domain:web.law.duke.edu
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
Honestly I expect the “resistance” to Peter out pretty quickly once the gloves actually come off. I just don’t see anything that makes me believe that these people understand power, strategy, or even real desire. It’s like they’ve almost decided that Trump is going to get away with it anyway so other than making noises so that people don’t mistake them for supporting Trump. But there’s no real drive there.
Chuck Schumer writes “strongly worded letters” that do nothing and mean nothing. He had not, however used the filibuster to block any of Trump’s legislation or nominees. He didn’t refuse to raise the debt ceiling when that came up. Corey Booker sat on the steps of the Capitol for a day, telling everyone how much he wanted to save Medicaid. He also voted for Trump’s nominees even when it wasn’t required. No Democratic legislators have introduced impeachment or contempt of Congress charges, they’ve held no hearings to investigate the supposed crimes. Even Newsome is pretty much rolling along. He could have easily as governor ordered the National Guard to stand down. He didn’t try it. This isn’t a group of dissidents willing to do whatever they can to stop something they see as an evil regime marching towards authoritarianism. This is a group mostly miming opposition while doing nothing.
And the protests are much the same. These are not spontaneous protests brought on by genuine outrage. These are planned protests, short in duration, carefully crafted such that they are short, easy to get to, and coordinate with most people’s schedules. Holding a planned demonstration from 11-2 on Saturday is pretty weak sauce. Holding a protest like that without making any concrete demands is a joke. We are here, clear, and only doing this so long as it doesn’t interfere with work, chores, or Billy’s little league game. What’s the point? How does this demonstrate power? Resolve? Anything? But 3.5% showed up on a sunny weekend day in June so according to them the Revolution will succeed. Again, I very strongly suspect that this movement is less about Trump or anything Trump is doing and more about having learned in school that they’re “supposed to oppose this” lest history judge you complicit. It’s not about Trump, or ICE, or anything else. It’s the nagging fear that their grandchildren in their horror scenarios will ask them why they didn’t do anything. So they’re making a public show of opposition they don’t actually care about. Because how will anyone know they’re the good ones if they don’t hold up a “honk if you don’t like fascism” sign.
But since nobody is serious about anything they’re saying, it will absolutely fade under real opposition. A few sidewalk protesters thrown into prison, the arrest of a political figure who defies Trump, cutting funding for a pet project for their district, whatever. They won’t continue fighting when it has a real cost. As such Trump can do pretty much anything he wants to.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
Israel can’t actually finish the job on their own, at least not with conventional arms. Their whole strategy was to suck the United States into the conflict, preferably with a ground invasion. Trump knows this, hence his annoyed tone.
The Ukraine War is tougher because the United States has less leverage over both parties. Russia is an already heavily sanctioned nuclear nation and the only major stick that can be deployed against them is the threat to deploy American ground troops in Ukraine, which is unlikely. Europe is still convinced that the war is a good idea and if they are willing to sacrifice a bit they could continue to fund and arm Ukraine for the next several years, even if all US support is cut off. Both Ukraine and Russia seem to be convinced they can still win and that continuing to pursue the war is in their own best interest. There’s not a lot that America can actually do to force them to stop.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Talking about GOP front runners at this point is more snail brained than usual: the odds that more than one of Rubio, Hegseth, and Vance are still in Trump/MAGA's good graces in 2028 are lower than the odds that none of them are.
the argument is less "this content is sinful", and more "this content is demonstrably poisoning the relations and sexual health of our children".
What did you think 'sinful' meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
Sin is definitionally injurious to individuals and societies.
All that's changed is that instead of warning people (and getting called crazy), we now get to say "I told you so" (and still mostly be ignored).
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
One might draw a parallel to (broadly speaking) Democrats and smoking tobacco. In the 90s, there was a claim around the Republican side of things that the Democrats were going to ban tobacco. One could believe this, because it was very clear that the Democrats as a group were not fond of the tobacco industry, and because the people who really did want to ban tobacco seemed mostly to be deep-blue democrats, and also because the people making this comparison somehow didn't mention counterexamples. But in fact, Democrats did not ban tobacco, nor did they make any serious effort to try to. Instead, they took numerous steps to paint tobacco consumption and the tobacco industry as sleazy, dirty, and dangerous, relying on coordinated social power and messaging to try to push people to drop the habit of their own volition, thus carving away the industry's financial base and reducing its lobbying power. What laws were passed were either focused on forcing the tobacco companies themselves into cooperating with this push, or else targeted attacks on areas where tobacco was framed in the worst light and where public support was strongest, such as the lawsuits.
I think this is a pretty good model for what an actual Red-Tribe attack on porn and the porn industry would look like.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
I will at least observe that Red states have been, even in this era, pushing back on the prevalence of online porn. Pornhub, notably, has blocked a number of states that have passed relevant legislation to require age verification. It's Very Possible Nowadays to circumvent such things or find sites that don't care about (American) jurisdiction quite so much, but it is happening.
Notably, though, the argument is less "this content is sinful", and more "this content is demonstrably poisoning the relations and sexual health of our children".
Or, in other words, the aisles are swapping underneath the parties, and the Ds are going to fully re-emerge into the collective consciousness as the right-wing/conservative party (the term "progressive-conservative" comes to mind, back when right-wing causes had the social license that left-wing causes do today). The Rs have very solidly positioned themselves on the left-wing/reform side, and Trump II exemplifies this.
Remember, Obama was the last time a D voter could logically/consistently claim to be on the side of reform, and [Rs voting in 2012 or 2016 for any non-Trump candidate] was the last time an R voter could do the same on the side of conservatism. This is what "right is the new left" was talking about. Biden was fundamentally a conservative pick, exactly what you want in a crisis (which said conservatives manufactured, but that's not actually important with respect to the actual dynamics).
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
4d ago
The obvious GOP front-runners for 2028 and 2032 are Vance, Rubio, DeSantis, and Hegseth in roughly that order. All of them are currently under 55 and much closer culturally to what @FCfromSSC is describing than anything you have.
You can bet on Conservative inc ( yes even Trump) doing Israel's bidding and you'd be right 10 out of 10 times. The level of influence AIPAC has over the us is disgusting, especially when contrasted with the histrionics we got from the left and the media for 4 years alleging all sorts of non-existent bullshit wrt Trump/Russia. At one point they were throwing a hissy fit about Russian citizens existing in the vague proximity of Trump.
I'm not so certain that the founders of this country would agree.
If you read the correspondence of the founding fathers, I am pretty sure they would wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment described above. They put a lot of effort into making sure the Republican government they devised insulated itself from people's worst habits. The fact that we have unwound most of those protections is a different topic of discussion, but related.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
The Republicans will not ban abortion at the federal level. Neither will they commit significant political value to attempting such a ban.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
Online Politics Brain. Look at Pew data on religious identity instead of anecdotes.
...It seems to me that your arguments would benefit greatly from expansion into more than single-sentence, contextless dismissal. You appear to be arguing that the population as a whole is still moving away from religiosity. But my argument was not that people are moving toward Religion, but rather that they are moving away from liberalism and its axioms, upon which the Progressive edifice is founded. My argument is not that Conservative Christians will secure power, it is that power will lean somewhat more in our direction and very hard away from our most dedicated opponents, because our critiques are valid and theirs are not.
They're the ones who will be running for office in 2028. They won't live forever, but 2028 is what we're talking about here.
I am highly confident that none of the 2028 contenders will be Boomer-brained Gen-x-er preachers or middle-aged church ladies, in either party. I'm highly confident that the Republican 2028 contenders will be much more sympathetic to Conservative Christian social critique than they will be to Progressive social critique, and will consider protection of religious freedom for Conservative Christians as a winning political cause.
I'm weakly confident that Republicans will win in 2028, and I am highly confident that taking advice from the Hananiah set would degrade those odds, not improve them. The sort of reductive mental caching you seem to be deploying in this thread is a fair bit of the reason why. Rather than engage with what is actually happening, you consistently substitute factual realities for an imagined set more conducive to your axioms. Here, you are trying to round "Conservative Christians have persuasive critiques of our current culture" to "The Religious Right is ascendent, will try to jail people for viewing porn."
The problem with your claim, as I understand it, is that this is not actually going to happen, and the reason it isn't going to happen is not that people with power will take your advice. You can box phantoms for the next three years as much as you like; the world will proceed without you.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
So everyone is "wholly justified" in destroying everyone else? That is a bit of a nihilistic conception of justice, there.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Nuclear deterrence does not work as a 'I can hit you, no hit backs' shield, which already has a good deal of precedent not only in Russia-Ukraine but also in, well, the Iran doing retaliatory missile strikes against US bases in the middle east. The precedent for this line of thought failing have already been established, notably by Iran.
As long as Iran remains wedded to its proxy war strategy against Israel (and the US), it will be subject to retaliation strikes.
Counterpoint: the two main participants in the Cold War, the US and the USSR, were both very active in fighting proxy wars with the other. Supporting Hamas against Israel is not that different from supporting Bin Laden against the USSR, for example. Both sides tried very hard to avoid situations where US soldiers would have a shootout with USSR soldiers, because both sides were very aware of the danger of escalation.
This meant that if one side was a belligerent in a conflict, the other side abstained from officially sending troops as well. Sure, the other side would support the opponents with weapons, and they might send the odd liaison or special op soldier, but these would generally not participate in the killing of US/USSR soldiers and if they were killed, their side would not sweep that under the rug.
So if Iran was a nuclear power, as far as the cold war etiquette between the US and Iran was concerned,
- the US supplying chemical weapons to Saddam would be within the norms, because the US are not the ones using them
- Iran supporting Hamas against Israel would be within norms -- a classic proxy war
- the US assassinating IRGC general Soleimani in Baghdad in 2020 would be against the norms -- like if Brezhnev had used a Soviet missile to kill Kissinger while he was in France
- Israel dropping US-manufactured bombs on Iran would be within the norms
- Trump bombing the Iranian nuclear sites would be against the norms
Another point of etiquette is that you do not try to critically destabilize a nuclear power, even through indirect actions. While their soldiers are out bringing freedom and democracy or the glory of communism to some backwater, they are fair game for your proxies, but you want your proxies to stick to their local theater, not engage in intercontinental terrorism. For example, you would not back 9/11, or arm Ukraine to the point where they might force a regime change in Moscow. (As far as cold war etiquette between a hypothetical nuclear Iran and Israel are concerned, the Oct-7 attacks would be debatable. Attacking civilians -- especially in the deliberate manner displayed by Hamas -- of a nuclear power is going to piss off that power, and you generally don't want to be anywhere nearby in the causal chain of events.)
Tail risks are an important consideration for military interventions. If you are pushing around a conventional enemy on another continent, the question to "what is the worst that could realistically happen due to bombing them?" is likely stuff on the level of "they miraculously manage to sink an aircraft carrier" or "the sponsor a terrorist group which manages to kill a few thousand citizens". If you try to push around a nuclear enemy, then even for NK the answer is a lot bleaker -- they might not be able to nuke you on another continent, but they will certainly be able to drop a nuke or two on your regional allies.
There is also a case to be made that the knowledge that your side has nuclear weapons will make you more careful when engaging other nuclear powers. At the moment, Iran can lob rockets towards Israel whenever they feel like it -- the tail risks are sharply limited -- Israel is not going to nuke Tehran over a few dozen citizens killed, at the most they will kill a few hundred Iranians in return. By contrast, if you are an actor who has some but not absolute control over a nuclear armed side, perhaps a general or military advisor, you want to be careful to avoid a spiral of escalation where your side might be the first to use nukes and gets destroyed in retaliation. Say nuclear Iran launches a few missiles, Israel responds in kind, and as usual their missiles are much more effective than the ones fired by Iran. Suddenly there is some possibility that someone will nuke Tel Aviv, and Israel will nuke Tehran in response.
In conclusion, no, a nuke does not make you completely untouchable, but it very much protects you from direct confrontations with other nuclear powers both by limiting their and your own conduct. I can totally see why the ayatollah regime wants nukes.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
4d ago
Nobody in power seems to want to acknowledge what these men actually want out of society and, by contrast, what they're actually getting.
They will, but only long enough to say that it's disgusting or that them not getting it is entirely their own fault. The latter might be reasonable if it were actually true.
Im starting to wonder if "Fortifying the election" might ultimately go down in history as the choice that brought down the DNC as a viable national party. All it seems to have accomplished is undermine thier own credibility while giving Trump four years to build a viable post-Trump MAGA coalition. Vance is the obvious hier apperant, but Rubio, Hegseth, and DeSantis are all relatively young (Rubio is the oldest at 54) and well positioned to be candidates in 2032 and 2036.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
4d ago
They still have abortion, which they want to ban at the federal level.
kky
4d ago
and by nature people love rightful royal power.
I’m not so certain that the founders of this country would agree. Quite honestly this kind of attitude feels unAmerican. How did we get here?
He has the head of the longshoreman’s union and the head of NATO writing effusive love letters that wouldn’t be out of place addressed to a Chinese emperor.
Obsequious, disgusting behavior. What happened to manly dignity and self-reliance? Isn’t America supposed to rise above feudal Europe?
kky
4d ago
I think we are going through a Whig collapse, if much slower and less of a split. The party is sloughing off working-class voters and refocusing on the educated elite. The “small fractures” in the remaining party mean little; the core agrees on everything but whose ass should fill which seat. The real fracture is between center and periphery, and in the years to come I would predict an increasing muscular fringe of swing-vote Democrats whose real selling point to voters is that they do not fall in line in front of Trump or Vance or whoever, nor the Democratic apparatchiks. There will eventually be a showdown of sorts between that fringe and the party center, and the result will either be a takeover of the party itself or the founding of a new party. Either way, the principles of that group will steal voters back from the Republicans and re-establish the unstable equilibrium of two-party democracy.
That’s my prediction, anyway, or possibly my hope. I’m real damn sick of the current political divide.
faceh
4d ago
Plus, they got their destruction of Roe v. Wade.
What large issue do they have to animate them to action and grant them leverage over the national GOP, after that?
hydroacetylene
4d ago
Thank you for writing this up with more comprehension and detail than I could have done. I’ve had roughly the same impression- Trump has people to put democrats in jail this time, the party is increasingly in disarray, 2026 is going to be a disaster for the DNC in the senate for structural reasons, etc.
But Trump has also gotten good at performing the part of a strong rightful king, and by nature people love rightful royal power. He has the head of the longshoreman’s union and the head of NATO writing effusive love letters that wouldn’t be out of place addressed to a Chinese emperor. Obviously, writing this way to Trump is a great way to get what you want(or at least make it more likely), but it also sets a precedent that this is how the president, leader of the free world, POTUS, is to be addressed, and that in turn makes it more normal, which in turn raises the impression that president Trump has the Mandate of Heaven. People understand that on a primitive clan based society level.
I wrote earlier about how Trump was campaigning not as a better leader, but as the rightful leader. Democrats don’t have any counter to that. That’s why Trump’s popularity keeps rising.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
4d ago
Meanwhile, I'm watching Atheist stalwarts openly reject liberalism and its works.
Online Politics Brain. Look at Pew data on religious identity instead of anecdotes.
But by all means, if you believe Conservative Christianity is going to enshrine the rule of boomer-brained gen-x-er preachers and middle-aged church ladies, say so, and show some examples of how this happens.
They're the ones who will be running for office in 2028. They won't live forever, but 2028 is what we're talking about here.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
It seems to me that you have failed to understand the current state of discourse in Conservative Christian circles, and have instead proceeded with basing your reasoning off cached data from a quarter-century ago.
The fundamental difference that you appear to have missed is that Christians lost these arguments decisively around the turn of the century, and their opponents got their way. As a result, Conservative Christians no longer need to argue what might happen if the other side gets their way, but rather what has happened, and what results the other side is accountable for. Christians can now operate as a genuine counter-culture, offering a cogent critique of the conditions we are all living in every minute of every day. We can offer meaningful answers to the myriad discontents created by our present society, and through those answers coordinate the systematic withdrawal from and dismantling of that society. The powers of compulsion no longer rest within our hands, and so we can focus on persuasion instead. And the worse Progressivism makes things, the more persuasive our arguments get.
But by all means, if you believe Conservative Christianity is going to enshrine the rule of boomer-brained gen-x-er preachers and middle-aged church ladies, say so, and show some examples of how this happens. Meanwhile, I'm watching Atheist stalwarts openly reject liberalism and its works.
Usually, the word "sinful" is taken to mean an appeal to abstract, unfalsifiable moral commandments dependent on faith in some religious nonsense for even the slightest form of coherency, not "here is the solid statistical evidence that consumption of this media will make your life objectively worse by your own values."
It seems to me that the population is moving from seeing porn consumption less like saying "fuck" and more like smoking cigarettes, and that this is because porn consumption is in fact more like smoking cigarettes than it is like swearing. There are significant observable costs to consumption and the industry that supports it, even from within the Materialist frame.
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