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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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It's over for me.

We pretended that senile rambling old man was a president for four years and now the country is more divided than ever. I am ashamed of how I have treated people while I have been under the influence of that horrible man who helped break this country.

I say helped break because he didn't do it alone. Every person who covered for him, who made excuses for him, who refused to see that there was an old man with no control over himself (he was leaking constantly, he couldn't keep a secret. He couldn't keep a secret.) has some share of responsibility in this.

This is a serious situation that we let get out of control. And we need to be united, and I wish I had been able to admit that Trump was a divider sooner.

  • -78

We seem to be having a spate of low-effort ramblings that are basically "I'm mad about something and want to vent." I am sorry if you're having an existential crisis over Trump (for months at a time now?) but if you are going to post a top-level post, please make it relevant, interesting, or at least present an argument. We don't want to see free-form rants about how Trump or Biden or whoever is The Worst, devoid of anything but your own undigested disgust.

An argument? You want an argument?

Every person who was wrong about Trump and his effect on this country needs to pray to God for forgiveness. I know I have.

If you spectated this disaster from the comfort of intellectual distance, you're part of the problem.

  • -50

Yeah, imagine. We could have had Hillary instead, and the Ukraine war would have kicked off eight years earlier.

I'm not a Clinton fan, but I doubt she would have been bad enough to retroactively start a war two years before her election.

I think she'd have been far more agressige in prosecuting whatever we were doing in the Syrian civil war. One of her stump points was establishing a no fly zone there (which would have meant shooting down Russian aircraft at the time she said it).

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/25/hillary-clinton-syria-no-fly-zones-russia-us-war

Yes, this - this was only and sufficient point given on Less Wrong (or other rationalist space, do not remember after such long time) as reason for supporting Trump.

From rationalist perspective, avoiding raising the probability of escalation all the way into Global Thermonuclear War even by few decimal points beats any bad things Trump ever did or was expected to do at the time.

You found one of the five reasons I voted for him. it seemed obvious to me at the time that Hillary would have pushed NATO forces right up to the Russian border on Ukraine. She wanted Gaddafi’s, al-Assad’s, and Putin’s skulls on her wall, figuratively.

One of the “scandals” from before he was even in office was his “office of the President-Elect” having pre-inauguration contact with the Russian Ambassador, to reassure Putin that Trump didn’t want war. The point of having ambassadors is to ensure diplomacy! Talking with an ambassador is probably the furthest thing from collusion I can imagine.

Putin’s skulls on her wall,

This must be the reason Russian Sberbank paid her husband for "lectures" and why she approved sale of Uranium One to Rosatom after a modest bribe. All that was leading to nailing Putin's skull to the wall, somehow. Must be one heck of 3D chess.

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