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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   37689 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

  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.

FRENCH PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS

Another win imho for the faction "Nothing ever happens"

Win for the NFP and the left, Macron's party recedes but still resists, RN did not win ad expected. Tactical voting and a surge in participation did it, the "1945 Front" keep winning.

The huge banner that says "France is a nation of immigrants" says everything.

One thing I've always liked about Macron how willing he is to put the common man in his place and his actions over the last month have only solidified this view. A substantial minority of the French threw a far right tantrum in the EU elections and they are going to be punished for it with total government deadlock over the next year at least. Here's hoping next time around they see sense (the pessimist in me knows though that it'll take at least a few more rounds of "treatment" before they behave).

  • -32

A substantial minority of the French threw a far right tantrum in the EU elections and they are going to be punished for it with total government deadlock over the next year at least.

punished with deadlock

Don't threaten me with a good time. Are you sure it's the "far" right throwing a tantrum?

These are the French we're talking about. Famously the country with one of the largest tax to GDP ratios in the world. Cutting off the ability for their government to function (and thus extract even more tax to fund even more spending) is like taking a fish out of water. It's gonna hurt.

Electing a divided government does not guarantee an end of taxation and policies and stuff. Your idea sounds like a kind of vengeful wishful thinking: you want the French right to suffer, so you need an explanation. "The government you hate is more divided and powerless than ever, haha!" ?

Famously, the protests over the election are by the far left.

No don’t ask me why.

Weird how they have one of the best results in a while and still insist on le riot.

The French riot every time something happens. In Summer 2020 when the Floyd meme came to France, French policemen held their own counterprotest against accusations of brutality.

The rioters didn't necessarily vote for NFP (at least in the first round), or vote at all.

You know there are lots of interviews with them, right? Like why are you trying to deflect the blame here rather than celebrate like they are?

Cutting off the ability of their government to mutilate their country even further can only be a good thing, if you're of a far right mindset.

This comment (like many others of yours) seems motivated by a desire to guard your ego against the idea that indigenous Europeans don’t like your presence, and that you may not actually belong here.

There is no tantrum, there is just the usual democratic process, there is no punishment, merely Macron trying to retain power, again the usual democratic process.

Please refrain from psychoanalyzing other commenters. Or genetically analyzing them.

  • -11

Or genetically analyzing them.

What does this even mean? Are you saying it’s against the rules to acknowledge another commenter’s racial/ethnic background? Even a commenter like @BurdensomeCount who brings up those same topics all the time and who speaks openly about his own fraught racial/ethnic relationship to his host society?

There is a type of accusation along the lines of "you think this thing X, because you are a Y". These accusations are generally very annoying:

  1. Puts words and opinions in people's mouths that they might not hold.
  2. Turns discussions personal rather than idea oriented. It can become about whether someone is a Y rather than whether X is a good idea.
  3. Implies that the person can't change their mind and thus insures that no discussion can take place, only arguments and debate.

There are good ways to acknowledge someones biases without turning it immediately into shit flinging. "If I was a middle eastern man living in France I think I'd feel this way about things".

There are definitely situations where I wouldn't mind other people shedding some light on my own psychology. Sometimes I can see what my thoughts are motivated by and sometimes I'm stuck in my own blind-spot.

Perhaps the best way to do it is to collaboratively compare and contrast life experiences with one another. I've seen a few people having that sort of discussion on this very page. It seems to shed the desired sort of light with minimal epistemic friction.

Its the difference between solicited and unsolicited advice. Sure, go ahead and ask for solicited advice, we have whole weekly threads for that. Giving that advice unsolicited ... seems pretty rude and like you just want to pick a fight.

Fine, but why not? (Psychoanalysing, I didn’t do any genetic analysis, he revealed his ethnicity giddily more than once)

It's a form of bad faith argument known as Bulverism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism

The Bulverist assumes a speaker's argument is invalid or false and then explains why the speaker came to make that mistake or to be so silly (even if the opponent's claim is actually right) by attacking the speaker or the speaker's motive.

Is it really psycho analysis though?

He's been pretty vocal in expressing his disdain for white people in general and western culture in particular. Are we supposed to just ignore that context when he starts going of about how people different from him desrve to be punished?

Yes and no.

seems motivated by a desire to guard your ego

Where does the conversation go from there? It’s immediately dragged down, because in addition to making it personal, this remark is unfalsifiable. BC can say “nuh uh,” and A can double down, but nothing good is likely to come of it.

Responding on the merits is best. Questioning motives is not recommended, but can be done with tact. I have yet to see someone tactfully and respectfully accuse another user of having a fragile ego.

A substantial minority of the French threw a far right tantrum in the EU elections and they are going to be punished for it with total government deadlock

Good, don't catch a falling knife. The situation in France can't be fixed with democratic reforms and a society that focuses on feelings. The correct way to vote for right wingers in the west is to vote against the system. The most anti-system vote is voting for gridlocking the system. Vote to get lame duck presidents, impossible coalitions and endless palace intrigue.

The system has several systemic issues to deal with and the best way to fight the behemoth is to ensure that the system is too busy squalling among themselves to solve anything.

You should probably include what you think is wrong with France that can't be fixed by democracy as normal.

Probably something to do with the Jews.

Please don’t speak for other posters.

If you think functor is being dishonest, either press him on it directly and politely, or move on. This sort of speculation isn’t helpful.

RN won 37% of the popular vote and the Macronistas have delivered an awkward minority government where they'll be deadlocked by the left until atleast the Presidential election.

Where is this banner?

I was running markets on the election. Gotta say RN did slightly worse than expected but people assuming/acting like they were poised to win an outright majority were insane. I think this is a good step forward for them, especially as the Presidential election will likely be after 2-3 years of not much happening.

US Election Updates – Democratic Infighting + Project 2025

Some “top” House Democrats met yesterday to discuss the ongoing situation within the party. Besides an Asian Congressman being confused for another Asian Congressman, nothing really happened – House Democrats remain divided on how to proceed. Biden reaffirmed that he was running in a spicy letter to House Dems and told Dems to challenge him at the convention if they had a problem. Biden refused to acknowledge himself as “the elite,” using populist rhetoric to separate himself from the establishment that has defined his career. One Congressperson is pissed about leaks from the call, having wanted the opportunity to speak candidly amongst peers.

Some Senate Dems were supposed to meet today, but concerns over leaks led to Warner cancelling the tentative plans. Speculation grows they will instead discuss at the caucus meeting tomorrow. Schumer told Manchin to back off of publicly calling for Biden to drop out. Manchin, generally a maverick, obeyed, for reasons that are unclear.

Horseshoe theory is validated in real time. Biden’s misstating polls. Convicted felon Hunter Biden supposedly gatekeeps access to his father. Democrats are increasingly frustrated with the media and pundits are reluctantly acknowledging health issues that they previously called conspiracy theories. New conspiracy theories around Biden potentially having Parkinson’s have popped up. Democrats seek to redirect anger to Project 2025 to keep the heat off Their Guy, even as Trump disavows Project 2025 and instead seeks looser abortion restrictions in the Republican party platform - a direct contradiction of what Project 2025 seeks.

The hysteria over a think tank’s wish list astonishes me on a personal level; the involvement of previous members of Trump’s administration by no means indicates Trump signed onto the project or even knew about plans to direct his platform. Trump isn’t really one who likes to be controlled. But the rhetoric from the Twitteratti (X-eratti?) from “vote blue no matter who” to “vote against Project 2025 at all costs” – even though Project 2025 isn’t actually on the ballot.

I don’t see the Democratic party going as far as invoking the “in all good conscious” clause at the Convention to pick a different candidate, as that hits a level of party disunity I don't think we've seen from either side in recent memory. There’s funding issues that make Kamala the easiest option to continue campaign machinery, and Kamala isn’t very popular. Kicking both Kamala and Biden off the ticket makes it unlikely either one of them will direct their campaign funds back into the DNC. There’s also still enough DEI vibes floating around the Dems to maybe not want the optics of kicking a Black woman off the ticket. A brokered convention is messy, and it feels, in this moment, inevitable that Trump wins. Polls skew towards Democrats, after all, and Biden is still behind. Further intra-party chaos won’t help.

At the same time, Trump is only leading by an average of three points, and he beat Clinton when she was only ahead by four. There’s another debate on Sept. 10 (maybe), during which time Biden can possibly turn it around (so long as the debate is held between Biden's "good hours" of 10 am and 4 PM). Eight days after the second debate, Trump’s sentencing is set to proceed (pending evidentiary issues spawning from the SCOTUS immunity ruling); jail time will surely mess with the campaign, although polling around the impact of Trump's convictions is mixed.

Is there enough time before the election for Democrats to rally around Biden and wipe this mess from the minds of voters? Will Dems rally around Biden, or will the Lord Almighty Himself come down and remove Biden from the ballot? (as a side note - invoking God as the head of an increasingly a-religious party is an interesting choice). Is Project 2025 enough of a Bogeyman to overcome the very valid concern that Biden might not even be currently running the country? Is the average voter’s goldfish brain enough to move on from this mess in time for the election? While the conversation around replacing Biden has become a 24/7 media circus, extending over a week since the debate itself went down, how much is the average voter actually paying attention to any of this?

The most fascinating part of this, to me, are the Democratic attacks on a media that skews left. Turning against one’s historical allies is fascinating at a time when large Democratic donors are demanding Biden drop out. What a fun few months of culture war ahead.

The average voter is assuredly paying attention to Biden being way too old. That includes people who have no intention of supporting Trump but who now can’t support Biden either- no small number. I agree that democrats are between a rock and a hard place but the idea that this can all blow over if they ignore it is not the best of a bunch of bad options.

Instead there’s a senile old man who’s closest adviser is a crack addict and who’s obvious successor is an obvious bimbo widely perceived as selected due to her(frequently disliked by the general public) race and gender. Leaving that in place is probably worse for the democrats than any possible replacement, or possibly even multiple replacements. Unironically it’d be better for democrats to have a Newsom v big gretch v Biden/Harris fight than to have a straight Biden v Trump showdown.

At this point, it's unclear to me that Kamala is worse than Biden. All of that was based on polling from back when the media and party thought the age issue was manageable and so tried to contain it. The cat's out of the bag now.

Though I have to grant that there is a risk that she'll be framed as the worst of all worlds: complicit in Biden's deception but not in his actual successes.

It only a rock and a hard place because they lack the will to do anything about it. If they wanted Biden out, they’d have pushed him out. If these were republicans, he would be out by now simply because republicans are much more focused on winning the election. Instead, they’re publicly hand wringing while the clock ticks down and they lose support from average people who don’t want to be ruled by a guy who can’t string a paragraph together. It’s really hard to sympathize with an entire party too worried about being mean to a guy with obvious dementia to kick him out and take control before their chances tank completely.

Who is "they" in this? Team Biden has all the cards here; any attempt to get him off the convention floor without his consent is likely (certain?) to fail. Even if there were a way to, there would need to be some leader for people to coalesce around as an alternative, and anyone who took up that mantle would be trashing the remainder of their political career. And even if someone successfully navigated all of that, there's still the small matter of actually beating Trump in the wake of a nasty, chaotic convention (losing to him also being the end of a political career).

As someone who thinks Biden should go, I think you’re wrong about the division simply because if they beat Trump they are heroes. And I think given the urgency most of the rank and file feel about Trump, I think once they have a candidate, the sniping stops in short order.

As far as going after Trump, democrats can’t do that now. Biden lacks the mental capacity to turn the conversation to Trump, he can’t even get the focus off his dementia symptoms even on the left (lots of speculation on the cause with a lot of people saying Parkinson’s or Lew Body dementia). All of the energy from the party from here until election night is going to be spent on defense — proving Biden fit — rather than trying to defeat Trump. And all the while, Trump can spin every attack in him as a desperate attempt to deflect from Biden being unfit for the job. That’s unwinnable to my mind.

...Huh? What Establishment Republicans are you talking about who are very good at getting candidates who don't help them win elections off the ticket? The same ones who kicked Trump out, along with Oz, Mastriaono, Masters, and every other nincompoop that threw away a winnable seat in 2022?

I read it as Republicans are disciplined this round. And observably the friendly fire and unforced errors seems pretty D in 2024 in a way it didn't in 2022.

Yeah I’d argue republican elites have even less control of their party. The GOP is captured by the % of the base who loves Trump.

Project 2025 is just a project to develop technocrats of the right.

Exactly. It's a pretty bog standard ThinkTank wishlist of policies and politicos that they want to put into some of the literally thousands of political appointee positions that follow any election. Every other major ThinkTank does this.

The "fear" of Project 2025 is a strange media / twitterati / very-online-people invention. I think it allows a lot of vague gestures to the idea of shadowy planning by unnamed (but somehow very influential) "party insiders." They kind of did this with the Federalist society people after Kavanaugh and Barrett got confirmed. It's quite literally the same as, all of a sudden, telling you friends, "Did you know that the GOVERNMENT is, like, storing all of these old BOOKS in these, like, secure buildings and you have to get an official identification card to ACCESS them?!"

All you've done is dramatized a dusty old library

Zooming out just a bit however, don't you think it's actually a good thing we are seeing greater emphasis on examining these non-official but still influential groups and what they actually do to policy within governments? Perhaps not, of course, panicking over it and we need to view it all in context, but isn't this still preferable to ignoring the whole thing as is historically the case? For example, if people had paid more attention to the Federalist Society's influence, they wouldn't have been as "surprised" about some of the actual Supreme Court picks that came out of the Trump years. While it's always tricky and potentially unfair to lump non-official positions in with official ones, the simple fact is that these non-official positions that are nonetheless strongly associated with one of the two major parties, and that's relevant info for a voter.

An analogy would be: you don't just marry a person, you marry their family too (in-laws). Factoring in what their family is like into a marriage decision might feel a little unfair, but it's eminently reasonable, because it's actually pretty hard to ignore the family in practice (and, even beyond that, this is the family that raised your potential spouse, so at least some of their ideas and values will have rubbed off).

I think this is what these kind of orgs would want you to think.

My opinion is that, in truth, all of them a far, far less influential than they want to be. I see big think tanks like Heritage, Brookings, CSIS etc. as something more like under performing charities that release ho-hum reports on various issues.

They do often function as halfway houses for former staffers who are (a) waiting for the next Congress / administration to come around and (b) Need to actually make some private sector levels of income before they go back to the goofy "salaries" of Congressional / admin staffers. But even that reveals something; if you have to find a bench to warm at a ThinkTank, and didn't get some actually big time job at a bank / law firm / lobby shop / tech company etc....are you that influential?

I once did some consulting work that dealt with illegal finance networks (terrorists, drug cartels etc.) I was doing a bunch of IT work for it, but wanted to get some degree of subject matter understanding. I asked which CSIS report I should read. The company laugh and introduced me to about four totally under-the-radar specialists in the space. They sell their research privately to firms who need it. It's higher quality, more quantitative, dispenses with policy "recommendations", and is generally delivered by folks who have worked outside of downtown D.C.

I was kinda shocked when Trump felt the need to distance himself from it publicly. Really bizarre behavior. From what I saw, he distanced himself from Project 2025 harder than he distanced himself from a lot of much worse things.

My two competing theories:

  1. Trump read Project 2025 as "telling him which people to hire." Not exactly wrong, but also not right. If Trump hates one thing, it's being told what to do. He'll always slam that.

  2. (tin foil hat) Actually a coordination between Project 2025 and the Trump campaign to create separation between the two. Trump doesn't need them to win the election (they aren't a campaign vehicle at all!) but they can bring along "bad vibes" because the Heritage Foundation always rubs some people the wrong way. Then, after the election, Trump can just ... hire everyone they recommend without every saying "Thanks, Project 2025!"

Trump thinks in terms of zero sum transactions. That's part of his frankly bizarre constant obsession with NATO spending. In looking at Project 2025, there's zero loss to him for bashing them and zero gain to endorsing them or growing closer. So ... just get it off the balance sheet!

Weirdly his obsession with Nato spending is my single favorite policy position of his.

His admonishment of other NATO countries for underspending on defense was prophetic. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine they are doing it of their own accord and non-NATO countries around Russia are rushing to join. The media likes to make fun of Trump saying Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine if he was president, but if Europe had built up it's armories back then, Russia would have thought twice about attacking and might have been defeated in the early stages of the war.

if Europe had built up it's armories back then, Russia would have thought twice about attacking and might have been defeated in the early stages of the war.

My impression is that most NATO countries want a prolonged conflict between Russia and Ukraine and so are not sending much of anything.

Here's how many main battle tanks NATO has access to:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1294391/nato-tank-strength-country/

Here's how many they've sent to Ukraine:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1364974/ukraine-military-aid-tanks/

More military investment doesn't make financial sense because there is no real enemy worth fearing. An actual war between NATO and Russia would be little more than a cleanup operation.

Could it be about Trump trying to avoid getting trapped by a faction among his supporters? I'm thinking of a scenario where an independent right wing group publish their own "Here is what Trump is going to do." story. Some Trump supporters like the story and vote for Trump on that basis. Trump gets elected and then fails to do some of the things; they were never part of his plan. But his supporters are upset, claiming that he promised and is letting them down.

Sometimes this is fuss about nothing. Other times it is a bad look and Trump comes under real political pressure. So he wants to get out in front of the problem by being clear that it is not the official Trump manifesto.

Trump has never reacted particularly well to the traditional small-government/social conservative/hawk conservative fusionist tendency, and there's a lot of that - particularly the free market libertarian streak - in the policy bits of Project 2025.

There’s also a lot of actual social conservatism, it’s highly disingenuous to criticize it as some libertarian / tea party thing.

I'm not treating it as a tea-party thing. To the contrary, it's a fusionist document. Trump doesn't like that stuff - he's pushing the GOP to the left on abortion, entitlements, and foreign policy all at once.

Trump needs to distance himself from a number of unpopular items on the movement conservative wishlist to be electable. In particular, he can't afford to be associated with "Cut Social Security and Medicare in order to cut taxes for the super-rich" - something that was a huge part of why he polled better than the Goldman-Aramco Republicans in 2016 - and he doesn't want (for good reasons) to be associated with the likely consequences of actually making an abortion ban stick.

Project 2025 includes entitlement reform and a big federal push against abortion (e.g. enforcing the Comstock Act) so Trump benefits from publicly rejecting it.

It strikes me as a Bad Move on his part, though I will confess that Donald is a significantly better political mind than me, possessed as Asimov put it of a tremendous instinctual understanding of psychohistory.

Attempting to distance himself from it will reduce or blunt Democratic attacks on him precisely zero, any more than Conservatives are less apt to attack Biden about the 2020 riots because of his public denouncements of defunding the police. He won't succeed in persuading anyone who has heard of Project 2025 and can process what it is that he isn't tied to it, he's more likely to succeed in convincing people who like the Heritage Foundation that he isn't a reliable executive for that purpose.

Trump has been an incredible maverick about that kind of thing up to this point. He's notable/notorious for his refusal to full-throatedly denounce some really out-of-the-mainstream support he gets. This is a guy who had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over for dinner, he's not afraid to charm people who are way outside the norm, he doesn't tack to the middle the way most politicians have, to the chagrin of media blobs and to great electoral success. Appealing to the extremes has gone well for him!

It strikes me as odd, because I've had the conversation with my wife, far more liberal than I am, and we both found the liberal obsession with Project 2025 groan-inducing. It's a very inside-baseball, extremely-online liberal attack, similar to the ever-idiotic analysis of party-platform positions. We're seeing the Trump campaign neuter the party platform too.

Maybe he's smarter than me, but I always think of this kind of stuff as more editorial page nonsense than having a real impact.

Attempting to distance himself from it will reduce or blunt Democratic attacks on him precisely zero, any more than Conservatives are less apt to attack Biden about the 2020 riots because of his public denouncements of defunding the police.

Maybe, but it could conceivably make him far more palatable centrists anyways. Think of Clinton and his Sister Souljah moment. Breaking publicly with your party's activists can win over that swing voter, if you can do it without making too many of your own people stay home.

I have to be honest, I don't know what sister Souljah means.

Here ya go.

A Sister Souljah moment is a politician's calculated public repudiation of an extremist person, statement, group, or position that is perceived to have some association with the politician's own party.

More comments

It sounds like the Biden Democrats are using the same style of populist rhetoric that Republicans are using to try and deflect from Biden's poor debate performance and his responses to calls to step down.

Biden has never been a favorite of the Democratic elite; he's always been an old white man with a tendency to go off the rails when let off the leash. In 2008 the elite favored Obama and Clinton over him, and in 2016 they (including Obama!) favored Clinton over him. The only reason they ended up jumping to his side in 2020 was he was the only moderate positioned to beat Bernie.

From his point of view, he's always been kind of shat on despite paying his dues for decades, and now these disloyal bed wetters are freaking out because of a couple of bad polls (when his likely replacements show no real signs of doing any better than him). At least Hunter has his back.

Note that I'm not advocating this POV--he is obviously too old, and at the least shouldn't be running for re-election, and from a purely electoral point of view it makes more sense for Democrats to go with the high variance strategy of replacing him with an unknown. But his populist rhetoric isn't cynical and comes from genuinely held feelings of aggrievement.

But his populist rhetoric isn't cynical and comes from genuinely held feelings of aggrievement.

I think you're correct.

It is fascinating how both Biden and Trump do exude what, as far as I can tell, are genuine feelings of personal aggrievement when both of them have had objectively stupendous lives. Biden was either the youngest or second youngest Senator of all time. His initial victory was narrow and surprising, but then was so incredibly solid that he never faced any legitimate challenge to it. True, he "failed" in his prime-age bid for President in the 1980s. But he simply went back to that Senate seated and just waited and waited before stumbling into .... the Vice Presidency.

Trump was not only rich, but he lived a cartoon version of a rich man's life because of his deep entanglements with media and entertainment. He wasn't some financial engineer who spent 20 years in balance sheets and came out of the other side holding a huge fortune. Between opening casinos and flying on his private jet, he was getting cameos in movies and, eventually, turning himself into a reality TV star (personally, I would detest this life, but I admit it at least seems like it could be compelling to those interested in glamour and fame)

Of course, yes, if you jump into the details, both men have had some personal tragedy. Biden's first wife and her car accident, the loss of Beau Biden. Trump's brother drank himself to death and I feel like his mother / father's deaths were maybe harder on him than has ever been reported.

But, still .... how the hell are either of these guys mad about anything? I can understand "I am a political leader and I am emoting in a way that relates well to my base" but neither of them comes across that way to me. These dudes seem bone-deep rageful at life sometimes.

It's never about objective quality of life; it's always about a sense of unfairness. Trump wanted to be accepted and feted by the Manhattan elite, but in the end he will always be the uncouth son of a slumlord in Queens. Biden always wanted to be President, but he was always passed over because he was a not-especially-bright stuttering kid from a small state who went to Syracruse.

I wouldn't be surprised if Trump's entire decision to run was in retaliation to him being humiliated by Obama (so loved and feted!) at that comedy gala in front of all the people he wanted to like him.

I can definitely see this.

If it is the Truth, I feel genuine pity for both of them. Living life with, "Because fuck you! that's why!" as your primary motivator has to be constant chaos.

Someone who mostly wants to be happy can find a low-intensity job and raise a family. Someone who embraces gluttony and lust have much easier paths to satisfy those urges than high level politics.

Bitterness and hatred, however, are impossible to satisfy, and the only thing that even approaches satisfying them is wielding power over your enemies.

Yes, basically. My life makes me happy, but hatred is an entirely separate category. There's no amount of money you could give me to make me stop hating the things I hate, because I hate them for a reason, not because I'm dissatisfied with my bank account/sex life/penis size/whatever sneer is being used.

The idea that "hateful people are just upset about something else/losers/defective deplorables that belong in camps" is just a scummy leftist tactic to distract from people's real, valid grievances. Bulverism, pathologizing dissent, whatever you want to call it.

I'm sure Trump and Biden (and Musk) are similar. They have a drive for power or status or change that isn't satisfied by living the good life or having lots of stuff.

I miss when our elites would just slam an axe into each other's skulls and then payed the weregild afterwards. Made things easier for the masses they ruled over.

Well, I am not longing back to idea of elites being able to slam axe into my skull and pay (much smaller) weregild

But, still .... how the hell are either of these guys mad about anything?

Most people on the internet find getting into the weeds and dirty details of the various bad faith prosecutions of Trump to be unbearable - imagine having to live through them. I'm honestly surprised he isn't angrier when I picture myself in his position, sitting across from someone who knowingly lied in order to start a fraudulent criminal prosecution against me while threatening my family, reputation and legacy. Throw in the fact that he's now a constant target for mockery in public and in culture, and I can absolutely see why he's angry.

I would never have imagined using the word "equanimity" in relation to Donald Trump, and yet here we are. His ability to weather these storms borders on superhuman.

Important caveat I missed up front - I feel like Trump was like this before 2016.

I can understand why he might have a bit of a persecution complex since then.

I thought the usual argument there was that Trump has always wanted to be recognised and respected by New York high society, and he never has been. He's tried to use money and fame to buy his way in, but he's too fundamentally lacking in class or tact. I could imagine that, internally, what it feels like to be Trump is to be always excluded from the inner ring. He wants to get inside that ring, but no matter of power, not even being president, is enough to generate acceptance or respect.

Trump was not only rich, but he lived a cartoon version of a rich man's life because of his deep entanglements with media and entertainment.

The cartoon bit is important, I think. Trump is very rich and powerful, but Trump is also a clown in a way that real high society elites aren't. Trump's status has always depended on his ability to perform, the ability to get a crowd to hoist him on to their shoulders in a rush of popular enthusiasm. That's not how it is for the real upper class. The real upper class may be popular, but they don't need popularity, and in fact ought to mildly disdain it.

He's tried to use money and fame to buy his way in, but he's too fundamentally lacking in class or tact.

Money, fame and golfing ability. Elite golf is part of WASP high society (Steve Sailer has written a lot about this), and Trump embraced it and it embraced Trump (rejecting him only after January 6th). I don't think you are excluded from the inner ring if a club like Winged Foot not only grants you membership, but also tolerates blatant cheating.

I can absolutely imagine that Trump needed the single-digit handicap (which he earned legitimately when he was younger) to get into clubs that old money is allowed to shoot 90s at, but if the bluebloods see you as actively undesirable (at the time Trump was learning to golf, "undesirable" mostly meant "Jewish"), you need to be winning majors to get in with pure golfing ability.

Trump is also a clown in a way that real high society elites aren't.

This is a choice. Not many real high society elites make that choice, but the ones who do don't get kicked out of the club.

The real upper class may be popular, but they don't need popularity, and in fact ought to mildly disdain it.

Trump doesn't need popularity for business reasons, he craves it for personal reasons. Fred Trump never courted popularity, and nor do most commercial real estate guys. Trumps third and fourth careers (reality TV star and politician) were choices made by a man who was already rich enough to do what he wanted.

Of course, the ultimate test of whether old money accepts you is who your kids marry, and the results for Trump are interestingly ambiguous.

  • Don Jr married a girl who was "brought up in an Upper East Side townhouse" and went to a posh Manhattan private school. But the white-shoe lawyer who paid for the townhouse was her stepfather, not her father, and both the girl and her mother had worked as models.
  • Ivanka married the scion of one of the ri