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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.
The final resting place of TDS: acceptance that it was just aesthetic snobbery all along. The greatest political actor in the US since FDR, vanquished both parties, slew the Bush and the Clinton dynasties, co-opted the Kennedies, rewrote the political playbook and realigned the party system, the international treaty system and US policies more generally. One day they'll probably teach this little banger in 300-level poly-sci classes, in the same chapter as the Fireside Chats.
So gauche!
It so happens that if you are too stupid and malicious to consider consequences, you can do a hell of a lot as the president of the United States of America. You can do great things indeed. The greatest. It's a tremendous force, this office.
For example, you can kill a whole civilization.
You can realign everything into a crooked parody of itself. You can throw a temper tantrum and wreck international treaties, replacing them with your preferred club of third world kleptocrats. Easy-peasy. The hard part is getting into that office, but thankfully even the smart Americans have grown tired of treating things seriously, and so happily elected a random moron.
This is genocidal rhetoric. What do you even say at this point? We are clearly in the wrong. Trump has disgraced America more than anyone before him. The Republican Party may be over for the next decade. Perhaps endless immigration will simply be our punishment from God for allowing the bloodthirsty to occupy the government.
Press X to doubt. 2 reasons:
Any foolishness from the side of Republicans will be seized on by the Dems to be more foolish themselves. It'll allow them greater leeway to hang themselves politically by supporting nonsense like defacto open borders or wokeness 2.0 or whatever else they can cook up with. Then that'll alienate more people, and we'll be back to equilibrium.
MAGA voters could choose to end this war at any time by aggressively protesting what Trump is doing, threatening to withhold support, etc. Trump listens to them in broad strokes, and becomes much more TACO-y when he senses the ground shifting beneath him. So far though, MAGA has not done this. It's going along with the Iran war despite the massive hypocrisy of many MAGAs of previously being isolationist. There's a few tiny cracks and some softening support here and there, but Trump's base remains relatively united behind Trump.
A lot of major conservative names have actually defected here. Here's Candace Owens calling for the 25th amendment over his comments. Tucker Carlson is calling on troops to disobey these types of orders. Theo Von has been extremely against the war in Iran (I havent yet seen any comments on this recent but specifically)
They're the 3rd, 7th and 11th most listened to podcast on Spotify in the US.
It's not just the traditional podcasters either, for example here's Alex Jones. You can find plenty of major conservatives, many who have been conservative way before Trump even was, who oppose this war.
It is true that Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones have large audiences, and that most of these audiences are Red Tribe.
It is also true that they are opposed to the war with Iran, and yet we are having a war with Iran, and at least to date that war is overwhelmingly popular with Red Tribe.
I do not see how it is possible to claim that Red Tribe is both taking Owens, Carlson, and Jones' arguments as authoritative, and also overwhelmingly supporting a way they vehemently oppose.
So let us speak plainly here: is it your argument that Red Tribe should be taking Owens, Carlson, and Jones' arguments as authoritative? If so, why do you, yourself, personally, think that would be a good idea?
Bonus Question: One of your more notable posts, in my opinion, was your extensive arguments that Red Tribe is increasingly converging on anti-semitism of the Fuentes/groyper variety. I believe I've previously noted that I consider this one of the worst arguments I've seen on this forum in quite some time, but have not yet had the time for engaging with the substance of your arguments in detail (or indeed with most other arguments, sadly.) Still, pursuant to such engagement, could you elaborate on your personal understanding of the nexus between Israeli government influence and Trump's decision to go to war with Iran?
Opposition to the war doesn't really matter that much, especially when there's a disconnect between the average politician and the voters anyway. It's the politician who decides until their time is up and they might get replaced, and as we're seeing with the midterms Trump is increasingly losing influence in that area.
Confidence and support are still falling and that's despite the selection bias that people who change their minds don't always show up as mind changers, because they retcon it to begin with. The increased dissatisfaction among independents isn't just independents turning sour, but also sour republicans who turn more independent. And independent registration is at the highest ever because of dissatisfaction by otherwise Dem and GOP leaning voters. People who are upset leave, the tribe shrinks and election chances get worse even if the inner tribe circle jerking gets stronger.
It's simple, Israel is not the average Jew, especially the average American Jew. I believe in personal responsibility and some random Joe Stein who works in accounting or whatever holds absolutely zero responsibility whatsoever for the Israeli government's influence on US politics. Antisemitism, like all bigotries, is mostly based around blaming groups instead of individuals.
Like imagine a world where Nazi theories were correct and powerful secret elites did control Germany and were corrupting it, and those elites were all Jews. Even if that were true, it would not suddenly make it ok to round up a bunch of random Jewish people, including many children, and just kill them. There is no world where literal babies and newborns could have done anything wrong, and yet they died too.
I voted for Trump because he promised no foreign interventionism and I thought Trump 1 was better than Biden, and have regretted it immensely. Unfortunately, there aren't many people who are willing to listen to this; strong Trump supporters hold this to be traitorous, and Democrats don't provide much of a runway for people who had reasons to support Trump but feel betrayed, because they were already on the bandwagon of anyone who voted for Trump is evil. Retconning your vote is basically the only pathway to being respected, so it's not surprising people are doing it. Trump is a phenomenon that has to be survived, because he has a stranglehold on his base. Hopefully the country survives.
That said, unfortunately the anti-war movement on the right has coalesced around antisemites and undesirables like Carlson and Owens, who oppose this war, like the local antisemites, because they believe Iran is a necessary counterweight to Israel which is the country they actually care about. I'm anti-war for reasons that rhyme with leftist views; I hate the American foreign policy apparatus, I believe it is a force for evil in the US, and I believe it does damage to the world while not aiding actual American interests. So it's frustrating to see that the right's anti-war impulses are being redirected into a shape that blames the problems of American foreign policy on THE JEWS!!! and not, for instance, the military-industrial complex, the blob, and the deep state.
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