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Notes -
Since nobody seems to be bringing it up, I will:
"Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"
It really is Poetry.
Over time, I've lost faith in religion. I no longer believe in deontology. I doubt objectivism. I don't think consequentialism produces meaningfully outcomes. I find modernism passe. The rationalists seem kinda irrational. I've done the calculations: utilitarianism doesn't math out.
I think I'll have to RTVRN to tradition: I think Plato might have had it. Maybe Aesthetics as Virtue was the true path all along.
It seems that the aesthetics someone chooses to project and their aesthetic sense (taste? values?) are better predictors of what they will do and who they really are than anything else. It seems that half of my political values boil down to aesthetics in any case: I find trump-hegseth-vance-desantis et al to be disgusting and contemptible; I have more respect for Rubio, but the last Republican I could really get down with was Mccain, purely off of his aesthetics, even if choosing someone as gauche as Palin disqualified him from my vote (Romney was too morman for me to handle, I'm sad to say).
Likewise with the D's: Their candidates have been universally superior to the republicans these past 8 years because they would rather be eaten by wild dogs than put "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" up in lights and then line up behind it, but I have the most good vibes off of Bernie, Buttegieg, and Mamdani; also probably for purely aesthetic reasons.
I think this might actually be rational: just by observing the aesthetics an individual chooses to portray, you can make a judgment vis. how they intend to act in a way that is much harder to fake than "Saying shit". Kamala was a social climber totally absent of virtue, and campaigned like it. Bernie is a crusty old marcher, and acts like it. Buttigieg is a bloodless technocrat, and looks like it. Trump is a neuvo rich venal tasteless rich guy, and governes like it.
All this to say: I think I'm just going to be unapologetically ruled by my aesthetic sense from now on, and say that we can allow some grace. Maybe Duublya had a stutter, you can get an aphorism wrong and it's fine. It's ok. That being the case, if any politician in the future sits down and types out something as fucking sauceless and cringe and gross as "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" and thinks "This is great, fucking SEND IT"; they should probably go back to screaming at the cocain ghosts in an alleyway stop blighting our eyes with their garbage.
Very funny to see people trying to normalize Trump's behavior by comparing him to Dubya, or doing the usual "but the libs", or "TDS". We're not in Kansas any more, this isn't about stutters or being uncouth, Dubya had nothing on this guy, irrespective of bad faith criticism and outright slander by his opponents. Trump 2.0 is a sui generis in American history, whether in his ineptitude, corruption, or malice (or, yes, aesthetics). And the only TDS I see at this point is unquestioning, defensive loyalty to Trump that has become completely untethered from his faithfulness to any policy line – except, perhaps, owning said libs, making them seethe. But perhaps that's all there was to it from the start? Conservatives felt bullied, mocked. Conservatives were fed Romney-style polite retreat or, if they grew intellectually curious, Moldbuggian defeatism about Cthulhu swimming left inexorably, like a law of nature, about the Elite Human Capital destined to convert their kids into hating their bloodline. Conservatives wanted to know how it feels to be on the other side of the boot – just once. And so long as Trump grants them this wish, so long as the moment of ecstasy continues uninterrupted, he can do no wrong.
This is pretty much how Palestinians saw Oct 7. When you're convinced, rightly or wrongly, that you're a desperate underdog, no manner of retaliation feels unjust or unwise – punching up, as libs like to put it. Of course, Israeli politics are the same, perfected, elevated to the core of religious doctrine – eternal righteous lashing-out of a cornered rat, since the Holocaust, since Titus, since the Pharaoh. Iranians are lashing out against the Satan Duo and the entire global economy now. Russians imagined themselves boxed in by NATO, post-colonial third worldists chafe under the White Man's revealed superiority and asserted colonial sins, the Chinese are fantasizing about revenge for the Century of Humiliation… Perhaps the root of evil is plebeian resentment as such. Elites that can feel it themselves are an unacceptable hazard, and political systems that reward fanning and exploiting this loser sentiment are powder kegs. What can stop this? Fukuyamists hoped it'll be the sheer sedating comfort of the unfathomably rich liberal democratic order. Didn't work. Christianity offered some lofty words about forgiveness, but Christianity is now a garish Easter Bunny mascot that ushers in gleeful war crimes on Passover. Praise be to Allah, I guess.
I mean, there are definitely comparisons you can make to past historical eras. Andrew Jackson's presidency has a lot of Trump parallels: non-politician elected to the presidency, political scandals that became loyalty tests for supporters, non-normative uses of presidential powers, firing large amounts of federal employees and putting in their own guys instead, disagreement with the central bank of the US, etc., etc.
And surely some of the presidents we had at the height of the machine politics era of US history were at least as corrupt as Trump is? Perhaps they had more decorum about it, but corruption is corruption.
If you have to go all the way to Jackson…
But America was a bit player back then. I am not sure even Jackson would have been such a jackass in charge of the global hegemon.
Does the ‘flavor’ of jackass really matter in this sense?
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I think Trump has been uniquely bad in terms of foreign policy by a pretty massive degree, and this is absolutely the worst time for the US to have bad foreign policy. And it's not even that he's got a strategy that he's competently carrying out but it's a bad policy, it's that he seems to not have a policy and yet is doing so many erratic things that damage US foreign relations that he might as well be taking a wrecking ball to the country. Jackson was pretty bad on domestic policy, but Trump is worse on foreign policy. At least Jackson actually had a military record behind him.
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