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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   34592 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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So, there's some talk downthread about Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants and such. Putting aside I guarantee in the late 19th century there was in fact plenty of examples of massive population changes, even in more rural parts of the country. Ironically, many of the same people who put forth those population changes are now the ones scared of immigration, so in 50 years, as is American tradition, these Haitian immigrants will be saying we shouldn't be letting in the Bangladeshi's or whomever.

But, the interesting thing is the questions about "why" anybody puts up with them and well, at least according to local business owners, because they're more likely to show up to do the job and not fail a drug test than the righteous pure American's currently living there.

https://youtube.com/watch?si=nke3DETnGvcaAHE4&v=FA80DOcJnu8&feature=youtu.be - Youtube video

https://x.com/otis_reid/status/1833578554778374462 - Quote from the factory owner.

Of course, 2016 J.D. Vance would probably agree with this factory owner about the get up 'n' go of this socioeconomic group of people instead of defending them from economic competition from supposedly mentally deficient Haitians.

Now, to quote a lot of Twitter, it is true the Haitians are ruining that community's traditions, by actually getting to work and not showing up high.

I broadly agree with this, springfield was already a declining shithole town, the type of place where anyone with ability leaves and doesn't look back. Haitians as a group may be low human capital but if all you need are manual laborers then just don't import too many men in their 20s, the group responsible for major issues, and you'll be fine. The one issue of course is whether the people of springfield were asked about whether they wanted mass migration - presumably the haitians did not all manage to end up in springfield of their own volition, some government agency or NGO must have set it up.

he one issue of course is whether the people of springfield were asked about whether they wanted mass migration

Sure they did. They got to vote in elections. They just got outvoted and we have free movement within this country, and it turns out, it's easier to resettle migrants in poorer places than richer places for obvious reasons. Less waste of government funding by NGO's placing them in a smaller city than San Francisco or New York.

then just don't import too many men in their 20s, the group responsible for major issues

20s is a bit on the older side for a troublemaker.

Do you know much about the modern history of Lebanon? Seems like late-stage multiculturalism to me. Exhibit A in what happens when you have too many ethnic/religious groups and welcome a huge number of refugees.

There’s certainly selection bias here. The miscreants are far less likely to bother trying to get a factory job than the Hard Workers.

because they're more likely to show up to do the job and not fail a drug test than the righteous pure American's currently living there.

Are you going to campaign on some Mega-Singapore ticket to remove birthright citizenship and deport anyone that fails a drug test? I could be convinced pretty easily.

Disparate impact means this is a non starter for them most likely

My first thought is that the real reason employers are so happy to have the Haitians is because they can pay them less, but not having been to the Midwest I may be underestimating the degredation of the native human capital.

Haitian-Americans seem to be doing okay so far, though one always has to be concerned about selection effects. Maybe Haiti's abysmal situation is due to instability and mismanagement. If only there were some way for an outside force to provide order, political stability, and facilitate foreign investment...

UPDATE: WE HAVE GEESE! The Federalist claims to have obtained a police report and non-emergency call from August where a citizen reports a group of Hatians who "all had geese in their hands." Finally, some actual journalism.

Here's a story that's not going to play very well.

Woman saying that her 71 year old mother in law got killed by a reckless Haitian driver while taking out the trash. That no one was punished, not even for expired tags on the vehicle.

Honestly anyone taking a good look at Haiti could have bet that far, far worse stories are going to come out of this. The car insurance($420 insurance per month on 2 cars) and crime (doubled since '21) factoids are likely right.

Locals are saying they believe Haitians have 'amnesty' and cops can't touch them. A woman - and not a great looking one, complaining she was groped and saying she doesn't go out without her pitbull and her gun.

EDIT: local claims he saw police stop a van full of Haitians who were collecting cats.

EDIT 2: Interesting talk by people from a neighboring village of Tremont (just NNW) https://youtube.com/watch?v=YrCotATOgR4&t=665s

Police in Springfield ordered not to tow vehicles without licenses. 7+ car accidents every day in Springfield. Haitians get out of fines because they don't have translator(?). Second guy who's speaking says he's been crashed into twice, his mother once.

Here's a story that's not going to play very well.

And therefore, it won't be played on the mainstream media at all.

If it's big enough on social media they're going to have to try to address it.

Maybe Haiti's abysmal situation is due to instability and mismanagement. If only there were some way for an outside force to provide order, political stability, and facilitate foreign investment...

Yeah, the US tried it. It was a shitshow. The US sucks at imperialism. Maybe Canada would like to try?

Who's still good at imperialism actually? The list has gotten pretty short.

Europe and the US are clearly out, one needs only to glance at Lybia and Irak. China's not exactly doing great. Free infrastructure with strings attached is a classic strategy, but they suck so much at diplomacy that everybody still hates their guts except maybe Iran.

It seems weird to say but I think Russia is the best we got here, and I wouldn't call them good. They're not afraid to go from the iron fist to the velvet glove, which gives them a leg up. But while turning the Chechens into loyalists was a feat, it was also a bloody mess.

China's not exactly doing great.

No, they're quite (horribly) effective at imperialism. Remember that just because Chinese territory is contiguous doesn't mean it's not an empire; China proper, peopled by Han, looks like this. Xinjiang and Tibet, at least (I'm less sure about Inner Mongolia and Manchuria), are not very happy with being ruled by the PRC, but it's doing them little good because they're brutally occupied.

I guarantee in the late 19th century there was in fact plenty of examples of massive population changes, even in more rural parts of the country

Even if we accept the moderate estimate that we're talking about 12k immigrants in a county of 110k residents in a span of 2 yrs, I'm pretty sure we're talking about a population influx on a scale and in a timeframe that surpasses any similar example from the immigration wave between 1880-1914.

I mean, I guarantee there were parts of the country that accelerated a similar rate, when you account for a much bigger immigration wave nationally.

But putting that aside, once you're in the United States, you're allowed to live where you can get housing. That's it. The community doesn't get a veto.

I'm pretty sure you're aware that there used to be such a thing as freedom of association.

I mean, you still have freedom of association in your personal life - some people in fact, call that 'cancel culture' when some people don't want to associate with other people due to their personal views, but yes, if you want the privileges and success that can come with being a business owner in America and all the advantages that has thanks to centuries of work by men and women of all colors and creeds, you don't get to make that business a private club for your own kind.

Or to quote a current Presidential candidate, you didn't just fall out of a coconut tree.

You know perfectly well that is not at all what cancel culture is. You also know perfectly well that freedom of association as a concept traditionally present in American civic life applies to communities and groups, not individuals and private lives.

And it's been a dead letter for 60 years. Sadly we did not have Switzerland's foresight to allow people to deny citizenship to their literal neighbors.

Tbh in Switzerland the cantons where almost all immigrants are (Zurich, Basel, Geneva) have a standard naturalization process that doesn’t really involve locals having that kind of say.

The process you’re referring to was more about rural Swiss-German communities being able to stop annoying Germans (often wholly useless professionals like doctors and engineers) being able to waltz in and ‘become Swiss’, sit on the local town council etc. it affected the occasional unlucky migrant family from further afield, but for the most part they don’t want to live in Inner Appenzell or Schwyz or whatever.

I'm 0% bothered by the fact that a town can come up with incentives to get 20,000 people to move there (and grow by 25% or whatever). Even if they're immigrants, necessarily.

What's rather alarming is that it was not by the town's political process and that they somehow are all immigrants from Haiti? What's their legal status? And how did so many of them end up there? This requires a lot more light.

I certainly wouldn't want my town to grow by 30%, populated entirely by (e.g.) Sudanese refugees that are totally 0% ex-Janjaweed we swear, with no say in the process whatsoever.

Putting aside I guarantee in the late 19th century there was in fact plenty of examples of massive population changes, even in more rural parts of the country. Ironically, many of the same people who put forth those population changes are now the ones scared of immigration, so in 50 years, as is American tradition, these Haitian immigrants will be saying we shouldn't be letting in the Bangladeshi's or whomever.

The various European groups that migrated to the US in the past were and are more similar to each other in terms of political views & shared cultural history than they are to the populations that arrived post WWII. Concluding that current migration is going to work out favorably from past European migrants being able to form a coherent new identity under vastly different socio-economic circumstances is a reach. From surveys like the GSS or others, it seems pretty likely that adding more migrants from places like Haiti, Central America or Africa isn't going to result in a smooth temporal continuity of extant American cultural sentiments about various things like immigration, free speech or the economy like you seem to imply.

As an aside, I remember reading a similar argument by you in the past, and sure enough going through my post history this turns out to be the third time I post this objection to the same kind of argument put forth by you. I don't expect you to concede, but given that you've never responded so far to me or others pointing out more or less the same thing, it'd be interesting to hear where you think this counterpoint goes wrong.

1.) If you would've told a British person they were basically the same as a Serb or Bulgarian in I don't know, 1851, they likely would've punched you and called you some weird slur nobody knows anymore. But, also, the whole "these ethnic groups are all similar too each other so that immigration was OK, it's just these people won't be able to do it," is literally the same argument made against Italians, Jews, Slavs, and hell, the Swedes at one time. This weird 'we're all white and should have solidarity' is a thing that never existed. As I've might've said before, as the descendent of Pole's, it's actually far more likely some ancestor of current non-college educated half-German guy in rural Ohio did a bit of light war crimes of ancestors of mine, as far as nothing bad has been done to my ancestors by non-European immigrants, so why should I, as argued below, have solidarity with them on racial lines?

2.) I'm quite sure the ole' American assimilation process (which continues largely the same way it always has despite protests to the contrary) will do it's work on Salvadorans, Venezuelans, and whomever else is the scary migrant group of the week. Yes, yes, the culture will change around that - welcome to being in the position of Bill the Butcher in 1863 upset the Irish were changing things or whatever. We're not some European country where people stay on the same patch of land for 9,000 generations. Things shift and change, and whatever you think was the perfect time that we globalists ruined was a time of ruin and destruction for some a generation or two older than you.

As far as imparting cultural sentiments, I don't know, Trump seems to be winning over Hispanic's fine. A little economic success leading to ladder pulling does not know color. It's an American tradition.

3.) Which is probably my inherent bedrock disagreement on where we don't agree - America's not getting worse to me. There are issues, as always, but in the long run, even with Trump, things continue to progress bit by bit.

Genetic similarity is pretty high, many Serbs can pass for Britons and vice versa. Not true for Haitians or Chinese etc. Cultural similarity is now much higher because modernity wiped it out during 20th century.

I'm quite sure the ole' American assimilation process (which continues largely the same way it always has despite protests to the contrary) will do it's work on Salvadorans, Venezuelans, and whomever else is the scary migrant group of the week

None of these people are, on average genetically on par with anglo-saxons, germanics or even balkan slavs, who are believed to be the dumbest Europeans there are, with the possible exception of southern Italians. I'm talking about stuff like propensity for violence, polygenic scores for educational attainment and so on.

If they were really on par, Salvador or Venezuela wouldn't look like Salvador or Venezuela, but would look like Australia.

Genetic similarity is pretty high, many Serbs can pass for Britons and vice versa.

Also, it was British colonists who came up with the legal concept of the white race in the late 17th Century. I'm pretty sure no Briton in the 19th Century would take serious offense at the argument that they have more racial similarity with Serbs and Bulgarians than with Haitian or South African blacks.

It’s entirely plausible that Hispanics with good nutrition have IQ’s similar to Balkaners.

Famous US joke is that when math departments are trying to fill their Hispanic quota, they look around for Argentinian Jews.

Hispanics span everyone from (Italian) Argentinians to 100% indigenous Mayans from Yucatan to Dominicans of mixed white, black and indigenous ancestry.

German ancestry Argentinians do not count for Hispanics for US purposes?

Genetic similarity is pretty high, many Serbs can pass for Britons and vice versa.

Denizens of autistic phenotype forums are screaming right now

What I meant is there exist a number of not really typical people in each population who wouldn't raise an eyebrow in either place.

Obviously you can tell at glance which group of tourists are from where, you can even tell Brits from Germans if you look carefully enough, but still, there are people who can pass in both places.

I'm quite sure the ole' American assimilation process (which continues largely the same way it always has despite protests to the contrary)

Prior to the last few decades, assimilation resistance came from the minority.

Now it comes from the majority (or whatever we want to call the media blob that approximates the "majority" opinion regardless of what most people actually want), which is why people expect the process to not function like it did prior to Western liberalism's suicidal turn.

There is no such thing as assimilation resistance at least the way it actually matters in society, as opposed to being upset there's more aspects of cultural group x in American life. There's no evidence of the usual pattern changing - first gen speaking mother tongue, second gen speaking mixture, third gen speaking English and a little bit of the mother tongue, fourth gen not knowing the mother tongue. OK, the last part is a joke.

There is no such thing as assimilation resistance at least the way it actually matters in society, as opposed to being upset there's more aspects of cultural group x in American life.

What exactly do you think assimilation is? Do you think that if these immigrants continue all of their normal cultural practices, but do them in English, that should be good enough for us to stop complaining?

I mean, seemed to work out for Irish, Italians, Jews, and all the other formerly high-crime low-wage ethnic groups. Even among Hispanics, there's a rising tide of 3rd & 4th generation who are now very successful and just like the white ethnics are starting to vote on cultural grievance and status protection, just like Archie Bunker and such started to do so.

Outside of that, there's no evidence that sort of issues, say, Europe is having with it's immigrant population is happening in the US at any large scale in the long run. Sixth and seventh generation Algerians and Turk's aren't considered fully French or German, and this just isn't an issue in America, outside of a rump 30% of which there has always been a population that's been upset since we started letting those swarthy Swedes in.

At what point do you expect African Americans to assimilate (that is to say, start getting outcomes around the US average in terms of crime, educational attainment and earnings)? Why do you think that Haitians will be more successful than they have been?

Sub-saharan African-immigrant populations are largely assimilating in terms of average outcomes of crime, educational attainment, and earning (see here) and appear to be mostly being dragged down on group averages by Somali immigrants specifically. Kenyan immigrants, for example, out-earn US-born citizens on average ($70,000/household vs. $66,000/household). Cameroonians and Liberians similarly have lower poverty rates than either the migrant population as a whole or native-born Americans (9% each vs. 14% of the immigrant population and 12% of the native-born population).

The repeated discussion of whether or not the native-born African American population is genetically distinct and disadvantaged from the general African population, that is the losers of a historical fitness competition, seems to gain another data point in its favor.

Though of course it's something of a folly to group together Somalis with Yoruba with Hausa with Ngala, it's at least a data point.

It seems pretty obvious that this is a selection effect and nothing more. If those Kenyan immigrants were representative of their home country, then Kenya would be a very wealthy country. You see a similar thing in the UK, with Nigerians (very selected) outperforming Jamaicans (unselected). The latter have outcomes that are pretty similar to African Americans.

Of course, if African migration to the US continues to be hyper-selective, then those migrants probably will end up with similar or better outcomes to the current Americans. But the group of Haitians in Springfield do not seem to have been selected for their high IQs (most of the Haitian elite left during the Duvalier dictatorship, as I understand it).

I can believe that 30 (and many more) of the 20,000 are hard workers. But does that justify the movement of tens of thousands?

If you get 2x number of good low-wage workers, 10x number of welfare users + x number of bad low-wage workers (the ones who crash the truck into someone because they're bad drivers, or cause industrial accidents) + 2x number of petty thieves and drug dealers... Is that a good deal? It's a good deal for the business owner who has his workers - maybe he can distinguish between good and bad workers, maybe he knows what he's doing and isn't just racking up legible gains and ignoring tail risks. But it's probably not good for the community or the region.

I just made those numbers up, who can say what the ratios are. We can observe that Haiti is not a very well-run country. There is no reason to think that the numbers will be good.

I mean, one should be able to look at the crime rate of Springfield, Ohio over the next few years and see if things shift that much. Of course, history shows that at least w/ the first generation of immigrants, crime is likely to go down.

Having seen the effects of recent migration to my city, the idea that 1st gen immigrants not committing more crime than the natives can only actually be true if there is a large black population in that place. Among crimes that can't be covered up by the community, like DUI, the Venezuelans we've gotten are massively overrepresented. We know there is a lot of sex crime being covered up by the community. As we see with this Springfield situation, authorities seem to be covering up immigrant crime at high rates as well.

Of course, history shows that at least w/ the first generation of immigrants, crime is likely to go down.

Why do progressives repeat this when the exact statistical mechanics of this have been known for years? No, history does not show that at all.

What’s the statistical mechanic, and source?

Presumably a combination of:

  1. First generation immigrants have foreign citizenship and can be deported or have their visa revoked, requiring them to be on best behaviour.
  2. First generation immigrants are selected to some extent, their children revert to the mean.

I don’t see how either of those invalidates the statistic

High crime parts of the US drag the average up, and while it's technically true immigrants have a lower-than-average crime rate, that's small consolation for communities that aren't in that dragging-the-average-upwards cluster.

and source?

Tell you what, how about you grab the stat that the claim is made on, and I look up the crime stats of Springfield, and we'll see how it would affect them.

Very well. That stat appears to come from the paper LAW-ABIDING IMMIGRANTS: THE INCARCERATION GAP BETWEEN IMMIGRANTS AND THE US-BORN, 1870–2020. On page 24 of the PDF, the chart appears to show an incarceration rate of 1,200 per 100k first generation immigrants in 2020, versus 2,600 per 100k native born. (How the hell do you escape a tilde on this site?) The breakdown shows an incarceration rate of perhaps ~1,900 per 100k first generation Mexican and Central Americans (this would presumably be the closest category for Haitians).

According to this page, Springfield hasn't been very safe lately:

The 2022 crime rate in Springfield, OH is 573 (City-Data.com crime index), which is 2.3 times greater than the U.S. average. It was higher than in 97.9% U.S. cities.

Looking at the crime type breakdowns, assaults have gone way up since 2020, while rapes perhaps did a reversion to the mean. Other crimes don't appear to have meaningfully increased in volume.

Meanwhile, the demographics put it at 77% white and 1% Latino as of the 2020 population of 65k. Obviously, the demographics have changed quite a bit since then, with 15,000 Haitians settling there since 2020.

Overall, I don't know if we have enough data to do a proper apples-to-apples comparison. One specific type of crime rose from 2020 to 2022, but we don't know when most Haitians came in from 2020 - 2024, nor do we know the breakdown of those crimes by ethnicity over the years (it appears the town has had an economic downturn, so how would we know the crimes are because of the Haitians and not because of disgruntled native workers with nothing better to do?).

In any case:

High crime parts of the US drag the average up, and while it's technically true immigrants have a lower-than-average crime rate, that's small consolation for communities that aren't in that dragging-the-average-upwards cluster.

I don't see how this invalidates the statistic. Are immigrants settling disproportionately in formerly peaceful areas that now have more crime than before? That would seem surprising to me, given that I mostly see immigrants in the metropolitan cities rather than in the rural countryside, and big cities have much higher crime rates. But by all means, if you have evidence that shows that the statistic is misleading, please do show it.

Overall, I don't know if we have enough data to do a proper apples-to-apples comparison.

Well, to make it slightly more apples-to-apples, since the your link provides the incarceration rate, I did a quick search for Clark Country. Funnily enough, like you said, it's not the safest place, and it's actually one of those that drags the national average up. Still, comparing it to your link, it seems roughly on the same level as "all immigrants". If you take South and Central America, it's not even close, sending in more people from that region would increase the incarceration rate even more.

Looking at those charts, I have the feeling they're being misused. It seems they were set up to say something like " America's racist society is turning otherwise law-abiding people into criminals", but through some game of telephone people started retelling it as "immigrants are literally less criminal than average Americans", which is completely wrong.

I don't see how this invalidates the statistic.

What do you mean? He literally said "Of course, history shows that at least w/ the first generation of immigrants, crime is likely to go down". How do you parse that data to come to that conclusion? Even if we go with "there's no data for a good apples-to-apples comparison, he's the one that's wrong for making the claim!

Am I missing something here?

Edit: There's something very weird going on in that source. Apparently the average incarceration rate in the US is 531 per 100K, I don't know how you get these numbers to work together with the study you linked. Do they per 100K of the prison population??

Maybe it's because of the age? My link gives the rate for 15-64s, while yours for 18-40's. God, I hate academia.

I took his claim to mean that overall crime rates as measured across the US would be lower than it’d be without immigrants. I’m not even parsing the data, I’m just not seeing how your claim — even if true, which it may well be — invalidates his claim.

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The idea that Haitians are superior to the people they replace fits the far left racial supremacist mythology but it is certainly not true. You would really love for places like Haiti and their people to be superior to white Americans.

I find it notable how far leftists like to push the myth of the native working class as degenerate, inferiors. Kind of shows an obvious downside of this migration since a core aspect of it is benefiting the foreigner, or those who benefit by lower labor cost, over the native, even in terms of actual redistribution, but also in terms of social freedom, community cost, two tier justice system, an agenda in favor of insufficient policing because of the desire not to police demographics like blacks such as the Haitians, and the desire to give a misleading picture, etc, etc.

Of course the American business elite who went along with the marxist BLM, and started discriminating against white Americans are not wise for what is the common good and we need to have a gatekeeping agaisnt far left capitalists, and hiring managers, CEO, just like we ought to against NGO, Bureaucrats, Politicians. Because these people abuse their power at the expense of society, to fulfill unethical and based on false premises and criminal, and racist anti-native and anti-white objectives. Additionally short term valuing of lower cost over other important concerns like, not destroying ones nation and community, not bringing populations to be favored over foreigners, violent crime, net welfare (obviously if you as a corporation use lower wage labor but the same labor gets paid by the goverment, there is a negative externiality and a tragedy of the commons).

Anyway, the attempt to destroy and replace a population while presenting them as inferior to the replacers and lying about it, is a completly treasonous and criminal agenda. Both to advocate, and of course far more so to do it. The remedy to this is to imprison and shut down the NGO and politician networks doing this and to make it a massive taboo for people to advocate this. Prioritize this as the moral issue for people to be condemned and suffer negative consequence, over the far right boogiemen. And of course business executives pushing for this, can themselves be targeted by the legal system as facilitating an invasion. Or being part of a criminal agenda to make the native Americans tm second class citizens. Or violating democratic representation by flooding communities that were never asked.

There is an enormous problem of too understated a reaction towards extremely destructive, hostile, treasonous agenda. Tied with also people who control institutions of influence and power, using censorship and trying to impose the respect towards a faction that defiles what ought to be sacred, and deserves in turn a proportionate harsh reaction. Trying to flood with foreigners in general is violating a sacred red line, but that is doubly so with violent ones from low IQ countries with massive problems. This is a red line that should not be breached, and severe consequences should follow for those who breech this norm. We need to reestablish a norm against such massive moral hazard and need to punish the obvious problem of massive racist oikophobia from the far left that joins in its attitude and in part invites for these purposes, foreign groups and foreign nationalists. In combination with this also promotes massive racial discrimination.

Anyway, Haitians if they are so good, should run Haiti well and even from a universalist perspective this is the superior course. Of course Haiti is not a success. But in any case good luck to them. The pretense of people who have it out against European Americans that they should replace the later because the Haitians are superior is nothing but a blatantly false excuse.

Now, to quote a lot of Twitter, it is true the Haitians are ruining that community's traditions, by actually getting to work and not showing up high.

The sadistic hatred towards what ought to be your own people speaks for itself. Although it would be condemnable towards a foreign ethnic group as well because even towards foreigners you have a moral obligation not to support their destruction on the basis of their inferiority. In general but doubly so when you are distorting things. Of course, you have an even greater moral obligation towards your own people.

That this behavior exists with such predictability instead of people being too ashamed to display it, is precisely because people have failed to be sufficiently intolerant to it.

Another wall of text full of polemics directed at your outgroup and personal attacks directed at the person you are arguing with. You've been warned about this repeatedly and banned a few times. I'm going to leave this as a warning since sometimes you dial it back a bit after being warned, and you had an AAQC recently which is just barely mitigating, but the mods were split on warning or ban, so take the grace and dial it down more.

A pretty long time ago ('07) I've read a mfg company manager that finding a working class person who can come to work on time, pass a drug test is quite hard in the US. Because probably everyone from them who can do these things is already employed. Or worse, in college.

Murray made a case in his Coming Apart book that the working classes have been badly hit by the last 50 years. People with worse cognition aren't as flexible and need a more functional culture.

A pretty long time ago ('07) I've read a mfg company manager that finding a working class person who can come to work on time, pass a drug test is quite hard in the US. Because probably everyone from them who can do these things is already employed. Or worse, in college.

In many cases this is because they don't want to pay the going rate for good employees. They get fooled because with a lowball rate they can consistently get an employee who is good enough for a short while, and then the employee goes back on the sauce or gets in a barfight or some other such thing.

For machinists, as with the specific company here, specifically it's also just extremely unpleasant work -- loud, repetitive, lots of metal shavings and cutting fluid, just the wrong mix of boring and extremely dangerous, sometimes in really subtle ways.

For a while the pay made up for it when machinists could pull the sort of wages that 'skilled trades' like HVAC or assembly could (though even then, it wasn't popular), but right now the industry is pretty badly squeezed; if you aren't aggressively chasing pay and jumping up from operator roles, you're probably gonna be closer to a McDonald's worker than a specialized-skill one. And in turn, leaving the operator or setup roles to a true machinist seat requires a very broad set of problem-solving skills that... well, it isn't the same as IQ, and it's definitely not the same as college-readiness, but it's the sort of skillset where you have a lot of other options. Boosting pay would be the normal solution, but (excluding spheres where Made In America is mandatory) there's just not that much slack in the market, nor space for improved employee productivity.

There's a certain type of person that excels at it, because it's indoor work, not always on your feet, and kinda nice from a feeling productive bit, but there's not a ton of that type of person that wouldn't be better doing something else.

((Though I'd caveat the skills problem is more complicated. It's not just that the lower wage workers are nuts, though some are, but that we've spent nearly forty years putting massive selection pressures against conscientious people learning a lot of the physical skills necessary for these classes of jobs. I've seen engineering college graduates that don't know how to use Allen wrenches properly, or know the names for Phillips-head versus Torx, or how to use a proper set of wirestrippers. Not everyone who does has facial tattoos, to borrow a turn of phrase, but it's a serious dichotomy.))

Why.. metal shavings and cutting fluid are contained inside the CNC machines, you only encounter that while cleaning them, no ?

Cleaning completed parts is a not-trivial part of what operators do, and while they should be just a quick brush-and-dunk in degreaser by the end of an operation, 'should' is the operative word. Keeping your machine(s) clean and clear ends up taking a lot more time than you'd think. Deburring and material prep adds yet more, operations like tapping. It's not a literal swimming in grunge sorta problem, but especially if you're sensitive to it -- and I know more than one person that finds common aluminum cutting fluid to smell like bile when hot -- or the first time you put pressure down with bare skin on a surface that looked clean of chips, it gets really annoying.

I find it notable how far leftists like to push the myth of the native working class as degenerate, inferiors.

I find many people in PMC circles compare legal educated immigrants (basically the best human capital of the donor countries) to the least educated working class proletariat in the host countries. It's never apples to apples of the worst educated proles from the donor countries. If you tried to compare the proles from western countries to proles from places like India and China it basically ends up looking like a /pol/ rant. Let alone comparing high human capital educated 'international' westerners to proles in places like Dubai or China.

Putting aside I guarantee in the late 19th century there was in fact plenty of examples of massive population changes,

19th century immigrants weren't getting flown in on taxpayer dime while being eligible for massive welfare and benefits. 19th century immigrants brought a lot of crime and ethnic mafias. Many of the worst ended up leaving America.

Many of the worst ended up leaving America.

What do you mean?

Back in the periods of major European immigration to the USA a large number would return back to their home country, usually because they failed to make their fortune and America was rough if you were poor.

Also because that's what most of them were planning to do from the start i.e. to make some money in the US in order to return and pay off their debts and buy a house etc.

Also the jobs of the 19th century were better suited to human fungibility. If there was still a widespread low-skilled manufacturing base in the West the immigration dynamic changes a lot, IMO.

You're right about massive population changes in our past, but they were not all positive.

Consider Detroit, for example. In 1910, Detroit had around 450,000 people, 99% of whom were white. Thanks to ample factory jobs, and the Great Migration, the population exploded to 1.8 million by 1950. Among the new citizens were 300,000 black people from the Deep South who filled valuable roles in the city's numerous factories.

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

We all know what happened next. Today, Detroit's population has fallen to 600,000 give or take. The white population has fallen to just 10%. The factory jobs disappeared and today the median household income in Detroit is just $37,000 making it the poorest large city in the U.S. Much of the income comes from government transfer payments. Labor force participation is incredibly low.

https://poverty.umich.edu/files/2019/10/Detroit-Labor-Market-1213.pdf

Job shortages are temporary. Demographic change is forever. First, the white citizens of Springfield will leave. Then the Haitians will leave. And it will eventually end up like Cairo, Illinois - a ghost town.

Yeah, Detroit had a bad run with a combination of the capitalistic incompetence of the Big Three ownership + corrupt leadership + the general Sun Belt migration.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of the most economically dynamic and innovative and growing regions of the US are far more diverse, with the places that are less diverse mostly slowly dying out. This includes red states too - Houston, Miami (weird how the amount of Haitians wasn't a worry for all the VCers and blockchainers a few years ago), etc. There aren't a ton of super-white areas of the country with massive growth. Even a place like Nashville is diversifying as it grows.

  • -11

Even a place like Nashville is diversifying as it grows.

This seems to be suggesting the opposite causal direction to what you're claiming - that growth/dynamism causes diversity, rather than that diversity causes growth/dynamism.

We have lots of discussion here all the time about the unfortunate state of black demographics. It is fine to "Notice" and comment on this. It is not fine to simply make blanket, very general assertions intended to be inflammatory, which you do all the time. Something about Haitians seems to be stirring up an unusual level of nastiness in the mod queue, but unlike the last few people I have warned, your record is nothing but shitty comments like this.

Banned for a week.

Houston actually does have really high crime rates, albeit not St Louis tier. Of course Texas racial dynamics are a bit less apologetic than elsewhere in the country, having white bosses over all-POC crews is totally normal.

I've personally lived in an African village of about 1500 where I was literally the only white for about 200k, and it wasn't a shithole, except by shallow criteria such as relative poverty (many lived in literal mud huts). But these huts were swept clean, the interior stone floors regularly polished to a slippery sheen, the people's clothes, such as they were, were ironed (with a fucking iron heated over a fire) and generally it was a very pleasant place to live.

That's an interesting observation. I wonder whether it's something about village life that makes people care about their reputations (see C20th British housewives scrubbing their doorsteps to keep up appearances). African cities look pretty filthy from what I've seen.

That said, I assume somedude was more talking about crime. In that case, the relationship is much clearer.

There have been many studies and philosophical reasonings on this. Anonymity, Dunbar's Number, reputational importance, clan survival, reciprocity odds, etc...The reasons are multitude and it is only in WEIRD societies that we can have nice cities and large groups that all act like small groups.

"Among the most prominent features that make people WEIRD is prioritizing impersonal pro-sociality over interpersonal relationships. Impersonal psychology includes inclinations to trust strangers or cooperating with anonymous others. " https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henrich-explores-weird-societies/

A good reason to not import too many non-weird clannish people at once.

And there's the rub.

Some immigration is good. Some is bad. I'll argue that the high skill immigrants Silicon Valley gets are good. And low skill immigrants from Haiti are bad.

with the places that are less diverse mostly slowly dying out.

Studies have shown that when people move within the U.S., people of all races migrate towards areas that are whiter.

Except some currently high skill American residents are the descendants of low skill immigrants and refugees. If you actually want long-term dynamism and growth, you actually have to roll the dice on people without the right papers and hope for the best. Worked pretty well the first 250 years or so.

Would you not consider the importation of millions of Africans during the slave trade to be a similar 'roll of the dice'? I would say these Haitain migrants (being quite literally African American, in the sense of being Africans who have lived in the Americas for hundreds of years) are much more similar to America's current AA population than they are to the Jews, Irish or Italians of yesteryear.

This isn't Reddit so we can say these things explicitly. Subsaharan Africans have very low IQs (85 for AAs, 76 for Haitians). This can be compared to European IQs of around 100 or East Asian/Ashkenazi IQs of around 110. With this knowledge, can you really say that importing tens of thousands of Haitians to be a 'roll of the dice'? It seems pretty obvious to me that we can predict what will happen.

Those people came from populations with average IQ's that wouldn't be literally retarded in civilized countries. We can expect Italian(average IQ upper nineties) and Chinese(average IQ vaguely above 100) peasants to occasionally produce a genius. This is unlikely from Haitians.

Our nation is more diverse than ever and less dynamic than ever.

I mean, the citizens of Springfield were already leaving. I don't like Haitians, wouldn't be happy to have them near me, and if a bunch of them were heading to my suburb I'd be on the phone with state elected officials demanding they be rounded up and shipped somewhere else. But in the long run this doesn't change the future of Springfield's white population. It was already dead.

The real victims here are the Haitians. In one generation they're going to be utterly wrecked by the US welfare state, VR porn, and fentanyl. They will be chewed up and spit out. Their birthrates will crash through the floor and that will be the end of them. They are now being thrust into the hedonic suicidal memetrap that is modern culture, and they are even less equipped to survive it than the whites they are replacing.

I don't disagree. Haitians should make something of themselves in Haiti. Their kids will masturbate to pornography until they get erectile dysfunction and smoke themselves out of having jobs, mostly milling about wondering who their dads are.

Native whites can recover(if they want to) by joining a religious community. Haitians don't know that, and the black church isn't as good at setting people on the straight and narrow.

Of course, it couldn't happen to better people. Literal devil worshipping jigaboos don't arouse much sympathy.

  • -12

Really hating someone still isn’t license to ignore the rules.

Going with a one day ban to cool off a little.

You gonna apply that to outlaw83? I seriously doubt it.

People drunk on Twitter quips let out the friend enemy distinction once again.

The post cold war left has now abandoned the native working class for sexual and ethnic minorities for so long that calling their former constituency a bunch of hicks that deserve to be replaced by Haitians is not just a guilty pleasure, it's bog standard rhetoric.

Of course those same leftists will complain that those same hicks are too stupid to vote for them when it's "in their interest" and not only totally occult their contempt but attempt to justify the contempt through its consequences.

This is fine. It's normal politics, you can't be mad at people for trying to win. I think this is a terrible strategy and that the success of both Danish socdems and the Europeean far right show exactly why. But I'm cool with it. Let them eat their caps when white devils votes for the right wing chauvinists who actually promise getting rid of the scabs and protecting local industry.

It is amusing, however, that we have once again run into "you are not being replaced by Haitians but it is a good thing that you are".

vote for them when it's "in their interest"

This is one of those phrases that says more about the speaker than about the subject. If you can imagine having principles beyond selfishness and greed, then that objection rings hollow.

If this X thread is to be believed, what is actually going on here is that a federally-funded labor arbitrage organization called Switchboard is providing extremely low-wage labor to these businesses, offering to link them up with “refugees” who can be paid dramatically less than native workers (who are not even considered for these job openings, nor even made aware of them) because their entire housing and healthcare budget are 100% subsidized by the very same government.

Twenty years ago, committed leftists would still have had the good sense to be highly skeptical of capitalist claims that immigrant labor is “just better” than native labor; see Bernie Sanders famously calling open borders “a Koch Brothers project.” They would have immediately smelled a rat and seen this for what it is: a way for employers to pay their employees as little as possible. Nowadays, however, leftists eagerly gobble up these businesses’ transparent excuses, because it flatters their fetish for diversity and population replacement. “Haha, of course the factory owners wouldn’t lie about this; white American workers are just a bunch of lazy entitled slobs, and the non-white scab labor is more virtuous!”

I can well believe that one of their major complaints- marijuana- about native white labor is 100% true. This is ubiquitous amongst the native born and dramatically less common elsewhere. I can easily believe that this is the one major problem Haitians are less prone to.

And marijuana use is often a problem for blue collar bosses, both for reasons stemming from observations of its effects and because insurance companies don't like it when your employees can't pass drug tests.

On one hand: yes to all points.

On the other hand: no employer of mine has ever dared drug test me. Somehow I get a pass but some guy whose job involves stacking and unstacking boxes must never touch cannabis on a day off work, unless he wishes to be fired.

I get firing people who show up to work high or drunk. Obviously. But checking if someone smoked weed at any point in the past few weeks is a craze for many employers. And I mean craze in a very negative sense.

At least some major employers are coming around. A few years ago Amazon stopped firing low level warehouse workers for pissing hot for weed. Because if someone wants to work in an Amazon warehouse and can hit their strict metrics, why would you fire them because they smoked weed at some point in the past few weeks?

Whatever happened to MeToo? In 2017 it seemed unstoppable and like it was going to really change quite a bit of the social dynamics between the genders. It’s since gone very quiet, has there been any more major celebrities or persons getting MeToo’d? The last person i remember getting destroyed is Cuomo.

It feels like there’s been basically zilch since then, although I could be wrong. Is this because men are finally treating women like sexless persons deserving of respect or is it merely that it was a passing fad?

We've likely reached the peak of unrest sometime in the last few years. The woke movements are still bubbling, but the first derivative of their energy has turned negative.

Man if Noah Smith says something I'm reflexively going to believe it is the actual inverse of the truth.

It'd be 'easy' to "call the top" after the intense violence that marked the summer of 2020, but I don't for a second buy that the factors that enabled that sort of violence have changed much, or that there's not sufficient energy simmering under the surface for it to happen again.

Typical sort linear thinking, draw the line on the graph, circle the high point, and assert that things couldn't possibly go higher than that!

You could make the same argument about inflation, actually, claiming that because it peaked under Covid conditions it is unlikely to ever get so high again because those conditions have passed.

Typical sort linear thinking, draw the line on the graph, circle the high point, and assert that things couldn't possibly go higher than that!

This is uncharitable, bordering on a strawman of what he said. He didn't claim it with strong certainty, just that there was a good chance that unrest had peaked. Given the retreat of woke (e.g. Harris' campaign platform) this is seeming more and more prescient now. Quoting directly from the article:

Now of course, interest might die down and then surge again even bigger than before, as it did for BLM and QAnon in 2020. But as of right now, all of these movements seem to be less in the public eye.

On the other hand, there have now been two separate attempts on Trump's life. Clearly a sign of lowering temperatures!

Globally, unrest seems to be ticking up regularly!

We just had riots in Ireland and England over their migrant situation. Also in Venezuela over an election. And in the U.S. Pro-palestine protestors are still kicking around. There was an actual shooting involving one recently.. We've had multiple (three that I know of, as another one occurred this past weekend) individuals who have literally burned themselves to death as a political statement.

I'd wager the main reason things are holding a bit steady is the pending election, where both sides think they have a shot a victory. I will happily bet against anyone who thinks unrest won't immediately spike up inside of six months if Trump manages to win the election.

Like, the whole argument seems to hinge on the idea that people are becoming more satisfied with the status quo, less prone to lash out. Which seems blatantly untrue to me?

Anything he’s obviously gotten wrong in the past?

Just curious so I can update my mental model.

And here he goes doing it in just the past couple days:

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1836065799406280838

Claiming that China somehow possesses capacity to detonate electronic devices at will... in the U.S.

Without a single suggestion as to the means they could do it. Like, there's almost zero reason to believe this is true.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1835718296047653161

Here he is giving Kamala credit for increases in U.S. energy production that By the very graphs he posted obviously and clearly began during Trump's term.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1835388262464286853

Here he references data that cuts off in 2022 to dismiss claims about the number of migrants in Springfield in 2024. Then later admits that the number could still be higher and indeed plenty of people post various sources to back up the claim of 20k. Note that you can easily check and see that there was dramatic devolution of the situation in Haiti that might have caused a large uptick in refugees since then!

This is the guy who writes a column claiming to analyze facts and give reasonable conclusions based on those facts.

I don't use the term hack as a trivial thing, but I genuinely believe Noah Smith is a hack.

The one that really, really got me to reject him as a source of useful insight was this INTENSE insistence, during Covid times, that every state, every country absolutely HAD to implement a "Test and Trace" protocol before lockdowns could be lifted.

He actually changed his twitter handle to include "Test and Trace." He wrote articles about it. Its not that he was suggesting the idea itself, per se, that bugged me it was more the complete conviction he decided to take on the position which seemed extremely unwarranted by the actual information on hand at the time.

And of course I think he abruptly stopped mentioning it at all sometime in 2021, and so hasn't grappled at all with whether it actually proved effective vs. other methods (or simply doing nothing) and re-evaluated his once strongly-held beliefs.

Granted, he's just one of many people and institutions who torched credibility in my eyes during that period of time.

Another example, he (a Jewish man) was apparently quite blind to antisemitism on the Left until October 2023, and he OF COURSE insists this wasn't due to his own ideological leanings. He's not the only one, but my lord does his obliviousness seem particularly terminal.

Finding a blind spot THAT massive should inspire some epistemic humility, but he earns his keep by writing pieces about how people should understand and act in the world so that would mean he'd have to find some other line of work, too.

Here he is 2022 calling for a troop buildup in Poland and in other NATO countries. not sure where he thinks those troops are coming from, or what his actual expertise on military matters is. Or whether he's gone back and checked if this was a good idea in light of the past two years of fighting.

The main reason I haven't really lost even an ounce of respect for Scott Alexander, by comparison, is Scott's willingness to actively re-examine his past beliefs (which he often posts in form of odds-based predictions anyway!) to see if he did anything particularly wrong. Noah simply does not do this, and as mentioned probably can't afford to if he wants to keep his job.

Test and trace certainly seemed like it could be good early on, before it became clear that COVID was too easily spread and would never be effective. He dropped the push for test and trace after a few months.

Reinforcing east-flank NATO countries is a good idea given Russia's aggression. Previously, NATO had mostly only kept tripwire forces near Russia to avoid "provoking" them. Rescinding that policy to at least some degree was a good choice.

None of these seem like horrible miscalculations by any stretch unless I'm missing other context.

Reinforcing east-flank NATO countries is a good idea given Russia's aggression.

Again, with what troops? What second-order effects are there from doing so? Why does it assume U.S. troops rather than Europeans stepping into the gap?

Can't just magick up these solutions because you think they sound good. Perfect example with the test and trace. He didn't bother to think about feasibility (or, as he might put it "state capacity") given the actual situation on the ground, and just pushed for an idea because in theory it might be a great solution! But what does that count for?

He seems to be incompetent on geopolitical matters, and I've had a few Gell-Mann moments where he talks about topics I'm actually familiar with and he gets things badly wrong, or misses some important extra variable.

Like, it is unclear why you'd choose him for your analysis over any other random pundit, other than he's pretty good at couching his observations as if they're detached and 'objective' in some ways. But as with the leftist antisemitism issue, he appears to be so heavily detached that he's not really engaged with base reality enough to pontificate!

The guy I've been currently listening to for insights is Peter Zeihan, and he seems to be MUCH, MUCH better at the "levelheaded examination of objective facts on the ground and delving into implications" game.

So the value that Noah contributes to the discourse, even if it isn't negative (I think it is, he clouds issues more than he clarifies!) is probably not enough to justify listening to him over someone like, say, Nate Silver or even Eliezer Yudkowsky with Demonstrated expertise and a track record for honesty and accuracy. And again, Scott Alexander is great on the meta level for figuring out why we make certain errors in thinking.

Again, with what troops?

With troops from NATO member states? There's been a steady drumbeat of articles over the past few years of countries doing exactly this. By the way you're framing this you're seeming to imply there's some huge problem here, but you're not really saying what that is. I also don't recall this being a topic that Noah has returned to much. Did he write an article about it? You posted a single tweet he made as your evidence that he has no idea what he's talking about, on a thing that did end up happening and was (I would argue) a good idea. Is there more to this that I'm missing? This just seems extremely thin to me.

Zeihan triggers the same "bullshit artist" alarm to me that you're getting from Noah, although for me it's probably somewhat lesser here. I've only read a few of his takes and I haven't been particularly impressed, as he has the age-old pundit problem of overconfidence. His book is a good example, where it's stated as a prediction rather than a highly unlikely worst-case scenario. Funnily enough, Noah had the same critique as I did.

I also read Nate Silver and Scott Alexander and think they're great overall. They run into issues sometimes, nobody is perfect after all. But they're better than the pack which is the important part. I'm less enthused about Yud, as he's sounded more and more like a detached luddite lunatic.

Went over Noah's recent twitter posts and he's as bad as I remember. Recounted here:

https://www.themotte.org/post/1160/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/250998?context=8#context

He's just all over the place. He wants to comment on cyberwarfare capabilities in China, but I doubt he has knowledge in that area.

Then on U.S. energy production policy.

Then on Haitian migrants in Ohio.

But makes glaring errors in each comment, and that's just the ones I semi-randomly picked as examples.

This is the stuff you GENERALLY don't get from Zeihan, Silver, or Scott, they wouldn't make STRONG claims well outside their area of expertise and then fail to back up any of it.

Yud, well, his whole thing is that AGI is likely to kill off humanity and he's seeing more and more signs he feared might arise and yet few people seeming to care, it must be a bit of a living nightmare for the guy.

His book is a good example, where it's stated as a prediction rather than a highly unlikely worst-case scenario. Funnily enough, Noah had the same critique as I did.

I also read Zeihan's book and skimming that review I'm not even sure Noah understand the arguments. He makes the following statement:

There’s also the strong possibility that China — the only state capable of overthrowing U.S. power by force — will choose to cooperate with the U.S. to keep the sea lanes open, simply because of the catastrophic consequences to China of not doing so (which Zeihan vividly describes). Ultimately, Zeihan’s predictions of global anarchy rely on countries collectively making decisions that are utterly disastrous for themselves.

But he earlier grants that "The first of these [demographic collapse] is probably unavoidable." So he's accepting the premise that Zeihan uses there!

And Zeihan's whole point is that China is in such rapid, terminal demographic decline that they will collapse entirely on their own, with or without U.S. keeping the sea lanes open, so unless you can explain why a Chinese collapse WON'T happen, then 'U.S.-Chinese Cooperation' is not a viable solution because there won't be any China to cooperate with.

I don't know how a guy can miss or ignore points this badly without it being intentional. the reason countries will collectively make decisions that are disastrous for themselves is that they won't have much choice once the demographics collapse forces their hand!

More comments

Why would it change the social dynamics? The suggestion that men would start living in fear was always a bogeyman.

Anyway, the Trump/Carroll lawsuit probably counts.

"The suggestion that men would start living in fear was always a bogeyman."

Can it be a mere boogeyman if it's an explicit progressive goal? Here's Ezra Klein's infamous statement on the matter:

"No Means No” has created a world where women are afraid. To work, “Yes Means Yes” needs to create a world where men are afraid.

For that reason, the law is only worth the paper it’s written on if some of the critics’ fears come true.

Klein doesn't make policy, of course, but the people that read him do. His writing is deep inside the progressive Overton window (and when he steps outside it, it's usually because he's making more right-coded points), so I'm inclined to think something close to his vision animates the people writing sexual harassment legislation and policies.

You can make the argument that they have been ineffective or argue that these efforts are unnecessary to make men fearful, like Ozy Brennan did, but that's a big project. To be fair, making the positive claim would be a big project too, to establish that efforts to create a world where men are afraid were effective. But those efforts were not phantasmal.

Meanwhile, half of young men between the ages of 18-25 say they have never approached women for dates in person.

It did change the social dynamics. It's just that nobody with power cares about what it did change.

I’d be willing to bet

in person

is doing most of the heavy lifting there. But there’s plenty of possible confounders. The existence of dating apps, sure, but also the general rise of social media, the ubiquity of smartphones, and the overall economic situation.

If this is the data you have in mind, I think it’s supposed to come from here. That author specifically denies that MeToo is at fault, though I find his justification shaky; his theory of generational risk aversion is compatible with an increased threat.

But I digress. None of his data shows change over time. Without that, I don’t think you can suggest cause and effect.

That's the one I had in mind. But fair enough, it doesn't prove the causal link.

They didn’t stop approaching because they were scared of being arrested for harassment, they stopped approaching because of a combination of apps allowing for a lower-fear experience (walking up to a girl with her friend is scary, on the apps you only match with people who have already expressed some interest in you) and the entire rest of society’s distraction mechanisms, like tiktok and video games, making people less interested in real life.

That's not quite my experience but I may know too many people whose lives have been destroyed by lies, surely we can test this?

How many otherwise attractive, charming, confident and single young straight men with good social skills (ie not social anxiety) do you know who chose remain celibate for fear they’ll commit a MeToo?

At least three, more if you loosen the criteria. One of em is a boxer whose brother did years in prison after being accused of raping a girl he never met.

But it's only my own sample of course.

How was he convicted of raping a girl he never met? In almost every false rape conviction the sex was consensual, without a rape kit/DNA match at all it’s almost impossible to get a conviction without witnesses or very compelling circumstantial evidence. How were charges brought if there was zero evidence he ever encountered her?

I should say jail, not prison. He wasn't convicted (that I know of). There was no possibility of bail and justice is excruciatingly slow.

In France detention without conviction can last up to three years depending on the severity of the crime you're accused of.

Not familiar with the details of the case I will say, there may have been some circumstantial evidence, I know he did get his way in the end.

That some megachads still approach women does not mean this phenomenon -- men being afraid to approach women for fear of serious consequences -- does not exist. If the point of the whole movement was just to stiffen up the filters so that women only receive approaches from megachads... well, mission fucking accomplished.

They didn’t stop approaching because they were scared of being arrested for harassment

Who said anything about being arrested?

Your explanation for why apps are lower-fear is exactly why they'd be a shield against metoo.

Fear of reporting vs. fear of rejection.

But sure, both are probably less threatening on dating apps. That’s just not enough to show causation, or even a trend.

Yeah, but "fear of being reported" does not boil down to being reported to the police. When MeToo was at it's peak, we've had progressives unrinonically argue that no one should ever hit on a woman at work, to the utter shock and horror of our local Europeans, for whom it's it would imply lowering the birthrate from "dangerously low" to "extinction level".

Sure. The study IGI was looking at said HR complaints were ~half of reports. Police rarely came into it.

I’m saying I expect MeToo takes a distant back seat compared to the traditional dating woes of insecurity and embarrassment.

They didn’t stop approaching because they were scared of being arrested for harassment

The beauty of the whole system is that you now suffer the consequences even without even ever being arrested. A woman can make a social media post about you and you get all of the social stigma of being guilty without any of the due process. Most people who suffer from this are simply thankful that only their social life, career, or both were destroyed and that they aren't in jail.

It won…

I think you are running together MeToo the movement and MeToo as a type of event (as in: "he's been me-tooed"). The fact that MeToo events are no longer occuring with regular frequency doesn't mean the movement has sizzled out! On the contrary, the fact that new creases are no longer forming only means that you've finally broken into a pair of shoes!

On thing going against it is that the victims just aren’t that sympathetic to normal Americans. Most of these people are elites with more money than most median Americans will ever have and they’re upset, basically about something that had been known long before these particular women decided to show up. The “casting couch” had been a known feature of Hollywood film and TV since long before most of us were born. It’s not like they were surprised it happens, it’s been a thing since the 1930s or earlier, maybe going all the way back to the early days of stage. It’s something that anyone considering a career in movies, TV, or music would absolutely be aware of going in and likely decided beforehand was a reasonable price to pay to be famous for acting and live in a mansion.

Other movements were a bit more sympathetic simply because they were the normal everyday people who worked normal jobs for normal pay and were expected to put up with bad male behavior. Sleeping with your secretary as a condition of her either getting promoted or keeping her job is worlds different because that person isn’t making a choice to follow a dream of fame and thinking “well if I want to be a secretary, I’ll have to sleep with the boss, but the deal is just too good to pass up.”

MeToo platformed high-status women and gave them a voice to speak out about the corruption in the upper echelons of show business. It completely ignored the everyday people who have been victims of sexual assault, as well as the marginalized. It didn't do anything (or did the bare minimum) to help cis or trans men who were raped, prisoners who are raped, victims of human trafficking, victims who are poor and/or uneducated, or victims of child sexual abuse.

cis [...] men who were raped

In the woke mindset, men are the oppressors, helping them is at best a distraction from the fight of structural oppression. Almost all rapists are men, and any man who rapes other men is a sexual minority. Now, if you are a high status, handsome, gay man of a known-to-be-oppressed ethniciy, and your rapist was some creepy, fat, powerful, bisexual white dude, then that might be enough that fighting for you would be fighting against structural oppression, but anything less does not fit the narrative.

Cynically, if you want people to care about (male) prison rapes, what you should do is claim some 90% of all prison rapes are White Nazis raping some poor Black kid.

Of course, from what I remember most of MeToo was never about violent rape. Instead, it was more about coercion, from 'have sex with me and you will get the role' to 'senior colleague is hitting on a younger colleague, who feels their collaboration might be in danger if she rejects him'.

Feminist concern about rape is, just in general, targeted at women of concern to feminists, because(wait for it) feminism is a class interest movement and not a general woman's interest movement. Witness the level of concern feminists have over rape on campus vs the part of the uniform code of military justice allowing commanders to dismiss rape accusations summarily. This is because functionally all of the women mainstream feminism is concerned about go to college, and not a lot of them enlist in the military. The difference is class, not in the sense of money(although functionally all working class jobs which pay well skew very male) but in terms of social strata. Likewise, very few of the women in this class go to prison, and very few of them grow up in the circumstances where CSA is a legitimate and major concern.

As said already, Neil Gaiman was MeToo'd recently. So individual cases are still happening.

As for the wider 'movement', I think it's just the fact that outrage is exhausting, particularly if your goal (no sexual misconduct or hurt feelings ever again, anywhere, but people still couple up somehow) is impossible. Noahpinion has written about this quite a lot. Basically, the Great Awokening (God bless whoever came up with that designation) is winding down, as it was always destined to do. Humans can't do permanent revolution.

Scott has also written about this. New Atheism got replaced by pop-feminism which got replaced by Kendi-style antiracism as the very online left-wing topic of choice. Not sure what will come next, or if anything will come next.

Basically, the Great Awokening (God bless whoever came up with that designation) is winding down

It's winding down because it won. It has been installed as law. Every society requires a certain set of baseline social and ethical rules to function, and many of these rules require no extra "energy" to enforce. No one needs to be reminded not to go outside naked, for example; it's simply understood. You don't need a permanent revolution to uphold your strictures when your strictures have been integrated into the foundational social fabric itself.

Outside of all but the most deep Red social contexts, its simply taken for granted now that a man who claims to be a woman must be treated as a woman, and that non-whites are to be privileged in hiring, school admissions, and media representation. The revolution was successful. Everyone got the memo. We're not going back.

It really doesn't seem like this is true, outside of specific contexts. Roe is dead. AA is gone. DEI is declining. Trump is openly calling for a blood-soaked deportation campaign and nobody really cares (although maybe people realize he's just full of shit at this point). Even leftists like Matt Yglesias are calling for more immigration restrictions. Harris is sprinting away from woke as fast as she can. Ctrl+f for "trans" on her campaign platform brings up only 2 results, both of which deal with "transnational criminal organizations".

From her campaign website:

Protect Civil Rights and Freedoms

Vice President Harris and Governor Walz believe many fundamental freedoms are at stake in this election. They will fight to ensure that Americans have the opportunity to participate in our democracy by passing the John Lewis Voting Rights and the Freedom to Vote Acts — laws that will enshrine voting rights protections, expand vote-by-mail and early voting, and more. Her Administration will also continue to protect Americans from discrimination, building on her work to secure $2 billion in funding for Offices of Civil Rights across the federal government. And as President, she’ll always defend the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride. In 2004, she officiated some of the nation’s first same-sex marriages and as Attorney General, she refused to defend California’s anti-marriage equality statewide referendum. As President, she’ll fight to pass the Equality Act to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQI+ Americans in health care, housing, education, and more into law.

The Equality Act explicitly adds protection against discrimination based on gender identity to existing federal anti-discrimination laws (titles II, III, IV, VI, VII, IX). That hardly seems like "sprinting away as fast as she can".

This mostly just seems to be about gay marriage, which even most Republicans are on board with by this stage.

AA is gone.

The Harvard admission statistics for 2024-5 strongly suggest otherwise.

DEI is declining.

  • The Democratic nominee for president brags about tripling federal government loans specifically to non-whites.
  • Her Vice Presidential nominee, as Governor of Minnesota, signed into law mandatory racial quotas for bodies disbursing state health and community welfare grants. (e.g. MN Statutes secs. 145.9285, Subd. 3; 145.987, Subd. 1). Of course, this already builds on existing "Ethnic Councils" established in 2017, explicitly charged to "work for the implementation of economic, social, legal, and political equality for its constituency" by lobbying the governor and legislature for set-asides, exercising oversight over proposed legislative and administrative changes, promoting racially-affiliated interest groups, and disbursing contracts. (MN Statutes sec. 15.0145)
  • Approximately one in five academic jobs requires an ideological litmus test of allegiance to DEI.
  • The Department of Education (pdf warning) spends a significant amount of effort on collecting detailed statistics on the racial and gendered breakdown of suspensions, expulsions, and law-enforcement referrals in schools, heavily-hinting that this is racial discrimination...but then tucks the tables with student offenses at the very end, and doesn't provide any details on who's actually doing the offending. In that report, by the way, the Department cites a 2014 "Dear Colleague" letter that threatened loss of federal funding if schools didn't punish black and brown kids less, regardless of their actual behavior, which is apparently still active.
  • The Department of Agriculture just doled out over a billion dollars in reparations-style payments to black farmers specifically.

Yeah, I'm going to say DEI is doing problematically fine.

Trump is openly calling for a blood-soaked deportation campaign

As opposed to the blood-soaked results of the fetishization of open immigration?

Even leftists like Matt Yglesias are calling for more immigration restrictions.

Ah yes, Matt "I think fighting dishonesty with dishonesty is sometimes the right thing to do" Yglesias. Clearly he is being fully open and honest about his views, which have changed based on evidence which has convinced him to foreswear his most recent book, "One Billion Americans." (I am being sarcastic; I do not believe for a second that Matt is being honest).

Harris is sprinting away from woke as fast as she can. Ctrl+f for "trans" on her campaign platform brings up only 2 results, both of which deal with "transnational criminal organizations".

Ahhh, but remember - "her values have not changed."

As opposed to the blood-soaked results of the fetishization of open immigration?

Why just one case?

You should use a statistic when making an argument like this.

(Hopefully one that doesn’t fall into the base rate fallacy..)

Why just one case?

At least I provided a case, unlike the original, completely unsupported assertion.

You should use a statistic when making an argument like this.

Respectfully, no. Societal cohesion and solidarity is a fragile, fickle thing that we barely understand and do not know how to sustain across lengthy periods. Slapping a number on something doesn't necessarily mean that you're using the right statistic, or that the thing you're trying to measure is even actually legible with the methods and information at hand.

Statistics around illegal immigrants are notoriously unreliable, because many jurisdictions do not cooperate with federal immigration efforts, and illegal immigrants (for completely understandable reasons) are disproportionately likely to use falsified identity documents and avoid getting involved with state agencies, including law enforcement. We don't even actually know how many there are in the country - the media has been using the same number for appx. thirty years, across high and low migration periods alike.

Reasoning from examples has flaws, but at least we can draw direct lines from immigration to particular incidents, like that one.

Pretty bad response. In any group of millions you can find examples of anything you want.

As we all know, cardiologists are horrible, horrible people.

Sounds like an isolated demand for rigour to me

“Oh, you don’t want your nation flooded with Haitian refugees? Got a source on why that’s bad? A peer reviewed, published government source?”

More comments

Yeah, I'm going to say DEI is doing problematically fine.

Plus there's the big one that you didn't even mention- that Harris was pretty obviously picked for DEI reasons. EG: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/875000650/pressure-grows-on-joe-biden-to-pick-a-black-woman-as-his-running-mate

No one has been willing to publicly push back on that at all, except for Trump (kinda) when he questioned her blackness. It's insane.

Companies are closing their DEI departments, affirmative action has been overturned, and there's no longer a full offensive from the entire media and every sports league, etc., when a red state passes a bathroom bill, the way there was when such things first came up.

Companies are closing their DEI departments but the function is entirely integrated into HR. Affirmative action in college admissions has been "overturned" but the colleges are still doing it. The media/protest complex is cooling it to try to get Harris elected, that's all.

its simply taken for granted now that a man who claims to be a woman must be treated as a woman... We're not going back.

I dunno if I'd go that far. Male convicts serving their sentences in women's prisons was controversial enough to take down two consecutive Scottish first ministers, and the current sitting Labour prime minister in the UK recently stated that it's just common sense that men have penises and women vaginas. The suspicion that a male-bodied athlete may have been allowed to compete in a female Olympic sporting event was controversial enough to become the dominant culture war topic in the Olympics. All across Europe, access to "gender-affirming care" for minors is being heavily restricted.

This does not look like a society that takes for granted that any man who claims to be a woman must be treated as such, aside from a minority of conservative hangers-on.

I think that this is a bit of an exaggeration. I live in a city that overwhelmingly votes for the Democratic Party, and I know almost no-one who is actually Red tribe, yet I know many people, including a few coworkers, who don't agree that a man who claims to be a woman must be treated as a woman or that non-whites should be privileged. Of course part of that is that I am more likely to become friends with people who are not turbo-woke than with people who are, but my point is that I regularly see this woke dogma challenged outside of a deep Red social context.

That said, I do think that there is one sense in which you are right that wokism has "become law" - confrontation against the woke. I know very few people, even unwoke ones, who would deny a transgender person's self-identification face-to-face offline, or who would strongly push back against a black's person's demand to be privileged face-to-face offline, unless they happened to know that transgender person or that black person pretty closely. With relative strangers, there is a fear of confrontation and perhaps even violence in doing so. I am probably relatively brave compared to most unwoke people I know offlline in this department, but even I know not to pick intellectual fights against either dogmatic religious zealots and/or people who are too stupid to understand my arguments, especially given that I have a sense that authority figures and in general, people who do not know me, are likely to assume that I am the guilty party if they become aware of the confrontation.

So in a sense, we are living in a mild Soviet-style thought regime. It is not quite Havel's greengrocer, but it has shades of it. In most Blue areas, one can freely go around questioning woke dogma in most civilized well-mannered contexts outside of some woke jobs and probably university campuses as well, and generally speaking nothing bad will happen. But at the same time, one cannot go around pushing back against woke dogma face-to-face too hard against woke people whom one does not know closely, even if the woke person is the one who brings up the issue, unless one is willing to risk the other person exploding in anger and causing a scene, a situation that carries some risk of drawing other people in, who are likely to immediately assume that you are the guilty party.

And of course, there is also the matter of anarchotyranny. Democratic policies are hampering the operation of law enforcement and are aiding violent criminals. We are used to it that there are some parts of cities where one just knows not to go, some people one just knows not to interact with, and so on. And this has in a sense "become law" in that while technically being a violent scumbag is illegal, civil authority is letting such things continue even though the state could easily crack down on all the scumbags and thugs and destroy them in a matter of months if it really had the will.

Now of course, violent crime is down compared to the early 90s, and there have always been places one knows not to go, and people one knows not to interact with - I mean, probably half of Westerns are based on that kind of concept. But with modern technology and social organization, we are now at the point where violent crime could be down much more if the left stopped thinking of violent criminals as pets or children who need to be hugged and gently treated. We have the state capacity, this is not the Wild West or 1920s Chicago, but some people are preventing us from using it.

I regularly see this woke dogma challenged outside of a deep Red social context.

I do too, but I mostly see those challenges being whispered in quiet rooms, or muttered between a small group of men at the bar. I don't see anyone openly challenging the woke workplace rules, James Damore-style. I tried to complain, once, when they converted the mens room at my (small, male-dominated) office into a gender neutral room, because that meant that only one person could use it at a time and it caused long lines. I was given cold glances and a stern warning.

Neil Gaiman comes to mind.

It still exists, but I think there are fewer cases that go super viral, because there are less Toxoplasma of Rage ones. The ones that went super viral were the debatable ones- usually ones where the left were going "You should believe all women!" and the right was going "Hold on, the evidence of this is entirely he said, she said", then they'd argue back and forth for weeks about which position was better. It really came down to, what % likely someone committed rape is the minimum to cancel them, although few people thought about it in probabalistic terms. The right might feel you should be at least 90% confident, the left would feel you only need to be like 20% confident(which I sympathize with- if I was an employer, I'd fire anyone who isn't a rockstar employer if I thought had a 20% chance of being that toxic. But as a member of society, I wouldn't want to imprison anyone with a 20% chance of rape).

I think it ended when Joe Biden got MeTooed with one of those accusations that had a ~20% likelihood of being true, and then all the left suddenly went "oh hold on actually we probably do need stronger evidence and cannot just Believe All Women".

This is the equilibrium state for those participating in the game of white feminist culture; either you are a safe sexless gay, or a toxically masculine Tate supporter. See declining rates of sexual activity in the later generations for fear of cancellation and #MeToo. Nobody, other than degenerate sexual deviants who think with their dick, would stake their career or social reputation just to get lucky, especially given the erosion of values such as loyalty and monogamy amongst white women and white culture at large - especially when safer alternatives such as porn and parasocial relationships exist.

Don't hate the player, hate the game, and the incentive structure it encourages people to follow and obey.

degenerate sexual deviants who think with their dick

You rang?

Nobody, other than degenerate sexual deviants who think with their dick, would stake their career or social reputation just to get lucky

As a proud "degenerate sexual deviant", I feel seen.

But on a more serious note, you never know what sublime things your dick might lead you to. Many a loving, intimate relationship started with a couple of people who were originally thinking with their sexual beings but then found something deeper in common.

But on a more serious note, you never know what sublime things your dick might lead you to. Many a loving, intimate relationship started with a couple of people who were originally thinking with their sexual beings but then found something deeper in common.

If I may indulge in a little evopsych, that may be some of what thinking with your dick is FOR.

No disagreement there my good man. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes the dick is actually wiser than the rest of you.

The me too moverment didn't understand statstics.

Most men don't hit on many women, some men sometimes hit on woman. Some men hit on thousands of women each year. Those guys have a personality disorder. Women's experiences with men are skewed by a small group of men who are highly overrepresented. I have met feminists who think that there are lots of hidden rapists becasue "everyone knows a victim but nobody knows a rapist". What they are forgetting is that there are far more rape victims than rapists. The left likes broad measures that don't really work but are implemented against an entire population instead of identifying the culprits and dealing with them. Pretty much all bad behaviour is the fault of a small number of people. If the 1% of the population that does the most drunk driving was stopped, drunk driving rates would fall substantially.

The me too movement made it hard for ordinary non and well meaning guys to talk to a girl at the gym, at the office or in the grocery store. It will not stop the guys with the personality disorders. This worsens the relations between the genders as women's experiences of men become increasingly skewed to psychopaths and bipolar men.

On another note there seems to be a feminist fantasy of men being really passive and girly but being so attractive that women can't resist them despite their behaviour.

On another note there seems to be a feminist fantasy of men being really passive and girly but being so attractive that women can't resist them despite their behaviour.

I think this is a misunderstanding. The fantasy is not of men actually being passive and girly. It is of men demonstrating their masculinity by being performatively passive and girly in order to amuse the women, when they desire to be so amused. It is no more than a spin on the traditional "He makes me laugh.".

The final paragraph is what feminists claim but revealed preference suggests women actually like men.

On another note there seems to be a feminist fantasy of men being really passive and girly but being so attractive that women can't resist them despite their behaviour.

No there's not, there's a pervasive female fantasy that men can read their minds to be able to pursue them without ever being disrespectful or pressing on boundaries. The feminist version uses the words 'sexual harassment' a lot, but it's not really an appreciation for men being passive- see 'nice guys'.

Pretty much all bad behaviour is the fault of a small number of people

The most hilarious episode of the metoo kerfuffle was a PMC woman doing a hidden cam walking through shitty areas of NYC and getting cat called mostly by low status black men. And the ensuing backpedaling and gnashing of teeth. She was so, so ready, so thirsty to slander an entire sex, when the culprits turned out to be one of her favorite protected class the twitter drama was delicious.

like it was going to really change quite a bit of the social dynamics between the genders.

It totally did this. Insane rape/sexual harassment scaremongering is one of the main features driving young women so far left. Pundits would prefer to either rant about the female nature or general wokeness instead of addressing the overactive fearmongering about sexual harassment.

Really? Young women have leaned further left since women’s lib, if not earlier.

Not like they do today, they haven’t. Polls show that young women started becoming dramatically more liberal around ten years ago, and only now are the numbers starting to show a return to normal (but who knows if this is a temporary blip or the start of a long-term trend). Googling “women becoming more liberal” will pull up plenty of articles and graphs discussing this phenomenon, though I’m pretty sure it’s been discussed here as well.

Polls show that young women started becoming dramatically more liberal around ten years ago

2013-14 was the heydey of whatever that wave of feminism was. It's when Scott wrote his most hard-hitting anti-feminist posts, the ones he's been coasting on ever since. Feminism was the first movement of the Great Awokening, followed shortly by Black Lives Matter, and the legalization of same-sex marriage and resulting ascendant LGBT movement.

If I were going to write a book about wokeness, and were a conservative grifter, I'd call it "The Second Term of Obama." This sounds vaguely ominous and gestures subtly at "The Second Coming," appealing to the "Obama is the antichrist" people who presaged the "Trump is Hitler" people. But I really do think something very bad happened in Obama's second term, progressives lost hope after they elected a Black Man to the White House and the color of the building didn't change.

(Well, not permanently.)

I can't escape also the possibility that the civil service under Obama just poked the bear. Things like the Dear Colleague letter did a lot to institutionally support major planks of grassroots feminism. Obergefell came down in 2015. And then when Trayvon Martin died and Obama cried on national TV...

It was just an era where the left got very angry, and the right got even angrier. And what do you know, we got a very angry, very unappealing-to-feminists president after that, and everything skyrocketed from there.

Whatever happened to MeToo? In 2017 it seemed unstoppable and like it was going to really change quite a bit of the social dynamics between the genders. It’s since gone very quiet.

A combination of two factors i think, at least part of it comes down to what @Crowstep said about outrage being exhausting but i think the bigger factor is that it was intended to be a weapon to be weilded against Trump (see the whole "grab 'em by the pussy" thing) but once democrats and media execs realized that the people most vulnerable to metoo were democrats and media execs it was quietly shelved.

The people pushing MeToo didn't really understand the situation.

The first sexual harassment was in 1974. By the 90s lawsuits we common enough that Michael Crichton's Disclosure (1994) featured a fake sexual harassment complaint as part of a conspiracy.

Business men protected themselves through a mix of better behaviour, legal strategies, and other techniques to avoid trouble.

However since the lawyers involved were strongly left wing, liberal strongholds like Hollywood and the Media were given a pass and ignored. This was compounded by the fact that those industries attract a lot of pretty girls, have powerful men at the top, and look down on traditional sexual rules.

This wasn't well understood on the left, and they all insisted on believing that Republican businessmen are the worst people ever and much worse about things that MeToo covers.

So activists pushed MeToo hard. Then they noticed that all the big fish going down were on their side. So they sort of stopped talking about the whole thing.

What legal strategies protect a boss from sexually assaulting employees?

I was trying to find the right words to capture a bunch of different things. I was thinking of having the lawyers explain to the bosses that making passes at subordinates endangers the company and they will be fired, while also making sure that they are aware that there are a lot of ways to use money and status to get sex outside of the office.

Until very recently, someone who felt that they had been sexually assaulted by a prominent person could not just go online and instantly broadcast it to millions of people. And it is very hard to definitively prove that such a sexual assault has happened, given that bosses who commit sexual assaults are usually smart enough to do it when no-one else is around. Before modern social media that has made it relatively easy for anyone to do one-to-many broadcasting, and before the modern political culture in which it is pretty easy to find people who sympathize with your claim of sexual assault, I think it was probably a very different story. It was less likely that a boss who got accused of sexual assault, but without there being any concrete proof of it, would get forced out of his position by the force of public opinion and bad PR. In some ways, maybe Monica Lewinsky / Bill Clinton was the first major sign of the shifting attitudes about such things, and ironically the Republicans were the ones supporting a sort of MeToo in that case. Or maybe that's just the first one that I remember, I am not sure.

The Graham/Pence rules, glass doors to conference rooms, that sort of thing.

The administration of the Democratic mayor of Indianapolis is currently suffering from a MeToo witch hunt: https://www.indystar.com/story/news/investigations/2024/09/10/everything-to-know-about-hogsett-administration-sexual-harassment-crisis/75148395007/

The city's human resources department is also conducting six other investigations into current and former staff, officials confirmed to IndyStar.

The mayor himself has not been implicated, but Republicans are calling on Democrats to call for his resignation. "Your rules applied fairly."

I think there is something to the idea that Democrats assumed Republicans would be the hotbed of sexual exploitation and that they would come out of MeToo relatively unscathed. I wonder if they will ever have a "Physician, heal thyself moment."

I wonder if they will ever have a "Physician, heal thyself moment."

Biden was metooed in 2020. It made no difference.

Kamala even said she believed the accuser, but that didn’t stop her from becoming his VP

Isn't it strange that #MeToo took down Al Franken, but not Biden? Is it really just as simple as "Biden had the potential to be an effective opponent to Trump, Franken didn't, ergo Biden's accuser was smeared and discredited while Franken's career was destroyed"?

It's not even special-case usefulness.

Shot, Chaser.

The first era of sexual harassment lawsuits was often about (a) complaints from married women, who started returning to white collar workplaces after marriage (as secretaries, clerks and then increasingly in actual professional roles) from the mid-70s in ways they hadn’t before, and (b) was often about financial compensation and protection (for the women) from being fired for reporting these things to management. It practically never resulted in criminal charges being brought (or any police involvement at all) against accused men, since mostly it was considered bad workplace behavior (like being racist to an employee or firing a woman for getting pregnant were at the time) rather than a crime, often even in the most egregious cases of violent sexual assault.

This explains why MeToo didn’t happen in Hollywood in the 80s and 90s. Firstly because the legal employer relationship between a producer and an actress is completely different to that between a boss and an an employee on Wall Street (where many leading early claims were brought), and secondly because this first era of sexual harassment complaints almost never dealt with the implicit quid pro quo of the casting couch variety. Legally, there was widely considered to be a difference between “Mr Smith groped, stuck his tongue down the throat of, and slapped Mrs Wilkinson (devoted mother of two, longstanding accounts receivable clerk at Walker and Company) at a company party and three people saw and watched her walk away and cry after trying to push him away” and “Miss 21-year-old Hollywood starlet got drunk with producer and went up to his hotel room, and two months later got casted in a major role (WITH a smutty sex scene btw) and only four years later did she say he groped her and then told her to suck his dick for the part”.

If a lot of the MeToo actresses had gone to police they’d have said there was no case and no evidence, and if they had gone (and many did) to lawyers who deal in civil sexual harassment suits, they’d have said that the case had little chance of victory. In addition, most actresses want to be famous and the award in a civil suit would likely be quite small, coupled with a complete blacklisting in Hollywood. By contrast if you were a young female trader on Wall Street in 1987 and you won a sexual harassment lawsuit against your boss at Morgan Stanley, you were likely making enough money to retire. So again, the dynamics were very different.

Alright folks, the U.S. Presidential debate is coming up tomorrow night. I'm invested because I've got friends from both sides of the aisle coming, so we'll see what's going to happen...

What do you think will be the major issues discussed? Strengths for Trump? Strengths for Harris?

Outside of just 'debating skills' what do you think the policy strengths/weaknesses will be? My guesses:

  • Trump will continue to hammer strong on immigration issues
  • Abortion will still be a sore spot for Trump and Kamala will focus tehre
  • Economic issues will of course be Kamala's big weakness, Trump will pounce
  • War in Palestine will likely come up again - not sure how Kamala sees it (will she go anti-Israel?)
  • Taxes will be a thing
  • Maybe Trump will harp on government spending/inflation?

I doubt these will come up, but my personal dream is that nuclear and crypto become talking points, and Trump very publicly comes out for both. We'll have to wait and see.

So - what are you predictions my fellow Mottizens?

Harris will deliver a mediocre performance that will look positively masterly next to Trump's old man ravings. It will have minimal impact because every aspect of Trump's incapacity is priced in. Practically speaking, Harris can't win, she can only lose.

what do you think the policy strengths/weaknesses will be?

Trump's biggest policy strength is simply that he is the challenger and can thus run on vague promises instead of his actual record. Whenever he talks about specifics, it's embarrassing (but again, priced in - no one expects Trump to know what he's talking about). His biggest vulnerability on that front is that he's surrounded himself with extremist weirdos who have fairly radical ambitions and Trump has a history of being pretty milquetoast with respect to his advisors, so he may suffer if those attacks stick to him. "JD Vance pals around with mask-off authoritarian billionaires" is probably a more fruitful line of attack than "your proposed economic policies are positively Argentinian", even though the latter is more substantive.

Harris' biggest policy strength is that she's not Trump and can thus talk about policy in a way that doesn't threaten to have your brain self-deport through your ear canal. Her biggest policy weakness is that her policy proposals are still very bad and she's not going to get graded on a curve like Trump will be.

5% chance Trump refers to Harris with a racial slur. 50% chance Trump makes some implausibly deniable misogynistic remark.

Practically speaking, Harris can't win, she can only lose.

Then why take the debate?

There's only certain lengths you can go before defensive campaigning looks like cowardice.

And you can't really afford that given the circumstances.

You don't want Trump able to say "I knocked out Biden and now Harris is hiding, I took a bullet for the American people and she's too afraid to even tell you who she is. Who do you want standing up for you?"

Doing one debate denies him at least that.

She and her staff may not share my belief. Also, they may believe (possibly correctly) that not debating is worse than the likely outcome of an unimpactful debate.

As far as I can tell, she inherited the debate agreement from the Biden campaign, and would look weak backing out of the already-reduced debate schedule (and rules!) he had committed to. I believe the last few cycles have had three debates, all after the conventions.

I think there are rumors they tried to get the rules modified (unmuting mics), but I don't think they changed them. IMO if Harris were a strong candidate, they'd be trying to schedule another one or two, but I haven't heard any such rumors.

Trump is the moderate realignment candidate, this is why he's backing off abortion and being endorsed by Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, and Elon Musk. The odds of Trump using a racial slur are zero, because like his decorum or not he comes from a generation that finds such things unspeakable. (If he didn't say it about Michael Jackson or Muhammed Ali why would Trump wait 80 years and then start dropping slurs now?)

His biggest vulnerability on that front is that he's surrounded himself with extremist weirdos who have fairly radical ambitions

Like the Biden administration? Like Kamala?

I have to admit that I'm disappointed the microphones will be muted except during designated response times, because it denies us the (admittedly small) chance that, when Kamala tried to talk over a moderator, Trump could butt in with "Excuse Me, ECKS-CYUSE ME, SHE'S SPEAKING!! COMMIE-LA IS SPEAKING!! VERY RUDE!!"

There will be pressure on Harris to get in at least one "zinger", although it doesn't need to be too effective. She just needs to show that she can form a coherent thought to be better than Biden. Harris will be well-rehearsed so I doubt there's much of a chance that she self-destructs as spectacularly as Biden did. There's a chance that Trump could do something crazy, although he's too tired now to act like he did in 2020 so I also don't think the chance is that high. He can ramble semi-coherently and it will be enough since the bar is extremely low for him.

I'd say there's a 10% chance one candidate loses badly, a 30% chance Harris overperforms slightly, a 20% she underperforms slightly (relative to expectations), and a 40% chance that both candidates hold their own and nothing really happens.

but my personal dream is that nuclear and crypto become talking points, and Trump very publicly comes out for both.

Being a crypto holder, I'm more concerned with the Dems/Harris' opposition to it than Trump's support for it. At the Nashville bitcoin conference thing, Trump tried to make it into a more partisan thing. I'm worried that Harris might respond to this with more opposition rather than trying to win votes from crypto holders...

The winner and the show stealer will be the fly, dispatched to vanquish Trump this time…

Upon the stage where giants took their stand,
A simple fly descended from the air.
On Pence’s crown it chose to make its land,
A moment strange, bizarre, beyond compare.
While words of policy and law were said,
That tiny creature stole the viewers' eyes.
A fleeting buzz now swarmed around his head,
And tarnished Pence with silent, mocking ties.
For though the speakers bandied weighty things,
The fly became the subject of the night.
No lofty speech nor future hope could bring
His image back from this odd, comic sight.
Thus, politics—so fragile in its grace—
Was boggled by a fly's brief, subtle trace.

Agree with other posters that Trump holds a large home field advantage. Kamala’s task is to define herself without angering anyone. This is hard, and she doesn’t really have time for people to get over it when she PO’s people or says retarded things. Trump, on the other hand, his foot-in-mouth disease is like water off a duck’s back for anyone who could vote for him at this point.

I saw a profile of undecided voters from the NYT. Median picture- not a trump fan but think they can live with him, pocketbook voter, feels like he doesn’t know enough about Kamala to make an informed decision. Usually, the more people see of Kamala on economics the less they like her. So advantage; Trump.

Kamala's campaign has been about minimizing attack surface area. I don't see why they would go for broke here unless they think they need to. She'll have some zingers and jabs, because that's what the event is for, but my guess is the people around her don't aim to win the election off of the debate. Trump will provide enough distractions that turn an unimpressive, mediocre performance into a perfectly adequate one. I expect that's what the Kamala campaign wants: an adequate performance that provides some evidence she is not an empty husk. That Slate and WaPo can write about and gloat over. No big risks, no big offensive. She only wants small wins. Small little anecdotes that can comfort "ew/sigh, Trump" people to think okay maybe she is someone I will turn up to vote for.

If a bad (not catastrophic) performance happens there's still some time to at least partially recover. This probably applies to Kamala more so than Trump, but Trump already has a lot Trump priced into the polls right now. Play it safe, do the things, say the stuff, flip flopper, abortion, try not to implode, and hope other person implodes.

Policy differences aside, I'm not sure what kind of performance she could provide in a presidential debate that would convince me she's worth turning up for. It's a contrived arena and POTUS doesn't always get 4 weeks of prep to deal with stuff. I need to see her on her feet, nimble, thinking. I want to see her express a train of thought beyond Politico Brain Speak, or perhaps a more sophisticated version of those same platitudes would do.

There are plenty of people that are looking for reasons to trust Kamala is not only a DNC puppet suit and, while they would never say it, unqualified. Most of them do not like Trump, but she needs a couple wins for these people to point to. Trump, as ever, is a walking wild card. For all I know he'll give the greatest debate performance ever. The debate does provide a mostly unfiltered platform for Trump to reach people that typically only read about his latest antics in their feeds or reporting. If he wanted to sell a More Moderate Presidential Trump it's the best platform he'll get.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true.

First of all, like or hate Trump, he has political views and ideas and he’s been talking about them. She has said very little about what she wants to do. And I think unless she has something she wants to do, is just going to come off as weak. He wants to round up millions of illegal immigrants. What does she want to do here? If he talks about his plan and adds in the crazier stories about what immigrants are doing (for example killing ducks in Ohio parks) and it’s going to be hard to just vibe it. Likewise inflation. Talking in vague generalities isn’t going to make groceries or gas cheaper. Again, if he can point out those stories where this hurts ordinary Americans, she can’t exactly get away with not having a plan.

As far as the bad performance being recoverable, I’m not so sure just because of how close the election is. We vote November 5, two months from now. That’s a pretty small window and probably not enough time for memory to fade. People were talking about Biden’s bad debate for a month or more. I grant that his obvious Sun-downing is probably worse than anything she would ever do, but still it’s not easy to just forget an obviously bad debate. So she kinda has to go for broke here. If she can’t convince people t9 even consider her as anything other than an empty head, she’s not only not going to close the deal, but might lose some Never Trumps.

As I said I expect her performance to be sub-par for me, but most presidential debates are not memorable enough to store in my stupid faux elitist hipster brain. For Kamala's needs, and the average voter watching, I think she has a good chance of getting some small wins and not spontaneously combusting-- a la the Hindenburg or the sitting POTUS. People talked about Biden's debate because it was so terrible he had to leave the race. There's no one else behind her. Kamala is too big to fail.

If she does poor enough to get hurt in the polls she can tap a media machine that's chomping at the bit to get access to her to Learn What She Really Thinks. They will be happy to help her out. Admittedly, if she sucks so bad at the debate her entire campaign and media engagement strategy has to change that's not a good sign. I wouldn't bet on the crash and burn though. Does she need a good performance at the debate to win the election? I say no. Is she capable of getting some monster success out of the debate? I haven't seen signs she is capable of this, but she could surprise us!

That's why I predict safe, boring. She aims for the minimal adequate showing. She has a brain, a mouth, she can memorize some zingers. She's fine. Better than that other guy.

Perhaps this is more deserving of a top level, but Kamala released a policy page on her website! Interestingly, all her policy proposals are juxtaposed against her campaign's summaries of "Project 2025 Agenda". Man, they really committed hard to the 2025 angle. Some bean counter strategists must have determined that if attacking Trump isn't working anymore, then attacking something that represents him is just as good.

Policies include:

  • Guns are bad
  • Tax more
  • Tax less
  • Fentanyl is bad
  • Borders are under control thanks to me (Kamala, Not-Border-Czar Esq. II)
  • High rent is bad

I won't look at the Trump campaign's policy page but I bet I could copy paste most of this except guns and change high rent to high inflation. Since this was posted before the debate, I assume we'll hear all about her concrete policies posted to her website during the debate. People say she doesn't have much policy, but don't they know there are concrete policies on her website?

I mean we’re a bad sample simply because we’re tuned into political issues and discussion. Keep in mind that outside of the too-online left and right, most people’s interactions with politics happens in spurts — the conventions, the debates, and maybe they catch an interview or two on a talking head show. They have other interests and are too busy doing other things to really pay close attention to who’s doing what outside of the big show events. Which means that this debate is likely the first time these normies will have really paid attention to what either one of those candidates has to say. This means it’s a make or break for Harris who hasn’t publicly tried to run for office since 2020 when she failed pretty hard.

The media can help, but it’s not going to completely erase a bad performance especially 2 months from the polls. If the normies aren’t following closely, they might not see her interviews with friendly journalists.

Some bean counter strategists must have determined that if attacking Trump isn't working anymore, then attacking something that represents him is just as good.

Interestingly enough, I got a Pro-Trump leaflet through the door, and about a quarter of it was dedicated to debunking the fact that Trump supported Project 2025 along with some Trump quotes calling them wrongheaded or something similar.

That tends to suggest at least some of the Trump PAC's et al think connecting him with Project 2025 is a potential weak point. Otherwise you don't spend time and money counter-pointing it. Though my wife had never heard of Project 2025 so all it succeeded in doing for her was make her look it up in a kind of Streisand effect way.

With the parties' microphone being muted while the opponent is speaking, that prevents Trump from shooting his mouth off too much, and it prevents Kamala getting her true girlboss moment where she shuts down the misogynist orange man.

If we get the relatively restrained Trump from the first Biden debate (feels forever ago, honestly!) I think he makes it out okay.

I can't think of a single Trump debate moment that actually hurt his standing, there may be a couple but he's a known quantity. Unless someone else takes a shot at him during the debate it won't be anything remarkable.

I don't see how Kamala makes it through the entire thing without at least one 'gaffe' and it is possible her normal demeanor, once its on full display for an extended period of time, just grates on everyone.

I'd argue that Kamala has the really hard job to make herself look both competent and collected, and if she doesn't land a single solid blow on Trump she loses by default.

I think there is potential that Kamala has a complete cackling brain fart moment where she spews a genuinely absurd answer to a question she didn't anticipate. This will be somewhat relevant but will depend on whether its 'memeable' or not, I'd guess.

Mainstream coverage of the debate will declare she dominated the entire time in any case.

I can't think of a single Trump debate moment that actually hurt his standing, there may be a couple but he's a known quantity. Unless someone else takes a shot at him during the debate it won't be anything remarkable.

His first debate in 2020 was very bad. Not as bad as Biden's recent debate, but worse than pretty much all others in living memory.

I think you are generally unfair to Trump but this is spot on. Dude couldn’t shut up and saved Biden numerous times.

Ok let's play some fantasy football here in the comments:

YOU are the wizard of oz behind the Kamalarama. You need to come up with a line of argument, a plan of attack, to coach her on that will win the debate for your candidate. What do you do? Litigate Project 2025? Bring up Hannibal Lecter in your own answers (seriously what's the deal with that)? Ask him when he last spoke to Mike Pence? Ask him when he stopped cheating on Melania?

What's the attack she can launch here?

The best outcome for Harris, and also the most likely outcome where the debate makes a large difference (I agree with other commentators that the debate is unlikely to change anything and that the most likely outcome is that both candidates have been effectively sedated by their teams and we get a mediocre snoozefest where nobody takes risks), is that she manages to put Trump on tilt and he spends a large part of the debate rambling incoherently. Double points if he rambles incoherently about the 2020 election because that makes him look like a bad loser.

I don't know what are the best attacks to put Trump on tilt, but I assume Harris has people on her team who do have an idea. The critical point is that the target audience is Trump, not the people watching on TV. The cliche one is to talk about how small his hands are.

prescient! as was parent's hannibal lecter mention.

I think emulating Obama's 2012 "the 1980s called. They want their foreign policy back" debate performance is probably a good call. Especially with how effective the "Republicans are weird" attacks have been recently. Be confident and even a little dismissive, while constantly jabbing at how weird/conspiratorial Trump and his allies are. Try to bait Trump into coming across as a loony old man while presenting herself as the boring, safe option that's not going to slip into senility two years in.

This could backfire and come across as bitchy if Trump manages to remain disciplined and statesmanlike, but Trump historically has about half an hour in him before discipline breaks down and he starts free associating.

I think something like Trumps tax cuts and tariffs are going to blow up the economy at a precarious time when you want the adults in charge, could work.

Maybe a "too online" jab as a variation of the "weird" jab now that he's getting Elon Musk to cut down the government, which intrigues me but could come off as alienating or reckless to the average voter? Basically emphasize that she cares about what people in the real world think instead of being obsessed with the internet.

Abortion should be an obvious win especially with the recent Trump Florida flip flop.

I think laying out a succinct case for what Trump's recent criminal cases are about, and push the fake electors story hard, saying something like two terms won't be enough, and after Trump it'll be Trump Jr. or something.

Bring up Hannibal Lecter in your own answers (seriously what's the deal with that)?

What do you mean what's with it? It's a joke in a laugh line Trump has given in a few speeches. It's not esoteric.

The smart attack is to outflank him from the populist side by out-promising him in a vague way. Whatever Trump says he'll do (on the economy, immigration, whatever) she'll do even more and better. "I'll do even more and give you more free stuff."

This approach doesn't appeal to me personally at all, and probably doesn't appeal to the type of person who is coaching Kamala for the debate, but it appeals to the average voter and Trump would have a hard time rebutting it.

I think the rebuttal would be to point out that she's been VP for 4 years, and neither she nor Biden nor the other Democrats have done or tried to do most of those things, and it's off-brand for them to even try. If Kamala promises to build a wall and it will be "uge! bigger and better than any wall ever built before. The best wall!" Trump will call her a liar. Now granted, Trump also didn't build a wall, but he tried, and can blame the Democrats for not letting him.

Kamala is restricted to promises that are consistent with Democrat positions, at least if she doesn't want to get called out as a blatant liar. And avoid alienating the Democrat voters.

I think the best line of attack would be portraying Trump as a buffoon who lacks the work ethic or principles to accomplish anything or even do his job. Not a neo-Hitler or American ayatollah, but a huckster whose entire vision is driven by whatever talking head he last saw on Fox said. Mention how many games of golf he played while President (ideally, claim he has a terrible handicap and draw him into a prolonged argument about how good he really is). Have a long list of his broken promises and, if possible, at least some plausible sketch of a story of how the Biden/Harris administration actually fulfilled them. I'd encourage her to heavily embellish those stories; if there's even a remote kernel of reality to them, she won't get any flak for it, and even if it's an outright fabrication it doesn't matter too much. At the same time, represent herself as a competent workhorse who's capable of handling the job of President. Have defenses at the ready for attacks around her being too liberal, and feel free to jettison or reject any policies that are inconvenient.

The problem with playing exclusively the man and not the ball is that you only discredit Trump and not any of the things he wants to do. If you beat Trump by effectively saying that tariffs, immigration control, free speech etc. are great then people will expect you to implement those things in office. So you’ve won the battle but lost the war.

Ideally, you want to discredit your enemy and his ideas at the same time:

‘Orange Man’s ideas must be stupid, listen to him ramble on!’ And simultaneously, ‘only an idiot could think that cutting off free trade will improve the economy’.

  1. Winning is winning. I think people here overstate the level of committed ideology among practicing politicians. They mostly want to win and be celebrated by culture.

  2. There's the time honored strategy of campaigning one way and then governing another. You'll have less public support to implement your maximalist goals, but you'll also have won an election (and helped more downballot Democrats win their elections). That leaves you in a better position to achieve maximalist goals than losing and being the minority party. When you wield power is when you try to shift public opinion: you have more tools at your disposal.

All true.

Seems like a pretty good strategy; I guess the obvious problem is the conflict with previous messaging, and trump appealing to his actual record in office versus kamala's record in office. still, a better suggestion than I think most of the strategists are offering.

Well, the previous messaging is baked in already. But although the best time to have good messaging is yesterday, the second best time is today.

There's a nice side benefit: Republicans will then say "she's a weather vane who's abandoned all her previous policies!" That does some damage to her, of course, but it's mitigated because voters hear "she abandoned a bunch of failed policies and is more moderate nowadays."

I think her strongest line of attack would be the people who have worked with him before who either disavow him or are endorsing Harris. The nonpolitical normies are most likely to defer to people whose names they know and that they remember as competent bureaucrats.

I think her strongest line of attack would be the people who have worked with him before who either disavow him or are endorsing Harris.

Trump's best retort to that would be "Like Dick Cheney!" Maybe pantomiming a shotgun.

Yeah hammer home they are people like Cheney and it was a regret you (ie Trump) had in first admin. Then note the turnover Harris has in her office but note it wasn’t political but personal. Recount the story about how she made the intern stand when she walked into the office whilst being California AG.

I honestly don't know, because I cannot possibly craft an argument she could make at this late stage which could possibly win me over. Her proposals to raise capital gains tax, a new unrealized gains tax, her talk about how Trump has lost his "privilege" of free speech, this woman will utterly ruin this country. At best the deep state runs her like a puppet, same as they did Biden, to prosecute pointless foreign wars while a feckless DEI cabinet lets the country burn as they give speeches about how bridges are racist and sexist.

As for what she can do to win over that extra 1% of the electorate to clinch a close election, I'm not sure that's on her. That's going to be on the media to craft her legend, and social media to censor anything that puts holes in it. I mean, already, with virtually nothing that's changed about her, she's still the same abject failure of a presidential candidate she was in 2020. But the media has turned her into the second coming of Obama based on nothing.

All she really needs to do is get a few canned lines out that the media spin masters can work with, regardless of context. That'll be clipped out. If she can get out a single "I'm talking now", whether it lands or not during the debate, SNL this Saturday will have a long hagiographic cold open dedicated to it. More people will see that than the debate, and that's how they'll actually remember it. And everyone will clap.

It doesn't work that way anymore because the very concept of a 'mainstream media' was shattered into a hundred thousand screaming fragments by the bale curse of social media. 'respectable' media like NYC and ABC may capture the lib normies but that audience is growing smaller by the year and more out of touch by the moment.

No one even remotely in our reality would think Kamala is a strong candidate.

No one even remotely in our reality would think Kamala is a strong candidate.

Someone reported this as "Building consensus," and it does come awfully close to saying "Nobody could possibly disagree with me." I'm gonna call this a borderline statement of opinion, but do avoid making statements like this no matter how strongly you think they are true, because there certainly are people "in our reality" (though maybe not on the Motte) who think this.

I apologize. I've got a bad habit of making hot takes.

To expand on that pithy statement, I can't see her as anything but a worse version of Hillary Clinton. She, at the very least, had experience in government and political wrangling. What does Kamala have in comparison?

Harris is a better candidate than Hillary Clinton. Clinton treated voters with apathy at best and unveiled contempt at worst. Kamala, whatever someone thinks of her substance, is actually trying to appeal to voters.

No one even remotely in our reality would think Kamala is a strong candidate.

All this could be, and I feel the same way. And yet, the fact remains, lots of voters are not "even remotely in our reality". The mainstream media might be shattered, but Kamala only needs to nudge things fractions of a percent, and those shards are fully capable of that.

Mainstream media proved it still existed and was stronger than ever during COVID and the Summer of Floyd.

I subscribe to the @wemptronics school. The Goldilocks zone falls between “more present than Biden” and “less bitchy than Trump.” Both should be easy for a normal person. Unfortunately, nobody in this election cycle has been particularly normal, so there are a few routes to mess it up.

  • Hammering on Trump too hard will cross the “bitchy” line.
  • Staying completely vague will fall below the “present” line.
  • Presenting unhinged economics could go either way depending on how specific she gets.

I predict Harris will not unveil anything resembling signature legislation. If there was any low-hanging fruit, it would have already been pushed through via Biden, because a good economy is better at winning elections than a good promise.

More likely she remains a policy non-entity. Fox and friends will press on this as a safe, reasonable angle of attack, but they don’t have a good counterplan, since no one wants to admit to running a tight economy. That leaves us with “State” vs. “State” strategy: two smiling faces telling us they’re going to fix inflation and/or original sin.

Also, why would you want Trump to come down for either nuclear or crypto? I guess he can’t make the latter more sleazy, but he could single-handedly boost the green wing for a generation.

Also, why would you want Trump to come down for either nuclear or crypto?

Why would you not want the President of the United States to be on your side?

Because the current generation of eco-warriors are focusing more and more on carbon than on nuclear. The last thing they need is an infusion of fresh anti-Trump partisans.

Possibly because you believe he won't be able to accomplish anything for it anyway, but will tar the idea for the future by his association with it.

Even better: he'll highlight the crazy, the unserious, and the vindictive, letting you know to avoid them.

The three stools of Trump's original 2016 campaign were: illegal immigration, tariffs, and ending wars.

Tariffs were so successful that Biden continued many of them.

Ending wars was so popular that Biden also basically didn't start any new wars.

Illegal immigration: when Trump took this up in 2016 he was the only GOP politician talking about it, now it's mainstream. The wall went from being violently opposed to routine funding in Kamala's budget.

Trump is the most popular politician in America.

Ending wars was so popular that Biden also basically didn't start any new wars.

Only technically true, in that he didn't start the war in Ukraine. However it has enormously escalated under his administration, and we're basically bankrupting our nation and ignoring every other priority to keep escalating it.

bankrupting

Less than 60 billion in total is hardly a rounding error...

I'm not sure whether I'm more amused by the conflation of correlation and causation in an inversion, or the unironic use of budgetary PR in a budget year that was nearly half continuing resolution.

Edit for elaboration, since it may come-

I find the claim that the Ukraine War escalated enormously under the Biden Administration laughable in a 'that is actually amusing' way, given the evolution of many dynamics since 2022.

In 2022, the Ukraine War was a war of national elimination by a Russia waged on three different fronts that threatened to collapse the Ukrainian state, multiple major population centers changed hands with a routine use of artillery against population centers, European countries were to supposedly facing mass freezing death in the winter and total economic deindustrialization for lack of gas, and Very Serious People and Motte Posters were warning that the specter of nuclear escalation was right around the corner if Ukraine received military supplies or tried to retake cities that the Russians had not only conquered but formally annexed. 'Plausible' peace terms included a unilateral disarmament to a scale where Ukraine would have fewer tanks to begin the next war with than it has lost since this war began, a great risk factor for a fourth continuation war. Western discussions on Ukraine included whether there would be an armed intervention, ranging from a No Fly zone to special forces advisors or 'volunteer' military formations.

In 2024, the Ukraine War has largely narrowed to one front, the scale of territory changes and civilian deaths has dropped precipitously to a degree that zoomed-in maps are required to assess relative changes that are hard to recognize from a country-wide scale, the Europeans are far from freezing and no longer operating under the previous economic sword of damoclese, and nuclear threats are so passe that the Russians themselves are downplaying the first invasion and occupation of Russian territory since WW2. 'Plausible' peace terms now adays no longer pretend to rest on Ukrainian disarmament, but hinge on how many years it will take the Russians to re-build themselves out of a Soviet-era military and whether they would really try another attempt at Ukraine and thus does Ukraine have a reasonable need for western security alliances. Western discussions on Ukraine now includes routine criticisms that the lack of Western presence on the ground to die is an immoral policy of treating the Ukrainians as canon fodder.

The stakes, the risks, and even the rate of loss of the Ukraine War have decreased considerably since 2022. It is strategic de-escalation in nearly every sense of the word.

As for bankrupting the nation in the support of the Ukraine War, that would be somewhere between factually inaccurate and glossing over many other more relevant contexts that prevent one's preferred policies from being funded.

Ending wars was so popular that Biden also basically didn't start any new wars.

I don't think that Trump surrendering the the Taliban was that popular - it is just that the Republicans managed to pin the blame on Biden (who was in office when the final US pullout from Kabul was due under the surrender agreement Trump signed in Doha in Feb 2020.

FWIW, I think that Trump was right to surrender to the Taliban (there was no pro-US government in Afghanistan worth defending) and Biden was right to implement the surrender agreement rather than ratting on it the way the Deep State wanted him to. But I notice that "Biden pulled out of Kabul and bad things happened as a result" is an attack the Trump campaign are running on, notably at the Arlington press stunt, so I assume the people making the decisions think that this is a good line of attack.

When the Biden administration came in they tore up Trump's agreement with the Taliban in their desire to avoid ever giving Trump credit. Then followed the debacle. Trump deserves the "blame" for starting this chain of events, but hes right to note that Biden could have handled events better -- for example, not leaving all our weapons for the Taliban to pick up off the ground.

Criticizing America's poor leadership is one of the great themes of Trump's tenure in politics.

Ending wars was so popular that Biden also basically didn't start any new wars.

To be fair to the poor old man, Biden himself was notably part of the "peace wing" in the Obama administration - he opposed getting involved in Libya

Talk is cheap, and he didn’t have a son or an election on the line for the Lybian misadventure.

He did for Ukraine, hence the war.

The best bet for Kamala will be to be super fake and positive for as long as she can keep it together. She has a deeply unappealing demeanor, and if she can keep that under wraps it will be to her benefit. Quips like "I am speaking now" might cheer the troops but will lose her votes. Trump will try to bait her. If she sticks to her pre-scripted answers she'll do better.

Whatever happens, the media will say that Kamala "won" the debate. If she is halfway competent, they will even say it was "one of the greatest performances of all time" up there with Single Ladies.

Speaking of exaggeration, Trump will say that when he was in charge, the U.S. economy was the strongest of all time. He will probably invoke Communism at some point.

90% chance that Kamala will lean heavily on the biggest lie of the campaign to date: that Trump will ban abortion nationwide.

Abortion will still be a sore spot for Trump and Kamala will focus tehre

I'm not sure why it's a sore spot, but then I may not have kept up with the "debate" on that topic. Can't Trump honestly (for Trump) say something like:

"What are you talking about? I've been saying all along abortion should be left up to the states to legislate, and oh, look, now the Supreme Court says I was right all along, it should be left up to the states. Which contrary to your side's usual fear-mongering, is all the ruling says. I already won! The federal government is out of the abortion business. Don't take my word for it, ask the Supreme Court, that's the law of the land now. There's nothing either of us can do about it, even if I wanted to, which I don't!"

That's actually less exaggerated and blustery than the average policy-related thing Trump says; as far as I know it's basically true. He's probably the least anti-abortion Republican president in living memory, yet has (indirectly) given that side its biggest win of my lifetime. It seems to me neither side can attack him convincingly on this topic. What am I missing?

What am I missing?

Trump is the Republican nominee for president

a) Trump appointed the SC majority that overturned existing precedent on abortion. b) Democratic voters believe (correctly) that many Republicans want to ban abortion nationwide and many more Republicans are happy to go along with that.

There's zero chance that happens, of course.

Probably, but outside of election season, Trump is likely to be providing party support to those who will try whatever they can. For example, I still have no idea how Texas' laws about traveling out of state to get an abortion are not a violation of interstate commerce.

Yeah, I'd be inclined to agree. Kavanaugh, at least, would agree as well (he said so in Dobbs), so I imagine that's true of Roberts too. It'll die if it makes it to the Supreme Court.

Can't Trump honestly (for Trump) say something like PERFECTLY REASONABLE THING

Not really. Because the level of discourse is just too stupid. The average person doesn't know anything about the Constitution, how the government works, etc... They just want more (or fewer) abortions because other team bad.

Nevertheless, I'm not sure this issue is quite the slam dunk the Democrats think it is. The number of Americans who are pro-choice is not a large majority, only a narrow one. At times in the not-so-distant past, pro-life has been the majority.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/225975/share-of-americans-who-are-pro-life-or-pro-choice/

Donald Trump's position on abortion is much closer to the median voter's than Kamala Harris. Al Gore's "safe, legal, rare" was a good formulation. But the current Democratic party positively celebrates abortion. They refuse to denounce horrific late-term abortions. Things like having an abortion truck at the DNC come off as vampiric. It's not a good look. Which is why they lie about Trump's position rather than defend their own.

The thing is, Trump's personal opinions on abortion don't matter. Trump isn't proposing any changes to federal law, and in fact the justices he appointed ensured that he can't. His opposition to Florida's actions are all talk, and given he's on the campaign trail there's no reason to believe he'll put any public pressure on future actions if he wins the election.

Trump's effective policy on abortion is ending Roe v. Wade, which opened the floodgates on states banning abortion. But aside from a few extremely principled libertarians, that's not the policy anybody actually wants. Whichever side of the abortion debate people are on, their beliefs are strong enough that they probably want those beliefs to apply nationwide. And given he's running as a Republican, Trump is still on team "wants to stop virtually all abortion."

The thing is, Trump's personal opinions on abortion don't matter.

You're misunderestimating Trump. He has fully captured the Republican party. He forced them to remove anti-abortion language from the platform.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-backed-republican-platform-tempers-language-abortion-2024-07-08/

Kamala is a product of the machine. Trump is its master. His personal opinions on abortion matter a lot.

Whichever side of the abortion debate people are on, their beliefs are strong enough that they probably want those beliefs to apply nationwide

I actually don't think so.

Probably like 25% of the population are pro-life absolutists. And maybe 5% or 10% are pro-choice absolutists. But most people support abortions in some cases but not others (and miniature American flags for everyone). And lots of people don't care about the issue a lot either way.

He has fully captured the Republican party. He forced them to remove anti-abortion language from the platform.

My personal interpretation of Trump is I don't think he would take any real action in any direction on abortion once he's in office. I think he's more interested in being President because of the prestige of being President more than for any policy reasons. And because of that I don't think he would do much if they returned to that policy after the election.

But to tie it back to the point about Kamala vs. Trump's debates, I think she can simply ignore what you said and concentrate on him being largely responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade. I expect lots of talk about Texas.

Probably like 25% of the population are pro-life absolutists.

Let's clarify some language here. I was trying to do so in my first response but let's confirm if we're on the same page here.

When it comes to marijuana legalization, you might have an opinion one way or another but if the state next to you decided to legalize or criminalize marijuana, you might say it's none of your business. If the state next to you decided to legalize murder you would probably say "What the hell?! Change it back!" It likely will not affect you but it still offends your sense of right and wrong. Most people are not pro-life absolutists in that they might make exceptions under X weeks or in the case of child rape, etc. But I do think whatever criteria they think is right, they generally think is right everywhere and should apply everywhere, rather than being decided on a state by state basis.

My personal interpretation of Trump is I don't think he would take any real action in any direction on abortion once he's in office.

Which, surprisingly, is congruent with what he says he'll do.

I'm convinced that unless one has strong philosophical priors related to either the sanctity of life (life begins at conception) or bodily autonomy (woman's right to choose), the intuitive moral answer is one that you almost aren't allowed to say in public: there are capital-G Good abortions, there are bad abortions, and there are meh abortions. There are times when it is close to murder, there are times when it is a mitzvah, and there are times I don't really care one way or the other. And there are a hundred virtually unprovable factors that go into that determination.

But by altering what kind of abortion you are talking about, you rapidly change people's opinions on abortion.

But we have numbers!

Everything below comes from this link from Guttmacher. Guttmacher is rabidly pro-choice.

You can piece through the crosstabs as you like, but I focus on these numbers:

  • There are about a million abortions a year.
  • "45% of abortions were obtained at six weeks’ gestation or earlier,"
  • " 49% at 7–13 weeks’ gestation"
  • Only 7% occur after 14 weeks
  • The abortion rate is 15.9 per 1,000 women aged 15 - 44. If my mathin' is good, this would be 1,590 per 100,000. St. Louis has 69.4 murders per 100,000 people, the highest in the country. Do with that apples-to-oranges comparison what you will.

Here's another Guttmacher link - " About half of all U.S. women having an abortion have had one previously."

What does all of this mean?

Your categorization of good/bad/meh abortions is good and useful. The raw numbers, however, show that even if "bad" abortions make up a very small minority of all abortions, we're talking about (probably) somewhere on the order of 100,000s of cases of what a lot of reasonable people would probably view as infanticide.

Secondly, there's a bit of a hidden conclusion to drawn from the "Only 7% occur after 14 weeks" statistic. Some posters here like to point out how raising a r*tarded child is somehow beyond the pale for many humans (I think differently). Taken a little more charitably, it makes sense to consider that a fetus that has demonstrable physical or cognitive deformities could give would-be parents pause. But, if 45% of people are getting these abortions at six weeks or earlier, people aren't making these judgements based on particularly advanced fetus condition. At 6 weeks, an embryo is 6mm long, the size of a pea. Yes, there could be markers, indications, signs, what have you. But the often presented narrative of "We learned our baby would require 24/7 care forever" is far more rare than is presented in campaign narratives.

And that leads me back to the numbers. Democrats love to campaign on the the smaller proportion of abortions that would probably fall mostly into "meh" (and definitely into "good"). Pro-lifers see the plain fact that a lot of abortions are purely elective on the part of a mother than feels somehow "unready" to be a mother. We (I) think these are absolutely "bad" abortions, mostly the product of a sexual lack of discipline or a cavalier disregarding for what are very predictable outcomes of, you know, having sex.

While I don't doubt the sincerity of those emotions, there is no way they outweigh the fundamental right of an otherwise healthy baby to be born. Hypothetical future states about being "unloved" or "having a bad life" have to be thrown out. That's literally trading the truth of the present for an emotionally based forecast of the future. That's bad decision making 101.

Finally, regarding the fact that half of all women getting abortions have had one previously, I don't see how this is anything than stupid after-the-fact birth control. "Young girl makes mistake" is certainly an understandable situation for a single abortion. I do not see how it can be that common (50%!) unless it is viewed plainly as "no big deal"

Infanticide was a large part of the human condition for hundreds of thousands of years. With no real access to abortion and no way to tell if a child would be deformed at birth it was a very common practice.

"Most Stone Age human societies routinely practiced infanticide, and estimates of children killed by infanticide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras vary from 15 to 50 percent. Infanticide continued to be common in most societies after the historical era began, including ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the Phoenicians, ancient China, ancient Japan, Pre-Islamic Arabia, Aboriginal Australia, Native Americans, and Native Alaskan"

Killing actual living babies and not just a small pile of cells with no consciousness is a time honored human tradition, back when HARD TIMES™ made HARD MEN.

Abortion seems like a big step up in humanitarian behavior.

You're discounting that gestational time plays into most people's moral calculus. Most people feel differently about six weeks than six months. Which is logical: miscarriage rates start dropping precipitously after six weeks, and are minuscule after ten weeks. Many people might be placing those abortions of fetuses the size of peas in the meh category automatically, as the probabilistic child isn't probable enough or present enough at that stage.

To piggyback off of what @The_Nybbler said. This comes down to a bright line definition of when life starts. And an honest debate about abortion would have that at its center.

It's funny, we've all heard the joke about it being impossible to be "a little bit pregnant" - you are or you aren't. It seems, however, you can be pregnant with something that is only "a little bit human."

The problem is that this becomes the Sorites Paradox -- the paradox that asks the question "how many grains of sand make a heap?" (Worse, actually, because time is continuous). It's not resolvable.

@100ProofTollBooth

I'm not saying it doesn't present a philosophical illogicality. What I am saying is that philosophical consistency ends up requiring (for most people) taking counterintuitive actions in real life.

Taking a hard black-and-white stand at conception or at birth prevents you from ever facing inconsistency. But each requires biting the bullet and accepting some tough choices. The shift from people identifying as pro-life vs pro-choice is mostly capturing shifts in the perceived environment around those people, their actual beliefs resemble neither philosophically consistent position.

The polling is like asking people "Do you think we should paint things Blue?" Some small percentage of people will genuinely never tolerate anything blue, and some small percentage of penn state fans want everything blue. Most people will change their minds depending how many things are already blue.

I see what you're saying. This makes sense. And I appreciate the comment on philosophical consistency.

I'm not pro-life because of dogmatic adhere to religious teachings (although I do that in my spare time). I'm pro-life because I think philosophical consistency would push the more rabidly pro-choice into favoring eugenics.

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I think this is the mainstream opinion too.

Therefore, the goal of each side is to make the other side defend their most extreme beliefs. Here's where Trump can win I think.

He can flat out say "I do not support an abortion ban. But my opponent supports ultra late-term abortions". Kamala will have a hard time denouncing late-term abortions because she is a product of a machine that highly values conformity.

I mean the question is whose extremists are going to inflict a cost on the candidate for having a philosophically squishy position.

Not really. Trump is willing to defy his extremists on this issue(and almost all of them will vote for him anyways); Kamala is not(and they'll never have to face the question).

Trump can (and might) say that Harris supports abortions up to nine months, as he said about the Florida abortion referendum (after saying "we need more than six weeks", he said "At the same time, the Democrats are radical because the nine months is just a ridiculous situation" -- the MSM news blackout is such that I had to search specifically for Fox News to get this; other MSM just describe this as "Trump repeating lies about late-term abortions" or something similar). Of course the fact checkers will call this a lie (and it might be), but I don't think that matters at this point.

Yeah, it's a good point. More people will be exposed to heavily-filtered post debate coverage than the debate itself.

Honestly, the best bet for Trump is if Kamala shows up drunk or does something else that is too juicy too ignore. The debate won't be won or lost on policy.

Imagine the chaos if Trump says he can smell alcohol on Kamala’s breath.

Debate drinking game rules:

If Trumps says the words "wine aunt", everyone has to drink.

Right, I would be aghast if my sister got an abortion. But some crack whore getting an abortion? Yes, please, do everyone a favor! Or someone who will resent that child for the rest of its life due to the circumstances of its conception? By all means, save that poor kid the trouble. And of course that’s not even touching all the health-related stuff, both when it comes to the baby and to the mother.

I would be aghast if my sister got an abortion because she just didn't want a third child. Or if she had an abortion because she didn't want another boy. I would be aghast if my sister chose not to abort a down's syndrome kid, or a pregnancy that threatened her life.

Oh certainly, like I said, once you introduce serious health complications into the picture, my take is pretty much always, “Just get the abortion.”

That is the logical take, there are many on this forum that think you should be forced to raise a retard and care for them until you die because all life is sacred. So sacrifice your life and your wife's to raise an unproductive person that would probably have died without modern medicine because God says so.

I mean, no.

Because I believe in it and think it's right - that's why I'd raise an "unproductive person" (BTW how do you feel about 100% disability war veterans, just asking)

Your model for a "worthwhile life" doesn't trump anyone else's model for a "worthwhile life."

The only way to discover if you can derive meaning in life is to live it.

Never allowing that life to start is certainly a way towards finality.

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Serious question, not trying to bait.

What if we have or develop a technology that gives you an early probability. You're 6 weeks pregnant and you get a report along the lines of "There's a 15% probability your baby will have xyz horrible disease or condition. We will know with 60% certainty at week 18, and 90% certainty at week 24"

What's the decision model look like then?

Right, so obviously I’m sure situations like this do come up, and I wouldn’t fault a woman for pretty much any decision she makes under that level of uncertainty. I would need to factor in things like: how much more difficult is the abortion going to be on her body the longer the decision is postponed?

I’m currently reading John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, and one of the early chapters in the book is about one of the characters becoming an abortionist in the late 19th century and the absolute horrors the women endured at that time; a lot of it dwells on how much more difficult and potentially fatal an abortion becomes the longer she is into the pregnancy. Now, obviously our medical technology is worlds better in the 21st century, but I would think that the likelihood of complications still increases substantially as the pregnancy progresses. I’m not a doctor and don’t want to speculate about what I would recommend for a woman in such a scenario. I hope to God I and my hypothetical future partner never have to make a decision like this.

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I think most would agree with this choice put in front of them, but the faith in the public health system generally is low enough that it might poll surprisingly poorly, especially if stories of (pro-choice) doctors handing out "totes serious health complications" notes for late-term abortions like prescriptions for emotional support animals. Witness the slippery slope that euthanasia in Canada has wrought.

You're missing that feels > reals. To the Democrats and to a sizeable chunk of unaligned it's not a complex philosophical or political issue with any nuances. There's the good guys who want abortion to be more accessible and the bad guys who want it to be less accessible (either due to ignorance or for cartoonishly evil reasons). Anyone who says it should be up to the states is for making it less accessible, because the position they were working from is it being federally protected. The idea that one could personally wish for it to be available but shouldn't be a federal matter does not register because Democrats consider government as a tool to use and not a neutral umpire enforcing rules and codes. It's baked in to both parties' core identity; in a democracy the majority votes and gets their way, but a republic is a specific structure.

Previous Republicans gestured at reducing accessibility but it didn't change. Due to Trump's supreme court nominations, abortion is less accessible. Nevermind that it's just he was in charge when something Republicans were working on for decades reached a tipping point, his presidency is the one that put the final nails in the coffin of Roe v Wade, so he's the worse of them all.

Are you saying that "feels > reals" doesn't apply to Trump's base as well? It is the human condition, not specific to one party or group.

Are you saying that "feels > reals" doesn't apply to Trump's base as well? It is the human condition, not specific to one party or group.

I am definitely not saying that. It is absolutely universal.

I just had to ask as you pointed out Democrats and undecideds but not Republicans or MAGAs.

They have their own topics on which they'll ignore the other side's nuanced opinions and just go by what's most convenient to assume the other side's saying. Accusations of "communism" from that side are often like that.

Kamala has to do 80% of the work in the debate.

Trump is a known quantity in these things. Rambling will occur. His best messaging will be on immigration.

He'll have three some (EDIT: editing for clarity, but leaving the original typo because the first response to it was hilarious)

Trump will launch some zingers that land with varying degrees of efficacy.

Kamala has to convince those on the fence that she's not just a party apparatchik. She also stands to risk some support if she gets caught in a flip-flip struggle (some outlets are reporting that part of Trump's strategy is to try to corner Harris with her own debate performance from the 2019 primaries).

The median case is just that - something like a 2-3 point bump in the polls for whoever "wins' the debate. But this cycle has been about outliers. The last debate resulted in a sitting president getting knocked out of the race. So, what are some possible outliers?

  • Trump could actually say something to sink him with a large part of undecided women - the key demographic for the election. It won't be about abortion, but I wonder if Harris can needle him enough so he off-handedly says something along the lines of "This is why you can't have a woman as president, the're too nasty." Trump loses hard on comments like this.

  • Trump plays possum enough to let Harris sink herself. This is an almost guaranteed win strategy, but Trump finds it hard to help himself and just not say much. The interesting thing is this was actually what happened for a good part of the first half of the Biden debate. Trump saw that Joe's train was running off the tracks and just stayed out of the way .... before joining him in the ditch over the second half of the debate. If Trump had more discipline, he could engineer some pretty amazing mechanics with this in the debate - say he gets a 30 second rebuttal period after some Harris response, instead of responding at all, he could say "Actually, I'd really like to hear more from VP Harris on xyz" and just give her 30 more seconds to implode.

  • Harris short-circuit version 1: She gets tongue tied and confused early with an answer and defaults to a weird combination of canned responses and her woo-woo wine aunt aphorisms. This is probably the debate perfformance (outside of the median) that most people are expecting - and the reason why Harris has, reportedly, been conducting many, many prep debates with her staff. If this happened, I think you might be looking at almost the same level of panic as after the Biden debate. There's not enough time for Harris to recover and the worst clips would be repeated ad nauseum in PA and elsewhere. Like I said in another post, there's a chance Trump goes 2-0 with 2 KOs in Debates this year.

  • Harris short-circuit version 2: ONLY Canned responses without any zingers to Trump or "hear felt" personal anecdotes or connection to voters. Comes across as robotic and scared to go off script. Will answer follow up questions with close to literal repetitions of what she just said. Minimal wine-aunt woo-woo-isms, but not zero. This exits as a Trump win, for sure, but I don't see the same level of panic in the DNC / Harris campaign. They would wake-up Wednesday thinking it wasn't that bad and "she won on substance." They run the rest of the campaign with these odd "isn't she so relatable!" spots from time to time (remember the infamous Hillary in Cedar Rapids selfie video). The end result is a Trump win bigger than everyone expects. The sobering, "Oh, shit, how did we not see this coming after the debate?" will hit like a falling silo on election night.

All that being said, the thing that will definitely not happen - but that I want to - is one of the debate moderators asking, "Why the hell have both of you gone full retard on economic policy. Tariffs and unrealized capital gains taxes. No reform to social security and medicare. How will your administration handle the recession that will likely occur during your first year in office?"

He'll have three some zingers

“Blowjob Kamala? More like spit roast Kamala.”

(If you’ll excuse me, I need to wash my mouth out with soap.)

Thanks for the hilarious catch. I edited the original.

Continue doing the Lord's work, brother.

Personally, I think I would prefer her to be a party apparatchik, because I think another President DNC is preferable to a President Kamala. I wonder how many Democrats feel the same. The impression I am getting from many Democrats is that they're voting for the party not Kamala, so coming across as a party apparatchik might actually be a the better move. She just needs to come across as the black female girlboss figurehead but not too obnoxious to turn off moderates.

because I think another President DNC is preferable to a President Kamala.

In what ways?

This is a fair ... enough ... reason to vote, but my perspective would be that "rule by party" resulted in an orchestrated dishonesty campaign denying the senility of an elderly man endowed with the power of the office of the President.

When no single person is "in charge" and decisions can be made with a collective diffusion of responsibility, bad things happen.

As a partisan Democrat, my issue with Joe Biden was he could not win the election. He can still do the job of President, at the very least no worse than 2nd term Ronald Reagan, he just couldn't be President & run an effective campaign due to his age.

The reason he could not win the election was that he is a senile old man, which impacts his ability to be president quite a bit as well.

I think it might be worth examining your biases re: Ronald Reagan.

Here is a speech from Reagan towards the end of his second term. A balloon pops and he reacts on his feet, quipping "missed me", which causes the audience to erupt in laughter.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2IGDYGroToY

Here's Reagan giving a 36 minute speech in 1992, four years AFTER the end of his Presidency.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WxL3OU1dwmI

In this video we can see signs of decline, but he's still quite a bit more functional than Biden today. Will Biden be giving speeches at the 2028 convention? Will he even be alive?

There's a lot of sane-washing that's being done on Biden's behalf. People are trying to claim "both sides". It's simply not true. His current decline is far beyond what we've ever seen for a President.

Donald Trump is the main reason to vote Democrat, and Democrats are now the party of trusting the experts. I think Democrats mostly just want "their people" (the experts) in charge, and President Kamala is just a product of circumstance. If Kamala tried to exert too much autonomy, I think the party would remove her like they did Biden, or at least freeze her out and frustrate her efforts to do anything. It could happen quite suddenly, perhaps with some scandal that had previously been denied and ignored. I think Democrats would mostly be okay with this. There is very little talk about the previous dishonesty campaign, nor the fact that the US does not and has not had a functional President for a long time. That doesn't seem to be shifting anyone to vote differently, because they're voting for the party. Attempts to build a cult of personality around Kamala have been mostly astroturfed, and it has no staying power.

Trump is entirely opposite in this regard. Much of Trump's support comes despite the party. He does have a cult of personality. This is perhaps a much weaker ideological coalition, and I am concerned about what will happen when Trump's luck runs out the next time someone shoots at him.

While the DNC might be preferable to this particular candidate, it's not a positive development for the country.

Who are the DNC? They are people who care about partisan politics so deeply that they dedicate their lives to working for a political machine. They are not elected by the people but instead advance via intra-elite status competition. In short, they are activists and ideologues.

The median views of a White House staffer are far removed from those of the typical American. They defer to the voters only to the extent that it helps them win the next election. Then it's right back to doing the things they wanted to do anyway. Did the voters ever call for open borders? No. But that what the activists wanted, so that's what we got.

A President is more directly answerable to the people than his staffers. A strong President can restrain the extremist views of his staffers. But a weak President like Biden or G. W. Bush gets dragged into doing whatever their handlers want. As a result, we got endless wars and open borders. Kamala, with no internal compass of her own, means more of the same.

A strong President can restrain the extremist views of his staffers. But a weak President like Biden or G. W. Bush gets dragged into doing whatever their handlers want.

I like the idea of a "high draft pick" presidential candidate being (1) Self-assured to almost the level of obstinate and (2) Very vocally honest about their value system, world view, and political theory.

This would probably result in more Trump-like dispositions in candidates (regardless of political persuasion). Higher temperature in terms of campaigns, but, perhaps, a lot more predictability in the administration.

"This is why you can't have a woman as president, the're too nasty." Trump loses hard on comments like this.

Well, he didn't say that for Hillary.

I was specifically trying to describe outlier scenarios. I don't think he'll say it regarding Kamala, but the chance is not zero. Furthermore, while I don't buy into the "Trump is just as cognitively frail as Biden!" narrative, I think there has been some level of performance decline over the past eight years. I don't see Trump flying into a totally unhinged misogynistic diatribe on "womenz are bad!" It could see Trump, in his stream of consciousness, letting fly some line like the one I proposed in my original post. Look at the J.D Vance "cat ladies" comment; off the top of his head in an interview, and it was horribly received pretty much all the way around. If Trump hits the same note, even if the line is flippant and unserious, it matters in an election that will come down to ~250k votes.

Predictions: the debate will be boring; Kamala will say a bunch of vague things and throw some zingers at Trump; Trump will offer some stream of consciousness responses and some Kamala jabs; neither will have a collapse a la Biden; hand-picked focus groups will say Kamala won in a blowout; nothing really happens in the polls.

I'd love to see AI come up in the debate, though.

Harris will give bizarre word salad non answers to half the questions, but the other half she'll have a nearly flawless rehearsed answers for.

Trump will mostly ignore the questions and just go on about whatever topics he feels he's strongest in. His answers will also be too online, and assume you know what he's talking about. At some point he'll bring up the 20,000 Hattians in Ohio, but it will be in the most confusing way possible. You'll either know what he's gesturing at and nod along, or think he's an absolute crazy person.

Despite the mics being muted while the other person is talking, at some point Kamala will try to shoehorn in "I'm talking now", because the "vote blue no matter who" crowd loves it when she says that and it gets them all fired up. But in context it will make almost zero sense.

If the debate rules break down at some point like they did with Biden, and they stop muting the mics, I have no fucking clue what sort of chaos will break loose. Pretty sure Harris' entire strategy is to just bully Trump into shutting up with girlboss energy, but I'll be extremely disappointed if he lets her. But I wouldn't be shocked if the moderators put their finger on the scale and start selectively muting Trump so Harris can speak in that situation, even if it's supposed to be his time to speak, like for his 2 minute rebuttal or however they structure it.

If Trump actually accused Kamala of helping Haitians eat cats what the heck happens?

"You, and Joe Biden brought in millions of illegal immigrants, and now. Did you see this folks? They are stealing and eating cats in Ohio. True story, I couldn't believe it myself."

I think it'll be way less coherent than that. You can actually tell what's happening almost in your fictionalization. I think it'll be something where Trump just blurts out, apropos of little

"She put the Hattians on Ohio! Terrible, terrible. Many such cases." And if you know, you know. If you don't, he just sounds crazy. What about Hattians in Ohio? Was Kamala actually in any way responsible for... whatever he's talking about? He might as well be ranting about lizard people or clockwork elves.

But your paragraph doesn't have to word "cats". The cats part is something Trump could really fixate on if he gets told about it.

I know. That's the point. The last year Trump has been terrible at explaining the things he's seen on Twitter. He just blurts out some words that are kind of a sentence, and if you saw the same meme he saw, you know what he's talking about. Absent that, it's a mystery.

The only Trump I've watched lately was him getting shot and the debate. Debate Trump would talk about eating cats and say something like, "they're eating cats now, cats. People's cats. Terrible terrible people, and Kamala wanted them here "


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