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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36861 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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So much of the rhetoric right now is that Trump's rally in MSG was or was like a Nazi rally. Only looking superficially at social media, I am not seeing a thesis or high level argument except plain assertion and vague comparison that the Nazi's also held rallies. I don't think it's controversial to say that part of the recent messaging is a renewed "Trump is a Nazi" message, partly sparked by a controversal claim that Trump supposedly said he wanted generals like Hitler had or that he admired them or something.

Campaign rhetoric? sure. But clearly some people really believe Trump is a Nazi? Can somebody help me understand the claim? Not necessarily the veracity, but what the substantative argument is. I am not a Trump fan, nor do I buy into the hype around him, so I'm not here to defend him. Neither am I particularly a student of history. My understanding of WWII is general. I am on the fence about voting Trump. Yet, as a non-TDS sufferer, I really do not understand what the Trump is a Nazi claim is trying to convince me of. Can anyone lay out the argument and why Trump is Hitler sufficiently captures a real claim about the dangers of his presidency. (Again not looking for veracity, I'm trying to understand what the claim means.)

I will start by shooting some low hanging fruit of my low-information confusion.

  • Trump is clearly not a 'literal' member of the Nazi party.
  • It does not seem like Trump wants to invade or conquer European neighbors.
  • Trump does not seem to hate Jews.
  • If the claim boils down to white supremacy, why is the better comparison not with America's own racist history (in other words, I would grok what a 'Trump is KKK' argument was getting at better here.)
  • Was Hitler particularly and uniquely motivated by closing a broken border?
  • Is the argument that any mass deportation rounds up to Holocost level evil?
  • Am I supposed to understand it as 'Hitler' is just secular for 'the devil' and it simply means 'Trump is Evil' without any more substantative depth intended than if someone called Obama 'the devil'?

This may be the week I finally have to admit I don't understand a large portion of anti-Trump sentiment, at least as it manifests on Twitter. For me, the last straw was the reaction to the Washington Post's decision to not endorse a candidate for president, despite the fact that any reader who is paying attention at all knows that the editorial board endorses Harris, a fact reflected throughout basically all of their election coverage, and I am comfortable saying that the publication of an endorsement would literally have persuaded 0 voters to change their vote.

The three main theories would be (1) that accusations of blatant partisanship are actually starting to hurt the self-perception of some of those involved; (2) that they are trying to build up a defense because they are expecting a backlash against anti-Trump media; and (3) that some PR advisor told them about a significant pool of people that is unreachable by traditional media messaging because they think the media is blatantly partisan, and they need to take steps to raise the weight that those voters assign to media reporting.

the twitterati need to punish people for defecting even if their particular instance of defection produces no harm in order to send a message to all the other potential defectors.

It's all selective and out of context quotes. I listened to an MSNBC clip that was just a gish gallop of gibberish. All the hoaxes in one run on sentence, "fine people", "bloodbath", "dictator on day one", "enemy within", "jail his political opponents". They only reason they compare him to Hitler is because Hitler is the only fascist dictator they don't like. Stalin, Mao and Castro are all heroes in their book. That leaves pretty slim pickings for fascist to compare him to, so you are left with Hitler even if it's a really poor fit.

I think this was a coordinated October Surprise that was likely concocted on some Journolist style forum somewhere. It's targeted at low information voters who it's authors hope will not look into the claims in the way that you are here. There was an accusation by Hilary Clinton that Trump was trying to re-enact a 1939 Fascist rally at the same venue. There was also The Atlantic article that said Trump said he wanted the type of generals that Hitler had. Prior to that there was also their article that Trump spoke like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini.

Am I supposed to understand it as 'Hitler' is just secular for 'the devil' and it simply means 'Trump is Evil' without any more substantative depth intended than if someone called Obama 'the devil'?

Basically. I believe it to just be a blatant ad hominem. Many on the left have been trying to label Trump as a fascist for years. There's probably also some element of the left that has Antifa sympathies. If you label your enemy a fascist successfully, then you can do anything to destroy them without guilt.

This article is from a historian who thinks Trump is fascist. He points to these specific things:

  • Exalts the Nation and Often Race Above the Individual

Donald Trump claims immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our nation,” a turn of phrase used by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. He also vilifies racial or quasi-racial groups: Nazis spread libels about Jews, Trump falsely spreads baseless rumors about Haitian immigrants, “they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” warns his followers that “Your children are in danger. You can’t go to school with these people [immigrants], these people are from a different planet.” In his first campaign, he promised what he described as a “Muslim ban.”

There are plans to operationalize these views, including the creation of mass detention (concentration?) camps to facilitate mass deportations, which Trump has made clear will include at least some immigrants currently in the country legally.

  • Associated with a Centralized Autocratic Government Headed by a Dictatorial Leader

This one is almost too easy: Trump says, “‘You’re not going to be a dictator are you?’ I said ‘No, no, no, other than day one.” And later, “I only want to be a dictator for one day.” Please scroll up to see how other grants of ‘temporary’ dictatorial powers to fascists turned out. It is a claim he has reiterated, rather than softened.

  • Severe Economic and Social Regimentation

Trump also proposes to radically restructure the US economy through an across-the-board 20% tariff on all goods entering the United States, discouraging trade. That’s actually a very traditional fascist economic policy: fascist governments tend to favor ‘autarky‘ – closed, self-sufficient economic systems (Adam Tooze in his book Wages of Destruction goes in to extensive detail on Nazi dreams of autarky) though they don’t generally achieve autarky because it turns out that it is a terrible economic system that doesn’t work very well. Still, massive across the board tariffs certainly seem to count as severe economic regimentation.

  • Forcible Suppression of Opposition

Trump has said that there is an “enemy within” which he would handle with military force. Asked to clarify who he meant as the “enemy within” he has clarified that he means political opponents like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. Asked to back off this rhetoric, he has instead doubled down on it, expanding his ‘enemies’ to include the press. He’s also threatened members of the January 6 Select Committee, declaring “they should be sent to jail,” and is now on social media threatening to prosecute anyone he claims ‘cheated’ against him, keeping in mind that Trump falsely claims he was cheated in the last election, a point on which no court in the land agrees.

Note as well how the Italian fascists suppressed political opposition not through state action but through state inaction – by refusing to stop their squads of violent thugs who were intimidating and murdering opponents. Likewise, Trump has promised repeatedly to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists, “on day one”, effectively a promise of impunity for his most violent supporters.

I think this is all kind of ridiculous, and if these four items are the mark of Fascism, then I could easily make a comparison to the Democratic party.

  • Exalts the Nation and Often Race Above the Individual

DEI, Affirmative Action, celebrating immutable traits over individual accomplishment, etc.

  • Associated with a Centralized Autocratic Government Headed by a Dictatorial Leader

Which party would like to give power back to the states on issues like school choice, abortion, etc? And which party in contrast has been encouraging centralized power? Which party wants to remove the electoral college and pack the Supreme Court the minute they lost control of it?

  • Severe Economic and Social Regimentation

Which side wanted vaccine passports and to shut down "non-essential businesses?" Which side is currently arguing for price ceilings?

  • Forcible Suppression of Opposition

Which side is currently prosecuting a politician under "novel legal theories?" Which side has been calling for censoring political opponents on social media?

It seems to me that Fascism (and in the downstream, Nazi-ism) has features that has always been acceptable in the United States in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Being able to compare your political enemies to Nazis is just a matter of who has control of the talking heads at this time.

Devereaux's citations for defining fascism are an online dictionary and Eco's points of ur-fascism. Neither are a serious analysis of what fascism is. Devereaux writes as an academic, but he didn't think to look at a single academic definition of fascism? He's a historian, and he didn't make any historical survey?

The post is lazy. It should not be taken seriously.

What really irked me was that he ended his two month hiatus early just to post that.

I think it can be taken seriously. Trump legitimately is crappy in a lot of those ways. It's just, well, SJ is also terrible in a lot of those ways.

Exalts the Nation and Often Race Above the Individual

This one is unforgivable for Devereaux in particular; as an SJ historian, he is opposed to "great-man history" i.e. emphasises what nations and populations do over what leaders do.

Severe Economic and Social Regimentation

The tax on unrealised capital gains is probably of similar magnitude to the tariffs. Social regimentation, um. He's an academic. Surely he can't have missed all the loyalty tests to SJ?

Forcible Suppression of Opposition

Note as well how the Italian fascists suppressed political opposition not through state action but through state inaction – by refusing to stop their squads of violent thugs who were intimidating and murdering opponents.

Trump has also recently begun threatening news outlets, declaring CBS’ decision to run Harris’ 60 Minutes interview “so bad they should lose their license, and they should take ’60 Minutes’ off the air.” Again, it may seem absurd but authoritarian leaders do take opposition media off the air. This isn’t new – in 2017 Trump as President said NBC’s license “must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked.”

That is, of course, part of a broader strategy of threatening the media into silence, one that appears to be working.

So, um. The FBI threatened social media companies into implementing political censorship, and when one of them got bought by someone who refused to bow, Biden declared "Fair Game" on him and instituted a multi-agency conspiracy to damage all of his holdings in any way possible. And there was the fiasco with the Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board. Also, exactly one candidate got shot during the 2024 election campaign, and I happen to personally know some people who openly wished the attempted assassin hadn't missed. Trump is bad on this front, but the bar is set very, very low here indeed.

The Cult of Tradition, particularly a syncretic traditionalism that latches on to various iterations of an idealized past, even mutually incompatible ones.

SJ loves this - it's just that the idealised past is specifically not the white one. It idolises pre-colonisation societies - all of them, including the ones busily trying to kill each other with copper arrows before white men came along. It's all about trying to right the mistake of colonisation and slavery.

The Rejection of Modernism, specifically, in Eco’s mind, a rejection of “the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason…seen as the beginning of modern depravity.”

Four words: "indigenous ways of knowing". Far more central case.

The Cult of Action for Action’s Sake, which for Eco is really a rejection of intellectualism, thinking or consideration, a despising of experts, intellectuals and universities: don’t think, just do, and hate the thinkers.

But equally it is J.D. Vance declaring that “the universities are the enemy.”

Not part of my overarching point, but I feel it's relevant to point out that Vance is a fan of Mencius Moldbug - he opposes the specific universities we have now, not the concept of intellectualism in general.

Disagreement is Treason

Hate speech codes and cancellations for SJ-heresy surely qualify. Also, Vance is an ex-Never-Trumper.

The Deceptively Strong/Weak Eternal Opponent

The patriarchy and white supremacy fit this much better than SJ does.

Life is Permanent Warfare

SJ lionisation of political activism and the rather-common demands that people engage in it fit this far better than Trumpian rhetoric. I'd actually say Trump isn't really guilty of this one.

Newspeak, which Eco identifies both in changing the meaning of words, often inverting them, but more broadly, I think Eco is getting at here what Orwell sums up in his famous line, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Really? Really?

So that's what, half his points where it is exceedingly obvious that SJ's got serious problems and in many cases worse ones?

SJers liked to say in the past few US elections that "democracy is on the ballot". But what I found truly striking about this one is the degree to which (liberal*) democracy was literally not on the ballot. Pick an SJer authoritarian who wants to dismantle her opposition permanently, or an anti-SJer authoritarian who wants to dismantle at least part of his opposition permanently. Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!

*As opposed to totalitarianism. Devereaux cleverly avoided mentioning it but Hitler got like a 90% approval rating after he took control of the media; it's just that he also suspended elections so he technically didn't get voted for during that time. It's good and correct to not count that kind of manufactured consent - which SJ has been openly trying to produce for the last ten years.

I think you're largely correct about the points in question, which just helps to show why Eco's ur-fascism should not be used as a diagnostic guide. Eco was trying, in a roundabout way, to describe a kind of mentality or psychology that he experienced as connected to authoritarian politics. Anyone with enough verbal flexibility can connect a bunch of Eco's points to any movement they don't like, and then accuse it of being fascist.

OK that's all very fair. I guess what confuses me (or I understand now) is that Hitler accusation mostly just equals fascist accusation?

Like it seems to me, as a historically ignorant normie, that there have been lot's of fascists and dictators in history and active in the world today. When I think Hitler, sure, it's bad that he was a dictator, but his two biggest sins seem to be WWII and the Holocaust. A lot of what's notably bad about him being a fascist dictator vs. one of lot's of dictators in history is his usage of his fascist dictatation to commit those two sins.

So is the implication that Trump is Hitler tied to the idea that he will do things like the Holocaust and WWII, or just object level being a fascist dictator and Hitler was one also. Because I feel like the former is disingenuous.

I think it's the classic Motte/Bailey.

I mean, yeah, those couple of oopsies did kinda cast fascist dictatorships in a negative light for a lot of people, I think.

I think the argument they want to make is that Trump is a charismatic populist that will lead his people down a dark path with his "violent rhetoric".

The inherent issue is that pretty much all national-level politics resembles Fascism at most levels these days.

The larger the Federal Government grows the more influence it has on every aspect of life. The tighter it gets tied in with large private corporations and favors their interests (this is the closer definition of Fascism, if you ask me). The more it does favors for those it prefers and makes life difficult for those that oppose it. And the government is constantly attempting to expand and solidify its own power. So fascism looks a lot like what any 'normal' government does as it expands its own scope of authority.

I think the factors that would make a given party the most "Nazi-like" would be:

  • Emphasis of the superiority of some identifiable subgroup of the human population and based on said superiority, insist that said group has an inherent right to rule. This needn't even be race-based, but its easy to default to that.
  • The intentional oppression, especially the internment or imprisonment, of dissenting groups solely on the basis of their dissent.
  • Extreme Nationalism to the point of paranoia that any adjacent nations are looking to attack them and thus justification of pre-emptive invasion or similar actions. I directly differentiate this from extreme isolationism where they will vigorously defend their borders against incursion, but I admit these lines get fuzzy.

Safe to say there are no real identifiable Nazi-like parties with national sway in the U.S., to me.

But as I said in my other comment, I (perhaps wrongly) don't think of Hitler's defining characteristic as having been a fascist dictator, but has having been a fascist dictator who started WWII and the Holocaust. If the Hitler comparison is just a fascist dictator claim with only a ... following it, I think that's disingenuous.

I'm not defending fascism. But if the argument isn't that he'll use fascism to commit specific atrocities comparable to Hitler's, but only that fascism is the atrocious end in itself, the specific Hitler comparison feels weak to me. There have been other fascists and dictators in history too.

This is everyone's reminder that George Orwell, writing in 1944 before we even finished defeating the Nazis, argued that there was no clear definition of the term fascist and that the term had been used so widely and to describe so many fundamentally different things that it had already lost any real meaning; https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

We love our floating signifiers, don't we folks?

MSNBC played footage of Nazis from their 1930's rally in MSG while covering Trump's rally. Coverage of the event has conveniently ignored other events at MSG, including a bunch of DNCs.

I don't want to be uncharitable, and I admit I didn't look hard, but superficially, yes that is the only justification for the comparison I saw. It felt very "Hitler also ate toast!" to me.

Here's what no one is saying: Madison Square Garden was the home to the original WWE (WWF). Trump also appeared on WWE. Trump loves Kayfabe. Therefore Trump is a professional wrestler.

To start, the idea that Trump is the next Hitler is obviously crazy, overheated political rhetoric. Trump is nothing like Hitler, historical fascism was a movement born out of millions of angry World War I veterans and nothing like it exists or could exist today.

Part of the issue is that American education stinks and so there is simply no broad frame of reference for strongman leaders other than the good leftwing/progressive guys (FDR, Lincoln) and Hitler. You can't compare Trump to a Salazar, Pinochet, Sulla, Hidenberg, Caesar, Augustus, etc, because people simply don't know history well enough.

However, there is a bit of a "woke more correct" element to the Nazi accusations. Historically, communism/progressivism/leftism was an alliance between the intelligensia and aristocrats with the lowest classes. Fascism was renegade aristocrats and a lower-middle-class alliance. Second, Trump's base actually does want him to be much more of a "dictator" than Trump himself wants to be, but sometimes he gives signals as if he is going to play along. Trump's base actually wants him to act alike a real executive in control of the government -- they want him to fire employees and close departments (contra civil unconstitutional civil service law), they want him to ignore unconstitutional Supreme Court rulings, they want him to take strict and harsh measures that are morally beyond the pale by the standards of the current establishment. Overall, the wishes of Trump's base do pose an existential threat to the current post-New Deal, soft-socialist expertocracy. Thus you can see that the left has a working definition of fascism as being: "An alliance of a strongman with the lower-middle class that poses an existential threat to socialist (soft or hard) bureaucratic state." By that working definition, you can seen how Trump does match the pattern.

Ultimately, this is a case of Scott Alexander's worst argument in the world. You rhetorically group A and B together, when A is something with really terrible connotations, in order to have those connotations rub off on B.

  1. Nazism was a movement of a strongman leading the lower-middle class in order to become dictator, invade Poland, start a world war, and genocide six million Jews.
  2. Trump shows strongman tendencies, and he is a lower-middle class populist leader.
  3. Ergo, Trump has smiliarities with Nazis. Therefore, we can call him Nazi and then all the other things associated with Nazism (killing millions of people) get associated with Trump.

Campaign rhetoric? sure. But clearly some people really believe Trump is a Nazi? Can somebody help me understand the claim? Not necessarily the veracity, but what the substantative argument is. . . . Can anyone lay out the argument and why Trump is Hitler sufficiently captures a real claim about the dangers of his presidency. (Again not looking for veracity, I'm trying to understand what the claim means.)

At the risk of being glib, Orwell already explained this: The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.”. They're just screaming "ORANGE MAN BAD" in the most powerful imagery they can think of.

It’s about creating a strong unconscious distaste for Trump by associating him with the most universally distasteful political “thing”. Its Cue->Response, pure animal psychology. My dog doesn’t leave the yard because she will get zapped; my sibling gets nauseous smelling cinnamon rolls because it reminds them of long car rides; the subject doesn’t vote for Trump because when his name is said by the TV the tone gets grim and they hear the word Hitler. I think that’s it. Vance weird, Trump Hitler, say it over thousands of trials across different contexts and it will stick. There’s no thinking required at all. How did Voldemort and the N-word become verboten? The same process: the word is said (cue), there is an immediate stimuli associated to it (response, the verbal response of others), this occurs over iterations until you are now afraid to utter the word.

But clearly some people really believe Trump is a Nazi

Truly believing Trump is Hitler would lead to the moral prerogative to commit illegal acts. Clearly, the vast majority of Dems do not believe he is Hitler, or even Hitler-lite, because they aren’t storing weapons and organizing resistance networks. “The resistance” political meme is like Star Wars cosplay, whereas if they really believed he was Hitlerly it would be like the IRA. You can draw a comparison to abortion. How many people really believe that abortion is murder? The same amount of people spending every weekend protesting it and being jailed in doing so. If the store down the street were massacring children by the dozens every month would you really be watching football on the weekends?

The valence of 'people thinking it is murder' is actually non-zero, given the bombings and the murders of abortionists.

But I think that in of itself is an inaccurate measure, because it is very rare that people are strong enough of conviction in their beliefs to kill for them. Even Islam, who certainly puts in clear terms the valor of dying for the faith, only a very few are actually suicide bombers.

In both cases, "if you really believed X, you would Y; you don't Y, therefore you don't really believe X" is an insincere rhetorical tactic. Factual belief X does not in fact necessarily imply strategy Y, all the more so because, in cases like these, strategy Y would most likely be counterproductive.

In the "Trump is Hitler" case - it may be worth the reminder that the spread of violence was a factor in Hitler's rise, as one fellow's ACT review noted. If you really think Trump is Hitler, "let's not recreate the circumstances that allowed Hitler to seize power" seems like a sensible move!

In the abortion case, it's fairly straightforward - is bombing abortion clinics an effective way to reduce the number of abortions? No? Then maybe it's a bad idea. And this isn't even considering that many pro-lifers have a deontological commitment not to kill, or even to to take actions that plausibly risk killing. They're pro-lifers: being against killing is the point! Some make exceptions around cases like criminals or in war, but nothing that would apply here.

"You're not fighting this the way I think you ought to fight it" is a bad faith dismissal, that's all.

Your link seems to be broken.

I tried to edit it, but it seems to automatically re-add the distorting part of the link about the Motte. The link should be - www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-rise-and-fall

Oh, that's weird. The source looks right, and then it...concatenates? Is it treating it like how you can link to /comment/262705?

@ZorbaTHut

@OliveTapenade It's treating it like a relative link; without an http:// or https:// in front of it, it's considered relative to this current directory. Note that it's not even The Motte doing this, The Motte is dutifully linking to whatever you ask for, that's web browser behavior.

If you paste it in raw, then The Motte says "oh shucks that's a website link isn't it? I'd better do all the appropriate processing!" and dutifully stuffs a http:// on the front of it.

Fix it by adding an https:// .

one fellow's ACT review noted

one fellow's ACT review noted

(click the "view source" button)

We should probably be autoprefixing it with https:// but I think this is literally the first time this has come up :)

The media reports on events that happen in New York City differently than they report on events that happen elsewhere. A Trump rally in Michigan or Western Pennsylvania might as well be in American Samoa or Guam. It’s different when Trump brings his ilk to defile Madison Square Garden. There are more Jews than Trump voters in Manhattan. The people who live there don’t even have cars. It probably does feel like Nuremberg to them.

Is Trump supposed to be antisemitic? Who's making that claim and based on what?

It’s not going to go well for Jewish Americans if we start having ethnic purges. They have a sixth sense for this kind of thing. If Puerto Rico can be a floating pile of trash, so can Brooklyn.

Is that the real argument, that trump will bring ethnic purges? And is this just extrapolated out of his border views?

I think that’s what it ultimately boils down to. Trump started his campaign promising to deport illegals. Then there was the Muslim ban. Now Vance is saying that Haitians on Temporary Protected Status are basically illegal and should be deported. The next step is to look into canceling green cards. Then revoking naturalized citizenship. Couple that with relaxing civil-rights laws, and you see where this is going.

Whether or not Trump himself wants to do all these, a sizable chunk of the population does. That is the demographic that attends Trump rallies.

Then there was the Muslim ban.

It wasn't a Muslim ban.

By that same token, though, I imagine many Jewish Americans are not sure about Kamala not listening to the Free Palestine crowd.

Aren’t the pigeons keeping the trash down?

I understand the fear, though I’m not sure exactly which end of it is worse. Trying to scaremonger Jews about a potential Hitler for political points is extremely dangerous. I can’t imagine anything scarier to a Jew than invoking the Holocaust in relation to a candidate for president. Whether or not it’s true, and especially if it’s not, this is like telling a rape victim that the guy down the hall is a rapist. You’re bringing back all the trauma of what the original event means. I mean obviously if it’s actually true, then a warning is warrented, but if it’s not, it’s extremely cruel and terrorizing millions of New York Jews who now believe that they need to prepare to flee because Hitler is coming back.

Trump is, if anything, pro-Jew. I accept that American Jews may be sensitive to potential ethnic troubles. But specifically worrying about Trump is a false positive.

I find the claim that Trump is antisemitic confusing. I try to visit enough different forums that I get an idea of the breadth of opinion. The places that approve of Hitler often call Trump the Zion Don and think that he is owned by Jews. For example: https://communities.win/c/ConsumeProduct/p/199OTqPFyM/why-havent-you-voted-for-zion-do/c

There's a widespread belief held by urban Jews that rural whites areas are heavily anti-Semitic (which is untrue), I would guess that it's probably related.

‘Trump is Hitler’ might be meant to invoke the Holocaust- the people who say it would not correct you if you believed that- but more as a desirable side effect than the thrust of their rhetoric. No, it’s meant to say Trump is going to overthrow democracy and build an authoritarian regime. This doesn’t seem to be true, but the supporting evidence for it is stuff that the people making the argument will give you.

It’s meant as a thought terminator. What they mean is that Trump is evil and therefore if you even consider voting Trump, you’re evil too. Nazi has never really had a definitive definition, nor has fascism, or racist, sexist, bigotry, and words that end in -phobic. They’re not supposed to. That’s not what those words are for. Orbán is fascist, Trump is, Hitler is, Mussolini is, so is Putin. What specifically do they all share in common? Name 3-5 policy positions that all 5 men and the movements around them have in common that aren’t shared by neo-liberal politicians. What are we talking about? But since there’s no set of positions that could be declared as defining fascism, it’s basically a sneer meant to stop all thought. You don’t have to think about what he wants to do, or what Kamala wants to do — he’s a fascist, so she has to get your vote unless you’re a fascist. Your grocery bills don’t matter. Building things in America doesn’t matter. You must accept the premise, and then act on it.

It is also meant to incite and justify violence against him and his supporters.

I think it's more like Trump is not a nazi, the argument is that he condones those around him who invoke fascism. It's like the dog whistle concept.

This rigamarole has gone on forever. Repeat from 2016 onwards:

Anti-Trump: "He's like the nazis! Who were bad!"

Pro-Trump: "He's not like the nazis! Who were bad!"

High minded, mentally elevated and euphoric: "He's like the nazis, who were good."

Hitler was good at public speaking, holding rallies and a lot of other stuff. Being as good as Hitler, to the point of it warranting comparison, is a compliment. Having a 'Hitler' that wants to deport the immigrants, secure the borders, kill the drug dealers, clean the streets of crime and in any other way protect the rights and privileges white coding people care about, and uphold their preferred political order, is good!

The problem here is that people are so religiously captivated by the mythology of Hitler that they can't get over it when the comparison is made. Hitler occupies the 'devil' portion of the western brain. You can't be like the devil and not evil in some way or another. That's just definitionally true. Like being more like Jesus or MLK makes you definitionally good.

Since most people are unable to recognize their true religion, for whatever reason, we get pro-Trumpsters contorting themselves around meaningless concepts and baseless associations in order to defend their chosen one. 'Fascism' 'Hate' 'Holocaust' 'Hitler' '1939'. None of it matters, none of it tracks. It's meaningless nonsense. You'd have a better time deconstructing someone calling Trump a doodoo head.

But what you’re talking about sounds a bit more like Napoleon or maybe Caesar or something of that sort. The point of a Hitler comparison is the negative bits — the camps and the invasion of other countries. At worst I’d call Trump a potential Putin or Orbán, and at best a Napoleon. I definitely expect him to make a bit of noise

The point of a Hitler comparison is that Hitler is Satan. Satan is obviously bad to everyone who shares the western religion so the negative association is not to anything specific, it's just definitionally evil to be like Satan. Saying someone is like Napoleon or Caesar is not the same, since those two are not the antagonists of the ruling religion.

If you want to make an earnest comparison between Trump and Hitler I'd stop you are the part where Trump is Trump and Hitler is Hitler. If you feel the need to invoke mythology and shared religious gestalt to get your observations across I'm not super interested, but would prefer 40K lore as the medium.

The other potential takeaway is that the media lied about Hitler the same as they lie about Trump.

A lot of this, as with every Republican nominee since 1932, is just that Everything I Don't Like Is Fascist Hitlerisms.

The steelman is that anti-immigration is a major component of Trump's interests, that the necessary steps for achieving those interests will involve putting a ton of people in extremely bad circumstances, and that when things get fucked up in the process quite a lot of people would die unintentionally or 'unintentionally'.

  • Exact numbers are messy, but when we're talking immigration we're necessarily talking about a lot of people. The official numbers for illegal undocumented immigrants (eg, not TPS enrollees) are only 11-12m, but this is broadly believed to be an undercount, with more skeptical takes being closer to 20m. There are around 800k TPS enrollees almost all of which are past the point where it's temporary, a larger-but-unknown number of refugee-applicants of varying levels of honesty, and a tiny number of really sketchy green card or naturalization or refugee cases (probably <10k?).
  • A large portion of Trump's claim is 'sending them back': charitably, to reenter a line or waiting list for lawful immigration that will be made moderately more accessible after enforcement of immigrant law returns to any level of credible effort; less charitably, by flipping the bird after.
  • Rounding them up is, alone, a big issue. TPS enrollees and refugees officially are supposed to keep their location on file, but enforcement is kinda lax and they definitely aren't going to have a lot of incentives if there's broad-scale deportation going on using that file. By definition, undocumented immigrants don't. There's a lot of trouble any time law enforcement gets involved in anything, but it scales up real quick.
  • Some number will 'self-deport', but this is likely to be a pretty small fraction. A more sizable group might take the L after getting caught -- trade a flight and a cleanish record for not kicking up a fuss -- but at best they'll be a minority, and more likely there will be direct efforts to jam up the system as much as possible.
  • Which matters because the system isn't built for high throughput, and several portions have Constitutional guarantees. Even if you avoid the question of whether non-citizens have certain relevant due process protections (which is itself a big question), you at least have to separate citizens from non-citizens with enough accuracy and due process. Some of them will have minor citizen children, so that's even more fun.
  • And even when you're absolutely sure you want to deport them, and you have all the physical infrastructure to actually bus or fly them out, you actually need a place to put them. In many cases, we're talking whole percents of country populations, often from countries that don't necessarily want or have the infrastructure to take them back.
  • So now you've got 5m-25m people that you're trying to kick out or are attached to people you're trying to kick out. You probably don't want to just have them wandering the streets after you catch them, but this is larger than the entire existing American prison system, possibly by an order of magnitude.
  • Well, we actually do know how to hold a whole bunch of not-especially-violent people without having to imprison them: set specific geographic areas aside for them with fences and limited in-and-out. It's not pretty, though.
  • Except, uh, we don't know how to do that well or safely. WWII Internment had no small number of rough edges, and it was much smaller, even after adjustment for general population size. We don't have good numbers for what sorta fatalities are happening in Uyghur 'reeducation' camps in China are, but I think a lowest plausible estimate is in the hundreds, and while I'd like to think that American open-air prisons would do better, I'm not hugely optimistic on them being perfect.
  • And, uh, we'll also have a large number of people newly removed from the mainstream population, not especially liked even by their home countries, and definitely not liked by the US government's leadership. Shame if something were to... happen to them.

This doesn't work, in a wide variety of ways. We've seen that it doesn't work, and at step one Trump gets slapped with APA problems, and it's going to keep going that way. Everything after step six or so just rolls around on the assumption that the Evil People are Going To Do The Most Evil Thing Possible, because mumble mumble someone said bad genes somewhere. In the actual real-world, in the incredibly unlikely chance that a Trump administration manages to get any of the big TPS status revoked, it'll be disruptive, but in the slow trickling sense.

But it's not incoherent or made up. It's just wrong. Probably with a bit of hyperbole because they see the plausible cases as Bad Enough. And those probably aren't really 'wrong'. You can do the QALY assessments, but napkin math puts 10-50m QALY on the table, sometimes pretty luridly.

((Though they may not be honest.))

You may recognize that this makes any effort to enforce immigration law Nazi-level, not just despite but because of Democratic efforts to make even trivial efforts to enforce the law so costly and disruptive. If so, congratulations, here's your Encyclopedia Brown merit badge.

My guess would be (assuming some level of competence on the part of the Trump team, I know) that they'd lean into the self-deportation -- if you crack down on illegals working/driving/transacting business in an effective way (which is theoretically possible, federally) then American Life becomes less attractive. Also it's not clear how much Trump cares about effectiveness of deportation per se -- being able to claim to have taken action and being cock-blocked by California or whatnot is probably fine with him.

Yeah, and I think conservatives are underestimating how hard even that limited approach is going to be -- there's a lot of people who know about past TPS rollbacks getting APA'd, but there's fewer who know about states just banning use of eVerify or firing people for their immigration status, or the extent that a lot of funding to support immigrants is laundered through various indirect grants or other organizations to make it hard to trim.

Trump taking whatever attempt, successful or not, and calling it is definitely plausible.

Short answer: Twitter delenda est.

Direct comparison between Trump and Hitler is silly, which is why even partisan outlets are resisting the urge. What they’re doing instead is quoting the individuals who are drawing those comparisons. The most prominent ones appear to be a state senator and Hillary Clinton. Higher-ups, such as the actual Kamala campaign, prefer to call him a fascist, which is much more defensible. “Hitler” is shorthand for “charismatic fascist,” so our high-heat, low-light excuse for Discourse uses it.

But since you want the steelman, I guess…

Recently, I’ve seen Trump supporters encouraging others to “take him seriously, not literally.” If one applies that standard, why argue over details? He’s obviously a populist with a strong sense of national character. He encourages modern forms of autarky and is skeptical of international cooperation. His supporters deserve to be rewarded and pardoned and his enemies ought to be locked up. There’s the bit where he blames shadowy interest groups for any setbacks. He selects for a real cult of personality. And above all, he cheerfully bulldozes norms so long as he’s winning.

Those are really the big ones. Drain the swamp. Lock her up. Stop the steal. I just want to find 11,780 votes](https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/01/03/politics/trump-brad-raffensperger-phone-call-transcript). Anything to get results.

So when you’ve got a charismatic populist with a dedicated base desperate to recover the glories of a bygone era, and he keeps hinting that maybe they can suspend normal procedure just this once, for a good cause…maybe you take that seriously.

Dear Motte, please help me place my vote.

I really want to support the Democratic Party. Biden's FTC, EPA, and NLRB all seem to be working in economic directions which will make my life and the life of my children better: open markets, cleaner air, better working conditions. I can't help but notice that Trump's previous court picks tend to work against my goals of regulating business, increasing vacation time for my family, and limiting the EPA's attempts to regulate fossil fuels.

But voting blue has some tradeoffs. Some of these I'm aware of, but they are less relevant to me: Immigration is high and crime is up, but immigration and crime are intensely local, and my locality is pretty safe, with lots of rich donors and its own competent police force.

I'm going to have a family soon. I would like my child to be able to enjoy a carefree childhood, without needles in the parks and bullies in the schools, and without the chance that they are brainwashed into values that won't give me grandchildren.

But then things happen which force me to reevaluate and acknowledge that I cannot support the Democratic party. For example, this exchange during the VP debate (Transcript from Matt Taibbi):

VANCE: You yourself have said there’s no First Amendment right to misinformation. Kamala Harris wants to use…

WALZ: Or threatening. Or hate speech.

VANCE: …the power of the government to use Big Tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this political moment… Let’s persuade one another. Let’s argue about ideas and come together afterwards.

WALZ: You can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test!

Matt makes the argument that Walz got the crowded theater analogy backwards, but even more than that what rings alarm bells in my head is the phrase "Or hate speech."

What do you mean hate speech isn't protected by the first amendment? How do you think the market of ideas is going to work?

This exchange was the last straw for me, and convinced me that, however much it may harm my short-term personal interests, I cannot cast a ballot for Walz and the group of people who think like him. No matter how shitty life might get without the EPA or FTC working in my best interest, it will get much more shitty, much faster if donors to the Democratic party (NPR listeners?) get to define contrarian thought as "hate speech".

So here are my options for presidential tickets:

  • Donald J. Trump / JD Vance (Republican)
  • Randall Terry / Stephen Broden (Constitution)
  • Chase Russell Oliver / Mike ter Maat (Libertarian)
  • Jill Stein / Rudolph Ware (Wisconsin Green)
  • Claudia De la Cruz / Karina Garcia (Party for Socialism and Liberation)
  • Cornel West / Melina Abdullah (Justice For All)
  • Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. / Nicole Shanahan (We The People)

Any ideas who has the most "Grey Tribe" values and best policies?

Important issues to me, in order of importance as far as I can tell:

  • Freedom of expression
  • Transparency in government
  • Competence in government and making decisions without corruption
  • Quantitative approaches to existential threats (climate change, nuclear proliferation, AI engineered viruses, ASI, etc.)
  • Maintain international trade (i.e. maintain the empire)
  • Increase economic competition (anti-monopoly)
  • Labor rights (anti-monopoly)
  • Reduce everyday mortality: healthy lifestyle, healthy food, healthcare access, traffic safety, crime, etc.
  • Improve everyday quality of life: clean water, clean air, low prices, YIMBY
  • YIMBY and environmental law (abolish zoning but enforce strict laws against pollutants).
  • Immigration: let in those who follow the process, but stop allowing "refugees" and people who overstay visas (currently, overstaying a visa is the fastest path to a relative's green card.)

Edit: formatting of candidate list

WALZ: You can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test!

Narrator: It is not, in fact, the Supreme Court test. That would be "imminent lawless action".

its funny they make reference to a case that involved a socialist being jailed for his anti-war protest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debs_v._United_States) that was clearly decided incorrectly based on the current interpretation of first amendment protections. of course this also shows that the current interpretation is something that needs to be strongly guarded against because the courts can quite easily take away the right to free speech.

What always gets me about that stupid "fire in a crowded theater" cliché is that it's:

  1. From a case about distributing flyers about resisting the draft. Shouting "fire" here is resisting being sent to die in the trenches of WW1, which was not deemed protected because: "when a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right."
  2. Has been overruled by Brandenburg for more than half a century
  3. Has nothing to do with free speech and equates unpopular politics with disorderly conduct

It's a terrible argument from bad precedent used to justify tyranny, and somehow it all seems to be okay to hide behind because it's a memorable maxim by a nominally progressive jurist who later actually changed his mind and supported broader 1a jurisprudence.

I hate it, when someone repeats it I know they either have no historical context for it or loathe Free Speech as a concept and are just trying to make that palatable.

immigration and crime are intensely local

Yes for crime, but Kambala can potentially start dumping millions of illegals in your town on a moment's notice. Nowhere is safe.

FTC, EPA, and NLRB all seem to be working in economic directions which will make my life and the life of my children better: open markets, cleaner air, better working conditions.

Trump has been in favor of clean air and water, just against the enemy's decarbonization agenda.

I'm not sure joe's nlrb has done much except union stuff, which is a shrinking segment of the workforce. At the very least, he hasn't given anyone extra vacation days.

You can’t stop, can you?

Two week ban. Come back after the election.

Only warnings for those two posts (and then padded with reassurances like "which usually we'd probably let go"), and now a mere two weeks? Was there an executive decision to let the forum turn into an /r/CWR-lite space?

Nope.

You know, I was kind of expecting to be criticized for harshness.

Right, well, moderation compounds. If in two weeks you were to ban somebody else for making posts like this, maybe the user you just banned would be there to complain that you are being too harsh.

If providing a home for it was not the goal, the sneering and blatant culture-warring from the forum's right edge should have been contained much more relentlessly from the outset. Now that they have numbers and precedent on their side, it's natural that belated attempts to moderate this behaviour away will result in defiant "community sentiment". I'm sorry that I'm joining in on making your life hard, but I see no better way to level the incentive landscape.

Eh, you should see some of the stuff we did contain. Your brand of polite criticism is far from the most difficult thing about this place.

Matt makes the argument that Walz got the crowded theater analogy backwards, but even more than that what rings alarm bells in my head is the phrase "Or hate speech."

The whole thing should ring in your head as an incredible example of what a blubbering idiot Walz is. He confidently, bloviatingly says, "You can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test!" and this is just completely wrong in every single way. It's not the controlling precedent. It's considered an example of terrible law. Even at the time that Holmes penned the line, this was a paraphrased dictum from his opinion, not a test. He didn't just misunderstand the context or modern meaning, he got literally everything around it wrong in order to line it up with his desire to control speech. We have a man running for Vice President that doesn't understand the basics of the First Amendment and confidently cites a Supreme Court opinion that isn't a controlling precedent and that he doesn't understand. The whole thing is a damning indictment of Walz and the party that nominated him.

To be pedantic, it is illegal to incite people to imminent lawless action. Walz is technically correct that you could be prosecuted for willfully creating a false emergency.

The part that's wrong is that quote was used in conjunction with suppressing protests to the Vietnam War, edit: WW1, which the comparison to "Shouting "Fire!" " is nonexistent and was terrible law. And Walz is still wrong for the same reason. I'm not disagreeing with you so much as specifying which part of that was terrible law.

protest to WWI, was it not?

My apologies. You are correct.

Have you considered not worrying too much about it and just going with your gut?

The chance that your vote is the deciding one is effectively zero. You shouldn't think too much about it.

This is what I think about voting. Funny enough, giving the argument "your vote doesn't matter" is probably more impactful than actually voting, but still probably not impactful enough to worry about for most people since they don't really have an audience.

The counterarguments are always something like, "but if everyone thought the same as you, then your vote would matter since way less people are voting!", which is true, but also never going to be the case.

People also always bring up cases of "look at this super close election, the difference was only a few hundred votes!", but, even in that case your odds of changing the election are still only 1 in a few hundred. And that is assuming you know how close the election is going to be before hand. So, yes politics are very important, but your chance of changing anything about it with your vote is next to none, so there is no real point to voting. Paradoxically, this makes telling people to vote, while not voting yourself, more important to do.

I'm going to have a family soon. I would like my child to be able to enjoy a carefree childhood, without needles in the parks and bullies in the schools, and without the chance that they are brainwashed into values that won't give me grandchildren.

Congratulations!

Your vote doesn't matter. Not at the national level, not at the state level. It might, just might, matter a little for your local elections, especially the very boring ones that most people in your area skip because they are boring and most people know nothing about them.

But you know where you really can make a political impact, is showing up to the open sessions of your local school-board, your town-hall meetings, your county supervisors meetings, having read up on the agenda in advance and then taking that opportunity to give your 3-minute speech.

You won't sway votes on every issue, but I have been amazed at how many times an agenda item got tabled or substantially changed based solely on a dozen people showing up and giving their well-reasoned 3-minute opposition.

And that's without being plugged into a more serious local organization that regularly interacts with your local politicians, that's just you yourself. If you do get plugged into such a local organization, you can have even more impact.

(And, of course, get to know your child's teachers and school principal. And be prepared to put them into a competing charter school / private school / homeschool, lots of options out there.)

Thank you. Haven't gotten involved in local politics yet. Will have to start attending meetings.

Trump seems like he sort-of-fits your top issues; but if you live in a non-swing state, try voting libertarian.

Labor rights (anti-monopoly)

Reduce everyday mortality: healthy lifestyle, healthy food, healthcare access, traffic safety, crime, etc.

The issue imho has been misallocation of public resources. For example, why is so much healthcare spending on people who are at the end-of-life for example who have no hope of living much longer. Or so much education spending to bring laggards up to speed, who should go into the trades or drop out of school. Or too much credentialism. Many of these proposals seem like an expansion of the government or vague that will necessitate higher taxes or more deficit spending. The minimum wage is an example of 'labor rights', yet creates a barrier to work.

who should go into the trades

While your typical electrician or HVAC tech didn’t do well in school, this was because he either thought school was dumb or wasn’t willing to listen to his teachers. Guys that were genuinely not smart enough to handle the material usually aren’t smart enough to work in a regulated trade.

this is why the min. wage is harmful. there is a market for dumb workers; it's just not high enough to justify paying them

You would expect this to be true, but empirically it doesn't seem to be. The going rate for a sober, trustworthy worker with a 90 IQ and a good attitude is something like 2/3 of the going rate for a 100 IQ worker - in other words it is above any likely minimum wage. And the going rate for a 90 IQ worker who is drunken, lippy, violent or dishonest is comfortably negative.

The Problem of low wage work (and in today's society it is a capital-P problem - a lot of what tradcons hate about our society is downstream of it) is really a two-parter:

  • How do you raise 90 IQ normal-testosterone boys so they grow into men who will be sober, trustworthy workers with a good attitude? (Yes - the "Prussian education" thing happened for a reason)
  • How do you make the experience of low-wage work something where a normal-testosterone man can maintain a good attitude without feeling emasculated?

If you solved those problems then the going rate for 90 IQ male workers would be well above the sort of minimum wage levels that are within the Overton window, so the minimum wage would be largely irrelevant.

As someone who had voted libertarian or green in every election until now, just so what I've done, bite the bullet, and vote Trump.

If you're in a swing state, then it might actually matter. If you're in a deep-blue state, vote down ticket Republican to avoid or prevent one-party control. It would only be in a deep-red state that I would consider voting third party or down ballot Democrat.

There's an idea in cultural criticism called Advanced Genius theory. The basic gist of it is that, when and iconic artist (usually a musician) puts out a work that everybody—critics, the public, etc.—agrees is terrible, it's probably not terrible in any metaphysical sense, it's just that the artist's genius has advanced beyond our ability to understand it. This is a fringe idea to be sure, as I am unaware of any critics who actually subscribe to it. Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield has said that it's merely an excuse for people to "listen to shitty music by artists they consider to be non-shitty".

1959 was arguably the most important year in American musical history. Jazz, up to this point, was largely based on concepts of functional harmony that were prevalent in American musical theater. Musicians had been gradually increasing the harmonic complexity throughout the music's history, a trend that accelerated following WWII. John Coltrane's album Giant Steps upped the ante considerably by creating an entirely new theoretical framework of constant structure major 7 harmony cycled across major thirds in consecutive multi-tonic systems, aka The Coltrane Changes. While this sounds perfectly normal to the casual listener, any musician trying to improvise is forced to deal with moves that are otherwise unheard of in any kind of music all while keeping up with the breakneck pace of the chord changes.

At the other end of the spectrum, Miles Davis, never among the best technical players, ditched conventional chord changes entirely in favor of modes, which hadn't been a common feature of Western music since the Renaissance era. Instead of a chord progression, there was merely a tonal center and accompanying scale. Rather than keep up with the acrobatics of a complicated chord progression, soloists could put more thought into what they were doing and stretch out. Kind of Blue has since become the most revered album in jazz history. And then there was Ornette Coleman, for whom modalism wasn't enough. He wanted to ditch harmony entirely in favor of melody, and put out The Shape of Jazz to Come, its title a not-so-subtle harbinger of the future.

John Coltrane recorded Giant Steps as a leader (obviously), and was a sideman on Kind of Blue. He didn't play in Coleman's band but he was in awe of him. To Coltrane, Coleman's ideas represented a sort of platonic ideal. In 1960 he recorded a series of Coleman compositions with members of Coleman's band, and while the results are okay, it's clear that Coltrane had to chart his own path. The 1959 albums would be the cornerstones of modern jazz. Armed with this knowledge, Coltrane would spend the first half of the 1960s plowing further and further into uncharted territory. By the time he toured Japan in the summer of 1966, his band was the only thing keeping him tethered to earth. In 1960 he recorded a version of "My Favorite Things" that recast the song as a 12-minute modal vamp that didn't bother to get to the bridge until the very end. By 1966 he was extending it up to an hour, and it bore so little resemblance to the Julie Andrews version that one wonders why Rodgers and Hammerstein were even getting credit. Everything he recorded after this is almost beyond description, and he would be dead within a year of returning from Japan. He was forty.

A few years back, there was a Netflix documentary about the life and career of John Coltrane. Cornel West appears in the film as an interview subject, and when they get to Coltrane's final recordings he admits that they aren't something he can listen to unless he's in a very specific state of mind. One gets the impression that Dr. West doesn't actually like these recordings, and that he's effectively never in the appropriate state of mind, if such a state even exists. But he doesn't go as far as saying that the recordings are actually bad. I've heard these myself, and while I share West's inability to truly get into them, it's clear that they aren't bad. Coltrane, by this point, is operating on a plane of consciousness so foreign to us mere mortals that we're simply incabable of comprehending it.

John Coltrane is the only musician that approaches the level of Advanced Genius. Advancement theorists like to bring up people like Lou Reed and Neil Young as the quintessential examples of such, but, let's face it, all these guys ever really did was make rock and roll records. Coltrane took the idea of harmony to its logical conclusion and spent the rest of his career destroying it. With each step he took, he blew the minds of those who listened to him, and eventually reached the point where no one could keep up with him. Miles Davis may be personally responsible for multiple revolutions within jazz, but those were genre-transforming. Coltrane is sui generis. Even acolytes like Pharoah Sanders and enthusiasts like Kemasi Washington can only exist as pale imitations.

I doubt Cornel West has ever heard of Advanced Genius Theory or is familiar with its principles, yet he seems to understand the concept more deeply than those who invented it. If you're looking for someone to vote for and can't decide based on their actual political positions, that's as good a reason as any.

puts out a work that everybody—critics, the public, etc.—agrees is terrible, it's probably not terrible in any metaphysical sense, it's just that the artist's genius has advanced beyond our ability to understand it.

So there is hope for Freddie Got Fingered? Some thing are bad and irredeemable. Or relegated to cult status. Has there been a piece that was poorly received and then gained widespread popularity?

1959 was arguably the most important year in American musical history.

maybe Jazz history, but the genre is still so tiny. It's amazing how A Kind of Blue, the best-selling jazz album ever, sold only 5 million copies in over 60 years despite all its acclaim. Probably the invention of rock and roll was a bigger deal, but harder to pinpoint a year.

So there is hope for Freddie Got Fingered? Some thing are bad and irredeemable. Or relegated to cult status. Has there been a piece that was poorly received and then gained widespread popularity?

No. The first thing you should be aware of is that the number of subscribers to Advanced Genius Theory is very small. The second thing is that it puts faith in the artist based on a prior evaluation of genius. For example, with a guy like Coltrane, he's already established himself as a genius, so we should give him the benefit of the doubt. Tom Green was never considered a genius by anyone. Finally, one of the requirements for a work to be Advanced is that it has to be presented without irony. Tom Green accepted the Razzie for Freddy Got fingered in person, which is not behavior that suggests he thought of the film as a serious piece of art that was deserving of respect.

The chance of anything meaningful happening relating to speech laws under a Democratic administration is zero. Even if they did control both chambers, which they won't, any national legislation on 'freedom of expression' would never get out of the starting blocks among swathes of Democratic congressmen and women. Walz made a silly comment, but it seems very paranoid to think this would ever actually amount to something. Certainly, if that is beyond the pale for you then you should be much more violently opposed to Trump, given his comments on freedom of expression have gone way beyond that. They're all well known now, but some of the worst below;

“We’re losing a lot of people because of the Internet, and we have to do something. We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. And we have to talk to them. Maybe in certain areas closing that Internet up in some way [audience member cheers]… Somebody will say, ‘oh, freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people. We have a LOT of foolish people.”

Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag - if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!

"One of the things I'm going to do if I win, and I hope we do and we're certainly leading. I'm going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We're going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they're totally protected,

“it is frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write.”

Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked. Not fair to public!

"It's truly incredible that shows like Saturday Night Live, not funny/no talent, can spend all of their time knocking the same person (me), over & over, without so much of a mention of 'the other side,'" the president wrote. "Like an advertisement without consequences. Same with Late Night Shows. Should Federal Election Commission and/or FCC look into this?"

Now, Trump obviously can't/couldn't follow up on any of these threats for various practical or legal reasons, but nevertheless if it's a contest of 'who has more contempt for freedom of expression' Trump wins hands down.

The chance of anything meaningful happening relating to speech laws under a Democratic administration is zero. Even if they did control both chambers, which they won't, any national legislation on 'freedom of expression' would never get out of the starting blocks among swathes of Democratic congressmen and women.

This is strongly refuted by the facebook and twitter files wherein it is laid clear that intense backroom pressure was applied to suppress speech. Passing laws is hardly how the government works anymore. It is mostly about controlling the agencies, which it seems Trump is unable to do, particularly on this particular issue. The DOJ prosecuted him and his supporters more than Democrats when he was ostensibly in charge of it!

I strongly agree with this. OP lists freedom of expression as his top issue but the whole top post reads as an isolated demand for rigor from the left. You can't always buy the hype. Elon Musk makes a ton of noise about free speech too - but his actual track record running X is decidedly mixed on the issue of free expression. I'm a big fan of the 1st Amendment, it's important to me too. Which exactly why I've done enough background reading to know neither major American political party is particularly good on the issue of free speech!

https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1850700851104358438

...

When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Pick your 2 priorities. 1 short term, 1 long term. Dump everything else. Then pick which matter more. Short or long term. and roll with it.

How I'm thinking about it:

  1. short term - YIMBY. Build more & clean up cities. (Dems win)
  2. long term - Freedom of expression. (Dems lose narrowly)

With the supreme court stable & a post-woke zeitgeist, Dems can't move the needle on strongly enshrined freedoms. This will be a 1 term president, with a half-term before mid-terms to get anything done. It won't affect long term change. YIMBYism has finally gained momentum and can have quick impact. So short term it is.

For national elections, I wouldn't waste my breath on a 3rd candidate. Pick a tent. Everything else is theater.

I'd reluctantly vote for Dems in nationals. And then vote for the YIMBYiest (pro housing, clean streets) local candidate, irrespective of their leaning. Couple of years ago, Ann Davidson in Seattle was the right candidate despite being Republican. But in SF, don't think there are any good right leaning candidates.

short term - YIMBY. Build more and restore cities. (Dems win handily)

I'm not sure how you draw this conclusion when the modal Democrat controlled state is California, a state renown for the impossibility of building anything, and rent control schemes sabotaging housing supply over decades. Compared with nominally Republican controlled Texas and Florida where building is cheap, easy and plentiful.

The incentives faced by legislators at the municipal vs state vs national levels are different, and the incentives faced by blue politicians in a blue state are different than those faced by blue politicians in a red state.

My ideal political alignment is purple-purple-purple (municipal, national, state), but since it's impossible to live in a red city in a blue state I'm happy enough living in a blue city in a red state in a purple nation. I could probably tolerate living in a blue city in a blue state in a red nation. I would soon grow to despise living in a blue city in a red state in a red nation.

  1. short term - YIMBY. Build more and restore cities. (Dems win handily)

I really don't see how this is the case. Long-term democratic cities are notorious for having draconian planning regulations. When I lived in SF, I couldn't even add an internal door inside my own house as a noise barrier without applying for a variance. And the criminal worship on team blue is just out of control. The number one issue in the way of restoring cities is that people, and especially people with children, just don't feel safe.

The cities need a committed reformist movement, probably within the Democratic party, since their policies have shut out people with children who vote Republican from living in urban areas. But on the national level, it's hard to see how the better option is the party of BLM, leading with a candidate who endorsed the riots.

I'm sure there are a ton of exceptions and caveats, but this is the rough shape of things in my mind: If you're concerned about building more, then the two major parties may have opposite effects depending on whether you're talking about the local level or higher levels. Locally, conservatives who favor less regulation and more individual freedom will tend to lead toward allowing more building. But we also have a problem of most municipal governments already being overly restrictive with their zoning codes and regulations, and progressives seem to be more willing to use power at the state and national levels to incentivize/force municipal governments to allow more building.

Progressive implementation of the policies will not be as advertised however. You wont get new housing in the city or near the urban core, instead you will get subsidized housing foisted onto suburbs that are being made to heel ala the NJ Mt. Laurel doctrine (see Southern Burlington County N.A.A.C.P. v. Mount Laurel Township ). This pattern has been repeatedly seen in progressive states. The goal of such policies is to make the city itself expensive and rich and less violent while foisting the worst of it on people who explicitly moved away from the violence, thus ending those communities repeat as people flee.

Just vote for Trump and move on with your day.

Politicians are much better at implementing fiscal and regulatory policy than making sweeping shifts in civil rights. They’re also more interested in doing the former. Niche Internet free-speech forums spend much more time thinking about freedom of expression than the average politician or the average American.

On the off chance that Walz becomes VP, then President, then is handed a draconian 1A bill by Congress, I suppose he’d be likely to sign it. I don’t consider this a likely outcome.

In the interest of the next few items on your list, I suggest voting for the candidate who won’t appoint her family members to diplomatic posts, hire his lawyers and golf buddies to consult, and otherwise funnel money to his own enterprises.

Are you in Wisconsin? That's the only one that had that list match exactly. It looks like their only write-in candidate available is Peter Sonski, of the American Solidarity Party.

I imagine De la Cruz is too extreme with you, wanting to abolish capitalism. I couldn't find identifiable policies for Terry.

If by "quantitative approaches to existential threats" you mean, not shutting down everything over climate change, while still caring about it, I imagine that rules out West and Stein. They're also just generally more extreme.

Of the remaining:

Oliver likes to handle things by just having the government leave the matter. He wants to let everyone in on immigration. He wants to help the climate only by stopping government actions that make things worse.

Trump's probably more anti-trade than you'd like, and cares less about the environment than you'd prefer (though he agrees that clean air and water are important).

RFK's now only listing things that he can agree with Trump on, which makes him hard for me to evaluate.

Sonski's not really a YIMBY, and wants to keep allowing in refugees.

I'd say, if you want to choose someone with a chance, definitely go Trump. Otherwise, your closest match is probably one of those last four, but I'm not sure which.

Yup. I figured the "Wisconsin Green" party made it obvious, but most responders didn't read that carefully.

Thank you so much for the good-faith tips!

I've been (slowly) going through the third-party candidates in Detail, scoring them by (freedom+transparency)*competence*weighted issues. Terry was indeed hard to find info on. Stein is out, because she's provided a laundry-list of "human rights" which she cannot possibly deliver on (Free Tuition, Free Housing, Free Medical, and no nuclear, but Declare a Climate Emergency....). And .. that's about as far as I've gotten.

I'm glad I researched her, though, because I came across an interesting story of how the Democratic secretary of State of Nevada colluded with the Democratic Party of Nevada to keep Stein off the ballot. It serves as an interesting counterpoint to the argument that Democrats only play dirty in response to Republicans playing dirty, since the Green party was victimized by Dems' dirty antics. (tl;ds: Secretary of State tells the Green Party to use an updated petition to put a candidate on the ballot, which petition doesn't collect information on signatories' eligibility to vote. The Democratic Party of Nevada sues to challenge the Green Party candidate's inclusion on the ballot under the argument that the law requires the petition to collect eligibility to vote information to be valid, and now Stein is not on the ballot in Nevada.)

Who did you end up going with?

I have a policy of not telling anyone who I actually voted for. That said, here are my notes for the rest of the third-party candidates:

Cladia De la Cruz (Party for Socialism and Liberation)

  • Single-payer healthcare
  • Pro-reparations (too left wing)
  • "seize the forgive all student debt", "Fight for a socialist future" (going to destroy the economy)
  • "cut military budget 90%" (going to destroy the Empire) and "lift sanctions" on "Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, North Korea and Iran" (going to lead to nuclear proliferation)
  • Take over fossil fuel companies (might actually solve climate change, but good luck doing that without a military.)
  • No mentions of freedom or freedom of speech, but I could get behind "disband the NSA"
  • Claims on her website that US median income is $31,000, which is a good 50% lower than the actual number given by the US census bureau in 2022.

Cornel West (Justice For All party)

  • '"Free Speech and Whistleblower Protections"
  • Making voting day a national holiday is great, but vote by mail and nothing about voter ID means coercion is going to be more rampant.
  • Nothing about nuclear or AI in platform
  • Green new deal: nationalizing fossil fuel industry, end new oil drilling (would take a cut out of climate change, but doesn't address foreign emissions)
  • Moratorium on False [climate] Solutions might address foreign emissions, but I doubt it.
  • Nothing about monopolies on platform
  • Streamlining legal pathways for immigration would help my family.
  • Abolishing ICE, demilitarizing the border, upholding asylum laws, and demilitarizing the police/criminal justice reform would probably harm my family

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (We The People party)

  • "dismantle the censorship-industrial complex"
  • "We will return the intelligence agencies to their proper role as protectors not violators of liberty."
  • "Install honest, competent leadership throughout the federal bureaucracy, agency by agency"
  • "replace corporate-friendly agency leaders with reformers and whistleblowers"
  • "Make the agencies transparent to public view"
  • Removing corporate influence from government hits pretty much all my major issues.
  • "Make student debt dischargeable in bankruptcy" (the only serious proposal that I have seen for student debt that makes any sense)
  • universal public housing
  • term limits in congress
  • break up monopolies, end stock buybacks (good for national competitiveness)
  • equalize school funding
  • focus medical research on chronic disease prevention
  • "Protect our Environment from Corporate Corruption and Contamination"
  • "Dismantling US Imperialism", "unwinding empire" (would destroy international trade, probably send us into another dark age.)

How do you think the Puerto Rico joke will affect the election?

Reuters article to flesh out this low-effort comment

Political leaders from both sides of the aisle and Puerto Rican celebrities bashed comments at a major Donald Trump event in New York by a comedian who called Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage."

Speaking before the Republican presidential candidate at a rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, comedian and podcast host Tony Hinchcliffe added that Latinos "love making babies" and that they do not "pull out," comments that leaned into a racist trope that Latinos are preoccupied with childbearing and averse to birth control.

"There's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now," Hinchcliffe said. "I think it's called Puerto Rico."

The presidential campaign of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats, several prominent Puerto Rican celebrities and some congressional Republicans denounced the comments, which were widely panned as racist.

The Trump campaign itself said the comments do not "reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign." Trump himself has not commented on Hinchcliffe's performance.

The Hispanics in the US have a birthrate identical to republicans and in actual Latin American countries it’s, like in Latin European countries, lower than America.

While I don’t think contraception is good, ‘Hispanics have a lot of kids because the Catholic Church tells them to’ is mostly not true, see also, the percentage of those births out of wedlock(very high).

This was an example of an unforced error, albeit a tiny one in the grand schemes of things. It makes me wonder why anyone would book a comedian at all. Politics is very much scripted; comedians by trade are not.

Probably tiny. The problem is that, if the polls are accurate, this is a ludicrously close race and tiny errors can have huge effects.

podcast host Tony Hinchcliffe added that Latinos "love making babies" and that they do not "pull out," comments that leaned into a racist trope that Latinos are preoccupied with childbearing and averse to birth control.

The irony is that the age of the big Catholic family in Latin America is over. Mexico has a lower birth rate than the USA. Puerto Rico's TFR is lower than Singapore!

Young Latinos love KillTony and older Latinos from Puero Rico are probably critical of their home country. I doubt it changes their vote.

Please put more effort into top level posts

So far the outrage seems to be localized in people that have never entertained voting for trump as a thought. And I do hope that the blue collars will pass the IQ test of "comedians telling jokes and landing flat" that the punditry class seems to have failed.

Agree. It's been this way since 2016: "OMG Trump did or said bad thing , I am going to vote for Hillary/Biden/Harris" said probably no one.

It won't

Judging by the massive surge in DJT stock this morning, or prediction markets, not at all.

unchanged:

https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-2024?tid=1730135416810

If the joke had been about Haiti I could see it being a boost for Trump, following the pattern where he dog-whistles racism shortly before elections in order to get racists to vote for him, even though he doesn't end up implementing any of the policies they support. But Puerto Rico was a non sequitur because nobody had been making a campaign issue out of anything related to Puerto Rico. I don't see it having any effect IMO.

I don't know who that guy is, maybe he's totally out of the loop and using stale lines? Or not generally political and falling back on stuff from last time PR was politically relevant?

These guys need an SNL writers room feeding them topical lines. Just more missing cultural infrastructure.

He is the host of the largest live podcast in the world. I could see the joke doing fine at his normal events.

You can see that he is getting a bad audience reception and gets nervous and it makes everything worse (he even does the risky thing about commenting on the cold reception). Allegedly, there’s some background about the islands trash collection being bad or something, but I watched the set and it just comes off as mean and punching down (plus even if that was the connection it’s not well enough known to make for a good joke). As do about half the jokes overall. Just bad vibes all around. It doesn’t even have any lead in!

Making jokes at a political rally is always a little dicey (especially since on possible pillar of comedy is an element of transgression) but there’s absolutely such a thing as being too mean and he was absolutely in that zone, to my judgement. I only chucked once.

I think those remarks have low potential upside for Trump's campaign and high potential downside. I doubt that the number of people who would decide to go out and vote for Trump because a comedian at his event said Puerto Rico is a floating island of garbage is as large as the number of people who would decide to come out and vote against Trump because of it. So it was careless for Trump's campaign to allow it to happen. It's another unforced error, following on the heels of when Tucker Carlson, a few days ago in a public speech, made a long political metaphor involving spanking one's daughter. These are the kinds of things that make me wonder, did Trump's campaign people start smoking meth the last few days or something? It's just stupid, stupid shit that might endanger an election that might well be decided by a few tens of thousands of votes, especially given that the Democrats have spent the last week putting a lot of media energy into trying to make the Madison Square Garden rally seem like a Nazi rally. Like come on, Trump campaign people, just shut up and go do more McDonalds type photo ops and talk about crime and immigration and shit. There's a time and a place for crude, controversial jokes. A week before the election and at a highly publicized rally at a major venue where most of your main people appear is probably not the right time and place.

What "Puerto Rico joke", and why would anyone think it would effect the election?

One of the speakers at Trump’s MSG rally was talking shit about Puerto Rico.

It’d be a campaign-ending breach of decorum for any other candidate, but for Trump, it was Sunday. Not much chance it swings the election.

Do some people enjoy being raped?

I normally don't wade this deep into controversial gender stuff, but... once I had this thought it won't leave my head. It's super anti-memetic, the sort of thing that if true nobody would want to admit and everyone who found out would suppress other than misogynists who people would ignore. If it were known to be true and widely admitted then rapists would just use it as an excuse, therefore the media/scientists/everyone lie and say it's not?

A bunch of people have rape fetishes. They are aroused by power and strength, or the courage and audacity to defy social conventions, or the idea of being so desirable that they drive someone insane and make them lose control. Or I've heard someone describe being raised in a super conservative household where you need to be pure and chaste, but they secretly want sex, so fantasize about being raped so that they could experience sex but it wouldn't be their fault and they haven't done anything wrong. I personally can imagine scenarios in which as a teenager a hot girl could have offered to have sex with me and I'd say no because I was a good boy who didn't do that sort of thing, but maybe would have ultimately been happy if she had forcibly insisted? But that never happened so I don't actually know.

Now of course, fantasies are not reality. Actual rape is going to be more violent, less perfectly tailored to someone's ideals, more terrifying, and probably with a much less attractive person than in an imaginary hypothetical. Lots of people have fantasies that they wouldn't actually want to carry out in real life. But it seems like the translation should be nonzero. And the translation of that it actual rapes is also nonzero. That is, if the proportion of people with rape fetishes is A, the proportion of those people who would enjoy actually being raped is B, and the proportion of those people who experience rape is C, and if all of these proportions are nonzero (and not so tiny as to pragmatically be zero), then the product, ABC is the proportion of people who have actually been raped and enjoyed the experience.

And it seems like they would experience an entirely different set of issues than normal rape victims. On the one hand, the experience is going to be a lot less traumatic: Instead of a horrifying and degrading experience they got to have an enjoyable if unexpected sexual encounter. On the other hand, they probably feel guilt and shame for their feelings, which they cannot voice without severe backlash from society. Rape is "the worst crime" possible, it's victims are permanently "Victims" and "Survivors". Its existence is a weapon to bash men and promote women. Mainstream culture is super well equipped to support and assist typical rape victims, at the expense of absolutely silencing and shunning anyone who might have not had a terrible experience and not been traumatized by it. And that itself might just amplify the shame and guilt and trauma for this subset of people. Like the kid who doesn't cry until they know someone is watching, I suspect that this subset of rape victims might not be traumatized from the rape itself, and wouldn't ever be traumatized in a different society, but are traumatized by our society's reaction to them and the need to stay "in the closet" so to speak, because of the backlash they'd receive if anyone found out the truth.

I'm not crazy, am I? Is this secretly a thing that nobody is allowed to talk about? I'm not sure it's really actionable if true. I don't think it makes rapists less horrible people even if they get lucky and target someone who secretly enjoys it, because the expected value of their crime is still catastrophically negative. So it wouldn't indicate reducing criminal or social penalties for rapists. And I don't think it would indicate reducing support or funding for rape victims, a majority of which are still traumatized in the normal way that everyone thinks they are. But maybe it would suggest something along the lines of... giving people the benefit of the doubt? Having more options for how people are allowed to cope with rape on their own terms without assuming they are "victims" when they might just be fine? I'm not sure this makes much difference, but I'd like to hear thoughts and/or statistical/scientific evidence for or against this (if that's even meaningful given the massive reporting biases this would create)

Obviously some substantial proportion of generally well-adjusted women have “rape fantasies”, but these rape fantasies mostly involve (a) extremely handsome 6’5 vampire princes who are in love with them, who (b) are extremely good at giving head and spend most of the sexual interaction giving them pleasure, and (c) who inevitably marry them, are monogamous and have children with their beloved wife who they spoil and are happy with forever after after the fact. Very different to getting roofied and waking up with some random guy from a party on top of you (who will never speak to you again), let alone being raped by a homeless guy in an alleyway on the way home from work, such that the comparison is ridiculous.

The archetypal male fantasy is the harem of nubile young virgins (72 of them, maybe even), the archetypal female fantasy is taming the dangerous and powerful bad boy into a loving monogamous husband and father who only has eyes for them. That’s why almost no romantic fantasies written for women involve female promiscuity, and why almost all end with (as in Fifty Shades of Grey) the protagonist marrying the man of her dreams and living happily ever after.

That’s why almost no romantic fantasies written for women involve female promiscuity

Though my knowledge of the genre is somewhat limited, I know a clear counter-example: Kushiel's Dart, by Jacqueline Carey (plus the following two books). The protagonist is a courtesan, and remains so after her marriage.

I haven't read Twilight, but wasn't there a continual 2-men-1-woman drama?

Yeah but she only ended up marrying and having sex with the vampire, not the werewolf. As someone once described it, the series is "A young woman's struggle to choose between necrophilia and beastiality."

Twilight is very much about the drama of having to pick, and that's common but not universal to paranormal romance of that era. For a not-awful version, see the first three books of the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs (though in turn the main character of that series has already dated and implied to have hooked up with one of the two-or-three suitors, so I guess it depends on 'promiscuity').

That said, it's very far from universal. Anita Blake is the most infamous for having the heroine pick up every non-villainous character to get within arm's reach, since it's set in a universe where fucking solves everything, but Jemesin does has a couple love triangles resolve themselves into polyamoryish in The Broken Earth series. In online spaces, it's often a pretense for the readers to get some M/M in their het romance. Rare to see that published, though. Some of the less... bizarre parts of the Omegaverse and paranormal erotica spaces tend to revolve around "Why Choose" or reverse harem solutions, though I doubt most non-furry guys want to know much about it and it's not really fuzzy enough for my tastes.

Of course they exist, in the same way that things that are the complete opposite of the classically ‘masculine’ fantasy obvious exist. But they’re very much in the minority of successful romance stories.

And yet, some proportion of rapists are 6'5 attractive sociopaths who go on romantic dates with women and then rape them. And probably don't marry them afterwards, if they were interested long term they'd probably be patient. But I assume that people not being traumatized and therefore not reporting it to the police would cause a rapist to keep going and thus become disproportionately prolific than some disgusting homeless person who gets reported and caught quickly.

Also, I'm not at all suggesting that this is typical or average. It's an exception, I'm just wondering if maybe it's on the order of 1-5% rather than 0-0.01% mentally ill people that society's failure to entertain it as a possibility would imply.

I thought the archetypal male fantasy was a femboy with an AK.

No, that's the archetypal liberal male fantasy (the liberal female fantasy is this but with a girl instead, and why you find both of those on 4chan).

The archetypal traditionalist/male fantasy is being doted on by unlimited young women of breeding age; the archetypal progressive/female fantasy is being doted on by unlimited powerful older men who prefer separate beds.

Notice how the former is co-operative in character while the latter are adversarial; notice also how the former is really childish in character compared to the more mature/realistic tastes of the latter. Finally, note that the women who post about turning their rape fantasies into rape realities online are liberal in character.

...

Nah, getting off on humiliation is much more of a male thing than a female one, see how cuckqueaning as a fetish is so much rarer than cuckoldry. Women who are into degrading sex don’t really see it as being humiliated because it doesn’t happen with low status men, it’s more about surrendering control to a hot man, which is feminine. Amusingly the only widespread female equivalent of male fetishes that are huge popular on porn sites like women insulting men’s penis size or “mom fucks my high school bully” is the fetish many ftm trans men have for a transman being treated like a woman, called ‘she’, which kind of proves my point and says interesting things about the effect of test.

A woman being attracted to a fantasy of surrendering and being treated like a favorite toy by a powerful and sexy man isn’t a humiliation fantasy. It’s more like a man fantasizing about the harem or whatever.

For men, sexual humiliation is your woman whoring herself out and everyone knowing about it. For women, sexual humiliation is your husband and love of your life leaving you for a younger, sexier, skinnier woman. And while there’s plenty of material made in which that happens, pretty much all of it is made for men.

is the fetish many ftm trans men have for a transman being treated like a woman, called ‘she’, which kind of proves my point and says interesting things about the effect of test.

From a gender critical perspective, there’s a much simpler explanation.

I don't think this is a topic that is THAT secret. It's well known that rape victims sometimes orgasm and feel awful about that, and that is by no means a completely taboo topic in therapeutic communities. (It probably is in many relationships though.) Neither is it at all obvious whether that would make the ordeal overall more or less damaging. If it helps to think of this from a male perspective (I totally assume 98% of people here are male but maybe you're not), think about the female guards at Abu Ghraib torturing male prisoners via sexual touching etc. It's easy to imagine getting turned on in the house of your enemy, and it's just another power your enemy has over you in addition to electric shocks, waterboarding, dogs etc.

The part where a victim just shrugs it off and feels fine, that story I find much less likely and here's where it's complicated. The victim may well feel and tell themselves that they're fine, but then go and act differently in their lives (this is basically the life of many porn actresses). This is damage or impact that the victim can't acknowledge. Is there also sometimes a case where a rape victim can just shrug off what happened and go back to life as it was, just an experience for the wank bank, never to be considered any further? Hmm. Sounds conceptually possible. But then so is it possible to imagine someone who doesn't mind any kind of crime happening to them. It is hard to know quite what to do with that possibility.

The part where a victim just shrugs it off and feels fine, that story I find much less likely and here's where it's complicated.

I think that's the meat of my claim/conjecture though. Not just that it feels physically good in the moment, but that they literally are happier as a result of the encounter than they were before. Or at least would be absent the social ramifications. You can imagine it happening for any type of crime, but it seems highly implausible for most crimes, but rape seems like the scenario where, because things are so complicated and unstraightforward, you'd have more variance: with some people being damaged by it way more than something simple like being mugged, but some being damaged way less and possibly negative.

A lot of people have responded to you and covered more substantial ground than I will cover here, but I'd like to bring up the odd point of maturity, which I believe is relevant. Many of the Epstein girls readily went along with his cash-for-sex deals in the 90s or whenever. Courtney Wild, One of the most vocal women in the various documentaries, has admitted that, after initially pleasuring Epstein and I guess ageing out(?) she became a kind of tout for him, corralling other girls who might have wanted to make some extra money (for drugs or whatever). While she presumably did not do this for erotic pleasure, she did do it to cash out.

That she could do this then and now regret it is no impenetrable conundrum. She was something like 14 or 15 at the time. By current standards, just a dumb hustling kid. We get older, we realize how stupid we were.

In another infamous pop culture case, Mackenzie Phillips, former star of the 1970s sitcom One Day at a Time, claims to have had an ongoing consensual sexual relationship with her own biological father for ten years .

If this doesn't trip your WTF meter I don't want to know what does. Anyway she regrets it now, has admitted to being really messed up in the head, and over the ensuing years of regret and shame wrote a book about it (as one does.)

My point here is that we are all always growing, and the orgasm of yesteryear may today be something we look back on later with feelings of guilt and shame (Notably I have never had this experience). It doesn't really matter. To enjoy rape as the raped surely still does not excuse the rapist. The old Monty Python skit springs to mind:

MANDY: Well, Brian,... your father isn't Mr. Cohen.

BRIAN: I never thought he was.

MANDY: Now, none of your cheek! He was a Roman, Brian. He was a centurion in the Roman army.

BRIAN: You mean... you were raped?

MANDY: Well, at first, yes.

The crux of your question is whether some women (or men?) might actually sensually enjoy the experience of violent rape. I would suggest that looking at the macabre list of salacious and bizarre experiences that people report enjoying (a list I shall not enumerate) no doubt this is one of them. I also don't think this is necessarily anything we need to worry about collectively or individually.

If they are not consenting in their minds, something has just happened to them they didn't want or ask for. Most normal people are never going to be happy about that. If they are consenting from the word go, but don't indicate it, then, well, that's just a weirdo.

To be honest I find it easier to imagine someone who shrugs off being beaten up because it gives them a good story or makes them feel more alive, than I do this.

Most normal people are never going to be happy about that.

And who's to say that they're normal? Some people are weird. I'm not even slightly suggesting that this is the typical case, because it's obviously not. But some people are weird.

People have fetishes for seemingly everything ,so this would not surprise me either.

...

The one thing they cannot have a fetish for is 'homosexual behavior' I have been told online.

On the contrary, as a supporter since before it was popular of the rights of gay people, I believe that, if one condition is fulfilled, one can legitimately consider someone to have a fetish for 'homosexual behaviour'.

That condition is that one also consider heterosexual behaviour a fetish.

To me, 'equal rights for gay people' means that for a system of ethics to be valid, it must be invariant with regard to gender parity, i. e. the morality of an act or relationship is identical to that of an otherwise identical act or relationship, differing only in that the gender of one participant is reversed.

Isn't a fetish by definition a minority preference? And by implication a small/fringe minority?

Someone saying they have a pizza fetish doesn't just mean that they like pizza; almost everybody likes pizza, it's not a fetish. (unless taken to some extreme; do not recommend googling "pizza fetish")

A fetish, or paraphilia, is traditionally a focus on a part or feature of one’s sexual partners, or oneself considered sexually, or a behavior/role. By contrast, a sexual orientation or gender preference is based in the partner’s identity, and a gender is how one’s sexual features relate to their own identity.

One can have a thumb fetish: for big thumbs, small thumbs, thumb-play, gloves, mittens, art focused on thumbs, etc. Most people would not consider the thumbed to have an orientable identity, so a fetish it remains. (I can think of two specific exceptions for that sentence.)

Features traditionally considered primary, secondary, or tertiary sexual characteristics of one sex (size and shape of genitalia, big/small breasts, long/short hair, short/tall stature, small/large hands or feet, hair color, etc.) can be immediate dealbreakers if they go against one’s typical image of their target orientation. However, they can also be fetishes, not just identifiers.

Race can be a fetish or an orientation. So can height. For people toward the middle of the bisexuality spectrum, major categories of genitalia can be fetishistic; those toward or on the edges will generally consider them orientable.

For furry fans, consult a furry scale. Everyone inside and outside of the fandom will have different opinions on what level of furriness is a furry fetish, what level is xenospecies orientation, and what level is a bestiality perversion. Levels 5 and 6 do not have thumbs. Level 6 does not have linguistic sapience.

To me, 'equal rights for gay people' means that for a system of ethics to be valid, it must be invariant with regard to gender parity, i. e. the morality of an act or relationship is identical to that of an otherwise identical act or relationship, differing only in that the gender of one participant is reversed.

This seems a very odd and unique definition. The genders are not the same, so why would swapping them in any situation result in the same result?

I'm not referring to

s/modal woman/modal man

but to

s/woman with xyz characteristics/man with same characteristics

.

In any case in which Alice and Adam, as individual people, not as representatives of womanhood and manhood, are identical in every way except their gender, and Bob and Bill are identical in every way except that Bob is attracted to women and Bill is attracted to men, and Alice and Bob have exactly the same feelings and commitment to each other (or lack thereof) as Adam and Bill, the relationship between Adam and Bill is immoral if and only if the relationship between Alice and Bob is immoral.

The genders are not the same

I'm not referring to 'the male gender' and 'the female gender', averaging over four billion people; I am referring to four hypothetical individuals.

If women are, on average, disproportionally FOO, and men, on average, disproportionally BAR, then, in the hypothetical, Alice is more BAR than most women and/or Adam is more FOO than most men.

If women are, on average, disproportionally FOO, and men, on average, disproportionally BAR, then, in the hypothetical, Alice is more BAR than most women and/or Adam is more FOO than most men.

This is only relevant if you think ephemeral things like FOO and BAR are relevant, and if you think it is wise to make society-wide policy decisions for fringe cases. I, in particular, don't think the latter. You make policies for the 4 billion, and the couple thousand outliers conform, get outcast, or something different.

Its no different than dealing with other antisocial behavior like crime, just luckily most of these issues are rarer than retail theft of cigarettes and razor blades.

This is only relevant if you think ephemeral things like FOO and BAR are relevant

FOO and BAR are what are called metasyntactic variables, acting as a stand-in for anything different between the average man and the average woman which would affect the morality or immorality of their relationship. If you tell us what you believe the relevant differences between the genders are, I can explain how this applies to it specifically.

You make policies for the 4 billion,

Who saves one life, saves the world entire.

and the couple thousand outliers conform, get outcast, or something different.

Many societies have thought this way. They have tended to leave skulls.

Its no different than dealing with other antisocial behavior like crime

Except for the fact that other anti-social behaviour harms people....

Who saves one life, saves the world entire

Out of context religious doctrine just makes you sound stupid.

Many societies have thought this way. They have tended to leave skulls.

Proudly misunderstanding the failure mode of communism and fascism also makes you sound stupid.

Except for the fact that other anti-social behaviour harms people....

We are talking about a specific arrangement where the state provides benefits to a sort of arrangement. Including and excluding different types of people is often necessary to preserve resources. There is no reason to extend marriage benefits to M-M or F-F relationships because they don't function similarly to M-F relationships.

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The one thing they cannot have a fetish for is 'homosexual behavior' I have been told online.

That sounds like ego defense. Groups build those when they feel threatened. When groups feel safe they totally just kink on those models.

IRL, I used to work in the same building as a therapist and I used go to lunch with him. He told me it's fairly common in male victims of child rape to fetishize the behavior, that is, at least in the ones who are troubled enough to seek therapy. This didn't take place in a therapy-happy country mind you.

When I was a young man in a long distance relationship I would often end up listening to Loveline with Adam Corolla and Dr. Drew on my way back home Sunday evenings. One of those nights, they were discussing this in the more general context of the sexual experiences of children. Adam was talking about how while he was initially skeptical of the connection between adult sexual issues and childhood experiences, with enough time and repetition, he had come to believe that Drew was onto something when he always asked folks about their childhood when this sort of thing came up. He went on to liken a child's mind to wet cement that was slowly drying. Those childhood experiences would make an impression on the cement that ultimately cured into sexual expectations and preferences as an adult.

This made sense to me at the time and speaking as someone who works in the mental health field and is married to a therapist, I've heard more than enough stories like this myself to believe that this is the most likely explanation for all sorts of sexual preferences.

I'm not crazy, am I?

If you were trying to convince others that you're not crazy I wouldn't let them read this post.

What you're describing, that level of deviancy from the norm can only be, to me, explained as mental illness. They're clearly not "fine" even if they're fine with the rape.

But say they're not, then maybe they don't consider it rape at all and this crisis of being abnormal wouldn't occur to them.

So it wouldn't indicate reducing criminal or social penalties for rapists. And I don't think it would indicate reducing support or funding for rape victims, a majority of which are still traumatized in the normal way that everyone thinks they are. But maybe it would suggest something along the lines of... giving people the benefit of the doubt?

It probably already does this. People who consider what happened to them not that bad are probably not reporting it as a rape and if it happened out that it was reported they're probably not testifying, not getting a rape kit, not taking pictures, and even assuming all this is done just happenstance of them enjoying the experience, their descriptions, testimony, and demeanor would probably end up maybe allaying some amount of criminal penalty.

But even considering all that, you break a law, you get punished by the law, some things are mitigating, but someone enjoying a thing because they have a mental illness doesn't make it okay.

The rape your requiring in this hypothetical means the person being raped can't be aware that it is going to happen. Even if they enjoy the act their agency is still being taken without their permission. Even doing something I like, I wouldn't be thrilled to have this forced on me and my time taken.

This kind of thinking is like "it's okay to steal from rich people because they won't miss it." or "it's okay to attack that guy because pain don't hurt and he loves to fight." Maybe you could use that as mitigating factor in sentencing, but no, there's no benefit of the doubt. In fact, what is the doubt here? That we should give people a pass if they encounter a .01% individual who is not bothered by their victimization?

This topic is cursed, so I'll keep my thoughts brief.

From an evolutionary biology standpoint:

Some meaningful percentage of humans in the early history of the species were the product of coerced sex.

Males being naturally stronger than females is the reason it would normally be males doing the coercing.

Females who aggressively fought back against coerced sex were more likely to be injured or die by said males.

Thus, females who fought back would not be passing genes on to the next generation quite as often.

Likewise, females who 'accepted' coerced sex and adapted to bear and raise any resulting child were more likely to pass on their genes.

After 1000 generations, the genes of women who accepted it would be more prevalent than those who resisted.

The inverse is probably true for males. Weaker males who didn't/couldn't coerce sex probably lost out overall.

So we would expect there to be some innate tendency for some women to find coerced sex 'appealing'. Call it a survival mechanism if you want. Being forced into an act but at least being able to 'enjoy' it means you don't get killed in the process.

Then tie that into the need to filter partners for 'Fitness' (as defined by prehistorical norms), and a male being strong enough to overpower and take a woman without her cooperation is an imperfect but not entirely incorrect proxy for a male who can produce and protect strong offspring.

So a complex set of factors and the way intersexual dynamics work would make it not too surprising that women and men would have some kind of urge to engage in 'coerced' sex acts because that's a way to signal one's fitness as a mate on a very primal level. How strongly one experiences this urge, especially compared to other competing urges probably varies a lot. So even if I believe the urge/desire is common, it doesn't mean everyone actually experiences it as an overpowering desire.

Thus, females who fought back would not be passing genes on to the next generation quite as often.

Then tie that into the need to filter partners for 'Fitness' (as defined by prehistorical norms), and a male being strong enough to overpower and take a woman without her cooperation is an imperfect but not entirely incorrect proxy for a male who can produce and protect strong offspring.

Aren't these two factors contradictory? If the woman does not fight back, then there is no fitness filtering. Meanwhile, a rapist who kills his victims won't pass on his genes either.

I mean, if a woman is strong enough to fight back and escape a man, that's either an abnormally strong woman or an abnormally weak man.

So I should perhaps phrased it as those who effectively fought back versus merely offered impotent token resistance.

Meanwhile, a rapist who kills his victims won't pass on his genes either.

Well, he won't pass on his genes with that woman. Even assuming that he never finds a woman who offers little enough resistance to leave alive, he could still have children in a consensual relationship separate from the rape.

Definitional question: if the victim enjoys it, is it even rape? Note: I'm not taking about if the woman feels pleasure or orgasms from it, but if she actively thought it was a good experience and she was glad for it.

I used to joke with my wife and ask her "can I rape you?" When she would say no, or roll her eyes, I would say "fine, I'm not going to rape you if you don't want me to".

I used to joke with my wife

Why did you stop? (Alternatively, hey Mitch, didn’t expect to run into you here!)

Definitionally I think rape is defined by agreement/consent prior to and/or during a sexual encounter, which is a conscious and voluntary process, while pleasure and enjoyment are (mostly) involuntary and emotional responses.

Hopefully it's clear that a scenario where a woman expects to enjoy having sex with someone, agrees to have sex with them, and he's not very good and she has a surprisingly poorer experience than anticipated. If she later regrets that decision, and in retrospect should not have agreed to it, they still did agree to it at the time, so it is not retroactively defined as rape (by sane people).

What I'm considering here is the inverse scenario: the woman (or man) does not agree to have sex with someone, the other person forces it, and it's a surprisingly good experience. In retrospect they would have agreed to it (or, at least, would not have objected as strongly), but they still did not agree to it at the time, so it was definitionally rape, and the person who committed the crime is not retroactively absolved of their sins (which had a highly negative result in expectation even if not instantiated in this instance).

I don't necessarily think your inverse is fully analogous. We are not necessarily talking just about women who happen to like it during and afterwards, but women who specifically wanted to be raped because they really enjoy or believe they will enjoy that experience. My point is that if she actually does actively want it, then I'm not sure if it's definitionally rape, which I always was told meant forced and unwanted sex.

Furthermore, as another thought experiment that goes beyond just a definitional dispute, I believe someone who really wants to have an encounter like that will be acting differently and giving off different signals, so it's not entirely clear to me if a man who takes the bait is really a rapist, or someone who's on some level playing along with the game she is setting forth. Some of the dispute likely comes down to whether we believe that all consent is truly verbally communicated, or if there are levels of communication that go beyond that.

Well. It can still be forced even if you wanted it. And 'unwanted' can be complicated. The mind is rarely a monolith on such matters.

The instance I'm imagining for the inverse is more latent. A woman who doesn't consciously realize she has a rape fetish, or enjoys porn of that sort but doesn't think she wants it in real life, or has it but thinks that's bad and feels shame and tries to suppress it. Therefore isn't sending off signals to get it, and if someone tried to rape her she would try to stop them. But then when it happens she realizes that it actually is fulfilling and enjoyable and she retroactively changes her mind.

This would be quite rare, and there's probably less contrived scenarios, but this would definitely count as rape because whatever implicit consent would only apply retroactively.

I don't think consent is a conscious and voluntary process. Even if we're supposedly defining the word... this new word doesn't seem to be what consent feels like to me.

Your language center's justifications are not always a good predictor of your deeper bodymapped feelings of whether you want to have sex. The actual predictor of trauma is whether or not the body and spirit are engaged or revolting, the language center just provides very circumstantial evidence of the state of body and spirit.

I think there is a substantial conscious and voluntary component to the thing we mean by consent, and for legal and social purposes that's the only part we as third parties can/should use as inputs into decision making processes. A law saying "If you have sex with someone and they are traumatized afterwards then you get 20 years of jailtime, but if they shrug it off then you go free" is a terrible law because people choosing to have sex with someone else can't entirely control the other person's reactions. So legally rape should absolutely be defined by visible and mostly unambiguous signals. Similarly, a social convention of "If you have sex with someone and they are traumatized afterwards then you are a bad person and everyone should shun you, but if they shrug it off then you're fine." is... more reasonable, but still dubious, because if you're so bad at a sex you traumatized someone then clearly something is wrong with you. But again, if you force sex on someone and they shrug it off you're still a horrible person because that is an action with very negative expected outcome. If you shoot at someone with a gun, maybe you don't actually hit them and wound them, and maybe you don't get convicted of murder, but you still get convicted of assault, because you easily could have hurt them.

So there's the legal definition, and the social definition, and the moral definition. And the moral version of consent involves internal thoughts and feelings, the legal one does not and should not, while the social one is probably somewhere in between. And all of them are meaningful and useful, and mostly referring to the same thing even if having different words for them might make it easier to communicate the distinctions.

At least on the fantasy side, it's worth spelling out how different even consensual stuff is in practice rather than theory. There's a lot of people who have fantasies about being woken up by oral (or... other forms of somnophilia, even if they get kinda borderline on consent from a currency matter), very carefully set up clear consent ahead of time, and then find out the hard way how active their startle response can be. Some of it's not realizing the line between a) letting someone else access to you, and b) giving up control, but some of it's also just more direct and instinctual.

And for genuine clear nonconsent, there's obviously many more issues -- you mention violence and attraction, but disease and (for women being raped by men) pregnancy risk are significant, and rapists are (unsurprisingly) not likely to be considerate of their victims in other ways, and there's no shortage of other more subtle problems. A lot of rape fantasies also revolve around things that aren't really possible or even safe as part of negating the fetishist's 'responsibility' in the act: in fandom spaces, this can be as blaise as sex pollen or hypnosis, to full-time slavery or pet play, to as extreme as abduction or worse.

There's probably some interesting things to be said about the extent that formalizing grief and harm can really augment or concretize it, but it's not clear how much that happens in the general case, nevermind how much it applies here. Rape fetishists know it's wrong, and that's part of the point.

That said, the bigger reason for the taboo on conversation about the topic, even (arguably especially) in sex-positive spaces, reflects more concern about how potential rapists would react to prolonged discussion. A lot of academic literature and criminology on the subject points to rapists excusing or justifying their bad acts, and while a formal belief that their victim 'deserves' or 'wants' it isn't the only method (social pressure is a big popular target), it's a pretty common one. There's some debate about how accurate these models are, but there's no small amount of evidence in favor. Given that, by definition, we're not exactly talking people who make good evaluations of other's interests, putting an asterisk saying it's only a tiny percentage wouldn't really defuse this concern.

but disease and (for women being raped by men) pregnancy risk are significant

Perhaps for those who also have fantasies of being forced into the OB/GYN office beforehand to remove the IUD, maybe; for everything else, it's not meaningfully distinct from promiscuous gay men, so the same mitigating strategies they use should be viable here for those who are intentionally chasing this.

the bigger reason for the taboo on conversation about the topic, even (arguably especially) in sex-positive spaces

If a space claims to be sex-positive yet has taboos on conversations about the topic it is, obviously, not sex-positive (it's only pretending to be one, typically for political reasons or [more charitably] self-defense).

There's probably some interesting things to be said about the extent that formalizing grief and harm can really augment or concretize it

This is the thesis statement of free love and 1970s-type liberal sexual ethics (as distinct from progressive sexual ethics) more generally. The answer is "this is obviously true, but leads to Repugnant Conclusions", and is an outright attack on progressive/feminist/gynosupremacist and traditional/androsupremacist sexual ethics because 'sex with women is harmful by default' underwrites them, so they need to preserve that notion [that this sex creates grief and harm] by any means necessary, even when it makes no logical sense.

Case in point:

reflects more concern about how potential rapists would react to prolonged discussion men [99% of 'potential rapists', as women define rape] might use the information to harm women

I think what most women want is to be enraptured by a powerful, handsome, high-status man and "it just happened."

This is exactly what is portrayed in one of the most famous romantic scenes in motion picture history, a scene long renowned by women for how "hot" and "sexy" it was:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=l0976pL8iTw&themeRefresh=1

What this scene portrays is by modern standards sexual assault. She tells him to stop, never gives consent, and he kisses her anyway.

Another example of this is the Suits Matt and Rachel file room sex scene -- no consent, he yanks her toward him, they have sex. That's rape by college campus standards, but again, it's considered one of the hottest scenes in TV history by women.

Now, when things end badly, two sayings come to mind: "hell has no fury like a woman scorned." "What women hate, hate, hate with the passion of the thousand suns is finding out the man they had sex with is not actually as high status as they thought." So if he is a chad but he scorns her, or it turns out in the light of day all her friends think he is a total dork, or a few weeks later it turns out her husband is a more powerful force in her life than her adultery partner -- then "it just happened" gets retconned as rape. In some of metoo stories there are admissions that the women only changed their mind about the incident days or years later after "reflection." I also think people, and especially many women, have an incredible ability to self-modify their own feelings and so they will actually believe that it was "rape."

I think the archetype sexy rape fantasy is the following scenario: woman is already very attracted to man, but refuses sex because of some powerful societal force or other reluctance unrelated to attraction ("my parents won't let me" "we are out in public" "you are too much of a rogue" "I'm holding out for a nice guy" "You just sacked my entire village and kidnapped me") but the man overpowers her anyways, thus showing that he is more powerful than all the things that she feared or worried about. And I would wager that most women would get turned on by this kind of fantasy.

Now in the case of ambush rape by a hobo, I suspect the woman understands that this man is, despite his temporary physical domination, low status and thus she is not actually all that aroused by him. Perhaps there is some pleasure in the middle of the act, but it is quickly erased in the clarity of the aftermath. The trauma still exists in the idea that she had forcible sex with a low-status man.

It's also interesting that historically under the oldest laws "rape" was considered a crime against the woman's owner -- her father or her husband. There wasn't really a distinction made between ambush rape and rakish seduction. Under more recent laws, mostly obsolete, it was only rape if she screamed and tried to fight, otherwise the woman is liable for severe punishment of committing adultery. It's possible that some kinds or rape would be enjoyable for many women, but are also terrible for society to allow. Imagine there was a law that rape was legal "if she enjoys it" or "rape is legal for 6' professional athlete chads because on average women will enjoy it." It might actually be the case that women would get some pleasure from such a law -- but it would be an absolute disaster for society. So in this case society has two choices 1) admit the real crime is against the father or husband -- which is not possible under feminism or 2) force women to act as if they were traumatized them and treat them as damaged if they admit enjoying it. Personally, as a man, if my wife was ambush raped, I would not want society telling her, "actually tell your husband how much you enjoyed it, it's ok, drop the stigma." Society should be telling women "your husband or future husband is higher status than the guy who raped you, you should be ashamed and disgusted by the sex with that low status guy."

Imagine there was a law that rape was legal "if she enjoys it"

This is exactly how "the law" already works. You really think the judicial system magically detect the small bursts of XXX-radiation emitted every time a penis contacts a vagina (or whatever) like some sort of BBC TV-detecting van?

It's all dealing with what happens after the fact; the risk you take when you break the law like this is that the viewpoint of the aggrieved never changes their mind in a way that's hostile to you- this is usually done through blackmail [or if this is legal-but-frowned-upon, hush money] since it's more lucrative to the aggrieved, but can happen for moral/religious shifts too. Rape allegations correlate with moral/religious revivals and declines in a man's status [as the "nobody would ever believe you" effect wears off]; that's the lesson of #metoo.

rape is a property crime

Seeing you write this, and the fact you phrased it in this way, has illuminated something very important for me: traditionalist sexual ethics in a context where sex and pregnancy are divorced coalesce to reveal that this is just the male version of the need to play status games with sex, in bitter conflict with progressive sexual ethics where it's the female version of the exact same thing.

I guess that's why sexual ethics that don't account for, or de-prioritize, status are so different and unnatural-feeling.

It's also interesting that historically under the oldest laws "rape" was considered a crime against the woman's owner -- her father or her husband. There wasn't really a distinction made between ambush rape and rakish seduction.

Under English common law (and therefore pre-feminist American law), "Rape" was the subset of illicit sex where the man was wholly guilty and the woman wholly innocent - all other illicit sex was a crime with two co-conspirators. (In the Christian west, it was a crime against society, not the woman's father specifically, but I agree that the oldest laws were pre-Christian.) Jed Rubenfeld wrote a law review article about this that was the most infamous thing about him until his wife wrote Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

This explains why people who experienced rape trials in the pre-feminist age thought the victim was on trial - because in important ways she was.

Rape fetishes usually involve implied consent. The “rapist” is the most attractive person in the erotica’s universe, and the protagonist usually knows that he would stop if she didn’t enjoy it. We should probably just stop calling it rape fetish altogether and call it dominance fetish or something. The phenomenon of the fetish is totally distinct from the real world phenomenon of rape.

It’s always seemed very much that the idea is less the rape part and much more a fantasy of being able to have sex and not be responsible for it. That’s the thing they show in the scenes women like tend to show the woman having sex with a powerful and wealthy man, while not exactly her idea, she enjoys it. And of course since we’re talking rape the woman isn’t responsible for the choice. He raped her, after all.

Now I would consider this the female version of the male fantasy of having hot women hit on him and all but jump on him. The fantasy is different different from the male simply because women aren’t going to fight off most men.

But this should then translate to a small fraction of real life encounters, right? It's certainly not the central example of rape, but there are powerful and wealthy man in real life, and a lot of them are horny and unethical enough to wield their power and influence to coerce the women around them into sex, which in turn removes responsibility for her choice. While probably the majority of the women in this scenario have a bad and icky and possibly traumatizing experience, it seems like some of them might enjoy it because it's literally their fantasy playing out in real life.

There’s mentally ill women who seek out getting raped as a form of self harm(the term for these people is ‘crazy’) and there are women who have a fetish for getting raped by men they wanted to have sex with anyways, and we should probably note with this group of fetishists that the median woman doesn’t actually want to have sex outside a relationship so date rape as casual sex is still unwelcome to these women.

Louis CK has met one of the people you're talking about.

Yes, there are whole subreddits full of them. /r/Rapekink for example. Yeah I have a thing for digging up weird corners of the internet where utterly bizarre stuff happens.

Evidently, there is such a thing as "rape baiting", where women who actually want to be raped, for whom role-playing isn't enough, go out seeking to be raped. They have a whole FAQ on it, trade tips on how to do it most effectively, and share stories of their most successful attempts!

There's also a lot of women posting there about what happened to them and how they feel about it. Many seem to be struggling, not quite sure how to feel about it. Things like, not liking it, but also not wanting to think of themselves as victims, not seeing it as the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone. I can see going to a place like that when you don't really want the fawning sympathy treatment but aren't quite sure what you actually think about it.

I have no clue what percentage of women overall think or feel along these lines. Even coming up with a way to measure it accurately seems difficult. But there's enough written about it that I don't think it's all fake or like 0.1% or anything like that.

How much posting on subreddits like that do you really think is organic and how much do you think is trying to spin up male attention? I'm not going to rule out the former but I'm going to mostly bet on the latter.

I think it's mostly the former. Possibly there are a few creative writing exercises on there, but I'm doubtful there's anything organized like that going on about it.

Nobody is going to go to that much effort to spin up male attention just for kicks. If somebody was doing something like that, it'd be for money, and there would be pretty clear tells. Links to OnlyFans accounts or other paid fetish porn sites easy to find, use of accounts that were purchased for higher karma or otherwise artificially karma-boosted by lots of unrelated low-effort posts in mainstream subs, lots more active engagement with male "fans". Not to mention being quarantined by Reddit would be a death-knell for such an operation, to be avoided at all costs or abandoned if unavoidable, rather than a mild inconvenience with some upsides, which is how it seems to be treated. Plus, people doing marketing-like things mostly just aren't all that creative. Go on any porn sub on Reddit, you'll find OnlyFans links behind almost every profile. That's what spinning up male attention looks like.

It smells to me a lot more like a group of fantastically weird people who are mostly self-aware about how weird they are who have built a small and out-of-the-way community to discuss their weird thing than some kind of artificial operation. Perhaps not all that different from this forum here infact.

I think it’s organic. Male attention is not hard to spin up and I would predict that the median poster their expects there to be no male attention on that board.

Things like, not liking it, but also not wanting to think of themselves as victims, not seeing it as the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone

This is not meaningfully distinguishable from men who go to bars with the intention of getting into barfights.

And... like, it's just sex. You can die from getting into a barfight because that's inherently dangerous, suffer a medical condition that affects you for the rest of your life, or suffer psychological damage (people who get mugged tend to look over their shoulders a lot more often, for instance); sex is not meaningfully or materially different.

Which these women recognize, obviously; this is a simply a consequence of gender equality. Actually, it's even more noteworthy since it takes an active rejection of the societal privilege women are granted to see unwanted sex as something special and distinct from "standard" assault (in diametric opposition to the women who aren't raped but claim they were for social clout reasons).

This is provided they're telling the truth about what they feel, though criterion of embarrassment and that hard rejection of the "easy way out" heavily suggests they are.

The basic idea of sin is that there are certain actions which seem likely to cause temporary pleasure but will in the long run only lead to suffering. People generally are sinful, and virtually every conceivable sin has been committed at some point by someone who wanted to do it.

Wanting to get raped is similar to wanting to rape someone in the sense that it is an incorrect, invalid preference. In some senses those who want it to happen are worse off than those who don't--they have a longer way to go to get back to a healthy psyche and the capacity to form stable, healthy romantic relationships. If Sally wants to be raped and it actually happens, this preference may be reinforced and she'll probably seek out more dangerous, unstable, abusive men who trigger to some extent the same desire in her. It's a totally different kind of suffering but just as bad and spread over a much longer period of time.

Our current culture's fervor to recognize all preferences as valid has forgotten an absolutely crucial concept, which is that people can not only make mistakes but have harmful (invalid) preferences. People in general can truly "consent" to virtually anything, including flagrant acts of self-harm, but that doesn't make those acts okay or something society should encourage. It especially doesn't mean their preferences will remain static--someone who burns off their own hands in a fit of mental illness may recover from these disordered preferences in the future and regret their own actions. Consent doesn't carry forward into the future--that person cannot now consent to having no hands; the choice was made for them by their past self.

Sally may not ever fully recover, or recognize that she was harmed, but that doesn't mean she wasn't harmed. This is an uncomfortable position to take because it requires a sense of moral sovereignty. We know what's right for her even if she doesn't, and we say she was harmed even if she disagrees. This is already the position most people take regarding mental illness, even people who think morality/values are entirely subjective, and it has to be extended to less obvious mental illness too. We have to acknowledge that it's possible to have bad preferences, that there is such a thing as an evil action even if its only victim is the perpetrator, because if we don't then our moral philosophies (such as consent-only sexual ethics) will collapse under the weight of all the epicycles they will require.

This is a good argument. I'm certainly not trying to argue that rape is okay if the person enjoyed it. But in this case that would still imply that the appropriate social/therapeutic response to such a victim is entirely different than the response to a more typical rape victim, right? A thing happened to them and instead of traumatizing them due to something horrible that they hated happened, a thing happened to them and it wasn't immediately horrible but instead messed with their preferences and self-perception. Or simply brought to light that their preferences were already messed up. And it doesn't seem like the way to help them heal, the way that society is structured to try to help rape victims heal, would be the same.

Well, from a practical standpoint, I think women are very susceptible to social pressure and telling them that something was traumatic has a good chance of making it actually traumatic. Which ironically enough is what I want in this case--better to be traumatized by something terrible than to seek it out for the rest of your life. I guess there are probably a few people clear-minded enough to see through this, and they need to be dealt with more honestly, but as a society we have no consensus on these things so even something like "that wasn't traumatic but it should have been" is not something everyone will agree on. Probably more effective to say something like "that was traumatic and this is how you process trauma."

That's an interesting perspective I hadn't considered before. But if you dig into that it's kind of like inflicting psychological punishment on someone for their own good. Like if a kid is picking on their siblings, and they don't really understand the long-term adult consequences of being a jerk (nobody will like you and you will have no friends and be lonely), so you spank them so that they learn to associate the bad behavior with pain. You are inflicting pain that previously didn't exist, and could be avoided on the first order simply by not punishing them, because you expect that in the long term it will improve their behavior and make them better off due to second order effects.

Except in this case instead of a parent it's all of society inflicting the punishment, and it's inducing psychological trauma into them instead of physically spanking them, and they're adults instead of children. But it is still supposed to be for their own good. I'm not sure how I feel about that. And as a side effect you also end up inducing trauma into the subset that genuinely tried to avoid being raped, will try to avoid it in the future, but happen to be tough enough not to be traumatized by the experience unless society induces it into them. And those people may be more common than the sort who irresponsibly set themselves up to get raped semi-on purpose.

Some people enjoy being killed and eaten. They even record a video telling everyone they were fulfilling their biggest dream. Their partner still goes to prison for murder and cannibalism.

Anyway, there's no central definition of rape anymore, so we have to examine each one separately.

  1. You invite the dude upstairs for a coffee; the vibe is off, but he won't leave and makes advances to you, you are a bit too tipsy and tired to argue, so you have sex with him to get him to leave. The "new" forced central example, and the one I have the biggest doubts about. I would appreciate if anyone knows women that are explicitly into that.

  2. A handsome, high-status acquaintance safely overpowers you or blackmails you into sex. A very non-central example, probably the most commonly fetishized one, as already discussed by other commenters.

  3. An ugly, low-status stranger safely overpowers you or blackmails you into degrading, no-kinks-barred sex. All I can say is, more women watch kink.com porn than you think.

  4. An ugly, low-status stranger beats you up or threatens you with bodily harm to coerce you into relatively vanilla sex. The "old" central example. People already wrote about /r/rapekink, but I remember another story I read on Reddit, probably on /r/tifu or something.

The guy's girlfriend had a rape kink and it was an itch that he couldn't scratch no matter how hard he tried. Rough sex? No. CNC? No. 24/7 CNC? Still she kept complaining that it didn't really tickle her fetish because she could tell it was him and it was 100% safe sex, she wanted something that was indistinguishable from "the real thing". So he waited until she had to fly to a different town on a business trip, bought a disguise, secretly flew there as well, ambushed her in a park and had surprise sex with her before revealing his identity. Well, that was when she realized she didn't really have a rape fetish.

The moral of the story is: while there's at least two people in the world that into any kink you might think of, people routinely lie to each other and to themselves.

Some people enjoy being killed and eaten. They even record a video telling everyone they were fulfilling their biggest dream. Their partner still goes to prison for murder and cannibalism.

I will push against the lack of is-ought distinction here. I am entirely in support of radical bodily autonomy, if a sane and informed person wishes to be killed and eaten, I won't stop them, or seek to punish anyone who, uh, lends them a hand or a mouth. Emphasis on sane, of course, but people can be weird enough to have all their cognition and still want absurd and harmful things, but as long as it's done to them and they can't be talked out of it while retaining capacity, I wish society would let them.

That's reasonable. I just wanted to generalize the issue, to show that rape wasn't unique in this regard.

You're going to have trouble reconciling that with any reasonable definition of sanity. Most that I've seen try either give up on the concept of mental illness altogether or cop out to i-know-it-when-i-see-it.

Quite a few things that are common in the human condition are past the verge of what counts as sanity for me. That being said, while I agree that the majority of people who wish to be killed and eaten are mentally ill, in a manner that might be amenable to treatment, I think there are a non-zero number who have no other mental illnesses, ignoring "wants to be eaten" by itself.

For the latter, well, it's their body and their choice, advocating for radical bodily autonomy requires me to bite that bullet.

Why?

If your belief is that people should be trusted to make their own decisions, well, people are wrong all the time, and suicide is irreversible. It is quite common for people to make decisions they'll regret later, and putting guardrails around certain large decisions (not making them impossible, mind, just preventing people from getting away with them without careful planning) protects people.

For the same reason babies can't be trusted to not eat toys, toddlers can't be trusted to be alone around fire or bodies of water, and children can't be trusted to make large medical decisions on their own, adults generally can't be trusted to fully understand what it means to be killed and eaten. The few who can be trusted to actually understand what that decision means, are also perfectly capable of orchestrating and getting away with it, so a strict law banning that decision is really more of a filter banning it for the less intelligent and conscientious.

If your belief is more general--that people have a right to their own preferences--then I submit to you that people are frequently wrong about their own preferences. Preferences are built atop more basic preferences, and most people are not great builders.

Why?

I am firmly for people being in as close to total control of their bodies, in life and manner of death, as feasible.

For the same reason babies can't be trusted to not eat toys, toddlers can't be trusted to be alone around fire or bodies of water, and children can't be trusted to make large medical decisions on their own, adults generally can't be trusted to fully understand what it means to be killed and eaten.

I disagree strongly. I understand perfectly well what it means to be killed and eaten, and have no desire to undergo that fate. So do most people. But if someone, however rare, is otherwise a sane and functioning member of society and harbors a desire to be cannibalized, then I support their right to do as they will with the most inalienable of properties, themselves.

I'm an advocate for the availability of MAID (though implementation details can vary) and I see nothing wrong with the occasional art piece where someone lets others dine on bits of themselves while alive (memory brings up someone using the fat removed during liposuction to fry food). Where's the stretch when I already consider those acceptable? Personally, if I was dead beyond hope of recovery (and wasn't set for cryogenic preservation), I couldn't care less what's done with my corpse.

The few who can be trusted to actually understand what that decision means, are also perfectly capable of orchestrating and getting away with it, so a strict law banning that decision is really more of a filter banning it for the less intelligent and conscientious.

A fair point, but I'm a stickler for principle here. I'd rather have a formal system where people are exhaustively examined and certified as being "sane and intelligent enough to make stupid decisions" and then let them do as they will. I'd hope that's the default assumption for most people, we already let people drink more than is good for them or eat themselves into obesity, and while attempts to regulate that or reduce negative externalities by things like banning drunk driving exist, most people are against societal meddling as invasive as outright prohibition or somehow making fatness illegal.

A society that only lets people make "good" decisions is a tyrannical one as far as I'm concerned.

I don't want to nitpick every way someone can off themselves. I'd rather have a means for people to prove that they're competent to kill themselves, and then let them choose how to dispose of the body (or the means of death) as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else.

If your belief is more general--that people have a right to their own preferences--then I submit to you that people are frequently wrong about their own preferences. Preferences are built atop more basic preferences, and most people are not great builders.

Inconsistent preferences != wrong preferences!

We all have conflicting preferences. My desire to have a burger conflicts with my desire to lose weight. Someone's desire to have a good family life conflicts with their desire to be a billionaire.

There are often temporary conditions that can make people do things that cause a combination of permanent harm while being something they wouldn't want on reflection. But if someone who isn't otherwise mentally ill wants to be eaten, is able to articulate their preferences and reason about them, and can't be convinced to do otherwise over a decent length of time, I'm not standing in their way (unless legally and regulatorily obligated, which I am).

Inconsistent preferences != wrong preferences!

We all have conflicting preferences. My desire to have a burger conflicts with my desire to lose weight. Someone's desire to have a good family life conflicts with their desire to be a billionaire.

There are other points I could bring up, but I think this is the crux of our disagreement. I also want to both eat burgers and lose weight. I want to lose weight for all sorts of reasons (live longer, feel better, be healthier, look better, make more money) and have basically one reason to eat a burger--it tastes good. Any healthy person should be able to weigh these preferences and make a decision to diet. The fact that I don't do that means something is wrong with me, according to my own (and in my opinion any reasonable) set of values. A healthy society should also be able to weigh these preferences and come to the same conclusion.

There are second order effects that make universal government-mandated diet programs a bad idea, but I think it would be fine for the government to force me on a diet if I weighed, say, 450 pounds. At that point I've demonstrated an inability to abide by my own long-term preferences to any degree. If you take me, with my current values, and put me in a vacuum, I'd probably even agree ahead of time to abide by the diet because I recognize it's a good idea, even if in the moment I'd try to fight it.

Maybe you could go anarcho-capitalist with this and let people decide ahead of time which social contract they want to follow and how restrictive it will be. Some people can live in the forced-diet country and some can live in the eat-all-you-want country. But in my opinion this doesn't take things nearly far enough. If you take the veil of ignorance to its logical conclusion, there are people who now in this life have incorrect preferences. I think mentally healthy people, behind the veil of ignorance, would commit to protecting each other from these harmful preferences. It's reasonable to agree to some social compact along the lines of "we'll both do what's necessary to protect each other from class V obesity."

The preference to eat isn't wrong necessarily, but it is actually wrong to place it above the preference to live longer, and it's something I and most people do all the time, because we aren't perfect. If your model of people and human rights doesn't account for imperfection (or sin as I wrote elsewhere) then your ideal government will lead to a lot of suffering as people are enabled to pursue their worst impulses.

In short, there are two ways (relevant to this discussion) that preferences can be incorrect, and they bleed together. The first is that your priorities are wrong. This usually has to do with time preference--you logically know you shouldn't eat the burger, but dieting is long-term and the burger is right there. The second has to do with knowledge--maybe you simply don't fully understand what it means to die 10 years early, or how great being skinny feels. Either way, I'd say just about everyone has wrong preferences and that when they're wrong enough the government should step in and intervene.

When and where to intervene is another question. I'm fine with MAID, particularly for those already dying anyways, but I worry about the cultural effects of government (so society)-endorsed suicide. Same with cannibalism, if you make it legal sometimes, the taboo starts to unravel. I think culture warms up to cannibalism generally and people suffer unnecessarily. So on the object level, I'd still prefer cannibalism be illegal. If people really want to do it they can skirt around the relevant laws in secret, without the government stamp of approval. But I don't think that's where our disagreement really lies, and I could probably be persuaded otherwise about cultural dynamics.

Authorities are investigating after at least two ballot boxes were set on fire Monday morning in the Portland, Oregon, area.

Police responded to a call about a fire in Portland about 3:30 a.m. Monday, the Portland Police Bureau said in a statement. An “incendiary device” was placed inside the box and security personnel extinguished the fire, officials said.

CNN has reached out to the Multnomah County Elections Division for comment.

So it seems that there are some vulnerabilities in the early voting system. The people are getting crazier and the whole election is getting heated. Literally.

Can you think of any other innovative tactics that could disrupt the election - especially since there is literally a non zero chance couple of hundred votes somewhere in Pennsylvania or the Midwest to swing the election one way or another.

Can you think of any other innovative tactics that could disrupt the election

Not today, federal agent.

A couple points here:

  1. There is a significant chance that this was just methheads doing methhead shit and there's no political motivation at all. This is the most likely, imo.

  2. The next most likely outcome was that this was the local anarchist/black-bloc idiots. So theoretically left aligned, but mostly just retarded agents of chaos. Slightly better organized than the drug-retarded agents of chaos in #1 above, but still not great culture war fodder because basically everyone already hates them.

  3. There's a slim, slim chance that this was anything more meaningful, but what would the purpose possibly be? The local elections are absolute chaos because the city switched to rank choice voting and expanded from a five person city council to a 12 person city council all in one shot, so there's no clear benefit to burning ballots because nobody has any clue how this is going to shake out. For national elections Oregon is as blue as it gets, so pretty much nothing can move the needle there.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/28/us/ballot-box-fires-oregon-washington/index.html

The boxes are about 15 miles apart. The one in Vancouver is in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, where one of the most competitive House races in the country is taking place.

This seems to point to #2 - this was coordinated across state lines and not some spur-of-the-moment thing. But I can only speculate as to what the local anarchists think they're accomplishing by doing this. Maybe it's a far-left accelerationist thing: "We want Trump to win while Kamala supporters think it's rigged, so that the system will be discredited in the eyes of liberals and they'll realize that since voting D won't change anything, radical action is needed."

Have we considered it might be a right wing extremist? It doesn’t seem like their usual MO but it’s definitely possible.

Right. Because setting two mailboxes on fire is going to turn Portland red. Nope, there's nothing to "consider" here, it's not even good as a Disney movie plot. And that's a very low bar.

But by the same token, Portland is already blue, so why bother?

Some people just want to watch the world burn. Portland is where their safe space is.

Something tells me that whoever did this(and I’m not sold of the right wing extremist hypothesis but its categorical exclusion is strange) will not turn out to be a careful planner who gamed out the impacts for maximum political effect.

What's strange? When people consider violent acts done, in the city known by the multitude of violent acts performed by left wing extremists that has been tolerated and encouraged for years, and when there are no base nor numbers nor hope in the area for right wing extremists and they do not gain absolutely anything from it, then people go with most plausible explanation and exclude the least plausible? I think it's the least strange way of doing it.

That's why I'm going with homeless drug addicts or anarchist dipshits, this is definitely not part of some greater plot.

/r/Portland being absolutely 100% convinced it was the proud boys just makes me more sure.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but there's an article that police are looking for the owners of a Volvo S-60 spotted near the box via CCTV.

Yeah, and it looks like both were incendiary devices placed on the exterior of the boxes. That disqualifies criddlers, so now my money is on anarchists.

Devices With ‘Free Gaza’ Messages Found at Ballot Box Fires. Ah yes, the infamous "Free Gaza" right-wing extremists!

Yes, I will admit this was almost certainly some kind of lefty activist, probably antifa. Still think ‘right wing extremists’ should have been on the list of possibilities, albeit not as the #1, before we knew this.

A right wing extremist would have obviously just shot the boxes 5000 times with the ammo he had laying around in his truck, not used a Molotov. It's all about which tool you reach for.

There’s literally nothing innovative about arson. In related news, my parents went to see Conclave last week.

I disagree that a couple hundred votes, lost in a fire or flood, would sway the election. Too well-documented, I think. In the inevitable court case, you’d actually be able to point to the abuse, and…hmm. I suppose I don’t know what the remedy would be. Runoff? Cage fight?

This was intended to hurt Joe Kent, where dozens or hundreds of ballots will absolutely matter.

Is the box located in an area that'd be expected to go for Joe Kent?

I’m saying that, if the race is close enough, “someone burned two ballot boxes of votes” is fuel for a recount. Or whatever court remedy is allowed. It’s provable in a way that 2020 allegations weren’t.

You can’t count ballots that no longer exist. They’d have to hold the election all over again. Apparently this is a thing that happens.

They're intending to hurt the Republican candidate by setting fire to ballots in urban Portland? Do you think those ballots leaned R or leaned D?

Edit: there are two burnt mailboxes. One in the 1000 block of Southeast Morrison Street, Portland. This is not even in Washington so obviously it has nothing to do with Joe Kent. The other one was in the Fisher's Landing transit center in Vancouver. That is actually in WA-03 but Clark county, which contains Vancouver, has Kent lagging behind majorly, so I really don't see the connection at all.

That was the primary, not the general, and you'll notice that there are two Republicans splitting the vote. I expect a win by less than two points, but mayhaps I'll eat crow on that expectation.

I thought we were talking about the one in Clark County, and was unaware of the Portland one.

I would guess this is Antifa/black bloc types, because they are prevalent in both sides of the border.

That was the primary, not the general, and you'll notice that there are two Republicans splitting the vote.

Thanks for the correction. Clark county was still blue in the 2022 general.

https://archive.is/mZo7J

I expect a win by less than two points, but mayhaps I'll eat crow on that expectation.

Perhaps, but that doesn't prove that this was supposed to hurt Kent. I don't have sub-county numbers but I don't see why someone would target this mailbox to hurt the Republican candidate.

I thought we were talking about the one in Clark County, and was unaware of the Portland one.

The OP was about the Portland one.

Oooh, that’s smart. The evidence is literally destroyed, along with the ballots. Authorities would be able to switch to fire-resistant envelopes if this became a problem, but not until the next election cycle.

...

No. I think if someone threw a match inside they would be able to catch him. My assumption is that this was some kind of delayed chemical reaction that was engineered to take place within one of the envelopes, the kind of thing that takes planning.

I think you have a massively optimistic idea of the competence of law enforcement.

Any such speculation is pointless unless and until we know who did this. It could be a GOP member worried about ballot stuffers. It could also be a democrat burning republicans ballots. It could be the government trying to cast doubts on a potential Trump win. It could be a teenager doing the equivalent of stuffing a firecracker in the mailbox because fire is cool. Trying to guess why it happened with no evidence of who did it is just going to end up with all sides accusing all others of trying to manipulate the outcome of the election. We have no idea.

But how likely are we to find out who did it? 50/50 seems high odds. Throwing a molotov into a mountain of paper isn't exactly something that is all that easy to sleuth out. Unless the offender drove up with a license plate visible to nearby cameras or stared into one their ID is going to be pretty hard.

Left off "homeless guy setting the fire because he wants to get arrested." e.g. https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/ballots-damaged-after-usps-mailbox-lit-fire-phoenix

fire-resistant envelopes

My biggest complaint about The Batman other than it's absurd length.

Not the Riddler being 100% sane and rational until the director/writers realized he was too sympathetic and had him start indiscriminately target civilians with a flood?

Something like that. The film had a very lengthy narrative about Batman following the Riddler's string of murderers and clues. And also Selina's struggle against her father. Those story lines all wrapped up and the film was over. Wicked father dead, Riddler in jail. We're done.

And then they introduce the bomb truck/overly online white guy terrorists plot line and it goes on for another half hour or so. Pointlessly excessively long. And as you mention they threw away a better interpretation of the Riddler in which he murders corrupt politicians and mofiosos who wronged him and every other orphan in Gotham.

A few off the top of my head:

Power substation attacks on Election Day, killing power to polling stations in a major metro for an extended period, say a few days.

A flood of mail-in ballots using the names of registered voters and info gleaned from credit agency data leaks, not necessarily with the intention of having them counted but to overwhelm the various crosscheck and verification systems. Bonus if lots of voters get to the polls on election day only to learn a ballot has already been submitted in their name.

Theft of a significant proportion of a large jurisdiction's paper ballot supply. Again, bonus if not discovered until late. Alternatively, a supply chain attack causing a significant fraction of ballots mixed into the overall supply to be slightly misprinted, requiring checking each blank manually to ensure it is correct.

Radio/cellular signal jammers covering polling places: as I understand it, the vast majority of machines use some type of communications signal to report results at the very least.

Exposure of a poorly concealed scheme to outright buy votes for cash (false flag, of course).

I'm gonna suggest that it's probably not a great idea to come up with long and seriously-considered lists of ways to upset civil society, especially those that could be planned and executed in less than a week.

An hour after I wrote this, /u/SomethingMusic linked to reports of what appears to be Bad Idea #2 in action.

I think most of these would be tough to pull off in a week though, with the possible exception of jammers.

(Hi feds! I'm a good guy, promise.)

Probably not for an individual to publicize them. But isn't this the perennial question in security vulnerability reporting? An organization says they have perfectly secure systems; an investigator thinks of a dozen ways they're not secure and reports it; organization responds in a way that the reporter doesn't think is serious and so makes them public.

especially since there is literally a non zero chance couple of hundred votes somewhere in Pennsylvania or the Midwest to swing the election one way or another.

This is one of the many reasons why the electoral college is so profoundly stupid.

  • -10

I actually have the opposite opinion: it prevents local shenanigans from swinging the overall vote except in niche cases (which admittedly have happened at least once in my lifetime in Florida). National popular vote means that any ballot box can be stuffed to swing the result, subject to mostly local rules on elections.

Although I will concede that it's disproportionate weighting of votes between states is probably not ideal.

The amount of ballots you can stuff (or otherwise compromise) is in either case proportional to what turnout "should" be for a given area. But the net effect is smaller if the race is decided by millions of voters versus thousands. Also, in a popular race you have to spread out the vote fixing over more overall states or people can catch your interference by looking for states where turnout is unusually high. Meanwhile in an EC race you can focus your operation on specifically the swing states, which have a built-in explanation for high turnout.

If you don't believe me, just look at the non-illegal "vote-fixing" measures the candidates have been using-- making all sorts of promises narrowly tailored toward swing state voter interests specifically.

How so? With the national popular vote you encourage such vote inflation practices nationwide. Engaging in election security would be gimping your own state's votes, better to just have the election security of a subway turnstile during rush hour. A city of 100k produces 200k votes? All the better for amplifying the will of your state citizens.

All the incentives for rigging the vote already exist everywhere-- people want to win local elections too. But in truly national vote small state-level distortions have less effect on the overall total, and natiomal election-fixing rings have to deal with a fact that large secrets aare harder to keep.

In a world where elections are run by mutually-distrusting state governments, the logic of the electoral college (fixed number of EVs per state, allocated winner-takes-all) improves election security because it means there is nothing for a one-party state government to steal - to steal a presidential election you need to tamper with votes in a state with functioning two-party politics, which means committing multiple felonies with a sympathetic and politically powerful victim. The actual machinery of the electoral college is bad because it creates additional attack vectors (what happens if you blackmail or threaten an elector to vote faithlessly?) and creates additional process steps which take up time pointlessly, cutting into the time available for recounts and investigations.

A version of the electoral college where each state government cast its electoral votes directly (by certificate fedexed to the Capitol on January 5th, by Eurovision-style capitol-to-capitol video link of January 6th, or by some hypothetical future system of secure electronic communication between federal and state governments) would just work better. To avoid the Hawaii 1960 problem, you could require the state chief justice to countersign the certificate to confirm that there is no ongoing state court litigation that could change the vote.

I'll preface this by saying that I don't think statistically significant election fraud has ever happened for the presidential elections. For state elections I don't know. But in the counterfactual, isn't there a stronger incentive for precariously positioned swing state government officials to fix the vote in the hopes that the national party returns the favor through patronage than for a securely positioned official to risk their reputation?

Also, moving past the election security question and more directly addressing the "should we have an ec question"... If we're sticking to per-state voting and giving state governments even more power to shift things their way... Why not just return to the original way of doing things, where state governments selected electors directly? I'm strongly in favor of the popular vote because I don't think states are or should be discrete cultural-economic interests... But if we're going to treat them like they are, I would unironically prefer the old way of doing things because at least it forces people to care about local politics.

ll preface this by saying that I don't think statistically significant election fraud

Does "except Illinois" go without saying nowadays?

I haven't heard about illinois election fraud. I've heard about their machine politics but thought that was the standard "not technically illegal" monopoly tactics.

So it seems that there are some vulnerabilities in the early voting system.

So there's some moisture in the Pacific Ocean!

But this particular thing is not going to disrupt anything important. We all know where Portland leans, and if due to unlikely turn of events, this will lead to one hyper-leftist local candidate losing to another hyper-leftist local candidate, nobody but other local hyper-leftists would care, and they like it this way. "Forget it, Jake, it's Portland".

Unfortunately this kind of media attention (itself an extension of Trump’s own bad faith arguments) is often a self-fulfilling prophesy similar to the nature of mass shooting coverage leading to copycat shooters, I predict.

The New York Times reports:

Investigators responding to arson fires at two ballot boxes in the Pacific Northwest this week found devices at both scenes marked with the words “Free Gaza,” according to two law enforcement officials. Investigators are trying to determine if the perpetrator was actually a pro-Palestinian activist or someone using that prominent cause to sow discord, one of the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing. But the message has added a heightened layer of political sensitivity to a closely watched investigation in the final days of a tense presidential election.

The “Free Gaza” message appeared not only on the two devices, which were discovered on Monday, but also on a device found at a third ballot box this month in Vancouver, according to the law enforcement officials. That device also had the words “Free Palestine” on it. Officials said at a news conference that they believed all three events were linked. They later released surveillance images of a suspect vehicle, asking for the public’s help in identifying the person driving a dark, early 2000s Volvo.

I guess we will never know who that was and what were their motives.


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