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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26272 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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Haha. I figured there must be a software glitch showing zero posts 12 hours in.

Maybe traffic is low due to the site being down for awhile last week.

As a doomscroll addict, I always wonder how that drives people away. When the site is down I just check tomorrow. Idk how you'd enjoy using a site, hit a roadblock and then just never come back.

Many articles have been written on the topic of how users get annoyed by long webpage loading times. And a one-time roadblock is one thing, but a roadblock that pops up repeatedly and at random intervals is another—uncertainty is a real mood killer.

That's very fair

I'm definitely not representative, I love this place, I'll take the abuse lol

Turns out we were all Iranian/Israeli bots, our uptime not so good lately.

And the Israeli bots are suing their government over unpaid bills.

I got a culture war hot take for ya'll in the dying hours of this thread while I marinate infront of a screen on account of I fell off a fucking ladder and rolled my ankle like a QUA-SAUN'T:

Qualification before I even start: obviously its bad if anyone is killed, and I would prefer if none of this happened, or if it did happen it stayed as geographically isolated as possible, but given that it hasn't:

I am not fan of Iran or it's ruling class, but if I had to pick between them and the gulf states, I'd pick them every time. The gulf states are full of degenerate lazy assholes, run by people who are dumb as shit outside their little lanes, ruling over people who are parasitic insects on the global economy, and I don't give a shit what happens to them or anyone who chooses to live there. It is the worst place I have ever been payed to go, I would rather go back to bucharest and get chased down a half finished bridge by stray dogs then spend another hour in Dubai, and anyone who likes it has no taste; a crime worse than being a bastard.

What the fuck is even the point of these places? At least Switzerland and Singapore have some class as they wash your blood money; I just don't want to hear another dude talk about how nice his place in dubai is. Bitch, Dubai is rich person Mcdonalds, be a real man and get you a place in Macau and another in Monaco and a third in Sun Valley.

To be clear Iran cuts down on Chinas oil exporting allies which actually makes it fairly important for policing China and protecting all of the west Asian allies.

To be clear this is capeshit. China does not depend on Iranian oil (it just exploits the sanctions-driven discount) and in fact keeps getting Iranian oil even now. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan depend enormously on the oil from the Strait of Hormuz and unlike China have NO domestic fossil fuel production; this all can turn out tragic for them. Accordingly Chinese indexes are stable and other East Asians are in shit. And removing THAAD launchers from Korea to reinforce the Middle East underscores how little attention has been given to the Chinese angle in this conflict.

Trying to frame this obviously Israeli war as part of some 4D chess strategy to "police" China is cope. Israel is not at war with China, therefore neither is the US. Indeed, Trump is even calling on PLAN to assist in reopening the Strait.

has no taste; a crime worse than being a bastard

Absolutely based.

I have a soft spot for Saudi Arabia, but Dubai can go and do one.

I have a soft spot for Saudi Arabia

That's bait.

No, I genuinely like Salman bin Saud and think of all the gulf nations Saudi Arabia is the most on the "righteous path": not being too fundamentalist but also not going full hedonist like some of the other countries. Plus the fact that they control Mecca and Medina helps too.

He does seem to be drinking the Techbro Abundance Kool Aid a bit too hard and I'm skeptical he's going to be successful longterm. I do agree with you that I'd rather 'Arabs spend a lot of money trying to actually build productive things even if too ambitious' to the 'Whores' or 'Wahabbism' alternate routes on the tech tree, though.

Saudi Arabia has a few insane vanity projects and a poor human rights record, but it manages to accomplish both its religious and human development goals. That's a hard problem to solve.

Broadly agreed. Iran atleast capable of putting together a solid situation whilst essentially everything South of there has nil chance outside of occasional massive petrochemical windfalls that they will inevitably squander in the longrun.

Dumb analogy: is the Arab Gulf basically the Avatar of the world? A bajillion dollars and zero cultural impact (at least in the West).

No cultural impact he said sipping his alcohol and coffee with sugar while sitting on a sofa and wearing a cotton shirt posting on a machine that works on algorithms made with algebra.

Those are products of yeast, north africans, Persians, Persians, Peruvians, and Persians again! Three out of six of those are IRANIAN, hence my bias.

Yes. Loan words exist. Including from Arab sources within the past few centuries.

Not clear why they are being credited with cotton and sugar. Ancient Egyptians and Indians had cotton and traded it to ancient Romans. The middle East being between Europe and East Asia means they were the middle part of larger trading networks. So Indian numerals and far East trade such as sugar cane went through them. But I don't give them credit for being in the way of Chinese and Indian traders. Adopting Indian numerals was a good call on their part.

What did they produce in the last few hundred years that isn't the various forms of Dubai Chocolate (stinky vs not)?

Mostly the logistics of spice trading as attested by the Portuguese, and the large scale development of desalination technology.

Eh? I think being a traveling merchant or a trade hub doesn't count by my standards.

I'm sure they've helped with the cost-reduction scaling curve and overall adoption and implementation of desalination, but they did not invent it, and as far as I'm aware they do not directly export it or have independent cutting-edge R&D that isn't just hiring a Western firm. I could well be wrong here, please correct me if I'm missing something.

Are we giving all the civilizational accomplishments of the Chinese to the Mongolians since they had whatever tenure as colonial overlords?

I hope you aren't claiming that the Arabs were the first to discover fermentation.

alcohol

I don't know if that's what he meant, but the etymology of the word alcohol is Arabic.

Naturally, but I don't know what that proves.

Alcohol is worldwide, and wasn't cotton well known in Egypt back before it was really "Arab"? And sugar is... either cane-origin or beet-origin, neither of which is indigenous to the Gulf.

The word "alcohol" is from the Arabic, though the Arabic word had nothing to do with the intoxicating sprit. As is the word cotton (English lost the characteristic "al", which still exists in Spanish "algodon") -- here, Arabs brought it to Europe but didn't originate it. Cane sugar also came to Europe through the Arabs, but originally from India.

Ah. So the cultural impact is just the linguistics, rather than anything about the concepts themselves.

Except for coffee.

algorithms made with algebra

These are named after Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi who was, well, Persian and who in his youth was likely Zoroastrian. Though kudos for Arabs who after conquering Persia allowed such a talent to flourish.

I'd say their cultural achievement runs the other way. There one of the best maintained non western cultures.

As an Egyptian, completely wrong. The vast majority of Arab culture, i.e music, movies, films and intellectual writings, are produced in Egypt or Lebanon. Gulf arabs merely consume.

Also, while outwardly they might seem non western, the elites are just as westernized as every cosmopolitan rootless elite out there. They drink, smoke weed, fuck prostitues, buy German cars. There's nothing unique about them.

You can add that they are literal slavers who fund ethnic cleansing terrorists in Sudan and betray fellow Muslims by allying with imperial outsiders and extract much of the region's natural endowment of wealth through resource and geography rents while spending it on sybaritic pleasures, and yeah, they basically exist to cater to the globalist rich who don't think they're cool or suave enough for any other tax haven with greater personality and style to it and would prefer to construct their personal images around chintzy opulence and unreproductive sex with Russia prostitutes, or at least that's the view of the place I receive.

I'll take this bait.

Because there is a bastard here. And it's the one that laughs at industry.

You sit in some People's Republic of Museums and you spit on the few who dare to do instead of waiting to die. Because they do with so little class.

Has Howard Roark no taste? Why does he insist of making gawdy metal things, why doesn't he just lay there and die? Is Hank Rearden not a dangerous fool making monuments to his vanity instead of giving his all for boomers and children like good Jim Taggart?

A few poor bedouins lucked on some, not much, but some, oil. And those poor bedouins were sly enough to turn this not into an endless war, not into a brutal theocracy, but into one of the most successful cities in the world.

And people like you, who feel small in the presence of achievement, will instinctively need to lower it. The search of greatness must simply be a sign of one's vanity. Poor Yankee doodle so classless he thinks the feather in his cap is macaroni.

But it's not low. Greatness is great. Bending a desert full of essentially nothing into a paradise is nigh miraculous and demonstrates clear ability that commands respect to the wise, or at least, the sane.

In the end if it does get destroyed, the world will be worse for all the people this city has welcomed and one of the few places in the world that rewards skill with opportunity will be lost, hastening our spiral towards world spanning destruction and mayhem in exchange.

Damn you and damn all like you who worship death.

Having been there: They deserve credit for choosing a dude and not biting the hand that feed, we can give them that. Other peoples have managed less with more. That said:

The degeneracy comes from the fact that they took that enormous amount of money that comes out of the ground, and who exploits it? They have third world poors do their physical labor, they have professional class westoids do their intellectual labor (me!), they import all their artists and cultural production from those who have the mercenary souls needed to take it (me again!), and they half heartedly manage when they can be bothered, until a western technocrat jingles some keys at them loudly enough that they stop eg. plowing a trillion dollars into impossible megaprojects wouldn't even make sense in the post scarcity future.

If tomorrow all the oil in the world vanished, after the dust settled Russia would still be Russia, the USA would still be the USA, Iran would still be Iran, Venezuela would still be Venezuela, Canada would still be Canada, and the gulf arab states in question would be populated entirely by tribal nomads and ghosts.

This discourse is all too common and may be true of much of the GCC but you targeted Dubai specifically, which essentially exists on the premise of diversification because they knew the oil would run out. The rulers we're literally spelling out that exact scenario as something that needed to be avoided.

What then is one to make of a place whose economy is now a mere 1% petrochemicals? Does that falsify your judgement or validate it?

I suppose one could make arguments around the strategic necessities of Abu Dhabi and of the ostensible tensions created by oil. But were there no oil there would also not be funding or motivation for this war.

Dubai has already had several huge pullbacks when the oil money was disrupted. The 1% number is inaccurate since it's pulling in oil money from across the region and still heavily subsidized by the Emirates who have larger amounts of oil.

As somebody who's seen the Dubai government investment process first-hand a lot of their future proofing efforts are more elaborate scams from the connected to absorb resources than productive endeavors

As someone who's seen many investment processes from the inside, that's essentially all of them and not really a good yardstick.

It's scams all the way down. Competence is really measured in how much you can wrangle the scammers into having to produce actual value.

War brings out the worst in people. Especially on message boards where no one is actually in danger of dying. But we sure have opinions about who deserves to die and who doesn't.

Dial it down.

To hell with opinions. I'm making an argument. I shall like to see it answered. As is after all the point of this forum.

Hear hear.

In response to the few things in there that might have been an argument I'd say that:

  1. Bending a desert full of essentially nothing into a paradise is NOT nigh miraculous if you do it by throwing money at it, unless you think that just having oil money is miraculous. It's better than just using the money to go to war, but that's an extremely low bar to meet.

  2. There's a difference between demanding that some specific person not waste their money (I agree that it's their money and they can do what they want) and noticing that everyone is wasting their money and making unfavorable inferences about the society from that.

Exactly. Good for the emerging world peoples and tax-avoidant who've been able to take advantage of the Gulf States, but the whole thing is borne on essentially a massive oil lottery win and all the neighboring states sans oil are absolute messes. Being able to just buy luxury space communism for a tiny population (which isn't going to necessarily last and has already crumbled before) for 50-100 years is pretty piss poor in the terms of broader civilizational accomplishment.

Would you make the same argument about the industrial revolution? And if not, why not?

Industrial Revolution is a series of processes that is widely copied and not a random windfall.

Exactly. Good for the emerging world peoples and tax-avoidant who've been able to take advantage of the Gulf States, but the whole thing is borne on essentially a massive oil lottery win and all the neighboring states sans oil are absolute messes.

Except Jordan.

Is Jordan a Gulf state? I figured they're more Levant.

... which, granted, a lot of the Levant is a hot mess, but for different reasons unrelated to oil or lack thereof.

No, Jordan isn't a Gulf state; it's a neighboring state, however.

I don't think you have any understanding of the logistics involved in something like this if you think one can just throw money around and end up with Dubai.

Most of the GCC got more oil money to play with and don't get anything like it. Despite some actively trying. Why is this?

Have you been to the region? There's an abundance of Dubais and microDubais built to resemble each other through Oil brute forcing

I lived in the region for some years doing business. I don't think that's an accurate characterization.

People like to copy models that work, and the financial ar hitecture of the region is very much grown around the oil business, not least because all modern industry flows from petrochemicals.

But the UAE is not Oman is not Saudi is not Qatar. There are significant differences, which is why some projects succeed and others fail. If there were none, Saudis would just be blowing past the whole gulf out of sheer scale.

Sorry, missed this at the time, but I liked reading it so here: a late response in kind in honor of intresting prose.

You sit in some People's Republic of Museums and you spit on the few who dare to do instead of waiting to die. Because they do with so little class.

They ain't doing shit, what they have is the consent of the people who actually do shit to pretend to own the land the go juice comes out of; as opposed to Iran who owns their go juice land by their own blood and effort.

Has Howard Roark no taste? Why does he insist of making gawdy metal things, why doesn't he just lay there and die? Is Hank Rearden not a dangerous fool making monuments to his vanity instead of giving his all for boomers and children like good Jim Taggart?

Much like those jagoff fantasies of a shitty writer and welfare leach, the Gulf state imagine themselves captains of industry when they are pathetic ticks living and dying by the consent of their betters; the great historical cultures of the world that walk their goat paths and deign to not instantly obliterate them.

A few poor bedouins lucked on some, not much, but some, oil. And those poor bedouins were sly enough to turn this not into an endless war, not into a brutal theocracy, but into one of the most successful cities in the world.

And people like you, who feel small in the presence of achievement, will instinctively need to lower it. The search of greatness must simply be a sign of one's vanity. Poor Yankee doodle so classless he thinks the feather in his cap is macaroni.

But it's not low. Greatness is great. Bending a desert full of essentially nothing into a paradise is nigh miraculous and demonstrates clear ability that commands respect to the wise, or at least, the sane.

They took their great gift and turned it into ashes and CO2; they received their inheritance of 5 talents and built a glittering babylon on sand, the great whore of the world who accepts all abominations. Where is their world bestriding colossus? Who builds their great monuments, forges their weapons, who is it even who constructed the substrate of their society? It's not called the Petro Riyal or Dihram.

In the end if it does get destroyed, the world will be worse for all the people this city has welcomed and one of the few places in the world that rewards skill with opportunity will be lost, hastening our spiral towards world spanning destruction and mayhem in exchange.

Damn you and damn all like you who worship death.

Unless it changes, when it gets destroyed the world will continue turning, having gained nothing and lost nothing. The great river of crude and trade and lucer will lurch and slosh until it finds it's new level, and collect into new tributaries and oxbows and lakes, and the opportunity to rise will have been squandered on libidinal ephemera.

Damn you and damn all like you who worship mediocrity and pretend it is virtue.

But Dubai is pretty infamously known for being created by slave labor. You claim the rulers bent the dessert into a successful city, but neglect to mention who actually did the manual labor. Slaves. Slaves create the buildings, slaves maintain the infrastructure. Without slavery, the city collapses. That is not a successful city. Successful cities are good places to live for a large majority of their inhabitants. Mistreatment of foreign workers, trapping them with debt, and stealing their passports so they can't leave is all pretty well documented at this point. The city is a hellhole if you are not a tourist or rich.

I see that the city is an impressive feat from the perspective of human ingenuity and mastery over nature. But the leaders deserve no praise. Anyone so explicitly utilizing modern day slavery for an achievement that is impressive but obviously totally unnecessary is a pathetic loser.

By all means, dare to dream and attempt what others believe to be impossible. But if your construction project that mainly exists to show off how great you are, requires trampling on tens of thousands of human lives, then it is time to let go of it, and do something else.

That's entirely fair.

But is the claim that it's all built on the back of slaves substantively true?

The largest estimates for this phenomenon by NGOs top out at around 100k people, about the same absolute numbers as the UK (though much more concerning proportionally). A big issue that ought be stamped out for sure, but hardly a systemic necessity to run the place.

My estimation is that it's one of those real social problems they have, as any society does, and that they're trying to address it. Not that it's some kind of ostensible social choice, like their political system.

Iran's issues in contrast seem much more like deliberate choices of its ruling class.

While I broadly agree with this point I heavily disagree with their choice of architecture. Why must everyone make the same souless glass and concrete blocks everywhere? If you're making all this money at least do something more interesting with it than making a bigger glass tower than anyone else. The artificial islands are working in the right direction imho.

People focus on the Burj because it's iconic, but there's a pretty wide diversity of architectural styles in that city, from this to this.

Iran is an oil state that completely ruined itself through religious revolution and now regularly mass murders its population whenever they vet the balls to protest every couple years and exports terrorism throughout the region. Are the gulf states retarded? I guess so. Would any sane person prefer to live in Iran over them? No.

That is true. It is also true that the people of Iran are more productive than the sum of the entire population of the other gulf states, who need to import third worlders to do their physical labor and europeans/americans to do their intellectual labor; which populations are prohibited from entering into their society.

If that isn't the essence of degenerate decadence, I don't know what is.

Dubai is cringe all the way. Simple comparison between Qatar airlines and Emirates shows everything wrong with the dubai mindset.

As in, Dubai/emirates has superficial style and no substance? Does Qatar have substance?

No substance, but Doha doesn't try to suffocate you with opulence. It is built on slave labor and not a good place - not sure how to tell it - a month in Dubai - and you will be tired, a month in Doha - you will be rested.

Have you seen much of the middle east? Would you recommend any of it to people who want to sample parts of the whole world?

Right now - I would say that I wouldn't recommend anything of the middle east. But the best places I have been there are Erbil and Muscat. Dubai is Sin City - anything goes if you have money. Didn't like it that much. There is no reason to go to Saudi Arabia unless you are muslim. Doha is ok, but kinda boring.

Seconding Erbil, once things have calmed down. Also get out to the countryside while you're there, many historical sites.

Before going to the middle east, finish out europe/asia/ go to Romania/Bulgaria and do the ancient painted monastery loop from cluj to brasov/ go to plovdiv and veliko tarnovo to see some OLD christian sites.

If you've been everywhere else: Trust your heart. I still need to get to poland, cambodia and most of china before I think of doing middle eastern tourist shit.

China's good though the recent development wave means a lot of the bigger cities are kinda samey.

I have been highly recommended to visit Chongqing by multiple people. I'm also interested in travelling around Yunnan province and experiencing life away from the big cities. One day...

I went to Chongqing at the start of February and I've been to approximately 15 or so cities in China. It's a cool shock to see the whole urban geography, but the day to day experience in Chongqing is pretty typical for nice, new developed Chinese cities. There's not a ton of unique flavor there honestly but it is abundantly pleasant.

Chengdu and Yunnan more unique vibes arguably.

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Lol, Qatar is just Dubai Jr. Same "build a fuckload of gaudy skyscrapers in the middle of the fucking desert despite miles of empty space everywhere while relying on a population made up of 90%+ imported labor to do all of the dirty day to day actual work."

And Qatar Airlines is just Emirates with a better marking team. They fly the same planes to the same destinations with the same customers (ie- economy is full of subcontintals on transit flights, biz class is full of rich arabs or western biz people). The whole experience from glitzy airport lounge that somehow manages to be less comfy than the average Scandinavian bus stop to the glitzy permium cabin pods that are underneath the outer cosmetic shell the same parts made by the same suppliers to the glitzy menu with gold-leafed cappacinos and "premium" wines is interchangeable with most airlines these days.

Except Qatar is quite light on glitz. Emirates are all glitz and flash. I have flown both and spend quite a lot of time in the lounges. Qatar color scheme is more subdued - calming purple instead of gold everywhere. Even the music is better. The personal are quite good at giving you whiskey and cashew and getting the fuck out until you land. They don't pester you every five minutes with "do you need anything sir?" They don't wake you up about seatbelts while you are sleeping. They let you sleep almost to the touchdown. The first class lounge is also better if you care about comfort - quieter, calming.

Emirates are built on the idea that the luxury must be displayed and consumed, qatar - that it needn't be.

Brother the folks running Iran are not better. They also live off oil revenue and are degenerate.

The worse thing about Iran is that they rule over a populace with decent innate potential (well, subtracting anyone with means and will to leave).

Brother the folks running Iran are not better. They also live off oil revenue and are degenerate.

Yeah but they've had periods where they've managed to genuinely better themselves and hold actual jobs and whatnot.

What the fuck is even the point of these places?

According to international consensus, as codified by the United Nations (1 2):

  • Every people has the right to self-determination (free determination of political status and free pursuit of economic, social, and cultural development).

  • The purpose of a country is to fulfill its people's right of self-determination.

  • More developed countries do not have the right to decide that a particular people is not sufficiently civilized to deserve the right of self-determination, or has failed to properly pursue economic, social, or cultural development.

The best thing that Trump is doing is destroying those international travesties. If we are lucky by the end of his term we may get to the point where "rule based order" is so damaged that even eager democrat president may be unable to salvage it.

Padme: And then we build a new rule-based order that actually functions as such rather than just being a marketing label, right?

Sure, nothing wrong with "might makes right" world order ... as you are 100% certain that you have the might, that you really wield the biggest club.

The alternative is "might makes right when used against us, but when used to our benefit we are suckers who could use our might but give in instead". I don't think that's better. I can't think of a time when the US benefitted from the international order keeping anyone from using "might makes right" against us.

I am convinced that the modern "rules-based order" is actually might-makes-right order, it's just that at the time the rules were established in 1945, "might" was on the side of Western Liberalism and generally wrote them down in its favor. It's quite evident in practice that the rules are never applied to the major powers evenhandedly: in fact, they quite explicitly gave themselves vetos at the UN for most such issues!.

But the principles of rules-based order do sound good on paper, if that means anything. I like the idea, but I don't think they're enforceable without a higher power enforcing them. And Team America: World Police is a poor simulacrum of such a thing.

To the extent that America's foreign policy was subject to democratic influence, I think it did lean towards a rules-based order to a greater extent than any other empires or hegemons have historically done. Vietnam as the crowning example - taking a geopolitical loss in order to stand by popular principles and appease the masses. The problem is that the people only take an active interest in foreign affairs from time to time, and quite a lot can be done clandestinely through the CIA or whatever. This gives the state department a lot of room in pursuing an agenda that's might-makes-right under the hood while preserving an outward appearance of civility.

But the very need to disguise their actions imposes some limitations, so even that can be considered a win for creating a more idealistic world.

Exactly. The world may not be black and white, but there are paler and darker græys. The post-1945 liberal order has moved us closer to the Star Trek future, while the belief that "The U. S. isn't perfectly virtuous, therefore all possible international orders are equally lex silvæ." moves us closer to Warhammer 40k.

I hope I don't need to explain why the former is preferable to the latter.

I think the "rules-based order" after the Cold War has basically been nothing but Team America: World Police; before that it was that plus some wrangling with the Soviets about how to keep the cold war from turning too hot.

I'm not subject to rule by the UN, so I say fuck these places in particular. They can send a blue helmet to stand outside my house and shake their head disapprovingly if they feel like it.

"Self-determination" is a concept that really could use some expounding here, since we are talking about absolute monarchies. Who sets the boundaries of the "self" here? You seem to think that Arabs under a dictatorship of Arabs are satisfactorily self-determining. If you are a Hindu Shudra in a Brahmin dictatorship, are you enjoying self-determination? What about a hypothetical Wakanda project of US census "black"s, where Ethiopians in the vein of Timnit Gebru rule over Haitians?

Who decided who is "nation" deserving of self determination?

In practice, your ability to find great power generous uncle who supports your cause diplomatically/militarily decides the issue.

There is no supreme commission of linguistic experts that examines dialects spoken in Trashcanistan/Carbombistan border zone and scientifically chooses where the true border should be.

Unfortunately, the ICJ has not seen fit to issue an authoritative ruling on this issue. However, the opinions of Kosovo and Serbia on the topic may be of interest.

Kosovo:

While the exact contours of any right of self-determination have not been articulated by this Court, the authorities noted above may be read as identifying two key components that permit the exercise of the right: the existence of a "people"; and the demonstrated inability of that people to be protected within a particular State, given prior abuses and oppression by that State's government. The people of Kosovo are distinct, being a group of which 90 percent are Kosovo Albanians, who speak the Albanian language, and who mostly share a Muslim religious identity. The Security Council itself has referred to the "people of Kosovo". Further, the prior infliction of massive human rights abuses and crimes against humanity by the Serbian authorities upon the people of Kosovo, are well-known and well-documented, as demonstrated by the February 2009 ICTY Judgment in Milutinović et al., and have been condemned by the General Assembly, the Security Council, and many other international bodies. The continued denial by Serbia of representative government to Kosovo was recently demonstrated by the failure of Serbia to invite Kosovo-Albanian representatives to the drafting of the 2006 Constitution of Serbia, nor to give them a chance to express themselves upon it (only Kosovo Serbs were allowed to participate in the referendum). In these circumstances there can be no doubt that the people of Kosovo were entitled to the right of self-determination.

Serbia:

Kosovo was neither a mandated/trust territory nor an overseas European colonial territory in the UN sense, nor was it registered or recognised or ever even submitted for acceptance as a non-self-governing territory with the United Nations, nor did any international or regional body ever recognise it as such, nor was it subject to foreign occupation as determined or evidenced by relevant international organisations. Kosovo formed an integral part of the FRY (State Union of Serbia and Montenegro). It remains an integral part of Serbia, and as such the population of that territory were, and remain, part of the "people" of Serbia. Those persons forming part of a minority within the territory of Serbia, including Kosovo, are entitled to the protection of minority rights as laid down in Articles 14 and 75–81 of the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia 2006.

Kosovo, as a part of an internationally recognised independent State, is not a self-determination unit as that term has been understood in international law and practice. Consistent international recognition of the territorial integrity of the FRY (and thus of its continuator, the Republic of Serbia) by definition precludes acceptance of the right of self-determination as inhering in the inhabitants of the province of Kosovo.

Every people has the right to self-determination (free determination of political status and free pursuit of economic, social, and cultural development).

If anyone truly believed this, surely they'd conclude that the South should have been allowed to peacefully secede from the Union. I'm sure someone is going to pipe in with "but slavery", but wars of aggression to change economic and social models is directly against the third point (and if it weren't, we can talk about fascist Italy ending slavery in Ethiopia, or the British ending widow-burning in India).

I see roughly what the authors were intending to codify, but I don't think it can be done even-handedly, and in practice it's going to end up being a lot of "who, whom?" and unwritten assumptions about what counts as a "people" that privilege certain parties. Not even always unreasonably: we couldn't practically take every sovereign citizen at face value. And for the record, I think Southern secession was a bad idea for a bunch of reasons, and slavery abhorrent.

If anyone truly believed this, surely they'd conclude that the South should have been allowed to peacefully secede from the Union. I'm sure someone is going to pipe in with "but slavery", but wars of aggression to change economic and social models is directly against the third point (and if it weren't, we can talk about fascist Italy ending slavery in Ethiopia, or the British ending widow-burning in India).

I've been toying with the thought that nothing Israel is doing in Gaza is more "genocide" by any definition than what the North did to the South. And, for the record as you say, I toothink Southern secession was a bad idea for a bunch of reasons, and slavery abhorrent.

It's interesting because getting wealthy from oil happened at the same time as "wahhabism" was spreading. Although apparently there's some dispute if that is actually the correct term.

In the 70s the idea was running spreading that any music other than singing over drums was un-Islamic. Similarly there were strict views about women's clothing. So even though the Ottomans certainly had music and women's fashion there was domestic pressure against promoting it. Cat Stevens famously converted to Islam in 1977 and felt he had to give up his music career.

Also gulf donors took over funding far left groups in the West after the Soviet Union fell, and they managed to make Palestine one of the premiere causes on all campuses. That's actually a pretty incredible achievement of foreign policy.

Tangentially, is Bucharest really so bad as to be your go to "place only really better than that other place I really hate?" No experience traveling in that area, but was considering visiting someday.

No, bucharest is great if you aren't so tiktok pilled you can't deal with old stuff that isn't perfectly aesthetic; beautiful churches/arcades/opera house, totally insane palatial monument to being a dumbass you can visit, the people are nice as heck (to me, but my vibes are immaculate in person. I save all the poison for the internet.)

It just happens to be the place where; after dark; I had one beer over my tolerance; and then was chased by stray dogs up an unfinished road bridge. It's the funniest thing that has happened to me while traveling to relate in text form. Unless you get drunk and do dumb shit late at night you'll be fine.

The worst crime of the Gulf Arabs is their gullibility. They invested in those vanity projects (The Line being its ultimate symbol), basically redistributing the oil windfall back to the West. This is deserving of much mockery.

But on the merits, they've exceeded every standard I could expect from them. They maintain stable, rich nations. They are trying. They are buying world class AI experts hoping to get some high value-add economy going, building datacenters, constructing attractive (not to you yeah, I get it) cities on worthless patches of the desert, despite negligible culture of sophisticated urban life. Their royalty has some real assabiyah and is concerned about its legitimacy among the native masses – more so than the elites of the West. This time they are doing it without the cheat code of Persians carrying their intellectual jobs. I respect all people who struggle against the odds. It would be quite sad if they failed.

I agree and also respect the Arabs for what they are trying to do. I view places like Dubai, similar to places like Las Vegas or phoenix, as a testament to the idea that you can really just decide to make someplace nice. Even with unlimited amounts of money that kind of infrastructure takes functional governance. It’s sad that in this age I don’t think the us could do as well. For instance do any communities in California besides San Diego have any kind of desalination capacity?

Half jokingly California is a third world country with a 100,000 outer space alien enclave.

That's not true.

We've got at least half a million outer space aliens in the enclave.

I don't know that desalination capacity is really the best measure of competence. California doesn't desalinate because, most of the time, there's enough water in the mountains that can be impounded that it doesn't make sense to desalinate. Consider that California supports large-scale agriculture that the UAE doesn't have anywhere near the capacity for. Urban water use is a drop in the bucket compared to that. Desalination is energy-intensive, and brine disposal is a real problem, so it's only done when there aren't any better options.

I claim that given the state of Californian infrastructure they couldn't do it even if they wanted to.

The barriers are all legal and paper based, which are actually more real than gross physicality it turns out.

See also: Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable from SSC. It's getting to the point that geology is more mutable than society.

Yeah, I'm also really not into that dubai style, but I've now heard from multiple people (some I know in person, some just online) who worked with arabs that they've been impressed with how they at least try to think in a genuine long-term perspective on how to keep their society running in a way that isn't just a complete capitulation to the west. Not that I'd expect that to work well long-term, anyway. For an example, the demographer & pronatalist Lyman Stone has commented on the foresight of the UAE to explore possibilities to keep up the birth rate before even dipping below replacement rate. Most other countries dipped below replacement half a century ago, told themselves it's just delay and will surely fix itself, noticed after ca 20 years lol no it doesn't, then told themselves that surely infinite immigration will surely fix it, and now, well, the results speak for themselves.

What the fuck is even the point of these places?

Osama Bin Laden answered your question thusly:

(c) Under your supervision, consent and orders, the governments of our countries which act as your agents, attack us on a daily basis;

(i) These governments prevent our people from establishing the Islamic Shariah, using violence and lies to do so.

(ii) These governments give us a taste of humiliation, and places us in a large prison of fear and subdual.

(iii) These governments steal our Ummah's wealth and sell them to you at a paltry price.

(iv) These governments have surrendered to the Jews, and handed them most of Palestine, acknowledging the existence of their state over the dismembered limbs of their own people.

(v) The removal of these governments is an obligation upon us, and a necessary step to free the Ummah, to make the Shariah the supreme law and to regain Palestine. And our fight against these governments is not separate from out fight against you.

(d) You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of you international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.

(e) Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sanctities, to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures.

You may have a different view of the moral valence of these facts, but they form a pretty useful model.

There's an alternate history where America winds up allied to the Iranian Shia coalition instead of the Turkish/Saudi/Egyptian Sunni one. I'm not sure that world is any more peaceful, but the Shia generally are less trouble than the far more numerous and expansionist Sunni.

I have a lot of respect for the Iranian people and their ability to organize. I have a lot of respect for Persian culture and their long and fractious history. There's a reason it's so unstable, and it is largely the result of tribal loyalties and clan-based societies. In this respect, the Iranians are no different from the Arabs.

Aesthetically is an entirely different story.

They trade oil for a high standard of living, and Dubai banks the oil money locally.

Now, to be clear, Iran is in some ways morally superior to these countries- at least the locals do actual work instead of abusing indentured servants, for example, and the gulf states don't have stellar human rights records either. But let's not sugarcoat the Iranian regime; they're fucking retards whose sine qua non is being enemies of America, who have seemingly failed at both their good governance and their religious goals. The same cannot be said for the gulf states.

Literally, the gulf states are the bull case for monarchy. You know what most Arabs do when they discover an ocean of oil? Have a civil war and let the winner squander the money on terrorism, with no benefit to the people. Saudi citizens might be lazy fucks, but they don't do that. Saudi Arabia is a developed country with a high standard of living, that's managed to avoid sanctions. Same for Qatar, Kuwait, etc. Iran hasn't had a civil war recently, but you know what they spend their oil money on? 'Cause it ain't good governance. They're out of running water in the capital. That's very unlikely in Riyadh despite supplying water to it being a harder problem. The Gulf Monarchies are basically achieving both their human and religious goals, even if they don't get all their foreign policy goals and have poor human rights records. Yes, they cheated by using oil money, but this is not a foolproof loophole- just ask Nigeria, Venezuela, Libya, Iraq, etc. Does the median petrostate benefit the people at all? I guess Russia's oil money enables a military machine that provides economic stimulus.

For avoiding the petrostate trap, hats off to the gulf Arabs. This is actually a hard problem and they solved it.

The Gulf Arabs are absolutely in the petrostate trap. They don't make things, they just function as a shady tax haven and cheap-energy zone for certain industries. They have ambitions in AI, not in making AI models but buying GPUs made by industrious countries, hosting AI models made by clever companies, exploiting their cheap energy.

The Gulf buys US weapons, they buy Chinese weapons, they buy (or attempt to buy) US protection. Who makes the actual oil equipment and drills? Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Samsung... The Saudis have some Chinese made ballistic missiles waiting for Pakistani nuclear bombs they think they paid for.

Iran makes their own oil equipment. Iran's MAPNA Group makes gas power plants at world standards. They are trying to export technology, not just oil. Their oil industry has problems, as you would expect given sanctions. But it is their oil industry and not imported oil industry.

Iran makes things, they build their own missiles, drones and weapons. They develop their own strategies to take advantage of their enemies' weaknesses. Their proxies do a good job.

The UAE's proxies in Sudan haven't covered themselves in glory and they're merely fighting Sudan, not exactly a tough opponent. The Saudi army has all this fancy US gear. And how do they perform against the Houthis? They got wrecked by the Houthis.

Iran is far superior to the Gulf Monarchies in governance. They may be an enemy of the US but they are not stupid. There's a huge power gap between Iran and Turkey and Pakistan at the top end of the Islamic world, then there are the Gulf monarchies and below them assorted Arab riff-raff. The Gulf states don't know how to fight or do anything correctly. Their manifest impotence in this war is obvious, America has to do all the fighting for them.

Their land mostly sucks. There is a reason the Arab states never developed much in terms of civilization. It’s because most of its desert and not useful to develop agriculture and then more. Sort of like Alaska in some ways.

There is a reason the Arab states never developed much in terms of civilization

This is a truly bizarre take without more elaboration.

Think I’m suppose to specify the oil countries which are mostly desert that can’t support a lot of population without outside resources paid for with oil money.

Just to distinguish, the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates are canonically the breadbaskets of the ancient world and are largely Arab.

The Arab States in the Gulf, not so much.

The Fertile Crescent used to be a lot more green back in the times of the Sumerians, there's a cycle of roughly 25,000 years in which the Sahara and that region as a whole transitions from being a lush green fertile land to becoming a desert and back. Plus those people who built those civilisations weren't really Arab, either culturally (which really arose with Islam) or to a large extent genetically.

Also the irrigation literally salted the earth over centuries.

Are they? Egyptians are pretty separate to Arabs especially the vintage that made Egypt a big deal initially. That's like saying the Byzantines were Turks.

The gulf states turned their oil money into everything they want, without needing to kill tens of thousands of their own people from time to time. They have high human development, high incomes, and did that without needing to abandon their way of life/traditional culture.

Not bad for petrostates with average IQ in the 70's- the most comparable countries are shitholes in sub saharan Africa. Has Nigeria transmuted its oil money into anything good?

Iran produces better tech than the gulf Arabs, I'm willing to believe that- but unlike the gulf Arabs it doesn't keep the water on in its own capital city. Iran's government ignores huge chunks of its responsibilities.

When the oil runs out, the Gulf States will wither into nothing. Already it rather looks like they're withering away since they're so shit at fighting, even with all the fancy weapons they purchased. The crass prostitutes and grifters seem to be moving out of Dubai.

I dispute that the Gulf is highly developed. All their development is done by other people. It's just development that happens to be located in the Gulf and whose fruits happen to accrue to Arabs since imperialism went out of fashion at a very fortunate time for these people. It's not true development and comes without the underlying productivity and industriousness one expects of a real developed country.

Nigeria is a 'it never even began' country, irrelevant. They make the Arabs look like a bastion of civilization.

If the water was really off in Tehran, wouldn't the people be dying of thirst? The water situation there is bad. But droughts do make it difficult to get water. In Australia we also had problems with water during the Millennium drought requiring rationing. It didn't get quite as bad as Iran but it was pretty bad.

Just a thought about Vance's chances for presidency. On the one hand his electoral chances are slipping. On the other hand he has the greatest opportunity anybody will ever have of becoming the "American Caesar": 25A Trump, attest to the foreign subversion of US government, invoke any and all power under the sun (all the ones Abraham Lincoln used, any new ones since then), ignore the courts, air out the dirty laundry to stir the masses, orchestrate mass FARA surveillance and prosecution campaign (remember FARA allows you to surveil anyone who is a degree of separation from the target), sue for peace with Iran with an offer that throws Israel under the bus.

It won't happen, but Vance actually has the crisis at his fingertips to become one of the great American historical figures. Instead he'll take the flak for the war and Rubio I guess will be the GOP nominee.

Oswald Mosley had a rousing speech about standing at the precipice of history. Which for the most optimistic of us might be where we imagine JD Vance is standing. I took the liberty of slightly editing it to fit America. Though it sounds a lot better after being edited by what appears to be some Polish nationalist living in the UK.

You're living in a historical hour. Do remember that always, live in that sense, I beg of you, of history and of destiny.

When that period comes to be written and men look back at it, if we did right, if we stood firm, if we stood greatly, it will be a matter of honour and veneration for generations to come. I could not ask to live at any other moment of history than this, because never has mankind, never has the human species been confronted with such possibilities, with such choices of disaster, or of greater heights and greater glories.

My friends, do live in that sense that you are American, that you come from people who have faced tremendous odds again and again. That much is against you, but you've got within you that will, that spirit above all, that faith and that belief which will lead the generations to come to look back at you in the pages of history with the proud words to America, to Europe, to the world, they were true!

Sadly, if one thinks back to Mosley's day, none then could even imagine just how much worse things could and would get. In that sense JD Vance has not demonstrated any characteristic that would lead one to think he is anything other than a less charismatic Trump. And things might get a lot worse than we think.

I would withhold any positivity until he proclaims he will personally start executing the worst violent criminals in the US right on the White House front lawn with a gold plated 1911. Or maybe I've been seeing to many rage baits here and on X about criminals with mile long records getting released again and again for some mystical reason. In any case, he has to do something. Being as he is, I can't see it as being enough.

Vance just isn’t personally charismatic. Yes, he beat that stupid oaf moron Walz, but so could almost anyone. Absent an upset Newsom will win if he wins the nomination, probably even against Tucker (who I doubt will run).

Newsom has a profound liability in needing to run against his record as chief exec of a state renowned for mismanagement, however. I agree that the GOP could screw the pooch enough to lose to him, but he's not a particularly strong candidate.

What exactly is Newsom's selling point? If you want some charismatic Obama stand-in surely the party is full of many such pretenders who don't have absolutely awful records* and don't come across as a slimy cyberpunk mayor? They're all trying to be that guy now.

The Democratic party is still unpopular now despite Trump rampaging. People don't like what it stands for. Newsom is slick, but he can't actually change the past and what he did.

If it's just that Trump will have sunk the GOP's chances then charisma shouldn't factor into it (and presumably Democrats will pick someone they think the general public will vote for, like they did with Biden)

* Note that Obama himself had a thin resume and that was a good thing.

Have to admit, I do like Newsom's brass neck in rewriting his personal history to try and present himself as relatable (or maybe simply to get some distance given the Democratic party's current 'eat the rich' stance) to we ordinary little people, talking about how he was/is dyslexic and had a hardscrabble upbringing due to his divorced mom having to work two jobs.

Yeah, that's because your dad was a deadbeat, Gavin, and we don't all get to hang out with the Gettys because our dad - who is too mean to pay proper child support - instead introduces us to useful contacts among the mega-rich to make up for that.

I don't trust the guy, but the audacity there is nearly admirable. "I was pretty much broke growing up, I only got to visit the homes of billionaires and hang out with them instead of living in one such of our own".

Yes, he beat that stupid oaf moron Walz, but so could almost anyone.

Possibly, but Kamala is so funny in her memoir because she is so salty over the lapdog she picked, because he would be a lapdog, not being able to win against that rascally scoundrel cad Vance:

It was not a comfortable role for him. He had fretted from the outset that he wasn’t a good debater. I’d discounted his concerns. He was so quick and pithy in front of the crowds at our rallies, I thought he’d bring those qualities to the podium. He’d prepared with Pete Buttigieg, a consummate debater, and I thought his big heart and his good humor would counter J. D. Vance’s malice and pessimism.

But J. D. Vance is a shape-shifter. And a shifty guy. He understood that his default meanness wouldn’t play against Tim Walz’s sunny disposition and patent decency. Throughout the debate, he toned the anger and the insults way down. As Van Jones later remarked, he sane-washed the crazy. There were no cat ladies, no pet-eating Haitians, no personal insults. Just a mild-mannered, aw-shucks Appalachian pretending he had a lot of common ground with that nice Midwestern coach.

When Tim fell for it and started nodding and smiling at J.D.’s fake bipartisanship, I moaned to Doug, “What is happening?”

I told the television screen: “You’re not there to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate.”

There was not supposed to be any on-air fact-checking in this debate, as there had been in mine. But the moderators did correct Vance twice, on the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change and on the legal immigration status of Haitians in Springfield.

“The rules were you guys weren’t going to fact-check,” Vance complained petulantly, in a flash of his more familiar persona.

Tim fell into a pattern of defending his record as a governor. Then he fumbled his answer when the moderator, predictably, questioned why he had claimed to be in Hong Kong during the democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. Tim had been on his way to teach in China that summer but hadn’t yet left the United States on the date of the massacre. Instead of simply stating that he’d gotten his dates mixed up, but that being in China during a period of human rights oppression had profoundly influenced him, he talked about biking in Nebraska.

The following weekend, Saturday Night Live did a sketch in which actors posed as Doug and me, sitting on our couch, watching the debate. While I did not in fact spit out wine, it was otherwise uncanny in its portrait of our evening.

Tim felt bad that he hadn’t done better. I reassured him that the election would not be won or lost on account of that debate, and in fact it had a negligible effect on our polling.

In choosing Tim, I thought that as a second-term governor and twelve-year congressman he would know what he was getting into. In hindsight, how could anyone?

Thanks for the excerpt. This is amazing. JD Vance is so wicked, so vile as to sink to an even lower and more debased level as to be reasonable, agreeable and pleasant.

Imagine the level of depravity in his low, cunning, mind to debase himself so as to be polite and reasonable in a debate! Is there no iniquity too foul and black that the GOP will not sink to?

Newsom has consistently underperformed a generic Democrat in California. Not nearly as bad as Kamala, but still trailing other Democrats.

The issue is that (recent) California politics rewards different traits than more partisan-competitive states. It is incredibly cutthroat and involves genuine skill, but it is much more cloak and dagger and focused on managing the groups and building alliances with other politicians. These have some carryover to national elections, but it would be much smarter for Democrats to select someone whose skill set involves winning competitive elections.

Then again, he's tall and has a good head of hair, and that may well be enough if the economy or the war go south.

I think when we have posts like this where a poster calls a series of broadly successful politicians uncharismatic and/or stupid, we should make it an expectation that the poster cites some examples of politicians they do think are charismatic. Somebody has to have charisma and intelligence to have reached the top in a cutthroat hierarchical game filled with competitors. They didn't all luck into becoming senators and governors and vice presidential candidates.

This place is feeling like one of those barbershops where every modern athlete sucks and couldn't carry the jockstrap of [guy from when the barber was a kid].

where a poster calls a series of broadly successful politicians uncharismatic and/or stupid

Let me be clearer. I don’t think Walz came across as intelligent in the debate and in interviews generally. Vance is very intelligent (Yale Law, the Thiel thing, with his background, I don’t think that’s deniable) but has an off-putting personality, smarmy (even now when defending the president) and is not particularly attractive.

There are plenty of successful politicians who are either uncharismatic or unintelligent. Plenty of European and Asian countries (democracies) have uncharismatic but smart leaders. And there have been charismatic but dumb leaders, too. Boris Johnson probably isn’t stupid but was academically poor (graduating with the lowest passing grade in the British college system); JFK wasn’t particularly smart.

"With all due respect, sir, you are no Jack Kennedy."

I always thought Obama sounded exactly like a mediocre adjunct law professor and could never see any charisma, but given his successes, I'm obviously the wrong one.

You wouldn’t want to be friends with college law professor Obama because he would be the most annoying “um akshually” midwit at the table. That said, he could read a speech well and had good speechwriters throughout, stuck to the script, and could practice the tone shift needed to speak to both black and white audiences in a plausible and mostly likeable way. The arrogance was and is there under the surface (and seeps through the page in the texts he semi or largely writes himself), but he lacks the overt greasiness of Vance in my opinion.

I hate to dig into your personal life, but what sort of academic qualifications do you have that you can describe an Ivy League law school professor as a "midwit"?

He was never a professor. He was a lecturer at University of Chicago. This may seem like splitting hairs, but there is a gulf between lecturers and professors.

Even worse, he was a rising activist/politician using the lecturing position as a cushy gig that gave him 1) time and free interns/research assistants to write his first memoir; and 2) a captive audience of students he could recruit into the Chicago Democratic political machine.

Obama never published anything academic beyond co-authoring a couple mediocre law review articles no one has ever cited. And despite being a world famous celebrity who taught at U Chicago Law School for twelve years, I've never once heard of an attorney praising him as a professor. I know people who were at U Chicago during that span of time, and my impression is that he was a complete non-entity. Liked by students because he was a "cool" young professor who smoked cigarettes and talked about lefty politics and taught an easy, blow-off class. But not a meaningful contributor to the academic community.

About what I expect from a lecturer. Not an academic or a researcher. Only responsibilities are to teach a class.

The lecturers I'm familiar with are rather wretched. They couldn't get into a research position as a professor and this is a bad second option. They are paid little and lack stable employment. Maybe Obama was a very well off lecturer with student assistants and a decent wage. Or he wisely married another lawyer who stayed working at a law firm.

And while the University of Chicago is Ivy-tier academically, and covered with physical ivy, it is not an Ivy League university - that's purely restricted to the Northeastern US.

Worse ones, of course.

I made the same conclusion, and based it off a series of article from 15 years ago, written by his professors, ostensibly as a tribute.

Do you know how he got that job? According to the guy who recruited him (note the recruited), the process began at a meeting where someone said "Hey, we're a law school in Chicago, a super black city, and we have basically no black faculty. Maybe we should do something about that?" And someone else said "I hear the kid running the Harvard Law review this year is black." "Great, go hire him."

I had heard for years that he was the only editor of the HLR to never write an article. One of his own spokesmen confirmed that, as referenced in this bizarre time-traveling Politico article that claims to have found a "lost" Obama article, without ever getting around to mentioning how it was found.

Anyway, Chicago hired him without actually having a real spot, so they paid him for a few years to take a sabbatical (before ever actually doing any law professor work) so he could write a book on constitutional law. At the end of that time period, what he purportedly handed in was his autobiography, Dreams from my Father. And UChicago just... took that.

That was a recurring theme in those retrospectives written when he was still new and fresh. The man never found a room he couldn't walk into and instantly have every irresponsible white progressive go "Wow, he's so handsome and articulate and black! That guy's getting an A!"

And the kicker is, I think Obama is actually a smart guy. The few ideas he bothered to have were actually pretty good. But the way his professors and mentors talked about him, no one ever felt the need to push or challenge him. Even just make him do the standard work. He's kind of the epitome of what Vivek crashed out about the Christmas before last, the Zack from Saved by the Bell guy who skated through on raw charisma, and could have probably benefited from some more serious study time. Maybe then he wouldn't have had to resort to regurgitating bong-circle Marxism on the rare occasions where he was pressed for a real answer.

Ditto that when People magazine called Bill Clinton the sexiest man alive back in the day, though I'm a straight dude so that probably has a lot to do with it.

Bill Clinton is incontrovertible evidence of the sheer power of charisma. The man looks like a corrupt cartoon mayor character named Potato McDrunkie, yet the near universal consensus of people who've met him personally is that he's almost superhumanly charming.

a cartoon corrupt mayor character named Potato McDrunkie

Should I be offended at racial stereotyping there? 🤣

I agree, Bill has charisma by the shedload, and it's part of why Hillary failed in her endeavours, she comes across as even more robotic and schoolmarmish when it's Bill's effortless charm standing beside her. I never trusted him an inch, but it's no wonder he went into politics, he could indeed charm the birds out of the trees.

Hand to god, I only realized how anti-Irish it looks after posting. Typically, I try to keep my Irish bigotry nice and subtle. I was really just commenting on the fact that Bill Clinton looks like an alcoholic and also looks like a human potato.

Bill Clinton looks like an alcoholic and also looks like a human potato.

Not helping, given that Bill:

(1) claimed Irish ancestry through his maternal grandfather (though that is probably more Ulster Irish, given the tenuous roots in Co. Fermanagh)

(2) William Cobbett had strong opinions on the Irish and spuds, and how if the English rural labourers were brought to live on potatoes then they too would be degraded to the level of the Irish:

Little time need be spent in dwelling on the necessity of this article to all families; though, on account of the modern custom of using potatoes to supply the place of bread, it seems necessary to say a few words here on the subject, which, in another work I have so amply, and, I think, so triumphantly discussed. I am the more disposed to revive the subject for a moment, in this place, from having read, in the evidence recently given before the Agricultural Committee, that many labourers, especially in the West of England, use potatoes instead of bread to a very great extent. And I find, from the same evidence, that it is the custom to allot to labourers “a potatoe ground” in part payment of their wages! This has a tendency to bring English labourers down to the state of the Irish, whose mode of living, as to food, is but one remove from that of the pig, and of the ill-fed pig too.

I was, in reading the above-mentioned Evidence, glad to find, that Mr. Edward Wakefield, the best informed and most candid of all the witnesses, gave it as his opinion, that the increase which had taken place in the cultivation of potatoes was “injurious to the country;” an opinion which must, I think, be adopted by every one who takes the trouble to reflect a little upon the subject. For leaving out of the question the slovenly and beastly habits engendered amongst the labouring classes by constantly lifting their principal food at once out of the earth to their mouths, by eating without the necessity of any implements other than the hands and the teeth, and by dispensing with everything requiring skill in the preparation of the food, and requiring cleanliness in its consumption or preservation; leaving these out of the question, though they are all matters of great moment, when we consider their effects in the rearing of a family, we shall find, that, in mere quantity of food, that is to say of nourishment, bread is the preferable diet.

...Then comes the expense of cooking. The thirty-two bushels of wheat, supposing a bushel to be baked at a time, (which would be the case in a large family,) would demand thirty-two heatings of the oven. Suppose a bushel of potatoes to be cooked every day in order to supply the place of this bread, then we have nine hundred boilings of the pot, unless cold potatoes be eaten at some of the meals; and, in that case, the diet must be cheering indeed! Think of the labour; think of the time; think of all the peelings and scrapings and washings and messings attending these nine hundred boilings of the pot! For it must be a considerable time before English people can be brought to eat potatoes in the Irish style; that is to say, scratch them out of the earth with their paws, toss them into a pot without washing, and when boiled, turn them out upon a dirty board, and then sit round that board, peel the skin and dirt from one at a time and eat the inside. Mr. Curwen was delighted with “Irish hospitality,” because the people there receive no parish relief; upon which I can only say, that I wish him the exclusive benefit of such hospitality.

...[This was written in 1821. Now (1823) we have had the experience of 1822, when, for the first time, the world saw a considerable part of a people, plunged into all the horrors of famine, at a moment when the government of that nation declared food to be abundant! Yes, the year 1822 saw Ireland in this state; saw the people of whole parishes receiving the extreme unction preparatory to yielding up their breath for want of food; and this while large exports of meat and flour were taking place in that country! But horrible as this was, disgraceful as it was to the name of Ireland, it was attended with this good effect: it brought out, from many members of Parliament (in their places,) and from the public in general, the acknowledgment, that the misery and degradation of the Irish were chiefly owing to the use of the potatoe as the almost sole food of the people.]

Fear not, I do not accuse you of anything more than stating the obvious! 🤣

I don't think Newsom is personally charismatic either, aside from having the looks of a stereotypical US president from a movie, which Vance doesn't (although unlike Rubio, Vance at 6'2" at least has a height that is within the normal range for a modern US president).

So if it comes down to Newsom vs Vance, their middling levels of personal charisma might cancel each other out and the election will be decided by other factors.

To be fair, I haven't seen much footage of Newsom speaking, so it's possible that I'm missing some clips where he displays significant personal charisma.

Rubio is 5'9". Which is about average male height in the US, but he would look small up on the debate stage next to the 6'3" Gavin Newsom. Newsom is also better-looking. I wonder if maybe that alone would be enough to sink Rubio's prospects if the Republicans do some basic electability research. Vance has many issues but from a pure electability point of view, at least he is 6'2". No US President under 5'11" has been elected since Jimmy Carter.

No US President under 5'11" has been elected since Jimmy Carter.

It's a trend, for sure. But I really doubt it's the one and only important characteristic of a candidate that predicts his likelihood of success or failure. Which is what several people in this thread seem to be suggesting.

Oh, I think those people might be me. I brought it up several times. Yes, it's definitely not the only characteristic. But recent Presidential elections have been so close in the swing states that I feel it would be dangerous for either party, when it comes to their chances of success, to run a candidate who is under about 5'11", unless that candidate is extremely attractive to voters in other ways.

Vance's only shot at being president is if Trump dies. That's not particularly far fetched- Trump doesn't show many signs of ill health, but he is in his eighties. But Vance doesn't have a lane in the GOP primary.

I think people here are underestimating 25A possibility if Republicans lose Congress, which is looking increasingly likely. Existing Democrat hatred of Trump + impeding Iran war disaster + global economic crisis + some wildcard (blackmail/allegations etc.) it's not as crazy as it sounds especially if Vance is willing to throw his weight behind it.

Trump picked his cabinet based on loyalty more than competence. If Trump is out of office most of them would be standing on highway onramps with "Will Work for Food" signs. They may be incompetent, but they aren't so stupid as to realize that replacing a guy who won't fire them with a guy who might isn't going to be good for business. If Vance decides to end the war, then Rubio and Hesgeth at least are dead men walking, and Bondi and Kennedy are probably gone as well. If the tide actually turns against Trump to the degree that this is even a possibility, I'd expect impeachment and removal from office before any 25th Amendment shenanigans.

Trump picked his cabinet based on loyalty more than competence.

Repeating the leftoid talking point endlessly doesnt make it true.

Hegseth is clearly vastly more competent than Austin (to be fair, a low bar as Austin wasnt even present for large chunks of his tenure), Bessent runs circles around Yellen, Rubio mogs Blinken, and really the only sorta tie is Bondi vs Garland. You may not like the agenda, but Trump 2.0's cabinet is actually capable of doing things, unlike 1.0 or Biden.

25A section four has never been invoked, and I'm skeptical that Vance has the personal political machine to be the first. Diadochos style taking the throne by assassination feels plausible but is probably no more likely, but everyone would agree it would be legitimate.

I think that's the thing getting left out. Legitimacy. It matters. And the US has an assumption that removing a president for incompetence/incapacity is illegitimate. Why would Vance want to be an illegitimate successor taking ownership of a very difficult situation?

Why would the Democrats replace Trump with Vance? They know the latter is more reactionary in practice, has a longer attention span, will avoid some of Trump’s worst policies for the economy (by limiting tariffs and seeking a quick resolution in Iran), is invested in staying in power for a second term, and will replace cabinet ministers chosen because Trump liked them on Fox with seasoned conservative operatives who have spent decades wargaming coming to power. That seems like a bad trade.

You misinterpret what the democrat politicians are about. Openly centrist Dems + moderate dems (about 65% of the party) would happily endorse 80% of MAGA's policy goals, including deportation and certain tarifs, if they were carried out competently with a less jackbooted aesthetic.

Remember: if they had to choose between Bernie and Trump, the congress criters would rather have Trump.

25A isn't likely. It's actually a lot harder than impeachment, by design. You can do the initial removal quickly but the President just has to send a letter to congress stating he's not disabled to return to power. The VP & cabinet have 4 days to dispute that and if they do then congress needs a 2/3 vote in both houses within 48 hours to make the removal permanent.

That’s all sci fi levels of far fetched.

He’s going to run for President after Trump and lose.

He’s he who he is. I’ll even give thought to the conspiracy that he’s a plant from … whatever. Big business or something.

No boat whacking.

He could’ve been great but he comes off like such a dork.

Basically nothing has happened but the commentariat has decided that Vance is a failure and doomed to lose. I don't know why. I think everyone must be bored.

Realistically, Vance is the heir-apparent to MAGA. Vance is popular, well-spoken, and ties together the different factions that make up MAGA. The only alternative at this time is Rubio and there's no indication that Vance and Rubio are even a little at odds.

Vance just has to defeat whoever the Democrats put up. Is the second rise of Kamala that threatening?

The fantasy you lay out is neither a credible path for Vance to take the Presidency, nor even to rank as a great figure of American history, but more likely to lead in him getting jailed or worse. "Sue for peace with Iran"? I think you should stop scrolling the timeline and pick up a book or something.

My impression of this forum is that it leans overwhelmingly anti-populist and technocratic. Some of the posters here may have supported Trump and Vance briefly as spoilers within their own intra-factional pissing matches, but they remained 'capital D' Democrats at their core. Now that they know that they may have handed 8 - 12 years of consecutive rule to the populist wing of the GOP the knives are coming out.

I expect many more posts here about Newsom's "inevitability" and how Vance, Rubio, Et Al. are dead in the water before November of 2028.

As an actual Democrat, I can tell you right now that Newsom is not inevitable; in fact, I'd be rather surprised if he wins the nomination. He does not have the support of any component of the Democratic base that I can think of. Black people don't like him. Older people don't like him. Progressive young people don't like him. Moderates don't care for him. Conservatives who dislike Trump don't like him. Try finding a forum online where people keep talking him up. You won't. Maybe people from California like him. He offers absolutely nothing. Okay, he's willing to stoop to Trump's level, and seeing a Democrat do that was entertaining for a while, but the schtick has grown tiresome. He's not going to turn out the base, or any subset of the base, and his crossover appeal is nonexistent. The only reason his name keeps coming up is because he's the governor of a large state and everyone knows who he is. The nominee is probably going to be someone like Shapiro or Beshear who has shown he can appeal to moderates and hasn't accumulated much political baggage.

I want to see Pritzker run on a left-leaning populist platform. It's possible he could pull it off because, as a billionaire, he doesn't need to kiss the feet of the democratic donor class.

Wasn't that part of Trump's argument, i.e. "I'm already rich so you can trust that I won't be corrupt"?

Black people don't like him. Older people don't like him. Progressive young people don't like him. Moderates don't care for him.

How did Harris fair in that kind of estimation? I get the impression she also lacked a natural constituency, but she ended up a presidential candidate anyway.

I get the impression she also lacked a natural constituency, but she ended up a presidential candidate anyway.

She didn't go through a primary in 2024 to get there. Her 2020 results speak for themselves.

She lost her primary. She was then appointed VP because she was nonthreatening and stumbled into a big girl presidential run.

Even she admits that:

Biden had won the nomination because Congressman Jim Clyburn, leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, had thrown his support behind him. The Black vote in the South Carolina primary—especially Black women’s vote—had thrust him to victory. The pressure was on him to pick a Black woman running mate.

The press knew I was on the short list, so they had our DC apartment building staked out. When Doug and I stepped out to go somewhere, they’d follow. Occasionally I’d save them the trouble. I’d wander over to their van and say, “Doug and I are just going for coffee, can I bring you something?”

Honestly, I didn't expect much from this memoir when I bought it, but it's solid gold for an inside look at why it all crashed.

The prose here is extremely clunky and betrays a cringe personality but this anecdote betrays charm and an ounce of charisma. (That’s why it was chosen for the book, which is what makes it cringe.)

Wait till you get to the "charming" anecdote about how her staff threw her an impromptu birthday party but some misfortunate made the mistake of getting one of those balloons with the age on it.

Kamala does not like reminders of her age.

So she crushed the balloon saying "60" beneath her heel while looking at her staff. To me, that reads more like "this could be your head and will be if you fail me again":

That afternoon, when I climbed the steps to the plane, I discovered it had been decorated in streamers. My team on board were wearing gold party hats and presented me with a deliciously rich German chocolate cake, my favorite birthday cake. They had red velvet cupcakes for the press. There was also a big helium balloon with fat numerals: 60. My team knew that I stopped counting birthdays a long time ago. So I looked at them with a big smile when I landed my stiletto heel in the middle of that balloon. Then I went to find my Uggs.

And then she regales us all how she laid into her hubby dearest for not making special enough effort to celebrate her birthday. Oh yeah, "charming" is not the word I'd use. Imagine working for her. After reading this book, I now believe all the stories about how she was a terrible boss and the turnover in the VP staff was rapid and high:

He hadn’t put any thought into where we’d stay that night, so staff had picked a place for us that they thought would be a bit more special than the usual campaign hotel. It turned out to be a bland establishment whose red-and-black decor looked like it hadn’t been redone since the ’70s. The only distinguishing feature of the room was its larger size, but the curtains were broken.

Storm, knowing how much I love good food, had picked two possible restaurants from which to order dinner. She thought it would be nice if the meal was a bit of a surprise for me. So, on the plane, she knocked on Doug’s door to ask him to choose the menu. He’d shrugged and told her to ask me. So she picked the menu herself. Ordered a cake. Dressed the table with candles. My girlfriends had sent flowers.

Doug at least had thought to get a gift for me. It was a necklace by a designer I admired from Ojai, California, Jes MaHarry, the same designer who’d made the piece he’d chosen for my anniversary gift. This one featured a set of baroque pearls nestled in a gold setting. When I turned it over, I saw that the pearls’ backing had been engraved with the date. How thoughtful, to commemorate the milestone of my big birthday. But then I looked closer.

The date was not my birthday. It was the date of our wedding anniversary. He’d obviously intended to give me both pieces on our anniversary, until it occurred to him that by repurposing one piece, he could kill two birds with one stone. He could practice thrift and also save himself the bother of shopping for a birthday gift.

...I noted earlier that Storm speaks bluntly but always with correct protocol. The next day she told Doug, “Mr. Second Gentleman, you have to fix this.” She handed him a set of note cards. She’d numbered them one through five, for the nights we’d be apart through the end of the campaign. She instructed him to write a note on each one.

From then till the election, no matter what city each of us had landed in, at the end of the day I would find a note on my pillow, in Doug’s chicken scratch, telling me how much he loved me.

Yeah, I bet he remembered to leave her a card telling her how much he loved her. God Almighty, that's dog training, not how you treat a spouse.

More comments

I think it goes without saying that she didn't take the traditional path. Her own candidacy in 2020 is an object lesson in this. Reasonably well-known, sort of hyped by the media, candidacy goes over like a lead balloon before any votes are cast.

With the reputation as Copmala, she over-corrected by swinging too hard to the progressive side, wasn't able to pull off the course correction subtly enough and so gave a lot of hostages to fortune, and to top it off was running in a primary that everyone pretty much knew would be Biden's version of "It's my turn now" after his previous failed attempts at a run, and the desperate hope that the aura of Obama would cling to him and bring success in the election.

It worked, in fact it worked too well as he was only supposed to be a one-term placeholder to keep Trump out while the Democrats worked on their real pick for the next election, but he (and his inner circle of the family) convinced himself that he could run for the second term. And by the time it became painfully obvious that this was the wrong decision, there wasn't any real alternative but to run Kamala instead. And because of all those hostages to fortune from 2020 plus the indebtedness to Biden, her campaign swung wildly all over the place on the basis of "I'm not Trump!" plus "Time for the First Female Ever!" and not much else. Policy positions? Oh no no no, look I'm a black woman, vote for me or you're a racist sexist!

Jesus. I had forgotten that she even ran

But... but... but did you not listen to the "Call Her Daddy" podcast? Everyone listens to that instead of Joe Rogan! 🤣

It's okay, I think she forgot about that too.

Biden definitely forgot.

Compared to other Democrats. Any candidate is hated by 70% of Democrats and loved by 30%. Even as a GOP I don’t see how you hate Newsome. He’s just mid. So maybe his route is no one loves him but only 50% of Democrats hate him.

Try finding a forum online where people keep talking him up. You won't.

You best start believing in ghost stories forums Ms @Rov_Scam, you're in one.

PotC memes aside, I actually agree with your assessment.

I must have missed all the Newsom fanposting on here.

If you want to shell out the ten bucks to Scott you can read his case for Gavin.

You'd have to pay me rather more than ten bucks to read more than a summary of any remotely modern Scott article. He's a prime example of a writer who spends 95% of the words on completely pointless waffling and even the remaining 5% only very occasionally contains something of value.

Someone would have to pay me $10 to have me read them making a case for Newsom.

He does not have the support of any component of the Democratic base that I can think of.

What about unmarried middle-class white women? What about Hispanics?

Josh Shaprio is 5'8", which does matter I think. No US president since Carter has been under 5'11". He is also Jewish with a little bit of personal history in Israel, which could bad for him in the current political climate.

I know almost nothing about Andy Beshear, but at least he does seem to be within a typical height range for a US president in the modern era. He is also a gentile straight semi-Southern white man, which matters. Democrats have done well with that kind of combination in modern history and would almost certainly be served well electorally by trying to continue something like it rather than risking a black and/or gay and/or female candidate (Obama is commonly thought of as black and did great electorally, but he is also one of the most charismatic political figures in recent history, and people with that sort of charisma seem to be rare in both the Democratic and Republican parties).

Shapiro seems like their best candidate right now. But this isn’t the Supreme Court where you can place the Jew and nobody cares. What percent of Dems right now would never vote for a Jew?

Probably no higher than the percentage of Republicans who won't.

Never? Very few. There may be some Muslims or conspiracy-minded blacks that wouldn't vote for one, but they're at the fringes of the party. If you had garden-variety Free Palestine lefties in mind, these are the same people who probably already voted for a Jew twice.

I agree that the percent of registered Dems who would never hold their nose and vote for a Jew is well within Lizardman territory, but regarding which potential candidates receive the party’s blessing, I think you underestimate both how pervasive low-level antisemitism is among Blacks (perhaps it’s the lingering effects of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam?), as well as how much Democrats think the Black vote is worth, both for reasons of woke-progressive virtue signaling and, to be fair, political reality in the Deep South.

I could easily imagine, in a smokevape-filled room at DNC headquarters, the progressive vanguard of the party putting their heads (such as they are) together and deciding, for reasons ideological as well as practical, that the most electable coalition they can realistically hope to assemble must rally around the tentpole of anti-Zionism.

As for

If you had garden-variety Free Palestine lefties in mind, these are the same people who probably already voted for a Jew twice.

I assume you are referring to Bernie Sanders, who has done a decent job—for a man of his advanced age—of navigating between the Scylla of his old-school, class-first leftist ideology and the Charybdis of the woke-progressive party line since 2016. In particular he has never, to my knowledge, given any public indication that he is a committed Zionist, or even a practicing Jew at all, or that his Jewish heritage endears him to the State of Israel.

The same cannot be said of Shapiro, who has repeatedly commented on his Jewish faith in ways that, at the very least, reverse-dog-whistle “Zionist bootlicker” to the watermelon-emoji Free Palestine types. Say what you will about their ilk (and believe me, I have an earful of my own criticism), but in my experience they are perfectly willing to accept that an ethnic Jew is not secretly doing Israel’s bidding, provided that the Jew in question makes the right mouth-noises, and avoids making the wrong ones. Sanders has pretty well passed that litmus test; Shapiro, regrettably, has not.

I think the allegations of black antisemitism are overplayed. Yeah, it may exist on the fringes, but one only has to look at the 2020 Georgia Senate Democratic primary to see that it isn't a huge factor. Jon Ossoff, a Jew who made his heritage part of his campaign, won overwhelmingly. I can't find exit poll numbers, but he got near unanimous support from black politicians in the state, most notably from John Lewis. Josh Stein, a practicing Jew, got nearly 70% of the vote in the North Carolina Democratic primary, running against a black guy in a state where the black vote is more important in the Democratic primary than it is in a lot of other places. It's hard to do a similar analysis for Shapiro since he never ran in a competitive gubernatorial primary, but by my calculations he got about 223,000 black votes in the general election. When Wolf ran for the first time in 2014, he got about 177,000 black votes. While the latter election had higher turnout, there's nothing in the data to suggest that blacks were especially put off by Shapiro, since he performed about as well as one would expect him to. It should be noted that blacks made up about 10% of the electorate in 2014 compared with 8% in 2022, but more blacks total came to the polls, and 92% of them voted Democrat in both elections. I don't know that any conclusions can be drawn from this, but I wanted to bring it up.

You're right that Shapiro's specific political positions may come into play when it comes to certain demographics, but that's different then saying that they'll never vote for a Jew, because they probably wouldn't vote for a Gentile who said the same things, either. And with Shapiro, you'd have to be really far to the Free Palestine side of the aisle for his comments to matter. His stance on Israel is similar to that of most Democrats: He accused Israel's military of overreaching, denounced Netanyahu, called for humanitarian aid to be allowed into Gaza, and called for an end to the war. What he refused to do was call for a unilateral cease fire without the hostages being returned, and refused to denounce Israel or Zionism altogether. The former position is now a moot point, and the latter position is likely to be held by whoever the nominee is. I agree that he's riskier on that front than a guy like Beshear, but he doesn't talk about it much and the perception of him could change when and if he's in a position where he has to talk about it more.

Shapiro may be short and have a lot of baggage, but he is a tireless climber and a fairly smart, ruthless one at that. I wouldn't count him out.

I think the only thing that could legitimately knock him out of the running is if the Ellen Greenberg case actually gains some traction outside the Fox news info sphere.

he is a tireless climber and a fairly smart, ruthless one at that

Which seems to be the problem if the Atlantic story is any way accurate. Lot of enemies inside the party who will be all too happy to knife him in the back should he formally run:

The worst-kept secret in Pennsylvania politics is that the governor is disliked—in certain cases, loathed—by some of his fellow Democrats. The causes vary: policy disputes, personality clashes, accusations of meddling and sabotaging and ceaseless self-promoting. When Shapiro was being vetted for vice president in the summer of 2024, Erin McClelland, whom Democrats had recently nominated for Pennsylvania treasurer, stunned the state party by suggesting on social media that Shapiro would “undermine” Harris—adding other insults for good measure.

...The private commentary from Democrats is worse. In 30 years spent climbing the party ladder, Shapiro has acquired a long list of enemies. If he wasn’t already aware, the governor found out the hard way in 2024, when a not-small and not-subtle chorus of Democrats made their misgivings about him known to Harris and her team. (A Pennsylvania lawmaker told me that, at one point, a member of Harris’s vetting operation called him to say that in their decades working in party politics, they had never witnessed so many Democrats turning on one of their own.) If Shapiro chooses to run for president in 2028, Democrats in the state told me, the backlash will be far more visible.

Vance is not popular, though. He's certainly well spoken and has a good shot at being a conservative intellectual or vizier. But it's difficult to say who he appeals to; the Romneycrats that like his speaking ability prefer Rubio(and have since it became apparent they weren't going to get their first choice, ever).

You wot, mate?

Vance just has to defeat whoever the Democrats put up. Is the second rise of Kamala that threatening?

I'd be surprised if the Democrats were that dumb. Not extremely surprised, but surprised.

But in general I agree. It's 2026. Election's in 2028. We've got a war to get through, plus midterms. Lots of things can happen, it's way too soon to count Vance out.

Who have they got otherwise though? Newsome probably gets cancelled eventually for resembling a white male with initiative

Newsom at the moment looks like the front-runner, but his problem (same as with Kamala) is that the skills that won things in California aren't going to scale up to the national stage. Nate Silver had a run-down of "these are possible Democratic candidates who are doing better than Newsom" but none of those jumped off the page for me.

It can't be Kamala a second time, because she imploded so badly first time round that if they put her in a free primary there's no way she'll win (see her run for 2020 which planted the seeds of a lot of things that tripped her up in 2024, e.g. the infamous trans surgeries bit) and if they try and force her as the nominee as they did for 2024 there are no reasons for it this time round as there were last time, and unless someone has even fewer functioning brain cells than Tim Walz no way they would agree to be her VP (see Shapiro's little hissy-fit over why she rejected him).

Newsom is the obvious choice; it's possible the Democrats can keep their wokies under control long enough to elect him. There's also Shapiro, though with the anti-Israel (and anti-Semitic) turn in both parties, I find him unlikely. And AOC, who is probably more electable than Kamala (though not by much).

The wokies can't win a straight vote. They universally hated Biden but it didn't matter.

Yeah, but I think his problem is the same as Kamala's (and indeed, Pete Buttigieg's problem): great, you did fantastic in your home state, now what?

He was governor of California, what does that mean for the rest of the country? Is he going to try and turn the entire USA into California? Some might love that idea, some might not. I can see why he's trying to rewrite his personal history ("I had to take a job as a paper delivery boy because my single mom had to work multiple jobs! I'm dyslexic!") in order to get away from the billionaire connections, but that's not really going to work. The French Laundry incident, the Getty wedding where he and a rake of other Californian pols were all too happy to bow and scrape for their very good close friends - it's not everybody can have City Hall closed down to preside over their single wedding. That's not helping with "I can relate to you, ordinary people, because I too had a hard life" presentation:

It seems we finally know what California Gov. Gavin Newsom was up to for at least part of his prolonged public absence for the last week and a half.

Vogue reports that the governor — who has not held a public event since Oct. 26 and abruptly canceled a trip to a climate change conference in Scotland — attended the wedding of billionaire oil heiress Ivy Getty in San Francisco over the weekend. A photo from the event appears to show the masked governor watching Gordon Getty kiss his veiled granddaughter. The Getty family are longtime San Francisco residents.

...Newsom has always had close ties to the Getty family, though the wedding does not entirely explain why he canceled his trip to the climate conference. The Sacramento Bee's Hannah Wiley noted that Newsom was supposed to be in Scotland from Nov. 1-3, and seemingly could have made it back in time for the weekend wedding.

I think Kamala will have a lot of power because she presents a fantasy. If a Kamala wins 2028, it’s a mulligan, Trump was just a fluke after all, we’re back to the original timeline. She won after all it just took a while. Anybody else is an explicit acknowledgement that Trump won and we’re living in his shadow.

She lost the popular vote to Trump. The stink of failure is too great this time. I predict an early flame out in the primary for her.

The dem primaries for the midterms have, so far, pushed towards conventional wisdom white male candidates. Not the same thing as moderates, but not diversity hires or people who can't string a sentence together.

Speaking of, what the heck is going on with Jasmine Crockett? First she gets beat by the white guy which clearly has to be down to racist misogynoir, right? and now there's some possible scandal over a former security guy of hers turning out to be a criminal impostor who just got shot by the cops?

I see she's another one touched by the guiding hand of Kamala:

When I became VP, I had a secret project—I called it the Stars Project—that only my senior team knew about. We’d brainstorm about the younger talents in the party and then, on Friday afternoons, I’d invite one or another to visit my office in the West Wing or the residence. As I’d offer a seat on the couch across from me, more than one nervously confessed: “I feel like I’ve been called into the principal’s office.” I would laugh and say, “No, I think you’re very talented. What are you working on, and how can I help you?”

Many of those on my list spoke at the convention: Lauren Underwood, Robert Garcia, Angela Alsobrooks, Lateefah Simon, Maxwell Frost, Joe Neguse, Lina Hidalgo, Jasmine Crockett.

I can’t speak for the others, but Lina Hildalgo is also crashing and burning, although she blames ‘mental health problems’ rather than racism and sexism.

Talarico is not a moderate; but he is a conventional seeming white guy… until you hear him talk(which during the primary, he didn’t do very much of). He won the primary due to black-Hispanic tensions and mismanaged elections in Crockett’s strongest county. This doesn’t make him a particularly strong general election candidate although he seems like it superficially.

Talarico is not a moderate

I don't have much exposure to him. Just some sound bites where he comes off as a decent and likeable Christian with down-to-earth, pragmatic ideas about politics. Though I see there's now a kerfuffle over a deep fake Talarico reading some of his old tweets and there's no hiding the fact he's debased himself at the altar of woke in the past. Is that what makes him immoderate? Or is there more to it?

Kamala was never that popular without a coronation there's no way she gets the nomination.

Vance's chances are high, but the most important thing I think is Republicans to have real primaries. It is best if they learn from the other party's mistakes.

He can be, from time to time, a captivating speaker from prepared notes. But in other situations he comes off as really, really unlikeable, which is a death sentence for a politician seeking the presidency in this age. That's as rational as women who say a guy gave them the "ick", but that's how most operate.

My prediction is Marco Rubio will eat Vance alive in a primary. I know he previously said he wouldn't run against Vance. That's not some enforceable oath or promise.

Crazy talk here, I know, but what do you think of a possible deal where Vance runs for president and picks Rubio as his VP, positioning him for a run at the big job himself later?

Marco Rubio will be in his sixties after an eight year Vance presidency, and he's already been waiting a while. Americans like to complain about how old their politicians are and he likely knows this, plus he's almost certainly more popular among the broader public than Vance. He doesn't have a lot of reason to take that deal.

I suppose it depends if he thinks he can win the next election as the Republican candidate, or if Vance has a better chance.

Worst of all worlds would be to go on his own, win the nomination, then get creamed in the election. Vance would be young enough still to try again in 2032 and run on "you tried Rubio and he fell on his face at the polls".

The presidency tends to flip flop because Americans periodically vote for change.

I wouldn’t accept a later run if I were him.

I'd say his chances for the nomination are lower than they were a few months ago. He has the same problem that Ron DeSantis did—he hasn't been very outspoken lately, suggesting that he wants to distance himself from Trump's policies somewhat, but he's unwilling to take a stand against him, despite being the one person in the administration that Trump can't fire. If he's not going to do that, then the least he could do is toady up to the administration to avoid being eclipsed. I'm guessing he thought that being VP would give him the inside track to the presidency; Suzie Wiles pretty much said he was a blatant opportunist. What he didn't take into consideration is that Trump likes being kingmaker as much as being king, even though his attempts at that thus far have been lacking. If the Republicans take a shellacking in the midterms, which is looking increasingly likely, then his chances of being president will be comparable to Dick Cheney's in 2008; even with the support of the president, it would be a tough row to hoe.

25A Trump

I don't think Vance has enough control over the cabinet to push this through, much less Congress. If only he did, then he could finally be the Millennial Caudillo 4 Lyfe we've all dreamed of.


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