shut down their free HIV testing clinic early, because demand was higher than expected.

Furry fandom is benign.

As a former employee of a convention center adjacent hotel which hosted an annual furry event, I can attest that imo the furries are better-than-average tippers.

That's true, and the seriousness of the policy disagreements are definitely part of the pressures making transgender politics so prominent in public discourse; not just that they are permanent, but that they're permanent in ways likely to be undesirable outside of the axioms and assumptions of the movement.

I think my argument is more that FoxDad can happen even (arguably especially) in communities with a lot or even revolving around 'toaster'-fucking, and this kinda puts a fork into the thesis from the greentext.

That said, I do think that people can and do treat benign communities as dangerous and harmful.

I was there, watching usenet and VCL-era wars over a zebra pool toy inflationist. Furries absolutely were a matter of serious controversy, believed to be self-modifying their sexuality in ways that directed them to same-sex attraction (probably wrong direction of causation) or made real-world 'healthy' sexuality difficult or impossible, in ways that can't be changed back, and in ways that made us a threat to innocents or even animals. There's still social conservatives circles doing that sorta thing, today; there actually been a recent mess in about (nonsexual) furry teenagers in schools. And some of the lesser-known stuff can modify you in even weirder ways -- I've got more respect for therians and therian self-modification than most people here would, but I'm not convinced mirror-dwellers are doing their brains any good.

((It might even literally be the specific target for this greentext: there's a long-standing meme in the fandom about protogen, a fantasy cyborg species, as toasters. Though the timeline is tight enough that it probably isn't, at least not that directly.))

There's a fair argument that they're wrong, for furries, and I'd agree with you. I could point to LGBT spaces that consider themselves self-criticizing, or where they keep the more prurient stuff moderately out-of-sight. ((Or rare places where a furry or furry group insufficiently policed the private behavior rules, or where public behaviors are accepted and should be acceptable: there are absolutely out-of-convention-center-doors fursuit parades. And bowling events.))

Furry fandom is benign.

But it is fundamentally a sex (or sex-adjacent) thing, like crossdressing (and its more permanent cousin, transgenderism) is. This is why there is sex stuff for the convention-goers to know of. And sure, things can be both benign and sexual, but that depends on your surroundings (Japan and its relationship with loli works the same way).

but humans are obsessed with sex

And if you accept the above, you run straight into the landmine of "kids shouldn't have a sexual bone in their body until the Approved Age", so discussing the fact that they're related in the open is just giving ammunition to your enemies (and now you know why some countries don't have a truth defense against libel).

Keeping them out of the fandom provides zero protection.

On the contrary, this provides a lot of protection for the fandom (it's not about protecting kids). Which, given that the fandom mostly consists of the male gender [the demand for sex crimes from this demographic far exceeds its supply], is something that it requires (as opposed to the transgenderism fandom, a gender who by contrast has the social license to not only freely and openly support, but actively force, child participation).

Everyone wants to be special and be more trendy than everyone else. Being truly intellectual or inventing something or being elite at sport is hard. It is easier to follow fashion. Just show how woke you are or buy the latest hype-beast merch to signal how superior you are to the normies. Learning the latest pronouns is easier and lower effort than other ways of showing elite status.

The issue is that the normies catch on and then the trend setters have to move to the next thing. When soccer moms like gay marriage the cool kids have to do trans. When the HR-lady at a saw mill is taking about trans the cool kids have to move on to something else. Eventually the trend goes too far. Big butts are nice on instagram so people get a bigger butt. Eventually the butts get too big so going bigger to beat the normies becomes nonsensical. At that point the cool kids have to find a new trend. Talking about LGBT is not a good way to signal how with it you are these days. Pride was pushed far as a new stripe could be added when the old flag was being used on discount crocks at dollar stores. Eventually there are too many stripes and the flag is no longer useful.

Also young people are struggling with dating. Inceldom is exploding and women are not having an easy time either. The sexual revolution did not benifit the masses. The sexual revolution benefited an elite of men and a handful of deviants. The number of incels and women angry at being pumped and dumped far outstrips the number of trans people and men sleeping with hundreds of women. If an ideology benefits a few but hurts the many its popularity will dwindle.

I'm increasingly of the "old man yells at the clouds" opinion that all pop culture is the death of human potential. Pop culture is practically the death of culture. It erases the enduring wisdom and collective stories that were told for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and replaces them with increasingly intense novel hyperstimula, that people have little choice but to chase. In my own home, we've been trying to spend a lot less time watching TV or otherwise mindlessly consooming, and more time reading or practicing productive hobbies.

That said, in my choice of novel I'm right back to last year's (or maybe last century's) pop culture! Robert E Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, some Dostoevsky to pretend I'm being cultured. Comic adaptations of Moorcock's works, a giant Calvin & Hobbes complete collection, then some Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire to keep my brow from completely scraping the ground. Maybe that makes my entire complaint completely incoherent.

I'm finding myself repulses by the concept of a franchise. What began as annoyance at how the Star Wars and Star Trek of my youth were hollowed out and now seem to explicitly hate me, grew into a realization of what the fuck was I doing for decades hanging onto the serialized output of this nonsense? Free of the spell of jonsing for what happens next, it made me question all the investment I'd had in those fictional worlds and stories. Sometimes the best part of a story is that it ends. It's not like there is some sexually deranged sultan that will murder you if you don't continually leave him with a cliffhanger so he spares your life.

I saw a tweet, all caveats about taking a tweet seriously aside, about the looks of concern and horror this parent gets when others discover they are just trying to raise their kid like they were raised in the 90's. Which is to say, free range, outside, little to no internet, no tablets, etc. On the one hand, my old man brain goes "The 90's weren't so long ago", but then again, it was 30 years ago. It's akin to if my parents had tried to raise me like they were raised in the 60's. Which involved my dad's father beating the ever loving shit out of them, and everyone growing up hungry all the time. Still, the look of concern and horror we've occasionally received when people find out our 4 year old has never used a tablet makes us wonder if the world has been taken over by pod people.

Our society is deeply, deeply sick, and to go full old man, pop culture is the disease.

Yeah learning about the pace at which TNG episodes were written and shot was a revelation to me, and it made me question why so much is invested in a show that was, as good as it was, clearly hobbled by not having time to really flesh out ideas and rework bad scripts, and was basically rushing all the way to its end.

Similarly, years ago I was listening to a Phil Ochs song about how terrible "liberals" are and it just hit me, why am I getting my political opinions from music? From rock to rap, why are the pop stars determining what I think over political scientists, essayists etc.

It's feels like even the most deep cuts of pop culture feel shallow as a puddle, it's like it's all expressionism, just surface level reactions to things, no humility, no ability to dig deeper, due to time constraints or just ignorance of the authors. And it almost feels like a psyop where we're told to just stay in the there, don't try to look up the past, it's all problematic and boring. Like they read Great Expectations and Shakespeare in High School just to intimidate and bore you so you stay away from that stuff for good.

And it almost feels like a psyop where we're told to just stay in the there, don't try to look up the past, it's all problematic and boring. Like they read Great Expectations and Shakespeare in High School just to intimidate and bore you so you stay away from that stuff for good.

I feel this in my bones, because I loathed school assigned reading. Except for one singular English class in 10th grade where we read Brave New World, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, it was my most hated subject. Good god, I remember slogging through Mill on the Floss one year. It was quite possibly the most boring thing I was ever forced to read. And I remember when they added the diversity requirement to summer reading, where you had to read X many books from the standard list, and then X many books from the diversity list. Because god damnit, you will appreciate poorly written polemics.

I have a model (not, I think, original) of three ideal types:

(1) People interested in things. Their ideal book would be a hard sci-fi book that explains how the time machine/interstellar space craft actually works. I have known a few people who embody this almost perfectly and they are either about as autistic as you can be while still being functional OR successful salt-of-the-earth tradesmen.

(2) People interested in abstract ideas. I think that people who gravitate towards classic dystopian fiction, as well as Big Theory sci-fi like Dune or some of Asimov's work, tend to be this way, as well as mathematicians, philosophers, theologians, theoretical physicists etc.

(3) People interested in people. They like books about people. This is almost all books regarded as "classic" literature, as well as a lot of any genre of books, as well as a lot of entertainment in general.

My classic image of (3) is a high school English teacher, who are also at least partly responsible for putting many of type (1) and (2) people off reading fiction. Works like the Dune novels and Asimov's books/stories were literally banned as dissertation topics at my high school due to "insufficient literary merit"; I was just about able to convince them to let me write about Dostoevsky, but I was strongly encouraged to write about the characters rather than the ideas. I know another person who had the same experience with Brave New World and Nineteen-Eighty Four, which were too respected to be banned as topics. You were supposed to write about Jane Austen, Shakespeare (as long as you focused on style and characters), George Elliott (or F. Scott Fitzgerald if you weren't bright) and the like: character-focused, with minimal action, and certainly no in-depth discussions of how a time machine worked.

I think ideas are very important, but I hope it’s not uncharitable to say that writing a 4,000 word essay on the physics of interstellar travel in a hard sci-fi novel, for a high schooler, is more suited to a science class than an English one, where literary analysis is going to involve discussions of word choice, sentence structure, rhythm, commentary on descriptions and so on. Of course it would be entirely possible to write great literary criticism of passages revolving around specific speculative technology in science fiction, but high school nerds are unlikely to be capable of it, and it will turn into a bad Reddit post full of bad math and numbers that combines the worst of both low quality STEM and literature papers, so one sympathizes with the English teachers.

Plus, geeky teenage boys are always going to be interested in science fiction; some would say the job of an English teacher is to help develop a wider interest in fiction that might also involve genres they wouldn’t otherwise read.

As you note, there are two separate things here:

(1) Focus on literary technique.

(2) The subject matter.

It's easier to use (2) as a way to lure otherwise uninterested students into talking about (1), IF you are more interested in (1), as English teachers tend to be. But there we agree.

and to go full old man

If it makes you feel any better, due to an unprecedented general decline in IQ and the attendant competency crisis, the old man complaining about people being dumber and society getting worse is looking less like a grump and more like a leader these days.

If an ideology benefits a few but hurts the many its popularity will dwindle.

Would that it were that simple... a lot of ideologies can persist surprisingly long despite being that way. See eg: historical empires and dynasties. The trick is to set up a trap where anyone who fights against the ideology is punished even worse, so the masses support in hopes of getting a little scrap of reward for being a good subject.

As with a lot of situations where people talk about "LGBT" these days, I think 99% of this is about the T and maybe 1% about the LGB.

The shift towards acceptance of gay people is very broad across society. It's not just young people, not just progressives, not just the nonreligious, but just about everybody. Yes there are evangelicals and online weirdos who still freak out about gay people but they're the minority. I don't think there is going to be a substantial backlash to gays and lesbians. Maybe with respect to some of the more gauche and outwardly freakish gay men, but that's the 1%.

I think what it boils down to, and similar to what you're getting at, is people just don't like freaks. They don't care much about labels; they don't understand them anyways. But freaks make them uncomfortable. They don't want to be around freaks. They don't want their kids seeing freaks. They don't want to turn on the television and watch freaks. And the freaks are overwhelmingly concentrated in the T part of LGBT.

is people just don't like freaks.

Even when it comes to this lots of people don't care that much. What shifts a lot of people from "whatever" to "fuck off" is being told they're awful and/or stupid for not agreeing with trans people's conception of "gender", the accompanying entitlement to women's-only spaces, their kids being encouraged to change their identities etc.

Yeah. "You can think those guys are nuts and everything they think is bs, but just don't say that to them and don't be a dick about it," is what the ask used to be, and I think most people are happy enough to accept that. Now it is, "you must actively affirm our bs and act in all ways as though it were true and having your own opinion will be met with consequences" which is fighting words.

I think the general attitude isn't even necessarily thinking those guys are nuts or weird; people take a laissez-faire approach and are broadly apathetic, with the dominant thought about them being "I don't think about them." You may like carrots, I may hate carrots, but there are plenty of ways we can get along without fighting over carrots; there should be more to us as people than that.

The friction comes when one side starts making demands that everyone talk about their favorite kind of carrot, that social situations have to begin with saying the last carrot dish you cooked was, and that we have a struggle session whenever someone expresses something that can be construed as lachanophobic ("I personally just make parsnips for my family, we don't really do carrots").

Cross-dressing as a full-time lifestyle choice is weird, some might say it's Wrong, but both the people participating in it and the people condemning it could at least agree on what it was.

Transgenderism on the other hand, which is at its base essentially the same thing, makes unjustifiably radical epistemic claims.

People-pretending-to-be-the-other-sex became a live wire when those people wilfully abandoned the pretending part. That's the core perversion that engenders such a hostile reaction; the perversion of meaning itself. That those positions came to be enforced by coercion just makes it that much more objectionable.

perversion of meaning itself

Some objected to gay 'marriage' on substantially similar grounds.

This was one difference between gay rights (sans gay marriage) and transgenderism. You didn't have to assert a factual claim as a result of homosexuality being legal, gays being able to adopt, gays being able to serve in the military etc. Gay people weren't insisting that e.g. "You must say that gay sex is identical to heterosexual sex" or "There is no difference between gay people and straight people."

The T seems conceptually revolutionary to a far greater degree than the LGB part, which only aimed at moral and legal changes.

Instead, most people were forced to assert factual claims prior to commenting on legal matters. You had to assert that an 'orientation' is a thing that is objective, on a known, fixed spectrum, that cannot change, because one is born that way, something something genes/brain structure, etc. If you displayed even the faintest of doubts about this bundle of factual claims, you got stared at like you were an alien. It was only after being forced to assert such factual claims that people were then asked, "...and would you really be okay with denying, say, your child, from having these various legal rights, if they happened to be factually born that way?" That's why proponents themselves say that it was critical to make people believe the factual claims in order to win the political victories.

Devon's tweets are terrible. Even for a conclusion his audience already believes, the arguments appear to just be made up. And unfortunately he's very talented at making things up, as the popularity of his book shows. Take this lovely tweet:

"Fascism is when boring normie dullards make it illegal to be weird, then kill all the bright, creative, and interesting people out of knee-jerk tribalism and fear."

That is bad! It's not fascism, though. Fascism was not normie. It was very weird. It attracted some of the best artists and intellectuals. You write sentences like this when your motivation is "I want to OWN my twitter enemies", and not "I want to understand fascism, the political ideology".

The same thing applies to this thread. There just nothing there beneath a series of insults. Reading it literally, the toaster-fucker problem's blamed on the internet. So the internet existing is a necessary condition for today's LGBT weirdness, because it's necessary for social status games to cycle into irrationality. But irrational social fads are not at all new, and the LGBT thing is less intense and insane than some past ones, such as disputes between or within religious sects over abstruse religious doctrine. Even the LGBT movement was as weird in the past, with many activists also pushing to remove the age of consent. And since excessive competition over status signals has always been a human tendency, does this theory actually explain anything? There are clearly patterns to 'wokeness' - historically oppressed minority sexualities, minority races, etc - and this theory doesn't tell us why the bureaucratic caste would become obsessed with those instead of another of the ten thousand niche internet communities.

And in the toaster-fucking group, the axis of prestige aligns with fucking toasters. So first they compete to see who can fuck the most toasters. Then, when that is saturated, they one up each other by being most open with the general public about their toaster fucking ways.

Sure, this has happened in the online gay community, like it has in the online fishing community and online retro video game community. This is part of why the online gay community is so weird. We wanted to explain why the 'bureaucratic caste' is so pro-gay, though.

Then they move on to bragging about how they sneak into other people's kitchens and fuck their toasters, too, and swap tips for how to introduce kids to the joys of toaster-fucking.

This is a well written snipe, but if we unpack the analogy it's not really true, we're ignoring the differences between different "they"s. The person from the previous quote, say a gay dude who competes to get the most likes on photos of him tied up while getting fucked by two other guys, is not actually 'swapping tips for how to introduce kids to the joys of toaster-fucking'. He's referencing trans kids there, but trans evangelism to trans kids happens because of (probably false) beliefs like - trans kids are being repressed by society - introducing them to the idea will help them be their true selves and prevent suicide - etc. This memeplex, and the fact that it perpetuates itself, isn't explained by 'toaster-fucking'.

Pretty soon normal people, who ten years before would shrugged and said "that's weird", are now sick of toaster-fucker flags everywhere and their kids being told to fuck toasters by sickos, and now they're going to burn every toaster-fucker flag they see, and Florida just passed a law requiring you to be 21 years old with proof of ID to buy a toaster. And Utah has banned toasters altogether and the Mormons have stopped even eating toast, bagels, waffles, or any other heated bread product.

This is clearly implying a general anti-gay backlash, but as other comments point out this isn't happening! The minor decreases in LGBT-support for gen z are within the margins of error.

Because a few toaster-fuckers get beaten with fence posts by people sick of hearing about toaster-fucking, and other people, who didn't see or hear the toaster-fuckers' prior behavior, say "holy shit, toaster fuckers really are oppressed". And they decide to become "toaster-fucker allies", despite the fact that they haven't the slightest real interest in fucking any toasters themselves.

... And then the premise here isn't true, so the conclusion isn't either. There's no huge anti-gay backlash, hate crimes are decreasing, and yet allyship goes way up! If the number of people who are strongly anti-gay is much smaller than it was before the internet existed, it doesn't make sense to attribute causation to "toaster-fucking" for this. There are real explanations here, ones that depend on the particulars of LGBT ideas and "oppression", but this isn't it.

This is what "go outside and touch grass" really means. It doesn't mean that plants magically cure insanity, it means go encounter randomly selected people who have nothing to do with you other than geographic proximity. The purpose of this is to remember what normal people are like, and what normalcy is.

And then, atop this collapsing foundation, the solution: "be normal". But we can trivially observe this doesn't work - the whole phenomena to be explained is that many people, otherwise normal people, are strangely enthused about being LGBT allies, and this happened despite being in contact with many other normal people. Or does he mean that it's the "toaster-fuckers" who need to be normal - that they need to stop posting about their sex lives online, and then a few years later suburban moms will stop putting up LGBT flags? Really?

The whole thing doesn't work. The picture it's painting is a disconnected series of vibes.

Have you contemplated the idea he is speaking to normies in normie speak because normies have been conditioned to reflexively bristle when hearing 'fascism' ?

the person from the previous quote, say a gay dude who competes to get the most likes on photos of him tied up while getting fucked by two other guys, is not actually 'swapping tips for how to introduce kids to the joys of toaster-fucking'.

Yeah, sure, some of that's true. However..

Remember San Francisco gay choir scandal?

Or does he mean that it's the "toaster-fuckers" who need to be normal - that they need to stop posting about their sex lives online, and then a few years later suburban moms will stop putting up LGBT flags? Really?

Sex interest based online communites .. are kinda getting a little out of control. There are certain things that probably shouldn't be promoted because they're not good for individuals or society. I mean, how do you feel about 'stupid sluts club' ? Cool ? Maybe, if you're not into monogamy. What about a place that sexualizes smoking? Or drug use..

Have you contemplated the idea he is speaking to normies in normie speak because normies have been conditioned to reflexively bristle when hearing 'fascism' ?

... I guess but this fully collapses all moral distinctions about 'lying' or 'being factually correct' into a friend/enemy binary, which one could do, but I prefer higher standards than that? And anyway the people who RT his tweets so that I see them are definitely not normies, they are smart enough to know better. Same for this place. Like you do have a point, but Devon's tweet was posted here, we're smarter than this, it's not like it's a republican tv ad

Gay Men's Choir That Sang 'We're Coming for Your Children'

This was a joke. They were explicitly and intentionally mocking the concept of conservatives saying that. It is simply unreasonable to attribute that to genuine desire to brainwash your children. I and many others here have said worse on the site we copied the code for this one from or in private.

Sex interest based online communites .. are kinda getting a little out of control. There are certain things that probably shouldn't be promoted because they're not good for individuals or society. I mean, how do you feel about 'stupid sluts club' ? Cool ? Maybe, if you're not into monogamy. What about a place that sexualizes smoking? Or drug use..

No I think it's reasonable to find cnc vacuum bed hypno piss play concerning. But the point of the post was to explain the general obsession with being a pride moth LGBT ally. That's just a different thing, it has different causes, they can't be explained with a gesture at some other somewhat related bad thing.

This was a joke. They were explicitly and intentionally mocking the concept of conservatives saying that.

I remember all the “conservatives pounce” headlines from the Gray Lady and her friends making this argument, but I’ve never bought it. Consider a world where, say, the chair of the Texas RNC or whatever puts out a pro-Trump campaign video where they say “When we win the election, we’ll go stage a little putsch, / Suspend your sad democracy and voting rights and such”. You know, to make fun of liberals’ overblown fears of a Trumpian self-coup. Do you really think that progressives like the San Franciscan choir and their defenders would accept this as just a wee bit of humor poking fun at their neuroses, rather than a serious Threat to Our Democracy?

EDIT: I realize that I forgot to clearly make my point: if you’re in a position to do things that other people think are bad, and you state “hey, we’re gonna do those things that you think are bad”, then you shouldn’t be surprised when people take you seriously. And those people would be right to wonder whether you’re just joking or going “haha, only serious”.

Isn't this just a classic Poe's Law case? To me, for example, the original choir line reads as clearly self-aware, but things like Trump's comment about suspending the constitution does not... but it's also quite possible that Trump's comment was self-aware, but the choir line was not. It's an internet communication problem endemic to the medium. Unfortunately, there's not a good solution, because "humor" can encompass many things, and sometimes people find the same statement humorous in different ways, and sometimes it's not even humor to start with!

Issues like this have led to my dad forgoing sarcasm altogether, though he loved it; and also, in theory, this forum doing the same, though sadly we can't help it too much if Twitter leaks in as "evidence".

EDIT: I realize that I forgot to clearly make my point: if you’re in a position to do things that other people think are bad, and you state “hey, we’re gonna do those things that you think are bad”, then you shouldn’t be surprised when people take you seriously. And those people would be right to wonder whether you’re just joking or going “haha, only serious”.

You'd have a point if the chair of the texas DNC put out this video. But it's a choir. It's a bunch of random people singing. The Texas Lutheran Choir singing a song about how kids should go to christian schools isn't a threat to democracy either.

This was a joke. They were explicitly and intentionally mocking the concept of conservatives saying that.

Yeah, a joke. A joke's supposed to be funny. We're also not supposed to be reminded by the many, many prominent gay men who have said they had sex as children and that it was just fine.

genuine desire to brainwash your children

Ok, granted, maybe specifically SF gay men's choir had no desire to brainwash their children. But seeing as children are stupid and impressionable, what then are we to think of 'sex education' aimed at preteens ? For example.

No I think it's reasonable to find cnc vacuum bed hypno piss play concerning.

That's pretty esoteric. What about more .. mundane stuff that's not the greatest, seeing the medical problems.

One of the weirder things out there I found while looking into body positivity-I was incredulous- is that there's is a seemingly huge website that rewards pretty women for being fat and showing it off or getting even fatter. You see, fat women who want to be body-positive also somehow resent there are men who like especially that.

Site doesn't even allow full nudity, nevertheless, by the comments it's pretty clear people are getting off on that. That's.. pretty messed up. And it seems to benefit from network effects to a huge degree.

A joke's supposed to be funny

Okay to be more clear I have made jokes like that and worse hundreds of times, as far as offensive jokes go it's one of the mainstays. Homosexuals reproduce by... I can understand not having that taste in humor, but it's simply a joke.

But seeing as children are stupid and impressionable, what then are we to think of 'sex education' aimed at preteens

Retread of past discussions, but, like, have you used the internet and interacted with teenagers? They watch a lot of porn. A few years ago I was organizing some video game thing and we banned several minors because they just kept posting porn, and screenshots of them dming each other weird porn. I do not think sex ed is a notable place where kids learn about weird sex stuff, I think they basically all learn it on the internet and from their friends. This may be bad, but it doesn't have much to do with sex ed, which in turn isn't directly connected to the original thesis about LGBT online communities and toaster intercourse

One of the weirder things out there I found while looking into body positivity-I was incredulous- is that there's is a seemingly huge website that rewards pretty women for being fat and showing it off or getting even fatter

Yeah, feeders, it's terrifying. There's a lot of ridiculous things. People who cut their penises off as a fetish, nullos. Self-harm fetishes. Anal prolapse!

I don't think I've seen LGBT activists fabricate incidents

"Fabricate" is the wrong word, but the Obama administration passed a law against anti-LGBT hate crimes which was widely referred to as the Matthew Shepard Act. Matthew Shepard was a drug dealer who was murdered by a couple of rival dealers, and there is zero evidence that homophobia played any role in his death (he'd had sex with one of the men who murdered him).

(he'd had sex with one of the men who murdered him).

What a world we live in.

Isn't this normal? Violence in relationships is certainly not just a gay thing.

Of course, I was just reacting to the comical juxtaposition of what seems to have actually happened and the attempt to paint the whole event as some sort watershed revelation of levels of homophobia in western society.

Sometimes I find it darkly amusing to contrast the idealised conception of gay men in Western popular culture (sassy, impossibly stylish and fashion-conscious, bitchy but essentially decent and kind-hearted) and the reality that gay men can be just as violent, unscrupulous and remorseless as anyone else.

I don't have a good source for this offhand, but I'd heard that the deal is, the rival dealers' defense lawyer convinced them to argue that the attack was a homophobic hate crime because he thought it would get them a lesser sentence than a drug deal gone wrong. Not sure if that was a good idea then, but apparently the story got legs and next thing you know, it's the Standard Accepted Truth.

Both the standard and Jimenez's counterstandard histories seem... more than a little fuzzy, if you start digging into them.

((The trial court blocked the 'gay panic' defense before it was presented; a lot of the assumptions of anti-gay animus derive from it being presented at all, as well as some pretty pathetic sequences from Aaron McKinney during questioning.))

McKinney claimed years after the trial that he did not know Shepard, and was just looking to rob someone, and that the gay panic defense was partly something he came up with and partly his defense attorney, but at best that's the jailhouse word of a self-admitted meth-raging liar. Most of the claims that Shepard and either attacker had previously had sex come from 'Doc' O'Connor, the operator of a 'limo' service (coughcough: with a lot of sex work ties), but Jimenez's actual quote is that "Matt may have been one of the guys in back with Aaron... I can't say for sure", where the same man previously claimed to have only met Shepard once only days before the attack (and longer after the supposed car hookup), and if you start digging into other media coverage for O'Connor he alternates between knowing nothing and having been deeply involved in the personal lives of not just Shepard but also McKinney and his wife, and many of the stories are contradictory.

There's pretty strong evidence (if second-hand) that Shepard used drugs, including pretty hard drugs like meth, and some evidence that he was at least in a few degrees of contact with people who moved the drug through Colorado, but it's not clear where he fell on the lines for selling or reselling. A lot of people game-of-telephone Jimenez's account into certainty that Shepard was moving ten thousands of dollars in meth (cfe Reason here), but the actual claim in the book is a little different.

"I was therefore surprised when he [Aaron McKinney] confided that his “real plan” on the night of the crime had been something altogether different. He claimed that a roofing co-worker had tipped him off about “another dealer” in town who had six ounces of methamphetamine, worth more than ten thousand dollars on the street. Aaron said he had planned to steal all the meth, believing it would not only solve his money problems but also provide him with an ample personal supply of the drug. It was only when he couldn’t pull that robbery off that he decided to rob Matthew “instead.”"

The implication is that Shepard actually had or could get access to that much meth, but Jimenez never really ties it down further than one of McKinney's methhead friends boasting on the matter, and said friend, while never naming who that "another dealer" was, later points to a married man, ie not Shepard. Instead there's just insinuations about some regularly scheduled run from Denver, where someone would move ten thousand bucks of meth and be paid a few hundred dollars in meth, and it could have been Shepard. The quotes claiming genuine knowledge of Shepard selling anything, rather than mere belief, instead point to stuff that could be courier, small-scale resale, or even (heavy) personal use, not of knowing or long-term control.

On the flip side, investigators didn't test either attacker for recent drug use, so the alternative story of a meth-rage is pretty hard to prove or disprove, either. The official story conveniently places McKinney's last binge just long enough ago to remove even withdrawal as a motivator, and it seems to be based on little more than whatever an investigator could pull out of their ass. And there was little contemporaneous attention paid to how deep shit McKinney seemed to be in with his own suppliers, or even investigation of those suppliers. Jimenez points regularly to the possibility of either intentional ignorance or even outright assistance by police in the drug trade, and there's enough gaps in the official investigation that it doesn't look wrong, either, and that's knowing the extent that vice tends to be compartmentalized. Shepard seems to have gotten set on a bit of a pedestal, post-mortem, and while part of that's trying to avoid blaming-the-victim, part of it does seem focused around presenting a nearly perfect innocent for the story.

My gutcheck points more to something messier in the mix.

A lot named people in Jimenez's book claim McKinney was at least gay4pay, and that's a lot of other quotes that point to him as also self-closeted or genuinely doing it out of addiction. And there's pretty strong evidence that McKinney and co were looking for cash or drugs in anyway or form, not least of all that they did steal Shepard's wallet. McKinney was almost certainly desperate enough to fuck or fight someone for a hit, probably expected people at the particular bars he scoped out to be more likely have cash or drugs, and might (if we're trusting O'Connor) have suspected Shepard to have some cash or drugs, and targeted him specifically because of that, though in turn we have little reason to believe he had good reason to believe Shepard had drug-dealer amounts of cash.

But someone who's gay4pay isn't exactly immune for homophobia, especially if they genuinely were doing it for the cash (or drugs) or self-closeted, including violent homophobia -- especially at the time, there were a lot of hangups over what 'really' makes someone queer, many esoteric even within the gay world. But even were a methhead to turn a plan for a seduction or a 'simple' robbery or into a fatal beating because the methhead didn't bottom, it's hard to separate that from a methhead being a methhead who might have gotten set off for any of a thousand other things.

But that is just me pulling it from my gut.

I recently listened to podcast of Jordan Peterson with Eric Kaufmann and Kaufmann explained the phenomenon of woke as coming in waves. With first being in the 60ies in old Days of Rage where the left radicals first pushed this stuff and actually managed to carve out huge cultural concessions especially for blacks in form of Black Studies departments and such. Then there were eighties where people thought it was all behind them, it was age of Regan and neoliberalism and winning the Cold War - but at the tail end of 80ies and 90ies came the second woke wave in academia with intersectionality and and queer stuff. It also subsided a bit after 9/11 and Bush era of War on Terror only for woke to reemerge in 2010s.

I think he is right, saying that the woke is subsiding to me feels like previous times of pause. Kaufmann is especially skeptical as the millennials and zoomers are strongly in favor of woke ideas in various researches - especially women. If there will be some pushback next few years we may expect 4th wave maybe in the 2030s where the phenomenon may be rekindled with some new additions.

It does seem incredible but either the search is broken, totally broken, but no one has posted a review of Christopher Rufo's book "America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything" which pretty much explains woke as a result of a carefully planned campaign by a few prominent neo-marxist thinkers to shape the nation's memes by altering language so favorable politics result and the glorious revolution and liberation from oppression can be achieved. Namely Herbert Marcuse and Paolo Freire. If you've never heard about either, that's pretty curious. Freire's book 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed' is a classic in the field of American educational studies, that is, teacher training.. And has been, for the last 50 years. 100k hits on Google Scholar, e.g.. For comparison, Foucault's famous scribblings have 100k too..

You might think the title is a bit hyperbolic. It's really not. But aren't you at least a little curious why a book written by a Brazilian Marxist, later neo-marxist, concerned with how to use education to promote conditions for the Revolution is a mainstay of US teacher training? It's pretty odd, you know, US having been an ostensibly anti-communist country.

Anyway, here's Kaufman's review of it (1st part is .

Key paragraphs:

Rufo’s account begins with Marcuse, who, despairing of the Western working class, turned to the energy of Third World Socialism, Black Panther radicalism, and the 1968 student revolts for inspiration. Instead of the orthodox “dictatorship of the proletariat,” Marcuse dreamt of a “dictatorship of the intellectuals” who could join hands with “outcasts and outsiders” to make a revolution. In effect, he invited Marx’s lumpenproletariat into history. His One-Dimensional Man (1964) became a bible of the counterculture, and while his Frankfurt School colleague Theodor Adorno reacted against the anti-intellectualism of young protestors, Marcuse embraced them as a harbinger of the new utopia.

Dubbed the “ideological leader of the New Left” by Weather Underground terrorist Bernadine Dohrn, Marcuse rubbed shoulders with their leadership and that of Black Panther radicals like H. Rap Brown. The rioting and vandalism in America’s inner cities in the late 1960s blighted neighborhoods and sent crime soaring, hindering black progress. Together, the Weathermen and black militants conducted some 4,330 bombings, resulting in 43 deaths. The Weather leadership gushed that it would have to kill 25 million people to achieve its aims. The organization styled itself the “white revolutionaries inside the oppressor nation” and their manifesto, Prairie Fire, spoke of the United States as founded on white supremacy and “white-skin privilege.”

Marcuse envisioned the university as the “first revolutionary institution,” the nerve centre from which the revolution would spread. As if on cue, many comrades settled into cozy academic sinecures. Dohrn landed at Northwestern, Bill Ayers, who bombed the Pentagon and the Capitol, wound up at Columbia, and Angela Davis, who participated in a courtroom siege that left the judge and three others dead, was handed a position at UCLA. Davis, a Black Panther, successfully recast herself as a latter-day runaway slave resisting a system of white supremacy.

Rufo convincingly draws a line between violent Panther radicalism and the Black Lives Matter movement. For instance, Panther leader Stokely Carmichael coined the concept of “institutional racism.” The Panthers’ Ten-Point program called for affirmative action, the release of “all Black and oppressed people” from jail, and the teaching of its revisionist racial ideology in schools. The Black Lives Matter movement of the 2010s merely reiterated these slogans, seeking to abolish the police and prisons while demanding “culturally relevant education.” BLM leader Patricia Cullors, meanwhile, studied with the Weather Underground’s Eric Mann and lauded the influence of Davis and the Panthers.

Still reading the book, I've been very online so aware of the woke and even the abortive laughable revolutionary attempts in early 1970s - but I had no idea there was a direct line, same phrases used, same concepts, even personal continuity.

Sure, I love my boy James Lindsay including his extensive deep dive into Paulo Freire - with Pedagogy of Oppressed being the 3rd most cited work in humanities. Kaufmann himself gives a lot of praise to Lindsay and he by no means denies these influences.

But that is not the whole story, Kaufmann argues that it is moderates and "bleeding-heart liberals" who enable free reign of these ideas. The way he put it is that after defeat of economic socialism at least in its most radical form of planned economy, liberals still do not understand where the borders on social issues are. This is what enables woke to rampage through our society. It is a little bit depressing but also encouraging - most people do not actively believe these revolutionary thoughts such as Critical Race Theory or Queer Theory - they just want to be and sound as if they are kind and moral. On one hand they can be easily duped into various extremes, but on the other hand it means that potential pushback may not be as tough as many people think.

I fully agree. It's the consequence of our being not anxious enough. Prosperity has insulated us from the consequences of bad decisions,we can afford to be sloppy and sentimental.

they just want to be and sound kind and moral. Which is precisely what the critical theory deconstructors are using. If you redefine $your radical demand as compassion, just being nice etc..

As the mad prophet said: "Never get so racist that your forget that white leftists are the worst people in the world."

I'm trying to imagine what pushback looks like. Perhaps it starts with language reform. Those pushing forward call it "gender affirming care". Perhaps those pushing back need to insist on calling it "gender bending care".

Race and crime get easier to discuss if you expand your vocabulary through anthropomorphism.

  • Black criminals are foxes
  • Working blacks are chickens
  • White criminals are wolves
  • Working whites are sheep

Now we have encoded the real-world racial segregation of crime into the language of parable: foxes eat chickens, while wolves eat lambs or sheep. Racial discourse, pitting black against white, implicitly says that one team is team fox+chicken, while the other team is team wolf+sheep. But most of us see sheep and chickens as a team that must work together against foxes and work together against wolves.

With this framing, abolishing prison and defunding the police is a movement of sheep working to let the foxes into the chicken coop. Notice that this language punches hard. It is nearly as strong as "transwomen are women".

But I'm still stuck on imagining what pushback looks like. I'm not seeing catchy reframings coming from the right, and I don't know why. The right was traditionally on the side of law-and-order. But that depends on what the law actually says. If a persons experience of the law is with red-light cameras with wonky timings being used to raise revenue, they will find "law and order" slogans repulsive. What about saying that the teams are chicken allied with sheep, not chicken allied with foxes? That emphasizes real harms. Maybe it leads to a crack down on red-light cameras rather than a focus on foxes? That would be good; a small amount of progress but in the right direction.

Maybe my fox-chicken-wolf-sheep language doesn't work. I spend the words on it to make my comment concrete. Abstractly, I'm noticing that the left are the masters of word magic, and the right seems bewitched by it, and unable to cast spells of their own. But why? What is going on?

Thanks, I've been meaning to check out the research he and Lindsay(?) did, because it's so anthropologically fascinating.
Like the question of who first used "folx" and Y/X-ing words generally, where did "abolish the family" come from? Who came up with all the awful rhetorical tactics to paralyze victims like a spider's venom?

I said in another convo that there's still a lot of value in discussion here. Its an Area 51 bunker where we can carefully dissect this stuff while flying saucers obliterate cities outside.
Who knows, maybe someone will make a virus for Will Smith to upload to the mothership or something. But at least it would be more interesting than another round of "it's not happening and it's good."

Abolish the family is a 19th century concept. Loyalty to family above state and class, all that. Complicates the revolution.

Rhetorical tactics are mostly new. A big chunk of it is due to:

In 1977, a group of black lesbian activists working together as the Combahee River Collective followed Davis’s lead and published the landmark Combahee River Collective Statement, which gave birth to the term “identity politics” and operationalized Davis’s unified theory of oppressio

And why was Davis who bought guns for the criminals who used them attack a trial walking free, writing?

Davis and her attorneys had beguiled the all-white jury, persuading them that the Marin courthouse revolt was a “slave insurrection” and that Angela was a “symbol of resistance.”56 They turned the tables, identifying the state as the victimizer and Davis as the victim. During thirteen hours of jury deliberation, the facts of the case seemed to melt away and the political narrative took hold.

Then her ideas were elaborated into a system by that 'lesbian collective'.

But this cage of oppression also contained the key. The program of revolution could begin with an excavation of personal complexes, pathologies, and traumas, which can be transformed into emotional weapons, using the status of the oppressed as a means of establishing credibility and a method of organizing resistance. “This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics,” they wrote, coining the phrase that would devour American politics for the next half century. “We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity.” The Combahee River Collective’s goals were unoriginal: they proposed the old tripartite solution of anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and anti-patriarchy. But their means were revolutionary. The activists eschewed the masculine inclinations toward violence, system-building, physical power, and the seizure of the means of production, and created a uniquely feminine program that marshalled identity, emotion, trauma, and psychological manipulation in service of their political objectives. The Combahee Statement recast left-wing politics as an identity-based, therapeutic pursuit. The language of the document is strikingly modern: the reconceptualization of the activist organization as “an emotional support group”; sentences that legitimize themselves with “as Black women” or “as Black feminists”; gratuitous capitalization of identity markers such as Black and Lesbian; embarrassing neologisms such as “herstory” instead of “history”; emotional references to “pain,” “joy,” and “sisterhood”; venomous hostility toward white women in particular.7 Despite its shortcomings,8 the Combahee Statement is a triumphant document: a declaration of independence from “white male rule,” using a vocabulary and a method of argumentation that would become commonplace in every corner of American society.9

Do you see a "vibe shift" around attitudes towards LGBT, and if so, is it generational?

A few days ago I read a Reductress article (now apparently memory holed) mocking a man who had identified as a straight man, followed by a gay woman, followed by something else. I was pretty surprised to see a women's magazine (albeit a satirical one) be willing to mock a member of the rainbow flag crowd, given how on board young women usually are. It definitely felt like evidence of a vibe shift to me.

Of course, the fact that the article ended up being removed anyway suggests that either management or outraged readers decided it needed to be taken down, so I guess these things take time.

Was it this one?

Yes! Bizarrely I searched for it using the TRANS tag but only one article came up. It may have just been a bug in the website.

My read of that article is not that it's poking fun at trans men for being posers, but describing a phenomenon wherein trans men "push the boat out". Rather than going to bed as Liam, then waking up and demanding to be addressed as Lilith (as many trans women have been known to do), some trans men will ease into their identity by first coming out as a lesbian, then coming out as a trans man. It's a phenomenon I've personally witnessed at least once, and I could imagine a trans man sharing this article like "omg too real haha!"

Yeah, I'd second that read. The Reductress framing is a little obnoxious in the gossip magazine summary of things (that Lady Gaga aside?!), but it's pretty common, and I could name three or four people who've taken variants of it each direction.

The anti-racism movement started well before the gay rights movement, so by this reasoning we should be in the middle of a massive backlash among the youth against any sort of anti-racism movements. It's fair to say that we don't have that.

I think a big difference to keep in mind is that you can choose your own gender (according to the very in-group of gender minded folks) but you cannot choose your own race.

I think that part of the backlash - to whatever extent it exists - is that the the internal logic of lgbT activists is so flimsy and self-contradictory that people are essentially pointing out "none of the rules are real and I kind of feel like you're just in this to browbeat me into blind submission to .... whatever the hell you're on about"

Anti-racism at the very least does hold to obvious and immutable attributes as its fundamental categorical function. Is it a fair / reasonable distinction? That's for another debate.

I think a big difference to keep in mind is that you can choose your own gender (according to the very in-group of gender minded folks) but you cannot choose your own race.

This is not my parsing of the dogma the annoying transactivists are trying to push (unsuccessfully in the UK, even in left-wing circles, though by most of what I read on the internet they are succeeding in Blue America). If you take "gender identity" seriously then people don't get to choose their own gender identity - by the time you go through puberty your "gender identity" is an objective fact about you, and is fixed. The claim isn't "you can choose your own gender", it's "we should believe as a matter of course people who claim to have a gender that doesn't match their biological sex". Transactivists are comfortable with the idea that some people are trans (as a matter of objective fact about their "gender identity") and either don't know it yet or are lying about it due to closeting, and a few of them are even willing to admit that in principle a cis man could pretend to be a trans woman for nefarious purposes (Jonathan/Jessica Yaniv is widely suspected to be an example) - they just think that there are so few of them that letting them get away with it causes less harm than gatekeeping actual trans people.

You get to choose your own preferred pronoun. But transactivists who stop to think don't think agree that this isn't claiming a gender identity, it's just a pronoun. The easy case is that not everyone who is nonbinary uses they/them pronouns, and not everyone who uses they/them pronouns has the same non-binary gender identity. The harder case is that closet cases and trolls exist.

In this model, race, like gender identity, is an objective fact about people. The difference is that it is externally observable, so you don't need to trust people who claim to be black. Kicking Rachel Dolezal out of "Black" doesn't put the blackness of actual black-skinned black people into question in they way kicking Yaniv out of "Trans" or "Woman" puts the transwomanness of non-passing transwomen into question.

I agree "there is an objective fact about people that is completely unobservable externally and which ingroup never, ever lie about" is a silly thing to believe. But I think transactivists actually believe this - they don't believe that genders are clothes you can take on and put off. If you get an older transactivist drunk, they may even admit that they find tumblrgendered snowflakes annoying too.

so by this reasoning we should be in the middle of a massive backlash among the youth against any sort of anti-racism movements

Black Trumpists/Republicans seem to skew younger but not enough resolution to say it's "the yutes" specifically.

don't think I've seen "beaten with fenceposts"-level backlash (I figure it would pop up here if it was an issue),

I think he’s referring to the Matthew shepherd case, where a meth dealer who was known to be homosexual was murdered in a drug deal gone wrong and the whole thing got proclaimed an anti-gay hate crime.

First I imagined a world where hardened criminals pretend to be gay, or trans, or whatever, to up the ante of anyone taking them out if caught.

Second, I wondered if we already live in that world.

Knowing what I know of the underclass, to whom hardened criminals overwhelmingly belong- no, they don’t. They don’t expect legal consequences for harming them and think relying on such things is for battered women. They’ll pretend to be gay or trans for temporary advantage(eg nicer prison), but not to take advantage of legal protections.

This attitude that legal protections don’t apply to them is a big part of why they’re so violent; for people living under state protection it’s best to let stuff go most of the time, but without it, to do so is suicide. Add in pervasive impulse control and IQ problems(trans inmates just keep getting their cell mates pregnant) and the fact that big chunks of them hate each other for whatever reason, and underclass violence is just a fact of life to people immersed in it. The idea that it’s a bigger crime to assault a gay man doesn’t occur to them because in their world assault isn’t wrong, it’s just impolite without a good reason.

It was a project by some charity or other claiming that "hate crimes" (or victimization, or incidents, or whatever they measure) jump by 60% during pride month.

Probably on its face true, because vandalism is considered in the same category of "hate crime" as assault, and during pride month the amount of publicly displayed gay stuff increases by vastly more than 60%. If the modal hate crime is something like "FAG" graffiti on a pro-Gay poster or tearing down a pride flag, the number of pro-gay posters and pride flags has to increase by 500% or better during Pride. So really, the hate criminals are restraining themselves more during pride month. It's the same way that AIPAC and the ADL have long played with the numbers to make Jews the primary victim of hate crimes, because swastika graffiti anywhere within five miles of a Synagogue is counted as a hate crime in their numbers.

Anecdotally, as Pride is becoming something you get taught about in middle school, the backlash is inevitable among the youth as a basic form of teen rebellion. Kids are always going to find whatever their 7th grade health teacher teaches them lame. I remember in health class they showed us a Lifetime movie about Date Rape called She Cried No. As a gang of virgins in the Boy Scouts, we spent multiple camping trips making up alternate titles when the scoutmasters weren't looking. "She cried maybe later" "She cried not you" "she cried and then kept crying." And it wasn't like we were pro-rape, just that health class was lame and we were going to make fun of it.

I've had the argument with many well-meaning progressive friends who tell me they are teaching their kids that classic profanity is no big deal, but slurs are the really bad words. I tell them that is the opposite of how to teach their kids not to use slurs: every kid turns twelve or thirteen and wants to use the no-no words, from Romeo's buddies in Verona swearing by Christ's Wounds to kids buying Eminem CDs in 2001. If you tell them that Nigger and Faggot are the only really bad words, those are the only words they can use to get the thrill of using profanity for the first time. The old Reddit joke about Dr. Kikey McNiggerFaggot will hit all the harder for them. Unless your kid is some Ned Flanders-ass dork, they're gonna cuss. You better teach them cuss words that are no big deal, or they'll use the ones that are. #ReadAnotherBook and all, but liberalism has fallen a long way from 1997 when Fictional Liberal Hero Dumbledore confidently intoned that "fear of a [word] increases fear of the thing itself;" and you knew the really good guys because they weren't afraid to use the no-no words, they said what they meant and meant what they said. Now the left-wingers would be in support of not using the "V-word" because it "re-traumatizes" the victims and their families.

And it wasn't like we were pro-rape, just that health class was lame and we were going to make fun of it.

This is a GOAT out of context quote.

#ReadAnotherBook and all, but liberalism has fallen a long way from 1997 when Fictional Liberal Hero Dumbledore confidently intoned that "fear of a [word] increases fear of the thing itself;" and you knew the really good guys because they weren't afraid to use the no-no words, they said what they meant and meant what they said. Now the left-wingers would be in support of not using the "V-word" because it "re-traumatizes" the victims and their families.

I'd never considered this take on 'You Know Who' before, and I find it utterly fascinating, especially in light of how Rowling backtracked in Book 7 and made Voldemort a literal Taboo where saying the name would summon a small army of 'Snatchers' to attack you and imprison you.

(For the life of me, I have no idea what Rowling was thinking with this plot point. It seems obvious that the Taboo was intentionally foreshadowed in earlier books -- Voldemort is identified as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, after all -- but it's more a little brain-bending to realize that Rowling wrote Dumbledore as absolutely insistent that Harry should always always used Voldemort's name and that there is never any reason to fear a name and that other wizards are funny and weird at their fear of even hearing Voldemort's name. My pet theory is that this was part of 'Dumbledore wants to set Harry and Voldemort on a collision course so the prophecy could be fulfilled ASAP', like the Philosopher's Stone obstacle course in Book 1, but that just opens a whole new set of questions.)

Onto youth. A recent tweet by a newish Twitter account, America_2100, claims a drop in support for LGBT over the past few years (2022–2023: US-wide: -7 points; Republicans: -15 points, to a 10-year low of 41%; Democrats: -6 points; "young people": -8 points). In particular, they claim Gen Z's support for gay marriage dropped by 11 points between 2021 and 2023, which is double the time span of the other stats but could indicate an ongoing decline in support. Unfortunately the tweet doesn't source the surveys it refers to beyond saying that it came from PRRI and I don't have hard data beyond a couple of anecdotes.

I wish the tweet cited its sources because the data I can find does not seem to support this. Here is Gallup in 2021 and 2023. The total US number is up 1 percentage point (71 in 2023 vs 70 in 2021). Republicans are down about 6 percentage points (55 to 49) but Democrats (83 to 84) and independents (73 to 78) are up. The age groups are not quite comparable across these two polls but taking the lowest age group (18-29 in 2023, 18-34 in 2021) support for gay marriage has increased (84 to 89). Just eyeballing the age based changes I think they are more a composition effect of how the ranges have changed but none of them show a decline.

On the other hand a PRRI report from this year does show Gen Z being mildly less supportive of LGBT rights than millennials, though the still the second-most supportive generation.

Around six in ten Gen Z adults (62%) oppose allowing a small business to refuse to provide goods or services to LGBTQ people, if doing so goes against their religious beliefs, compared with 64% of millennials, 58% of Gen Xers, 57% of baby boomers, and 53% of the Silent Generation.

...

More than two-thirds of Gen Zers (68%) support allowing same-sex couples to marry legally, while 28% oppose. Millennials have the highest support for same-sex marriage at 73%, followed by 66% of Gen Xers, 62% of baby boomers, and 57% of the Silent Generation.

Around six in ten Gen Z adults (62%) oppose allowing a small business to refuse to provide goods or services to LGBTQ people, if doing so goes against their religious beliefs

I would be hard pressed to answer this survey, because I believe that the Masterpiece Cakeshop lawsuits were determined correctly, but also that no business has a right to turn away an LGBT person from receiving the same service as everyone else.

I am pretty anti-LGBT, as that goes today. I don't believe that two members of the same sex can be married in the same sense of the word "marriage" as I use when I say my marriage, my parents', grandparents', or great grandparents' marriage. Homosexual marriage is just talking about a completely different thing that can't even accidentally turn into the referent I mean.

If I was a wedding photographer and someone wanted me to photograph a gay wedding, I would want the right to refuse based on I don't believe the two events are even similar. It would be the equivalent of if I were a professional photographer that specialized in Christian First Communions, Confirmations, and Baptisms, then refused to be hired to photograph a Satanic Mass desecrating those things. "But the government says they are both equivalent religious expressions!" I don't care.

I'm pretty pro-LGBT, as far as that would have gone in the 80s or earlier. People deserve healthcare, non-discrimination in the necessities of daily life, security in their homes and jobs. I believe homosexuality is largely due to forces outside people's control. Having those attractions is not a moral failure. All of these would have been radical a hundred years ago, now they are the bare minimum of decency that only the smallest, most fringe groups would deny. The LGBT movement won there. Can they accept that victory and move on?

This is also my point of view, but I add to it that I'm skeptical most of the LGBT-identification among young people is the sort of homosexuality that is largely due to forces outside people's control. It seems pretty clear that social contagion can shift people's sexual orientation or at least move them to decreased revulsion towards sexual activity they once may have found unappealing. My impression is that there's a small subset -- maybe 1, 2% -- that is gay due to developmental or neonatal factors, with maybe some genetic predisposion factors in there that we just don't understand. But that's wildly different from the much higher rates not only of LGBT identification but LGBT activity among younger people. And it absolutely changes the state of the debate over things like gay marriage if only a very small part of the population is gay than if a much larger proportion is.

I don't think I've seen LGBT activists fabricate incidents

I mean, I’m not sure, man

I believe Jussie claimed he was called the “faggot empire nigger.” So it was both a race and LGBT hoax.

From the POSIWID perspective, one could consider the purpose of pride month to be to spike hostility against LGBT people, so why do it?

They aren't trying to spike hostility, they are trying to make their opponents feel ruled. Spiking hostility is meant to show them how impotent and powerless they are.

Hot Swap time?

On the All-In podcast, a couple of the podcasters have been making bold claims that Biden would be "hot-swapped" out for a different candidate (presumably Gavin Newsom) after the first debate. I thought their claims were pretty outlandish, but after last night they are seeming a lot more, um, inlandish.

I concur with a lot of the Mottizens below that Biden's performance was not that bad. I thought he landed some decent punches and fought Trump mostly to a draw. But expectations matter. Like most people here, I am well aware of Biden's state of decline, whereas perhaps the average voter is not. I was not expecting vigor, so was in no way shocked by Biden's lack of it. Furthermore, Mottizens tend to actually listen to the words that are said. Normies react more to feels. Biden's blank-eyed stare and gaped mouth said more than words ever could. If this was your first exposure to Biden in the last 4 years, it would be unsettling.

What I was shocked by was the immediate consensus by CNN's post-debate panel that Biden's performance was a disaster, and the immediate speculation about a new candidate. I had expected them to rally around their leader. There was a plausible argument to be made that Biden did okay. Instead, they threw him under the bus.

The timing of the debate certainly seems a bit suspicious. This was the earliest Presidential debate in some time (ever?). Conspicuously, it comes before the convention, but after the primaries. If Biden can be pressured to resign, the DNC will be able to handpick their preferred candidate without the pesky need for voters.

As Bill Ackman and others have pointed out on Twitter, everyone in Biden's inner circle knew that this was Biden's ability level in 2024. They didn't have to agree to a debate. Why did they send him out there to get slaughtered?Seen through this lens, Obama "helping" the elderly Biden off the stage a couple weeks ago take on a darker tone.

Shares in "Biden 2024 Democratic nominee" crashed during the debate and now trade at just 63%. Newsom is at 22% and Harris at 13%.

I don't know. All of this seems very conspiratorial. The real world is messy and boring. I doubt that the DNC are sitting around in a smoke-filled room, twirling their mustaches. But, however it shakes out, odds of Biden being replaced are shooting up. This seems very undemocratic. There was a time to replace Biden, and that was during the primaries. However it shakes out, the election season just got a lot more interesting.

Furthermore, Mottizens tend to actually listen to the words that are said.

This line going around today feels like a motte-rat ingroup circle-jerk. Other people are superficial, but we focus on the real substance! It's a presidential debate, there is little substance, the words have always been made-up and meaningless. Does Biden debate Trump to a draw because, although he looked horrible, and although nobody is persuaded by anything he said, he did manage to say things? I feel as though people have always been a little disingenuous about debates. Everyone pretends that there is a reified debate format, where people say things like, "Well, Biden's answer doesn't convince me, but it's an objectively-strong argument and might move somebody else." But there is no imaginary modal voter. There are not actually rules for deciding who won. It becomes an exercise in imaginary terms that nobody is actually thinking in, but everyone assumes everyone else is thinking in. This is all a little too self-congratulatory for me.

Nobody is impressed with the substance of Biden's answers. Nobody even really cares what they were. Obviously, we all already know what Biden's policies are and what his candidacy means. For that matter, nobody cares what the substance of Trump's answers was either. It's an intellectual exercise. I don't care what Trump did on January 6th, you do care what Trump did on January 6th, so does anybody care that Trump gave this answer instead of that answer? Is there some hypothetical voter who does?

The style is much more important. Bring back the smashing and yelling and interrupting and crass. I actually want to see Trump walk all over the other guy kicking and fighting. Show me that Jeb actually can't stand up for himself when called out and attacked. Give me the Hillary who glowers but doesn't back down. What did Andrew Yang say in the first 2020 debate that showed how impressive his policy credentials were? Who even knows. I do remember Chris Christie decimating Marco Rubio over repeating the same canned stock phrase on three separate occasions. I don't remember a damned policy argument Amy Klobuchar ever made, just that she was boring, and uninspiring, and lacking the actual qualities of a leader.

Imagine how boring politics would be if we all went back to this frame: Biden tied Trump because, when you strip away how he spoke, how he looked, how he stood, how he argued, and how he lead, his stock canned prepared statements were just as technically sensible as Trump's, or maybe better. No, Biden lost, because he looked like an old man who didn't even know what room he was in. He froze up. He couldn't get the words out. He made uncomfortable faces when he wasn't speaking. He sometimes didn't know what he was saying. He looked old. Trump lightly bullied him and except for a few moments he couldn't fight back. This is how politics works, this is literally what matters. The motte-rat insistence on some sort of Nixon-Kennedy radio interpretation of disembodied words floating in space actually feels deeply anti-rational, because it is obviously not how things work. Nobody cares. The exercise in imagining that we can care about "the words that are said" but also imagine the mindset of "the average voter" is vanity. No!, actually. Those things literally do not exist. They are endless rationalizations. If you live in this plane of unreality, you could completely swap Trump and Biden's policies and ideas and visions, and it wouldn't matter.

Thinking about these policy wonk ideas isn't a more elevated form of politics stripped from emotion and chance. It's actually a degeneration. Because this is what people care about. A robot could make the words, it's the emotions that count.

This line going around today feels like a motte-rat ingroup circle-jerk. Other people are superficial, but we focus on the real substance!

Relative to the general public, we probably do. I don't think it's circle-jerking to say this forum is, on average, more intelligent, more educated, and more political aware than the average American (or the average redditor or Twitter poster). That doesn't mean we're a bunch of geniuses or that people here don't fall into the same predictable mindkilling partisanship as everywhere else, but yeah, the entire point of this forum is to try to make discussions more than exchanging insults and memes. The majority of the flack we mods get is because someone just wants to shit on his opposition and then feels mistreated when told he can't.

To answer your real question:

Is there some hypothetical voter who does?

Yes. The overrated "undecided" or "swing" voter. They exist. They may be less than 10% of the electorate (maybe 5% or 6%?) but they are the ones who decide the election in battleground states. You're right that most people in the general public, and also most people here, are very unlikely to change which way they're going to vote even if Biden shits his pants or Trump eats a puppy on live TV. But there are people who are still swayable, and they're the ones who matter, basically.

You may also underestimate the impact of actually getting the vote out. A lot of people may be unwilling to vote for the other candidate, but if they find themselves thoroughly disgusted and demoralized by their candidate, they can just choose not to vote. Speaking personally - I do not like Trump, and do not want him to win (although I have to admit that if he does, I will feel a tiny frisson of schadenfreude enjoying meltdowns in certain quarters), but I am so unimpressed and unenthused about Biden that I'm almost in the "fuck it" camp myself.

but yeah, the entire point of this forum is to try to make discussions more than exchanging insults and memes

Pretending that canned practiced debate lines is meaningful is worse than insults and memes. It is actively refusing to understand. The guy making memes has a better worldview: he sees Biden looking old and lost, and he feels panic or glee. Only in this highly reified artificial fake turfwar debate do we say, "Aside from the stuttering, the mumbling, the bad faces, the halting voice, the aged walk, and the glazed eyes, how did he do?"

I appreciate that the Motte is smarter than average, which makes it even more frustrating to argue made-up intellectual exercises. The guy posting memes of Biden in a diaper has a better understanding of the debate. The guy saying he doesn't care because he hates Trump has a better understanding. The guy saying Biden looked horrible and needs to drop out has a better understanding. The guy saying that Biden did fine, because he did better than he expected, has no understanding. He has negative understanding. Normies are just seeing Biden's decline for the first time, but I'm smarter and world-weary and cynical and jaded and I can judge Biden's real performance. Using more intelligence asking the wrong questions means a worse answer. That's what we're doing.

Pretending that canned practiced debate lines is meaningful is worse than insults and memes.

I don't think your description of what the discussion here looks like is accurate. I mean, in the mainstream media, yes, there is a lot of cope and denial about Biden's mental acuity. Here, I don't see a lot of people denying that Biden is cognitively declining.

The guy saying that Biden did fine, because he did better than he expected, has no understanding. He has negative understanding.

I think Biden did better than I expected (which was a very low bar). I don't know that I'd say he did "fine" - he certainly bombed with the audience. But it's not clear to me what you think the "correct" understanding of the debate would be that you think is being missed here. It seems like you want everyone to vigorously nod their heads at your own highly partisan take. Instead, we dissect what the candidate actually said, and we also evaluate to what degree Biden's faculties have declined, and also we evaluate how it's going over with the "normie" voter. Those all seems like fairly rational takes to me. No back-patting and circle-jerking required for us to be offering better discussions than people lobbing grenades at how much their guy sucks less than the other guy.

I appreciate that the Motte is smarter than average, which makes it even more frustrating to argue made-up intellectual exercises. The guy posting memes of Biden in a diaper has a better understanding of the debate.

He has a better understanding of what plays well on social media, so I don't blame Trump partisans for posting memes of Biden in diapers. But this isn't that place.

It seems like you want everyone to vigorously nod their heads at your own highly partisan take.

My takes are highly partisan, your takes are... neutral and objective?

I don't think you are understanding me Mayne you want to reflexively defend the Motte. I am not arguing that anyone here is coping over Biden's decline. I am arguing that there is a lot of discussion along the lines of...,: -- "Besides that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" "We discuss what the candidate actually said." Yes, that's the rat trap. We all know that the promises politicians make are not enforceable. They are riddled with lies. They were rehearsed in a backroom focus test to sound good. They were designed to manipulate us. So why are we discussing them seriously?

As the "highly partisan take"-maker, I have a coherent interpretation of the debate: Biden showed serious mental decline, and lost. The actual specific answers aren't really important. And I don't think anybody cares really what either guy said.

So let's come back to this:

we dissect what the candidate actually said, and we also evaluate to what degree Biden's faculties have declined

If Biden is in serious decline, why would you "dissect what he actually said"? How is that not an act in rationalizing?

My takes are highly partisan, your takes are... neutral and objective?

I wasn't really talking about my takes here, though yes, I do think I am less partisan and more objective than you.

I don't think you are understanding me Mayne you want to reflexively defend the Motte.

I don't reflexively defend the Motte - I have a lot of criticisms of the discourse here. I just don't think your criticism is accurate.

I am arguing that there is a lot of discussion along the lines of...,: -- "Besides that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?"

Well, the general consensus is that Biden did very, very badly but for all that Nate Silver seems to think Trump is virtually a shoo-in, people have been dramatically wrong about how an election will turn out before, so if you want everyone to just settle on the consensus agreement "Biden lost and the election is over," I am not surprised you aren't seeing that.

If Biden is in serious decline, why would you "dissect what he actually said"? How is that not an act in rationalizing?

Because it matters how serious the decline is. If he is (as some people seem to think) virtually non-compos mentis and only able to handle public appearances with serious drugs, that's different than if he's still more or less got all his marbles and has just slowed down a lot. If he's still functional but declining, then what he believes (and would do) as President matters. If he's a zombie being puppeted by his handlers, then no, what he says probably doesn't matter.

You seem to have misunderstood my argument as something dumb like, "Joe Biden is senile and poops in his pants and Trump is awesome the motte suxxxx hahahahaha BTGO".

What I'm telling you is that your objectivity doesn't exist, and debates are fake and gay, and I want to see Trump and Biden gorilla smash funhouse wrestlemania. I want us to stop reading fact-check statslop fanfic and pick up some Byron or Keats. I want to watch Rocky and Drago slug it out until somebody dies. I want to see Trump yelling. I want to see Biden yelling. I don't care about whatever some focus-tested Dem-Rep slogan-pollster convinced Biden to say. I don't care about made-up technical details. It's beneath my dignity to be manipulated.

Thinking empty things isn't thinking.

I don't think anyone is truly "objective", but not everyone wants the same thing. You want wrestlemania; fine. I care about facts, even if those aren't the things that win elections. The Motte leans more towards the latter, and "debates are fake and gay" I can get on Twitter.

I loathe fact checking. So many times the fact checkers are wrong, or take claims that obviously are claims of opinions as testable fact, or focus overly literally. It isn’t an honest enterprise.

It's beneath my dignity to be manipulated. Thinking empty things isn't thinking.

Well said.

We all know that the promises politicians make are not enforceable. They are riddled with lies. They were rehearsed in a backroom focus test to sound good. They were designed to manipulate us. So why are we discussing them seriously?

Ultimately that's what bugs me so much about the whole "Trump lies" schtick I hear from the media and the PMC.

It's tone deaf and insulting to the public, because the public knows very well what they have in front of them. They know politicians are salesmen, pitching a product. Usually, pitching that product will involve some sort of lie if we take that word in an narrow sense. The car salesman who tells you the deal he's offering you is the best in the industry, is that a lie? I mean, maybe technically, but only a very socially stunted person would get offended by it, stand up and point at the car salesman and yell "LIAR! THIS ISN'T THE BEST DEAL, AT HONDA THEY MADE ME A BETTER DEAL!" The dude's trying to sell a car, you know that coming into the dealership.

And Trump as a salesman is a lot like a car salesman, Obama is more like a startup founder pitching to angel investors. But both are selling something, trying to make their product look as good as they can, and yes, technically lying. Or omitting important truths. But the public already knows this, they've interacted with salesman, they know that not everything you hear from a salesman is to be taken at face value. But the media thinks that since Trump talks like a blue collar worker and Obama like a university professor they can make you "realize" that Trump is lying but since he uses big words maybe they can fool you into thinking Obama is not. Which is insulting because the public knows they're both just as much salesmen one as the other for a long time, it's all been priced in already.

And ultimately I'm in the camp that the debate is probably not going to move the needle much, unless it causes Biden to be replaced, because of the same reason. People know what they have in front of them. The only thing it will change is independents who already knew they would like to vote Trump but needed an excuse to voice it now have it.

I don't think anyone doubted since 2020 that Biden was not reaaaally going to be in charge. The guy was always entirely a vote in favor of letting the PMC/The Deep State/the Cathedral/the Swamp/The Adults In the Room/whatever you want to call it reassert control of the government, and they on-purpose pushed a candidate with little ability to assert himself to represent that choice. Biden's cognitive state never mattered, except that now they think they have an excuse to saddle him with the blame for all the failures of the last 4 years and replace him with someone who's going to come into this looking like a fresh start.

I think this is an especially important understanding because to a large degree, the job of United States CEO is about being the face man, in effect the salesman selling the United States position to the rest of the world and his federal government policy to the rest of the country. Therefore, being an effective persuader, i.e. being an effective salesman, is actually a major qualification for the job being sought!

I think the idea is this:

Imagine if Biden been a bit more together, and had successfully given a line about, say, "we spent 300 million more on Medicare". Realistically, that number would almost certainly have been Sir-Humphrey'd to death. 100 million of it would turn out to be money that they were already spending, classified in a way to allow it to be used for the factoid. Say, reclassifying 'elderly medical support' as 'medicare assist for the elderly'. Another 100 million would be money that hadn't actually been spent yet, but had been put aside on the budget and probably would be spent this year unless it got used for something else instead.

We, and the partisan media, would get to work on this. Some people will say that it's all bollocks and he hasn't done anything. Other people would say that no, the money is there and it's being spent. And in reality, very little new information would have got through. Biden is spending a bit more on Medicare, probably.

So I believe that @SlowBoy's argument is that paying attention to what is actually said in debates (or elections) is a fool's errand. Everyone knows that the promises will not be carried out, that the numbers will be carefully constructed houses of cards, etc. All the promises, the statistics, are intended to produce a vibe. The real message that Biden is trying to convey is "Biden cares about medicare. Biden strong."

According to this argument, people paying attention to what is said, rather than the vibes and the character that is revealed, are paying attention to the wrong thing. The debate is supposed to be a vibes-based slugfest.

Your whole premise is flawed. It might make sense if we had some rule that everyone has to watch the debate but we don't. Normies wouldn't be caught dead spending over an hour watching two old people spittle on each other. CNN seems to have claimed somewhere between 50 to 80 million people tuned in, many of which could be internationals. What does influence normies is what their politics brained friends and collogues tell them happened and that is downstream of the words and the performance.

I'm not sure what this has to do with me. Normal people don't watch presidential debates (?), therefore... we should debate made-up talking points made up by the politicians?

Normal people don't watch debates, they get their info from people who do. People who watch debates can take all sorts of things from them some of which are the actual policies hit on. It's a very dynamic thing.

I think normies tune in for the first thirty minutes or so.

A single poll before the debate very roughly broke it down into one third of US adults were very/extremely likely to watch live. Slightly more than that were going to watch clips or analysis after the fact. Due to splits in response, this was a bit over half overall of respondents who were very/extremely likely to get some form of debate content, and only a quarter who weren't going to tune in or look after at all.

Anecdotally, even some of the more politically-engaged people I know only tuned in for about 15-20 minutes, in most cases near the beginning, and in many cases a random stretch out of curiosity only. The actual viewership implies that the poll was either a significant over-estimate, or there were a lot of people why couldn't bring themselves to watch despite intending to. Probably the former, this kind of survey is not very accurate for this type of question, in part because the question reveals the simple fact that there is a debate happening! A fact most are only vaguely aware of, much less the exact day. Plus maybe some survey bias and personal overestimation of probability. I'm betting a massive chunk of the viewership were these already extremely-likely people.

Yes. The overrated "undecided" or "swing" voter. They exist. They may be less than 10% of the electorate (maybe 5% or 6%?)

I don't deny the existence of about this level of self-reported undecided, but I'm starting to develop an alternative theory.

I believe it was NBC (could've been CNN) ... after the debate, they had an "instant reaction panel" populated by "double haters." These are people who say the don't like either Biden or Trump, but still, I guess, intend to make up their mind and vote for one or the other. My pre-existing suspicion here was, "what new information are you waiting to see from either candidate?" For a time, the strongest answer to that was waiting to see if Trump got convicted. He did and that is legitimate new information. For those who are still undecided, I am having trouble identifying what new information is even out there for discovery?

But I digress. What came across as incredibly obvious during that "insta-panel" was that 4 of the 5 people there were obviously not double haters and were going to vote for either Biden or Trump. It was plain to see by how they answered the open ended question of "What's your initial reaction to the debate."

And I think there's a sizable about of voters like this. They say they're undecided or a double haters for a variety of vapid, stupid reasons. It get's them attention (in that people will try to convince them one way or the other), they get to demonstrate how "above it all" they are, or how they have these amazing nuanced and complex views that don't fit neatly into blue vs red.

Except that it's all made up and they probably know exactly who they're voting for.

A televised panel is never going to be actually any good. There's way too much "look mom I'm on TV". A well put together focus group is superior, and these actually do tend to reflect actual campaign trends pretty well. Even survey takers are subject to "this is a survey" bias, but we've gotten better over the years at comparing these surveys to physical realities, namely the public vote counts broken down by polling precinct, that most of the time we can figure this out and make appropriate adjustments. And all of these methods have found that yes, swing voters do exist as a small group, and yes, things like enthusiasm do predict turnout.

I believe you are correct.

How many "double haters" would voluntarily show up for a no-cameras focus group? It certainly wouldn't be zero, but I think it would be drastically less than the "10% of likely voters" number I see thrown around all the time.

In my opinion, Presidential campaigns since about Bush-Gore in 2000 come down to 47%/47% Blue vs Red default vote. We know the two big structural variables are the economy and incumbency advantage. Sometimes war is also that, but generally only one the U.S. is fully and obviously involved in and that has some strong immediate emotional saliency (Vietnam in 1968, Iraq in 2004).

Beyond that, it's mostly about the candidates building competing narratives targeted at the most important voter demographics in swing states and a little "get out the vote" party machinery. Therefore, running an effective campaign in the sense of management and execution - almost at a corporate level - isn't the most important thing, it's the only thing. Substance, issues, vision kind of doesn't matter if you can't get it into voters heads, and you do that with a lot of activity that looks more like a corporate marketing campaign than you do with impassioned Patrick Henry level speeches.

The accurate knock against the 2016 Trump campaign was that it was poorly run. It absolutely was. But it was better run than the Hillary campaign that (a) Took off the month of September and (b) routinely dismissed highly reliable polls on the midwest and didn't focus her visits there when it mattered.

So when I look at Trump vs Biden in 2024, I'm looking at who's running a better campaign like an investor looks at the operations of a logistics company. Obviously, I can't get into the various war rooms on a day to day basis, so I have to use public appearances and general messaging as a proxy. The debate on Thursday showed me that with a full week of preparation and multiple months of "he's cognitively sharp!" messaging, the Biden campaign couldn't turn in the basics. This is like my analogous logistics company failing to print shipping labels. It's a failure at such a basic level.

Whatever the recovery plan might be - Biden stays in, but Harris becomes more visible, a ticket flip (Harris-Biden instead of Biden-Harris) - it doesn't matter. The ops are broken. The basics aren't in place. Certainly not at the level to achieve an insanely high risk stunt that they now have to do because of the Debate.

How many "double haters" would voluntarily show up for a no-cameras focus group?

There is a reason why focus group participants are paid. How many double haters would explain just how much they hate both candidates in front of a sympathetic audience for $100? Quite a lot.

The point of a focus group isn't to get a large enough sample for statistically meaningful results - it is to listen to what people say. You only need 5-15 people to hear all the common opinions, so you can afford to pay them.

For those who are still undecided, I am having trouble identifying what new information is even out there for discovery?

The price of gas in late October, cynically. Optimistically there are always a few candidate specific issues we can learn more about as time goes on, although the biggest one in this race is probably 'how senile is Joe Biden, exactly?' and normies are taking last night as a definite answer.

I imagine there is more movement in who votes than in changing votes.

I think there are probably very few people who are genuinely so undecided that it's a coin flip which way they'll go. But I think there are a fair number of people who lean towards one or the other but might still be convinced (by a disastrous debate performance, by some new breaking scandal, by an emerging crisis) to go the other way.

That said, I agree that a lot of "undecideds" just like to pretend they're open to being persuaded so people will fawn over them.

Nobody is impressed with the substance of Biden's answers. Nobody even really cares what they were. Obviously, we all already know what Biden's policies are and what his candidacy means. For that matter, nobody cares what the substance of Trump's answers was either.

Maybe the folks here do, because we're all policy wonks ignorant of politics. But I've run into people in the wake of the 2016 election who didn't know what Clinton's position was on opioids, or on Appalachian economic development, or on climate policy, or on Net Neutrality.

This is enough of a problem that if you explain Republican policies in a reasonably objective way to people, they'll frequently think that you're making things up, because of course no one would do something that evil. (Example, example, example.)

The modal voter isn't nearly as well-informed as you seem to think they are. I don't know to what extent the debates would inform them on policy (I've written elsewhere on the potential value of the format), but the starting place isn't where you're describing it.

(Example, example, example.)

Matt Yglesias. Data for Progess. Vox.

Dude....Sources matter.

Yes, but the contents also matter, and this is just lazy of you. Who do you think is going to write about this sort of thing? The right?

Yglesias is pointing out that the stated positions of conservative interest groups (e.g., no abortion even in cases of rape our incest) are sometimes really unpopular (per Gallup polls quoted by the FRC), and conservative politicians have become quite good at tiptoeing around this.

DFP did some surveys that discovered that Republicans specifically had some weird ideas about the party's platform; a majority thought they had a healthcare plan that would protect people with pre-existing conditions and opposes the rollback of certain environmental protection rules, nearly half thinks they want to expand Medicaid. These are all wrong. People don't know the party's platform.

The Vox article involved Sarah Kliff interviewing a lot of people who had lost their healthcare under Republican policies, who said things like:

“We all need it,” Oller told me when I asked about the fact that Trump and congressional Republicans had promised Obamacare repeal. “You can’t get rid of it.”

Or:

“I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this, he would not take health insurance away knowing it would affect so many peoples lives,” says Debbie Mills, an Obamacare enrollee who supported Trump. “I mean, what are you to do then if you cannot pay for insurance?”

What part of this do you think is fake or misleading? A significant portion of voters don't know their party's platform, and won't believe it if you tell them because it sounds bad.

Yglesias is pointing out that the stated positions of conservative interest groups (e.g., no abortion even in cases of rape our incest) are sometimes really unpopular (per Gallup polls quoted by the FRC), and conservative politicians have become quite good at tiptoeing around this.

True, but he's told but half the tale. As Trump accurately pointed out on stage (to little fanfare) Biden, and the mainstream (not even progressive) Democratic position is that abortion should be legal at all points of the pregnancy, even during labor of a viable fetus. Even "borne alive" bills cant get DNC votes (although Ill admit I think this bill is unconstitutional, as would be all federal abortion bills, but that obviously doesn't factor in the voting for your average Democrat given they voted for the one above). The extreme left position seems to be something like a child acquires the right to life some unspecified time after leaving the womb, but will not specify that amount of time, and it is much longer than 1 second.

I don't think there's the symmetry you think there is. Institutions on the right are specifically very keen on women in those circumstances carrying to term.

On the left, it's not so much the idea that women in the 40th week can and should and would just change their minds like that, but rather that in situations like, say, this one, having the heavy hand of the government involved will just make things worse. And that narrowly written exceptions don't actually help, given situations like this.

The idea is, if I understand correctly, that the heavy hand of the law will just make things worse, because the Shirley exception is not an actual usable piece of law.

I think that the first half of your post is the very charitable explanation that I think is false for the majority.

And that Shirley exception post is like, one of the worst examples of deceptive argumentation I've ever seen and is a rebuttal of an argument I've never seen.

Sorry, can you be clearer about what you think is "false for the majority"?

I understand that you may not have seen that precise argument... but it's in the quotes upthread. “You can’t get rid of it.” “I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this, he would not take health insurance away knowing it would affect so many peoples lives." Surely this bad thing can't actually happen.

As it's written:

Once upon a time, I believed that the extinction of humanity was not allowed. And others who call themselves rationalists, may yet have things they trust. They might be called "positive-sum games", or "democracy", or "technology", but they are sacred. The mark of this sacredness is that the trustworthy thing can't lead to anything really bad; or they can't be permanently defaced, at least not without a compensatory silver lining. In that sense they can be trusted, even if a few bad things happen here and there.

There absolutely is disbelief that awful things could actually happen; you see it everywhere. Surely it won't be that bad. Surely people will be reasonable. Surely it will work out for the best.

I think you're being overly narrow in what you think of as The Shirley Exception.

More comments

And that Shirley exception post is [...] a rebuttal of an argument I've never seen.

I saw this this week, and I thought of you.

Rather than stay at the hospital to wait for infection to set in, Farmer went home to wait, monitoring her temperature and her pain. On Aug. 4, she called her state senator, Bill White, and explained her situation to an aide.

He told her, "That’s not what the law was designed for. It’s designed to protect the woman’s life."

"It’s not protecting me. We have to wait for the heartbeat (to stop). There’s no chance for a baby; she’s not going to make it. It’s putting my life in danger. We have to wait for more complications. I’m 41, it’s not something I can recover from quickly. I could lose my uterus, there’s a lot of things that could happen," Farmer said she remembers telling him. "We just want to move on, we just want to grieve."

The aide told her he would reach out to Attorney General Eric Schmitt, and also connected her with Choices Medical Services, "which is basically an anti-abortion clinic" in Joplin, Farmer said. She never heard back about what Schmitt said.

You may be right to dismiss biased sources. But you’ve got to put in the effort instead of skipping to dismissal. Make your objections clear so that other people can engage with them.

Okay. Fair.

I usually stay out of political discussions but I want to endorse this stance on all counts. Imho the very essence of presidential debates is pitting two directly opposed people against each other and watch them sink or swim in a marginally-less-scripted-than-usual environment. It's pure PR/show business, entirely driven by the personalities of the debaters. If you're reading it, it's not for you. I agree that watching debates for thoughtful policy takes is like watching porn for the plot - I will concede that sometimes you need a convoluted narrative to really get off, but I will dare say that is not the actual point. At least the faintest semblance of passion is absolutely vital, have people forgotten why they call red/blue tribes tribes?

Additionally, style/memes/whatever you call a winning scenario in debates is literally all that matters with non-Americans - strictly speaking this show is domestic audience only, and Americans are under no obligations to give a shit about how they look from outside, but it's current_year+8 and like it or not everyone is watching. At risk of invoking "whomst inquired", I will cast my vote as a filthy second-world pleb and say the 2024 season so far is fucking boring. Not that the others weren't - if you ambushed me on my walk home and demanded at gunpoint to recite a crumb of Hillary's proposed policy or a single meme of the Blue campaign circa 2016, I would've just resigned to getting shot. At least with Reds I can shout LOCK HER UP and make a run for it. Memes matter. {russell: Passion|Belligerence|Hostility} matters. You can be annoyed that this is what gets lodged inside the normies' unconscious id, sure, would you be surprised to know normies don't watch porn for the plot either?

Maybe I'm not online enough but what does current_year+8 mean and what is "whomst inquired", and what is a second-world person?

I'm guessing current_year+8 refers to 2016, where the election of Trump broke the brains of the American left. But I thought the eternal current_year began in 2014, when the culture war really started to take off in its current iteration.

I thought it started in 2015 with Justin Trudeau's election. When he was questioned about the diversity of his cabinet he answered "Because it's 2015?" and that got memed into all sorts of "Because it's current year?" nemes and when 2016 came around it became current year + 1.

Edit: looks like the earliest known instance of the meme is from 2014, but it became a popular meme in 2015 making fun of John Oliver (and later Trudeau). So 2024 is current year + 9 for standard usage of the meme:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/come-on-its-2015-current-year

"Current Year" started as a meme on places like 4chan. It was observed that a common specious argument would go something like: "You don't support gay marriage? But it's 2014!" "How could you not have socialized healthcare? It's 2015?" The idea was that people were advancing incredulity and consensus instead of an actual argument. After a few years of this argument being popular, it became mocked in the phrase, "It's current year!"

After Trump's election in 2016 and the shock that engendered, it became common for some people to refer to the year 2016 as "Current Year." With the implication that we never mentally left the shock of those events.

"Whomst inquired" is a specific instantiation of a more general meme that essentially made fun of the word "Whom". First you have "who," then in more formal contexts you use "whom," so, obviously, there must be "whomst," "whomst'd," "whomst'd've," and so on down the line. "Whomst inquired" is a whimsical way of saying, "Who asked," i.e., "nobody asked for this but..."

"Second-world person" has a few different meanings because it doesn't exactly have any meaning anymore. It sits between "first-world" and "third-world," and is a leftover term from the Cold War. (US and its allies were first-world, Soviets and its allies were second-world, the non-aligned world was third-world, which is also sometimes a synonym for the world's shitholes.)) In this case, it means he's not an American.

Thank you for the detailed and accurate summation. I really do appreciate it!

The 8th year of the Permanent Current Year of 2016, I think.

2015 is Current Year, so we're in Current Year + 9 at the moment

Other people are superficial, but we focus on the real substance!

Motte being the upspring of rationalist culture does harbor people that care more about whether something is actually true. And this is generally very good metric for politicians. Because they will make important decisions and when they do it doesn't matter how flashy or rethorically potent they are. And it's historically been the case that competent technocratic leaders were better for their populace than loud demagogues.

people that care more about whether something is actually true

That's the problem! Nothing anyone says in a presidential debate is true. The highest apex virtue peak of substance-over-style is empty words. Biden says that a seven-point-four tax whatever is marginally more efficient at generating revenue for solar panels, and Trump counters with seven-point-three. When I'm elected, we'll make progress on making progress. We are beyond true and false. Politicians are constantly making promises they don't intend to keep, that nobody expects them to keep, that we have no means of making them keep. And we sit around debating whether those promises sound good!

No! Bring back the slaughter! Give me screaming and yells. I don't care if Biden's tax plan is technically more correct than Trump's. (How would you even know if it was? Who "decides"? Sixteen economists?) It doesn't mean anything. I want to know if Biden will shrink under pressure. I want to know if Trump has a vision. I want to know if the Vice President is a cringelord wineaunt Machiavellian doomerpilled femcel broke-a-loid edgy based-woke calmchad. Is God on his side? Does he have the mandate of Lady Heavenluck? Does he swing a big dick or is he going to get schlonged because he's a technocrat who can't lead smoke out of a fire?

Who cares about "the actual truth"? There isn't any! We all know that campaign promises are a lie. We all know what we already think about both candidates. We already know our hopes amd fears. Why do we put on this useless pretension of evaluating their technical words as though anybody cares? I also love highly ritualized choreographies of martial valor. This isn't a parade. This is war!

Personality is important. So is policy. For all that Trump is based and chad, his inability to grasp policy has prevented him from getting much done. And yeah, part of that is being able to use technical language. That doesn't mean that they need to be able to rattle off trivia like an Aaron Sorkin character, but it does mean they need to know the difference between Iraqi immigrants, Iranian insurgents, immunocompromised indigents, industrial incentives and indignant indigenes.

Yes to your previous points, but:

And it's historically been the case that competent technocratic leaders were better for their populace than loud demagogues.

That's sure one opinion. I'm not entirely sure you are even wrong, but "competent technocratic leaders" is so poisoned by the modern EU and American Democrats.

This is the Elizabeth Warren of political views.

Your comment is highly voted, but attacking a strawman argument that doesn't truly exist. Everyone, and I mean almost literally everyone, including here, knows that debates are only important for two things. Media reactions, including maybe a few clips, and the narrative it sometimes establishes; and the impact on swing voters. That's it! That's the whole list! And swing voters are well known to decide things on vibes and gut feelings and impressions. Also not new news.

Partisan or pre-decided viewers, who we all know are not the target audience, have different feelings. That's what will show up in a number of formats, because they are the people writing many of these opinions, and virtually everyone likes to hear themselves talk.

We are in the latter category almost all of us, the ones who want to talk. We are discussing the debate because it is fun. At least on some level! And virtually everyone in this thread agrees about the fundamental points about what actual swing voters probably thought. So I'm not too impressed by a rant against people who basically don't exist, and don't understand the hostility against "motte-rats", because I was under the impression that we all know how much of a bubble this place is, and use it as some form of entertainment or vague intellectual hobbyism? Or are you not aware of this?

That argument is a strawman, the real argument is [the same argument].

There are plenty of posters in this thread arguing that Biden might have looked old, but he still won because blarglemumkas. Likewise, I watched the debate with (conservative) friends who said things like, "That argument doesn't work on me, but I bet it plays great with normies!" These are all rationalizations. I want to remove the word "normie" from our vocabulary. I want to stop analyzing how some hypothetical person who doesn't exist might have reasoned. (To the extent that "normies" exist, they reason in a million idiosyncratic and personal ways.)

My position is that this substance is style, that these political facts-and-figures arguments are not real, that discussing these things are an empty trap. It doesn't matter what Biden (or Trump) said as much as how he said it: the substance is style, the style is the real substance. I think much of the discussion here is focused on the wrong half of the debate. I think it's masturbatory. And I'm not impressed by the argument that, of course it's jerking off, that's what we're here for.

I think a reified debate format is possible. Take this interview:

https://youtube.com/watch?si=zc3iAibHgxxf6gir&v=fPQ9uA_M1Eg&feature=youtu.be

In it, Tucker Carlson pushes back against a member of the media who said that Tucker's head was in the sand about the Assad regime being responsible for gas attacks. Carlson comes off increasingly hysterical as the debate goes on, as the media member stays calm and lands good points. That sort of debate is absolutely possible, if Biden behaved like that guy and had cool and factual responses to Trump, he could've knocked it out of the park. Instead, Biden flubbered on abortion that should've been an easy popular issue for him, and didn't press Trump on stuff like Ukraine that he has no plan for beyond asking Putin to pretty please stop the war.

I do think verbal debates are over hyped and in an ideal world they would write oppositional essays to each other, and the media would do honest fact checking to explain context on any misleading statements in the essays, and we could have actually trusted experts to summarize the most important take aways. But obviously even that is too boring for most voters.

At the very least it might be interesting if both candidates had to provide their sources to the opposition ahead of time like how lawyers have to tell each other which witnesses will be involved ahead of time. That way debunkings can be prepared for bogus sources.

For those who still don't realize SlowBoy is correct, read Parable of the Dagger until you are enlightened.

This seems very undemocratic.

I'm very interested if anyone has any ideas for how this could be done in a way that doesn't feel awfully undemocratic. So far, the dominant position seems to be that the only mechanism would be if Joe willingly stepped back, said he'd refuse the nomination, and supported someone else. Josh Blackman suggests that maybe a deal could be made to give him some things he'd want in return. "Look Joe, we'll hook you up with two more SCOTUS nominees and _____. You have the ability to take an easy out by just saying that you've had a very recent health issue. No one will view you too negatively, and the history books will mostly forget about this."

At the same time, looking in from the outside, it will be hard to distinguish between positive, log-rolling like trades here (which I wouldn't view as too undemocratic) and negative, coercive ones ("Joe, if you don't step back, we're going to X,Y,Z to hurt you in whatever ways"). The latter feels more undemocratic to me, but again, it will be hard to distinguish from the outside.

All that said, has anyone seen any other credible ideas for how the DNC could pull off a switch without Joe's explicit agreement and without it seeming too terribly undemocratic?

All that said, has anyone seen any other credible ideas for how the DNC could pull off a switch without Joe's explicit agreement and without it seeming too terribly undemocratic?

It's not very credible, but it's not impossible: They could cause his death or complete disablement. He's probably on a bunch of drugs, a slight change in dosage and Biden goes from an incoherent old man to one in a coma or dead.

We don't need any such sinister scenarios. Honestly, if the DNC really, really wanted Biden to step down, they could probably lean on his family and friends enough to talk him into it. Does he, personally, really, really want to spend the last few years of his life in the White House? I think he's only doing it because he genuinely believes the country "needs" him and if he could be persuaded that he'll be a hero and not be handing over the country to Trump, he could be convinced to let someone else step in.

I don't think it will happen because as bad as Biden is looking right now, openly admitting "Yeah, our guy we've been talking up for months is in such decline that we're replacing him months before the election" would look even worse. I doubt Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom does better against Trump.

Harris is a long shot against Trump but I think Newsom, without the need to appeal to primary voters, could take up the mantle of "generic Democrat". Trump's biggest play against him might be the LA train robberies and general law-n-order in California, but even given that he could get all the "we want a competent adult in office" types and get the base by default.

For me, Newsom gives off an "I am a sociopath" vibe. I mean this literally, and am not implying that the vibe is reliable evidence of him being a sociopath, rather a possible hindrance to him being elected president. Do any of you also get this vibe from him?

Why do you imply that sociopathy is a hindrance to electability?

I didn't mean to. I think giving off the vibe of being a sociopath is the hindrance because voters want someone who they think cares about them.

Well, he did get elected in California, so it can't be too big a hindrance.

Fwiw I don't like him myself and didn't vote for him.

I've had a dislike of Newsom long before it was cool, and I don't see it. He's more just a smarmy politician. Voters won't love it, but it's just a generic politician vibe, which would be a win for Democrats.

but even given that he could get all the "we want a competent adult in office" types and get the base by default.

Does he get the base by default? Are the black and/or female parts of the Democrat coalition going to accept Harris being looked over?

She got looked over by primary voters in 2020. It's reasonable to hope that the people who stan for her (are there actually any?) will come into the fold. And if they don't and the only plausible option for replacing Biden is Harris, then Democrats are cooked anyway, so better to jump into the unknown than face very likely defeat.

The #KHive hashtag is still gettin recent results, at least.

Wasn't the whole purpose of making her VP to appeal to black voters? The Democrats appear to at least believe she's valuable for that reason, and I'm not sure they want to risk that.

My understanding is that Biden is, personally, an incredibly stubborn person and prickly about his ability or lack thereof. that's not unusual for a politician, but I don't know if anyone could do this.

The issue is not that him being removed from the candidacy looks bad. It's better to admit a mistake and fix it than to soldier on. The issue is that it raises the question - who the fuck is running the country today while Biden is apparently unable to carry a conversation?

who the fuck is running the country today while Biden is apparently unable to carry a conversation?

My guess: To the extent that the United States Government needs anyone running it, it is being run by whoever is in the room with Biden at any given moment. Biden himself acts not so much as decision maker, but as a magical talisman, granting whoever is nearest to him authority over government decisions.

Like a conch... pass me the Biden so that I may speak.

who the fuck is running the country today while Biden is apparently unable to carry a conversation?

There's a theory that it's Obama. Who is living in DC (which I think is highly unusual for a former President), and who has connections to a lot of the members of the Biden administration.

The President mostly has advocacy powers, nomination powers, and a ton of power in a crisis. Functionally, Cabinet members run the government. This has almost always been true. And that part of the system does have checks to it, for example all nominees must be Senate-confirmed. The president doesn't even need to sign bills into law! They become law automatically without a veto. In other words, virtually all government functions can and do run just fine without a President by design.

Again, this is not new, and is on purpose. Even if the President were a potato, and no one invoked the 25th, the country would run just fine unless a major military conflict were to pop up, and even then presumably the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State could put their heads together and figure something out together.

All that said, has anyone seen any other credible ideas for how the DNC could pull off a switch without Joe's explicit agreement and without it seeming too terribly undemocratic?

I don't understand the "undemocratic" argument. The general election is meant to be decided democratically - political parties can decide who their candidates will be any way they like, including in smoke-filled back rooms. Nowadays they generally don't do that (at least not overtly) because it pisses off their base, but political parties exist to select winners by the most effective (legal) means possible.

This seems to be the same fundamental misunderstanding of party politics that I saw in 2016 when the Bernie Sanders supporters were enraged that the DNC "picked" Hillary instead of Sanders, and made similar complaints - "This isn't fair, it's undemocratic, it's crooked!" Uh, no, the political party picked the candidate who has been a party insider and supported other party candidates and raised money for the party for years, over the outsider who wants to crash the party. That is how political parties work!

Here is where once again I make my pitch for reading early American history. You all know that it's relatively recently that conventions became essentially coronations for a pre-selected winner, but in the 19th century party politics were even rougher and more arbitrary. Abraham Lincoln's VP got switched on him for his reelection campaign and he really didn't have much to say about it. Several presidents either were not selected by their parties for reelection, or chose not to put themselves forward because they knew they would not be selected. Lots of negotiations were very much smoke-filled room sort of deals, and no one cared much about which candidate the public would prefer, except in the general election. It was interesting contrasting, say, Thomas Jefferson's view of party politics (he claimed to hate political parties while being extremely partisan) with Martin Van Buren's (a pure and unabashed party creature who thought party politics were fundamentally good politics).

I'll admit that, coming from the outside, the American primary system has always seemed absurd to me. Maybe this is a result of being Australian instead, but I am much more accustomed to the approach where the party selects its own leader, and the public don't get a say. We get to vote later on. But of course the party get to choose their own leaders. Why wouldn't they?

It's become tradition in America that the way the parties do that is with primaries, but there's no in-principle reason why they couldn't do it any other way, and frankly I suspect it would be better for America if they did. If the party establishments or members of congress had gotten to pick their presidential candidates (approximating the way it works in Australia), Bernie Sanders would never have been a concern, Donald Trump would never have become a political figure at all, and America would have been spared long, divisive primary seasons. As it is, they have a system that rewards extremist candidates playing towards the base, rather than one that rewards trying to appeal to a genuine majority, and that seems like a poorly-functioning electoral system to me.

On the positive, at least, it means the American elections provide some very high quality popcorn.

Parties can choose whoever and whatever they like, for whatever position they want. But democracy is sacred enough in America that there's always pressure for parties to select their candidates through a democratic process with an open vote, and sometimes parties cave in, probably because they think it will get them votes in the long run. No one wants to alienate that weird fringe who might wind up voting for the mainstream candidate, so why not give their fringe candidate a chance to compete in the primary? Of course that only works if your mainstream candidate is viable, or if you're good at rigging the process.

Yes, there are a number of reasons why Americans have primaries - it's just become an expectation at this point, it lets you judge popularity with the base because America is a system where turnout matters, and so on. It's more that in the aggregate I think it creates a weaker system than the alternative.

Well, party leaders often can get pulled into their own insular "bubble". The leader of a party is sometimes chosen despite being a poor candidate simply because of their internal connections. Corruption can happen. Why wouldn't the rank-and-file want more control over their candidate, not less? Why would voters trust someone else, much less a party elite/insider, more than themselves?

Because America shouldn’t be like Iran, where you are free to vote for any of the six candidates hand-picked by the Guardian Council.

That's not equivalent, though. Iran has a central authority deciding who is allowed to run for office. A political party gets to decide who they want to represent them in the election. You don't have any democratic right to tell a political party (even your political party) how they will choose their representative. You can agree with their process, or you can choose not to support the party.

You can vote for literally anyone you want to. At least, anyone who meets the legal requirements to be eligible for office. The constitution does not formally acknowledge the existence of political parties at all, they're not part of the official legal process. All the political parties do is provide a Schelling point so that all the people with similar ideas can coordinate votes instead of wasting them splitting among a bunch of candidates in a first-past-the-post election.

Now, informally this is an incredibly powerful tool that has become a de-facto necessary component of the election. But the political party is legally allowed to do whatever it wants, and if the voters don't like that they can try to figure out a different way to coordinate on a different Schelling point to vote for.

The general election is meant to be decided democratically - political parties can decide who their candidates will be any way they like, including in smoke-filled back rooms.

I disagree here. Both parties bill themselves on the plebs being empowered to select the nominees. Nothing wrong with cigar smoking back room deals per se. But not when you market yourself on the fact that you use democratic process to select the candidate.

Also states have rules about how primaries are conducted. It's not like political parties can just do whatever they want.

I agree with most everything that you say. However, I think that the Democratic Party, itself, bills itself as having a democratic process for selecting its candidates. They may be misguided in wanting to have this feature in their process, and they may ultimately turn back from it. I think that there would be nothing objectively wrong with them making such a choice. But if the question is whether they are able to proceed in running the party in a way that is not terribly undemocratic, while also managing to change horses midstream, I'm still interested in whether there are options.

Well except for many elections now the process by which the party chooses their candidates has been largely democratic. An end run around that process is therefore undemocratic.

The Democrats mostly did away with party leadership selecting candidates after 1968. At this point the DNC has even defanged superdelegates, they're not allowed to vote on the first ballot. So the leaders only get outsized voting only if the nomination is still contested even at the convention.

They've also painted themselves as the defenders of democracy, that Trump is a would-be dictator who will end democracy in America. Yet it's Trump that won the primaries fair and square, and if the Democrats replace Biden it's them that's ignoring the will of the voters.

We've come a long way since the 19th century when it comes to rules for selecting major party candidates. And for good reason. Back in the day, a single party machine could control a city. Since the general election was a farce, the primary was the "real election". But the primary was fixed by party insiders with little to no oversight.

Fortunately, many states now require free and fair elections to select party candidates. Replacing Biden with someone who no one voted for is a terrible perversion of this process.

The days of elections being decided in smoke-filled rooms are in the past. May they ever remain so.

Or even at least one president who was strong-armed into it by other people in his party! Garfield. Also relevant that for a long time, it was seen as "unseemly" for a candidate to do the actual vote-asking themselves. Many candidates would sit at home and chat with visitors, and surrogates would canvass the country and make speeches and raise funds on their behalf!

A critical mass of Democratic operatives saying out loud they want Biden to step aside does functionally make Biden step aside, even if he does not want to. It's partly why a lot of people end up resigning from their jobs, even if they don't actually need to. As I like to say, numbers matter. No threats or coercion need take place. Only enough donors, campaign staff, polled regular people, media saying stuff loud and often. And/or a few very high-up people. Or even some type of "strike". If this doesn't happen, it's because enough people are, by revealed preference, actually still OK with Biden being the candidate.

In other words, a process can be "democratic", here meaning reflecting the will of the people, without explicit votes needing to be cast. The key here is that "people" is not the general public. It's the average Democratic partisan. Most of the people in charge are still people with opinions, and though they diverge from everyday voters, they don't diverge that much.

Ok, I don’t agree with ‘Biden’s performance wasn’t that bad’. It was. Biden had to show that he was mentally fit to be president. This he majorly failed to do.

If your pitch for Biden was that the evidence for him being senile was cherry-picking and deceptive editing, this debate has blown that narrative out of the water. I agree that this was not a perfect performance for trump, but it achieved his goals of showing people that Biden is senile and he’s not.

That being said, I’m not sure the DNC can solve the coordination problem of swapping out Biden. Harris is a bimbo but she’s also a black woman and her supporters will cry foul for that reason. It’s ultimately worse for the DNC to have a convention fight. Plus swapping in a candidate this close to the election is probably a major handicap and whoever does it is going to have to eat a high profile loss for the rest of their political career.

I believe the DNC would swap out Biden if they can do it with a minimum of fuss. But I think it’ll be a Kamala-Beto-squadmember-last of the blue doggers slugfest.

The argument for Newsom is that he's a tall, very good looking man with a hot wife and four beautiful children.

Obviously, his record as California governor and SF mayor is beyond awful. But how many people in the country even know who Newsom is? 10%? 20%? So he's kind of a blank slate to the low-info independent voters.

He'll run a very vanilla, centrist campaign. People want someone besides Trump or Biden. He's someone. And once in charge he'll be a reliable cog. The only thing the Republicans can tag him with is his dismal record in California. But that requires voters to know something.

But Newsom doesn’t want to run for president this round.

Caesar refused the crown twice.

If I'm Gavin, I take the nomination if offered. This a golden opportunity. Primaries are tough and random. Hillary probably felt pretty good about her chances in 2008. Jeb felt secure in 2016. Then they both got demolished by a prodigy who wasn't on anyone's radar 4 years prior.

I think it might be hard for the GOP to say Newsom did awful in SF/Cali. The tech industry has been so overwhelming successful that I’m sure it gives Gavin plenty of stats that make him look amazing.

Not that he had anything to do with the success of tech, but he will no doubt take credit for growth numbers that are a result of tech.

I think it might be hard for the GOP to say Newsom did awful in SF/Cali.

Should be sufficient to run some ads of what actual streets look like in SF and LA nowadays. I'd run an ad with a Back to the Future II theme, comparing California today to the alternate Biff timeline in which Hill Valley becomes a shithole.

But that assumes anyone is even paying attention, which is doubtful.

Harris is intelligent and well-spoken and apparently just fine in-person, if often prickly, but the instant a camera turns on she becomes one of the most vaguely unlikeable and stilted candidates I've ever seen, maybe even worse than Hillary. Nothing to do with her race, purely her personality and way of speaking. Her camp does nothing but complain either, which doesn't win them any favors internally. For example, they were complaining forever about her not having anything to do, then Biden gave her the border as her issue to work on, and then they complained about how they were given an assignment that was too hard.

Harris is intelligent and well-spoken and apparently just fine in-person, if often prickly, but the instant a camera turns on she becomes one of the most vaguely unlikeable and stilted candidates I've ever seen

I hope you can recognize the troubling parallels with the torrent of claims we’ve endured for three years from Biden loyalists that no, actually, Joe is incredibly sharp and in-control behind the scenes, he’s just bad at public speaking and seems doddering when the cameras are on.

I’ve personally never seen any indications from Kamala Harris that she’s intelligent, or talented, or even interesting. Her political origin story is… inauspicious, to say the least. (Look up her relationship with Willie Brown to see what I mean.) I found her absolutely unwatchable during the Kavanaugh hearings; now, I understand that my perception may have been clouded by the fact that I believed (and still believe) that the proceedings against Kavanaugh were an obscene miscarriage of justice, and Harris happened to be one of the figures they appointed to go after him the most aggressively. Still, she came off as vain, preening, unserious, and performative, in a way that even the average DC pol doesn’t. I think she’s a bimbo, and unlike the average bimbo she appears to have a deep-seated need to be perceived as hyper-intelligent and competent. (In that sense, she’s similar to Biden.)

Haha, fair play. I didn't realize that a good chunk of her law career was nepotism (though passing the bar is at least, I think, reflecting some level of intelligence, even if it took her a second try). I don't know if I've thought about her competence that deeply, so I guess I should take my own advice and put some caution in there, though I had never seen much need to look into it given how much I dislike and don't support her in the first place. She's probably even a drag on the Presidential ticket, and this is still likely true even after Biden's debate disaster, which I think is saying something. There was this (edit: dug it up here) long Atlantic piece I read that went into some detail trying to explore why she was a terrible communicator and politician, which was an interesting read that informed some of my comment, and though it was overall sympathetic to her it also had some harsh criticism, including about how she has a super thick shell even the veteran reporter had a hard time with.

Upon a reread/skim, maybe I came away from that article too positive. It seems to have talked about how useless she was at least politically, and in contributing as well, several times. One nice one underscoring how both ignored and non-contributory she is:

This summer, I asked Jeff Zients, the current White House chief of staff, if he could recall a moment when Biden had noticeably leaned on Harris for guidance, or when her input had meaningfully changed the administration’s approach to an issue. He had mentioned earlier in our interview that Harris had been instrumental in putting “equity” at the forefront of the administration’s COVID response—ensuring that public-health efforts reach the underserved. Other examples? “Let me think of a specific anecdote, and I’ll have somebody follow up,” he said. His spokesperson texted after the call to confirm that the office would get back to me. Despite my follow-ups, that was the last I heard

Yeah, her origin story is fascinatingly similar to Barack Obama’s in a lot of ways. Raised primarily outside of the U.S. during her formative years (Montreal, Canada in her case), with apparently little to no involvement from her non-American black (specifically, Jamaican mulatto, basically an endogamous Brahmin-style racial elite in that country) father.

Exposed heavily to a non-Christian religious tradition (Hinduism, by her Tamil Indian mother) with which she maintains an affinity which some of a more nativist bent might find somewhat concerning.

Only developed any real relationship with Black American culture in college, and now insists that people affirm her blackness, despite many blacks privately questioning whether or not she can claim any authentic connection to the culture.

There’s also an interesting additional family dynamic which Steve Sailer has noticed; Kamala’s younger sister Maya, who seems genuinely impressively brainy (taking after their parents, a biologist and a Stanford economics professor) and who excelled academically, whereas Kamala seems to have been a mediocre student who had to attend an HBCU and a non-prestigious law school due to unremarkable grades. This might be part of what drives her thin-skinned need to be affirmed as intelligent and valued. (In this case, the Obama parallel is with Michelle, who similarly seems to have grown up in the academic and social shadow of her brother Craig, and who seems to have nursed a chip on her shoulder ever since.)

Ultimately, though, like I said, her political career seems to have been propelled almost entirely by having slept with a married politician, who then paved the way for her, and subsequently by having the correct combination of melanin and sex organs. All of which would be less frustrating if she wasn’t also so obnoxious, phony, and visibly dimwitted. If Biden had selected a VP even marginally more competent and less grating than Kamala, we likely could have seen him step down years ago in favor of someone who’s actually capable of doing the job.

Yup. It is a coup. The way the everyone got reprogrammed in an instant points towards coordinated action. But it is a very dangerous game - if you shoot at the king you better not miss. And I am far from certain that that big part of the party is on board - there are a lot of people willing to risk a lot on a senile biden second term - so they can be the real power. A protracted democrat civil war will be most welcome - and in this world lately - all blitzkriegs seems to end eventually into meatgrinders. I am more and more convinced that Trump will be sentenced to jail. And with the other candidate removed against his will in extremely undemocratic matter to preserve and spread democracy - well let's just say I will see what is the going rate for Helldivers jumpsuit.

The way the everyone got reprogrammed in an instant points towards coordinated action.

It was deeply weird seeing all the CNN analysts saying the same thing, except for David Axelrod who at least stated factually that Biden is the nominee unless he voluntarily steps down.

But, in practice, how does this reprogramming happen? If you're in that CNN studio, who is making the call to throw Biden under the bus? Because I just don't see how it can happen from a top-down level. I really doubt they "got the call from the DNC" to deliver a narrative. Instead I think the narrative spreads through group think.

It does seem to happen awfully quickly though. Very few people within the Democratic memeplex were calling for Biden to step down until last night. The ones that were (such as Nate Silver) were heavily picked on. Then, on a dime, the narrative shifts. It's weird. Everyone who is paying attention knows that this is what Biden's face looks like now. No one should have been surprised.

They probably have a literal groupchat and are able to peek at how the chat is feeling and adjust own opinion in real time.

This is exactly what John King said on TV. "I've been getting texts non-stop."

Agreed, it seemed like on the CNN panel Axelrod and Van Jones were the only ones flailing like I'd expect if they were actually blindsided. If you're a loyal Democrat I'd expect some grasping at straws, making excuses, and outright denial.

On Kamala's post-debate interviews, the most she'd say is that Biden had a "slow start." I'm guessing she was left out because whoever's running the show knows she can't be the nominee, so they can't let her know the plan and try to position herself.

Everyone else got the memo that if Biden can't hack it they're free to call for him to step down, so they were prepared to see him fail.

I think no one makes the call. This is flocking behavior, not central decision making.

One unusually brave or reckless person announces some latent opinion respectable people didn't previously announce. That gives cover for slightly meeker people to say it. That bold group gives cover for much meeker to say it. At this point if you don't follow the group then you've been left behind.

From our point of view all Democratic beltway pundits suddenly are repeating the same new phrase or have a sudden new opinion.

And also this small group all texts each other, so there's some regular coordination. But not centralized I'd suppose.

I think it’s what you suggested in your first post, and why ‘we’ thought it wasn’t all that bad but mainstream Dem media and political figures did. They had spent years telling themselves that there were no cognitive issues and it was all a bullshit conservative media Fox News Tucker psy-op. Then they were unambiguously forced to confront it. Meanwhile people on the right or in places like this were largely unsurprised and perhaps even felt Biden did OK because they weren’t deluding himself about this decline.

For a lot of TV pundits I think being forced to spend an hour with no (other) distractions directly and uncomfortably confronting the President’s condition was a shock.

This is just the Age of Twitter working. The consensus emerges very rapidly and takes hold.

My experience is that it doesn't emerge quite immediately, but happens by, oh, hour 72. As of hour 24, maybe even 48, there's still confusion and disagreement, but, after more than a day but less than half a week, an ironclad consensus emerges.

(This is at least how I recall things evolving around George Floyd. In the immediate aftermath, things were just "wow, that's really bad" - took a couple days for "BURN IT ALL DOWN" to fully blaze.)

Right now, the question "should Biden step aside" doesn't have an ironclad answer, but I expect one side or the other to effectively drop out of the argument as of early next week.

I don’t really know what Joe Biden is about from this debate itself. I know Trump is about stopping the border.

I think even if you took away the style points (huge win for Trump) the merits were also for Trump. Biden’s policy seemed to be free puppies for all paid for by billionaires (I love how supposedly raising 500b in ten years covers anything when we are borrowing 1t ever 100 days). It was all over the point with no specific goal or vision. With Trump, he also was very airy fairy but it was obvious what he cared about: immigration, immigration, and immigration.

Completely agree with this. I watched the whole thing and just don't understant the argument that Biden won on substance. Over the course of the debate, Trump made a couple things clear about his 'platform', whether you believe he can get it done or not aside:

  • Keep abortion at the state level
  • Address inflation
  • Address the border crisis and as a consequences, jobs, crime, social security, and medicare funding
  • Be economically aggressive against China (and others)
  • Return to the 'quiter' level of global conflict under his term, and reign in the foreign spending.

Biden on the other hand closed with an "everything is great America is great" statement with a dash of 'there's work to be done'. Sure it's always hard for the incumbant to thread the needle of bringing improvement without admiting your first term has been lacking. But just so. Shit sucks now, and Biden didn't offer much about how it would improve under a second term.

Biden dug in hardest as his strongest theme that Trump is a liar, but 1. That's irrespective to Trump's assessment of the issues to be addressed, vs Biden's lack thereof. and 2. Biden went hard on two debunked hoaxes: Fine People, and Suckers and Losers. (He also made passing references to other debunked hoaxes like injecting bleach). This alone, should have undermined his ability to portray himself as an arbiter of 'truth and lies' by any honest critic.

In other areas, Biden's arguments were just contextually irrelevant, despite the fact that he spoke with more 'detail'. The biggest example that comes to mind is the abortion exchange. After Trump made it clear that he personally beleived in exceptions that include rape and incest, but beleived that the states should decide democratically, Biden went on and on about different examples of rape and incest. Sure he was exhaustive in the different relatives that could rape a woman, but what counterpoint was it making to Trump? Trump already pre-agreed that those are indeed scenarios he believes in allowing abortions for.

Worse yet Biden launched into talking about illegal aliens raping and killing a young girl in response to softball abortion question. Pivoting away from his strongest position to Trump's strongest position. And then followed that up with an exhaustive list of family members who could rape you, including step-family members and your sister. So anyways illegals raping and killing children isn't so bad in comparison to other rapes and, oh yeah, keep abortion legal.

I'm paraphrasing, but it was a roller coaster of an answer.

including step-family members and your sister

A large body of online internet documentary research suggests that this a common source of sexual partnerships.

Stay strapped or get clapped.

And for God's sake don't get stuck in the washing machine door when your step brother's around.

On at least three different occasions, Biden responded to a predicted Trump attack before it even happened, but still framed it exactly as if it had. Which I think speaks to both piss-poor debate prep, plus some diminished mental nimbleness. The whole debate I was kind of thinking, "what if a real person were up there instead of an old guy?" That's really not what you want a viewer to be thinking, ever, that they could do better.

Yep agreed. I think people are confusing high level policy statements (we will spend 50b on x) as policy when it was untethered from any over arching goals etc.

And I actually think while Trunp exaggerated more he was directionally true most of the time while Biden lied and lied frequently.

This is why I made my original post about "what people heard" rather than the direct what-they-said. Your bullet points almost exactly reflect what people heard. With one exception: Voters who did watch the debate almost universally notice, and are annoyed, when candidates do not answer questions. Trump noticeably dodged at least three questions. Whether this matters long-term is up for debate, but the answer is probably not to a big degree. Which is why I expect the current (swing-voter) narrative/impression for the next two months to be about how Trump is directionally correct even if he's light on details and a bit mean, but at least he's not in charge of a failing economy and a failing intellect. People still dislike Trump, so the situation can still change, but he currently has a significant advantage. Even as a lean-left moderate, who hates Trump, I still came away from the debate feeling better, not worse, about a Trump presidency again, which is not "supposed to" happen.

Barack Obama -

"Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight — and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit. Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November. joebiden.com"

Obama is the one man who could have made the switch happen. If he had tweeted, "Biden must go," Biden would be gone. He has decided not to tweet that. Biden will not be removed.

Obama is the one man who could have made the switch happen. If he had tweeted, "Biden must go," Biden would be gone. He has decided not to tweet that. Biden will not be removed.

Obama also doesn't always say publicly what he thinks or says privately.

Obama might be worried because if Biden has a chance at all to win, it would be by a slim margin, and if Biden won't step aside, disunity might cost the dems that margin, and Obama would be one of the obvious ones to blame for it.

Obama is highly influential in Biden’s administration to the point that a pretty common D.C. belief is that he’s running large parts of it behind the scenes. If Newsom or some other Democrat with their own infrastructure and large state political operation becomes President it’s more likely that they replace Obama’s guys with their own and his power fades.

Interesting that he would throw in his two cents/blow his load now, this early in the election season. Maybe this is a more serious event than I was suggesting.

Clinton too now: "I'll leave the debate rating to the pundits, but here's what I know: facts and history matter"

Feels like being in some south American country where multiple coup plotters have captured different radio stations. Absolute civil war behind the curtain while everyone pretends to be the ones in full control.

I didn't see the debate, so I don't know how awful it went for Biden, and I don't generally follow presidential debates, but I just wanted to ask if it's possible that all of this might blow over, and no one will even think of it come next debate, or even in a week. Sure, if Biden is really on death's door, he'll probably appear in poor condition in future events, too. But on the other hand, politicians oscillate in their presentability sometimes, and it doesn't always bear out. People cling to the latest thing saying "this is the most important event ever!", and at least 80% of the time, it ends up not being the most important event ever. Other politicians have had weird moments before, like when Hillary suffered some sort of temporary mental break or heat stroke or something during an interview back in 2016ish (I can't seem to find the video) and seemed completely unaware of her surroundings for a minute or two.

I've said this before, but man, I wish we could pause time and not move forward into election season. No matter what the outcome is, I'm going to feel terrible.

It appears that the Democratic establishment has recovered and is backing Joe's horse again. They're going to try to memory hole this but there is still the matter of the second debate. I think it goes much like the first, but the spin will be fixed this time. Something along the lines of "Comeback Kid! Biden sparkles in second debate". And if Biden's performance was like last night's they might just pull it off.

But it's not impossible that it goes even worse. The poor guy must have trouble simply standing at a podium for two hours. He seems to be vanishing before our eyes. I have no idea how he makes it another year, let alone 4.5.

Well at least we have some interesting horse race aspects this time around.

In the end, I'm hoping for a Trump landslide as I think that's the only path that leads to introspection, and then hopefully healing. I've come to terms with him personally. He's a liar and a braggart with the attention span of a goldfish. But he's his own man, and he's not evil. And sometimes that's enough.

In the end, I'm hoping for a Trump landslide as I think that's the only path that leads to introspection, and then hopefully healing.

I really hope you are right. But the only introspection we got last time was "Trump's election proves the legacy of racism, sexism, colonialism, xenophobia, homophobia etc is real and strong and we need to feel bad/crush fascism"

These things usually don't matter, until they do. Trump was the first presidential candidate in decades to win his primary without endorsements, and to become president without experience in any elected office. Debates usually don't move the needle much, or in a permanent fashion... Until now.

Lots of voters have expressed concern over Biden's age. Lots of Democrats have. And so far they've done an alright job of sowing doubt about the veracity of that claim. So to see him, mumbling and stumbling, makes a difference.

Debates usually don't move the needle much, or in a permanent fashion... Until now.

The Nixon/Kennedy debates were said to have moved the needle also. It's not new. The Reagan/Mondale debates probably would have moved the needle if it wasn't already pegged.

I don't think it went quite as bad for Biden as had been suggested (he did make some cogent points and even landed a couple of good hits) but he was visibly struggling to keep up and because the position of the Whitehouse plus much of the mainstream media up to this point has been that anyone expressing doubts about Biden's health and vitality is a russian troll, it wasn't a good look. In order to meet expectations he needed to show up and kick ass, not just barely hold on.

Edit to add: short version is that Trump showed up and appeared to be much more prepared and ready to play than Biden did.

I still don't get the "conspiracy" thing. You can't organize a middle school party committee without all the actual decisions being made in private chats between "the serious people."

Like, they can't change FAA hiring policy without giant conspiracies of leaking, cheating, and backroom dealing. That's just how things work.

If you could hide microphones in all the DC coat rooms, bathrooms, and small back offices used for quickies and mid-morning coke bumps, you'll hear the same conversation happening over and over. And that's how the party makes decisions.
They all saw the same thing, know it's finally socially acceptable to believe their eyes, and see an opportunity to influence the next "socially-constructed reality" they're going to impose.

To temper this sentiment: there were famous conspiracies with zero leaking that were discovered by much later happenstance. COINTELPRO was not leaked, it was a watertight criminal conspiracy perpetrated by federal law enforcement. Leftists breaking into an FBI field office late at night and ransacking their files found it by accident.

And I thought MKUltra had a similar flawless lack of leaking but the modern crippled version of Google won't give me confirmation.

If it helps: MKUltra was discovered via FOIA because the CIA missed a spot when cleaning up the crown jewels. Fairly easy IMHO to imagine a world in which it existed only in urban legend and conspiracy myth.

Link is broken, at least for me.

Hmm! Here's the full URL as it's supposed to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra#Revelation

That's it.

And I believe there's many similar conspiracies we never found about because they didn't have their documents in that one FBI field office and didn't accidentally fail to entirely destroy their records.

Biden was not selected democratically (a great deal of maneuvering was done to give him a royal road through the primaries) in the first place. And bemoaning the lack of democracy now is silly. If Trump was hit by a meteor tomorrow, would that be antidemocratic, in that it would deny many people their favoured candidate?

It would be antidemocratic unless we took a vote first.

If Trump was hit by a meteor tomorrow, would that be antidemocratic

I'm voting for the meteor.

This seems like a silly hypo. Yes, force majeure is always an exception. Biden’s infirmity has been a known problem for years. It is just that he had one of these moments at a very inopportune time. The two aren’t the same.

I doubt that the DNC are sitting around in a smoke-filled room, twirling their mustaches.

I doubt any cigars are in play, but the DNC has a history of executing conspiracies at this level far more effectively than the GOP. They own the "Debates" - whether you're talking about leaked emails lining up softballs or the rules updates this year to favor their desired outcome.

They struggle to control their idealogical upstarts in the party every once in a while, but they are in absolute lockstep with the mainstream media. Command and control here doesn't have to get everyone in a room. It's a couple texts here and there, conversations over cocktails in Manhattan, DC, and LA.

I've been wondering if they were just going to hurtle headlong into disaster, keep trying to hide Biden indefinitely, or what. I'll pick a side of the fence here and say the pressure on him to back down is going to be ENORMOUS, and he'll do so in the next few months.

Can Kamala or Harris save the election? Maybe. It has to be very difficult for anyone to look another human being in the eyes and say that Biden at this stage is worse than Trump. There is such a thing as mentally and physically unfit for office. I was filled this morning with, honestly, just pity. I've been extremely angry at Biden the past few years, but I think if you were to look at his whole career, he isn't even close to the worst politician in this country, and it feels like the dems are just riding his miserable corpse into the grave.

I was filled this morning with, honestly, just pity

I agree. I felt the same way. I've absolutely hated him for his Covid policies, and for his lawfare, and for buying votes with student loan forgiveness.

But last night all I felt was pity as the CNN analysts tore into him. He's still with it enough to know that this was an epic disaster. His legacy is now in ruins, no matter what happens. Once he got home and it was just him and Jill, did he break down and cry? I don't know. Maybe politicians at this level don't have those feelings. But the non-thinking part of my brain felt a lot sympathy for him personally.

But last night all I felt was pity as the CNN analysts tore into him. He's still with it enough to know that this was an epic disaster. His legacy is now in ruins, no matter what happens. Once he got home and it was just him and Jill, did he break down and cry? I don't know. Maybe politicians at this level don't have those feelings. But the non-thinking part of my brain felt a lot sympathy for him personally.

One of the points pressed by the CNN panel was, "How did the DNC/Biden's campaign let him get this far without intervening?"

I would be shocked if half of that panel wasn't already aware he was this bad. David Axelrod (who was oddly half-covered in water droplets for the first segment, like someone had thrown a cup of water at him right before cameras), Obama admin heavyweight, didn't know? Van Jones didn't know? It's their job to know. It's hard to buy the feigned shock from a bunch of high-level DC journos and politicos who surely never gossip.

As for Dr. Jill, if anyone knows, it's her, so it would be rich to assume that last night was some dam-breaking revelation for her. If she's let him get this far, it's either out of cynicism or a sense of entitlement, and I would guess neither of those states at this stage are penetrable by actual self-reflection or honest emotion.

I would be shocked if half of that panel wasn't already aware he was this bad.

My guess: they did and they didn't. In the Orwellian sense of doublethink. They had to know, because they were among those covering for him. But on the other hand, they also fully believed the narrative that Biden's decline was not real, a product of cherry-picked clips and misinterpretations from MAGA types.

I think people are over-estimating how unified the Democrats will be on this. Pretty much anyone important in the Biden administration relies on him continuing to be president to keep their own position, and will not willingly go along with replacing him. If there was someone waiting and perfectly suited to step into Biden's position that would be one thing, and that's usually the role the VP holds, but it doesn't sound like the Democrats have much confidence in Kamala Harris to lead them to victory. On the other hand, they would be risking alienating many of their voters by passing over the black, female VP to pick someone like like Newsom instead.

There's also the question of how exactly they even could force Biden aside, assuming he wants to stay. Would the party rules allow it? And would he be good-natured enough about it not to cause a significant damage?

Would the party rules allow it?

I heard an interview with Lanhee Chen on the radio today and he said absolutely not. He's really plugged in to presidential campaigns and worked at high levels on previous Republican election campaigns. I take his word for it.

Legally, Biden needs to either die or choose to step aside. Practically, if enough of the party apparatus went against him, he'd step down even if he didn't really want to.

The editorial board of the New York Times now asks Biden to step aside.

Democrats who have deferred to Mr. Biden must now find the courage to speak plain truths to the party’s leader. The confidantes and aides who have encouraged the president’s candidacy, and who sheltered him from unscripted appearances in public, should recognize the damage to Mr. Biden’s standing and the unlikelihood that he can repair it.

Mr. Biden answered an urgent question on Thursday night. It was not the answer that he and his supporters were hoping for. But if the risk of a second Trump term is as great as he says it is—and we agree with him that the danger is enormous—then his dedication to this country leaves him and his party only one choice.

The clearest path for Democrats to defeat a candidate defined by his lies is to deal truthfully with the American public: acknowledge that Mr. Biden can’t continue his race, and create a process to select someone more capable to stand in his place to defeat Mr. Trump in November.

It is the best chance to protect the soul of the nation—the cause that drew Mr. Biden to run for the presidency in 2019—from the malign warping of Mr. Trump. And it is the best service that Mr. Biden can provide to a country that he has nobly served for so long.

There is no reason for the party to risk the stability and security of the country by forcing voters to choose between Mr. Trump’s deficiencies and those of Mr. Biden.

This, for both parties. Seriously, Trump and Biden are both way too old to be POTUS in a term that could very well include literal WWIII. I've been hoping for ages that one of them has a heart attack* and gets replaced by a non-geriatric candidate (preferably Trump, because a lot of non-Biden Democrats are true believers in extreme forms of SJ and some of those beliefs are relevant to fitness to preside over WWIII, but I'll take a Biden heart attack if that's what's on offer). Accomplishing the same without a death required would be even better.

*NB: hoping that someone dies of natural causes =/= hoping that someone is assassinated; the latter would lead to chaos and I don't want that.

I have had similar thoughts re the timing of this debate. Why have it so early? It is very unusual and it seems like the only reason I can think of is so that people can point to either candidate in a public forum and say, see, this guy can't cut it and here's the evidence. It doesn't seem like either of them come off well.

I don't think there's probably any sort of a fifth-dimensional chess element. They thought that Joe is demented but not that demented, so they can beat the expectations and get a bit of a boost in the midst of middling-to-flagging polls before the conventions and Trump sentencing (not that Trump sentencing is probably going to affect anything, at least). Instead, they didn't beat the expectations, and all the talking heads simultaneously realized they're going to have to react accordingly or lose all credibility.


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