Romney author:gattsuru
gattsuru
16d ago
But no Blue government actually passed a federal ban on firearms.
The Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 is within living memory. The last Blue Presidential nominee laughed at the idea that the Second Amendment would protect against outright confiscation of firearms from their current owners. There are several federal bans on firearms, and not a single one has been successfully challenged at SCOTUS. The only federal gun control law that has ever been successfully challenged was the Gun Free School Zones Act, under the Commerce Clause, and which immediately was reenacted with the court pretending it was all okay. Nor is that because the statute-writers carefully wrote around the borders of the Second Amendment, or even believed it could cover anything.
If you mean to say that the Blue government have not passed a federal ban on all firearms, granted. But this does not reflect the Constitution coming out of its glass case.
I guarantee you that in a world where everybody ignored the Constitution without a second thought, they would have tried at some point.
They did, in fact, try. They have, in fact, tried repeatedly, both at local and federal levels. The 1938 Gun Control Act started out specifically as a complete registry of every semiautomatic, under a theory that this could make a future nation-wide Sullivan Act possible! Lujan Grisham was not stopped by a preliminary injunction (it got stayed), or a citizen grand jury (New Mexico has them in theory but defanged them against politicians) or civil suit (New Mexico's overturned qualified immunity with a but, and that butt is Grisham's face) or impeachment (nope) or federal or state censure (double nope, didn't even get a single Dem vote); she was stopped by actors holding politically-responsive offices knowing that knew they would face a serious cost at the next poll.
The only thing that has stopped several very broad gun control laws has been serious, prolonged, and coordinated political and structural force from the Red Tribe against its own politicians, well away from the courthouse.
Some of those came at massive political cost! The NRA tanked several Red Tribe politicians to protect Harry Reid, in exchange for Reid blocking gun control efforts, right before Reid infamously burned the next Red Tribe presidential nominee with malicious slander from the House floor. Even smaller stuff, like increasing efforts to curate Blue Dog Democrats and trim anti-gun Republicans, cost no small amount of political capital and literal money, and was one of many factors that lead to the ACA passing.
The way I see it, your choice is between selective application of the second amendment, and it simply being torn down.
There is no application of the 2nd Amendment, today. There are only fancy papers talking about it.
Heller can not register (lol) his gun from Heller I, he's brought a handful of other cases that SCOTUS punted on every single one, in Heller II a goofball wrote a dissent from the appeals court case specifically calling for SCOTUS to decide on the question of 'assault' weapons bans, and yesterday the guy who wrote that dissent in Heller II put out a statement in Snope deciding nope not gonna. From the last available numbers, the NYPD have issued fewer CCW permits per-annum post-Bruen than before it, those lucky few can carry fewer places at greater legal threat, and they may not be able to carry at all anyway. Other courts have simply read Bruen's rule against banning carry across an entire island and deciding that five sounded better, and SCOTUS punted. Lower courts have simply defied SCOTUS opinions that covered other rights too, and SCOTUS punted; others outright deny that the 2nd Amendment exists in their courtroom.
I can keep doing this.
To be clear, I do applaud you for writing this. It takes some genuinely uncommon courage to admit to a mistake, and it speaks well of your character to do so. No one's immune to being mislead or making error, and I've personally made worse (and dumber) mistakes, including in this forum.
So to the extent I'm making commentary, this is to comment on the Mescales News et all, with an emphasis on the et all. This isn't even the first time people have accused DOGE of killing people via tornado, falsely. Lest I be called out for nutpicking, today, a sitting federal senator accused Trump and DOGE of killing at least two sailors; accusations that DOGE cuts and the Shelton Snowlikes were the real cause of AA5342 or MedJets 056 were endemic even as it became clearer and clearer that it wasn't and couldn't have been. Nor is this specific to Trump: Abbott murdered migrants [even if]https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/13/us/us-mexico-border-drowned-migrants) he needed a time machine to do it, and that's just the one that's been discussed here.
It's clear that they don't really 'believe' it, to the extent someone who worked for Vox can be said to 'believe' anything, but I think that's besides the point. They don't believe the truth, either! That's not what their job is, and even if they're lying because their mouths are moving, you can't assume that anything bad is literally always wrong.
((Going back to the question of Being Wrong, I nearly started writing a bit on the Qatar AF1 donation, and while some of the initial reporting was wrong, not enough of it was for what I wrote to be worth posting.))
There's a bigger question of how we got here, to this. I'm tempted, as always, to point to Palin, where between actions and lawsuits the punchline was written years before Very Rarely Lies was -- Trump or DOGE might well try to sue here, but everyone and their dog (and insurance company) knows that they won't and can't win. Maybe I'm just drawing too big a contrast from previous variants, either on the right or left, where there was at least some motion around hyperbole or figure of speech or schizophrenia, maybe I just missed some of the more clear examples back then.
((Something something USS Maine?))
But this should matter! It's a problem for people like you or I that we have to dig twenty layers deep to find any discussion of Noem's quote that doesn't bury the actual lead -- that the Trump admin is considering whether FEMA's cause could be better served by state-operated grants, rather than just burning the entire concept of disaster response like an ostrich. It's not our fault if we can't tell a hundred percent of the time when facing off against an entire industry that has optimized itself to be persuasive.
But fault's got nothing to do with it.
gattsuru
7mo ago
Most of the opposition is going to point at her record on Syria -- she was ponderously slow to realize Assad was an asshole, and remained skeptical that he used chemical weapons after . She cites the Iraq War as cause, and that's fair to an extent, but it's an odd thing to bring to the DNI. I dunno whether to read it as a (figurative) bomb-thrower that'll root through some of the various agencies' more corrupt bits or at least throw some chaos into the various whisper campaigns, or just something she really wanted and Trump was willing to give her.
Some of that's just a tendency for conservative hawks to treat anyone remotely skeptical of their institutions as deadly poison, but even in the self-described neocon circles that wouldn't have cared about other spheres are really concerned on this one -- there was a minor news cycle when she mentioned demanding a ceasefire around Ukrainian that was mostly noteworthy for Romney calling it treason. Same from the places Democrats have been hawks. Which... may or may not be persuasive to you.
She shares a bit of crystal healer woo with RFK, though that probably matters less at here than any other cabinet position. She's also separately a social conservative on a lot of stuff (gays, trans people, abortion, DEI), though that's mostly a separate deal.
From the Blue Tribe-specific stuff, it's a little more boring: she pushed against Clinton getting the 2016 nomination, and hasn't treated Trump or January 6th as The Worst Thing Ever, and is not pro-LGBT.
And it isn't nice from your behalf to be calling right wingers who aren't abandoning anything remotely conservative being the most bellgerent men to walk the face of the earth, and so what you demand as right wingers to behave like, comes off as an attempt to control them.
I mean, I'm neither going to pretend to be one of the 'nice' people, nor claiming that the 'nice' people are actually nice -- Romney's my central example in the above post because he's particularly two-faced about it in a single book and a single article, but if you want one of my rants about David French I've got a pretty wide variety to choose from! And there's definitely a tendency for a Russell Conjugation of politeness, demanding carefully-drawn borders of acceptable discourse that one would never be tempted to overstep, while calling people they don't like as acting moronic.
There's some fun debates about whether the belligerent assholes or the 'nice' hegimonizing swarm are more directionally correct, but I'm willing to assume for the sake of this discussion that the assholes are at least a little more honest, or at least make finding the truth more likely in the end. My problem is that even at the most charitable, being just a little more honest than the 'nice' hegimonizing swarm is damning with extremely faint praise.
Like, for your specific example, progressive are and always were also going to quibble about Springfield vs Dayton and Haiti versus Africa, or whether one example is enough, but they can also now deflect because there weren't any dogs involved. There's actually a decent number of social and structural reasons that dogs are particularly unlikely, but even without them there's just the bit where it wasn't even on the twitter radar pre-debate. It's possible Trump had some external information otherwise. There's reason his advocates have mostly dropped it, though.
It's not that this is necessarily 'more' lying. I'd quibble with MacDougald a lot, here: as much as Trump is a bullshitter, you can absolutely find a ton of examples of just straightforward lies from the 'Nice' people, including many in last week's debate. My complaint is that if we belligerent assholes are advertising ourselves as talking about the truth, it'd be nice if belligerent assholes were actually doing that.
((Just as my complaint over at theschism is that it'd be nice if the 'Nice' people weren't talking about how they should metaphorically punch and literally remove from public discussion the people they disagree with.))
gattsuru
9mo ago
"You're so Nice. You're not Good, you're not Bad, you're just... Nice."
Into the Woods is a 1987 Sondheim musical (and a 2014 live action movie), throwing together a bunch of Brothers Grimm fairie tales into a stew, and then asking what happens after happily ever after. While later pieces in the same genre would often re-invent, twist or just completely invert the morality and drives of their main characters to provide a more morally 'complicated' story, Into the Woods is a good bit more restrained in its re-imagining. The heroes remain protagonists and the villains jerks; it's just what this does to them and those around them that changes.
In particular, the tweaks here recognize that one good day does not make for a happy life, nor does everything that is heroic end up being good. Because this is a musical, and subtlety is for cowards, this is explicitly stated in song, with the villainous Witch belting out complaints about how the protagonists are Nice. And this predates the Nice Guy discourse; she's complaining that they are the sort of people who end up being protagonists.
Mitt Romney released a self-titled biography recently, and did a related media tour, as he saw the writing on the wall retired, and there were certain parallels that hit my brain and wouldn't leave since, nor have been left unassisted by other events since. Like no shortage of claims from him and his allies, quite a lot of the focus is on how his particular brand of Dignified, Professional, and Polite conservatism is important, and how its federal prominence has recently and near-completely collapsed. I can get some specific quotes for those interested, but chances are very good you've heard them before, and it's far from specific to Romney or even to conservative critics of populism. There's no shortage of politician, political, and non-political actors that really develop a personality and identity as being nice, above all.
"I'm not Good, I'm not Nice, but I'm Right."
While the play follows several different viewpoint characters, much of the connecting force and impetus for events comes from the Witch: in the first act, she needs the Baker to collect items to cure her curse of ugliness, she took away Rapunzel in her tower, her magic beans get Jack to the giant's tower, so on. While the second act is more about the consequences falling from those decisions, she still plays a serious role. Even up until her removal from the play in the final act, she's the one with ideas.
And she's not a good person, and they're not exactly nice ideas! She's gets the Baker to cooperate with the aid of a curse she placed on his house decades ago, she took Rapunzel from the Baker's father, she's just an all-around unpleasant (if funny) person to be around. Her final demand is to have Jack, to let him be crushed by the Giantess. If it weren't for how important those ideas were, no one would stand her.
For conservatives, especially the sort of conservatives who complains a lot about Romney being a RINO or use the phrase 'controlled opposition', there's a lot to complain about important and truthful ideas that either weren't getting voiced, or are only given enough attention to disclaim or throw under the bus. In many cases, it is that niceness that acts as an argument against recognizing even the strongest version of these positions; but even the strawman version where the bloodless (as far as the death of a child can be bloodless) story gets no attention and justifies the cruel story exists. I've pointed before to VanDyke as presenting vital information about procedural gamesmanship -- not despite, but because of the very traits that lead to him being seen as unqualified by the ABA.
... but the Witch is not always, actually, that right. The Last Midnight (and the Witch being literally eaten by the earth in the film version) is driven by her demand, and the rest of the cast's refusal, to surrender Jack to the Giant's Wife, who is currently in the process of stomping half the kingdom and much of its subjects flat. That demand might be ethically justifiable given Jack's killing of the Giant, but given that the Giantess is nearly blind and squishing much of the populace of the kingdom by accident or indifference, very far from clear that it'd actually salve her anger (especially in the film version). Even small asides, like the growled promise that the Baker will never find his sister who can never be reached, often end up wrong. Her prophecy about the protagonists being doomed to repeat their sins and the sins of their forebears, unsurprisingly, doesn't last to the curtain call.
The obvious metaphor today would be to point toward "they're eating dogs", which lacks even Vance's deniability of 'heard reports of' or the memeability of the oral sex joke. But that's just recency bias, and it wasn't even the most recent one at the end of that debate night: he and his quite willing to throw out the implausible (bluetooth earrings!) with the at-least-precedented (leaked debate questions) to the overt and obvious (ABC 'factchecking' things wrong). Call it bullshitting if you want, but at best it's distracting, and more often it's only defensible at all by pointing to the rest of the politician populace -- ie, no defense at all. And it's not like he's alone, here. I'm not a huge fan of Ken White of PopeHat calling everyone he doesn't like a dogfucker or shoot up federalist society meetings, but it'd even more damning when he yells those sorta things and also can't be bothered to take his 'serious' writings seriously.
((For a lighter-weight comparison that everyone involved would absolutely loathe, Neil deGrasse Tyson's schtick has increasing focused on what would charitably be called improving awareness of nitpickingly specific scientific knowledge, at the cost of coming across as obnoxiously uncharitable... and also doesn't even do that.))
"You're all liars and thieves... Oh, why bother? You'll just do what you do."
Except... one of the Witch's mistakes is claiming that the protagonists and their fellow travelers are nice. The Baker steals Red Riding Hood's cape and tricks Jack out of his cow, his wife cheats, Cinderella is gormless, Rapunzel has no idea how to interact with normal people, Red Riding Hood's turned her trauma from the wolf eating her not into grl pwr but into oft-unchecked aggression, Jack's a sociopath and a thief, the princes are "charming, not sincere". Again, no small part of the play is pointing out that the acts needed to turn a wish true don't come free, and also that they're often not exactly nice things to actually do. At best, the protagonists are willing to rationalize or excuse their faults and bad acts; at common, they project them on each other; at worst, they just don't want to have to think about it. There is literally a song of nothing but that!
(tbf, not one of the better ones)
Romney portrays himself as a man of dignity and kindness, and no small number of his biggest fans can't help but agree... at the same time that Romney gives constant asides about what specific person he disrespects most, or tells stories about how he and his political allies "burst into laughter" as soon as the target of that laughter left the room. The famous 47% gaffe might have played particularly poorly in Peoria, but it's not like the man was slow to. It gets worse if you look at the guys who tried to work for his campaign.
And, of course, it's not limited to Romney -- the currently sitting President who ran on his moderation also released a first-party political ad including an innocent citizen as a "white supremacist", still up on twitter, the people opposed to Romney -- or even to politicians. I have and will complain at length about pundits who have strong words and split the finest hairs about extremism in pursuit of virtue, and then lose track of the topic entirely as soon as there own vice comes to challenge. This sorta perverse combination of Abilene Paradox and whisper-or-not-so-whisper cruelty campaign is frustratingly common even down to small-scale organizations.
There's an excuse that the Kind get outsized and mean outspoken response, and that's what drives people who made it their brand to occasionally fall to snark and crude response. At best, it's an excuse for incivility; more often, it's an excuse waved before slapping someone for placing the last straw. Kindness has its limits
"Oh, why bother? You'll just do what you do."
Unfortunately, this stanza is about where the metaphor falls apart: the Witch decides she's rather exit the stage than continue to deal with these putzes, throwing away her magic beans and inviting every and all curses just to get away from them. The odds of Trump ever deciding to voluntarily be anywhere but the centre of the spotlight is about nil. Nor would Trump be willing to act the scapegoat responsible, as the Witch offers when she gives her ultimatum -- she'd take all the blame, be responsible for all their faults, if only she gets to try to make the problem go away. And the problem is far broader than him. We're not getting away from this just because one politician retires.
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Even before we get to the problem of exploring the chasm between “I for one welcome abandoning anything remotely conservative” and “I must be the most belligerent man to walk the face of earth if I want to be based”, is it even possible to get kind Abileners or honest belligerent assholes? I'm not saying that would be good, but it's bad when the bad option can't live up to its own awful marketing! Forget a Buddha-like calm detachment; it's hard to avoid calling morons morons no matter how much you know it's not worth it, and many of the important things for belligerent assholes to discuss are hard or impossible to really 'know'.
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Is there a space in between those two points, even theoretically? Even before we get to the pragmatic considerations or human failings, is there even theoretical space where one could be a polite and civil critic who still takes likely-but-unpleasant discussions seriously? (Not just the right: can the progressive movement surface its more serious critiques, without #KillAllMen or Guillotine Rose fandom tagging along?) I'd say it was one a goal for the rationalist movement, but that's just an indirect way of saying it's not gonna happen.
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If not at the individual level, are these perhaps organizational workarounds? One can at least imagine a straight-man/wise-guy combo that distributes responsibility such that the overt temptations are at least not as present, and that's historically been no small part of the role of public relations, but does that actually buy you anything? Or does this just drive the problem one layer earlier, where the organization instead will be either compromised or ripped apart?
gattsuru
11mo ago
The conservative take is that McConnell has only returned in kind escalations by past Democratic speakers, with the blocking of Miguel Estrada predating the blocking of Merrick Garland, and the detonation of the filibuster for judges in 2013 predating the death of the filibuster for justices in 2016. Even then, noting that it was limited to official acts (eg, McConnell hasn't given false claims about Biden's tax returns on the House floor).
I don't think that's entirely honest -- McConnell hasn't 'he won, didn't he' in no small part because every Republican knows it wouldn't work rather than some sense of fair play, and there have been some conservative escalations like the attacks on ACORN -- but it's more fair than not.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Or, if we're looking to 2020:
So—yes. When it comes down to it, with everyone who supported Donald Trump, "I'm ready to bury the hatchet" is about as uplifting and positive I can get. I didn't support Obama when he was in office. I felt like Bush was a good man who would be vindicated by history. I wanted McCain to win, then Romney. I grew up emotionally fully in the camp of Team Red, frustrated at how much it felt as though the left hated and misunderstood me, and I felt deeply personally betrayed when Team Red embraced Donald Trump, as if everything I had ever hoped about them was a mirage and they really did want to be as bad as the left always claimed they did. I can put the past in the past, but I can't pretend I don't strongly wish that particular chapter of the past never even came close to happening.
Sorry, I'm trying to not to take out a bad mood and what I see as a repudiation of Trace's entire ethos on him, and I get the distinction TW's trying to move around ("I'm not going to write off the half of the country who supported him"). But it's hard to read this conversation and not see my (and I guess @drmanhattan16 's?) participation in TheSchism (and TW's twitter sphere) as part of the problem.
gattsuru
1yr ago
This is what mystifies me about how large the supposedly beyond the pale attacks on Romney during the 2012 campaign are such a huge theme on this forum, popping up time after time after time.
Some of it's literally just me, and just used as an example over other cases like Palin or Dubya because Romney's more recent.
That said, just because it looks like harsh weapons sometimes get used doesn't mean that there are no rules, or motions about rules that people 'should' follow. LBJ's famous (alleged) pigfucker politics weren't exactly shared as aspirational goals -- note this summary is from a clearly progressive partisan Dem! And we do not see many serious attempts to call random politicians literal pig-fuckers today, and indeed that progressive partisan Dem mostly does not highlight statements from either serious politicians or their cutouts.
Part of that's because 'no one would believe it' (uh...), but the bigger part is that after a certain point this is the sort of thing that gets the Wohl's convicted or Project Veritas driven to bankruptcy. There are rules, as arbitrary and ill-enforced as they might be.
More critically, there's a point where the published violations of those rules would be more costs than the benefits might hold. It's like the people who wonder why Peter Thiel doesn't just hire private detectives to ruin the lives of everyone who pisses him off: the very act of trying to hire them would be a far bigger story than anything they could come up with would be, in ways that would undermine anything they could come up with. Scott Alexander might call this a specific form of bounded distrust, and while I don't particularly agree with his analysis, it's not completely wrong, either.
The flip side to 'Bounded Distrust' is that, even assuming it to be true, those bounds are not set in stone or engraved into golden plates, and the 2012 election was either a major shift or the revelation of a major shift, here. People point to the 2008 Swiftboating of Kerry, and maybe th at was another shift, but it was one where a rando PAC made allegations. We did not have a handful of plausibly connected cutouts claiming Romney would put "Black people back in chains"; we had the sitting vice president of the United States do it. We did not have some sketchy tabloid mag claiming Romney did not pay taxes; Harry Reid stood on the Senate floor and made his case.
But probably the more damning bit is that Romney made no small part of his public persona his decency. There's a (fair!) argument that this was always skin-deep: 47%, and all, and I've got a draft post I've been working on pointing out how much he was just as prone to snickering about his opponents as Trump was, just behind their backs rather than to their faces. Yet he made a large number of costly commitments to that skin-deep 'decency', while no small number of partisans on both sides were talking up how vital it would be both for the Republican project and for the American democratic project as a whole to elevate discourse.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Hradzka has a good bit on what he expected Richard Spencer was trying to do with the term to start with, and what a lot of progressives were doing as well. Or see this New York Times piece (by Singal, of course) that separated the 'alt-right' from the 'alt-light' -- and contrast, even contemporaneously, other pieces.
There's a lot of if-by-whiskey, where sometimes the alt-right was just the nutty white nationalists when defining their ideology, others where it was people who hadn't denounced them heavily enough, and then other times the alt-right was pretty much everyone to the right of Mitt Romney. And to a lot of the progressive and leftist movements, the difference was kinda marginal : if you think Mitt Romney was a white supremacist, you're worried about all of them.
This is very much not my recollection of that election, what are you talking about?
The current sitting President of the United States, then VP campaigned against Romney by claiming he would put African-Americans back "in chains". Romney was campaigning against hormonal birth control, somehow. Romney's VP pick faced attack ads that had him wheeling grandma off a cliff. Ann Romney was a repeated target of pretty shitty media coverage that conveniently intersected with her multiple sclerosis. People were absolutely sure Romney-Ryan were going to ban gay sex, somehow! The IRS leaked NOM donation records that just conveniently happened to have his donations included, and just so happened to get delivered to the HRC.
Harry Reid famously and falsely claimed that Romney'd paid zero taxes on the floor of Congress, and after it had been widely distributed, widely believed, and at cost proven wrong, then years later said he had no regrets because "he lost, didn't he"!
The last Presidential election had a first-party ad under the candidate's own twitter account insinuate an innocent man was a White Supremacist, so there's at least one that I'd consider people personally and deeply irresponsible for publishing. And this isn't the first time I've brought it up, or even brought it up in a conversation with you, even if I am pleasantly surprised a few other predictions related to that were flubs.
Romney was personally responsible for a woman's cancer death, Kerry had the SwiftBoat mess. Go back a little further and you have the famous Daisy ad and Confessions of a Republican (remade for the 2016 season!) in a single election. "Read My Lips" and "Act of Love" were mostly unusual for being somewhat near honest.
They don't all have wikipedia articles, but a good number are memorable; with the exception of Confessions of a Republican and maybe "Act of Love", I'd hope anyone who's been paying attention politically in the last decade is familiar with most of these. A rare few aren't even attack ads; Reagan's "bear in the woods" ad has a wiki article because... some reason? The deletionists haven't heard about it yet?
It's not like this is even specific to Presidential elections: see The Agenda Project anti-Paul Ryan ad, or the hilariously offensive attack ad on Abbott in Texas.
And the Horton ad is at least believed to have been hugely effective, along with Dukakis' infamous tank ride, as part of why he lost in a landslide. I'm not sure how much I buy that compared to the macro-economic trends or broader policy disagreements -- same for Romney and Kerry, while I think Jeb! had broader and deeper issues than immigration policy -- but at least in claimed reasoning a lot of people point to them.
...
[emphasis added]
The only person to use the President in this conversation, so far, has been me: to highlight that Kamala Harris laughed at the idea of the Second Amendment meaning anything, and to point to Harry Reid burning Romney.
EDIT: To be clear, the Harris cackle.
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