This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The element of the story you gloss over is the extensive but not-much-talked about cooperation between the Nazis and Zionists, which is a subject which was discussed in Ron Unz's new article on Israel and the Holocaust earlier this month. In addition to the extensive efforts of the Germans to transfer Jews to Palestine, there existed plans for a post-war Jewish state in multiple forms, including the Madagascar Plan (a plan which Joseph Goebbels still mentioned in his diaries when the Holocaust had supposedly already been decided and implemented). After the Madagascar Plan, there were various plans for resettlement in the Pale of Settlement, newly conquered Russian territory, the Lublin district of occupied Poland, etc.
This is why the gas chamber and alleged extermination program are such important claims in the story. Without those elements, this is a story of a country that brutally collapsed right in the middle of a mass resettlement. Like if Israel decided to concentrate and then resettle all Palestinians out of Israel into Egyptian territory, but then Israel was destroyed and conquered by Iran right as that was happening. And then the Iranians made a bunch of ridiculous claims about death factories using absurd methods of mass murder- i.e. the Israelis turned the Palestinians into bars of soap!
So, the Nazi plans all entailed the creation of a Jewish state after expulsion from the European sphere. Historians though claim that (for some reason) this long-standing policy was replaced with an extermination order (they can't say who, when, where or why such a radical change in policy was decided, and such an order has never been found) using primarily homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
If you accept the Revisionist interpretation, that the plan was for resettlement East ahead of the post-war creation of a Jewish state, then these plans by the AfD are absolutely comparable to what the Nazis did. And in particular, if it turns out the Wannsee conference really was all about resettlement as a plain reading of the minutes show, and not codewords for an extermination policy, then the Wannsee Conference is comparable to secret conferences planning for mass resettlement of migrants to their homelands or to a separate colony of some sort.
The gas chamber legend and alleged extermination order are the only things that set them apart, which is why those claims are so important to the broader history.
If someone like 2rafa is making a post that is inviting a discussion of this topic, i.e. trying to make an argument for reasons these situations are not comparable, I'm going to engage in the discussion with my viewpoint. You need to decide if you are going to ban me for doing this or not, I agree it's an annoying situation. It's up to you, I'm not going to avoid engaging in these discussions just because I'm afraid of these kinds of mods interventions. That defeats the point of this community for me...
What I will not do is not spam top-level threads to force topics like this every week, which I've never done. But if someone brings up a topic like this in a relevant CW discussion (especially with 2rafa trying to let Israel off the hook for policies that are indeed very similar to the Nazis), I'm going to participate, and if you're going to ban me for it then the ball's in your court I guess...
You are answering only those parts of @raggedy_anthem's post which you want to address, and ignoring the actual salient points. Which is, ironically, the same thing you do every time someone engages with you on your Holocaust revisionism: answer the points you have ready pat answers for, and ignore the points that you can't actually refute.
You are not being threatened with moderation because this is your pet topic, or because we hate Holocaust deniers, or because we're coopted by Jews, or because you answered someone else who (indirectly) brought it up. That is not the problem, since you have indeed cut back on the manifesto-posting after the last time we told you to give it a rest.
The problem is that, precisely as @raggedy_anthem described, you are not engaging in good faith. What that means is, for example, multiple people have walked through your claims that there is "no written evidence of an intent to exterminate Jews" or "the numbers don't add up," etc. etc. And while I'm sure you will disagree about whether your claims were effectively refuted, you cannot claim that people haven't given you very solid (and cited) responses, which at least deserve to be acknowledged and answered in turn.
Instead, what you do is disappear after someone does this. And then return, a week or two weeks later, making exactly the same claims as if no one ever responded to them before.
Understandably, the last person to go point by point with you probably doesn't feel like doing it again, only to be ghosted and ignored again and then see you weeble-wobble your way back into the same talking points after short-term memory of the discussion has faded. Other people see you do this, and also feel like it's not worth the trouble: you will just stick to your talking points, disappear when effectively challenged, and then come back with the same talking points. Repeating the cycle over and over again until you are effectively in command of the field because only the occasional newcomer encountering you for the first time wants to bother. Occasionally someone will be frustrated at this tactic and call you a liar and then we have to mod them because calling you a liar (even when you are being transparently dishonest) is not allowed.
This is not how debate is supposed to work here. We don't have rules requiring you to keep responding when someone challenges you. You don't have to answer anyone. We don't have rules requiring you to admit when you've been refuted. We don't have rules forbidding you from making the same argument you've made in the past, or requiring you to acknowledge that someone else made a counterargument you never answered. In other words, what you're doing, while obviously a very bad faith debating tactic, is as one mod put it, "finding a bespoke way of arguing like an asshole in a way that's hard to mod without singling him out."
What we would like you to do is actually engage in good faith. I don't think you can or will do that, so that puts us in the position where we can either let you keep exploiting our charity, or decide we've had enough. If your response continues to be "Well, I'm going to post what I post and you can mod me or not," fair enough, so be it.
Why avoid actually quoting the parts of my comments where you think I'm being dishonest?
I said, exactly:
And nobody in the replies has challenged this claim at all or provided an explanation for this: the who, when, where, and why the long-standing policy of resettlement became "extermination." Even Historians don't have a consensus on this point either, and it's dishonest to pretend otherwise.
Can you Amadan please show me where this question has been answered for me, and I haven't responded to those answers, such that I have no right to again make this point where it is relevant?
This is a highly relevant point because if Revisionists are correct, that the Resettlement policy never actually changed to "extermination", and that accusation is a wartime propaganda fiction, then 2rafa's conclusions are wrong.
I promise I will engage in good faith, if you can just give me examples of something I have said here which is dishonest.
On the other hand, I think it's dishonest and bad-faith for Moderators to constantly put on their red hats when I am engaging in discussion. If you are going to accuse me of bad faith, then point to where in this thread specifically you think I'm engaging in bad faith or not responding to people who have replied to me. That would be more helpful than using your moderator status to accuse me of bad faith with vague generalities, and threatening to ban me for engaging in the discussion.
Because I'm not interested in getting into it with you myself. This entire response is you basically demanding that I engage with you on your hobby horse. No.
You can think what you like. We're telling you that we see what you're doing, and no, we aren't going to get into a protracted legalistic debate about what "is" is.
If you accuse me of being bad-faith, and I ask you to point out where exactly in this conversation I have been bad-faith, and you reply like this then I think it's fair for me to complain about this moderator intervention here...
How about you just let this conversation happen without jumping in to accuse me of being bad faith, and then refusing to identify where in this conversation I have done what you are accusing me of?
You can complain. Clearly you are complaining.
If by that you mean "How about you just let me continue to do the same thing," no.
There are two possibilities here:
I personally believe it's 2, but if it's 1, you're just going to have to spend some time figuring out what you're doing wrong, because I am not willing to extend the necessary charity it would require for me to walk you through it (again).
If it's 2, well, short of persuading @ZorbaTHut to overrule us, no, there is no other avenue of appeals.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I never heard of the Madagascar plan before but as an alt history that would be one of the more interesting things if it happened especially for the HBD crowd if 6 million Jews went there.
American Jews accomplished a lot but we never received anywhere close to that and they took over our elite institutions. Ashkenazi Jews were 15/20 of the biggest political donors in 2020 in America. Madagascar could have become one of the most powerful global civs on that timeline.
Best I can tell America received around 2 million Ashkenazi Jews by 1920. So a country counting for some natural population growth double the size of Americas Jewish population. That population has produced 30-40% of Nobels. The scientific output of Madagascar might rival the rest of the world.
There were a few equivalent ones. Northern Australia was also mooted, and I'd love to see a counterfactual in which the Australian Indigenous had to fare with that particular settlement.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is this where you pretend that Eichmann doesn't exist again? This is well trod territory by now. I'm trying to keep my wording compliant in order to avoid a warning by the mods, but your particular fixation wouldn't be so annoying if it were just merely dishonest - it's that you have to constantly bring it up as well.
It is "well-trod territory" because even the mainstream has backed away from the original stature given to the Wannsee Conference as supposedly being the decision point for the extermination policy. It was a 90 minute meeting of mid-level officials. Wannsee was only important because they have literally nothing else to go on, so they have to take a 90 minute meeting about Jewish resettlement and pretend that "resettlement" is a codeword for gas chamber extermination. They also say the Germans specifically wrote the minutes of the meeting to camouflage the actual purpose of the meeting. That's not a misrepresentation, either, that's actually what they claim.
The Revisionist interpretation of Wannsee, i.e. what the minutes of the meeting say it was, is actually comparable to AfD meeting in secret to plan proposals for mass resettlement of migrants. It is not comparable to the Steven Spielberg version of history.
Man, if only they had somehow tracked the guy who wrote those Wannsee minutes down. Maybe interrogated him, or had a big trial or something. What an incredibly insightful process that would have been. Shame it didn't happen.
Your hate is too obvious, it makes the shtick too visible. You need to apply a few more layers of lacquer or something. I don't get the point of it all either, it's too effortful to be merely the product of some kind of stubborn contrarianism. I know you're lying, you know you're lying, you know I know you're lying, what's the point?
An interrogation in a show trial from a rogue state that violated international law by kidnapping someone is not a good way to establish the use of code-words in the minutes to a meeting. Decades before the Eichmann circus, Josef Bühler, the deputy governor of the General Government and attendee of the Wannsee Conference testified at the IMT as a defense witness for Hans Frank in 1946, and claimed that the purpose of Wannsee was to discuss the forced resettlement of Jews in the northeast of Europe:
You must admit though, that it's likely he understands that if he does say, yeah we did decide to exterminate the Jews and I was in on it, is unlikely to go well for him after the war. So why do you think you can trust what he says? He has a huge incentive to say, oh no, from my understanding we were just going to move them.
If I were a Nazi, that is exactly what I would say once we lost!
Yes, if you assume the conclusion, you can explain behavior in that light.
It's not assuming the conclusion. It's pointing out IF the conclusion is right then his words cannot be trusted. You can't then rely on his words to disprove the conclusion. Because he would say the same thing either way.
An accused murderer who is guilty is highly likely to lie. Which is why we generally do not accept "I didn't do it" on its own to exonerate them and let them go with an apology as part of an investigation. We check their alibis against other people, were they at the bar they claimed to be at? Did anyone see them?
But pointing out that someone accused of X is not often a credible witness in their own defense is not particularly radical. It can't be used as evidence they did do X, because of course an innocent person will also claim (honestly!) they didn't do it, but it doesn't on its own tell you they are innocent either. because there is a significant incentive to lie to protect themselves.
OJ says he was innocent, should he be believed?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Whatever the actual numbers the nazis conduct against various ethnic groups during the war was murderous. They also enslaved for labor plenty of Europeans and Jews too. It isn't accurate that AFDs plans are equivalent with the nazis agenda even under the framework of many revisionists. Whether towards the Jews specifically, or other populations. It is fair to say the nazis commited genocides against multiple ethnic groups.
Actually the use of nazism as a propaganda towards Europeans is unethical also because the Nazis mistreated the people of plenty of European countries. But of course before the nazis and during and after them, other evil factions existed with a negative agenda against Europeans who even milked antinazism to justify themselves and demonize Europeans. Including those who suffered under the Nazis.
One could well argue that the antifa type of faction, which in fact shares some of the worst pathologies that nazism had, has in fact an agenda quite more destructive than even the nazis. And this applies especially when it comes to Europe. So I would say that if you are more hostile to Europeans than even the nazis, then you should not be allowed to have any influence and say about Europe.
In regards to AFD, some level of repatriations is a moderate response for their own survival that has been forced upon European nations by the extreme "destroy Europeans" faction which tries to promote as fait accompli the extinction of European ethnic groups. And of course there is the issue of those who migrated, illegally but "legalized" or legally, and got a paper saying they belong in said nation while are contemptuous of the native people and see the process as a conquest and are happy for it, and support discriminating against the natives, denying them their nationhood, and bringing more foreign settlers. Fundamentally, homeland's should be made mainly by their own people and minorities that respect the native majority and are tolerated in turn and through small numbers and intermarriage there might be some assimilation.
Too large numbers and too much hostility and the assimiliation goes to the other way towards the postnational state for the natives to be oppressed and destroyed and as a homeland for the conquerors. There are always trade offs when it comes to human rights and different nations, and this is the way that results in the least trouble and mutual respect of the rights of different nations to existence. And preserves world diversity of different nations, over say the world being dominated by the more fertile blacks, or a coalition of foreign groups who subsequently transform the west more in line to south africa. https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/diversity-is-good-actually
The Nazis conduct was of a more imperialist, genocidal nature in general at expense of non German populations under their control, so it isn't productive to compare AFD suggestion to that. In fact it can aid the conduct of anti-Europeans and help create a narrative that reverses the victim with victimizer. Which in this case the victimizers are those trying to destroy European nations.
The concentration camps and labor camps were part of the war effort, for sure. But the "Final Solution" as such was the resettlement of the Jews out of the European sphere into what would have become a Jewish territory partly occupied/administered by Germany, at least in the short term. That is comparable to Israeli ambitions to expel the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, including proposals to resettle them into a territory on the Sinai peninsula. 2rafa is trying to say these things are not comparable, but that's only the case if you accept certain premises such as mass gas chamber extermination inside shower rooms. If you take the documents at face value, they are comparable policies.
The use of "slavery" to describe wartime conscription is a bit dubious, but I don't feel like splitting hairs. If you give someone a rifle, force them to the front, and shoot them if they try to desert, I don't think you would call that enslavement (or maybe you would!).
The Nazis conducted slave raids across Europe, ultimately kidnapping millions for forced labor. Himmler being characteristically blunt:
The Nazis conducted slave raids across Europe insofar as the Soviets conducted slave raids across Europe, but nobody says the latter because the only real purpose of the former is to draw distinctions that don't actually exist. It's pretty typical of the mainstream historical method, too: ignore the thousands of WVHA documents dealing with the administration of the prisoner labor force, which did not regard them as slaves (and they were paid for their labor), but pick out a sentence from a (poorly sourced? can't tell) "secret speech" by Himmler.
If you want to call the forced labor during the war slavery that's your prerogative. I think it would be dishonest to call wartime forced labor as salvery but not conscription for front-line combat. But it's just splitting hairs. My point was that just because the Israelis have no plans to use Palestinians for forced labor does not mean their proposals to expel the Palestinians to the Sinai peninsula cannot be compared to German plans for the resettlement of Jews.
Nazis burned down Polish/Ukrainian villages and marched people onto trains at gunpoint to be sent to the Reich to work but at least they got paid in worthless money.
Yes the Soviets also made extensive use of slave labor and Stalin was also a bad guy.
Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is quite horrible and still isn’t half as horrible Nazi treatment of the European Jews.
It's not as much a question of "horribleness."
For our entire lifetimes, the idea of anybody supporting a mass expulsion/deportation/resettlement, whatever you want to call it, so close to home has not even entered into anybody's minds. It is significant that now we are faced with two plausible programs of mass resettlement within the "Western" sphere of influence: the resettlement of Palestinians out of Palestine, i.e. to the Sinai desert, and the mass deportation of non-European migrants.
Of course people like 2rafa who support these initiatives are going to try to explain why these programs cannot be compared to the Nazi policies regarding the Jews. But the uncomfortable reality is that they are definitely comparable. It's a grave situation, it's going to be violent if these policies are carried out. The gas chamber legend elevates the Nazi policies to another plane of existence, and allows people like 2rafa to not confront the similarities which are definitely there.
Look, I am willing to believe- I don’t believe it, I think the evidence is stacked against it, but I’m willing to believe it in the existence of a good argument- that Hitler did not intend to exterminate the Jews and German gas chambers were not tools of mass murder. I’m willing to believe the death total from the Holocaust was dramatically lower than generally believed. And I’ll even concede that Nazi Germany had the moral high ground on the eastern front compared to the USSR(but still in the sense of, like, the edge of the Mariana Trench instead of the bottom).
But it seems suspicious that of people making this argument- and I say this to Holocaust deniers in my ingroup- the argument makers(as opposed to fellow travelers and argument repeaters) can’t tell you if 200k-300k Jews dying from a combination of localized massacres and poor conditions in the camps is a tragedy that reflects a black mark on Hitler’s regime. Because Germany was quite clearly capable of running large scale prison camps with a normal-at-the-time death rate in conditions of wartime. They did it in WWI, after all. But even if the Jews in the concentration camps all died of typhus or famine or whatever(and I will concede that plenty of them did in fact die from this), that represents at least a lot of neglect from the German government and Nazi party for which they are morally culpable. Not to mention the massacres ‘in the field’ by einsatzgruppen. I’ve never seen a Holocaust denier even attempt to address the einsatzgruppen by the way; if it was all localized massacres that also seems like something Nazi germany is morally culpable for because they 1) had a policy to concentrate these people 2) per official state ideology considered them racial undesirables and 3) per official state ideology considered murder an acceptable way to deal with other undesirables, such as the disabled, and overzealous SS or Wehrmacht captains ordering massacres is what happens when that combination comes about.
Look, the eastern front was evil vs evil in a way that breaks most peoples’ brains. I don’t blame you for trying to resolve that ambiguity in your head by absolving the Nazis of guilt. And I especially don’t blame you for it when whites are under attack and anyone who defends them gets called a Nazi. But acknowledge what actually happened here especially when polite, intelligent people refute your arguments and provide high-quality, detailed, evidence-filled explanations of Nazi Germany being more evil to Jews than Israel is towards Palestinians a couple of times a month.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Again, we have the extermination program in writing. You seem to have conveniently forgotten this, again, since our last 40-comments back-and-forth in which you tried to dodge the issue.
Of course they can. You know this, because we discussed this ad nauseam.
It won't
It wasn't
It clearly doesn't. The opposite is true. We've been over this. Stop lying.
More options
Context Copy link
If Israel was in the process of resettling all 5.4m Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and was then invaded by Iran, and when the dust settled it turned out that perhaps 500,000 of those Palestinians survived and were discovered by the Iranian occupiers, the rest having vanished from history never to contact their countless surviving relatives overseas ever again, I think it would be fair to suggest they had died in the war. If it turned out that the Israeli civilian casualty rate was such that only 500,000 out of 9.5m Israelis were killed, it would be reasonable to ask what the Israelis had done to ensure a civilian casualty rate that was 90% for Palestinians but just 5% for Israelis.
Beyond the usual discussions, though, I think there are a few questions you gloss over.
Firstly, most mainstream Holocaust historians accept that Hitler’s initial plan was not to murder all Jews if he could persuade them to leave by other means. They acknowledge Hitler’s deep enmity toward Jews, but they also acknowledge that emigration was obviously the first preference of the Third Reich.
Secondly, you seem to imply that a Jewish Madagascar under Nazi authority would have been (a) capable of hosting the exiled population and (b) something analogous to a Jewish state like Israel. I don’t think either of those are likely. If anything, a Jewish Madagascar would have been - at best - like an occupied West Bank, which you have previously railed against as highly unethical. In reality, given the extremely generous NGO support for the Palestinians, life on Nazi Madagascar would have been much worse.
Thirdly, Hitler wasn’t only concerned by Jews on his territory. Hitler was of the profound belief that all Jews, everywhere, were a threat to his project and to Aryan civilization. Hitler railed against Soviet, American and British Jews long before he was at war with them and indeed long before he was even in power. The argument that ‘it just doesn’t make sense for him to kill them, even if he was hostile to them’ often ignores this fact.
Hitler believed Jews were a great threat to his civilization whether they were within or beyond Germanic lands, and in this context the Holocaust makes more sense for Nazi leadership, since the mere exile of Jewry would not ‘solve’ their Jewish Problem under these circumstances, particularly if those exiled Jews bore a (reasonable, we might say) grudge about all their expropriated land and property and general ill treatment.
And this is the crux of the whole question. If Hitler doesn’t merely hate Jews but considers them eternal enemies of his civilization, then leaving them alive in their own state in Madagascar or in Palestine or elsewhere just doesn’t make sense amid the heightened tension of wartime, unless you think he was such a great guy that he just considered it morally wrong to kill them (but not to do any of the other stuff he unambiguously intended, like ethnically cleansing West Slavs to make way for German settlers and so on).
The revisionist interpretation requires that Hitler - who had no issue killing his political enemies, or indeed even friends, often on spurious or fully false flag charges - chose not to kill the Jews under his total control, despite extreme public hostility toward them for 20+ years, blaming them for almost everything that went wrong in Germany, and considering even their existence in foreign lands a great threat to Aryan civilization, because…he was a nice guy? Because that was a step too far?
The Holocaust would appear to be more congruent with Hitler’s writing, ideology and deeply-held worldview than the absence of the Holocaust. Nowhere does Hitler express any empathy or compassion for the majority of the Jewish population that would suggest he was not content for them to die.
Dunno, Ashkenazi Jews are much better at running a society than Palestinians.
Without extensive imports (which Germany was already short of) of food and fuel the great majority of the settlers wouldn’t have survived the first 24 months, it would have been like Darien or one of the other failed European settlements of Central America. Beyond that time the survivors may have been OK, depending on the level of German meddling.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If Iran had the grip on the region that Stalin had behind the Iron Curtain, you would not trust any reports coming out of Iran about the state of Palestinian survivors and how many of them were killed by Israel, and how. If Iran refused any international observers or investigators and deployed their own kangaroo courts to place the blame for every single Palestinian death during their brutal conquest of Israel onto Israel, you would not accept that either.
Yes, the Madagascar plan is comparable to the Israeli expulsion of the Palestinians to the occupied West Bank, that's my point (with the major exception that Palestinians were indigenous to Palestine and Jews were not indigenous to Europe). So were the plans to concentrate the Jews in the East in the Pale of Settlement/Lublin/Russia which never came to fruition because the Eastern Front and then entire regime collapsed. Those plans are in fact comparable to plans you support for dealing with Palestinians, and to a lesser extent non-European migrants.
It's interesting you call adversarial rhetoric from leaders the "crux of the whole question" rather than the mountain of documents that quite clearly lay out the policy objectives as described by Revisionists... South Africa's submission to the ICC accusing Israel of genocide follows a similar line of argument, under the heading Expressions of Genocidal Intent against the Palestinian People by Israeli State Officials and Others (pp. 59 - 67), i.e. here's a brief sample from those pages:
This is especially interesting because, since no written orders for extermination or mass gas chamber executions have ever been found, the mainstream historical position has heavily relied on vague rhetoric from German leaders and cherry-picking diary vague diary entries to allege a genocidal policy intent in lieu of any orders actually establishing it, like you are doing in your post here. But now that it's Israeli leaders giving the same sort of rhetoric you would hear from Goebbels or Hitler (in many cases worse), I assume you don't think this is evidence of a genocidal intent. But don't tell me these things are not comparable, they absolutely are comparable.
“Genocidal intent” is a largely bullshit term (even if it’s sometimes necessary) outside of the most banal “I will commit genocide” declaration (and even then), just look at how many thing politicians say they’ll do and then don’t.
That said I think, exactly like some of the speeches and diary entries you mention, that some on the extreme right fringe of Israeli politics (not Bibi) have expressed what could become an openness to genocide. And I certainly think there are a substantial number of religious Zionists who don’t particularly care what happens to the Palestinians, or whether they live or died.
But litigating genocidal intent is different than litigating genocide. And yes, I absolutely think that if there’s some geopolitical chaos and 90% of Palestinians on territory controlled by Israel vanish in 4 years Israel should be the prime and obvious suspect in their disappearance. So I’m not, in that sense, disagreeing with you at all.
Edit: And regarding your first point re. the Iranian control example, I agree and am glad you acknowledge that the central question about the whole revisionism debate does revolve around estimates of the prewar and postwar Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe, as I have long argued here.
I don't think it's a bullshit term given that you appealed to it without calling it that in your previous post. Revisionists point to all the documentary evidence that the plan was resettlement and concentration. You point to Hitler's speeches portraying Jews as an enemy to infer a genocidal intent even if you don't call it that. In any case, you are trying to draw a difference between these two cases where we only find more similarities...
Bibi has invoked Biblical prophecy and associated the Palestinians with Amalek:
The revisionism debate does not revolve around population estimates, because that data is fundamentally incomplete and unreliable. The Revisionist case weighs most heavily on the documentary and physical evidence, with population census data being too inconclusive for the question at hand. For what it's worth, the mainstream position does not revolve around estimates of prewar and postwar population estimates either, by far the most important body of evidence is testimony from witnesses which has been picked apart by Revisionists for decades.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Broadly on your side in this sub-exchange, but puzzled how ‘thirdly’ fits with the claim that a Jewish state would have prevented the Holocaust. Palestine was not only well within Germany’s reach, but it was right next to their primary goal in North Africa. If the Germans had taken Egypt and the British had withdrawn to Iraq, it seems like the Palestinian Jews would have been screwed regardless of their relative population share - if Anita Shapira is to be believed, the Yishuv’s plan (such as it was) was to cooperate so as not to give a pretext for reprisals.
More options
Context Copy link
The same could be said for the rhetoric of various Israeli politicians towards the Palestinians.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It is unreasonable to compare any repatriation of migrants in European countries to their homeland to what is happening to the Palestinians. The mass murderous ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their own homeland is analogous to similar historical behaviors of genocidal ethnic cleansing done by many regimes including the Soviet one.
Also, it is immoral for you to keep bringing up Jewish suffering when you promote the take how white Christian communities of Trump supporters deserve to die and support attrocities against Palestinians.
Fundamentally dead Jews from 80 years ago matter less than currently dying Palestinians, because we should care about current events and the past has passed.
Another thing to consider is that Jews in modernity not only suffered but also participated in causing suffering to others. Both as part of the communist movement but also as part of race marxist movements that supports the destruction of western civilization and its people, vilifies them and promotes one sided extreme propagandistic grievance that falsifies history.
The attempt by Jews to impose a Jewish supremacist ideology, makes some of the whining about insetivity to be particularly disingenuous. And this is why this taboo you are trying to take advantage is completly in bad faith and we need the opposite taboo against those trying to manipulate history in this manner.
Empathy towards the Jews is manipulated for purposes of elevating Jewish lives above non Jewish lives and to support screwing non Jews.
This milking of history by people who want to manipulate others to empathize with them while they are racist supremacists themselves ought to stop. So we actually ought to be punishing propagandists using Jewish suffering in such a manner to justify stripping groups from their rights. Or to promote a general dishonest narrative of one sided historical victimhood that justifies Jacob ruling over Esau.
Also important to decriminalize discussion of historical facts even if we ought to make it as taboo as possible if not criminalize using Jewish suffering or slavery to demonize Europeans in general and strip them of their rights. This is to say discussions about facts should be free, but overly milking such events should not be a free action.
Even excessive amount of holocaust, slavery films is suspect, but how things are framed and what narrative they promote is also important. The narrative of Jews as oppressed group that are chosen by God and God's will it to destroy other nations is one narrative that must be condemned and not promoted.
Rather than stopping machiavelian grievance merchants who promoted such narratives for destructive purposes, we had people siding with their crocodile tears about how they are victimized by racists.
Anyway, a moral goal is to stop the grievance merchants and to put different nation states on an equal playing field in regards to certain rights. Including the Jews. Rather than using say their history with communism, or the oppression of Israel towards Palestinians to claim that Jews should have no homeland neither.
So my favorite end result is fairer towards the Jews than your end result towards your various outgroups. So there is an inconsistency here.
Jewish supremacists who want it all at the expense of other ethnic groups such as the Likud faction are kind of paid by the same currency if they are responded to by people who want from the river to the sea a state only for Palestinians. Just like Netanyahou wants from the river to the sea only Israel.
So compromise is a good idea but it can't be a one way street by people who want to promote maximum sympathy for themselves while not respecting at all the rights of others.
Nevertheless for us who want good and moral outcomes, we should pressure the worst behaving faction with power who are destroying their opposite ethnic group on the ground. And we ought to not respect whatsoever such manipulations.
There is a reason why so many countries worldwide including countries that have nothing to do with the middle east like Japan have such a negative view of Israel. It's because the lie that people react negatively to bad Jewish behavior due to them being racist is wrong, and Israel is abusing human rights of Palestinians in a despicable manner that deserves condemnation.
Of course not. The key part of whether mass expulsion is genocidal is if it is done through mass murder. And indeed mass murder, the goal to induce starvation and horrible circumstances to Palestinians, as well as destroying their homes is part of this violent ethnic cleansing.
It is definetly a warcrime that those who support paint themselves in some of the most negative colors.
Also, it is especially immoral to expel people from their homeland and Palestinians homeland is Palestine.
This is about racist supremacist Jews wanting greater Israel. What would be more in line with justice would had been for them to try to agree with a compromise with the Arab world and Palestinians that took seriously both Israeli security and Palestinian statehood that respects Palestinian human rights. This compromise would have come after past mass murderous ethnic cleansing and occupation. So even that would be a big compromise for the Palestinians.
There is a fundamental difference from resisting colonization in your own land by foreigners that leads to your entire destruction as a people (which is unsuprisingly supported by a movement that demonizes your history and people and discriminate against it and that is an important reason why they favor your destruction), to expelling people from their own country to take it for yours. Also, the movement against Europeans milks and utilizes past Jewish suffering against Europeans. And even promotes propagandistic narrative of Jews as historically the inoccent victims who never didn't do nothing, all antisemitic slander and Europeans as the permanent evil oppressors.
The behavior of both Jewish migrants in Israel and of Palestinians in how they are polled and even how they behaved in places like Lebanon is actually indicative of the problems of foreign colonizations.
The one thing both groups have in common is they should not be trusted to rule over others fairly, and shouldn't be destroyed neither.
The world does have an interest in suppressing the more sociopathic elements from being leading those communities. More so for the Jews due to being more influential worldwide. Especially outside their country. Such as suppressing those more narcissistic, sociopathic factions and individuals from destroying and mistreating foreign ethnic groups and having power over them. Also there are non Jews who have been influenced into being Jewish supremacists who favor the destruction and oppression of non Jewish ethnic groups and share the same pathological extremism, including the hypocricy of pretending that they are against "racists", when they are the worst ones and people are correct to oppose them.
So there is an interest in changing the prevailing ideology among Jews and having them be less self serving. But really, what can observe when looking at the history of Israel, Jewish mega ngos and groups of billionairs connected with people like Epstein and Mossad like MEGA, polls and behavior is that there has been a continuous core element of Jewish establishment which has been Jewish supremacist against other ethnic groups and organized to use their power against them. And the Jewish community has had some sympathy for that. But there has been also some divergence which was reduced as that establishment got them in line. Crisis is used to get Jews in line, since they have absorbed a mentality of the inoccent martyr.
If that establishment is broken and Jewish elites are both moderate at Israel and in diaspora, less influential abroad and also the dominant non Jewish elites who would be influential worldwide are moderates, and I consider you the opposite of that then a greater bulk of the Jews would behave morally, as they are subject to moderate memes that promote the idea that the rights of Jews/non Jews end where each others begin.
That we even allow Jewish supremacists to promote their propaganda and to be a faction acting freely is a mistake. We well know by now that it is a faction that is fanatically spiteful, totalitarian, greedy, cruel, dishonest and ruthlessly destructive. It should be a faction that is suppressed and condemned.
Do you think the descendants of European settlers have a right to remain a majority in America and Canada?
Yes.
More options
Context Copy link
I know this isn't addressed to me, but the thing is European settlers won in America, Canada, Australia. Indians/Aborigines are not going to become a majority in any of those countries anytime soon, no matter what the fertility rates look like, nor is there anywhere to import those people from(sure, you can probably find a Navajo living in France or something, but probably north of 90% live in the USA). The alternative in these countries to a White European descended majority is a majority of Chinamen or Mexicans or the other kind of Indians or something.
That is a meaningful difference between Israel and the USA; if all white people left the US it would be either a black country or a hispanic country(depending on how you count) with only local majorities of Native Americans. If all Jews left Israel, there would be a solid majority of Palestinian Arabs.
More options
Context Copy link
(Don’t endorse much of what Belisarius said, or only much weaker versions of some of it).
I don’t think we’d have a right to complain if North American Indians pulled an Amish/Hasidim and outbred us. I also don’t think it’s reasonable to begrudge them having resisted our expansion with violence, though without endorsing every single thing they did. (The Palestinian Arabs do have a very bad habit engaging in violence that’s both needlessly indiscriminate and ineffectual - the Cherokee didn’t really have the option of nonviolent resistance, whereas the Palestinians would probably have done much better for themselves with that approach than they did in reality).
One relevant difference between our northern Amerindians and the Palestinians is that the whole Zionist process was needless - some European country was going to roll over the North American tribal societies regardless of what Britain did. But Zionism-in-Palestine was a very complicated and very involved way to not achieve security, normalcy, or
the new Soviet Jewrenewal.More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Does she actually do this? I do not think this true.
This whole thread gives her an opportunity to discuss Jewish suffering and compare it to Palestinian. She indeed directly downplays the violent murderous ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by comparing it to deportation of migrants.
Further bellow she is debating the holocaust as she knew SecureSignals would bite the bait. And most importantly others would jump in the opportunity to show how serious they take this issue.
She recently argued that Williamson was right that white working class communities of the type that voted for Trump deserve to die. And she definitely supports atrocities against Palestinians and their ethnic cleansing.
Cimarafa is definitely a spiteful individual that wants to dish it out and while she promotes destruction and condemnation for other groups promotes sympathy for Jews, accuses others of antisemitism and so on.
Williamson’s point was that it wasn’t wrong to say that those people can move to where the jobs are, not that the people literally deserve to die.
More options
Context Copy link
You are allowed to disagree with someone, and you are allowed to dislike their viewpoint (and even dislike them personally), but these last two posts are full of personal antagonism, which is not allowed. @2rafa is allowed to bring up Jewish suffering and say it's the most horrible thing ever and not comparable to anything else. She's also allowed to "downplay the violent murderous ethnic cleansing of Palestinians." I am not necessarily agreeing with you that she's actually doing that, but she is in fact allowed to. You are allowed to take offense at someone's arguments, and you are allowed to make counterarguments. You are not allowed to namecall or engage in literal ad hominem arguments.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The analogy doesn't fit the premise, so the conclusion is... not even wrong??
Germany is a board of landlords who - rightly or wrongly - signed various contracts (citizenship, residency, asylum). So tough titties to them. They have to live up to the responsibilities they signed up for. If someone can convince the majority of the board to void certain contracts and "evict" people, then they'd run afoul of their responsibilities to various human rights charters aimed at preventing exactly this kind of "eviction". They're free to do that too, as far as I'm concerned, but "landlords remorse" doesn't make comparisons to other dubious evictions unreasonable.
More options
Context Copy link
I agree with your reasoning.
The whole affair is just very slightly unusual in how hitherto-respectable politicians and functionaries ended up going to an event with Sellner. Did they not know in advance that the Identitarians would be there? Did they expect perfect secrecy to hold up? How the media would spin it seems obvious, and I don't mean in retrospect.
I wanted to type out my opinion of the whole thing just to add a German sorta-nativist perspective and some details regarding the media coverage and "public" reaction to the affair, but as I set to it it turns out to be too tiresome. The goodthinking people of Germany have promptly held several rallies to denounce the participants and their ways of thinking, but no more than that because what more can they do that they haven't already, the initiatives to ban the AfD have been underway long before this event and there's just not much more that anyone can do in that direction. The overblown reactions I'd say are part AfD Derangement Syndrome and part a performance of the rites of the German Civil Religion.
Ah, I think I don't really have anything to say. It's all very tiresome and mostly just more of the usual.
The interesting thing to me is that this has created the fuss it has, when the AfD itself contains people who are arguably more radical on these issues (particularly Höcke and his wing) than Sellner is.
Is that an attempt to signify ö, or a deliberate anti-search-engine variation?
It’s poor eyesight while holding down the ‘o’ key on iPhone, unfortunately…
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You're right, but frankly, it doesn't matter. The German anti-right is on a hair trigger because of the AfD's recent growth to the point where, if their polling numbers hold up in the upcoming state elections, it will no longer be possible to exclude them from all high offices as before. Since the political methods of keeping the AfD from regional power are about to fail, there are instead redoubled efforts on other levels - in the media, via legal measures, and through public rallies. Many people who genuinely believe that the AfD is a blight on the country are very on edge at present, and will react more strongly than before to anything related to the matter.
Wait, I don't understand. The AfD's polling #1 in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg, but it's not polling more than Die Linke + SPD + CDU, and they already did a "Die Linke and CDU work out a confidence agreement" thing to keep the AfD out the last time Thuringia had an election. Are they fearing AfD will continue to gain to the point where it has an outright majority? Is someone threatening to break the cordon?
Wagenknecht is probably enough of a wildcard to throw it out of whack.
Eh, not necessarily. I mean, I'm no lawyer or political expert - I don't actually know how it works in the nitty-gritty. What I look at is just how media and people around me act. And Wagenknecht doesn't really play any noticeable role in their fear of the AfD. But sure, when it actually comes to elections, she may have an effect.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Presumably CDU wouldn't want to work with Linke any more than it absolutely is forced to, and the rise of Sahra Wagenknecht's party throws another spanner in the works?
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not 100% sure why, to be honest. Media and politics are panicking and sure enough, it might just be some drama put on to increase voter turnout or just to attract attention. Maybe it's even merely a performance intended to galvanize one's existing supporter base. Maybe it's just a hysterical feedback loop.
Under the assumption that the risk of the AfD winning a state election is real, I'd guess the following:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is Copenhagen ethics. Assuming you're not a weird EA utilitarian, you don't have any obligations to someone who's already starving in the streets. So if you take someone in, you can't have any obligation to not throw them back out in the streets again.
I think being a 'weird EA utilitarian' is to a significant extent implied by the morality that most people hold, but it's just to difficult to actually follow so people rationalize it. Even if you aren't an EA though, I think 'you can ethically kick someone out of your house even if it will lead to them instantly dying' is something that very few people would agree with. I think the vast majority would agree you can ethically kick someone out even if it makes them homeless, but not homeless to the point where it's >50% likely they will die in the next month. (Note, though, that this is true because we have material abundance, a welfare state, etc - if tradeoffs between 'your family starving' and 'kicking out your guest and them dying' were common, the popular stance would be (and was) different, B is unconscionable precisely because there's a better option. But it's reasonable for 'which action is moral' to depend on 'which action is available')
But I think you're assuming a contradiction and using it to prove something false.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is...intensely silly. You assume, without justifying the assumption in any way, that one can accurately describe citizens and residents of a different ethnicity/religion as "house guests" of a polity. I reject your ethnonationalist distinction. I'm amazed to see the Zionist-Nazi collaboration revived, we've closed the loop here.
Neither German Citizens who some bureaucrat judges as "unassimilated" nor German Jews circa 1940 were "house guests." If the nation is a family, these are their brothers. They live there. This is, at best, three brothers voting to throw out the fourth brother onto the street.
Palestinian families have been in Israel, their genetic roots go deeper, than the Israelis who are "throwing them out of the house." Ditto, you know, most of the fucking Jews you so blithely label houseguests in the 1940s, they lived in countries Hitler conquered.
Both the Israelis and the Nazis didn't throw houseguests out of their homes, they broke into another home, and murdered part of the family.
In what sense is the nation a family? Particularly given that we're letting people swap citizenship on a whim.
It's her pathos based metaphor not mine.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think you've left out houseguest C; houseguest C is unwelcome due to his many poor habits- let's say he's a substance abuser, occasional thief, and also just loud and messy. Houseguest C's parents live down the road, and fed up with his antics, they kicked him out with a restraining order. Absent your shelter, he will be homeless in a rough neighborhood and all of the neighbors are turned against him.
This seems to be the more comparable situation for the mass deportations under discussion- or at least some portion thereof. Egypt doesn't want palestinians and won't take them. And "unassimilated citizens" in Germany have quite literally nowhere to go; most of them are not Turkish citizens and Turkey doesn't want them.
I would say that in Israel’s case it is reasonable to attempt to broker a deal whereby Palestinians are resettled in nearby Arab lands. If all refuse (as they have in recent decades) then the Israelis will have to accept responsibility for them and are morally obliged not to deliberately hurt those who are peaceable. However, it is also within their rights to do what is necessary to limit terror attacks and political violence against them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Israel boasts of genocidal intent. Everyone from former policymakers to children singing war propaganda songs talks about how the Israelis are going to stamp out the Palestinians, annihilate them.
There's been a lot of discussion about how the slogan 'from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free' is a genocidal mantra. If so, then there can be no doubt that 'within a year we will annihilate everyone and then return to our fields' is a genocidal slogan. Moving on from rhetoric, Israel is genocidal in action, blowing up an enormous amount of Gaza without regard for civilian casualties.
Well, that's how borders are formed, that's how nations move or get moved around. Survival of the fittest. History is written in blood.
What I object to is how Israeli expansion is somehow turned into this normative, moralistic end as opposed to the cold functioning of nature, tooth and claw. They can't reasonably cry 'help us we're being attacked by genocidal inhuman monsters' as they kill 20x more than they've lost. If Hamas and the Palestinians generally are genocidal, it follows that Israel and Israelis generally are also genocidal. And they clearly need no help in defending themselves.
Israel is using US-supplied weapons, US-supplied diplomatic and military coverage to wage this war. It's geopolitical cuckoldry to subsidize the imperial operations of other powers, assist Israel de facto with its settlement-building and colonization of Palestine (since that's what US aid unarguably does, by strengthening Israel's position). I live in a colonized country, the essence of civilization is conquest. But the big idea is that if you do the conquering, you enjoy the spoils. You don't do the conquering for other peoples. We are literally paying so the Israelis don't have to come to any reasonable accord with the Palestinians or other Arabs, so they can take more land, annex it, ignore the NPT and attack their neighbours with impunity. They know that they won't have to pay the price of their actions in Arab hostility, that we'll shield them militarily like we are now.
The US and the West more broadly doesn't need Israel, Israel has never joined the US in any war. They've made a lot of enemies for us, they provided phoney intelligence to encourage the Iraq War, they sold US tech to China, they brought down the Arab Oil Embargo on us. Israel clearly doesn't consider itself part of the Western bloc, they've never contributed anything. They only cause us problems, lap up aid and beg for more assistance like the aforementioned cuckoo bird. Now they've gotten us into another conflict in the Red Sea with their zeal for bombing. So be it if they want to kill lots of Palestinians - why is that our problem? Why do we have to guard their container ships from the Houthis and get ourselves targeted, start yet another expensive war? Why do we have to provide them munitions (out of already depleted stocks) and make Arabs angry with us? Strength is needed elsewhere, we've expended about 4 years worth of Tomahawk production (yes, that amounts to 80 missiles) on this campaign, which hasn't yet yielded any results.
Even this proposed moral trade 'if we get to expel our troublesome Palestinians from their own land as we annex it, that means you get to expel your troublesome migrants from your land' is unnecessary. I have no doubt that the plethora of Jewish refugee/migration NGOs would reject it, many are consistent in their contempt for both Israeli and Western national homogeneity: Soros and Ignatiev for example. The fact is that the Western world can do a great deal because there are hundreds of millions of us and we wield vast resources. Israel is a small country that acts as though it's a great power, having us shoulder the cost of its supersized ambitions.
Civilian casualty figures for the invasion of Gaza are on par with other urban assaults by western militaries. You can contrast this with the battles in the Ukraine war, which are a lot a lot worse, and Assad’s reconquests of major Syrian cities, which are also way way worse.
So, a question I keep asking when people make this claim, and which no one has answered thus far(or even engaged with)- why is Israel’s genocide killing fewer civilians than Russia and Syria are doing on accident in campaigns with the goal of controlling the civilian population to subjugate as normal citizens of their respective regimes? While the IDF is probably more competent than the Russian army and definitely dramatically more competent than either the SAA or NDF, this shouldn’t matter that much if it’s an attempt at genocide-by-collateral damage, because after all Israel could easily get away with making Gaza look like Mariupol and then say sorry, we definitely not really regret the collateral damage, can’t make a shakshuka without breaking some eggs.
Can you?
Russian actions and intentions are considered genocidal.
How many civilians dead in Gaza (and West Bank, and Syria, and…)? 10k, 20k? I don't want to cite Hamas-affiliated sources. But no, it doesn't sound a lot a lot worse.
Russians are currently in mourning about the (admittedly cute) cat Twix who got tossed out of the train near Kirov (really tragic), they don't give much of a fuck about hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians killed by the Russian army. Had we higher verbal IQ, everyone else would also have cared more about Twix. Jews care about Jews, and they're smarter and more influential than we are, though not remotely as smart as they seem to imagine.
It is what it is.
By Ukrainians and in a very limited sense by some observers around stuff like the Ukrainian kids taken to Russian orphanages or adopted or whatever (I don’t know whether that’s actually true). Russian actions are only genocidal around the expanded late-20th century definition of genocide that includes the Uyghurs and other cultural reeducation efforts (or ambitions toward such efforts). By this logic of course Napoleon repeatedly genocided his own people to make France and so on. Public schooling is essentially genocide by these standards.
Actually it was the second-most read article on BBC News (UK) yesterday, so maybe you do. That said, they then followed up with this.
More options
Context Copy link
For the record, I don't believe Russian bombing ought to be considered genocidal at the current rate. Its insinuations towards "destroying Ukrainism", however...
Who makes those insinuations?
Nuts on telegram channels? Russian equivalents of Ann Coulter, she of "We must invade theur countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" fame?
At least one major Russian mass media outlet. I googled Ann Coulter and she is labeled as "a conservative columnist". I must remind you that there is no such division in official mass media as there is between Democrat newspapers and Republican ones in USA. You get pro-government TV and mass media, and nuts on telegram of various sorts.
Apparently, in late 2013, in an auspicious coincidence with Ukrainian Maidan troubles, RIA Novosti was directly reorganized by Putin's edict, and since then there has been a trend of anti-Ukrainian messaging.
edit: does Dmitry Medvedev, ex-chairwarmer for Putin of 2008-2012, count as a nut on telegram or as an Ann Coulter? He does post on telegram, and he does sound like a nut, and his posts are similar to what you quoted. I could dig some up if you're interested. You know, when Putin doesn't outright say "we really should paint Ukraine our color on the map and call Ukrainian 'an outdated Russian dialect'", but everyone around him says so, it gets one thinking.
You aren't familiar with Ann Coulter? She was a conservative political pundit known for telling it like it is or saying the quiet part out loud, depending on your politics. Sort of respected in the nineties but a joke to most people after the culture shift of the noughts (although not conservatives generally of course). I think No_one's point was that she was a political pundit, not an official member of the government (telegram nut and Coulter being of a kind, as opposed to alternatives). So Medvedev is definitely closer to authoritative than either the telegram nut or Coulter, but still not someone representing Russia's official position. As for that news piece, denazification of the Ukraine might be a fig leaf, but it's a pretty good one.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Genocide is now like fascist— a slur that doesn’t really mean anything outside of “I don’t like X.” By any reasonable standard, Russia is not committing genocide. Ditto Israel.
Now that doesn’t mean complaints about civilian causalities are necessarily wrong. But seems to me the real complaint is about war per se.
Or about the existence of Israel full stop. If you're anti-Zionist, any stick to beat Israel with is fine.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is not true. The civilian casualities in Gaza are significantly higher than that in Ukraine, the invasion of which by Russia people have been rushing to call genocide, including many people here. For simplicity I will just takes about deaths specifically and not casualities.
As already posted below the OHCHR estimates 9,701 civilian deaths in Ukraine between 24 Feb 2022 and 24 September 2023.
Reliable estimates for Gaza are hard to find but OHCHR estimates the deaths to be over 11,000 between 7 October 2023 and 16 November 2023 (some of whom would not strictly speaking be Gazans as there are also casualities outside of Gaza). So Gaza has roughly the same number of deaths in a month than Ukraine had in a year and a half. More recent numbers from early January suggest this number could be over 22,000 for Gaza. This would put the percentage of Gazans killed somewhere around 1% of the total population.
Now, Gaza is more densely populated and urbanised where the fighting is taking place, but this is also offset by the fact that Ukraine has a much larger population than Gaza and the operations are larger scale.
Regardless, no matter how you cut it, the civilian casualties in Gaza are extremely high and people would not be hesitating to call it genocide if it were any other country.
Did the US genocide Iraq?
For that matter, did the US genocide Japan?
Something like a million Japanese civilians died in the latter years of WW2 in retaliation for Pearl Harbor. And this was long after Midway: the US was clearly the dominant power by that point and not under existential threat, if it ever was.
And I think unequivocally the answer is “no.” One might think the fire bombing or the nukes were bad, but not all bad things in a particular category is the “worst” thing in that category (I don’t think that’s the point you are making to be clear).
More options
Context Copy link
The USA has committed its own atrocities in the past. When it comes to the war against Japan, the Japanese had their own murderous empire.
What is the point to bring them now but to excuse new warcrimes? At some point bringing WW2 constantly to justify new wars being started, or actual warcrimes such as Dresden kind of undermines the moral legitimacy of WW2 itself and should make us question whether the people doing this were also acting with self serving motives then too. Especially since the Nazis and Japanese were condemned for being warmongers and imperialists.
Is WW2 a permanent card to excuse starting wars and committing attrocities rather than a historical episode that should make us oppose such bad behavior?
There is also a genocide that happened against German civilians after the end of WW2. So by this logic, you could justify the most depraved behavior.
At some point this milking of WW2 to excuse warcrimes is behavior that is similiar to the nazis using the communist atrocities (including against ethnic Germans) as a means of legitimizing their future attrocities.
Rather than deflecting responsibility towards the past USA, we should focus on the now and judge morally Israel's actions. What we will see is an extreme racist supremacist goverment that dehumanizes a population and wants to conquer its land.
The same population that they ethnically cleansed in the past, in violation of the expectation of initial promises by zionists when they were promoting their project that they would respect the Arab inhabitants of the place. And in addition to this, of course they also promote culturally genocidal propaganda denying the Palestinians their nationhood. Unsurprisingly this is related to also to the project to violently ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land, as well as as it is always the case with such rhetoric. The people who don't exist, can more easily be made to not exist.
History isn’t about creating get out of jail free cards. But it is a useful barometer for “what is normal” and what is “abnormal.”
By historical standards what is happening in Gaza is not abnormal nor is it a genocide.
By historical standards all sorts of mass murderous attrocities are not abnormal, including genocides. As is rhetoric of people calling such conduct as not abnormal to justify and excuse it. It is definitely a disgusting atrocity of ethnic cleansing through mass murder, complete obliteration of the homes of the Palestinians, inducing policies to starve them.
Considering the starvation it is mass murder in the process of becoming genocide if one takes a higher standard for genocide. Or already qualifies as a genocide if one considers the mass murder that already has happened as qualifying.
Also, obviously all this attempt to understate terms and it would be too late if the numbers of dead keep on pilling, in line with what Israeli politicians want. Not to mention all the people who have lost limbs.
The reality is that the treatment of Jews in WW2 is brought precisely to justify the murderous ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by people who certainly prove in that regard that we should be careful with our sympathies for bad actors would use them to justify vile warcrimes. It would be more sensible to not be manipulated to obsessing about Jews from 80 years ago and be diverted by that from confronting those committing or supporting the warcrimes of today.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The Gaza Strip has a population of 2.1-2.4m (the lower is from the CIA, the higher is from Wikipedia), so no, 20,000 civilian casualties are absolutely not 3-4% of the total population. It’s possible you looked up the population of only Gaza City, one of several in the strip.
Corrected, thanks.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm somewhat disappointed by the long span of time in which people in this discussion here just claimed that either number was higher without comparing actual numbers.
Those people work with a very loose definition of genocide.
Personally, I'm not particularly interested in the question of whether Israel's actions meet the 'definition' of genocide, formal or otherwise. I get why it is important (least of all for the ICC and other international law proceedings) but at some level it just becomes a semantic question. I do think those who claim Russia is committing genocide against Ukraine but refuse to make or support the claim that that Israel is committing genocide against Palestine have a huge double standard.
My perspective is that, at best, Israel has displayed a overwhelming level of disregard and negligence to the Palestinian people that amounts to criminality, both recently and historically. At worst, I have to take at face value the multiple statements, both recently and historically, of senior Israeli officials that they want to utterly destroy Gaza and/or the Palestinian people. I both these things to be horribily immoral and should be rebuked. Whether they meet the formal definition of genocide I don't particularly care to argue.
More options
Context Copy link
Blame the U.N. Since 1948, it has defined genocide as
It also criminalizes “direct and public incitement to commit genocide” and “complicity in genocide.” Some of the speeches by Israeli politicians clearly fall afoul of the former, while, if what is happening in Gaza is a genocide, the United States’ actions would arguably fall afoul of the latter.
So October 7th was also a genocide?
According to the U.N.’s definition, yes. As were 9/11, various other terrorist attacks, the aftermath of the Armenia/Azerbaijan war, etc. Now, you could argue that this definition is so expansive as to be useless (and I’d agree if you did), but it’s the one that the international community has been using for the past 75 years.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If our ‘benchmark’ for genocide is the Holocaust, in which the vast majority of Jews under Nazi geopolitical control were murdered, then it’s hard to see how Israel’s action in Gaza is genocide. Even assuming that the vast majority of the Hamas-reported casualty figures are civilians, something like 1% of the population have been killed, which is not unreasonably high in comparison to historic invasions of dense urban environments. Whatever the threshold for genocide, 20,000 casualties out of a population of 2,000,000 surely isn’t it.
The Israelis have proposed multiple reasonable accords with the Arabs, who have rejected all of them, and who indeed rejected even the UN’s 1947 accord, brokered by many global powers. More generally, I don’t think that either Israel or Hamas are ‘genocidal’; they would commit genocide if they could, but so would many tribes and peoples throughout history, what matters is whether they can (both geopolitically/diplomatically and practically), and in this case neither can by those conditions.
To be clear, that wasn’t my intent. My intention was to argue that the expulsion of descendants of German Gastarbeiter would not be ethically equivalent to the Holocaust by any means. I added the last line about Israel because I knew that, otherwise, it would be all anyone would discuss in the replies. I don’t think the fate of the Palestinians and the fate of Muslims in Western Europe are linked, certainly not in so direct a way.
I know you said in the past 'I don't support the West giving Israel aid'. However, the key issue with Israel repatriating/expelling Arabs out of Israel is that they're using our strength to do it and having us pay most of the diplomatic, economic and military price. If it weren't for the US carrier groups nearby, the looming threat of Western firepower to back up Israel and the munitions they've received, they would not be able to do what they've been doing.
The intense bombing and blockade meets "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" to a certain extent. Genocides are routinely listed which don't kill a high % of the population in question - the Rohingyas for example. If the Israelis have killed 1% of the Palestinian population in 3 months of war, that's roughly similar to what happened in Myanmar over several years, indeed it happened at a faster rate.
The Israelis never proposed any reasonable accord with the Palestinians or at least they haven't done so sincerely. They've refused to allow Palestinian statehood, which includes control of borders, airspace, water rights and raising an armed force. They expelled a large number back in 1948, more in 1967 and won't let them return. They've consistently annexed more and more land from Palestine, regardless of what the UN says. If the UN ruled to give Israel land more land than they had before, as it did in 1947, they'll take that land happily. If the UN rules against Israel and tells them to give land to Palestine as in 1967, they'll ignore them and keep taking land. These are not the actions of a state that's interested in a long-term diplomatic solution but a state that knows they are stronger and wields that strength (our strength) to their advantage.
True, it's not you but there were a bunch here who make an equivalence between Palestine and struggles with third world migration - 'how can you claim to be against terror attacks/atrocities in the West from migrants and not oppose terror attacks/atrocities against Israel' was the implicit reasoning. The natural conclusion is 'since we oppose terror attacks against Israel, we should assist Israel in war'. Yet one could reverse it just as easily: 'since we oppose bombing of civilians and support national self-determination, we should support Palestine in war'.
This sort of thinking is the underlying rationale behind the disastrous global war on terror. Terror is a subset of war, war is the use of force to achieve political goals. There's no need to support either Israel or Palestine, it's not and shouldn't be about who can present themselves as the victim. We shouldn't be picking sides in other people's conflicts.
Diplomatic perhaps, but economic and military? Other have already pointed out that most of Israel's foreign aid is for them to buy US weapons - in other words, it's a government subsidy for the US defense industry.
The US is probably all that is keeping the Israelis from literally committing genocide. Our presence may give them more of a sense of security, but it also serves a sort of "big brother is watching" function and gives them less excuse to claim that they are under an existential threat.
US carrier groups aren't deterring Hamas or Hezballah, they're there to deter Iran.
But it's still a transfer of wealth from the US to Israel. If I give you an Amazon gift card then I'm giving you something valuable even if Amazon also benefits. If the US announced tomorrow that it's stopping all aid to Israel I don't think their reaction would be "I don't care, it's just a subsidy to the US defense industry".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, they would. Israel has won very consistently in major conventional wars.
Thanks to US military aid. If it were the Soviet backed Arabs vs Israel alone Israel would've lost.
More recently, without US support the Israelis would not have enough munitions to bomb Gaza as intensively as they have since they're using munitions that come straight from the US. Without US support the Israelis would've probably just made peace, as opposed to continual settling and expansion, since they'd be paying full price.
https://www.axios.com/2023/11/04/us-israel-aid-military-funding-chart
Israel won in the 40’s without US support, and it’s reasonable to think they’d be poorer without US support but they probably still would have won the 6 day and Yom Kippur war.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why? Who do you think would invade them in 2024?
Hezbollah would've launched a major attack, not skirmished on the border. The US seems to think somebody would've been opportunistic, they sent a carrier group there with the express intention of warding off any opportunists. https://www.voanews.com/a/us-aircraft-carrier-to-remain-in-mediterranean-near-israel-officials-say-/7400248.html
I don’t think we know this - I don’t think Hizbullah & Hamas together can take Israel. Iran would have huge logistical difficulties intervening directly and it is… not obvious that would succeed, even if Israel didn’t have nukes.
I don't think Hamas + Hezbollah can take Israel, but I do think there is at least some probability they would have tried if the US hadn't moved its carrier groups nearby. And in that reality we're talking about a much bigger, bloodier, and less restrained war than the one we're seeing now.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Who would stop them?
You think Hezbollah could stage a successful land invasion against Israel?
Or that Egypt would give it one more go despite knowing that even if they succeeded in breaking through, they'd just get their victorious troops neutron bombed?
You don't have to be capable of storming Tel Aviv to impose serious costs on Israel, just like you don't have to raise your flag over Washington DC to impose costs on the USA. If it weren't for unflinching US support the Israelis would moderate their stance since they'd have a less favourable balance of power.
Finally, they're using US supplied weapons:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Return to where? The right of return is such a tremendous case of isolated demand for rigor. I don't know any other case in which a treaty between two powers allowed people who left to come back into a land now controlled by a foreign power.
Well, we can see what happened after a unilateral withdrawal from settlements in Gaza.
I actually disagree with RR’s response here - allowing refugees to return after a war is historically normal, not allowing it is somewhat unusual (though by no means unheard of). Rulers usually didn’t care what ethnicity their subjects were in the past, and usually preferred mass forced conversion to expulsion except in special circumstances. Why not let the expelled Palestinians return (since their expulsion probably wasn’t actually planned)? Democracy creates a very strong incentive to engage in (relatively soft in this case, to the Yishuv’s credit) ethnic cleansing.
More options
Context Copy link
Historically, it is indeed customary for stronger powers to expel populations they defeat in war. If you read my posts I note that history is written in blood, that this is how borders are made.
We also saw intensive bombing of Gaza, indiscriminate shooting of protesters, those IDF T-shirts with 'one shot two kills' and pregnant women in the crosshairs pre October 7th. It reveals a certain attitude. Do you think this might be related to lots of people joining Hamas and going on to dedicate their lives to killing Israelis?
Intensive bombing, you mean after gazans shot rockets at Israel?
Shooting protestors indiscriminately after they tried to illegally cross the border?
It's beyond crazy to claim that Israel is responsible for the sorry state of Gaza when the gazans took advantage of the Israeli withdrawal to elect a party running on a platform of killing every jew and subsequently poking the three hundred pound gorilla next door for nearly twenty years. The hatred of Israel was well ingrained at the time of withdrawal. Everything since has been biding time and begging, borrowing, or stealing war materiel to attack Israel with.
How about sniping two women walking inside a church courtyard, as happened just before Christmas? Seems pretty indiscriminate and militarily indefensible to me, yet for some reason, the Israeli government doesn’t seem to mind.
As I said in my other comment, I'm not doing to defend everything Israel has done. But this event from December cannot possibly explain how things got to this state in the first place.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There was no 'illegally trying to cross the border', they were protesting from inside the fence.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2019/02/no-justification-israel-shoot-protesters-live-ammunition
When did I claim that Israel is responsible for the sorry state of Gaza? It's a conflict, responsibility is split. Obviously it's Israeli (US-supplied) bombs that are doing the destruction.
I'm not going to defend every Israeli action, but this was a classic "mostly peaceful" protest.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think the ancestral homeland part actually matters. What matters is just whether someone is willing to take them in.
If Israel had existed at the time, the worst of the Holocaust probably could have been averted, because it is true that the countries of the world refused to accept the Jews. But the flipside of that is that if there had been any country willing to take them the worst of the Holocaust could have been avoided. It didn't have to be Israel.
And if any country had taken them, that country would probably be more powerful in the present day as a result. Let's say all the Ashkenazis who would have settled in Israel all immigrated to Canada (historically some tried this and were turned away). Today Israel has a population of only 9 million, and many of them aren't descended from Holocaust survivors. You could pretty comfortably put all of Israel inside Canada without bothering anyone. Israel and the Canadian province of Quebec have about the same population, but Quebec is 70 times the size of Israel. Canada's population would be about 10-20% higher today.
This feels like an argument for having open borders, but it's not. Is it even a good thing to live in a country with a higher population? Actually, my main point is just that it doesn't have to be your ancestral homeland. What matters is that any country is willing to take the refugees in.
Agree it can be anyone willing to take them in, or even anywhere they're strong enough to conquer themselves.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Your last sentence rests on a category error fallacy. Arab is an umbrella group, but Palestinian is a specific ethnic group. The Palestinian homeland is Egypt in the same way that the Irish homeland is Spain, both being Europeans of Celtic origin; in other words, it’s a mistake to assume that an ethnic homeland is the same as an umbrella group’s territory. The DNA of Palestinians is closer to Samaritans than “North African Sunni Arab Muslims” for this reason. Also, I don’t think this argument would be made if the Palestinians sought to repatriate Israelis to Brooklyn or Lakewood. Isn’t Israeli culture unique despite belonging to the general umbrella group “Jews”?
The opposing argument will be that “Palestinian” as a distinct and/or overriding identity didn’t crystallize until the mid-20th century (there exist people arguing for earlier, have not read, can’t comment on quality of argument). Of course, pre-nationalist identity for non-Jati-like groups* was generally more local/regional than what replaced it, so it still wouldn’t make sense to “repatriate” them to other Arab countries.
To anticipate another counter-argument, there was some migration between Muslim regions (especially at urban and elite levels), so that some Palestinians have surnames indicating, e.g., Egyptian origin at some point. This is accurate, though the scale can be significantly exaggerated. My main complaint about this line of argument is that (except with very recent migrants) it makes about as much sense as “repatriating” all the Slovak Horváths to Croatia.
*Actual Hindu Jatis, but also Bosnian Muslims, Jews, Gypsies, Druze, Zoroastrians, etc. - (at least mostly) endogamous, religiously-defined groups with severe intercommunal purity barriers that reinforce common identity at a relatively early date.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Interesting developments in use of AI in mathematics and writing
{Math}International Mathematical Olympiad is an international competion for high schoolers around the world. They compete in solving problems related to inequalities, number theory and geometry. It is the last category in which Google's AlphaGeometry leapfrogged the previous SOTA, reaching almost Chinese-team level of success.
It's method is intuitively attractive: it uses both unbiased but blind pattern finding skills associated with LLM today, and rigourous symbolic math honed by millenia of human efforts to find the greatest amount of pure truth. That the latter was included speaks to the fact that we are still at the centaur stage of AI, in that sometimes augmenting AI with what humans already know, allows it to perform better than not doing so.
In the future all AI will be unconstrained by human traditions and biases, thus it will be able to search a wider space, enabling it to beat humans at games humans invented. Such is already the case with AlphaGo. Euclidean geometry has more difficult rules, so some handholding is still needed.
{Writing}Akutagawa Prize is a literary prize expected to awarded twice each year. It is considered one of most prestigous such prizes in Japan. Previous winners include: 石原 慎太郎, 安部 公房, 遠藤 周作, and 大江 健三郎.
The latest winner, 九段 理江, won it for 東京都同情塔, a novel about a high-rise prison tower in futuristic Tokyo and its architect's intolerance of criminals, AI being a recurring theme. In the acceptance speech 九段さま admitted that 5% of the novel was copied verbatim from ChatGPT. Again centaur approach wins out against pure AI.
Had the author attempted to write the 144 pages by asking AI to do it instead, the result would be incoherent, as currently techology isn't there yet to hold in memory so great amounts of data. 九段さま judicious and moderate use of AI to augment, rather than replace, human writing seems to have served them well, beating out works written by only humans.
And yet creative-class salaries and status is the greatest it's ever been. The very jobs AI is predicted to automate, are thriving. For example, the revenues and readership of the 20 or so Substack blogs I follow has only grown, even accelerated, since 2021. Blogs that only got 40 'likes' per article in 2021 now get easily in the hundreds. Substantial revenue growth, too. So either AI cannot replace this job, or there is a big arbitrage opportunity here. Same for fiction writing (e.g. AI imitation Stephen King ) . I think the former. This does not mean it cannot eventually happen, but predictions about technology have a tendency of being either wildly optimistic or pessimistic. Or , AI can do a good job fooling or pretending to be human or emulating human-like attributes, but cannot easily replace a job.
I don’t think Substack readership or even revenue is a good proxy for the general salaries and status of the arts. Maybe substack is just in its New Relationship Energy. Maybe this is what the kids call a “zero interest rate phenomenon.”
Shit, with the amount of hate a “creative-class” receives around here, you’d think authors were one paycheck away from getting run out of town on a rail.
A motivated doomer can go scrounge up, say, movie theater statistics. I wouldn’t take that seriously as an argument against the arts. The ceteris never is paribus.
It has been 3 years and no sign of slowing, coinciding with the huge surge of LLMs over the past 2 years. If that is a poor proxy, consider tech salaries, which are also on the up-and-up, layoffs notwithstanding (although these layoffs seemed to have more to do with over-hiring post-Covid than Ai). I think this shows that creative jobs are surprisingly resistant to automation. The laptop class is the butt of many jokes or a convenient whipping boy for perceived class stratification in an increasingly divided America , but is not going away either.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I wonder how long before AI makes substantial progress with string theory, which based on my limited understanding is based on geometry.
More options
Context Copy link
For once in my life, I will contend that a particular example of AI reaching competence comparable to peak humans is not that big of a deal.
Here's Paul Christiano claiming this could happen, and soon, and quite easily, in the primordial times of 2022:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sWLLdG6DWJEy3CH7n/imo-challenge-bet-with-eliezer?commentId=jSnfYKAv3hxAPwWhH
So while I agree with the general thesis that AI is going to overtake humans, even our best, and quite soon (3-10 years for ASI is about my 95% CI, 50:50 by 2028, as in any an AGI that is better than the set of all humans at all cognitive tasks), this shouldn't make you update particularly hard in either direction.
The arrival of GPT-4 prompted me to dust off my urge, present for a while, to write a novel. Not because it is as good a writer as me (it isn't), but I could see the writing on the cards since the GPT-3 days, and right now I give maybe 30% odds that GPT-5 will write a better novel on any topic I would wish to, including emulating my voice, and according to the majority of readers, do a better job at it.
It does, however, write better than the average human on any topic, if only because of how incompetent the average human is. GPT-2 was semi-convincingly replicating entire subreddits, even if the outputs were hilariously incoherent, and I think most of the default subs like /r/aww or /r/WorldNews would be improved if every human redditor commenting was replaced by an instance of GPT-4 (hopefully one not prompted to act like the average user there, and even then it's only pretending to be retarded). Have you seen the average email or high school essay? For most people, outsourcing that to GPT-4 is an unqualified improvement.
But yes, the strong expectation that I will one day be obsolete as a writer was a driving force for me knocking out a couple while I'm still relevant. Maybe it'll give me street cred in the posthuman future, like Usain Bolt has today even though a car from the 1930s could leave him in the dust. I was good at my passions, before AI replaced everyone.
Yeah, Christiano is absolutely right here. There are some sorts of problems which have significant components that are comparatively much simpler for machines than humans, for example:
This is not to say that it's trivial to make a computer be superhuman at these problems. Despite there being aspects that are very machine-friendly, there's still a lot of difficult work to be done to actually get a machine do them. But it shouldn't make you update particularly much; this is not an "AI is now smarter than IMO medalists" moment.
More options
Context Copy link
That is actually a problem: it gets harder to filter out spam and idiots. I actually got fooled few times already.
essays free from typos or other errors from students whose in-class work is full of mistakes or otherwise of poor quality, would give it away
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The goal of those is usually proof of work/attention given, not quality.
One thing I've learned from the internet is that American schools and universities seem to love making students do large amounts of largely pointless drudgework.
this is to filter for conscientiousness
More options
Context Copy link
Are other school systems any better? My experience with South American schools and everything I have read about East Asian schools suggests that both are worse.
My school in India (a prestigious one, for what that's worth) did not give us nearly the amount of homework as was expected in Western school.
Homework is hardly a thing here. You're not graded on it, you have annual and quarterly assessments, and the teachers expect you to look over the teaching material and practice till you pass them.
What is substituted, for homework, is hours of private tuition after lessons, which is not imposed on the students by the teachers, not a filter for conscientiousness (almost anyone who is not bottom 25th percentile is chucked into one of those), and is nigh a necessity if you want to be competitive for the exams that actually matter, at the end of high school.
But homework, in the American sense? Largely irrelevant. You will be tested, in a standardized manner, on your mastery of the subject, at the end of primary education, and that will change the trajectory of your life.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Because the goal of the American school system is to justify its absolutely ludicrous amount of funding, ideally in a way which doesn't require the people staffing it to do any actual work and definitely in a way which requires even more funding.
Massive amounts of pointless drudgework is easy to evaluate and declare a thing which is a result, an output that shows the education system doing something. That it doesn't help students learn and may actually be counterproductive is besides the point; the students learning is absolutely immaterial to the education system, and in fact the students learning too well may not be a good thing from its own perspective, because that makes it harder to make the obviously false claim that schools need more money.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To be honest, the base LLM-style AI seems far more reliant on "what humans already know" than augmenting it with some math laws. The former seems like a move closer to a truly thinking AI rather than one that just predicts what an answer would be without any kind of logic behind it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How could we fix the Chevron defense?
I am not even sure this is culture war outside of the left tends to think they own the bureaucracy therefore the left has a preference for the Chevron defense.
I assume most have basic familiarity with the Chevron defense and may be aware that a case will soon appear before the Supreme Court where the Supreme Court is expected to weaken the Chevron defense.
Here is a basic Wikipedia summary
“The decision articulated a doctrine known as "Chevron deference".[2] Chevron deference consists of a two-part test that is deferential to government agencies: first, whether Congress has spoken directly to the precise issue at question, and second, "whether the agency's answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_U.S.A.,_Inc._v._Natural_Resources_Defense_Council,_Inc.
This has resulted in a situation where different administrations can interpret different laws completely differently. Which to me doesn’t feel much like a nation of laws.
The Chevron defense though does seem to solve a legitimate problem that the US legislature isn’t designed or doesn’t function well to deal with smaller issues/refinements/vagueness in writing laws. One issue here is congress liking to pass big bills in order to horse trade. A second issue is we have 435 congress people and I can’t expect each of them to know the details of manipulative order entry to buy IBM stock and the temperature that a nuclear plant could release waste water that would be too high and kill off the manatees which at some level a law is seeking to deal with.
The Chevron Defense exists because in my opinion someone does need to get the details right for the regulatory state and the regulatory state probably does need to exists (some libertarians will disagree but I think I’ve moved into something like State-Capacity Libertarianism)
Our current options are basically:
The Executive Branch/Bureaucracy gets to decide. With occasional pushbacks from the courts if they go too far. Student Loan forgiveness would be a recent example when the courts stepped in. Taken to the extreme you end up with a system where only one branch of government matters and it’s the Presidency and if you win that you control the meaning of words in everything.
The Courts get to decide the meaning of every word in every piece of legislation. Taken to the extreme if you win the SC you own the meaning of words in every piece of legislation. These people are indirectly elected. As someone on the right I tend to think conservative judges atleast use legal theories where they try to interpret meaning based on how the legislature intended. Thinking of the lefts “living constitution” I think that could become quickly a “living legislature” and then any law could just be interpreted by the current popular view on the left. The Judiciary could then become the true legislature.
The Legislature passes more laws and fine tunes their legislation. For our form of government I believe this is the best path; however I do not think our current system has the operational capabilities
My proposal. We should solve this. My best guess is we need to add mini-legislatures somehow. Congress finds a way to delegate rule-making to smaller focused legislatures that will retain the legitimacy of congress and being Democratic.
What will happen is the SC pushes back on the Chevron defense and takes more power for the courts and removes some power from the executive/bureaucracy. The complexity of the modern world leads me to believe we need to find a legislative solution and the vacuum is leading Courts/Executive doing things they shouldn’t be doing.
Edit: Should be deference as was noted.
Laws are always going to have some ambiguities. And the executive -- which is tasked with implementing or enforcing the laws -- will thus always have some leeway, subject to judiciary oversight.
As an analogy, consider two cities subject to the same traffic regulations (that is laws). City A might say "we use traffic regulations to establish culpability after an accident, but do not prioritize on enforcing them ahead of fact". City B might go full 1984, having AI-powered cameras on every intersection and writing tickets for every missing turn signal.
Unless the law considers specific provisions for its enforcement (like "communities need to spend at least one police hour per resident per year on enforcing traffic regulations" or "traffic violations shall not be detected through autonomous camera systems"), both seem like valid interpretations, even though they will create very different environments.
If you are worried about the president having too much power by establishing law interpretations for their agencies, I think congress could establish agencies outside of administrative reach. Establish some other mechanism (appointment by congress, supreme court, popular vote) to determine who gets to head the EPA. This would likely cause more problems than it solves, though.
More options
Context Copy link
So long as both interpretations are permissible (e.g. not completely arbitrary) why not? They are both within the law as Congress chose to write it and signed by the President.
Inversely, to say that laws have to be so constrained as to admit only one interpretation is a fairly strict restriction on the legislature.
I think this is not only the best path, it's the required path. Congress is expected to pay attention to legislation after it's passed. Both to the judicial interpretation but also to real world impact, unintended consequences and so forth.
I do think that it would be beneficial if there was a semi-formal system by which the courts could note ambiguity and refer the matter to Congress. The court would still have to rule, and Congress wouldn't be required to act on the referral, but it would serve as a tangible record.
More options
Context Copy link
https://www.sunset.texas.gov/about-us/frequently-asked-questions
Seems like a partial solution to add this on the federal level.
More options
Context Copy link
I would push back on Congress not being able to write laws to fit the needs of a large government. I think it can, its just no one there wants to, and, in particular, no one wants to vote on regulations that inevitably kill jobs.
More options
Context Copy link
You dismiss the libertarian approach a little too quickly I think. The modern bureaucracy is still in need of some degree of justification. There are three major problems with bureaucracy:
True. The libertarian approach is likely how I think this should settle legally.
The administrative state would be severely limited if they needed explicit guidance. And since congress struggles to pass sufficient legislation it would mean a very limited state.
I did want to avoid ideological debates though I opened the door to it. Even in the case at hand for what the court will settle on I would not be completely against the state putting agents on private ships but I am against the state putting agents on ships without specific Democratic legislative intent and simply ordered by a bureaucrat. Someone elected should have a connection to it.
This is a decent summary of the case which I would assume you know. And Kagan’s quote I would completely disagree with.
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/17/1224939610/supreme-court-chevron-doctrine
Justice Elena Kagan threw tough hypothetical questions at the challengers' attorneys, asking if federal judges are really the best positioned to answer questions about whether a new cholesterol-lowering product would be a dietary supplement or a drug.
"And it's best to defer to people who do know, who have had long experience on the ground, who have seen a thousand of these kinds of situations," Kagan said, referring to agency experts. "And, you know, judges should know what they don't know."
A Democracy in my opinion still needs some process to decide what a government can do. The process of a mini-legislature won’t happen but we also aren’t going to have another system either.
The main criticism that most judges are ignoring, and most commenters seems to ignore is that the bureaucracy as a whole is not public service oriented. Those are organizations are subject to incentives, they are run by regular people, and if there is congressional oversight that oversight is concerned with winning elections, not writing good legislation.
Its conflict theory vs mistake theory writ large. The libertarian story is that conflict theory explains most of the bureaucracy. But every issue that winds up in front of a court seems to be resolved on mistake theory grounds.
"Ah well, the bureaucracy filled with people that hate you didn't mean to ruin your livelihood and humiliate you, it just accidentally happened over a series of years as congress didn't provide enough oversight into the day to day rules of the organization. And they may have gotten a little too overzealous about applying certain rules."
Its politics all the way through. And I think whatever protections we expect for people to not be fucked over by their political opponents are the same type of protections people should have from bureaucratic over-reach. If that means gutting the bureaucracy then that is a win. No amount of complaining bureaucracies can't effectively legislate is ever going to move me, because I don't fundamentally trust bureaucracies in the first place.
I can't speak for the American bureaucracy but in Sweden I can fairly confidently say that most of bureaucracy is public service minded, and to the extent I've interacted with other western European bureaucracies they have been too.
People of course complain about the actions of the bureaucracy but this mostly comes off as them disagreeing with the stated goals of the bureaucracy but blaming the personal motives of the workers.
America seems like it's becoming partisan to truly stupid degrees so maybe the bureaucracy at large really is out to get people for ideological reasons, but I have a hard time believing this.
This somewhat gets too the issue I have with the case at hand of a fisherman being forced to pay the salary of his regulator to be on the boat.
I don’t quite have an issue with the regulator being on the boat as I guess I can think of that situation being necessary for a public good. Which I’m this case overfishing leading to smaller fish catches is definitely a public good.
But I do feel like the person making that decision should be accountable to society and having congress make that decision has accountability even if it’s only a small accountability but having a bureaucrat make the decision feels like their is no accountability or process.
I don't know what the law says here but usually these things are handled by laws giving fairly wide powers to governmental agencies to fulfill their mission as defined by the executive. They are indirectly accountable through the executive (and legislature through whatever overarching laws there are). If there is no legal basis for this agency exacting fees for this kind of category of inspections then it does seem iffy.
I can of course not speak for US law, I'm not very interested in this particular case, I just commented on the claim that the bureaucracy isn't public service oriented, which I disagreed with.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The low level cogs in the machine are mostly blameless. The high level parts of bureaucracies know exactly what they are doing.
Bureaucracies with enforcement powers of any kind are generally going to be worse and more politicized. IRS, ATF, FCC, etc are bad. NASA, BEA, etc are not bad.
Politics is at a level in the US where parties feel it is dumb to just leave weapons lying on the table unused.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And will never be; that's Pournelle's Iron Law of bureaucracy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Isn't the American solution supposed to be that's something for your state to regulate, with 50 different options for this and leave national defense, international trade and other enumerated powers to the Federal government?
That worked well enough in 1789, pre-telegraphs/railroads/steamships. A 20th/21st century economy is far wider in geographical scope, thus companies can more easily threaten to take jobs/tax revenue elsewhere. In order for a state government to have the option of 'factory that cleans up after itself even if that is less profitable', rather than having only the options of 'horrendously polluting factory' and 'no factory', a method of coördination is needed across state lines.
More options
Context Copy link
Not since FDR.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Enlarge congress. Congress doesn’t have the time or manpower to deal with administrative issues in any kind of granular detail, so they mostly punt the work of actual lawmaking to administrative agencies. It’s a workable solution, the United Kingdom has six hundred and something MPs for a jurisdiction one third the size of the US. The problem is, that would make each congressman or senator individually less powerful >:(
More options
Context Copy link
Ah yes, soviets.
This is not really tractable, do we really expect people to vote in special elections for a representative to the EPA or the ATF? And for that to not be even more gamed and corrupt than Congress as it exists?
The juridictional conflicts between these mini legislatures alone seem like a nightmare. Not to mention the level of corruption that could be enabled by procedural specificity. In effect you'd end up with the exact same thing as the current technocratic state, but with even more power because they could claim to have a direct mandate from the people and even less oversight.
The outcome of devolution in the UK should caution anyone about splitting the sovereignty and therefore the responsibility of parliament.
Maybe it’s terrible idea. But when I think about the issue it feels like we are lacking what I would call a middle management legislature.
I wouldn’t advocate for direct election of “mini-legislatures”. Probably something like the mini-legislature has 46 people and any 10 congress people can join in a group to select 1 mini-legislature person. Basically 10 GOP congress people would decide whichever staff knows most about securities legislation and goes on the securities legislature congress. They have to color within the lines of larger bills and if anything they do is too radical a vote of 45% on big congress cancels it.
The alternative would be sunsetting and expecting congress to pass more bills but I just don’t see congress being capable of that.
The Chevron defense feels wrong to me with unelected administrators having too much power for my liking but if we get rid of governance like this it feels to me like a vacuum is left behind.
I think people on the left to often claim Congress doesn’t do anything so we have to do things thru Executive orders etc but I do think there could be a process for cleaning up legislation/more direction later when bills go from law to execution and issues arise.
This is kinda how independent agencies are appointed here in France, you get direction councils with a mix of MPs and appointed experts. I think it's a more pragmatic solution than what the US is doing right now, but I also don't think it's going to change the behavior of the institutions in any significant fashion.
Then again, our parliament is both more and less consequential than US' Congress in ways that are difficult to compare. I do think putting more direct power back in the hands of formal representatives would generally be a positive thing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's called the committee system and it has existed since the first Congress.
Subject matter committees allow Congressmen to specialize and the institution to begin to develop durable, institutional knowledge. The problem is that Congress is far too small to allow Congressmen to specialize, given the size and scope of the Federal government, and they're too busy fundraising these days to do a good job of it, anyway.
Still happens, though. Mike Gallagher's China committee is a good example.
Yes I thought about that.
My opinion probably lies on the spectrum of the Chevron Deference shouldn’t exists or if it does be extremely limited. The power of the Presidency should be small.
Is it rational that if we get rid of these things that congress is capable of governing? Even if we need to increase its size?
Maybe. There's probably still more going on than just those particular problems. The theoretically correct answer is that the virtue of the people themselves has declined, so we elect men to Congress who will not govern well regardless of the structure you place them in. This is an appetizing enough answer, although certainly not itself complete.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A tangent, but you brought up one of my favorite hobby horses. I'm fully in favor of dramatically increasing the amount of parasites we have in Congress. More congressmen = far more people you have to bribe in order to succeed at regulatory capture, and citizens will feel a stronger sense of control over their individual representatives creating more trust and legitimacy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
4. We eliminate the Administrative Procedures Act. If Congress wants to make something illegal they have to pass a law directly. The whole administrative state is tossed into the toilet.
More options
Context Copy link
*Chevron Deference
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What is the steelman for voting for Trump in the primaries?
He's not a true outsider anymore. He's not an unknown quantity. We know his temperament. We know his governance style. What does he provide over Desantis/Haley/Ramaswamy? He didn't build the wall the first time, why would he do it now?
I have some ideas, but they're all terrible once you think about them for ten seconds. I am willing to believe that the median voter is unable to think clearly for ten seconds before being hijacked by monkey-brain, but I'd like to make sure I'm not missing something obvious.
1. Personal Loyalty: This is close to the Richard Hanania theory. Personal loyalty would make sense if Trump was loyal in turn to his supporters, but he isn't. How many of his lawyers have gone to jail? How many orange-blooded Trump fans lost their jobs or got arrested for believing in him too hard on January 6? He could have pardoned these people, but he didn't. Orange Man good because Orange Man good.
2. Perceived Injustice: Yes, Trump has been treated unfairly by the media and the Washington establishment. Lots of people have been. I can understand why this would be seen as a necessary condition (e.g. "nobody liked by the 'elites' could ever be a good president"), but why would this be a sufficient condition? Surely electability and general competence matter more than an extra standard-deviation worth of grievances against the media.
3. Hatred: I'm not talking about "Hate™". I'm talking about a genuine desire to see one's political enemies suffer. It's not even clear to me that Trump would be better at this than other Republican candidates, but I feel I would be missing something if I didn't put it on the list.
Trump represents a pent up peasant and heartland burgher rage in a way that no other GOP politician can.
Yes, they want to “own the libs”, but that’s misses out the most important part. They want Donald Trump to own the libs. Owning the libs is important but not essential. Donald Trump is essential. Better Trump is in power and fails than DeSantis is in power and actually succeeds. This is, in effect, the decision that is being made.
But in a wider sense, American conservatives aren’t serious people. They consider forcing impoverished black single mothers to give birth to more children higher priority than ending mass immigration. That considered ending the tiny amount of GDP sent to Ukraine (tying up a longstanding geopolitical foe for years at the cost of zero American lives) more important than ending affirmative action - which only happened because of a 30-year effort by some autistic Jewish guy who couldn’t let it go. These are people who genuinely abhor the pittance spent on America’s empire when it has been the mission of every great Western civilization to conquer, to expand and to rule other lands and peoples.
They live in an imaginary mid century fantasy that is itself a product of Hollywood. They do not aspire to greatness, personally or collectively. Kevin Williamson was right about Trump, and about his supporters. The libs - if he wins again - will be “owned” well and truly for 4 years, and then simply pick up where they left off. Trump doesn’t understand institutions, but his supporters don’t care. The ‘deep state’ will let him spend 4 years in the AG’s office fighting spurious legal cases against his onetime political foes, and all the while the rest of Washington will tick along as usual.
You think this is about money?
The American empire is the Blue Empire. For the longest time heartland red tribers - which are the only demographic that still serves in the tip of the spear of the army -- have been duped into dying in droves in the name of "empire". Which somehow means making Ukraine safe for pride parades, or teaching Afghan girls how to put condoms on bananas, or creating refugee crises in the Middle East so that we can import mass numbers of Muslim immigrants to live on welfare and vote Democrat. The benefits of empire go to the Blue Tribe (or mostly to a small number of well-connected grifters), the costs accrue overwhelmingly to the Red Tribe.
If real empire was on the table - an empire ruled according to the interests of those who actually helped conquer it - the Red Tribe would sign up in a heartbeat. But that's not exactly what's on offer.
How do the costs only accrue to the Red Tribe? Seems to me the costs are born by everyone except a very select few, plus the foreigners who are actually receiving aid
Only the Red Tribe actually fights in the army.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not if project 2025 succeeds or fails in a way that really blows up. Let's say Trump attempts to "drain the swamp" at the Department of Education. He actually manages to replace some of the management, but the bulk of the staff keeps on following the old processes. "Abolish Title IX", they hear, and come back with a 300 page report "On amending Title IX" that ultimately recommends not doing anything.
In response, Trump posts on X that DoE must be protected from the agents of the deep state that think they run the department. A totally spontaneous peaceful protest of magahats blocks the doors of 400 Maryland Ave and lets in only those federal workers who swear loyalty to the head of the executive, including some IT workers that disable remote access to DoE services. The new rump department quickly passes new regulations that blocks Pell grants, student loans and Title I grants unless the receiving institution can prove they have zero DEI policies in action.
This can't happen. The "peaceful protest" will be broken up by one of the various security agencies whether Trump likes it or not. You can't "quickly" pass new regulations, the Administrative Procedures Act precludes that, and lawfare will prevent any attempts to promulgate regulations. The same courts which allow the deep state to get away with shenanigans normally will suddenly decided that every such procedure must be followed. Further, the DEI proponents will come up with novel legal theories as to why those regulations aren't allowed, and the courts will accept them.
Not if their leadership is replaced first.
How many divisions do the courts have? Will they send US Marshals into the DoE to wire the funds if Trump says, "I am the head of the executive branch, if anyone has a problem with you doing what I tell you, it's not your problem: you do what I tell you and I deal with the fallout, if I tell you to stop, don't cover your ass with bullshit acts, just stop".
The leadership which matters has civil service protections and can't be replaced first.
Most of the executive branch will support the courts over Trump on their own accord. They'll even oppose Trump on their own initiative. We saw that when Trump talked about suppressing the BLM riots with force.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Trump (or his administration) did rescind Obama's Title IX interpretation, so it's certainly possible. Of course Biden put it back.
That was because Obama didn't actually pass a regulation in the first place. And you will note that colleges responded to Obama's letter by stripping (mostly male) students of due process, but did not respond to the rescission by restoring it. This is the general way of things -- when the left does something it has instant and lasting effect and cannot be challenged (since the guidance wasn't a regulation change, there's nothing to challenge, by one theory). When the right does something it is buried in challenges and even if the right ultimately wins, there are no effects (see various posts by /u/gattsuru on the ways the appeals courts have nullified every provision of Bruen including those directly at issue, and note the only challenge the Supreme Court has taken up was by the one court which upheld gun rights)
IIRC many of those policies were softened because the schools started losing (or at least, being forced to settle) lawsuits over those policies themselves violating Title IX, largely during the Trump administration -- although whether the president influences court settlements is unclear. The Columbia University Mattress case is the first example that comes to mind, but not the only one. There are other examples more recently, as well.
I'm not sure exactly what standards of due process are on campus for accused students these days, but I'd be surprised if they're as unbalanced as those of the tail end of the Obama administration. EDIT: Also, the Biden administration has at least proposed reviving those rules, but it's unclear if that is actually going anywhere.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Honestly, Trump may have Rufo-esque entryists volunteering, all but begging, to help do it right this time around.
The man could care less about policy but other Republicans do, and he's not inclined to fight them over it if they're sufficiently flattering.
Not really the standard you'd want for the President but hey, it's what conservatives have.
He had extraordinary talent volunteering the first time round too (eg Bannon) and with the exception of Miller he screwed almost all of it over.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Baby boomer self-described "conservatives" drawing social security and sometimes maybe going to an evangelical church .... are not serious people.
The next generation of conservatives is bringing the motherfucking ruckus especially when compared to their liberal / progressive peers. Mike Gallagher has more foreign policy bonafides than anyone on the Republican campaign trail right now. He is just one of a literal generation of multi-tour combat veterans. He isn't 40 yet (or maybe he's just 40). The fastest growing subset of American Catholics - and traditional Catholics at that - are millenials. Even though I'm not a fan, Look at the subscriber growth of Catholic Joe Rogan. Even the weirdo dissident right online community flows pretty easily to Rogan-Tate-Huber-Jocko LiftBro territory.
The point is, after 2024-2028, I think you'll see the emergence of an American Conservatism that codes strongly and obviously towards traditional male patterns of socialization. The "machismo" of Trump will become laughable compared to basic and common actual badass credentials of, say, Congressman eye patch pirate SEAL. The "family values" double speak of evangelicals working on their second divorce will be trampled by NunCore chicks. Even if the numbers are quite less compared to median pop-culture Americans, I'm not super worried as that later cohort is largely and quickly dropping out of society. The "RETVRN" people are weird and sort of goofy - but I think they might be durable.
Long term, I'm jacked to the TITS! about American conservatism because millenial liberalism / progressive is already a circular firing squad of bewildering self-contradiction.
I just hope the Boomers don't immolate the entire nation before we get there.
There are phonies or pretenders everywhere. Not just evangelicals with divorces , but plenty 'trad' guys with undisclosed 'pharmacological enhancement' . Everything is acting to some degree. The image sold to the public is not reality.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Who ought we to be conquering if we were appropriately aspirational toward greatness?
Tuvalu. The domain name is great money, and what are they going to do, throw coconuts at you?
When you’re right you’re right. Though the total population doesn’t seem suitably glorious. Maybe we could vassalize Georgia and Armenia and diplo-annex them in 10 years?
Surely one Georgia is enough for the American Empire? At a certain point it becomes confusing, which is why I wager Britain hasn't been reverse-colonized.
We can call it Sakartvelo as a sop to local sensitivities
More options
Context Copy link
You have two Carolinas, two Dakotas, two Virginias. American Georgia can be South Georgia, Caucasian Georgia can be North Georgia. As long as the US doesn't try to annex the island of South Georgia there shouldn't be any issues.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm all for a peacefully-aggressive expansionist American foreign policy. We should be offering any small, culturally compatible, developed nation an opportunity to join the USA voluntarily with a path to full statehood. Potential targets:
Singapore. English speaking, small, rich, educated, strategically located, with a basically compatible common-law system of government. Singapore has limited natural sovereignty, and so would face relatively little difficulty in adapting to statehood. Would add massively to America's human capital and geographic reach. Would be the natural ambassadors of America to the rest of Asia, while the backing of the USA would permanently secure Singapore's future from covetous neighbors or population decline. A beautiful, genuinely diverse, and intelligent people, a credit to the Nation. Could ultimately foster further expansion into ASEAN countries, Malaysia is already most of the way there with the flag and over 60% of Malaysians are fluent in English.
Cuba. Small, relatively developed, produces disproportionate numbers of doctors and engineers relative to its size. Don't just raise the embargo, eliminate the border, correct the mistakes we made after the Spanish American war and make Cuba a state. Alongside Puerto Rico, and splitting the smaller island territories between them, Cuba would foster further filibustering into Latin America. Cubans are historically a brilliant people, with outsize contributions to arts, music, heroic politics, and science. Cuba developed its own damn Covid vaccine, think what they could do with Capitalism and Capital from the rest of the USA.
Greenland. One of Trump's better ideas. Allows us to surround Canada, a prelude to the inevitable CanadAnschluss. Honestly I have no opinion on Greenlanders, but there aren't that many of them anyway.
Ireland. The ethnic, cultural and linguistic ties are obvious, the most powerful Irishmen in history have all been American Presidents. Ireland's economy is already based on Americna corporations, why not formalize things? Becomes the entrepot to the EU for the USA (how statehood and EU membership and Northern Ireland border issues would be handled are obviously issues, but wouldn't be any more complicated than the British saga in the EU). A lovely people (on the inside) who have plenty to offer the USA in culture and humor.
That would be a good start.
One reasonable method of assessing the overall size of the USA's states may be to take the natural logarithm of (population × land area ÷ km2). Under that metric, the currently-incorporated states contain e27 ± 1.7 people⋅km2, ranging from eμ − 2.99σ (Rhode Island) to eμ + 2.2σ (Texas).
More options
Context Copy link
Ooh, or Flanders - my brother tells me they ~all speak fluent English
More options
Context Copy link
Hah, I've never heard this take before, but it's hilariously fascinating. We are a nation of states after all... why not just drop the pretence and build an empire for real?
The answer is in the question- the "nation of states" isn't used to putting up a united front about anything but the basics (outside of maybe what that year's progressives are busy being angry about, whose power waxes and wanes with time), so that empire tends to be relatively minimalistic.
The only reason to impose empire, at the ground level, is to make a statement to the world that a.) your social policies are obviously bullshit (if they were true the other country would already have adopted them), and b.) you're more interested in enforcing them than you are with what your vassal can do for you resource/economy-wise. All the imported goods get a lot more expensive once a country sends its goons to force those populations to abandon all their old gods and bow down before LGBTesus; you get way more revolts that way (Afghanistan being the most recent) and it's a great way to unify and otherwise motivate your enemies.
Better to just leave them to their own devices and try to impose bits and pieces when you can through things like the Imperial Monetary Fund; this is especially important should you have a nation who sees things the same way (and the Chinese are offering much better terms than the Soviets ever could, International Communism has a higher interest rate than Belt and Road).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
DeSantis isn't making too impressive a showing right now, unless events have moved on, which is rather disappointing after his performance as governor of Florida. Is he now finally deciding to stop trying to be the anti-Trump and come out as his own guy?
Yes, how very terrible it is that those poor, poor black women can't control their own fertility. They just get pregnant, who knows how, maybe the North Wind fertilises them, and unless we have abortion then they will all have twenty kids each with no ability at all not to get knocked up. Hooray for the white saviours making sure they don't have to have the babies even if they have no idea how baby-having happens!
Or maybe black women have intelligence and agency? Nah, can't be, why else would they be having babies via conservatives standing over them with whips forcing them to go out and have sex and not use protection and infallibly get pregnant from each encounter?
It is indeed true that the major reason, by a country mile, for abortion is economic, but tell me this: how is it that the liberal solution to "impoverished black women having babies" is "kill the babies" and not "end the impoverishment"?
if not for Trump, DeSantis has the goods to win. It's just that Trump is so dominant.
no, Desantis would lose a general election because he will not motivate needed voters to show up in the must-win mid-west
Desantis is an uncharismatic dork who would have to rely on a grass-roots get-out-the-vote operation, but despite the GOP, Inc. grift hoovering up hundreds of millions, the GOP doesn't have that and won't have that
without Trump, Desantis wouldn't be governor of Florida at all
Trump is his own get-out-the-vote operation who can fill stadiums in small towns in the middle of nowhere
it really is Trump or bust, there is no one else with a chance of winning a general election
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If America actually conquered people instead of experiments in nation-building in the ME or normalizing trade with what would become an even bigger rival, I'm sure the Trumpists would give more credit.
The mission is unclear, greatness doesn't seem to be a likely product but the cost is still perceived by MAGA-types.
More options
Context Copy link
I think this is misrepresenting the position of most of the working class Red Tribe Trump supporters I know. Sure, there is an element of "owning the blank" that happens on both sides. But they absolutely do aspire to greatness. They have a very heartfelt belief in the greatness of America. That's why the Trump's slogan was so successful. They are very serious people, with serious problems. That even I as a neo-liberal myself acknowledge are true and correct. Their small towns and cities have been hollowed out my decades of neglect and policy. Their kids are turning to drugs at tremendous rates. Getting good healthcare coverage is difficult.
and Trump for all his faults speaks to them in a way no-one else really does. And many of them acknowledge that he is a serial liar, cheater and has an ego the size of a small moon. But at least he talks about going to bat for them. DeSantis and Haley may be conservative and know the system better than he does, but they also pattern match to exactly the same kind of Republican politician who has sided with big business over the little people for the last 50 years.
See Fetterman's success (even after a stroke!) for another kind of "working class joe" kind of vibe (even as it isn't really true for either Trump or Fetterman). My old neighbor, told me he would vote for Fetterman way before he would vote for DeSantis, and he is diehard for Trump, all day every day.
The truth is, they have been taken for granted, and that has created a level of anger and despair. And for all Trump's opponents may well be better at navigating bureaucracy they are not well situated to tap into that emotion and channel it positively. I think DeSantis is an excellent political operator. But he has the charisma of a wet paper bag where the bottom fell out and spilled your shopping all over the floor.
Trump, I predict will (barring any weirdness) easily win the primary, and it will be a 50-50 shot against Biden, depending on how the economy is feeling in a few months. His big weakness of course is that he is divisive, his supporter's love him, but his opponents hate him, so he drives turnout both ways. I think he probably narrowly loses because of this, but I am by no means certain of that and he could easily win.
But to be clear, Trump supporters are very serious people, they just have very different priorities that you do or I do. To many of them, it is absolutely not a contradiction that abortion is a bigger deal than immigration. Sure a conservative utilitarian might point out that immigration is more of a "threat" to conservatism, but they are not utilitarians. While they certainly do care about mass immigration it isn't a big leap to understand why they might think (what they see as) murder of children is a teensy bit more important than illegal border crossings. Especially when it is possible deport people after they enter the country, but you can't reverse an abortion. Having said that, they support Trump who wants to build the wall, so it isn't as if they are against doing more than one thing at the same time!
More options
Context Copy link
few Trump voters would pick Trump if you asked them, "You get Trump but he does nothing and 'fails' or you can get Desantis and he actually does all the things he's promising and 'succeeds'"
even slight exposure to Trump voters, or especially die-hard supporters, makes clear they think Desantis is a fraud who will sell them down the river like so many other Republicans, not that he's just not Trump
Trump is a reaction to "American conservative" elites being unserious people and, worse, complete losers.
funny enough, the exact opposite of what Trump wanted to do and what caused his support to begin with
trump didn't run on ending abortion in 2016, he made immigration and trade the election topics pretty much single-handedly, and it wasn't the driving message in 2020 either
"trump is a dumb failure and the peasants support him to fail even if they could succeed" may scratch whatever itch you have, but it's nonsense
one, a claim the US or the median American only spends "a pittance" on America's empire is nonsense and attempting to make the entire discussion about "America's empire" as only talking about a couple hundred billion dollars going to Ukraine is dishonest
two, "American conservatives" and Trump supporters are not the same group of people. Many Trump supporters are fine and proud of American empire, they're upset that it's being used to impoverish them while they get no benefit. They were proud when they went over or sent their sons to fight for it. An easy way to see this is when Trump makes comments about the middle eastern wars that we conquered and didn't even get the spoils. Others want a different "American empire"; they don't like seeing their cities and towns gutted and turned into drug-zombieland as their jobs and wealth are shipped overseas and the wealth to the coasts. Very few want the US to not matter on the world stage.
it's not that "Trump supporters" or "American conservatives" don't want "empire," it's that they don't want an "empire" which means getting their sons killed and them impoverished to make Kabul, Baghdad, and Tehran safe for Pride parades all the while making people who hate them fabulously wealthy
three, even if this was an accurate description of the "American conservatives" who support Trump and of the "pittance," trying to portray ending Affirmative action, an institution which may as well be the bedrock of American institutions, and ending sending "a pittance" to a war on the other side of the planet as in the same category of things to prioritize is just silly because one is relatively easily obtainable right now and the other is revolutionary
additionally, the SCOTUS which exists in its current form due heavily in part to Donald Trump, did deliver a blow to Affirmative Action, Inc., in SFFA v Harvard
a tv show host clown beat the vast political machines of the GOP and Democrat Parties to become President of the United States on the slogan "Make America Great Again" because his supporters wanted to go back to a time they thought America was "great"
a claim these people do not "aspire to greatness, personally or collectively," is simply ridiculous; for some of them, collective greatness is all they have left
your model of Trump supporters and American politics generally is way off
I would not be so sure about this. War has generally been a a popular platform for the right . first-order patriotism/nationalism takes precedent over second-order questions like who profits or whose interests are served. An empire by definition means being global and enforcing its interests abroad.
If trump were replaced by someone else, his replacement would get probably the same # of votes, so for all intents and purposes they are the same people . Even if you vote for Trump grudgingly, that still is a show of support.
what the empire looks like or should look like and what are its interest are subjective; part of "the right" soured on the middle east adventures and when asked they tell you why and it's some mix of what I listed: they don't believe the empire benefits them, they don't like what the empire is and who it benefits, and they don't like a lot of what it pushes, consuming their blood and wealth to keep running
no, this couldn't be more wrong; Trump wins because he motivates non and low likely voters to show up when they otherwise wouldn't
the reason why the GOP loses despite great metrics is because they do not motivate voters while Democrats have bottom-up get-out-the-vote machines going in every small city and larger across the United States who deliver ballots to friendly counting centers
in a state like Ohio where Trump won by over 8 points, the last election had a Biden +2 electorate; where did all of the Trump voters go? they didn't show up in his absence
Trump voters are not GOP voters and to the extent they vote GOP it's because Trump gets them to show-up
This presupposes that Trump wins. He lost the popular vote to Dolores Umbridge in 2016 and lost the popular and electoral votes to an empty suit in 2020.
Trump appeals differently to swing voters compared to the Goldman-Aramco Republicans, but it isn't obvious that he appeals more to them. What is clear is that the Republican base prefer Trump to the Goldman-Aramco Republicans that run against him in primaries.
thankfully, the national popular vote isn't how presidents are elected in the United States and the other candidates on deck in 2016 or 2020 would have lost much worse
sorry mottezens, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz weren't going to win in the midwest, some of those states for the first time in over a generation, in 2016 against Hillary Clinton
You just don’t know this. Romney would have won in 2016 against Hilary, he just couldn’t win against Obama (and neither would Trump have been able to).
Speaking of things no one actually knows ...
More options
Context Copy link
I don't know that a counterfactual which didn't happen "would have" won in 2016 against Hillary? No, he wouldn't have. A claim that Mitt Romney would have won PA, WI, MI, or even OHIO in 2016, all necessary states to win to win the presidency, when he lost in OHIO by over 3 points to unpopular incumbent with policies so unpopular they caused the largest seat swing for the GOP in 80 years in 2010 is just ridiculous.
No, Mitt isn't winning Ohio in 2016 either after ads hit the TV screens with cry stories of people who lost their pensions because Mitt Romney and Co. bought their companies and gutted them to sell them off to foreigners so they didn't have assets to finance the pool.
your model and info is just way off reality
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Trump also brings out non-regular voters on the other side.
Truly, a festival of democracy. How can we ever repay Donald?
More options
Context Copy link
The non-regular voters and non-voters don't split their votes evenly between red and blue; Trump has commanding leads in the non and low-voter turnout demo largely because non-regular voters who lean blue are already well mobilized by Democrat "nonpartisan" get-out-the-vote operations across the US which deliver ballots to friendly counting centers. This is even more true in the midwest, GA, NV, AZ, etc.
The GOP low turn-out Finkelstein strategy of the 1990s doesn't work and hasn't worked in the general for 15+ years. We've seen this strategy fail repeatedly and recently. Despite the best generic ballot in decades, the GOP was able to deliver only a neutered majority in 2022. It's really only still effective at shaping the primaries towards Party derps who then go on to lose.
Sounds a bit like the main man himself.
A lot of the electoral issues the GOP has faced over the past 6 years is crazy MAGA candidates winning primaries on Trump's endorsement and then going on to lose the general.
this is simply wrong; low voter turnout doesn't benefit MAGA candidates in primaries, it's the opposite
without MAGA, there are no big GOP victories, especially at the national level
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How many times does it need to be expressed that a huge chunk of American conservatives are also religious and consider ending what they conceptualize as mass scale baby murder to be extremely serious? Please stop using this like it's some kind of a dunk, all it does is indicate that the person using it like a dunk doesn't have a good mental model of the minds of the people they are trying to dunk on.
If that was their motivation they wouldn't vote for Trump a second time, they already got their judges and Trump has expressed much milder and more reserved pro-life sentiments than many of his contemporaries on the primary ballot.
yup. There were always better pro-life alternatives. It was clearly obvious in 2015/2016 that Trump was not a pro-lifer
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, if they're paying attention: The win was from Mitch McConnell stealing a seat from Obama. Literally any warm body with an R next to their name would have produced the same or better results for the pro-lifers during Trump's term, that's just when the last seat needed happened to open up.
we have decades of history with people with R next to their name who nominated justices who refused to do just that
arguing counterfactuals are nice for the proponents because in practice they're unfalsifiable; no other GOP candidate was going to flip PA, MI, WI, likely even Ohio, and other states to win the presidency in 2016
the corporate neocon grift of GOP, Inc., which had lost elections for over a generation in those states, was somehow going to accomplish what Donald Trump accomplished with a radically different message who near single-handedly made the 2016 election about immigration and trade while explicitly denouncing the idiotic neocon projects to boos from GOP, Inc., stooges
Mitch McConnell blocking Obama from replacing Scalia was likely a conditional to the win, but the rest of your statement is based on counterfactuals supported by an unfalsifiable myth of the great alternative GOP winner which does not exist
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Religious conservatives have reasons for supporting the GOP and being very invested in GOP judicial appointments that go beyond abortion. Notable among them are conscience rights/religious objection, support for parental rights, especially in education, and preventing discrimination against religiously-based organizations by public agencies. And the GOP does in fact deliver on these promises to its conservative Christian base; it's generally easier to live the trad conservative christian lifestyle in red states than blue states, and generally easier in blue states than in western Europe.
The GOP, yes; I'm talking about supporting a different Republican.
Why? Trump delivers on his promises to that section of his base, it’s only fair to give him loyalty in return.
He appointed a conservative Justice when a seat opened up, which is what literally anyone with an R next to their name would have done at the time.
He's been a lot softer on the pro-life message than some of his competitors, it's pretty reasonable to predict he's not the option that would deliver the most on that front.
Of course if your decision metric is 'giving loyalty for past favors' instead of 'doing the thing that will accomplish your goals in the future' then yeah that makes sense.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The value is in the judicial appointments , which can long outlast him and have far reaching implications. Maybe a single piece of legislation that slows illegal immigration would be optimistic.
More options
Context Copy link
It would be some feat to pardon people accused of committing a crime after he wasn't president anymore, are we talking time travel or just precognition here?
Personally I'm just sitting back and watching the circus for entertainment value (which I can do as a non-American, sorry USAians), though I think there must be some miracle in operation this time round because Snopes of all places fact-checked a Trump story (that he had said something which had been misrepresented) and deemed it false! What wonder is this? A favourable decision for Orange Man Bad by Snopes? Keep an eye out for three headed calves and talking dogs!
From scotusblog:
On January 7th Trump could have pardoned them all.
I think the confusion is that only some by the 20th had undergone any criminal proceedings. most were unidentified.
Confusion is there because some folks cannot accept that Trump obviously threw his supporters under the bus and have to come up with cope theories why that wasn't what happened.
More options
Context Copy link
Presidents have previously granted mass pardons of categories of people without knowing or specifying each named individual. Based on my very layman understanding, I think Trump could have blanket pardoned them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
He was President up until January 20.
It's a nice technical point, isn't it? He was technically president, but he had been beaten in the election. More informed people can tell me if he was still able to issue pardons while the clock on his term was running out. Biden was president-elect and inaugurated on January 21st, so you're saying Trump could have exercised full presidential powers right up until the very last minute?
I vaguely remember that he wasn't allowed to talk after Jan 6th. He lost Twitter, I don't remember any press conferences, there was the impeachment, but I don't think he was permitted to talk to the public or sign anything.
Legally he should have been able to issue pardons up until his last day, that is a power the president has. But I don't know if he was allowed near a pen.
He was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Donald_Trump_presidency_(2020_Q4–January_2021)
The start of that article is a shitshow, but the timeline table is relatively solid. He’s very quiet for a couple days, then
I elided a bunch of actions by his cabinet and by Congress. He was also making speeches and TV appearances in this window.
Thank you for the correction, like I said it was a vague memory.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes and yes. It's very common for presidents to issue last-minute pardons, and Trump was no exception.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_granted_executive_clemency_by_Donald_Trump#Chronology
Furthermore,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_pardons_in_the_United_States#Modern_process
More options
Context Copy link
It's a proud American tradition. The powers of the supreme court are based in a case about midnight appointments. Clinton was issuing pardons and selling off anything that wasn't nailed down until the last possible second.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Other possible ones would be just "being on the winning side" (a nonsensical but still powerful motivation for many) and "for all his faults just liking him more than the options" (insofar as I've understood at this point considered typical Republican lizards who are found likable by no-one expect their spouse, if even them).
More options
Context Copy link
The steelmanned case is "Trump 2024 The Return - Make Liberals Cry Again" (bumper sticker). Obviously Trump is a greedy unprincipled narcissistic hypocrite who hasn't delivered on anything really, but he sure does drive the sanctimonious liberal elites insane in a way that no other Republican can. Plus he's pretty entertaining, at times.
Much more exciting than a generic Republican. I don't know if there are more redeeming qualities than this.
More options
Context Copy link
Haley is the same old establishment. Ramaswamy bugs me on some level. De Santis would be preferable if he were not a lawyer.
Wait, why is lawyerdom bad? I'd think it would make him more competent.
I think that in light of the existence of the judiciary branch, which is pretty much exclusively staffed by such, lawyers holding elected office in the other two branches runs contrary to the notion of checks and balances.
Well, you'd think the people drafting the law, at least, should have some facility with it, so it makes sense to have lawyers in Congress, at least. And if the executive is supposed to be executing the law, that would seem useful. (Or, in actual fact, doing whatever he can manage, lawyering would still be useful)
Yes, but it is outweighed by the conflict of interest. I don’t think it’s an inherent indicator of competence either - iirc Biden, Harris, Pence, and Hillary needed multiple attempts to pass the bar exam.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Lawyers have a professional incentive to overcomplicate law and government access. While not all attorneys succomb to this incentive, many votors prefer non-attorneys in government.
Do they really have an incentive like that on a personal level?
I could certainly see them being less bothered by complex law, and so not realize that it's a problem/not worth it, but it would be weird for them to actually want it to be hard to approach.
It would be weird for lawyers to want to create more demand for lawyers?
Yes.
Why are you saying they'd want to create demand for lawyers. Are you suggesting that they personally plan to go into the field? Are you suggesting that they are consciously thinking that more complex laws will raise demand for them?
That might be plausible for some administrative agency workers, but I find that hard to believe in the case of the president, and unlikely in congress. The focus would rather be on their actual incentives: good law (to the extent that they're ethical), and what's politically advantageous (to the extent that they're not).
It turns out, though, that it's politically advantageous to have complex law, because you get lobbied by the big companies that can afford the legal burden for the sake of getting rid of their weaker competition who can't.
Note that that doesn't really depend on whether you're a lawyer. The lobbyists and interest groups will do most of the work of writing the complex law for you.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I believe they don’t consciously do that, but it likely is how bureaucracy grows. As Randall Munroe of XKCD puts it, “Even when they’re trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person’s familiarity with their field.”
Imagine “User Interface” testing for government programs, where the goal is to make every form legible to and usable by a ten-year-old child. Imagine being able to take your pink slip to the unemployment office and have “social safety net” programs guarantee you’ll have rent payments and medical insurance that same day.
I’ve played open-world RPGs which simulate civilization-level legal systems by detecting if you take or break anything which isn’t yours, or if you try to hurt anyone else, and it’s a decent enough level of realism most of the time. One thing only the most devoted game modders do is to try to make the economy and tax laws semi-realistic. But if it were their job, they’d build systems so complex, only they could interact successfully with them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I hate commenting twice on the same thing but Jamie Dimon basically steel-manned at WEF today and he always came off as corporatists Dem to me.
https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1747645227194855919?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Summary - Trump was right on everything (NATO, Immigration, tax cuts).
More options
Context Copy link
Dems haven’t gotten tired of screaming over nothing yet, ergo, there is still some screaming left for them to do.
This says nothing but "hahah my enemies are crazy." Don't post low effort sneers like this.
Ok sure, I’ll respect that, but for your consideration this was an invitation to gush out a motivation. I meant it less as an authentic idea and more as an explanation of the emotional motivation that I feel is at work here.
You can propose an emotional motivation, even an uncharitable one, if you put enough work into fleshing out and justifying it. Not just with a low-effort one-liner.
Fair enough
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What is the steelman for voting for anyone in the primaries? Why should I spend hours in the freezing cold at some stupid caucus just so that my preferred candidate increases his voting share by 0.000001%?
You don't matter, but if enough people think like that it really matters.
In addition to the response by @BahRamYou if everyone started believing that way then I’d vote since it would matter.
More options
Context Copy link
I wish I had the superpower to make everyone else think the same way as me, but sadly I'm just not that charismatic. Even if I was, I don't think me marking a ballot would do it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In my mind there has to be a compelling reason not to vote for Trump. There isn't. At all.
My bias is that none of these people will improve my life in any way that really matters. Certainly not any of the non-Trump candidates. But with Trump, still the answer is almost certainly no, but there is that wildcard chance that something cool happens.
When I consider that, in my lifetime, there will never be another man like Trump running for president, and that I will have ample opportunity to vote for conventional politicians like DeSantis et al., to me, there's no decision that needs to be made. It's clear as day.
That makes no sense. You don't have to vote for anyone, so the default option should be "don't vote for anyone".
Unfortunately, "none of the above" is not an option at the polls. Until that's the case, my default option is "someone will win this election, and the consequences of who wins is directly proportional to my likelihood of voting".
Yes it is. You don't have to fill every spot on a ballot, and indeed don't have to vote at all if you don't want to.
Let's see if rephrasing this helps.
If "none of the above" were allowed to win, I'd be okay with selecting that more often. If you're stuck picking which color boot is going to be on our necks - and that's the world we live in - then I'm going to pick the color that matches my hair.
If "none of the above" were allowed to win, what happens when a supreme court justice dies?
Allowing "none of the above" to win doesn't necessarily mean you leave the office unfilled. It could for instance force a new election with the candidates from the first barred from running.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A plausible ranking of what a US president does by importance is (1) Controlling Nuclear Weapons, (2) Foreign Policy, (3) Appointing Federal Judges, (4) Regulatory Policy, (5) Budgetary Stuff, (6) Other Law Making, (7) Communications. Almost everyone ignores (1) which is horrible, but that seems to be the nature of democracy. Perhaps it was mostly luck but US foreign policy went extremely well under Trump as he seemed to have deterred adversaries from making new trouble. If you are a conservative Trump did about as well with (3) and (4) as you could hope from any president especially with respect to the Covid vaccines. Washington is broken with respect to (5) and Trump didn't fix it but most likely neither would anyone else. We didn't get many bad new laws under Trump which is the best you can realistically hope for if you are a conservative. If you like Trump's style then he maxes out with (7).
More options
Context Copy link
Which one of your categories does the idea that it's all about status and posturing correspond to? One tribe has pulled out all stops and staked a lot of prestige and institutional power perception on the idea that Trump must be prevented, and when that tribe's power is based on the perception that it can and will get its way in the end anyway, it is necessarily diminished if that is shown to not be the case. If the Democrats had spilled as much ink arguing that no orange piñata must be allowed within the boundaries of the National Mall as they did on the orange man in the White House, forcing through such a light act of cultural appropriation might likewise turn out to be a rational goal to use billions of red-tribe campaign money for.
(cf. also prison stories where they say that displaying crazy violent overreactions a few times is the key to being left in peace)
More options
Context Copy link
The temptation to give the middle finger to the Respectable Establishment is strong.
The only other somewhat viable middle finger choice in the primaries would have been Vivek, but he’s out.
I think this is probably the main thing. Voters know that they can't control what happens once the candidate gets into office. Maybe Desantis wusses out on all his promises. Maybe Trump flounders and runs through a staffing treadmill and accomplishes nothing. But what the voters can control is who gets into office, and the left is busy sending the signal as loudly as possible that the mere fact of Trump getting elected again would be a major blow to the establishment, and conservative voters believe them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The same reasoning as voting for anyone in the primaries: preferring him to the competition, or believing he could drum up more enthusiasm in the general election than the competition, or not really paying attention and recognizing his name more than others.
At least he has already been president, and mostly just produced a lot of media drama and didn't get as much done as some had hoped. There are worse things.
More options
Context Copy link
Because he's better than the alternatives, and has the greatest odds of beating Biden? It does not have to be deeper than that.
He doesn't have the greatest odds of beating Biden (that would be Nikki Haley according to the polls), and he's worse than DeSantis on just about anything where they differ.
I doubt Haley with full exposure would win. She would get some points with independents but lose more with the base. Her unfavorables amongst republicans are getting higher and higher.
What are republicans going to do about even if they're unfavourable, let Biden win?
There are some people openly suggesting that they will never vote for Haley and would stay home instead of voting for Biden. It seems insane to me to screw the down-ballot candidates just because you can't stand the top of the ticket, but these are otherwise sensible-sounding voices, so who knows?
Those people wouldn't say they would vote for Haley to a polster either, so that's already included in the equation.
My point is not yet — the more people know about Haley the more Never Nikki republicans will become.
Isn't Haley just a weathervane?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’d vote down ballot but I wouldn’t vote for Haley. She is a bad joke
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I imagine they'd hold their nose and vote for her, generally, unless Trump actively campaigned to see her lose?
There is the choice of simply not voting.
More options
Context Copy link
Similarly to when Mittens ran, I'd vote third party or write in a spoiled ballot name if Haley is the nominee.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think the argument I made in 2016 holds up fairly well. Eight years of subsequent events mainly just add exclamation marks, I think.
More options
Context Copy link
IMO while Trump is most likely going to lose, I'm not convinced that either Haley or Desantis have a chance of winning either. While I personally like Desantis he might be the least personable candidate since Richard Nixon if not Barry Goldwater. Haley, meanwhile, appeals to a coalition that's won the popular vote in a Presidential election once in the last 30 years (Dubya would get stomped in 2024 in the Electoral College as well as the popular vote if he performed as he did in 2000 given contemporary demographics.).
Put bluntly, save for a time in the 1990s when fiscal conservatism got trendy and people were really sick of crime and a shorter time in the 2010s when people were mad about Obamacare (which the GOP did a good job of milking for House purposes with REDMAP) the Republican platform has been dreadfully unpopular since the 1930s. For a Republican to win the Presidency they either need a God-tier candidate (Eisenhower and Reagan come to mind here.) or for the Democrats to self-destruct/be in office when something really bad happens. Richard Nixon didn't magically become more telegenic from 1960 to 1968, for example.
So, counterintuitively, Trump supporters aren't exactly wrong to value style over substance. A non-stylish Republican isn't going to win. Unfortunately for them Trump seems to inspire his opponents as much if not more than his supporters and was largely incompetent at governing, but it isn't as if the GOP had been putting forth an all-star cast before he showed up.
Haley polls well, somehow.
Any candidate without Trump's negatives running against Biden would poll well.
I don't know why Biden is doing badly enough with swing voters that his losing to a coup-plotting serial bankrupt rapist is a serious possibility, but he clearly is. Haley is clearly sane, hasn't wrecked the economy (whether the Biden economy is actually wrecked is controversial, but the median voter definitely thinks it is), and doesn't have a junkie failson in the pay of the Red Chinese. Given what the voters think about Biden, that makes her a good alternative.
If nothing else, the various mask-off moments of the last few months have some moderate voters questioning what fraction of Biden's coalition supports antisemitic violence (the Ivy League drama isn't helping) and some number of far-left voters threatening to sit-out because he hasn't cut off arms deliveries to Israel. The administrations mostly noncommittal responses haven't been seen positively on either side.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If you look at what his supporters are saying, they trust him more than any other candidate to do the things they think they want him to do. That this requires a huge suspension of disbelief is just part of the process.
MBD of National Review told a story recently of asking his driver why he supports Trump. The driver said he thinks military experience is important and Trump went to a military style school for a while. MBD asked him if he knew that DeSantis actually served in the Navy for six years (as a lawyer) and the driver admitted that he knew this. He just counted Trump's boarding school experience as more relevant than active duty service.
He starts from the premise that Trump is his guy and any evidence is weighted to support that conclusion. Somehow, Trump has convinced a huge segment of the population that he's "their guy." It baffles me, too, but it seems that that's all there is to it.
I'm going to with grug-brain more correct than the midwit on this one -- being a JAG lawyer is not relevant military service in the sense that any historical citizen would care about, when thinking about wanting a leader who had proven themselves in the military. In fact, it is probably a net negative, it is anti-military service, in that a JAG lawyer is going to be trained in a way of thinking and operating that is inimical to historically how successful wars were fought and won.
Ideally, you would have a bona fide military veteran and successful general to choose from. But if you have to choose between frauds, the bombastic, even winking, fraud of the Trump is more appealing to some than the sophisticated and self-serious fraud of pretending that being a lawyer gumming up the military operations is something that counts as being a successful warrior for your country.
More options
Context Copy link
I can't remember who said this, I think it may have been one of the podcast bro's back in 2016, but part of Trump's attractiveness - as a born-into-wealth billionaire - to working class people is that he looks, sounds, and acts like they think they would if they were billionaires.
boughtmarried an exotic european supermodelThis feeds into a comfortable narrative for working class southerners and midwesterners. Sure, he's a plutocrat, but, unlike Mitt Romney, I can envision him tearing into a Big Mac because I have seen him tear into a big mac a bunch of times.
One thing to point out: Trump gladly and gleefully wears MAGA ballcaps a lot. In $5000 suits. And it somehow looks ... normal? Most other politicians would never make the fashion faux pas of mixing a ballcap with a suit and, even if they did for some sort of folksy photo-op, it would seem about as natural as Hillary's southern drawl. Trump thinks his MAGA ballcap looks fucking awesome and so wears it with confidence, arrogance, and pinache. Double for the dick-length red ties.
Trump is, in fact, a real estate huckster. And if you're a working class dude or chick, you know a lot of real estate hucksters, or used car salesmen, or plumbers who do bad work and overcharge, or house painters who use lead paint still, or an electrician who's been electrocuted on more jobs than he hasn't...you're probably related to one or more of these people. So, Trump Is. Your. Guy.
(Side note: This is why Ramaswamay failed. He may be just as much of a huckster as DJT, but ... a biotech huckster? Not going to work)
Some of these reasons sound like just-so stories. When Ron Paul would routinely wear an oversized suit I could say something like, "That's relatable, it's like your cousin Joe who has that one imperfect suit he wears for special occasions!"
But RP went nowhere with most.
More options
Context Copy link
Has Ramaswamay failed? He's a rich guy, sure, but he's also 38 years old, had zero political experience, and just got 7% in Iowa. If I were rating that effort on a scale 1-10 scale, I'd probably call it about a 9. He's plausibly in position to be in Trump's good graces and get a cabinet position if he wants it, setting him up for further federal political opportunities in the future, if that's a goal. That he beat the breaks off multiple Republican governors, including a tech billionaire governor, would make this a success from any perspective other than a pure pass/fail grade that requires beating Trump.
There is no sugarcoating that 4th place, tied for last, is a failure. It felt like his campaign was DOA . Dropping out in last is what I expected from him. He had not built the necessary connections or exposure to have any hope. You cannot just ride in from the private sector and proclaim "I am really smart and competent vote for me". It does not work like that.
There are many things where finishing 4th place isn't failure. I don't understand why you would say otherwise. If some random amateur shows up to the Boston Marathon and finishes 4th, he didn't fail. Beating a bunch of governors with pre-existing institutional support is an impressive achievement.
4th out of 30,000 runners And losing by such a large margin to Haley , too.
also the typical runner does not have a multi-millions dollar media campaign. Given all the media coverage he got, for whatever reason it failed to resonate. His performance would be like a runner on PEDs getting last place against other runners on PEDs but he beat the runners who were not on PEDs.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'd agree. He is in a decent position for some kind of future position, if he wants it. He almost certainly knows his chances of winning the nomination were close to zero. So that probably was not his motivation.
I agree with you that Ramaswamay was running to profile himself and make him an obvious candidate for some kind of position in a Trump administration, but I don't think it has worked for him.
Given how Trump thinks, Ramaswamay needed to pull out before Iowa to get a consolation prize out of Trump. My read of Trump's social media rantings is that he thinks Ramaswamay continuing to contest the nomination for as long as he did to be disloyal behaviour.
Nah. He dropped out and endorsed Trump, It's all good now.
I can't speak for Trump personally, but "people like that" hold onto grudges, particularly where there is a sense of betrayal.
There are a lot of people who Trump could appoint to administration positions who didn't run against him in a primary.
He's since had a rally with Trump.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I remember all the snobbishness about Trump first time round (ugh, he eats his steak with ketchup!) and that, coming from the Party of the Little Guy, Minorities, and Totally Not College Grad White Professionals, really sounded even worse than it needed to be. If you're sneering so hard that your eyes are permanently crossed looking down your nose at 'what a low-class bum' his mannerisms are, then how the hell are you going to appeal to those same lower class voters who might eat burgers with ketchup and steak with ketchup and what's wrong with ketchup anyways?
Hillary did herself no favours with the "basket of deplorables" and it's really hard to believe the other side that "no, we really care about you and want to make your lives better" when you know they think of you as a deplorable. Why are the working class blue-collar whites voting against their economic interests instead of voting Democrat? Well, why are the Democrats doing all they can to sound like their fondest dream is to be able to piss on working class blue-collar whites?
I do think that's it. He's relatable in a way any of the others, Republican or Democrat, aren't (maybe Joe Manchin, but he gets more stick from his own party than the opposition precisely because he represents rural/industrial Virginia, knows it, knows what his constituents want, and gets it for them to the best of his ability). Think of that book about Hillary, which I can't really blame Hillary for since she had nothing to do with it, but oh man. Cringe-inducing (remember the illustration implying that Jackie Robinson and others had it so much easier in life than a middle-class white girl in the 60s?). Imagine a version about Trump instead, it would be awesome because it would be so over the top!
EDIT: Those illos are even creepier than I remembered, what is with giving Little Girl Hillary those staring, painfully wide-open, serial-killer eyes?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I find the need for "steelmanning" of trump to be silly.
He's running for president. People like him for what he stands for. They can vote for whoever they want, it's a republic with tinges of democracy.
I will be voting Democrat because I don't like Russia/Putin, but that's the extent of my reasoning for my presidential picks. I understand and see why people like Trump, and to say that he's being unduly attacked because he doesn't "fit in" to the establishment is not a lie.
They're very clearly trying to pin him to the wall for things that would be relatively minor scandals with a few fees and a public apology and then it would be over with any other ex-president. It's really satisfying to see how hard the establishment strains at gnats to pin him to the wall, when we know that they've gotten used to letting people like epstein go around as an open secret.
More options
Context Copy link
Easy. I want a Trump presidency 2.0 because, unlike Haley and Desantis and Ramaswamy, he doesn't have the option to defect. Trump has burned the bridge behind him. I would trust Desantis not to defect, I guess, but less so than Trump, because Trump doesn't have the option. I'd vote third party over Haley.
Look, I know establishment republicans will make a few nods towards social conservatism and then get back to spreading it for the chamber of commerce. Trump won't.
I don't believe this. He is going to have to pardon himself of felony charges anyways. Why not plunder whatever he can for personal gain? What's a few more pardons or a third (or fourth) impeachment to his eternal legacy? He might single-mindedly appoint judges based only on how likely they are to back him up in his legal battles, above all other considerations. Isn't that defecting?
In practice, no, because those would be hardliner conservative judges.
More options
Context Copy link
That's not what defecting means in this context. It's also not really in character.
Defecting would be declaring that Somali migrants are the real true Americans and dumping millions of them into the suburbs. Or eliminating tariffs on China in exchange for a Netflix deal. Or a million other things that benefit the DC and Donor classes.
I'll accept your terms on defect but self-serving actions seems exactly in character for Trump. He lashes out any one who disagrees with him, why wouldn't he try to stack the deck with loyalists?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Trump spent his entire presidency catering to chamber of commerce Republicans with the sole exception of a brief and insignificant trade spat with China that was ultimately a bipartisan policy (continued by Biden) anyway.
even if this were an accurate portrayal of the Donald Trump administration (it's not), this is still better than the last GOP administrations or viable alternative winners (which don't exist)
the non-Trump GOP only has shouldas and couldas and other unfalsifiable counterfactuals because their actual track record when they have positions of power is always finding ways to lose and fail to deliver what they promised and what their voters want
whenever Trump isn't in the picture, the GOP defaults to garbage, loser politics which harm their voters, "the right" generally, and has no chance of changing the direction of the country; they are essentially the soft pillow powers-that-be use to strangle the right quietly in their beds
The next-up neocon/neolib derp Nimarata Haley advocated for raising the social security age. Can you imagine? A GOP politician who is in office almost exclusively due to people over the age of 65 advocating for a policy that directly attacks one of their main supporter bases. Welcome to non-Trump GOP Politics.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
He defected during the campaign already, when he said New York handled Covid better than Florida.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The responses by various commenters here reveal severe contradictions at the heart of “the case for Trump”. I think that this profoundly confused tweet by Martyr Made is illustrative.
In this framing, Trump is the champion of the weird, socially-unpopular kids - the ones shut out of bourgeois normal society. The jocks and the pretty girls snub and bully them, but by banding together in a coalition with disaffected members of the social elite who have become awoken to their plight, they can launch a liberatory strike against the privileged upper crust who have historically marginalized them.
This is textbook leftism! This is literally the ur-narrative of the cultural and political left. It’s also the opposite of reality. Blonde jocks and rich cheerleaders are one of the core voting constituencies for Donald Trump! The weird alienated kids who got bullied in school, meanwhile, are a core Democrat constituency! One bloc of Trump voters are now apparently attempting to re-brand themselves, or re-contextualize themselves, as oppressed victims - the marginalized Other.
However, this is blatantly at odds with the original core appeal of Trump, which is that he was a champion of normal, well-adjusted, classic and confident America, here to take the country back from the freaks and faggots and pencil-necks who have essentially usurped control through subterfuge and used that power to resentfully force their unpopular obsessions on the mass of normal popular people.
And of course, it is manifestly risible for Trump voters to claim to hate bullying. Whatever else you want to say about the Trump phenomenon in 2016, it clearly involved a substantial amount of bullying, derision, and even rough-housing/violence at some of the rallies. (I’m not absolving the Clinton campaign, which of course also involved a different type of bullying and derision.) Trump supporters have also ruthlessly mocked and derided “DeSantoids”, using classic nerd-bashing behavior; see Scott Greer’s (admittedly amusing) unflattering impression of DeSantis’ nasal voice and spergy affect.
Trump voters have no leg to stand on if they wish to wear the mask of the oppressed and marginalized. That sort of maudlin victimhood-signaling has never been what conservativism or right-wing values are about. If anything, Trump voters should be proud to be the jocks and cheerleaders rightly excluding the maladjusted weirdos; playing this “no, you’re not the underdog, I’m the underdog” game is just totally conceding the left’s frame.
If anything, Trump voters most closely resemble the oppositional culture cultivated by blacks. When they are a minority or are relatively disempowered, they cry victim and throw out accusations of cheating and unfair privilege. When they are a local majority or gain any sort of power, though, they ruthlessly bully whites and Asians; they also bully those within their own ranks who “act white” by refusing to wallow in victimhood and who aspire to earn a spot in the majority culture via self-betterment and the adoption of bourgeois values. Blacks as a cultural-political constituency would rather destroy the mainstream American establishment - supposedly for excluding and “othering” them - than try to prove worthy of being embraced by that establishment. And when they don’t get what they feel they’re owed, they riot.
I say this all as someone who voted for Trump in 2020 and who will vote for him again this November, assuming he’s the GOP nominee. I just hate liars and cope. The people in power in Washington DC and in the media and academia are certainly not Chads and Stacys. They were not jocks and cheerleaders. They see themselves as champions of the marginalized and disempowered, the same way that [the Trump who exists only the minds of his ardent supporters] does. Oppositional populism is a great way to drum up votes and guilt your way into power, but it’s also the sign of a catastrophically unwell society. Give me a candidate who is proud to represent normal, productive, intelligent people, and maybe then I’ll start getting excited. That’s what Ron DeSantis was supposed to be, and Trump supporters called him a fraud and a sellout for not going to bat hard enough for J6 rioters or agreeing that the 2020 election was stolen.
Our country is fucked.
It really isn't. It will be ok if Biden wins and it will be ok if Trump wins and it will be ok if Haley or DeSantis wins. For the vast majority of people life will not change much in any of those cases. Taxes might rise or fall immigration might rise or fall, but the political fallout overall will be more theatre than anything else. For 95% of people in the country, the differences will be actually tiny.
agree it's not. people say this every four years and then lo and behold things go on. It is changing, no doubt, but this is not the same as its destruction. Metrics such as GDP and others remain strong.
More options
Context Copy link
This is just demonstrably untrue. Have you considered that some of us believe that current levels of mass immigration are an existential threat to the future of this country? That whether or not DEI and affirmative action programs expand or retract will have a measurable and significant effect on the efficacy of our institutions and infrastructure? That one presidential candidate is more likely than another to create the conditions that will plunge the country into a large-scale war?
It can't be demonstrably untrue, because whether the country is fucked or not is not an objective question. It's a subjective one. You think it is, I do not.
I think it is better than it was 50 years ago. I think tomorrow will be better than today no matter who is president, because most of the changes have nothing to do with who is president. Who is president is downstream of cultural change, not upstream.
In other words if people turn against DEI or AA in then it will go no matter who is elected president. The president is a figure head, a lightning rod, a symptom, not a cause.
I’m not saying it’s demonstrably true that the country is fucked. You’re of course correct that this is subjective.
I’m saying that it’s demonstrably untrue that 95% of Americans’ lives will not change at all depending on who is elected president. The president does obviously have the power to affect the day-to-day lives of citizens. The government’s response to COVID, for example, had very significant and tangible effects on the day-to-day lives of nearly every American. If you want to argue that any imaginable president would have handled the situation in exactly the same way, you have to explain why other countries’ COVID responses varied so significantly.
Americans have opposed AA in large numbers for decades now. Multiple states - including California - passed ballot measures and laws to ban it. This did not have a significant effect on its spread or its implementation, because the ban was trivially easy for institutions to skirt around by appealing to the logical extrapolation of the Civil Rights Act, and to the decisions of unelected judges, including ones nominated by past presidents. Very very few Americans support DEI, and yet it is ubiquitous in both the public and private spheres.
Woodrow Wilson was elected on a promise to keep Americans out of the First World War; less than six months later, American soldiers were dying in Europe. Ronald Reagan’s voter base largely opposed mass immigration, yet Reagan himself signed the largest amnesty of illegal immigrants in American history. Presidents can simply lie about their intentions, or change their mind after being elected. It’s simply not true that they are merely catspaws of public opinion.
I'm sure you are aware that there are many other people in the government and adjacent to it besides the president. People that don't change much between term changes in USA, but are completely different in other countries. You're also aware that other countries operate under different arrangements of those people and different laws that take various lengths of time to change, when they can be changed at all.
You know all this, so why not skip to the point and explain why you believe the president has more influence on the covid response than all the rest of that?
More options
Context Copy link
Did the response vary much between Trump and Biden? I would argue not much. Trump championed the vaccine etc. etc. The fact that different countries react differently does not mean changing the president within the same country changes much! The difference is confounded by different government, different history, different "deep states" etc.
I think you are making my point for me. Regardless of who was elected in before WW1 Wilson or someone else, America would have almost certainly ended up at war. Who was president was largely not important. Do you think Wilson was lying about being isolationist? Or was it simply that the president is simply not that important? Even a man who promised to keep the US out, could not do so. And you want to argue the president really makes a difference?
Only once people are REALLY against something (not just wishy-washy against it, but still go on as normal) will the establishment change. Who the people vote for as president is a symptom of that feeling, but it doesn't mean it is enough in and of itself, it's just one signal. Reagan enacted the amnesty but tied it to making it illegal to hire illegal immigrants. He said he wanted to eliminate the incentive for illegal immigration. But that is similar to stances he took in 1980 before he was elected. Ergo, it seems his immigration stance did not dissuade voters from picking him. They may even have agreed with his stance that, spending money trying to get rid of current immigrants was a waste and only be disincentivizing future immigration could change happen.
Consider Macron moving to the right on immigration et al, because there have been more than just votes. Your president can stay the same and public feeling can be strong enough then so to will the president.
It's not just a symbol, it is one of the mechanisms holding people in check, a ritual people perform that has 'given them a say in how the country is run', enforcing acceptance of the legitimacy of the election process and also making them complicit. The shit will really hit the fan when the people give up on voting as worthless imo.
Sure, but as pointed out people still supported Reagan even if they were against illegal immigration, because in reality people care about more than one thing. It's only when one thing begins to be the reason why people vote or don't vote for someone does it actually realistically matter. If you heard Reagan speak about immigration in 1980 and voted for him anyway, then clearly illegal immigration is not really a big enough issue for you to switch your support. You have to make trade offs on which values are important to you. So, his supporters had other things they prioritized (primarily the economy).
If illegal immigration had really been a huge deal for people Reagan likely would not have been the nominee in 81 indeed both Reagan and Bush in 1980 advocated for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. If it had been the top issue, someone else with more hawkish immigration positions would have been the pick no?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How exactly is immigration an existential threat to America?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This would be more believable if we hadn't gone through the entire Covid debacle, where one side was utterly hellbent on following a set of barely-supported policy guidelines with large amounts of ideologically motivated reasoning and would have imposed these guidelines on the Federal level had they had the levers of power at the time.
And so, we have a clear, stark example of a situation where the leadership of the country can have direct impact on the lives of most of the population, where literal TRILLIONS of dollars can get flung around depending on who controls the pursestrings.
So yeah, its fair to think that the country could be made better or worse off depending on who won.
Now, CARING too much when you, individually, cannot impact the outcome is a different matter.
Except most of the lockdowns by governors happened while Trump was President. And was the one who signed the CARES act (2.2 trillion dollars and the largest stimulus package in US history), the Families First Coronavirus Response Act and another 900 billion in the December Appropriations act. When Biden passed his 1.9 trillion stimulus package in Feb 2021, Trump wanted bigger direct payments not smaller!
If you want to say that governors made a big difference, I would agree with you. But the actions taken by Trump and Biden were pretty similar overall. And the discussion we are having is the difference the president makes to the standard person.
Many effects of the president are downstream. If the president pushes a trade deal, or energy policy, or whatever, you're not going to see new prices and changes in the economy the next day; it's going to take a while. Even something like picking Supreme Court justices isn't going to have an effect the next day.
More options
Context Copy link
Vaccine Mandates and penalties were one of the major flashpoints.
Biden tried imposing them nationally.
https://apnews.com/article/biden-lloyd-austin-e4047962b92087be278c6886e2e2d0c5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_Independent_Business_v._Occupational_Safety_and_Health_Administration
Biden also tried to pull the student loan forgiveness card a couple times.
https://www.ncsl.org/state-legislatures-news/details/supreme-court-strikes-down-student-loan-forgiveness-program
He used the Pandemic as the justification in that one:
Even if I grant that Biden and Trump's approaches were similar in many ways, the ways in which they were different are pretty damn salient.
Sure, but I'll note that you used the word tried multiple times there. My argument is not that Trump and Biden are the same, it's that the office of President is much more limited than people think. Biden trying and failing to do something, that Trump didn't even try to do has exactly the same outcome. The thing does not get done. So the difference in actuality was vaccine mandates for the military. Which the link says affected 8,400 servicemen/women.
If the Presidency gave you unlimited power then the differences between a Trump and Biden presidency would be huge, I agree. But it is highly constrained, so when it comes down to it, their differences of what they actually did was I maintain pretty small.
If you're the victim of an 'attempted' murder I think you still will have certain rational opinions about the perpetrator who tried to kill you but failed.
I just think it's odd to make the argument that it 'doesn't matter' when we've got a recent example of how much it can matter.
Which still subsumed by the point that one shouldn't worry too much about it because the factors we can control have little influence on that particular outcome.
Again, that is fine, I am not saying that having preferences between them is a problem. And it's absolutely fine to prefer the person who didn't even try to do X in the first place. That makes perfect sense!
My very narrow point is the system has built in rails, and those rails in general mean, that in practice, the difference presidents make to their citizens as opposed to the difference the legislatures, governors et al make is actually pretty small. And much, much smaller than most people think. A combination of the deep state, federalism, separation of powers and so on contributes to this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The Trump phenomenon does not have a single rationale, but many, some of which are contradictory.
They want law and order but also to tear down the establishment. Some support Trump because he's not Hillary/Biden etc. Some see Trump as bringing fresh air to politics and an alternative to politics as usual. Some support him because he exudes coolness or owns the libs. There is no particular clique that maps to trump.
More options
Context Copy link
I think many Trump supporters really do see themselves as the underdogs being picked on by Chads and Stacies, and that is a common perception even here: many, many posts are devoted to how the "Elites" (whether that means liberals, Democrats, Jews, the media, all of the above, whoever) are the popular kids picking on the losers.
Thank you for an example of an acceptable use of slurs, since recently a number of people have been claiming not to understand when they can and cannot use words like "faggot." If you were directly calling Democrats, or the "Elite," or whoever, "faggots," I would mod that as being inflammatory and boo outgroup. It would be little more than namecalling: "My enemies are faggots." Not because we don't allow people to use "faggot" or other slurs, but because we don't allow namecalling and unnecessary antagonism. However, using it to represent what other (hypothetical) people think isn't going to get a warning for using "no-no words."
This honestly doesn't seem like a good use. If they weren't signalling that they were on the same side, it would read exactly like putting some very antagonistic words in the outgroup's mouth.
More options
Context Copy link
This would be an interesting use of Chat GPT to see if it can tell the difference between a slur used for rhetorical effect or pejoratively
Dollars to donut holes says that ChatGPT understands the use-mention distinction but has been explicitly programmed not to apply it to racial slurs.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"I imagine my outgroup would use slurs" really should be prohibited. It at least violates "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be", "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument", and "Don't be egregiously obnoxious". But since it's put in the mouth of Trump supporters, it's okay.
Because "faggot" is considered to be an extremely bad slur to use, accusing someone of using it without a direct quote is likewise extremely bad. If using it directly is so bad that you can ban people for it, using it indirectly by putting it in the mouths of your outgroup should lead to a ban too. The fact that such things are permissible is a double standard. (Which is enabled by the fact that many slurs that leftists use such as "racist" are considered acceptable, so the right can't accuse the left in the way that the left can accuse the right.)
"Racist" is not a slur. It may be an insult or an unwarranted accusation. Saying "You're a racist" would probably get a warning. Saying "That's racist" would generally be an allowable expression of opinion.
The comparison isn't calling someone a racist, it's saying "those leftists call people racists". Which is the right-wing version of "Trump supporters call people faggots". Except that it's acceptable for progressives to call people racists, so the accusation is useless.
There obviously are leftists who call people racists, and Trump supporters who call people faggots. Whether or not the two statements are equivalent (I don't personally believe they are), in themselves, I would not find reason to mod either one.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’m not criticizing my outgroup; I am involved in multiple group chats where people, including myself, use that word without feeling bad about it. I wouldn’t call somebody that on the Motte, because I respect the norms of this community. But I want to be very clear that I don’t think it reflects particularly poorly on Trump voters (or anybody else) if they use that word.
More options
Context Copy link
I feel like there's a large range in how bad this word is depending on where you are in the US, in contrast to the other double-g word which is more dependent on in which race you belong in the US. Where I grew up, this word was barely a hair beneath "nigger" in terms of how unacceptable they were, but as an adult, I learned that there are entire communities of people elsewhere in the US who use the term as freely as any other slur. Which is bad IMHO, but doesn't make it an extremely bad slur to use. So I think depicting someone as using the slur could reflect just a different culture around the term rather than some judgment about the people throwing about the term.
More options
Context Copy link
No it’s not. It’s offensive to some people but most think it’s rather crass.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The Trump-supporters-as-jocks framing does not match with my own reality or what I have observed. The guy who refreshes Drudge compulsively about the latest minutia in the Hunter Biden story, has an obsession UFOs or conspiracies, or reads Ayn Rand strikes me as more Asperger's or neuro-atypical, whereas normie liberals are more conformist or trusting. Rebellious left-wing youth not uncommonly grow up to be normie, conformist liberals. Conservatives go the opposite direction of becoming more distrustful of the system. Even someone like Rush Limbaugh was much more of a nerd than a jock, by being so obsessed with politics and broadcasting, despite his cigars and other props intended to convey a care-free masculinity.
My experience in youth politics is basically that more extreme people get in either direction, more likely they're to be a nerd or otherwise maladjusted. Normies tend to be centrists, though there are nerds of all stripes. Not a particularly mindblowing observation, I know.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To echo Fruck, I think you've unfortunately got twisted round the axle on the specifics of the analogy and it makes it hard to engage with the rest of your post as a consequence.
More options
Context Copy link
Please give the following article a read. I don't think you've got an accurate picture or understanding of Trump and the forces animating his campaign. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/
Specifically, please pay attention to the part where he outlines the salary/wage class and the distinctions between them. It neatly answers and resolves the quandaries you've posted.
I was skeptical of this but it really was well worth the click.
More options
Context Copy link
For those interested, the "managerial revolution" expands this a lot further. A dash of "elite theory" spices it up.
More options
Context Copy link
In the class framework of that article (which is a valuable one), Trump's best demographics are small business owners and retirees - the groups which together make up the vast majority of the investor class. He clearly does better with the wage class than the salary class, but the idea that the wage class is his core vote is incorrect, unless you skew the numbers by insisting that non-white members of the wage class don't count. Considered in the round, the wage class are still swing voters.
The thing that both the MAGA right and movement conservatism have in common (to the point that it is no longer easy to tell them apart) is that they are the "country party" in the classic court-vs-country dynamic - their core constituency is local elites in unfashionable places who think the national elite is dissing them. The woman who waits tables at an Arby's in Peoria thinks she is getting the short end of the stick. Whether she ends up blaming her asshole boss or the smug librulelites on TV more is the meat and drink of court vs country politics.
The nature of the American culture war is that there is a large-enough-to-matter minority of white men who are not local elites but who see themselves as local elites because they are white and male - they are mostly "wage class" and make up the noisiest subset of Trump supporters. (They are also the reason why "country party" right-wing politics works better in the US than in other countries even pre-Trump). But the core Trump voter is rich enough to own a boat.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The thing is, what is your notion of "normal, productive people"? Is it the guy in a white collar job writing code for some big company? Is it a farmer? (and there's a huge difference between the notion of the 'Ma and Pa Kent' style farmstead and modern agribusiness). Is it the guy who would have worked on the old style union assembly line job, which is now pretty much outsourced where it's not union-busted (for good or ill depending on your view of the unions)? Is it the Rust Belt and flyover state small towns dying on their feet because all the young people move away?
Everybody is appealing to the 'squeezed middle', the middle-class vote. The people on the margins, who speaks up for them? The Democrats, or a section of them, have gone for the minorities, but who is taking the side (even in appearance only) of the blue collar lower class guys (and gals)? That's Trump. Not DeSantis, though that's who he was supposed to be. Maybe he'll pull it out yet. I sort of like Nikki Haley, but she does need to get a position on something and stick to it because right now she's looking like Hillary Part II with "just tell me what opinion you want me to have" and getting in a stupid slap-fight with Ramaswamy, who is not impressing me and is certainly not 'blue collar rubes' material (honestly, if he reminds me of anyone, it's Andrew Yang).
Trump, for all his crassness and vulgarity, indeed because of it, does seem to be the guy who's "hey, you in the back there, who would have been one of the normal, productive, people had the economy not moved on, yeah wanna make America great again?" more than any of the rest of them.
This a funny and true observation. Politicians are always suck in a certain time (e.g. 1930s or 2008) or track in which the majority of Americans are struggling, but most Americans have a rather good standard of living, for all SES-levels.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Excellent post and I really enjoy your point, but something I think you are missing in your overall argument: everyone who is heavily involved in politics, especially the extremely online and out of the Overton kind like MartyrMade, are categorically losers. Normies just don't get involved in that kind of thing. I've been to GOP fundraising lunches and ProgressiveCoalition fundraising dinners in the last year, and both were full of freaks and geeks.
To move out of high school movies and to Tolstoy instead. Fat bastard Pierre Bezukhov is political, nerdy, reading, questioning everything around him. Legitimately born young nobles and military officers Prince Andrei and Nikolai engage in none of those activities, they merely do what they are told to do, their politics are their parents' politics or their teachers' politics or their classes' politics. Your political types are going to identify with Pierre, the weirdo, the nerd. Whether they are right wing or left wing, that's the archetype of the vast majority of political writers/commenters/tweeters/bloggers.
MartyrMade's Darryl is, affectionately, a weirdo. There's something delightful about listening to him talk to Jocko when they podcast together, the contrast between Darryl who has every weird conspiracy bullshit theory on tap and Jocko who's like "really bro no fucking way I didn't know that!" His perception of society is still anchored in that high school identity as a nerd/loser.
But so was any leftist hack podcaster! They were both the dorks in the back of the classroom! The class of people who write about politics all perceive themselves as primarily dorks.
Sorry to hijack a little.
One of the miracles of my life was becoming aware that I was a weird nerd at the end of High School, realizing it was a life sentence of neurosis, and very deliberately Chad-ing it up in college (Frat, did a sport). Fuck "be true to yourself" nonsense. I had leaned into maladaptive behavior for all of my adolescence and it didn't make me feel good. So, I changed it.
What's jarring to me in professional life now is seeing people who did something similar (albeit with maybe less conscious direction) flip their persona like a light switch based on the immediate social context. Product Managers in Big Tech, generally speaking, are much, much more likely to be MBA Chad/Stacey types. Yet, the second they don't get their way or face some sort of adverse group dynamic, they start sperging out with statements like "I know I don't "get it" like all of you do, I'm just trying to do my best here with what's a really awkward situation for me!" Contrast this with one of the better PMs I've ever worked with - a literal ex college football quarterback - who would often wrap up meetings with "Cool, cool! Computer dudes get after it!" And they would. Happily. Because he was being honest.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's an analogy man. Do you understand why the dorks and losers would cheer for the linebacker? Then you understand why people cheer for Trump. You are reading far too much into it. And you are demonstrating a problem I have mentioned before - high school is forever now. You have so firmly and readily mapped your old high school cliques onto the political demographics that an analogy using an opposite framing agitates you. Also you are a Trump voter by your own admission. Trump voters are people like you.
But it’s a poor analogy precisely because it doesn’t actually resemble observable reality. Analogizing Democrats to jocks and cheerleaders, and Republicans to freaks and geeks, only works if the actual ground-level reality isn’t the opposite of that. Literal (white) jocks and cheerleaders, in real life, are in fact Trump voters. The kids who are the most likely to be bullied in school are future Democrat voters who despise Trump - in many cases precisely because they see him as the guy who will help jocks and cheerleaders persecute the losers!
The linked tweet could have chosen to analogize Trump voters to any number of different things or groups, but instead he chose the one group which is least like Trump voters.
Let's accept at face value that White jocks / cheerleaders support Trump. Then I still think there's a category confusion hiding in the insistence that analogies should "resemble observable reality."
I'll give an example. Say my friend were deciding between studying Russian and studying Hindi. Now say I tell him he should study Hindi because, per Wayne Gretzky, great hockey players "skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been."
Would it really undermine my argument to learn that more great hockey players study Russian than Hindi?
No, because you are not making any claims about any intrinsic qualities of hockey players in particular. You’re using “skate to where the puck has been” in a metaphorical sense to refer to the geopolitical future of India vis-a-vis Russia.
In the analogy made by Martyr Made, though, he is claiming that there are specific intrinsic qualities of Trump supporters: marginalized, unpopular, needing to be “rescued” by a defecting member of the well-adjusted mainstream. He is also claiming that there are intrinsic qualities of Trump’s enemies: popular, privileged, good-looking and well-adjusted.
However, the observable reality is that the relative distribution of these qualities is actually reversed. Trump supporters are, in fact, more likely to be popular and socially-well-adjusted members of their local communities. Meanwhile, a massive part of the Democrats’ coalition is people who are outside of the core American mainstream: racial/sexual minorities, neurotic middle-aged women, childless adults. These people may be feted by the media, and affirmative action has allowed them to carve out patronage networks within certain PMC industries, but they are in fact still the people who got bullied, and still the people who feel alienated by the American culture that existed at any time before the election of Barack Obama.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think it depends on how you’re thinking about the bullies vs bullied. I’ll concede that the jocks/nerds version of the story isn’t a good fit. On the other hand, the social acceptance and power dynamics do absolutely fit. Liberals are not classical jocks. They don’t do competitive sports or things along those lines. What they are, though, are the cool kids and the empowered kids. They’re the ones “normies” want to impress. They’re the ones who can define what good and bad taste are. They’re the ones that marketing campaigns want to appeal to. And MAGA tend to attract those who don’t fit in. Being a smug, highly educated (or certified as such) agnostic who works in socially conscious companies “making a difference” is cool. Being a religious person who works in a conventional job with no overt social mission is not.
If you were to map this onto Breakfast Club, think of the DC elites as the princess girl. Always dressed in expensive and fashionable clothes, eating the hip new thing (which in the 1980s was sushi apparently), always trying to make sure she fit in. That’s the DC elite — including the snobbish attitude. The MAGAs would be perhaps Bender or the Jock. The dork is too busy on hobbies and interests to care. And I suppose the artists are just hanging out making art and being weird.
Why the heck would I want to do that? The whole point of the Breakfast Club is that all the kids in detention are outcasts, some of them more obviously than others. It is a movie about how generation X was (as Strauss and Howe put it) the most aborted, most abandoned, most latchkey generation in history, or how (as Tyler Durden put it) our Great Depression is our lives. Claire (the "princess girl") is going off the rails because she is collateral damage in her parent's acrimonious big-money divorce. Andrew (the "popular jock") is beclowning himself with performative toxic masculinity because he thinks he won't be respected by his father if he doesn't.
Politics isn't like that. None of the Breakfast Club characters (probably not even Vice Principal Vernon) would be a serious political candidate in adulthood. There is a reason why Generation X is underrepresented in Congress and America keeps electing borderline-senile Boomer Presidents rather than letting an Xer into the White House.
All 5 students plus the janitor in the Breakfast Club are more likely than not to be Trump voters in adulthood simply because they are white and live in the Chicago suburbs. Vernon would as well if he weren't a union teacher. Claire is unhappily married to a man who owns a car dealership (or divorced from him, in which case she votes Dem like Julia) and Andrew is a corn ethanol salesman at ADM.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No dude, literal white jocks and cheerleaders are both. They are democrats and republicans. The denizens of Madison Ave aren't geeks right? Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansen aren't dorks are they? But they are all democrats! I realise now my last two sentences in my previous post might have appeared to be a slam on you, but I meant it the opposite way - you were a nerdy theatre guy right? And you are a Trump voter! Are you the only freak?
There's something weird to me when people draw a line from "high school jock" to "Hollywood actor". The future hollywood actor during high school is a drama class geek. The jock, if he is highly successful, does not become Chris Evans - he becomes Tom Brady.
The line I draw is from the envied in high school to the envied in popular culture.
Are pro athletes not envied in popular culture?
They are, yes. As are celebrities. Both are considered lucky and not deserving their success by the envious. I think whether they play football or superheroes is just a distraction.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My sense is that the partisan split among white adults who are former football players or cheerleaders leans heavily Republican, although you’re correct that there would still be millions of Democrat voters who fit this demographic profile. As a total percentage of Trump’s versus Biden’s constituency, though, I would say that white “former popular kids” are a much larger part of the former than of the latter.
As Hollywood actors, they’re highly atypical of their general demographic profile. (Johansson is also Jewish, so it should actually be very unsurprising that she’s not a Trump fan.) The incentives pushing Hollywood actors toward expressing liberal views are so strong that it’s nearly impossible to get a sense of what these people truly believe in their heart of hearts.
I am extremely atypical. The percentage of American adults with theatre arts degrees who voted for Trump has to be less than 10%.
Scarlett Johansen and Chris Evans are highly atypical of the stereotype of jocks and cheerleaders as conceived by millenials, absolutely. But they literally are the Hollywood actors today. Nerd culture has been In so long it's passe, coolness no longer has any tie to intelligence - or if it does, it's a positive association.
I'm not saying stereotypes aren't real, or that jocks are Democrats and nerds are Republican now, and I bet that a lot of republicans and democrats would agree with your assessments of the demographics, but that is the map, not the territory. The democrats hate outcasts and love the elite just as much as republicans, the only difference is how they spin it.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, it makes perfect sense for Jews to be prejudiced against the guy with a Jewish son-in-law who moved the American Embassy in Israel to Jeruselam.
I believe the line "this, but unironically"? I think it's safe to say many people are unhappy when people take active steps to fulfill a prophecy when a popular version of that prophecy includes, among other undesirable effects, the destruction of their faith:
A lot of the Christians beliefs of what the "second coming" will look like are not great for the Jews. Or, really, any non-Christians, but the Jews in particular get used as pawns and then screwed over.
Aren't we talking about the really insanely pro-Semitic Christians here? The ones who go and provide free labour in Israel? The annotated Scofield bible preaches Zionism and Israeli sycophancy: https://www.wrmea.org/2015-october/the-scofield-bible-the-book-that-made-zionists-of-americas-evangelical-christians.html
Evangelicals love Jews, Jews hate Evangelicals: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/03/15/americans-feel-more-positive-than-negative-about-jews-mainline-protestants-catholics/pf_2023-03-15_religion-favorability_00-08/
More options
Context Copy link
Once you've decided that support for Israel is anti-semitic, you might want to reconsider the rabbit hole you've dived into.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’m not arguing whether or not Jews’ antipathy toward Trump makes sense or not. It’s just a fact that Jews voted overwhelmingly (I believe it was 80-20) in favor of both Clinton and Biden.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Who are the cool kids after say, 30 years old? Writers at the NYT, Hollywood folks, tech titans. Almost universally liberals, almost universally wouldn't desire to be surrounded by deplorables.
The analogy is about group dynamics, not specifically mapping political group A to high school clique Y.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The elite not liking Trump isn't a bare fact with no implications. The fact that the elite doesn't like Trump means that if Trump gave up all distinctively Trump positions and tried to act like an establishment Republican, it wouldn't work. So there's no chance of Trump trying to appease the Democrats by becoming a "moderate"--he'd just lose his base and he wouldn't get anything.
You can't prove whether Desantis is going to backslide, but you can know that he's able to backslide.
the elite dislike trump so much he is still free despite tons of jan 6th ppl actually being sentenced, some for a long time. I don't think the elite ever hated trump that much. Until 2015 trump was heavily embedded with the entertainment industry. This is narrative to explain why he gets negative media coverage. To the elite, Trump is a tool.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I can tell you the honest perception of my in-laws, is simply that Trump did a very good job as president the first time, and would have 'gotten the job done' if he had a second term.
They believe that he did build the wall, and did deliver on every other promise. Even arguments that he tried to deliver on X but the deep state stopped him, have been met with an insistance that he did deliver and that he will be smarter against the deep state this time around. There's no hatred here, there is percieved in justice, but that's not the driving force for them, and you could call it personal loyalty, to a degree but in their minds it's loyalty to a job well done. My in-laws beleive that Trump delivered a great first term and that the following are true: Trump:
Some of those things are more true than others. But to answer your question, I think some of voting for Trump is simply believing he was a known, great president, and while I think that's wrong, it doesn't need a completely different explanation.
More options
Context Copy link
I think 80% of it could be covered by 3. Trump’s base are Midwestern and Southern American Whites. Many are working class or small business owners. Those are the groups that the DC elite talk down to and sneer at, their culture is denigrated and something to educate the kids out of, their declining standard of living doesn’t matter to anyone in DC. They are the ones told to sit down and shut up, that they are “privileged” and need to be shunted aside to make more room at the good jobs for minorities and women. And when Trump came along, the hatred of the DC elites made him the ultimate middle finger to those elites who they perceive as hating them.
More options
Context Copy link
He's funny
More options
Context Copy link
He tried to build the wall but was blocked by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
DeSantis is an old pal of Paul Ryan and has been getting campaign advice from him. He's likely to be talked into not doing anything on the border and only paying lip service to MAGA policy items.
Haley is funded by Bilderburg billionaires like Reid Hoffman. She would never ever try to build the wall. Her major goals would be American troops in Ukraine and Syria.
Trump did deliver economic gains for blue collar workers that DC types have been insisting were impossible for generations. He avoid starting new wars. He improved trade deals. For the "borders conservatism" voter he was the most successful President in a long time. He delivered some major wins in the face of intense opposition from the establishment.
Voting in an establishment friendly politician would be silly.
More options
Context Copy link
I'd offer that if you spoke to Trumpers, most or all of them would hold opinions about Trump and his positions that seem paradoxical, totally incorrect, contradictory, impossible, or just flat out idiotic. Trump, despite having served as president for four years and remained politically loud (if not exactly active) for four more since, remains a cypher. Ask eight people what exactly Trump believes you will get eight different answers. There's a temptation, on all sides of the political compass, to treat Trump like an empty vessel and hope that he will favor your cause. He's really a Red-Brown Strasser-ist fighter for the white working class, or he's really a Christian crusader (or for the more biblically sophisticated a Cyrus figure), or he's going to cut government spending and fix the deficit, or he's going to gut the MIC and usher in peace.
There's a standard format that goes: "He just says X to get votes, he really doesn't believe X, he believes Y." He just makes saber rattling noises about Iran to placate the GOP, he's really anti-war. He says anti trade things to appeal to the rubes, he's really pro business. He has a secret plan to fix immigration policy or he has a secret plan to empower a Immigrations and Customs NKVD, he is actually in favor of police reform or he's going to crack down on criminals, he's going to restrain Israel or he's going to let Israel off the leash, he's going to cut regulations and he's going to prevent chemical train derailments.
And the bitch of it is, somebody has to be right. Trump has said so many contradictory things about so many topics that you can easily put together a series of quotes that paint him as anything. He's just so out there and he talks so much, I could put together a photo series and quotes that paint him as Ibram X. Kendi's best friend or as a budding Caudillo. And there are people who hope he is each of those. He's a real person, he has to believe something. But I'll be damned if I could tell you what it is with any confidence.
Just in the last few days I can recall this. I've seen leftists joking about how Trump is going to dominate the debates by calling Biden "Genocide Joe" for supporting Israel. I've heard friends tell me Trump will bring back prayer in schools. I've seen people on here claim that he will drain the swamp.
So the steelman of Trump is that they believe he is a different Trump than you believe he is.
ETA: I literally closed my laptop and my father immediately told me that Trump planned to declare OPEC a terrorist organization and confiscate their funds from the banking system.
Maybe the appeal is this: the default politician behavior is to converge with the establishment hive mind on all issues, either actively or passively. A politician who has no firm principles, but who has a proven ability to thumb his nose at the establishment hive mind and to go with his common sense or his gut, would be a huge improvement from the point-of-view of a anti-establishment voter.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Kulak had this theory that Trump was only good for acceleration, that he incited autoimmune disease amongst the progs, forcing them to burn their legitimacy and weaken their broader position: https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/short-take-trump-and-autoimmune-disease
I'd still favour giving DeSantis a try personally. Vivek is untested.
Left lost a lot of credibility in the Trump saga, but so did the Right: birtherism, Q, "Trust the plan", J6, forming a personality cult around him, Laura Loomer being one of his top spokespeople etc.
Thank goodness none of the Nice People ever had that!
"Nice People" also had Jim Jones and the People's temple, so what? Does that justify republicans making their version of that too?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think you understand loyalty or why voters feel loyal toward Trump. It's one thing to blithely declare that Trump didn't show loyalty because of this or that squabble. But have you talked to the voters? Trump's voters don't feel betrayed at all. (As an exercise to the reader: how much loyalty do Republican voters have for other republican politicians?)
I realize that many people are in fact loyal to Trump. My point is that this is stupid and counterproductive. If you have a good reason that this is actually smart and productive, I would love to hear it.
Insofar as I understand Trump voters' motivations, "productive" is orthogonal, if not actively counter, to what they're looking for. Trump is essentially a big middle finger directed at (for want of a better term) the blue tribe, and many of them actively want to burn the government to the ground. This is not some rationalization I'm making up, it's a somewhat-close, if condensed, paraphrase of some of the defenses of voting for Trump that I've seen in this very space, or rather its predecessors.
More options
Context Copy link
I realize that many people are in fact loyal to
Trumpthe progressive left. My point is that this is stupid and counterproductive. If you have a good reason that this is actually smart and productive, I would love to hear it.IMHO, this is one millimeter away from "boo outgroup."
What's a "good reason" for being loyal? I don't think thats the point. The point is in figuring out why that loyalty exists, good or bad. Many other replies have tried to explain why. You seem to just continue to say, "yeah but that's dumb."
It's not wrong to ask for reasons for loyalty. Loyalty usually has some form of reciprocation as an intended part of the relationship.
Is he wrong to say that it's counterproductive? And in what ways? That would more substantively address the assertion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, it's just weird because he's accomplished almost nothing. His biggest win was SCOTUS, in my opinion, which any Republican could have done (just consult the federalist-society approved list, and pick at random/whoever strikes your fancy/makes political sense).
I think Hanania's roughly right, though. Trump's good enough at managing vibes to warp most of the Republican party, especially the rank-and-file around himself.
People think Trump failed in the 2022 midterms, because Republicans failed due to his endorsements. What he actually did was prove that you needed his endorsement to make it through the primaries, and get people to double down in their personal devotion to him, even though he lost in 2020.
But they didn't, is the thing. Promises and promises: "jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but never jam today".
I was astounded by the Roe vs Wade decision, because holy hannah the Trump judges really had done it! This was one of the campaign promises that Trump could have dropped in a heartbeat because nobody really expected anything to come of it, if past Republican administrations were any indication, and he did it. Wow.
"But they didn't, is the thing"
I really don't get your model of the government. The reason Trump got a bunch of justices is because three justices died. He got lucky. The reason other Republicans did not appoint three justices is because they did not have enough justices die. I don't get what you think any other Republican should have done, or how you think pre-Trump Republicans failed us.
Trump deserves no credit for Ginsburg, Scalia, and Kennedy dying. That was never about him, that was about them being old.
Trump's also fairly pro-choice for a Republican, so Dobbs is a weird thing to list as an achievement of his for that reason.
Tell that to Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Sure, any guy with an R beside their name could just have their pick waved through, no bother! Trump was just lucky!
More options
Context Copy link
Previous Republican appointees defected on abortion a lot. It’s probably not trumps fault directly that he didn’t appoint a Sandra day O’Connor, but you can make a case that Roberts’s sudden turn to the right was trumps doing and that bush wouldn’t have appointed ACB.
Reagan got three picks and two of them were O'Connor and Kennedy. Kennedy wasn't entirely his fault - if there had been a Republican Senate majority he would have got Bork - but I think a pro-lifer could reasonably say that there were plenty of candidates without Bork's Watergate baggage who would have been both confirmable and a more reliable pro-life vote than Kennedy.
Bush Sr put Souter on the Court. 'Nuff said. Admittedly he had to get his nominee through a Democrat-controlled Senate, but given he could get Thomas confirmed with he could presumably have managed better than Souter. (FWIW, I think the Senate still had a right-wing majority at the time given the existence of conservative Southern Democrats like Richard Shelby and Sam Nunn)
Bush Jr only got two picks, which is unlucky for a two-term President, and one of them was Roberts, who movement conservatives hate for good reasons and who was never going to be the fifth vote to overturn Roe, even if he was willing to be the sixth. Alito was a good conservative pick, but Bush had to be dragged kicking and screaming into nominating him - his first choice was Harriet Miers.
Trump was lucky to get three picks, but he managed to make all three count (at least on abortion). The Republican Senate majority helped a lot, but Bush Jr had that. If the filibuster was still in place for SCOTUS nominees his nominees would have been filibustered, but the reason why the filibuster lasted as long as it did was as part of an unwritten set of rules where candidates like Thomas and Alito didn't get filibustered - in other words the removal of the filibuster reversed the effect of increased partisanship in the Senate, rather than making life easier for Trump to get nominees through.
If you are the kind of movement conservative whose main issue is judges, Trump was a great President, and deserves re-election. If the next President is a Republican, Alito and Thomas will retire during his term. Given the record of establishment Republicans, Nicky Haley would appoint replacements who would move the Court to the left, and DeSantis can't be trusted not to do the sane.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Exactly as much as those politicians have for them, which in most cases is zero.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
For having an unironically decent track record as president ? (bad human, worse husband, terrible role model.....solid track record)
The way I see it, Trump doesn't give a fuck. Ramaswamy, DeSantis and especially Haley care too about much about their career after politics. This means they are more or less beholden to the whims of the American elite. Also, after seeing them debate, I do not think Haley has any change of victory. DeSantis has sounded more and more bitchy as the campaign has lost momentum and Ramaswamy is a little too early to the game. US is not there yet, racially.
So as much as Trump is not the ideal candidate to face
TrumpBiden, he is the only one who might win and maintain his anti-establishment status. Yeah, a white Ramaswamy or a less whiny DeSantis would have had a better chance. But, that's not on offer.edit: Note that I am talking about his presidency rather than the Republican house. A republican house + senate have shown themselves to be pretty incompetent. However, they don't have much to do with the President.
Who cares, really? More American money spent on middle eastern bullshit.
Low interest rates and high deficits causing an artificial boom.
That was bad, actually.
That's not true, he initially pushed lockdowns and tried to bully the governor of Georgia into not reopening.
More options
Context Copy link
If you post the argument you made to Reddit you will get a lot of people wandering if you are being serious.
Looking back at his track record I believe he did a great job. He got things right I didn’t even think about then like immigration and China and both of those aged well. He also yelled at Powell in 2018 about hiking rates and for that environment (inflation sub 2%) Trump was absolutely correct Powell was making a mistake.
I do take issue with you calling him a bad husband. He did the most important thing a husband can do which is procreate and successfully raise functioning children.
Anyone who gets married 3x isn't a good husband, and I'd be shocked if him and Melania have anything I'd consider a good relationship.
Would a women rather have a best friend as a husband or one who produced attractive, well-educated , healthy children?
If you noticed in my prior comment I said nothing about his relationship with her. Evolutionary biology I would think says my model is the better husband.
More options
Context Copy link
As an absolute statement this can't be right. The range of reasonable exceptions, from "the wife soon contracted a terminal disease" to "the wife turned out to be untrustworthy" is wide enough that there must be men who have had awful luck from it twice.
As a specific case, though, things like "the wife didn't get along with the mistress" or "the hooker turned out to be untrustworthy" are not in that range.
This reminds me of the shopping cart debate in which people point out a bar, resting on the floor, to be considered a functioning member of society. And then many heavily "disabled" mothers explain why their corner case makes it OK.
Statistically, I don't see the case for any double divorcee to be a good husband, and Trump's inadequacy in the EQ department is both one of his strengths and one of the 100 nails in the coffin for his quality on that front.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Trump is an unprincipled egotist who is unable to work with the Establishment: he'll do whatever he wants, and he has no incentive to work with the Powers That Be because they despise him and would never cooperate with him (and the feeling is absolutely mutual). No other candidate comes close to offering that.
It's not particularly likely to lead to anything good, I think, but if you're broadly anti-establishment, he's the closest thing to a sure bet to do things differently than how the Establishment wants things to be done.
More options
Context Copy link
As someone who preferred the other GOP candidates I do not feel like Ive had a choice on who to vote for in the primary.
Ever since lawfare began against Trump it has forced the right to vote for him. Simply put you can not allow members of your political coalition be bullied. You have to fight together or die alone.
Reason 2: Entertainment
That's illogical. Just nominate someone who's likely to win and pardon Trump.
Even if there was someone else with as good or better chance to win the general (and further not likely to play a Democrat with an R after her name if she did win), I wouldn't trust them to pardon Trump.
So many objections to voting for Trump rest on there existing some alternative candidate who is outside of the establishment wing of the party AND is somehow possessing the wherewithal to take the same kind of coordinated attacks Trump has suffered... AND is somehow a less uncouth, more measured type of person.
But failing to identify such a person, only that they could hypothetically exist.
In this case, it could be Desantis, but there's a lot of bad blood there now yes, it'd be doubtful he'd pardon Trump or otherwise come to his aid beyond calling off the Federal hounds.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Who would that be?
More options
Context Copy link
It’s not about the pardon. You also can’t let the other side bully your candidate selection process.
That's exactly what the republicans are doing, Trump shot up in the polls versus DeSantis with every indictment. Dems basically said "don't throw me in the briar patch" and it's working out like in that tale so far.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Trump's first presidency was hamstrung by multiple factors, some of them explicit (Crossfire Hurricane and the Mueller investigation it turned into) and others less visible (entrenched resistance from the deep state and republican party). The last eight years have seen substantial shifts in the GOP, with many more pro-Trump individuals getting involved in the actual political machinery of the republican party, and he's going to have a lot more leverage in a second term.
The moment Trump pardoned the J6 protestors he would have been impeached by the Republican party - the threat was even made explicitly in the media IIRC.
Every single person who has been trusted and liked by the media/Washington establishment has immediately abandoned the particular policies that Trump-voters want and support once they get into office, and it isn't like this is an accident - the only way to be liked by the media/Washington establishment is to preserve and extend the same policies which they like and the Trump base hates. This is also why Desantis and Nikki Haley were immediately rejected by the base - they're just more representatives of Conservative Inc who want to return things to business as usual, and business as usual has gotten utterly intolerable for a lot of the people supporting Trump.
Have you been paying attention to how much weeping, moaning and gnashing of teeth even the prospect of Trump getting back into power has caused? Nobody's writing lengthy thinkpieces about how the election of Nikki Haley would mean the end of democracy/sunlight/good things in the world.
DeSantis attacked Trump from the right, Trump attacked DeSantis from the left. Trump endorsed the supposed Con. Inc. - Ronna McDaniel, speaker McCarthy, etc.
I don't believe this is meaningful at all when looking at Trump and what he represents. The policies that got him elected and which he tried to implement, are in direct opposition to the bipartisan consensus of more forever wars, more outsourcing, more illegal immigration and more corruption. I don't think that the Left/Right divide is really that useful when you look at Trump's politics and his base. Opposition to or support of the existing elite and their chosen policies is the far more meaningful divide. Desantis and Haley have donors which the Trump base find intolerable, and the Trump base is a big enough constituency in the GOP base to give them effective veto power over future candidates.
Last time around top Trump's donor was Adelson, who really wanted a war with Iran. Trump and Kushner do a ton of buisness with Saudis. You don't apply the same standards to Trump, otherwise you wouldn't support him.
Are you predicting that, if elected in 2016, Trump will go to war with Iran?
No, I just think that this talk about DeSantis' donors is a cope from Trump supporters and they never applied that standard to Trump.
This is a glib argument. Donor influence is legendary in American politics, and Trump famously does not need their money. Are you suggesting that Trump's policies come from his donors? This is the charge levied at Haley et al.
While the perception may be that Trump doesn't need anyone's money, that's not reflected in his fundraising efforts.
More options
Context Copy link
Trump needs everyone's money just to pay his legal bills.
Haley seems bought and paid for, but I don't think DeSantis necessarily is.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not an American, but you're right that I don't apply the same standards. Trump isn't dependent upon his donors, Desantis and Haley are - this distinction matters quite a lot.
Of course Trump is dependent upon his donors. His own legal issues aside, a major presidential campaign costs billions and Trump doesn’t have close to the amount required in cash or easily liquidated assets, or indeed at all, and that’s if he was prepared to burn through his entire fortune, which he certainly isn’t.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If the injustice that has been done to him is not punished harshly, it will become the norm and the Republic will surely be destroyed. Trump must win or be defeated in a way all regard as fair.
I tend to think it'll be destroyed regardless because the ruling elite will not be able to muster the discipline not to fuck with him even more if he wins, but at least there is a chance a Trump administration can convince the American people that they successfully drained the swamp, if none at all that they would successfully do it.
We'll see how it shakes out, but the Rubicon has already been crossed, Trump is on a collision course with the establishment. People are not going to pick the GOP candidate on such petty motives as policy or track records. Not this time. Not after presidential mugshots and attempts to remove him from the ballot.
I think people are judging such things in such a biased way that this has become impossible. This goes for all points on the political spectrum, not just the R base.
(Which, I suppose, might reasonably be parsed as "the nightmare scenario you're trying to avoid is already here".)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If you care about the things that Trump's base cares about (immigration, America first, bringing industry back, stopping the 'woke' agenda, curbing the establishment/Cathedral-state, etc. ) , then for all of Trump's faults, the other options may be even less unappealing:
Haley -- do I need to even explain why she is bad? She is an awful combination of 1) having the worst of neocon foreign policy 2) being an authoritarian on free speech issues 3) being weak against the woke agenda 4) being cynical 5) being dumb as bricks. Desantis -- naive boy scout who is going to be eaten alive. He simply doesn't have the charisma or the guts to take on the establishment. Ramaswamy -- I think he has a lot of trouble overcoming the "who is this guy" problem. Both in the sense of having low name recognition and no history of being a public figure, but also in the sense of how did this Harvard/Yale/Goldman Sachs guy come to be giving Trumpist talking points -- is he sincere or does he think there is a market to be tapped?
The bet with Trump is that maybe he learned from his mistakes and won't staff his administration with GOP establishment types who wanted to cave in on issues and stab Trump in the back.
Is it likely that Trump can learn from his mistakes at age 77 and be a better president this time around? Is it likely that he can overcome is own personal history of not having the back of the people who supported him or worked form him? Very doubtful.
The basic reality is that right now all the presidential options are terrible.
Eight years later, the “crackhead taxi driver” analogy still holds.
Imagine you have a destination in mind. You hail an Uber, 4.9 stars, great vehicle, clean. You tell them where you want to go and they look at you like you have three heads. And after realizing you’re serious, they flat out refuse to take you there. No matter how much you beg or attempt to reason with them or bribe them.
So you call up a Lyft. 4.6 stars, nice vehicle. Same outcome, first they think you’re joking, then you’re crazy, and finally an idiot.
On and on it goes. Seven vehicles later, you hail an unlicensed taxi cab. The driver opens the door, it smells like piss inside. There are empty beer cans and takeout containers strewn around the vehicle. You tell him where you want to go, the driver looks at you for a minute with his cigarette still in his mouth and says “Fuck it, let’s go. Hop in.”
If you’re a Trump supporter, hearing that you just jump in. So far it’s you’re only shot to get where you’re going, it’s getting late and you’re getting desperate.
Honestly? Don’t blame anyone who chose that way. With the benefit of hindsight, I think they were absolutely right.
Agreed except that I want to point out that the "serious person" Trump alternative Nikki Haley is every bit of the crackhead that Trump is, in her own way. Saying something "Hamas attacked because it was Putin's birthday" is unhinged and betrays an attitude that would be really dangerous to have in the nation's chief diplomat. Of course, Trump chose as diplomat once, so a pox on him too :-P
More options
Context Copy link
If multiple taxi drivers refuse to take you to your desired location, and the only one that agrees is a crackhead, isn't it exceedingly likely that not going there is a sensible decision and if you continue to insist then you’re joking, crazy or an idiot?
Probably! But history is made at the margins.
For example, I bet if you ask four random cabbies in Manhattan in the 1940s to take you to Harlem, it’s not crazy to think that most of all of them would reject you. Some percentage of the refusal is rational, concern about crime etc, but certainly not all of it. Maybe not even most of it.
And more importantly, there were non crazy reasons to want to go to Harlem in the 1940s, lots of them. There are plenty of good reasons to go to Cuidad Juarez today, but a lot of people on the US side of the border would refuse.
I think it’s an excellent, but not perfect, analogy.
History is strewn with lots of groups who did and believed things that the majority thought were crazy. Most really were crazy. A smaller percentage weren’t crazy at all with the benefit of hindsight. And sometimes the majority of society were clearly the crazy ones all along.
That’s the risk of living in history, backing the “wrong side” in hindsight, but we don’t have hindsight in the present.
This is the reason why you shouldn't base your moral opinions on what you think "the right side of history" will be. You'll probably be wrong.
It's kind of like trying to fully max out utility, only not only do you have to account for all the pleasure and pain that exists everywhere in the present, but you have to develop actual clairvoyance too.
"The right side of history" is an insane justification for any moral stance, because of its uncertainty. When religious powers made eschatological predictions, they at least did so with the justification that omnipotent, omnescient powers made an infallible prediction that certain moral stances would lead to ruin. When secular people talk about "the right side of history," their argument rests on the authority of social opprobrium (which, for every reason in the book, you'd think lefties would be less likely to think of as reliable) and on utterly unreliable predictions of the future, as every such prediction will be.
Fools base their opinions on what people around them think they should believe. And it stands to reason that even greater fools base their opinions on what they think maybe people will believe at some unspecified point in the future.
I’m just saying, I a hundred percent agree with you. Which is why “Wrong side” is in scare quotes, I absolutely don’t frame this that way.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To play along with the metaphor, it probably means either as you suggested ("perhaps that's a bad destination") or that civilized taxis aren't interested in serving "people like you". I wouldn't be surprised if the people in question see it more like the latter.
More options
Context Copy link
If we lived in a normal world, yes, but we seem to be living in some absurdist "everyone pretends to not see the elephant in the room" comedy. The desired destination is "stop immigration, bring jobs back to America, cool it with the global empire that doesn't benefit people at home" and a bunch of cultural issues from "stop transing kids" to "stop teaching racism". Now, if the taxi driver came out and said that's an actually insane destination, we could have an actual conversation, but what we get instead is the conversation Truman Burbank would have had if he asked the taxi driver to take him somewhere outside of Pleasantville.
EDIT: changed the analogy to one that's more fitting.
Excellent analogy; elite political parties are only interested in driving you around a highly astroturfed overton window, and if you claim to want something else they'll try to gaslight you that you really wanted something they want. "I want to stop mass immigration" "Gotcha, we'll get you some tax cuts!" "No, I want to stop mass immigration" "Ohhh, sorry I misheard you. We'll increase the defense budget, just like you asked, don't worry".
More options
Context Copy link
I love this analogy, the Truman show is a perfect encapsulation of our incredibly stupid media ecosystem that has penned in an increasingly small amount of people into epistemic closure.
In the taxi analogy, trump haters act like they are requesting we go to the city of dis on the 7th circle of hell, when we really want to go to like… upstate New York. Can you imagine if every cabby you asked to go to upstate New York cried or pissed and shit themselves or immediately tried to change the subject or flat out refused to talk to you afterwards? I imagine That’s a common feeling being a Trump supporter, like “What the fuck is wrong with these people? I just want to go to Connecticut from Manhattan.”
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm pretty sure a lot of it is "Hatred", but I'm not sure which direction the Hate Flows.
Most of my family comes from Mountain Stock. Up until about 2020, they've always been staunch conservatives who voted straight ticket Democrat 100% of the time. Since Biden took office, many of them have been direct targets of new regulatory stances that have completely fucked their livelihoods. I'll list a few below.
Since Biden got in office, there have been repeated attacks on the livelihoods of an entire class of blue collar people. I've watched entire branches of my extended family go from straight-ticket blue voters to people who are so furious about what Biden is doing that they will gladly vote for Trump just to see Biden lose in the most humiliating, soul-destroying, morale-breaking manner possible. They don't care that it might not be great for them either. They're rednecks; they're used to getting the shit-end of every trade. They're accustomed to being the target of America's hate for the last 30 years. All they know is that they think they can weather the disaster better than the Biden people can, and they'll gladly suffer that pain if it means they can watch their enemies hurt worse.
Can you give some context on that? What causes that type of voting profile?
At least in my circles, it all comes down to Unions.
Appalachia skews old - old enough that many blue collar workers were able to get Union jobs before both the Companies and the Unions closed off those means of employment. For people still working those jobs, most of their political information gets filtered by (and for) the Union. Since Unions skew Democrat, so do low information voters who are members.
After that, the next most common person is the person who is not union, but is steeped in Union culture from birth. They'll tend to vote like their parents and neighbors do, which is straight ticket democrat, if they vote at all.
There used to be an entire category of socially conservative Democrats who had this voting bloc locked down tighter than a duck's asshole. Today, though, Joe Manchin is really the only one left.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
For years I've read about the many abuses of "navigable waterways". Clearly meant to protect actual rivers or bodies of water so large that boats could cross them. But commonly applied to any dry ditch that sometimes becomes a little stream in heavy rain. This and other examples of bureaucracies stretching limited narrow text into extremely broad powers is why I don't like the Chevron deference.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'll probably vote for him this fall.
Why? Because I don't think Haley or DeSantis will stop my side from losing. At best, they will work within the bounds set by the the deep state machine, at worst they will throw their base under the bus to ingratiate themselves with the elite like so many Republicans do.
Trump is all the bad things his haters (and some of his supporters!) say he is. And if he gets elected, it's likely that not much will change since he's unpredictable and the swamp has a lot of inertia and defense mechanisms. However, IMO there are two main differences from 2016.
First, the GOP has become way more Trumpist. There is a movement in the GOP personally loyal to Trump, something he didn't have when he was just a meme president. They follow Trump because they believe American political system is corrupt and that they are not represented by anyone else in either political party. So they are probably willing to go further smashing norms and seizing power than any other candidate's loyalists.
Second, and maybe most importantly, I think Trump is probably big mad after the last 8 years. This time it's personal. I think Trump probably cares somewhat about America, the working class, freedom, apple pies etc. but vastly more than any of those things what Trump really cares about is validating his MASSIVE EGO. And the elites and deep state have spent the last EIGHT YEARS poking it with a thousand sharp little sticks. He's also now being threatened with prison. If he gets elected, I think there's a real chance he will do everything to punish the people he perceives as his personal enemies, the vast majority of whom are people that I detest for completely different reasons, and may also try to harm their political power and maybe even do something crazy and cause a constitutional crisis, all out of SPITE because of his severely affronted ego. Those are all things that I think are great, because TBH at this point I hate what America has become, I hate the GAE, I hate the progressive religion, I hate the apathy towards the decay of societal institutions, I hate the prioritization of aliens over citizens, and if it all gets burned down there's at least a chance something better will arise and my children won't have to raise their children in an enclave in the hinterlands to prevent their corruption and alienation.
Electing Trump in 2016 was throwing a rock through the window of Deep State. Electing Trump in 2024 is throwing a Molotov cocktail through the window of Deep State. Yeah, it might get put out quickly, or might even fail to ignite, but it also might land on a pile of newspapers and books. Voting for Haley or DeSantis is knocking on the door and threatening to write a sternly-worded letter to the HOA.
EDIT: @gorge sums it up pretty well
So, a bit off-topic, but DAE feel like it's time to get building enclaves in the hinterlands? I wonder if anyone's studied how this has gone in South Africa and what we might learn.
Orania is probably the best test case in South Africa, if you're curious
More options
Context Copy link
I think it's hard to do before shit starts hitting the fan unless you want to live among a lot of oddballs and not a few simply deranged people.
My compromise is to live in a place where I fit in well (e.g. am not a cultural/religious/ethnic minority) and forge ties with my neighbors. When coronavirus had just broken out, before we knew how lethal it was, I lived with my family in an apartment complex where everyone was pretty much anonymous. I remember an eerie feeling that if things really went sidewise, I'd be living around a bunch of people who I didn't know from Adam. How would they behave when the cops stopped showing up? When there wasn't enough food to go around? Ever since I've been determined to live only in neighborhoods where I felt I'd be able to rely on neighbors at least somewhat in times of crisis.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The Steelman is that it's the only vote that 'matters' if you're someone outside of the elite power structure.
Putting Trump at the controls as the result of an election win (as opposed to something like an insurrection) is the strongest possible message that "We do not like how the political class has managed the government, we want them out of power, and to remind them who is 'actually' in charge of the government."
He is the approximate equivalent of a "none of the above" option when it comes to selecting from the various candidates that the Mainstream parties are trying to shove down our throats. Well, not equivalent because he is not a void, he's an actual candidate with a platform, but there's just nobody else who is outside the standard power structure who can provide that option.
This partially explains why he maintains or grows in popularity the harder they bring the hammer down on him. The more the elites/political class express their spite for the man, the stronger the signal that electing him will send. Of course, sending a signal doesn't mean anything actually changes.
Pulling the lever for Haley is a tacit 'approval' of the status quo. You're not registering your voice in the system so much as clicking "Accept" on the Terms and Conditions of the current edifice and its activities. It doesn't 'count' in any real way, as she's fully ingrained in the current power structure and will not modify it's trajectory one bit.
Trump has remained the major Schelling point for everyone who is very much against the status quo and wants to voice that displeasure rather than merely withdraw.
Edit: I would also mention that Bernie Sanders represents a similar sentiment from the left, but in my opinion he folds to the main party too quickly for this purpose.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link