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I saw the following exchange between Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, and it made me angry. So instead of getting over it and going and doing normal things like a well adjusted adult, I decided to complain about it on the internet.
First of all, I'm at least glad to see that reality is starting to set in. Trump is going to get his nonsense "absolute immunity" claim promptly rejected 9-0 by the Supreme Court. He's going to go on trial on March 4, he's going to get convicted, and he's going to go to prison. This has all been obvious for some time, and people do need to come to grips with it instead of telling themselves "it can't happen, so it won't".
But there is a stark mismatch here between the acceptance on one hand that the jury will convict Trump but the insistence on the other hand that "the charges aren't real". DC is an overwhelmingly democratic voting jurisdiction, but you would need to be cynical indeed to think there is no chance that even one Democrat juror would refuse to imprison a political opponent on obviously baseless charges. But of course, the charges are not nearly so baseless as Carlson suggests.
No, the reason that Kelly and Carlson know that Trump is going down is not because they think there is not one honest soul to be found in DC. They can have confidence Trump will lose this case because both his conduct and the law have little mystery about them. On the facts, there's little if any dispute about the actions that Trump took. On the law we have seen similar charges applied to many January 6 defendants, and it has not gone well for them. If Trump is to get similar treatment for similar conduct, he must be convicted.
Carlson and Kelly know that he's guilty and yet they pretend otherwise. Carlson rants about how outrageous it is to render people's votes meaningless, and yet when Trump is charged for conspiring to do exactly that he flatly states it's "not even a real crime". I emphasize that his contention here isn't even that Trump didn't do the awful thing he's accused of - he's saying that the things he's accused of aren't awful. This lays bare how empty and fake Carlson's feigned defence of democracy is. You can believe that it's outrageous to deprive people of their democratic rights or you can believe that conspiring to deprive people of their democratic rights isn't a "real crime", but it's incoherent to claim both.
But worst of all is the "warning" of violence. Carlson tells us that the man who incited a riot must not be punished or else we'll get more riots. This is the logic of terrorism. Give us what we want or there will be blood. Sure, he phrases it as a prediction rather than a threat and says he detests violence... but he knows full well that many of the people who might actually commit it could well be listening to him, and he knows he is fanning the flames of their resentment and putting the thought of violence in their heads. This would be irresponsible even if Carlson were sincere, but the fact that he's obviously being cynical makes it worse. This is a man who passionately hates Trump and couldn't wait for him to get kicked out of the White House - and yet here he is inventing excuses for him, pre-emptively trying to discredit the verdict he knows is coming, sanewashing Trump's "rigged election" claims, stoking anger, and telling people that violence is the inevitable response if Trump gets locked up. All, one presumes, so he can maintain his position in the GOP media ecosystem. What a worm.
Smith and Chuktan will obviously not allow themselves to be swayed by threats of violence, so we will unfortunately get to see if the dark talk turns into action. I for one hope Trump's most volatile supporters will at least recognize the truth that Carlson acknowledges - it will go extremely badly for anyone who takes it upon themselves to shed blood.
In May 2020 there was a real chance my mother was going to die alone in a hospital room because of fascist policies enacted to stop transmission of an illness that doesn't kill people. Day after week after month after year I still see people entirely seriously using the term fascist to refer to those most opposed to pound-for-pound the worst lie in the history of this country. Of course I know they don't truly understand what fascism is, if they understood it, they could recognize it; if they recognized it, they would realize everybody screaming fascist over the last 10 years are those most inclined to supporting and perpetrating fascism. I know it just means to them "this thing is viewed by my ingroup as bad, and with this term I am signaling to my ingroup that I am one of them." It's galling, at times I've felt the temptation of a rage and frenzy, but I'm pretty good at keeping a cool head and I know when it comes down to it the people saying these things are deeply unserious.
You provide no substance here; the story of Carlson's supposed texts is old and baseless. Dominion sliced apart internal communications and arranged them to falsely portray things like Carlson hating Trump. His frustration has been known and as a non-federal-voter with limited subject interaction with Trump supporters, my impression has been they too view him as not delivering much on what they had hoped. If he's actually grifting, well his latest grift is getting Alex Jones back on Twitter and being Melania's pick for VP so I imagine Trump might be wondering if he could get any more Tucker-tier grifters on his side. On the prosecution, Carlson voicing concerns is easily explained; he believes the system is sufficiently corrupt to baselessly convict. I'm sure /pol/ is full of the blackpilled who would describe moral certainty of Trump's innocence and equally of his inevitable conviction. Nybbler might have even said it here already. Thinking that means any of them believe he's guilty is kafka shit.
But that's not what I'm here for, this is: is the American government bursting at the seams with depraved criminals? You can answer wrongly, but it's yes.
I have a postulate I put here a while back detailing my view on election fraud, most briefly it's "If possible, certain." The basis is that depravity. I saw someone here last week thinking apropos "They would [defraud voters] if they could" a suitable response is nevertheless "Sure, where's the evidence?" But no, you don't understand, if you truly understand how they are criminals who will take whatever they can the only rational consequent is "Can they prove they didn't?" And so likewise with the prosecution of Trump when you truly understand the overwhelming criminality present within the American government it's not the midwit's pattern-match of "whataboutism" it's the necessary consequent of "Can everyone involved prove their allegiance to justice?" Nope, they can't. So what do you go to, "He's a unique threat to the constitution"? Government organizations and taxpayer dollars censored speech, 1A out. The left is quite clear on guns, 2A out. NSA soldiers spying on homes and American citizen communications, 3A and 4A out. Or to cut to the quick, believing people who don't pay taxes should get to vote, that's the foundational ethos of the country out. The law doesn't matter to these people and the constitution doesn't matter to these people. (And please, I speak not the map but the territory.) What remains?
Trump won't be convicted. If and when this reaches the supreme court they'll rule 8-1 on what could be the utterly flimsiest of procedural issues that won't otherwise be immediately applicable as precedent for however many thousands of cases. The 8 members of actual merit will understand this is all politics, and so those 8 members of actual merit, appreciating their places in history and/as the only people with real power and real principle in 21st century America, will decline from participating in fuckery befitting the Roman senate.
So, if you too understand this truly, that this is entirely politically motivated, then you won't waste my time with the unserious person's poor gotchas or crimestop pattern-matches. Trump could have broken the law, probably even, so arcane is much of American law, but the law doesn't matter to those prosecuting him so why waste everybody's time here talking like it does? Trump does however represent a threat to their particular order, and that finally brings us to the only thing worth discussing in this entire affair: of Trump or those on the side of his prosecution, who deserves power?
My mother survived, and a politician I campaigned for as a bright-eyed youth got my dad in the hospital room. I'll back him forever for that just as I will never forget those who made it so I had to make that call.
Sorry, who are you backing forever? I’m a bit confused on the timeline.
For what it’s worth, COVID did in fact kill people, including one of my uncles. This was especially true in the months before vaccination or Paxlovid. I’m glad your mother survived.
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What is your working definition of fascism? I'm not sure I see one under which your outgroup's use of the term is as obviously meaningless as you make it out to be, but at the same time your description of COVID policies as such is not.
Tyranny underwritten by corporations/financial interests.
Lockdowns, mask mandates, mass testing and compulsory immunotherapy are each tyranny. Restrictions to movement and the operation of businesses and of course the money spent to acquire all manner of medical equipment and supplies and pharmaceutical interventions produced significant gains for major multinationals.
Trotsky's actual definition, poor as he articulated it, is just anti-communist populism. But that's not what anybody means when they say fascism.
I think that definition is awfully general, but then surely right-wing preoccupations such as privatised prisons, the military-industrial complex, anti-union laws, and generally every instance where the state collaborates with corporate interests against private individuals (such as the whole legal edifice of copyright and DRM, prosecution of whistleblowers, ...), which historically have been a right-wing domain under the umbrella of pro-business - and let's not start talking about all the military misadventures that the US continues engaging in allegedly in furtherance of the interests of oil companies - should at the very least suffice to make left-wingers' accusations that right-wingers are fascists a plausible thesis to be debated.
(It's true that many of the above have fundamentally become bipartisan ventures, but many lefties within the US and beyond would surely retort that this is just a sign of both US parties being right-wing except for a bunch of wedge issues.)
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Not only did you conveniently put your bottom line as it's own line at the bottom of the argument, you even drew a line above it as in the standard notation for a deductive proof of this kind.
It's so on-the-nose it makes me wonder if it's an intentional parable on the topic, but probably not.
Anyway, genuinely sorry for your family's pain in that situation, I'm glad it seems to have worked out ok. But rampant safetyism and trying to avoid legal liability really just isn't qualitatively similar top mass criminality and corruption of the type you speculate. If all politicians were the criminals you model, I would expect you to have to bribe one of them to get in to see your mother, not have one of them compassionately bend the rules to help you.
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Lockdowns aren't on the pareto frontier of policy options for even diseases significantly deadlier than covid imo, just because rapid development and distribution of technological solutions is possible, but ... covid killed one million people in the united states. Yes, mostly old people, but we're talking about protecting old people here. No reason to pretend otherwise.
The texts were:
Even for this, I agree it's possible he was just really mad at Trump and is usually pro-trump even in private, and that was his defense. People say a lot of things, in a lot of contexts, and cherrypicking can do almost anything. But ... on the balance, those are very strong statements. What makes you call it baseless?
... are they? I know some people in the Democrat Establishment. Mostly, they follow the law and the rules and try to do what's right. I don't think this is good evidence against election fraud, but it is strong evidence against them being moral mutants who hate truth and all that is good. Are my enemies innately evil?
150 million people could have died and the measures would still be tyranny.
A government's mass seizure of power from the people, for any reason, is evil. Governments can do evil things from necessity, using nuclear weapons against Japan was evil even as it saved millions of lives. The failure in discourse is people who either downplay the tyranny of coronavirus policy or else employ the non sequitur of "It was necessary, so it wasn't tyranny." The relevance here is the usage of terms: they care about tyranny when convenient; they care about the constitution when convenient; they care about the law when convenient.
As for Carlson, this picture does some heavy lifting. What we have came via Dominion who had Carlson fired as part of their settlement, they're untrustworthy. If the full communications are available in raw I'd read them to see what he actually said, and if what Dominion released was fair enough it'd ratchet up "Carlson's a grifter." But first, the Trump circle still looks highly on him so they clearly don't consider the communications meaningful, and second, he's the most effective individual political commentator in the US, if this is his "grift", be afraid of when he plays the game for real.
So do I. I like them and I care about them but I wouldn't call them "good" except in the sense of the greengrocer. They do what is expected of them, they are obedient. They are not specifically righteous or moral as their morals are not meaningfully distinct from or independent to their political alignment. They're good members of the herd, just like pretty much everybody who's ever lived. They aren't deliberately seeking ill ends, but they believe what their superiors want them to believe and so they think they're being moral and philanthropic when they don't truly know what good is or what it means to love their fellow. As to their superiors, the politicians, just about all of them are moral mutants. Bernie Sanders probably not, Thomas Massie probably not. Exceptions otherwise few and prove the rule. The desire to have power over people, from the pettiest internet bureaucrat to highest office, is intrinsically inhuman and necessarily evil. It's pretty ancient wisdom that nobody who wants power should be allowed to have it, and equally how the best leaders never want power and are often only spurred to taking it to fight against the former. Or to directly answer your rhetorical question: bureaucrats and politicians are my enemy, for they are innately evil.
If tyranny is necessary to prevent half of a nation from dying, the tyranny is of course justified? You wouldn't let your wife and children die just because it'd be tyranny to prevent it. You might be claiming tyranny isn't actually useful in those cases, but that isn't the same thing.
(although as I noted the lockdowns weren't particularly useful)
I don't think this makes sense. Carlson didn't deny the texts or provide a meaningful clarification, something he could've easily done. The "trump circle" is a hot mess anyway, and would keep him around because of how popular he is however disloyal he was. Your last sentence is just ... not even denying the claim, I'm not a left-winger and am not afraid of him, I'm not sure what you intended that to mean.
If this is equally true of Rs and Ds, or of all politicians in history, is it really evidence of election fraud or that someone will or won't be convicted? Like there do seem to have been not-particularly-rigged elections in US history and often politicians or people of influence get convicted of crimes and sometime go to jail.
Getting into the weeds of English, "justified" most literally means "to make right." Deontologically, evil deeds cannot ever be right. My usage of "necessary" was deliberate. Murdering a hundred thousand Japanese civilians in two flashes was necessary to prevent a million from dying in a war on Honshu but it wasn't right. Tyranny can be necessary but it is most philanthropic to understand it as always evil lest we put ourselves on the path to endless destruction as we think we can do evil that good may result. The Nazis, Soviets, and Mao China (and still Xi China) were evil for what they did, not who they did it to or why.
The second part of the issue of Carlson was in my original comment. The right would be ecstatic if every grifter had his competence. As for "be afraid", it's me trying to subtly make people recognize calling him a grifter isn't the criticism they think it is. If he can explicitly say "I hate Trump" and then be welcomed in their circle and eyed for VP, his having ulterior motives would mean he's playing a vastly different game than simple profiteering and that would make him the most terrifying political actor in this country.
Finally, I said in my original postulation many months back I'm not certain of what happened, I'm only certain elections would be stolen if possible. Because of that the burden of proof rationally falls on those conducting the elections. As elected officials and public bureaucrats vested with certain powers of the people, they are specifically bereft of the right to claim a presumption of their acting in good faith (this even before but obviously intensified by the rampant corruption and general criminality), they must be able to prove it; so if they can't prove they didn't cheat, the presumption is they did.
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Everyone dies. Protecting people from having their death pulled forward six months is only mildly socially valuable. If the opportunity costs put on the rest of society are even mildly onerous, it’s almost certainly a net loss.
You can look at it in terms of DALYs, or just 'even weighting every life equally, sixty more years is 60x as valuable as one more year'. I prefer to look at it in terms of what one does with that time - productive work done, depth and complexity of experience, et cetera, and young peoples' time is certainly even more valuable by that metric. At the same time, I think lockdowns were more 'dumb and avoidable' rather than 'awful terrible catastrophe'. It was dumb, wasted a bunch of effort, but it was fine, and like 75% of the population thought it was a good idea and actively went along with it at the time. And modern society wastes plenty more effort and time than at the best of times, so whatever. Half of everything is broken and evil, to react with terror and rage to a particular instance while not noticing the rest is simply mistaken, and if you notice it all the "OMG THEY ARE FASCISTS WTF" no longer seems particularly useful. We're all fascists by that standard.
I think it was dreadful. I have small kids. The toll it took on them was immense. We were in the process of moving to Florida when basically the US said “this is BS.”
We are still seeing (and will see) years of damage.
This was true of us as well - having small children, needing to figure out how to work while they were stuck home with basically no support, then watching them flounder in virtual school, and (though better) under masked conditions for a further year was very difficult to watch and live, and the toll it took on their intellectual, social, and emotional development was obvious and extremely painful to watch.
In my case, what made me most angry was that it seemed like nearly a textbook case of a society eating its seed corn. It seemed that there was (in general societal terms and from the ruling political class) a very cavalier attitude of "oh kids are resilient they'll be fine" to save, yes, some number of mostly much-older people, with no acknowledgement that there was even really a trade-off being made. Not that I want (or wanted) anyone to die, but there seemed to be no real discussion of what we were "buying" and what its actual cost was.
It seemed even worse to me. it seemed to pose an inordinate cost on kids (using “their resilient” excuse) to create an at best marginal benefit for the old. It’s like burning your seed corn because it was dark and the flashlight was in an inconvenient location.
One of the interesting things about the Covid responses were how unequally distributed costs and benefits were even within groups of the same rough income and age.
I thought that the lockdowns were wrong, but they mostly benefitted my family, because we got to spend a lot of time with my 9 month old daughter, which was great. (Lower middle class, job that can only be done properly in person, but we made lame attempts to do it remotely that were mostly fake)
Previously, I had to go into work every day, and she was super upset about it, and she screamed about it literally all day. Then, suddenly, I could be kind of a stay at home mom for most of a year, and it was su much better! We walked through the forest, with her in a little pack! We played in streams! We reconnected with old friends with kids of roughly the same age! We tried to go to wildlife refuges, but were turned away because Covid might harm the birds? Anyway... By the time I had to go back in person, she was mature enough (and weaned!) to take it more in stride.
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I think the acceptability of lockdowns entirely depends on where you were in the social ladder. The reason it was initially accepted was the for the PMC and elites, it was basically “work from home in your pajamas, order in, and be told it was all for the greater good.” For them, it was vacation more or less, and they used the time they would have spent commuting baking bread and making terrible videos of themselves dancing. For ordinary people it was absolutely a catastrophe. If your small business wasn’t essential, well, basically you were literally fucked. Sorry about that, but gotta protect people from the Coof. Likewise for people who worked for those businesses, again basically the government forced them out of work, made getting unemployment nearly impossible, and gave them $2000. If they did still have a job because they were fortunate enough to work for a place that the government deemed essential, the rules and regulations made the work more difficult and uncomfortable. Factories and meat processors work at pretty good speed in normal circumstances and you have to move quickly to keep up. Remove a third of the workforce, it’s much harder. Some of those jobs lack climate control, making the required masking miserable.
In part a good point. But I'm friends with plenty of 'ordinary' non-elite people (lol!), and the general vibe I got wasn't catastrophe. I think it was well within the norm of 'bad things that happen sometimes', and as an example I think the great recession was worse.
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Speaking of government policy, I wonder how many lives were lost because we couldn't conduct challenge trials on COVID? It was almost the ideal case - a disease with a rapidly-developed, experimental new vaccine and a large cohort of people (anyone under 40) for which it wasn't threatening. If we were a serious society - genuinely trying to optimize lives saved, rather than performatively closing churches and masking toddlers - I wonder how early we could have rolled out RNA vaccines for the elderly?
Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. We could've also done challenge trials on masks, different types of masks, different ways of instructing people how to use masks, ultraviolet sterilization, etc. And probably at least half of covid deaths could've been prevented with the level competence that's present in the best SV companies.
Rather more than half, given that 1st-world Asian countries did in fact prevent 80-90% of the deaths relative to a US baseline, and "the best SV companies" are presumably claiming to be more competent than Taiwanese bureaucrats (are they? Good question, and I don't know the answer). In terms of the combined cost of COVID mortality and morbidity and of unnecessary and ineffective preventative measures, the US was shockingly bad (and the UK was almost as bad - the only thing we got right was the vaccine rollout).
Preventing 1/2 the US deaths isn't the level of competence of the best SV companies, it's the level of competence of a slightly-above-average first world government bureaucracy.
Fair. Sometimes I make claims much weaker than my actual beliefs if they're enough to prove my point. I'm pretty sure a 'competent country' could have prevented 90%+ of covid deaths with no behavioral changes whatsoever other than minor things like masks, better ventilation, uv sterilization, and vaccines. But those asian countries still had significant behavioral changes that I'm arguing are unnecessary, even if less than here." And the standard for competence is somewhat high
There is a mountain of evidence masks did nothing.
Also Sweden looks great as well.
Maybe the solution to doing well with covid is “don’t have a bunch of fat old people”
Yes, I'm implying the competent country would design masks that worked.
I did a whole thing about this a year or so ago, obesity is much much less of a risk factor than age. Old and thin people still died a lot, 20 year old fat people didn't.
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Whether the policies may or may not have protected any old people has nothing to do with whether they were fascist or not. I could deprive everyone of freedom of movements this holiday season and probably save several thousand people from the flu, but that does not mean it is not fascist.
My reply didn't address whether or not it was fascism, I was replying to him saying covid didn't kill anyone.
I (of course) don't at all agree that covid lockdowns were fascism. And, like, I'm not anywhere near as psychologically opposed to proper Fascism as you'd guess, so I'm not saying that because I like lockdowns, they're just totally different things. But saying lockdowns are fascism is pure 'i don't like it so it's the same as everything else i don't like'. I didn't address it in my OP because, well, it's like arguing with a BLM protestor about how IQ has a strong genetic component that varies by race, it's not going to be a productive conversation unless you put a truly heroic level of effort and persuasion into it.
Lockdowns are fascism because using a trumped-up emergency (whether or not it killed people it was obviously trumped up - particularily the threat to children, young, healthy, and "long COVID") as pretext to confine your population to their homes only to be let out when your approved political causes are up for support is bad, well working with the media and technology companies to censor any opposition to your views is like, basically the dictionary definition. Like what political system would it be if not?
Fascism is when you exalt strength, might, and glory, and Will, when you devote yourself to the State, when greatness takes priority over weakness and the lie of equality is laid bare, when the noble races are given their due, when the parasite of judeo-bolshevism is purged from the blood of the nation.
And so on. Or at least it claims to be that, but if it doesn't sound like that, it's probably not fascism. Moldbug? BAP? Sure, clearly similarities there. Lockdowns may be state overreach, but they aren't fascism.
would you prefer authoritarian?
Forgot about the whole "yeah the 1st amendment doesn't apply anymore, no religious services or protests (except the state-sanctioned ones)"
I still disagree with 'authoritarian', mostly because I think this scale of societal intervention in itself is inevitable, both for good and for ill (consider prohibition, drafts in existentially threatening wars, etc). But it's much closer to what you seem to be arguing than fascist.
Do you think the "state" had a genuine desire to harm religion by closing religious services? That's what this seems to imply. Yet it makes much more sense to me that religious services were shut down along with similar kinds of businesses.
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I'm curious about where you draw the boundaries around "fascist." Are there any circumstances you would consider it acceptable to restrict freedom of movement of individuals or groups?
Would any of the following be acceptable circumstances to restrict freedoms, while qualifying as non-fascist:
Closing down an airport or adding additional security is the same as mandating everyone stay in their homes, actually.
Securing your borders is very different then securing someone's home. This should be obvious.
If there's a black death like plague close your borders and tell your population what is going on - people will be more careful (as indeed they were in early March, even with popular figures telling them to "go hug a Chinese person" and that "they really should be worried about the flu".
EDIT: Also, saying "would these actions be justifiable with a plague that was 50x worse" is again, not really addressing the point at hand. Is fascism justifiable if things are bad enough (Do you support Korematsu v United States) is a separate question from "Was fascism justifiable in this instance" which is clearly false, especially because everyone abandoned their commitment to it as soon as a more politically favorable current thing popped up at the end of May 2020.
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Unfortunately this site also gives him no reason to speak plainly.
Speaking of plainly, do you mean "the site encourages him to be bombastic about covid because it doesn't push back", or something else? Not immediately obvious
I mean that the mods don't care about whether he says that, regardless of the fact that it's literally false and solely exists as rhetoric.
I don't hold voters or commenters on this site to any standard because the whole point of mods is that "the people" lack the coordination to have/enforce healthy norms.
When people say false things, you can just say as much, and provide some evidence?
Sure, then the mods can remove the hot-take rule and be honest about that fact that proactive defense of claims is nice, but that they won’t/can’t enforce it.
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We don't judge truth values. The mods do not want to (and you would not want us to) start modding people according to whether or not we think what they said is "true." Making inflammatory claims without backing them up is against the rules*; saying things that @you-get-an-upvote thinks are false is not.
I'm not interested in another conversation with the mod who thinks all I really want is to silence my outgroup. Happy to talk to literally anyone else, since at least two other mods have shown the ability to be charitable, even if they disagree with me. Also happy to not talk since it's unlikely either party will leave convinced.
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