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I want to talk about the AI video that Trump reposted, where he is flying a plane with 'King Trump' on the side, wearing a crown, dumping a payload of feces on a crowd of No Kings protestors in NYC.
Frankly, I keep thinking I can't be surprised anymore by the depths which Trump (or more realistically, his social media team0 will stoop too, and yet here we are...
Ultimately as a Christian, I find this sort of blatant hatred and mockery of the outgroup quite disturbing. I understand that staid, boring, conservatism has lost majorly over the last few decades. I understand that the right needs some vitalism, some dynamism, some sort of way to act in an agentic way that isn't just mindlessly opposing whatever progressives are doing at the moment, and then slowly backing off and letting progressives have what they want over the course of a few years.
However, I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze. At this point, while Trump definitely is effective at rallying the base, I simply find his aesthetics to be revolting. It's hard to countenance not just the outright hatred of the outgroup, but the sheer crassness that is presented here.
Not just that, but why would he egg on this idea that he wants to be king? It makes zero strategic sense from my perspective, all it does is fan the flames. I suppose if he wants to fan the flames of the culture war, fine, but that's also not something I'm behind.
Anyway, the current coalition of the right, where Christian or even just classical conservatives are sort of holding their nose and voting for Trump, seems increasingly unstable to me. I suppose we'll see how things end up.
From the last few years of Motte and Twitter discourse, I think the answer you will get is obvious:
His supporters don't care. He fights, he makes libs cry, and traditional, "respectable" conservatives are now seen as cucks who conserved nothing and are committed only to losing politely. MAGA cares absolutely nothing about propriety or decorum, because that's a chump's game, and any discussion that veers in the direction of "What happens when the other side does this?" will get a hundred stories about how the other side is worse anyway, the other side has been defecting forever, and only after we crush them and make them lick the soles of our boots might they learn to behave and restore a kind of equilibrium.
I don't think the analysis is correct, but I can see the crude, vitalist appeal of President Shitpoaster. What I think will actually happen is one of two things: (1) The darker suspicions of Trump's foes are true, and MAGA really does think it's going to remain in power permanently, one way or the other. (2) The Democrats will return to power eventually, this will be remembered, and yes, it will be tit-for-tat and we spiral into ever-worse decay.
Either way, I foresee no positive endgame.
Yep, this basically sums up discussion of this on TheMotte. It saddens me but this is just one of those things where people are just so solidified in their opinion there is really no new argument or event that could change it.
If you wish to argue by appealing to a general principle, what is the proper way to rebut such an argument if one disagrees that the principle is generally held?
I too am saddened when people are so solidified in their opinion that there is really no new argument or event that could change it. I am more saddened, however, when I see people who appear to believe that mountains of evidence they don't like and can't meaningfully respond to should spontaneously evaporate so that it can stop impeding the arguments they would prefer to present unchallenged.
On this subject in particular, a few others have offered the best insight available, and I'll reiterate it in my own words:
People who are upset by this appear to want the old sociopolitical system, wherein there was a strict division of labor between the people who cranked out images of shit being dumped on the hated outgroup by laughing cartoons of tribal champions, and the actual tribal champions who directly benefited from those images while standing solemnly before a podium in a very expensive suit extruding the blandest possible word-product into an array of very official microphones. If one is going to argue for this previous system, one should argue for it as it actually was, not as it might be imagined to be, particularly in the imagination of the side employing a large majority of the old shit-pouring cartoon experts.
In the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting, there was an article I read that offered an interesting nugget; the author, a professional journalist, had of course heard (and only heard!) about the shooting the day it happened. When her kids got home from school, she went to talk to them about it. By that point, of course, her kids had not only heard about it, but had already spent the day watching close-up slo-mo video of the moment of impact, the spattering fountain of blood, the crimson-soaked security detail struggling to load his body into a vehicle... she described a fundamental generation gap, where the experience of the event was sanitized on her end and far more visceral for her children, simply through their respective approaches to media technology, in a way that she probably should have seen coming, and maybe should have done something to prevent...
Food for thought.
Nigga, this is just going through the exact motions Amadan outlined. I get it, libtards started it by employing legions of late night comedians and entertainers to metaphorically pour shit on Republicans for years except (duplicitous as always) they his behind a veneer of civility while their Hollywood Jews did the dirty work for them. Trump isn’t doing anything fundamentally different, he’s just more crass and if anything the crassness and directness of it is a virtue, there’s an honesty to the directness of it.
My point as always is that there is value to norms. Even if the norms seem paper thin or hypocritical I believe they are better than nothing. There are just proper ways a president should behave. I believe there is serious value in having a degree of ritual and civic religion. It is always possible to construct a plausible sounding reason why your enemies really started it, your enemies are actually so much worse than this, blah blah blah. It has to stop somewhere else escalation begets escalation. I know everyone will tell me this isn’t an escalation because libtards have already done a million worse things, but that’s exactly how escalation works and can always be justified
That means letting your enemies possess a superweapon
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