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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.
Unfortunately, knowledge of Gell-Mann amnesia as a meme/antimeme is not nearly strong enough to overcome the temptation of a powerful institution's offer of ammo to defend your ingroup's membership-defining beliefs. Remember how, at the outbreak of the Ukraine war, the overwhelming majority in this forum suddenly developed unconditional trust in consensus MSM reporting, if only on that topic?
I'm pretty sure the debates around the Ukraine war on here have revolved around the morality of other western countries helping Ukraine vs avoiding foreign entanglements. People weren't arguing over whether Russia actually invaded or the minutiae of what was happening on the frontlines.
As I remember, the disputes were principally about factual questions that were relevant for the moral dimension - whether and how significantly the 2014 revolution was orchestrated by Western countries, to what extent neo-Nazi movements were a driving political force on the Ukrainian side, whether and to what extent the Ukrainians committed actions that ought to lower their moral standing by Western standards before and after the Russian invasion (extrajudicial killings, ethnic and political persecution, various forms of corruption...), and to what extent either of the two armies was "clean" or engaged in atrocities (targeting civilians vs. using civilians as shields, allegations of massacres (Bucha) vs. allegations of false-flag massacres (Kupiansk), abuse/killing of POWs and whether it is systemic, both sides accusing the other of using "barrier troops" with orders to shoot those who retreat or surrender).
The thing is, manipulative advancement of a moral case for some cause through selective reporting/FUD/editorializing is exactly what most of the resident witches would accuse the Western media of in contexts where they are at odds with it. The NYT and WaPo were not disputing that BLM protests were happening, or that property damage occurred as part of the protests, but (were charged by those opposed to BLM to be) distorting the reporting on the scale of the property damage, amplifying information that made anti-BLM look bad and pro-BLM look good and thereby misrepresenting the moral qualities of the protesters and those they were protesting against to the point that someone who read their coverage would come to the opposite conclusion regarding which side deserved support from what those opposed to it thought was right. This is the shape of basically every progressive media establishment vs. basket of heterodox deplorables dispute, whether it is about added punctuation in Biden transcripts vs. removed punctuation in Trump transcripts or grifters sleeping around for reviews=?women artists trying to spread high culture to video games and getting a torrent of death threats trying to put them in their place. Yet, the same people who have no problem coming down on the media conspiracy theory side, and bemoaning the impenetrable wall of argument-by-authority and social pressure defending the official narrative, in each of those would then happily insinuate that you are a brainrotten conspiracy theorist if for example you expressed doubt about the Bucha story.
It may be a question of asymmetrical enthusiasm then. I don't think the overwhelming majority of the forum bought the mainstream narrative, but a disproportionate amount of skeptics may have decided to sit this one out. From what I recall of your posts, I'm pretty sympathetic to your perspective, but I didn't really bother debating the details of Ukraine's politics.
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