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Notes -
Scott Alexander endorses basically anyone but Trump
The main points:
I went back and read Scott's 2016 anyone but Trump election endorsement.
The main points:
I would maybe suggest in the future that these posts are counter-productive. The most recent one moved my needle more in favor of Trump. I can't believe I'm considering voting for a major party candidate (I've voted libertarian the few times I've bothered to actually show up). Going back and reading the old anti-endorsement was even worse. With hindsight answering the criticisms:
I really feel like there is some gell-mann amnesia going on with Scott. He reads these horrid stories about Trump. With the details sensationalized in the worst possible way. And he accepts them as fact. Meanwhile the New York Times threatens to dox him so they can run a hit piece article on him that they sourced from a weirdo on wikipedia with a knack for rules-lawyering.
He talks about how Trumps norms violations are loud and unsubtle. While the democrats only subtly and slowly violate norms. But this is a framing that has been shoved down our throats by the media. Every minor violation of Trump's is blown out of proportion, and every major violation of the democrats is minimized and not talked about. How is it not a massive norms violation to spend 3 years investigating and accusing a sitting president of Treason based on a campaign dosier that was almost entirely made up by his opposition? And the people doing this knew it all along. I don't think democrats or liberal leaning people seem to realize how much the Russia Hoax thing has utterly fucked their credibility on everything. Especially after the Hunter Biden laptop story came out, and it turned out that the intelligence agencies helped them cover up exactly what they had been accusing Trump of doing.
This is supposed to be a government system where one side wins, implements their things, becomes a little too unpopular for going too far, and then the other side wins and get to do their thing for a little while. They switch back and forth. We all learned in 2016 that no, this is not actually how it operates. There is actually a hidden veto by the bureaucracy and the deep state. If they don't like the president they can decide not to let him do his thing. People are righteously pissed off about that, and many of them would happily see that bureaucracy and deep state dismantled if it meant they never get to use their veto again. And one way to test if they still have the veto power, and one way to give someone an incentive to fix it, is to keep electing presidents that we know they will "veto".
Trump is a vote for restoring norms. For restoring the ability of democracy and the vote to actually pick a direction for the country, rather than have that direction dictated by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. I dislike Trump on most of his policies, but it wouldn't be a vote for his policies. Its a vote for voting on policies.
To say nothing of using the Supreme Court to impose abortion and same-sex marriage on every single state. Or "not my president"--there was even a 2016 campaign to recruit faithless electors. The idea that Trump is the blatant norm-violator requires an awfully selective memory. I don't like Trump, but thanks to him I have been mostly satisfied with what's coming out of the Supreme Court for the first time in my adult life. The idea of returning to an activist Court, but with fresh Wokist judges instead of merely Liberal ones, is in my mind the most realistic bad-and-lasting effect of a Harris victory.
(Which, by the way, I do think is inevitable at this point, if not necessarily without some of what Time once called "fortification" from a "shadow campaign.")
That said, I think Scott's endorsement is 100% in-character for him, and it's probably worth noting that the reasoning he provides is in response to a case he has first worked to steelman. I suspect it is not a steelman he actually buys--just the best he was able to come up with. Rather, think of what the New York Times put Scott through the last time Trump won a presidential election. I don't know that it was this way for everyone, but in 2016 and 2017 I personally lost about 25% of my social media connections after Clinton's loss, and I didn't even support Trump--I just expressed clear criticism of Clinton. So I suspect that a lot of what we're seeing from Scott here is a kind of rhetorical, anticipatory flinch. Particularly given his somewhat defiant direct link back to "You Are Still Crying Wolf." (Insert Straussian reading here?)
So my biggest concern for this election is not really to do with either candidate, but with my suspicion that either way, the country comes further apart. The one thing I have appreciated from Harris is her bumbling attempts to appeal to the garbage deplorables. Even she (or at least her campaign) realizes that the culture wars are moving the nation in a potentially disastrous direction (not that this seems to have inspired the Left to pump the brakes--yet). But I have to wonder, climate-change-style, if we're not already past the point of no return.
A major crux for me is P(WWIII) combined with P(Trump goes senile at some point in this coming term).
Because, let's be real here: if WWIII happens, then dealing with SJ is not very hard. Half their voter base will literally die in a fire. The other half will be discredited by having weakened the West and invited the challenge to them that resulted in WWIII. In-office representatives might try to fight a desperate rearguard to preserve malapportionment, but that's super-doomed. And then the Serious Business tools - constitutional amendments, impeachments, and so on - start getting handed over to the conservatives while they're still hopping mad (even more mad if a malapportionment rearguard had to be crushed). At that point I'd be more worried about White Terror than about Thermidor failing.
Trump being old and too much of a Trump to resign or 25A himself, though, might worsen the Western death toll.
Could I get a confidence level on that prediction?
This is a common argument over at Jim's blog — that nuclear war will benefit the right because it's the big lefty cities that will go up in mushroom clouds, not the right-wing countryside. I've had a few objections to this; primarily, given what the competence crisis has done to our government's ability to maintain things — and particularly, the question of tritium production — I'm not sure our nukes will work, meaning I'd expect us to lose WWIII, and that will have serious negative consequences for us regardless of which side wins the internal political conflict.
More personally, I once found a website that let you see the blast radii for various nukes superimposed on a (Google-sourced) city map of your choice. And if your standard Russian or Chinese nuke got dropped on JBER — a reasonable target for either country in a WWIII scenario, especially the former — then I'm outside the "killed almost instantly in the blast" radius… and, unfortunately, inside the "die slowly after an agonizing hour or two from horrible burns down one side of your body" radius.
Russian Nukes are likely even worse- US nuclear maintenance might be skimped on or done by questionably competent people who overlook mechanical issues, but the commanders aren’t systematically stealing the budget for it. And China has a shortage of warheads to wipe out life in the U.S.
Moreover, nuclear targeting is not done on the basis of a list of largest cities in the enemy’s homeland, it’s done by targeting military and command installations and war critical infrastructure as well as strategic forces. A lot of that is pretty red, although admittedly DC and San Diego are not.
I'd expect both in actual practice; a lot of the point of a deterrent (short of the US/Russian lolhuge arsenals) is that you threaten to go countervalue in response to an attack out of spite, and it's likely that things going nuclear will be the result of a false alarm saying the other side's attempting alpha strike.
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A full exchange of nuclear warheads will end the US as a political entity for at least decades and probably forever. If it reforms it will be much later. The current political situation will cease to matter at all to the survivors. Pretending this is not true is deeply silly.
In a scenario where Taiwan goes hot in the near future and the Chinese arsenal is deployed, I'd expect probably a few dozen mushroom clouds over the USA, due to destruction on the ground + ABM + other targets (Taiwan itself, Japan, South Korea, Australia, possibly others). The USA would probably survive, although things'd be tough for a while.
The Russian arsenal, assuming for the sake of argument that it works, is a different kettle of fish.
China is rapidly building up there arsenal. Taiwan won't go hot until they know they can slag the US as a going concern.
...unless they're confident that the USA won't intervene, or that they can avoid escalation to nukes like they (barely) did in Korea.
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Well yes, right wing posadism remains stupid.
Although you aren't technically replying to me, I feel obliged to note yet again that Is =/= Ought. I have no clue why I keep having to spell this out, and in Rat spaces no less.
I am saying that SJ is, probabilistically, less of a problem because there's a fair chance nuclear war gets rid of it rendering most efforts to fight it moot. I am not saying that mass casualties from nuclear war are good because of this. The past couple of election cycles I've been begging all the parties to do anything about civil defence; I'd have been willing to vote for the Greens if they'd had word one about this.
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"I know my thumb is broken and if I cut my whole arm off that will defiantly fix the problem" type thinking
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I'm bad with numbers, but it feels pretty likely to me. Is that 70%-80%? I don't think I'd say 90%, the electoral college situation does give me some hesitation. By "inevitable" I mean "I don't see anything short of a black swan event shifting the outcome from where it's currently headed," not "I'm 100% sure of this specific outcome."
And yes: when Harris' chances hit 33% on Polymarket, I was sorely tempted to YOLO a lot of money into it. But I am extremely risk-averse; I can barely psychologically handle the uncertainties of reasonable business investment. "Shares" of anything that can go rapidly to $0 are just too much for me, at least on my current budget.
Trump is sliding on polymarket and fast. So it seems your opinion is shared by some people.
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I understand completely, sharing this aversion to some extent. I wasn't looking to bet you, just to quantify the various dire claims I'm seeing floating around here; as a non-American it's hard to know who to believe, and track records help.
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Is this assuming a mostly legitimate election?
I don't mean to interrogate you, I'm just curious how one reaches that assumption. I'm less comfortable with Trump than you, and I'm thinking Kamala basically did her job of losing gracefully for the Dems.
Well, I feel like it's already a little late for that; to whatever extent "violating norms" can be said to undermine legitimacy, Harris' circumventing the nomination process to simply assume candidacy has already called into question the legitimacy of this election.
But yeah, I don't think the Democratic machine in the relevant swing states is going to go down without a fight (and a dirty one, if necessary).
Insofar as Harris has not (yet?) done anything blatantly unconstitutional, I also think it is a little more likely than not (55%? 60%?) that a true electoral win from Trump could still see his inauguration prevented by his opponents, hook or crook. This could potentially be done by preventing an apparent electoral victory simply by thumbing the scales in a few key states. We saw Lisa Page's and Peter Strzok's texts; how many three-letter-agency texts have we not seen? How many texts like that were never sent, because the people who might have sent them were smarter than Page and Strzok? (Page and Strzok were ultimately fired, but they sued the government over that, and then settled for a payout of about a million bucks apiece--not exactly the kind of government response that seems likely to discourage similar behavior from others.) We saw Hollywood's faithless elector scheme, how far would they go to prevent a second Trump term? There have already been so many attempts on Trump's life that there is a whole Wikipedia entry dedicated to them, which does not appear to be the case for any other U.S. President or presidential candidate. As we discussed a few weeks ago, there are a lot of people expressing worry over how to convince Republicans to accept a Trump defeat gracefully, and yet when I asked whether there would be any way to convince Democrats to accept a Harris defeat gracefully, no one even attempted to answer that question. Instead, several people flatly denied the demonstrated reality that Democrats in 2016 were working just as hard to change the outcome of the election, as Republicans were in 2020.
Unfortunately, I suspect that no matter who wins this time, the response from the other side will be lawsuits, denials, and probably some riots. Just like in 2016. Just like in 2020.
I'm pretty uncomfortable with Trump; I'm just much, much less comfortable with the idea of packing the Supreme Court with justices who don't know what "woman" means.
So No, it's not assuming a mostly legitimate election, it's assuming a high probability of a stolen election?
What's "high?" What's "stolen?"
I think it is a little more likely than not that Harris pulls off an electoral victory without anyone stuffing ballot boxes, and I think she does this by virtue of corporate news media having become the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. This is why Bezos is getting such pushback on seeking to gain media credibility outside the blue tribe: news no longer exists to be credible, it exists to build consensus for your tribe and punish the outgroup. Does that count as "stealing" an election? My inclination is to say no! But when you add to that the political influence of teachers unions over indoctrinating children, the moneyed influence of woke capital, the cultural influence of Hollywood, the behind-the-scenes influence of government employees... at some point it seems like the idea that any election is the result of rational discourse or democratic consensus just becomes laughable in a way that discourages the appellation "legitimate."
Those same forces (news media, schoolteachers, woke capital, Hollywood, "deep state") are additionally committed to preventing a Trump inauguration even if he wins electoral victory, and so I think it is at least somewhat likely that, conditional on a Trump electoral victory, there will again be significant efforts to prevent his inauguration.
I'm just trying to resolve a prediction from sometime I respect between
"Butch Coolidge will lose his upcoming match because his opponent is an up and coming star and too fast for an over the hill has been"
And
"Butch Coolidge is going to lose his upcoming fight because I saw him come out of Marcellus Wallace's joint and tuck a packet of cash into his jacket."
Both are predictions based on knowledge, but reflect very different observations.
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