domain:alexberenson.substack.com
nopie
26d ago
I think it is obvious now that he has a mild form of dementia.
Scott Alexander wouldn't accept that Biden was senile but it was clear to me early on. It is not professional to diagnose people online, but from the other hand it has to be done for political persons who could cause a lot of harm.
Biden could function because he was surrounded by reasonable people. It does not appear to be the case with Trump. Trump should be removed from the office for reasons of mental incapacity.
WhiningCoil
26d ago
There Are No Viable Political or Legal Solutions (Drooling Retard Edition with words, words, words fo the slow kids in the back who have hammers they can't be trusted with)
Imagine, hypothetically, your daughter's teacher was a fucking machine. You might have concerns that this literal automaton that is only capable of fucking might fuck your daughter. I mean, you can plainly look up it's product page, seems pretty cut and dry. This machine fucks. You goto your local school board meeting, but inexplicably, the school board is like 70% fucking machines, and they are struggling to understand the nature of your complaints. They actually find them rather hateful, like some sort of personal attack. The police pull your pants down, drag you out of the meeting, and arrest you.
You vote as hard as you can, and bless your heart, you even win! The schools don't care. The dude you voted for specifically tells the schools to tell the fucking machines to stop fucking. They simply can't stop.
When you think about it, it is rather silly to imagine you can vote or law your way out of having a single purpose machine fulfill it's singular purpose. You might as well vote or sue to make a mouse into a lion.
Now, I'm not saying the public education system is literally a machine that fucks kids. Although... No, this is more an allegory that it's impossible to change the nature of a teacher, and the hill they've chosen to die on. Around me free public institutions are risking it all, to make sure kids can keep viewing cock sucking. Libraries are forgoing the majority of their funding from the county, schools are grandstanding on it, it's a world I can scarcely comprehend. Neither politics nor the law provides any solution. Turns out the physical reality of these people's nature, and the fact that they have exclusive control of your child for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week is just immune from votes or the law. It would probably takes the 101st Airborne stationed in every classroom to make it stop, and even then teachers would still do it, confident that the government would never use their monopoly on violence to actually stop them from showing middle schoolers some queer cock sucking.
I repeat, there is no viable political or legal solution. What you do with this knowledge is between you and your own conscience. I've chosen to move counties, keep my child out of public school, and look towards joining a church that shares my values. It's been at great expense, and to my eternal sorrow likely cost me the opportunity to have more children. In a shameful sense, I've chosen to run, because I view my family as something too precious to risk. Other people might have different views, less options, or have already lost the one thing they lived for. I refuse to condemn them for the different choices they may make, nor preface this bare fact, that there are no viable political or legal solutions, with some smooth brained pre-emptive disavowing.
If pointing out the hopeless position we are in amounts to a "call to violence" to you, that is between you and your conscience. It's not illegal to shout fire in a crowded theater if the theater is actually on fire.
how do we stop it happening again?"
The only answers to that question, at this point, involve literal bullets.
Well, now that I'm off ban, to clarify: I mean less "2nd amendment solutions," more Suharto.
How we stop it happening again is we get a Caesar Augustus or a Bonaparte, with the loyalty of the warriors, and the willingness to use them to purge the enemy. It's "tanks in Harvard yard" as part of going Henry VIII (or Qin Shi Huangdi) on academia.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
27d ago
Oh, great.
I just gave Capital a slap on the wrist for his near-identical response. For consistency’s sake, you can have one, too.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
23d ago
I covered this in my earlier post. Yes, the flood that happened under Biden was his fault, although it didn't seem deliberate. It seemed like he wanted to roll back Trump's immigration vibes in nebulous ways, but they way they (Biden or his handlers) effectuated that had unintended consequences that were functionally open-borders via loophole. I know a lot of conservatives on this site take the approach of "never attribute to incompetence that which can plausibly be explained by malice if it involves the outgroup", but the Dem response to immigration afterwards sure made it seem like they knew they fucked up and had dropped a grenade at their feet that they never intended.
Coalitions in the US are large and amorphous, so both your points 1 AND 2 can be correct for different Dems, and they occasionally rotate turns at the wheel depending on who wins elections or who has dementia.
Better immigration laws are needed because the US system is fundamentally broken in ways that only Congress can fix. Executive orders can help (or hurt), but they're just bandaids on a bullethole. You can try mangling interpretations of laws created decades ago and hope the courts don't notice, but they have the annoying habit of saying "hey bro, you can't just ignore Congress" and striking things down. In the status quo, the best conservatives can hope for is Obama-era levels of immigration. At worst, they can expect open borders with next to no recourse. Changing the laws on the books could significantly help that.
About a year ago I made a post (with motte discussion here) about an immigration reform bill that would have handed Republicans a major victory on the issue with the most conservative comprehensive reform in a generation. Dems would have agreed to the bill since Biden's whoopsie defacto-open-borders made the issue a huge liability for them. Trump tanked it for purely cynical reasons, and the discussion hinged on whether the legislation was somehow a "trap" since Dems were agreeing to it, and whether Republicans should risk getting nothing if they lost in 2024. I contended that Republicans should take the deal and then maybe do additional legislation that was even more stringent if they won, that way they'd have something even if they lost, which was about at a 50% chance on betting markets at the time. But MAGA and Trump won out, going all-in on the double-or-nothing strategy.
In a sense that bet paid off, since Trump won and got a trifecta! There's just one little problem: he's not actually trying to pass any comprehensive enduring immigration legislation. There was the Laken Riley act, but it's quite small in scope. Overall, it's back to his first term tactics of mangling the interpretation of laws through executive orders, and hoping the courts don't stop him. It's likely to be about as successful as it was in his first term. Why do it this way? Why not just ask Congress to give you the powers to do what you want so you don't have to gamble on the courts? Matt Yglesias has a potential explanation in his mailbag post
I think this is pretty easily explained as the intersection of the filibuster, Trump’s authoritarian temperament, and Republican Party domination of the Supreme Court.
We saw progressive versions of this kind of thinking in things like The American Prospect Day One Agenda from 2019 or the late-Obama effort at dramatic climate (Clean Power Plan) and immigration (DAPA) policy via executive branch rule making. But Democrats get much less leash from the judiciary than Republican do, because the Supreme Court is very conservative. We never got to see what the universe in which Biden halts all new oil and gas leasing on federal land looks like, because he just lost in court.
At the same time, Biden genuinely did not have the Trump-like aspiration to be a plebiscitary dictator. When he lost in court, he mostly folded and moved on. If anything, his administration was happy to be able to tell the Sierra Club that he tried and then reap the economic benefits of record oil and gas production. Biden really enjoyed legislative dealmaking, was very good at getting bipartisan bills like CHIPS and IIJA done, spent decades in the US Senate, and was frequently the Obama administration’s “closer” on the Hill. There’s a reason Frank Foer’s admiring biography of Biden is titled “The Last Politician.”
To Biden, shooting the shit with other elected officials and striking bargains was the peak.
Trump, despite the art of the deal bluster, has never shown any interest in legislative dealmaking. At no point during either of his terms has he attempted to engage with Democrats on passing some kind of immigration bill. He spiked the bipartisan border security bill from the Biden era, and has never gone back and said something like, “If we tweak these three provisions, I’m okay with it.” It’s just not of interest to him — he wants power. And the broader conservative movement has become weirdly deferential to that, both because it’s a bit of a personality cult and also because the filibuster has acculturated everyone to thinking of this as being the way the government ought to work.
A bunch of people have asked me whether the 2024 election outcome doesn’t make me glad that Democrats didn’t scrap the filibuster. But honestly, I feel the exact opposite. I would be much more comfortable with a world in which the answer to the question “Why don’t you just get Congress to change the law?” wasn’t just “Well, Democrats will filibuster if I try.”
So MAGA as a political movement has a better chance to change immigration than Republicans have probably ever had, and they're pissing it away with Trump cultism. They'll try to hide behind excuses like the filibuster, which could be ended with 50 votes in the Senate, and Republicans have 53 right now. Alternatively they'll try to hide behind political nihilism and say that passing laws doesn't matter since Dems could just ignore anything they pass -- this is wrong because the laws could help Trump (or other Republicans in the future) do things while there's a friendly president in power, and they could do a variety of things to try to force the Dem's hand when out of power like writing hard "shall" mandates in laws, giving Republican governors or even private citizens the standing to sue for non-enforcement, attach automatic penalties like sequestration-style clawbacks if removal numbers fall below some statutory floor, add 287(g) agreements with states giving local officers INA arrest authority, create independent enforcement boards, etc. None of these are silver bullets obviously since Dems would always be free to repeal any such laws (there are no permanent solutions in a Democracy, just ask Southern Slavers how the Gag Rule went), but that would cost them political capital or otherwise force them to try gambling with the courts if they tried to circumvent things by executive fiat.
But doing any of this would require telling Trump he needs to actually do specific things, and potentially punish him in some way if he fails to enact an ideological agenda he (vaguely) promised. That's very unlikely to happen.
LiberalRetvrn
25d ago
He doesn't have the kind of dementia where you forget your kids' names, but he obviously has severe cognitive decline relative to any old video of him talking. He's settling further into routinized thought as his mental plasticity disappears. His perception of the world is now filtered through a few basic ideas that are now hard-wired into his brain: trade deficit BAD, media LIARS, deport the illegals. He's not capable of moderating his ideas or taking account how context has changed since he first had these thoughts in the 80s. Which doesn't necessarily mean he's wrong. Old people with fixed beliefs can sometimes provide a useful perspective. The issue is with letting him unilaterally make horrible policy decisions in domains where details matter, like trade. Biden's dementia wasn't a big issue, because he surrounded himself with trusted advisors who helped him make the actual policy.
Lizzardspawn
28d ago
What would their alternative be?
Crybulling. Zelensky is master of that.
It's worth noting that Churchill does not, in this passage nor anywhere else in writing- including Churchill's six volumes of Second World War, reference Nazi gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. The Holocaust is not referenced at all in any concrete terms either in Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe, nor in Charles de Gaulle's memoirs.
Magusoflight
22d ago
hmmm those are pretty surprising results; let’s look at the poll study author
Tatishe Nteta
Oh
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
25d ago
The Virginia Giuffre suicide brought to mind an idea I've been thinking about for a while: populism works best without the people. Rob Henderson and many others have talked about how certain ideas promoted by the upper class disproportionately harm the lower class. In his book Troubled, he wrote:
Many of my peers at Yale and Stanford would work ceaselessly. But when I'd ask them about the plans they'd implemented to get into college, or start a company, or land their dream job, they'd often suggest they just got lucky rather than attribute their success to their efforts. Interestingly, it seems like many people who earn status by working hard are able to boost their status among their peers even more by saying they just got lucky. This isn't just limited to my own observations, either. A 2019 study found that people with high income and social status are the most likely to attribute success to mere luck rather than hard work.
Both luck and hard work play a role in the direction of our lives, but stressing the former at the expense of the latter doesn't help those at or near the bottom of society. If disadvantaged people come to believe that luck is the key factor that determines success, then they will be less likely to strive to improve their lives. One study tracked more than six thousand young adults in the US at the beginning of their careers over the course of two decades, and found that those who believed that life's outcomes are due to their own efforts as opposed to external factors became more successful in their careers and went on to attain higher earnings.
The problem is that people who entertain populist ideas like the above wind up shoved into the same part of the political spectrum as all these people who rave about "pedophile rings." Along with the internet personalities who won't endorse QAnon outright but pander to their QAnoner supporters with equivocating crap like "why can't they release the Epstein documents? I'm not saying there's a conspiracy, I just want TRANSPARENCY IN GOVERNMENT. Just asking qwestchins!" The populist movement winds up embracing the same mentality of helplessness Henderson is criticizing. Many of the Epstein victims admit they did it voluntarily for money, but you can't say that because it gets in the way of the narrative of helpless proles victimized by evil sex-trafficking finance guys.*
You can only really stand up for the people by keeping them at arm's length.
*The QAnoners are convinced that happens ALL THE TIME but Epstein is the only example they can point to, which is why we're still hearing about it five years after Epstein's death and will probably keep hearing about it for decades more.
You goto your local school board meeting, but inexplicably, the school board is like 70% fucking machines
You vote as hard as you can, and bless your heart, you even win!
Sounds like you voted in the wrong election, if your anti fucking machine constituent turned out across the relevant districts for the school board and won then those board members would be replaced.
The dude you voted for specifically tells the schools to tell the fucking machines to stop fucking. They simply can't stop.
Did the voters turn out for the school board election or state level representatives? Or did they just turn out for a single position and then got confused out of ignorance that there's more positions to vote for with their own different appointed powers, many of which are local? It sounds like the latter. An idiot with a great goal is still an idiot and it's not shocking when their plan comes undone. Likewise an idiot voter with a great goal is still an idiot.
When you think about it, it is rather silly to imagine you can vote or law your way out of having a single purpose machine fulfill it's singular purpose. You might as well vote or sue to make a mouse into a lion.
Well yeah, if your side doesn't turn out for your local school board elections then it shouldn't be a shocker that you lost them. And if you're simply outnumbered then that's local democracy. A fucking machine school board for the fucking machine city constituency, just like a Japanese National Diet for the Japanese citizens.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
This comment seems to echo the fantasy among some dateless conservatives that if only they were born in some bygone era where women didn't have nearly as many options then they'd surely get a girlfriend almost by default. I hate to break it to you, but if you can't get a date now, you weren't getting a date then. And I suspect that these guys never once consider that they're being just as selective as the women they're criticizing. I grew up in the Mon Valley, an area that's not exactly hot at the moment. If anyone here is seriously interested in getting married to a woman who is young enough to have a lot of children and doesn't mind staying home and not working, DM me and I will be glad to take them to the kind of bar where their chances of meeting an overweight, chain-smoking phlebotomy school dropout who's willing to date them are nearly 100%. Hell, you don't even need a good job; a steady, decent job is more than enough, considering most of the guys these women date are the kind of guys who quit because they got into an argument with their boss. Where I'm from these girls are a dime a dozen.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
20d ago
Hard agree with Scott here: MAGA's refusal to try to rein in Trump when he does something silly is not a fluke, it's an essential part of the cult of personality that MAGA has become. The fact that the usual suspects are working backwards trying to justify it from nearly any angle (many of which are mutually conflicting, but they broadly don't bother trying to rationalize their defenses) should update the priors of anyone who thought MAGA was an ideological movement rather than a cult built around aggrandizing the whims of a single capricious man.
HughCaulk
28d ago
These people are sick. Teaching kindergarteners about sexual fetishes will never be ok, whether it’s gay or straight. Unfortunately there are a lot of very intelligent pedophile/groomer men, who’ve successfully convinced suburban white women that it’s a moral imperative to ram this down children’s throats, and steamroll the wishes of parents.
Need to look into sending the kids to catholic (or other reasonable religious) school, especially in these hyper-woke areas.
Barfknuckle
28d ago
Scott Alexander is hysterically overrated just because he actually criticized wokes a bit back during the era where the spineless techies that make up his fandom were busy cowering and licking progressive boots.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
23d ago
I covered that in my post that I linked. The notion that the bill was "open borders up to 5000 migrants per day" was just egregiously false.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
22d ago
This is so low effort it's barely even a critique. Normally I'd leave it at that, but you've now been told about eight times to stop the low effort sneer-posting and that you were heading for a permaban. I dislike permabanning someone for a post that would normally be just a warning, even if it is like strike nine, but I think it's appropriate at this point for you to go away for a while. Thirty days, and don't come back unless you're going to stop doing this.
Putin hates democracy
The year is 2025 and we're unironically busting out "they hate our freedom" for the purposes of neocon war propaganda.
cartman
26d ago
This commenter's post is deeply objectionable for a number of a reasons, but the cherry on top is the dishonest framing of the evidence provided. The link to the comic which was provided displays that this book was available in a CITY'S PUBLIC LIBRARY, not some middle school where it was part of the curriculum. Of course the argument that a public city Library should contain zero material for an adult audience is absurd and I believe hardly anyone would defend it (though I'm happy to be proven wrong), which is why I believe this argument which could be defended on truthful merits was ignored instead for this dishonest framing.
Furthermore, a link to an article shows us the news that some female teachers rape their young male students. This is deeply horrible behaviour that deserves to be condemned, but I'd like to ask the obvious question, which is: what is the rate of teacher rape you are asserting (de facto by not mentioning other professions) is so much higher than other positions that come into contact regularly with children? Do we have reason to believe it's higher than the rate of priests at the hypothetical church you might join? If so, the evidence has not been provided. In the lack of that evidence, it seems a strange leap to assert that teachers are some uniquely dangerous creatures immune to societal condemnation (especially when incredibly disparate things like rape and allowing a graphic comic to remain on a public library shelf are lumped together)
I'm sorry, but do you not understand that the elections for governor and the elections for local school board are different elections for different positions? Of course winning a governorship has little immediate impact on the decisions of any individual school because state governors are not meant to be elected kings. They have specifically given powers and limits.
Those particular limits can change as states have pretty broad freedom, but even that still requires more than the governor. It requires a state legislature (something else people vote for).
And if you think it's particularly biased, I recommend looking at North Carolina which has a Dem governor and yet the legislature leans heavily Republican to the point they normally have a supermajority and constantly overturn vetos. In fact just recently they overturned a veto on a law that limited the power of the positions the Democrats won. As supermajority winners of the state legislature, that was their legal right to do and no amount of Dem voting for governor can change that because the governorship is not a king position that assumes full and direct control of everything in the state.
UnopenedEnvilope
28d ago
The left has won for a century pushing things that nobody wanted, because they've discovered an entire strategy based around an ideological vanguard pushing insane things on the masses.
Like an end to segregation? The pro-segregationists oft spoke of outside agitators.
It is worth noting in understanding the WWII mythos that is the subject of the discussion. Why was it not mentioned at all in thousands of pages of memoirs across the most important leaders? There are two theories: the mainstream theory is that this is just a testament to how much Allied leaders were ambivalent towards Jews, therefore also providing evidence they wouldn't wage a psychological warfare campaign to sacralize a Jewish victimization narrative which is the ultimate bedrock to this entire discussion- including the reason a song like this is censored so heavily. The Revisionist theory is that they knew the nonsense story about millions being tricked into gas chambers disguised as shower rooms would eventually be debunked like the very similar WWI propaganda about the Kaiser's death factories.
But @johnfabian is wrong that Churchill's writing represents the Holocaust being viewed as uniquely terrible early on, it isn't mentioned at all in many volumes of writing across thousands of pages written by the most important belligerents who otherwise have a strong incentive to feature that story to justify their own frame of the war.
It is in times of change like these that I remember how important it is for the Catholic Church to reach out towards each and every human, no matter how different their tastes may be. After all, it is the catholic church, and so what better way to do this than give the people for mass something with a bit more oomph to it. May I present to you The Vatican Rag.
(All credits to Tom Lehrer)
Trump did an interview with "Time," to mark the end of the first 100 days of his second term. The first topic they discussed was Presidential power:
Anyone know of a mainstream interpretation of the Constitution that claims Trump has not done anything to expand Presidential power and is "using it as it was meant to be used?"
He also claimed to have made more trade deals than there are countries... The way he answers questions is peculiar and worth reading. Near the end of the interview:
Should we be considering the possibility that Trump has dementia?
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