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The WSJ has a new article (archive link) out detailing a certain incident where Trump was composing fanfic of himself and Jeffrey Epstein bonding over their shared secret interest in the same kinds of women, and then signing his name to it. This was sent as a gift for Epstein's 50th birthday.
I personally don't think it's that bad, but I've been heavily radicalized against conspiracy theories over the past few years. I highly doubt Epstein was blackmailing huge swathes of wealthy/influential people with pedophilia. However, if I was given towards conspiratorial thinking this probably wouldn't be a great look for Trump.
EDIT: Trump has responded, and he's furious. It appears he desperately tried to have Rupert Murdoch crush the story, but that Murdoch apparently wasn't able to do so. Now he's promising to sue. Also, Hillary.
It also looks like he might cave and actually publicize it? I don't know if the grand jury stuff is all that people are interested in or what:
That’s bad. “Me and Epstein share a secret pleasure that only the elites are able to enjoy. This enigmatic thing never ages, wink wink. But you remember that from last time. I AM WRITING THIS WITHIN THE SILHOUETTE OF A NAKED WOMAN IN CASE THERE IS ANY CONFUSION”.
Eric Weinstein wrote on x a few days ago
The funders of Jeffrey Epstein were possibly able to blackmail both Bill Clinton and Trump. In the 2016 election, no matter what, they had leverage.
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We're gonna have to see if Trump actually goes through with the lawsuit and what happens over it, but given WSJ and Murdoch decided to go through with the article knowing his plans (they even state in the article that's the comments they got when reaching out to the admin) I'm expecting they might be storing more in the barrel still and baiting.
As a North Carolinian, I saw a similar story play out with Mark Robinson where he claims it's fake, starts a lawsuit and then quietly dropped it after things were no longer relevant. Especially funny cause he kept using the username in question too.
Still whether or not this particular letter is real is mostly a distraction from the Case of the Missing Epstein Files we kept getting promised only to end up not existing and things like the altered video. Probably why this is the first time JD Vance suddenly has some thoughts to share, of course none about the Epstein situation, it's so sad how we just don't talk about it anymore in favor of random drama of the day.
Anyway funniest conclusion will be a real letter but not by Trump or associates, but by Epstein and associates faking it and putting people's signatures on things for some weird fantasy.
Nah the funniest conclusion would be that 2003 Trump didn't actually know Epstein all that much, had met him in passing, but knew he was rich and connected (he's such good friends with Bill Gates AND Bill Clinton!) so he wrote this note off rumors he heard to appear in the know.
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There is a woman sitting in the Federal Correctional Institution, Tallahassee right now who could clear up so many of these mysteries. If only she could be convinced to speak, and could be trusted to tell the truth. Alas...
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Of course Trump is in the Epstein files. It was deniable 2 weeks ago ("two more weeks" guys finally get a win), but there is really only one reason everyone in the administration would suddenly get cold feet and display the same suspicious nothing-to-see-here attitude at exactly the same time. They didn't just want this quietly ignored, they wanted this GONE.
Yes, and?
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I find it impossible to believe that if there were some hint of damning evidence about Trump in Epstein's files that it wouldn't have gotten leaked during either of the last two elections. There is just no conceivable value that the Dem establishment would have held high enough to cause them to refrain.
Much more believable that the juicy parts of the relevant hard drives and data were "accidentally" thrown into an incinerator in 2019.
I've seen this excuse used approximately a thousand times, and look: what if your priors just are wrong here? What if the Democratic party and its surrounding establishment just aren't the all-powerful, almighty band of operators that this theory presumes that they are? What if genuinely is information that they haven't obtained, at least in usable form, until it comes out?
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What about Epstein's links to Mossad? Supporting Israel is a rare example of US bipartisanship, opening this can of worms would have serious consequences for relations with Israel. There would be MAD as Trump and Republicans name all the Democrats they know of with Epstein connections. Very damaging for both parties and govt legitimacy generally, it only strengthens outsiders and populists (see how Musk has been using this issue).
Plus it'd be a funding nightmare given how much Jewish patronage they get. The Republicans are propped up by Adelson money and now Yass, while the Democrats get lots of money from Soros and some of the other liberal Jewish donors. If you go through the biggest donors for each party, about 50% of them are Jews, more on the Democrat side. A bunch of Jewish billionaires (many of them strong Israel supporters) are unlikely to want lots of investigation into the corrupt connections of a Jewish billionaire with Mossad connections. They certainly don't want any more anti-Semitism in America, there's already lots of complaints and nervousness on that front.
From my post about 2020, I'm assuming it hasn't changed that much since then:
Mildly amusing, fictional, Thick of It video (Malcolm Tucker: NOBODY brings up dodgy donors because it makes EVERYBODY look bad!): https://youtube.com/watch?v=uaydTJqZoIM
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I think that Trump's involvement is the more peripheral "lot of smoke, no fire" kind of thing. The Democrats wouldn't release it because it would have just been brushed off as such and made it look like they were grasping at straws, just like the various prosecutions. If there was nothing they could prosecute, it would just be another smear that everyone forgot about in a week.
I don't know if they planned it this way, but it was good ammunition to have in the event that Trump won the election. Now that the pressure to release it is coming from his base, and he at least alluded to releasing it, but he has cold feet for some reason, it makes matters worse. It's like with his tax returns; it's unlikely that they would reveal any criminal activity, but there's something personally embarrassing that he doesn't want revealed. Now that he's been intransigent despite the pressure, anything that is in there that's unfavorable is going to have a much bigger impact.
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If there's one thing we learned about the Democratic establishment in 2024, its that they love themselves more than they hate Trump. Very possible that those in charge decided that the hit to Trump wasn't worth the risk to themselves or their friends from bringing additional scrutiny upon the Epstein story.
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Or the Epstein files have been destroyed and they don't want to admit it.
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My Trump-voting mother has been saying "of course Trump's in the Epstein files too" for like, years now? Quite a while at any rate. At least some segment of his base just took it to be common knowledge and wouldn't view it as a big revelation even if it was "confirmed".
FWIW, as a 2/3 Trump voter (albeit in a red state, so I knew my vote didn't matter and just thought it would be funny if he won the popular vote) I'm generally bored with the Epstein stuff and wouldn't be surprised if he was in it or if he was covering for others in his circle.
I mean, he's more Ross Perot and Bill Clinton than he is Pat Buchanan (so the immigration restrictionists should be expect to be betrayed), even if he was clever enough to ape the latter for politics' sake.
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That's deep. Feels like we're getting a rare look at the man behind the mask.
Never wrote a picture in his life. Does he regret that? Is there an artist in there, struggling to get out?
Better writing than most of what's on AO3.
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Ok, consider this a crash out. The last straw was the how many upvotes the "invasive species" comment got. There's just no way that the opinions on this site aren't tainted by racism. Too bad really, this place could be valuable otherwise.
Presumably this is a pointless post on my part, since you have already "crashed out" and thus, assuming you are a serious person and not some kind of attention whore, you will never read it.
But I'll say it anyways: Your post is in very poor form. If anything, complaining about "tainted by racism" and "could be valuable" smells a lot of you being a culture warrior who came here to do a victory lap around the deplorables rather than to engage with the site's actual purpose. Maybe that's wrong. We'll never know, since you're gone. But it's one more data point, one more anecdote in favor of the narrative that the left runs on purity spirals and echo chambers and cannot tolerate dissenting opinions. Presumably because current-day leftist thinking is built on lies and wishful thinking and cannot stand up to outright disagreement. Maybe that too is wrong, but again we'll never know. Not from you anyways.
Which is, quite honestly, a shame. I don't want The Motte to be an echo chamber, racist or otherwise. I'm racist enough myself, thank you very much. But of course you're right, we live under conditions of culture war, not culture polite exchange, and you presumably want to actually fight that war. You want to punch the nazis, reeducate the stupid masses susceptible to outmoded populism, and live in a world in which everyone is educated and enlightened and on the right side of history, and like all good leftists you are, of course, too good to waste your own time with the enemy.
Right? Wrong? No point in caring, you're gone.
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A few things.
First, nobody likes a flouncer. You would not be the first to decide this hive of scum and villainy is too much for you and crash out. And that's entirely fair. This place is not for everyone. But if you think loudly declaring you will take your marbles and go home will effect a change in the status quo... no, it probably won't. We allow people with unpleasant views to say their piece if they can stay just this side of attacking individuals or groups. That's by design, it's because we want to have a place where you can actually be exposed to someone able to make an argument for a point of view you might find reprehensible. I do not like racists, blackpillers, incels, white nationalists, accelerationists, Holocaust deniers, and our various other deplorables, but where else can I go (except a forum specifically dedicated to those views, which would be nothing but unfiltered bile and rageposting) to hear what they actually believe and engage with them?
"But I don't want to engage with racists!" you say. And again: fair enough. Maybe this place is not for you. But what is it you want, exactly? For us to be less racist, collectively? Then be one of those who pushes back. For us to not allow people to be racist? Might as well just demand we ban all the deplorables, right?
Second: @WhiningCoil earned a number of reports on that post. He gets reported a lot as he descends further into his bitter nihilistic hole. He's been temp-banned many times under his various alts since he first started blackpilling hard on reddit, so it's not like his seething rants about how much he hates (an ever-expanding range of people) have gone without consequences. That post (and several others of his) are in fact still sitting in the mod queue because I decided I was not going to be the one to make a decision about them.
Borderline posts about how much you hate your enemies are, well, borderline, and whether we decide they cross the line depends a lot on how a particular mod reads the particular wording. Outright saying "Black people are a violent invasive species" would be unambiguously cause for a ban. Saying plainly "I hate black people" would get a lot of reports but would actually be allowed. You are allowed to hate people here! Making a nasty innuendo is, well, borderline. Same goes for a lot of the various posts we get about Jews Jews Jews.
As for the upvotes, would it surprise you to know that many of our most heated, reported, and ban-baiting posts also get heavily upvoted? The more spicy your screed about how much you hate Those People, the more likely that a lot of other people who also hate Those People will upvote you. Yes, that means we have a lot of haters here. You'll notice quite a few people also downvote those posts, though, so it's not one-sided.
So yes, this site is "tainted by racism." We have racists here, and they aren't banned just for being racist. That is intentional. The intent is not to be a haven for racists (though we've certainly been accused of being just that), but to be a place where people can say the things they can't say elsewhere, and then have to defend it. I only wish more people like you would muster the wherewithal to argue back instead of just getting indignant and leaving.
The problem is that the original comment wasn’t even an argument.
There is a fundamental tension with this moderation stance: while “Black people are a violent invasive species” may be ban-able, it’s at least an idea that can be challenged and dissected. However, “I hate black people” cannot, especially if it’s expressed without any surrounding context to challenge.
What is someone supposed to even say to that? There is no idea to respond to, only a person, but we are not allowed to make personal attacks. It’s frustrating to hear the only response to @shoeonfoot — “just debate the hot takes” — completely miss the point.
The original comment wasn't about African-Americans in general though but about the African-American criminal underclass.
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It depends on the context.
"I hate black people. Black people suck! We should get rid of them!" would be an obvious violation of the site's ethos of aiming to bring light instead of heat.
"I hate black people. However, I realize that this is an emotional reflex and if I analyze things more objectively, I realize that not all black people fit the stereotype that I have of them." would not be a violation, since it would bring more light than heat.
WhiningCoil's comment is, to me, pretty clearly more like my first example than like the second. But as Amadan pointed out above, WhiningCoil has not been exempt from mod action, so it seems to me that the system is working decently.
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I'm here and I'm not a racist. I'll keep chugging along.
Can we please not be reddit fixated on vote tallies?
If you don't want to be fixated on vote tallies, the site shouldn't have vote tallies thrown in your face on any post over 1d old.
No actually we've managed to avoid fixating on quote tallies 'til now despite having votes viewable after 24 hours since back on reddit iirc. We just don't fixate on vote tallies.
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I also think having an upvote/downvote system on what's supposed to be a neutral discussion forum is just completely idiotic. Everyone just uses it as an "I agree" button for upvotes and "I disagree" for downvotes. This functionally means any left-leaning or even just contra-MAGA opinion gets heavily downvoted. I've had plenty of people then use this as an excuse to claim the equivalent of "uhhh, can't you see you're getting a lot of downvotes!?! Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe this is because you're wrong and stupid!?!?!?!?" Pure heat, negligible light.
However, you can actually block yourself from seeing the score if you use Ublock Origin and add the following to your filter list:
I consider this 100% essential if you want to use this site and ever substantially disagree with MAGA talking points.
For the record, I do not upvote or downvote people on here, and I would support getting rid of the upvote/downvote system here entirely. It gives me a nice pleasant dopamine hit to see a comment of mine upvoted, and I enjoy that very much, but overall, I feel that upvote/downvote systems make political discussion forums worse, not better. For one thing, they feed into a sense that the people who are writing the comments are like athletes in the middle of an arena, fighting it out to the cheers of the audience. Not exactly something that inspires intelligent thought.
That said, I disagree with your notion that any left-leaning or even just contra-MAGA opinion gets heavily downvoted. I write contra-MAGA opinions on here all the time, and they get upvoted more often than they get downvoted. Sure, sometimes I write something that does not fit the average Motte writer's political opinions and I get downvoted a lot, and I can clearly infer that it is because the downvoters disagree with me. But given that I often write things that go against the local average and still get upvoted a lot, clearly it is more complicated than that.
But we literally are doing that.
It is the basis of all intelligent thought:
Socrates was a smart guy by all accounts, but I don't think that his kinds of methods were the basis of all intelligent thought. It is telling that in many of the Socratic dialogues, Socrates' opponents are essentially straw-men, written by Plato to serve as a foil for Socrates. Surely Socrates' actual real-life debates were not like this. How much do we know about how Socrates actually spoke and debated?
The Greeks also gave us several other methods for intelligent thought that are very different from Socrates'.
One such is the mathematical method of proof.
Another is the Aristotelian essay. Aristotle used a very different kind of rhetorical approach than the Socrates of Plato's works.
So did Thucydides, whose arguments in the History of the Peloponnesian War are very different from Socrates' style.
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This is a pretty good analogy.
Care to share an example or two of this? My experience has been stuff like this conversation, where I said I doubted that Biden was pocketing bribes.
I've had contra-MAGA posts that go slightly positive if they're very high effort, but the difference between me posting that and say, posting an antifeminist piece is that the contra-MAGA post will be like +50 | -45, while the antifeminist piece will be +50 | -2 or something.
Not sure if you would consider this anti-MAGA, but it's certainly anti-Trump: https://www.themotte.org/post/2240/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/345537?context=8#context
This one is me criticizing Trump's tariffs: https://www.themotte.org/post/1812/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/315024?context=8#context
Me being concerned about Trump's authoritarian impulses: https://www.themotte.org/post/1681/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/298689?context=8#context
Me criticizing Trump's desire to increase the military budget: https://www.themotte.org/post/1827/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/316103?context=8#context
Thanks for sharing these.
Your first example is one of the few places where MAGA and Trump actually strongly disagree (Epstein stuff) so it's not a great example. Your second and fourth examples are a bit better but still generally places where MAGA disagrees with Trump, although its much weaker and they just go with the flow.
Your third example is a genuinely good example and is mildly shocking for me to see. You're anti Trump in a place where MAGA agrees with Trump -- MAGA generally likes authoritarianism, or at least thinks classical liberalism is for "cucks" or "losers" of the David French variety. It stands at +50 | -19 and reads like the same tone of voice that I could have posted. I'm not sure if it's a rare anomaly or if you know of some pattern where it won't be net downvoted or at least a lot closer to neutral.
I thought you said MAGA is supposed to be a personality cult, blindly following everything Trump says.
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So, to be clear, the reason people get downvoted is because they express views that go against the majority opinion. The downvote button is a disagree button. You will continue to get downvoted as long as you're not in line with the consensus. Sorry.
That being said, I think the reason @Goodguy's third comment there didn't get downvoted is because he framed the issue as being more about Trump (an individual) and Trumpism (an abstract ideology), rather than MAGA (a concrete group of people, as you seem to be using the term). In the short comment I'm replying to, you said that MAGA "likes authoritarianism" and "goes with the flow". You can't hide your contempt for the majority of people who are reading your comment. That's obviously not going to endear them to you.
I'm glad we can agree this is what's happening. I wish this was universal knowledge here.
Is MAGA really that concrete of a group? I always understood it to be fairly amorphous -- I doubt many people would unironically identify with such a label on this forum, yet I know plenty of people here are effectively in it by the points they argue.
Buddy. Pal. Lemme level with you here. I gotta be brutally honest, because you did ask for an explanation of why you get downvoted so much.
You have, from what I've observed in your posts, a staggering inability to ever acknowledge when the person you're talking to has ever made a valid point.
Now obviously no one in an internet debate ever actually admits they were straight up wrong. But there's a difference between "yeah ok, that's true but your position is still bullshit because of XYZ" and "ah, no, erm, you see, you've simply misunderstood the situation as it were, it's actually not like that at all, I don't know what you're talking about..."
You seem to be particularly fond of the latter. And it's one of the fastest ways to really turn people off from listening to anything you have to say.
I told you that the way you phrased your post will read as insulting to many people here. I'm quite confident that this is a fact. There are many ways you could respond to this. You could say "well fuck 'em I don't care", you could say "it shouldn't be an insult if it's true", there are lots of things you could say in your defense that aren't just total capitulation and admission of guilt. But instead you chose "nope, that never happened, don't know what you're talking about". Which is essentially the most obnoxious type of response possible.
Again, the lion's share of your downvotes come from the simple fact that your views are anti-consensus, but your particular style of argument certainly doesn't help things.
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B A S E D
Karma, even temporary, is for parasocial dweebs
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This website also has a built-in custom-CSS feature in the settings.
Is there a way I can use that somehow? I'm a professional programmer, but I don't do a bunch of stuff in CSS...
Add the following code to your custom CSS:
button.m-0{display:none;}Interesting, thanks for that.
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Or you can just like, not let it bother you?
My whole last page of comments got ratio’d and I’m still alive.
Humans are basically hardwired to care about that sort of thing. For any average human, arguments between people are mostly just popularity contests, not truth-seeking exercises. Even though the Motte might be composed of people who are several standard deviations away from being "average" in that sense, it's still bothersome. If the downvotes happen on posts you also thought were not your greatest, that would be one thing, but having them happen only on posts with a particular type of political persuasion makes it start to seem like a BOO OUTGROUP button.
Some are evidently hardwired to care more than others.
There's a reason why TheMotte leans heavily rightist, while leftist spaces don't even let us post there.
Sure. I would have been right there with you thinking it was silly to care about downvotes if they didn't soft-censor your post like they do on Reddit. But then at least a portion of my views started diverging from the dominant thought paradigm on this forum, and the downvotes for well-researched posts started feeling pretty obnoxious.
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I wasn't enjoying the comments about women all that much either, but shrug, people here are interesting. They often say interesting things. I can just not read the threads that are mostly complaining about large groups of people.
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There are lots of views posted to the motte which are offensive to various sorts. I don't understand why your offense at racism should be privileged?
Actually, let's take a broader view- society tolerates, and even encourages, lots of views which are very offensive to me. Why is your offense at racism worse?
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I found WhiningCoil's comment to be unpleasant, but that doesn't invalidate the site for me. My opinions about black people are much much more sympathetic than that WhiningCoil comment and they often get a decent amount of upvotes too. Sure, there are many racists here. I mean actual racists, not race realists (I don't think there is anything bad about being a race realist). So what? If you don't like those comments just skip them. This site gets enough posts per day that the mods are simply not capable of policing all content that breaks rules such as "be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument", which WhiningCoil's comment certainly does. I think the mods do a decent job given how few of them there are.
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The value of TheMotte is precisely in the fact that it allows for cordial discussion of extremely controversial views, including racist views. The system is working as intended.
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As I will never get tired of explaining - the fact that something is racist doesn't make it wrong or false.
On my part, I can take anti-racist views seriously as long as they don't include such nonsensical ideas that the Somali minority in the US 'will breed with the whites in two generations and disappear'.
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It seems obvious to me that even assuming WhiningCoil's claim is "true," in the sense that young black men commit more crime, and this is inherent to their biology, and we have countless studies to prove it, it is still perfectly valid to strongly object to describing them as an invasive species. To do so is a blatantly dehumanising use of language that I believe could easily prime those who engage in it to see such a group as less than human, and therefore to be dealt with in the manner you would deal with non-human pests. This isn't complicated, it would be clear to everyone if he were describing Jews in a manner that compared them to vermin. So it is with blacks or any other ethnic group.
To be clear, I'm not accusing him of personally wanting to genocide or start a race war against blacks or anything, nor is this about being squeamish and finding the language offensive. But I think when you normalise referring to groups in such blatantly dehumanising and contemptuous terms, there is a clear risk of it contributing to a culture that views violence against them as legitimate.
There is nothing about acknowledging HBD or even arguing for explicitly racist policy that requires you to engage in this sort of thing, and the only thing it accomplishes is to potentially egg on the next mass shooter and to turn the public against you because whatever points you may or may not have, they can clearly see that your position is rooted in seething hatred and malice.
Do you genuinely believe that the next mass shooter is reading The Motte? And if the answer is yes, do you believe that his opinions would not have been radicalized if not for having read racially-tinged comments on The Motte?
Not necessarily The Motte specifically, but I'm talking about the phenomenon in general, wherever it might appear. I do think that the tendency of hard-right posters on places like /pol/ to casually and unironically refer to groups with names like mudslimes, shitskins, and so on contributes to the gradual dehumanisation of those groups in the users' minds, such that it becomes easier to justify indiscriminate violence against them. Obviously that also has to be combined with factors like anger at terror attacks or crime committed by members of the group, dismissal of concerns over it in the MSM and so on to produce that result.
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The implication that a "ghetto boy" is a member of a "virulent invasive species" is both literally false, and metaphorically wrong.
I shouldn't have to explain why it's literally false.
The metaphor is wrong because in the typical understanding, the actions we should take against "invasive species" should be extreme, up to and including eradicating them from the "invaded" area.
You can make a nature/nurture point just fine without bringing these kind of implications into it.
The metaphor is specifically telling you not to put yourself in a position where you would have to take extreme measures to remove the invasive species. Have you ever read an account of an adoption gone wrong? In the worst cases, it sounds like the stuff that makes family annihilations seem understandable. And just to get ahead of the obvious criticism, the worst such story I've ever come across involved adopting a pair of Eastern European girls, who proved to be violently uncontrollable wrecking balls on the lives of their adoptive parents.
The difference is with kids is that someone has to raise them. We don't eradicate them like we do knotweed or whatever. For the good of the kid and society efforts must be made to get them to adulthood. A group home is unlikely to do as good a job as a family with resources. It may well be horrible and difficult for that family, but it must be done by someone. Which is why we don't force people to adopt or foster generally. It's going to be tough in a lot of ways.
It's supererogatory work, so it's not very helpful to talk about these kids as invasive species. In addition the whole rant about nature vs nurture is flawed. by the time a kid is an infant in need of adoption from a poor area like a ghetto, almost always nature has been confounded by maternal alcohol or drug use, maternal or infant malnutrition, you have lead exposure in pipes, a high stress environment for the mother, quite probable early birth and low birth weight. Likely lack of doctor's care and feeding post-birth. Possible neglect and abuse post-birth. Because if they had those things or were looked after properly, they are unlikely to be put up for adoption in the first place. May not make their behavior as they age any better for the parents of course. But it isn't possible to declare it nature and therefore the behavior of an invasive species.
The Khmer Rogue disagree.
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I feel so gross for asking but could you please share some especially-lurid ones?
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I'm not disagreeing that adoptions can go wrong, and horribly so.
I'm saying that the "ghetto boy" bit paired with the "invasive species" metaphor is implying that black people specifically are the problem.
I guess I just think you should really stay away from species-based talk when discussing human subgroups, it's too easyr to be dehumanizing.
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That seems like a bad way to judge a metaphor? If you say "wolf in sheep's clothing" or "fox guarding the henhouse" that has very little to do with the typical way farmers respond to animals threatening their own animals (shooting them).
For reference, the quote in question:
Whether accurate or not, I think the crux of the metaphor would be the idea of carelessly planting something that is destructive to the other plants/environment (particularly because they aren't well-adapted to dealing with it), not any particular response. The focus is on the planting/nurturing, on some poor gardener who thinks all seeds are the same (e.g. is a blank-slatist regarding nurture/nature) and then is left with the consequences, not on what he should do afterwards.
That's sort of the crux of it, I think. What the OP probably meant is that a the son of black ghetto-dwellers who put him up for adoption isn't a case of invasive species in the ghetto where his parents are from. But in an affluent middle-class suburb mostly populated by clueless, low-testosterone White liberal normies, he pretty much is.
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Maybe a bit pedantic, but your examples are also common idioms. The "invasive species" thing isn't, so I wanted why I felt it had such a strong negative implication.
But also if the comment implied that every black person in group of whites is a "wolf in sheep's clothing" I'd have the same issue. Those are both also very negative idioms to apply to people.
I think the "ghetto boy, invasive species" bits change the message from "be careful with adoption because you might get a bad seed" (the individual you might adopt could be bad and there's nothing you can do) to "don't adopt a black kid, they're all bad, and they're ruining everything".
No, the actual claim is, “The specific black kids who are up for adoption/fostering in America are, to an extremely large extent, likely to be a huge problem.” They are not a randomly-selected cross-section of the overall black population. There is a reason why they are up for adoption, and it is nearly always a terrible reflection on the parents.
If you accept any sort of hereditarian explanation of human behavior, then it should matter to you that the kid you’re considering for adoption is very very very likely to be the child of A) a drug addict), B) an incarcerated person, or C) a teenage unwed mother. (Or the very common D) all of the above.) The same traits that led such a person to such a lowly state are likely to manifest at least to some extent in the child as well. Even if you don’t accept any hereditarian claims, you still have to worry about things like Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, childhood malnutrition, and even neglect/abuse leading to stunted cognitive/physical development, etc. Again, these things are not guaranteed to make the child a ticking time bomb, but the likelihood is far from zero.
These things are at least partially true of non-black children up for adoption or in the foster system as well, but to a markedly lesser extent. The likelihood of these problems just is higher when it comes to adopting a black child. That could change at some point down the road, and certainly there are numerous exceptions and success stories even today, but that doesn’t mean it’s immoral or misguided to take these things into account.
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I'm going to go ahead and support the metaphor.
Consider ailanthus. Imported to New York when air pollution was so bad and green spaces so rare that almost nothing else would grow (c.f. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn). Now it's endemic throughout the country, integrated into a ton of rather harsh towns, cities, and as roadside hedges, and it's not going to be eradicated. Even if it could be, people would be upset about it, because it's providing privacy and shade.
Consider the Siberian elm. Planted during the Great Depression to provide shade when, outside the river valleys with high water tables, it was pretty much the only tree that would grow. And it's edible! Now there are canopies in the high desert with nicely kept, mature elm trees, but also weedy wild elms. They aren't going anywhere. People would be upset if all those old, shady elm trees disappeared, though the roadside volunteers aren't always welcome.
Now consider malaria and heatstroke in the old South...
I'm not going to disagree that black people as a group share common adaptations for warm climates, that's obviously true, and not the morally wrong part of the metaphor.
the fact that there are some nice invasive species doesn't change the fact that the typical attitude towards them in general is still very, very negative.
And finally any implication that subgroups of people are different species i.e. not human is also morally wrong, especially just dropped into an unrelated conversation (the original comment made no mention of race).
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Do me a favor and explain why it's literally false?
Or, you know, at least stop subsidizing them.
You realize that black people didn't hop on their ships, cross the Atlantic and invade America, right? Forcibly enslaving people, displacing them from their homes and bringing them to America is vastly different from an invasive species...invading and ruining an ecosystem?
Bailey: But Chris, that was hundreds of years ago! Whiningcoil wasn't talking about the slave trade or all black people, just modern 'ghetto culture.'
Okay...are you sure he wasn't? But whatever, you realize that the parents willingly adopted this child, right? That they consented to adopting and raising a black child? They didn't ask for a white baby and some dastardly HR Karen with a humanities degree shoved a black baby into their arms at the last minute. There's no great replacement theory here, there's no 'hostile invasive species' invading their home against their consent. Just another post from Whiningcoil meant to rattle cages, which for all we know, could be entirely fabricated.
That's literally how invasive species work. If rabbits had been able to swim to Australia unaided, they wouldn't be invasive, they would be part of the natural ecosystem. Like the French and Spanish in the Americas. Do people even bother calling rats invasive? I suppose the British are the rats in this analogy.
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Black people are not a seperate species.
Sure make an argument about "we should stop subsidizing black people" (I especially agree with "don't subsidize people based on race specifically"). But don't do it in a dehumanizing way by calling them a seperate species.
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She doesn’t even go here!
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How can you abandon the non-racists to be devoured by those nazis? Without your help, we are surely lost. We’ll be forced down the alt-right pipeline, and it’ll be all your fault when we come out brown on the other side.
Lots of white nationalists are brown in more than one way...
Those shirts looks badass.
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Look at how so many people have been talking about white Americans for about a decade now... I'm not saying either is good but are you really surprised?
Identity politics can't only go in one direction forever. :marseyshrug:
IDK, the Jews and the Philistines have been going at it for at least 3000 years with no signs of stopping ...
That's two directions...
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I don't even see the comment that you're talking about.
This one from @WhiningCoil. I can see where she(?)'s coming from, I had my own problems with that comment's plausibly deniable undertones, but Coil's a particularly abrasive poster and I don't think the median Mottezen's opinions are necessarily "tainted by racism".
Hey I know of a kid like that. Friend of a friend, parents are very wealth. Like tens of millions. Adopted a kid. "Please just go be a ski bum in the alps we'll pay for it all!" Nope! Got caught trying to file the serial number off a pistol in a fast food parking lot. Kid's dream is to be a gangsta!
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How do you think this sounds with a different ethnic group? Are you sure you aren't tainted by racism?
If you listen to the progressives, everything is tainted by racism. Everyone except white liberals views everything through a lens of race, and even they do too, they just are polite enough to say that they don't. For black people, it's negative outcomes that they get handed through the system. For Asians and other minorities, it's perceptions about their ability at math or other minor things. I think, as time goes on and the two separate Overton windows continue to get further away from each other, you will see more and more blatant acknowledgement of things from the perspective of race, as this is something that the progressive left and the "dissident right" share a viewpoint on. Racism is, after all, the default state of humanity. It is natural, in that groups with differences will have disparate outcomes simply because they're different, and they are viewed differently because they are different.
The fourteen words:
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Like, yes, but also no? Mostly no. First of all, we should probably state that race doesn't really exist. There's nothing inherently, fundamentally, deeply different about human groups. There are some genetic quirks here and there. Sometimes these genetic quirks collect in particular geographical and sexual assortment groupings. But groupings mix and blend like crazy, and different quirks show up, and then sometimes get re-blended, and sometimes groupings get big enough that humans in their constant drive for classifying and categorizing and delineating end up giving them a linguistic label. Sometimes, quite frequently in fact, these linguistic labels end up being poorly applied, but sometimes they are pretty accurate, or the label shifts and stretches to match some underlying grouping. And anyways, these labels very often extend poorly and incompletely to individuals: even a single mixed-race person breaks all the categories.
In this context, the modern (popular) understanding of race is probably less objectively "correct" (insofar as it even makes sense to say) than the more ancient understanding of race. Historically, and I mean by that roughly before the initial advent of genetic theories and eugenics and all that stuff, racism was the case where it applied geographically to clustered sexual assortment groups. And usually (but not even all the time) this worked just fine, because mass migrations and mixings were semi-rare. We should also note that even here, culture and race are basically intertwined quite tightly, because both are primarily geographic and spatial in nature (although culture can spread memetically and through trade links faster than actual sexual interlinkage). These migrations did happen though with some decent regularity, but the typical person alive would have limited exposure to other groups anyways. As especially "empires" grew (typically defined as a cross-cultural/ethnic political entities, as opposed to "kingdoms"), and increasingly leveraged what we could call cultural technologies, you did start to see some differentiation.
But here, it's important to take things into perspective. Locally, skin tone differences due to tanning would imply social things mechanically, but melanin differences were not seen as the primary differentiator, and nor were other ethnic groupings. Empire-wide, you'd get some local-geographical discrimination and categorization, but the interplay with culture was also very important. And even more than culture, social status. If you look at Rome, for example, as a time in history when you had different ethnic groups interacting all over, and frequently (in a relative sense), social standing and nationality seemed to matter much more than localized ethnic groupings inherently. There was this general idea of "barbarians" but that had again more to do with culture than race.
Fast forward. Today, many people think of race as skin color, and maybe a few other scattered traits like facial structure or whatever. This is ahistorical, frankly, at least when it comes to skin color. Slavery really did a number on the country and dichotomized things, for one, and also the modern "categories" are, frankly, terrible, even without skin color explicitly. "Hispanic/Latino" is such a uselessly broad categorization. Brazilian is its own pot of crazy. "Middle Eastern/North African" is like, very loosely its own category but doesn't even show up in many official government questions. We now have this vague notion of "white" which sometimes does and sometimes doesn't include Eastern European origin in addition to Western European origin, and sometimes includes Spaniards but sometimes doesn't, and anyways I'm not going to get into all the (common) edge cases, hopefully you get the idea.
And underneath it all, you have increasing rates of "interracial" kids. Underneath it all, even if you are to try and be scientific about "race", you still have to make a highly controversial and indefensible decision, which is where to "snapshot" racial differences as a baseline. When we are talking about Chinese people, are we talking before or after the Mongol invasion? How local are we going? Are 'Han' Chinese from Northern China different than 'Han' Chinese from near the Vietnam border? Do we distinguish Koreans from Chinese? What about Japanese, who objectively stayed more isolated historically? How linearly do we interpret genetic distance? Is a Japanese person more or less different than a Chinese person vs a White English descent person from a Portuguese? Are we just admitting that we're taking culture and history into account, or are we still insisting on some genetic measure? If we're talking genetic facts, are we allowing for snap judgements?
All this to say that sure, historically humans discriminate, but no, they didn't think of race like we do now. Racism is an obsession of modern discourse, and it just doesn't make sense. Most notably, there's this conflation of culture, nationality, and genetic "race" as one giant construct - often this is lazily referred to as "race", but it really is more broad. Maybe we need a better word.
Now, many people here at the Motte seem to take the tack that so what, categories are imprecise, but all that matters is some kind of "predictive accuracy" for my mental heuristics. Can I predict that a Black-presenting person will rob my store, and does that merit treating them different? These are different questions, and have more to do with "discrimination" (which includes much more than race) than they do race itself, and I've gone on too long, but let me just end by saying that if you think historically there was anything remotely like these modern issues of 'asians are good at math' or 'blacks are criminals' you are dead wrong. Historically, those statements are really weird to say. Charitably, you can maybe say that these issues are common to the last ~2 centuries of history, as transportation technologies accelerated migration trends, but you really can't say more than that.
Not again, let's not have the HBD discussion for the billionth time again, here's the cliffs notes:
HBD is trivially true, what decisions, policies, actions are taken as a result of that are up to you, but you need to be aware that they exist because sooner or later you will run into physical reality. You can continue to run from it, you can plan around it, you can even make giant state sponsored psyops to make sure that the hoi polloi don't notice and to prevent them from slaughtering each other. Value judgements about what heritable traits are preferable are again, up to you. Maybe evolution will decide intelligence is the Great Filter and the morons will inherit the earth, what the fuck ever.
Racism depends on how you define it, I don't like Swedish food and I dislike the French but I'd struggle with anyone calling it racism, especially since the definition of what racism is has expanded vastly over the last decade to include the default state of literally every Southeast Asian who has to live around other ethnicities
That's sort of exactly my criticism of race and racism, it just doesn't serve the purpose. We should either talk about discrimination on the individual level, or talk about stereotypes on the group level (and not limit it to poor pattern-matching, open it up to more than just genetic ancestry - let's talk culture and more, directly). Racism is a bad word because it can be applied to either case! Race by itself means genetic ancestry, and quite obviously genetic ancestry is not the biggest thing that matters when talking group-wide trends, fair or unfair alike (plus as I pointed out the ancestry gets fuzzy edges way too easily in modern life, especially melting pot countries like the US). I'm not even trying to start a HBD debate or anything. I agree on the trivially true bit and maybe even a bit more FWIW. But if you think pre-industrial humans believed in HBD or something like it, you'd be wrong on at least two levels.
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Why do you believe this to be true?
To summarize: genetic diversity and local groupings are constantly changing (fact of history) and any definition of race you make fundamentally requires you to choose a snapshot in time to use as a baseline (bad and subjective); this concept of race, ill-defined (it's a very high-dimensional space), generalizes poorly to groups with any significant intermixing (which is most groups), and especially generalizes poorly to any given individual (especially recently mixed-race ones). Slicing race more finely, in terms of geographic origin (e.g. "ethnicity"), fixes some of these problems, but far from all.
This is trivially true, but unimportant.
American blacks with racial consciousness have started calling themselves Black, and so that's what people call them, unless it's completely laughable like Meghan Markle. If someone with very dark skin comes over from some monastery in Ethiopia and doesn't do any American Black things, and doesn't teach children to whine about someone else getting opressed several generations ago, then even the racists don't complain about them.
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So do colors, clouds, emotions, religions, languages, etc... but there's been no mass political movement to try and convince the public that these things "don't really exist".
Bad comparisons. Religions, for example, have hierarchies of categorization. The modern Western understanding of race does not. Religions, to continue the example, have literal self-imposed structures inherent to their organization (OK, to be fair, at least most do). No inherent bright delineations exist when it comes to ethnicity. One reason I prefer the term "ethnicity" to "race" is that it's more localized/specific - partly due to connotation, but not entirely. Languages... eh, kinda, but still mostly no? Although it's true that languages intermix on a broad scale, and drift as the rule instead of the exception, the mechanism through which languages change and drift is by definition on a group level. Two individuals speaking different languages don't really create their own language. However, every human no matter their race or heritage can interbreed. Their children exist, and ruin the categories.
There isn't a mass political movement to paint race is something that doesn't exist, though? I'm one of the few people saying it, and I'm a strong minority in that sense (no pun intended). It's sort of like the gender-queer debate. "Liberals" (for lack of a better term) can't decide whether gender roles exist, but are bad, or whether gender is a construct, and thus doesn't matter. This indecision leads to a weak foundation. When it comes to race, they are trying to have it both ways, and this also means there's a weak foundation. This contradiction is true even for supposed "academics" in the liberal arts! Insofar as "woke" counts a mass political movement, woke never consistently claimed that race didn't exist, and still doesn't.
My whole comment is pointing out that "race" as currently understood in the West is ahistorical and has accumulated a bunch of recent baggage. The commenter above directly claimed that racism is the default state of humanity, and that's wrong. You quite obviously can't have racism without a conception of race. If the commenter above had said something more general, like "humans always discriminate against outgroups and foreigners" then we might have more of a real conversation based on truth, but they didn't, and I'm calling that out.
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You can take medical images in various different modalities, you can even mask off either the high-frequency or low-frequency spatial data, and use a machine learning classifier to reliably determine self-described race. Race is real, and it is pervasive.
I said "first of all" but so far responses have been fixating on this point rather than the broader point that modern racism doesn't back-extrapolate to history very well at all. That's presentism. Modern racism has at best very imperfect analogies historically (at the very least, pre-industrial ones). I just want to register my annoyance that I'm being argued with on a point that's not germane to the topic I was trying to refute.
What you say is true! Any categorization algorithm, which usually involves some kind of "cutoff" that is chosen, is inherently subject to a confusion matrix with its accompanying tradeoffs. Right? You have false positives, true positives, false negatives, true negatives. To continue that analogy, in the modern world, the tradeoffs are actually kind of large. Total model "accuracy" hits unacceptably low numbers, in my opinion, because of how many blurred borderline cases there are, resulting in miscategorizations of various types. So I guess what I was trying to say is that people have currently 'latched on' to race because of its salience in the political conversation, but it's a poor tool for the job. So sure, race as a categorization algorithm "works" to some extent, and so in that sense it's "real", but we shouldn't be in the habit of substituting models of reality for actual reality. That's the sense by which I call it "not real" - it works (kinda sorta) but it isn't a true depiction of reality. A lot of people especially on this forum go around pretending that race is a Big Deal, and are the equivalent of the gender essentialists (which I actually kind of am) but for race (which I am definitely not). But gender is like, obviously and self-evidently a Big Deal, and race is... well, it just isn't. Not by itself!
This is why I always try and insist that we should have different conversations for issues of race (broad category that, critically intersects with a lot of more-potent things like culture, social status, economics, etc that we might as well discuss more directly!) than we do for issues of discrimination (where we debate and talk about ethics and how they intersect with practical reality and probability) because otherwise everyone always ends up at cross-purposes.
Probably a bad idea to start off with a very confident declarative statement that's not even germane to the topic you wanted to discuss, then.
What's the acceptable level of accuracy? Would it change your mind if it turned out "race" is no worse in that regard than most other categories in biology, or would it mean we have to throw the entire science out?
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By now, most everyone has forgotten about the war. It's still going on now, still killing probably 200-300 men a day, every day. Neither party wants to end it so, it's expected -by war nerds who follow it in detail- to go on until 2027..
Not that much has changed, it's still largely a war of attrition, though most killing is now done by FPV drone and artillery is now less than half of casualties. (at least for Russians it's true. Last I checked, <5% were by small arms).
There's a few new things, but one development itself is noteworthy. Both for what it says about the West, and for the prospects for the West. Geran-2 (Shahed-136, 'Dorito') is an originally Iranian drone, a very cheap
$50k marginal cost two-stroke piston engine powered kamikaze drone(or a particularly shitty cruise missile). Russians have modified it and are now producing it wholly indigenously, except for the engines that are imported from China. As you can see in this video, in which an infantry ammunition dump, probably near the front, gets hit by one.Russia is now producing and using up to 200 a day, with Zelensky saying it might go up to 500 a day. Why is this a big problem? It's been upgraded to fly high, so you can't take them down with machineguns, but need guided munitions of really big flak guns - 35mm, 40mm, 57mm- or use planes. When they flew at a low altitude, Ukraine used to shoot them down with .50 machineguns from trucks.
Now it's diving on targets from 3km, so unless there's a very brave gunner on the spot, a .50 won't help you. There are variants with a datalink that can have a target assigned while they're flying. Here's Ukrainians talking about a drone that has been 'circling the town for 90 minutes'. (endurance is 5 hours).
Despite Russians having telegraphed this move (increased production) since the very start, West doesn't seem to have prepared in the slightest. There's no new cheap missile to take them down, nobody is building cheap pulsejet drones that can catch up & blow them up. Nobody was far-sighted enough to modify a 100 high-performance trainers with gun pods and fire control to allow shooting these down. Even the thoroughly obsolete A-10 Warthogs would serve great as drone interceptors, hundreds of kilometers from the front, finally putting that cannon in use somewhere. Even though right now they depend on GPS systems for accuracy, no one's figured out a way to jam them either. I thought the West was supposed to be innovative? Russia engages in a series of dead simple moves, doesn't even keep it secret, and the West does.. nothing?
Ukraine kept shooting expensive, high-performance missiles like Piorun or Stinger ($300k) at these till it ran out. Total production of Piorun missile is only 1000 a year, Stingers.. are in very limited production. So.. what now?
As total Russian cruise/ballistic missile production of all types is only 20 a day (contrast with the 80 a year Tomahawk production), an additional 200 strikes with 90 kg of HE to a range of 1000 km matter quite a lot. Between informers, long-range recon drones and so on, this could make front-line logistics situation of Ukraine even worse and even complicate frontline drone supply, as with 200 a day, drone workshops that get snitched on can get bombed. And while a 90 kilogram bomb is pretty bad, it's not going to take down an entire block of buildings like the half-ton cruise missiles, so even workshops in apartments blocks could end up on the target list.
The prospects are ..bad . We know from WW2 that jet engines can be cheaper to produce than piston engines. In the eventuality that Chinese develop a copy of a cheap drone jet engine (2 kN should push it to ~600 kph), one that currently sells for $70k, or make something like this at a lower cost, Russians could end up having a huge stocks of fairly cheap and capable cruise missiles. Unless Europeans wake up and develop an affordable counter- that'd be enough to deter European response to a Baltic occupations, as the drones themselves would exhaust stocks of European air-air missiles in a week and the air war would be unwinnable as dismantling Russian air defences would take far longer than it'd take for Russia to blow up all military objects within 800 km of the border.
I read this sentence, and my first thought was: which war? Israel-Gaza? Israel-Iran? Syrian civil war? Or (as it turned out) Russia-Ukraine?
You might have wanted to be more specific — or at least give an explanation why, out of all those ongoing conflicts, Russia-Ukraine is the war.
It was much more or a Current Thing than the other ones. You are allowed to not give a hoot about them, but Europe was in a COVID-tier psychosis at the beginning of Russia-Ukraine.
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Pretty sure they're using GLONASS, the Russian version of GPS.
At the end of the day war is mostly about mass. If there's broad technological and political parity (not a colonial stomp or a guerilla war), then it's about numbers. How can a European NATO of over 600 million lose to a Russia of 140 million? What level of unpreparedness and inexperience can counter 4:1 in numbers? And they have the defender's advantage too.
If Russia can quickly make lots of cheap jet drones, so can Europe. Anything Russia can do, Europe can replicate. The asymmetry is this: just as Russia can hammer Ukraine down in attritional fighting after early reverses, so can Europe to Russia.
Only if there's a political failure, if the whole edifice just implodes as the Turks nope out, the Serbs and Hungarians decide it's not their war, if Britain and France won't really use nukes to defend Polish or German territory... then Europe loses. But so long as they're united they can fight on to victory, if only by drowning Russia in men. The US need not even show up IMO.
Let the Gerans fly, let the Oreshniks blow up Patriot batteries, let the T-90Ms thrust into the Baltics, let the Russians run wild for 6 months. They've got a huge front to man from Finland to the Caucasus. They'll be hemmed in at sea. They'll still be facing vast reserves of wealth and manpower, a foe with time on his side and talent to spare. At the end of a long attritional war they'll have to fall back on their strategic nuclear forces to broker a peace.
I don't buy that they'd risk a war with NATO unless China suplexes the US in Asia, at which point we all have much bigger concerns.
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Eventually lasers will render this obsolete again, I suppose.
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I'm somewhat surprised I haven't seen anyone develop a miniature-CIWS to counter drones yet. Something like a small phased array radar paired with a 22LR (lol) minigun (you don't want to have to manually cycle it when it misfires) at a price point that allows "slap one on every vehicle larger than a pickup truck". Nothing about the small quadcopter drones has enough redundancy to take much of a hit, it seems (and I doubt drone-dropped explosives do either), so I doubt it would take much firepower. Speed, precision, accuracy, and attentiveness are all problems that can be solved mechanically (see the CIWS). An effective range of even 100m would at least protect a moderate-value mobile asset pretty well.
Small phased array radar is going to bring down thunder and fire on you. If you're spewing out EM emissions on the front lines of a modern battlefield you're going to be in trouble. Better off with electro-optical or infra-red, something passive.
What if they come in like a flock, 5 or 10 or 20 from multiple angles to overwhelm the turret? I've seen videos of that happening against even these up-armoured, orky looking vehicles. They achieve mission-kill eventually, then the crew have to flee because they're stuck. Then they die. 5 or 10 or 20 FPV drones won't cost that much compared to the minigun CIWS integration, especially if AI guided. And the drones kill not just the CIWS but the vehicle as well.
For now, you could go with 80 GHz automotive radars. Extremely short range, most current military radar equipment won't detect those ultra high frequencies, and it always could just be a newer Mercedes on adaptive cruise control.
Also, the sensors are cheap (because automotive sensors are a cut-throat business) completely integrated packages (even the phased antenna array needs to be directly on-chip), and at that frequency it's trivial to not only detect the quadcopter, you detect every single moving blade of its propellers, and the rounds you're shooting at it.
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That's why they fly them high up now
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There is actually, the APKWS laser-guided rocket, which has already been used by US fighters to take down Geran-type weapons.
A single F-15 can carry fifty of these, [edit: sorry, at least 42, although I'm sure larger pods could be introduced] introducing video game ammo logic to real life and allowing a squadron on station can defend a vast territory from even hundreds of Gerans pretty easily and more effectively than static air defenses (Gerans are slow and ~easy to detect if they are flying at 3km). At somewhere around $20 grand it trades nicely in cost with a $70,000 cruise missile.
Ukraine can't use this particularly effectively because it has been unable to degrade Russian air defenses and fighter coverage (and in fact I wonder if Russia modified their Gerans to fly at higher altitudes specifically to deny fighter interceptors ground clutter cover). NATO's air forces and capability to degrade air defenses are vastly superior to Ukraine's, so the APKWS is a more viable defense strategy for them.
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People have often claimed that a wunderwaffe would soon massively shift the tide of the war, and they've been wrong every time in this conflict so far. Some like HIMARs have legitimately moved the needle, but it wasn't a revolution, just a needle-change that was soon adapted to (with some minor costs associated with the adaptation).
I haven't heard Perun talking about this much and he's been a pretty good barometer for the tempo of the war so far. He actually had a video out recently that went into the use of drones as anti-drone weapons, so I don't see why those couldn't be adapted to this.
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I Read It So You Don’t Have To
Jake Tapper’s Historic Misnomer in Original Sin
How do you come clean without coming clean? How do you take your team out of a tremendous, historic, catastrophic failure and yet manage to convince everyone involved to change absolutely nothing? How do you protect the power and position of yourself and your personal friends, while letting everyone know that you’re Taking Responsibility? How do you present yourself to society and strongly say Mea Maxima Culpa while avoiding any consequences?
Well, Jake Tapper has gone back to an old standby in Original Sin: you find a goat, you put all the sins of the community on the goat, and then you drive the goat out of town never to be seen again. For Tapper and the Democratic Party, they want to put all the sins of the 2024 election loss on Joe Biden and his immediate subordinates, get rid of Joe, and ride off free of guilt or blame. Unfortunately, for all the promise of the title, Tapper fails to grapple at all with the earlier sins of the Democratic Party which lead them to the Biden presidency. It’s a fakakta head fake, a cheap attempt at a false accountability that leaves Tapper and the rest of the Democratic Party machinery safe to keep doing the same things they were doing before.
Personal opinion: This book was horrendous. I knew it would be bad going in, but my wife wanted to read it so I downloaded it off libgen and loaded it on our shared Kindle account, and we decided to read it together and discuss it. That part was fun. The book itself just made me mad.
What Tapper offers is a mostly-disconnected and somewhat confusing series of anecdotes that add up to what a lot of people around here were absolutely on top of years before Tapper: Biden was cooked. However cooked you think Biden was, you’ll see evidence that it was worse than you thought it was. I won’t bother going point by point, we’ve tortured every incident to death already. Tapper tries to throw Biden a bone here and there, but for the most part he adequately massacres his goat. In the process a few close Biden advisers come in for a bit of trouble. Tapper labeled them the Politburo, and they are the villain of the piece, lurking, a sinister and undefined presence. Everything is ultimately laid at the door of some decision maker in Politburo or with the last name Biden. Joe, Jill, Hunter, and a few close personal aides are responsible for the entire coverup: denying the obvious, blaming the lighting or a cold or a long night, pressuring underlings into silence, making never-specified decisions in the name of the president without his knowledge, and generally operating the entire process of Weekend at Bernies-ing the President of the United States.
What Tapper doesn’t offer is any in depth analysis of actual policy decisions or tactical choices in government. This book is pure politics. He doesn’t at any point question who was where and when during crises in the Ukraine or Palestine. He doesn’t look outside the standard West Wing cast of characters in the political circle of the President, what was going on in the State Department or the DoD, what did the kids get up to when it became clear that daddy wasn’t home? How was it that the SecDef was out of commission for weeks without the White House even knowing about it? Did people start metering what they told the President’s office? Did they feel more comfortable defying the President’s wishes? Well, you won’t find out about it here, instead you’ll get seventeen people telling you separately about how they couldn’t believe how OLD Biden looked when they met him…Except that time after time we get people telling us not that he looked old, but that he looked older. Meaning, it wasn’t a mistake to vote for Biden in 2020, when everyone with a calendar could tell you how old he would be in 2024; it just happened out of nowhere, and there’s no way you can blame the Democratic Party for it.
My disappointment stems from the title: Tapper promises to trace to the root cause of the problem. Everything was paradise until this, then after this everything went wrong. But ultimately, he seems to be aiming to skate by what, to me, seem the obvious candidates for Democrats Original Sin:
-- The Ratfucking of Bernie Sanders: The mainstream of the Democratic Party saw the momentum of the Bernie Sanders campaign, after he won the first three primaries in 2020. Biden wasn’t within 10% of Bernie in any of those primaries. Typically, after three straight fourth place finishes, a candidate drops out, that’s the purpose of primaries. Joe Biden, in fact, had some experience finishing poorly in early primaries and dropping out, having done it twice before. But the Dems needed someone to beat Bernie, and were stuck choosing in a bad field: Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Warren were all seen as too weak to step up and couldn’t agree on endorsing each other. Facing a split field among moderates, with COVID appearing on the horizon, and with no other unity candidate available, the rest of the field suddenly dropped out and rapidly endorsed Biden. Biden was seen as a compromise candidate because he was so old, he might only run for one term. This was a classic example of the Golem legend: they empowered Biden to protect them from Bernie, but Biden once empowered did not have to give that power up when it was time. The lesson being that you have to let the primary process play out, and that voters will punish you if you refuse to let them vote. The Republicans threw in with Trump in 2016, against their better instincts but to their long term benefit; the Democrats ratfucked Bernie in 2020 and the lack of a real primary left them with a reanimated corpse that finished 4th in competitive races. Tapper mentions Bernie only twice, for a moment, and pays no attention to how he played into the 2020 primary and the selection of Biden. The Original Sin was gutting the primary process and not forcing Biden to compete among voters.
-- Obsession with Identity Politics: Biden, of course, didn’t actually lose the 2024 race, that honor was passed to Kamala Harris. Why was she there? Because she was (marginally) black and a woman. Tapper is pretty clear on this one, and states it directly, but never pauses to question whether a better VP candidate might have been able to salvage the shit sandwich they were handed. Or, for that matter, whether a stronger VP might have pushed Biden to the curb years before. An ambitious, mildly evil VP, like a young LBJ or Bill Clinton, would have stuck a knife in Biden as soon as he looked weak. It’s the lack of a talented VP who could be president, or at least win an election, forced everyone to Ride with Biden until it became obvious that he couldn’t win. And how did we end up with a talentless nonentity of a VP? Because it had to be a Black Woman. The Original Sin was choosing a VP based on identity characteristics, and not based on talent, leaving you in a position where you couldn’t be seen to skip over a Black Woman, but because she had to be a Black Woman she had no chance in the election.
-- Trump Derangement Syndrome: The refrain from Biden and his handlers throughout the process was monotonous. We need to beat Donald Trump, Donald Trump is uniquely dangerous, Joe Biden is the only one to beat Donald Trump in an election (there’s a good chance he retains that honor forever). Democrats convinced themselves that Trump was so uniquely evil that they had to throw out all sense of decency to beat him; this kept them from beating him. Democrats convinced themselves that voters would reject Trump so thoroughly that it didn’t matter they were running an empty shell of what was left of Joe Biden; this destroyed voter trust in the Dems as a whole and cost them the election across the country. The Dems lost the plot completely due to TDS, and started to think they could or should do things they never would have thought of otherwise.
But Tapper doesn’t address any of these actual deep sins of the Democratic worldview, because that would require actual change by the Democratic Party, and change might lead to Tapper and his friends being disempowered. Equally, Tapper mostly ignores the great question of the Biden presidency: Why did everything basically run just fine? There is very little in the way of actual policy outcomes that is easily traced to Biden’s senescence. It pretty much felt like all the other presidential administrations I’d seen. What does that say about the capture of the government by the administrative state, if the elected official in charge of the executive branch seems to be irrelevant?
Instead he just blames it all on ol’ Scranton Joe, who will shuffle off to the great used Corvette dealership in the sky and leave the Dems to keep right on sinning just as they always have.
IME, it's not just Democrats who ignore this question. I find people on the right are also reluctant to consider this, and especially unwilling to draw the obvious conclusions.
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Sorry, I have to push back about the VP chosen because Black Woman narrative. This is wrong, and absolutely NOT the "Original Sin". It's true that Biden committed to a woman as VP. But the reason Harris specifically was chosen was loyalty. So we shouldn't be surprised that she never stabbed him in the back, because she was chosen on precisely that criteria!! Being Black or possibly the beneficiary of Democratic affirmative candidate action is mostly irrelevant. Extensive evidence here about the process of selection. If you want to play with counterfactuals, the other women in contention were: Elizabeth Warren, Gretchen Whitmer, and Susan Rice. So the more fair question is if Warren, Whitmer, or Rice were VP, would they have spilled the beans, or pushed back against a doomed re-election campaign?
That the government works fine without the extensive input of the President is a feature, not a bug. The fact that most Americans don't recognize that this has always been the case, even with more attention-hungry presidents, has more to do with how attention-hungry presidents are than the facts of who does the work. The Cabinet and bureaucracy has always done the lion's share of the work. And most Cabinet members, quite honestly, are also at least nominally capable of being president themselves, so it's not as if they are incompetent. And (relative) stability in US governance is partly why the US had such an excellent 20th century (of course far from the entire reason, but it helps a lot).
Ultimately I agree that Tapper doesn't actually want to find the Original Sin too badly. I just don't think there is a smoking gun anywhere. It's a larger Democratic problem, and not even a new one! However, if you insist on identifying, if not a smoking gun, that at least a moment in time that demonstrates the impending problems, you don't need to look any farther than 2016. Hillary Clinton and her campaign is the Democratic Party's original sin. Or, maybe, that Obama decided to make a deal with the devil in the first place? Anyways, nearly every single flaw of the Democratic Party today is visible in nascent form in 2016 already, from the cynical insider takover of the primary process, to the sanctimoniousness of the rhetoric about electing a woman, to the lack of Obama-style vision to help regular people's pocketbooks, to the mistrust of a temperamentally and ethically aloof Clinton herself.
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? Trump's not running again. It's impossible for someone else to beat him in an election.
Biden was, and is, personally a moderate strongly aligned with the black political machine and not on the best terms with the progressive wing of the party. That is, uh, not how he governed.
Assuming Trump doesn't run for president, he could still run for something else, Welcome to Moosewood style, and then lose.
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If you want something else in the same vein, but even worse, check out Dave Winfield's book Dropping the Ball, where he goes through a laundry lsit of things wrong with professional baseball, from steroids, to unhealthy ballpark food, to high school baseball players getting worse girlfriends than football and basketball players, and then proceeds to blame it on nobody at all, saying that everyone in the game from Bud Selig on down is doing a great job. Anyway, to address your points:
You could have made that argument in 2016, when the superdelegate field was stacked against him, but they changed the rules in 2020 specifically for that reason, ran a competitive field, and he still lost. Anyway, Sanders did not win the first three primaries; he won one primary and two caucuses, and in Iowa and New Hampshire the totals were close enough that he was still behind in the delegate count. This may seem like a pedantic distinction, but caucus states always seem to give outsiders a better chance, likely because of the low turnout compared to primaries. And while Biden did abysmally in the first two contests, he finished second in the Nevada caucuses. It made no sense for him to drop out at this point, as his star was rising and he had been consistently leading polls in South Carolina by a wide margin. And he ends up crushing it in South Carolina, moving into the lead in one fell swoop. Mayor Pete, meanwhile, has been trending downward, and it's pretty clear he has no purchase with black voters. It made no sense for him to stay in for Super Tuesday so he could get walloped in the South. It made no sense for Klobuchar to stay in at this point, either, as her campaign never really picked up speed. Had they both stayed in the race, I doubt it would have made much of a difference. Klobuchar wasn't winning any more delegates. Pete may have peeled some off in 5 of the 15 states that were contested on Super Tuesday, plus a few in California and Texas because there are so many of them, but winning anything was unlikely, and he would have bowed out immediately afterwards anyways. Pete was an outsider who debated well and overperformed in early states with low delegate counts. He was never expected to challenge for the nomination, and if it wasn't for a couple of fluke performances in heavily white areas nobody would be talking about any kind of Bernie screwjob. Sanders went head to head with Biden and lost, that's all there is to it.
It's identity politics, but not something you can blame them for. Nominees have a history of picking running mates for reasons not entirely related to their qualifications for the office (of which there really aren't any). Bush picked Quayle to shore up his support in the Bible Belt. Trump picked Pence for the same reason. W picked Cheney to counter suspicions that he was a lightweight. Kerry picked Edwards to shore up support among conservative Democrats. Obama picked Biden to compensate for his lack of experience. McCain picked Palin because unexpectedly picking a woman might have provided the miracle his campaign needed to win that race (which backfired, but nonetheless; also see Mondale picking Ferraro). And now we come to 2020, and the Democrats are running an elderly white man in the era of peak woke, four years after they lost a race in part because their candidate wasn't perceived as progressive enough, months after winning a campaign in which the nominee's biggest rival was a self-described socialist. They can be forgiven for wanting to shore up the progressive wing by running a woman of color with progressive tendencies, but not so progressive as to be at odds with the platform. I agree that they should have known at the time that vice president would have been a more important office than it normally is, but I don't see this as a huge blunder. You try to win the election you're running now, not the election you might be running four years from now.
Sure, but what else was he supposed to run on? His record? Biden's best chance was to keep the coalition that won him the presidency in 2020, and the best way of doing that was by reminding them of all the bullshit they'd be dealing with if Trump won again. The Democrats warned that something similar to this was going to happen, and Trump managed to exceed even the wildest expectations of Democrats, with talk of a third term, shipping people to Salvadoran prisons, talk of invading Canada, talk of firing Jerome Powell, the Epstein business, DOGE, tariffs, and countless more examples to name. His approval rating dropped like a rock upon taking office, and he's net unfavorable in every category. That there are people out there who are surprised by any of this boggles the mind. The biggest mistake they made was that once Kamala was the nominee, they didn't roll out a whole new agenda. She could have been sold as the way forward for Democrats, but in the end there was nothing but a few lukewarm proposals that didn't get any serious traction. You can blame that on the tight schedule, but I would have thought that by September they would have had a clear policy platform that was different enough from Biden's that Kamal could call it her own.
No, they can't. Because they didn't just run "a woman of color with progressive tendencies."
They ran Kamala Harris. Who was the worst candidate in the history of American Presidential races since WW2 (pre-WW2 Presidential stuff is really a completely different dynamic. It's kind of funny it almost parallels the deadball / liveball demarcation for baseball).
The "meta" of what @FiveHourMarathon wrote can be summarized as Democrats Often Neglect Reality (DONR PARTY). They professional politicos simply ignore the obvious. Not always, necessarily, in favor of something else (i.e. identity politics) but just because acknowledging a harsh reality is often jarring and uncomfortable.
Kamala Harris was bad as a candidate. Her interviews were atrocious. Her stump speeches were too volatile - she'd be doing well in one part of one speech but then nosedive in another part. Her "unrehearsed" interactions with her own voters/fans were awkward and seem bizarrely staged even for American politics. She had an awful laugh (which is something you can modify). This is America in 2024. Social media is understood. In fact, it's a cornerstone of mass communication, including politics. Beyond that, the "5 second clip" has been happening since the 2000s. You either have to be psychopathically on-the-ball sharp 24/7 (and this is why I still think Newsome is in the mix for 2028) or you have to develop a brand wherein gaffes and flubs are kind of part of the deal - this is what Trump has been doing ever since his first word salad speech in 2016.
How in the hell do you run Kamala Harris knowing all of these things? She's a dumpster fire of a candidate. But when you Just Say No (I LOVE YOU, NANCY) to reality ... anything can happen.
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I was saying this loudly and from the beginning. She basically had a classic "fork in the road": do I stay the course and hope that Trump is too unpopular to win, letting me win by default, or do I try to do something notable to make me stand out, and run a more traditional campaign? She took the first road, and I was screaming the whole time that it was the wrong one.
In fact, the sloooooow roll-out of a nearly non-existent policy platform was excruciating to watch. Did you know I asked my (liberal, news-reading) family about if they could name 3 policy proposals Harris had? They could name ONE. ONE policy! In a major election! That's insane! They should be the demographic most knowledgeable about this kind of stuff, my mom phone banked for Obama twice and they are both white college-educated liberals (since ~2005). I'm a self-admitted news junkie, and I could only name three!
Which policy could they name? And which are the three?
IIRC they both said she wanted more green energy stuff generally (power generation, that is), which I counted. My mom also said... "something about housing? I don't really know and can't remember" which I didn't count because it was too vague. She was right though, that was one I named, the first-time homebuyer credit. I also could name the expanded child and childcare tax credit, and her vague gestures at tightening the borer. After thinking about it a little longer, I think I was able to remember some plan to negotiate Medicare drug prices, but Trump also had some similar-sounding version of the same plan, so I wasn't sure if that counted - or if the border tightening counted either, since she was basically forced into it.
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Relevant context from WP:
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How much of that is due to small changes in policy positions, and how much of that is due to the entire liberal establishment utterly stonewalling any effort to find out?
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I think this in various forms is why democrats won’t be winning anymore. Not so much that it’s TDS, but that the entire strategy of their politics is negative, not just because they don’t like Trump or the Republicans. They’re negative in the sense of *negative space”. We aren’t evil like those guys, those guys want to do [insert evil thing here]. But that’s not a vision. There’s nothing to build toward, no city on the hill, no “once we do these things your life will get better.” Republicans, whether you agree with them or not, absolutely have an idea of what they want, why they want it, and how it’s supposed to make the median person better off. It might or might not work, but they absolutely have a plan, and furthermore a plan to actually do what they said they wanted to do. So when people go into the booth, they know if they vote Republican, Theres a actual agenda that’s supposed to help them, where a democrat mostly is going to thwart that plan in favor of the status quo. If you’re looking for change, you want republicans, even if you’re not completely sold on what those changes are, at least it’s not the stuff you already know doesn’t help.
This is because when democrats can articulate positive visions they're hyper-unpopular('defund the police' 'protect trans kids'). Trump, for all his faults, is very good at articulating ideas that are popular, even if they're bad('no tax on overtime').
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The Democrats' positive vision is more socialism and it's pretty popular with a lot of young people. The worsening economy will only fuel this fire.
So where exactly are they talking about it? They don’t say that as their agenda in most public facing platforms. Kamala didn’t run on “let’s be more socialist” nor was there a Socialist Agenda 2025 that would get that to happen. Kamala and most of the apparatus ran specifically as Anti-Trump, referring to the agenda as dangerous fascism, scaremongering about white Christian nationalism and Project 2025. They started calling JD Vance weird. And keep in mind that this was the Presidential Election Campaign, and they were pouring everything into winning, but they never really said “we want universal healthcare” or “let’s build a bunch of infrastructure” or “the government should raise the minimum wage.”
To me, this points to one of two things: either the agenda is unpopular and they know it, or they don’t have an agenda to run on. It just doesn’t make sense to say that socialism is popular and they want socialism, but they are running on Orange Man Bad Evil Fascist With Kooties.
It's also a credibility issue. You can only run on building infrastructure or fixing Healthcare and then fail to do it so many times before voters conclude you are either lying or incompetent. Ironically Trump benefited from being outside the establishment in this regard, as while he didn't have any credibility in delivering government results, he at least didn't have the stink of repeated failure to deliver that both parties have accumulated.
This is the I think accurate point the abundance bros are making: it's not actually enough to be in favor of things people want, you have to execute as well. And simply allocating funding doesn't count as executing!
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Well yeah, Biden was plenty coherent in 2020. He was actively campaigning and participating in debates. He was old, but not mentally gone and reflects more on a general political problem where we keep electing seniors. Trump is 79 now himself, and he'll be even older than Biden when his term is up (and if we count his sometimes stated desire to try for a third term, he'd be like 86).
And it is a general issue, just last year there was a sitting congresswoman found in an assisted living facility! https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/texas-congresswoman-who-last-voted-in-july-found-living-in-assisted-living-facility-kay-granger-dallas-fort-worth-republicans-democrats-congress-term-limits
At these ages decline happens fast and you can go from perfectly coherent to a drooling mess (or even just dead, as the Dems keep learning from their seniors dying in office) but I think there's not much to change this as long as olds are the main voters and rich olds are the main money movers in politics.
Biden was not uniformly coherent in 2020. He did accomplish stepping up in a few select debates and appearances, probably as a result of extremely planned napping schedules and drug dosing. It was obvious to anyone who wasn't on his side or influenced by mainstream media that he was already severely impaired. The tale of 2024 is that his impairment became so ridiculous that it was not possible to conceal.
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A note on the "so who was actually in charge?" question:
The deception that Biden's posse engaged in rankles me, but I think that Biden's level of competence didn't really matter much when it came to the well-being of the US. The global US/Western order can run itself just fine on autopilot for years. The President and the Sec Def could both be literal pieces of wood and nothing particularly bad would happen to the US. The US doesn't face any significant foreign threats that need any kind of quick, decisive thinking. The US is so powerful that to even have a foreign policy is largely a luxury for it, not a need. There are some urgent things that need deciding occasionally, like should the US bomb Iran to stop it from getting nuclear weapons or not, but all that stuff can also run on autopilot or be farmed out to foreign protectorates like Israel. Note that no US Presidential administration for many decades now has pursued a fundamentally different foreign policy from any of the other ones, Trump's included - the foreign policy differences between GWB, Obama, Biden, and Trump are minor in the grand scheme of things. There is a well-established foreign policy consensus that requires only very minimal executive steering. The only actual threat that the US faces from overseas is getting nuked, but the mechanisms by which the US prevents hostile minor countries from obtaining nukes is, I think, pretty well-greased at this point and can largely run itself.
A note on Bernie:
Bernie winning the first three primaries in 2020 was an artifact of the particular order that the primaries are done in. Even after he won those first three primaries, I thought that he would get destroyed in the South and on Super Tuesday. He has just never been popular enough to win the Democratic nomination without pretty particular circumstances coming together.
Nobody is popular enough to win a major party nomination without pretty particular circumstances coming together. Maybe Dwight Eisenhower.
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If there's one criticism of Harris that's untrue, it would be that she's insufficiently ambitious. The VP just doesn't have a lot of formal power to do anything, and even leaks will get found out in a non-Trump administration if they're consistent. The VP is just utterly at the mercy of the head honcho, and this was doubly true in the uncertain times around Biden's dropout since plenty of people wanted to have a mini-primary.
Harris isn't blameless, but she surely has less blame than the surrounding figures, particularly those that actually made Biden's presidency so unpopular like his Chief of Staff and Secretaries of various departments. She is a classic case of a schoolteacher level intelligence person being elevated far beyond her competence (in this circumstance due to race and willingness to sleep with older men). But she doesnt even know that. Her whole worldview is predicated on her being incapable of learning that.
AAND on top of that all she was the VP, which is typically a useless and powerless position.
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Surely the anecdote about Biden telling her "no daylight, kid" and Harris agreeing to put that albatross on her neck displays either a lack of ambition, or a degree of loyalty to a ship already 9/10 sunk that overrode the ambition.
I'm not familiar with that anecdote. Is this article an accurate summary? If so, I don't see how that's really related to ambition. She couldn't forge her own path that much when she was the nominee because 1) Biden was fairly popular with Dems, and her campaign was all about not rocking the boat to hold the fractious coalition together, and 2) people wouldn't believe her anyways since she was the VP.
I don't get how here strategic choice on the campaign trail is reflective of her ambition.
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I feel like we've heard more from Vance in the last six months than we heard from Harris for her entire term. Maybe some of that is at the President's discretion (giving speeches to NATO and such), but I think Harris could have been more visible if she wanted. Vance is posting that-which-Trump-is-probably-contractually-bound-not-to to X, and had that notable incident on Bluesky recently.
Yes, this is mostly Harris' fault, although her advisors were always quick to blame Biden. Most notably, she asked to be put in front of something significant, and Biden gave her immigration. Then, she turned around and complained about being put in charge of a "no-win" type of issue, and sulked about it. Biden's advisors then got mad and thought she was being ungrateful. However, you could perhaps imagine a world where Harris actually took that lead on immigration and pushed for more border enforcement - might that have deflected later attacks by Trump against her? Actually, quite plausibly. Instead she did some tours of Central American countries to try and pressure them to stop the flow and tried her best to dodge media attention about it. (Ironically this was at least mildly effective, as far as I'm aware, but selection bias means that it's hard to take credit for this kind of thing).
At any rate, the bad feelings about the immigration assignment meant that Biden's camp dragged their feet about giving her something else. She was also eventually put in charge of "voting rights" (federal level) as a portfolio, but IIRC they never managed to pass anything. Instead she just spent the whole time accusing Republicans of various things, which I think most people easily tune out. If she had managed a win there, maybe she could have talked about it more.
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Harris was out there too, it was just on more "typical politician" stuff like holding speeches on the migrant crisis. Trump's administrations have both been anomalous in how much you heard about non-presidential actors, e.g. Jared Kushner was practically a household name in Trump 1 but almost nobody heard of Mike Donilon during Biden's term, despite the latter being almost certainly more important and influential than Kushner ever was (and Kushner was quite influential!).
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This is true, but also still feels atypical. This goes back into childhood ignorance, but I remember precisely zero about George Bush Sr's VP except people clowning on him. Al Gore I remember precisely zero about during his term as VP. Dick Cheney was always more of a shadowy figure, presumed to be pulling the strings from the shadows, but rarely out in front doing anything visible to the public. The only thing I remember about Joe Biden as VP was when he got in trouble for saying "Shylock" and the ADL came out and said he was up to date on his
protection moneydonations and that he was absolutely not an antisemite. Oh, and when Obama put him in charge of curing cancer during a State of the Union address. Pence did fuck and all during Trump's first term.That Vance is out there, regularly, and seemingly successfully, advocating the President's agenda feels atypical across all my life experience. He gives on strong podcast "Debate me bro" energy that might just be an artifact of the times we live in.
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Will this obviously wrong and tired narrative ever go away? Bernie doesn't win because people don't want a leftist candidate, even in the primary let alone the general, he would get slaughtered. His path to victory has always required all the more moderate candidates to split the more popular policy platform in so many ways that he could sneak through with a plurality but not majority. Deciding not to let the less popular candidate win by avoiding creating the specific conditions that they need to win without getting the popular vote is not "ratfucking".
On the other hand Bernie was the only candidate in both 2016 and 2020 that had any form of genuine charisma and generated genuine excitement. And his platform at a times was almost what Trump used in 2024. If he hadn't bent the knee to the identarians he could have won if the stars align.
He was a populist promising improbably handouts to the kinds of people who dominated the social media sites when he was running. Really not surprising he appeared popular.
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Bernie obviously wasn't a Condorcet winner even among Democrat primary voter preferences, and probably would have done even more poorly in a general election, sure. But the non-creepy-to-the-public solution to this problem is to switch to an election method that's more clone-proof, not to get all the clones in a smoke-filled back room together to play "draw the short straw" or whatever. (As a point of fact I dispute the collusion interpretation in this particular case - Klobuchar was getting creamed when she dropped out, Buttigieg too, and Warren was getting creamed well before she dropped out - but in theory "Deciding not to let the less popular candidate win" can be a good sort of strategy to collude on in a plurality race, if only you don't mind how creepy it is to see collusion in an election.)
They're not going to switch, partly because even the people who try to improve election methods these days don't seem to be very smart about it (IRV is only one form of RCV, and it's not clone-proof either), and partly because any party insiders who are smart about election methods are probably smart enough to realize that escaping Duverger's law is a bad thing for political party insiders.
But making people sit through these sorts of weird "your favorite candidate dropped out before you even got a chance to vote" races is still a self-inflicted wound. If you put Democracy in the very name of your party, you're signing a "we'll be good at democracy" check that you'd better not bounce. The drop-out-when-you're-losing-badly system and even the smoke-filled-back-room system are probably improvements over plurality voting at democracy's job of trying to pick a good leader (though in hindsight it's hard to see how they could have done much worse), but they're not an improvement over plurality at democracy's equally-critical job of convincing your voters that they were the ones who picked the leader.
Imagine what the primary could have looked like under approval voting. Plurality's "Buttigieg dropped out before 46 states could vote because Biden had nearly half of South Carolina's voters" kinda looks pathetic, doesn't it? Even if the final outcome were unchanged, "Buttigieg stayed in until the end, but he only had 70% approval and Biden had 80%" would have been much more inspiring statistics. It's arguable whether we can do that in a general election without a constitutional amendment, but a party can do whatever weird superdelegate shit they want in the primary, and they ought to be able to make their primary better too.
I do agree that another voting system might be useful but it's not even the first past the post thing, it's also that they do every state in sequence. It's actually pretty hard to design a system around this kind of thing, especially because the primary isn't just about the voting but had also kind of morphed into a narrative building function. If you get rid of them and ran it all at once then you'd have the campaigns be very driven by polling which has its own problems.
Switching voting systems would help a little bit with the issues with sequencing too. Right now, typically a handful of states decide which handful of a large candidate pack are "serious candidates" for Super Tuesday, Super Tuesday knocks it down to 2, and everybody else just gets to pick between those 2. With something like approval, the ordering of votes still matters (because you still have to vote tactically, and what that means depends on who the front-runners are), but it can be hard to impossible for an earlier state to "knock out" a candidate who's more popular in a later state. If the race's narrative and polling all looks like it's A vs B, but everybody in your state would prefer C, with plurality it's not safe to vote for C unless you don't have a preference between A and B, but with approval you can turn your A vote into an {A,C} vote without risking getting B elected, your opponents can turn your B vote into a {B,C} vote without risking getting A elected, and C can actually win.
On the other hand, running a campaign is expensive. If the early states like A and B, but later states would prefer C, even if you have enough C voters to make C the winner, you have to hope that C knows this and is willing to risk the expense of waiting on all of you. You're right that everything would be driven by polling.
What we ought to have is an app where everyone ranks the field from day 1 of the campaign and can change at any point. Then we could get real time feedback on messaging. Of course the end problem is even if you were made godking of the docratic party you still have to implement a system like this where 95 year olds who can't handle technology more complicated than a television remote or deal wit the disengenuous claim that poor black people don't have cell phones.
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You didn’t like Bernie, that doesn’t mean that other people didn’t. You probably didn’t think Trump had a snowball’s chance in hell at winning either. If Bernie was so unpopular, why did the Democratic Party have to undertake heroic action every single primary to thwart him? And even if Bernie couldn’t win, it would have been better to let him take his shot, lose bigly, and put the issue to bed for good instead of creating a permanent Lost Cause myth and losing the left wing of the party for good.
Lots of people like Bernie. After Super Tuesday, when the vote was no longer split between anybody but him and Biden, he still got millions of votes, something like a third as many primary votes as Biden. But "a third as many as Biden" isn't enough to win a Democratic primary, and he's much less popular with independents and Republicans than with Democrats.
The 2020 "heroic action" mentioned originally was that three candidates who were doing much worse than him or Biden dropped out of the race after (significantly after, in Warren's case) their trajectory became apparent, and picked someone to endorse instead. That's not heroic action by the Democratic Party, that's just what losing candidates do to make the loss less expensive and less embarrassing.
For other less inactive forms of Party action, though? Insanity happens at this level, where people have orders of magnitude more power than average but not much more brains than average. Why did Clinton push the "pied piper" strategy with Trump? Because she didn't think Trump had a snowball's chance in hell at winning either. If her fans overestimated Bernie's odds in the primary too, well, clearly they're just not the best estimators.
3 to 1. Even counting the earlier votes from when the pro-Biden block was split, it was still 2 to 1.
What would it have taken? 5 to 1?
Despite my expression of annoyance with Duverger's Law in another comment, I do admire the way it selectively encourages people who are bad at math to disenfranchise themselves. Though this is another way in which plurality fails "democracy's equally-critical job of convincing your voters that they were the ones who picked the leader", the "democracy's job of trying to pick a good leader" thing is important too. It may be for the best that people who can't hack game theory end up with less influence over mechanism design.
Gave me a nice chuckle. Honestly, one of the things I admire about Approval Voting is that - on an individual level - there's almost no such thing as regretting your vote. The simplicity is refreshing. Vote for two people, even if you prefer one? The non-preferred one wins, but you still voted for them, so your vote "worked" as intended. Don't like someone? Don't vote for them. Like someone so much that you wouldn't be happy with any other? That's fine too, vote for them only! "I am okay with X person elected or I am not" is admittedly a little reductive, but is that really worse than the current system? I voted for Gary Johnson in 2016 as a protest vote, even though I infinitely preferred Clinton to Trump. Strategically, I felt a little bad about it, but it seemed like there was no other way to be seen. Even then it was a little out of character for me, an avowed moderate and work-within-the-system type, but I guess it does represent how bitter I was feeling about the way Clinton wrapped up the primary with a little bow (not even re: Bernie, I was more annoyed with how she preemptively pushed all other candidates out before the primary even started via a combination of threats and influence peddling. Plus, I guess, I hate her as a person, so that too)
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They didn't. Refusing to do something stupid that is required for him to win is not a heroic effort. Bernie is not entitled to the people representing the more popular platform splitting the moderate lane 4 ways so that he can win with a minority of the vote. "why didn't you let the guy that your base didn't want lose so that his followers, who never liked you anyways would whine less" is jot a serious argument.
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Trump nominally ran in the primary for the Reform Party in 2000 and lost to Pat Buchanan.
That jeopardy clue is going to hit so hard one day.
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I'm a doomer on the U.S., and I want to know what you guys think, in general, will be the trend for the next decade or further on. Here's my theory for how all this ends:
My friend is more of an optimist. Here's his theory on the first one:
Unfortunately, I didn't quiz him on all the rest of it. But now, somehow, it is making me wonder about the outlook of most of the Mottizens. I certainly see the doomer take on things pretty often.
I see a factoid sometimes that says conservatives are happier with their lives than liberals. Maybe that's a factor of rural living, maybe that's a factor of less thinking about serious issues, and less reading. I am pretty sure that conservatives on this site, on average, do not live in rural areas and, on average, think a lot more about serious issues, and read more. So maybe some bad, anecdotal science testing on The Motte is in order.
Are you a doomer, or a "bloomer"? What are some factors that lead you to your conclusion that the country is trending downwards or upwards? Please explain yourself, and please fight it out with everyone who thinks you're wrong.
I would consider myself heavily blackpilled, but no, not remotely a doomer. Mostly because personally I still get to enjoy life. I had to scale my ambitions back heavily and lower my standards, but I've been able to get small carveouts of joy.
There's something I experience as true in my own professional life; people will do the right thing, after first exhausting literally every other possible option. That things suck is not evidence of failure, it is evidence of how far we have left to fall. We suck so much because we can get away with it.
There are significant parts of the human experience denied to me, but for most of human history they were denied to most people as well, so my experience is not hugely different. Of all the tragedies I feel most fiercely is our inability to write fiction for the mass audience (and to have it actually read and understood) that isn't atrocious. I am willing to sleep on park benches and eat the bugs if we would just produce better fiction.
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I'm not a doomer by nature and I'm optimistic that America will still be a very good place to live in the medium term. The competition is very thin. Europe is busy ramping up footgun production; Israel is, uh, let's move on; the rest of the Anglosphere is content to give up all notions of freedom and liberty; East Asia is dying countries plus China; perhaps a small country like Switzerland is the only thing that can compete.
But at the same time as I get older I feel less confident that all the problems that, as a youth, I thought would be resolved will ever get resolved. The housing market is screwed. The education system is screwed. Unscrewing these is basically impossible because, as they say, "you'd make a lot of sick people very unhappy." There's too many entrenched interests, there's too many comfortable people whose ongoing comfort depend on nothing ever happening. You'd need a true 'orrible cunt who doesn't care about making friends who manages to get power to do something about this.
Fundamentally, I view these things as a conflict between dynamism and stasis. Outside of a few fields, I don't see dynamism returning to America in the medium term. Over the longer term, if we manage to beat back stasis without a true catastrophe, I think that will be enough for me and my children.
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If I may be less serious and delve into some Cabalistic insanity, and site Psalm 89: "Thou has a mighty arm, strong is thy hand, and high is thy right hand."
So, first, go read Unsong so as to avoid spoilers.
So there's this wordplay that equates Neal Armstrong to the right hand of God. After all, what strong arm has been higher than the Moon? But I'd take it a step further, and go back to the example of raising one's right hand high: when Israel was attacked in the wilderness, and Moses controlled the outcome of the battle by the raising of his hands. Notably, he was old and tired and the battle lasted for a while, so assistants had to prop up his right arm to keep his right hand high and win the day.
People like to point to the early 1970s as the beginning of the decline of the West. Not coincidentally, that overlaps the Apollo program. If we allow that Neal Armstrong represents the right hand of God being raised high, and Apollo is the climax of human achievement (that and eradicating smallpox, around the same time), then it's not so odd that the decline follows Armstrong's return to Earth. Like Moses, the strong arm tired and fell, and so too the tide began to turn against its people. But unlike Moses, we didn't have anyone prop up his right arm to win the battle.
So to answer the question: we're doomed unless we go back to the Moon. And the Artimas program is not encouraging.
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Honestly I don't think domestic life is going to be too awful. The real shock for the US is going to be the precipitous decline in US foreign policy influence. At some point this century, Americans are going to wake up to some kind of rude and jarring awakening to how (relative to the past) impotent the influence has become.
I think domestic life will be bad, in the sense that people will grow more atomized, disconnected, and lonely, while housing and health costs will continue to absorb more and more of people’s wealth, and the division between the haves and the have-nots grows even more intense.
I think both the left and the right realize this is our destiny, it just depends on how you frame it which side starts cheering and which side starts going, “well, actually…”
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Prediction- the GOP retains and increases its dominance at the national level due to a confluence of factors, some structural-constitutional and some by being blessed with insane enemies. Their performance in government is consistently lackluster; the solution to the exploding debt continues to be inflation and lying, the ideologues migrate to state level politics and the national US government becomes increasingly corrupt due to one party dominance. The long term trend in by-group TFR continues where the red tribe takes, and holds long term, status as the highest-TFR major group. US population peaks in the 2040's, and social security's decline in real dollar amounts becomes unfixable. This leads to a real estate price decline as seniors tap into their sources of wealth.
The labor market remains strong for blue collar workers but experiences ups and downs, and slow wage growth, for white collar workers. The population concentrates in a relatively smaller number of cities; for status seekers, this timeline sucks. For second tier cities, it's awesome.
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Russian (or maybe Irish) proverb: nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.
Also, do you think any country is doing better? Which?
We're always going to have problems. Problems can be solved though, and the ones that don't get solved are maybe not as bad as in our imagination.
One example: the debt problem is bad but it's still decades out before it becomes catastrophic, and it could still be ameliorated or turned into a soft default (e.g. a few bouts of massive inflation) in the meantime. Also if we default on our debt everyone else is also feeling serious pain as well.
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I believe we're in the twilight years of a meritocratic age, where it's fairly easy to build wealth and status now, but you need to be a highly intelligent and enterprising person to make it happen (like someone in a picaresque), and this gets slightly harder each year.
For instance, I'm developing a game, and the standards for indie games over the past decade have ballooned to such a wild degree that we're now selecting for elite members of the population who can learn and do anything. If 8-10 years ago you could succeed off a fun gameplay loop alone, in 2025 it now takes a unique art style, a healthy and active social media presence, and a fun+unique gameplay loop at minimum. You may counter that I'm describing the mega-hits, but the market is so risky that if you're not aiming for a mega-hit, you're rolling the dice on a flop. Gamers have criticized the industry for years for letting AA games die, but they died at the hands of the consumer. You are essentially telling creators to spend years on a product that is "kinda good" and gamble between a moderate success and a total flop, when aiming for a mega-hit is more like gambling between moderate success and incredible success (with a smaller chance of flop). Hitting the "gamble" button for a string of moderate successes is just unreasonable, when for both small and large developers one flop can spell catastrophe. So the norm that the industry has reached is, "let's gamble for a mega hit each time because just one will sustain us for years". Square Enix is one company that does this now, with XIV profits bankrolling their single-player games -- many of which aspire to be mega-hits and fail.
In this environment, the naturally gifted Miyamotos and Sakaguchis and Carmacks of today will still rise to the fore, but increasingly, they stand alone. And I can't feel positively about that. Aristocracy is predicated on the idea that if you simply gather all these gifted people together, they'll all cooperate and do incredible things. But I feel like that's bullshit, and innovation is drying up all across society.
The real problem with all of this is that our best and brightest are competing to make video games and other pieces of entertainment which are, let's be real, mostly meaningless. Not all games can be Expedition 33.
No offense meant, but ideally these gifted people would be going into government and industry, not spending all their time on video games.
You can meaningfully start working on a video game even if you're completely disconnected from any sort of career track or network, and can still produce something that many strangers will happily interact with if it's successful. Government is a complete nonstarter for any sort of solo work, and unless you're up for full-stack entrepreneurship on your lonesome, so is industry. Interesting work at unsolved problems also isn't exactly at the bottom of the org chart, so you'd need to maneuver some sort of illegible career-entrepreneurship maze with bottomless will to political power to get anywhere where you might get a chance to have meaningful impact anything. I don't see that many of the sorts of people who have a mindset of being good indie video game programmers wanting to get into that or thinking they would succeed at it. Sixty years ago, "try to join Bell Labs" would have been a clear path for someone who can do clever stuff but isn't terrible interested in constantly spending most of their effort in career advancement, but stable, slack-providing organizations like that are hard to keep around.
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I wish our best and brightest were competing to make video games. They're all at FAANG serving ads and optimizing our attention.
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For the most part, yeah I agree. It's a symptom of the decline.
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Intellectually I can't argue against doom, but I have faith in a special Providence that protects fools, children, and the United States of America.
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I do think America's gender wars will get worse before they get better, but keep in mind that much of South Korea's gender dysfunction is due to sex-selective abortion two decades ago.
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Some people think we're sliding into fascism and non-white people are going to be put in camps soon.
Other people think that if we don't deport 50 million brown people the country is doomed.
It's good to be a sensible centrist.
I also think the truth is generally to be found in the middle. 25 million deportations is the thoughtful man's solution.
Actually, the other side of the issue is to grow America to 1 billion people, so allowing in merely another 300M people would be the centrist approach.
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And make the camps livable but not comfortable. Like permanent fat camp. Honestly the best immigration strategy was Ali Gs strategy: only young hot women, no men EVER. I would also advocate for obligate LGB-especially T maximalism and have every declared MTF migrant get the chop. Yay feminism!
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I'm willing to wager $10,000 with any poster here that the US doesn't hit 4 million deportations by the end of 2028 and that there will be at least 700,000 new naturalized US citizens every year until 2028.
4m per year? or 4m total between 2025 and the end of 2028. I wonder sometimes what the actual realistic ceiling is on deportations. There are only so many ICE members, courts etc to process them. Though the budget for such was recently increased, it takes time to hire and train and build institutional capacity in any organization. I would expect a ramp in capacity over time; 2028 is likely to have more than the prior years. I read a semi-convincing argument that at current capacity, assuming the political will remains strong, we could maybe do 1m a year. Definitions and motivated statistical analysis also confound efforts to accurately capture such figures.
This is why the drum needs to be beaten over and over again that e-verify and ruinous fines for companies that employ illegal immigrants is the only way the problem will be solved. Trying to forcibly deport people while giving them a wonderful economic situation is a fool's gambit.
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I have no interest in a bet of any size, just curious about the details. Do voluntary self-removals also count? I assume all removals have to be documented, not vague estimates like most immigration stats are?
I haven't seen any reliable measures of "self-deportations".
TRAC and the Deportation Data Project are reliable.
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Meh. I think that everyone likes feeling "sensible". That doesn't mean much, if everyone does feel like they're sensible. Being a centrist doesn't make you more sensible. It just makes you more palatable to more people. It also lets you get away with not actually giving your own viewpoint on what will happen, I guess. Comfortably distanced forum poster, you did a bad job responding to my post!
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Aren't
and
the same people, if they think both are a good thing?
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I have found I’m a blackpilled doomer in many ways. I have Noticed that I am always quick to be pessimistic and assume the worst, even though i am frequently wrong. I think im just a generally more anxious person though, and am probably an odd conservative sample
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Conservative, think I'm much happier with my life, but not because of any kind of optimism towards our political future. I place about a 20% probability on a default and/or civil war in the next 20 years, but Christ is King so who cares? I'm American though so no thoughts of leaving. I'll die with this ship singing a song of praise that I was born on this land.
(Conservative happiness may not be dependent on optimism about material prospects.)
My mother and I were driving on the highway last night and talking about how the world seems to be going crazy, and half of young people aren’t even vaguely interested in family formation, and no one seems connected to any one any more.
And then the rain cleared and we saw a double rainbow, and she quoted from Genesis: “I have set my bow in the sky.” She continued, “We were just talking about how the world feels crazy, but God’s in control.”
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Not American myself and often I find myself thinking 'Americans should try living with real incomes actually declining for a few years before doomposting online.' Despite many problems, the US has been able to sustain productivity growth where Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia have failed. Productivity is everything in the long run. You can buy or build your way out of just about any problem.
See the chart here. All the rich countries have been self-sabotaging much worse than the US: https://x.com/adam_tooze/status/1945588810898620786
But also there's a certain level of dopeyness in US leadership: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-digital-escorts-pentagon-defense-department-china-hackers
The other democracies also are slack to a certain extent, often a greater level, there's malaise and pointless bungling. But this still seems pretty bad. How do you plan on beating (or even deterring) China, a vastly larger country with enormous depths of talent and ludicrous levels of industrialization? You have to fight smart, you have to be wise and judicious.
US govt doesn't seem that smart. Plenty of smart people in America but perhaps not enough and surely not enough in the right places. There is or perhaps was an entire Discourse about the need to keep the all-important AI weights secret from Chinese spies. The concern was that private companies like OpenAI or Google were nowhere near the level of cybersecurity needed to combat state actors, they needed urgent government assistance and targeted industrial policy to support them. But this idea assumes the US is capable of keeping secrets, or of maintaining a major lead in AI, or actually implementing good plans correctly. But this 'doing things correctly' skill just doesn't seem to be there - military procurement, infrastructure buildout, fighting drugs, countering crime, tariffs, industrial policy...
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Everything has been getting worse everywhere, always, forever.
And yet here we are.
Taking the USA - the 70s made the BLM years look like a tea-party. Insurrection and a new civil war looked way more plausible then, with amateur militias like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army running around shooting and bombing. And yet - that never happened.
Black Lives Matter movement and the Summer of Saint Floyd has fizzled out.
Yeah, globally we're probably due for a recession and a lot of political turmoil and things are going to hurt for a few years, maybe even a decade. See the Winter of Discontent in the 70s, and indeed the 70s in general for the UK - The Specials were not singing Ghost Town at the start of the 80s about a happy, jolly time. The 80s were terrible for Ireland.
But then things will slowly right themselves once more, until we all tilt to the opposite direction once again.
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Theta gang.
Other people do predictions all wrong.
Step one: they feel a slight change in temperature . Maybe they think polarization has increased, or atomization, resource use, artificial intelligence, immigrant problems, low TFR , etc. Could just be a vague feeling of unease with the way things are going.
Step two: they extrapolate that one thing to hell. So if you want a picture want the world in a hundred years, just delta times a hundred, aaaand you’re done. So one guy predicts the earth will be boiling, the other guy predicts total wireheading, another a 1000 IQ machine god, another complete resource depletion, another constant civil wars, yet another a zero point zero fertility rate, or a 99% amish population.
Why all the doomers are wrong:
Step One: It’s a very limited, myopic view. There’s a lot of randomness in the world. Where you are likely experiences some rate of temperature rise that is not typical. Some of the delta is pure gut feeling, nothing solid. There’s a lack of absolute assessment of the situation on a larger timescale. Are we as polarized as catholics and protestants in the religious wars? No, we’re very far from that.
Two: All the predictions are mostly contradictory, they refute each other, even though they may look like a sure-thing syllogism when looked at individually. The system is full of negative feedback loops that stop the simple extrapolation of even correctly identified trends. If a thing causes problems, the thing will eventually be limited, the problems mitigated.
Some of the arguments just look like an excuse to give up: they force this binary we’re screwed/we’re not screwed which doesn’t actually tell us anything . Even some of the worst ‘we’re screwed’ future scenarios they come up with would just be comparable to situations humanity already went through (civil wars, vast migrations, losing your home, starving poverty), and those people didn’t give up either. And that’s a small likelyhood. So chill and grill. Without forgetting to participate in the negative feedback loop of stopping the problems.
As always, the historically aware people have better perspective. Cotton gin is an interesting example. Deeply ironic: making the labor much easier for processing cotton increased the demand for labor for the cotton itself. It still took 30 years for the US slave population to double, and 40 years to double again, and the entrenchment of slavery took 70, all spurred by the technological invention, but the social and economic changes took decades to come to a head with actual war. Most every other important invention in history, even when adopted rapidly, usually takes decades to percolate and fully influence the economy and social fabric of a country.
The "population bomb" people being so obviously wrong is also a great example why the new "population stagnation" people are also probably going to be obviously wrong. "Doom" happens slowly.
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I like this post. Yes, the future flatlining and being the same trend forever is unrealistic. My points are more that I don't see any mechanism for some of those issues getting better. Also, you'll hopefully understand that just because humanity already has went through civil wars and starving poverty, that I regardless won't be particularly enthused if it happens again.
No, I want you to be psyched! Life is the ultimate experience, anything can happen! One day you could find yourself in South Africa or Lebanon, without leaving Ohio! Everyone's in trouble. The only question is: are you on top of that trouble or not ?
But in all seriousness, some people literally act like we’ll all be dead in 10 years because of AGI, climate (in Germany they often call them the ‘last generation’ protests ffs), elite mismanagement & evil and what have you. They just throw down their arms: "oh, we’re finished, it's over". The prospect of a civil war, properly considered, should cheer them up. It's not over till the fat lady sings.
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Good post. I agree way too many people take their wishy-washy vibes, put them on a chart and then zoom off to infinity.
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If only nothing ever happened...
Lol yeah. Have fun locking your capital up and missing literally everything.
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You need to distinguish some things.
First, you need to treat technological and social progress separately. Our civilization has been steadily progressing technologically for several centuries at this point, but it has been one of the biggest lies/self-delusions that the social changes happening alongside were consistent improvements. Some were, some weren't, and mostly it was just a change in the trade-off curve the ramifications of which we still probably haven't fully experienced and can't appropriately judge.
Second, the current state and the pace & direction of change; I agree that western society increasingly seems sclerotic, overregulated and overinterdependent. Nevertheless, the peak we have reached is pretty damn impressive, and even rome took centuries to fully break down, with golden ages lasting decades, long after its eventual fate seemed sealed.
Third, private and public. The reason why conservatives lean happier is that they are, on average, grillers. If you just ignore the public dysfunction, pretend there is nothing you can do about it and focus on ways to improve your own life, it's actually quite easy to get by and be happy. Imo this is the reason why civilizations peak; After reaching some level of prosperity, it's much easier to just pay off dysfunction to not bother you instead of fighting against it. At first it's a great deal, since in % terms it's very little, and there is a lot of inertia about not falling into dysfunction staving off the bad incentives. But what is incentived, grows, and eventually it's "suddenly" substantial, but now so many people depend on it that there is now way of getting rid of it without a revolution. Usually the society is still overall quite prosperous, so they just try to limit the growth at this point, or if you have really competent & conscientious people in charge they may even manage to find a way to slowly whittle down the dependency a bit. But it's a lot of work for almost no return for yourself, while frequently making lots of unnecessary enemies. So, the smartest and most competent at best actively avoid politics & just improve things in small localized ways, or at worst take advantage of the situation to redirect more stuff their way while paying off the important interest groups.
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Most Western Democracies aren't electing either far left or far right extremists mostly the policies stay the same. Wasn't Biden a steady moderate elected by a skittish electorate? It didn't seem to have much effect even if he wasn't demonized the way Trump or Obama were.
Biden advertised as a moderate but governed like a radical. Style aside, Trump is still a Clinton Democrat.
Trump isn't a Clinton Democrat as much as he is a 90s era labour-oriented centerist. IE the sort of "old Democrat" that the Clintons and thier "New Democrat" coalition displaced.
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Well... somebody governed like a radical. Jury is still out on who.
Biden was at least aware of and got on board with most of the radicalism. When Biden was a 2020 candidate, he was the sole voice of sanity in the Democratic primary on the question of whether the Presidency could govern like a kingship or whether it had to obey the constitution, but when Biden wanted to govern like a king and the Supreme Court stymied him he went on camera to decry the decision. Shortly after, he explained that "this is not a normal court"; the context on that also included his annoyance that the killjoys wouldn't even let Harvard violate anti-discrimination law at the expense of Asians.
Maybe he governed like a radical because senility made him fuzzy headed or easier to manipulate, but he was at least receptive enough to any manipulation that his hypothetical puppet masters had no problem letting him go on the air to speak for them afterward.
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I’m a soft doomer about the US but much less so than I am about (Western) Europe.
Mass immigration has seen fit to proffer the United States a gentle decline toward a high-inequality, mid-tier country with Some Third World Characteristics but probably with semi-functioning politics and many centers of high economic and industrial development. What is coming for Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Britain, and increasingly also Spain, Ireland and Italy is much, much worse than that.
I agree, Western Europe is a disaster. But that is cold comfort, because if anything, I see Europe as just a sneak peak of what America will be someday. That may be backwards. It is Europe that has been aping us, after all. And, as you say, there are important differences, like our immigrants being a better fit.
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So the East and West Coasts, particularly the West Coast, propped up by cheap
serfimmigrant labour? Spots throughout the rest of the country like the tech hubs in Texas of Austin and Dallas also doing great? Sure, a lot of the country is sliding into decline, but The Economy is going gangbusters through a mix of the giant tech sector massively outperforming everything else and skewing things that way (if AI works out the way everyone is betting their shirt on it working) and the world is still using the US dollar as currency of choice. Yeah, lower middle-class to middle middle-class you can't buy meat anymore and you're living sixteen to a four bedroom house to make rent, but GDP is booming, the market is sky-high, if you own stocks you're okay, so shut up about the economy, stupid!I could well see that happening.
The average household has 2.0 people in it. There might be people living with fifteen roommates, but this is very much not typical.
This anecdote isn't intended as commentary on what you wrote, but I feel like sharing.
My area is full of big homes occupied by single retirees and tiny apartments occupied by families. Somehow, whether due to regulation or tax nonsense or what have you, there doesn't seem to be a way of fixing this. Maybe when the boomers really start to die en masse it'll work out.
Actually something I've seen a few times is married boomers who are still 'together' but each live in their own full sized homes near each other as they simply find that more pleasant. Blew my mind the first time but it keeps coming up.
You see this all the time in California. I know a boomer or two who has empty houses that he doesn't even rent out because he doesn't want to bother.
The tax situation for real estate in California is an incredibly sweet deal. Your tax basis is the valuation at purchase time with a yearly increase not to exceed inflation or 2%. Boomers are paying pennies in property tax on all their properties while people who buy a house now can pay ten thousand a year for an ""starter"" house. Another transfer from the productive to the retired.
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You're mixing things up a bit; the depressed places don't have the high housing prices and until the next advance of the progressives, we're still America where even (or especially!) the poor eat meat.
The very poor in America do not eat meat. They're not eating rice and beans either, mind- it's a diet of ultra-processed food, made of vegetable oil, additives, sugar, and white flour combined in various forms.
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It’s not a great outcome but the reality is that life in eg. Southern Brazil or the nicer parts of Mexico is “fine” for the middle class. Worse, strictly, yes, but bearable.
The situation in what will become of Europe will be far worse than that.
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And why much worse?
Because of the character of the immigration. Latinos are largely deracinated, with little shared identity (which is why ‘Latinx’ or la raza stuff is largely the preserve of PMC white-Hispanic academics and the working class Mexican equivalent of Hoteps). Many will vote for a conservative ‘strongman’ caudillo over the left. Many consider themselves ‘white’ regardless of reality, and intermarriage rates are quite high. Many essentially share an ‘American dream’ of being an atomized consoomer with a big pick up truck, a bimbo wife and a McMansion in the suburbs. This may be suboptimal but it is not immediately catastrophic. An America after mass Hispanic migration (now occurring) is a poorer, more corrupt, more violent, more dysfunctional America, but it can probably survive as a polity.
In Europe the same isn’t true with large scale immigration from Islamic societies that have old, deep cultural and religious identities, often with an undercurrent of resentment towards Europeans and European society and separate both particular identities (‘I’m Turkish, not German’) and universal ones (‘I’m Muslim, I’m part of the global Ummah with my brothers and sisters’) that fully supplant the previous civic identity. Intermarriage rates between those from Islamic backgrounds and the natives are so low that in most places they’re negligible (and when they happen almost always involves an indigenous usually-woman converting). Coupled with general dysfunctional migration (including from non-Islamic regions) and the extreme pace of demographic change - faster in most of Europe than the US even if America is at a more advanced stage - and you have a recipe for the complete breakdown of social order and full Lebanonization in the coming years.
Consider that in 1950 the Maronites could easily have carved out their own state. But by the mid-1970s they no longer possessed the demographic strength even though they had most of the money and the technical skills.
It's actually even a bit brighter than you think- red tribe whites are on track to have the highest TFR of any major group in the next year or two(currently tied with hispanics, blacks are a distant third) and that looks to be durable.
No doubt many motteizeans would prefer yankees to be the durable demographic core. But hispanics are reliant on immigration to keep their demographic growth; that will inevitably slow from declining populations in Latin America.
I agree with you that the better parts of Mexico, Brazil, etc are extremely recognizable as a worst case scenario for America and are broadly 'fine' in global terms.
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I mostly agree with you, but I think that the levels of integration mean that if it comes to it, European countries can simply expel their migrants, while any immigration-caused decline in America will be permanent because the migrants have assimilated.
AFAIK the reason the Maronites did not carve out their own state was because it would not have been economically self-sufficient, they even lobbied the French for the inclusion of Muslim-majority agricultural areas such as the Bekaa Valley into Lebanon in order to avoid a repeat of the famines that had occurred under Ottoman rule. That being said, Maronites and Lebanese Christians in general have a weird sort of self-conception as Lebanese, given that they were the ones who lobbied for their rapey Muslim Lebanese countrymen to come to Australia. I can't imagine Europeans feeling that kind of kinship to their foreign underclass.
That's my view as well. I can agree with the argument that the Hispanic minority in the US isn't particularly causing large problems for now but we cannot be sure what the future brings.
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What do you think it would take for indigenous Europeans to reverse this process, in terms of both will and policy? Is Europe so senescent that it will end with a whimper? The current leaders are a lost cause, but is the younger generation cottoning to what's happening and starting to ask dangerous questions? I have almost no window into this as I don't understand the politics.
Offhand my guess is that, when the welfare states inevitably collapse, the immigrant populations get much more belligerent and manage to provoke even Europeans into self-defense -- first locally, and then increasingly with a resurgent European identity. But again I have no idea how plausible this is.
Breaking the stranglehold of the GAE / globohomo empire over the UK and the federal German state, which is a US imperialist creation in the first place anyways.
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There is no magic breaking point at which things get so bad ideologies necessarily start changing. Maybe something happens, maybe it doesn’t, there are scenarios where Biden ran in 2016 and won, where Trump is still a TV host. Tiny things can change the trajectory. I do expect that the situation will vary between Western European countries, perhaps even significantly.
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This is not true. Latinos express their race through their nationalities, the same way Europeans did in older times. You don't see a coherent concept of an overarching Race from them for similar reasons that a White European Identity would have been strange to a European commoner in 1600 - "I am French, what do you mean?"
The Latinx and La Raza stuff is a failed effort to force a singular Hispanic Identity by woke types, but that doesn't mean they don't share a common identity or that one won't form more naturally on it's own as they become a larger cultural block. Younger hispanic kids, IME, do see themselves an being in an ingroup opposed to everyone else, despite longstanding hostilities between some of their origin countries.
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I'm not 2rafa, but I would argue similarly on immigration. The advantage that the US has with immigration is that all their illegal immigration is Hispanic. They're not all people you would want in your nation, but the US has already integrated a huge number of them. There aren't big push factors coming that will massively bump numbers up in future, and in legal immigration the US system works pretty well, largely creaming off the best from the rest of the world. The US has relatively limited welfare which means most illegals are in some sense productive, or at least not active drains outside of the criminal elements. The US is also massive and very decentralized. Some states and cities will become swamped and turn into third-world entities, but there will still be dozens of productive urban areas with low levels.
In Europe, illegal immigration is coming from Africa and the middle east. These immigrants are much lower quality. They are poorly integrated, many going into ethnic enclaves and reigniting old tribal conflicts with other groups of immigrants, to say nothing of the dangers of Muslim immigration. They are attracted by generous welfare which they are increasingly exploiting, adding nothing to the host nations. Numbers are large and likely only to grow larger as their home regions increasingly destabilize. I can't speak for legal immigration for continental Europe, but at least in the UK they've somehow ended up importing millions of terrible unproductive immigrants in addition to the illegal flows.
Structurally, each individual nation is also poorly positioned to weather these floods. Productivity is often focused in a single primate city, and once you lose a London, Paris, Brussels, Milan, etc. you've lost most of the nation's growth. Individual areas can do little to fight against the waves. And all this is to say nothing of the respective strengths of the economies
I see so many African Muslims in my area, is distressing. Somalis control large swaths of Minnesota, and Indians are stunningly prominent compared to ten years ago.
It's not just Hispanic.
Advantage of being in a deep red state. They tried to diversify it by sending Muslims and Congolese but the state just doesn't have as much welfare as the blues so many left after the Fed resettlement money gets cut off, and trump cut off the refugee pipeline. I don't see nearly as many as I did 5 years ago. TitaniumButterfly commented on Sacramento, that's where a lot of our Muslims went. Thank you Blue states for your service.
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It isn’t just but it is mostly. We’ll see how things are under a future Democratic administration but for now the situation is still vastly preferable.
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This is ridiculous hyperbole. Somalis don't "control" anything. They'll breed with the whites in two generations and disappear.
They control an entire congressional district. None of the Somali Muslims I've seen have married whites, they're all paired up with their own ilk, and that especially applies to the younger generation.
This is an utterly ridiculous statement that can be debunked in 30 seconds of Googling. Ilham Omar's district is 17.1% Black, which will include some pre-65 "native" Blacks as well as Somalis. She was sent to Congress by white liberals. There's an important theme here, a lot of what the anti-immigrant Right habitually blames on immigrants is actually done by white liberals.
This is the kingmaker scenario, right? Gwern talks about it a bit - if you have three friends, and one friend refuses point-blank to eat non-Halal food, then you will find yourself always looking for halal restaurants even though he’s only 25% of the group. In a very real sense that’s on the other three for not kicking him to the curb, but in a practical sense he’s the one controlling where you go.
There’s also just the straight issue of shelling points. The left in the UK has such kingmaker scenarios a lot with local Muslim populations. If they can’t all agree to ignore them at vaguely the same time, the white liberals who do will be steamrollered by the ones who don’t.
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They have substantial influence in many local elections and a tendency to vote for their own. Such a voting bloc can easily end up in control of all sorts of important positions even while remaining a minority.
Interbreeding between the two is negligible and Somalian IQ is low enough that even after some mixing the hybrids will remain an underclass. What's more, the whites they're likely to mate with are in turn the lowest-quality and lowest-status whites, so they wouldn't even be mixing with the average.
Disagree.
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It was very odd to me to visit a Costco in Sacramento recently. I saw maybe six white people in the entire store, and no white or even hispanic employees. Shoppers seemed fairly evenly split between Asians (mostly Chinese and Vietnamese) and Arabs, with most women in hijabs and even a few in niqabs. The staff was mostly Vietnamese or something like them. I couldn't understand the English of the person at the checkout.
In fact something I've seen a lot more of in general is immigrants with different strains of unintelligible English trying to communicate with each other only semi-successfully. The other day it was some Sikh guys arguing with a Cambodian proprietor. I could mostly understand each but they couldn't understand each other. Considered offering to translate but decided it would be rude.
And so what? Why does this make you so uncomfortable? They're normal people and not bothering you.
He has no way of knowing that.
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I will eat the bullet and admit that people of different ethnicities tend to make me uncomfortable in large supply. I like that knowing that the people around me are like me in substantial ways. I have nothing against Chinese or Vietnamese who speak English as a second language, but I don't get the impression that I could speak to them as freely as a white person, if at all, and I think that my social missteps would be more harshly looked upon. Since humans communicate to each other, even as strangers, this has certain effects. For instance, at Sam's Club yesterday, I was asked if I was in line by another shopper, and I explained that I thought I was, but I evidently wasn't, and that furthermore, the line was too long for me to consider it worthwhile. I would not feel so free to give such an explanation to someone significantly different from me ethnically. Also, our definitions of "normal" are quite different. I don't think a practicing Muslim Arab would consider me normal, and I certainly wouldn't consider them normal, either. The details I have heard about immigration in Canada makes me think that even good liberals are generally bothered by vast quantities of foreigners in their country.
The vast majority of immigrants assimilate in the US by the second generation.
Would you consider a Chinese or Vietnamese person less American if they were born here and spoke English natively?
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Who said it made me uncomfortable?
What about my comment made you uncomfortable enough to feel the need to say something?
Were you uncomfortable?
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When I go to Costco, there is not necessarily a shortage of white people. However, there seems to be a total lack of white people under 40. I assume it's related to day/time when I go, but it's an ominous feeling.
"Ominous" how? They're just normal people who are trying to get by let everyone else. The enemies are the billionaire class selling out the country, not everyday immigrants raising a family. These are people who stock your grocery store shelves, clean your bathrooms at the malls, pick your fruit.
Ominous that the land and country my forefathers struggled and fought for is being silently overrun by foreigner who neither share nor respect my values, culture, and race.
Pretty obvious if you consider it for a moment.
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Some of us like having a country / nation. When you import a whole new population, with a completely different culture, with absolutely no attachment, no loyalty, and quite possibly not even basic respect, for the culture that's hosting them, and you see that all the young people are from that foreign culture, and all the old people are from yours, it's pretty clear who's in, and who's out. For example, I read somewhere that 80% of people under 20 in Belgium are not Belgian, effectively that means that that nation is over. For a lot of people that's going to be ominous, even if they people replacing them bear them no ill will.
What about the everyday immigrants who do nothing all day, and get housed in private hotels, paid for by the government? Or the ones setting up grooming gangs that the police and social workers run cover for?
Yeah, we should be doing that ourselves.
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Hey, Costco shopper! I am very dissatisfied with Sam's Club. They didn't have pork butt yesterday, and their pork loin was 40 cents more expensive than the wholesale store and 40 cents more expensive than their own website said it was. Are you satisfied with Costco meat prices? If only I had one near me. Please tell me more about Costco. What do you like about it? When you see the inside of Costco, are you blinded by its majesty? Paralyzed? Dumbstruck?
My (european) wife's reaction upon entering Costco for the first time could have been described as "awestruck". Like within seconds of entering and seeing the inside, she knew she loved it and that it was one of the best places on earth. And that's just inferior Canadian Costco. I can't imagine what American Costco would do to her.
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When I expressed interest in having a custom house built, my mother nonjokingly suggested that it might be nice to have a house whose interior looked like a Costco warehouse's, with exposed electrical conduits making diagnosis of problems easy. My design has a "flat" (1:12) roof, but no exposed conduits. Still, the wiring should be easy to access through the suspended ceiling.
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Yet the shoppers managed to evade your security, drive to the sacred Costco, and desecrate it with their filthy footsteps!
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Perhaps they’re at work.
It reminds me of how pre-COVID—but even to a lesser extent to this day—if I saw another white-collar-looking young man in the wild during the weekday daytime, we’d often briefly gawk at each other out of surprise like the Umbrella Academy driving meme, such as when we’re pushing shopping carts past each other at the grocery store.
Probably not. I go on weekends around opening time. I realize the demographics might be different at 1pm, 3pm, or 5pm on the weekends compared to opening.
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Doomer. If a civil war couldn’t happen over Covid, it’s not going to happen at all. Maybe an uncontested secession or three.
I think the risk of political violence is going up, but it no longer has the level of public buy-in you would need for a civil war. Especially for the youth, which is the primary demographic you would need for that. Zoomers are too checked out and there’s not enough of them, Boomers are too old, and Millennials finally managed to grab a small slice of the pie and are now just a bit too comfortable. I think the primary danger zone in the United States was 2014 to 2021. I think the chances of civil war in Europe are higher, but the most likely scenario is the Day of the Shed, when all the native peoples of Europe rise up and viciously cuck themselves to death Michel Houellebecq-style.
Could you elaborate on the Day of the Shed?
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I disagree with the parallel (not with your general argument). It's not sociologically possible. South Korea is a rather particular greenhouse in that regard, ethnically homogeneous and largely insulated from external trends, with distorted Confucian and cyberpunk tendencies taken to social extremes. None of that applies to the US or Western Europe either for that matter. I believe in the law that that which can't continue indefinitely, won't, even if it gets worse short-term. The hypergamy crunch is just around the corner. We're already at a point socially where there are three women to two men among new college graduates. This clearly cannot last.
Why can’t it last? Sure, over timescales some groups will have more children than others, but liberalism is a powerful identity package that has a lot of ability to convert people from conservative backgrounds.
A female-to-male ratio of 3:2 among college graduates means that one in three college-educated women remains childless and single or intentionally becomes a single mom or marries a working-class man. I doubt any current Western society is prepared to normalize such prospects.
Yes, and I'd say that almost all of them are going to be the first (childless), with a few taking the second option (intentional single mom, likely via artificial insemination or, given aging, IVF). It doesn't matter whether we're "prepared to normalize such prospects" or not, it's what's going to happen.
Have you ever heard of a society where this happened and it yet endured?
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I think they're being normalized as we speak.
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South Korea is an extreme example and bringing it up likely weakened the point. I don't mind the idea of things changing to be a more stable equilibrium, but if we're on a cliff, it would make me feel a lot better to know if it's a short drop or a long drop.
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I was a doomer 15 years ago. Things have mostly continued to get worse since then, but nowhere near as fast as I expected. The old saying goes that things fall apart slowly, then all at once. I figure it will all fall apart eventually, but I won't pretend to have any idea on the time scale. Anyone who pretends to know when is selling something.
"There are weeks where nothing happens, and there are decades where nothing happens" -Vladimir Chudin
You mixed up the quote man - There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.
They did that on purpose to state that nothing ever happens. Meme joking.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nothing-ever-happens
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I guess the Chudin didn't make the joke clear enough: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2883054-nothing-ever-happens
Ah lol that is where that comes from. I'd seen Lenin referred to as Chudin in the past, I thought it was just an insulting nickname for him. My bad.
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I liked your joke. I understood your joke. You can't win 'em all.
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Part of this tendency, surely, is that the scale of things is totally incomprehensible to the human brain. I don't know what 50 million dead people at the hands of Vladimir Chudin looks like. I don't know what 700 thousand pounds of steel produced resulting in an ungodly amount of GDP per capita looks like, or how it's even possible at such large quantities. Maybe the rest of society can catch fire but the 700 thousand pounds of steel being produced every year keeps the entire thing afloat. There's just too much of the picture that not only can you not see, but is impossible for you to see.
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