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It doesn't seem like your hiatus has given you much optimism on the culture war front.
The gap between 'grace and forgiveness' and 'punching back twice as hard' is wide enough to drive a semi through, but I'll try:
After the conservative majority on the supreme court (viewed by many on the left as obtained through defection) struck down Roe v. Wade, many people here and elsewhere predicted riots and burnination in every major city in America. Ask Whiningcoil and FC about that one. Where, exactly, is the punchback from that one? Jane's revenge?
Similar predictions of riots, defections, #resistance after Trump's inauguration in 2024. Even the protests were muted compared to 2016, Trump deleted USAID, laid off some largely indeterminate number of federal workers, is extorting Harvard and the other major colleges for hundreds of millions for 'antisemitism' (among other things). NIH and NSF have proposed budget cuts of ~40% each for 2026 - I suppose congress can appropriate the funds and Trump can just do to NIH/NSF what he did to USAID.
Since you want to talk about immigration, where's the liberal defection in response to Desantis and Abbott sending busloads of illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard or other liberal strongholds? People bitched about it, but it's not like Desantis/Abbott are being harassed by the feds or blue states are shipping red-county fentanyl addicts to Florida and Texas.
Your example for Republicans is what, 17 years old? And isn't even from a sitting president. Has Trump ever told his supporters to be nicer to Biden? There's no asymmetric defection here.
You mean the lockdowns that started during Trump's administration, that he could have stopped at any time for months? Lockdowns that had overwhelming bipartisan support in the first 1-6 months of their institution? Lockdowns that, I'll remind you, many people here predicted would be permanent as they asserted the government would never voluntarily relinquish power that they had taken from the people and it would be 'lockdowns forever.'
You're not concerned about Trump calling a governor and asking him to find votes after losing an election? I'm genuinely asking - do you think it was justified because democrats stole the election in Georgia, because this is normal behavior for presidents who lose elections, or you just don't think he should face consequences?
Come on, this is your steelman for why people are worried that John Bolton was arrested? The guy publicly had a falling out with Trump, wrote a nasty book about him and now he's got the FBI kicking down his door. You're not worried at all about the weaponization of the DoJ?
There's this funny phenomenon I've noticed during my time here. Regardless of what happens in the real world, regardless of the fortunes of Blue Tribe or Red Tribe, blackpilling only increases. Lockdowns/COVID end? Roe V. Wade overturned? Trump wins a trifecta in 2024? Doesn't matter, the response is only either gloating or increased pessimism.
I genuinely still don't know why this is. Are the moderates leaving the site and losing interest, and all that's left is the bitterest remnant? My perception is that this seems to be broader than TheMotte, though. And my recollection of you, at least, is that you were fairly restrained in your rhetoric and beliefs.
Secondly - much ado is made about the loss of faith in institutions over the last decade, but I have to admit the inverse is just as interesting to me. Why was faith in our institutions so high 50 years ago? Do you really think the government or New York Times were that much more honest with the plebs in the 70s than they are in the 2020s? And if not, is faith in flawed institutions nevertheless adaptive for a society?
Interesting question of where to set the clock and what counts as grace, given how atrocious the original decision was.
Yeah, response was much more muted than I expected.
The malicious compliance/indeterminate regulation (choose your charity level) has probably killed a few high-risk people.
LOL. Moving on-
Probably, yes. Alternatives aren't fairing much better in my experience though.
70 years ago, yes: post-war optimism, being the main country that mattered and wasn't wrecked, fairly strong sense of national unity. 50 years ago it was already declining.
Distinct lack of alternatives. Information control works if you manage it; it's much, much harder to manage now. Harder to hide the sneering contempt and the high/low cultural differences.
Define "flawed." All models are imperfect; some are useful.
We should probably rewind to prehistory, when women risked infection to get back alley abortions with filthy stone age awls. we ought to retvrn to the old ways, where women would give birth and then drop the baby in the ocean or jungle.
Is the joke that the 10 million refugees is the defection, or the angry letters in the newspaper and on tumblr?
Just curious, what are you basing this on? Because I bet if I dug into the history books it wasn't as wonderful as you might imagine. The McCarthy trials and Korean war can't have been universally popular, the scars of Japanese internment, continuing racial segregation, miscegenation laws...even then, setting your norm as the high-water mark the decade after winning a world war and emerging as one of two superpowers does not seem like a solid foundation for a nation.
Besides, we won another global conflict within our lifetimes! The Berlin wall fell, the USSR dissolved and for my childhood the USA was the sole superpower. The budget was balanced and our biggest problem was that the president was getting BJs in the oval office. You really don't think the 90s were another high-water mark?
Had I the time, my thesis would be that the institutions of the 20th century were just as shitty as today. As you say, information control is simply much harder now.
Uniting behind a flawed leader is usually better than no leader at all. Or at least that's what I tell my employees.
Reminds me of a poem.
While I am morally pro-life, I am just enough of a squishy lib at heart to think that abortion shouldn't be banned entirely (at this stage of technology). But I find pro-abortion people viscerally disturbed and pro-choice wildly inconsistent. They really shouldn't have given up on "safe, legal, and rare."
Yes, the several million illegal immigrants was the original defection, and sending a couple dozen to self-proclaimed sanctuary cities that immediately shipped them back was the tiniest possible tat in reply.
MASH was! (Yes, I'm joking and aware the actual war was not nearly as popular, and also years shorter)
Talk about a failed opportunity.
Well yeah, that's kind of the point, and that it was already declining into the 70s (your 50 years ago mark). I think the post-war years were unusually good (though you're absolutely right, not perfect) times, and they set a cultural memory bar that's basically impossible to achieve without that set of circumstances.
We either have to redefine down what a good life and good country is, or we have to find a different route to get there.
Well, absolutely! I'd give my left nut to crank the clock back to late 90s cultural détente, colorblindness, warts and all. Hell, I'd be tempted just for Utopian Scholastic and Frutiger Aero to make a comeback.
But I also think it's cliché for a Millennial to say that the late 90s/early 00s minus the terrorism response were a golden age.
The funniest thing is that most of the increase in the illegal population occurred during our mutually agreed upon golden age, and evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. Although, I often forget that MAGA has retroactively decreed Bush to be a democrat, the same way that every politician elected between prior to 2016 (maybe with some exceptions carved out for Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jackson and Washington) was a democrat.
Even if you argue that there were an extra several million that came during Biden's presidency, this is more a return to a historical trend than 'an invading rapist horde' to paraphrase someone here.
Numbers of illegal immigrants almost seems to correlate with the relative prosperity of the USA to South American countries rather than ICE enforcement, which I'm told was a bipartisan issue in the 90s and early 2000s...
Have you considered that your main complaint with the contemporary US seems to be the culture war, yet your vitriolic hate for Fauci (and apparently Tim Walz?) is itself, culture warring? Even as you decry a lack of national unity, you're just as angry as everyone else.
...why?
No, I missed it. That's...an interesting choice.
I have two, and I'm confident they are growing up in a better world. They'll have significantly more opportunity than I ever had should they choose to pursue it.
You act like the people have no agency or responsibility for themselves. Fauci is still trusted by close to a majority of Americans; there's every possibility that regardless of what Fauci did, half the country would hate him. I worked at the same institute as Fauci and met him in passing, and I'm sure you've read enough of my writing in the past to know I think that the right's fixation on Fauci as a figurehead betrays a near-complete lack of understanding of his actual role/function and is largely a character assassination downstream of resentment about lockdowns.
If you do, it will look like this. The politicians you would like are not the politicians that would win elections.
Can you imagine the CCP cutting funding from Tsinghua or Peking university? The center of gravity around biotech and STEM are shifting towards China, and the only question (in biotech at least) is whether the equilibrium will be that of peers or whether we go the route of low/mid-value manufacturing, aka extinction. NIH is probably getting budget cuts next year too. Ten years from now neo-MAGA will be bitching about how they have to buy their new drugs from China because their elites sold them out, without realizing it was their own retarded policies that got them there.
You want justice? Justice would be the next democratic president coming in and cutting subsidies to farmers, trade schools and other red-coded industries who are trying to fuck over mine. Thankfully, I doubt that would ever happen contrary to what you and Iconochasm think about retaliation from the left.
If this is how culture war is defined, it's too broad to be a useful phrase. By this standard how would you have separated civil rights from culture war? Or would you consider them together?
The "white guy tacos/black pepper is too spicy" thing. The "code talking to white guys" thing. He was self-consciously a DEI pick because Harris or somebody advising her apparently thought she needed another generic old white guy for racist reasons, and they played it up too much. And, frankly and shallowly, I found his mannerisms deeply offputting. Awkward and unserious. Yes, tbf, Trump is also unserious.
I shouldn't hold his wife's comments against him, but the smell the burning tires thing was too weird. Riot fetishism.
I certainly am much more aware of how things work and can guide them better than my family could.
Do you really want me to start ranting about public health and certain populations? I think people have agency. I absolutely think people should take responsibility. What I'm asking is that "experts" also have to take responsibility.
People absolutely have agency. It is unfortunate that the people used that agency to reply to incredible hubris with incredible stupidity.
Either experts have consequences when they're wrong, or you're asking that the lowly public trust them, forever, no matter what, that trust can never be harmed by failures. That is not a reasonable request.
While I do blame him specifically for the mask thing and some degree for his role in GoF funding, I am aware that the singular focus is overblown by most people and that's why I try to consistently specific that I'm using him as a convenient synecdoche, not a sole scapegoat. Whatever I think of his failures during COVID, they were not his alone and he did do good work with PEPFAR; I'll avoid using him as a synecdoche going forward.
The attacks on me are attacks on science things was a self-own, though.
All our conversations and you think I'm on the EA side? It has been too long since we've chatted, hoss.
I'm pretty fond of the current NC AG and I have hopes for his future. He's won multiple elections so far!
Back to the conversation about information control, I can't imagine Tsinghua and Peking hosting significant anti-Xi demonstrations while denying other protests, or... well, I'm not aware of a group that occupies quite the same spot Jews do in American/Western society to draw a good parallel.
I can imagine the CCP cutting funding if they considered the university to be acting against the interests of the Party. Or maybe the specific professors would just disappear for a while and come back singing a different tune. Trump is not so competent.
Yeah definitely, kind of like people that refuse to understand why public transit it so unpopular outside of a tiny group of big cities in the US.
Vengeance is mine, thus saith the Raptr!
Yeah, they'll just reintroduce all the unconstitutional race and sex discrimination, restore the appropriately gerrymandered speech allowances for elite universities about who gets to assault whom, and go back to paying NGOs to bring people into the country illegally without ever normalizing their statuses.
I remember once upon a time we had happier conversations. Can we get back to those? If you've got the time and interest, I've got two questions I've wondered your input on.
One, how can scientific institutions regain the public trust? Do you think there's anything they could do to meaningfully communicate some degree of awareness?
Two, I'm pretty sure we disagree on the topic of affirmative action and how left-racism plays out in the public sphere (media bias, etc) but I wanted to ask anyways. Do you think the left (defined very loosely to include even sane liberals; the phrase used as a matter of convenience rather than strict party lines) will ever change regarding their at-best indifference and sometimes encouragement of anti-white racism, or is that just permanently baked in and people are supposed to take it on the chin?
Culture war could be meaningfully defined as struggle/war for non-material reasons (more precisely, one that began this way). This is not something modern, examples galore from premodern history (mostly religious).
Politics as usual:
"Who is the rightful heir of the throne?"
"Should the nobility submit to the king, or the other way around?"
Culture war:
"Was Son created by the Father, or are they co-eternal?"
"Is veneration of icons proper piety or idolatrous pagan abomination?"
etc, etc.
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Probably parts of it were, given that it happened many years before I was alive and history is not my forte. Undoubtedly FC could give you a detailed list of anti-segregationist terrorists who went on to have illustrious careers at Harvard.
Gay marriage may be a better example. Writ large, I'd consider that an example of Mostly Peaceful and Well Intentioned propaganda and PR campaigns which successfully won supermajority support among the American people. And even among those who don't support gay marriage, probably a significant portion have no problem with gay people and just hold some views about the church and sanctity of marriage and whatnot.
But it was largely a campaign won by sympathetic figures you knew in your community, not shitposting on twitter about the hordes of illegal immigrants coming to take your jobs and rape your families. It wasn't won by darkly hinting about how many guns you have, or congressional shenanigans or gerrymandering.
Undoubtedly there are those who'd claim that the left's takeover of Hollywood, the media and institutions etc. are just culture war by a different name. Realpolitik applied to culture war. But realpolitik invariably seems to be an excuse for defection.
Were those racist reasons them thinking that rustbelt/Pennsylvania/Georgian white working class Americans (aka where the election was won) were less likely to vote for a black/black or woman/woman ticket than woman/white man ticket? Because...yeah? Probably true? I'm sure they're not opposed to voting for either black or female candidates (Obama clearly won handily), but on the margin, I would 100% go with Walz or Shapiro or Newsom over Stacey Adams. Are you arguing that there were better-qualified non-white/non-cishet-male candidates that were passed over because Walz is white?
I can guarantee you that physicians in the 50s and 60s (your golden age!) believed much dumber things than they do now, and they nevertheless enjoyed much higher levels of trust. Thalidomide? Doctors selling out for smoking companies? Tuskegee syphilis experiments? Refrigerator mothers and autism, electroshock therapy, lobotomies? What, exactly, were the consequences for the profession for all that shit, and why was the public too stupid to know better? And I can guarantee you that whatever era of history people want to RETVRN to, the 'experts' believed even dumber shit than they do now.
Your argument should be that nobody ever should have trusted experts.
Don't overindex on the beliefs of the candidate, the point is that you're weird relative to the population norm. If you genuinely liked a politician that much, they're almost certainly unpalatable to the general population. I can't imagine you hold the combination of positions most electable in any given campaign year.
I've been here for 7 years, give or take. I'd estimate I've read >95% of the top-level posts in that time, although I rarely participate. Somewhere along the line I lost interest in people bashing Fauci and other causes I care about while nodding sympathetically, patting them on the back and censoring myself.
With the caveat as always that I don't really know what I'm talking about; they can't. They haven't lost the public trust, they've lost the trust of Republicans. Pandering to one would piss off the other. Probably best case scenario is that they fade into the background over the next 5-10 years and win bipartisan support in the senate (which is still holding, by the way).
In the meantime, people can stop vaccinating their kids and take supplements instead of chemo I guess. They're free to make their own choices.
I'm pretty far removed from anyone deep down those rabbit holes, but the chasm between the way you see things and the way they do is...significant.
I'm far from the first person to say this, but the left and, to a large extent, normies, support the underdog. So long as blacks and other minorities are the underdogs, there's going to be an urge to perpetrate what you call anti-white racism. I feel like this has been shifting for men vs. women given the way women outperform men in school and outnumber them in university. I wonder if the dam would have broken already were it not that 1) women still make less than men on average (debate the data/methodology of that all you will, it's a nice figure to quote to normies) and 2) women are much better organized and understand the game significantly better than most men.
I also think it's why I believe 2015-2020 were so damaging to the right (all the shootings and gun rhetoric and threats) and why the last few months have been so damaging to the left. If the right can position themselves as victims of leftist violence rather than threatening paramilitary men with all the guns, the mainstream will bail on the left pretty quickly. People don't like assassinations and domestic terrorism.
But what do I know, I've been largely wrong about every prediction I've made in my tenure here.
Communist Terrorists, actually.
Consider the term "homophobe", intentionally chosen to frame opposition to LGBT as mental illness. Consider the sheer amount of propaganda in media and film, where anyone opposed was a violent, low-class, slovenly bigot, probably a criminal, or perhaps at best an ignorant, withered old church lady. This went on for more than a decade, and grew so hackneyed that it spawned a second-order meme of "not that there's anything wrong with that", to encapsulate the pervasive moral obligation that permeated culture. The Westborough Baptist Church was framed as the modal opponent of Gay Rights in the culture. A murder over drug money was framed as a hate-killing and blown up into national news, followed by new federal laws to combat the danger of hate crimes against homosexuals.
And as @gattsuru often notes, it worked. You won. Those you did not persuade, you shamed and abused and harassed into silence. "Protected Class" law formalized this for employment, the media and the Academy handled it everywhere else. As several Blue Commenters have straightforwardly stated it over the years, we lost, so it's our turn in the closet for a couple decades.
How fortunate that this sort of political hardball had zero negative consequences of any kind.
Are you beetlejuice? Or do you, gattsuru and germ have some kind of discord group? I don't see how else you could find a 6 day old comment in a two week old thread, short of trolling my comment history or someone else doing so and reporting everything I write.
It's foolish to ignore the actual issue being discussed and chalk it all up to what you view as a propaganda apparatus, both because you're ignoring a half dozen other issues (gun control? trans people? climate change? Taxation and social welfare?) that failed to achieve anywhere near the same level of unity and because you're going to fail when you try to spin up your own propaganda apparatus.
...political hardball? Winning the hearts and minds of a significant majority of the population is not political hardball. You're so blinded by your obsession with realpolitik, so deeply steeped in the culture war and obsessed with small-minded zero sum games that you can't see anything beyond conflict and winning or losing. You can't even reflect on whether the change was a net benefit to the country, you're just bitter that 'your side lost.'
Is a more perfect union simply one where your side wins, and blue tribe is eradicated? And what comes after that? You'd just fracture into normiecons and groypers, neolibs and church fundamentalists and repeat the cycle. Your path is just one of endless conflict.
Tell me, then, your model of ethically influencing the electorate without playing 'political hardball.' Or are you so far gone as to think it's impossible?
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Yeah, fair. I certainly don't agree with all the downstream effects despite my [redacted], but mostly? Yeah.
Setting the bar pretty low with Adams! No, I'm saying there were candidates passed over because Walz was (thought to be) a generically inoffensive white nobody. Old, non-Group, didn't show up Harris in any way. White wasn't the only requirement, but it was the one he and the campaign leaned into the most in a way that pissed off non-Dems.
Buttigieg had pre-existing name recognition, but gay counts as a Group and apparently is so unpopular with black people it's a statistical oddity. Amy Klobuchar, Tulsi Gabbard? Maybe Harris didn't want one of the people that did better than her in the primaries. Shapiro, purple state governor that's young enough to have a future, might show up Harris, and Jewish poses an issue to elements of both sides apparently. Bernie, way more name recognition, old, ~white, but definitely shows up Harris when public speaking and again the Jewish problem (ooo that feels unpleasant to type). Charlie Crist could've been an interesting dark horse pick as a former Republican that fulfilled the old and mostly-white requirements.
And that's with like 5 minutes thought of really prominent people. Surely the DNC has a list of potential state politicians since they pulled Walz out of a hat; some of them are undoubtedly less white, less old, less goofy?
Lobotomies and thalidomide eventually got banned, so maybe I should give it a few more years to see if GoF gets banned again? Feels too polarized and no one's even asking the question.
The consequences of the Tuskegee experiments were that 50 years later black people still have much lower trust in doctors and vaccines, nobody seems to have an idea of how to fix that, and sometimes that leads the big brains at Harvard and UPenn to really crazy places.
Guilty as charged. Go weirdos!
Yeah, that's how I feel in liberal-progressive spaces that don't think 2020 was mass insanity and prefer criminals over their victims, and why I've gotten chased out of them. To be clear I did phrase things much more gently back when I was trying, but here among disagreeable acquaintances it's not really the point.
The trans issue has reduced trust in a fair number of family-minded Dems, but not in the blanket way to turn against vaccines in the stupid way a subset of Republicans did. Hopefully it doesn't take 50+ years to fix the damage that experimental mandates did.
There's bound to be a really interesting anthropological study involved in recent polarization dynamics, but nobody willing to would produce something unbiased enough to be worth reading.
And I could've written the question in a less-steamed manner. Mea culpa.
The indifference angle is about as far as I am willing to go to bridge the gap. I recognize that it's not entirely hate in the way that a Grand Red Dragon of the Klan hated black people. The underdog factor is... whatever it is, but after 2020 I don't buy it as sufficient explanation unless we're being uncharitable enough to tag on the soft bigotry of low expectations. It gets pretty exhausting putting up the epicycles to explain why the Occam's Razor explanation isn't right.
Would you do this kind of hedging for someone that really likes posting crime stats and HBD commentary? Would you extend so much charity when they say that no no, they're not actually anti-black? When there's Harvard professors arguing that old white people should die for health equity, Yale lecturers fantasizing about shooting white people, the whole insanity around "being on time is white supremacy," are you able to wonder if it exists and isn't something I (and Jeremy Carl, and others) nightmared up?
I'm with you there, hoss.
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... the problem is that there's two models, here.
One is that the Gay Rights Movement won by a campaign of sympathetic figure you knew in your community, and sometimes even were in your family, showing that People Could Be People. I'd like to believe this is true, and contemporaneously it's the argument I pushed for (admittedly, to a level of slower progress that would frustrate me today).
The other is that it won by absolutely crushing any disagreement. Brendan Eich did, in fact, lose his job, and people did, in fact, beat him in public and years later were quite proud of it. Code Pink would publicly embarrass you, Google would (accept third parties gaming their tech to) redirect searches with your last name to a definition involving scatological jokes, people would shitpost at sizable length about hurting every single person who didn't agree. More critically, entire infrastructure were designed and implemented to make this not just common, or standard, but unchallengable: even before Bostock and Obergfell a wide number of states and regulators held that saying mean things -- defined so broadly as to include religious or philosophical discussion -- were workplace discrimination, even if uttered off-premises and after-hours. Organizations built to foster political debate on the wrong side of the aisle were skinsuitted, and that skinsuiting became something they were required to aid and abet. For the majority of its advocates, and a supermajority of its more palatable advocates, you could not argue the soccon position.
I would like to believe that the former mattered more than the latter. I don't have a lot of arguments that the latter hurt.
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Hi, Chris! I hope life is going well for you.
In general, the hiatus went well enough. The problem came last summer, when I had both parents trying to talk to me about whatever Facebook story they were incensed about that day, from both different sides, and then Trump got shot. I let myself get sucked back in. I still think it's not a productive use of my time (and I find myself thoughtlessly developing workarounds for my self-imposed limitations), but the last year has certainly been more cause for optimism than the previous four (at least in the US), as well as being a ton of fun.
The OP here, with it's Rose Tico concern trolling, just really grinds my gears. And really, I should probably just stop interacting with the OP. They routinely post stuff that hits me as so earnestly "someone is insanely wrong on the internet" that I get all riled up. And frankly, if it's not spectacularly fine trolling, then they are probably a literal child who simply lacks the experience to grasp that other sides do, in fact, exist. In which case, my own brand of scathing heat is less than helpful.
Anyway,
In fairness, a higher expectation for riots doesn't seem like an unreasonable prior just two years after the Summer of Love, even if it ended up being a false prediction.
Still, I don't think that's really a counter-example. The general response was still apoplectic rage, even if it didn't spill over into real violence, and kept itself to rhetoric and hostile personal encounters. My own mother blew up at me over it, even though she knows I'm personally pro-choice. Though that did give me an opportunity to gently explain that the reason she is a grandmother is because, as a man, I have literally no reproductive rights at all.
But in terms of the grace vs revenge scale, I don't think I've seen a single leftwinger say anything like "Look, the SC made their ruling and we have to accept that. Even Ruth said that Roe was on shaky legal ground. We should have expected this would happen, and better prepared for it. The issue has been sent back to the states, so let's focus on the state level and win as much as we can."
The reponse I've seen is more like "The Supreme Court is illegitimate, fuck the entire institution, pack the court, we literally live in The Handmaid's Tale." Along with a slew of very dishonest news stories, at least some of which look suspiciously like hospital administrators letting women die to own the cons. Alongside that was a bunch of low grade domestic terrorism, which was tacitly tolerated by the Biden administration.
I think it's a bit early to call on most of this. But I don't see any tacit acceptance, or anyone saying "fair enough, we did try to bankrupt, jail and kill you, let's call it even". Instead most of the Democrats seem to be talking about how they've been playing nice up until now, and calling for the gloves to come off in a scorched earth war to the knife.
They made a huge, grandstanding spectacle calling Abbott and Desantis cruel monsters (for exposing their own hypocrisy) and demanded they be investigated by the feds for human trafficking, kidnapping, fraud and deprivation of liberty. The feds didn't comply - is that where we want to set the bar for compromise and reconciliation?
Yep, the best examples I could think of were old. We're well down the slippery slope at this point. There are examples of Trump doing things like that, but they're all blatantly insincere and backhanded.
To be clear, I'm not saying the Republicans look particularly good under this light. A huge part of Trump's appeal is specifically that he's a Molotov cocktail thrown at norms and conventions that his supporters see as having been weaponized. He is the Devil turning round on you.
My incensed objection rather, is to the naive or trollish implication from the OP that the Democrats have clean hands.
Most lockdowns were state and local. It wasn't the Trump administration that was prosecuting gym owners - that was my Democrat governor.
I sincerely don't think he was asking for what you think he was asking for. That line came at something like the 53rd minute of a conversation, and the whole prior discussion was Trump confidently insisting that an investigation would uncover large numbers of fraudulent votes. I don't think Trump is as dumb and blunt as many, but I do think it's more likely he was referring to that, as opposed to pivoting abruptly to overt requests for obvious crimes on a recorded line in front of multiple other people. If nothing else, that theory presumes that Trump believed that he truly lost Georgia and I don't think his ego would allow that.
I hardly think the man covered himself in glory there, but there's a reason that investigation fell apart after the only prosecutor willing to push it was caught using the situation to engage in blatantly shady corruption.
And that was the "good" case. The asset valuation fraud and the 34 counts ones were, I believe, very clearly corrupt, politically motivated lawfare.
The DoJ was already weaponized. Do you remember when they were falsifying evidence to spy on the Trump campaign?
Tons of people write nasty books about Trump. And there's a thing among that cohort, where a lot of them seem to want to believe that Trump is out to get them personally, but most don't even merit a nasty Truth Social post. The Bolton investigation had been going on for years before it was shut down by the Biden admin. If anything, it looks like he was being protected by politics.
And really, it was for leaking classified documents, i.e. the exact same thing Trump had the DoJ kick down his door and riffle through his wife's underwear. Did that make you worry about the weaponization of the DoJ?
Do you have any specific reason to think Bolton is being held to an unusual standard? My memory goes fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure a few generals or other high level political types have gone down for very similar behavior to what Bolton is alleged to have done over the last few administrations.
Honestly, polarization spawns clicks and posts. Like I said in the beginning, I'm honestly pretty happy about how the country is going. I just don't feel the need to post about how I got what I voted for again. I just laugh at the meme and move on.
And I understand that the other side is going to be less than pleased with this turn of events.
Let me take a step back for a moment, and share a bit about where I'm coming from. Iirc, you and I are around the same age. I graduated high school just in time for Iraq, and that colored the hell out of my view of politics. I cut my teeth writing heated diatribes about Christian fundamentalists and neocon warmongers.
My tepid willingness to consider myself a Republican these days is mostly dependent on the fact that those factions lost, and the party was forcibly remade in a different image.
The Democrats now find themselves at an even starker crossroads. Their approval ratings are at historic lows and they are hemorrhaging voters. It's time for reevaluation and repositioning. For moderation. There have been a few gestures in that direction, but overall it looks like they're worse than doubling down. Beto is giving speeches about how the problem isn't that they support Unpopular Thing, but that they haven't been big enough assholes in their support of Unpopular Thing. And Trump has just been baiting the shit out of them, taking positions like "Crime is bad", and then watching them scramble over each other to claim the extremely bold "There is no crime and also all this crime is your fault" position.
I see videos of people who seem to think that the Ministry has fallen and Voldemort rules the land, genociding the Muggleborns... even as they feel emboldened to harass and attack federal law enforcement officers. If those people honestly think that the Biden administration was unacceptable generosity towards the outgroup, and that once they get into power it's time to be brutal and cruel...
And I do see many people openly calling for this.
On the plus side, I think/hope that the Democrats are going to spend the next 10 years in the political wilderness, and all their bloodthirst will amount to little.
But if I'm wrong, and their worse natures prevail, then yeah. I think that's potentially crossing the line where responses of a euphemistic variety go on the table.
Same reason I think we should be arming moderate rebels in the UK.
The NYT, no. The government, yes to an extent. In being less developed, it was less captured by people whose aim was power within the government over doing the government's job. I think there was more room for optimism then, regarding what could be accomplished by the hand of the state, and that a large portion of the lies we live under now came as a response to that optimism failing.
It's more general than that. One of our earliest social technologies was loyalty, because faith in an imperfect leader was better than no leader at all. But there does come a point where a terrible leader is so bad that your loyalty becomes maladaptive. The hard part is figuring out where that inflection point lies.
It'd be better if Trump and China weren't busy spitroasting the biotech industry, but the home life makes up for it.
And now you've updated your priors in the opposite direction, right? And false prediction is a fun euphemism for being wrong :)
Somehow I doubted that you would. But you asked for instances where your tribe won without a corresponding escalation, or 'cheating' such that your side couldn't win. Your personal life notwithstanding, there was no supreme court stacking, there's been no widespread riots or criminal activity (Amusingly, there are more recorded instances of vandalism/violence against abortion clinics in the same timeframe than what you call low-grade domestic terrorism), conservatives took the W and moved on. In your words, 'it's been a fun year.' And yet, and yet, you still aren't happy.
As for your lack of reproductive rights, say you had those rights. Without knowing the specifics of your life, would you have grabbed your ex by the wrist and physically dragged her to the abortion clinic? Would you have held her down to dose her with abortifacients or undergo a surgical abortion? Or I guess just not have to pay child support? What does this world look like, where you have reproductive rights?
Coming back to your dichotomy of 'grace and forgiveness' versus 'punching back twice as hard,' I knew as soon gave any concrete example the goalposts would move from the latter to the former. If your expectation is 'my side wins and nobody on the other side says mean things' then you both have a long, unhappy life ahead of you and moreover, come nowhere close to living up to your own standard.
There has been tacit acceptance. Trump issued reams of EOs, gutted agencies, tariffs, pretty much whatever he wanted. There's no widespread unrest, no major congressional resistance (remember Schumer giving in on the budget because the alternative was worse?), no 'deep state' blocking his will.
And 'we' tried to kill Trump? Did 'you' shoot up that synagogue, or that church, or the wal-mart? Don't give me that nonsense. If you want to play that game, take responsibility for your own nutjobs first.
And democrats escalated, responding with their own molotov cocktail against norms and conventions, Joe Biden.
I used to work for a guy who reminded me of Trump in some ways (insofar as I can know Trump from watching him on the television). He'd commit borderline research fraud, but do it in such a way that he kept his hands clean. Hey, I've got this great research idea! Go find the evidence for it. Oh, you've got 3 months worth of negative data? You must have fucked up the experiments! Go do them again and stop being so incompetent, I'm going to take you off the project and give it to a real scientist, etc etc etc. I know a lot of his old research is fraudulent, but when the chickens came home to roost he just said his postdoc fabricated the data.
If nothing else, Trump showed that the only check on a president's behavior is impeachment, and so long as the president is popular enough with their base, he can go shoot someone on fifth avenue and Republicans would say that guy had it coming and vote against it. Hell, Biden did too in the heady last month of his presidency when the pardon printer went brrrrr and the ERA suddenly passed. If Democrats elected left-wing Trump, I guarantee that you would absolutely lose your shit.
Frankly, and I'm surprised I've never seen this theory floated, I thought Trump intentionally broke a relatively benign rule that he knew would have to provoke a serious response from the feds. He'd keep himself in the news, get to complain about witch hunts for the next couple years and make it look like the feds were picking on him. It's probably what I would do were I playing the game.
I don't, other than that it's suspicious when a government's legal system starts going after people the president is personally pissed off at. I'd give it a low probability of progressing, but it's not a great sign.
And we just had a long discussion about overturning Roe, the keystone project of Christian fundamentalists, that your party executed a plan over a decade or more. Tell me again how those factions have lost and millennial atheists are in the driver's seat? What fraction of voters in the Republican party today voted for Bush in 2000 and/or 2004?
In 2008, Republicans got wrecked far worse than dems did in 2024. Word for word, what you just wrote applied to them 10x and was written about them as well. And then we all remember how they moderated, played nice with hispanics (muh demographic replacement) and that strategy paid off in 2016, right? Much as I'd like them to (and the Republicans as well!) it boggles my mind that you would look at the last ten years and say that moderation and saying nice things on camera wins you elections.
Sure, things don't look great for the dems today. But four years is a long time, and Trump's got plenty of opportunities to fuck it up. Either he's as successful as you think he'll be and I profit (at least if he stops fucking my industry), or he tanks babyface JD's chances for 2028 and dems win again.
Shooting people or waving guns around is the biggest own goal you can score, and will stay that way until the state has truly failed. And even if you win, what then? You're going to kick down every door with a pride flag on the lawn and shoot them, every registered democrat too, and then institute a police state to prevent wrongthink? These are all just childish fantasies. 150 million people disagree with you, and even if, as you like to say, 'we're the ones with the guns,' those people aren't just going to disappear. But by all means, talk more about euphemistic responses in public fora - I don't think it will help your cause.
Not to mention the juxtaposition of you ridiculing left-wingers for being scared of Republicans and a Trump administration while also 'darkly hinting' about 'euphemistic responses' is frankly hilarious.
I'm skeptical that the government of 50 years ago was particularly honest or well-meaning (see: the Power Broker to start), and I wonder if it's more likely our environment changed. But I sure as hell don't have time to develop that idea in any meaningful way. /shrug
"It's difficult to predict when the Riot Party will riot" might not be as much of an update as you're looking for.
You seem to be joking here but have you already forgotten those psychotic blanket pardons?
Referenced later on in the same post:
The point stands. Even now, the typical angle of attack is 'senile admin run by the deep state' because that lands a lot closer to the mark for normies than radical leftist firebrand.
At a certain point, this level of cynicism and bitterness starts reflecting more on you than the people you hate. You, too, seem to be even angrier now that your star is ascendant.
Fair enough, sorry for missing that.
I haven't posted here much in a long time and we haven't had a conversation in what, years?
But Trump's not my star. Not once in any election or primary have I voted for Trump. As much as I found Tim Walz to be an odious little troll performing a racist minstrel act, I held my nose and voted for Harris. At least Madame President could probably stay competent for 4 years and keep the creep in the closet like she had been.
Down ticket- well, did you catch the wackadoo that ran for governor where I am? I didn't vote a straight Dem ticket but it was closer than I would've predicted a few years ago.
I am angrier, because I have a kid and I want my kid to grow up in a better world, and neither of these idiot parties are going to deliver that. I am angrier because I watched scientists and public health experts and journalists shit all over the reputation of everything, and for what? They ruined and debased themselves for nothing, but the public pays the price! Fauci got his pardon and nobody that signed that braindead open letter got stripped of credentials, and here we are with Trump, RFK, Florida cutting vaccine mandates.
I just don't viscerally hate Trump the way so many people do, or the way I hate Fauci (largely as a synecdoche for broader problems in public health) or even, really, Biden. I never considered Trump in potentiality, so there's no sense of betrayal there. Trump and Republicans are my fargroup, I guess.
Someday I hope to vote for a politician I actually like, that isn't a collection of horrible tradeoffs or ends up doing things that disgust me. All I wanted was a little accountability. That the universe, sometimes, makes sense. SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY- ahem, got a little carried away there. I'll admit, I kinda like the Harvard stuff. Resentment isn't the healthiest motivator but I have so much of it. Perhaps that's my most socialist trait. Ha!
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No, I think the only way to get close to parity given the biological realities is just allowing men the option to opt out of the legal responsibilities. But I thought I was being careful, I was just too much of a quokka to understand why a woman might lie about being "on birth control AND infertile". I was presented with the situation fait accompli and had my life thoroughly derailed. It doesn't match up to the body horror of having an unwanted entity growing inside you, but it's not nothing.
But that's what a reverent respect for norms as the highest value would actually look like. From the conservative perspective, that's basically what John McCain and Mitt Romney actually did, and that's why so many people picked Trump - because for all his flaws he's a fighter. Because no one (aside from maybe 4 civic religion fundamentalists and the older Republicans who were content to be corrupt Washington Generals) actually places norms and standards as their highest value.
Again, my objection is to the two-facedness of crying about norms and standards, while never actually prioritizing them when it would cost. It just comes off as concern trolling.
Schumer did cave on the budget, not as an act of goodwill, but because a shutdown gave Trump even more power and authority. Meanwhile, every action you listed has been hit with an injunction from activist judges, often with no authority to do so, even after the SC smacked them down and told them to stop it. I don't deny that the Dems don't seem particularly effective in their opposition, aside from the rogue judges, but they still seem to mostly be in earlier stages of grief than acceptance.
I do sincerely think there's a massive gap in how nutjobs are parsed. I would bet that 80%+ of Republicans would support putting a bullet in Dylan Roof Storm. OTOH, Mangione (who I think is an actual drug-addled nutjob, rather than any kind of ideologue) is openly lionized on the left. People wear shirts emblazoned with his face in public. In the wake of the most recent shooting, the response that I've seen on the Dem side is a blend of blaming Trump (ABC news had an amazing piece where they noted that "Trump's name was on one of the guns" without mentioning that the phrase on the gun was "K-ll D-nald T-ump"), mocking prayer, and freaking out over the possibility that people might try to have a conversation about the Venn overlap between trans, mental health, and violence that looks like it might be a Thing.
Eh. I think the calculations there are very different. Biden himself probably is a good standard bearer for the "norms and standards" crowd, or at least he would have been 10-15 years ago. Same as the Republicans I mentioned above, I don't think Biden has broad ideological commitments. I think he wanted to keep the boat steady and enjoy the kickbacks.
The people who made up his administration are a different story.
They very much did go for the Hispanic vote. That didn't pan out too well, but ironically, going absolutely ham on illegal immigration did seriously improve the Republican party's favorability with that demographic.
But let's look at the comparison of today's Rs with the ones from 20 years ago. Roe was overturned, and that was a major win for the religious right, but it's coming from a president who utterly refuses to pass national legislation on the topic, and openly talks about how a 6 week window "isn't enough weeks". The religious right "won", but at the cost of their party being forcibly dragged over towards the much more popular centrist position on the topic.
Gay marriage is not something that anyone anywhere in power on the right is willing to spend political capital to roll back.
They're much more opposed to foreign adventuring. No more Iraqs. No more Afghanistans. The neocons have flipped back to the Democrats as a more pliable vessel for warmongering.
It's not "saying nice things", but these are all significant motions back towards the center of the American Overton window.
No, you're mostly right. I don't give high odds of things ever getting that bad. I did try to phrase that carefully, as "if the worst of the worst comes to pass". If a future Democrat administration invites in a hundred million foreigners on welfare, and all but openly tolerates them raping my children while viciously repressing the native population, then yeah. But I don't think the version of the party that could do that is one that can win national elections in the first place.
I think a lot of Democrats believe the world we live in is as bad as the "worst case scenario" I outlined above. I often hear people talking about ICE snatching any random non-white person off the street to disappear them forever - this is a thing I literally hear from strangers. FEMA camps for queers are opening up any time now. Women are dying in droves because Roe was overturned, and they'll probably lose the right to vote soon. The economy is surely about to melt and all the poor people will starve. Millions of children have been stripped of healthcare, we murdered millions more in Africa by cutting US AID, etc, etc.
So many issues where the emotional rhetoric is starkly at odds with the facts on the ground. So many people openly wishing for violence about it, much more than I saw during the Biden administration from the other side.
I think there is a world of difference between believing that there are potential futures where political violence is acceptable or necessary, versus catastrophizing yourself into believing that we're already there by social media psychosis.
This is complicated even further by the "who has the guns" issue, as you noted. I think a lot of the left-wing psychosis and ideation is driven by a kind of general helplessness. Someone should be doing violence to save the innocent trans migrants, someone else. I think a major factor in why the rhetoric gets so heated and incendiary is because there's no thalamic outlet, just keyboard rage until exhaustion. Humans weren't evolved to handle that kind of stimulus. I think the right is less prone to that because there's at least some degree of awareness that the specific individual might actually have to do something, and because they're more likely to have a gym habit or manual job that offers endocrine catharsis. There's a reason this rhetoric stuff seems the worst with "disabled by mental illness" twenty-something NEETs, because they have the most frustrated energy.
Or maybe it's just a bubble, and I tend to see the worst in the outgroup and only pay attention to the parts of the right I find tolerable.
I'm fine with that in the abstract, although in terms of concrete details it seems like a system open to abuse. But I'm sorry you're in that situation, and I imagine you don't want to debate something so personal.
The bad thing about McCain and Romney is that they lost, and the good thing about Trump is that he won.
Not to mention it's easy to lionize men who never won the presidency and had to actually get their hands dirty.
You think Mangione doesn't have fans on the right? Are you telling me MAGA is a populist movement that loves CEOs of health insurance companies?
For all the conservative memes mocking childless liberal women for their breathless, supposed erotic fixation on the Handmaid's Tale you have a shocking lack of awareness for similar fantasies on the right. There's this odd fetishism with home invaders and having to defend your family from the rapist hordes at the gates.
Isn't that the point of this place?
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Because most of the senior people in US institutions at that time were rags-to-riches war heroes. There would have been people there that were literally born in a hole in the ground, and every single one of them would have experienced the Great Depression.
That sort of thing tends to bring... certain perspectives that most today lack: that without restraint, and conservation of the same political mechanisms that took them from rags to riches, it could all be destroyed if mismanaged. For instance, the hysteria over the uncommon cold would never have occurred with them in charge, because this actually did occur, twice, with flu viruses that were deadlier per capita than said cold.
The generation in charge now, in aggregate born in 1970, is past the cutoff point to have any memories of that; it's taken for granted. The opposition to their institutional prerogatives now is people directly made poorer due to their mismanagement, which is something the US has literally never had to deal with before.
Well, there was that time after Jan 6, 2021 where he could have issued a blanket pardon to the meanest supporters he had [from the Blue viewpoint]. But he didn't do that, and once he left office it was open season with a de facto pardon issued to the meanest supporters Blue tribe had [from the Red viewpoint].
I legitimately think that when reformers are empowered, and reform happens, that things improve. I think the efforts of Red tribe to end what is functionally slavery in Blue states should improve things for the native population, I think constraining the powers of the education-managerial complex [and forcing it to follow its own laws] is long overdue, I hope that reform continues (and believe that what has occurred over the last 6 months has been impressive) and hope the rest of the Western world starts following that example, though I acknowledge it will take them longer to do that due to never really having
been Great in the first placethat war-winning culture the US did all those years ago.More options
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