domain:drmanhattan16.substack.com
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
3m ago
Circle of equals! All the legislators form a circle, and the two have to fight it out bare handed until one submits.
Corvos
5m ago
I'm old fashioned in many ways, but this reasoning seems so weird to me.
A: Threatens to kill B and his family.
B: Right. Tomorrow, at dawn, I'm going to give you the opportunity to kill me.
Very manly, yes, but not very helpful unless you're sure A is an abject coward. Hire somebody who knows how to use a telescopic sight or put a horse's head in his bed or something.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
14m ago
This is a verbatim quote from one of the screenshots:
“You were talking about hopping jennifer Gilbert’s children would die”
JAY JONES: “Yes, I’ve told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy”
The meaning could not be more clear. This is all from one screenshot, so these messages were not presented out of order, unless you think the screenshot was fabricated.
gattsuru
15m ago
Most people are lurkers and not posters to begin with. What exactly is the threat model for a lurker reading some chud website like TheMotte dot org?
Botond173
17m ago
Anyone care to explain why he switched bin Laden with Pol Pot of all people in his texts from the original?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
18m ago
I do not believe that they are thinking of a totally impartial judge and jury coming to the conclusion that their opponent has indeed committed the crime they are accusing them of beyond any reasonable doubt.
I have never considered it to be taken any other way? The truth is, the MAGA masses honestly, earnestly believe that these people have committed high crimes and treason, which a fair and unbiased trial would reveal the full details of, resulting in an inevitable and just execution that even the Blue Tribe would agree is just. Are they right? Likely not. But I have never doubted that this is what they earnestly believe.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
18m ago
These post-ers who pop up again after two years always have me scratching my head. Like what's been on your mind since 2023?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
19m ago
Name one instance where someone on the right engaged in violence or violent rhetoric and Trump offered nothing but a full-throated, unequivocal condemnation. Name one.
Looking forward to this, great post.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
21m ago
The Internet use patterns that 90% of young men want to keep private involve cooming rather than intellectual heresy.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
26m ago
First of all, why aren't you at your post?
Second, you're getting reasonable responses to what I'd consider an overgenerous appraisal of Jones, but let me back up a bit and ask about your lady friend who wants to stockpile bombs. What the fuck? Obviously you may have been using hyperbole or making a joke ot whatever, but if you're serious, what gives here? She knows something about bombs, does she?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
26m ago
Why does everyone keep saying he’d like to murder them?
Even the phone call, which we somehow only got secondhand, says he was hoping her children would die.
Again, awful, but a different vibe.
daguerrean
33m ago
They will hate you because you tell them the truth. Is this and the recent Kirk reactions an escalation by the Democrats in that it goes further than anything I can name from Republicans? Yes. But that’s how these endless tit-for-tat escalations work. Each new unprecedented devilry becomes justifications for a new hitherto unprecedented norm violation by the other side, and back and forth.
These new escalations are in fact escalations, and should be recognized and denounced as such, but we shouldn’t use them to excuse further norm violations by our side and we should acknowledge our side’s role in the escalation chain
That isn't true at all. You can do granular enough tests if you want, some countries do, and barring that you can have a lottery, which some countries do, mine among them.
The lottery has not really been a meaningful thing here (at the very top level) for about a decade though now since they increased the number of spots at the medical programmes and also made the test slightly more granular.
I don't see why America couldn't do one of those things. I personally think the runaway competition for those university spots is extremely toxic and would bound the competition for like the top 1-2% (for the top bracket) or so and then have a lottery for them. Picking the lucky seems preferable to torturing your children for some zero-sum competition with no societal gain.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
35m ago
Reddit =/= Reddit commentators amusingly, given the stats on commenting vs lurking
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
35m ago
For a Democrat to get the same benefit in a primary election they'd have to also tie it to some issue (anti-capitalism? pro-gun-bans?) where their base is afraid of them selling out
Off the top of my head, medicare for all, releasing the Epstein files, and student loan forgiveness are "traitor" issues to the left. Medicare for all especially, and to this day Jimmy Dore can't let go how much he got smeared by "sell outs" for his force the vote initiative. Epstein files I can't tell how deep or sincere the sentiment goes. Student Loan forgiveness being a traitor issue revolves around this theory that the Biden admin purposely chose the weakest legal theory to argue in favor of it, and lost on purpose in the Supreme Court. Once again, I don't know how widespread or sincere this sentiment is.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
35m ago
March the whole family against a wall and shoot them all, yes including the evil fascist breeding babies
Everyone in this thread is acting like that is indeed what he said.
Botond173
36m ago
The male perpetrators of "petty" political violence during the '70s were anything but "low status, violent men who have not much to lose".
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
37m ago
He called for killing his toddlers.
It's implied, but never explicitly proven he did. The people who leaked this were deliberate with what they showed us. If he said that explicitly, wouldn't they have leaked that too?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
40m ago
No, I was saying that wasn’t contained in any of the screenshots, which made me wonder if I was missing something.
It seems pretty clear that he said something like that in the phone call.
roystgnr
43m ago
It was mostly immigration; at least in his first campaign "Build The Wall" took priority and "Drain The Swamp" was behind that and "unfair trade deals" were mentioned but definitely a bronze medal campaign issue at best. As late as this spring there was still a vocal contingent of the right wing arguing that his tariffs were really just for negotiating leverage so that we could end up with free trade unencumbered by other countries' restrictions.
But that's just an aside. More critically, and I hate to say this: I think the norm-breaking and the vulgarity were an inseparable part of the immigration issue for Trump. The Republican M.O. at the time was to talk an anti-illegal-immigration game, look for bipartisan support once in office, and then let Lucy yank away the football again. The only way to convince Republican voters that a candidate (especially one with a fairly non-partisan history) wasn't just in the "talk an anti-illegal-immigration game" phase preceding the "the Democrats convinced us to trade yet another amnesty for getting Really Serious This Time" phase was to be so boorish towards Democrats and illegal immigrants that nobody could picture him ever negotiating with the former on behalf of the latter.
There's no shortage of Democrats competing to show that they can "stand up to Trump" by being assholes too, but I'm not sure what it accomplishes from their side. They seem to perceive it as an aesthetic signal of strength they need to adopt too, but for Trump his attitude actually was meaningful as a signal of intransigence. For a Democrat to get the same benefit in a primary election they'd have to also tie it to some issue (anti-capitalism? pro-gun-bans?) where their base is afraid of them selling out, and for that not to backfire in the general election it would have to also be an issue that wouldn't necessarily backfire with independents or backfire too badly across the aisle.
I can't think of any issues like that currently, but perhaps one could be whipped up. The median American wasn't a fan of illegal immigration, but also didn't think of it as a huge issue until Trump himself increased its salience. On the other hand, maybe polarizing the country is a trick that can only be pulled off once. In 2016 it might have been plausible to think that America had too much bipartisan cooperation and not enough bridge-burning heated rhetoric, but in 2028 that will probably be a tougher sell.
Rov_Scam
45m ago
There's a saying, more of a cliche, about being the change you want to see. Given that Donald Trump basically is the Republican Party at this point, and has been for some time, I don't see any evidence of anyone desiring any change or even indicating that they want a change, provided it isn't just that the other side has to do the changing. Name one instance where someone on the right engaged in violence or violent rhetoric and Trump offered nothing but a full-throated, unequivocal condemnation. Name one. I'm not interested in which side has more total incidents or who started it or any of that, because it honestly doesn't matter at this point. We can go all the way back to Trump's entry into politics in 2015 and see nothing but excuses, equivocation, or using tragic events as an opportunity to dunk on his political opponents. Let's take a look at some of the biggies that have transpired in that time:
-
Dylann Roof: Trump wasn't really in a position where he'd be required to say anything at the time of the incident, as it preceded his entry into politics, but he later criticized the media for not blaming Obama for the shooting. The context of that remark was somewhat complicated, but it's nonetheless impossible to believe any context where Obama could have credibly been blamed for the Roof incident.
-
Cesar Sayok: See above. A pro-Trump militant mails pipe bombs to various Democratic leaders. Trump's immediate concern is that the media is unfairly blaming him for inspiring the incident. Whether or not that was fair, there didn't seem to be much concern from Trump or any other Republican that somebody was mailing pipe bombs for political reasons.
-
The Whitmer Kidnapping Plot: Immediately following the arrests, Trump's response was to suggest that she should be in jail anyway due to her COVID policies. In the course of the prosecution it would later come to light that the perpetrators had an entrapment defense that wasn't entirely ridiculous, though it was ultimately unsuccessful, and various people on the right latched on to this to make them look like political prisoners. This ignores the fact that Trump made his comments long before anyone knew all the details.
-
Paul Pelosi Attack: Trump wasn't in office then, but his response was to make jokes about it on the campaign trail. Then a completely baseless theory developed among conservatives who were sure that the guy was a male prostitute in a relationship with Pelosi. Charlie Kirk said that a true patriot needed to come along and bail the guy out. Even the Republicans who offered support to the Pelosis did nothing to attempt to diffuse the rumors.
-
Charlottesville: The most famous of Trump's equivocations, endlessly defended among his supporters. The point wasn't whether he was technically correct when he implied that all sides engage in political violence. It was that unequivocally condemning a white supremacist who committed murder should be the easiest thing a president does. Had he simply disavowed white supremacy and violence that would have been the end of it, but he had to use the tragedy as an opportunity to take a dig at his political opponents.
-
Minnesota Lawmaker Shootings: This is probably the most he ever did in that his office issued a written statement condemning the attacks. But when he actually got in front of a microphone he couldn't resist the opportunity to dunk on Tim Walz.
-
Shapiro Arson: Probably his best response so far, in that he was completely silent about it, except for a private call with Shapiro several days after the incident.
-
January 6: The Biggie. This topic has been litigated to death on here and I'm not about to relitigate it. Hundreds of people break into the Capitol building, threatening the vice president and various other politicians, in order to overturn the results of a presidential election. Even while they're still in the building, Trump can't address the nation without telling them he loves them. Initial Republican condemnation turns to justification and excuse making: Most of them just trespassed, they weren't carrying guns, the Democrats didn't do a good job of stopping the 2020 protests (never mind Trump was president), Clinton pardoned Puerto Rican nationalists 30-years later, the election really was stolen and they were all patriots, etc.
If that's where things ended then I could just lump this in with the above, but it went further. As the years past the plight of the poor insurrectionists became a cause celebre on the right, culminating in the pardons of everyone involve. Doesn't matter if they actually caused property damage. Doesn't matter if they assaulted cops. Doesn't matter if they planned things in advance. It was all a big liberal hoax to take political prisoners. It was at this point that the GOP completely abandoned any pretext of being a law and order party insofar as the law applies equally to everyone. Instead they used the perceived bad behavior of their political opponents as a license to condone violence that supports their own political ends.
All of the above is why I find it hard to take the crocodile tears and phony-baloney moralizing following the Kirk shooting seriously. Even when Fox News tried to give Trump an opportunity to turn down the temperature, he rebuked them, insinuating that the ends justified the means; right-wing extremists were okay because they at least wanted the same things he did, while it's the left that's the real problem. When asked about mending the political divide he said he wasn't interested. He said at Kirk's funeral that he disagreed with Kirk in that he hated his opponents and wanted them destroyed.
So when someone says that Jay Jones's private text messages from three years ago should be politically disqualifying I can agree in an abstract sense that they probably should be. But how many things has Trump said that would have traditionally disqualified a presidential candidate? I'm not even going to list them, because on the one hand it would take forever, but more importantly, I'm sure I'd get a bunch of people arguing how it really isn't that bad. Hell, two thirds of Trump's appeal is that he "tells it like it is" without any regard for political correctness. Let's be honest, if text messages had come out wherein Trump said something similar about a Democratic politician in the weeks preceding the election, approximately five people nationwide would change their votes to Harris on that basis. I don't believe for a second that this is some kind of red line that you simply won't allow any politician to cross.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
49m ago
I wasn’t trying to say his initial texts were acceptable. More that they didn’t reflect a specific belief. Like how “I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire” doesn’t actually mean “I wish you’d burn to death.”
His remarks on the call are much closer to the latter, and I’ll edit my comment accordingly.
FistfullOfCrows
56m ago
Ideally there wouldn't be any.
I will be fine with rearresting all of the Jan 6 people once about 100,000 BLM rioters have been arrested, tried, and sat in jail for as long as the median J6 rioter did before being pardoned. Until then every time someone on the left brings it up all I hear is "rules for thee, but not for me."
And I really do mean it, I will be fine with that. I do not support the J6 people and do want them punished, all rioters should be. But while the feds under Biden spend years making sure every one of them was punished other dems have turned an intentional blind eye to their own thugs, a pattern that persists in DAs refusing to charge lefties who punch pro-lifers on camera. I want rioters punished, but I will not accept ONLY right wing protestors being punished. Pardoning them was wrong, accepting second class status is worse.
So I agree, be the change you want to see. You guys put 10,000 heads on spikes is a good first step.
More options
Context Copy link