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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.
One incredible thing about Trump's continued insanity is how much of a natural loyalty test it creates. If you take his words seriously, he's now threatening genocide (and implying nukes) against Iran over a war we won weeks ago about a strait that has been open for transit and is safe to cross against a regime that has already fallen and been changed to be favorable to us.
It pushes out anyone who can't, or isn't willing to, commit themselves to the double think and devout followers are making a constant fool of themselves because they aren't all able to update fast enough. There's a reason why the Democrats now hold the edge on the Senate, a thing that in any ordinary year should not be happening (just look at how low the predictions were until somewhat recently). But the mad king is even crazier than people expected and the Trumpist group grows more and more insular because most people surprisingly enough, are not willing to pretend the emperor is or isn't wearing clothes depending on his whims.
Almost half of all voters are independent now and that should be eye opening to these partisans.
If you're a Democrat you should be worried that the Dems are so politically toxic that people won't associate with you, even though the alternative is those "crazy Republicans". If you're a Republican you should be worried that the GOP is so politically toxic that people won't associate with you, even though the alternative is those "crazy Democrats". Just imagine how despicable the average citizen must be viewing you now that they're willing to consider you just as insane and awful. Outrunning the other person instead of the lion brings you only temporary victories, the 2020 Biden mandate turned into a 2024 Trump surge, and the 2024 Trump surge is turning into a 2026 Dem landslide.
It will come as no surprise to you that I think there are many progressive beliefs which serve a similar function as loyalty litmus tests.
The most notable progressive belief that serves the same function (feigned confusion toward or rejection of male/female definitions) is mostly harmless, though; worst case scenario, it wrecks women's sports, which no one actually cares about anyway. The Trumpist version has given us the highly escalated Iranian situation, which is much more costly.
I think the most costly progressive belief is something like "we should not punish antisocial behavior if we can tell a story where that antisocial behavior is downstream of prejudice around race, gender, or class". While Trump has obviously been acting like a petulant toddler lately, it's not like handing uncontested power back to the progressive "adults in the room" is likely to go particularly well. Probably less badly but that's not a very high bar to clear.
We are in agreement. I might gesture at "let's hand power to people who would do better than either," but unfortunately I don't see a way from here to there.
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