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What's going to be the big apocalyptic struggle this election?
I wrote a piece over at my blog about how at this time in 2020 we were already in "2 Weeks to slow the spread", were about 1 month out from the first anti-lockdown protests, and 2 months out from the Summer of Floyd.
It seems obvious to me that all the chaos in the wider American empire concentrates around election years and seems to have the oxygen sucked out of it on off years.. 2020 is obvious, 2016 was only slightly less history changing, and even the 2008 financial crisis was an election year event.
There's a lot of really obvious candidates: Ukraine could go south really catastrophically really quick; the middle-east is speculated to kick-off with a potential Israeli invasion of Lebanon; and going shearly off the numbers the US southern border is one of the largest population transfers in human history with few precedents since WW2 or the even the 4th and 5th century.
But I don't know, maybe it's my mind trying to fit things too neatly to the 2020 framework... it feels like the election hasn't started yet, it feels like there's some shoe to drop or issue I'm missing, something as far from public consciousness as Immunology in Jan 2020, or racial politics in March 2020...
I can feel this massive issue just behind my peripheral vision that's about to draw all my attention and require its own Motte containment thread, and that will devour the media and twitter, for months on end.
I feel like there's this huge world shattering issue that's about to explode and within the next few months I'll be lamenting that I only have 24 hours in the day to read enough about it, convinced that it DEMANDS every second of my attention.... And I have no idea what it is?
-Is Trump going to die?
-Will a Nuke Launch?
-Is China about to take Taiwan?
-Are all those Chinese and foreign nationals on the southern border about to start targeting power infrastructure?
-Is there about to be a financial crisis?
-An "Internet Lockdown"?
-Hot ethnic cleansing in Europe?
-Global food chain collapse? .
Give me your best guess.
What will be the major containment thread at the Motte between now and election day?
I've seen little evidence the Democrats have a plan B aside from jailing Trump. I see constant reports that their ground game is in shambles, they are hemorrhaging in every demographic except college educated white women, and polling in nearly every bell weather or swing state is devastating to them. But they just don't seem to care. They are either very stupid, or they have assurances from the usual three letter agencies about another, more pro-active Peter Strzokian "insurance plan".
Put me down for Trump dies in prison, and somehow all the cameras were broken and all the guards were on break.
Yes I think the missing crisis is that the powers that be in the left blew their load on trials. It still seems like it’s a big deal that the primary opposition Presidential candidate nearly had his property seized by the state and has criminal charges all over the place. It just doesn’t seem like it’s having the desired effect.
The thing I don’t get is it feels like someone is pulling the strings for summer of Floyd, launching dozens of cases against Trump, etc and designing these election strategies but I do not know who is the puppet master.
Fwiw Democrat political strategies seem to be failures. 2020 is likely a landslide in my opinion without summer of Floyd; it would have been 2008 with Trump taking the L for COVID happening in his watch just like 2008 was a blowout with the GOP losing because of the financial crisis. Court cases also seem to have boosted Trump. The only good thing I can say from the court cases is it seemed to elevate Trump before Desantis could get in a fight.
As a leftist/social democratic, there are no puppet masters. It's always weird when people assume the other side are these insane puppet master, wielding superpowers that can't be stopped. The left was like this for a long time as well, and it was annoying then. Karl Rove wasn't some Sith Lord, he was just pretty good at his job.
Like guys, there is no secret decoder ring. If anything, we on the left complain about how bad we're at politics as much as you guys do, because neither side thinks they're winning.
I'm always interested when people assume this - in every other country, regardless of ideology, the incumbent leadership gained a huge advantage, and many of them won big electoral victories. Now, inflation and other issues have run some of those politicians aground, but in 2020, they were all very popular. The only reason Trump didn't get that was not that the left would not give him any credit (see various Republican governors who had insanely high approval ratings during COVID), it's he did a terrible job, outside of the one thing his base now hates (Operation Warp Speed).
I do think a non-COVID 2020 election would've been interesting, because Trump would've had a good economy, but it was basically just the late-era Obama economy continuing, there would've been no checks going out to low-info voters, and many things people on this forum like Trump that normies don't would've been a bigger deal. I also think there might've been a bigger move among the center-right to basically sit out things, especially the people who got radicalized by COVID and then supported Trump/DeSantis/etc. harder than they would've before.
I don't mean famous people, but the owner of a HVAC company in suburban Michigan whose kind of annoyed by Trump, dislikes immigration, but also dislikes that he tired to repeal Obamacare, but hated that the country was shut down, and like the PPP loan he got. Without the latter, maybe he doesn't vote for Biden, but does he turn out for Trump?
This person is a deep-red Republican who might have qualms about their abortion policies but definitely agrees with trump’s economic and border agendas.
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There are people who like Obamacare? What would be the reasoning? From the business owner POV it seems that they'd be trying to hire less than full-time not to have to pay for health insurance.
If he wanted to spend more on health insurance for his employees, he could have done that prior to Obamacare I think.
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I don’t want to touch a lot of these because they are political narratives. Personally, I think for example Trump did the best job of anyone and you highlight two of them Operation Warpspeed and the PPP loans/economic program. The first was the most important thing for saving lives and the second was a primary reason America bounced back so quickly.
On the puppet master thing it’s because they feel coordinated. America has black criminals dying from law enforcement all the time for doing black criminal stuff. In Floyd’s case it’s using counterfeit money to by fentanyl of which put himself 80-90% of the way to his death. It makes no sense to me he wasn’t just labeled an OD. Black guy dies of fentanyl OD normally wouldn’t even make a local newspaper. Instead we had spontaneous riots in every major city and a lot of small towns. It only happens in an election year. And the timing of the riots just feels like someone is organizing. It’s like a war day Ukraine where there are battles at 20 different areas of the front where it’s obvious someone made a decision to time them together.
The same thing with the legal cases for Trump it feels like someone tried to stack them for constant news coverage and with many timed to land with key events during the peak of the election. If he had one case coinciding with the election it would seem like one person doing their things but when you have multiple it feels like someone is giving Lieutenant's battle plans.
In your case you identified Karl Rove as doing politics. In this case there is no one.
No point relitigating the cause of Floyd's death here, but social movements triggered by one emotive incident which stands for wider grievances or concerns are hardly uncommon. Alan Kurdi, Jyoti Singh, Rodney King; these are people who under different circumstances might have dropped out of the news cycle in days, or indeed never entered it, but chance would have it that their deaths (or beatings) happened in just the right time, place and manner prompt a wider consideration of some important issue.
The puppet master thesis is the “just the right time, place, and manner” is a US election. And this was all about winning an election than any real concern about black people. If Floyd had everything else happen to him and it was 2018 or 2021 he would just be another dead black man.
The first big case in this vein was Treyvon Martin and it wasn't a factor in the 2012 election. The first big police killing case of the current era was in 2014, a midterm year, and it didn't have much impact on that election. There were a number of others and they made have made an impact on some local elections, but I don't recall any precedent for it becoming a national issue at the electoral level. If it's 2020 and you're trying to manufacture an issue so you can get votes, there's already precedent to suggest that George Floyd isn't it. And there's nothing to suggest that the whole controversy even helped the Democrats. It resulted in a lot of Democrats saying a lot of dumb things about defunding police, and Biden had to specifically go against these people while campaigning. For Trump it was easy because all he had to do was keep to the party line that Floy'd death was a tragedy but there was no systematic problem with the police and we needed to stop the riots. Biden had to navigate dangerous waters. It's hard to see how anyone in May of 2020 would have thought that making a big deal out of Floyd's death would result in an advantage for Democrats.
I agree Floyd killing himself was not used well politically he the left. It becoming a bigger issue than Trayvon Martin though is the puppet master thesis. The puppet master can be bad at his job which in this case I think they made a mistake.
Also I wholeheartedly disagree that Trump just had to call it a tragedy. The right doesn’t agree with that. That implies the police did something wrong. I do not believe that. Letting the left control the narrative is something I do not agree with. A reason I vote for Desantis or Trump is because they have the balls to call out bad narratives.
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I know that's the thesis, I'm just saying you can't prove that simply by the fact that Floyd's story was covered disproportionately, since individual cases prompting a much broader movement addressing wider issues is a pretty common pattern that happens without anyone co-ordinating it. A few years before or after 2010 Mohammed Bouazizi might have sunk without a trace, but that doesn't imply that there was any puppet-master of Tunisians.
Plus, it's pretty unclear whether that summer of protests and riots actually did Biden any favours.
The protest hurt Biden. But that doesn’t negate a thesis that they thought it would was good strategy.
And of course you can never prove any theory in this day and age. We could have a puppet master in plain site (like 2020 election fraud and mail in ballots) and it would be called a conspiracy theory.
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So the left now blames exclusively themselves for their failures, and not people like the Koch brothers, Federalist Society, or alleged Russian disinfo agents?
Seems to be in contradiction with how having an internal locus of control is today right-coded, be it in the context of Black-white achievement gap or obesity.
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