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Well, this is the Trump experience. I mean this debate. He started out really strong, was totally defeating Harris for the first ten minutes or so. Then he just couldn't help but start rambling and making unforced errors. Why decide to bring up abortion and ramble about ninth month abortion? That's not one of the Republicans' strengths. Why bring up Marxism? Outside of the highly online left and right, people generally think of Marxism as some boring thing from decades ago, not as an important issue. Why bring up the Springfield pets thing? That's another highly online issue that plays weird to normies.
Why not just focus on your strengths of crime, the economy, and immigration? He's starting to try to pivot more back to those now, but now he's rambling and raising his voice and acting defensive, which looks bad.
This guy has always sucked at debates other than in the 2016 primaries and when he got to go up against Biden a few months ago, but almost anyone could have won that debate against Biden.
Kamala is a competent but relatively weak debater, a strong debater could easily run rings around her. But Trump has learned nothing, it seems, from past debate performances. He keeps making the same kinds of unforced errors and making himself look bad. He can't stop himself from getting defensive and rambling and bringing up stuff that most people don't care about, or even stuff that favors his opponent.
If he could have just stayed calm and focused, he would have this debate in the bag by now. Instead he is fumbling it. How the fuck can a man have nine years of experience at politics and political debating and not learn the simple lesson of staying calm and looking calm and tough when the context makes it the right decision, instead of getting flustered and emotional all the time?
I wish to do a follow up. Ignore the following if you do not wish to read a bit of venting.
I am angry. I am actually fucking enraged. It's irrational, but I hope people don't hold it against me. This is the fucking best that the anti-left coalition can do politically when running a Presidential candidate? Really? This fucking idiot whose idea of a good debate performance is acting like a fucking 15 year old who makes really basic mistakes and failed to prepare? If so, we might be fucked and we might need to get the fuck out of these leftist cities before things get worse, well those of us who still live in them, I mean. Not that I ever expected Trump to do much about local leftist politics, but I am worried that a Harris win might energize the left and make things worse.
The current right is kind of fucking useless unless you care about abortion, or about minor wins in things besides abortion.
Curtis Yarvin, for all his faults, such as some of his misunderstandings of history or his overestimation of what his preferred political systems would manage to accomplish, keeps seeming to be proven right in some core ways. The left is structurally stronger, the so-called right focuses on the wrong things. Like when they were overjoyed when Trump won in 2016, but that ended up not necessarily being a bigger win for the anti-left than when Musk bought Twitter, cause when Trump became President he mostly sat around Tweeting and getting blocked in his policy suggestions, whereas when Musk bought Twitter he ripped some new ideas right into the heart of what was largely before a leftist-dominated idea-shaping space.
Trump might win in November, though I do not evaluate his chances as good, but even if he does, what of it? Will he do anything more than he did last time he was President? I want actual wins, not symbolic wins, and I'm not sure I'll even get a symbolic win for the current anti-leftist coalition any time soon. To be fair, it's not like I've been doing much to help other than posting online. But in any case, fuck. From the perspective of my preferred political outcomes, I think there must be a major re-evaluation of strategy - what is going on now does not seem to be working.
Not that I ever liked this anti-left coalition much to begin with. I just want to live in a city that isn't full of insane violent people, and I want to not be censored online. I don't care much about abortion, I'm not religious in the least bit, and I am not a white nationalist, even though I am a race realist.
To get from where we are now to the kinds of policies I want will take some effort and maybe even a bit of higher-dimensional magic, higher-dimensional in the sense meaning that it goes outside the lines of what we typically imagine now as politics and taps into some deeper currents of existence and reality and life.
If the room is suicidal, then it takes someone who actively refuses to "read the room," and doesn't give a shit how impolite that is, to reject suicide.
Does that impose selection effects? Oh, yes.
The Bush administration were neither anti-racist enough not to bomb Afghanistan, nor racist enough to conclude that development of Afghanistan would require imposing radical social change, but in an uncanny valley where liberal democracy is perceived as the natural order of the universe, so American interventionism is morally cheap.
Western elites are stuck in group think because, reasonably enough, none of them want to be the guy to break the perceived inter-ethnic peace and cause a massive conflict. To get someone willing to point out that Haiti is a massive ongoing disaster, we had to search very far outside the typical distribution of politicians.
Thus, you are having the undignified experience of being rescued by a professional wrestler.
His intervention is better viewed as a lucky chance, to be exploited, than a done deal.
What we're probably going to have to do is rebuild the philosophical basis for liberalism from a stage 5 (post-formal) moral perspective, focused on epistemic limits and epistemic humility. Conventional philosophical liberals are having trouble explaining why their principles exist.
If there is a stage 5, then what is a description of all the stages? Your notion of reality seems subtle enough to maybe shed more light on what it really is than the typical ideologies do, Please explain further, if you feel like it,.
The different moral development theories as commonly discussed (Kegan, Kohlberg) seem to have some common ground in an arc of { social morality, formal morality, post-formal morality }, usually around stages numbered 3, 4, and 5, depending on how people are charting it out.
You can think of this as team sports morality ("I'm a Democrat, and our good ingroup believe X") which can turn on a dime (social morality), principled morality that's trying to integrate moral intuitions into a formal system (this would be your conventional philosophies like Utilitarianism), and finally a sort of intuitive recognition that low-dimensionality constructs (like Utilitarianism) are insufficient to contain the whole of morality (for post-formalists).
The transition between each stage involves significant intellectual investment. This motion can be painful because it looks like the old principles falling away into meaninglessness and leaving nihilism.
It's not that Democrats didn't believe in free speech at all. Rather, most political types including most Democrats are social moralists, not formal or post-formal moralists, so they take their orders on their appropriate beliefs from those higher up in their social hierarchy, and then attempt to act on them locally.
2008 American liberalism was a fairly well-hedged ideology overall, so when Democratic leaders pushed for principles like free speech and procedural protections for those accused of crimes and so on, and Democratic social moralists embraced these principles locally, the Democrats as a whole looked a lot smarter than they actually are. The quality of their overall thinking has declined significantly due to the much worse epistemics of Social Justice, and many Democrats are wildly miscalibrated right now.
When I say that we should rebuild philosophical or political liberalism from a perspective of epistemic limits, what I mean is that many liberal principles are similar to prohibitions on economic central planning which is practically problematic due to limits on available information and computational power, but most current liberals don't know this and thus lose interpersonal arguments to "care/harm" types (who use conflict theorist epistemology) because their support for freedom seems "arbitrary."
By developing a philosophical framework which roots liberal principles in limits to information and personal morality, a kind of opposition to "cultural central planning," a new generation of intellectuals could be trained and gain an advantage in the coordination for the defense of liberal principles.
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