domain:nytimes.com
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1m ago
Until the 2020 election, Trump's opponents were mostly crying wolf.
Less crying wolf and more underestimating the efficacy of checks in the US political system. It has largely been memoryholed here, but the first Trump admin was constantly going for executive power grabs. He simply had not consolidated power within the GOP to the same degree and was facing a less friendly judicial environment. Likewise, there was an incredible amount of corruption, and while the presidential pardon has never been applied very fairly in practice, Trump was exceptional in the self-serving nature of his pardons.
JarJarJedi
2m ago
Not sure why it should be. Generally, the majority of Israel population is very sour to the political Left right now because, as the sibling comment noted, Oslo process had thoroughly failed and none of the promises the Left made to the people is even close to being even partially fulfilled. The question is who would lead the right or the "centrists" which will be pretty much the same as the right on the question of Arabs, but may be different on taxes or economic policies or how to deal with secular/religious divide, etc. - Israel has more than one problem. Among all those people, Netanyahu is the most credible and the most seasoned politician, so he keeps the power. The challengers, even if they have temporary success, usually fail to handle one crisis or another and get booted on the next election - and in Israel, that can happen anytime, because of how the Knesset works, the moment the ruling coalition loses the majority, it's new elections (not mandatory, but the majority can cause them to happen anytime they want). So the reason as it seems to be is kinda boring - he is on the winning side and he is the best at this game out of all available players. Maybe one day he'll get too old or somebody better than him will raise.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4m ago
Election denial of various forms has been a notable and escalating feature of most elections of my adult life. In 2000, Blues did not accept the legitimacy of W's victory, and were not shy about saying so. There was less of this in 2004, but it was certainly still present, as was the widespread certainty that Bush would find a way to suspend further elections and rule as a dictator permanently (and no few "just kidding... unless..." references to assassinating him; the inimitable Tim Kreider's "Sic Semper Fuckwads" was a personal favorite, as is 303, a mass-market comic book about how Bush did 9/11 and wouldn't it be neato if a russian spetznaz veteran sniped his head off.)
2008, my side won, but the Reds had the birther conspiracy theory. 2012, I'd mostly checked out on; my side won again, birtherism was spent IIRC, if there was an election meme I wasn't aware of it. 2016, the left went in hard on the election being illegitimate, including through various organs of the federal government coordinating efforts with the media, activist class, and democratic leadership, and 2020 we had "election fortification" and Jan 6th.
I vaguely recall a story about some crypto bros who were facing federal charges for one thing or another which went away once they spent a suitable amount of money on Trump's shitcoins.
To be clear, your claim is that Trump pardoned criminals because they donated to him, and you believe that this is a new low in presidential pardoning?
Throwaway05
12m ago
Again don't really blame you - based off of the issues we have with insurance it often seems like the people on the other side didn't really have correct training. That actually being the case seems like the kinda thing that would be by design.
Depending on how long ago this was it could also just be process changes. As I get older I get more worried about these, times when you find out Pluto isn't a fucking planet anymore.
If you are lucky someone tells you at a reasonable time but it's all too easy to get left behind.
aqouta
20m ago
Then I guess it cannot, even in principle, be done so I would like to not hear about it as a problem and we shouldn't bonk down norms in order to fail to solve it.
cjet79
31m ago
The account of the introverted feeler here seems to be approaching an almost mythological level of detachment from social norms and practical concerns, an ideal standard that no mortal could ever reach. Like, barring mitigating circumstances, how can the goal of social interaction not be to make the other person feel good, or at least avoid causing offense? Hello?? But, if the accounts that I've been reading are correct, this is essentially how a great number of people go about experiencing life on a daily basis (or at least this is how they subjectively experience life, regardless of how much they must actually modulate their behavior due to social norms out of rational self-interest).
This is indeed how I feel and act, and it is neat to read a description of it that actually makes it sound cool.
Growing up I felt like everyone else got to read a secret manual about how to act in social situations, and I was stuck trying to figure out the manual through trial and error. I'm not autistic so I'm not oblivious to the veiled insults, or the looks of hurt on people's faces when I broke a social rule. And I'm not a psychopath, so I'd still feel bad sometimes when I caused those moments of hurt.
There is a great deal of rational self-interest in being able to moderate your behavior to match social norms. Its how you make friends, acquire romantic partners, maintain any job with a boss or customers you must speak with, etc. Its required, not an optional add on. We at at least need to know the rules before we can know how to break them. But the rules are not very simple, they usually take an entire childhood to learn, and I've known plenty of adults that still don't seem to understand all of the rules. I had always been jealous of the people that seem to have a psychic ability to read and measure the flow of a conversation with someone in such a way that they are just always a joy to be around. Then I discovered a magic elixir that could temporarily grant me their powers. People call it alcohol.
Grass is always greener on the other side I guess.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
35m ago
The way deficit hawking works is tax increases are proposed and accepted "to reduce the deficit". Myriad other interests smell the new money (whether it actually materializes or not) and make a play for it. Many of them succeed. Net result: more taxes, more entitlements, deficit goes higher. That's why there are very few deficit hawks left.
Florida is the fifth oldest state
Ooh ooh, don't forget we're The #2 most visited state by foreign tourists, narrowly behind New York, and CRUSHING California (if you don't count illegal immigrants, that is). That's why sales tax works so well for us, incidentally.
You probably can't tell me anything about my state's strengths and weaknesses that I'm not already acutely aware of.
Did you know we got high speed rail before California?
Oh, and don't forget we're second in all time rocket launches behind the USSR and ahead by a country mile in launches in the last 10 years. Yeah yeah its mostly federal funding.
Also we have won more Stanley Cups than the ENTIRETY OF CANADA over the past 30 years Panthers won this year so the total is now 5, BTW.
On the flip side, did you know that New York is the place with the most Medicaid spending, even in excess of its population share. Florida happens to be WAY lower on that list. Fourth from the bottom.
So your point about Florida being "old" is well taken, but not really a knockdown argument in the slightest.
Also we're allegedly #1 or #2 in the country for education DESPITE being eighth from the bottom in per-pupil spending and DEAD FUCKING LAST in K-12 spending as a % of taxpayer income.
SINGLEHANDEDLY blowing up the idea that its education spending that drives outcomes, I guess.
Having experienced the Florida Educational system I would find this hard to believe, but I assume other states' systems are genuinely JUST THAT BAD.
Best state for Higher Education...NINE FUCKING YEARS RUNNING. Seriously what the fuck are the rest of the states even doing at this point?
Anyhow, please don't move here, it sucks. You're welcome to visit and leave your money, though.
Of course even if there were 1 billion prisoners and 150 guards the guards would outnumber each individual person 150-to-1.
And yet, there are numerous examples available of the simple maxim that one or two people with machine guns can control a far larger, even if not infinitely or arbitrarily larger, group of unarmed people. I maintain that my formulation is an accurate description of the psychology of humans in crowds, and that your reductio does not actually answer it. I am confident that a demonstrated capacity and willingness to employ overwhelming lethal force is sufficient to overcome 20:1, even 50:1 odds, and maybe higher, and certainly for brief durations. The ratio for the Bataclan attack was ~500:1, for example. I bet if we looked at, say, the Khmer Rouge or the Gulags, we would not find guard ratios of 4:1. I bet if we looked at Vietnamese POW camps we would not find ratios of 4:1. A quick googling indicates somewhere around 10:1 for the Russian Gulag as a whole.
There's no statements to the effect that 100% of the security force or garrison was involved in managing the prisoners- quite the opposite, with the vast majority of the work was said to have been done and orchestrated by the unarmed Jewish "Sonderkommando" with little guard presence.
There's no evidence that 100% of the gulag guard force was involved in managing the prisoners either; If we assume split shifts, that bumps the ratio immediately to 20:1, 30:1 with three shifts per day. I bet you we can find photos, stories or SOP docs of two or three guards handling fifty prisoners or more for work details. Humanity has a long, long history of people with guns putting people without them in chains. The comparisons you're drawing seem question-beggingly selective.
Your argument was that there weren't enough camp guards to force large groups of people into a small building.
The idea that <150 guards (assuming every single guard and SS officer was at every single transport, which is not attested to) would be sufficient for the task of forcing 2,000 people to walk to their deaths without resistance is absurd.
This does not seem absurd to me at all. Again, Bataclan, three gunmen, 1,500 victims, who provided zero meaningful resistance. In this case, the victims have already arguably been repeatedly selected for meekness/ cooperation and keeping their head down, they've been subject to absolute power throughout their arrest, imprisonment and transport, and they presumably have no idea what's waiting for them. Uniformed men with machine guns and authority to use them on the resistant are directing their movements, as they have been on a regular basis for days, weeks, months previously. They tell you to go this way, all in a line. They tell you to go that way, all in a line. They tell you to go in there, all in a line. I see no reason to believe that people would panic at being crammed into a confined space, any more than they panicked when being into the confined space of cattle-cars for transport, as is generally claimed for both the Nazi death camps and the Russian gulag. humans will endure much misery if they don't see an alternative, or if they have even a glimmer of hope that they might survive.
Note that there are examples of procedurally-similar execution methods being used in other parts of history: loading prisoners into a barge, locking them in the hold, and then sinking the barge seems quite similar, and IIRC is attested to have been used repeatedly as an execution method in the French and Russian revolutions.
...If I had read the rest of the thread, I would not have bothered. Even from your evident priors, this does not seem like a productive line of argument. I'm not sure why you're expending this much effort to argue from such a weak position.
Dean
Flairless
1hr ago
The impression I got from the 2016 and 2020 primaries was that he lost because he wasn't popular enough with Democratic primary voters to win a national race
During the 2020 Democratic primaries, Bernie was positioned to pull a 'biggest minority in a divided field' win in the Super Tuesday primaries, where he was outpolling most competitors. This was after a strong early showing in contests, where to date Biden had been underperforming. This biggest-of-a-divided-field was notably the way Donald Trump started building momentum in the early 2016 Republican primary, where he never won a majority. The momentum-value of the primary win is what provided the growth opportunity in attention, endorsements, and so on that ultimately allowed Trump to win in 2016.
In 2020, things might have been different for Bernie since he was posed to do well on Super Tuesday, but do very poorly in later conferences where Biden had strong alliances with the southern black political machine Democratic parties. The Bernie party wing's bet was that they could leverage the momentum in early wins to build endurance and carry the campaign past this predictable barrier, where it might then open back up to a more even primary split once it went to more progressive regions.
The reason this didn't happen wasn't because Bernie's popularity dived, but because nearly all the major Democratic candidates at the time pulled out of the race and endorsed Biden, rather than split the field. Biden didn't get more popular as much as he had less competition for the centrist party vote, and so was able to win these early contests, and then cement victory with the Southern wing conferences, and thus cement the win. This was widely seen at the time as the Democratic establishment, which is to say Obama wing of the party that dominated at the time, pulling strings and applying pressure to the candidates who dropped out in favor of Obama's former VP.
Where the ass fuckery charge comes in is not only the Party establishment coordination in stage-managing the primary pool to shape primary outcomes, but also/especially the caveat of 'most' people pulling out. One of the main candidates who did not pull out at the time was the only one who was splitting Bernie's vote more than Biden's vote. Elizabeth Warren was also running on the progressive/left-wing track, despite herself having no chance to beat Biden either. This was likewise thought to be a quid-pro-quo of sorts between Warren and Biden, with Warren's network getting plenty of key postings in the administration. Had the left united behind Bernie, who was far less of a party man than Warren, it would have been the Bernie wing getting such posting potential during negotiations.
Combined, this was broadly seen as a two-part betrayal by the Bernie-left. It was a broader DNC betrayal of the Obama wing picking favorites to maintain its primacy in the party rather than letting voters pick via the nominal primary purpose, but it was also a betrayal by the more party-institutionalist Warren-left, who sabotaged a bigger left momentum in favor of selling out for postings and influence.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1hr ago
I do find myself fighting intrusive "do not redeem" thoughts on a daily basis. It doesn't help that they really like putting the Saar- prefix on everything.
faceh
1hr ago
I notice that some people forget that Trump's Organizations owns or has fingers in real estate all over the planet.
This gives him some pecuniary interest in NOT doing foreign adventurism and warmongering. And avoiding wars involving countries where he has property, at all.
I imagine the thought of big, beautiful buildings getting bombed to rubble causes the guy physical pain.
aqouta
1hr ago
Just inflate the debt away to virtually nothing, swap to a Gold and/or Bitcoin standard, and keep rolling.
Ok so you want to default on the debt and then switch to a hard currency that would make doing this again impossible and thus you'd have to have higher taxes because you cannot deficit spend. This is a very silly plan.
And I am not joking. I live in Florida. We have no income tax. We have no estate/gift tax, we have comparatively low property taxes. And we're discussing getting rid of the property taxes altogether. Most revenue is sales tax.
Well yes, your state is where a tremendous amount of those social security and Medicare dollars are being funneled to from younger states to retirees. florida is the fifth oldest state
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
-
remote, call center jobs and data entry jobs exist and are widely available. If you're trying to avoid a 'job' job this isn't an option.
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you can get paid for writing fake reviews, filling out surveys, etc. Pays Indian wages.
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you can monetize X by engagement farming. Pays a middle class income by the standards of the subcontinent or the nicer parts of Africa if you're good at it.
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secondary market in online gaming stuff. WoW gold farming is legendary; this option is sufficiently common that you can find guides online, including the economics of it.
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you can sell reddit accounts with sufficient amounts of karma to spambots/advertisers. I assume this pays Kenyan-middle-class wages when done successfully, but I don't know that much about it.
Dean
Flairless
1hr ago
I'd submit an underlying root of the fear Trump inspires for many people is the fear of a lack of control.
This isn't a claim about what those people would claim as their cause of fear. This is more of a claim about a distinction between an artifact-level expression of something, which might have its own rational, and the underlying cultural dynamic that underpins such an expression. In the same way that people don't feel the monsters in horror movies as much as they fear the [primal fear of being hunted], where the monster is merely the artifact to express the underlying fear, people fear the sense of a [lack of control] more than actual policies they don't like.
It's not exactly a novel premise that the fear of losing control is associated with a variety of disorders that generally amount to various expressions of stress, anxiety, and (bad) attempts to compensate. Generalized anxiety disorder is characterized by a consistent state of worry, anxiety, and catastrophizing worst-case scenarios. Obsessive compulsive disorder is generally linked to constant intrusive thoughts and the corresponding efforts to mitigate them. Panic disorder goes with the fear of having another panic attack, and 'control' is re-asserted by trying to avoid the triggers that might lead to another panic attack... even though the existing psychological reference of overcoming trauma suggests that avoiding triggers can make issues worse.
Now, there are separate arguments/posts that could be made about whether [current society] dynamics make these sort of things worse. Whether dominant domestic political propaganda narratives by less-than-non-partisan mass media over the last decades might have accidentally encouraged anxieties, catastrophizing, or so on. Whether COVID pandemic policies and lockdown advocacy, which became partisan-coded in the US, might have had unintended consequences for the psychological health of large parts of the population. We've certainly had good effort posts by Motte posters in the past of how social contagion dynamics have shaped or propagated various cultural obsessions, and pathologies, associated with the worst of various culture war elements. Those arguments exist, but they aren't the argument here.
The argument here is that the fear of a loss of control is not just a real fear, but an underlying theme of a lot of fears, and that Trump rides that line in how he breaks people's world views of how the world works, and the sense of control it provides.
This part gets into the overlap of politics and psychology, which can come uncomfortably close to pathologizing your opponents, so please bear with me as I try to make more general points.
One of the individual human psychological needs is a sense of agency / autonomy, which require a degree of control. This is a pretty consistent theme research about how higher employee sense of autonomy correlates with job satisfaction, the esteem stage of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and the commercial applications/implications of player agency in video game design. Control is not the same thing as agency or even security, but they are overlapping dynamics. What it boils down to is simple: people don't like feeling helpless, and one of the aspects of being helpless is not having the power to control your context. It's the difference between having to stay put and take abuse, or being able to choose to walk away.
One of the less obvious aspects of this desire for a sense of control is that it does not have to be directly exercised by the individual, but can be 'outsourced' to other people or even other things. This is a function of what we call trust. A child does not need to be strong enough on their own to face the scary thing, but can cry for their parent, whose presence is reassuring despite the child's own agency not increasing. You can feel safer having a drink in public if you can trust that a friend, or even just a taxi driver, will get you home safer. Note this also can work in the inverse- whether you feel safe or uneasy in a neighborhood can come down to social trust.
Where this starts to interface with politics is the now often-underrecognized dynamic between citizens and chosen leaders who represent. This used to be much more explicit in the Roman patria system, which was a cornerstone of roman society and politics alike. Patria was a patron-client relationship in which reciprocal obligations linked the patron and the client, with client's support/subservience being in return for the patron representing their interests in issues ranging from legal courts to career prospects and so on. A key dynamic of this relationship, however, is that while it could be inherited, it could also be changed- the client who was not served by their patron could, in theory, shift to another patron. The reciprocal obligations of patria are long gone, and the premise is often downplayed or reframed in service of egalitarian cultural biases of western democracies, but you can see it in campaigns where candidate vows to fight for you on X issue. This is an appeal for outsourcing your sense of control to your chosen leader. You may not have the agency, but the politician does, and so a [sense of control] can still be maintained.
What is less obvious about this less-obvious political extension outsourcing the sense of control is that it can also extend to hostile actors.
There is plenty of research associating a conspiratorial mindset with a sense of control, which has a long and diverse history of exaggerating the influence and efforts of hated outgroups to frame them as far more powerful than they actually are. This has expressions in things like the joke about the Jew who reads the Nazi news paper to feel good about how powerful they are, but it also has less comical expressions in exaggerating elements of truth into absurdities. To pick an American-salient example, Russia certainly does spy on the US, and Russian troll farms do try to escalate the culture war, but it is more misleading than informative to claim that the Russians are the cause of American political polarization. Sometimes these are done for purposes of cynical deflection- it's easier for the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party to blame Russian interference for losing the 2016 election than Clinton's long history of doing Clinton-like things- but sometimes these sort of explanations go back to the psychological need for a sense of control even when it's clear you aren't the one with it.
Step back to the field of antisemitic conspiracies. This is a very old genre, and occasionally it gets very absurd. There is, for example, a reoccurring minor news story in the arab middle east of birds being detained (arrested, if you will) in rural areas on suspicion of being Israeli spies. While it is true that the Israelis have considerable espionage capabilities- that grain of truth referenced before- to date there is no reporting I am aware of that has ever validated the conspiracy as opposed to the far more mundane explanation. Israeli universities in Israel tag wild animals as part of research, and then release, and then the birds go where they will across the reason, carrying those tags. There is no reason for the birds to be in that particular country where it is detained.
One one hand, this conspiracy is silly. On the other, if we step back to the [sense of control] framing, it makes a fair deal more sense. The arabs in the broader levant are not exactly known for being high agency societies. Many are in uncontested monarchies or functional military dictatorships that are uncontested because of very established, and often very brutal, security apparatus that stamp on the sort of agency that goes against the state. Nor are they exactly in patria relationships with leaders who do have that sort of agency. There are certainly patronage relationships, but if the Arabs had the sort of regional agency and control they wanted, Israel wouldn't exist. They are people without direct or even delegated agency.
In this context, the [Israeli bird] is a demonstration of a lack of control. Despite their inability to impose upon the state of Israel, here is an artifact from Israel that is able to intrude upon them. They did not know it in advance. They were not able to stop it from occurring. And, well, everyone knows what the Israelis can get up to if they want. The [Israeli bird] could be such a thing. It's presence is a demonstration of helplessness and threat.
Except... by being an Israeli spy bird, a sense of control is being re-imposed via framing paradigm. The bird is not an aimless or chaotic event of chance, but an agent. That agent implies agency on the part of its jewish masters. One may not know the insidious jewish plan, but there can still be a plan. One may hate the control of the perfidious jew, but malign Jewish influence means that someone has some control over things. Even if control is held by a hated outgroup, it still validates the sense that there is control. It's just a contest/conflict of who has control, and how to wrest control back.
This is not a novel or Arab-specific issue. The conflict over the nature of the locus of control of society is a very longstanding paradigm conflict. Our departed Hlynka would occasionally write in his inferential difference series about how it manifested in the western enlightenment as part of the philosophical difference of enlightenment thinkers. The distinction between whether the loci of control of society is fundamentally internal or external, deriving from one's self or subject to imposition from outside context which could be controlled. This has longer arguments about how the [post-enlightenment left] tends towards the external locus of control theory which asserts you can control broader context, and the [post-enlightenment right] leans more towards an internal locus of control because you cannot control outside context, but that's non-central to this.
What I want to go back to is that other political conspiracy, and Trump specifically.
I made a point earlier that the Russian interference narrative could be cynically boosted as a means of blame deflection. Clinton and her wing of the party would rather attack her enemies / blame the Russians / hurt Trump than concede that she was a bad candidate. But cynical deflection isn't the only dynamic in play- it can also go back to the point of 'hostile control is better than no control.'
If Trump is an enemy of the nation, after all, by conspiring with Russia- something that the Democratic party convinced about half of Americans about- then control may have been usurped, but it fundamentally still exists and can be regained. Hence the resistance, the mass organized protests of the mostly peaceful variety, and of course The Secret History Of the Shadow Campaign That Saved The 2020 Election. The later was an actual conspiracy- or prospiracy if you will- of government officials, party officials, media interests, protest organizers, NGOs, activists, and more to coordinate efforts to change laws, manage protests, shape media coverage and all the other efforts done to Fortify Democracy and Save the Election. This very classic 'sense of control' mentality, and neatly aligns with the sort of world view that might sincerely believe that Trump conspired with Russia.
By contrast, if Trump did not conspire with Russia- if he literally came down that escalator and then proceeded to demolish a number of nation-dominating political dynasties who people felt had been in control- or nearly in control- for the better part of a quarter century, winning primarily because of how hated the party and political leaders were... and because no one operating within the rules could stop him... even as the Trump administration was an endless cycle of chaos and turnovers and a lack of organizational discipline...
Well, that's a victory of a lack of control. And people really don't like the sense of not being in control.
But- for a time- the sense of control was restored. The election was Fortified. Covid was Locked Down. The Adults were Back in Charge. Trump was impeached (again), in court (again), and more reliable sense-of-control allies were being propped up in the Republican party. Liz Cheney was being set up to try and re-establish control of the Republican Party, so nothing like Trump could happen again, and the experienced hand of Biden meant the US was back in control..
And then everything stopped being under control, and Trump came back and smashed the 2024 election beyond a shadow of a doubt, and the sense of control was loss even more than it was with Trump 2016.
The Republican degree of victory gave a government trifecta which neutered the ability of the Democrats to to stall things in legislation. An already-existing non-Democratic Supreme Court was sympathetic to legal arguments curtailing left-court expansions from decades prior. The significant pre-planning represented by efforts like Project 2025 identified a host of actions that Trump could take on existing or inherent legal authorities, limiting the ability for Democratic-shopped courts to sustain objections to things on grounds that it's illegal if Trump does it. Which, in turn, led to a further curtailment of universal injunctions in a highly publicized loss for the people whose efforts at control were via freezing the status quo.
And, of course, the mechanisms of The Resistance that were novel during the first Trump administration were less effective in turn two. The Trump-Russia narrative hard largely collapsed into a mumble-mumble pretend it didn't happen non-admission of guilt, which left the no-longer-necessarily-anonymous sources a target of the administration's scrutiny of the intelligence community. Federal institutional credibility that was squandered during the pandemic and the Biden inflation-denials limited the sympathy for protecting agencies from the executive asserting control over manning policies. Mostly peaceful protests in California almost immediately saw national guard forces sent in over the Governor's objection. Democratic infighting overtook fortify-level coordination. Media credibility had another half decade to decline, including the clear cover up of Biden's, well, lack of faculty control.
I submit that what many people who fear Trump- and let's be clear this is mostly a fear held by Blue Tribe- are actually responding to is the breakdown of their sense of worldview and sense of Blue Tribe control.
It's not what Trump is doing, though people may dislike enforcing laws, or tariff policy, or so on. What is more frightening is the clear break in the effectiveness of the Blue Tribe's personal and patria agency over the broader state and culture. 2016 was not a fluke, which could be rectified by the Resistance re-taking control. Blue Tribe politicians and progressive preferences were genuinely were disliked / despised, not merely usurped by the evil-but-still-in-control Russians. Blue Tribe elites were not competant and truthful managers who knew how to manage those locus of control, as seen in the COVID and inflation and Afghan bugout. Blue Tribe leaders were not firmly in control of even their own faculties, as painfully evident during Biden's one and only televised debate, and Harris's notorious word salads. And with the political collapse can social and cultural deference, as preferences long maintained by inertia and political support now faced a hostile administration determined to roll back accustomed status quoes built in periods of advantage.
But what makes Trump specifically scary is the tension between [outsourcing agency to evil people] and [there is no plan]. Russian collusion was used to claim that the Blue Tribe loss of control was the result of someone else's control. Initially that was Trump as well as Russia, but the broader collapse of the Trump-Russia narrative meant that attribution never really gave control fully to Trump. Trump is something of a quantum agent- variously [in control, but evil] and [not in control]. Which he is varies by the moment or context, heightening the uncertainty, even as the lack of Blue Tribe agency to stop him heightens the clear lack of control.
And if there's something people fear in general, it's a lack of control.
birb_cromble
1hr ago
Still, on the national level, outright election denial was very rare before Trump.
Are we including the hanging Chad conspiracies in this comparison or no? If not, what makes them substantivel different?
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
1hr ago
"Master Race" which was never written nor part of popular propaganda
Interesting. Digging I only find stuff like:
Wir müssen deshalb ein Herrenvolk werden, und deshalb müssen wir unser Volk zum Herrenvolk erziehen.
ENDORSED.
Just inflate the debt away to virtually nothing, swap to a Gold and/or Bitcoin standard, and keep rolling.
Man, I'm basically an Anarcho-Capitalist, I will bite those bullets like candy.
And I am not joking. I live in Florida. We have no income tax. We have no estate/gift tax, we have comparatively low property taxes. And we're discussing getting rid of the property taxes altogether. Most revenue is sales tax.
And we've run a $10+ billion dollar surplus in recent years. There's just shy of $5 billion sitting in the 'rainy day fund' for emergencies. Spending is PROACTIVELY being cut just in case we get a recession in the near future.
I fucking love it. I'm actually quite tired of having to deal with the profligate spending of the Federal Government whilst living in an overall fiscally responsible state.
I expect that the U.S. economy would probably survive the FedGov defaulting on its debt. How each state would weather that storm is a bigger question, but the fact that the U.S. can so readily fall back on its constituent political units definitely makes it more flexible.
So hey, I say RETVRN to a system that apportions federal taxes amongst the states and makes said states figure out how to raise that money or, if the burden is deemed too high, acts to get the FedGov to constrain its spending.
But under the current political reality, I'm very interested in seeing how FedGov navigates the current crisis and avoids a default situation.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
The French revolution happened when the king decided to call the parliament in session to address bread riots in Paris during a fiscal crisis; the parliament had so long been disused that the arguing about voting procedure spiraled into the French revolution.
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
2hr ago
Well, shit. Now I feel like an idiot. Thank you for the correction, I apologize I must have missed your first comment. I threw in a link to your comment in the original, hopefully it will help to provide context.
JarJarJedi
2hr ago
Started reading Careless People without realizing it's currently a center of an active kerfuffle. I'm about 25% through and what is described is horrible in so many ways, and there are really no good guys (gender-inclusive here) there, including the author. So far my opinion of Mark Zuckerberg has improved though (from quite a low point, to be honest) - at least if this book to be believed, and again I am only 25% through, so I don't know how it goes further (didn't get to the China part, for example), but so far he looks like a very autistic tech founder that just wants to make the best product possible, but is surrounded by busybodies who want to "change the world". I hope my morbid curiosity would overcome my sense of revulsion and I can finish it.
KingOfTheBailey
2hr ago
There were enough people who still deny the results of the 2004 election that Politico ran a compare-and-contrast with the Trump 2020 deniers. Doubt in the integrity of the election has been around nearly as long as I've been politically aware.
erwgv3g34
2hr ago
The problem with "online" is that you are competing against every third-worlder with a cellphone on the planet, most of whom are willing to work for pennies. Add in the lack of skills and that makes it hopeless.
Well, almost. Some creative endeavors are still on the table. You could try your hand at writing an online serial (see previous discussion), or you could make an adult visual novel (sex sells).
JarJarJedi
2hr ago
Do you make all sorts of grunting noises when lifting?
I sometimes do on the last couple of reps on the cycle. It helps. Not every rep though, for me it'd mean the weight is too much. And I am probably annoying other people. Which I try not to do without good reason.
What conspiracies are you talking about?
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