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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30839 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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The Chris Kaba verdict is in, and it's exactly what everyone expected.

https://news.sky.com/story/met-police-officer-who-shot-chris-kaba-cleared-of-murder-13234639

The jury reportedly took only 3 hours to decide on the verdict, indicating that it isn't exactly what you'd call a tough case. Meanwhile, the initial CPS prosecution decision iirc took nearly a full 6 months to be cleared to go ahead, indicating that there was immense deliberation on whether it should go ahead at all in the first place.

So why did it go ahead? Well, the answer is probably somewhat obvious. Now, it's normal in the UK for every police firearms discharge to result in an investigation, but to actually go to court on such shaky grounds... I can only imagine that it was to head off "community tensions".

Activists in the UK have been desperate to ape the BLM movement over here, to have their very own moment where they could take to the streets and... do whatever it is they planned on doing. We had copycat protests during 2020, with brave activists shouting "hands up don't shoot" at entirely unarmed average British police officers. This case seems to be what most of them pinned their hopes on as the trigger point; you can see from the article above that those hopes still burn brightly despite this should-be fatal blow.

So, to head off inevitable riots if they didn't prosecute, CPS decided to put an innocent man through the justice system, costing time and taxpayer money on a prosecution that was doomed from the start, in order to try and appease a community that was itching for a reason to get heated and acquire some new Nikes. Truly, to my mind there is no better representation of the utter spinelessness of our leaders and elites in the face of accusations of racism and threats of violent protest than this prosecution.

The MacPherson Report published in 1999 forms the basis of UK law enforcements soft-touch approach to racial minorities and is critical when considering how the UK Met has gotten so soft (till maybe 2022). Every instance of a criminal black being arrested became an example of systemic racism, mandating inquiry and review. Police officers could potentially become racist by osmotic absorption of racist beliefs held by seniors, but the far more likely outcome is their absorption of 'sod this paperwork' effort-to-outcome practices.

The London public which serves the UK civil and political administration decries every instance of white rule enforcement as racism, cries which are eagerly taken up by Good People in London who need to display their moral credentials to the people around them. 'Its their culture' are the blinders automatically applied whenever nonwhites (except for adjacents such as orientals/jews/ibo/sikhs) do anything wrong at all, while 'systemic racism' will be screamed whenever a policeman looks at a brown rapist funny.

The current lefty narrative around the rotherham rapes and all the other muslim gang rapes of children - actual pubescent sub 10-16 year olds, not 'teen' 19 year old 'migrant children' - is that the institutional classism of the police made them dismissive of the claims of rape. In reality the police get attacked as racist for even asking if the muslims are doing anything bad, so why would they bother. Just shut up and let the browns do whatever the fuck they want, thats what the London elite prefer after all.

The police in Rotherham weren’t “institutionally classist” (the police are in any case obviously ‘working class’ under the British class system).

Nevertheless, an extremely disproportionate number (the great majority) of victims in Rotherham, Telford and other grooming gang cases were girls in the care system, children of single mothers, drug addicts and so on. They were the underclass. You can find old articles from the BBC from the early 2000s decrying the scale of “teenage prostitution” in some British towns (that not coincidentally later had ‘grooming gang’ cases) and it is accurate to say that the view of the police in many cases was that they were essentially prostitutes. For most of history most prostitutes started in that trade at a young age and were recruited (by pimps) from the desperate underclass in the same way.

The police in Rotherham weren’t “institutionally classist” (the police are in any case obviously ‘working class’ under the British class system).

The working class are far more snobby ("classist" is not a word) against the underclass than higher classes are. This is a universal phenomenon - people are most snobby against the class one rung below their own. Although I don't think institutional snobbery on the part of working-class cops was the problem - the class-related problem was soft bigotry of low expectations among middle-class social workers. It wasn't just "We can't expect the poor dears not to rape kids - it's part of their Mirpuri Pakistani culture." It was also "We can't expect the poor dears to go home to their mothers rather than hanging out with foreign rapists in minicab offices - it's part of their chav culture."

"classist" is not a word

Of course it is. Though you may not like it. It's much more a word than those on the Website of unrequited affection or whatever the hell that site is that came up with reddit darling terms like sonder.

The influence of US media narratives on crime has been especially distorting outside the US. Total gun deaths and police shootings between the UK and US are almost impossible to compare as the rates are respectively 60x and 150x less common in the UK.

I haven't heard of this case until now, but was there any claimed reason he didn't just get out of the car? Do I have the facts correct: the car and plate number were reported to have been involved in a shooting the day prior, the car was registered to someone other than Kaba, and nothing was found in the car? When pulled over, rammed several cop cars and tried to run the shooter over. Unsurprisingly he had been charged with attempted murder days prior.

The influence of US media narratives on crime has been especially distorting outside the US.

I find this fascinating, the same is happening in my country of Slovakia. My working theory is that we live in de facto what accounts to US Empire. It is not dissimilar to let's say Roman empire or British empire - you have various naturalized people who feel allegiance to the empire, they adopt the imperial customs and ethos and even ape people in imperial centers of power. It also fosters certain strange allegiances, I am sure upper class of Roman Britain or Egypt felt more in common with Roman elites than local people - not unlike what is happening now.

When it comes to culture, there are obvious things such as racism or sexism etc. However what I find interesting is that people here internalize even completely invalid themes - for instance the boomer vs millenial dichotomy from US. In Slovakia, boomers spent their best productive years during communism or very shady early years after the fall of Eastern Bloc in 1989, with 20%+ unemployment and average salary of $100 a month/$1,200 a year - if you were lucky enough to actually have an average job and the employer was actually paying you on time. Boomers at large do not have any financial property such as stocks or bonds to help in their retirement, because these were not accessible. Whatever they had, they probably lost it to double digit inflation, failing state banks and bankrupted post-communist industry. At best they may own some old commie apartment in some small town where they lived their whole lives. They are wholly dependent on state pension, which averages around 60% of average net wage, many of them have to work various odd jobs to survive. And yet young people are parroting the US talking point of how boomers had it so much better than them, how they hoard wealth, how much harder it is now in current economy etc. It is amazing to see.

For most of teh Roman Republic stage of the empire, they maintained the fiction that most of the territory controlled by Rome was technically sovereign and merely an "ally".

The US is a good bit less interventionist than we could be, and that's probably for the best, but we should not pretend that just because we haven't annexed Canada that they aren't US territory.

In my (American) opinion, NATO is the empire and America is the primary annexed province.

It may be so, for instance look at British Imperium - in a sense the local English population was first to be subjugated. Your cookie-cutter aristocrat who wedged himself into imperial bureaucracy let's say in India, had possibly more in common with some Indian educated native embedded into Imperial Civil Service and who worshiped the empire compared to some Welsh coal miner or English factory worker. It s a common enough theme in empires, for instance the Russian aristocracy during the Tzarist era was thoroughly westernized, they spoke French even during the time Tolstoy wrote his novels like War and Peace in 1869. They were looking down on Russian and Turkic and Finno-Ugric or even German imperial subjects and serfs as uncouth and unsophisticated dregs, who should be happy they can enjoy their enlightened and benevolent imperial rule.

However what I find interesting is that people here internalize even completely invalid themes - for instance the boomer vs millenial dichotomy from US. In Slovakia the boomers spent their best productive years during communism or very shady early years after the fall of Eastern Bloc in 1989, with 20%+ unemployment and average salary of $100 a month/$1,200 a year - if you were lucky enough to actually have an average job and the employer was actually paying you on time. Boomers at large do not have any financial property such as stocks or bonds to help in their retirement, because these were not accessible.

I made exactly that comparison about Ireland here.

Unfortunately I think the parroting is not without basis at all, with certain qualifications, that is. The fact is that the period roughly between 1955 and 1980 (that is, between the consolidation of the post-Stalinist political order and the critical period of economic stagnation, energy shortage and the foreign debt trap) was, according to the standards of their own history, an era of prosperity and peace for every country in the Soviet bloc. For local men born between 1935 and 1955 (for simplicity’s sake, let’s look at men only here), their experience as teenagers and young adults was roughly this:

  • If you have enough human agency to complete your education and to work a job, you’re not a cripple or a retard, and you aren’t some career criminal or alcoholic bum either, society basically gives you a guarantee that you’ll have a stable job, a pension, food on the table and some place to live. If you’re willing to make extra effort, you’ll maybe even have a car, a fridge and a cottage in the country.

  • Should you leave your job for whatever reason, you can just find another similar one.

  • There’s no blanket expectation towards the youth that everyone gets a college degree. You can have a respectable existence as an average normie without attending college.

  • Due to the lopsided sex ratio that disfavors women and a cultural environment that is markedly different from today, unless you’re a cripple, a retard, a bum, an alcoholic or a crazy person, and you aren’t hideously ugly or disfigured either, then finding a non-obese, non-addict, non-crazy, non-slut wife who’s 3-5 years younger than you and isn’t a single mom either is rather easy. As a man you can considerably raise your social status just by not being a drunkard.

  • You very obviously have a better life than your parents and especially than your grandparents. Society is generally in consensus that your offspring will have even better lives than you.

  • Life may be boring but also predictable. You have limited options but you can also make reasonable plans. Your general impression around you is that everything is getting more or less better. Energy is cheap, so is credit.

  • By the time the political transition of 1989 takes place, you already have a house/apartment, a family, a career and status. Even though bad times are ahead, you’re an established citizen. Most of your life is already behind you. You won’t need to adapt to the new order.

Now, compare this to the average life experience of men from the same region of the world born between 1970 and 1980, or between 1990 and 2000, and you’ll notice that the difference is like night and day.

Noted, the generation I described above aren’t the equivalent of Boomers in a strict chronological sense; they’re older than them. But that is beside the point. (It’s also true that the locals born between 1960 and 1970 or so faced rather negative consequences of the transition period after 1989, because they were expected to adapt but were generally too old to do so, and they were also too young to take part in the general looting of state assets i.e. privatization.)

The issue, I think, either in the USA or in Eastern Europe isn’t that young people think Boomers had it so much better, it’s that Boomers apparently think that their grandchildren have the same opportunities that they did, while at the same time actually having it so much better because they can buy shiny new gadgets with touchscreens, and are both baffled and angry when they don’t have the same outcomes in life as they did.

I can talk specifically about Slovakia or back then Czechoslovakia. The boomers born after WW2 reached their prime in 1970s, which was post 1968 invasion of Warsaw Pact countries into Czechoslovakia and period of so called Normalization. This was era of economic and cultural stagnation, purges, stifling cultural environment and disconnection of regular people from public life. Your career prospects were politically tied, there was feeling of ubiquitous demoralization and sclerosis in the system.

The issue, I think, either in the USA or in Eastern Europe isn’t that young people think Boomers had it so much better, it’s that Boomers apparently think that their grandchildren have the same opportunities that they did

The US vs Czechoslovak comparison of "opportunity" is absolutely off. Young people in Czech Republic or Slovakia now have much more opportunity than boomers had in 1975 Czechoslovakia. It goes beyond gadgets, we are talking about basic stuff ranging from opportunity to travel, opportunity to study what you want, even opportunity to buy something or even having long hairs at school or Lenin forbid - to go to the church. The cultural and social institutions in USA vs Czechoslovakia were almost as if from other planet.

What is interesting is that acknowledging that boomer pensioners have it tough is "common knowledge", that is why acceptance of boomer vs millennials theme is so interesting. It is part of common speak, even jokes. Let me tell you one from early 2000s that I find hilarious, dark humor is hallmark of tough times:

Do you know why a rat has four legs?

So it can get to the trash bin before a pensioner

Pensioners in Slovakia are the lowest of the low. Here is a 2022 article from Slovakia how 27% of our 1,1 million pensioners are living bellow the poverty line of EUR 424 a month, especially women as they live longer, had lower wages during their lives and their pension did not keep up with inflation. There is a reason for poor "babushka" or "babička" trope in Eastern Bloc, our seniors do not go for vacations to Mediterranean in their old Mercedes. Yeah, you can look at such an elderly women who romanticizes her youth, how fun it was to go with her "pioneer" friends from school to some socialist potato brigade and how happy she was. There is certain dignity to how many of them carry themselves despite their circumstances. But the truth rings different if you look at her way of living, actually having some kind of envy or resentment for how she has it so much better than you to me seems insane.

Hadn't heard of the incident until now but per the wikipedia page it looks like a good shoot.

Although,

Members of his family said that he would not have been shot dead if he were not black. Kaba's cousin said: "I've put it out there he wasn't perfect… but regardless of that nobody deserves to be killed by the police unless there is an imminent or direct threat to the public. He dindu nuffin."[13]

My emphasis. So I followed the cite and sure enough this quote doesn't appear on the page at all, let alone the bolded part. Wonder how long that'll stand.

I am impressed you managed to get the version of the page with that quote. It was reverted in less than a minute if I read the history right. Version with it and the reverted version. The whole quote was removed 11 minutes later.

I'm pretty sure every revision is available for every WP article...unless and admin deletes it. I'm not sure how much powers the admins have, but I think it's a lot.

Admins can't delete revision history. Only "oversighters" can do that - this is a rare permission held by 41 people on the English wikipedia, of whom 15 are actively using it. (Compared to 419 active admins).

Given that the addition of "He dindu nuffin." to the Wiki was vandalism - as @TitaniumButterfly points out there is a link to the source for the quote (a BBC interview with a family member), and the line isn't there - the quick reversion is unsurprising. There a lot of editors following changes to high-salience pages in order to revert vandalism quickly.

Sure, but unless one is going through the revision history of the article (which... why?) one would have to have loaded the article during the < 1m period when it was the latest revision to see it as on the main page. The fact the comment I'm replying to wonders how long that will be in the article doesn't sound like they saw it in its already-reverted form.

I legit just found it there and if you care to you'll see that the timestamps work out.

Britain and their restrictive culture around weapons. Next thing you know, they’ll require a license for operating a car.

Something I find interesting is how coverage emphasizes the “outrage” amongst firearms officers. This is the first I’ve heard of it, so I figured it was as manufactured as the charges, but apparently several hundred opted out of carrying their weapons in protest. Not very reassuring. It’s obviously in their interest to secure as many protections against misconduct as they can, and it’s obviously in the public interest to keep them on a tight leash…so long as they offer them respect. At a certain point such an adversarial relationship results in no one wanting the job. I don’t know how to design a process that doesn’t incentive both to claw for more power.

and it’s obviously in the public interest to keep them on a tight leash

In the UK? Hardly. The country has a tiny number of highly vetted, very well trained firearms officers, supporting a mass of unarmed ordinary police. We have one shooting by police marksmen every few years, and it's almost always a guy who is deep in with armed gangs. Armed police are not a threat to the public at all.

'Keeping them on a tight leash' (i.e. taking the side of criminals they interact with) has the second order effect of emboldening those criminals, which is definitely not in the public interest. We see this every few years when some bright spark in the Met decides that stop and search is racist. The police stop using it for a while, the black on black murder rate spikes, and then they quietly go back to using it because it works.

At a certain point such an adversarial relationship results in no one wanting the job

At a certain point such low pay relative to perceived risk results in no one wanting the job. If your paramilitary members (which, make no mistake, is what these particular cops are) have to risk that for every criminal/enemy combatant they kill as part of their job, they're risking sociofinancial execution, it better be paying ludicrous sums. That sum can be social wealth, that can be financial wealth, or they can be a mix (exhibit A: veteran's discount), but they must be paid regardless.

Progressives can never pay them properly because their preferred version of the paramilitary/police are the criminals that the paramilitary is supposed to be shooting, and their core revealed preference is that they just want to force men [and increasingly, the women who work like men] to labor and risk for free (just like Traditionalists reveal preference for free female childbirth and risk) which means they're incapable of fixing that.

I don’t know how to design a process that doesn’t incentive both to claw for more power.

Liberalism was that process, but we are unwilling or unable to afford it any more (which resulted in people being able to claw for more power, and ripped it apart in the process).

Replacing gynosupremacy (current regime) with androsupremacy (ancien regime) is known to fix a security problem in the short term (which is why the Traditionalists feel, correctly, that they can fix this by "retvrning") but at the cost of everything above Security on Maslow's hirerarchy (which stops being a problem when the average man is priced out of everything above it anyway).

So yes, that means that the rough men will use the fact everyone else requires their protection to angle for more power (or must become rough men themselves, which is a victory for the rough men). If the ruling party is unable or unwilling to negotiate they get Battle of Baghdad'd (and the soldiers protesting here is a nano-scale version of that) as the soldiers throw down their tools and cheer for the Taliban... because the Taliban will give those men the power over women that the former society could or would not and every soldier or potential soldier knew it.

because the Taliban will give those men the power over women that the former society could or would not and every soldier or potential soldier knew it.

I think they probably cared less about power over women and more about power over their abusers. Ending the practice of bacha bazi was a prominent selling point for the Taliban the last two times it took power in Afghanistan. Maybe we should have considered not covering up such practices by our "allies", but ensuring first-world LGBT people aren't smeared as pedophiles is apparently more important than preventing child sexual abuse.

It seems more likely that we wanted to destroy the Taliban because they harbored Osama Bin Laden after 9/11; cobbled together a messy coalition of liberals, tribal traditionalists, and the plain corrupt; and then looked the other way for the sake of maintaining coalition politics than it is we supported child rape at the behest of domestic LGBT politics.

Yes and no. Not raising a stink about it when we encountered it was "maintaining coalition politics". Classifying the investigation into the practice and the resulting report on it was for domestic politics.

[Refinement: "power over women" -> "power over abusers, most of whom happen to either be women, or are acting womanly".]

I think they probably cared less about power over women and more about power over their abusers.

Interesting that the "right-wing" is slowly rediscovering that this is how they need to couch their messaging (and then refusing to back down when pressed, and Trump will be the model for this going forward). Liberalism is a counterbalance against progressivism just like it was against traditionalism, and the progressives are only liberals in the "continue the revolution against traditionalism" sense, not the "continue the revolution against traditionalists" (which is why they're so occupied with fighting a strawman that no longer exists while becoming indistinguishable from the traditionalist tendencies that were the reason liberals opposed them in the first place).

But what happens when it is mostly women/progressives carrying out the abuse? Well...

but ensuring first-world LGBT people aren't smeared as pedophiles

The "global elite satanist pedophile" people have correctly identified that if you're in power, you get to sexually abuse young men with impunity. The specifics look a little different when women do it but "we will take away your ability to develop the things that make you sexually attractive" (either by raping/molesting you directly, or contributing to the cultural effort to chemically castrate you and give you breasts instead express your inner herbivore man where you hide under your bed in fear of offending a woman) is the general form of what that sexual abuse looks like regardless of whether it's a man or a woman doing either of those things, regardless of whether they think in the moment it's abuse or not (as you know). And the problem is that, because liberal men and women can and will use different functions to compute sexual attraction than normal people, but don't understand that they're doing that, they won't anticipate that their views on what makes the opposite sex attractive (if they even see it that way) is destructive when applied outside of that "orientation"- they can't defend against progressives because they don't know they need to defend against them.

Note that this is specifically forced feminization/passivization [in the traditional straight sex sense, where your psyche is built on men dominate, women submit] (and note that abuse victims tend to become hyper-female as a rationalization/result of the abuse, and that's true for boys as well as girls). Feminization that isn't forced is... something different, but can look the same way under certain circumstances (especially in all-male environments, like boarding schools [Eton is famous for this] and prisons) or if you're not aware/don't care they're distinct (most commonly for religious reasons).

Also, forced masculinization can be accomplished (Stanford Prison Experiment guards, Khmer Rouge putting children in charge of labor camps, royal families), it just isn't done because making more dominant individuals is not generally to the benefit of those with the power so we don't have good data on what happens. [I suspect the Soviet "strong woman, basically a man" meme is a little more than just a meme in this direction, but I don't have data to back that up; I'm also not convinced it's the cause of most FTM transitions as distinct from its standard social contagion effects.]

Maybe we should have considered not covering up such practices by our "allies"

The Westerners that are in power consider the institutional and cultural abuse of boys/young men to have neutral-to-positive moral valence (see above). I think the clearer examples of boy-raping are certainly things that a government would cover up for the same reasons the Church did- that it would allow their legitimacy to be questioned- more than it is an attempt to protect the LGBT movement (who don't really have to care about being called pedophiles as they now possess the social privilege the Church used to have).

because liberal men and women can and will use different functions to compute sexual attraction than normal people

Given the very large number of liberals who exist in modern Western countries, maybe they’re not as “abnormal” as you think they are? Your idea of what constitutes “normal” has to be open to revision in the face of new empirical evidence. Perhaps you need to take seriously the idea that these patterns of behavior were always a latent potential in humanity, rather than an aberration that has been imposed by force from the outside?

I’ve written a lot here before about what a wakeup Covid was for me, regarding facts about human nature - it’s a convenient example to return to. I didn’t want to believe that total mass capitulation to any and all restrictions to stave off a flu was “normal” for most people. But I was forced to admit, through the weight of sheer statistics, that they were the normal ones, and I was the abnormal one.

[Refinement: "power over women" -> "power over abusers, most of whom happen to either be women, or are acting womanly".]

Bacha bazi is machismo-based homosexuality and exists in a very different cultural context to western gayness-based homosexuality. Machismo-based homosexuality is a much more common pattern over time and space (from ancient Athens to US prisons) with varying degrees of consensuality on the part of the boi, but the key point of commonality is that it does not consider buggering a man to be womanly, only allowing yourself to be buggered.

You are trying to map a conflict going on in the post-Christian west to a pre-Abrahamic conflict going on in Afghanistan. Before the spread of Abrahamic religion, machismo-based homosexuality was the default. The Levitical prohibition on men having sex with men (which is reiterated in the New Testament and the Quaran) is very obviously a response to sexual practices that were actually happening (and probably happening licitly - hence the discussions about male temple prostitutes when modern argue about what the prohibition means) around the time and place where it was written. As far as I am aware, it is the first time an authority condemns the man who buggers (rather than the man who allows himself to be buggered) as a sexual deviant.

FWIW, the issues around bacha bazi are one of the many arguments for why Pashtun Afghanistan is so backward that the Taliban is a genuine improvement, and given that the west has lost the social technology to bring societies up from goatfucking to medievalism we should let someone who still has it rule there. The middle-class Kabulites who appear in all the famous "before" photos were probably an artifact of Soviet rule, and mostly managed to bug out anyway. (There also just weren't that many of them)

Bacha bazi is machismo-based homosexuality

You're missing the point slightly, but perhaps I didn't make it clear enough.

In Afghanistan, most of the abusive people are men, and follow male patterns of abuse. Men who are tired of this literally threw their guns down [such an event being the topic of the thread] and let the men who had a better way in.

In the West, most of the abusive people are women, and follow female patterns of abuse. (Most people don't know what they are, especially when the topic is specifically child abuse, so I figured I'd elaborate- "charge the soldier for doing his job because the enemy failed a paper-bag test" is similar abuse along those lines.) Men who are tired of this literally threw their guns down [event topic] and let the negative consequences occur (there are no men who have a better way willing or able to conquer Western countries so this is the best they have).

but the key point of commonality is that it does not consider buggering a man to be womanly, only allowing yourself to be buggered.

That consideration is biologically hardcoded. Forced feminization/passivization subtly breaks down men; doesn't matter if it's an individual man directly buggering you short-term or a group of woman collectively buggering you long-term. (Of course, you have to get to understand 'women can bugger men' first, and most people can't do that for other biologically-hardcoded reasons because never in the history of humanity outside of the last 60 years or so has that ever been possible.)

In the West, most of the abusive people are women

Can you clarify what you mean by this? The overwhelming majority of violent criminals (including rapists) are men. The overwhelming majority of people who participate in violent political unrest (e.g. the CHAZ in Seattle) are men.

When it comes to say, the architects of corporate wokeness, or deep state NWO bureaucrats, there are more women among their ranks, but also still plenty of men.

Yeah, that one threw me off too. The closest I can imagine is that women enforce social conformity on men and women both, and abusive female personalities get a free pass in a lot of communities.

Lots of women are...pointlessly abusive? Men are usually getting something vaugely quantifiable from it it.

I'm reaching.

That consideration is biologically hardcoded.

It may be hardcoded, but the point I was making is that Abrahamic religion considers both buggering a man and allowing yourselves to be buggered to be womanly, or at least sufficiently deviant that a sodomite isn't a real man. If machismo-based homosexuality is hardcoded, then Abrahamic religion has successfully overcome a hardcoded belief, to the benefit of humanity.

On the substantive point, I think the crux of our disagreement is that you see the problem as too much female authority (young men being figuratively buggered by teachers and social workers) whereas I see it as the absence of positive male authority (young men growing up without the kind of authority figure that it is possible for them to respect in the way that men need to respect authority). In the absence of either kind of authority what you actually get is the kind of young man for whom buggeration (or at least judicial rhaphanidosis) would be an improvement.

Thanks for the new word. I guess.

Uhh, you know that the people doing Bacha Bazi were something that rounds to 0% female?

I think that's besides @ThisIsSin's point, if I am reading correctly (the diction is a little dense).

Bacha Bazi was 100% about forced feminization in a culture that had (has) a lot of difficulty creating non-destructive ways for men to express sexual needs.

Progressives do not want criminals to turn into the law enforcement mechanism because progressives do not believe crime is real in the first place. Or at least progressives have convinced themselves that crime isnt real, hence the logical next step of abolishing law enforcement.

Self actualization for progressives is contingent on having an oppressive force to actively resist, because their set worldview is already perfect and does not require convincing externals. Said oppressive force must be manifestly engaging in oppression, and so law enforcement against criminal minorities is coopted by progressives to be proof of their worldviews conception. People being criminal assholes isn't because they are shitheads, its because they are systematically oppressed by the big bad state.

In the progressive conception there is never any need for law enforcement labor, and it is impossible for minorities to commit crime when there is no oppressive force incentivizing them to do so. Manifest failures like Christiania, CHAZ, East Hastings, Kensington, etc etc are simply proof of how oppression is so systemic that criminal minorities absorb the culture of white oppressors to oppress themselves.

The labor of law enforcement is false labor for the progressive. It was never needed, and so should never be compensated. Ironically, law enforcement is required for the progressive worldview to continue existing. Without law enforcement, progressives have no manifestation of the oppressive structure and no external force blameable for progressive failures. The progressive worldview requires law enforcement to exist more than it wants it to be abolished, because if law enforcement is gone the progressive ideas have to stand on their own, and deep down all progressives know their pet minorities will find it easier to scalp defenseless dangerhairs than armed magasuburbs.

Everyone loves a nice hot dump on progressives. It's practically the easy-mode for scoring upvotes.

You still need to actually be making an argument or saying something factual and defensible. This post is just pure boo-lighting with a bunch of uncharitable straw men. Do you think any progressive would agree with your characterization of what they believe and what their real motives are? It's one thing to argue that "This is the end result of their policies," it's another to argue "Actually, progressives are all zombie idiots with a worldview that says crime doesn't exist and minorities only ever do bad things because they are oppressed."

If this was a one-off, I'd chide you for weakmanning and ask you to put more effort into your inveighing against progressives in the future. But this isn't a one-off. You have a long, bad history of this sort of post, and being told to stop it.

You actually have a couple of notes to the effect of "last warning, permaban next time." Somehow you skated in the past, and then you went and earned a couple of AAQCs.

You seem to be able to post interesting things when you aren't choking on bile about your outgroup. We would like you to focus on your strengths. By that I do not mean "entertaining rants about how your outgroup is pure stupid evil."

Banned for 2 weeks, and next time will be a permaban.

Maybe this has to do with the fact that people aren't paying their rent & are scared to pay their rent & so they go out & they need to feed their child & they don't have money so... they feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry - AOC

The idea that crime is fake and that societal factors explain all observable group differences is stock standard progressive thought, actively taught in sociology departments all around the country. I was personally taught this in a university sociology class, and in a criminology class(at the same university).

I am curious, what, other than oppression, would a progressive accept as an explanation for why minorities do bad things? At the population level, at the national level, what other explanation is even compatible with progressive ideas? You could argue culture, but of course a criminal culture is a natural response to an oppressive society. You could argue socio economic factors, but again you are going to very quickly run into the root cause for those difference, oppression. When I brought up the crime-lead theory in my sociology class, my professor countered with, 'and why did certain groups have to live in the areas of high lead concentration?? tut tut tut'. It's oppression all the way down.

Sure, they might not be as frank as the original poster, but the underlying belief structure obviously leads to the same conclusion.

I feel like one of us must be WILDLY failing the ideological Turing test, for you to call this a 'zombie idiot' view.

I feel like one of us must be WILDLY failing the ideological Turing test, for you to call this a 'zombie idiot' view.

It's you. I know lots of progressives. Exactly zero of them believe that literally no minorities would ever commit crimes if not for oppression, or that crime doesn't exist.

I'm not going to debate progressive criminal theory because I don't subscribe to it, but I'm pretty sure even AOC would not say there would be zero crime if the economy were better. If you cannot steelman their perspective in a way they themselves would agree is what they believe (not "this is what your beliefs lead to" but "this is what you literally believe") then you are weak manning, and the OP was being obnoxious about it and has a long history of being obnoxious.

  • -10

From Emile DeWeaver at the Brennan Center for Justice: "Crime, the Myth":

Crime is not real. This assertion flies in the face of common sense and consensus. Of course crime is real, one would be justified in thinking — we see “crime” every day on the news. Charles Manson was, in fact, responsible for nine murders. Dylann Roof did, in fact, enter the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and kill nine people. Crime rates are, in fact, either up or down or stable on a given day in every city in the United States.

So how could crime be a fiction? The reader and I likely agree that people hurt others and transgress moral boundaries. We may also agree that communities have the job of figuring out how to prevent and remedy such transgressions because a basic precondition for happiness is safety. If, however, we are actually to create a society that is safe for everyone, we’ll profit from challenging our belief in the “reality” of crime.

Begin this challenge by considering race. For hundreds of years, race’s realness was a “fact,” but today, scientists understand that race is not real. What “real” means is well described by journalist Jenée Desmond-Harris. “By ‘real,’ I mean based on facts that people can even begin to agree on. Permanent. Scientific. Objective. Logical. Consistent. Able to stand up to scrutiny.” Racism is real, as real as Dylann Roof. Race, however, is a fiction, and the creation of this fiction was a political project aimed at a political end.

…

The national conversation about crime engages a similar mythology: prevailing narratives routinely deny us the ability to make the distinction between myth and reality. These narratives are, like racial narratives, political projects aimed at political ends. Given the conflation between myth and reality, it makes as much sense to call crime real as it does to call the legend of King Arthur real. If we want to call crime real, we have to locate the truth of what it is and what it isn’t. We have to dispel the mythologies of crime.

One myth is that we punish people for committing crimes. The truth is we punish people less because of what they do and more because of who they are. If I kill a stranger on the street for disobeying my orders, I’m a murderer. Police officers routinely kill unarmed people for, according to police claims, resisting arrest — arrests, as in the case of George Floyd, where no meaningful “crime” has been committed — but we don’t treat police forces like criminal institutions.

…

Then there’s a second myth, that crime is an act committed by an individual. Calling an act a crime is instead a choice we make as a society about how we respond to harms committed in our community. I recently experienced how this myth operates while standing in line at a local Walgreens.

I was about to check out at the cash register when I looked up from my phone and noticed a security guard becoming excited, even agitated. He alternated between whispering to a store clerk and positioning himself to track someone in the surveillance mirrors on the store’s ceiling.

The scene awakened trauma in my body. I remembered all the times I’d been caught shoplifting as a child, how quickly and easily our criminal legal system could destroy a young life, family, and community in the name of justice. I began to scan the security mirrors too, thinking please don’t let this be some kid. The security guard ducked into an aisle. I tracked him in the mirrors to determine his target. The person stealing wasn’t a kid.

…

“Hey, man,” I tried to sound as casually authoritative as I could. “Go back, get whatever you want, and I’ll pay for it.”

Something quite phenomenal happened.

The store’s tense, fearful atmosphere evaporated. A look of deep relief washed over the security guard, and he stepped back without protest. The people standing in line relaxed. A woman working in the photo department left her post to open a third checkout stand specifically to get this homeless man checked out. She smiled and treated him like a human being. It’s true that I had to buy this treatment for him ($30 for toilet paper, food, and a razor), but that did not make the decisions everyone made in that store any less real or less important. All it would have taken is for one person to insist on police involvement, and that homeless man would have been arrested. It took the entire community waiting in that store to save this man.

The homeless man had in one second gone from a criminal whom people feared and even reviled to a member of a community who needed support. Not only did this community — the people in the store — choose to support him, they seemed hungry to do it. They’d just needed to be shown a path and given the opportunity to be the community that the man deserved. The difference between crime and not-crime wasn’t the homeless man’s actions or his intent. It was his community’s response.

It's you. I know lots of progressives. Exactly zero of them believe that literally no minorities would ever commit crimes if not for oppression, or that crime doesn't exist.

I don't think anyone is claiming literally that. It's the difference in criminality between various groups that is 100% ascribed to oppression. Not genes, not culture, only socioeconomic inequity and mental trauma that both stem from oppression are the reason why some groups commit more crimes than others. It's the duty of the privileged groups to compensate oppressed groups by eliminating all trauma triggers and redistributing status and equity in their favor.

I don't think what I've written is a strawman or a weakman of the progressive views on crime.

Now you are engaging in a strawman of the other poster. I don’t take the hyperbole to mean that literal progressives believe there are zero criminal assholes. Instead, I think progs genuinely believe that the vast majority of criminals are just good people for whom the systems they are in led them astray. That is, criminals are a fault of society; not a blight on society.

I guess this needs clarification, but when I said 'at the population level, at the national level' I was trying to preclude the 'literally zero' type objection. I did not assume that a 'most' was all the OP needed to fix their post, since you called it a 'zombie idiot' idea, which suggested a fair deal of distance from a directionally or mostly correct idea (which it seems to be, to me).

I would also really love an answer the question in my post. At the population level, what other cause, that does not reduce down to oppression, is an acceptable progressive explanation for why minorities do bad things? Full disclosure, I honestly don't even know what your answer could be. I literally can't think of one. My understanding is that, 'oppressive society' and 'genetics' covers 100% of the total possible causal factors for the question "why minorities do bad things", with 'oppressive society' containing all of the factors that a progressive would view as acceptable. Again, to me, the view expressed in the OP is stock standard progressive ideation presented in an unfavorable way.

"Directionally correct" is fine. "Expressed in an unfavorable" (meaning uncharitable and inflammatory and weakmanned) way is not. Just saying "Progressives believe all crime is caused by poverty and oppression" would be okay. (Though most progressives don't literally believe there would be zero criminals without poverty and oppression.) But the OP said a lot more than that.

While I agree with the ban, progressives have frequently openly used this guy's characterization of what they believe as rallying slogans.

I mean, sure, hypocrisy is the only modern sin, being two faced is feature-not-bug, nobody actually believes what they say, etc. but his argument's pretty self-evident. He's saying that the (unspoken: white, neoliberal) progressive's opinions on policing through force can only exist in a gated community or bubble where (non white-collar) crime is non-visible and a fargroup concern.

What am I supposed to take away from this other than that "Defund the police!" people are either lying liars or burying their heads in the sand so hard that they're prospecting for lithium? I have to frequently express to Americans that in most of the rest of the world when people are openly telling them what they believe, their goals and aims, they should actually listen; "river to the sea" is one such recent example. When people say they want sharia law, they really want sharia law.

Since the poster is banned and thus cannot respond, I'll ask the question here: what failures in East Hastings and Kensington is he(?) referring to? What is the significance of these places, wherever they are?

Hastings is a street in Vancouver that at one time (60s-ish) was core shopping district, but for something like 30 years has been a centre for drug addled homelessness, prostitution, open sales of drugs and stolen goods, plus assorted crazies. (the major decline was contemporaneous with the shutdown of a large mental hospital, fancy that)

This:

https://preview.redd.it/p1658ejufvp41.jpg?width=640&auto=webp&s=58cb9c9f1e4253daa55db438873c181ec7797b15

vs this:

https://www.vmcdn.ca/f/files/via/import/2019/08/19141502_dtes8-min.jpg;w=960

I assume this is what he's talking about; Kensington is a street in Toronto that used to be kind of... bohemian and funky but has maybe gone the same way? I don't know, I don't care about Toronto at all.

But there are similar areas in all the West Coast Cities -- substitute "Tenderloin" if you are in SF or "Skid Row" in LA. (although I think Skid Row has maybe always been bad? "Skid Row" in Vancouver is now full of gentrified brew-pubs and lofts, IDK)

They probably mean Kensington in Philadelphia, which looks roughly like the aftermath of a zombie movie.

the major decline was contemporaneous with the shutdown of a large mental hospital

Which was in the vicinity, I suppose.

No, it was in a neighbouring borough as it happens -- but serviced the whole province for serious cases AFAICR.

because the Taliban will give those men the power over women that the former society could or would not and every soldier or potential soldier knew it.

I'm not convinced that this kind of gender-based class conflict thinking is a feature of rough men. It seems like something spontaneously generated in teenaged girls and gay men, which might explain why cultural marxists are so into female extended adolescence and LBGT. But the Taliban's views on women were not the reason for its popularity among the Afghani army(see: Taliban promises to moderate its treatment of women), Islam was(well that and the incompetence and corruption of the US-backed government).

I think the primary issue was all the buggery and child rape going on amongst the anti-Taliban forces and the new de-Talibanized Afghan Army. The Taliban's founder started his political career hanging child rapists from the gun barrel of a tank, according to legend.

The amount of energy being expended over Trump's recent visit to a McDonald's is kind of interesting to me. It seems to have generated an extraordinary amount of media and online attention. On the supporter side, they are hailing it as a brilliant and deeply meaningful activity, simultaneously trolling Harris and celebrating the dignity of unskilled labor, and generating deeply Americana visuals. On the detractor side, they decry it an illogical and bizarre stunt, that it was fake because the store was not actually open, and compared it to Dukakis in the tank. Some have even doxxed the owner who wrote to the state to complain about labor regulations.

Meanwhile, McDonald's corporate HQ sent what I think is a very good memo to franchisees explaining the value of their goal of political inclusivity and how that manifests as allowing visits from anyone who asks and being proud of being important to American culture.

I think this is interesting because symbolically, it's something that cleaves much more at the red tribe/blue tribe dichotomy than the Democrat/Republican one. I think a lot of blue-tribers disdain McDonalds and consider it trashy, but can't really say so too loudly because the poorer members of their political coalition enjoy it. Trump has been mocked in the past for having the poor taste of actually liking McDonald's food as well as catering a White House dinner with it, widely seen as trashy and disrespectful. The imagery of Trump looking for all the world like a store manager from 3 decades ago I think also triggered some nostalgia - or perhaps post-traumatic stress - about the current state of customer service.

I don't have too much more to say and offer no predictions. It just seemed interesting as one of those things that seemed to trigger something unexpected in people for reasons that go way beyond the substance of the actual event, and figuring out what's resonating with people in either a positive or negative way, and possibly why, seems like a good path towards predicting future trends.

Meanwhile, McDonald's corporate HQ sent what I think is a very good memo to franchisees explaining the value of their goal of political inclusivity and how that manifests as allowing visits from anyone who asks and being proud of being important to American culture.

This was actually my biggest takeaway.

I had thought that the art of using Corpo-speak to avoid political landmines without being tone-deaf was lost. But somebody managed to produce a memo that carries the subtle implication "We just make food and people give us money for it, don't read anything more into it that that" without taking a side or being dismissive.

I want more of that. Just do what your company is good at. Make money, don't throw jabs along ideological lines or invite political/culture wars in.

As for the stunt itself. The reason Trump 'gets away' with this stuff is he is just that guy. I think with most politicians, we're all aware that they have a mask that they put on to perform when campaigning. That mask drops in private, and they can be nasty people with few redeeming qualities.

Trump doesn't have that Kayfabe. He is himself. If anything, he's just more Trumpy in private (or so leaked audio suggests). So there's a level of earnestness that makes this appearance less of a clearly artificial performance, although it undoubtedly is artificial. Dude actually seems pleased to be out slinging fries, rather than just getting it over with to pull a few extra votes.

For a standard politician to achieve sincerity doing this, they'd have to drop the mask. Which might be a really bad move. Trump just doesn't have a mask.

I think in the West that we're all used to politicians to being carefully managed stage shows that Trump is genuinely an outlier. He's said and done so many ridiculous things that standard retail politics is elevated to a air of authenticity. If a guy is willing to say that Haitians eats pets and illegals have bad genes in public, then saying that he's lying that he likes cooking french fries feels like bit of a stretch.

it's something that cleaves much more at the red tribe/blue tribe dichotomy than the Democrat/Republican one. I think a lot of blue-tribers disdain McDonalds and consider it trashy, but can't really say so too loudly because the poorer members of their political coalition enjoy it. Trump has been mocked in the past for having the poor taste of actually liking McDonald's

I don't think PMC Turbolibs disdain McDonald's because it is lower class, I think they disdain McDonald's because it is so American. A certain kind of urban blue triber hates actually existing American traditions, they hate baseball and football and fast food drive-throughs and Christmas and guns and elections and cars with V8 engines. They hate their own families and communities, they hate where they grew up and those they grew up with, they are sure that whatever somebody else has over there is better than what we have here. How much of this is a still-lingering hatred of the jocks and preps and pretty girls from high school is left as an exercise for the reader. The crossover between self-professed progressives who hate McDonald's and self-professed rightists who hate McDonald's is where you hit horseshoe theory, where the radicals and the reactionaries run into each other, the Hlynka-point.

My wife is American-born, but her parents are immigrants while my family has been in America (and basically in our town) for generations. Sometimes the difference in traditions becomes obvious, and it has made me recognize things that are American for me.

So just after we got married, some eight years ago now, and moved in together for the first time, I mentioned one day before I left for work that I was craving macaroni and cheese, just had a yen for it. My wife, being an excellent wife, went into one of her cookbooks and made an Ina Garten recipe for a five-cheese baked macaroni and cheese, picked up really nice cheeses from Wegmans, and presented me with this delicious dish when I got home. Truly spectacular dinner, it was delicious (if so rich that it was nap inducing), she's since made the same recipe for company several times but...I did have to tell her afterward that when I said I was craving macaroni and cheese, this wasn't really what I was thinking of. I wanted the yellow, boxed, artificial Kraft stuff. My wife was pissed, she still laughs about it, she'd never had boxed mac'n'cheese as a kid, it wasn't something her family would eat, and didn't even really understand what I meant. She thought I was just insulting her cooking, saying it wasn't as good as some processed bullshit.

I'm aware that my wife's five-cheese macaroni and cheese is better, but I still sometimes crave what my mom would pop on the stove when I was a kid. Honestly, even as an adult, I sometimes buy the cartoon-character Kraft boxes, because they're better, I'm not sure if it's just the pasta shapes transporting the cheese better or if the sauce packet is formulated differently. A few days later I got the boxed stuff and made it, and she understood: this is just a totally different food, and she got why I was craving it a little.

McDonald's and Wendy's and Burger King feel the same nostalgic way to me, but McDonald's is the alpha, the icon. I don't eat a lot of fast food. It's not something I fit into my weekly diet. But it still feels nostalgic to me in a deeply Americana way, and every now and then I have a craving for it. The drive through is so American, so ingrained in my mind with memories of the road trip, or hanging out at the mall, or in the car with your friends driving around to nowhere in particular American Graffiti style. Drinking a soda, cruising down the highway, on my way to wherever, it's ingrained in my psyche.

As an aside, I remember growing up a stock stand-up comedy joke, which I literally think I remember hearing from different comedians in Dane Cook/Carlos Mencia/Bill Engvall range, went something like: you know what's so unbelievably stupid? When you see someone at a McDonald's and they order a burger, and fries and then get a diet coke! You think the DIET coke is going to keep you from getting fat?! What a DUMBASS!

And as a ten year old I laughed at the joke, because duh the diet coke didn't make any difference! What an idiot that fat person is ordering a diet coke! For some reason we all despised diet soda, it was a mockable concept.

Now, as an adult, that's exactly my ideal drive-through fast food order on that road trip. Cheeseburger, small fries just for a taste, small chicken nuggets, large diet coke. (My actual order tends to be determined by coupons and online offers) A mcdouble is 390 calories and 22g of protein, not that bad occasionally on an IIFYM scale though I wouldn't recommend living off them. A small fry isn't great but it's only 230 calories. The McNuggets are even decent: 190 calories and 9g of protein. Eliminating the sugar and empty calories from the soda is the [single best way] to improve the nutrition of an occasional fast-food indulgence! I get all my nostalgia buttons pressed for the fast food I ate as a kid, and the final result is something like 800 calories and 35g of protein, too much in the way of salt and fat and whatever bad stuff, but not going to ruin my week or anything.

Yesterday I was about to post in a topic that it seems to me that the real Trump sin is that he has the audacity of genuinely liking America. And that this just unpalatable to the vobt (vonline blue tribers). Seems you have picked up that sentiment too.

I agree with you, at times, but not at others. Trump loves America, but too often it's an America that he remembers dimly from before he was born. Patriotism is to a large extent loving what your country is, not what you imagine it was or should be.

Trump’s patriotic vision of America is like an idealized version of mid-century NYC. It’s not pastoral or even suburban.

The comparison, elsewhere in this thread, to his Home Alone cameo is relevant.

Diet Coke is also just a completely different drink. It tastes different, even than Coke Zero.

I used to have a lot of Diet Coke in my house as a kid, and the taste is something I can recall quite distinctly.

Diet Coke was sort of the first attempt at producing a zero-calorie alternative to Coke, and years later with better technology they found they could produce something closer to regular Coke, but by then Diet Coke had its own loyal customer base that would be dangerous to offend. In my own household, my wife loves Diet Coke, while I prefer Coke Zero.

It's interesting how the original goal was to make fake Coke, but then releasing a new product that was closer to real Coke didn't entirely supplant the original fake, because the original fake now had its own specific reputation and flavor.

Diet Coke was sort of the first attempt at producing a zero-calorie alternative to Coke

Second attempt. The first was Tab, which managed to survive until 2020. Coke Zero isn't nearly as superior to Diet Coke than Diet Coke was to Tab, and the 2021 reformulation made it worse IMO.

I'm another that prefers Diet over Zero. "What I thought I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those full-calorie sodas."

I have a stash of cheap spicy ramen noodles in my house that I get a craving for once a few months. I personally blame this on my experiences in university where after training in the evening the hot cup of noodles just kept me going and now this flavor is stamped on my soul forever.

Man.

Sometimes people just don't like things because the things are bad. Or, given the insane adaptability of human aesthetics, because they haven't yet found a reason to cultivate the liking. In a world of impossible luxury, is it really surprising that people's preferences don't overlap?

More importantly, does it really say anything about a more fundamental hatred? Disdain for Americana is a heuristic, a shorthand for a bunch of material and cultural luxuries. Disdain for America, or for one's family, is something else.

Sometimes people just don't like things because the things are bad.

I don't like Coldplay. I think their music is what they play in a waiting room for your vasectomy. I don't go around using Coldplay as a [prefix to indicate everything bad in the world]. Nevermind, I was going to link the wikipedia article, but the actual title of the article is too funny:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_prefixed_with_Mc-_(derogatory)

Or, given the insane adaptability of human aesthetics, because they haven't yet found a reason to cultivate the liking. In a world of impossible luxury, is it really surprising that people's preferences don't overlap?

I don't like Hockey. I try to like hockey, pretty regularly, but I don't like it. I don't go around complaining about the NHL for existing.

Disdain for Americana is a heuristic, a shorthand for a bunch of material and cultural luxuries. Disdain for America, or for one's family, is something else.

Yet the two ideas are tied together. "I love America, but I hate everything American and want America to be completely different" has some obvious illogic to it. Patriotism is Hegelian, it's about synthesis, glorifying both sides of a conflict. The patriotic American version of the Civil War isn't the Lost Cause or Marching Through Georgia, it is both. Within that ad, the Yankees and Red Sox hate each other, but baseball wouldn't be better off without either team, it needs both, both embody part of baseball's romance and joy. As ever, the success of Augustus wasn't at core about the brutal victory of one side in the Roman civil war, but about his success in glorifying the other side as brave Romans embodying Roman values who were nonetheless mistaken. The English aristocrats who descended from William's retinue came to honor the Anglo Saxon heritage of their conquered homeland. Russian patriotism today struggles to swallow a world in which both Lenin and Alexander were admirable, but it seeks it.

American patriotism today which does not contain McDonald's and the NFL and MTV isn't, at core, patriotism, because for most Americans it doesn't contain the traditions of your literal ancestors and the people you grew up with, your teachers and scoutmasters and little league coaches and the boss at your summer job. That doesn't mean you can't dislike McDonald's. To be honest, I don't really like McDonald's. I've been to a McDonald's three times in the past two years, and once was just a drink, while another time I just bought a medium fry to get change for a fifty so I could buy a velvet painting of JFK for $30 in the parking lot. I prefer Wendy's, when I do eat fast food, which is rarely. But I understand the appeal of it. (I'll note that by my own standard I'm far from perfect: I haven't seen a superhero movie since the Toby Maguire Spiderman)

Which Alexander?

This was a brilliant publicity stunt by the Trump team, and the unhinged reaction from Redditors proves why.

As I mentioned last week, Republican candidates need to "hack the media" in order to get coverage. This is a great example. Trump comes across really well in this appearance and amplifying it can only help his campaign. If, instead, he gave a speech to talk about entitlement reform or some other boring shit, he would have gotten almost no coverage (and the coverage he did get would be purely negative).

Most elections really do come down to who is the more likeable person. Trump is in his element here and seems like a genuinely nice guy as he hands out bags of greasy food.

The people who are seething that this stunt is fake, on the other hand, come off as really dumb. Trump has been the victim of two assassination attempts. Do you think the Secret Service is going to let randoms through the drive through? Next, they'll tell us that pro wresting is also fake.

And finally there's also the added benefit that Kamala Harris claims to have worked at McDonald's but is probably lying about it.

Of course, most people have already made up their minds. But when the sole plank of the Harris campaign is that Trump is a monster, these humanizing events really undermine the narrative. Trump is now up to 62.5% on Polymarket, the highest since Biden left the race.

The status dynamics are interesting. Having worked at McDonald's sometime in the past clearly isn't something that Democrats feel there should be shame over--regardless of the veracity of Kamala's work history, it's still something she thinks gives a boost to her resume. But the response is nevertheless unhinged.

Is it some kind of stolen valor? I'm imagining Trump stocking shelves at CostCo in a photo-op, and I doubt he'd even get any media attention. Or even doing the same exact thing at Burger King: despite being identical slop, the response wouldn't be nearly so vituperative.

It has to do with what McDonald's represents. Kamala worked at McDonald's, but it was something horrific she was forced to do, serving the lowest of the low so she could better herself. If her life is ever dramatized by Netflix, her last day there will depict her departure as she gives a soliloquy about the depravities of mass consumerist slop, corporate wage slavery, car-centric culture, and factory farming. Trump, by contrast, is not only going there voluntarily, but going there as if there were nothing wrong or shameful about going there. Anyone with his privileges doing something so declasse is breaking a code.

Yeah, this seems to capture a lot of the feels.

Tucker Carlson has characterized this election as the people who talk down to others vs. those who are sick of being talked down to. And while that's obviously reductive, there's a strong element of truth there.

The Democrat says "Come with me and you won't have to go to NASCAR races and eat McDonald's any more. You can be just like me! Wouldn't that be great?". It shows a real lack of understanding about the working class and what they value. They don't do these things because they have to. They like McDonald's!

Trump, despite being raised rich, seems to get it. It's weird. I feel my own common touch fading away with every passing year.

The Democrat says "Come with me and you won't have to go to NASCAR races and eat McDonald's any more. You can be just like me! Wouldn't that be great?". It shows a real lack of understanding about the working class and what they value. They don't do these things because they have to. They like McDonald's!

This reminds me of the narrative I bought into about 20 years ago, when the left was pushing the idea that everyone, including those in the Middle East, just wanted liberal democracy (even if they weren't aware of it). So once freed from the religious oppressive forces keeping them down, they'd gravitate towards such a system like in America. Same for immigrants from such cultures, whose kids would see how awesome liberal democracy is and thus adopt its values. I particularly recall a (more recent, but still like a decade old, I think?) 5-hour long conversation between Cenk Uygher and Sam Harris about this kind of stuff, where Cenk was smugly telling Sam about how suicide bombers and other similar Muslim terrorists could just be won over with the benefits of Western liberal values.

I think the amount of epicycles that have been required to explain the various failures and speedbumps that such a narrative has encountered in the past 2 decades shows that, no, it was rather that the people who pushed such a narrative largely just lacked the ability or willingness to appreciate the true diversity of thought there exists in humans. I don't put much weight to any sort of sociological study anymore, but I suspect that the findings that liberals in America have a hard time modeling how conservatives think in a way that doesn't exist in reverse might be pointing at something that's true. Likewise for the cliche that "liberals think conservatives are evil; conservatives think liberals are stupid."

I honestly think most people simply are not good at understanding the Zeitgeist of cultures outside of their own and perhaps nearby cultures that are fairly similar. We don’t really get the MENA region because most of us are generations removed from a culture that took religion seriously. To most WEIRD people, religion is just a personal preference, probably not much more important than other lifestyle choices. We don’t think of God in universal terms and not really as a thing to order society by. We would never ever suggest a state religion except in a nominalistic way— yes we’re Anglican, but it’s not like we take it seriously enough to seriously teach it or publicly acknowledge it or encourage its practice.

Comparing that to MENA, they’d be convinced that most of the West are atheists. They don’t allow the public display of religion outside of the state sect of Islam. They not only live by those rules themselves, and publicly so, but enforce those rules on everyone whether Muslims or not. The Quran bans homosexual behavior and they will teach gays to fly off skyscrapers. The mindset is that Allah is watching and allah is going to not only keep score but intervene in history and in personal life to enforce his will.

Now on the liberal conservative version, I think it’s the same thing. Liberals are farther along the path to practical atheism. Most have at best found churches that are liberal first and Christian second, if they bother to go. They’re much more down the path of chewing almost everything through the Post-Modern Neo-Marxist lens of oppression and global culture norms of not judging anything except traditional Western values. As such they simply cannot fathom that someone might take such things seriously.

MENA was a seriously different place from the west even when the west took religion seriously; endemic cousin marriage and segmentary lineage will do that

Tucker Carlson has characterized this election as the people who talk down to others vs. those who are sick of being talked down to

And some guy called Shelly Wynter commented to outrage a week ago:

“Let me boil this election down in the African American community to a very simple — I’ll reference the great Malcolm X,” he said. “This race is between house African Americans and field African Americans, and field African Americans are voting for [Donald] Trump.”

Black people certainly do have their own um... interesting versions of everything.

What Donald Trump has over Mitt Romney, J.D. Vance, and Ron DeSantis is that black people seem to genuinely like him. He's got swag. He's the second blackest President in history, trailing Bill Clinton but ahead of Obama.

But there are downsides. My elderly WASP relatives hate him. So disrespectful, so uncouth! Can't win New Hampshire with an attitude like that.

And here I thought being in the party of racism supporters would more easily bring himself to quote that directly.

Of course, his massa(s) will beat his ass if he says it, which implies he himself serves in the house.

I think this alongside the other types of events (football games for example) are things that are coded for the lower classes, the deplorables, the kinds of people that mainline Democrats sneer at while being really patronizing about their attempts to “help”. Republicans are able to appeal to that base because they don’t sneer. They see “dirty jobs” as noble, they see doing a job that needs doing so you can meet your obligations as noble. They see the note rests and sensibilities of the working class in flyover country as worthy and beautiful. And this phot opportunity highlighted the difference between the two parties. The democrats are run by the PMC who see working class whites as beneath them. They don’t want to feel snobby so they tend to give help to minorities. The republicans are the party of doers and builders.

I think your wrong about football coding low status, I mean have you seen how expensive nfl tickets are? Plenty of wealthy high status people enjoy attending them

High-end spectator sport has always been high status. More than half the traditional British social season is spectator sport.

There is a separate issue that specific sports can acquire a lowbrow connotation (like association football in the UK for most of the 20th century) because an alternative is higher-status, but the NFL never fell into that bucket. The Ivy League is primarily an American football league, for crissakes. To a WASPy blueblood, "The Game" is a football game. (Compare the UK, where "The Varsity Match" is a rugby game).

There's definitely a stolen valor angle. "Kamala had actually worked there while Trump never had a day of retail work in his life". Do you think upper PMC democrats are the ones posting on Reddit about the entire thing being a sham?

McDonalds is the most well-known public-facing minimum wage job, but I don't doubt there'd be stolen valor vitriol over CostCo too.

To me it looks like there's a huge disconnect between themotte's view of a typical democrat voter and reality. Just off the top of my head I'd assume there are more low socioeconomic class "that's why I shit on company time" democrat voters in the country than upper class "mcdonalds is too good for presidents" snobs.

I think Reddit is populated mostly by college age children of PMC parents or by failsons who were raised in a PMC family. So while the actual PMC democrats probably aren’t, the people posting on Reddit have been raised in PMC families and have those values. They’re more obnoxious about it mostly because they don’t have the wisdom to hide their PMC power level, or perhaps don’t have to care yet.

There's definitely a stolen valor angle.

I'd be open to the possibility, but no one who's freaking out about it seems to be credibly approaching it from the "stolen valor" angle.

Do you think upper PMC democrats are the ones posting on Reddit about the entire thing being a sham?

I'm sorry what? Do you think /r/antiwork, or the entirety of Reddit for that matter, is in any way representative of a typical McDonald's worker?

To me it looks like there's a huge disconnect between themotte's view of a typical democrat voter and reality.

This isn't about The Motte. It's one of those things that has visceral resonance, and the more you push back against it, the more it will look like Trump had a point to begin with.

but no one who's freaking out about it seems to be credibly approaching it from the "stolen valor" angle.

No one? Not one single person on planet Earth? Well sure then.

What's your definition of "someone"?

Do you think /r/antiwork is in any way representative of a typical McDonald's worker?

Well no, I think a typical worker in service industry or any other low-paid job posts on TikTok, not Reddit. Of those service workers whose viewpoint I do see on Reddit, or for example on various discords, they're closer to /r/antiwork in their ideology than to "it's 'onest work".

This isn't about The Motte. It's one of those things that has visceral resonance, and the more you push back against it, the more it will look like Trump had a point to begin with.

Unfortunately, our visceral resonances seem to be at odds.

No one? Not one single person on planet Earth? Well sure then.

Most people on planet Earth have never heard about it. Most people who will see this will think "heh, that's kinda funny". Somewhere, out there, there might be some lonely indivuduals upset at the valor stolen from service workers, but they'll be drowned out by legions that are upset that Trump did something mildly appealing to the common folk.

Of those service workers whose viewpoint I do see on Reddit, or for example on various discords, they're closer to /r/antiwork in their ideology than to "it's 'onest work".

"Of those service workers whose viewpoint I do see on Reddit" had to pass through so many filters that it will bear no resemblance to any remotely normal person. Reddit is a propaganda platform.

Unfortunately, our visceral resonances seem to be at odds.

I know this will sound weird, but I don't know if I believe you. Kavanaugh being a rapist vs. not was a disagreement of visceral resonances, Rittenhouse being a murderer vs. an innocent kid was a disagreement of visceral resonances... but this? The only visceral feeling I get here from the progressive side is "Trump bad. This good for Trump, therefore this bad".

but they'll be drowned out by legions that are upset that Trump did something mildly appealing to the common folk.

Where are those legions who express the belief that it is unbefitting of Trump to appeal to the common folk (as opposed to saying it's wrong to falsely appeal)? I've linked mine.

"Of those service workers whose viewpoint I do see on Reddit" had to pass through so many filters that it will bear no resemblance to any remotely normal person. Reddit is a propaganda platform.

What's your platform that is not a propaganda platform?

The only visceral feeling I get here

Here on the Motte? If not, then where?

I agree with other users that it's a clever publicity stunt, in that it will work with his base and the opposing base, naturally, is irrelevant to him. It's also bad, in my personal opinion, because it's transparently dishonest to associate yourself with menial work that you do not do and have never (in my knowledge) done. If Kamala is acting like her time at McDonalds was a nightmare, she's at least being honest even if she'll alienate the voters (likely red-voting anyway) who think menial work is always ennobling.

Where are those legions who express the belief that it is unbefitting of Trump to appeal to the common folk (as opposed to saying it's wrong to falsely appeal)? I've linked mine.

It's the same link. You don't really expect people to outright say "damn that Trump, why is he so appealing?" even that's what they feel, do you?

What's your platform that is not a propaganda platform

We're running short on those these days. I guess you can still post anything you want on Substack.

It's also bad, in my personal opinion, because it's transparently dishonest to associate yourself with menial work that you do not do and have never done

I'd chalk it up to getting upset at Gillette's slogan again, except:

If Kamala is acting like her time at McDonalds was a nightmare, she's at least being honest

This is completely backwards. There is no evidence she has spent a single day working in McDonalds. It's Trump who's honest here because his "lie" is just advertising, and everybody knows how it works. Kamala is the dishonest one, because people (including you) actually believe she made a factual statement about herself.

This is also how we know people upset at this aren't upset at dishonesty or stolen valor. No one who is criticizing Trump for this will turn around to criticize Harris, when it's pointed out she didn't work for McDonald's.

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I don’t think republicans think menial labor is per se ennobling. Instead, it is admirable to work instead of take hand me outs. That is, I don’t want people to stay working at menial jobs but if they start there and work hard in an effort to move up — kudos!

because it's transparently dishonest to associate yourself with menial work that you do not do and have never (in my knowledge) done

Yes, but associating yourself with them is the thing you have to do if you want to manage a company filled with the people doing those things regardless of whether you see yourself as above them or not (which you'll recognize as the stereotypical Karen mindset).

That is [one of] your job[s] in that position; Kamala is refusing to do that job.

(And that's completely ignoring the "leader is himself a servant" thing being... kind of foundational to the "Protestant" part of "Protestant work ethic".)

To me it looks like there's a huge disconnect between themotte's view of a typical democrat voter and reality. Just off the top of my head I'd assume there are more low socioeconomic class "that's why I shit on company time" democrat voters in the country than upper class "mcdonalds is too good for presidents" snobs.

Dramatically. The Democrats still win the lowest two income quintiles, it's just by a lot less than it used to be.

McDonalds is the most well-known public-facing minimum wage job, but I don't doubt there'd be stolen valor vitriol over CostCo too.

Costco notoriously pays above market and doesn't hire temporary workers, so it would have to be Walmart.

There's an angle, definitely. But my visceral response is that people would be much less angry at Trump doing a CostCo photo op than a McDonald's photo op. And, by the same token, there's a reason his campaign decided to do a McDonald's photo op over a CostCo photo op. The role McDonald's plays in the American imagination is key. Or, rather, in the two decidedly different American imaginations: one where it's symbolic of all the worst of American culture, and one where it gives fast convenient yummy oily treats.

To me it looks like there's a huge disconnect between themotte's view of a typical democrat voter and reality. Just off the top of my head I'd assume there are more low socioeconomic class "that's why I shit on company time" democrat voters in the country than upper class "mcdonalds is too good for presidents" snobs.

They have both. Democrats dominate the people without income, people with extremely low income, and people with high income derived from sinecures.

They lose most of the rest.

I haven't seen 'stolen valour' as an angle except from republicans trying to psychoanalyze their opponents. While this might be somewhat more likely to be accurate than the reverse, that's still a low enough bar to clear that it doesn't tell us much. I think most of the chatter is probably just TDS.

My suspicion is that Harris did work ad McDs, but it was in high school in Montreal. Her campaign doesn't really want to draw attention to her childhood outside the US, so they are being evasive.

I dunno if it quite adds up -- not sure what her family income was like once she moved to California, but I know somebody who attended Westmount High with her in Montreal.

This was (and still is) if not the richest postal code in Canada, definitely top 3 -- her parents didn't not own a home because (as her campaign is trying to imply) they couldn't afford to, they didn't own a home because they were rootless university professors and moved around a lot.

This was a pretty well compensated job, and not one that engenders a "kids should have a menial summer job so they will learn the value of demeaning manual labour" type attitude.

I see no reason to think that she would have had a job at all in this period -- maybe her economic fortunes took a turn for the worse once she moved out, but I kind of doubt this too -- I didn't go to college until the early 90s, but it definitely would not have been possible to pay a significant percentage of one's schooling costs on a part-time McDonalds paycheque then; I'd think that the 80s were even worse?

This was a pretty well compensated job, and not one that engenders a "kids should have a menial summer job so they will learn the value of demeaning manual labour" type attitude.

"Kids should have a summer job so they learn the value of hard work" was a completely normal viewpoint among upper-middle class parents as late as 2000 in the UK, and I assume it was so in Canada as well. It would have been even more normal when Kamela was a teen in the early 80's. I went to private school and Cambridge, and about half my social circle (myself included) were expected to get paid summer jobs by their parents, and about a third ended up doing menial jobs of the standard student-job variety. (I only know one person who worked at McDs specifically).

"Kids should have a summer job so they learn the value of hard work" was a completely normal viewpoint among upper-middle class parents as late as 2000 in the UK, and I assume it was so in Canada as well.

It was in my circles too -- but the point is that my parents actually are upper-middle class rather than literal-communist university professors, and I feel like the attitudes might be somewhat different there?

It definitely still is in Canada. I've mentioned this before here but a major part of the reason the affluent Toronto parents I talk to frequently are swinging against the federal Liberals is because none of their kids can get the typical high school jobs (fast food, grocery store, cashier, waiting tables, etc) that they expect them to get anymore.

I didn't go to college until the early 90s, but it definitely would not have been possible to pay a significant percentage of one's schooling costs on a part-time McDonalds paycheque then; I'd think that the 80s were even worse?

A lot of the problem with college loans reflects a growth in school costs, rather than decreasing incomes: see here for breakdowns. Demos estimates tuition for Howard University at the time of her graduation as "Tuition Then: $3,045 ($6,668 today)", aka 2016 dollars, in contrast to $23,419 in its 2016 tuition -- maybe hard to cover if you had a lot of other expenses, but at least something you could seriously dent.

Into the mid-00s, you could still do something comparable with community colleges, but these days they're pretty pricey for a full 2-year degree, and they won't get you to a 4-year.

Though in turn, a lot of the drive against students working is that the sticker-shock prices are only really getting paid by a handful of (often international) students, ameliorated by some amount of federal student aid or in-state discounts. Burnishing your college resume with extracurriculars can be much more renumerative in scholarships than slinging fries, and these programs and school workloads increasingly are incompatible with doing both.

((eg, I'm just a mentor for some FIRST programs, and they end up 25-hour jobs at times.))

Demos estimates tuition for Howard University at the time of her graduation as "Tuition Then: $3,045 ($6,668 today)", aka 2016 dollars, in contrast to $23,419 in its 2016 tuition -- maybe hard to cover if you had a lot of other expenses, but at least something you could seriously dent.

That's about the same as mine in the 90s (more like 4k/a as I recall) -- thing is, McDonalds paid even less than it did now, especially (I would think) in California.

Plenty of people (including me) had part-time (or more often, summer) jobs that were relatively menial and got by without student loans that way -- but these jobs were not pulling $5/hr shifts at McDonalds.

Minimum wage in California seems to have been $3.65 in the 80s -- if one were trying to pay for tuition (and were remotely hireable; ie. a law student) I'd think that one would find a better job?

At least in the current day, service sector work has the benefit of being relatively flexible with scheduling, and that can sometimes attract people who'd otherwise be unable to work stuff out. But especially in the 80s, yeah, it definitely wasn't the cash-maximizing option.

Nothing's impossible, although she claimed to have worked at McD's in college, not high school.

I'll say with 95% certainty that she made shit up. Even if she didn't have photos or paystubs, the Harris campaign could have at least provided approximate dates and the exact location where she worked. I could easily do that from my own menial jobs 20+ years ago. I don't know. Maybe it's a good thing for politicians and mob bosses to have a bad memory.

Edit: They did provide this info! Though none of her co-workers have come forward, it's a long time ago. On the other hand, it wasn't on her resume from 1987 nor in her memoir. I'm downgrading my probability of "made shit up" to 80%.

In the mean time, Ackman retweeted this funny dunk today:

"51 former intelligence officials say Kamala worked at @McDonalds"

I could still ping any of my co-workers at fast food joints and get them to corroborate that I was there, and if I ran from office they would come out of the proverbial woodwork (both good and bad on that front, perhaps). I think the fact they can't find one person who remembers working with her pretty damning.

Snopes tried their best to prove this true and still failed.

Aside from the above-mentioned news reports, there was no tangible evidence of Harris working at McDonald's as a college student. We reached out to Harris' campaign, as well as McDonald's headquarters, seeking tax records or other proof — which could include photos or videos of her working at the restaurant, employment records or physical items such as a uniform or name tag. We also reached out to Harris' sister, Maya, as well as a close friend from Howard University seeking comment, and looked for public interviews by friends or family members of Harris' to confirm the story, with no luck.

I don't think it happened.

To be fair, I would also ignore any media organ asking for comment from me on something long ago. In 2022 one reached out about an old college roommate who was running for office, and I sent the email straight to the trash.

I don't think McDonald's headquarters would respond about a private employment matter, and I'm not even sure it would have employment records from almost half a century ago.

Wouldn't the Harris campaign (who were contacted by Snopes) be highly motivated to provide some evidence for this if it were true? They couldn't find one childhood friend who said 'yeah we worked at Mickey D's together'? This has (at least for the next couple of days until the next cycle) blown up to be front and center in the presidential race.

I agree that the Harris campaign would have more motivation than anyone else. I just think this is assuming malice when incompetence is more than sufficient. Campaigns are extremely crazy internally (it's really hard to convey just how crazy they get unless you've been on one), with unclear lines of responsibility and a giant workload that you'll never get fully through. Even if they have Harris' lifetime tax records on hand (they should if they're available, but they might not be), there's no particular reason to think some intern or junior staffer would have an easy line to pass them on to Snopes. And even if they did, the expected benefit of convincing a Snopes reader that Harris worked at McDonald's might be outweighed by other considerations (giving away unrelated information that could provide avenues of attack, or just in setting a precedent).

Fair enough.

The New York Times has now seemed to find a friend that got told second hand by Harris's deceased mother that Harris was working there.

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Have you worked in a big campaign? I think it would be fun and enlightening if you shared your experiences on the thread!

All I know comes from West Wing and I have a feeling that the reality is way more regarded than the typical mass media depiction.

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Even the IRS doesn't keep more than a decade or so of records on hand ... but apparently the Social Security Administration does? With Form SSA-7050-F4, a $144 request for "Detailed Earnings Information" should provide a record which "Includes periods of employment or self-employment and the names or addresses of employers."

I don't see how the timing would have worked out, though. Harris mentioned working at McDonalds while campaigning in 2019, but I can't find mention of Trump calling this a lie until she brought it up at the end of this August, by which time it would have already been too late for the SSA to provide evidence. ("Please allow SSA 120 days to process", after which point you may call to "leave an inquiry" about why it still hasn't been processed, after which point I guess you just get to enjoy the sloth scene from Zootopia more.)

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Yeah, 'worked at McDonald's but can't directly confirm it because nobody cares about early fast food jobs so why would I save records of it" is definitely a story I'm willing to believe. I don't know that Canada is necessary for that story, but it would be an added wrinkle if so.

Maybe social media has kept people more in touch in my generation, but I can reach out to no less than four people that are direct connections on Facebook who I worked with at McDonald’s circa 2002 when I was in high school.

I just played a round of golf with one of them about a month ago.

And I’m not even much of an extrovert, much less a politician.

I don't think that's very typical, at least assuming that you went on to college afterwards. Although all I have as evidence is a gut feeling and my own n=1 case: I worked a fast food job for six months at the beginning of college and could not have been less interested in maintaining connections with any of the people I worked with there.

I think I can find people from about half the shitty menial jobs I worked. Entirely plausible to me that she worked at McDonald’s and doesn’t have any evidence because it was the 80’s.

I worked at a grocery store a couple of summers after you mention. I don't remember anybodies name who worked there, I have no paychecks, it's unlikely I have my tax records, there are no photos of me working there, and probably the only reason the supermarket would be able to have records of me is it's part of a giant corporate chain, not a franchisee.

Throw things back another 20 years and throw in the fact it's a franchisee, I have zero doubt Kamala could've worked there a few shifts every week and she has no real records.

I didn't think I had any paper records of working at McDonald's any longer, but on a whim logged into ssa.gov to see if they did. And they do. Employer name, address, EIN, and reported earnings are all there.

Just click "Review your full earnings record now" and then on the subsequent page "Take a closer look" to get links to details for each year.

Anyone who had a job in the 80's care to see if their records are online?

I have a lot of sympathy because I have a pretty similar story. When I was in high school I worked at {local pizza joint} that was sold to new owners and rebranded a couple years after I left. I put it on my first resume and the background check company my first employer used couldn't verify through whatever their normal means are that I worked there. I ended up having to reach out through several layers of friends to get the original owner of the place to write a letter confirming I worked there. It would have been way easier and more convenient to just leave it off. If someone wanted me to prove I worked there again today I'm not sure I could do it. Maybe a dozen people had contemporaneous knowledge and the only ones I'm still in regular contact with are my family.

That would explain a lot.

these humanizing events really undermine the narrative

Do they?

Even dictators can do a good photo op.

Even dictators can do a good photo op.

No, they can't. Their attempts to be cool are all cringe and gay.

Trump hit a real nerve here. People liked what they saw. The common touch is not easy to fake. Witness the multiple attempts by Harris proxies to do the same and fail.

Attack Trump for his policies all you want, but he can speak to the people in a way that few politicians can. He's not a phony.

They don't want to let it get to the "funny pic of Gaddafi or Putin shirtless on a horse" stage. They want it to stay at the "ominous devil figure" stage. The former implies some fatalism.

They've never made their peace with the fact that their country can elect someone like Trump and they don't want anyone else to either. Ironically, it's the "where my country gone?" meme they mocked for so long.

that it was fake

Duh, he's a politician on the campaign trail. There's something "It's Okay To Be White" about this, where most of the propaganda value of the stunt is in the reaction. A lot has been said about Trump's decline, and I agree, he's not the same man he was in 2016, but either he, or someone running his campaign, still seems to have the touch.

He seems kind of on fire lately TBH -- he may not be quite as sharp as 2016, but he's gotten back into the 'generate free advertising by trolling the MSM' groove finally.

I fully expect to be well entertained for the next couple of weeks.

There's something "It's Okay To Be White" about this, where most of the propaganda value of the stunt is in the reaction.

I think it speaks to the "red tribe/blue tribe dichotomy" described by the OP and the notion of "Protestant work ethic" brought up by others downthread.

There is a real sense that the blue side seems to view hard work (and service/menial service work in particular) as beneath them. Work is something to be suffered through when neccesary and avioded if possible. Whatever you're work is, it's not something your supposed to be smiling about or celebrating. One might almost be forgiven for thinking that "Flipping Burgers" was some sort of PMC euphemism for a fate worse than death given the spit that often accompanies those words. (as an aside The Menu was a pretty good movie).

As with "It's Okay To Be White" what i think is happening here is that the media and the Democrats are being baited into expressing "true feelings" that they would otherwise conceal. ie "that it's not ok to be white" or in this case that "working and serving is for suckers" which naturally doesn't play well amongst people who actually work.

Trump cooking and serving food at McDonalds, and taking instruction and orders from a teenage manager reminds me greatly of Saturnalia

The holiday was celebrated with a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, in the Roman Forum, and a public banquet, followed by private gift-giving, continual partying, and a carnival atmosphere that overturned Roman social norms: gambling was permitted, and masters provided table service for their slaves as it was seen as a time of liberty for both slaves and freedmen alike.

Trump submitted himself to a humbling role reversal. Was it brief? Sure. Was it "staged"? I mean, on a scale from "The grill is off and the meat is raw" to "Actually worked an 8 hour shift", I'd rate it a 2.5? Maybe as high as a 4? I think, like Saturnalia's role reversal, it's symbolically important.

According to some sources, there is (or was, back when conscription was 2 years and dedovschina was more prevalent) a similar role reversal day in some Russian army bases among conscripts, where the "older" conscripts took on the roles of the novice ones. According to the same sources, this role reversal was not very humbling - none of the novices would dare to subject the "granddads" to the same tribulations they were subjected to, because the next day everything would be back to normal.

I don't know if the slaves in Rome were much consoled by Saturnalian symbolic role reversal. Did they have the presence of mind to think "the master will just go back to his usual oppressive self tomorrow"? Perhaps. Could they state it out loud?

If my leaders are going to put on airs of being worldly, I want them to keep the pretense up for more than one day a year.

In the US military, there's a tradition of senior leaders serving food for a single meal, like Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. Example 3-Star Admiral serving Thanksgiving dinner. In my 20-year Navy career, I have never heard anyone be critical of someone's choice to participate in this sort of event. I heard (and contributed to) whining as a Junior Officer because our CO decided the entire Wardroom would be doing it, but in the end we all did it and enjoyed ourselves. I have heard multiple sailors complaining that their CO didn't do it. I have never even heard of anyone be an asshole to a senior leader serving the food, although punishments are pretty quick for unjustifiable assholery to food service workers even when they aren't Admirals.

But even when people aren't being dicks to you, I will testify that it's quite humbling to be serving food to your entire command. It's good and valuable to get your head out of the big - often intangible - problems of your regular senior job, and focus on all the little things that have to come together in order to get plates of food for a stream of sailors. It's humbling, in my experience, going from worrying about writing official memos or following up on a logistics request, into just having to deal with ensuring that there's another tray of mashed potatoes ready for when we run out of this one: you absolutely can fail at the latter even if you have a Masters degree and 70 people reporting to you. It reminds you that for all your skill and power, you're still beholden to basic reality. It brings into sharp focus how no matter how brilliantly the potatoes were ordered and shipped, no matter how cutthroat the price negotiations were, if you don't do the basics of cutting them up and putting them into a mixer, cooking them, and having them ready to go when they're needed, then its all for naught.

If human nature hasn't changed too much, I would bet Saturnalia gave the masters a similar humbling experience.

If my leaders are going to put on airs of being worldly, I want them to keep the pretense up for more than one day a year.

Isn’t one the chief complaints leveled at Trump, ever since he was a candidate the first time around, that he was/is "vulgar" and "unpresidential". I think that one of the reasons this little pr stunt has worked as well as it has is the relative lack of pretense.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older or if basic reasoning is actually at an all time low, but the “debunking” that the store preselected customers and that it was just for a photo op is absurd. (Top post on Reddit for the week is approximately that). Like yeah, of course they didn’t allow a presidential candidate with 3x attempts on his life to serve anyone driving by. Do they have any idea how risky it would be to do that, even if you scanned all the cars beforehand? Of course it was just for photos — do they think he was genuinely employed there? None of these debunk or detect an iota of the spectacle, but that they are shilled so hard signals that there really are low IQ Americans who are persuaded by this. The Reddit political propaganda in recent weeks has also been lots of “look at this photo taken at an inopportune moment that makes him look bad”, like the Elon Musk jumping photo. Yeah, if 20 photographers take 500 photos each, some are destined to make the subject look bad.

widely seen as trashy and disrespectful

I disagree. It was widely seen as awesome, including by those in attendance. It was narrowly seen as trashy by snotty rich progressives who don’t want to admit they enjoy the occasional fast food.

I think it was just really funny of him. It wasn't some brilliant move, it wasn't a mistake, it was just a small +EV event that's really entertaining to the internet

Note how this photo op is in McDonald’s interests. There’s been a huge shift online against “slop” and seed oils, overwhelmingly among young conservatives (one of the weird role reversals in recent years, along with young conservatives criticizing the military and vaccines). Making a big display of Trump serving the slop winds up associating Trump with McDonald’s in a nostalgic, Home Alone cameo kind of way, which improves their image among at at-risk demographic. The Democrats who care so much that they are willing to forego McDonald’s are few and far between, and no one will remember it in a few months anyway. But McDonald’s meanwhile gets a stupid amount of advertising. Whether the spectacle was a farce, insensitive, an homage to Americana, whether Kamala really worked there — McDonald’s is the constant in the controversy.

On the supporter side, they are hailing it as a brilliant and deeply meaningful activity, simultaneously trolling Harris and celebrating the dignity of unskilled labor, and generating deeply Americana visuals.

As someone who is either voting Trump or whatever semi-retard the Libertarian Party is trotting out (Has Dave Smith fixed the party yet??), I really don't think your portrayal of this is what even a small % of Trump voters think. It's kind of like how journalists take a tweet from someone with 120 followers and make a statement out of it. Tho I admit I don't know who the twitter personal is - but 11k likes, with half of them being paid for, is just noise. I'd understand this post more if you just thought this, like, instead of showing a random tweet.

I also don't think poor people rejoice in McDonald's anymore - we used to with 29 cent burgers and 39 cent cheese burgers twice a week.

It's a (former?) sometimes poster on this forum, which is why I tagged that user. However, I saw much the same sentiment among more prominent supporters, e.g., Matt Walsh.

I also don't think poor people rejoice in McDonald's anymore - we used to with 29 cent burgers and 39 cent cheese burgers twice a week

Clearly, lots of people are eating there, and I don't think it's the upper middle class.

The left doesn't hate McDonald's, or at least not anymore. It employs a lot of minorities, has many inner-city locations, and has always appealed to urban/hip sensibilities. I think there is more hate for McDonald's by the right for the whole obesity/seed oil angle. As part of the whole post-2021, post-Covid health reversal which saw the political polarity flip in terms of health culture, the left went from admonishing fast food in the early 2000s (e.g. Supersize Me) to bringing it under their coalition/fold. This is partly why they were so appalled by Trump working there; the rest because they are appalled by anything Trump does, or other reasons given.

It just seemed interesting as one of those things that seemed to trigger something unexpected in people for reasons that go way beyond the substance of the actual event, and figuring out what's resonating with people in either a positive or negative way, and possibly why, seems like a good path towards predicting future trends.

it's the trump effect, anything he does evokes a disproportionate reaction, because it's trump

Since when did the left start liking fast food?

Like is strong. They certainly have to pretend to like it because 25%+ of their voters love it and of those 25% it is one of the only jobs they can hold down.

under body positivity/fat acceptance they are indifferent to it now or see it as a personal matter . I see no evidence of leftists being opposed to to or speaking out against it. Some liberals, yes, but not leftists.

While Trump is making a correct move by being among his voters and not hiding in an ivory tower McDonalds isn't exactly a great brand to be associated with. Why associate yourself with unhealthy, bland consumerist food? Mcdonalds should represent the opposite of what the right stands for. It is the antithesis of tradition, beauty, culture, small business and family.

Trump is associating himself with working at McDonald’s, not with it as a cornerstone of the American diet. One in eight Americans have worked at McDonald’s- statistically, Trump is showing that he’s not too good for an incredibly common American experience.

Now obviously it’s a campaign stunt. But it’s a clever campaign stunt that plays into his Everyman image.

But it’s a clever campaign stunt that plays into his Everyman image.

Has Trump ever had an "Everyman" image? As far as I can recall, Trump has always represented a billionaire business tycoon. Maybe he acts the same way an average person would act if they won the lottery (gold plated toilets, supermodel wives, etc.) but I don't think he was ever a true "Everyman" in the same way Homer Simpson is.

Trump has always had a bit of a plebian sense of wealth. The expression a decade ago was that Trump lived like how poor people thought the rich lived, as opposed to how the rich actually lived. In that sense, he's the 'what the Everyman would see himself doing if he had Trump's wealth.'

Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.

There is a lot to this. Upvoted and AAQC'd, but I wanted to put one of the resident motteizean blue collar workers on record as saying- I see this attitude every day. You want to know why working class voters of all races, especially white ones, are turning against the DNC? Because their politicians come off as our hired bosses- managers, not owner-men, and especially as the HR people and managers of whatever the fuck who get left to deliver bad news when the actual bosses don't want to-, and the GOP pols come off as people who worked to build their own businesses.

Of course this is a false impression, and of course I have my own disagreements with democrat policies. But politics is vibes based.

Why is it a false impression though?

People who build their own business are more likely to be Republican than the PMC. It's not the whole story, obviously, but nothing is.

Nothing will turn a person Republican faster than owning their own business and seeing the heaping pile of shit that the government throws at you every chance they get.

It's a false impression because there are very few politicians of either description. Democrats running for office have mostly been in government service since they finished college and republicans running for office may have had careers beforehand, but usually as like, investment bankers and the like- few started businesses.

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The following is a transcript of a conversation I had with a friend which I think is relevant. I have recreated it as closely as possible.

clo: Work is shit. Humans can become accustomed to completely terrible conditions. Thrive in them, even. So why do people hate work? Why are there so many grifters, liars, cheats, when honest work seems, genuinely, easier? Because work is shit. People would rather debase themselves on Onlyfans or spend 18 hours editing some shitty yt video than work.

hv: arguably, it is working for a living. there's a streamer a mate watches, mainly does Resident Evil successful. chatter asks what it's like and how to get started themselves. his answer: "it's a job". he wakes up, has breakfast, maybe exercises, then plays Resident Evil for 12 hours, takes holidays, gets breaks, he's not in a cubicle, but yeah. that's work. I'd put money on guessing that most grifts are pretty fuckin' hard work too. people like to gloss over exactly how much effort and work things take because, yeah, it's ugly.

clo: Yeah but have you thought about why they did that. Over working. That's the question

hv: they are working, though

clo: not my question

hv: or are you drawing a line between working for themselves or someone else?

clo: Why did the guy choose to play RE for money, over say, getting a job? I refuse to believe there aren't jobs that pay more, especially now? Why would someone work for Rooster Teeth over like, I don't know, taking a minimum hours job in db admin.

hv: well in all these comparisons it sems to boil down to "working for yourself" or "working for someone else, who pays you"

clo: I've worked all through coof. I've had (counting) six jobs, and the whole thing reminds me, depressingly, of the replacement debate. People aren't honest because the honest answer is bad. They can say it's money or qualifications, and those are definitely factors. But I think it comes down to this: people hate work because modern workplaces are fucking dogshit for self respect. It's not the pay, it's not even the working conditions, it's the fact that you have to swallow your balls and watch as shit rolls over you from on top. that's literally it

hv: we agree on this, shit rolls downhill. why would anyone want to start climbing?

clo: I think this is all. And I wish it could be solved. Certain people do climb in this system and that's also why, you built a system that self selects for cowards and psychopaths. People say it's money, I don't think so. I've witnessed people turn down money to stay low. I've personally worked at two companies that were known for underpaying employees but treated their employees like human beings. They never had trouble retaining. In fact, people left and then came back. This is why someone would rather try and make pennies streaming Fortnite, than even take a mcjob for a couple months, because you'd have to swallow your pride for a half fucking second and just bend over and take it. You will be reminded of it every second of every day. And if you forget, the job won't let you forget. It's like being a prison bitch. Everyone knows. You know.

hv: yeeeeeah I think this is what got galvanized working at the last two places

clo: So that's why people are checking out. The depressing fucking thing is, working from home changed that. It gave people back a modicum of self respect

hv: AND THEY IMMEDIATELY TRIED TO TAKE IT AWAY LMFAO, YES

clo: it resulted in a flood of people quitting. In some case they don't come back even for 50% more salary, I've seen the numbers. So yeah, kids want to grow up to be a streamer. Being a streamer is pretty much objectively shit unless you are the 0.01%

hv: "content creator"

clo: You have zero job security and are dependent on algorithms and how much Twitch feels like losing. But people would rather do that than be a prison bitch, because you would know you were a prison bitch. People don't respond well to being told what to do. And to have your material existence and quality of life being used as blackmail against you to make you do as you're told - which, let's face it, is exactly what work feels like even though it's not what it actually is in a lot of cases, well... In the rumored words of Churchill, badly paraphrased, you already know you're a whore. The rest of it is haggling about the price. Wallstreetbets openly advertises how horrible it is to your financial well being, but people continue to yeet their life savings into it at warp speed. Why is that? It's because if they win, they're nobody's bitch

hv: Fuck You Money

clo: Now are you capable of finding your own path to money? Or are you a bitch?

hv: this plays into why people are finding it harder to get into relationships, doesn't it

clo: A relationship is work. We know it's not work for some people. We know because we see it and they tell us how great it is (or are lying). So why are we working for it? Fuck this!

The arrogance: the email server.

For a second I forgot about the specific Hillary context and reacted to this with, "What's wrong with Exchange admins!?"

He's definitely done the 'Boss swaps jobs with a worker' schtick before with good results.

The video of this was freely available until recently, but I've been trying to search for it in Youtube and it seemed to have been memory holed until I found it through external search engines.

Edit: Clip was from Oprah's show in 2011.

Note that Trump is already heavily associated with having McDonald's as a cornerstone of the American diet.

Mcdonalds should represent the opposite of what the right stands for. It is the antithesis of tradition, beauty, culture, small business and family.

On the contrary, McDonald’s represents the true culture of the American proletariat. You may never have worked at McDonald’s, but you know someone who worked at McDonald’s. The elitist liberal media says that McDonald’s is unhealthy slop, but deep down, you know the truth. every blue-collar worker in America has done great things fueled by a quick stop at McDonald’s.

The elitist liberal media says that McDonald’s is unhealthy slop, but deep down, you know the truth.

Yup. Very few people are deluding themselves that a McDonalds burger is healthy, but it's honest. Yeah, ground beef isn't the healthiest meat, white bread buns aren't the most nutritious either, but from remembering what I used to think when I was a liberal 15 years ago, it's as if McDonalds had an Underpants Gnome-like scheme that increased their profits from sneaking in toxic sludge inside their food and customer base.

Now, Portillo's Chocolate Cake Shake, that is one thing that on my last trip to the US that I couldn't allow myself to eat just from looking at the caloric intake it represented. That actually seemed like it was designed to bring ruination to a body.

While i do appreciate that mcdonalds uses real beef patties in their staple burgers, they also peddle a lot of weird stuff that kindof pretends to be something else. If you look at their website that describes a hamburger you may notice that the line where they say they dont use fillers/preservatives etc has an asterisk next to it. The asterisk is because this claim only applies to their nationally available permanent hamburger menu items. Chicken nuggets for instance do not adhere to a strict chicken and breading philosophy.

I agree that the hippyish mindset of mcdonalds being made of dead pig anuses is a fantasy, but i dont think the mc rib is what i would consider "honest" food. Their french fries contain Hydrolyzed Wheat, so a usually gluten free food is not gluten free at mcdonalds.

I guess my point is that while i dont hate mcdonalds i would be wary of lionizing them with the word "honest"

Interesting and... kind of true? I think it was Kerouac who presented roadside hamburger stands as the embodiment of the Great American Spirit (maybe On the Road, but could have been a more obscure book) and Steinbeck definitely raved about mobile homes in Travels with Charley. (in which he drives around in a camper-truck and does DIY veterinary interventions on his poodle in 60s USA)

Why associate yourself with unhealthy, bland consumerist food? Mcdonalds should represent the opposite of what the right stands for. It is the antithesis of tradition, beauty, culture, small business and family.

I really can't get myself into the headspace of someone who doesn't understand what this stunt is about.

McDonnald's is low-status precisely for the reasons you point out, but people eat there because it's affordable, and they work there because they'll hire anyone right off the street. He's showing he's on the side of people dismissed as "low-status".

It's not affordable anymore though, so he's a bit late.

Late news. They pivoted back.

$6 now gets you a McDouble, small fries, 4 piece nuggets, and a small coke. Counting app rewards all-in cost is closer to $5. It's real cheap.

But they do screw people who order a la carte items now.

It is, you just have to use the app.

If you ever find a mcdonalds app on my phone I'm already dead and robbed. :)

Senators Warren, Wyden, and Casey are on it and made a press release today:

https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren-casey-wyden-slam-mcdonalds-for-squeezing-customers-with-excessive-price-increases

How are they not bankrupt? It was their only redeeming quality.

Couple of things-

  1. McDonald’s is not exactly cheap, but it is slightly cheaper than the competition. Some people actually want and like greasy fast food and McDonalds is on the affordable end.

  2. Poor people really like McDonald’s treats for whatever reason. Think frappes and the like. I think it has to do with the amount of sugar in it.

  3. McDonald’s offers a lot of deals and coupons and the like. I have no interest in minmaxing for cheap Mickey d’s, but someone who wants to can easily do so rather effectively.

  4. McDonald’s stores are owned by franchisees, and corporate makes their money by extracting rent from franchisees with only a limited effect from sales.

It can still be, it's just that they've tiered their offering to extract more money at the top of the market. They probably realized there's a lot of people eating at McDonald's who don't really go because it's cheap, and would be willing to pay over 10$ for a trio, so they added items for that market, but you can still eat what I'd call a full meal for around 5 US dollars.

When I drive cross-country, McDonalds has the most reliably clean restrooms, and they don't insist on you buying stuff first. (The one exception to that I found was in a Denver suburb, where they had a sign on the bathroom saying "For customers only". I asked a worker to let me and the kids in, and she did without any questions, and without requiring a purchase. I guess that's to discourage the local homeless.)

The food is also fine. I don't subsist on it, but an occasional chicken sandwich isn't going to kill me any faster than anything else I can get quickly on the road.

(The one exception to that I found was in a Denver suburb, where they had a sign on the bathroom saying "For customers only".

This is pretty common IME in areas where crime and homeless are legitimate concerns.

The food is also fine. I don't subsist on it, but an occasional chicken sandwich isn't going to kill me any faster than anything else I can get quickly on the road.

Yeah, people exaggerate how unhealthy typical McDonald's food is. Their cokes are the exact same ones you can get anywhere else, their fries and burgers and nuggets contain more additives than elsewhere but have roughly similar macros, it's the 'treats'- frappes and mcflurries and deserts- that kill people there, and that's mostly just from McDonald's cornering the market. And even then, a bunch of this is really more like a starbucks drink, just to lower class clientele.

None of this is health food, but McDonald's is lower class and really common, so it makes an easy scapegoat.

Yeah, people exaggerate how unhealthy typical McDonald's food is. Their cokes are the exact same ones you can get anywhere else, their fries and burgers and nuggets contain more additives than elsewhere but have roughly similar macros, it's the 'treats'- frappes and mcflurries and deserts- that kill people there, and that's mostly just from McDonald's cornering the market. And even then, a bunch of this is really more like a starbucks drink, just to lower class clientele.

It's not unhealthy in relative terms, but it's still unhealthy. Fries, sauces, treats and non-diet coke are terrible. Nuggets are okay. Burgers are okay. But no one orders just a burger. If you have small fries with buffalo sauce, a small coke and a cone with your burger, the macros are not that bad. For a dinner. But if it's medium fries with ranch, a medium coke and a regular M&M's soft serve, it's many more calories than anyone who's not a miner or a lumberjack needs.

But if it's medium fries with ranch, a medium coke and a regular M&M's soft serve

Wait, I could have been getting fries with ranch or buffalo sauce all this time? Dang, maybe I do wish people would upsell me sometimes and not just offer me the pies (which I think have the highest calorie to dollar ratio of any fast food menu item ever).

But no one orders just a burger.

I was under the impression that everyone orders the standard meal. And if you do that, you're still coming in around 1K calories; you could go twice a day if you actually wanted to and be treading water, calorically speaking. Maybe if you get the mocha/lattes you'd be pushing 1400 but their coffee (that is not actually offered in the US locations, so maybe it doesn't apply as much) is good enough there's no reason to bother.

If I had to guess I'd say McDonalds optimizes its meals around 1000 calories specifically because these days it says so right beside the thing on the menu, where other places are usually pushing 1300-1400 for their default meal, which means your other meal now has to be smaller to compensate especially if you only eat twice a day and work a sedentary job.

Maybe if you get the mocha/lattes you'd be pushing 1400 but their coffee (that is not actually offered in the US locations, so maybe it doesn't apply as much) is good enough there's no reason to bother.

What? US McDonald's definitely serves filter coffee. It's very popular and there was even a notable lawsuit over it.

US McDonald's definitely serves filter coffee.

Yes, but it's fucking awful. It's coffee-inspired water by comparison.

It's not gourmet coffee, but it's approximately diner-quality, and is fast and cheap. It's definitely superior to the coffee at many other fast food places, not to mention gas stations and truck stops.

EDIT: Is this a Euro thing about not liking drip coffee?

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Why associate yourself with unhealthy, bland consumerist food?

The quarter pounder is one of the top 3 fast food burgers out there (especially in its double permutation) and is ubiquitously available. Wendy's has fallen off completely, Burger King has blown for more than a decade, and you need to cede a significant fraction of a minimum wage paycheck for Five Guys or Shake Shack, if you live near one.

The app performs reasonably well and you can actually get the food you order 90% of the time, unlike a bone-in-chicken place. It's really not that bad.

Maybe the right should be against it but I can't imagine going back a decade and telling people Trump's brand is incompatible with bland consumerism.

Because that's America's burger. Unhealthy, bland, consumerist food that takes advantage of a weird strategy to make money on real estate and not the actual burger is America.

That's America's president. America, as it exists today, is the antithesis of tradition, beauty, culture, small business and family. It has spent the last fifty years gleefully tearing down tradition and family, and when it's not actively hostile to small business it's trying to buy them out or crush them. It defines culture as being what the majority don't like and beauty as what the majority enjoy because they are stupid.

McDonalds is one of America's most successful cultural exports next to the Internet and pre-2020s Hollywood. Your opinion on McDonalds aside, it is an American institution, built by Americans, and is wildly successful.

McDonalds IS trashy though. Literally bugman food.

I mean-- okay-- I grab 40 nuggets sometimes and devour them like a starving caveman introduced to high fructose corn syrup. But also I literally drink soylent so I think I know what I'm talking about here.

It is actually a scandal that a member of the elite should publicly prefer such garbage, low rent food. It would be fine if he just liked it, but it should be a dirty secret instead a publicity stunt.

it should be a dirty secret instead a publicity stunt.

That's the joke.

Trump is simultaneously thumbing his nose at elite norms, calling out the Harris Campaign's cynical attempt to curry favor with min-wage workers, and reinforcing his own brand as "a man of the people".

The louder out-of-touch members of the PMC class sneer and complain it, the more effective it becomes as a PR stunt. See @jeroboam's bit about "hacking the media"

Mcdonalds is not trashy, its also not classy, it just is. It is food that is scientifically engineered to taste good, so denying it does taste good just makes you a liar. Is it also bad for you? Actually controversial. Compared to something like an impossible burger, a mcdouble comes out ahead. Sure the fries are very calorie dense, but that is the potato for you. You can do worse, such as buying wonder or other store stable breads.

The currency exchange is trashy. Lloyds of London is classy. A lot of things exist on the spectrum between them, and Mcdonalds is probably almost exactly in the middle. Maybe trashy people eat there more than classy people, but basically everyone does eat there from time to time because it provides consistency. I rarely get coffee before work, but when I do, Mcdonalds is the most convenient close option. And reasonably priced.

It's scientifically engineered to be addictive, not good. There's a difference. McDonalds food near-universally tastes like salty cardboard. And it's that very addictiveness that makes it bad for you-- modern food is terrible not merely on some "heart disease % per gram" scale, but because its hyperpalatable nature goads your lizard brain into eating way too much of it.

And ironically it's not reasonably priced-- unless you're talking about the coffee specifically, maybe. McDonalds prices aare comparable to much better restaurants unless i go through the rigamarole of getting the app and buying their deals. And since time and not-being-advertised to both have value, on net McDonalds is a bad deal.

To be fair, the only thing I get is the coffee and the dollar menu hamburger (which is now $1.50). These are still good deals.

Trump's interview with Joe Rogan is out. I think it should be mandatory viewing, as someone who has read a lot about both of them but never heard either speak at length I had some interesting surprises.

I spotted a few major pieces of culture war fodder.

  1. Joe apparently didn't want to do this because he was worried it would end up being fluff or making Trump look good.

  2. I do think it makes Trump look good. It's the beer test, implemented, and for all to see. Many people have the instant opposite visceral opinion. As with everything about this, that's interesting.

  3. Most here have concerns about legacy media, I think this adroitly makes the case against legacy media - as does Joe himself explicitly multiple times during the interview.

  4. I've polled some Kamala supporters and they all think she'd have done just as well, but I highly doubt that.

  5. Trump gets asked about election stealing...and some of his answer kinda matches some of the "best" answers we see here (complaining about procedural changes and so on).

At time of this posting it's at 18 million views in the same number of hours.

I watched the whole thing. The first hour was a bit hard to get through due to Trump being Trump and 'weaving' some long monologues or rehashing the same tired material we've heard before.

After that though, there were quite a few pieces that I found interesting.

  1. I really liked when Trump would bring up something that he was clearly knowledgeable about such as regulations and their effects on businesses. His explanation about how environmental consultants (and some lawyers) are incentivized to drag out Environmental Impact Statements and the like, reflects what I've seen about some of this in the real world.

  2. He seemed to be pro-nuclear and particularly pushing for Small Modular Reactors over (more complex) Large Nuclear Reactors.

  3. He's clearly got a Principal level understanding of the building industry. Actually it was his aside into how building commissioners would ask him to tear something down if it wasn't built to spec that did this (as well as how he stopped himself going into detail about modern construction materials like reinforced concrete). All this knowledge is great when you want new infrastructure to be built. He can sniff out bullshit when people tell him what can and can't be done.

  4. I found it amazing that Trump was really nonplussed when Rogan emphatically described how the media and deep state elements had unfairly crucified him. He reacted like he'd been told the sky is blue. He really must just have that baked into his world view by now.

  5. He really doesn't care about aliens. At all. He seemed to find them so boring it was palpable, while Rogan was wild eyed talking about them.

  6. It was hilarious how they pretended they haven't been trash talking each other in the past. Bridges have been mended it seems.

  7. The message is the medium. I mean that in the sense that Trumps ability to do an unscripted 3hr conversation will stand well in comparison to Harris who couldn't do Rogan due to 'scheduling conflicts'.

  8. I don't know how many new voters this will win over. To be honest I can't see a lot of normies making it through the full 3 hours. The bite sized clips of the interesting parts (JRE clips) will likely be a lot more influential.

After the McDonalds something-burger (heh), this podcast and Kamala's recent lackluster performance, I'm predicting a Trump win at around 55-60% certainty.

you might have the meaning of nonplussed backward - if so its a common mistake no biggie just wanted to mention in the spirit of being helpful

edit: oh no apparently now the dictionary says that in "north america" it can informally mean its opposite now. i guess i'm too late.

nonplussed

Interesting. I've always used it in the North American sense, which is weird because I'm usually a stickler for using the Queen's English.

the Queen's English

I’ve got some bad news for ya bud…

(Well I suppose you didn’t specify the Queen Regnant’s English so…)

Old habits die hard. Elizabeth was much more likeable.

Hasn’t every King Charles dissolved parliament? I’d be rather disappointed if this Charles breaks tradition.

Wait, what? When did that change happen? The parent comment to this one is the first time I can remember seeing it used in the informal North American sense, and until reading your edit, I assumed CertainlyWorse got it wrong as well.

i think people who learn it by osmosis through reading often think it means something like unphased, and now enough have used it that way that it's officially a definition. i think i'm fine with it, not a linguistic prescriptionist

it means something like unphased

I think you mean unfazed here.

unphased

ha you're right, bit of an ironic blunder there

Even if normies can only get through 15-20 minutes, for a voter who gets their information about only the most outrageous and bifurcating statements, any exposure to humanize himself is an incredibly positive move. Going on the podcast circuit was a genius idea supposedly pushed by Baron, and this type of forward thinking really sets himself as a trendsetter instead of an evil bogeyman. It's much harder for the media to discredit his personality when there's a 3-hour long form podcast, even if the interview is fairly benign compared to the interviews by legacy media.

I slightly agree with number 8, at this point the battlelines are largely drawn. I voted before the interview even came out.

Also, I'd like to point that the 18 million views with Rogan is just on Youtube. This doesn't include Spotify or any other media platform where this interview may have been shared.

I actually think 2 - 3 hours of Rogan (or day-time tv) is the "normie" attention span as evidenced by his podcast's reach as well as that of others like the Kelce brothers. 2 -3 hours is also the typical run-time of football or baseball game.

IMO, the extremely-online trying to dunk on "normies" for an alleged lack of attention-span reads more like projection than anything else.

I watched all of it, and the interview was highly inconsistent with the narratives that either Trump is Hitler or Trump is senile. The interview made Trump seem joyful. Funny to think back to the TV show NewsRadio (yes, I'm old) and consider that the actor playing the station mechanic played a key role in an US presidential election by interviewing Donald Trump.

This is the key thing. There’s no way to reconcile the presentation on here with any mainstream narratives about him unless he’s also the world’s greatest and most restrained actor as well.

Trumps not hitler. Trumps not a wannabe dictator (sorry @Amadan). Trumps not senile. Trumps not a dimwitted lazy slob whose world view comes from watching cable news all day. Trumps not a paper thin egotist who doesn’t really like America or hold policy positions. Trumps not a phony fake executive who can’t actually think business.

But also Trumps not a genius. Trumps not a conservative. Trumps not a particularly visionary thinker or populist leader.

That leads to the obvious question: What is Trump?

He's my model of Trump:

He's a uniquely talented bullshitter who is also uniquely able to withstand a level of criticism and scorn which would break almost anyone.

He is above average intelligence, but certainly not extremely book smart. His energy and extroversion stats are maxxed out.

His intuitions are incredibly strong and he can't be fooled by other people's bullshit. So he often arrives intuitively at the correct conclusion (build the wall) long before others catch up using rational arguments. He actually is a talented negotiator.

In terms of motivations, he mostly wants personal glory, but he also loves America, and humanity more broadly. He wants peace and prosperity.

He's a bad coalition member. He won't play nice with the other kids unless he is the unquestioned leader. In 2017, he had an opportunity to bow to the uniparty in exchange for social acceptability, but he refused.

He's bad at making a plan and sticking to it. He mostly just goes with his gut, and that's worked for him so far, but it makes him an ineffective executive compared to someone like DeSantis.

This jives with my more general model of him:

He's basically a creature acting on instincts evolved over decades in one of the most competitive and cut-throat environments on the planet: New York Real Estate Development.

His long term survival in such an environment is proof positive that he is good at 'what he does.'

This is a refutation of the "4-D Chessmaster" model that nonetheless respects the fact that Trump is like a shark. Senses honed for finding blood in the water, efficiently targeting weakened prey, and killing and consuming them quickly. Every move is simply based on the innate drive for survival. No strategic thinking necessary. Also like a shark, he doesn't tend to maintain alliances very long, he goes off on his own inevitably.

Thus, even if Trump isn't a 'brilliant tactician' he can still perform well enough against a fractured, weakened, and incredulous enemy that tries to model him as a more standard threat.

It worked so well for him for so many years, it did not take much adaptation to bring it into the political arena, and it turns out that politicians themselves were ripe prey, and they simply haven't adapted to this new type of predator.

Eventually something will come along that is either purpose built to beat a Trumpian candidate, or that has honed insticts that effectively counter him, and THAT will be the new apex predator.

FWIW I watched that recent Vince McMahon documentary and I got the exact same sense from him. I also get this sense from Elon Musk, but with a bit more strategic thinking afoot there.

Creatures that have almost no real 'existence' beyond their drive to compete and win at whatever game they've chosen. Their entire persona is in service of that goal at all times. Trying to understand who they 'really' are misses the point.

This seems exactly right and I dunno from this if you're voting for him or not, so maybe it's a characterisation people on both sides can agree to. I also agree that a new apex predator will emerge (the Marlo to his Stringer Bell) but the interesting thing is what they will have had to go through to be sharpened into such a new variety of shark. Although I really cannot see Musk as commanding much authority with either ordinary people or non-SV elites, I do think Silicon Valley could produce the right combination of brutal drive combined with (lying) idealistic rhetoric. There would need to be an extra ordeal or formative chapter in a candidate's background though for them to reach a broader audience. Vance in theory has both though I feel like he's speedrun poverty and tech too quickly to be adequately honed by either.

I disagree re Musk. The man has run several companies and has managed to build all of them to be successful, he’s created new technologies that weren’t even on the table before he showed up. Nobody in 2010 thought that you could reuse the launch phase of a rocket. Musk figured that out and can actually have one caught in midair at this point. He’s dreaming the future, except that when Musk says he wants to see it, it stands an above average chance of happening. You don’t think that if (when) a guy steps out of a SpaceX vehicle on friggin’ Mars that he’s not going to resonate with average people who will be seeing him as “commanding authority?” I can’t think of anything that would get blue collar voters in line like “when NASA was busy booking trips on Russian rockets, Musk went to Mars.” They like doers, big thinkers, and bold adventures.

I mean if he goes to Mars and back, then who knows. But he doesn't put people at ease and is not gifted as a communicator, so he's got quite a lot to overcome if he is going to get through all the normal gates political candidates go through (debates, speeches, interviews etc).

Vance in theory has both though I feel like he's speedrun poverty and tech too quickly to be adequately honed by either.

I, too, am curious about Vance. It is possible 4 years in the White House will sharpen him even further.

I personally expect something new and 'interesting' to pop out of the Democratic party, eventually, their best hope is someone that can keep the social justice wing satisfied while also restoring populist appeal, I think, and that's going to take a unique set of traits, similar but not identical to what Obama brought to the table.

They won't be a 'standard' politician and will have a unique background, though, I can predict that.

One consistent thing about Trump is that he's of the belief that America has been getting a bad deal internationally and has had poor leadership. You can see this back in the 80's when he was on late night talk shows complaining about America's standing relative to Japan.

He’s a showman and a patriot.

He’s the reincarnation of PT Barnum, running a rally at Barnum’s own Madison Square Garden. He’s a dealmaker from Queens. He’s someone who took the silver spoon he was given and made the most of it. He’s the average non-ideological American who never really thought about partisan politics until it started affecting him.

He’s a husband and father whose family saw him almost get killed several months ago.

He’s a political moderate who came in as an outsider at a time when Americans wanted an outsider and Bernie had been taken down by the ultimate insider, “Crooked Hillary” Clinton. He’s an anti-woke political moderate who’s seen the beast from the inside, and wants another stab at its blackened heart. He’s the kind of man who believes in strength and power and expects to be lauded for using them for common-sense win-win goals. He’s the kind of American the founders imagined standing next to kings and holding his own.

When everyone else is playing chess, he’s prepping a pro-wrestling move that’ll knock the board over. If Ted Cruz is Batman, Trump is Superman.

I don't think among the superheroes Trump is a Superman. Superman is a Lawful Good with both qualities dialed to 11. Trump is more like Chaotic Good.

He’s someone who took the silver spoon he was given and made the most of it.

Huh? You're talking about a man with ~6 corporate bankruptcies. He made the worst of the several hundred million dollars he inherited.

He also had four years of control of America’s executive branch and armed forces, at the time an exclusive club of 45 men throughout history. A quarter of Americans would willingly fight and die to return him to that control, were cheating provable. That’s riches.

He became a demagogue and rabble-rouser, and rode that to being a poor/mediocre president. I don't think that's related to his silver spoon, or making the most of it.

A 90s pre-NAFTA Democrat who survived to the current day in his old age.

As the line says, you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villian.

Who is Atlas?

At this point, I think, it doesn't matter who he really is: the hyperreal personae that the partisan public impose on him are more compelling than the authentic human being beneath it all.

I don't watch too much of the election stuff, but when I see clips of Trump doing the speeches or interviews, I always notice this - he's loving what he's doing. He likes to speak to the audience, he has a good time doing it, and it can be seen. He can shoot breeze for 3 hours and he's enjoying it. Politicians are professional bloviators, but I haven't seen many of them that have the same quality. It looks effortless when he's doing it. I don't think Harris has this quality.

Harris was apparently pretty good at confidently saying nothing substantial back in the day, according to what Harmeet Dhillon said during her TC interview. Wasn't known for stumbling over her tongue..

Dhillon met her in San Francisco, Kamala was self assured and cool meeting people. Something happened to her since then.

Yes, she can prepare the word salad and serve it, but you can't survive 3 hours on that. You can't survive any serious amount of time, and not with a counterparty that might call you on that. And she seems to be either incapable or under severe prohibition from talking about anything genuinely and on substance.

As for what happened to her - maybe deep inside she realizes the same thing many of us realize - she has no business being where she is, and it wasn't her decision to be there, she didn't earn any of it and she's there only because some other people are using her, blowing her up like a frog with a straw. That can't be a comfortable feeling. People may hate Trump as much as they want, but I think even his enemies believe Trump does things that Trump wants to do. Even for his enemies - you can't think he's a future Hitler and also think he's a nobody that has nothing of his own. He's a figure. Harris isn't. She never won anything on strength of her achievements, and without the vast party machine she's nobody. I can't know if she realizes it, but if she does, that certainly can't be comforting.

I tend to suspect that she’s doing word salads because she’s afraid to simply say what she actually thinks. Probably her handlers are worried that her actual opinions will turn off a part of the electorate. If she says anything substantial about Israel, she’s either going to lose the woke left (who are so pro-Palestine that a good number seem okay with Hamas) or she says something pro-Palestine and loses most of the evangelical vote (because to a good lot of them even mild criticism of Israel is blasphemy in the sense that they think God backs Israel). So in that case you don’t want to forthrightly answer the question. Now a good politician would say something like:

”We support a peace with strength in the region and we’re working with both Israel and our Allies in the region to secure that peace. Until then we are working with international partners to supply humanitarian aid to the people displaced by the conflict.”

This is, quite clearly, a nonanswer. There’s not much in the statement that can be construed as supporting either side. It’s simply a wish for a strong and lasting peace and support for displaced civilians.

Her word salads seem like they’re trying to do the same thing. She’s trying to come up with a statement that sounds convincing but doesn’t give any substantial, tangible information that can be used against her. Her problem is that she’s not particularly good at it. Probably because she’s actually spent most of her political career in state politics that didn’t need that skill as much. Her opinions would be pretty standard in big city California, so she could just say what she thinks without too much difficulty. Very few in California are pro-Israel or anti-abortion, so she can just give an opinion.

yes this is what i think, she is trying to pre-filter her output in real time out of concern that it would be offputting to various segments of the public

If she says anything substantial about Israel, she’s either going to lose the woke left (who are so pro-Palestine that a good number seem okay with Hamas) or she says something pro-Palestine and loses most of the evangelical vote (because to a good lot of them even mild criticism of Israel is blasphemy in the sense that they think God backs Israel).

I think you're spot on with regards to what's happening with Kamala's thought process and agree with the rest of your post, but I just can't believe that she cares that strongly about the evangelical vote. Last I checked the evangelicals were almost as devoted to Trump as black men are to the democrats, and support for Israel's genocide is a massive enthusiasm-killer on the left. I think she is unable to credibly move left on this issue, but I can't believe that the tiny share of the evangelical vote she's trying for is the reason. The deep state, wealthy donors and lobbying/interest groups seem to me like they'd have far more influence over who she does or does not try to offend.

Not evangelicals, necessarily, but there are others to convince. Moderate and liberal Christians and Jews might be turned off by a strong anti-Israel sentiment. There’s also the conservatives who are leaning against Trump, who are probably pretty easy to alienate since they’re already holding their nose to even consider a Kamala vote. She’s kinda in a hard spot. Going left will break off the conservatives who don’t like Trump. Going too far right means her left wing either stays home or votes Jill Stein. Hence the nonsense answers.

she probably does very well among her typical crowd, the struggle looks like trying to avoid saying things that would trigger the wider public.

Yeah, News Radio is very surreal when rewatched knowing where Joe's career went.

In 1995 when NewsRadio first aired, Trump had just lost his casinos in a billion dollar business bankruptcy. It’s wild to think Joe Garelli’s actor interviewing someone similar to billionaire radio boss Jimmy James* might be the most consequential media event of the twenty-first century.

* Jimmy James’ actor, comedian Stephen Root, refers to his character as “Trump-like” in this Uproxx intervew from 2020

Yeah, Jimmy James was definitely quite a character! I still am amazed that Stephen Root is the voice of Bill Dauterive from king of the hill! That blew my mind when I made the connection.

Especially the episode where Joe (temporarily) went on the air.

I'm by no means a fan of Donald Trump, and if I was an American citizen there's no question in my mind that I would've voted for Hillary in 2016. But regardless of my opinion of Trump's politics, his authoritarian tendencies, his disregard for principles, his emotional incontinence etc., credit where credit is due - the man is a remarkably compelling public speaker. I watched the first ten minutes of the podcast, having never watched Joe Rogan before, and I was riveted. People used to say that Johnny Cash could read the phonebook and make it interesting - I think I could listen to Trump go off on weird tangents about his real estate ventures and Lincoln for an hour and not feel like my time was wasted. This is not the rambling of a senile old man suffering from the onset of dementia: this is an extremely practiced, keenly honed skill. He knows exactly what he's doing.

Obviously the job of being a compelling public speaker and the job of being President are very different things, and I am confident that skill in the former is only very weakly correlated with skill in the latter. But to the extent that it's correlated at all - well, it's a skill that Trump and Obama have, Kamala and Hillary don't have, and that Biden probably had at one point but no longer has. Kamala appearing on the Rogan podcast would have been an awkward, unproductive and uncomfortable experience for everyone involved, and I'm sure everyone involved knows this, up to and including Kamala herself. If Kamala's campaign manager had made an appearance on the podcast, he or she would have come off better than Kamala herself.

He knows exactly what he's doing.

As a point of fascination with Trump I'm not really sure if he knows exactly what he's doing or he's just an entity who has gone through enough selection pressure to emerge as a thing that naturally does this kinda stuff.

I haven't listened to anything long form and uninterrupted from Trump in a while (I watched most of the debates and some Trump clips), so what instantly struck me was just how fake the "Trump is old and incoherent just like Biden was" narrative is. I already thought it was a bad narrative and this really cemented that thought in my head. Trump is aware of the way he goes on conversational detours and actually says it is one of his strengths, so he clearly does it intentionally unlike with Biden's gaffes. He called it "the weave" and says it's the mark of a good speaker if they can weave multiple different things together but still come back home at the end. I found this all amusing to listen to even if I didn't 100% agree about the weave being the mark of good oration.

I also watched the recent Theo-Vance podcast and what I found notable was Vance on the election. When asked, Vance says the biggest problem in 2020 was big tech bias and the Hunter Biden laptop story, but that he still thinks voting is fair. When Trump was asked, he "weaved" together an answer that involved various vote by mail problems and law changes he thinks were done wrong, date changes, voter ID, or just outright ballot box stuffing alongside the Vance answer of an unfair big tech.

Back to Trump, I really liked the mini deregulation theme with environmental review and permitting. I also really enjoyed when he looked off to the side and stopped himself from saying something with a big smirk on his face (maybe a slight mark against the Ezra Klein disinhibition theory?), like when he said "You know, my uncle, I had a great uncle who was a great genius just like (pause, look to the side and smile while clearly holding back a specific name of someone he was about to say) other members of my family but he was a professor at..." or when he said "I only believe them if [the polls are] good (chuckle). No, ..." all with a huge smirk knowing what he said is ridiculous.

He called it "the weave" and says it's the mark of a good speaker if they can weave multiple different things together but still come back home at the end.

Again has someone who has never heard him talk at length I was really impressed by the answer about a thing, shove in a random campaign talking point in a reasonableish way, go back to the thing.

He's clearly still very with it.

He's clearly still very with it.

This is what I've been saying for months, but there are people here who firmly insist that he's losing his grip. It's like the Shiri's scissor of this sub. Not only do I disagree with the people who say he's senile, I just can't understand where they're coming from at all. It just seems self-evident to me that Trump is still very present and energetic.

The media blitz on this front has been very strong, it's tough to consistently completely disregard "experts."

My single encounter with his speeches (as I generally can't stand video/chatter content) has been a live stream of some recent rally that I only tuned into because I randomly entertained the thought of playing the Polymarket "will Trump say Border more than 25 times" game, and my immediate first impression was that he really just sounded shockingly old and tired. I don't think I got a sense of mental decline beyond what is a necessary consequence of old age, and he sounded way sharper than I remember Biden doing in the one video I saw of his fatal debate, but he certainly didn't come across as either spry or quick-witted. I don't think I have any particularly negative emotions towards him nor that he has declined to a point that would be extraordinary for a head of state, but it did seem to me like those who claim that he currently presents a picture of rhetorical brilliance and strength must be suffering from a case of reverse TDS.

Maybe not "energetic" but agree that he's very much "with it" and so clearly so that i find it difficult to understand where the people who are calling him "rambling and incoherent" are coming from.

He even speaks in the interview about how he believes that part of being a good orator/negotiator is being able "to weave" multiple tangents together to create a desired mental/emotional state and then he goes and does it.

Are people's brains here litterally so rotten from exposure to TikTok Instagram and chat-GPT that they can't process a "brick joke" or any argument that isn't in the form of a soundbite?

I found it boring but I think that was the point. My personal desire for a 'based Trump' performance nonwithstanding, Trump's biggest problem is that he's being painted as a radical fascist demagogue: the more he can soften his image the more undecideds he can pull to vote for him.

Yeah to some extent it just seemed like two dudes talking about a bunch of random stuff with a moderate degree of intelligence. For Trump that's a big win.

Meanwhile Kamala Harris apparently declined to go on Rogan even though she was in Houston.

What was she doing in Houston? Rallying with Beyonce, of course. According to the Harris team, over 1.5 million people registered to attend although there was only space for 30,000. Passionate Harris fans? Hardly. They thought there would be a Beyonce concert.

When Beyonce did not in fact perform, but just mumbled into a bad mic, the fans were not happy. They came to see Queen Bey, not Queen K. There's a viral TikTok clip of people booing and Kamala cackling awkwardly for like 45 seconds.

https://pagesix.com/2024/10/26/entertainment/beyonce-fans-furious-singer-did-not-perform-at-kamala-harris-rally-in-houston/

Seriously people, how hard is it to get Beyonce to perform? No one gives a damn about the endorsements of celebrities, but they might just vote the way you want if you give them a free concert. Tickets to Beyonce are hundreds of dollars. It's a nice vote-buying technique unless you blow it massively.

Seriously people, how hard is it to get Beyonce to perform?

As hard as Beyonce wants it to be. She sets her own price.

I'm curious if it's genuinely a matter of price. The Harris campaign is rolling in dough, and spending it in much worse ways. If it were worries about getting tied to a sinking ship, the endorsement is enough of an albatross.

My first thought is that there's some process limitations that make it hard to get done so quickly. There's reasons charity concerts after disasters often take the better part of a month if not months to assemble: planning properly for a 10k+ person assembly is a nightmare, and converting one type of assembly into another doesn't buy anywhere near the sort of stability you'd hope for.

But I have seen that sorta thing move faster before, and Harris (surrogates) have been motioning around it as long as there's been a Harris campaign. So I dunno.

I think it comes down to Beyonce doesn't want to do it.

Why? I don't know. Speculation? They don't see themselves as circus clowns for whatever the Democratic candidate of the day is. They truly believe in themselves as black royalty. (Which others, like the NFL, seem to agree with)

When it comes to the black elite, it's them and...people allied to them. There's no hostile Elon Musk-style billionaires on the other side. They're the top of the layer cake and have a monopoly on "celebrities who can mobilize black voters" or, more cynically, "celebrities white female staffers believe can mobilize black voters".

They might be willing to take a somewhat deferential stance towards Barack Obama, but he actually was the first black president and actually did win his elections before retiring to make enough money to be in their tax bracket. He can be primus inter pares.

Kamala Harris is no Obama.

Beyonce doesn't actually need to dance around for her and it's somewhat demeaning for there to be an expectation that she has to (for a person that doesn't even deign to give interviews anymore, so certain is she in her cultural cachet) so Kamala can salvage a campaign event. She's Queen Bey after all, her laying hands on Kamala should achieve the goal of telling her people who to vote for. She did Kamala - and the Democrats - a favor already.

There's nothing odd about this: Anne Hathaway and Scarlett Johannsen support Democrats but don't have to do soliloquys for whoever the Democrats randomly picked to lead them. They give an endorsement and the party is happy to get that much.

Leave that the dancing bear behavior to the Meg Thee Stallions of the world. She's still hungry and climbing the ladder.

This is kinda off the wall, but I'm wondering if the local democrats didn't make enough problems to prevent Beyonce from performing? The Harris county democrats are at least partly(but not entirely) tied to/infiltrated by the state level GOP and it's entirely plausible that this is a cheap favor by democrats for Ted Cruz.

Sounds like her endorsement doesn’t mean much.

Can you share the viral clip?

Here's the one linked in the article, but I've also seen it on Twitter. https://tiktok.com/@hunterbidenslaptop4.0/video/7430049960197967146

To Kamala's credit, I'm not sure what a person's supposed to do when they're being booed. This is probably as good as anything.

It's a nice vote-buying technique unless you blow it massively.

Maybe they didn't want to be accused of doing such?

They got Bruce Springsteen to perform at another rally. They got Willie Nelson to perform at the not Beyoncé concert. They are openly asking for Swift to perform at one of these rallies.

The reason Beyoncé didn’t perform is because Beyoncé didn’t want to perform. But Harris stupidly ran a bait and switch.

I doubt it considering all the other naked vote buying.

I predict that in 2028 the Democratic nominee will leverage concerts a lot more effectively. It's the $20 bill just sitting on the sidewalk for the taking. It's a massive advantage for Democrats since most of the top stars are aligned with Dems.

It's kinda like Elon's lottery except that instead of just one winner there will be tens of thousands.

How? I’m not sure paying people to be at a rally by booking a band translates to votes. She might be able to buy large rally crowds, but she’s not going to be able to convince them to vote for her. They often don’t actually stay for the rally part (actually quite surprised they haven’t noticed and moved the concert until after the rally).

I wonder if there are FEC limits on it

At time of this posting it's at 18 million views in the same number of hours.

18 million hours? Jesus Christ, that was before Jesus Christ!

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

I mean... technically still a valid statement, right?

Sorry that was in subjective hours as experienced by Hillary Clinton being forced to listen to Trump. I apologize for my lack of clarity.

At time of this posting it's at 18 million views in the same number of hours.

Plus Spotify -- the reach of Rogan is just wild.

Joe apparently didn't want to do this because he was worried it would end up being fluff or making Trump look good.

Joe said in the interview that he knew he wanted to do the interview as soon as Trump got shot. He goes on to say he wanted to wait for dramatic timing.

Well, he certainly got the timing right.

I'm pretty amazed at Trump's campaign to be honest. Recruiting Elon Musk, RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard and now finally getting Rogan onside (debatable as it's not an endorsement, but the outcome is the same as if it was).

And these are real investments into Trump's success, not just your usual 'celebrity endorses politician' article that is quickly forgotten. I never thought I'd see Elon (awkwardly, as is his way) holding townhalls around the country to promote a politician.

Overall, this is a really interesting election year that is probably only overshadowed by 2016 for craziness.

Overall, this is a really interesting election year that is probably only overshadowed by 2016 for craziness.

Right, when people say they've been especially exhausted by this election cycle, I have to wonder what they were doing 8 years ago. That one was crazy because no one liked Trump. No one with any respectable position in pop culture was willing to openly hope for his victory. It seemed his only supporters were anons and the denizens of flyover country, who all did their best to make the movement very unseemly. And then he won! My sister texted me that night telling me she was crying. I told her she needed to chill big time (and I was right).

This time he's got Zuck calling him a badass and Reddit's ultimate hero-turned-villain Elon Musk basically campaigning for him. JFK's nephew?! Scorned former Democrat (and woman) Tulsi Gabbard? Sure your open support will leave your professional friends sputtering, but this time around you do have some modest cover under the support of these guys.

Maybe that does make it crazier than 8 years ago? I don't know.

Right, when people say they've been especially exhausted by this election cycle, I have to wonder what they were doing 8 years ago. That one was crazy because no one liked Trump

Speaking from a purely entertainment standpoint, it was much easier to root for Trump in 2016 because no one liked him. It almost felt like a movie, where Trump went around and beat down all of the Republican candidates before fighting the final boss. Also, 2016 Trump was a much more fun, energetic, and clever Trump. A lot of the quips he made off the cuff in the debates were legitimately genius. Also, him gimmicking every one of his opponents (Lyin' Ted, Little Marco, Crooked Hillary) was really fun (Cacklin' Kamala was literally so easy). This time, there's no underdog story because he's already won. He's much slower mentally. He's also much less energetic. In 2016, the Republican debates were legitimately riveting television. There weren't any debates in 2024. The magic is just not all there. It's like if they did a remake of a beloved childhood film. It looks like the film everyone knows and loves, but there's just something missing.

I have to wonder what they were doing 8 years ago. That one was crazy because no one liked Trump. No one with any respectable position in pop culture was willing to openly hope for his victory. It seemed his only supporters were anons and the denizens of flyover country, who all did their best to make the movement very unseemly.

That honestly doesn't sound worrying if I completely ignore hindsight. Why would you exhaust yourself over some puffed up nobody who's going to go down in history as the other candidate when the first woman president was elected?

Eight years later, he has the weight of history behind him.

I just said the other day I was feeling lukewarm on Trump. But now I'm feeling different. I thought the podcast was awful. Couldn't make it past ten minutes. I might have to try again now that people say the first hour was rough.

It was Trump rambling at its worst. Rogan asks about winning the race in 2016, and next thing I know Trump is talking about how Lincoln was melancholy instead of depressed, cuz his kid died.

Sometimes I feel I would love Trump if it weren't for Trump.

Man I had the opposite reaction to this. Trump was telling the story of his first night staying in the White House, and sharing some of the feelings he was having while standing in the Lincoln Bedroom.

I thought it was a very humanizing story. Trump has kids who he seems to really care about (he talks about them a lot), and he seemed to be connecting how depressed the Lincoln’s were at the loss of their son.

I thought that was a really great story and was one of my favorite moments from the episode.

Whether you liked the story or not (I did not). It was the most rambly part of the interview. It was the only part where Joe got impatient. After this the conversation settled down quite a bit

Joe asked Trump how he felt when he entered the White House on his first day. Trump tells a story about seeing the Lincoln Room and having the reality of the presidency set in. He saw all the details of Lincoln’s real life, like the bed that was custom-made because he was too tall, and the small photo he kept of his son who tragically died. Lincoln was no longer a mythical figure but a real person, who lived in this real room, occupying the same job as himself.

I guess this is rambling but at what point is rambling just good story-telling? I mean, Homer rambled. Trump talks like a wise old East Coast relative who has lots of good stories. I also think there’s an element of Irish American conversational style he inherited from his mother’s side. Trump’s mom was born in the Outer Hebrides in a Gaelic speaking household, people forget this.

Trump’s mom was born in the Outer Hebrides in a Gaelic speaking household, people forget this.

I posted a comment the other day about the impressive social skills and conversational abilities of my grandmother and her brother's amazing storytelling ability. Her entire family and that of most of the people in the community she grew up in were from the Outer Hebrides. Many of them, including their parents, spoke Gaelic as a first language.

It might be worth noting that she was known for making things up if it made for a better story.

It’s funny — during the interview Trump basically admitted to bullshitting to make the story a bit better.

I mean, Homer rambled.

Did he? I've only read him in translation, but he's never seemed particularly rambly to me.

The list of ships is some of the most rambling verse I've ever read.

This is a little bee in my bonnet for me, but the more I read about Ancient Greece, the more I agree with my old Classics prof claiming the list of ships was in a way the most important part of the Iliad. Not to us, of course, but to the Greeks that list of ships was how each city and region could claim its connection to the political founding myth of Greek civilization. Think of it less like part of the narrative and more like Revolutionary War memorials in New England towns.

I had a teacher assert something similar. That naming of people and households was important because the people listening to the story could claim some of those were their ancestors. So there ends up being 1000+ named people almost all of whom are (from a narrative point of view) pointlessly mentioned in passing.

And that teacher claimed a bit of improvisation in oral retellings was allowed. An ancient bard or traveling storyteller could add in a few mentions to local families. As though their ancestors were battling at Troy.

Rather off topic, but is that why there are a lot of genealogical texts in the Bible? It seems like a similar idea a way to connect all the places that exist. Or maybe I’m not understanding something.

The Bible is like this because a lot hinges on the descent of the person in question from the right person. Shower thought: why is the term "Y-chromosomal Adam" and not "Y-chromosomal Noah"?

My understanding is that the genealogical passages are about establishing Jesus as the descendant of David. But I'm not an expert and I could well be mistaken.

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That's an interesting concept. When you say important, do you mean narratively important, culturally important, or something else?

I think what my prof was saying was "important to the average Greek listening to the Iliad." It's the bridge between the distant characters of the Iliad and the flesh and blood, the soil and city of the audience. Maybe a mild exaggeration given the different ways passages can be important, but imo a reasonable argument nonetheless.

Knowing the names of my five ancestors aboard the Mayflower, listening for their names during a Thanksgiving narrative is more exciting.

I suppose you could consider Homeric Simile to be somewhat rambly? Or the extensive repetitions? It's not how I'd see it, but Homer isn't exactly concise and rigorously structured.

I would certainly not describe the Iliad or the Odyssey as 'rambling'. They're extremely well-honed texts, refined over generations of repetition and modification.

I’m not Trump fan, or a Rogan guy. I thought the first twenty minutes were pretty tedious. But it gets much much better. It is actually quite enjoyable and insightful. I am saying this as a guy who has only ever sat through 1 other full Rogan show and never listened to a trump speech I. Full outside of a debate.

He does very well, his style works well in this format and once you settle into his ideoayncracies he’s still long winded , but it is very clear that he stays on topic in a particular way. He answers a lot of important questions that reveal his way of thinking. And there’s also a lot of fluff.

My favorite part was trump not really being interested in Joes alien obsession.

I think it helps if you try not to parse it like high density scientific style communication (much of the diet of most people here) or usual focused politician/PR boilerplate.

It's more like two guys smoking weed and shooting the shit, but one of them has to periodically say some campaign related bullcrap.

It's all over the place, Trump goes on these asides, but I was enthralled with the first ten minutes or so - it's easy to listen to, shockingly focused for his reputation, and charismatic as hell (this is coming in as someone who hasn't really heard him do anything long form before).

My suspicion is that most of the people here who didn't like it were already pretty anti-Trump or very logic brained. Both of those are totally fine, but it's worth considering a more "typical" person might be more directly buying what he's selling here. This is very much one of the ways high end charisma can manifest itself, and in one of Joe's post-game type things he even talks about how hard it is wrangle Trump, which is interesting given how proficient of an interviewer JR clearly is.

I listen to a bunch of podcasts. Joe Rogan is probably in the top ten. But everyone above him that I listen to are also comedians and guys just shooting the shit. Matt and Shane's, Tim Dillon, Two bears one cave, Flagrant (which i think had trump too?), Stavy's world, etc.

I think I was more annoyed because I like listening to Joe Rogan. I tend to not like guests that speak over and monopolize the conversation. They are on the "Joe Rogan Experience", not the "Guests of Joe Rogan". The whole point of the podcast is that an everyday man is injected into this position of having a conversation with important, famous, and knowledgeable people. It ruins the ambiance to just talk over him.

Probably should have realized this would be my reaction. I couldn't watch much of his convention speech either. Got like 5 minutes in and quit.

I'm not saying this as someone that is very anti-trump. It would be nice to like trump. He appeals to some of my contrarian instincts. I just also have standards of entertainment. He talked about the apprentice a bit in the beginning as well. I was never interested in that show. Maybe its like many other fads, I'm just the wrong target audience. Whether the fad is MAGA or TDS, I'm just missing out. I don't get it.

Interesting. Again I don't think it's invalid to not be about Trump, but I did find it very entertaining - Joe is a great interviewer but it felt like he was on the Trump ride and at times sitting there going "wow." The anecdote about the Lincoln bedroom isn't particularly interesting, but the fact that it was Trump saying it and the way he said it was.

If I want to hear about the technical details of Space X I want an engineer, if I want to hear Elon do his thing I want to hear Elon. Talking over Joe, being hard to pin down. That's part of the Trump experience.

And again, no problem if you don't like that or aren't about it in this situation because you want to see Joe nail him down on the JFK stuff.

From a campaign perspective you have Trump sitting down and seeming more or less normal, with it (despite media push about that) and reasonable (despite reputation about that) for multiple hours.

Someone else called it relatively boring but if I'm Trump that's what I want to be here given that so many people have heard me called senile Hitler.

Also for what it's worth I know some people who have met him, and this interview matches what casual interactions with him are supposedly like. Don't know if there is anything else under the hood however.

I listen to a bunch of podcasts. Joe Rogan is probably in the top ten.

If yoh listen to dozens of podcasts but can't listen to Trump talking about the Lincoln bedroom... it sounds like you like slop. I guess that's your perogative.

  • -24

it sounds like you like slop. I guess that's your perogative.

This is pointless antagonism. It adds nothing but heat to the conversation. Your AAQCs get you some leeway, but that leeway is not infinite.

Three day ban.

I listen to podcasts all the time, including Joe Rogan's. I mainly listen to comedian podcasts. I think they tend to have the best economy of words. Even if they are idiots most of the time, they at least know how to tell a good story and make it entertaining.

To be fair, comedians literally have as a job description "tell narratively-interesting and humorous stories in as economical, effective, and entertaining a manner as possible." It's useful for politicians to also have this skill, but they're not as hyper-selected for this trait as comedians.

Trump just naturally learned to be charismatic. Trump is very flawed, but I found it interesting how Rogan as a comedian saw and respected Trump's oratory. The timing, the way to hold a crowd. It's great when people see something in their own craft in the craft of others.

It's not a good interview. Trump is a very boring person to listen to. It would be more interesting if someone who knew more about politics and economics would interview him and challenge more of his assertions, but that might just get hostile and he might refuse to answer. He used every opportunity to go off topic and avoid answering direct questions.

Here's Cenk Uyger's take, which seems pretty positive for someone who pretty clearly isn't suffering from pro-Trump derangement.

De gustibus nil est disputandum. shrug

It's a bit spooky how much he's being glazed up-thread.

Some people will cling to the counterfactual no matter how aggressively the world beats them over the head.

Wishful thinkers tend to reinforce each other.

No idea whether it's the case though. I couldn't bring myself to watch that Interview.

Some of this is just ridiculous.

The thread you linked has people describing an inflection point where Red Tribe gets enough of a breach in the establishment firewall to actually have a go at producing good things outside the stranglehold of the present consensus. It's obviously quite optimistic; I think it's a reasonably open question whether optimism is inherently ridiculous at this late date.

The more probable outcome is that no matter who is declared the winner, trust declines precipitously, possibly to the point that credit cards stop working. I observe that there are multiple forms of doom converging rapidly on our present position, most of which even people here show no awareness of. Rockets and unrestrained Can-Do might thread the needle. It seems unlikely to me that your general prescriptions can. Or maybe I'm wrong; how does the future go in your view?

He did well, but mainly because he knows a lot about boxing and MMA and they spent half the interview talking about that, and Rogan didn't push back too hard when he kept dodging questions by going off on rambling tangents. He tried to bring him back a few times, but he would give a vague answer and then immediately veer off topic.

Harris is terrible at interviews and I don't see why she wouldn't have gone on the podcast unless she knows that.

I kinda wanted Trump to go full-bore off on that tangent about concrete because Rogan is at his best when he facilitates his guest in talking about something they know about and have enthusiasm for, and I really think Trump cares way more about concrete than he does about running the federal government.

One of the things that I found interesting was Joe talking afterwards about how he couldn't pin Trump down. It makes sense! He's a good interviewer, politicians in general and Trump in particular manage to dodge and weave - but Joe makes it explicit.

And I think we spend a lot of time Monday morning quarterbacking communication and would do no better without additional training or something.

he knows a lot about boxing and MMA and they spent half the interview talking about that

I got the impression Trump was bullshitting his way through this subject. He said nothing of substance, just mirrored and affirmed Joe.

He brought up quite a bit independently, including specific details, which were mostly affirmed by Joe.

I get the impression that you want to see Trump as having bullshitted his way through.

Trump has an interest in fights (Boxing, wrestling) that stretches back decades. Even if he doesn't have technical knowledge about MMA, I believe he is genuinely interested in it.

No I don't think so at all. Trump's been showing up to boxing, pro wrestling, and MMA fights for as long as I can remember. I don't think you insert yourself (or allow yourself to be inserted) to multiple WWE storylines without at least being a casual fan. He allowed UFC events to be held in the Trump Taj Mahal when MMA became legal in New Jersey (which was the start of his long standing friendship with Dana White). Hell, he was one of the main investors in Affliction, the short lived MMA promotion that actually had quite a lot of push at the time. Famously, Josh Barnett killed the promotion by popping for steroids. Trump's definitely been a fight fan for a long time.

It could be. I know very little about it

Here's a link to the podcast on youtube.

Go ahead and watch at 1.25 speed. I’m glad I did.

The interview a big W for the Trump campaign in my opinion. The podcast has the biggest reach of any other, and more exposure the better, he didn’t blow up or look dumb, not sure there’s any undecideds left to convince but this could just be a nice reminder to Trumpy people “oh yeah there’s an election I better vote!”

I’ve never been able to get into podcasts, but I actually found this engaging. Part of it might’ve just been the week long hype cycle. When it first got announced Trump was gonna be on JRE, it legit had me soy facing.

Now will this move the needle? I’m not sure. I find Trump entertaining but for people more ambivalent, I feel like this may have just come across as more of the same Trump who is already a known quantity.


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