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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   38283 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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That sounds like it should be able to be sorted out, legally. It should be possible to get a green card issued. So maybe talk to a lawyer?

It looks like the process is a decent bit easier if she was here legally in the first place, which it sounds like is the case. Otherwise she'd need to leave the country, which adds complications, as having been in the US illegally could make prevent her from being allowed to return for ten years, so fortunately, you probably don't need to worry about that. She'll need to apply and an immediate relative who is a citizen (your father, if they're married, or you, if you're at least 21, could both work) will file a petition on her behalf. One form for each of the citizen (I-130) and the noncitizen (I-485), it looks like.

It looks like she then wouldn't need to worry about deportation in the meantime before the green card comes in.

I'm not sure how long that will take.

If she married an American citizen she should be fine. Deportation is not a revokation of citizenship.

You should probably have known this already and you should become educated on the subject to correct that immorality.

Is there a statute of limitations on the offense that the mother originally committed (visa overstay)?

Criminally, perhaps. But even if there's a statute of limitations, a person that's present here without authorization is (generally, YMMV, consult a good immigration lawyer) eligible for removal.

If she married a US citizen in the ‘90s, presumably she is now a naturalized citizen. That citizenship won’t be revoked, even in the case of a criminal conviction (AFAIK). But if she is and will remain a US citizen, on what basis could she be removed from the country?

Edit: TIL that denaturalization is a thing. But it seems like that can happen only when a naturalized citizen is found to have become naturalized illegally, e.g. by making false statements on a green card application or whatever, or for various other reasons that don’t apply here (like taking up arms against the US, or holding certain government offices in a foreign country). In this case, the naturalization process itself was (presumably) carried out legally, via the marriage pathway.

You don't automatically become a citizen. There's a process that has to be gone through.

Right, but presumably that’s already happened

It sounds like not in this case?

I think it's like possession where the crime continues for as long as you remain in the country.

As an anchor baby you can sponsor a family visa for your parents.The fact that you haven't even bothered trying shows how blatanly open the border is.

As an anchor baby you can sponsor a family visa for your parents.

If he's 21, which, given that the entrance was in the 90s, and the marriage after, is probably but not at all necessarily the case.

Sponsoring a family member who is already in the US illegally is complicated. Firstly, the anchor baby can only apply if they are 21 and meet the financial requirements. (Although in this case, the US citizen spouse of the illegal alien should be able to sponsor them).

CFR245.1(b)(3) says that someone who entered the country by sneaking across the border ("without being admitted or paroled following inspection") can't adjust status in-country, and on leaving to apply for a visa from abroad they would become inadmissable for (probably) 10 years due to previous illegal residence.

This case is a visa overstay. Most visa overstayers are ineligible to adjust status in-country under other paragraphs of CFR245.1, but people applying as immediate relatives of citizens are exempt from those restrictions. There are various categories of ineligibility due to previous illegal residence, but they don't apply to the case of someone who entered the US legally, overstayed, has not left the US and returned since their visa expired, and had never been in the US illegally before their arrival. OP's mother appears to fit that category, so it is more likely than not that OP's father could have regularised the situation by sponsoring mum on as a spouse of a US citizen.

But the claim "As an anchor baby you can sponsor a family visa for your parents" is mostly false.

Changing birthright citizenship would require a constitutional amendment, since it was created by a choice of wording in the 14th amendment. So you yourself are probably fine. Your mom should probably talk to an immigration attorney regardless of who ends up president.

I know Ramaswamy's argued otherwise, as e.g. children of ambassadors don't count.

Depends on what the clause “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was publicly understood to mean.

It would be odd for it to literally just mean something like personal jurisdiction — that would be the case whenever someone was in the US (ie the clause is surplusage).

There is an argument it meant something differently (ie that the person was somehow legally connected to the US, which is different than an illegal alien or somehow who was just visiting the US).

It would be odd for it to literally just mean something like personal jurisdiction — that would be the case whenever someone was in the US (ie the clause is surplusage).

No, it could mean that there was no bar on the US refusing to treat expatriates as citizens. I agree that it's an unlikely meaning but it doesn't render the clause surplusage.

Usually the meaning is taken to be that they were subject to US jurisdiction at the time of birth (or naturalization I suppose, but I don't see how they could not be) -- so not children of diplomats or invading armies. But I don't know if that was the original meaning.

The case that "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" is about children of diplomats and invading armies - and in the US context also members of quasi-sovereign Indian tribes, who didn't get birthright citizenship until 1924 - is that those were the exceptions to birthright citizenship under English common law at the time of the founding. (Incidentally, the UK didn't abolish birthright citizenship until 1983)

How much should a host country suffer on behalf of outsiders before they can legitimately demand that they be left alone?

I see the term 'diaspora nationalism' thrown around a lot, where the immigrants are proud of who they are, where they come from, try to live through some of their homelands culture through cooking and music and such... And whilst there is a lot of examples of that in real life I don't feel it captures the whole of what's going on.

In my experience 'immigrants' adopt and invoke a sort of universalist ethos. Immigrantism, for a lack of a better term. The core of it is simple: So long as the immigrant is working hard and following the law, they should be allowed to stay in whatever country they are in.

It's hard to argue against this in practice, since it's a very emotionally confrontational thing to tell someone that they are not wanted despite those things. But at the same time we are seeing first world countries shift towards third world norms. All the hard work, all the faith in the old country and whatever else sentiment carried by immigrantism doesn't change this constant slide towards things becoming worse.

I feel like there needs to be some reciprocation of charity here. Maybe try tugging on your own heart strings as little The good first world folk let you in, now they want you out. Why should they feel obligated to empathize with mix status families with young children when, as things are going, the first world can't effectively have children of their own.

While I'm quite sympathetic to your position, it's harder to be sympathetic to your mother and other people like her. She knowingly and willingly broke the law of a country that was kind enough to let her in. She is, in a quite literal sense, a criminal. Ultimately, laws only work if they are enforced. All Trump is planning to do is actually enforce rules that most of the political class (claim to) agree with.

It's about time that the US got rid of birth right citizenship too. It's a bizarre custom which seems to only exist in the Americas for some reason. Like the right of a asylum, it's a gigantic moral hazard. If you want people to obey the laws of your country, you shouldn't reward them for breaking those laws.

While I'm grumbling, the disingenuous conflation of 'immigrants' and 'illegal immigrants' is also very frustrating. Conflating the two is like conflating renters with squatters or shoplifters with customers. Ditto for euphemisms like 'undocumented immigrants' (did they leave their visas at the hotel?) or 'irregular migrants' (A North Korean migrant is irregular, a Mexican who snuck is just a regular criminal).

It's a bizarre custom which seems to only exist in the Americas for some reason.

Do you mind justifying this statement more? Here's the standard defense for birthright citizenship: two kids who grew up in the same neighborhood and are equally connected to their surrounding community, equally adapted to the local culture, etc. should not be treated differently under the law just because of who their parents are. Not doing this is extremely inegalitarian---it's not about "rewarding" the parents, it's about not capriciously punishing the kids for something they have no responsibility for or control over.

Given all this, it might even be justified to claim that it's bizarre that it doesn't exist in other countries (particularly European ones) that pretend to buy into classical-liberal ideals. This is in fact my goto counterargument when the inevitable America-bashing discussions start with European or progressive colleagues.

two kids who grew up in the same neighborhood and are equally connected to their surrounding community

What does this have to do with foreigners getting on airplanes while pregnant in order to secure a US passport by technicality?

Not doing this is extremely inegalitarian

Life is inegalitarian, and that isn't going to be fixed any time soon. Make the case that it is bad on its own merits, or don't.

it's about not capriciously punishing the kids for something they have no responsibility for or control over.

Bad things happening to you need not be punishment.

And you don't care about the actual citizens being punished, who also have done nothing wrong and do not deserve to have their citizenship devalued as it has been.

Well as I said, it's a giant moral hazard. If you grant any child born on US soil citizenship, then you allow the parents to stay to look after the child, then you incentivise parents to come to your country illegally. You reward criminals instead of punishing them, which incentivises the crime. The appropriate thing for parents who give birth abroad to do is to go back to their home country, where all three members of the family have citizenship. That's what the rest of the world does and it works absolutely fine. Nobody thinks there's any wrong being done when foreign tourists take their newborn home rather than using them as a tool to stay in a country they are not allowed to be in.

Indeed, the justification you gave conveniently skips the decade or so when the parents could have returned to their home country. There is zero reason for a newborn to stay in a foreign country, even if he was born there. He's not losing any emotional ties or severing any relationships. Indeed, that justification only works if a country has de facto open borders and gives illegal immigrants all of the benefits of legal residence in spite of their crimes. And well, we don't need to speculate about what happens when a country does that.

A lot of things violate equality or hurt the kids other than just saying the kids can't be citizens. What if one kid has a car given to him by his parents, but another kids had parents who stole a car and gave it to him? Should we refuse to confiscate the car and return it to its owner on the grounds that the kid didn't commit the theft and taking it away makes the kids in the two families unequal? What if one set of parents is just ordinary criminals, should we refuse to send them to jail for bank robbery because doing so impacts the lfe of the innocent kid?

If you don't "capriciously punish" the kids, you create a moral hazard that encourages parents to illegally immigrate (or steal cars, or rob banks).

(@4bpp too) Values come in conflict a lot and you need to make trade offs. The cost of allowing theft for sake of children to be ok is much more than that of allowing birthright citizenship. The same holds for the massive wealth distribution equalizing inheritances would require (I think this is another related example people bring up a lot). In particular, the anchor baby problem has been and can still be mitigated in a much more morally acceptable way by tightening border security than by outright getting rid of birthright citizenship---if you make the moral hazard hard enough to actually take advantage of, it'll happen infrequently enough that the cost is an acceptable trade-off, I think for almost everyone's relative weightings of the values. (For full disclosure, I weight the values in way that, for example, much more dramatic redistribution of inheritances than we have today would be a good idea, but I'm trying to make sure this argument works even if you weight differently).

By the way, it's also important to emphasize that most people's morality is actually ok with some level of theft for the sake of children in extreme circumstances---Jean Valjean is the hero of the story after all.

Jean Valjean is the hero of the story after all.

I don't think this is quite what Les Miserables is doing. The book doesn't spend all that much time downplaying his crimes and so forth; rather, it presents him as, at least after some time in prison, a hardened criminal redeemed only by the mercy of the bishop, and who becomes afterward a great man. To be fair though, stealing bread there was to give maximal sympathy, so I don't know that I disagree with your overall point as to what you can draw from that, just, I don't think that his crime was minor is really very related to him being the hero. It's probably closer to a reflection on the legal system as a whole, and so, if anything, would reflect more on Javert than Valjean, even though Javert was, to the best of my recollection, entirely uninvolved.

It's a great book.

Something that may appeal to a few people on this forum is that Thomas Aquinas allowed for theft, or well, considered it not theft, in such extreme cases. This is not unique to him either; there are Protestant authors that say the same, as well as political philosophers like Locke.

There is a model of anchor babies that would see them as comparable to a hostage situation: the parent essentially says "let me stay here (too), or else this innocent child suffers". Do you also believe in a general moral obligation to yield to hostage takers if the hostage can't be saved otherwise, the argument that this encourages more hostage-taking notwithstanding?

and are equally connected to their surrounding community

Except they're not equally connected to the surrounding community, and cannot be, because one of those connections — perhaps the most important connection — is ties of blood, of kinship. This is something I'd say most people in history, from ancient Athens to modern Dubai, have understood well. "Nation" and "state" are not synonyms, and their conflation by many modern people reduces our grasp on the relevant concept spaces.

it's about not capriciously punishing the kids

I think you're smuggling in an assumption here: that the kids in question in some sense deserve or are entitled to citizenship, such that it constitutes a "punishment" for them to be deprived of it. Does a club "punish" everyone to whom it fails to grant membership?

Except that the US as a country has specifically rejected that blood and kinship ties are important since it's founding---I feel like I repeat this so much here but no one ever seems to remember "All men are created equal". This is what enlightenment, classical liberal, or whatever you call it values means! And yes, they are drastically different from any values anyone had before the 1700's---this is why the enlightenment was such a big deal and why we think of older civilizations as morally hopeless and barbaric. We definitely don't think of places like Dubai that are blatantly not onboard as reasonable.

It's also funny to get this reply when I've just had a bunch of discussions here about the prevalence of explicitly racialist values on the Motte. @Felagund, Let's see how much the peanut gallery supports this.

When the founders said that all men were created equal, what they were endorsing was an equality before the law, and a lack of hegemony. In particular, they were opposed to the deprivation of the traditional English rights from the American colonies, which they saw as antithetical to living freely, and were also opposed to titles and legal birthrights and so forth, supporting rather a republican form of government. If I remember rightly, they considered adding a prohibition on titles to the Constitution. (Yes, all this seems incompatible with slavery, but there's nothing forcing individuals to be consistent.)

So yes, I do think that Dubai and similar, where there is a large labor class with diminished rights would be contrary to American values, even if, given slavery, something more extreme than that already existed. (And even if I personally wouldn't be all that opposed to one existing, consensually of course, in the United States on economic grounds.) And so I do not think it would be American for there to be a class of permanent residents without other allegiance who are not citizens.

In practice, this would seem to mean that having a de facto class of people without birthright citizenship living out their lives in the country for generations would be contrary to American values. This seems to be what @atokenliberal6D_4 thinks removing birthright citizenship would be like.

At the same time, this vision does not seem to require that those with a more tenuous connection be granted the same affordances. So if lack of birthright citizenship were followed by immediate deportation, that doesn't seem to be obviously in conflict to me. An equality among men does not grant them a right to your sovereign territory, and as long as you are being consistent in not setting up a two-tier citizenship, this does not seem contrary to founding principles. I imagine this is what @Capital_Room would endorse.

But that's merely trying to spin out a philosophy from the declaration. The U.S. Constitution, following the abolition of slavery, acquired the 14th amendment, saying, among others,

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

This seems designed to, among other things, overturn the effects the infamous Dred Scott decision, which held that people of African descent could not be citizens (and which Lincoln, along with many others, thought was wrongly decided).

I imagine @Capital_Room would lean on the "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" clause, which, from looking online, was originally meant to be excluding foreign nationals and some Indians (cf. "Indians not taxed") from what is under discussion here.

My reading of this would seem to allow for broader exceptions to birthright citizenship than currently are in place. But I'll also note that, contra @Capital_Room this does not seem to be about blood or an ethnic Nation, as this was deliberately to bring in people (Blacks) who were, to that point, excluded from citizenship based on blood.

So, I suppose, I think both of you have points?

Now I want to read Dred Scott and Lincoln on these matters some time. That would be fun.

All men are created equal, not all men are created American.

Those other, non-Americans can go on being equal somewhere else.

I don't think most of the political class agree with every variation on retroactive enforcement, especially when it comes to children that grew up here.

And I think this can be earnestly true even in such cases where an individual believes that we should be stricter in enforcement prospectively.

retroactive enforcement

Sometimes it takes time for the criminal to be apprehended, but if the laws which the criminal is said to have broken, were already in force when the crime is said to have been committed, there is no "retroactivity".

What I mean is that the ruling mentioned appears to postdate the actions under question.

This is bait, new account and as others have noted, highly ignorant for being in a life changing problem.

That said, I'll take the moment to pitch my opinion: citizenship should be purchased with a large fine in cases of illegal aliens who have clean records, employment, and obvious means of support. Laws were broken, let them pay their literal debt to society.

Strong agreement. We in the U.S. should be willing to practically sell citizenships for a substantial sum... perhaps $50,000? Given a clean record and lack other risk factors, of course. We let a lot of money to into lawyers pockets when we could get roughly the same outcome but pocket the cash ourselves.

Taxing immigration in general (or an auction) would be a nice policy—it would incentivize preventing illegal immigration, make it easier to pitch for more legal immigration, and would raise revenue.

Edit: I don't know that a new account is actually a good signal of bait in this case, although it would be evidence in that direction.

Peterson vs Fuentes twitter drama

The entire story is shown in this thread. Someone is asking why something is 'like this', Fuentes predictably answers 'Jews', Peterson swoops in to condemn, and then the rest follows.

The AmericaFirst/Groyper movement seems to have finally found another 'gatekeeper' to poke. After Charlie Kirk rather expertly adjusted his rhetoric to fall outside the AF/G firing line.

To avoid doing another dissection of Peterson: he certainly seems to have been bitten by the Zionist bug. For all his posturing as a rational and reason minded clinical psychologist when talking to feminists about feminism and the difference between the sexes, the merits of individualism and focusing on immediate short term goals and family, he seems completely unhinged when it comes to semitism.

Bullies thrive on weakness, and whilst it might not be nice to push peoples buttons like this, I'm left wondering just why Peterson is such a rabid philosemite. The trolls can only do what you allow them to get away with, as Charlie Kirk demonstrated by defusing the avenues of attack. Peterson seems to be doing the opposite of that.

As a further question, is this part of the right wing sphere dying? I'm not sure how Peterson is doing. Last I heard he did a rather big media deal with Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire. Whilst the AF 'conference' or whatever it's called, didn't do so well.

  • -10

What did Charlie Kirk do?

Started using the term 'anti-white'.

He used to get 'invaded' a lot by AF/G, both online and in real life. He could hardly hold an event without the open question line being filled with AF/Gers asking about his stance on immigration, demographics and the relationship between Israel and the US. Most notably asking him over and over about the USS Liberty incident.

Charlie, to his or his handlers credit, changed his tune a bit. Becoming more aggressive against anti-white rhetoric. There's a layer of irony here, but there was definitely a change. But if there's lore here I'm missing I'd be happy for someone to correct the record on this. I'm not as tuned in to politics as I used to be.

After Charlie Kirk rather expertly adjusted his rhetoric to fall outside the AF/G firing line.

What did he do? I mean in general Trump is moderating so hard that he’s repudiating even the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, it’s clear he’s in another dimension to the whole AF wing.

Trump is moderating so hard that he’s repudiating even the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025

The impression I'd got from this article in Unherd was that Trump doesn't like Project 2025 because:

a) He's the big boss and nobody tells him what to do (in his self-conception). He's not interested in being some pencil-neck's sockpuppet.

b) He thinks that small-state conservatism is stupid and electorally unpopular.

How accurate is that? I don't really know much about the Heritage Foundation.

Trump didn't write it and hasn't read it. Reporters keep asking him questions about it and he doesn't like how those questions hijack his messaging strategy.

More or less, with a side of project 2025 being way overblown and not coordinated well enough with Trump.

Quick compilations:

It's amazing watching these figures collapse into a deluded schizo-philosemitism. These figures used to represent the "Right of mainstream" perspective but that is falling apart as this nauseating Israel worship gets exposed to increasingly skeptical audiences.

As a further question, is this part of the right wing sphere dying?

What do you mean by "this part of the right wing sphere" here? I wouldn't consider Peterson and Fuentes part of the same sphere. I also wouldn't consider the AF 'conference' being canceled an indicator of that sphere dying. Engagement on X is probably the biggest indicator for the growth of those spheres. And Fuentes was able to ratio the Petersons handedly. And yes, ratios matter- they are the memetic fitness signal among the genetic algo of X discourse.

There also appears to be an enormous proliferation of DR engagement on X. It's quaint to imagine not too long ago where the most "radical" decile of the right wing youth would be listening to Glenn Beck or something. But now they are on X signal-boosting DR talking points and engaging in WWII revisionism. The engagement is huge and appears to be growing.

Another area in which X discourse seems to be changing is Holocaust Revisionism. I am increasingly seeing posts alluding to or outright endorsing Holocaust Revisionism and WWII Revisionism with high engagement and high numbers of likes. The ranks of "Holocaust Deniers" are certainly bigger than they have ever been before and appear to be growing judging by the number of accounts I am seeing endorse it on X. The taboo is collapsing, and it is largely because of the actions of Israel and the collapse of the credibility of the Jordan Petersons and Glenn Becks unable to corral young right-wingers any longer.

"Western civilization would die without Israel"

It's takes like this that are utterly baffling to me. And I say this as someone who's very pro-Israel and who generally likes Jews (even though I generally hate their political leanings). Like Nikki Haley saying Israel doesn't need us, we need them, it just strikes me as a completely delusional way of looking at the relationship between Israel and the West. I'm more than happy to sell Israel all of the weapons they need to glass Gaza or replenish the Iron Dome or bomb Iran or whatever tickles their fancy, but I'm not happy to be the one paying for them via our foreign aid. Israel has clearly been very dependent on us for both arms and the funding to buy those arms, and it's completely insulting when people like Shapiro and Haley suggest that we need them and not the other way around.

Fuentes is charismatic but not very intellectual. I'd guess that he's been embarrarassed in public a few times by being unable to compete with Ashkenazi verbal ability.

Also there are a bunch of Middle Eastern groups eager to fund anti-Isreali speakers on the right, so I imagine that plays a part.

Whenever left wing activists hear someone on the right complain about powerful rich New Yorkers, they immediately respond with "Oh, so you hate Jews?!?" I think that Fuentes has embraced that to a certain degree.

If you come from a working class background and have a non-HBD world model, it's easy to assume that it's Jews who are making decisions that negatively affect your community. If he was a bit more worldly he'd realize that upperclass gentile blue tribers also hate him.

He's been attacking Steve Sailer recently because a bunch of the more intellectual groypers read "Noticing" and were discussing it's contents. Previously Sailer's work was scattered over decades of posts on different sites, it was suddenly more accessable.

Fuentes couldn't really engage so he started attacking Sailer as a secret Jew. Sailer is adopted and despite his interest in genetics has never done a DNA test, I think he feels it would weaken his connection to his adoptive parents.

But fundamentally Fuentes is reactive not reflective. He caters to lazy anti-intellectuals.

The default low-IQ tradcath take(which Fuentes either is or pretends to be, even if he’s more of a racist than anything else) is some kind of antisemitic conspiracy theory. Fuentes being not that intellectual…

What is going

On with Peterson’s

Spacing, capitalization, and punctuation

In that thread

Been reading e e cummings?

It makes a little sense if you try to do a Jordan Peterson impression when you read it.

I think it's because JP spend a lot of time thinking about evil, and he seems to have learned about the human capacity for evil by studying WW2 and concentration camps. He knows how easy it is for somebody to fall into an ideology like nazism and rationalize ones hatred for an outgroup, and he's quite determined to keep this from happening (again, this is just my view). Sadly, because he feels so strongly about this, he seems unable to pick up on the patterns relating semitism and wokeness.

Ethos is downstream from Mythos, it really is as simple as the boomer-internalization of the gas chamber mythos.

What's the party line today from your type, that the gas chambers weren't real, or that they were somehow exaggerated?

The Revisionist position is the same it has always been: the story that millions of people were tricked into entering gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower was wartime atrocity propaganda. This propaganda originally centered around the Western camps until those claims were proven false after Allied investigation.

The mainstream position admits the gas chamber story in the Western camps was a hoax, created by false testimony and confessions, but then they claim that the "extermination camps" conquered by the Soviet Union were all totally real. Revisionist scholars have spent decades proving that the gas chamber story was likewise a wartime atrocity propaganda hoax in the currently alleged Eastern 'extermination camps' like Majdanek.

So the Revisionist position is simply that the gas chamber story is as real in the Eastern camps as it was in the Western camps. The mainstream position is that it was a hoax in the West but totally real in the camps "investigated" by the Soviet Union, where they fabricated evidence and denied access to Western observers.

The mainstream position is that it was a hoax in the West

[citation needed] that it is mainstream position

The mainstream narrative says that the six alleged death camps were in the east. See: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/concentration-camps-1942-45-maps

Notice how all the camps in the west were not death camps. So in the context of the mainstream narrative, how do you explain contemporary newspaper articles from the time confidently claiming otherwise? Obviously they are understood to be propaganda. In other words, a “hoax.”

Can you link mainstream position confirming that camps on West were described as extermination camps?

(It was claimed upthread that "western extermination camps were hoaxes" and want to see confirmation of that)

(again: it would not make big difference to me whether they gassed people to death or starved them to death in Auschwitz, but I obviously prefer to have an accurate info)

At Nuremberg, the series of Eastern camps allegedly responsible for the majority of gassing victims were barely mentioned at all in the trials. What was filmed and submitted as evidence were allegations that the camps liberated by the Western allies were the centers of extermination. Here is the Nuremberg Concentration camp footage which was submitted as evidence and shown in the trial courtroom supposedly showing a gas chamber at the Dachau concentration camp, here's a short transcript of that part:

Hanging in orderly rows were the clothes of prisoners who had been suffocated in a lethal gas chamber. They had been persuaded to remove their clothing under the pretext of taking a shower for which towels and soap were provided...

Even mainstream historians admit today that the clothing hanging outside the delousing chambers was not from prisoners executed in gas chambers, but that these were real delousing chambers use to disinfest clothing to prevent epidemic typhus. Dachau was one of the camps mentioned in the document I cited earlier, admitting that this claim was a hoax created by false testimonies and confessions:

The Allied Commissions of Inquiry have so far established that no people were killed by poison gas in the following concentration camps: Bergen Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, ...

In those cases, it has been possible to prove that the confessions had been extracted by tortures and the testimonies were false.

This must be taken into account when conducting investigations and interrogations with respect to war crimes.

The result of this investigation should be brought to the cognizance of former concentration camp inmates, who at the time of the hearings testified on the murder of people, especially Jews, with poison gas in those concentration camps. Should they insist on their statements, charges are to be brought against them for making false statements.

The Mainstream position admits that this film submitted as evidence at the Nuremberg trial was a lie. But it insists that the identical claims made in the camps conquered by the Soviet Union, the camps where the Allied Commissions of Inquiry were not allowed access to investigate, are the only camps where those claims were actually real.

Revisionists though have shown that likewise these Eastern camps which are currently claimed to have been extermination camps are the exact same story as the Western camps: real delousing facilities and shower rooms which were fabricated as gas chambers by Soviet propagandists, tortured confessions, and false testimonies.

Fun fact, if you review the Wikipedia page of the Nazi Concentration Camps film submitted as evidence and screened at the Nuremberg trial, the "Contents" section omits Dachau entirely and makes no description of the falsely alleged gas chamber described in this film. This is part and parcel for Wikipedia treatment of the Holocaust topic as a whole.

It’s funny that JP’s own hero Solzhenitsyn, who he quotes and praises endlessly, wrote a ~1000 page tome on the influence of Jews in Soviet Russia, criticizing Jewish Russians as well as gentile Russians. Yet Peterson is unable to discuss the topic as it applies today. As if Judaism today is somehow different from the Judaism in 1900 or 900. I think this is just part of his boomer programming. Remember that every boomer westerner has been circumcised with the holocaust narrative: consciously traumatized at a young age in a way that reduces their sensitivity while inculcating a definitive story about Jewish suffering and redemption. Not far from the original circumcision-exodus narrative, just applied to gentiles.

is this part of the right wing sphere dying

Nick Fuentes continues to grow in popularity, he is literally ratioing the Petersons and getting shoutouts from the Tate brothers. Fuentes-adjacent Sam Hyde is sitting down with zoomer influencer Matan and KillTony regulars, and also has a bizarre inroad to underground rap through Joeyy. They sorely lack IRL infrastructure but their influence is expanding I’d say.

As if Judaism today is somehow different from the Judaism in 1900 or 900.

But it is. No way in heck would any Jewish community in either 1900 or 900 have outmarriage rates nearing 50%, for one.

Antisemitism is rising in popularity among younger people in the west. I don’t think that Fuentes is the story- he’s too much of a dweeb- but it’s definitely a thing.

Remember that every boomer westerner has been circumcised with the holocaust narrative: consciously traumatized at a young age in a way that reduces their sensitivity while inculcating a definitive story about Jewish suffering and redemption.

I like this metaphor even if I disagree with lots of the specifics. The overall thrust is definitely true in the sense of boomers thinking Jews are special perpetual victims.

The west can’t solve antisemitism because the west isn’t a fact based society. Maybe no societies are fact-based. The left can’t deal with antisemitism because oppressed-oppressor ideology makes the Jews look like the bad guy because they’re the most successful society on earth. The right is probably more aware of the reasons but they still can’t have the honest debate on the Jewish question.

Is the reason “evolution doesn’t stop at the neck”?

they’re the most successful society on earth.

The Jews are America now?

Most successful group in the most successful country

We probably lose WW2 if the germans just wanted to dominate Europe and were pro-Jewish. They get the bomb when we did and you just have to guess their intellect is enough to delay D-Day.

That quite clearly didn't work for them the first time they tried it, although I suppose the treaty of Versailles was a better deal than the end of WWII.

Truth there. Taking France so easily completely tilted it. I guess that was the difference. Even Oppenheimer was a NY born German Jew. It’s not hard to imagine the scenario if they got the nuke first if they somehow were friends.

We probably lose WW2 if the germans just wanted to dominate Europe and were pro-Jewish.

Who is "we"? Maybe we never get into a war with Herr Schicklgruber; he nukes Moscow and unites Europe under a 6-armed swastika, and the US just deals.

Point being that a WWII Germany that's pro-Jewish is so different that you can't really assume anything will be the same.

To avoid doing another dissection of Peterson: he certainly seems to have been bitten by the Zionist bug. For all his posturing as a rational and reason minded clinical psychologist when talking to feminists about feminism and the difference between the sexes, the merits of individualism and focusing on immediate short term goals and family, he seems completely unhinged when it comes to semitism.

He hates Fuentes for the same reason he hates the feminists.

His reaction to complaints from UofT pro-trans progressives was to liken them to Maoists. He accuses Trudeau of having a "murderous equity doctrine" for defending gender equity. Anything that blames/focuses on groups earns his ire as the revival of some murderous 20th century movement.

If feminists are like murderous communists and pro-trans activists are Maoists, how should he feel about anti-Semites?

There are absolutely philosemites nakedly driven by shared enemies (Douglas Murray comes to mind) but Peterson has always leaned towards unhinged rhetoric about people if he feels they resemble certain baddies. We don't need an explanation. What would be strange is him having any patience for Fuentes at all.

  1. Peterson should know by now that he's really bad and unpersuasive at X-posting. Every time he gets in an argument there he comes across much worse than when he's talking.

  2. As is often then case with X threads, it's kind of hard for me to evaluate what's going on. It's like everyone is sitting around drinking absinthe and yelling at each other (in free verse? And drawing angry pictures?), I walk into the room for 5 minutes, and then walk right back out again thinking that maybe I prefer social contexts with babies and tea after all. Except that it's conducted in a public online venue, which is weird and probably not a good idea.

You know, I forget the interview I was watching. Maybe it was Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith. They stumbled onto the topic of Worlds War II history, and how "infected" it is. Which is to say, you can question the facts, the narrative, the scholarship, the normie understanding of virtually any other historical event. "Well actshually..." to your hearts content. "Just asking questions..." all you want. But you do that with World War II and people lose their god damned minds, as though you were poking an infected wound.

Now in the interview, they mostly take this framing, and talk about how WW2 was the dawn of the American Empire, and all the stories we tell ourselves about how America is a force for good in the world. This despite losing virtually every engagement we've fought since, not achieving any publicly stated foreign policy goals through said conflicts, and spending massive amounts of blood and treasure doing so. And it all goes back to the story we aren't allowed to question at all about how we were the good guys in World War II.

Now they don't go down this rabbit hole, but I will. Wrapped up in our unquestioning moral superiority that gives us the right to intervene anywhere in the world we want, is that we stopped the holocaust. And so philosemitism is baked into that story that is holy to our civic religion. Jews are our chosen people, and protecting them gives us the moral standing we need to bomb brown people for any reason what so ever.

This is an example for how X discourse influences the Tucker Carlson's and creates a feedback loop. Carlson will wade further into WWII Revisionism as it continues to gain ground on X. These twitter Spats actually matter.

This despite losing virtually every engagement we've fought since...

When did this idea become so popular? Korea was a stalemate that has sharply bettered the lives of many people in the long run. The US won in Grenada, in Panama, in Kuwait, in Haiti, and so on. Maybe the results suck anyway or maybe these are just too lightweight of opponents to be treated as serious, but the United States does win military conflicts. Iraq was a stupid idea, but Saddam Hussein is emphatically dead. Muammar Gaddafi doesn't think he kicked the Americans out of Libya, notably because we came, we saw, he died.

When did this idea become so popular? [...] Maybe the results suck anyway

When figuring out what someone is trying to say in a compound sentence, it helps to read the part after the comma

not achieving any publicly stated foreign policy goals through said conflicts, and spending massive amounts of blood and treasure doing so.

Yes, you have correctly restated my point that even when we "win" on the field and have a great big "Mission Accomplished" celebration, we are worse off for it.

Perhaps you didn't intend to use "and" to join those clauses, but there it is, clear as day. Many of these conflicts were won militarily. In fact, many of them even achieved the publicly stated foreign policy goals.

I suspect that in two to twenty years we will have retroactively lost the Korean War.

Can you explain?

In other words, I think North Korea will probably successfully invade South Korea and the peninsula will be united under the hammer and sickle. If that happens, it will be difficult to look back at the 1950 Korean War and call it a victory, even if it really was a mostly successful military operation at the time. A similar thing happened with the first Gulf War, which is now much less rosy in the American memory after the 2004 Iraq war and the current state of Iraq now.

I think North Korea will probably successfully invade South Korea and the peninsula will be united under the hammer and sickle.

That is certainly a bold prediction. I don't see it going quite so well for the Norks. Say whatever you will about the US military's ability to deal with insurgent groups, if you give them a stand-up fight against an organized state military it'll be Christmas at the Pentagon. Generals who cut their teeth as butter bars in Desert Storm will weep tears of pure joy.

I suspect that any scenario in which Kim goes for it will involve the US military being tied down elsewhere.

The US Military is highly effective. The US State Department is completely unable to do any of the "establishing a peaceful liberal democracy" tasks that it thinks it's capable of.

But the State Department is also where people who study international policy dream of working, so they push it's failures back onto the military.

That sentence also stuck out to me as very strange. I generally think of it the opposite way. The US has generally won every specific engagement its been in. They seem very good at winning battles. The rare times they do lose become rallying cries for the improvement and betterment of the armed forces.

The US achieving its foreign policy goals seems heavily related to just how realistic and specific those goals are. If the goal is something specific like "kill that guy, or destroy that small country's military" then they do well. If the goal is more nebulous like "spread democracy, or prevent the spread of communism" then they seem to consistently fail.

Did Vietnam result in meaningful improvement? Judging by Iraq our counterinsurgency skills were still lacking.

South Vietnam didn't fall to insurgency. Both the Ngo family and the later variants of kleptocracy were able to handle the VC. South Vietnam fell to North Vietnamese tanks, and the US military is quite good at conventional warfare- both in 1975 and today. In actual fact, US involvement did prolong the life of the South Vietnamese kleptocratic minority-rule dictatorship(which is what it was) meaningfully- the ARVN couldn't have stopped the Tet offensive on its own, and required US air support and political advisement to stop the 1972 North Vietnamese offensive.

I thought the general goal with Vietnam was to prevent the spread of communism. They failed at that.

Vietnam seems like it's in a good place nowadays, my guess would that the Vietnam war made that happy ending take longer.

I'm left wondering just why Peterson is such a rabid philosemite.

I understand it to be similar to my own embrace of Zionism - I just despise Israel's enemies. If Israel's enemies weren't also the enemies of the West and free civilization more broadly, I would apply a great deal more skepticism to things like their colonization of the West Bank. As it is, I just need to pick sides and the choice is very easy. Notably, this extends to the spillover of the causes in the United States, where enthusiastic Zionists are no real problem for me, but the Hamas enthusiasts are spectacularly annoying leftists.

the enemies of the West and free civilization

The West and free civilization seem to have led inexorably to everything you now decry. Are you sure this makes sense?

Are you sure you're thinking of me? I am quite literally proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free. Disagreeing with my fellow Americans about whether Chevron deference or Skidmore deference is the appropriate degree of license for administrative agency discretion does not shift me to wishing I had more Islamic theocracy in my life.

If Israel's enemies weren't also the enemies of the West and free civilization more broadly

They aren't. Palestinians are fighting to stay where their great grandparents lived. Assad fights to keep Syria together. Israel fights to cause a mega-refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep. AIPAC and ADL want to open the borders to the west and ban right wingers off twitter. Israel financed jihadists in Syria while bombing the country. Meanwhile, israAID was shipping migrants to Europe.

We heard similar arguments for invading Iraq. The result was a giant refugee crisis, a spike in islamism and a disaster for local christians. Israel is not the anti-islam option, it is the pro Islam option.

Palestinians are fighting to stay where their great grandparents lived.

Must be a really great place. I can't imagine anyone fighting that long to stay in Jersey City or Bayonne, NJ.

I'm left wondering just why Peterson is such a rabid philosemite.

Because your standards for being a philosemite are absurdly low such that everyone seems to be defending the Jews too much.

This is how I know the Trump assassination attempt was done by a rando. He tried going for a headshot. You never go for a headshot, you aim for center mass. People who think a headshot is what you do get their ideas from games and tv shows.

This article makes the same argument.

It's always funny to see these blogs where some random nobody (or at least, nobody with any credentials relevant to the case) gives a detailed argument in support of a definite claim that turns out to be entirely and utterly wrong.

Yeah true.

photos and eye witness describe it it being a riffle

it instantly killed one of the audience members after being hit to the head

snipers regularly aim for the head ,as the secret service had done for example. they didn't shoot his torso

Shooting from an elevation into a crowd, head hits are more likely.

Snipers aim for whatever's showing.

To be fair, his head was probably all they had to shoot at if he we peeking over the peak of the roof from prone.

Thank you for using the right word. I see everyone using "peaking" nowadays and it's driving me crazy.

"Sniper peaking on the roof" like damn, he really enjoys his work

trump was wearing body armor . Given that Trump had medical staff within feet, the killer's only choice was a headshot which would have been instantly lethal. even aiming for the upper torso could have been survivable with armor and rapid medical attendance.

Trump wasn't wearing some fancy battlefield armor with ceramic plates. Meaning any rifle round apart from (maybe) hollow point small rifle ones would have gone right through.

Also, he was being shot from the side, which is a direction where soldier armor doesn't have ceramic plates so rifle rounds are lethal.

Really, had the shooter used a better gun, practiced more and went for center of mass, he could have killed him easily.

Odds are cca 50% that a torso hit with a .30 rifle kills a person. And he's a spring chicken only when compared to Biden.

Odds are 50% that the shot would have splattered Trump's brains. And it's not a non-zero probability the body shot would have missed as well.

Apparently the shooter missed because Trump turned his head at the last second pointing at the poster that was there..

The reason that you shoot for COM is not that it's a bigger target, it's that heads bob around a lot and centre-of-mass does not. (as anyone who's done defensive line in hockey, soccer, or football knows perfectly well)

Trump's (20"x20" or so) torso is surely not a killshot -- but the 10-12 inches around his heart definitely is, .223/.308/doesn't matter. This is kind of a textbook case against headshot efficacy -- Trump literally moved his head just after the guy decided to pull the trigger; if he'd shot for the heart with the same accuracy we would be living in a very different world today.

but the 10-12 inches around his heart definitely is,

Theodore Roosevelt not only survived being shot at torso, but even continued his speech for 1.5 hours after being shot.

.223/.308/doesn't matter.

of course it does, size of bullet and whether it rotates on impact makes different size hole, .22LR might fail to reach heart vs. vest + rib at that distance.

Here's what cheap-ass .223 ammo does to soft armour:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=T71ku4Fjn3w&t=479

Note all the action in the ballistic gel -- this is not something you want going on anywhere in your torso, and absolutely makes you D.R.T. if your heart is in that area.

Yes, .22LR or whatever bullshit pocket pistol cartridge was used on Roosevelt are quite a different thing -- these are literally an OOM less powerful than centrefire rifle rounds, even .223.

Sorry if ".223/.308/doesn't matter" was unclear -- the 'doesn't matter' refers to centrefire rifle rounds; any of them (with very limited exceptions; .22 Hornet maybe?) will go through soft armour like butter at this range, and retain enough energy to create a hydrostatic wave which will shred/explode one's heart given a true COM hit. Other parts of the torso (eg. lung shot) might be survivable with prompt medical heroics, but would still have been a pretty bad time for Trump.

I don't think you need to penetrate body armor at all. You just need to pump enough kinetic energy into the heart area. And at trumps age chances of it being fatal are not low.

Fat standing between unpenetrated vest and heart area would distribute kinetic energy pretty much

I'm seeing online (so let's take a grain of salt) that this shot was from 130 or more yards away. Maybe this is just how good this guy's aim is. Bullets flying wide. We don't know where he was aiming.

I think after seeing he missed his initial shot realized he only had a few seconds left, so unloaded as fast as he could

How do you know he wasn't aiming for center mass?

You don't know whether he went for a headshot.

It's a common joke really. "1: nice shot, you got him right in the head." "2: I wasn't aiming for the head"

You don't aim for center of mass if your target is wearing body armor. I don't know if Trump was (probably not, it was too damned hot), but the shooter had to consider that possibility.

Can't rule out that line of thinking, but no normal soft ballistic vest will protect against rifle rounds. They're certainly not strapping up presidents with ceramic plate armor these days, right?

Correct. A soft vest wouldn't stop rifle rounds.

Not at short range, but this was a pretty far shot. The bullet would be going much slower than muzzle velocity when it hits.

556 at around 100 yards easily goes through soft armor. Velocity should be at or a bit lower than 3000 ft/s. Let's call it high 2000s ft/s depending on barrel length and ammo.

this was a pretty far shot.

This isn't a far shot for the cartridge (5.56 is effective out to 800ish yards, but 450 is about the practical maximum if you're not fiddling with the sights) and it'll still defeat soft armor at those distances provided you're using the appropriate ammunition. It won't defeat the cutting edge of body armor, though (the newest-gen UHMWPE stuff).

It put a hole in a hydraulic lift, so I suspect it would easily penetrate a soft vest (unless that shot was really lucky and actually hit a hose). But I think a sniper wouldn't want to count on that with a .223.

I would assume hydraulic hoses are significantly easier to penetrate than any armor, soft or otherwise.

They're pretty hefty actually, I wouldn't be so sure -- hydraulic fluid is at like 5000+ psi, there's several layers of steel/rubber/fibre in there.

Anyways unless he was using some frangible coyote round .223 absolutely does penetrate soft armour at 150 yards, this is not even a question.

agree. this center of mass rule is for police shooting at ordinary civilians who do not have body armor

Basically. There's various youtubes and articles out there about the difference between military (1000 yards/meters+ center of mass) and police snipers (<200 yards/meters head shots) and what they aim for. Assassins are in the later category. Today's events is a case in point. Look how close the shooter got.

FWIW, I regard the whole idea of assassination by medium-long range gunshot at a well-known public event to indicate a crazy rando. Someone seriously experienced or some sort of elite intelligence operative would work on acquiring and leveraging specialized intelligence for a much simpler and more certain kill, and good chance of the assassin surviving and escaping.

Especially for someone with a little less protection like a former president and candidate, it's likely that at least a dozen times a week he's just walking around in some random public place with a bunch of random people nearby who haven't been checked for weapons or inclination, with a few USSS bodyguards around. This is mostly reasonably safe since it's highly secret and hard to predict exactly when those encounters will be. If you were super-elite, you'd try to learn about some of these ahead of time, choose one where you're reasonably likely to be able to get away clean after you shoot, and take the shot. Get away clean, and it's a super-mysterious event. It'd be hard to prove afterwards whether it was a crazy rando that just got lucky or really was some kind of elite operative acting on masterfully-obtained evidence.

Depending on the connections, certain randos can roll their own shaped charge.

Randoms being the same as the Stasi, now.

I'd note that that incident wasn't exactly randos - it was the work of Red Army Faction, which was backed by the KGB and likely receiving training and materials from them. I don't think any randos are going to be constructing a precisely timed shaped charge IED to take out a target in an armored car.

It's possible to get away with murdering a high-ranking official even with a sloppier and more opportunistic approach; just have a clean record to avoid being identified by your DNA, wait until a reasonable opportunity presents itself and then take the shot. Sweden's Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated more or less this way in the Eighties and the killer still hasn't been conclusively found, though one Christer Pettersson was put on trial (but acquitted in the Court of Appeals) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Olof_Palme

The real give-away of a nutjob amateur is indeed choosing a time, place and method of execution which only guarantees one casualty: that of the gunman.

It could "make sense" if your goal was not necessarily just to shoot him, but to explode his head on national television so the Internet could be flooded with 4k celebratory videos.

Sure, we wouldn't think of that as a rational calculation compared to aiming for center of mass, but I'd go out on a limb and suggest that people shooting at Presidents are not gruff sober Operators concerned with eliminating the target and nothing else.

There's nothing inherently stupid about going for a headshot. It's obviously a high risk, high reward strategy relative to center mass, but there is no guarantee of a death with a center mass shot and the medical care a President would receive. We don't know the caliber of rifle being fired, but if speculation that it was a small caliber is accurate then going for a body shot would risk failing to even defeat light body armor.

The reason I would tend to think the competence level wasn't particularly high is the apparent choice of weapon. As near as I can tell, he didn't have any sort of optics. While that distance is absolutely a makeable shot with an AR platform rifle with iron sights, it's a hell of a lot more assured with a simple hunting rifle and good glass.

It is the thoracic triangle from what I read. Shooting him from beneath the chest would not have been lethal given rapid care . He was wearing armor

Also wouldn't the principal have body armor of some sort on?

Exactly, they watch too much TV instead of looking at the actual data. The reason assassinations like Kennedy and Lincoln were unsuccessful were because the assassin went for the head, whereas in successful attempts like Roosevelt and Reagan, they aimed for the body.

Too early for irony, only one cup of coffee in this a.m.

Ah yes, point blank and multiple shooters. Really, it's all the same thing.

Multiple shooters?

Referring to Kennedy. I don’t know if I like the grassy knoll theory, but several of the alternatives still have a second shooter (including my personal favorite, accidental discharge by adjacent Secret Service officer).

Mary Todd double-tapped Abe while Booth was distracting everyone by jumping on stage.

and shouting "sick simping trannies"?

I am inclined to believe that a modern combat rifle round would have gone straight through Roosevelt, assuming he were not equipped with tougher armor than his speech and glasses case.

why? late 19-20th early century rifles (e.g. Mosin) used more powerful cartridges than later assault rifles ("intermediate cartridge")

Roosevelt was shot with a .38 Special, which is like 250J when shot from a short barrel, almost half the energy of a 9mm Luger cartridge, another handgun round, or about the same energy as a high-powered .22 LR cartridge.

You are right that any rifle round would've gone straight through Roosevelt, though.

I thought it was a .32-20. basically the same really

He's just comparing the 32-20 black powder carbine/pistol round with a modern smokeless rifle cartridge, which is <300 joules to 1800 joules.
(I know Roosevelt wasn't shot with a blackpowder version, but the original loading still limited chamber pressures, and the non-expanding semi-wadcutter bullet is much less lethal than modern hollow points, let alone engineered-fragmentation rifle bullets)

before the advent of modern medical care and decent body armor , aiming for the torso would have been better . infection would have been lethal if initial bleeding/trauma wasn't

From what I’m seeing a direct torso hit only had a 62% death rate in the civil war era. If you have a better than 62% odds of hitting their head, you would have been better off aiming for the head. Doubly so if the person is particularly healthy and hardy, given it was usually days or weeks till they actually died, and those with robust immune systems had much better odds.

On the other hand Trump is in his late 70's and if the objective was 'Trump can't be President' that'd likely be accomplished by even moderately wounding him considering recovery timelines at his age and needing to campaign.

From 1/6 one thing we have never been given any information on is the alleged pipe bomber. Zero. Nada. The only planned terrorist activities on that date.

I have no idea what happened here. Was it the CIA. A lone wolf Democrat activist trying to paint maga as terrorists? Some smart maga extremists crazy enough to do the strategy but smart enough to do it right?

person of interest https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-identified-person-interest-capitol-pipe-bomb-case-jan-10-2021

Conspiracies do hide in plain site. Eipstein being a pedophile and getting a sweet deal was well known. Hunter Biden laptop to a lesser extent.

The left also hasn’t tried to hammer the right on the issue of a pipe bomber being there. And the left often tried to play up things that weren’t done/known like Trumps covid disinfectant drink bleach thing, Ivermectin as dewormer, or the fine people hoax. Maybe it’s not enough of an edge case to get people to fight over it or the powers that be knew not to publicize it because if people looked into it more it would be bad.

Edit: I guess you could argue Russia/State Actor did it. Saw that America had gone crazy. And wanted to escalate. Could have their Michael Westen whose good enough to do it right without being caught.

I think it’s worth pointing out that pipe bombs were placed outside the nrc as well. Which makes this whole effort to assert that it was some sort of false flag operation seem ridiculous https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/seeking-info/suspected-pipe-bombs-in-washington-dc

I don't follow. Why is the presence of a second pipe bomb evidence against, rather than evidence for, or irrelevant evidence?

I think his take is wrong.

It can be argued it was a maga because the GOP didn’t properly fight for him etc. I don’t believe both getting pipe bombs tells you anything.

"can be argued" is a poor standard here.

The point is that if this was a false flag operation to make the right look bad, it would have been more effective had there only been a DNC bomb.

At the very least it's off narrative, although it's in somewhat of a subtle way. The media and "deep state" don't like to publish things that make people get ideas. The idea that someone could do this and get away? Big no no. Emphasizing all these stupid Trump supporters who were stupid and got stopped by the majesty of the security state? Big yes yes.

So they probably don't want others to remember this and get ideas. Which is also kinda fair?

the cellphone data from one provider that law enforcement usually has access to was also corrupted. but don't worry it was not on purpose and we don't want any conspiracy theories.

We did a complete geofence. We have complete data. Not complete, because there's some data that was corrupted by one of the providers, not purposely by them, right. It just – unusual circumstance that we have corrupt data from one of the providers. I'm not sure – I can't remember right now which one. But for that day, which is awful because we don't have that information to search. So could it have been that provider? Yeah, with our luck, you know, with this investigation it probably was, right. So maybe if we did have that – that data wasn't corrupted – and it wasn't purposely corrupted. I don't want any conspiracy theories, right. To my knowledge, it wasn't corrupted, you know, but that could have been good information that we don't have, right. So that is painful for us to not to have that. So we looked at everything.

https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/republicans-release-new-information-january-6-pipe-bomb-investigation

though, maybe these warrants that the government is using are unconstitutional. i guess in this case maybe if the location and time were precise then it is kind of similar to accessing CCTV information.

I expect anything they get out of a telecom is fine by the Third Party Doctrine.

Note that I at all support that doctrine, I would probably pare it back to say that anything an individual shares/discloses to a third party with the recognized and reasonable expectation that the party would not further disseminate it is protected by the Fourth Amendment. That language is stolen directly from Katz vs US.

Alas, that ain't the law today.

99.99% an op IMO. DC is the most recorded place in America. You don’t enter or leave it without being recorded. The full weight of intel might would be on finding the planter. It would be a trivial project for deep state to determine the person’s vehicle, the direction of the vehicle, how they obtained the vehicle. I do not believe that a planter could have the sophistication to steal a car, sufficiently hide his appearance while driving, hide the car (dna / prints) somewhere our of sight of video recording and vehicle photographs (no highway) where a different vehicle is waiting. Doing this on a day in which security would be increased makes no sense.

This is as suspicious as the Seth Rich murder, which for some reason has been memoryholed from my own memory — didn’t they find his probable Reddit account pointing to his leak or something?

It could still be a Russian op, or something. It doesn't necessarily have to be CIA. Although I guess if it was a foreign intelligence operation I would expect the FBI to accuse someone of it.

Do you realize what that would mean?

If the pipe bomb was an OP assuming CIA. Besides the huge abuse of power etc. What were they covering up? You start going down a path that gets very crazy.

The mildest version would be Biden legitimately won the election but the CIA wanted to permanently ruin Trumps political future.

Technically, the mildest version would be some variant of the Curtis Culwell Center attack. If the malefactors in that case hadn't gotten shot red-handed on-site in a way that shut down the center of a small city, they'd have been incredibly embarrassing for the feds to pursue in court: encouraged toward attacks and their specific target by a federal undercover agent, armed with a Fast and Furious gun, and literally tailed by FBI agents who were apparently dressed up like Team America extras but did not provide aid to those under attack.

We don't, tautologically, know of any situations where this sort of embarrassing attack happened and the feds just shrugged their shoulders about it (... probably), and I'd like to think that 'found the pipe bomber' would outweigh the 'took an embarrassing and hard-to-solve case' bit, but it's at least plausible that they exist.

That said, I think the null hypothesis is still more plausible than most people think. DC police and surveillance just aren't that good, and while opsec is harder than a lot of people think, sometimes even mediocre opsec won't necessarily drop a case into your lap. There are some details that leave me suspicious enough that the more dire options aren't implausible, but follow enough crime investigations and you do occasionally see people caught on HD video with no masks, who drove past a couple LPRs in a bright painted weird car, and who left ammo cases at the scene, and months later no one can find or ID the fuckers.

For the 16th Street Baptist Church scenario that would seem to strongly point towards an antifa or otherwise identifiable leftist group as the perpetrator. That would be a reason the FBI would bury evidence on who did it.

Since after 1/6 Trump was a very bad man and the primary target you would not want it to come out that on 1/6 day there was also a leftist trying to do a frame job on Maga as very bad people by planting some pipe bombs. That would lead to a mixed narrative that gets Trump off. If it was a Maga guy who did it then they would use it to hang Trump.

Can we be sure he brought a vehicle into DC rather than walking the last 10 km or so (possible if you're determined enough, and pipe bombers are usually pretty determined)? Can we even be sure he doesn't just live in DC?

Even assuming that DC is so well recorded that it is almost impossible to not notice, it doesn't need to outright be an op. It can simply be someone inconvenient for whatever story the CIA wants to push. Which in this case would probably mean somebody who is openly and obviously anti-trump. But again, that would just be damning in a different way.

Is a dollar on sale for 40ish cents? Talk me out of maxing out PredictIt contracts relating to Joe Biden, if you would please.

The numbers are super volatile, but right now, PI thinks Joe is 60c for becoming the Dem nominee, so "no" costs 40c. Now, this likely pays out upon the formal nomination at the convention, the final day of which is 45 days away, as the rules clarify that the replacement of the nominee prior to election day has no impact on resolution. But if the daggers are to come out, they really ought to come out before Joe formally nabs the nomination--otherwise you end up with total chaos and only 75 days to select a nominee, raise money, and campaign to the general public. Sure, a hot swap generates excitement, earned media, and a real chance to beat Trump, but if you're going to go that route, you reap way more of the rewards and less of the cost to do it asap.

It looks pretty impossible to me for the dems to let Biden run unopposed. Sure, one Dem rep thinks Trump will win and the sky won't fall, but everyone else is shouting from the rooftops that America will be doomed, and surely a large portion of these are true believers who will do all that they can to avert said Armageddon. Does anyone actually think Biden can beat Trump? He's down more than 3 points nationally, double that in battleground states; he's only getting older with ever more adverse scrutiny, which also shifts the focus away from Trump, which was really the only way to win, to make it a referendum on Trump's character, since his presidency itself is remembered fairly positively by the crucial independents; there is no end to Ukraine or Gaza; inflation is easing but nothing is actually getting cheaper, they're just getting pricier more slowly. Trump is so hated that there is a firm floor for his favorability to fall--what else can you throw at a man who's been called a felon, fraud, fascist, rapist, pedophile, insurrectionist, Russian plant, and democracy-destroyer?

So, if Biden can't win, and the Democratic Party thinks Trump must not win, then there is only one logical conclusion, which is Biden can't run, and so he won't be the nominee. Now, I understand the big money is outside of prediction markets. But I'm not smart enough to calculate the secondary effect orders to trade options on macroeconomics or individual stocks as they relate to who wins in November. Sticking strictly to the $850 limit per contract on PredictIt, then--

Tell me why I shouldn't max out Joe Biden "no" for being the dem nominee. The $850 limit at 40c will return 2.5x, minus 10% PI's cut and 5% withdrawal fee (partly diluted by credit card points) in less than two months. How could I lose? Why aren't you heading to PI yourself right now to claim your free money?

(I mean, I know the literal answer is somehow the Dems just ratify Joe's nomination in 45 days, but can even Dr. Strange with a time stone find such an implausible outcome?)

These things are opaque and unclear. The politicians seem to be lining up behind Biden even as the media revolts. There are surely power groups who want a vacant presidency so they can advance their agenda without any limits or controls.

What about a special electoral operation to keep Trump from the presidency? A hell of a lot of people have been entering the US in recent years, why not practice a little ballot harvesting, organize some reliable deputies to enfranchise the right people and help them vote? Bring in some mail-in ballots! Or just practice legitimate vote-buying by running down the US strategic petrol reserves to lower prices. Trump also did this kind of thing with his 'massive deficits to pump up the economy' approach and a platinum plan to buy black votes. Trump was only running 4% deficits in a growing economy, Biden's pushed it up to 6%. It's a race to the bottom.

I'm not saying I believe anything for certain here, just that there aren't any clear no-brainers. This isn't technology or business, this is politics.

Rape charges would move the needle. The FBI/CIA are still in play and, I don’t think there is any way to push out Biden if he doesn’t want to go. Biden has stated he doesn’t care what pundits think, he doesn’t believe in polls, and doesn’t really care what other leaders in his own party think either - it would literally take the direct intervention of God to get him to step down. I’d buy Biden at those odds.

I have a very hard time believing that Trump has any chance at losing this election if it’s anything close to fair. If he loses this time I would think it requires real direct vote fraud. Hacked machines. Dead people voting.

If the betting markets are at 30-40% the Dem wins then my opinion is there is a 30-40% chance of direct provable voter fraud.

Trump years were not that bad. And everyone just saw on TV that the Dems tried to pass off a non-functioning human being. No one will trust them anymore.

Is Hunter Biden the defacto POTUS right now?

Even if you swap him out you can not undo the brand damage. That’s going to a point or two hit to whoever the new guy is. Was Bill Clinton in his prime America’s most talented politician? You would need someone of that quality to pull it off.

At this point Trumps best strategy is likely Joe’s 2020 strategy of hiding in the basement. I think Trump has gotten better at politics but he has no reason to take the field again.

The easier bet to me is to vote on Trump winning because I do think there is a real chance Joe stays on the ticket but I can’t see a way Trump loses.

Edit: it just hit me. They should nominate Hunter Biden. He’s still a Biden. Everyone knows his name by now. Go full reality show. Maybe the American people will vote for the they find the most entertaining.

The smart play would be Dean Phillips. He has a good story that he tried to stand up to Biden so he’s not in the oligarchy. You would need someone outside of the Party to try for a serious campaign, but he has zero name recognition and I would guess only 2% of the population know the name.

Funny enough if it were a race between RFK jr and Trump I think RFK Jr probably wins.

There literally isn't a mechanism for anything you're describing without Biden resigning (at which point he likely strongly recommends Harris which would be path of least resistance) or dying (again, most likely Harris) in the next 2 weeks.

I think Trump is not unbeatable, even by Biden. Biden could pull out very convincing performances in the next two debates. Trump could get clobbered in one of his many trials. The economy could upturn. All of these things are maybes, and there's no reason there couldn't be bad news for Biden. But there is a narrow but plausible road to the presidency.

I'll remind people that for months - basically the whole campaign, in fact - Hillary Clinton, supposedly the worst election candidate ever, led by similar margins over Trump. Where is she now?

I don't think any of those paths are plausible. The economy doesn't have much room to improve without overheating. The things that cause negative economic perceptions are mostly structural issues that will take decades to fix. Trump's trials are too manifold and confusing to really go that badly, if there were just one it might work, but every Negress prosecutor on the east coast filed a weak case and the scandals cross each other up. And there's no reason to believe Biden will get younger in time for the second debate.

Watergate was a manifold, confusing mess that unfolded mostly ignored by the American public. Then suddenly exploded. Nixon was around in politics for over two decades before his enemies in the press finally got their killshot. You're right to wonder if such a thing could exist for Trump, or could be found. I say it could. Trump is a fat, ugly, crude slug of a man, crooked, has terrible policies even from the perspective of the Right.

Biden is not going to get younger, but he'll have good days and bad days. I suspect hiding him away is doing more bad than good - egoist politicians like Biden draw strength from rallies, not from being sequestered with aides and drilled. But then, every hour Biden spends out of his cloister is a chance for him to shit his pants, and if the guy gets too excited he might actually try a pushup contest. I reckon Biden might have one more performance in him, even if it's his last, and if he can perform in the next debate he might get away with weaseling out of the third.

As for the economy, it's as much a matter of vibes and animal spirits as it is real data. On paper, as you say, there is not much room for improvement, but that's not how people feel and that could change.

Trump is a fat, ugly, crude slug of a man

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XGe2uPLgL28

I suspect hiding him away is doing more bad than good - egoist politicians like Biden draw strength from rallies, not from being sequestered with aides and drilled.

I see this argument all over the place, and it seems to be classic WFAN caller "the coach is stupid, why doesn't he just play the good players?" I generally despise everyone I know who moved to DC and went into politics, but don't doubt that the consultants that surround him know that he should be doing rallies, that rallies would be good for him, less than a coach knows that he has to score more points than the other team. He's not doing rallies because he can't do rallies. This is a case of running a projection model that doesn't take injuries into account.

On paper, as you say, there is not much room for improvement, but that's not how people feel and that could change.

It's not just that there's no room for improvement on paper, it's that any improvement on paper probably leads to increased inflation. We're running near frictional unemployment, and the stock market is hitting record highs. Any increase in employment or wages is going to push prices higher, which upsets people. The only way prices are going to decrease is a recession, which will upset people. Biden's best hope is that everything stays the same for another few months. But running your game hoping that suddenly Americans will realize what's been going on around them for years is insanity, and hoping that Biden suddenly improves his salesmanship while in the state he's in is insanity.

But Biden's biggest problem is that the narrative is running against him that he's senile. Every slip up or routine action will be taken as a sign of senility. I was joking with my wife that, under a microscope and facing an assumption of senility, you'd find ample evidence in my life. Just yesterday, we had the septic tank pumped at one of our rental properties, which must be done every three years by township ordinance. I last worried about this three years ago, and I vaguely thought the tank lid might be out back somewhere. The guy pumping it remembered precisely where it was, on the side of the house, off the top of his head, because he did a repair on it seven years ago. Oh my God my memory is terrible!

every Negress prosecutor on the East Coast

This kind of generalization is definitely in the “more heat than light” category.

Biden is gone. He is not winning a debate. He could not even do that in 2020.

Trump has already been convicted as a felon and as a rapists. Trials are not saving the Dems.

The economy could upturn? Unemployment is low and while inflation is too high it is better.

I see one positive catalyst. Russia collapses on the battlefield.

If the Democrats can swap out their candidate, they can get rid of all their negatives. Then turn the entire media machine on promoting the Democrat and denigrating Trump (as usual). The Ds still vote for the D, the MAGAs still vote for Trump, but the squishy center which says such things as "I just want a competent adult running things" votes D, and the squishy Republican-leaners who mostly believe Trump is the Devil (because the media keeps telling them that) loses their excuse (that Biden is incompetent) to vote for him anyway.

However, they would have to swap out their candidate without breaking the party long enough for Trump to win anyway. And critically, I think they have to swap with someone other than Kamala (who as part of the Biden administration wouldn't lose all the negatives, and isn't much of a politician)

I disagree because I think the Dems have shot their credibility. Anyone connected to the establishment is going to be taking on these credibility issues.

I don’t think you can swap in Newsome and people will view him as an outsider. He even has his own issues here of the French Laundry incident where he’s out in public and about to shut the state down.

This is why I mentioned Dean Phillips because he was calling Biden senile in the primaries. You need a guy whose disconnected from establishment.

RFK is taking the liberal but outsider spot, though.

He is.

But Dean Phillips is the liberal outsider who still seems like a normie. RFK has some weird views.

They should nominate Hunter Biden.

Saves on yard sign replacement costs, significant experience in Ukraine and China relations, and he only has three felonies. Sign me up.

Biden seems determined to hold on right now, and there isn't any easy process to oust him by other Democrat leaders. I think it's likely he won't be nominee, but I'm not super confident on it.

The markets are definitely super volatile though, you might be able to find some good arbitrage opportunities that will be just straight free money

Now, this likely pays out upon the formal nomination at the convention, the final day of which is 45 days away, as the rules clarify that the replacement of the nominee prior to election day has no impact on resolution.

I am not sure this is correct. The DNC is looking at doing a virtual nomination of Biden by July 21st. This has been planned long before the debate performance and is due to the state of Ohio's requirement that party candidates be nominated 90 days before the election (August 7th). In the past the Ohio legislature has done special sessions to extend this date when party conventions have gone later than it but I understand why the DNC doesn't want to risk it this time. Biden doesn't have to hold on 45 days to the convention, he has to hold on about a week and a half. At which point replacing him (short of his death) will probably be a logistical impossibility (I don't know the rules in Ohio on replacing candidates on ballots). If someone's plan to replace Biden involves a fight at the Convention they will be about a month too late.

Ohio moved the date back to Aug. 23; Dems still want the roll-call vote early because they don't really trust Ohio (which is fair but Ohio changing the date again would also create easy litigation re: promissory estoppel concepts that would likely still protect Aug. 23 as the date).

So, if Biden can't win, and the Democratic Party thinks Trump must not win, then there is only one logical conclusion, which is Biden can't run, and so he won't be the nominee.

Problem 1, to quote Zvi:

They are on what I call simulacra level 4, and they are moving symbols around without a direct connection to the underlying reality. Mostly, presume that politicians are incapable of means-ends reasoning or thinking strategically or engaging seriously with the physical world, and what comes out of their mouths is based on a vibe of what would be the thing one would say in a given situation, and nothing more.

Problem 2:

SJ activist-politics worsens these tendencies. The SJ model of the world is that choices are supposed to be (morally) easy; tradeoffs are mostly fake and made up by people who want to take the immoral options. Hence, there should be a way to win without pulling shenanigans.

I would argue that politics operate much on level 4 because the stakes are so low.

The life of the median US voter will not be affected drastically by the outcome of the US presidential election. They are unlikely to get fired or imprisoned or even have their income change by 10% no matter who sits in the White House. Trump will not turn the US into a totalitarian dictatorship. If Biden drops dead in a year, Harris will likely become an unpopular one-term president, not the downfall of the US.

Most people can be somewhat rational when they have skin in the game, but here they don't have that. It is like supporting a football team. If every fan whose team won the cup got a 20% raise, there would be an actual incentive to figure out if fan support can affect the outcome of a match, and what their optimal behavior regarding the object level should be. Instead, it is just performative, vibes, kayfabe. Politics is mostly the same, only the hatred for the other team is stronger.

I initially thought that this post would be that Biden being nominated was clearly underpriced, and there was free money being left on the table by people not concretely playing out how "Biden is too old" turns into "Biden will not be the nominee."

But, go for it if you have 100% confidence that Biden will not get the nomination. As your math shows, it would be free money, even with the substantial cut of the house.

(My guess of a fair price would be closer to 60c than 40c, and that's not enough of an edge to make it worth my while to go through the effort to place a bet and freeze up $850. It's probably better to take the $850 and dump it into UPRO if you think Biden is going to be replaced.)

Yeah there's a big gap between 'Biden is not the fittest candidate for the Democrat nomination' and 'Biden will actually be replaced with the mechanisms available at this point in time'.

The Democrats are not in charge of the situation, Biden is. He has to be the one to make the decision to step down, he can't be forced out. And Biden is echo chambered to an extreme degree, and ego-pilled to a very large degree.

Also, think about a raw pro/cons list. The Democrats have lost elections before and will again. Even an election to Trump himself. They are still here. It's not existential, despite the rhetoric. You know what is existential? Opening the door to an open convention. These kinds of things do create hard feelings beyond "oh man we nominated the wrong guy".

I say this despite a strong pro-replacement bias. If you want free money, maxing out "Yes" is the call. (Sadly)

He can be forced out at the convention.

Probably the best reason is that I honestly wasn't sure until I got to your third paragraph whether you were arguing that it's definitely 100% obvious that Biden will or will not be replaced before or at the Democrat convention.

You should think twice because the formal mechanism for denying him the nomination relies on either pledged delegates breaking their pledge, or him giving up voluntarily.

Also, it could make more sense to have him drop out after the convention to prevent an open convention and an open intra-party civil war that could ensue.

PredictIt just seems like a joke of a site, for multiple reasons:

  • banned for anyone outside the US
  • each market limited to 5000 traders and max $850 bet
  • huge "rake"- 10% of winnings + 5% of withdrawal

Do it if you want to gamble and have some fun, but the format means it's hard to make any serious money there and I wouldn't expect the odds to really predict anything.

Plus, in this specific case... Biden himself is saying repeatedly that he's staying in the race, and there's no clear mechanism for the party to remove him.

Biden staying in and dropping out will look the same until he makes a decision. If he wavers before hand, then things will look really crazy as the feeding frenzy belongs in earnest.

Potentially, but it looks like the people trying to oust him have lost a lot of momentum at this point and most of the potential challengers have flipped to supporting his candidacy.

He could always have a change of heart, but why now instead of last week?

My only point is that what Biden says he is going to do is not strong evidence of what he in fact will do given that he would say he is staying in until seconds before he announces he will drop out.

And maybe momentum has stalled. It’s hard to tell.

Yeah there's way better ways to get down with varying levels of KYC. Polymarket, some Crypto Casinos etcetera.

There is signalling value in taking 850 dollars of money and burning it to show your commitment to a candidate. The prospect of winning money is just a bonus.

Especially if you can actually move the prediction score because the other side is prevented by that maximum bet rule to call you on your bet.

Buying shares to hype up your candidate in the absence of an efficient market might not even be the least effective way to spend money on them, outcome-wise.

Joe Biden is nominee unless he resigns or gets hit medically. There's no mechanism for removing him. I agree he would not get the nomination if it was a fresh contest, but he has essentially already won it. I'm quite large on Biden at the equivalent of 30c for nom and 10c for presidency for full disclosure, but the window for replacement has largely passed.

The Dems if they really wanted to could invoke the 25th which whilst not cancelling his nomination would render it impossible for Biden to win effectively forcing Biden to withdraw.

I guess they could impeach and remove Biden (eg for covering up his extreme mental decline or for Biden corruption) but would need republican support.

That's Pandora's Box and Democrats can not open it.

It's pretty telling that even criticisms from the establishment are near uniformly disciplined about making this about the campaign.

If they admit he may be incompetent in his duties everyone will be dragged forward and asked what they knew and when.

As an outsider I think it’s the right move. A view Trump as unbeatable at this point. Invoking the 25th would make it look to me like the Dems are reforming which will massively help them in Senate and House races.

But what do I know. I thought Dems saying the GOP should abandon Trump the last few years and I thought it was a bad idea and now I’m expecting a route in 2024 led by Trump.

I want Biden as the Dem nominee. And expect that my side will win big. With Trump being quiet it seems as though their view is the same.

I do understand why they have some uniformity right now. Whatever you do in politics you do need to be unified. Having different factions fighting doesn’t work.

Invoking the 25th would make it look to me like the Dems are reforming which will massively help them in Senate and House races.

I don't agree with this. Invoking the 25th would make Democrats look weak and their administration look incompetent. Because it would be a declaration that its headman is incompetent, in the literal meaning of the term. Invoking the 25th also normally requires the consent of the President -- that's the only way it has been used in the past -- and to do it over his refusal would require a whole rigamarole where the Cabinet tries to argue with the Congress and Biden attempts to convince them he's actually competent. It would be an absolute shitshow of constitutional and political maneuvering that would make even the most insane Brexit deliberations across the pond look like normal legislative operations, with the executive fighting against itself and the Congress held up from all other activity while members get prime time TV slots grandstanding about the administration. In the worst case, this would lead to the nuclear football being tossed back and forth between Biden and Harris like an actual football.

Meanwhile Republicans look on uproariously laughing at the magnificent incompetence and Trump gives rallies where he talks about the Democrats as unstable and so fractured they can't even get a senile old man to step aside without causing chaos. Expect numerous comparisons to the impeachments, and if Biden were actually confirmed as unable to discharge his duties as President by the Congress, expect Trump to use it to wash his hands of the entire impeachment proceedings -- after all, the other guy actually got removed.

Although, to be clear, it would be different, in the 25th procedure Biden would still technically be the President, just one without the powers and duties of the President. What that means is little understood. The 25th was designed for a president in a coma, not a living president vigorously (well, as vigorously as Biden is capable of nowadays) defending his ability to exercise his office.

It would also make Kamala Harris the acting president. And she is unpopular, moreso than Biden. Presumably it would put her at the top of the ticket too -- there's no precedent, but it would be suicidal to run as candidate for President of the United States a man who has been unprecedentedly removed from the powers and duties of the Presidency for incompetence as a candidate for President of the United States! And even then, I could easily see the convention being fractured, giving Republicans another incredibly massive win in the months leading up to the election.

If they have Biden's consent, he can just do the normal, expected thing and resign. Which would also put Harris at the top of the ticket, but at least without the insane constitutional boogaloo that the 25th Amendment process would require. But the 25th Amendment process is pretty involved, to prevent coups. Harris can't just up and declare herself the Big Cheese.

The 25th invocation suggestions aren't serious to anyone who has taken even a cursory glance at the actual text. No senior Democrat would ever call for it. It would be the biggest unforced error in the history of the American republic.

A view Trump as unbeatable at this point.

He really isn't on polling, though. The margin of victory in these things isn't that big.

Oh, he is.

Biden barely won last time with a >4% lead in the popular vote. He's behind now by ~3% I think.

That's before we get into specific swing states, at which point you get why there were allegedly tears in meetings from swing state Democrats who have to be stuck with him at the top of the ticket.

I mean, there are mechanisms to remove him, they're just not super likely to be invoked. The dem electors can hypothetically invoke the "in all good conscience" clause at the election and remove him. He could be impeached and convicted and thus cannot hold public office ever again. The cabinet invokes the 25th amendment and all hell breaks loose, although it's unclear if invoking the 25th would remove him from campaigning as well.

Does anyone actually think Biden can beat Trump

Definitely, there's a lot of game left. Trying to call it before October seems a fool's errand. Anything greater than ~80% confidence seems like pure hubris to me. We have two people born in the 40s running very volatile campaigns.

You can get better odds on a black jack table if you want to gamble. I thought it was certain that the Democrats would dump Biden a week ago; but, he, somehow, is hanging on. That's why the bet is so even. Most of the time, if you think you've found a mark, you are the mark.


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